Lightweight Living (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://www.aldha.org/ltweight.htm <comment><USER2> Everybody on this site is always attacking stuff. I'd like to write in defence of stuff.

Stuff is awesome. Four years ago when I moved to the US I went from the situation of having an apartment full of stuff to having two suitcases full of stuff. I acquired an apartment where the old tenants were happy to leave behind a crummy couch and a mattress on the floor, did a quick run to Walmart to pick up a minimalist set of kitchenware and bedding, bought a bike to get around town, and I was pretty much in the supposedly-blessed state of having the mininal possible amount of stuff.

It wasn't that great. It was just limiting and depressing.

Four years of stuff-acquisition later I now have just about the right amount of stuff. Some stuff (like half the stuff in my kitchen) I seldom use, but it's there in case I need it. Other stuff is completely useless, but I like having it around because it looks nice. I own four frypans, which is probably at least twice as many as I need, but y'know what? Contrary to what you read in many of these articles, having the extra two frypans doesn't cause me any distress.

So while I'd never advocate anyone buying stuff just for the sake of buying stuff, nor buying stuff that they can't afford, I really don't see any problem with having some stuff, nor any great advantage to getting rid of stuff. Three cheers for stuff, and its nonzero ability to enhance your life!

<comment><USER3> I'll bet that you have a job that you really love. In this case stuff is a win-win scenario -- you earn money by doing something you enjoy, and you use that money to buy stuff that you enjoy.

Most people are not in this situation. They have a job that they either put up with, or in many cases actively dislike, and they have a lot of stuff that requires a continuous money flow to sustain. They're convinced the stuff is 'necessary', and therefore it is necessary for them to continue slaving away at the job that they hate so that they can enjoy the stuff they think they need.

In that cases, it's not a case of net postive or negative for stuff, but cost- benefit analysis. Is the stuff that you have worth the cost of working for it?

But like I said, if you enjoy your work, then stuff is basically free.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, that's a good way of putting it.

"If you enjoy your work, then stuff is basically free."

I'm off to enjoy my free stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We've come oddly full circle over the course of the industrial revolution. Once upon a time no human owned more than they (or their mule/ox/wife) could carry, as by necessity we were nomadic. Agriculture caused us to settle, industrialisation brought us to cities, and with a few notable exceptions, all our lifestyles adapted to suit 'settledness'. Now, as we're moving into the post-industrial age, a return to mobility seems to make more sense, and with it new attitudes and beliefs about property.

Steve Roberts ( <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDaz8vaKzdQ> ) is a bit of a hero of mine and I think the first person to really figure out the physical implications of internetworking for the knowledge worker. Steve took his first voyage a few years before I was born, but in that short time we've seen unbelievable changes in society, the economy and of course technology.

I struggle to think of somebody I know personally who couldn't do their job from anywhere in the world, if only they had the courage to demand it. The whole economy seems to be disappearing into the ether and the workforce seems to be slowly following, albeit largely via Bangalore and Beijing. Perhaps most extraordinary is the technological change. I recently built a modern version of Steve's Winnebiko, but I quickly realised that it was a largely pointless task - twenty-odd years of miniaturisation and a whole heap of bandwidth have shrunk almost all of his 125kg trailer rig into an ordinary smartphone. I still get a little thrill every morning at the marvel of technology that lives in my left pocket. Every record, every book, every photograph, a telephone, a camera, a television and much more besides in what previous generations might have described as "something no bigger than a pack of cigarettes".

It is so easy to forget that we already live in the future.

<comment><USER5> You kids these days with your unbridled wonder. Back in my day the future had flying cars!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bruce Sterling wrote about simplifying possessions a couple years ago on signaling the end of Viridian Design.

Basically useful, sentimental and beautiful things make the cut. Everything else goes.

His unique recommendation was to photograph and meticulously document everything you got rid of and generate a database of your former possessions. Quite useful if you find yourself missing it in the future, and a pretty cool personal history project to boot!

The essay is on the main page: <http://www.viridiandesign.org/>

<comment><USER7> I question the value of most sentimental stuff. I'm moving next week and have been looking at my boxes of sentimental stuff. I realize I only look at it _when I'm moving_.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not throwing it out--because I'm human and _I can't_.

<comment><USER8> Put the sentimental stuff into storage and look at it every month when your storage bill comes in the mail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's like the feeling you get when you delete stuff off your hard drive, except now you're deleting real things.

</comment><comment><USER9> Twice since 2008 I've left one state for another with all my possessions crammed into my Honda Civic. It's liberating in a way that's hard to explain to someone who doesn't already understand the feeling. I learned what I really valued (apparently some books, my computers and gadgets, and old letters and other mementos). And a car is large enough that there was still plenty of room for junk I didn't need.

<comment><USER10> I've done the same, except in one of these

[http://xtbuy.com/image/album/Toyota+MR2/Toyota- MR2-SW11-Mk1-...](http://xtbuy.com/image/album/Toyota+MR2/Toyota- MR2-SW11-Mk1-Orange.jpg)

The trunk is the size of a bag of golf clubs.

It is a fantastic feeling. For me it's a sense of freedom, knowing I can cut loose and move at any time, anywhere.

<comment><USER2> I've done the same except intercontinentally and with two suitcases.

I didn't feel liberated from my stuff, I just felt like I now had an inconveniently small amount of stuff and needed to buy all my stuff all over again.

<comment><USER10> I'd say the difference is I had enough space to carry all that was truly important to me, whereas two suitcases is enough for some clothes, a laptop, and maybe a couple other things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Lightweight living, a minimalist lifestyle, or whatever you want to call it represents maximum freedom for some people. If you come across adventure or you decide you want to move, you can do whatever you want at the drop of a hat.

I'd say it's best suited to people who don't have a family, sedentary lifestyle, or hobbies that require a lot of stuff.

In late 2007, I got rid of my place and everything I owned to travel indefinitely with only a laptop, HD cam, four shirts, a pair of pants, and two pair of underwear/socks. My worldly possessions weighed 14 lbs and occupied a backpack smaller than the L.L. Bean that hauled my books in high school.

