Swift Blog - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/

<comment><USER2> Wow, this is an interesting/refreshing development from Apple. I can't recall them ever having a public blog to communicate with their developer community. Until now, it's mostly been through their developer forums, private support, and in-person at the yearly WWDC.

How they've developed as a developer-facing company this year is really encouraging. Google et al have always been transparent as glass relative to Apple's iOS work, but this blog, the twitter dialog from Swift's development team, and the no-NDA release of iOS8 has really changed my opinion of the direction they're pushing the ecosystem.

<comment><USER3> Well, let's just wait and see, because frankly, I'm tired of reading marketing fluff like "We can't wait to see what you build!".

After years in the making (which means plenty of time to think of an answer), one of the most important questions still hasn't been answered, and not even mentioned on the blog.

Namely, will Swift be open-source and submitted to standards bodies? Will key libraries also be released?

If I make an investment to learn Swift, what are the chances that I can take this knowledge and use it outside of the Apple ecosystem? Or is Swift destined to follow the fate of Objective-C and be completely useless outside of Mac/iOS apps?

<comment><USER4> Their lack of transparency on this matter sucks, but at least they haven't committed to making it proprietary: [http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2014-June/073698....](http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2014-June/073698.html)

<comment><USER3> Interesting thread. Not buying Chris's (with his Apple hat on) answer though.

The idea that you spend a few years to create a new language and have not even had a discussion yet about whether or not it will be open source is simply not credible.

Unless Swift was rushed to release because companies like Apportable were making too much progress and they wanted to herd developers back into the pens with new proprietary languages and APIs e.g. Metal.

<comment><USER5> Have you ever worked at a company that open sources code? I mean it's fairly common, even VERY common that the devs are all for open sourcing the product but the legal department has not made a decision yet. Engineers move at an incredibly swift, no pun intended, pace but Lawyers tend to take glacial ages to decide anything. It's completely and totally credible that the legal department hasn't given their final ok on things, especially at a company like Apple and as large as Apple is.

<comment><USER6> How is "incredibly swift, no pun intended, pace" not intended?

It's an unnatural forced use of the term expressly for that purpose, expressly saying something _is not_ exactly what it _is_ , isn't in anyway accidental.

<comment><USER5> How is it unnatural moving at swift pace is a very common phrase. I can think of several times that I and others have said it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is great news. Apple seems to be going the proactive route with all this. I think that's a really good idea on their part.

That said, as soon as I saw Swift was announced, I took the plunge and started my own journal about learning Swift.

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

Figured I'd document my progress as I went along and it's been a lot of fun so far. This is something I plan on doing over the long haul and I'd like to get in some small 5-10 min videos that covers not only the language but also new things coming out in XCode as well.

I'm two posts behind, but I'm trying to release a new post every week. My biggest slow down has just been figuring out the blogging software and hosting.

</comment><comment><USER8> I am currently downloading XCode 6.3 Beta [1] without being a registered developer (used my ordinary credentials), does that mean that I will be able to write applications and play with the REPL? Has it just been made available?

[1] [https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/download.action?path=/...](https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/download.action?path=/Developer_Tools/xcode_6_beta_3_lpw27r/xcode_6_beta_3.dmg)

<comment><USER9> I believe so–that's what the blog says at least!

Would've been nice if they'd done this from the start (says someone who just paid his registration fee last month solely for access to the new XCode beta/Swift) but better late than never. Maybe there was some strategic value in only letting paying devs have access it for the first month or so as the news settled in...

<comment><USER10> Beta 1 was really pretty flakey and Xcode tended to crash every 20 minutes or so. Beta 3 is much better. I suspect the quality and readiness for a potentially less friendly audience is what caused them to keep it to registered devs rather than an attempt to get more cash.

Hopefully you end up getting some value from your registration. You could always ask for a refund but I don't know if they would give it to you.

<comment><USER9> > I suspect the quality and readiness for a potentially less friendly audience > is what caused them to keep it to registered devs rather than an attempt to > get more cash.

Probably true.

> Hopefully you end up getting some value from your registration.

Definitely got some value :) For one, I had the time to play around with it last month, that I don't have this month, so for that alone it was worth it. So not bitter about it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's really great to see Apple opening up - maybe not in their products, but in their culture. Programming language blog, a presence on social networks (mostly Twitter), posing for pictures with devs at WWDC, and generally embracing the dev community. All of these individual things seem small but together show a much more open side of Apple.

A side effect of these changes: Apple can control their own story now; whereas the rumor mill and the Apple-Needs-To-Release-A-New-Category-In-The- Next-30-Days-Or-They-Are-Doomed websites have been controlling their story/image for the past couple years.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great timing, was just reading the Swift ebook

       let interestingNumbers = [
        "Prime": [2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13],
        "Fibonacci": [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8],
        "Square": [1, 4, 9, 16, 25],
      ]
      var largest = 0
       for (kind, numbers) in interestingNumbers {
        for number in numbers {
            if number > largest {
                largest = number
              }
          }
        }
        largest

Excerpt From: Apple Inc. "The Swift Programming Language."

<comment><USER10> Note that if you downloaded the original book into iBooks you need to delete it and download it again to get the version that matches Beta3 (fixed array semantics and new range operator ..<)

<comment><USER13> Did both the Swift books get updated or just the one?

<comment><USER10> It looks like they both did along with examples. I don't know if the changes are significant[0].

Revision history for main book:

[https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/Swift/Conceptual/Swift_Programming_Language/RevisionHistory.html)

[0] [https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/navigatio...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/navigation/) and search for "swift". All the docs seem to have July dates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Slightly off-topic: is this the first time Apple has hosted a blog? I realize it's developer.apple.com rather than apple.com, but still.

<comment><USER15> Steve Jobs blogged on Apple's main site [https://www.apple.com/hotnews/](https://www.apple.com/hotnews/), including the famous Thoughts on Flash article [https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts- on-flash/](https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like the idea of a blog, something where I can get official news and tips from is great. Perfect supplemental reading for all those blogs run by outside developers. I look forward to using Swift.

Also, for those that may have missed it, you can use Swift in XCode 6 beta, so long as you are a registered Apple Developer.

</comment><comment><USER17> Has anyone used Swift yet? Report please?

<comment><USER18> I've been using it for my latest project. Haven't done anything too fancy with it yet. Lack of automatic type conversion between ints and floats is driving me up the wall a little bit, but maybe that's a personal flaw rather than a flaw with the language. String manipulation is also incredibly confusing to me: I have yet to figure out how to get the number of characters in a string, or how to generate a random character. Other than that, it feels pretty nice to use.

EDIT: also how to get character n in a string.

<comment><USER19> In general, there are good reasons to not do implicit casts, especially between ints and floats. For one, it's actually a fairly expensive operation.

<comment><USER20> Eh, not really. Certainly conversions from int->long should be implicit (I don't know if they are in Swift, though).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Day Trading Outsourced to China - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/business/global/10daytrade.html?ref=business&pagewanted=print

<comment><AUTHOR> ok I think I figured it out. The key parts were 1) high turnover, people only last a few months, and 2) the company gets 50%.

Suppose the traders have no insight into the market and trade randomly. As a whole they incur losses due to costs. To simplify, suppose there is a 50% chance they will lose 100 bucks, and a 50% chance they will make 90 bucks. The firms money goes down by 10 dollars, but then they take half of the winnings, 45 bucks, and so thus profit 35 dollars. Is my logic sound?

In summary, they could just be taking advantage of the uninformed chinese traders. (It goes without saying: the business could be completely legitimate, can't say for sure from the article. Just seemed a little odd).

<comment><AUTHOR> nope, nevermind, I am double counting money there.</comment></comment>


The 10 Biggest Misconceptions About Remote Work - <AUTHOR> http://blog.trello.com/company-remote-work-myths <comment><USER2> I am working remotely and I am 12 hours away from the main team.

All the good stuff mentioned in this article is absolutely true. I guess the only downside is the real lack of social life. You also need a great deal of self-discipline to operate in this kind of arrangement.

However, we are evolving in terms of communication as new people join our team.

Overall, it's working great for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are there any tech startups/companies which are already offering a full WFH?</comment>


Skype rolls back its redesign by ditching stories and squiggles - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/03/skype-rolls-back-its-redesign-by-ditching-stories-squiggles-and-over-the-top-color/ <comment><AUTHOR> As much as I love to hate on Skype's godawful and seemingly inexorable UX decline since the Microsoft acquisition, I have to give them credit for this latest rollback. It takes balls to admit that you were wrong on such a major redesign.

No idea what they were smoking when they decided that their target customer was Snapchat users. Skype is still relevant to me in 2018 because their core streaming tech is in my experience still more stable/reliable than Hangouts/FaceTime/Slack etc. Often Skype still connects on a crappy network when these other apps fail. This alone has made it my go-to for mission critical video chats. All I could do was cringe in embarrassment when trying to schedule business meetings and seeing those squiggles pop up all over the place.

Skype UX doesn't need to be "fun". It just needs to be usable. Kudos to the powers that be for making a tough call to benefit their core userbase.

<comment><USER2> Companies are deathly afraid of introducing new brands and cling to the misguided idea of expanding their existing brand into unrelated territories. Usually this results in the brand losing all meaning.

So here we have Microsoft trying to leverage an existing brand (Skype) into new territory (social media). The technical aspect or what users actually want is a afterthought.

Microsoft could release their own alternative to current social media apps but they won't just start small and build a new brand.

