What Stays on Facebook and What Goes? The Social Network Cannot Answer - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/technology/facebook-misinformation.html <comment><USER2> The problem that Facebook, Twitter, et. al have run into is this: curating, moderating, (dare I say, policing?) our own feeds of information. This gives them a share of the responsibility for what's posted on their platform, which is something they can't take on -- both practically, and logistically.

Back in the day, if you ran an IRC server, you generally ran the service laissez faire. Your chief concern was providing the service. If someone was sharing illegal content, that wasn't your responsibility any more than state governments sharing culpability for roads that facilitate robberies. And behavior? Who cares what you do, unless you're attacking the service?

Channels themselves could come up with their own set of rules, if they wanted. You want to restrict swearing? No problem. Only registered accounts? Fine. No discussion of politics? Who cares? If you came crying to the server administrators, because you were unfairly banned from #atheism/religion/linux for walking in and trying to have an honest debate, they'd shrug their shoulders. Not their problem!

What a ridiculous state of affairs to have the service administrators make a network wide rule: "No saying untrue things", or "Don't be mean, but only to certain groups of people". It isn't their job to decide what is true, or what is hurtful.

"Oooh, but bjt2n3904, the First Amendment doesn't apply to Facebook! There's this great XKCD comic where he shows mean people the door, and..." \-- Yes. I get it. But the fact remains, the 1A is a good principle to adhere to, even if you aren't the government. Policing your own little channel of the internet is feasible, if you so choose. Policing the entire internet is madness -- especially when it comes to subjective things like "hate".

Everyone has a different level of tolerance for putting up with jerks on the internet. One person might feel they're being targeted with harassment, another might just call that "Monday". The solution isn't to have Twitter declare how everyone should behave, the solution is for Twitter to push that decision to the user, and provide them with effective tools for filtering and blocking people.

<comment><USER3> That and trying to get people to understand that "free speech" as a concept is separate from the First Amendment.

Facebook is trying to abide by the principles of free speech. Yes, they could try to censor their platform, but they choose not to in most cases.

And make no mistake, it _is_ censorship. Censorship is not limited to government intervention.

<comment><USER4> Censorship isn't a bad thing if it isn't a government doing it. Facebook has no power to tell you what is or isn't appropriate to write on your blog, they can't stop you from writing a book or from publishing an article via any other medium that isn't their platform. You have a right to say whatever the hell you want to, you don't have any right to other people's help in disseminating that point of view.

<comment><USER5> It's bad for society if the media the people need to effectively express their first amendment rights is preventing them from doing so. In which case freedom of speech loses its meaning. Why even have it if businesses can take over the channels of communication and limit them for profit gains? What kind of principle is that to stand for?

<comment><USER6> You're choosing to comment on HN, and compared to many forums, it has rather heavy handed restrictions on what's acceptable. That's something I (and presumably others) find appealing much of the time. Doesn't mean it's perfect, but that doesn't mean what it needs is more laissez faire.

The thing I don't like about Facebook is not that it may _restrict_ people acting badly, but that it shows you all the worst posts of people you know, in order to create engagement. What I would like is for all non-objectionable posts from my friends to appear in chronological order. Facebook's algorithms seem to have an emergent behavior in which they synthesize a toxic persona by selecting the posts which get the most reaction from everything a friend posts. Except when you go to a friend's page to see everything they posted recently, you get a very distorted view on your own feed. I don't think Facebook has come to terms with the monster they've created.

<comment><USER5> If HN was the equivalent of Facebook, or Google, or the phone company, I would agree with you. But it's nothing close to a de facto communication channel for personal and business use; it's an industry forum.

Your expectation of Facebook is very unrealistic, at least for now, because who is to say what is and isn't objectionable? Although I can't really make much more of a comment than that since I just don't see that many toxic posts from friends on Facebook. If my friends were really that toxic, I'd probably not be friends with them or at least just block them.

Facebook already supports a chronological feed. It just has to be turned on by the user, and it seems to untoggle itself after a while. But it's there, and that's what I tend to use. I otherwise just don't befriend toxic people, although I've blocked a few people who just post repetitive crap I don't agree with. Everyone has the tools to control their feed right in front of them, but they're not using them either because they don't know they're there or because they're afraid they'll miss that one meme post from their otherwise toxic friends.

<comment><USER6> As far as I know, the chronological setting has to be reset every time.

As far as blaming people for the toxicity of what appears, I don't think that's right. Salt is toxic in large quantities, essential in small amounts. Systematically placing it in wounds adds a whole new dimension. Context has a huge effect on the meaning of events. Suppose someone made a video of dozens of brief instances where you were at your worst, and sent it to everyone you know. That would not be the truth about who you are, or your fault. Selecting one of 10 or 100 posts for how intense a reaction it gets, is creating a toxic narrative, and the emergent result of the algorithms is not to be blamed on the source of the data. Systematically manipulating the context of interactions with people is an incredibly destructive, harmful thing to do - traditionally, it's the bread and butter of tactical politics, but Facebook has brought it to ordinary people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Const-me The issue is very challenging, but it needs to be solved regardless. IMO, the key to do it right is transparency.

For example, reddit does that, and unlike FB they're not afraid to talk to journalists about their content policing, see e.g. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16569778](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16569778)

A quote from that article:

Melissa Tidwell, Reddit's general counsel, told me, "I am so tired of people who repeat the mantra 'Free speech!' but then have nothing else to say. Look, free speech is obviously a great ideal to strive toward. Who doesn't love freedom? Who doesn't love speech? But then, in practice, every day, gray areas come up."

<comment><USER7> I am really impressed that Melissa is not only living in the gray, but defending the wisdom of doing so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> having worked for a large internet company, I have to say the challenges of dealing with content like this is much more complicated than the NY Times appreciates.

<comment><USER9> I would be interested in what ways you think that silencing Nazis and Holocaust deniers is complicated. Can you explain?

Edit: Thanks all. I'll know better than to kick the troll hive next time.

<comment><USER10> Who gets to define who a Nazi is?

If I say that 4 million died in the Holocaust rather than 6 million, is that Holocaust denial?

<comment><USER9> The issues raised by the article are not about morally grey areas, they are about overt Holocaust denial and InfoWars. InfoWars caused a person to shoot up a pizzeria. This is not a place where a slippery slope argument can be made.

Edit: funny that people are downvoting me because they think I'm speaking against free speech, thus silencing my opinion.

<comment><USER11> You think some guy who's willing to shoot up a pizzeria is going to reevaluate his life choices because he can't post his conspiracy theories on Facebook?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article actually made me more sympathetic to Facebook. These issues are not as simple as the NYT thinks, and Facebook seems to be making every effort to navigate them in a principled way.

<comment><USER13> Isn't it pretty simple when a corporation is posting fake news? Shouldn't corporations know better and be held to higher standards than individuals?

<comment><USER12> > Isn't it pretty simple when a corporation is posting fake news?

By who's definition of "fake news"? Do you want anyone who contradicts the current US administration thrown off the platform? Anyone who contradicts current Facebook leadership?

> Shouldn't corporations know better and be held to higher standards than > individuals?

Corporations aren't magic. I have a corporation, its HQ is my home and I pay ~$20 every year to stay registered, it's not like that corporation knows any better than I do. One of my hometown churches publishes a newsletter that's essentially whatever my dad wanted to write. I would expect a lot of niche or local news sources are similar.

<comment><USER14> "Fake news" is often interpreted as "news I don't agree with". That is not the definition.

News can be defined as genuine if it's truthful, in reporting facts, in reporting uncertainties & limits of current knowledge, in reporting potential conflicts of interests and finally in explicitely outlining when unproven opinions are put forth, whether by the author or by an interviewee.

News is deemed fake when it fails to be truthful. While there can be some grey areas, or perhaps poor journalistic standards, there are plenty of cases where articles fail to disclose conflict of interest, put forth unfounded opinions and intentionally mislead the reader to draw an untruthful conclusion. That is fake news.

<comment><USER12> > there are plenty of cases where articles fail to disclose conflict of > interest, put forth unfounded opinions and intentionally mislead the reader > to draw an untruthful conclusion. That is fake news.

"Untruthful" is begging the question. For the rest of it, virtually all news articles fail to disclose the writer's personal biases, put forth unfounded opinions, and intentionally lead the reader to draw particular conclusions. Your proposed standard is hardly any better than "news I don't agree with" in practice.

<comment><USER13> Could you give an example? For example, all news articles published by Reuters have an unfounded opinion in them?

