Bpkg – a Bash package manager - <AUTHOR> http://www.bpkg.io/ <comment><USER2> I do not want to be that guy, but I do anyway. Haha.

Is there time for a service that looks at any README on a github project or other indexable repos, and give it a cute landing page and failing grade if the install recommends curl [http://supersecure.script](http://supersecure.script) \- | bash # fuck my box.

Perhaps ismyboxvaklem.pt?

<comment><USER3> technically, they don't recommend it. curl whatever | bash is one of the 3 possible method (first listed, I agree) but there are 2 other ways to install it.

otoh, don't you think that without the unsecure one liner to install it, some people would complain about its lack ? Stating they can read the script before executing it anyway.

Plus, it's not much less secure than cloning a repo and running 'make install' (in both case, one could read the script(s) but will unlikely do so).

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly my thoughs, too! When you clone and make blindly, it's not any safer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> STOP IT. WE DONT NEED THIS.

Direct your efforts to your favorite OS's package management team. Stop creating new package management systems that permit idiots to install vulnerable software that won't get flagged by widely accepted monitoring practices for every OS

<comment><AUTHOR> There's too much overhead to package and maintain small shell tools as native packages. Plus, who wants their repository list to be growing infinitely with PPAs that usually tell little about themselves. Major distros other than Ubuntu are not any better.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Olauncher – minimalistic, free and open source launcher app for Android - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.olauncher <comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I have been wasting too much time on my phone during this pandemic. I had to delete my most used social media accounts permanently to fix this. While that was helpful, it wasn't enough. I wanted to bring down my smartphone usage even further and that's when I stumbled upon minimalistic launchers for Android. Used them, loved them and decided to make one myself and open source it. Well, today's the day.

Presenting Olauncher! A minimalistic, free and open-source launcher app for Android. Now available at Play Store and Github. I hope you find it useful.

Play Store: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.olauncher](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.olauncher)

Github: [https://github.com/tanujnotes/Olauncher](https://github.com/tanujnotes/Olauncher)</comment>


Tether reopens account verification and direct redemption of fiat - <AUTHOR> https://tether.to/tether-reopens-account-verification-and-direct-redemption-of-fiat-from-its-platform/ <comment><USER2> Min $100k and $1000 fee. Ouch.</comment>


Sing Out - <AUTHOR> https://phirmware.host/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://phirmware.host/music/5c1eb2777bcdeb68a4f5b7d7](https://phirmware.host/music/5c1eb2777bcdeb68a4f5b7d7) I think this is the best music on the website</comment>


Golang libs released by Prevoty - <AUTHOR> http://blog.prevoty.com/simple-tools-to-solve-simple-problems

<comment><USER2> I was really excited by pdo until I saw that it only supports mysql and sqlite. Maybe this weekend I can fork and add at least postgres.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice. Yeah we built for our needs but happy to see it augmented.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: At what point does your side project become your job? - <AUTHOR> I run www.propertywizard.io and also work full-time. I launched in December and I am at £544 monthly recurring revenue. The cost to run is roughly £1k a year, so I'm profitable if you don't take into account my time.
I have a child and a mortgage to upkeep so I cannot leave my job until it is making significantly more, however, I know it needs my full attention to reach that stage.
What would you do?
I'm wondering if I should seek investment to cover my living costs. I'm not sure investors would be happy knowing their money is literally buying my time? <comment><USER2> Congrats on developing a SaaS with revenue . . . keep bootstrapping . . . you don't need investment.

Polish up your app and code . . . there are some rendering issues on initial load and validation on the login form. Test, improve, polish provide the best UX you can to keep existing customers.

Start a blog with articles on how realtors can use social media, publish often and collect emails/build a list, email that list valuable information and details on PropertyWizard.

Invest some of your revenue in contacting realtors, test out some ideas and see what your ROI is. Try calling realtors in person make a goal of 1, 5 or 10 per day, approach an office with 50 realtors and offer them a group package, test mailing out 100 postcards, track the realtor/office names/provide a unique URL and track signups. Find out what's working to generate signups and focus your efforts there.

Add a signup process on the site (checkout stripe), test three subscription levels, offer a annual discount sign up for 12 months (price of 10). Add an Office package up to XX realtors, email us for custom plans/more realtors. I think focusing on real estate offices with multiple agents might be a good way to grow your subscribers.

Add a favicon, minor but I always notice when they are missing from a site.

Don't sell a piece of your pie at this point, keep growing it.

Good luck, update us on how it's going.

<comment><USER3> Agreed with all this.

Definitely focus on your CTA on the site. It's not very clear that I can sign up for your service on the site.

I'd also offer a 30 day refund for unhappy users, this helps put new users minds at rest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > I'm not sure investors would be happy knowing their money is literally > buying my time

Isn't that what most investments do in the beginning? Pay for the time for the idea to become a reality and give the founder(s) the ability to realise it?

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree to some extent, but normally they would expect there money to be spent on marketing etc. rather than to cover my household bills?

<comment><USER5> In the context of a Hacker News discussion, there are really two types of investors worth distinguishing. The difference centers [or centres?] around the meaning of "startup".

In Silicon Valley, a startup is a company designed to grow fast and structured to take outside investment in exchange for equity [i.e. a Delaware C Corporation]. Everywhere else, to a first approximation, recent shifts in popular culture have made "startup" mostly synonymous with "new business": the local chamber of commerce will refer to new restaurants as startups and restaurant owners as founders. These "local" startups are organized to meet the needs of local investors and local investors focus on cash flow [in the US an S-corp or an LLC so as to avoid double taxation].

The difference in structure is reflected in a difference of investment management. Silicon Valley style investors achieve returns via capital gains. "Local" investors primarily try to achieve returns via dividends, profit distributions, etc.

To put it in perspective, the YC investment model [as a sub-type of the SV model] is exactly about covering living expenses to allow founders to do things that increase the value of the underlying equity. That includes activities such as raising additional funding to allow more of the same.

In contrast, a "local" investor may not want additional investment because growth increases the risk of failure or a drop in profitability.

Lastly, one of the advantages of a US C-Corp is the legal requirement that employees get paid a legal wage. It avoids situations like that mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I should mention the reason I haven't made an 'Apply HN' post is the money available ($20k) wouldn't be enough for me to cover my expenses and quit my job.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would try to invest your current revenue in someone who can help you make your product more visible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any ideas on how? I have tried Facebook/Google/LinkedIn Ads' and didn't get much response, it's a high touch sales process that involves pointing out the problem they have, most are aware of social media, have created accounts but then do nothing with them.

<comment><USER6> Thats why i thought about a third party. Not sure where you would find such a person/company but you are providing a solution for a very specific need which is most likely not easily advertised to. Basically i think you need a sales guy.</comment></comment></comment>


Challenge: disruptive for the blind - <AUTHOR>

Can you send out an email to some of your tech  friends? I am looking for some disruptive technology for the blind. There is a high school girl here in NH -- she is a STEM nut but has limitations learning with current technology. She wants to take notes in Braille and follow along with the instructor. Currently she uses an IPAD hooked ot a Braille board but she cannot keep up with the instructor and with the rest of the class. SHe wants to be like the other students where she listens, follows along in a book and takes notes. One day she wants to go to college and do what other kids are doing but this technology limitation is making things difficult for her.
I suggested two I Pads. One for assistive technology with a braile connector and the second for her to follow along in a book and take notes. A bit unworkable -- perhaps an app that would open up two panes one with the book and the other for notes. Something with the assistive technology working seamless with her notetaking.
She wants to own her own technology business one day. Can you help make her dream come true?
Mike Daniele Email *	email@example.com
Michael <comment><USER2> I'm a totally blind software developer. Based on my experience there is no way to efficiently take notes and read from a book at the same time. She should ask the teacher to let her know ahead of time what reading will be discussed. She can then do the reading ahead of time and focus on taking notes in class when the teacher is talking. I would also suggest using a bluetooth keyboard instead of typing in Braille. While Braille is useful for reading it is not as efficient of an input method as a normal keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER3> What about these combo keyboard-braille displays? Or the braille display laptop attachments?