Over the course of the preceding 6 months, I'd realized I never actually used my kitchen, living room, couch, TV, or pretty much anything else in my place. I would get home, play guitar and drums, use my computer, sleep, and leave.

So I got rid of it all, and the feeling was one of total liberation. I haven't looked back, and after 3 years (including a move to SF), I've added a small acoustic guitar and shed the HD cam.

I also realized that an apartment is mostly wasted space for someone who spends most of his time outside and around town, so I got rid of that too and sleep in my car.

Long story short, I've found getting rid of excess to be liberating, productive, and addictive. Highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER12> I am personally obsessed with lists, rankings and statistics in general so I do not know how universal my desires are... but:

Try making a weighted list of your dearest possessions. In as much depth as possible to its dearest extent. Not the "true wealth" things such as love, family, friends et cetera, but instead your physical objects like laptop or favorite books.

I found that the objects low on the list I didn't care so much about and did not use too often. It was easy to get rid of them then. Putting on paper what my unconscious already valued made this process much more comprehensible and satisfactory to me.

I find that the more I eliminate in excess the more I can love the things that I do care about. Maybe that is true for you as well.

</comment><comment><USER13> The best kind of move is when you can keep your old apartment for a while.

You just relocate stuff on a when-needed basis and eventually the old apartment is full of crap you haven't missed once.

Figuring out what to keep and what to give away is an easy problem at that point.

<comment><USER14> That's what I do too! Just did it again last month and simultaneously move into a smaller place. I still have some boxes in my car and now that they've sat in my car for a couple weeks and I don't miss them I'm pretty sure I don't care or it may just be sentimental stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I moved to Europe for a two year post-doc with nothing but a suitcase. I left absolutely everything behind --- people included. I learned things about myself and the world that I could never have imagined.

That said, I should have at least brought a damned book.

</comment><comment><USER16> I just got back from 7 months backpacking from Peru to Panama. Sometime while I was away, my storage locker was broken into back home.

My whole life is in that locker, yet when I sat down to think of what might have been stolen it occurred to me that there was absolutely nothing in there that I'd really miss if it were gone. Maybe a couple old photo albums, but that's about it.

Turns out, the burglars came to the same conclusion. Evidently nothing I own looks particularly valuable to anybody else either. Anybody want a bunch of my old useless stuff?

Oh, and as to Pack Weight, it goes for traveling too. I carry exactly one complete change of clothes on the road, along with a few books and a laptop. At one point on this trip I wore the same shirt 40 days in a row (washing it and putting it back on every couple days), until it degraded to the point where I wore it shirt shopping and tossed it in the garbage can next to the fitting room.

Much like the author, I get a bit of a chuckle watching the first-timers hauling expedition packs on their backs and "daypacks" larger than my main one on their front. They're learning their lesson for next time.

</comment><comment><USER17> The annoying thing about stuff is that there is that tool or that nick nack that you might use 5 times a year. You really really need it, and don't want to buy it and dispose of it and waste the time of going to the store to find it, so you just keep it in some box for when you do need it. It's usually not big enough to rent or to deal with the hassle of renting so it can get pretty irritating.

</comment><comment><USER18> My wife and I are selling pretty much everything we own: our house, our car, most of our furniture, etc.

It feels scary and liberating at the same time.

<comment><USER19> Is selling a house in this market a good idea? The important thing is to not let your possessions tie you down. If you own it outright, maybe you can just rent your place out while you check to see if that sort of a life is for you or not?

<comment><USER18> We've gone through all the options. We don't own it outright and renting in this market isn't that great either.

It took us a long time to come to this decision. We'll see...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't think I'll ever get to this point, but I'm slowly working my way up. Sold a few computers, excessive speakers, and more a few weeks ago to finish paying off my collegiate credit card debt. It's unbelievably liberating.

</comment><comment><USER21> I just wrote about doing this myself recently, actually... getting rid of stuff feels good.

Oh, and the obligatory pg: <http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Link to your post?

<comment><USER22> I guess he means this:

[http://blog.steveklabnik.com/where-there-is-no-property- ther...](http://blog.steveklabnik.com/where-there-is-no-property-there-is-no- injust?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SteveKlabnik+%28Steve+Klabnik%29)

Also available via <http://flavors.me/steveklabnik#dd8/feed>

<comment><USER21> Yes, thanks. I always feel like linking to myself is a bit... scummy. In some way. Can't put my finger on why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Tip: pack up all your stuff and move somewhere smaller. In the new place, unpack as you need/want things. In 2 months, throw out all the boxes left over.

</comment><comment><USER24> related story: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1140670>

In the article, the writer mentioned a Russian who went around buying typewriters, stereos, and all sort of car parts. He couldn't believed that these things were so cheap but he brought it anyway. In Russia, every one of these part are extremely valuable. All of which are simply junk to the author. So the Russian guy didn't quite adjust his value system yet.

Now, the author himself is faced with the fact that he is doing the same thing as the Russian guy did years ago. A whole lot of things are completely digitalized, such as video, musics, scholarly journals, and all these thing. He throw 200 pounds worth of information into the dumpster as soon as he realize that there are no more values in such papers, which are already digitalized.

</comment><comment><USER25> Nothing beats the feeling of a good "format c:"

</comment><comment><USER26> We learned just about the same lesson (maybe not so far as ditching the insurance...) while backpacking the globe a year ago. Amazing the kind of junk we've shed that used to be 'important' or 'valuable.'

</comment><comment><USER27> Yeah, I don't get the point of cancelling the insurance. Selling the house and buying a smaller one would be a better idea.

Insurance doesn't buy stuff, it buys not having to worry and plan.

<comment><USER3> That's the trick -- you don't _actually_ have to worry or plan _without_ insurance.

<comment><USER28> yes, but if having stuff is what works for you or you want to make sure responsibilities are attended to even if you're not around, you probably need insurance.

<comment><USER29> isn't that quite circular, in a thread about minimalist living?

<comment><USER28> I don't know about it being circular, but if someone decides they need a particular thing, making provisions so they can keep having it makes sense

<comment><USER3> 'decides they need a particular thing'? Can I _undecide_ to need food and water? I would argue that 'needs' are by definition the things you don't have a choice about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It sounds good and feels good to get rid of all useful rarely used things that clutter our minds as much as they do our homes.