<comment><USER12> Sure. Let's look at the top article on Reuters as I write this, which happens to be [https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-germany/new- for...](https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-germany/new-foreign- secretary-hunt-warns-of-no-deal-brexit-risk-idUKKBN1KD13J)

Second paragraph opens "With just over eight months left until Britain is due to leave the EU, there is little clarity about how trade will flow" \- sounds like unfounded opinion to me. Third paragraph talks about "a step that could spook financial markets and dislocate trade flows across Europe and beyond." which is either vacuously true (anything "could" anything else - but then why say so?) or baseless speculation. "few diplomats expect the deal to be struck until months later." is unsubstantiated opinion - even if it were possible to verify who these "diplomats" were, having a news article report an opinion second-hand doesn't make it any less an opinion. Likewise "some investors have said such a chaotic scenario would seriously damage both the economies of Britain and the EU over the short term.", and "they cast as a failing German- dominated experiment in European integration.". I doubt the second half (below "DISORDERLY BREXIT?") will be much different.

I'm not trying to attack Reuters here - they do better than many news sources - but any kind of substantive reporting requires making judgements on questions that are politicised or, often, inherently political. Even the most skilled journalist will make calls that eventually turn out to be laughable in hindsight. I want committed, engaged journalism - reducing reporting to a bloodless "A said this, B said that, readers at home must make up their own minds" would not be an improvement - but the price of that is that journalists must have the freedom to make honest mistakes. And that in turn means tolerating the dishonest kind, unless and until we can come up with some clear bright lines that separate the one from the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is the reason for the curated/managed feed related to what type of original content advertisers want their ads beside?

Or is it merely that curating the feed allows for retaining a user's attention?

If truly the latter, that is just atrocious.

</comment><comment><USER16> The size and reach of FB poses new questions:

\- Is it (de facto) public utility.

\- Does it have a public service responsibility.

\- Should there be "program content regulation" equivalents for internet social media?

\- Should FB stick to removing only illegal content, or should it start doing social control. Misinformation is not generally illegal and what is not socially acceptable is much larger set than what is illegal. Removing Holocaust denials is a start, but what if all FoxNews content disappears too?

</comment><comment><USER17> I saw it put succinctly like this: "Don't give a platform to people who wouldn't give you one."

<comment><USER18> That certainly goes against the free speech traditions of Facebook's home country. Why should Facebook lower itself to the least common denominator? Why not act with integrity and principle and uphold dearly held values like free speech?

<comment><USER19> If someone came into your house and shouted rasist lies you're within your rights to kick them out. Free speech relates to protecting people from the government punishing or silencing people for what they say. It doesn't apply in the same way to private spaces or platforms. It's entirely reasonable to not provide a platform for antisemitism or other hate speech especially if it's reducing the quality of the platform for other users.

Edit: clarity

<comment><USER18> But this isn't someone's house. This is a public square where nearly everyone is invited to speak, and also given tools to block people they don't want to hear. And I never spoke about the 1st Amendment or any of the free speech laws, but of governing principles of the United States - that Democracy only works when all voices are heard. People who don't have a voice might decide this whole Democracy thing isn't working for them and decide they should be heard through violence. And we had 300,000 years of that shit. Democracy is mind boggling special considering our history and every effort should be made to make sure everyone has a seat at the table. And like it or not, Facebook is one of the most important tables these days.

Bad ideas should be discussed publicly so that all can see the arguments against. Covering up/hiding such speech doesn't end that speech, it just makes sure that those who believe it never hear a refutation.

<comment><USER19> It's not a public square. It's a private platform that already censors people for other reasons, often to do with making profit. There are low hanging fruit that have been discussed and we know the the answer, e.g. holocaust denial, where the content is just designed to hurt others. Why bother having that discussion over and over and trying to convince trolls and racists? Don't give them a platform to waste everyone's time.

Do you think Facebook should allow paid antisemitic advertising on the platform?

[https://boingboing.net/2015/11/06/facebook-is-censoring- link...](https://boingboing.net/2015/11/06/facebook-is-censoring-links- to.html)

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2016/10/12/13241486/facebook- censorship-breast-cancer-nipple-mammogram)

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/11/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/11/facebook- censorship-news-feed-trending-topics)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think Facebook is in a tough position. Making hard rules around what is allowed and what is not is very difficult, as there's a whole spectrum of ideas that could or could not fall into them. It's too easy to think that everything should be clear-cut, but reality is messy.

I think Zuckerberg was also shaken by the Congressional hearing, and seems to be cowtowing a bit to Conservatives after the raking he got from Cruz. He is trying to avoid the appearance of being partisan, but also trying to uphold ideals of reason and truth. That's a no-win situation when one side has made it their fundamental platform to oppose reason and truth.

<comment><USER21> > That's a no-win situation when one side has made it their fundamental > platform to oppose reason and truth.

That's a fairly extraordinary claim, and you know what they say about extraordinary claims.

Do you have any evidence of this? Care to share your most compelling piece?

<comment><USER22> mistermann, I've noticed that a lot of your activity on HN seems to consist of demanding that others do research for your own edification. I wonder if you'd consider, please, recognizing that other people also value their own time and energy, and actually expending some effort to educate yourself. It seems like the polite and responsible thing to do. Thanks!

<comment><USER21> If you reread, I think you will find that I'm not asking people to do research, but rather to back up non-trivial claims of "fact" with actual evidence.

Ideas _matter_.

Culture is not an imaginary concept. It is real, and it _matters_. You can safely ignore it in the short run with few problems, but ignore it in the long run and you will may suffer dire consequences.

Certain words have very precise meanings, that's why we have synonyms in our language. Improper choice of words _matters_ , to varying degrees. As does improper "choice" of "facts".

The degree to which an individual and overall collective society understands and correctly interprets (to the best of our ability) reality, and honestly _acknowledges_ the that which they know to be true, _matters_. Some lying may be justified in an "the ends justifies the means" sense, sometimes, but be careful that you don't get into a habit of it lest you lose the ability to recognize when you're lying. This goes doubly, at least, for the media. Repeat something enough times and people start to believe it whether it is true or not. In practice, _perception is reality_ , and I think you can observe this theory in action in any internet forum, including this one (on certain topics), as well as the overall political discourse we're enjoying in the West at the moment. And when I say this, I _am_ keeping in mind this: [https://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html](https://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html)

Censoring (via outright deletion/banning, or via imperfect downvote-based mechanisms) sincere and _legitimate_ opinions that may differ from the current mainstream fashion can result in perception bubbles forming within social media communities. In the long run, this can affect people's _perception_ of reality, and it _matters_. The universe doesn't care whether you agree or not.

I hope you might reconsider the content of my past and future posts with these ideas in mind.

EDIT (since I am currently censored):

> Great! Both you and the guy that you are originally challenging seem to > agree that facts and truth matter. So what's the problem?

He is stating opinions as if they are facts, that's the problem.

> I think I'll do you the favor of not addressing most of the rest of your > post, which seems a little... unfocused.

Consider _the possibility_ that it isn't me that is in need of a favor. See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris)

<comment><USER22> Great! Both you and the guy that you are originally challenging seem to agree that facts and truth matter. I also belong to the reality-based community. So what's the problem?

I think I'll do you the favor of not addressing most of the rest of your post, which seems a little... unfocused.

<comment><USER21> See edit above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's amusing to watch the old media pivot against free speech lately.</comment>


Server-side DOM manipulation in Node.js with JSDOM, JQuery, and Mustache - <AUTHOR> http://blog.marksoper.net/Server-side-DOM-manipulation-in-Nodejs-with-JSDOM-JQuery-and-Mustache-Templates-April-25-2011.html

<comment><USER2> I was hoping something like this would eventually happen with node. This is interesting from a technical perspective, but I think even more so from a business one. Creating more of an overlap between the technology used on the server side with that of the client just makes it easier to find developers who can do both. Personally I'd love to see the term "front end developer" lose some steam.

<comment><USER3> > Personally I'd love to see the term "front end developer" lose some steam.

I don't think it will. There will definitely be more dabbling but the APIs and environments are so different it'll still make sense to specialize.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is HN definitely bad at? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Stopping these kinds of vague, pointless questions?

</comment><comment><USER3> entertaining alternative points of view, outside of the liberal HN viewpoints.</comment>


No Redditing Allowed - <AUTHOR> http://www.stochasticgeometry.ie/2010/03/13/no-redditing-allowed/ <comment><USER2> Attempting to game reddit, brave man.