[http://store.humanware.com/hus/at-school](http://store.humanware.com/hus/at- school)

</comment><comment><USER4> hey Mike, shed be perfect for masschallenge! applications are about to close! masschallenge.org</comment>


Microsoft Issues Windows 10 Upgrade Warning - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2019/02/02/microsoft-windows-10-upgrade-problem-price-cost <comment><USER2> is it DNS flag day? [https://dnsflagday.net/](https://dnsflagday.net/)</comment>


Ask HN: Sensible security for Linux devices - <AUTHOR> Does anyone have experience shipping Linux devices? What is the standard way to secure them? Maybe random (but stored for troubleshooting) passwords during manufacturing? Or maybe no password but an SSH key per device?
Users should not have to access the root account on them (only a user account, which we could set to change on first access).
I'm not sure of a sensible method and really don't want to reinvent the wheel here.
EDIT (for clarity): I am looking especially for root password strategies where company support reps can log in as root but users cannot. <comment><USER2> [https://highon.coffee/blog/security-harden- centos-7/](https://highon.coffee/blog/security-harden-centos-7/)

</comment><comment><USER2> [https://www.cisecurity.org/cis-hardened- images/](https://www.cisecurity.org/cis-hardened-images/)</comment>


Why Obama Has Failed to Close Guantanamo - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/01/why-obama-has-failed-to-close-guantanamo?mbid=synd_digg <comment><USER2> When Obama visited Sweden last time I wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece in my local newspaper to put him to trial in the Hague for crimes against humanity. I think most of his tries to close gitmo has been half-assed at most. Just moving gitmo to the US mainland without changing any policies around how to treat detainees is not good enough, and it definitely is not the same as closing it.

<comment><USER3> It's just how political polarization works in the US. Nothing changed in Iraq until the actual pullout a free years after he took office, and Obama ramped up the war in Afghanistan and over Pakistan, but the anti-war movement here shut down the moment he took office.

The "they won't let him shut down Gitmo" business is exactly the same thing. It's just a rallying cry, and strictly one to rally around the president with, not to try to accomplish change with. Hence the literalism - it's not about humane treatment of prisoners, human rights, or anything like that. It's about _that one base in Cuba_. It's just excusing a failed campaign promise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What speaks volumes about the business is the statement, "My interrogators told me no one leaves Guantánamo innocent." No matter how you got there, you are guilty. Because once you leave, no matter what your feelings, you will want revenge. Which makes you a terrorist in thought, if not acts.</comment>


Michael Arrington Invented Groupon in 2005 (Idea 4) - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2005/11/21/companies-id-like-to-profile-but-dont-exist/

<comment><USER2> Proving once again, an idea without execution is worth precisely fuck all. All the non-technical founders out there trying to rip the executors in terms of equity, take note.

<comment><USER3> Exactly, "inventing" is the wrong word, if you invent you build, an idea by itself is useless without execution.

<comment><USER4> "Useless" is also the wrong word.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Greoup buying has been done many times before, including in the bubble. GroupOn has the distinction of working. I also think it is essentially orthogonal to the original group buying aspect but that was useful pretraction.

</comment><comment><USER6> If Arrington had invented Groupon, he would have invented Groupon

</comment><comment><USER7> I wouldn't say invented so much as 'foresaw the large opportunity'.

It popped up on Techcrunch a lot before GroupOn, ie. how is it that the $170B local ad market has been left untouched by the web?

</comment><comment><USER8> A business idea is conjecture, execution is an experiment.

The word 'invented' here is a vocabulary failure.

</comment><comment><USER9> Ideas are cheap, good execution is worth millions (or in Groupon's case billions).

</comment><comment><USER10> <snark> and I invented time machine in 2001 </snark>

Idea means almost nothing. Execution is the hard part.

</comment><comment><USER11> he's also listed spotify/grooveshark there in number 6 ...

anyway, I would hardly call having an idea an invention ... the invention is the implementation of that idea, which is worth nothing until it's actually implemented ...

</comment><comment><USER12> Apparently he also came up with dropbox

<comment><USER13> More like Carbonite, Backblaze, Mozy, Crashplan, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is Dropbox today's answer to idea #1?

<comment><USER15> "500 GB for $20 per year" I wish!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> and ordered bullet list</comment>


Graph Databases, NOSQL and Neo4j - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/articles/graph-nosql-neo4j <comment><USER2> Great article. I like Neo4J but I have never used it for a customer project - just for personal experiments.

In general, NoSQL vs. relational is an interesting tradeoff between the ability to horizontally scale at reasonable cost vs. immediate consistency.

</comment><comment><USER3> A few more years of forward progress and the noSQL movement will make it to 1959 level technology: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CODASYL></comment>


Hackers Gonna Hack - <AUTHOR> http://vesess.com/blog/hackers-gonna-hack/

<comment><USER2> It's very easy for Mark Zuckerberg to say this kinda thing because he is sitting on billions of dollars. Hackers may build things for fun, but most of us have profit in mind as well.

<comment><USER3> I like to make money building things, but honestly, that isn't why I do it. Actually, I typically switch jobs when I don't like what I'm building. Billions or hundreds, that shouldn't change who you are. If it does, perhaps you were never that passionate about building things in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You will really enjoy anything that you love to do instead just working for someone for something.</comment>


Monad tutorial by graham hutton - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/monads

<comment><USER2> Fantasically written!

There is a typo on the list monad example; "x <\- ys" should be "x <\- xs".</comment>


400-square-foot micro apartments coming to downtown San Jose near Google village - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/25/400-square-feet-micro-apartments-coming-to-downtown-san-jose-near-google-village/ <comment><USER2> That's 70 square feet bigger than my first apartment in Boston. And those were the "big" apartments in the building!

OTOH, Beacon Hill was super cool</comment>


Lodash: 10 JavaScript Utility Functions That You Should Properly Stop Rewriting - <AUTHOR> http://colintoh.com/blog/lodash-10-javascript-utility-functions-stop-rewriting

<comment><USER2> Are browsers intelligent enough to inline the function invocation on each step of a _.times ?

<comment><USER3> If the function is small enough, yes.</comment></comment>


Would Charlie's app on Girls have received funding at Y Combinator Demo Day? - <AUTHOR> http://economichacks.tumblr.com/post/46577489058/would-charlies-app-on-girls-have-received-funding-at

<comment><USER2> Yeah, except that it's not technically possible on iOS (pushes glasses up on nose).

<comment><AUTHOR> :)</comment></comment>


How AT&T Recognizes Unauthorized Tethering from Jailbroken iPhones  - <AUTHOR> http://www.iphonedownloadblog.com/2011/05/08/how-att-recognizes-unauthorized-tethering-from-jailbroken-iphones/

<comment><USER2> Last week at a conference, I spoke briefly to an engineer from one of the large two US telcos on this issue. He indicated they utilized a variety of methods, including utilized fingerprinting of the IP/TCP headers, and protocol analysis to help identify traffic. Specifically, I heard TTL mentioned, as well. He might be a user here.

There are more knowledgeable people than you working on the issue. That said, I haven't gotten an evil text from using PDAnet, yet. Then again, I don't tether that much and when I do it's not a lot of data.

<comment><USER3> If you want to be safe, run a VPN on the phone and route all your traffic, tethered or not, through that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Note: TetherMe (native tethering on jailbroken iPhones) sends all tethered data through the same APN as mobile data by default so users won't fall foul of the APN detection method mentioned here.

Of course that wouldn't stop AT&T & Co sniffing browser strings of high data users, but that's a more complicated system to implement.

<comment><USER5> Or just assume that high data users are all tethering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd like to see a proper source of this (other than Android Police / iPhone Download Blog). I have used MyWi without having any special settings for tethering (my provider doesn't supply those), and it worked just fine; it would be a bit silly to go through the trouble of setting up a hotspot and making sure you're actively routing the data to the 'wrong' APN.

(Note that iPhone Download Blog is the one calling MyWi by name)

Also, if this is the case, wouldn't it be easier for AT&T to just disable the tethering APN for you if you don't have the tethering option? That would seem to be much more effective.

<comment><USER7> Every good dealer knows that you don't cut off your customers' supply. You "work with" them, you send someone to break their legs for not paying, but you never cut them off.

Seriously, wouldn't it always have been easier just to cut customers off to prevent things like astronomical texting overages? That would interfere with that beautiful revenue stream.

<comment><USER8> I think everyone here is only worried with the breaking of legs anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A couple of years back, federal regulators (thanks to the efforts of EFF) declared that jailbreaking an IPhone is not illegal. Since then, Apple has stopped threatening users with jailbroken IPhones, and also, finding and patching new vulnerabilities that allow jailbreaking has become a moot point.

In the same vein, has there ever been a verdict on the legality of unofficial (MyWi-like) tethering?

<comment><USER10> There's a huge difference between jailbreaking an iPhone, which the EFF established doesn't (necessarily) violate the DMCA, and breaking your contract by using services from AT&T that you're not paying for. The first means using something you bought and paid for in a way the manufacturer doesn't want you to. The second means using a service that the provider charges for, but you're not paying for. The law is never going to protect the second one.

To start with, tethering without paying for it is definitely a contract violation, and AT&T could cut off your service, retroactively charge you for it, or do whatever else (within reason) the contract provides for. There is little or no legal ambiguity about this. You are getting a service for free from AT&T that other people are charged for, so you're breaking your deal with them and owe them damages.

The (slightly) more interesting legal question might be whether AT&T could ask a prosecutor to bring criminal charges. My uninformed guess is they could, based on something like "theft of services." If I charged $20 a month for you to come fill up a one-gallon bucket any time you wanted from my well, and instead of a bucket you filled up a tanker truck, it would be theft plain and simple, because you'd knowingly be taking something from me without my permission.