Its unfortunate that our government is so committed to consumption and has geared so much of our economy and infrastructure, at great expense and much debt, to supporting a complex existence, often at great cost to those who swim against the tide. Why is it that we cannot let life develop in its own direction?

</comment><comment><USER30> that is very enlightening but unfortunate

<comment><USER31> Why unfortunate?

<comment><USER27> They died.

<comment><USER32> More info: <http://www.aldha.org/larry05.htm>

<comment><USER33> I'm sad to find this out. One thing I know is cycling is dangerous! I road my bicycle 10,000 miles around the perimeter US and loved it but everyday on the trip I would hope that I would not get hit by a car. Had a few close call on the ride, but I made it home safe.

Here is a video of my ride: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8Uht3DnbOQ>

<comment><USER34> I have watched your video before, good job!

<comment><USER33> Thanks! That is cool that you actually saw it. Ha. I'm going to try to complete the Pacific Crest Trail next year.

<comment><USER34> Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's difficult to simplify past a certain point. I want to reduce more, but I'm at the point where I have:

1: Some clothes

2: Tools

3: Key things (laptop, vehicle, phone)

4: Books

5: Food and some dishes

I know tools and books are the next in line, but I value books highly and tools just as much. I haven't got a tool I don't absolutely require at least occasionally.

<comment><USER35> For books, get a Kindle. I did that 2 weeks ago. Since then I have sold or given away most of my books. It took 1 more thing away.

<comment><USER36> I'm just waiting for my Sony PRS-600 to arrive. I hope it allows me to get rid of a bunch of my fiction books too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I posted a comment on a similar article recently (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1332845>)

</comment><comment><USER38> Am I the only one reading these comments that appreciates the need for some people to settle down given that our current "nomadic" lifestyle is heavily dependent on farms?

Last time I checked, none of these people were hunting and gathering with their 14 pound packs. In fact, I would argue that were they to start deriving all their food from hunting and gathering, their packs would increase in weight by approximately one spear and probably a decent bow and arrow. A gun, would of course, require people to work in a factory to manufacture it, so that's out.

There seems to be a general ignorance amongst many people these days that almost everything humans have accomplished started with domestication of plants and animals. And a core element of domestication is a sedentary lifestyle.

<comment><USER39> You're right. Modern nomadism isn't about leaving stuff behind, it's realizing that stuff is now mobile.</comment></comment>


Torch – A scientific computing framework for LuaJIT - <AUTHOR> http://torch.ch/ <comment><USER2> Note that (Lua)Torch is basically dead; PyTorch [1] is where current development is happening.

[1] [https://pytorch.org](https://pytorch.org)

<comment><USER3> A classic worse is better.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How long did it take to learn an alternative keyboard layout? - <AUTHOR> I'm one week into my journey getting about 25-30 wpm.
Considered Dvorak and ended up making/using an Asset variant.
I'm hoping it to be easier to learn than the Tarmak steps to Colemak. <comment><USER2> I gave this a shot in the 1990s.

Took about two weeks.

Typing prose felt slightly smoother overall, but it was not revelatory. Unix command were utterly fuxnored though, the defaults are 1) burned into my muscle memory and 2) very QWERTY ergonomic.

Overall tradeoff ( _very_ modest speed gains, huge compatibility issues) weren't worth it.

So I quit. Haven't gone back.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is so different to expectations from readings. I thought perhaps month(s) and much greater gains.

I'm hoping to get comfort and speed as a bonus. I had a couple days with shooting (not really pains, more like) electric shocks along the backs of my hands.

I too did notice that command-line muscle-memory is completely separate from prose and has to be relearned.

<comment><USER2> It's not so much that CLI needs relearning as that it simply doesn't map. "cp", "ls", "rm", and worse, movement keys such as hjkl or WASD are highly or entirely layout dependent. There are some possible exceptions -- "cd" isn't great on QWERTY, though I forget its Dvorak equivalent.

As I live in shell and vi, this was a complete deal-breaker.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought about vi and don't yet know how that will go. I'm slowly relearning my shell commands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I learned Colemak, for fun, really. There were several very distinct phases.

In the very beginning, just hitting the right keys most of the time was very challenging. I'd have to actively think about where to put my fingers for a few days or up to a week. I did a lot of training exercises then.

After that, I was able to type pretty good at 20-30wpm, growing quickly. I played lots of type racing games.

Until I hit about 70wpm again (I started at QWERTY with around 100-120wpm, depending on text types), it was super frustrating, because I couldn't type fast enough to keep up with my thoughts. I would feel my thoughts slip away as I was still typing the last thought out, thinking "Wait, nooo, I'm almost there!"

I think it took about a month or two until I hit 70wpm again.

After that I felt like it was usable and I could probably be productive in it.

Oh yea, I should mention that I was on a sabbatical during that time and did the Colemak switch full-time, cold turkey - I haven't typed in QWERTY since except when some stupid 3rd party computer doesn't have Colemak (it comes with every modern operating system) and I have to use that for a second. But because I was on a sabbatical, I didn't need to be productive for months. It would've taken me 1-2 months to be productive enough to write code or respond to emails/chat quickly. Colemak is very coder-friendly in that it doesn't change any of the special characters except ";" and the zxc keys are all the same.

After reaching the 70wpm point, it was mostly smooth sailing, but I wasn't 100% yet. I'm a vim user, so a lot of my muscle memory was wrong. I simply continued using vim as usual and ended up learning the hjkl keys on Colemak. They're actually all under the left index finger, but spread around in a weird way. I'd have to look at the keyboard to tell you what they are, but my fingers know them.

So, eventually, vim and everything is just fine. Also eventually, I got back up to my old speeds of about 100-120wpm, again depending on text. I've read that Colemak is actually not as fast as QWERTY because it optimizes for low finger movement, not speed. While I think it'd be cool to type 150wpm, I don't really miss it except when doing type racing games. I seem to think somewhere between 70-100wpm at most. My fingers move a lot less when typing than using QWERTY, and people have commented over the years on that.