<comment><USER3> _> So here we have Microsoft trying to leverage an existing brand (Skype) into new territory_

Did someone mention Skype for Business? (... Live 360 ME)

<comment><USER4> And given how Microsoft trashed the skype brand, I wonder why they thought it was a good idea to use it for a new product.

<comment><USER5> Even Skype for Business is now being deprecated, and Teams promoted in its place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Skype is terrible. The call quality sucks, it's overpriced, video calling sucks, screen sharing sucks, and recently text messaging stop working almost completely. So what did they do? They moved the ability to text to some arcane sub-menu, it's still there, albeit non-functional.

That was the last straw for me before my account got the axe.

<comment><USER7> What's a good alternative, that has native apps for Mac/Windows/iOS/Android, and isn't attached to a social network?

(Ideally with the ability of callout, buy a phone number etc)

<comment><USER8> For VOIP I've just been using TeamSpeak3. I'd prefer mumble, but TS3 is more user friendly and running a server on a cheap VPS is simple. No callouts/phone numbers though, pure VOIP, and probably hard to get a customer to join a TS3 server if you try using it professionally. But imo gaming VOIP is miles ahead of everything else, because gaming has relied on it for a long time.

None of the non-gaming VOIP solutions (I know of) even have voice activation, which drives me crazy.

For text, my friend circle has shifted to just using whatsapp web, again, I'd prefer Signal,or Matrix (or even IRC), but there's the network effect _shrugs_.

I can live with TS3 and whatsapp over Microsoft Skype any day of the year.

<comment><USER9> Hey, I looked into your HN profile but there is no contact info. I'd like to get in touch with you. I am working on a side project, to offer VoIP (Matrix, XMPP, SIP) and social media hosting services. When pitching the idea to people, network effects are indeed cited as the issue to solve. I am trying to provide an answer by selling package plans, basically as a means for enabling the privacy-aware people to help bring their contacts/friends/family along.

Anyway, it would be great to get in touch with you, I'd like to send you an invite link and see if you could validate some of the ideas. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A few weeks ago I got a new laptop and downloaded a new version of Skype. It forced me to use a Microsoft account and I could not use my existing Skype name, which had all my contacts. There was no apparent way to move my contacts. I don't care that much about UI changes, but preventing me from using the account that I have been using for 10+ years is ridiculous.

<comment><USER11> On the general Microsoft account issue, my Skype account I had for 10+ years also became inaccessable after a random criminal linked their Microsoft account to my Skype account to make fraudulent transactions. After trying to get my skype account back using the account recovery form, I realized that even though I should have had enough answers to successfully recover the account that it was failing probably because all the answers were now being checked against the criminal's Microsoft account instead of my Skype account.

No amount of customer support chatting or Microsoft supoort calling could get that account back, or even get someone to investigate the fraud. I suppose that Skype makes money off these transactions so why bother to stop it.

<comment><USER12> I've had more success chatting with our houseplants than chatting with Skype support. At least the plants grow faster when you talk to them.

<comment><USER13> I hope you live in a free state like California with your "talking houseplants".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _The company had argued at the time that the rise of stories across social media meant it was something that all social apps would adopt. And because it was the way people were used to interacting now, Skype needed to include the feature in its own app, too._

When has this type of thinking ever been a good idea?

<comment><USER15> The PMs in charge of this particular design choice did not listen to external or internal feedback.

That is a mistake regardless of the product, space, etc.

<comment><USER16> Sometimes it is external feedback, but bad researchers.

Customer testing: "what feature you do use every day"

"Stories."

We should put stories in.

<comment><USER15> The blow back on this change was so bad the ratings in the iOS App Store tanked to 1 Star. It crept back up over time.

Early testing indicated people were not happy. The people involved made their impact, got their promos and moved on.

When Skype was acquired by Microsoft, it was flooded with PMs (primarily) and devs rolled in. I think LinkedIn has done a better job shielding itself from such.

I'm glad to see the rollback, but from talking to friends and family, a lot of damage has been done - mainly around rolling out new design above all else despite degradation in features and quality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Skype in general was, for me, always one of the "how the hell can they be so successful and so crappy at the same time" experiences. Calls are ok (not more than that), but everything else - UI, resource utilization, pricing, and especially messaging - is just horrible.

Messages are so unreliable and inconsistent that they can only be used for something where you don't care that much if it's ever going to be received - which is, I'd assume, not that often. I had a message from my colleague - sitting next to me every day and having Skype open every day same as me - arriving suddenly 6 days after he sent it. And dozens of minutes of delay is just normal.

I mean everyone had instant messaging figured out long before Skype - ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, MSN...It's just inexcusable.

<comment><USER18> Just goes to show how long a ghost can live inside a famous brand. Skype gained a lot of good will when it first came out and was by far the best thing out there. That hasn't been the case now for at least 10 years and they have living off of that name recognition for a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> We've tried several different video conferencing programs within my company to bring in people from two offices about 150mi apart in Cali, as well as a couple of employees working in the mid-west. Nothing has worked as well as Skype but even Skype still seems to have issues with reliability at times, necessitating a reconnect to the call.

When we tried Discord for a while the reliability was ok but some folks had struggled with the user interface.

Eventually IT rolled out Office365 but Teams was so unreliable for most people in my group that we stopped using it for our daily stand-up meetings and switched back to Skype.

Does anyone else feel like there's still room for a dead simple and extremely reliable product in this space? (corporate video conference)

<comment><USER20> Zoom is the best software in the world for this.

<comment><USER21> (I have used both Zoom and Hangouts. These views are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.)

Zoom,

1\. Needs better call quality. The audio is often … difficult … particularly if both ends are speaking or if one end has too much ambient noise. (That is, it seems like _local_ noise degrades the _incoming_ signal. (To me, it feels like it believes us to be talking, and essentially mutes the incoming signal so as to not cause a feedback loop; but then we can't hear the incoming. IDK.)

2\. Numeric meeting IDs are a terrible, horrible UX coming from Hangouts. Joining meeting "foo" vs. joining meeting 904-857-597. (When calendar integration works, it's nice, but sometimes you need to convey a meeting ID over your voice to another human, and "foo" is just so much easier.)

<comment><USER22> Every Zoom user can set a vanity URL for their meeting space. Most use their firstname+lastname where I work.

<comment><USER21> Well, TIL that existed.

It's not quite what I'm talking about. That link is unique to your user, kind of weirdly, and is some sort of personal meeting room.

I'd like to assign names to _meetings_ , not to _me_ ; every meeting that I happen to schedule the meeting for shouldn't all have the same name; the name should be descriptive of the meeting itself. That is, a meeting about widget production shouldn't be "suzieqmeet" just b/c Suzie Q. scheduled it; it should be called something like "widget-production". A later meeting about spline reticulation could just be "spline-reticulation"; the URL "meet.vc- company.com/spline-reticulation" is obvious, and trivial to transfer over speech to a coworker.

The great thing about Hangout, IIRC, is that it sort of automatically slugifies the meeting subject, so the defaults are pretty close to "magically just works". Trying to convince my entire coworker base to adopt "vanity URLs" is not going to happen, and doesn't really solve the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Glad they rolled back the redesign.

Hopefully they will work to improve "Skype for Business" to work more like Skype.

Skype for Business is just horrible.

1) Messages appear grouped by who I send them to, but there are multiple message threads. This wouldn't be the end of the world, except if I respond on my phone or laptop the responses go to different message threads. Impossible to read back a message thread and have it make any sense.

2) Most of the time, there's a sync issue... I get messages on all devices, but if I reply I only see my responses on the device that I was on when I typed the response. Mix with point 1, and I have no meaningful history being logged.

3) Messages take different amounts of time to get to a phone or a computer.

4) Files will silently fail to send. I look at a conversation, and it looks like my file goes through... then I look back a day or so later and it says, "File failed to send." So aggravating. Can't rely on it at all.

Anyway I know it's probably more to do with the instance my work set up, but this is my first time using Skype for Business since it rebranded away from Lync. And the experience hasn't been good. Give me Slack or Discord or WhatsApp... really anything else. No shortage of options these days.

<comment><USER24> The 4th point is the file sharing was disabled by the administrator. There really should be a clear message on that rather than error the file transfer.

For the rest, I don't think that skype can work at all when opened on multiple devices. It should be easy enough to uninstall from your phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Onr can hope that they will roll back the electron app. Legacy native app was way faster and this just feels like a downgrade.

<comment><USER26> At least the old one still works. I have still have the DMG on my computer just in case it decides to auto-install the new one so I can go back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can someone explain to me how, with modern day A/B testing, companies can still fail with these kinds of deployments?

<comment><USER28> I dunno. When a Skype voice call on my iPhone ends, I look at the screen, and press the sole red button at the bottom-right of the screen.

It's a heart, and it attempts and fails to "like" the voice call.

Then I press in the middle of the screen and the sole red button becomes a "disconnect call" button.

How does that get through A/B testing? How does that get through, "hey Aunt Linda, try to make a call." testing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Now if only they would make Skype For Business comprehensible...I have tried many times to join (not host) a call run by someone at MS or one of their partners, and the links just end up taking me in circles. The host always said it happens regularly, and we just end up talking on the phone.

</comment><comment><USER4> The article is full of screenshots with skype in full screen mode. But is anyone using skype that way? I want it on the side, not taking real estate space when nothing is happening. Instead they created a big block where you cannot hide the conversation even when there is none. I guess Microsoft must think that their users want to stare at a stale, old conversation and that when they use their computers they should focus on nothing else than skype (and full screen dialog messages notifying them that windows needs to be updated).