> _And the idea that my submission of my work is frowned on, but others > submitting my work sees them rewarded, that is deeply abhorrent._

The point is that work others find interesting/important in some way are posted; most authors consider their own work to be worthwhile.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The point is that work others find interesting/important in some way are > posted; most authors consider their own work to be worthwhile.

Most authors consider their own work to be _theirs_ as well. My stuff is under creative commons; I've no problem with people wanting to see it, or even submitting it somewhere; but being prohibited from submitting it myself while others are encouraged to, that's not something I find acceptable.

<comment><USER2> It has nothing to do with CC.

It's about the opinions of other people. You're prohibited from making the submission yourself as your opinion of your own work is considered to be too biased, end of.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is what I just said. I just disagree with that rule, I think it's wrong- headed; so I don't wish to participate in the site anymore, end of.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


US Set to Approve Private Moon Mission - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-set-to-approve-moon-mission-by-commercial-space-venture-1465166277 <comment><USER2> This is one of 16 teams competing for the Google Lunar X-Prize:

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

My bet would actually be on SpaceIL or Astrobotics to win the prize. Astrobotics has been the consistent winner when it comes to demonstrating intermediate goals; they won the prizes for Landing, Mobility, and Imaging, and seem to have a solid engineering effort based out of CMU with partnerships with major U.S. corporations. SpaceIL has some interesting design choices that limit risk, eg. they're launching on a SpaceX Falcon 9 and they aren't building a rover, instead lifting off via rocket and flying to a second destination 500M away.

Moon Express has two major risk factors against it: they're launching on an Electron, which is a rocket that has never successfully flown before and won't be commercially available until 2017, and their founder has a reputation for making grandiose promises and then running away with the money. (He founded InfoSpace during the dot-com boom, sold all of his stock at the peak even while revenues were declining, then was ordered to pay $247M in insider- trading fines by the SEC.)

<comment><USER3> Out of interest: What is the correct way to sell your stock in your company? What made the way that the founder of InfoSpace did it illegal?

<comment><USER4> In principal, publicly traded stock has the attribute that all investors make buy and sell decisions on the same information. In order to enforce that, laws prohibit persons who know what is happening within the company before the general public investor knows from profiting specifically from that insider knowledge. There are a lot of restrictions, policies and processes for buying or selling stock "while in possession of material, nonpublic information about the security." [1] There are literally 'black out days' where employees of companies that have stock traded on the public market are prohibited from buying or selling company shares. From my days at a public company, this period was generally 4-6 weeks per quarter, encompassing the quarterly reporting period.

In particular, officers, director and senior staff have to file a form with the SEC in order to trade shares at all. Those trades are subsequently reported to the public in SEC Form 4 [2]. From the SEC [3]:

"Examples of insider trading cases that have been brought by the SEC are cases against:

\- Corporate officers, directors, and employees who traded the corporation's securities after learning of significant, confidential corporate developments;

\- Friends, business associates, family members, and other "tippees" of such officers, directors, and employees, who traded the securities after receiving such information;

-Employees of law, banking, brokerage and printing firms who were given such information to provide services to the corporation whose securities they traded;

\- Government employees who learned of such information because of their employment by the government;

\- and Other persons who misappropriated, and took advantage of, confidential information from their employers."

[1] [https://www.sec.gov/answers/insider.htm](https://www.sec.gov/answers/insider.htm)

[2] [http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/tsla/insider- trades](http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/tsla/insider-trades)

[3] [http://ir.tesla.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1494730-16-7&CIK=...](http://ir.tesla.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1494730-16-7&CIK=1318605)

<comment><USER5> Adding on one thought, many insiders of publicly traded companies will sell shares through pre-established 10b5-1 plans. This can help to provide liquidity to insiders while limiting the potential for accusations of insider trading as insiders can set up defined trading plans for their stock that act independently of their knowledge or day-to-day intentions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b5-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b5-1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's a version without a paywall: [http://www.marketwatch.com/story/first- commercial-mission-to...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/first-commercial- mission-to-the-moon-nears-approval-2016-06-05)

(Alternatively, there's a "web" link on HN to bypass the WSJ paywall)

</comment><comment><USER7> hm why do they need permission?

<comment><USER8> Haven't read the article because of paywall but it's likely a requirement of the outer space treaty where the government is required to ensure conformity to the articles of the treaty by private entities.

Specifically, article VI requires - "the activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty"

Interestingly I don't know of any established processes for monitoring the activities of companies in outer space apart from getting approval from the FAA. It's not really ever been a problem up 'til now.

<comment><USER9> Who is the appropriate State Party if, e.g. SpaceX decides to start launching off of Of Course I Still Love You out in the ocean, in international waters? Do they go with the country where the launch platform is registered? Where the owing corporation is registered? Each of these seem to fall apart once you register a shell corp and launch platform in a non-space-faring nation like... Monaco ?

<comment><USER10> ITAR makes that illegal.

<comment><USER9> An interesting notion - it would be an interesting case to see if exporting rocket components to "not a country" would violate ITAR. That hasn't stopped Iran from getting launching satellites into orbit though, and misses that e.g. ULA buys their rocket engines from Russia where ITAR obviously isn't a problem.

<comment><USER11> It seems like it would be very difficult to export to "not a country." Every dry rock in the world is claimed by some nation, and ships and platforms on the open ocean are flagged and/or operated by citizens of some existing nation. Many U.S. laws apply to U.S. citizens no matter where they are in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A one-way robotic mission to the moon is reasonable enough.

It's been 50 years since the first one. The USSR's Luna I landed on the moon on February 3, 1966. The US's Surveyor I landed on the moon on June 2, 1966.

<comment><USER13> There was one in 2013: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutu_%28rover%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutu_%28rover%29)

<comment><USER14> I wasn't aware of this, somehow totally flew beneath my radar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What are the scientific goals of such a mission? The article only talks about the regulatory hurdles.

<comment><USER11> It is probably primarily an engineering mission--with goals to see if it can be done, how efficiently it can be done, and what can be learned along the way.

It is similar in this respect to SpaceX or Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin. The science of rocket engines is pretty well understood, but it's still an interesting problem to optimize.

To some extent future science depends on future engineering, so advances in engineering can still have scientific value.

</comment></comment><comment> awinter-py guessing the '20 pound scientific payload' isn't a solar-powered 3d printer

</comment><comment><USER16> I really don't understand why SpaceX doesn't do the Moon. A Moon base relay is FAR more meaningful to our established presence in space, and a fallback location for global conflict.

<comment><USER17> > _I really don 't understand why SpaceX doesn't do the Moon_

SpaceX wants to colonise another world [1]. The Moon is more difficult to colonise than Mars because it has no atmosphere. This means no aerobraking, no aerodynamic flight ( _e.g._ for drones or parachutes) and no carbon dioxide from which to make rocket fuel [2].

Furthermore, while the Moon being close to the Earth makes supplying a colony easier, it also reduces its as an independent hedge for humanity. Any gamma- ray burst, nearby supernova or supercharged solar flare hitting the Earth will probably take out a base on the Moon, too. Mars has a chance of hiding behind the Sun.

> _A Moon base relay is FAR more meaningful to our established presence in > space_

I think an independent colony is a far more valuable.

> _and [could be] a fallback location for global conflict_

See above. A lunar base would be dependent on terrestrial re-suppply. Knocking out those logistics knocks out the base.

[1] [http://www.techinsider.io/elon-musk-mars-colonies-human- surv...](http://www.techinsider.io/elon-musk-mars-colonies-human- survival-2015-10)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction#Manufacturin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction#Manufacturing_propellant_on_Mars)

<comment><USER18> There is water (ice) on the moon at the poles and carbon in the rocks so it would be possible to make rocket fuel. Wanting to colonise Mars does not mean you should avoid the moon.

Edit. Spelling

<comment><USER17> > _There is water (ice) on the moon at the poles and carbon in the rocks so it > would be possible to make rocket fuel_

Both requiring advanced, energy-intensive chemistry to extract small amounts of water and trace amounts of carbon. All running on specialised gear built out of elements difficult to find on the Moon. Compare that to heating a fluid containing 95% CO2 to 400 degrees C and running it over a catalyst which makes up over 5% of Martian soil (aluminium).

> _Want [_ sic _] to colonise Mars does not mean you should avoid the moon._

There's value in focus. Mars is the easier and superior target, given present technology and Elon's goals. Someone else can focus on the Moon if they want to.

<comment><USER18> I am not sure Mars is the easier target given how much further it is up the gravity well, but certainly Elon is welcome to focus on whatever he wants. I was just making the point that the Moon is able to be used as a source of rocket fuel if so desired and in my opinion it is a worthy target.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If some other criminal hijacks their gear is the government responsible for protecting their assets?