Another thing that took almost 2 years to go away was "awkward angles." You know how some people who learned touch typing can't use the keyboard except when their hands are exactly aligned with the keyboard? I had that. So sometimes I would try to reach over to my laptop and hit the pause button, or mute, or something like that, and just have no clue where to press, because I only had that knowledge in relation to my index fingers being on the home row. I'll admit that this is pretty unimportant, but I just used to know that by heart, no matter the angle. I've since learned the Colemak positions for most of these, probably just from doing it and getting it wrong for years on end ;)

By the way, as part of this, I also reconfigured my default movement keys for video games. Why are people using WASD? Much too close together. I use EADF, so I can play video games with my fingers on the home row in normal position. Much more comfortable than WASD.

Programming keys/symbols were never an issue on Colemak because most of the symbols stay the same. Only ; changes position, and ; is useless and languages that use is except as comments should go back to the 7th century where they belong. C can stay.

I've met several Colemak typists who are able to fluently switch back and forth between Colemak and QWERTY, and one even also Dvorak. I had a hardware- switched Colemak keyboard at work and this new guy shows up. He types for a second, looks at the screen (git add == dug ass in Colemak), and begins typing in perfect Colemak. Wow!

I seem to have completely lost my muscle memory for QWERTY. Maybe it would come back if I tried using QWERTY, or switching between the layouts regularly. But I don't have to ever use QWERTY, so I haven't even tried.

Colemak has the advantage that, as the third most popular layout, there are off-the-shelf keyboards with hardware switches for it. I never got into building/modding my own keyboards, so I just got some random Taiwanese mechanical keyboard that offered a Colemak switch on the back. There are several, all I've tried were very good quality and fun to type on. Dvorak is even more widely available, of course.

Was it worth it? Hard to say. You kind of have to switch layout on every computer you use, e.g. at work, or bring your own keyboard. But I bring my own keyboard anyway, so that's not much of a difference. And Colemak comes with Linux and OS X, and probably on Windows too. So it's really just a few clicks away.

I'm not a faster typist. I didn't have RSI or any other wrist pain. Maybe I would've gotten it and now I haven't. Maybe I'll get it later than on QWERTY. It's a bit of a hassle when you get a new job or have to use your co-worker's computer. Everybody finds it very fascinating and wants to talk about it for exactly 30 seconds, then never hear of it again. It is hilarious to have people type "git add" on your Colemak keyboard.

I was just bored on my sabbatical. I don't think it makes a huge difference. If you have RSI issues, like I see people post here on HN all the time, go for it. I've also never bothered to get an ergonomic keyboard, but for some people it makes a huge difference in their typing ergonomics or strain. If you have issues, you can definitely give Colemak a try. But don't expect any huge productivity boosts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the awesomely illustrative story. I can relate to the early parts of it. I looked at Colemak/Tarmak and thought it was too hard. Ended up keeping same finger sequence for home-row ASET-GH-NIO(R). Other letters kept close and shuffled for freq/bigrams. I switched cold turkey and am up to about 40 wpm after a week now. Great to hear that 70 wpm makes things good enough to not be frustrated. My speed would be much faster if not for the errors which are the most annoying part and the random pauses when my fingers forget where to type.

Command-line/vi is a whole other story--don't know how long that will take. I think I should practice QWERTY now after a week so I don't lose it. How do you type on mobiles? Separate 'thumb memory'?

I was never a fast typist to start with and mostly did it out of boredom and I did have pains once along the backs of my hands that made it impossible to type for a day so may help. This time around I will learn to touch-type.

> Everybody finds it very fascinating and wants to talk about it for exactly > 30 seconds, then never hear of it again.

So true.

<comment><USER3> Didn't change on mobile. Colemak explicitly says it doesn't make sense for a thumb-based layout, because it's optimized for touch typing. Never had any issues, probably because thumb-memory is different.</comment></comment></comment>


Miranda released as free software - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/ <comment><AUTHOR> You've at least heard of (if not used) a programming language heavily inspired by Miranda: Haskell. A lot of things about Miranda were really interesting; it reflects modern languages in some ways, but looks completely foreign in other ways. Like Haskell, whitespace was significant; unlike Haskell, it was fast. Really fast.

It was one of the pioneering purely-functional languages, but seems to have been mostly forgotten. That's unfortunate, because in many ways it still is superior to its successors. Their fault for keeping it proprietary for so long, really.

<comment><USER2> Are there any more modern functional languages that are as fast or faster?

<comment><AUTHOR> k, J & APL, in roughly that order.

<comment><USER3> As far as I know, all three of those languages are interpreted. They might be good at slinging together predefined operations with fast implementations written in another language (C)… as long as you're operating in parallel on large arrays, so that you spend more time inside the C functions than actually interpreting. But if you need to write your own operations or just do anything that's isn't massively parallel, none of those languages even compete. For example, you couldn't write a performant compiler in them. In contrast, languages like Haskell and OCaml have compilers that generate native code – maybe not C-level native code, but still an order of magnitude faster than an interpreter.

Edit: For that matter, from quickly browsing the source code, it looks like Miranda is interpreted as well. So it's absurd to say it's faster than Haskell.

<comment><AUTHOR> k is faster than hand-written C in many cases, and significantly faster than compiled Haskell.

<comment><USER4> You're ignoring the main point of the comment though:

>For example, you couldn't write a performant compiler in them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I started studying CS in Hamburg, Germany, in the early 90's, they taught us Miranda to have everyone on the same level.

Which was not such a bad idea: I had three years of C & five of C++ under my belt already at the time but never touched a functional programming language.

Very few co-students had worked with Lisp and they did have an advantage. But they still had to new learn a new language.

Trivia 1: I was going out with a German-Iranian girl who's name was Miranda, at the same time.

Trivia 2: As I was also studying graphics design with an emphasis on typography then I made her a t-shirt for her b-day that used the 'Mirinda'[1] logo but turned it into 'Miranda'. She never wore it which hurt me a bit at the time. Maybe I should dig that out and donate it as the logo for that language since theirs is an absolute eyesaw? :]

[1] Mirinda is a carbonated soft drink ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirinda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirinda)) The logo in the 90's looked different -- like this: [http://tiny.cc/24rnkz](http://tiny.cc/24rnkz)

<comment><USER6> Likewise, when I started my CS degree at UNSW in 1989 they taught us Miranda before moving on to Modula-2.