<comment><USER30> It's not just Microsoft, every company seems to believe that their application needs to be fullscreen, all the time. I reality I don't think that anyone run any app in fullscreen, except perhaps video editors or photoshop.

iTunes, Spotify, browsers, editors, everything is shown in fullscreen, and often designed like that. It's doesn't make sense on 27" screen, and it doesn't make sense on an 13", but everyone seems to think that their product is why people have computers, nobody want's to be just a service.

Maybe it's a little like CPU, disk or RAM. We have more of it, so applications use it, while not giving us more actual functionality.

The old ICQ, MSN and WinAmp got it right. Take up as little screen as possible and just sit in the background and do their thing.

<comment><USER31> Skype I don't use full screen. But everything else is full screen: browsers, editors, 7-zip, etc.

Stacking windows makes them easier to manage, especially on Windows. You just Alt-Tab and it's predictable where the next one will pop up.

90% of the people I've seen, especially regular people, use full screen windows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I only use skype to call 1 person, Before the redesign the first call would never answer, only ring out. The second call worked. A third+ call always has a periodic echo every 8ish seconds.

After the redesign every call now connect pretty fast, but there is no audio or camera for 60 seconds. Every Call & the echo remains.

Piece of shit.

</comment><comment><USER33> I just want to be able to resize the computer app to a non-phone sized window (and not all the way to full screen).

</comment><comment><USER34> Yes, the last overhaul was really bad. Good to see them pivot :)

</comment><comment><USER35> Would be nice if they could consolidate Skype, Skype Desktop and Skype for Business (comes with office) that were all installed on my Fathers PC for some reason.

<comment><USER36> From trying to hold remote meetings in Skype, I've learned that the number of versions of Skype that a colleague has installed is inversely proportional to the their technical ability. Usually it's easier to get someone to install Skype on their smartphone and call in that way than to sort out the confusion on their computer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> you can still use the previous versions on desktop , which threaten you every single time that they 'll be deprecated. Today i feel vindicated though.

</comment><comment><USER38> Skype is one of those applications that peaked about ~5years ago. It's been getting worse and worse every in single update since then. (and I mean the UI and the UX, perhaps the voice engine is better but that's not visible to the users).

It's sad. It was so simple and worked well all those years ago.

</comment><comment><USER39> I mostly have to use Skype at work, and only today I've been unexpectedly amazed at how quickly, almost instantly, it starts up on Mac. Great job.

</comment><comment><USER40> Does this happen very often? A UX rollback for a piece of consumer/business software used by hundreds of millions of people?

</comment><comment><USER41> Now if they'll just go back to a proper native desktop app, _maybe_ it'll be usable for business.

</comment><comment><USER42> I actually liked the squiggles.

Also, once you've tried Whatsapp calls, Viber calls, Google calls... Skype is so much better.

</comment><comment><USER43> It's just a lot of social network fatigue when every freaking app is copying each other with similar features.</comment>


Medical staff say virus stigma driving Tokyo hospitals to edge of collapse - <AUTHOR> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/04/24/national/tokyo-front-line-hospital/ <comment><USER2> This is the first time that I've read about health/care workers being shunned and stigmatised, but I can see how it can happen. I can't imagine that this is a purely Japanese phenomenon, though. Anyone from anywhere outside of Japan able to point to similar media reports?

Edited to add: thanks for the posters below who pointed me at relevant articles concerning workers similarly stigmatised elsewhere. Shameful and depressing are words that spring easily to mind :-(

<comment><USER3> There are enough reports from the US about physicians and nurses getting evicted because tenants are getting concerned about coronavirus spreading in the building.

Daily Beast isn't a real newspaper of record, but I've seen similar articles in reputable papers: [https://www.thedailybeast.com/coronavirus-nurses-face- evicti...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/coronavirus-nurses-face-eviction- housing-discrimination-from-scared-landlords)

<comment><USER4> That does seem like a valid concern.

Not sure what a solution might be.

<comment> toper-centage How is that a valid concern? The only way the virus could spread would be through the building door, and maybe elevator buttons. It's a matter of cleaning those regularly and washing your hands when you get home. It's not rocket science.

<comment><USER5> The virus is airborne and lasts for hours floating in the air, aside from surfaces. Its not just a matter of washing up.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/18/coronavirus-lives-for- hours-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/18/coronavirus-lives-for-hours-in-air- particles-and-days-on-surfaces-new-us-study-shows.html)

<comment><USER6> It _can_ last. It's fairly unlikely especially if people are considerate with minimum precautions.

E.g. If one sneezes uncovered into air with the right humidity, etc. it COULD survive for a while airborne. That's not to say merely by breathing a person's usual exhalations they could get it.

The virus is transmitted through droplets, or little bits of liquid, mostly through sneezing or coughing, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of WHO's emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, told reporters during a virtual news conference on Monday. "When you do an aerosol-generating procedure like in a medical care facility, you have the possibility to what we call aerosolize these particles, which means they can stay in the air a little bit longer."

[https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/18/coronavirus-lives-for- hours-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/18/coronavirus-lives-for-hours-in-air- particles-and-days-on-surfaces-new-us-study-shows.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In the discussion in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22934704](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22934704) patio11 was pilloried for claiming that, _We project a true count of over 500,000 infections, including more than 5,000 severe cases, and a breakdown in provision of care ("overshoot") in Nagoya, Osaka, and Tokyo, before the end of April._

And yet, according to medical staff, Tokyo is close to a collapse of the medical system. [https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/japan/](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/japan/) says that there are currently over 12,000 reported cases in Japan and this doubled in the last 10 days. So it is likely to be in the 20-25k range by the end of the month. [https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/new-york-virus- deaths-...](https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/new-york-virus-deaths- top-15k-cuomo-expected-to-detail-plan-to-fight-nursing-home- outbreaks/2386556/) says that New York reported COVID-19 seems likely to underreport actual cases by a factor of 10. Which puts Japan at the 200,000-250,000. But as widespread reports say, Japan's testing has been extremely anemic. That can easily put us back in the ballpark discussed.

You know, that projection is looking reasonably close for having been made over a month ago.

<comment><USER8> The NY study is preliminary, not peer reviewed. The sampling strategy used over-represents people going out, and we have no information on which test was used or its accuracy.

Given antibody testing done in places like Vô, the NY results seem a bit of a stretch.

Hopefully Japan gets it together and starts testing properly, though.

<comment><USER9> The NY study does align fairly well with similar studies done in Santa Clara County and Los Angeles County in California, though. All three indicate a significantly lower IFR than previously expected.

<comment><USER10> > All three indicate a significantly lower IFR than previously expected.

The NY study, if it holds up, suggests an IFR in the 0.8-1.0% range for NYC (depending on whether or not you include the additional excess deaths), which is in the range most experts have been assuming (0.5%-1.0% has been a common range that's been tossed around). For example, the Imperial College model used 0.9% IFR as an input. Additionally, a 10x confirmed cases to actual cases ratio is in the range most experts were assuming.

The two CA studies were outliers (and, had significant and substantive critiques), and suggested an IFR as much as 10x lower than the NY study suggests. I wouldn't call those two studies as aligning with the NY study.

<comment><USER9> Do you have any links handy discussing the issues? I have not come across anything like that in my reading and would like to read more on the critiques.

<comment><USER10> Sure!

Andrew Gelman (Stats at Columbia) had a commonly shared piece: [https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal- flaw...](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaws-in- stanford-study-of-coronavirus-prevalence/)

Also a good dive into the issues: [https://medium.com/@balajis/peer-review-of- covid-19-antibody...](https://medium.com/@balajis/peer-review-of- covid-19-antibody-seroprevalence-in-santa-clara-county- california-1f6382258c25)

Mercury News also had a good article covering a lot of this: [https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/20/feud-over-stanford- co...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/20/feud-over-stanford-coronavirus- study-the-authors-owe-us-all-an-apology/)

And yes, lots of twitter discussions from folks in the field, e.g. Natalie Dean of University of Florida [https://twitter.com/nataliexdean/status/1251309217215942656](https://twitter.com/nataliexdean/status/1251309217215942656) and Trevor Bedford (Fred Hutchinson) [https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1251332447691628545](https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1251332447691628545) and others.

<comment><USER11> The most interesting thing (to me) about the Gelman page is that by the PPPS, he's hedging all of his most significant criticisms:

 _" The data as reported are also consistent with infection rates of 2% or 4%. Indeed, as I wrote above, 3% seems like a plausible number. As I wrote above, "I'm not saying that the claims in the above-linked paper are wrong," and I'm certainly not saying we should take our skepticism in their specific claims and use that as evidence in favor of a null hypothesis. I think we just need to accept some uncertainty here. The Bendavid et al. study is problematic if it is taken as strong evidence for those particular estimates, but it's valuable if it's considered as one piece of information that's part of a big picture that remains uncertain. When I wrote that the authors of the article owe us all an apology, I didn't mean they owed us an apology for doing the study, I meant they owed us an apology for avoidable errors in the statistical analysis that led to overconfident claims. But, again, let's not make the opposite mistake of using uncertainty as a way to affirm a null hypothesis."_

The twitterthink reaction to this study has been vicious, mostly based on amateur re-hashes of the Gelman critique, which even Gelman himself doesn't really believe.

<comment><USER12> The study pre-print is published and some of the numbers are publicly available, we don't need to play a game of revelations here between one person and another, or incorporate Twitter users into the mix. (I didn't even realize this was being criticized over Twitter, as I don't really use the service.) Gelman's critique is quite substantive, and commenters on Gelman's post have created Bayesian analyses which incorporate the uncertainty from test sensitivity and specificity.