</comment><comment><USER20> Paywall

<comment><USER21> Click the web link, then click the first result. Going through google bypasses the paywall.</comment></comment>


Capture & Share your presentations on-the-go - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/12/9slides-ipad-app/

<comment><AUTHOR> Great easy to use tool for pitching to investors..

</comment><comment><USER2> Just tried..very cool, works like a charm</comment>


Google just launched three new photography apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16763544/google-appsperiments-storyboard-selfissimo-scrubbies-apps-photography-motion-stills <comment><USER2> Great, three more products I won't care for, and nothing to show for a Picasa replacement (offline, native desktop photo library/viewer/editor) which I still use, but can no longer download (from Google, at least).

And given that it's "garage-style" "experimental", etc, these tools will probably have the lifespan of a firefly, to be Konmari'd away just after getting an ardent following from the never-sufficiently-many devoted users.

But I won't be one of them.

<comment><USER3> What happened to Picasa? It's still incredibly useful. I just wish they had a Linux release...

<comment><USER2> They decided to kill it so that people would start using Google Photos.

This would greatly encourage people to keep all their photos in the cloud, tying them to the Google ecosystem and giving Google plenty of data to munch on, at the detriment of user experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 6 months later - "Google retires three photography apps"

<comment><USER5> Six months? You give them more credit than they deserve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> These look like childish demo apps. Has a summer intern written these? Why are they launched under Google brand?

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand the purpose of publishing small technical pieces, put it there, and highly likely forget about it later and never come back to make anything really meaningful out of it.

This is at the best Google's "user/product study" to figure out if a product concept is worth developing further, but if you don't have a smart plot and meaningful conversation generation in the comic-gen-app, you won't be able to understand the actual reception of such a concept and risk killing a good idea pre-maturely.

But hell, why would theverge cover apps for the purpose of user study testing from Google.

<comment><USER7> Replace Google with a VC and you have the current state of startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is Google doing with all of these images and videos?

It has to monetize on these somehow or someway?

Are they trying to get us addicted to taking photos and videos?

Very confused.

<comment><USER2> >Are they trying to get us addicted to taking photos and videos?

No, everyone likes taking pictures already.

What they want is that all those random snaps and associated metadata should be stored on their servers. That's something even the Stasi would never dream of, but we're fine, because Google promised to do no evil some time ago, and Facebook is doing the same thing.

<comment><USER9> One of the most concerning things this year (2017) was the incessant talk of Zukerberg getting into politics.

Our democratic principles cannot dis-allow him to contest. At the same time, imagine a rouge group of developers within FB, guided by Zuckerberg, digging dirt on political opponents and info-sniping anyone in his way to power.

Google might have browsing habits, purchasing habits and perhaps emails (though who, especially young people, communicate their thoughts through email?) but FB has peoples thoughts, political leanings, influence of news on their world outlook, detailed data on how to manipulate them, what angle of a piece of news will best influence them, their personal lives, their friends, family and acquaintances, their dissent, their passions and a very detailed timeline of their lives.

And they also have detailed real time analysis on chats in WhatsApp, browsing habits, detailed biometric information, GPS location details and what not.

We have a lot more to fear from FB.

Imagine how useful that info and power will be to a politician.

Imagine, as a retaliation against European Anti-trust and data security issues, FB delays implementing tools to fight Russian social media influence in Europe for a few weeks before election?

Imagine FB using AI to automatically change news stories to feed off the leanings of it's audience.

Imagine FB preventing flow of atrocities within communities.

Imagine FB covertly publishing dirt on people trying to investigate it.

If FB went rouge, is it possible for the current political and media systems to really counter its onslaught?

The whole world should be afraid of FB. It has too much data and too much power. Its the one true cult.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> These all look fantastic, but "appsperiments" is a horrible category name. Really hope that was Verge being silly.

</comment><comment><USER11> Storyboard is absolutely incredible if you like comics. Takes a video and makes it a completely different story. we

<comment><USER11> [https://twitter.com/xrd/status/940375296682762240?s=09](https://twitter.com/xrd/status/940375296682762240?s=09)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Getting started with pcg, computational art and demoscene? - <AUTHOR> As the question conveys, what is the best approach to learn it? All the tutorials I have seen are pretty scattered. <comment><USER2> Here's what works for me!

I reflect clearly on what tools / techniques I'm already comfortable with and think of ideas for some projects I'd like to do. Then, I figure out how to bridge the gap. E.g. I'm super comfortable with Python so I could just learn how to do game dev in Python until I feel comfortable / need to learn C++ / Unity / whatever.

You can do computational art even in Excel! Or any programming language. Start with the basics, use the positive feedback loop to get over bigger hurdles (learning specific tools, specific techniques, recreating papers / projects in your tool, etc).

Find the right balance between flow and deliberate practice / deep work and alternate!</comment>


Debian Squeeze probably the first major distro to support ZFS - <AUTHOR> http://robertmh.wordpress.com/2010/11/27/about-zfs-in-squeeze-2/

<comment><USER2> To be clear, this is Debian/BSD not Debian/Linux. ZFS is released under the Sun CDDL which is compliant with the BSD license but not the GNU GPL.</comment>


Leaving .Net - <AUTHOR> http://whatupdave.com/post/1170718843/leaving-net <comment><USER3> Compared to anything except rails, ASP.NET is pretty good.

Yes, the viewstate / gridview bs is annoying and should not be used. The problem is primarily that corporate dev departments want interchangeable parts. They want to be able to hire a developer and him to know the API that everyone is using. They don't want magic. They want everything spelled out so that the code looks identical to the UML and identical to the Use case document as signed off in triplicate by a committee of managers. In corporate dev you get promoted for doing everything to the letter not something new and exciting. I've seen pages with more than 100 checkboxes on them and arranged in a grid, it was like someone when mental with excel putting a checkbox in every cell.

To be honest, if rails were adopted by corporate dev you'd see things like not being allowed to use haml / sass, etc. You'd have a corporate list of approved gems in specific versions that were 3 years old (probably whatever comes with a default install of RedHat)

I'd bet if you look at what Atwood and Spolsky are doing over at StackOverflow on ASP.NET it's probably a reasonable choice of defaults and open source. There are a lot of stupid decisions you can make with .NET and I agree that the community is definitely lacking, but largely it's a mindset issue that stems from the socio-political environment they program in.

At my last job you should have seen the shit show that ensued when someone in management found out the DLLs I was handing off to other teams were written in F#, even though it was the .NET team and not the C# team. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, the largest cause of developers leaving a company is due to being hit by buses, and a dependency on FSharp.Core.dll is just unacceptable and could never be part of the automated build process.

<comment><USER4> It appears you've never heard of Django or Pylons/Pyramid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dave has some reasonable points, and frankly I think MS is going where he'd like them to go.

But he does miss the boat on a few things.

One thing that I do think he discounts too much is the surprising effectiveness of small focused teams. In the same way a small startup is more effective than a lumbering machine, a small team of devs is often more effective than 1000 loosely organized volunteers. The classic example is GCC which has probably 10x more people working on it than any commercial compiler, yet the Intel and MS C/C++ compilers generally kill it. Not to mention other less popular compilers like IBM xlc and DEC's Alpha compiler.

The contribution list to RoR is impressive, but the quality of the product doesn't scale with the number of contributors.

I think the question MS has to ask is "do we forego control to possibly get an incremental increase in product quality?" What I've found interesting is the speed at which Silverlight and ASP.NET MVC have improved over the past few years. With relatively small developer teams, they've increased in quality as fast as any open source projects I know of.

The other thing he gets wrong is he conflates framework developers with application developers. And I think this causes him to see a skewed world-view that developers are "waiting" for Microsoft. In general, app developers, are not waiting for MS to do anything. You have tight deadlines and are trying to find the best solution today. You take a snapshot of the world right now and pick the best solution (or starting point). You don't have the time to ponder what might be available in eight months.

Most ppl on the MS stack are app developers. Always has been the case.

<comment><USER6>
          GCC which has probably 10x more people working on it than
          any commercial compiler

Citation?

Personally I think you pulled that figure out of your ass; especially since the GCC codebase is a mess (on purpose), it's been stable and good enough (and arguably stagnant) for quite a while and all attention shifts lately to LLVM.

         With relatively small developer teams, they've increased in
         quality as fast as any open source projects I know of

When speaking of both Silverlight / ASP.NET MVC ... they are copying other projects. And we aren't talking only about high-level ideas here, but actual implementation details.