Fresh out of high-school and our first programming course, the lecturer said something like "Ok all you smartarses who have mucked around in BASIC and think you can program, we're going to teach you Miranda!"

<comment><USER7> ANU in maybe 2003, we had a single tutorial in Miranda to demonstrate the functional paradigm. It wasn't enough to appreciate the value of functional programming, but I guess they still had licenses and wanted to use them for something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Miranda is still taught as a language for University College London's Functional Programming course: [https://www.ucl.ac.uk/module- catalogue/modules/functional-pr...](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/module- catalogue/modules/functional-programming/COMP0020)

Students grumble at having to learn such an esoteric language; the justification of the professor is that it's simpler and more focussed than Haskell and so better for teaching functional concepts. This may be true but perhaps he's just been teaching the same material for decades and doesn't want to update it.

<comment><AUTHOR> He's right! Haskell is still stuck with most of the wrong decisions they made in '88, and it was intended as a (clunkier) Miranda clone, anyway.

<comment><USER9> > Haskell is still stuck with most of the wrong decisions they made in '88

Which ones?

<comment><USER10> While I don't agree with the general snarkiness towards Haskell of the commenter you are replying to, being lazy by default could be seen as Haskell original mistake. It was interesting from a research point of view though.

<comment><USER11> it's hard to call the sine qua non of a language a bad design decision. if it were, the language would be dead. haskell survives because it's a lazy purely functional language with some industry support. bad design decisions have to be something apart from that.

<comment><USER10> I can't disagree more.

What set Haskell apart is how it successfully limited side effect to the IO type and the introduction of type classes.

Laziness by default is definitely a bad design choice as far as I'm concerned. The drawbacks are not worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been playing with Miranda a little bit since seeing this yesterday, and man, I gotta say, the quality of the REPL environment and documentation is amazing.

Everything is laid out plainly, and you can learn how to work with the language in a matter of minutes.

Even the readme was one of the best I've ever encountered. It makes no undue assumptions and leaves no work up to the reader. It even notes that one may need to make certain edits to the Makefile on certain systems and, if needed, how and where one should do so (I've had to make several other programs in the past that require _more_ tweaking and don't document the possibility or guide the user _at all_ ).

The language itself seems slim and elegant so far, but, if nothing else, I'm amazed at the level of quality of the compiler documentation, the manageable size of the source, and the REPL's design--it encourages you to _write_ entire programs from the REPL, by allowing you to direct output to a file _and_ to invoke an editor to modify the current scripts loaded into the environment-- all this _without_ the need for special plugins on the editor side; instead of having to invoke the REPL from your editor, your REPL invokes your editor-- honestly it seems like the right relationship and now I'm fairly confused why other REPL focused languages _don 't_ commonly support this.

Everything comes bundled too--you don't need to go through some gitbook based tutorial docs in your browser to get up to speed--it's all available right from the system itself.

A lot of contemporary programming languages I've used don't have nearly as good of an onboarding experience. It makes me wonder to what extent this is just a rare case of quality work by great programmers and to what extent its symptomatic of what one can deliver with licensing and funding, as opposed to purely open-source contributions largely driven by community interest.

<comment><USER13> > instead of having to invoke the REPL from your editor, your REPL invokes > your editor--honestly it seems like the right relationship and now I'm > fairly confused why other REPL focused languages don't commonly support > this.

That is originally how REPLs worked in Lisp and APL systems in the 1960s. In BBN Lisp/Interlisp (see [http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/bbnlisp/W-...](http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/bbnlisp/W-21_LISP_Editor_Apr67.pdf)) and APL\360 you called the built-in editor from the REPL. There were not really any stand-alone interactive editor programs around back then, and the operating systems BBN Lisp and APL ran on mostly did not properly support running multiple processes to run editors anyway. Maclisp on ITS had job control, and you could call external editors: [http://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/edit.html](http://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/edit.html)

Doing it the other way around is better for projects written in multiple languages, dealing with multiple implementations, running processes on remote systems, and IDE features.

<comment><AUTHOR> I disagree with your last sentence, but thank you for bringing the history here up!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is really big news, albeit about 27 years too late to matter. Miranda is the elegant sister of Haskell, a really beautiful pure functional language. When I was a student I wrote a Perl(!) script which translated Miranda source to Haskell so I could test my classwork exercises at home on my Linux/386 machine without having to go into the labs (no internet in those days!)

</comment><comment><USER15> Under "Why the name Miranda?":

> Because it is a proper name, not an acronym, only the first letter of > Miranda is capitalised.

It took me a second to realize that most language names of this era were in fact all-caps acronyms

<comment><USER16> I kindly beg to differ for the 1980s:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_lang...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_languages)

The all-caps acronyms were the 1960s and before

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I read the overview, cool language, very cool to see it open sourced, and just looking at the code it is clear how much it inspired Haskell.

I started hacking (a lot!) this week on an experimental project in Swift. Swift is similar to Haskell and Miranda in supporting functional programming. I like Haskell's syntax and in general REPL based Haskell development, so at first Swift's syntax bugged me. However, when I set my project up with Playgrounds for developing bits of low level functionality in what is effectively a REPL environment, and spent a day with XCode, I now think Swift is a worthy substitute for Haskell for some projects (i.e., when targeting macOS and/or iOS).

<comment><USER18> Swift is not similar to Haskell and Miranda. It's an imperative refcounted manually managed language with strict evaluation, while Haskell and Miranda are GCed languages with lazy evaluation and immutability. It's hard to find languages more different, really.

<comment><USER17> You are right of course about the non-lazy part and like Scala, it is easy enough to use mutable data, although not good style.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Cool, looks like a pretty browsable/readable code. There's some apparently duplicate code in '/new/' I omitted.