When I made one in PyMC3 (which lined up with a commenter's approach with PyStan), the 97% CI for the prevalence based on the non-poststratified data I got had the prevalence between (-0.3%, 1.7%). What does that mean? The test just isn't certain enough to allow us to make any conclusions, not that the null hypothesis is correct or that we can reject the null hypothesis.

There's nothing wrong with performing the study. Indeed, the publishing of the study allows us to have these vigorous debates about methods and informs future trials from being more exact and not suffering from the same problems as previous studies. But trying to extrapolate a conclusion for something as important as COVID based on studies with extremely high uncertainty is highly irresponsible. Sometimes we have to accept that coming up with statistically significant conclusions is difficult.

<comment><USER11> _" When I made one in PyMC3 (which lined up with a commenter's approach with PyStan), the 97% CI for the prevalence based on the non-poststratified data I got had the prevalence between (-0.3%, 1.7%). What does that mean? The test just isn't certain enough to allow us to make any conclusions, not that the null hypothesis is correct or that we can reject the null hypothesis."_

Yeah, that doesn't sound substantially different than Gelman's frequentist intuition in the blog post. I'm not sure the more complex methods are adding much here, except that you can now examine the posterior, and see what portion of the density lies below zero (i.e. probably not much of it).

IMO the "CI includes zero" was weak when Gelman advanced it, because even though it's _possible_ , it was clear from the assay error rates that the outcome was on the tails of the distribution; even if 95% of repeated samples _may include_ zero, very few of them actually would. So at the end of the day, as you have demonstrated, you get a non-post-stratified posterior that encompasses the point estimate they gave (1.5%), but your confidence interval is different, and perhaps the mean is lower.

Now you're just left with debating the validity of the bias adjustments they made.

That said, it's wrong to frame this in terms of a "rejecting the null hypothesis". There's no hypothesis in an observational study like this.

<comment><USER12> > So at the end of the day, as you have demonstrated, you get a non-post- > stratified posterior that encompasses the point estimate they gave (1.5%), > but your confidence interval is different, and perhaps the mean is lower.

You cannot use confidence intervals to argue the validity of a point estimate inside of the CI. When using frequentist methods, we usually have some sort of control group where we can use a paired test to compare sample means in order to reject a hypothesis.

I wanted to use Bayesian methods not because they were more complex, but because I felt that when a control group is not available, a Bayesian analysis would be a lot more obvious about surfacing uncertainty. Bayesian methods also allow us to actually simulate P(prevalence | data). And no, just because 1.5% is in the 95th percentile of the posterior prevalence, does not mean you can say that 1.5% is a valid estimate. What the CI shows is that, with 97% confidence, the prevalence is somewhere between -0.3% and 1.7%. Additionally, the mean of this posterior came out to 0.8% prevalence, which to me is good as, to me, saying it's inconclusive. In fact, if we use the median of P(prevalence | data), then we get very close to 0.8%, so this test is basically showing that the prevalence in this population is negligible.

<comment><USER11> _" You cannot use confidence intervals to argue the validity of a point estimate inside of the CI."_

You're using a Bayesian method, so you have a posterior distribution. You can sample from it.

 _" And no, just because 1.5% is in the 95th percentile of the posterior prevalence, does not mean you can say that 1.5% is a valid estimate."_

You told me that was the confidence interval on the parameter. The confidence interval contains the point estimate for the original study. It's as valid as any other point within the confidence interval. As you say: "you cannot use confidence intervals to argue the validity of a point estimate inside the CI".

 _" What the CI shows is that, with 97% confidence, the prevalence is somewhere between -0.3% and 1.7%."_

Which includes 1.5%.

<comment><USER12> > You told me that was the confidence interval on the parameter. The > confidence interval contains the point estimate for the original study. It's > as valid as any other point within the confidence interval. As you say: "you > cannot use confidence intervals to argue the validity of a point estimate > inside the CI".

> Which includes 1.5%.

And everything else in the CI. If we're treating this like a CI, then it's like saying a dice will land on 1, just because it's equally likely to land on 6.

The actual P(1.5% | prevalence) is quite low at 3%.

<comment><USER11> _" And everything else in the CI. If we're treating this like a CI, then it's like saying a dice will land on 1, just because it's equally likely to land on 6. The actual P(1.5% | prevalence) is quite low at 3%."_

You _just said_ that you can't use a CI to estimate the likelihood of any point within the CI (you actually can, for well-behaved problems, but I digress) when I commented that 0% isn't a likely outcome within the interval.

Literally the same argument. If you want to argue that 1.5% is unlikely, then you have to accept that 0% is unlikely for the same reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "At the hospital, about 10 nurses and other staffers have left since the first COVID-19 case was found on the medical staff. The list included clerical workers."

I fear this is going to be an increasing problem if we continue to rely on the belief that medical personnel can be abused indefinitely.

<comment><USER14> That's actually the nicer side of the problem. Given current conditions pretty much everywhere, doctors and nurses that don't run away end up overworked to the point of exhaustion. Some of them die, rest are left with PTSD. Healthcare systems worldwide are bleeding medical staff, and unfortunately, training a new medical professional takes many years (more than a decade if you want them to be any good).

<comment><USER15> If we're hemorrhaging healthcare workers, it is because we're not giving them enough support.

We're spending $2+T on keeping everyone afloat in the US. We can spend a lot of that money encouraging everyone to pitch in to fight Covid.

We need ~hundreds of thousands of contact-tracers. If that were our only need, we could offer $1,000,000 to everyone who works as a contact tracer and have money left over.

I'm already volunteering ~70% of my time on FindTheMasks.com. I can only imagine how much more work could be done if unemployed people were given the opportunity to work on _fixing the root cause of unemployment_!

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure what contact-tracers do (seriously, I don't know, and I'd love a description of what this job entails), but I assume they'd need PPE and tests, both of which are generally unavailable due to insufficient manufacturing capability, supply chain issues and bureaucratic blunders.

> _We 're spending $2+T on keeping everyone afloat in the US._

I think it's best to consider this as less "money to help fight the pandemic", and more as "money to save everyone from starvation", or alternatively "money to have a country to save from the pandemic".

> _I 'm already volunteering ~70% of my time on FindTheMasks.com._

My strong and sincere thanks for the hard work you do!

<comment><USER16> Contact tracing is about asking the patient where they have been in the last few weeks, identifying (tracing) every person they've been in contact with during that time, finding out where and how they caught the virus (ie the specific person they caught it from), and also finding and immediately quarantining everyone the patient has had contact with. It's not a process that necessarily needs PPE, more the ability to go through someone's Google Location History data and make lots of phone calls to people.

Australia is even introducing an open source app next week (like Singapore has) to automatically collect Bluetooth IDs of nearby devices as a person walks outdoors, so people can be more easily traced & notified / quarantined if they've been in contact with someone who has been infected.

Here's one of our Australian state government's explanation of contact tracing, in this case for Tuberculosis:

[https://www.healthywa.wa.gov.au/Articles/A_E/Contact- tracing...](https://www.healthywa.wa.gov.au/Articles/A_E/Contact-tracing-for- tuberculosis-TB)

(Edit: and here's some info about the Australian and Singaporean contact tracing apps, if you haven't heard of them before)

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/17/australias- cor...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/17/australias-coronavirus- contact-tracing-app-what-we-know-so-far)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is described as "stigma", but it looks like people making reasonable decisions trying to avoid getting sick. The child of someone who works in a hospital really does bring higher than normal risk to their daycare.

People with medical jobs not being able to get childcare is a serious problem, but we need dedicated separate childcare if we're going to keep the spread down.

<comment><USER18> For a disease as transmissible as Ebola or the flu that might be true, but for a brand new highly transmissible disease like COVID-19 with limited testing supply, it might be safer to live near someone who might actually have access to regular testing. Do the people stigmatizing healthcare workers have the data to back up your theory?

Trying to explain away prejudice with science requires actual science.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Japan already has formal stigmatizing of groups: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin) ... this is how caste systems develop.

Burakumin: "They were originally members of outcast communities in the Japanese feudal era, composed of those with occupations considered impure or tainted by death (such as executioners, undertakers, workers in slaughterhouses, butchers, or tanners), which have severe social stigmas of kegare (穢れ or "defilement") attached to them."

Add to this now "medical professionals".

<comment><USER20> This specific issue is hardly limited to japan. You can sadly find this sort of cases in the US, in India, in Germany, in France, in Belgium, Australia, …

From cars getting degraded to harassment to eviction to assault and battery.

<comment><USER21> I don't think the US has a history of confining them to villages though...

<comment><USER20> It certainly didn't call them villages. Rather preferred "plantation", "ghetto", "reservation", "inner city", "hazardous housing inventory".

It also has a history of owning them as furniture, of killing them in many manners, of breaking treaties with them, of hanging them as town event, of not treating them, of banning them from states, cities, neighborhoods, of excluding them from society, public places, social benefits, … and I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch.

<comment><USER21> Are we still talking about doctors and medical staff here? Sounds like you just want to drag a whole host of other issues into this conversation, but I urge you to try and stay focused on the discussion we're having, and not the one you seem to want to have...

<comment><USER20> > Are we still talking about doctors and medical staff here?

I assumed not since Japan does not have "a history of confining [doctors and medical staff] to villages" So your comment could only apply to the treatment of burakumin.