They are great followers, yes, but what did you expect from a company with virtually unlimited cash?

<comment><USER5> I just looked at the GCC contributors list and used an educated estimateof how many on various commercial compilers. I don't have exact numbers, which is why I said "probably".

 _And we aren't talking only about high-level ideas here, but actual implementation details._

Huh? What implementation details? Citation? Silverlight looks fundamentally different than any other product, except WPF. I'd love to see who their copying implementation details from.

<comment><USER7> _Silverlight looks fundamentally different than any other product, except WPF._

Back when my company started using Silverlight, I was surprised to learn that none of my coworkers knew it was almost the same as Adobe Flex. I think this sort of ignorance about the greater world of programming is exactly what the original post is talking about.

<comment><USER5> They're only similar in that they both use markup and code behind. But that's like saying Silverlight and classic ASP are almost the same. With that said, I should have said, at introduction Silverlight looked fundamentally different. Flex has copied what I think is Silverlight (and WPFs) main differentiator, which is lookless controls (which ties into binding).

I think you underestimate the amount of people who have used Flex at some point in time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been waiting for someone to say this; Every development language includes a development community, and in this case, .NET communities are more or less stenciled across internal department lines and rarely extend much further. When I first started working as a developer, I thought it was just my then employer's department tribalism, but no. These patterns are things I've seen in every .NET shop I've ever worked for. Each shop had their own interal closed-source data logger, data mapping, and some other frameworks that were shared internally, but accomplished in an unpolished, mediocre manner. Each shop's code was redundantly similar and none of it was impressive.

The internal frameworks developed in .NET shops are inefficient and mediocre not because the Ruby or Python communities are full of pure genius, but because they have more than a single person continuously working on improving them. Pythonists and Rubyists have a culture of sharing and coding in a constant loop of feedback. They talk to and work with each other. People in .NET culture do not. As a .NET developer I have rewritten code that has been created several times before, and it will die in obscurity behind the closed doors of the companies I've worked for.

This is something I only begun to realize by talking to JS, Ruby, and Python developers. I've been teaching myself Ruby since September and hope to leave .NET as soon as I can.

<comment><USER9> It sounds like you've been working in soulless corporate sweatshops, which would be just as miserable regardless of which platform they adopt. Policy is the only thing preventing you from using log4net for logging and NHibernate for ORM (assuming that's what you mean by data mapping), for example, not .NET.

<comment><USER8> That's mostly true, but the culture dominated even in a small, non-corporate startup that I worked for in Scottsdale. Once, a few of us were attempting to utilize the CSLA framework in our app, but as soon as the CFO caught wind of the required reading of third party docs, etc, he stopped the effort dead in its tracks, because it would mean "having to learn something new," and that statement pretty much sums up the prevalent mentality in the .NET community.

<comment><USER10> "he stopped the effort dead in its tracks, because it would mean "having to learn something new," and that statement pretty much sums up the prevalent mentality in the .NET community."

This is an over the top and even somewhat offending generalization. I don't know if all companies in Scottsdale are like this, but I can promise you that it's most definitely not the prevalent mentality in the .NET community nor in most .NET shops I know of.

<comment><USER5> It's not so much offensive as contradictory.

"We were told we could not use 3rd party components, which sums up the prevalent mentality in the .NET community. So we did not use the popular 3rd party component CSLA, written Rocky Lhotka, a well respected member of the .NET community."

To make it clear... how can that mentality be THE prevalent mentality when there are these extremely popular third party components such as CSLA and Log4Net. They're popular because a LOT of .NET shops use them. They're extremely popular, because that mentality is not as common as you might think it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> His description reads more like an indictment of mediocre enterprise code shops than anything specific to .Net.

It seems self-evident that the farther off the beaten path you go with languages and tools the higher the concentration you'll find of people who care and think deeply about the tools they use.

</comment><comment><USER12> Previous (extensive) discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1719277>

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like his blog was previously on Tumblr, so the dup-detector didn't catch it.

<comment><USER13> Not to be a jerk, but you didn't notice the "comments on hacker news" link at the bottom of the post?

<comment><AUTHOR> Seriously? Clearly I didn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm a .NET programmer, and i really don't hold allegiance to any one technology or platform.

There are some good points here, but who cares? The real issue is that Microsoft treats developers as if they were a separate marketing channel -- with promotions, partnerships, walled gardens and the like.

So don't play that game. I'm working in F# on mono, on my own stack. Do I care about branch commits, bad abstractions, onerous licenses or such? Nope, not in the least.

Look, there was a day where you had to take the entire MS stack or leave it. But that day is past. Now you can pick and choose a bit. Sure, not as much as we'd like, but it's still open enough for developers to control their environment.

If you don't like the game Microsoft plays with the development community? Then don't play it. But that doesn't necessarily mean you have to walk away from the entire thing.

<comment><USER15> I don't enjoy being a lone gunman. Being able to lean on other peoples' libraries and works on Github is an incredible boon and timesaver.

Reinventing everything yourself on F# is scarcely an option, especially if you're seeking a valuable community to collaborate with.

You might as well tell everyone who doesn't like the government to go buy a farm and live off the land.

When I am in the mood for being adventurous, I go with something that makes me feel truly transcendent in productivity, like Clojure. Plus, I still get an awesome community.

Hell, I've had Rich Hickey answer my questions before. Where else could I possibly have such a grin-inducing experience?

<comment><USER14> I guess I don't understand your criteria.

There's plenty of help available on F#. Mono was painful, at least for me, but nothing like C++ or .NET internals.

When I'm coding I look for community support and ease of solutions. I have that. So why again would I switch?

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't understand your criteria. Who cares if famous person X answers your question? I just want to get my work done, not become a celebrity or hang out with the cool kids.

Once I decided to move to linux I thought about moving to OCaml, Java, or Haskell. It's really not that big of a leap, and I've done some Java and OCaml in the past.

But in the end I liked having other .NET folks making assemblies that I could pull into .NET and use. A zillion guys out there coding for the CLR, and I can leverage that.

All that other stuff -- TDD, CI, good abstractions, dependency management, etc -- that's just good coding practices. Has nothing at all to do with .NET, does it?

In you have a hammer and it's not working, stop hammering. But you don't have to throw out your entire toolbox. Just pick up the screwdriver. In fact, that's the difference between the tool -- VB, C#, MVC, whatever -- and the toolbox. Seems like you just jumped from one example to a broad generalization.

Whatever works for you, though. That's my whole point: instead of making big generalizations about the state of microsoft, .net, and the community, just mind your knitting. You'll kill more time thrashing around reacting to perceived problems than you'll save from a new platform. Don't do that.

This isn't really an argument for or against .NET. Perhaps Java rocks for you. Just don't waste time trying to find the perfect language. Instead go make things that people want. Even if you do that at 50% efficiency, you're still better off than using the perfect tool making a bunch of stuff that has no value. There is a cost to switching.

<comment><USER16> > Mono was painful, at least for me

I'm interested to hear more about mono, what was painful exactly? How is the performance compared to the MS implementation?

<comment><USER14> I plan on writing a long blog post once I get it all nailed.

It will probably go something like this: the linux environment is like running an operating system at the same time while you're coding it -- little pieces of code and scripts here and there. That makes linking, compiling, and installing the primary chores. Although there is an awesome package manager, it doesn't have the coverage you'll probably need. So lots of different pieces to plug in, lots of advice on the net, some of it bad or incomplete, and instead of just googling you end up doing quite a bit of _thinking_ as you assemble your development environment and OS. Nothing at all like the VS2010 pnp stuff.

But I'm specifically referring to F#, which is a PITA on mono right now. I understand it's going to become part of the standard distro. Can't wait for that to happen. The default Monodevelop c# environment looks easier, but even then I'm having to do things like figure out where the gac is, find sql drivers and install them, bludgeon my way through mono dll linkage problems (Hey mono -- it's in the gac, it's in the directory, and you can compile it. Why the frack can't you find it when you run the program? I have to statically link my mysql driver, making my 2K executable into 1.5MB. That's hosed.)

Example #2: I have some generic type magic that works fine in Windows. Basically I throw an object at a function and it generates an SQL INSERT for me. Works and tested and being used in Win. Over in mono, however, for the type name all I'm getting is "System.Object" which, of course, is the correct base type, but not the real type name the caller is using. Can Mono handle this type-fu? Or am I stepping into some area the Mono guys just haven't developed yet? Don't know. Could be a while trying to track that down. Just like all these other snags.