        $ ls *.[chy] |  grep -v y.tab | xargs wc -l |sort -n
              3 version.c
              9 utf8.h
             21 fdate.c
             30 lex.h
             62 big.h
             88 utf8.c
            143 combs.h
            144 cmbnms.c
            295 just.c
            320 menudriver.c
            350 data.h
            656 big.c
           1000 trans.c
           1220 lex.c
           1315 data.c
           1674 types.c
           1689 rules.y
           2241 steer.c
           2394 reduce.c
          13654 total

</comment><comment><USER18> Here's an idea I have: never close-source any programming language, make 'em free and open from day zero. Languages are not products, but infrastructure, like roads. They benefit and grow from the number of users, not from paywalls. Closed languages tend to fade into obscurity. That's why everyone knows Haskell and nobody knows Miranda, everyone knows Java and nobody Eiffel. I laughed when I read that the author of Shen/Qi changed the license from a commercial to a slightly more permissive one, when no one cares about his little language. Such conceit kills languages. Microsoft has realized this only recently with .NET, when the JVM was already miles ahead. Which is sad because the CLR is so much smarter than JVM.

<comment><USER20> How is JVM miles ahead of the CLR? All I ever hear (at my current and previous jobs) is about how Java's runtime and tools are miles behind .Net and the CLR.

<comment><USER21> As someone that works with both platforms since the early days.

It supports more platforms and implementations than CLR ever will, including bare metal deployments with real time GC.

Thanks to those implementations, there is a plethora of GC algorithms and JIT/AOT optimizations not yet available in CLR, like AVX-512 auto- vectorization, JIT code caches with PGO, tiered JIT compilation, real time GC, GC able to deal with multi-TB heaps with ms pauses, ...

If you want something like VisualVM or JFR, you need big pockets for Visual Studio Enterprise, and it still doesn't match in capabilities.

Naturally the CLR has other things going for it like having had NGEN since day one, value types, reiffed generics and designed from the get go to support multiple languages, including C++.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Back in the 90s I remember taking a course that used Simple ML. I was pretty amazed by it's elegant syntax, and If I remember it correctly, it was either based on, or related to Miranda. I haven't really used a functional language since university. But would love to try one again. Whats worth checking out? I know nothing. Anything I can use to make a website or an interesting project within a week of learning.

<comment><USER23> F# is an ml inspired language running on the .net clr.

Use the SAFE template if you are interested in doing web development with this language.

<comment><USER22> Is this possible to use on a Mac

<comment><USER24> Definitely, using .NET Core.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I _think_ I've responded to everything in this thread. If I've missed something, please point it out. I'll look through again later: I spent like five hours straight replying to this thread today, so I'm kind of tired of talking.

</comment><comment><USER25> I learned a bit of Miranda in my programming languages class at the University of Iowa, back in... 1999? 2000?, under Prof. Arthur Fleck. Just that little bit of Miranda really prepared me for generic and functional idioms in C++.

</comment><comment><USER26> I learned a bit of Miranda and Oberon for a programming languages course back in school, prior to knowing what Haskell was (or even functional programming proper). Can anyone speak to its capability for a fun hobby project (web dev, or a CLI)? I liked the language.

</comment><comment><USER27> If you would make a new language today you would design for readability above all else. Because modern software are huge, while programs back in the day was small.

<comment><USER28> Readability is entirely and extremely subjective. I don't find Japanese readable, but that's because I never bothered to put the time in to learn it. I find TeX and LaTeX readable, though. Readability becomes slightly more objective, but not much more so, when you have a well defined and sufficiently homogenous target audience.

If you make a new language today, you should figure out who it's for (probably yourself and a couple of other people), and design it accordingly. As was always the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> First language I learned at Uni, right before C!

</comment><comment><USER30> Anyone know of any available-online courses that teach functional programming using Miranda?

</comment><comment><USER31> This could do with a 2010 label.

Back in the day, Orwell was a free Miranda clone. So I used that.

<comment><USER32> The page has been updated recently, the 64-bit version was added this year. So it's actually the date on the page that is wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, the date on the page is wrong.

See:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20181015090301/http://miranda.or...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181015090301/http://miranda.org.uk/downloads)

It was still proprietary as of 2018/most of 2019, got a source release in the form of a 32-bit version around December, and then a 64-bit version released around a month ago, from what I can tell. I completely missed this occurring until a friend pointed it out, but I'm so happy it did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Wonderful. Along with original MIT Scheme it is a great teaching language and an example of clarity, brevity and conciseness which comes from a rigorously trained mind.

Beautiful piece of software.</comment>


Organizing your life using GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/und0ck3d/organizing-your-life-using-github-6an <comment><USER2> This is actually a good idea, but I might take it a step further and deploy my own Git server (even as a backup). If GitHub goes down or your billing lapses, you'll loose access to those documents. Plus, with your own server, if there is some sort of catastrophic GitHub breach you'll be confident your data is okay.

</comment><comment><USER3> Link doesn't work for me. And I could use the organization.

<comment><USER4> works for me: [https://dev.to/und0ck3d/organizing-your-life-using- github-6a...](https://dev.to/und0ck3d/organizing-your-life-using-github-6an)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to Price a Software Library? - <AUTHOR> More than once, I've built a software library - usually something required in specialized industries - which I've then gone on to sell to enterprise customers. Each time, however, I feel that I'm leaving money on the table by pricing it wrong.
It does not seem wise to charge a fixed one time fee of a few hundred bucks when the customer then uses the library for years in their own products. Is it still common to charge per installed CPU/core? How do you then deal with cloud systems where that number always changes and may even be difficult to determine? What about charging "per end user"? In general, can libraries also be charged on an ongoing basis like a SaaS (x EUR per month or year), i.e. do customers accept that?
I've offered maintenance and support packages but when the software works beyond the initial warranty, customers usually don't order them. I could turn the library into an API and charge for that but that's not always what the customer wants.
Any ideas on how to maximize my revenues here? <comment><USER2> I've developed and sold several libraries over the years. Here's how I approached pricing. I'm not saying this is the best way, but it has worked for me.

I don't really do ongoing payment (rental) schemes, out of pure personal preference. (If a customer asks for one, I can do that, though -- it's just not a default option). I don't like it when other software does this, so I'm not going to do it myself. That's not an economic or business-based decision and not a recommendation. I'm just mentioning it to explain why that's absent here.