> Sounds like you just want to drag a whole host of other issues into this > conversation

You're the one who made mistreatment of minorities the issue, it's not really my problem if it also makes you uncomfortable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> In the USA most doctors doing residency would get an immediate pay bump if they went on unemployment.

<comment><USER23> A quick search says the average us residency salary is $61,200 as of 2019, which is above the unemployment maximum even taking into account the additional $600 a week in pandemic funding.

<comment><USER24> I think they're going off a per hour basis. If a resident is working an 80 hour week, they aren't getting paid much per hour.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I know in some places the hospital workers are given decent hotel accommodations, that seems to be a pretty reasonable compromise for medical workers in dense living situations, in some places that would require building some additional places or taking possession of some, but given the amount of slack resources right now that also seems reasonable

</comment><comment><USER26> Humans are irrational fear driven creations.

Only institutions (involving decision making by multiple humans) can help in these circumstances, because we need each other.

</comment><comment><USER27> This isn't really surprising in a country where saving face, social standing and collectivism is everything. Other horrible consequences of these deeply embedded social systems are "evaporated people" [0][1] and the terrible treatment of single parents [2][3].

[0] [https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-04-25/japans-evaporated- peo...](https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-04-25/japans-evaporated-people-have- become-obsession-franch-couple)

[1] [https://www.businessinsider.com/evaporated-people- disappeari...](https://www.businessinsider.com/evaporated-people-disappearing- from-japan-2017-4?r=US&IR=T)

[2] [https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/japan-i...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/japan- is-no-place-for-single-mothers/538743/)

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

<comment><USER28> Do you have any insight on what differentiates Japan from other Asian countries like South Korea? Collectivism is not a unique characteristic to Japan and South Korea has arguably done a good job.</comment></comment>


LDraw – A list of free tools for creating virtual Lego models - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Symbian9/AWESOME-LDraw <comment><AUTHOR> If you has any addition or correction to this list, please, do not hesitate to create issue or pull request.

 _Fair Play:_

> _LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO Group of companies which does not sponsor, > authorize or endorse this site & software._</comment>


Kelora law suit - <AUTHOR>

We have just received the same letter Sep. 17th 2011. We would like some more information regarding this issue. We are a small to medium size business and surly can not efford paying Kelora or lawyers... email email@example.com <comment><USER2> Heard about this. Sounds like Kelora is fishing for money. Good luck upholding this in court. I hate what these patent trolls are doing to the industry! Time for government involvement.</comment>


If it weren't for those meddling cryptographers - <AUTHOR> https://www.attejuvonen.fi/meddling-cryptographers/ <comment><USER2> All issues aside, some form of electronic voting system could benefit ballot counting, reduce workforces for all counting and be more trustworthy.

If a paper ballot is casted then I have no way of knowing wether it is counted, My ballot might be lost, invalid or wrongly counted by the one in a thousand people who might nefariously count it wrong. The paper voting system is just as much a black box as the electronic voting system. A second electronic system could prove usefull to check wether all casted ballots have been counted and wether you voted for the right party. Mismatches will no doubt happen as I hold no belief that either the electronic system or the ballots are perfect. But at least then we have two trails of evidence to determine who voted for who. The only downside is that it might lessen voting privacy. Maybe for a next article though.

"If a tree falls in the forest and no cryptographers are around to hear it, is the New South Wales iVote® system still insecure?" Only if the Australian law permits it to.</comment>


Kernels, a free hosted Jupyter notebook environment with GPUs - <AUTHOR> https://www.kaggle.com/kernels <comment><USER2> The timing of this submission appears to follow the Colaboratory submission with similar functionality just removed: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17692263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17692263)

Notably, both are owned by Google. The free-GPU notebook market is catching on.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey Ben, are these going to support arbitrary CUDA?

<comment><USER3> Also, does Kaggle have any IP rights to code written in a kernel?

<comment><AUTHOR> Code made public on Kaggle Kernels is currently required to be under an Apache 2.0 license.

Beyond that, for private work the non-legalese TL;DR is no, at least not beyond what's required for us to operate the service. I'll refer you to [https://www.kaggle.com/terms](https://www.kaggle.com/terms), and copy one relevant section below. If your work is in the context of making submissions to a specific machine learning competition, then that competition may have bespoke exceptions to this as well (which would be detailed in the rules of the competition).

"For all User Submissions, you grant Kaggle a license to translate, modify (for technical purposes, for example making sure your content is viewable on an iPhone as well as a computer) and reproduce and otherwise act with respect to such User Submissions, in each case to enable us to operate the Services, as described in more detail below. You acknowledge and agree that Kaggle, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users (including you), may need to make changes to your User Submissions to conform and adapt those User Submissions to the technical requirements of communication networks, devices, services, or media, and the licenses you grant under these Terms include the rights to do so. You also agree that all of the licenses you grant under these Terms are royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, and worldwide. These are licenses only — your ownership in User Submissions is not affected."</comment></comment></comment>


Almost one-fifth of Britons 'do not use internet' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49607061 <comment><AUTHOR> I posted this because I think we tend to live in a bubble where everyone carries multiple internet connected devices on their person at all times (only a slight exaggeration!). But there are over 11 million people in a first world country who don't use the internet at all, and likely many more who have access but it's limited to eg only an old desktop PC or only at work. How should internet-based start-ups react to this?

<comment><USER3> By leaving those people alone to continue living their lives as they like?

<comment><USER4> If it's by choice, sure. A lot of people either can't afford it or there's no Connectivity where they live

<comment><USER5> 96% of UK premises could have "Superfast", not just "Internet" but "Superfast" broadband, which is defined as 30Mbps to the door. But you're correct that a very large fraction of the population don't choose to buy this either because they can't afford it or they don't want it.

There is a Universal Service Obligation, just like in the days of voice telephony, which says the incumbent (British Telecom in most of the country) is legally obliged to offer anybody who wants it at least a minimum service (10Mbps down 1Mbps up asymmetric, so mediocre DSL basically) for a fee. In unusual cases (imagine you live on an otherwise uninhabited island for some reason or up a mountain) you may need to contribute to capital costs for installation.

About 2% of the country are estimated to /live/ in places that can't get USO obligatory service (without new construction) if they asked. Unsurprisingly people who want fast Internet don't tend to buy properties with problems like that, but in principle if you were stubborn you could buy one and demand they fix it to 10Mbps up 1Mbps down.

So, whatever it is the problem is not Connectivity.

<comment><USER6> Isn't that USO voluntary?

> In unusual cases (imagine you live on an otherwise uninhabited island for > some reason or up a mountain) you may need to contribute to capital costs > for installation.

I agree with you, but this bit doesn't really describe how many people need to pay for broadband infrastructure installation.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2018/may/31/h...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2018/may/31/how- can-i-get-faster-broadband-in-a-rural-area-bt)

<comment><USER5> The USO is mandatory but isn't funded yet. So, right now the regulator would struggle to rationalise say, fining the operator for not meeting it when they aren't given any money or any means to raise revenue to provide it. But in principle if you can imagine the British government ever doing anything again except arguing about Brexit they might get around to it. Don't hold your breath.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A lot of public services and utilities have shifted their customer facing operations to the web and the very people who struggle to interact with these services are often the ones who need them the most.

Factor in that a lot of these web-based services are poorly designed and badly constructed and it is no wonder that some people get frustrated or are easily swindled.

Local council sites tend to be the worst, in my experience, with unfathomable navigation and broken forms being the most common problems.

My dad often asks 'why can't I do x?' and my usual answer is that the website is sh1t, there is nothing you can do about it.

<comment><USER8> A __lot __of work goes into making GOV.UK sites accessible to people who aren 't au fait with technology. From the design of form elements and wizards to the extreme care in choosing the correct language.

It's a huge project and driven by user research and testing. Best part, almost all of it happens in the open

[https://design-system.service.gov.uk](https://design-system.service.gov.uk)

[https://design-system.service.gov.uk/community/backlog](https://design- system.service.gov.uk/community/backlog)

The technology and design should eventually filter down to localised services.

<comment><USER9> Lmao the local councils have been left to run their own web services and they are painfully backwards and outdated, payment portals for council tax from the early 2000's, sites that are not responsive by default, dead/missing links.

From what I have seen they are left to do their own thing a little too much.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, we can lead the horse to water.

A dev can get a Node or Rails app with all the correct assets and templates running in two minutes. C# and Django in a bit longer.

Most of the things they'll need to build are already there, well-engineered and tested.

Some councils have longstanding contracts with local companies or just have their heads in the sand. Not much more we can do.

Some work on this has actually been started

[https://localdigital.gov.uk/funding/leeds-city- council-2/](https://localdigital.gov.uk/funding/leeds-city-council-2/)

Edit: just read the assessor's comments, pretty damning. Doesn't sound like the project delivered much - pretty sure I could do more in an afternoon

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's scope for pretty massive sampling errors with any door to door survey like this - you only end up polling people who are home (presumably during the day), that answer their door to strangers (and not screen via camera) and are willing to answer a whole bunch of questions.

That may be representative of the wider society, but amongst my acquaintances it is not.

<comment><USER11> I don't believe they're going door to door and knocking on random doors. It's not said explicitly but it's implied that they're sending postal mail and following up with people who respond for in-home interviews.

The methodology is outlined here:

[https://oxis.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/methodology/](https://oxis.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/methodology/)

<comment><USER12> "They're sending postal mail and following up with people who respond"

If so then even worse. They'd only be working with people that take snail mail seriously.

<comment><USER13> Every important document ever in my life arrived via "snail mail" so I can't really imagine anyone not taking it seriously. Except maybe some odd internet whiz-kid with a propeller hat.