It just seems like every little thing is more painful than it should be. Like debugging. Still haven't figured out how to get the interactive debugger to work on F#. I'm sure after an hour or two I'll figure it out -- or not. And there's 20 things like that. Because I'm new to the entire thing, each little step hurts.

I think it's doable, I think it's worthwhile, but if I were taking a team through this I would definitely want somebody onboard who has already been there, done that (and could mentor). Quite frankly doing it on my own gets a bit discouraging at times.

<comment><USER17> It sounds like you might only be doing web dev, so I appreciate that you might not have experience with this, but:

I've been looking at languages and VMs for doing GUI desktop app work. Specifically, cross-platform apps using native GUIs on each platform. Java (I normally use Clojure where I can) has decent cross-platform toolkits, but not so great native bindings. .NET obviously has good Windows GUI stuff, Mono's GTK# and Qyoto seem to work well for Gnome and KDE, and MonoMac seems to be going places. The main alternative seems to be to drop to low-level languages. (C, C++, Obj-C). Do you think it's worth it for me to go ahead with .NET and Mono considering the difficulties you've had with Mono?

<comment><USER14> Like I said, I'm about a week away from forming a solid opinion, but my guess is that I'd use Mono.

I'm doing very simple web stuff (fcgi-type, if I can get the fcgi bindings to work) Also a bit of command-line/batch work.

As far as I can tell, .NET is the best match for what you want. If i were you, I might want to do a bit of poking around to see how the low-level stuff is configured first.

<comment><USER18> Do NOT use the fastcgi server for ASP.NET. They are too unstable for use in production. Use mod_mono instead.

<comment><USER14> maybe you could help me.

I don't want ASP.NET. All I want is a resident .NET program that gets called when an URL is visited, getting all the parms passed like CGI. I can handle the rest.

I really don't want or need the ASP.NET stack.

Is there some way to do this? So far all I have is a stand-alone program that gets loaded each time using Apache and CGI. Can't seem to figure out how to make it resident and re-entryable without using the HttpHandler objects off the ASP.NET stack, which I don't want to do. Lord knows it was tough enough getting an environment working. Going through the motions of overriding a part of the ASP.NET pipeline in a foreign environment is probably just a bridge too far for me for this project.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

<comment><USER19> It sounds like what you are looking for is exactly what I am working on right now: [https://github.com/jacksonh/manos/blob/master/docs/tutorial/...](https://github.com/jacksonh/manos/blob/master/docs/tutorial/page-1.md)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Amen. This pretty well articulates what I experience at work with .NET on a day to day basis. When I code other stacks there's always a library or a plugin to do X. At work its always "we can buy something or build it in house." Frustrating to say the least.

</comment><comment><USER21> Yeah, I dunno I like/love c# (depending on post/pre 3am...). Plus Mono really kick's ass and is a lot of fun to play with (esp. monotouch). I seem to be able to find free stuff off codeproject or stack whenever I need it. Even on the UI it's pretty painless if you avoid MS's stuff and just go with jquery and open standards. I kinda dig it to be honest, and monodevelop is a pretty nice IDE for mac now. All in all coming along quite nicely.

<comment><USER22> Mono is where the innovation is happing now, e.g projects like Manos de Mono

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> As much of a bummer as it is, I have to agree with many of the points in the article - it seems as if many people in the .NET community simply don't _get_ the F/OSS mindset, that they should share code and build the future of the platform together, instead of building something solely for themselves until Microsoft releases a fully thought-out solution.

Finding contributors to projects is really, really difficult because of this, and the main OSS site (CodePlex) until recently had a lot of friction in doing so until they implemented the Mercurial integration.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think that the recently announced NuGet (<http://nuget.codeplex.com/>) will be a big boost to the .net community. Having the global library repository like Perl's CPAN will be huge in bringing the community together. More users of libraries will mean more improvements too them.

It also seems like the existence and success of sites like codeplex and stackoverflow negates his thesis.

Was glad to read that he was leaving for purely non-technical reasons. I bet he'll be back someday.

</comment><comment><USER25> Romantic, starry-eyed, hopelessly idealistic and mostly true.

<comment><USER26> This post perfectly frames why I pushed the organization I work for to move from ASP.NET to Rails / Sinatra for our web development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Funny, but I felt the opposite. I'm sick of open source software that's documented like a donkey's ass and that never works. And all those 'developers' that can't be productive and create things, instead all they're doing is plumbing joomla with jquery while high on json.

I guess it's like a mid life crisis, you just have to flip side.

<comment><USER28> I agree with you. The languages, documentation, and standard libraries of .NET are awesome. The community is definitely lacking though. These days you can get excellent help on IRC about F# and on stackoverflow for everything, but there is not really a spirit of "lets build something cool" outside of F#.

<comment><USER5> _but there is not really a spirit of "lets build something cool" outside of F#._

Can you give an example of something that is cool? Everytime I think of something cool, I can think of something done on the MS stack, but maybe our definitions are different.

<comment><USER28> I don't understand what you mean. Do you mean cool F# things? All the work of Tomas Petricek is way cool. Outside of .NET there is of course tons of cool stuff, like Clojure, Rails, Haskell stuff, the recent fuss about Yacc is Dead etc.

<comment><USER5> Just things that are cool. Stuff done in F# or in other communities like the Haskell, Clojure, or Rails community.

I'm trying to see why the things coming out of the Clojure and F# community are cool, but they aren't coming out of the C#/Visual C++ community. For example, ScottGu showed off a C#/Silverlight app built by a 3rd party that was a 3D model of the human body, where you coudl strip layers and interact in real time... all rendering pushed to the GPUs. That seemed cool to me. And they did it in a week.

I'm trying to understand why we have this disconnect.

<comment><USER28> No, absolutely, there are very cool things coming out of Microsoft with regards to C#/VC++. It's just that they nearly always come from Microsoft, there isn't an active community that does these things.

<comment><USER5> My point with the 3D body example is that it was not done by MS.

But take a look at a place like CodeProject. People post their projects and write up an article describing the technical aspects of that project. It's actually a surprisingly strong community. In the past month ~500 written or updated. I actually tend to find this place more interesting than GitHub or CodePlex, due to the exposition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It would be great to hear back from Dave after a few years with Rails, which as many know, has its own drawbacks.

I'm not saying he shouldn't be excited for a change, but in a couple of years, who knows? Maybe he'll be checking out Haskell, and we'll hear about how great that is.

</comment><comment><USER30> Funny timing.

I've been a .net developer, mostly web - some desktop, since the first release. I am currently going through the interview process with a company that focuses on rails.

Part of me is excited, I've been wanting to get away from MS technologies for a couple of years now. Part of me wonders if I am going to miss the safety net of the compiler and IDE, and if the grass truely is greener. I started out doing perl/cgi and the asp/vbscript, so it almost seems like a step backwards tool wise, but with much better languages and libraries than I had the first time around.

If anyone has any insight, it would be much apprecaited.

<comment><USER31> I've been doing development with Rails on personal projects and while Netbeans isn't Visual Studio, it's still a pretty solid development tool.

I also dig how the local Rails environment shows you every call that's being made, plenty of solid logging integration, etc. Also the gems and other libraries being open source and freely available is great, and Ruby crushes C# with regards to Metaprogramming if you're going to go deep (which you probably will).

The debugging style is different but it's definitely several thousand leaps above ASP/VBScript. You'll be more than fine.

<comment><USER32> _ASP/VBScript_

Are you referring to classic ASP? VS (for .NET) has great debugging features.

<comment><USER31> I am indeed referring to classic ASP, when the poster said taking a step back I assumed he meant classic ASP over ASP.NET.

<comment><USER32> I'm sorry for that, I guess I missed out that details since the topic is about .NET.

 _definitely several thousand leaps above ASP/VBScript_

But still, I disagree with the choice of words in your comment. I used VS Interdev for classic ASP debugging in the past, and I find it sufficient enough. Yes, I'm sure there are other IDE/tools which can do more than Interdev, but I don't think it will be several thousand leaps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Being as a core asp.net developer for 7 years and now working as a python/django from last 5-6 months; I can say every .net developer should change his development platform at least for couple of months, because it make you more mature developer.

.net is a good platform, but the real problem is you have to wait for MS to develop something. For example before "asp.net mvc" there is no option to use mvc in MS world.

For me learning python/django was not a big pain; but running them on ubuntu is a real pain; and i think this is true for every ms developer who want to change his platform.

On linux platform options are great and there are lots self motivated developers and fun projects which is not true in the case of MS.