I take a look at what my development costs were to develop the library, and use that to estimate what it would cost another shop to replicate the same functionality. I try to subtract out the portion of the development costs that are reflect the API design and other things that are unique to library development (including documentation).

Then, once I have an estimate for what it would cost my potential customers to develop the functionality, I cut that in half, and that becomes my asking price.

I also sell libraries in two forms: with source code and without. For those who want the source code (which is most of my customers), I charge double what the asking price I computed above is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Trying to figure out how much it would cost the customer to develop the same functionality is probably the best strategy (and suggested by most posters in this thread).

I would add that the customer may not come up with a detailed estimate/calculation so it's more a question of how expensive they perceive their development costs to be. (If their developer casually says, "I can do this in two days", that's bad even if it's wrong.)

One probably has to factor in the (possible) inefficiency of the customer, i.e. inexperienced devs and the usual overhead of working at a large company.

At first, I thought that by cutting the costs in half, you would end up with a fairly low price. But giving them the option to receive the source code at double the price is a nice touch, especially since you say most of your customers want that anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My company buys a math library. It's normally licensed per-core, annually, with a license key that expires and makes it stop working.

We eventually worked out a special deal where we would pay for 2 years at a time in advance, and get a version without the stupid expiring key.

The library vendor trusts us to account for the number of CPUs we are running it on and self-report. We don't abuse that trust.

The alternatives are:

1\. Writing our own math library. We estimated it would take a man-month to get it usable, but we might spend years in corner cases.

2\. Paying someone to improve Octave. Probably similar to case 1, but we would feel good about our contribution.

3\. Very expensive alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER4> > It does not seem wise to charge a fixed one time fee of a few hundred bucks

Maybe you could make the one-time price higher? I've seen some critical libraries cost several thousand dollars, and it was worth it in time saved.

<comment><USER5> I would have to agree with this. In the days when .NET was top dog and GitHub was not still a thing people spent insane amounts of money for libs that would save them time. Per client, per developer, per "seat", per core, anything you can think of someone charged for it. Telerik is the one that comes to mind, but they mostly did dev-oriented stuff.

The pay-more-once scheme always seemed the most easy choice for companies I worked for, as they wanted to be able to sell products that they couldn't easily keep charging for after the sale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Your customers are going to ask if it's cheaper to buy your library or build out the functionality on their own. If I were pricing this, I'd try to be at the highest number possible where the answer to that question is a no-brainer.

Personally, I'd do a fixed one time fee for each major version of the library.

Another option is to scale your pricing based on your customers' revenue like Unity does (minus the subscription part). Smaller companies can get a better deal on your software, but when they cross a threshold of annual revenue, then they pay more.

<comment><USER2> > Another option is to scale your pricing based on your customers' revenue

I don't scale the pricing in an overt way, but I have been known to reduce the fee for small companies or individual developers if they ask.

Also, if I think a particular customer would give me additional benefits (such as increased exposure or clout), I have sometimes cut the rate in exchange for permission to advertise their use of my library.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Look into charging per developer, with a site license option. Libraries / components, especially for enterprise development is big business. In the .Net space you have $100m+ companies like DevExpress and Telerik, and smaller, more specific and niche component providers (example: componentspace.com) selling successfully at a few grand a copy.

A few hundred bucks is way too low for any library of substance that saves the local developers a few weeks work.

</comment><comment><USER8> Value-based pricing is an alternative to cost-based pricing. Try to quantify the value that your library brings to the customer in terms of revenues generated or costs saved. You and the customer should get to share this value, so choose a price that divides that value between you equitably.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think for a library an annual 'support license' on top of the purchase fee, would keep your pockets padded - since it's niche say you charge $400 for the library, then $80/year -- if you have enough clients that's some residual on- going income just be sure to push out a few security updates per year which is what the subscription aspect is for -no subscription --what's your motivation to provide support/upgrades?

<comment><USER10> This is the worst advice in this thread by far. $80 would barely cover one hour of work.

If you charge any support, this should be similar or more than the price of the library. Clients who ask for support are the most annoying ones who are planning to use it and the bigger companies with deep pockets.

Better make the support crystal clear on what is covered because clients might try to have you do the integration in their software, which is a whole development project, not a support task.

<comment><USER9> Support mostly (to me) means maybe a forum/knowledgebase + on-going updates/patches/fixes. In person/hands-on help would of course be an hourly feature at $100+ per hour. But many use cases won't need that kind of support, for most the docs and updates/upgrades are worth the subscription.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You should charge "per month/year", if you have any intention of supporting your product and your customers long term.

Sell the library for X EUR, and then charge Y Eur/year for ongoing support and maintenance, where Y is a fraction of X. If the user does not want the support and maintenance, so be it, they can use the software indefinitely. In my experience, most serious users have no problem paying for long term support.

Good luck.</comment>


Tex Source Code - <AUTHOR> http://tug.org/texlive/devsrc/Build/source/texk/web2c/tex.web <comment><USER2> I wouldn't exactly call it source code.

It's more like a book with extensive description containing all the source code.. without much structuring.

Somehow it hurts.

.. then again, maybe the dvi/pdf version I saw just missed that. Not very experienced with TeX, but I guess the output can be rendered nicely. Why did you post the TeX source edition of a book?

<comment><USER3> It's both the source code and a book. This single source file can be compiled to both the book (weave->tex->dvi2ps) or too Tex itself (tangle->pascal compiler). It's kind of a beautiful idea I think. I would strongly recommend getting the printed book form (very cheap second hand on Amazon) as it's a fascinating read.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I posted this as I was reading Coders at Work.

Many of the people interviewed cite this as a great example of clean code. In addition, it is written in the Literate Programming style so I wanted to take a look and see what it was all about.

<comment><USER4> It's available in book form, as well, as are many of Knuth's literate programs.

One interesting program for the causal reader, found only online at his site, is Knuth's version of Adventure.