(Actually I hate physical metaphors for computer stuff, because they usually distract more than help if you're talking with reasonably technical people. So let's not get sidetracked with questions like, "what if I filled up the tanker truck _with the bucket?_" [Unless you happen to enjoy pointless arguments as much as I do, in which case go for it.] The point is that the contract permits you to access AT&T's network in certain ways for a certain price, and you're accessing it in different ways without paying the different price, and the law's not too likely to be on your side for that one.)

This is all probably hypothetical, though. AT&T wouldn't bother to bring an expensive lawsuit or risk negative publicity from criminal charges, when they can (perfectly legitimately) charge you extra under the terms of your contract and dare you to fight it.

IAAL, in case that changes your assessment of a random person's opinions on the internet.

<comment><USER11> Tethering isn't a service though. The service is the data transfer. Tethering is a feature of the phone (which you own, especially if out of contract).

Here's a metaphor: Imagine if the water company charged you per gallon for water you used, but then added an additional charge for having a shower. Since you own plumbing fixtures to which the shower connects, and pay for every gallon, we would consider it unfair for the water company to charge extra for an "authorized" shower.

As far as theft of service, what on earth have you stolen? You pay for the data you transfer. Tethering is simply an "unauthorized" (by the vendor) use of that data.

<comment><USER12> However, the water company will most definitely come looking for you if you start selling water to the neighboring town that has higher water prices, since then you are profiting from your subsidized water.

The real problem is that somehow the wireless companies, unlike residential ISPs, have gotten away with not being labeled as pure data transfer companies. It _should_ be none of their business what data you send, but unfortunately that's not (legally) the case.

<comment><USER13> The dumb pipe argument has been around for a couple years now. These companies (cable, satellite, telecom) absolutely _do not_ want to become utilities. It limits their control over their product, and cuts off several high-yield revenue streams.

If they were regulated like a utility (water or electricity, for instance), you would see any and all arbitrary surcharges disappear, and these happen to be the biggest cash cows for these companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone know if tethering can be detected on Android phones? I'm curious what other provides do to try to detect tethering on Android phones.

<comment><USER15> I wrote a non-root tethering app, so I might have a bit of tunnel vision.

First, any good tethering app should be immune to a simple TTL check. The most likely culprits are instead application traffic patterns. The following immediately come to mind:

\- Browser user agents

\- Automatic status checks under both OS X and Windows

\- Application behavior:

* Netflix and Hulu on Android isn't supposed to happen.

* Browsers like Chrome are very aggressive and can open dozens of simultaneous TCP connections. DNS prefetching can also generate dozens of requests over UDP in a very short time window.

<comment><USER14> Can you avoid these issues by establishing an SSH or VPN tunnel through the 3G/4G connection?

<comment><USER15> Yep. Any non-root tethering app should just show the encrypted tunnel as a connection originating from the device itself. Just make sure that DNS requests don't leak when using an SSH tunnel. In fact, a simple port- forwarding app is all that's really necessary for most tunnel cases.

All of this makes a $6-$8/mo SSH/VPN privacy service (e.g., cotse.net) rather intriguing.

<comment><USER16> Most properly configured VPN service providers will reroute any DNS request traffic to their private NS servers (e.g., privateinternetaccess.com).

Another thing I'd like to mention is MPPE is not functioning in most Android builds, so don't rely on PPTP based VPNs on your phone - encryption won't work! Make sure your VPN service provider has IPSec/L2TP tunneling available.

Obviously root users should opt for OpenVPN. (e.g., cyanogenmod 7+)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I tested my Verizon HTC Thunderbolt 4G's download speeds today. I got over 7 megabits per second down. It also got 4 megabits up!

</comment><comment><USER18> They'll find other ways i.e. looking at the UserAgent in any unsecured HTTP request would signal tethering

<comment><USER19> Not really. You could always write a browser app for iOS or Android that uses Firefox or Chrome's user agent to have servers return the full desktop version.

<comment><USER18> If I was AT&T looking for unauthorized tethering folk, I'd focus on the people that are using > 2 GB a month + other various heuristics. Something deff smells funny if someone is using substantial bandwidth and much of the traffic is with a UserAgent like Firefox or Chrome

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I heard they checked for varying TTL values?

<comment><USER15> TTLs should not affect PdaNet if it is written like any of the other non-root tethering apps. Mac and Windows update pings are probably a good indicator, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> anyone actually knows what the old unlimited contract says about this?</comment>


Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-about-the-iphone-and-technology-now <comment><USER2> Let me try to help this community regarding this article by providing some context. First, you need to realize that in the more than 50 years of my career I have always waited to be asked: Every paper, talk, and interview has been invited, never solicited. But there is a body of results from these that do put forward my opinions.

This article was a surprise, because the interview was a few years ago for a book the interviewer was writing. It's worth noting that nowhere in the actual interview did I advocate going back and doing a Dynabook. My comments are mostly about media and why it's important to understand and design well any medium that will be spread and used en-mass.

If you looked closely, then you would have noticed the big difference between the interview and the front matter. For example, I'm not still waiting for my dream to come true. You need to be sophisticated enough to see that this is a headline written to attract. It has nothing to do with what I said.

And, if you looked closely, you might note a non seq right in the beginning, from "you want to see old media?" to no followup. This is because that section was taken from the chapter of the book but then edited by others.

The first version of the article said I was fired from Apple, but it was Steve who was fired, and some editor misunderstood.

In the interview itself there are transcription mistakes that were not found and corrected. And of course they didn't send me article ahead of time (I could have fixed all this).

I think I would only have made a few parts of the interview a little more understandable. It's raw, but -- once you understand the criticisms -- I think most will find them quite valid. In the interview -- to say it again -- I'm not calling for the field to implement my vision -- but I am calling for the field to have a larger vision of civilization and how mass media and our tools contribute or detract from it. Thoreau had a good line. He said "We become the tools of our tools" \-- meaning, be very careful when you design tools and put them out for use. (Our consumer based technology field is not being at all careful.)

<comment><USER3> Wow, this article is a pretty egregious misinterpretation of those points. I didn't come away with anything even vaguely resembling what you just said, even if we disregard the factual errors.

Candidly, your comments here make a _lot_ more sense than some "We haven't yet built the DynaBook the way we should" piece.

<comment><USER4> People often ask me "Is this a Dynabook, is that a Dynabook?". Only about 5% of the idea was in packaging (and there were 2 other different packages contemplated in 1968 besides the tablet idea -- the HMD idea from Ivan, and the ubiquitous idea from Nicholas).

Almost all the thought I did was based on what had already been done in the ARPA community -- rendered as "services" \-- and resculpted for the world of the child. It was all quite straightforwardly about what Steve later called "Wheels for the Mind".

If people are interested to see part of what we had in mind, a few of us including Dan Ingalls a few years ago revived a version of the Xerox Parc software from 1978 that Xerox had thrown away (it was rescued from a trash heap). This system was the vintage that Steve Jobs saw the next year when he visited in 1979. I used this system to make a presentation for a Ted Nelson tribute. It should start at 2:15. See what you think about what happens around 9:05. [https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=135](https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=135)

Next year will be the 50 anniversary of this idea, and many things have happened since then, so it would be crazy to hark back to a set of ideas that were in the context of being able to be built over 10 years, and would be ridiculous if we didn't have in 30 (that would be 1998, almost 20 years ago).

The large idea of ARPA/PARC was that desirable futures for humanity will require many difficult things to be learned beyond reading and writing and a few sums. If "equal rights" is to mean something over the entire planet, this will be very difficult. If we are to be able to deal with the whole planet as a complex system of which we complex systems are parts, then we'll have to learn a lot of things that our genetics are not particularly well set up for.

We can't say "well, most people aren't interested in stuff like this" because we want them to be voting citizens as part of their rights, and this means that a large part of their education needs to be learning how to argue in ways that make progress rather than just trying to win. This will require considerable knowledge and context.

The people who do say "well, most people aren't interested in stuff like this" are missing the world that we are in, and putting convenience and money making ahead of progress and even survival. That was crazy 50 years ago, and should be even more apparently crazy now.

We are set up genetically to learn the environment/culture around us. If we have media that seems to our nervous systems as an environment, we will try to learn those ways of thinking and doing, and even our conception of reality.

We can't let the commercial lure of "legal drugs" in the form of media and other forms put us into a narcotic sleep when we need to be tending and building our gardens.

The good news about "media as environment" was what attracted a lot of us 50 years ago -- that is, that making great environments/cultures will also be readily learned by our nervous systems. That was one of Montessori's great ideas, and one of McLuhan's great ideas, and it's a great idea we need to understand.

There aren't any parents around to take care of childish adults. We are it. So we need to grow up and take responsibility for our world, and the first actions should be to try to understand our actual situations.