<comment><USER12> That's the rub I think. Would this be an "important document" in everyone's opinion? For me it wouldn't, it'd go straight in the bin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would suggest reading the original report. [https://oxis.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp- content/uploads/sites/43/2019/0...](https://oxis.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp- content/uploads/sites/43/2019/09/OxIS-report-2019-final-digital-PDFA.pdf)

Quite interesting to see that the majority of people who don't want to join the internet is because of choice and worry that they will lose their privacy.

Anyone done a study of how people who don't use the internet usually vote in elections and generally feel socially about the rest of the world?

<comment><USER15> Statistically, the older you are in the UK the more conservative you are. It's something like 17% 18-28 but 75% 60-70.

The privacy worries are weird. In my experience this is the same group that love to use loyalty/reward cards, coupons etc. To me, those are far more intrusive to my privacy than a properly set up internet connection.

<comment><USER14> So probably the privacy concerns come from over blown news articles and reporting about latest passwords leak, information leak, hacking, exploit and any other word that remotely sounds like it's related to the internet.

You should watch Sky News sometimes talk about the latest security problem, they do not take a balanced approach to the reporting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One aspect is that they describe themselves as not using the internet. There might be some Grandma who says that while writing a text message to her family. Does the survey make clear what "using the internet" means?

<comment><USER17> _Does the survey make clear what "using the internet" means?_

It doesn't state explicitly, but it does not appear that text messaging, or anything you could do with a feature phone was counted. The term used in the study was "online," not "using the internet."

The study looked at things like "buy products," "pay bills," "listen to music," "watch movies," "follow celebrities," "post videos," and "buy groceries."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Honest question: is it really worth it to try to change them?

For people older than 60 years the internet is still so new that many still might think it is a "fad". It will be very, very hard to teach new tricks to old dogs. As the article says:

> "There are a lot of things about the internet that get less useful as you > get older," he said.

OTOH, for people younger than 20, the proportion of not connected will most certainly be very low. As the article says:

> "Virtually everyone is online before age 50," Dr Blank told the BBC

I suspect that the effort to get the last and very reluctant old people online is just not worth it.

<comment><USER19> But also

> Earlier versions of the survey found the 50-plus drop-off in net use had > persisted for a long time, said Dr Blank, suggesting it was not tied to a > particular age group that grew up without the net.

Given that the different survey results didn't really agreec on the basics, I'm not sure the correlation means much. But if that is true it would definitely make it more worth it.

<comment><USER20> I've just gone through the decline and death of an elderly relative.

She was able to use a Mac and browse the web a decade ago. Then she began to forget how to do things she'd been proficient at a few years earlier. In the past four years her ability to use the computer dropped to zero, and attempting to get her onto an iPad instead failed (it was too complicated/required too much learning -- I'd left it too late, not recognizing the early signs of decline).

At the time of death she had medium to advanced vascular dementia; the point is, cognitive decline in old age is a real thing, and people lose the ability to do stuff they knew how to do at an earlier age.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > The detailed in-home survey of almost 2,000 Britons found that 18% described > themselves as non-users.

I'm really curious what the methodology is here. "detailed in-home" suggests it did something more than just ask people, but then it says they "described themselves" as non-users. If you asked my mum she'd say she doesn't use the internet, but if you sat down in her house with her you'd see she uses Facebook and WhatsApp on her phone to communicate with friends and family, and occasionally accidentally clicks a link that opens a browser. But she'll never open a browser, doesn't actively use her email and would consider herself not to use the internet.

</comment><comment><USER22> My first thought is of course surprise and shock that this number is so high.

My second thought is this is about the same number of British people who are below the official poverty line[1], and of course food is a higher priority than internet.

(It's still shocking that the number is so high).

[1] [https://m.spiegel.de/international/europe/poverty-in- notting...](https://m.spiegel.de/international/europe/poverty-in-nottingham- the-uk-s-worsening-problem-a-1269597.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> I remember in the early to mid 1990s when many were amazed at the Internet this new thing called the Web.

At that time I read that in the early 1990s only about 5% of the entire world were using the Internet home user would be using it via dial-up. But the shocking part was how many people in the world at that time did not even have a telephone. I can't recall the percentage but it was quite high.

</comment><comment><USER24> This shouldn't surprise anybody. Anecdotally speaking, most old folks I know (of) watch television, read physical newspapers, and call/write/see people. What do they need the internet for? I'm -- if anything -- surprised the number isn't higher.

</comment><comment><USER25> Or perhaps it's better to phrase it "over 80% of Britons use internet".

<comment><USER26> Downvoted because, if you have a point to make, you forgot to include it in the post.

<comment><USER25> Clickbait headline: "Almost one-fifth of Britons 'do not use internet'"

Non-clickbait version: "over 80% of Britons use internet"

How is that not clear? 80% internet usage is pretty good, not bad as the headline and article suggest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> WhoTF is the Oxford Internet Institute?[0]

I understand I'm just a dumb American, but is the OII something anyone knows anything about?

[0][https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/](https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a department in the University of Oxford. Unlike all those "Oxford School of English" type of places, this one is actually noteworthy and part of the real university.

<comment><USER27> Thank you. It looks like what I think BuzzFeed looks like but I was wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It would be nice to know how they did this survey, I'm presuming it wasn't an online survey. But us Brits do love to lie to people doing surveys, just to get away from them. Indeed, had they done this as an online survey - <USER2> would still get people saying they do not use the internet.

<comment><USER29> Large surveys used to be done via the phone. I think they're moving over to online surveys now.

Id be more concerned about the self selecting nature. There must be quite a limited demographic willing to sign on to Yougov say, and complete surveys for a very small financial reward.

<comment><USER28> More so when the sample sizes will be within a timeframe (during 9-5 usually) as well as being limited in size (very small samples given the scale) and in this case 2,000 people is about 0.0003% of the population they project those results upon.

<comment><USER30> It's an increasing struggle to get a good sample for surveys, as the rate of people refusing has been going up continuously since surveys were invented. This has methodological implications for survey researchers that are quite serious. Some things aren't a problem, though. Survey companies definitely work outside 9-5, and the 2,000 population sample turns out to be more than enough: the sample size needed for a particular degree of statistical confidence is independent of the population size (except for very small populations) and remarkably few people are needed for a good sample. 2000 is actually pretty large for survey research, where ~1000 is pretty standard.

<comment><USER31> There's nothing like UK election polling for shaking confidence in getting representative samples from the UK population.

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

shows that two polls this week, each of ~2000 people, found the Conservatives to have either a 1% or a 12% lead over Labour.

<comment><USER30> The British opinion polls are all over the place at the moment, yes. It's very likely that these are not sampling issues, though. British politics is currently in a period of realignment with the position of all parties in flux.

Election polling relies heavily on turnout modeling: it's not enough to know what people's opinions are to predict elections, but also which of those people are likely to vote. And the different polling companies have very different models for that, and other 'artistic' parts of the modeling which aren't strictly related to their polling sample. It certainly doesn't imply problems for survey research as a whole (though, as I said, there are increasingly long-term challenges to the while edifice).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Please fix the title, the real number is 18% (of 2000 people surveyed)

Direct link to report:

[https://oxis.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp- content/uploads/sites/43/2019/0...](https://oxis.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp- content/uploads/sites/43/2019/09/OxIS-report-2019-final-digital-PDFA.pdf)

very interesting numbers nonetheless.

<comment><USER33> is that not almost one fifth?

<comment><USER34> I thought parent comment was quibbling as well but it's actually closer to one-sixth and surprisingly this does affect my reaction to the information. So I do think 18% would be a better title. The article does get there in the second line at least (but not before saying "almost 20%" for no reason other than to exaggerate, I guess.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Assuming the survey methodology allows us to scale this number to the whole population, it would be nearly 12 million people (0.18 * 66 million = 11.88 million). Quite a staggering number no matter what percentage it is.

<comment><USER6> You included all the two year olds in your 66 million.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very true. Do you know a figure for UK pop above the age of 8? I can't find that with some quick searching.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Quicklisp public beta - <AUTHOR> http://www.quicklisp.org/beta/

<comment><USER2> This is awesome. Hopefully it will take off. Here's a list of recommended libraries:

<http://www.cliki.net/Current%20recommended%20libraries>

Maybe they should be highlighted in the Quicklisp package list?

I'll mention in passing another solution I've found to the dearth of libraries in CL: run CPython via pipes. Then I can call any Python library I want. I used it for GUIs, downloading stuff from the web, and for doing plots with Scipy/matplotlib. It works great, though obviously has some "bandwidth" limitations.

<comment><USER3> Everything on that page is in Quicklisp except Maxima.

edit: It's also not a great list - I'd add a few dozen things to it. I'd like to have a nice way to rate & review projects in Quicklisp, but that's something for the future.

<comment><USER2> Please write/update such a list if you can. For most people, choosing a library is as big a headache as installing it.

<comment><USER4> That's pretty accurate. I'm still a dumb noob about programming generally but I've been using and lurking in #lisp and the "community at large" for ~2 years now.

The best thing to do for new users is probably to show up on #lisp and solicit recommended libraries for X, I'm afraid. Or google and read extensively, selecting for newer information where possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can anyone recommend a good way to start doing something web oriented in lisp? (and quicklisp)

<comment><USER4> Well, the two prominent web frameworks are Weblocks and UCW but their documentation is...wanting. I'm working on a Weblocks tutorial right now but I gave a bit of a survey of the CL web landscape recently: <http://redlinernotes.com/blog/?p=1232>

Damn shameless self promoters. Anyway, seeing as UCW and Weblocks aren't well documented a lot of people just grab Postmodern or CL-SQL for DB stuff (there are some NoSQL solutions around if that's your fancy), then CL-Who or HTML- Template and Hunchentoot (web server) for the rest.