One more thing - lots of start-ups work on the non ms platform. Once people talk about asp.net mvc they only talk about <http://stackoverflow.com/>, but we can find more successful example in rails, or django or php; which makes every ms developer on back-foot.

PS: I love c#, asp.net mvc and VS as a developer tools.

<comment><USER34> This is not correct. There were multiple MVC frameworks on top of ASP.NET years ago, including Monorail and FubuMVC and a lot more actually. All of them were open source. Some of them were quite good, actually.

Were you active there? Did you contribute something? Did you commit fixes/features. No, you did not. But of course you do contribute to the complaining.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Interesting how the author questions why nobody's working together in .NET and then responds by leaving the .NET community rather than sticking around to help fix it. A bit of a circular argument?

(to be fair, I'd probably do the same thing, and I bet most of us would too)

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm in the same boat but for different reasons. I find learning a new language challenging and fun, I've just become bored with .NET and decided to pick up Ruby on Rails. I've seen great community in RoR, beyond what can be found for .NET, but that's not to say .NET has no community.

</comment><comment><USER37> I love .NET the platform -- the VM is absurdly efficient (almost too efficient, making egregious algorithm choices functional), and C# the language is superb and absolutely first class. There is nothing that shames either of those contenders, and I would argue that there are few that even legitimately compete with them.

Having said that, I couldn't agree more regarding _the community_. When MVC came out my only excitement about it -- given that I had been doing something better with .NET for closing on a decade -- was that the default baseline would hopefully be better than the terrible abomination that is WebForms (a construct either made to cripple web development, or to hold the hands of Visual Basic developers with a big viewstate diaper). But otherwise the excitement was hard to accept because it wasn't like it was actually something new, or something that you couldn't already do yourself with minimal effort. I'm seeing the same thing with some of the concurrency additions in .NET 4, where some trivial constructs are blessed with some syntactical sugar and it's treated like it's a new revolution in development.

Which brings up another oddity of the .NET community in general: There is a tendency to embrace and vigorously adopt whatever abstraction Microsoft grunts out, regardless of merit or actual value that it adds. The simplest need becomes layers of poorly contrived, poor fitting abstractions, where developers instead of asking "why _should_ I use this?" instead are too busy worrying about "why _didn't_ you use that?" The former question is much more valuable, but the latter is the defensive reaction of too many. LINQ is such a tool that is, in my mind, used for evil far more than good, but because it's a part of the gamut you have to mash it in wherever possible.

<comment><USER38> I develop on the Windows platform since its inception and I'm not aware of any Microsoft community you refer to. I know that there are millions of people who develop with the Microsoft tools and obviously the more people use something the more that something gets abused.

On the other hand try getting a job in a decent company based on tech that is also a Microsoft partner and you'll be torn into pieces with the questions about deep platform understanding.

<comment><USER37> By community I mean user base.

I'm not talking about outliers. I am talking about the majority of the user base, with few exceptions. To put a bit of a bigoted statement into this, let me say that traditionally Microsoft had several development streams, with the least talented, least motivated career developers finding the Visual Basic stream. The streams converged and it is all the worse for it.

To use the search engine "index", it's a quick way to gauge how frequently a user base dares to go outside of the trivial. With .NET I am frequently amazed when I'm trying to do something remotely complex and in looking for people discussing the topic, find nothing but a few unanswered questions via search engines. It has always disturbed me, and it in essence speaks to the linked article's point.

<comment><USER38> Is the user base behaviour that much different from, say, php user base or javascript user base or whatever mainstream tool user base behaviour?

<comment><USER39> Comparing the .NET user base with the PHP user base also says a ton about its technical prowess. PHP is the Visual Basic of web development - it's considered an entry-level language and has a lot of problems. That said, Visual Basic paid a lot of my bills between 1991 and 1995.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was a .NET dev before Python/Django.

All of this is accurate, and he's wise for leaving .NET

It's just not the environment or kind of people you'd prefer to work with, given better communities and concentrations of driven programmers you could be working with.

<comment><USER40> I've just recently ported a python/Django site to c#/.NET. The switch was not done for performance reasons (or community for that matter) but as a consideration the .NET version was an order of magnitude faster on the same hardware without any effort to optimize.

<comment><USER15> Did you have some point to make? You didn't even explain the original anecdote you referred to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Another day, another leaving .NET/Java for Ruby/Python post. This very link btw got posted twice, the first post was 3 months ago. Aren't you guys tired of that? We get it - HN is the place where people will go at great lengths to contribute/code all night rather than use something that works out of the box and juts move on. I am always surprised on the often hardcore technical problems discussed here and the relative lack of in-depth startup/business topics - and this is what starting up a company really is all about.

ASP.NET MVC is probably in the top 3 web frameworks created, and WebForms is not that bad either. ViewState/Page-Lifecycle - you can use this or not - <USER2> is up to you. You can always do the HTML5 stuff in ASP.NET too, and most of the code is jQuery now anyway, so why the big fuss?

And what do you mean there is no community around ASP.NET? Have you heard about StackOverflow? The majority of the devs are ASP.NET developers there, with ASP.NET and C#/Javascript being the most tagged posts - literally every single question gets answered asap.

And what's wrong with the 3rd party vendors? They exist, support and enhance the eco-system producing some great tools along the way. Like Rasharper. Like UI widgets. Like database tools. How many times have you seen an open source project with great potential just die because there was nobody to take over and maintain it? Understand - some companies have REAL business out there - not the next social this, web that average crap startups have on $0 revenue. They want REAL partners that they can rely on and WILL pay for that. Heck, you are paying $100K to your developers, why not pay $5K for a proven software and win some time/use the resources of the partner? What is the friggin' deal with that?

Grow up. Is it like mid-age crisis? You just need switching things now and then and trying to figure out the reasons? One of the top reasons I've seen companies fail is to switch technologies just for the sake of switching and "keeping it fun" - from a business point of view it is ridiculous to invest 8 years in a framework and then just switch, like that.

<comment><USER24> I think this story is so interesting because so many of us could never imagine leaving .net. It's got a real shock factor to it. Like someone winning the lottery and throwing away the ticket.

<comment><USER41> I wasn't aware .NET was that highly regarded. It's a decent platform, but far from the holy grail of development environments.</comment></comment></comment>


Proposal for turning off standard I/O buffering - <AUTHOR> https://blog.plover.com/Unix/stdio-buffering.html <comment><USER2> I recommend reading the follow-up at [https://blog.plover.com/Unix/stdio- buffering-2.html](https://blog.plover.com/Unix/stdio-buffering-2.html) too.</comment>


Google contractors in Pittsburgh vote to unionize - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xwmnv/google-contractors-officially-vote-to-unionize <comment><USER2> I am a long-time dev contractor (not with Google), and I am sick of staffing middlemen that keep 40%+ of my hourly rate and hold the money an extra month, simply because they had access to the client's contractor system. It's robbery.

<comment><USER3> Can you go work for the client and capture that money for yourself?

<comment><USER4> Yes of course, but companies will prefer to work with middlemen rather than directly employing individual contractors because it makes legal and accounting easier. There's often a lot of hurdles to employ an individual directly, like requiring the contractor to have a million dollar insurance policy say

Seems like a lot of money for that, but companies are willing to pay it

<comment><USER2> I'm a corp to corp subcontractor and aside from getting nearly half of my rate taken, I keep and pay for my own liability and e&o insurance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> White collar unions aren't a new phenomenon though they are less known: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Professional_Engine...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Professional_Engineering_Employees_in_Aerospace)

Is there a precedence for contractors unionizing? I'm curious what prevents Google from simply not renewing their contract since they will presumably be requesting much higher wages.

<comment><USER6> Considering that they work for a third party I imagine it is the third party's problem.

<comment><USER7> Exactly, thank you for being the first comment to point this out instead of taking a swing at Google/unions

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have two questions that are related:

1) Isn't this really a "problem" for HCL, and not necessarily Google? Google can just not renew the contract, meaning all the benefits they gain from working "for Google" go away. And if you make the assumption that Google is hiring firms like this primarily because of cost, then their incentive as a public company is to keep costs low and switch to another firm.

(Unless this is primarily to reduce the margins for HCL? i.e. costs to Google stay flat, but workers take home a larger share.)

2) More of a criticism on Unions: why don't these folks just go work for Google if they want the benefits? Either they have the ability and don't want to, which is their choice, or they don't pass the hiring bar, which then means any comparison to what Google employees make is not appropropriate.