<comment><USER5> I'm interested to see if you've seen the concepts of atemporality[1] and network culture[2] floating around. Basically, the core thesis associated with these is that we have adopted the internet as our primary mode of processing information, and have as such lost the sense of a cohesive narrative that is inherent in reading a book/essay, or listening to a whole talk, in the process.

You become fully immersed in Plato's worldview when reading The Republic, but if you were see someone explaining the allegory of the cave in the absence of a wider context you will only take the elements which fit your worldview and not his wider conception of knowledge.

I think this ties into what happened to the concept of a centralised computer network, working for the good of humanity, turning into todays fractured silos, working to mine individuals for profit.

[1][http://index.varnelis.net/network_culture/1_time_history_und...](http://index.varnelis.net/network_culture/1_time_history_under_atemporality) [2][http://index.varnelis.net/network_culture](http://index.varnelis.net/network_culture)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the references. I haven't seen these, but the ideas have been around since the mid-60s by virtue of a number of the researchers back then having delved into McLuhan, Mumford, Innis, etc. and applied the ideas to the contemplated revolutions in personal computing and networking media we were trying to invent.

I think a big point here is that going to a network culture doesn't mandate losing narrative, it just makes the probability much higher for people who are not self-conscious about their surrounding contexts. If we take a look at Socrates (portrayed as an oral culture genius) complaining about writing -- e.g. it removes the need to remember and so we will lose this, etc. -- we also have to realize that we are reading this from a very good early writer in Plato. Both of them loved irony, and if we look at this from that point of view, Plato is actually saying "Guess what? If you -decide- to remember while reading then you get the best of both worlds -- you'll get the stuff between your ears where it will do you the most good -and- you will have gotten it many times faster than listening, usually in a better form, and from many more resources than oral culture provides".

This was the idea in the 60s: provide something much better -- and by the way it includes narrative and new possibilities for narrative -- but then like reading and writing, teach what it is in the schools so that a pop culture version which misses most of the new powers is avoided.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I found it interesting that in an HN discussion about how to auto-update comments Alan Kay said, "How about a little model of time in a GUI?"[1] It ties into when he said of smartphone apps, "It's painful to see people using billions of devices that have forgot that undo is a good idea." [2]

It made me think about how things like Redux (or even just Google Drive revision history) where you can 'time travel' through state can be more important for UI than we realize sometimes.

1) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940472](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940472)

2) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6JC_W9F8-g&t=40m30s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6JC_W9F8-g&t=40m30s)

<comment><USER7> It is painful that most desktop apps never even got branching undo/redo.

<comment><USER8> Most non-technical people I know have trouble with "simple" undo-redo and copy-paste ; this would only make it harder for them.

<comment><USER9> So what? It shouldn't be too difficult to implement three states of userspace and have it be selected upon login:

\- Novice \- Advanced \- Expert

'Novice' gives you simple 'undo'. 'Advanced' gives you 'undo' with history. And 'Expert' gives you branching. For example... For file-managers this could be made so, that the novice gets something like the Finder or WindowsExplorer. Basically a file-browser, that handles its pane contents as a document. 'Advanced' gives you tabs, rearrangable layouts (dual-pane) and some more configuration. 'Expert' gives you fully configurable menus and toolbars, integrated with the hosts generic scripting host. Etc.

<comment><USER10> Finder does have tabs, and further automation is available through scripting (AppleScript and Terminal).

Actually, both scripting and the commandline are effective ways of making you organize your program into nouns and verbs that can be extended by the user.

But I don't think rearranging the basic UI is that useful, because all your users are basically the same - we're all human and not Lisp programmers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If, like Alan Kay, you think we need a major overhaul in software construction and are in the San Francisco Bay Area, let me know. I'm part of a group that meets on Saturdays once a month and we work on side research projects toward that end. My email is in my profile.

<comment><USER12> If anyone in the Boston area is interested in whiteboarding high-skill software development environments in the context of 2018/2019 hardware, I'd be interested. So: continuous speech recognition; hand tracking, controllers, and haptic exoskeletons, but still keyboards; HMDs with 30+ px/deg, and eye tracking, but still screens.

Dynabook was a nice vision. As always, society executed poorly, and failed to realize much of the potential of its technologies. No doubt that will happen again with VR/AR. For example, there's a toxic cauldron of patents brewing. Screens and keyboards and mice, have had a good half-century run. And GUIs, and personal local hardware. But perhaps time to shift focus.

<comment><USER13> When you say society always executes poorly, what alternative social reality are you comparing it with?

<comment><USER12> I don't understand - are you suggesting the only way to know you could have done something better, is to see someone else doing the same thing for comparison? That's certainly one way. Others include... all the ways you evaluate the execution of a company or project, when you don't have a direct competitor to compare it with, no?

<comment><USER13> Maybe you would agree with the statement "reality is broken"? I certainly don't think it's meaningful.

The unfortunate associations of wanting society to "execute better" (i.e. the merger of industry and the state found under fascism) just underline the fact that applying performance measurements to human life/social phenomena is misguided. We don't all agree on the purpose of life or the nature of happiness, nor should we.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't buy it that everyone would be a digital creative if they just had the right tools. To make quality content, whether it be apps/music/movies/etc..it requires much more than tools.

I respect Alan Kay, but I don't understand the need to bash on modern day technology.

Have we really come along way in terms of general computing? Maybe not [Example: 0]. But in terms of the digital world, I can take a video of my parents and send it to my cousin who lives 10,000 miles away and he can respond in a matter of seconds.

I can literally meet people in remote areas of the world. I can interact with people who barely have food but somehow can get cell phone access and now they are learning and communicating with everyone else. I can't imagine a better way to level the playing field (socioeconomically) globally then how we have it.

Do we have a lot more work to do? Sure. But Rome wasn't built in a day.

The future of the internet & technology, the direction it's headed, is going to come from small contributions from millions across the world.

What people will need will turn into what we have and use. And there won't be some magical device that just pops out of nowhere that will change everything.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv- zdhzMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY)

<comment><USER15> > "I don't buy it that everyone would be a digital creative if they just had > the right tools."

That is not Kay's argument. Not everyone who scribbles notes or draws something on a piece of paper is a "creative" or artist. Not all who write at all are professional writers. But we do not have the computing equivalent of paper for everyone. Sure, someone can write in a word processor or draw in a drawing program, but that's not all that a computer is for -- that's just imitating paper. The outstanding question is: can we make something that is as extensible as pen and paper and literacy for aiding human thought for the next level, the computing level? All we have now are stiff applications. Saying that such things make people literate in computing is like writing by filling out forms.

> "Do we have a lot more work to do? Sure. But Rome wasn't built in a day."

Kay is your ally here, a constant gadfly putting the lie to all the hype and BS. He's a constant reminder that we shouldn't feel so satisfied with our mud huts. He's reminding us to build Rome at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's clear from the interview that Kay thinks mobile computing isn't where it should be. But I haven't studied the DynaBook. Does anyone know exactly what Kay thinks is needed, in order to realize his dream?

I found a few such things in the article:

\- more-discoverable undo

\- some sort of AI-based virtual assistant

\- a stylus and holder, and presumably input methods and applications that are better suited for that stylus

\- something nebulous about having warning labels and being designed for the higher-order cognitive centers of our brains

<comment><USER17> What's missing in today's software is described by the field of End User Development, the ability for normal people to craft new _software artifacts_ without the need to learn a formal programming language.

For most people, using computers means being force-feed a selection of existing applications; and most applications are pro- consumption, which is favoured by the media companies.

App stores (and the Linux repositories that preceded them) were a significant advance for the public, as they allowed common people top be able to find tools to cover their needs; previous to that, only power users were able to tune the computer to their needs.

However, non-developers still depend on the capabilities put in there by the developers, and can't fine-tune their behaviour.

<comment><USER8> > the ability for normal people to craft new software artifacts without the > need to learn a formal programming language.

The problem is not programming. It's conceiving. You can get 8 years old kids to do pretty advanced imperative algorithms with scratch. What's hard is to get people to write down in a blank sheet _what they actually want to do_ (mostly because you _think_ you want something and then when you've got this thing you notice you actually wanted something a bit different).

<comment><USER18> You don't need to be able to write down in a blank sheet what you actually want to do if you don't need someone else to do what you want to do.

Software developers aren't special in this sense - even when writing our own software we can't do what you want. This is why "scratching your own itch" is so much easier than the alternative. You reduce the "is this what I really want?" loop by an order of magnitude by cutting out most of the people from the process.

<comment><USER17> _> You don't need to be able to write down in a blank sheet what you actually want to do if you don't need someone else to do what you want to do._

This.

Why is it so hard for developers to understand this simple idea?

Life in computing would be so much easier if the people building the system understood what part of their job is essential (finding out the best way to arrange hardware and software to satisfy a requirement) and which part is circumstancial, gathering a set of precise requirements to begin with.