All the above libraries are easily installable via quicklisp. God bless Xach. And Amazon AWS. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I would also recommend not bothering with the frameworks. Get Hunchentoot and Postmodern and you're ready to go. I've even stopped bothering with CL-WHO, I now use CL-INTERPOL for HTML templating (cl-closure-template seems to do fancy stuff, too). If you're lazy like me use BKNR-datastore instead of Postmodern and you won't even have to bother configuring a database. Other stuff you'll probably need: cl-fad (file/directory manipulation), cl-ppcre (regular expressions), ironclad (hash digests), cl-smtp (sending the huge cash-money invoices to your eager users). Eventually you will become too lazy to write JavaScript by hand, in that case grab Parenscript. All of this is available via quicklisp, it really makes things easy.

<comment><USER4> BKNR-datastore seems really nice but I haven't gotten a chance to play with it yet. Do you know if it supports concurrent writes yet? I know it didn't circa 2008 or so...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, there's a global lock for transactions. I'm not sure it's such a big loss considering you still need a lock on the log file. Adding MVCC or per- object locks would mean rewriting most of BKNR, changing major parts of how it works, and a hugely more complicated implementation. And those things have a lot of their own overhead too. OTOH then you can just throw the objects into an mmapped file, put a REPL on a socket and bingo you have a multi-user networked ACID object database. But then you might as well just use Postgresql and Postmodern.

I don't know if you've ever installed the full Kloudshare, but Will wrote the first Hold backed by bknr.datastore, so you've probably used it.

<comment><USER4> > "But then you might as well just use Postrgresql and Postmodern."

Yeah, that's what I figured. I doubt for anything I'll work on soon that the lock will be an issue. Just curious. :)

I didn't realize the hold used to be backed by bknr. That's cool. Thanks for the heads up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The future, it's here.

<http://twitter.com/bhyde/status/26945887373>

</comment><comment><USER7> Oh. Oh my. This seems to be CPAN for LISP. Is that an accurate perception?

<comment><USER3> Quicklisp does some stuff that CPAN does (like make a bunch of libraries fairly easy to install), but CPAN does a ton of things that Quicklisp doesn't do, and that might be difficult to do for Lisp libraries (e.g. because there isn't a POD equivalent in the CL world).

<comment><USER7> Well, yes, I understood that immediately - but the basic functionality of CPAN for me, the reason I stuck to Perl in the first place and stayed there, was the ability to search CPAN, find a module that does more or less what I want, and load it, no worries. That seems to do this for LISP.

Now, if you wanted to provide all the _rest_ of CPAN for LISP, that would be really cool. Automated testing across platforms, some kind of standardized documentation of projects so you know what each one is (even without POD, surely something could be done - doesn't LISP at least have docstrings or something?), a search facility, etc.

That would be fun. If you want a volunteer who's not guaranteed to finish real soon but who has a clear vision of what could be done, feel free to email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I played around with this briefly this weekend in a clean SBCL install on my linux box and it worked beautifully. Very nice work Zach.

</comment><comment><USER9> What is it? A package manager? If so, how does it differ from ASDF?

<comment><USER3> It's approximately a package manager, in the non-Lisp sense of the word "package". If you carry out that analogy a little further, ASDF is like "make" and Quicklisp is like "apt-get".

<comment><USER10> Really cool.

I go back to CL each year. Last couple of times I checked I wasn't able to get linedit working under my sbcl via a chain of simple asdf-installs, so CL went into my private oblivion.

Great idea with some QA done to the released programs !! CL always seemed like the people involved hated the phrase "release management". Now there's some light at the end of the tunnel..

Thanks for your work !

<comment><USER3> I just started using linedit this week, because all I have to do to set it up is:

        (ql:quickload "linedit")
        (linedit:install-repl)

Before that, it seemed like too much trouble.

<comment><USER11> I got it to work via asdf-install, but I had to cheat a little to do it: I removed linedit's version check that was not present in the dependent package (I think osicat).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice work. Kudos!

As much as I appreciate Common Lisp, I'm always puzzled at how a language reputedly targeting AI problems still lacks an "intelligent" package manager the kind Perl has always had. To me, that says a lot about the failure of AI.

EDIT: Let's hope the time has comed.

<comment><USER13> Very nice work indeed Zach!

I think it probably says more about the motivation, need, and the size of the respective communities. CPAN has been a great success and example, but I don't think that has had anything to do with AI.

<comment><USER12> I should have explained further: when I say "that says a lot about the failure of AI", I mean that from a language whose target is AI, you would expect some kick-ass solutions to common issues. Common Lisp is good to solve hard problems, but then - after more than 50 years - you have to fight to install a library, when "lesser" languages make it a breeze. With direct words: I think AI failed because it tackled hard problems instead of everyday ones.

Obligatory Xkcd quote: <http://xkcd.com/224/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> AskHN: Who here remembers QuickBASIC?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickBASIC>

<comment><USER15> Maybe next someone will write a competing implementation and call it Turbolisp...

<comment><USER14> Or VisualLisp?

Or would it be VisualLISP?

Oh... Taken. [http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&...](http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=770237)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks like PLaneT for CL. Good stuff.</comment>


Xkcd wikipedia steps to philosophy, not so. - <AUTHOR>

Seen this http://ryanelmquist.com/cgi-bin/xkcdwiki ? Try telecommunication. <comment><USER2> Telecommunication takes 7 steps as of now. The telecommunication page has been edited a lot over the past day. Some pages have been edited to break the chain to philosophy xkcd mentions, e.g. mathematics (and then reverted by irate Wikipedians).

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. I found that loop by looking up "Homer Simpson", which now loops on poetry.</comment></comment>


Functional Pearl 1 – The Min Missing Natural Number - <AUTHOR> http://typeocaml.com/2015/02/02/functional-pearl-no-1-the-min-free-nature/ <comment><USER2> The "responsive design" of this website uses two columns for web content when viewport is wide enough. This is supremely bad UX. Not only it is totally unexpected, as nobody on the web does it, it is also quite frustrating, as it forces you to scroll up to read second column.

I really hate it when people do that. This looks good in print, but the print is different medium with different constraints. Web is not print.

</comment><comment><USER3>
        >But we can skip out ideally half of the numbers.

_ideally_ , but in the worst case it's O(n * (n - 1)), or O (n^2)

if your first X is the max, and your second choice is X-1, and so forth (in the worst case), then you're not operating in O(n), but n^2

<comment><USER4> Yeah, you are right, I should have mentioned that.

<comment><USER5> But there's an easy fix: don't pick numbers from the given sequence, instead use binary search on [0,n]. Then you're guaranteed only log n iterations.

<comment><USER4> Hi, I was using pure functional programming style, so list only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another idea is to just stuff the input into a hash table and then say: is 0 there? is 1 there? ... is n-1 there?</comment>


TV's Next Wave: Tuning In to You - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704288304576171251689944350.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think they get it - no one watches commericals. Most television commercials (with some exceptions, such as during the super bowl) are ignored, skipped, or fast forwarded by viewers as soon as they appear on screen. In fact, most cable companies, Cablevision included, readily dispense DVR's that enable viewers to fast forward through commercials and anything else that is recorded onto them...</comment>


Very fast development, how to do it? - <AUTHOR>

I'm not talking shoving a huge number of man hours at the project in the shortest time period possible. I mean what tools, strategies,or anything really that will cut application development time(and also the man hours put in).<p>Note:I'm asking this question with webapps in mind but something that would work with general development I think is also relevant. <comment><USER2> A willingness to do it right the first time. I find any time I take on "technical debt" it almost always bites me in the rear latter.

A good VCS and the ability to use it.

Spiral development with strict YAGNI. Do it right but don't over engineer.

Automated Tests. Not because I am all that big a fan of tests but because if you write it to where it is easy to test it is often better designed. Code that is written with everything you need to do to unit test is often written with lower coupling and better cohesion because you are thinking about how to take out this one little part to test.

</comment><comment><USER3> The fastest coding is no coding. Some pre-programming thoughts:

Problems are easier to fix the earlier you find them. Try to define the problem (get it clear in your head); try to define the solution. A minimal product can help ( _does it solve the problem?_ _is it the problem real?_ ), or mocking up a pretend solution (e.g. a manual backend, or no backend), even on paper, or with a tool like balsamiq.

Can you solve the problem using an existing tool, perhaps by modifying the problem to fit (constraining it, generalizing it, or transforming it)? This can be embarassingly effective, esp if you have NIH syndrome and just want to code.

Can you make the _cause_ of the problem go away? ie Doctor, my arm hurts when I do this. _Don't do that._

Estimate times, by sub-dividing the tasks, then _doubling_ the estimates. Then re-ask what is really essential. It can change the balance of what alternatives are reasonable to consider. [x2 seems to account for one's optimism. But confirm it for yourself: make some estimates and check what happened.]

Reread _The Mythical-Man Month_. eg He suggests 1/6 of project time be allocated to coding. (p.20, anniversary edition); the rest is planning (1/3) and testing (1/2)

</comment><comment><USER4> Use a framework: Django. RoR.

Go minimalist (feature set) and release ASAP - no matter how crappy it is. Having something released will force you to improve it quickly.