<comment><USER9> Given that it is HCL, can H1B workers unionize? They are in that constellation of contractors that pulls a lot of people from overseas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As someone without any context, 1\. Why they are unionizing? 2\. Why are they joining a union from a completely different industry? What would this achieve?

<comment><USER11> The article answers all these questions.

<comment><USER6> It doesn't. Where does the USW come into the picture, if PATP is affiliate of the DPE, considering that USW is _also_ an affiliate of DPE? I don't get it and I wished the article explained it.

<comment><USER12> > Where does USW come into the picture, if PATP is affiliate of the DPE, > considering that USW is _also_ an affiliate of DPE?

The PATP is a new chapter of United Steelworker's union. Why steelworkers? Because the union isn't just a steelworker's union, although it retains that name in common usage for historical reasons (and also because it's short enough to say). The union's full name is The United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Service Workers International Union. Years of erosion of union strength and membership in the US has led to a lot of union mergers.

The PATP is _not_ part of the DPE. The DPE is a branch of the AFL-CIO. The AFL-CIO is a federation of unions — a metaunion, if you will. The DPE helped the PATP organize, that's the DPE's job. But the DPE isn't a union itself, it's an umbrella organization for professional employees represented by the AFL-CIO's member unions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Earlier this year I left an IT & engineering contracting company (Alten, one of the biggest here in France) and I heard from a friend who was still working there that it was one of the union that prevented remote working because "it would prevent them from controlling the workers".

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't know much about unions.

What are some downsides to joining a union? Are there onerous obligations?

<comment><USER15> Labor unions are the reason why we have paid time off and 40 hour work weeks in the US. Unions in the US have a lot more negative press compared to other unions in the developed world. Big business has spent decades convincing Americans that unions are bad because for large corporations, they can make more money by reducing benefits and pay for their workers.

I would say in general, unions in Europe are viewed in a much more positive light. Collective bargaining allows for workers from blue collar to white collar work receive their fair share from the company.

I would try reading more about the labor movement in the US: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_States)

Please try and broaden your views. HN is an anti union echo chamber for the most part.

<comment><USER16> > I would say in general, unions in Europe are viewed in a much more positive > light.

It depends on the country. When I lived in Poland my father complained a lot about his union (Solidarność, he worked as an industrial electrician), as the management was mostly old people who did as little as possible to not lose their position, and did nothing outside of being in the union (they were retired). You would have a hard time outvoting them because you'd need to get a certain number of votes from multiple plants, around a thousand of people in total - campaigning alone would take most of your time, on top of doing your work. I haven't heard many positive stories about unions to be honest, and I lived in upper Silesia, the most industrialized region - where there were lots of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm running a pool. How long before Google drops HCL? The winner gets my eternal respect. What's your guess?

<comment><USER7> Never, unfortunately this also means you won't pay out to me

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> TFA is absolutely worthless.

Better one here: [https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/9/24/20880727/google- workers...](https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/9/24/20880727/google-workers- unionized-contractors-hcl-tech-activism)

> These 80 employees who work as analysts and trainers for Google's shopping > product

To me, this sounds like low skilled labor.

> Most of the employees organizing hold college degrees, get paid as little as > $40,000 a year, and don't receive sick days or many of the other perks that > direct Google employees get.

"perks that direct Google employees get" is irrelevant at best.

The first COL calculator I found (ie, first google hit, let's assume google didn't suddenly game this result) says pittsburgh is 1/3 the cost of SF. $40k = $120k. This is not bad at all (?) for such low skilled labor, if the "COL curve" is linear down to $40k. Also, they say "as little as", so we know that's the floor, not the median. (Shame on the editor for presenting it that way.)

The lack of sick days isn't that bad if the employees have health benefits and are not penalized for sick time off. (Just take away 1-2 weeks of salary -- the typical amount of sick days one would get.) However, if they don't have sick days, I have doubts about the quality of their health benefits and maybe they don't even have 401k?

<comment><USER19> COL is a terrible indicator. 1/3rd COL isn't really 1/3rd. If you have a large family the requirement of a large house/apartment will make your cost of living much worse in SF than 3x - while if you sleep in your car and cook on a camp stove your COL is the nearly the same in both places (car registration might be slightly more in CA). Both are extreme cases, but they get the point across.

While I would expect a somewhat lower salary outside of SF, it wouldn't be 1/3.

<comment><USER18> > If you have a large family the requirement of a large house/apartment

Thanks. That's why I qualified that bit by noting that the COL curve may not be linear. Due to regressive taxes, housing minimum, etc.

But without hearing from folks actually in pittsburgh, it's hard for me, sitting here in SV, to know how good or bad $40k is.

But the relativity to SF isn't the most important part anyway. If the pay is below market, shouldn't HCL quickly find themselves without employees?

<comment><USER20> I lived in Pittsburgh for 8 years. It was eminently livable as a single grad student on a ~$30k stipend, but I wouldn't want to raise a family on that or thereabouts. Also, apartments may be cheaper but COL is an average over the whole metro area, and decent apartments or houses in a neighborhood you'd want to live in are a bit more. (Say $1000/mo for a nice 1-bed, or $300k for a decent house.) Keep in mind that cars, electronics, health insurance, and myriad other consumer goods aren't cheaper just because the city COL is cheaper. I'd probably want to make $60k or so to actually be comfortable and put some money away (edit: as a single person, and more than that with a family). (Fortunately, software engineers in Pittsburgh generally make quite a bit more than this, from what I've heard.)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Error 503 Back end is unhealthy - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/glogin?URI=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2017%2F01%2F13%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fdonald-trump-transition.html%3F_r%3D0 <comment><AUTHOR> This error is generated if you click on the story "Trump National Security Adviser Called Russian Envoy Day Before Sanctions Were Imposed" from a google search.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems to be fixed now.</comment></comment>


Buddy Beers: How they are becoming the world's mobile beer tap - <AUTHOR> http://untether.tv/ellb/sessions/new-mobile-business-models/buddy-beers-how-they-are-becoming-the-worlds-mobile-beer-tap-and-how-they-landed-carlsberg-as-their-first-client-with-founder-travis-todd// <comment><USER2> What I've been waiting for so long! 3 Cheers...</comment>


Ask HN: What options are there for remote computers *with* graphical display - <AUTHOR> not sure exactly how to word this, but i find running headless chome and xvfb and the like is cumbersome on servers, i was wondering if there is a service that is more similar to an actual personal computer, with a graphical display etc. i use chrome to track some sites online and its quite awkward trying to do it on a server. <comment><USER2> Xvnc?

<comment><AUTHOR> ah thank you...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you keep track of the hardware and software used in your company? - <AUTHOR> For companies that have over 100 servers (for example), do you use software to track the servers and their relation to a product or service?  I'm not referring to desktops and applications, but somewhere where you can manage that the finance system consists of these 12 servers, 2 web services and this software.
In ITIL 3, this was a CMDB (Configuration Management Database).
For 'enterprise', there are solutions from Service Now, BMC and IBM.  But these are very complex and very expensive.   What are some solutions for small to medium companies that can't justify using enterprise software for this? <comment><USER2> I've used Device42[0] in the past and found it pretty good for asset tracking. It can map software to hardware and manage software relationships. It's a datacenter manager first though. That said, it's been a couple of years since I used it and I hardly scratched the surface of it's capabilities. It was reasonably priced, IIR.

[0] [https://www.device42.com/](https://www.device42.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks cweiss, haven't heard of device42 before. Having a look now. Seems light it might be what I am looking for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It depends what you mean by used. I wrote a system which learns what things are discussed:

[https://metacortex.me/](https://metacortex.me/)

If it's discussed it is tracked. A simple demo is: [https://hnprofile.com](https://hnprofile.com)

If you're intested in tracking software there is data dog (I believe it's called). It logs running software

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://snipeitapp.com](https://snipeitapp.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing

What I am looking for is more at a data centre level I guess that maps the infrastructure to the services provided. For example, Service 1 uses Server A and Server B. Service 2 uses Server B and Server C.

Then, once you have everything mapped out, it is easy to see when planning what services would be impacted if we wanted to upgrade Server B to a new operating system. We would know that we need to check compatibility for both Service 1 and 2, and not just focus on Service 1 and be reminded that Service 2 uses the same server only when something goes wrong!

<comment><USER5> I use AirTable for something similar. It's like excel on steroids & let's you "link" cells of data to one another. Kind of a low-tech solution but depending on the scope of your project it could work.</comment></comment></comment>


The Skin Gun - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXO_ApjKPaI&

<comment><USER2>
      > This video contains content from National Geographic,
      > who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds.

Bummer.</comment>