The last part wouldn't be needed if end users were able to build their own working prototypes to solve their needs, and engineers were simply called to rebuild the prototype with best engineering practices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _> rather than the wheels for the mind that Steve Jobs envisioned._

Proper quote, for those confused:

 _" I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. Humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list....That didn't look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle and a man on a bicycle blew the condor away. That's what a computer is to me: the computer is the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds."_

<comment><USER20> oblig. Bikes need road infrastructure, or at the very least, a path cleared of trees/underbrush (though less efficient). Condors don't.

<comment><USER21> Pretty sure Condors need a clear path. You usually don't see them flying below the tree tops low to the ground.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Reminds of what the people of Red lang are trying to achieve: [http://www.red- lang.org/p/about.html?m=1](http://www.red-lang.org/p/about.html?m=1)

Maybe I'll finally give it a try!

Every once in a while I daydream about a sort of "distributed app platform" built on top of Scheme and IPFS. -- Perhaps Red would actually be perfect for this...

<comment><USER23> > _Every once in a while I daydream about a sort of "distributed app > platform"_

Have a peek at dat and beaker browser, they've done interesting stuff in that regard recently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Without the vision that came from parc none of us would be viewing this today. The vision they wanted was vast and it still has more to offer today.

Disappointed many comments have disassociated this from where we are now.

Thank you Alan. Excellent read.

</comment><comment><USER9> Alan Kay comes from a time, when IT business was all about the creation of tools. The companies forming out of the 60's/70's experiments, of which he was a main protagonist, would drive the innovation according to more abstract needs of information management. That era ended in the 2000's.

The companies, who drive techical advancement and innovation now, are a shopping mall, some telocs, family camps with added spying bonus, and often any form of information gatherers, that do business by the worst part of our economy, selling image rather than delivering identity. I am talking about the advertisement business.

Alone, compare the Windows 10 address book to former installations. Back in the old days, the addressbook was scriptable. You could query it from other apps. Some third party apps had powerful filtering. And now? It is totally dumbed down to the most basic, primitive needs. And while we use cloud based addressbooks these days, it is much more difficult to keep them neat and ordered. I could go on for hours. Like XHTML vs HTML5 and so on.

</comment><comment><USER25> Simplicity is closely related to education, and education is closely related to freedom.

How are we supposed to take education seriously when we create devices of such complexity that they are essentially magic, and hand them to students?

Before computers, complexity always had tight upper bounds. A watch could only get so complex before it wouldn't fit in its housing; and a car could only get so complex before it could not be efficiently manufactured/repaired. With computers, there is no upper bound to the complexity.

We are now overrun with complexity, but it's hard to see how to fix that. A business that puts blind faith in a complex system to do something slightly faster/better will probably win against a business that tries to truly understand what it's doing. An employee who just keeps adding to the complexity will probably win against an employee stepping back to simplify things. A consumer who makes convenient choices about complex things without asking many questions will probably find life easier.

<comment><USER26> Simlpicity is related to education in a sense that education is about teaching you a sequence of simple steps that lead toward the complex.

Also, I think the perception of computers being magic doesn't come as much from their complexity as from the people who try to force the complex into looking like it's simple. They're hiding complexity so hard the end result doesn't make any logical sense, so it's magic.

AK had a lovely quote in the article:

"Well, a saying I made up at PARC was, "Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible." They've got simple things being simple and they have complex things being impossible, so that's wrong."

<comment><USER25> Education offers tools to help manage complexity -- abstract mathematics and lab sciences help us understand the complex world around us.

But that has mostly been used to manage complexity that already existed (e.g. physics, biology), or that is somehow inherent to our world (e.g. complexity resulting from social interactions among humans).

Now, we are creating our own, new kinds of complexity that didn't exist before. Software isn't there to help us manage complexity, it is _adding_ to the complexity of our world, and dramatically so. That moves education _backwards_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Interesting that neither Kay nor the interviewer seemed aware of Swift Playgrounds. I would have loved to hear his criticisms of that environment as a teaching tool for kids. It seems to be targeted at 8-12 year olds given the graphics. I would be curious as to how closely Swift Playgrounds follows Papert's ideas.

</comment><comment><USER28> Neglecting path dependence is the root of all evil. I mean, he's not wrong, but maybe the answer is just that this is fucking hard. And some of his specifics are just wrong. The pen? No. It's super useful in some areas, like drawing, but if you include it by default you get lazy developers making UI that depends on it for navigation. Apple absolutely made the right call. I'm not taking away any of his amazing contributions, but his habit of slamming every incremental bit of mainstream, at-scale tech because it doesn't fulfill his vision (yet) is not that helpful.

</comment><comment><USER29> This isn't the first time Alan Kay express his view on HTML / CSS and Javascitpt.

But what alternative do we have / had?

<comment><USER11> That's the problem here, actually, but not in the way you think. There are alternatives (Canvas, SVG, etc.) but they're not as good for the standard use case of coming up with something quick that fulfills the business requirement.

And then we need to recognize that that stack is a fucking abomination that should be burned with fire. It should so deeply embarrass us, that we wouldn't want to admit that we use it in polite company.

We need people who are willing to experiment with new ideas and give us something better than HTML/CSS/JS. And we need them to get funding.

<comment><USER30> What should embarrass us so deeply and why? HTML and CSS are some of the most generative, enduring, and transformative technologies ever. I wouldn't fund anyone who doesn't recognize how great they are!

<comment><USER31> HTML & CSS were good for the early web, when it was a simple document layout platform. They're not ideal for building rich UIs and applications. Just because they've been extended to allow that doesn't mean they are the best tool for the job. Similarly, Excel is abused to do all sorts of things it's not intended for as well, when there are better options for databases, financial applications and data science.

<comment><USER32> There is a huge difference between Excel and HTML: the former is Turing- complete ( _in addition_ to containing Turing-complete scripting language(s)) and was like this for as long as I remember, while HTML is not. I guess CSS nowadays may be Turing-complete (?), but HTML is most decidedly not.

That difference means that it's orders of magnitude easier to "abuse" Excel to do some things it wasn't designed to do than to do the same with HTML. I seriously wonder if the reliance on HTML to this day is not a kind of "job security" thing for web devs (like myself, btw)...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Just today I read that VPRI fonc mailing list was shutting down because they shifted focus onto other area (communication design or something like that). A YC incubator thing IIRC.

<comment><USER34> Hey, the FONC mailing list isn't shutting down! It's just moving! It's now hosted at MIT instead of VPRI. It's located here:

[http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/fonclist](http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/fonclist)

<comment><USER33> ha good to know, I only read a few mail on that thread maybe I missed the part where they mentionned relocation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The title is ironic, given Alan Kay is the one who said "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

</comment><comment><USER36> > let's do what Sony did with the Walkman, let's use this technology to make > things more convenient in a way that a consumer can recognize, even if the > user interface limits them.

That's a fantastic characterization of what I _hate_ about Apple, and to contrast, what I _love_ about free software.

The sad thing (in my opinion) is that people _love_ the limitations Apple gives them. There it's no undefined behavior when the behavior is so arbitrarily limited. People don't want to create. They just want content. I find it rather depressing.

<comment><USER36> Also from the article:

> Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible." They've > got simple things being simple and they have complex things being > impossible, so that's wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Many of Alan Kay's concepts will take not only time, but also some kind of catalyst to gain acceptance. What might that catalyst be?

</comment><comment><USER37> For me, the flip side of all of Alan's (and other's) inspiring work on Smalltalk is that, having started programming with Smalltalk in the late 1980s (especially with VisualWorks and OTI's Envy), my entire professional career since then has seemed like a long succession of dealing with less pleasant systems around people who just don't get it. That has been frustrating and painful (even if the money is good) -- in some ways, it might be better not to know what is possible because then you don't miss it.

It's sad that ParcPlace Systems made such a mess of commercializing ObjectWorks/VisualWorks Smalltalk (including not licensing it to Sun affordably for settop boxes, where Sun then reacted by creating Oak/Green/Java) and then they sold Smalltalk for a song to Cincom instead of open sourcing it and becoming a services company. I remember talking with one ParcPlace salesperson who kept going on about how Digitalk was their competitor, with my trying to point out that Visual Basic was really their competitor (and ParcPlace buying Digitalk was another part of the disaster for Smalltalk commercially).

It was also sad to see IBM abandon _two_ reliable fast Smalltalks it owned in favor of a buggy slow early Java for marketing reasons. And even working within IBM at IBM Research around 1999, I could not use Smalltalk because IBM's OTI subsidiary (which IBM had bought) wanted around US$250K a year internally just to let the embedded speech research group I was in try their embedded Smalltalk for the product we were making. They claimed they'd have to devote an entire support person to it -- and I tried to explain I was going out on a limb there as it was to suggest using Smalltalk instead of C and VxWorks (which my supervisor had already licensed). So instead I got IBM Research to approve Python for internal use (which took weeks of dealing with IBM's lawyers) and Python, not Smalltalk, ended up on Lou Gerstner's desk when he asked for one of our "Personal Speech Assistant" devices for his office.