</comment><comment><USER5> Choose the best language for the job, because coding really slows down when even the simplest things are awkward to express. Sometimes, this can be handled by writing a simple tool or file format for code generation, as opposed to using a new language. Make sure perl and python are both in your toolbox.

While it's useful to spend _some_ time looking for existing solutions, don't be afraid to build things. Your version will often be good enough, and quicker to integrate than a 3rd party solution. Besides, you usually learn something in the process, which will only make you better at coding, and speed up your next project.

</comment><comment><USER6> Abstractions and code generation. Start by being completely intolerant of repetitive code. Boilerplate must die. Closures can help a lot with this.

To whatever extent you can't abstract away, use code generation. Make your generator insert code directly into your project files, maybe in between comment tags. You want to be able to configure things with minimal code and hit a button to get everything you need.

I'm experimenting with using emacs for this, but generally I've just built c# projects to generate my c# code. On one project this had an unexpected benefit: I realized I could change my generator from a compiler to an interpreter, doing everything at runtime, and I got a very concise and flexible data-driven project, with 1/3 the lines of code as a similar project built by a contractor that had everything hardcoded.

Of course, know your language and libraries well. You don't want to be googling for every little thing. To help learn the libraries, staged memory software like anki or mnemosyne can be a big help.

Finally, get really good at a topnotch text editor. I'm about 8 months into using Vim for everything (mainly via Viemu, a plugin for Visual Studio) and it makes a huge difference. It's not just that I can edit faster, but that it helps keep me in flow.

</comment><comment><USER7> Automate all processes: assembly, releases, tests. If there is a process that has to do every day - automates this. A good example of when you need to do automation - delivery website for test and production server.

Also use modern frameworks like RoR, Grails, Django, Spring, etc

</comment><comment><USER8> The number one thing you can do to develop the "correct" software quickly is to choose a language at the proper level of abstraction and with the right idioms to allow you to address your problem space.

If you are tackling a problem space where such a language doesn't already exist, or one where the right idioms and level of abstraction is unknown to you, then choose a language that permits you to easily discover and construct the domain specific language that is required.

</comment><comment><USER9> The sooner you start typing the longer it takes to finish.

</comment><comment><USER10> tests

once you are sure that you arent breaking something, the speed at which you can code changes an order of magnitude.

the hard part is how to produce tests quickly

</comment><comment><USER11> productive django development: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1852237/productive- django...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1852237/productive-django-web- development)

</comment><comment><USER12> Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.

<comment><USER13> This doesn't really help you with putting out code quicker/more efficiently.</comment></comment>


Hacker News London Meetup, October 2016 – Review - <AUTHOR> https://thoeni.io/post/hacker-news-london-october-2016/ <comment><USER2> > The talks remind me somewhat of TEDx events, but primarily focused on > technology.

All tech meet-ups in my corner of the world seem to have devolved into these TED style talks.

These days everyone wants to be a visionary discussing big ideas. Everyone talks how awesome it is to work for their startup that is changing the world or be a freelancer that earns tons of cash by writing Ruby while surfing on Tahiti. Share various personal stories of enlightenment.

This style was exciting when TED got popular a few years ago, but now I find it increasingly annoying. I really miss old meetups where people would just present their open source projects and discuss technical topics. If I go to a Python meetup, I want to perhaps hear about some new cool library you made, not how you learned to play the trumpet.

(I don't mean this as a criticism of this Hacker News meetup - I haven't been to it and perhaps this style fits there. Just a general observation.)

<comment><AUTHOR> >I really miss old meetups where people would just present their open source projects and discuss technical topics.

That's pretty much what HN London is. We like to keep the talks as diverse as possible. Everything from local developers building 3D worlds in CSS3D[1] to the creator of Haskell talking about shaping the future of how children learn computing[2].

[1] - [https://vimeo.com/75454802](https://vimeo.com/75454802)

[2] - [https://vimeo.com/137420684](https://vimeo.com/137420684)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> HNLondon is probably the best tech meetup in Europe. It's hard to convey what makes it so special, and why other meetups can't seem to replicate its magic. I highly recommend going if you can.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow. Thank you.

The meetup has been running for about 5-6 years now and it's taken a huge amount of time and effort to get it to where it is today. We're incredibly fortunate that there's an amazing amount of interesting people willing to speak at and attend the event.

<comment><USER4> How does one find out when the next one is?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here you go: [http://www.meetup.com/hnlondon/](http://www.meetup.com/hnlondon/)

Next one is likely to be at the end of November.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If anyone is interested in coming along to future events, sign up at [http://www.meetup.com/hnlondon](http://www.meetup.com/hnlondon) . Hope to have the next one on in late November.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have been at meetups all around the world (Belgium, Madrid, SF, Barcelona, London)... and HN London is easily one of the highest quality ones I've been to. If you're in/around London and wanna meet some interesting people (e.g. I've seen pc there once), make sure you go there.

</comment><comment><USER7> Dmitri (dmitri1981) and Steve (Peroni) deserve a huge amount of credit for HN London. It's one of the largest tech-focused meetup groups outside the US, and it's hugely refreshing to have an event that doesn't charge through the nose, and seeks to help the local startup eco-system instead of seeking to profit from it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Been attending HNLondon for several years now. IMO its success is down to Steve and Dmitri's efforts to source speakers that cover diverse topics, are not salesy, and are often completely and unexpectedly inspirational.

They avoid the overly polished and sometimes sanctimonious TED style. HNLondon feels like an authentic event put together by true technologists for technologists.

Free craft beer and pizza also sweetens the deal :-)

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone able to explain the Poundstretcher thing? Why are they scattering around the Seychelles on Google Maps?

<comment><USER10> Yes! This is something I discovered whilst building part of the fieldmargin stack - basically historically speaking you order the terms as latitude, longitude. For lots of applications (inc. geoJSON) you follow the mathematical order however: x, y, z which equivalent to longitude, latitude. Our iOS dev made the mistake of incorrectly ordering them one day and we discovered our data along with the poundstretchers in the Indian Ocean which we thought was pretty funny. We assume they made the same mistake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's at least one example of technology used for the betterment of humanity. Wished I had been there!

</comment><comment><USER12> Great to see this meetup is back again, would be great if someone from YC (and/or YC alum) can do a talk about the emergence of hardware startups, maybe Luke Iseman ?

</comment><comment><USER13> Yesterday I created Hacker News Madrid Meetup ([https://www.meetup.com/hnmadrid](https://www.meetup.com/hnmadrid)) and now its being reviewed.

Any advise on how to run it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Finding decent speakers is harder than finding decent sponsors. Expect to spend most of your time chasing down speakers.

Start small. HN London started in someones apartment in London with 10-15 people turning up and grew from there to an average of 400 people attending.

Try to avoid talks that end up being a product pitch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if people is as critical IRL as they can seem here on HN sometimes. I guess not :)

</comment><comment><USER15> wow, didn't know about this. I'm definitely going to attend next time!

</comment><comment><USER16> Anybody interested to run a HN Meetup in Paris?

<comment><USER5> Sacha Greif and the dotConferences guys (Sylvain Zimmer and Ferdinand Boas) used to run them. Maybe get in touch with them and see if they can help you get started. Also, feel free to give me a shout if you want any input / suggestions

<comment><USER17> Hey!

We did start it a long time ago, but then someone aggressively took over the meetup page, so we're not in control anymore: [http://www.meetup.com/parishackers/](http://www.meetup.com/parishackers/)

We've since started "Paris Tech Talks" in the same spirit, which is now the largest generalist tech meetup in Paris: [https://www.meetup.com/Paris-Tech- Talks/](https://www.meetup.com/Paris-Tech-Talks/)

What we've seen over time though is that the Paris tech scene already has a enormous number of high quality meetups, and people are increasingly tired of them. We are seeing the same general decline in interest that happened with hackathons a couple years ago.

I'd say that "Hacker News" is not really a strong enough unique proposition to build a new meetup on. Meetups linked to specific languages or technologies tend to do much better over time.

Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss more!</comment></comment></comment>


Digg Surrenders to Mob - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/01/digg-surrenders-to-mob/ <comment><USER2> Wow, this is huge. I honestly think we might be witnessing a turning point in the history of the web - it almost reminds me of the french revolution. The masses are rioting, and torching the digital property of the elite. And those hex numbers have become this movement's rallying call.

What we know is that with 2.0, control over online content has been handed to the users. What we don't know is how the users will decide to wield this power, and the effect it will have on the likes of digg/youtube/etc.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure I'd put it up against the French Revolution, but I'd say it's a nice reaffirmation that it's all about your users. You have to be very careful when it comes to enforcing rules and restrictions.

<comment><USER4> You have to be open and honest with your users rather than "careful".

<comment><USER5> It might be nice it the world worked that way, but I don't think that's it. I think Daniel's use of "careful" is right on. Digg was transparent about what they were doing; the community still did not like it.

You have to do what your users want, simple as that. If what your users really want is openness and honesty that's what you give them. Digg's users want to be able decrypt dvds (even if in the abstract for most of them). They've had many accusations of lack of transparency in the past that went nowhere.

<comment><USER4> Your point about Digg is wrong, I think. It wasn't just the infamous encryption key. Digg was already known for inconsistent and at times unjustified moderation and many such stories went unnoticed for that reason - they were quickly removed. The HD-DVD was just a tipping point - for many perhaps only subconsciously.

And this explains my point: Digg has never been honest and that eventually paid off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone know what Diggmob.org is all about ?

</comment><comment><USER6> Diggmob is what makes Digg,DIGG.</comment>