I really learned to dislike proprietary software from that experience of seeing something I loved like Smalltalk being killed by a business model focusing on runtime fees and such. I remember how when an IBM Research group licensed their Jikes Java compiler as FOSS, their biggest surprise was not how many external users they had -- but how many internal IBM users they suddenly had who no longer had to jump through complex hoops to gain access to it.

Even now, Java, JavaScript, and Python are not quite where Smalltalk was back then in many ways. Of course, it's decades later, so there are other good things like faster networks and CPUs and mobility and DVCS and above all a widespread culture of FOSS -- and when I squint, I can kind of see all the browsers out there running JavaScript as a sort of big multi-core Smalltalk system (just badly and partially implemented).

For a while I had hopes for Squeak, but it got bogged down early on by not having a clear free and open source license. Sames as I did recently to Automattic when it used React with a PATENTS clause, when I pointed out the concern, some lawyer chimed in with how everything was fine -- and only years later did the growing damage to the community become obvious to all. [http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/501](http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/501) [https://github.com/Automattic/wp- calypso/issues/650](https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/issues/650)

I really learned to dislike unclear licensing on a community project from that early Squeak experience.

Squeak continues to improve and has fixed the licensing issue, but it lost a lot of momentum. Also the general Squeak community remains more focused making a better Smalltalk -- not making something better than Smalltalk. That is something Alan Kay has pointed out -- saying he wanted people to move beyond Smalltalk with Squeak as a stepping stone. Yet most people seem to not pay attention to that.

But if even Dan Ingalls could be willing to build new ideas like the Lively Kernel on JavaScript, I decided I could too, and I shifted my career in that JavaScript direction inspired by his example.

As luck would have it, my day job is now programming in the overly-complex monstrosity that is Angular, when I know the more elegant Mithril.js is so much better from previous experience using it for personal FOSS projects... I guess every technology has its hipster phase where decision making is more about fads than any sort of technical merit or ergonomics? I can hope that sorts itself eventually. But once bad standards get entrenched either in a group or the world at large, it can be hard to move forward due to sunk costs, retraining costs, retesting costs, and so on. But, thick-headed as I am, I keep trying anyway. :-)

And as in another comment I made, there are important social/political reasons to keep trying to create better systems to support democracy: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15311950](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15311950)

</comment><comment><USER38> _If people could understand what computing was about, the iPhone would not be a bad thing. But because people don't understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that Guitar Hero is the same as a real guitar. That's the simple long and the short of it._

Some kids learn guitar. Some kids fantasize about learning guitar. Apple makes machines that enable the computing equivalent of both of these things.

You're never going to turn all listeners into musicians, all readers into writers, all theater-goers into actors. You can't even get everyone to dance at a wedding with an open bar. Technology can play a role in getting a few more people over the line, but Alan Kay's head is way too far in the clouds for him to even see the problem that way.

Honestly, I think what he's done is dissociated himself from his own snobbery. He talks about technology failing humanity, but he's really saying he doesn't like people. He doesn't like how most people think and live. Why else would he constantly be disappointed in technology failing to turn all of humanity into always-on cultural creatives? It's like he looks at books and says, well, the dream for books is for everyone to read challenging literature, but at the beach or on the subway you see mostly "Eat Pray Love" and Stephen King, so clearly books have failed.

People are doing the same dumb shit with books and technology that they did without it. They choose passive consumption. When I complain about it, I'll blame it on technology so I don't sound like a misanthrope.

He constantly talks about creating, learning, and education, but he doesn't bring any attention to any current work supporting these activities. He doesn't say, look, here's this great work being done for kids, and it's limited because the iPad needs this feature. He doesn't say, look, here's this great computing system I use to support my own work, and it be a lot better with this specific kind of OS or hardware support. Instead of talking about how the Apple hardware is holding back current work, he's talking about how it fails to implement his own ideas from thirty years ago.

You'd think he could find SOME new idea to promote and celebrate, if only to point out what he thinks progress looks like, but apparently Apple has snuffed out every worthwhile avenue of improvement by a few unfortunate unfortunate hardware choices.

Hell, where's even the usesthis interview with Alan Kay?

<comment><USER15> The topic is Apple because the interviewer is a journalist who was writing a book about the iPhone. Plenty of other resources online show him praising work he likes (Bret Victor, for example) and systems that he thinks are in the right direction. It just wasn't in the bounds of the interview topic.

As for the "not turning all readers into writers," well, what can we say? One would hope that all readers are literate enough to write. Now, we don't expect all literate people to be professional writers, but this is not in line with what Kay is arguing anyway. He's saying that being literate in computing should mean being able to wield computing in order to aid human thinking -- for everyone. He's calling out our current systems, saying that their availability and use, though ubiquitous, do not constitute such literacy.

<comment><USER26> In particular, even though we don't expect all literate people to produce professional-quality writing, we do hope they can use their writing skills to solve their own problems. Be it filling forms, writing letters, posting "lost cat" messages on trees, _whatever_.

That's what I think computing should be. Giving people ability to solve even more complex problems themselves, even more effectively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I kind of feel sorry for Alan Kay. He's trapped in endlessly rehashing ideas from 60's and 70's.

<comment><USER40> What new ideas are there though? Social networking I guess. Have you seen the mother of all demos? Engelbart's team invented, like, everything.

On the programming side, dependent types maybe. Everything else is from ml or lisp.

Neural networks are old old ideas as well. Computers have finally gotten fast enough to make use of the ideas.

<comment><USER36> > On the programming side, dependent types maybe.

Have you learned about monads yet?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> For all the respect and admiration I have for Alan Kay, I think he's often showing a lot of bad faith.

His ideal vision is always described in very abstract terms. If he took the care to write it down precisely, what it should look like, I'm sure there would be hundreds eager to build it for him. Of course, part of it is "design principles". But then do some common use cases.

When the abstraction meets reality we get comments like "the iPad should have a pen". Which is really an interesting observation, but doesn't quite rill the crowd like the abstract impressive-sounding stuff does. And you'd hardly call these isolated observation "vision".

Clearly, the user interfaces we have today are sub-optimal, and I can make hundreds of factual remarks on what could be improved. But I don't think this works out to a "vision". In fact, a vision is I think sometimes bound to be too abstract. If we just had products where the shit was fixed relentlessly, I reckon we'd get to "good" without needing them.

<comment><USER42> On Hackernews there was once a skeptic of postmodernism who got into a debate with a Derrida fan. The skeptic said "If deconstruction is not BS, how about you explain to us, in plain English, what it's all about." The Derrida fan replied "No. How about _you_ demonstrate that you've read Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and Levinas. _Then_ we can begin to talk about Derrida."

If Alan Kay were like the Derrida fan, then he could have rebuffed anyone who came asking what the Dynabook was about with "How about _you_ demonstrate that you've studied the achievements of McLuhan, Montessori, Papert, Minsky, Engelbart, etc. Then we'll talk." Of course he's not like that so he's going to try to give the reporter a bit of the background he has in those things and let them figure it out for themself.

The Dynabook is supposed to be, roughly, an iPad with a keyboard, stylus, and a Lisp Machine-like OS. Of course Apple and third parties have closed the gap with keyboards and styli but it's the OS that's the really important bit because in order for a Dynabook to be a Dynabook it must not be a thing that you can just download and run preapproved apps on. You have to be able to discover -- and change -- the entire system from the bare metal on up. Think "Stallmanism on steroids".

It's like a television you can talk back to. Computing is a dynamic medium that demands interaction from its user, so to deny the user the ability to question and change the assumptions of the medium is to lock them in to certain stereotyped modes of interaction and deny the full richness of the medium. This is where Kay's "real guitar vs. Guitar Hero" analogy comes in. You can either have a device that offers its full potential up front, like a real guitar, or you can have a device that can _only_ be used in circumscribed ways, in vague imitation of having the full richness of the original device, like Guitar Hero. The price you pay for having a real guitar, or a real Dynabook, is what we call "ease of use" \-- the ability for a complete neophyte to pick it up and immediately display something resembling proficiency with it. (It is _much_ easier for a trained data-entry clerk to operate a 3270 terminal than it is for that same clerk to fill out a modern Web form, but that sort of ease doesn't count.) And Apple has really doubled down on ease of use, at the expense of everything else wonderful about having a powerful computing device you can hold in one hand. To the point where it's become just like regular, can't-talk-back-to-it television.

<comment><USER43> The basic problem there is that no company in the industry, from Apple all the way to the lowliest gray box manufacturer in China is not interested in that.

OLPC tried, it got hoodwinked by Microsoft et al.

Mozilla tried, FirefoxOS bombed.

Hell even Linux is turning ever more complex an opaque year by year.

Simple thing is that such flexibility self support do not sell widgets and support contracts, and thus company are not interested in making them.

<comment><USER42> Well, yeah. For the benefits to be realized you need a society that values that sort of thing. It will look quite a bit different from our society, just like societies with writing are completely different from entirely oral societies -- something else Kay touches on.

<comment><USER43> In effect Star Trek lala land...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I have total respect for Alan Kay but I hope he stops criticizing other people and actually shows his vision through his own execution (and by execution I don't just mean invention of a prototype but actual productization and distribution)

If you're building something visionary and are not the one who's making tons of money off of it, you have two solutions:

1\. IF you're interested in making money: Try to figure out what you're doing wrong and fix it so you actually CAN capitalize on your original invention

2\. IF you're NOT interested in making money: Enjoy the respect these people pay you and please don't badmouth others who worked hard to build important products that changed the world.

I feel like Alan Kay is on the second boat, so my heart breaks whenever he badmouths other people who worked hard to build cool things.

It doesn't matter what came first. What matters is what actually managed to pull off the ultimate success.

<comment> loup-vaillant > (and by execution I don't just mean invention of a prototype but actual > productization and distribution)

So, the STEPS project I mentioned above¹ doesn't count? Bret Victor's work wouldn't count? That's incredibly short sighted.

You seem to have missed the part where it's really _really_ hard to be successful with unnatural stuff, even when that stuff is unbelievably useful and valuable. Writing is unnatural, and took a long time to spread. It's still not there yet, and with the television and YouTube, we're actually reverting back a little bit.

Computing is even less natural, so instead of a Victor-esque interactive wonder, we got the caveman interface, where you point and you grunt².

Speaking of badmouthing, my heart breaks every time someone implies that recent Apple devices are cool. They're dystopian demons that seduced people into giving into thinking digital prisons are cool. The Apple ][ was cool. The iPad is crap (it _could_ be cool, with the right OS).

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15266230](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15266230)

[2]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKxzK9xtSXM&t=2m18s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKxzK9xtSXM&t=2m18s)

<comment><USER44> > So, the STEPS project I mentioned above¹ doesn't count? Bret Victor's work > wouldn't count? That's incredibly short sighted.

It is incredibly short sighted to make an assumption about what I said and criticize on that wrong assumption. There's a term for this logical fallacy but i forget.

Anyway, there's a huge difference between coming up with an idea/prototype and turning it into a product that's meant for mainstream usage. You would only know this if you have actually built something that's meant for mainstream usage so if you don't get this it's fine, but try doing that next time and you'll realize that's true.

What I'm criticizing is his comments on Apple's implementation decisions on things like the stylus. There are plenty of reasons why they decided to go that way, and I totally understand if this criticism was coming from some ignorant journalist who hasn't built anything (because they're ignorant), but Alan Kay should know better. There are way more things to consider than just ideals when you're building a real product.

This is probably why Xerox Parc built so many innovative prototypes but most of them were commercialized by other companies. If they had people like Steve Jobs instead, Xerox would be Apple by now.

If you think I'm being overly critical, just watch some of his speech videos on youtube, too much of what he says is based on the past and not the future.

<comment> loup-vaillant > It is incredibly short sighted to make an assumption about what I said and > criticize on that wrong assumption.

Are you saying I was mistaken and the STEPS project and Bret Victor's demos _do_ count after all? Even though they're prototypes that haven't been "productised and distributed"?

I merely assumed you meant what you wrote. If you didn't, don't complain.

> _What I 'm criticizing is his comments on Apple's implementation decisions > on things like the stylus._

Come on, that criticism was spot on. The iPad could have a spot for the pen. The pen could be tethered to the iPad. Apple could have sold pen like they now do. _The Nintendo DS ships with a freaking pen_.

I'm reluctant to dispute your point in general, but that was a bad example.

<comment><USER44> > The iPad could have a spot for the pen. The pen could be tethered to the > iPad.

Yes they could, but I really think this is subjective. In my case I prefer NOT to have a spot because of aesthetic reasons, plus I never use the stylus.

But like I said, this is subjective. And that's exactly the point. You can't really judge execution based on subjective qualities like this. It's impossible to satisfy everyone.

It's just a difference in vision. People have different priorities. For example the Bitcoin community right now is divided into two based on their philosophy, and you can't say one is right and one is wrong because each has their own vision and each side makes sense in their own right.

I'm sure Alan Kay had his own vision about what a computer could become. I think if he's so dissatisfied with what it's come to, the best approach is to build one himself and give it to the world. (But honestly, as someone who's been thinking a lot about this field, I see so many "plot holes" in all the criticism he's making)

I am all for visionaries building inspiring products and shipping to market. But it's sad to see people like him dwelling on the past instead of the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The ad layout on mobile makes this article unreadable on my phone to the point of rage quitting halfway through or so. How appropriate somehow...

<comment><USER46> [https://www.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/focus/](https://www.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/focus/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I have seen this pattern in other people with interesting but narcissistic personalities:

"Steve wasn't capable of being friends. That wasn't his personality."

</comment><comment><USER48> I hope someone could tell Alan Kay about the Galaxy Note. It has a really nice pen and a place to put it.

</comment><comment><USER49> I recognize the Alan Kay I met at HP. Very sure of his own genius and quick to snarkily dismiss the genius of others.

Case in point: The iPad and iPhone makes kids creative like no other tool has before. Kids know how to use it to text, exchange ideas or pictures of kittens, draw or sketch, learn how to program (Swift Playground anyone), take and edit photos. It is everything but a glorified TV where kids are passive. This is the only environment where kids are truly first-class citizens. How on earth Kay could spend so much energy (a whole article) trying to convince us otherwise based mostly on super-weak arguments like "nobody is using the Shake gesture to undo" is truly beyond my understanding.

Don't get me wrong. The Dynabook was a somewhat interesting idea. But it's about as much an inspiration for the real thing we use daily as the Star Trek tricorder. What Kay, to this day, did not get, unlike Jobs, is the power of networking, both physical and human. What made the iPhone greater than the Dynabook ever would have been is the App Store, and the combined creativity of millions of developers. What made the iPhone greater is apps like Messages, Facetime, Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, and countless others. What made the iPhone greater is Instagram, Flickr, sport apps, medical apps, HP-48 emulators, 3D "kill them all and think later" games.

By contrast, what would have made the Dynabook great in Kay's mind was "designed by Kay for Kay's personal interests". Or, as Fake Bill Gates would have said: "One programmer should be enough for everybody".

<comment><USER50> _What Kay, to this day, did not get, unlike Jobs, is the power of networking, both physical and human. What made the iPhone greater than the Dynabook ever would have been is the App Store,_

Interesting phrasing, considering that the iPhone did not come with the App Store. In fact, Apple's was the _third_ software distribution platform to be released for iOS, after Installer.app and Cydia.

Meanwhile, Alan Kay was working in Croquet[1] - a project that allows the creation of multi-user collaborative software with live-editing and automatic distribution and replication - since at least 2001.

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

<comment><USER51> > _Interesting phrasing, considering that the iPhone did not come with the App > Store. In fact, Apple 's was the third software distribution platform to be > released for iOS, after Installer.app and Cydia._

Which is irrelevant.

First, because it eventually came, and second, because whether they intend to put one out or not, obviously they couldn't create a first class API for third party use, fix public interfaces as much as possible, write documentation, create a store, et al, all while creating the first edition of a new product (which they didn't even knew if it would be a success or not).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Pop-up warning.

</comment><comment><USER53> writing diminished thinking and reasoning capacity, computers continued offloading cognitive functions to adaptive machines. dig up, stupid! is a fitting epithet.

</comment><comment><USER54> Elon didn't wait, he just made it happen

<comment><USER55> I don't know Elon Musk personally, but I'm pretty sure he'd refer to Alan Kay as one of the giants on whose shoulders he and quite a few industries stand on.</comment></comment>


Roadside textalyzer proposed to determine if a driver was distracted - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/04/first-came-the-breathalyzer-now-meet-the-roadside-police-textalyzer/ <comment><USER2> Oh hell no. They don't need access to your phone to know if you were texting. They could simply query the provider and mandate that they provide a record of outbound text usage within the time frame of the accident.

What is there to protect the owner of the phone from the police for not coming up with another reason to keep the phone? This sounds like slight of hand to be handed over an unlocked phone</comment>


Atlas for Android by Layer – Open Source Messaging UI Components - <AUTHOR> https://atlas.layer.com/android

<comment><USER2> Hi this is Drew, PM at Layer. Thanks so much for posting this. We're in pre- release, still developing out feature parity with iOS (github.com/layerhq/Atlas-iOS), but wanted to get the base API out into developers hands to start collecting feedback. We haven't done much in the way of publicizing this, but are looking forward to hearing what people think! Stay tuned for the 1.0, coming soon.</comment>


Ask HN: Consider Banning Infoworld - <AUTHOR>

Also see users 'ccraigIW' and 'snydeq' at http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ccraigIW http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=snydeq.<p>Notice they both have left no comments and only submit Infoworld. The articles do not generate much discussion. I suggest we will lose nothing banning Infoworld. <comment><USER2> I suggest we lose nothing by not banning them.

It's not like the articles ever trickle to the top. That's the beauty of the site. And if someday, they actually submit a good article, then I want to see it. We don't need some heavy-handed witch hunt.

<comment><USER3> precisely. I upvote, what, maybe 2 or 3 stories a day. And read around 20% of what gets posted here.

That isnt bad numbers - the point of the new page is, surely, to filter the crud :) I enjoy doing that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> ah yes, the weekly "why don't we ban (insert site here)" thread. i liked what came of last week's:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510309>

<comment><AUTHOR> Coding Horror is another case. It frequently reaches the front page and generates discussion. IW does not. IW creates noise on New, Andrews does have a point though. Still, it seems there should be a way to mitigate blatent spamming.

<comment><USER4> i still like the idea i put forth in that thread.

make it so that you can only submit X number of stories from a specific domain out of every Y submissions. possibly implement a penalty of some sort if you go over.</comment></comment></comment>


Across the board, top Facebook games take a tumble - <AUTHOR> http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/across-the-board-top-facebook-games-take-a-tumble/1401804 <comment><USER2> Not much of a surprise after Facebook killed part of their ecosystem.</comment>


Senate-Passed Deal Means Higher Tax on 77% of Households - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-01/senate-passed-deal-means-higher-tax-on-77-of-households.html

<comment><USER2> Let's be clear here. The deal means the bush era tax cuts remain for most people (a 3 percentage point reduction for most brackets), while we lose a temporary payroll tax for 2%: [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-28/breaking-down- the-c...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-28/breaking-down-the-cliff- the-bush-tax-cuts.html)

If I understand correctly, that means taxes should still be about 1% lower than they were during Clinton.

I love how every time a _temporary_ tax cut expires, we call it a "tax hike." I don't see how we can ever fix the debt if no one is willing to pay more taxes and no one is willing to lose benefits.

<comment><USER3> The bottom line is taxes are going up from what people paid two weeks ago. Calling that a hike is not disingenuous to me. It's a bit linkbaity, yes. The payroll tax holiday was a stimulus measure that was never meant to be permanent, yes. We should not compound the long term issues with social security by chronically underfunding it, yes.

It's a hike and one I'm perfectly happy to live with. As a commenter at metafilter put it:

 _Well, it's that or more ice floes to put the old folk on, and the ice industry isn't making any production gains either._

<comment><USER2> >The bottom line is taxes are going up from what people paid two weeks ago. Calling that a hike is not disingenuous to me.

I'm not so sure. If a company has a huge sale for 1 month and everything is temporarily 50% off, we don't call it a 100% "price hike" the next month. Maybe it's just me, but hike has a very specific connotation that isn't appropriate here.

<comment><USER4> > If a company has a huge sale for 1 month and everything is temporarily 50% > off, we don't call it a 100% "price hike" the next month.

No, but if they had that "sale" for over 10 years, rather than one month, then you might call it a price increase.

<comment><USER2> You do realize the payroll tax cut only lasted 2 years, right? Not only that, but I'm fairly certain it was enacted partly to counteract the recession, which by definition should only be temporary.

In the context of historically low taxes (the top rate used to be 94% and is now 35%), I think the sale analogy is much more apt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'll probably be unpopular, but it should be 100% of households.

We are in denial that we can have all of the benefits we want and not raise taxes. The choices we have is:

A) Cutting Medicare B) Cutting Social Security C) Cutting National Defense D) Raising Taxes

Everything else is noise. Choose some combination of A-D.

My choice is a 35% cut in C and D to cover the rest.

<comment><USER6> Cutting national defense entirely while raising taxes to 100% on the entire population would still mean a budget deficit by the middle of the 2030s due to the rate of growth of our social programs.

<comment><USER7> Do you have a source for that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article makes it sound like the bill explicitly raises taxes on 77% of households. This would be false. The bill simply does not extend the _temporary_ tax holiday that was signed into law at the end of 2010. The payroll tax rate goes back to the rate we've had since 1990.

<comment><USER9> "Your Honor, the prosecutor makes it sound as if I killed that man with a brick. Nothing could be farther from the truth - I just let the brick go, and some time later, completely independently from my actions and completely beyond my control, the brick fell onto the victim's skull and crushed it. I simply failed to extend my temporary holding over the brick, which I never promised to hold forever, by the way, and fully intended to let it go at some point. Clearly, I can accept no blame for this unfortunate incident and am completely innocent".

There was a tax reduction in 2010 and there is a tax hike in 2013. How adding word "temporary" to it changes anything?

<comment><USER8> I was simply commenting on the semantics of the article. The wording in the title and body claims this bill is the cause of the temporary tax cut expiring. That would be disingenuous. The cause of this "tax increase" is the fact that the original legislation made it temporary. This bill has nothing to do with "...[raising] taxes on 77.1 percent of U.S. households..."

<comment><USER9> Of course the bill is the cause. If they didn't want the tax to raise in 2013, they'd make it permanent in 2010 or extended the current levels in 2012. They did not, which means they fully intended for it to happen exactly like it happened. E.g., have taxes for 77% of households be higher in 2013 then they were in 2012.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> An interesting read related to Medicare issues. It says that on average, _"Medicare couple pays $109,000 into the program and gets $343,000 in benefits out"_

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/opinion/brooks-another- fis...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/opinion/brooks-another-fiscal- flop.html?_r=0)

</comment><comment><USER11> For reference, here is the 2013 US federal budget [1]. Make sure to sort the spending table by the Total column.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_United_States_federal_budg...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_United_States_federal_budget#Total_revenues_and_spending)

</comment><comment><USER12> Endlessly frustrating that there is such vindictive zeal on the right for pushing the faces of the poor into the dirt.

<comment><USER13> Endlessly frustrating that there is such vindictive zeal on the left for pushing the face of the economy into the dirt by refusing to cut spending.

<comment><USER3> If only the right could control the presidency and both houses of congress we'd finally see spending get under control right?

<comment><USER9> We would probably have less rampant abuse, though if Bush times is an indication of anything, the right can definitely be tempted by debt spending also, just in less egregious quantities. But I'd take Bush-level deficits (400bn) over Obama-level (1trln+) any day.

<comment><USER3> Obama's deficits are caused by the depression bush brought us (decreased tax revenues -> deficit) and the continued unfunded wars, tax cuts and Medicare D program.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonoberholtzer/2012/02/01/obam...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonoberholtzer/2012/02/01/obama- vs-bush-breaking-down-the-deficit/)

<comment><USER9> Of course Bush is to blame for everything. It's not like Obama had control over the budget for 4 years now and did nothing to reign in spending. Here I was naively hoping there's some point where blaming Bush has to stop. Of course it will never stop.

>>>> decreased tax revenues -> deficit

This is only partially true - IIRC, CBO estimates are about 24% of the Bush- era deficits were caused by tax cuts. The rest is spending increases and tax revenue falling short of previous expectations (i.e. would happen with or without tax cuts, and without tax cuts would probably be more severe as tax cuts were observed to decrease tax avoidance). The difference between 400bn and 1trln can not be explained by tax cuts.

<comment><USER3> "It's not like Obama had control over the budget for 4 years now"

Because he's a dictator?

"and did nothing to reign in spending. "

Slowest increase in spending since Eisenhower?

"Here I was naively hoping there's some point where blaming Bush has to stop. Of course it will never stop."

Because it will never stop being true that he's responsible for the current fiscal mess? I'm sorry it's an 'inconvenient truth" for you that Bush sucked and got us in this mess.

"The rest is spending increases and tax revenue falling short of previous expectations"

This is actually what I meant by decreased revenues. My full quote as you can see is:

"decreased tax revenues -> deficit) and the continued unfunded wars, tax cuts and Medicare D program."

So perhaps that could have been punctuated better but it's not hard to see that I was making the distinction between the tax cuts and the decreased revenues due to recession/depression.

<comment><USER9> >>>> Because he's a dictator?

Because Bush was a dictator, yes. Obama is the same level of dictator as Bush were.

>>>> Slowest increase in spending since Eisenhower?

"Reigning in" does not mean "increase". Especially when we have trillion deficit. If you have budget in surplus - fine, increasing spending may be kind of OK. If you have trillion deficit - "we are deep in the hole, but we keep digging slower" is not enough.

>>> I'm sorry it's an 'inconvenient truth" for you that Bush sucked and got us in this mess.

Bush sucked 4 years ago. This mess is still with us and only got worse since. I understand Obama can not be blamed for anything because he is the Saint Lightworker, but I still can't take it seriously. If you blame Bush for Bush time, blame Obama for Obama time. Otherwise you just sound like an apologist.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>