<http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html>

<comment><USER5> Wow, thank you very much! I'd missed that the last time(s) I'd checked his programs page (or feared it was still written in FORTRAN for some inexplicable reason (that code is hideous)). I had much fun learning the Colossal Cave in the same summer I learned UNIX, it'll be fun reviewing this.

<comment><USER5> Ah, I should go a bit further:

I got introduced to Adventure during Harvard Summer School in 1978, where they had a mostly idle much hacked UNIX V6 system on their single PDP-11/70 for all the undergraduates (HRSTS). It had a file system full of goodies and learning to navigate the Colossal Cave and an hierarchical file system really went well together.

(Prior to that was punched card FORTRAN IV (really more like a II) on an IBM 1130 ... so that was quite a step up!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To view on a unix system:

      weave tex.web
      tex tex.tex
      dvips tex.dvi -o tex.ps

<comment><USER7> In case anybody is too lazy: <http://3e.org/private/tex.pdf>

Does anyone know of a way to generate similar output but with some nice color- coding, or (even better) hyperlinks from functions and other symbols to their definitions?

<comment><USER8> It would probably be not too difficult to find the macros that generate the index and add in the appropriate PdfTeX instructions to make hyperlinks.

Although, as a veteran Knuth code reader, I would say that his code is intended to be read linearly, like a book, rather than in bits and pieces. (Think of it like dynamic programming: it's more efficient to start from the little functions and work your way up, than to start from the big functions and recurse your way down.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Relevant: "A Functional Description of T E X's Formula Layout (1997)":

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.39.6...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.39.601)

They rewrote the formula layout into purely (?) functional SML, and made it fairly easy to understand along the way.

</comment><comment><USER10> Notice the version numbers converging to PI

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder whether TEX is one of the most bugless codebases in existence. If it is, it's worth studying how Knuth arrived at it and the tools he used (literate programming). Personally, based on what I've seen, I don't like literate programming: code organized into header and source files, divided into modules (ie. classes) by files with some terse accompanying docs in text files seems more programmer-friendly. (Poor programmers can produce crap in both formalisms.)</comment>


Spotify's Spotty API Security - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dylankpowers/21e539abe192

<comment><USER2> Redirects to login form.</comment>


Lyft-Off: Zimride's Long Road to Overnight Success - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/29/6000-words-about-a-pink-mustache/ <comment><USER2> I first met Logan when he was working on ZimRide. He is a great example of a passionate, mission-focused entrepreneur. It's neat to watch Lyft get back to their roots with the recent launch of Lyft Line.

<comment><USER3> Seconded. Logan is class act. It's great to see Lyft doing well. They are a nice contrast to how Uber operates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Happy to accept downvotes for making the minor comment of saying I'm happy to see Lfyt's years of efforts in improving transportation paying off. This is so much better to hear than Uber's tale of one-upmanship.

<comment><USER5> Curious - why did you feel the need to start your comment like that rather than just saying 'I'm happy to see Lfyt's years of efforts in improving transportation paying off. This is so much better to hear than Uber's tale of one-upmanship.'?

<comment><USER4> Because comments interpreted as "good job team!" often get downvoted for not adding much value to the conversation.

I wanted to show my support for Lyft and dislike of Uber regardless of how it would impact my karma.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good Story!

I have a little story of my own. :-)

I met Logan Green the day that he first launched Zimride, at a student-run conference on climate change at UC Berkeley, in March 2007.

At the time I was working on a very similar social carpooling website "GotALift", but it wasn't yet ready to launch. I had also planned to announce my website launch to the exact same group of college students, so when he beat me to it with an almost identical product, I was a bit disappointed.

When I met him and got the chance to speak with him, I wanted to see if we could work together. No sense both working on competing websites!

At one point I jokingly suggested that we could rename Zimride to GotALift.

Zimride was really rough and buggy at launch, as he was the sole person working on it, and it was clearly rushed to make in time for the conference. I offered to help fix it up. At one point he offered to split the company 50/50 with me, but then changed his mind. Something about talking it over with his friend, who was going to help him get some funding so that they could contract out the development work rather than have me on as a tech cofounder. I thought that was a bit silly, since he had no money at that point and sharing equity wouldn't have cost him anything! I could understand him being cautious, but I thought we could have worked something out. Sadly it didn't end up happening.

Zimride became rapidly more popular during that summer since it rode the wave of new applications on Facebook's new platform. I ended up scrapping my unfinished social carpooling website because I didn't want people thinking I was making a Zimride copycat (a mistake, looking back), and I ended up rewriting it into a search engine with the goal to searching multiple carpooling websites, the "Kayak of Carpooling". I figured there were all these rideshare websites popping up which could use a way to search them all. That project went nowhere, other than a contracting gig for a local transit agency.

Fast forward to 2012. Zimride finally releases a mobile app, then their Lyft app shortly thereafter.

Next year, Zimride renames their company to Lyft!

</comment><comment><USER7> > They asked lead engineer Sebastian Brannstrom how long it would take to spec > out the new product. "About two months," he replied. They told him to have > it finished in two weeks.

Real nice, guys. Would 6 extra weeks have really broken the back of things that bad?

... that said, I do like Lyft a lot.

<comment><USER2> 2 months is generally an unacceptable amount of time to spec out an experiment at a startup. Things move faster than that. It's amazing what you can build in two weeks with the right motivation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Glad to see the story behind a startup focused on a mission to change the world for a better place. What a ride it has been for the founders.</comment>


"Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money" - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200812/fallows-chinese-banker <comment><USER2> Posted about a month ago. See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=404785> for the previous discussion.</comment>


Which workstations should a startup buy? - <AUTHOR> Normally I would just build, but as a funded startup I feel like we should just save time and buy some nice workstations as new employees join.<p>Any recommendations? Dell? Lenovo? HP? ThinkMate? <comment><USER2> Buy nice large Dell monitors (the U series, say the Dell UltraSharp U2410), two per developer.

Then, round up your engineers, drive over to Fry's or Microcenter, and buy parts and build your boxen together. That's one of my foundest memories of my first job.

It'll be cheaper, it'll blow an afternoon, and it'll bond your team.

</comment><comment><USER3> In my experience white-label systems from local shops give you more bang for the buck. I've used HP a great deal, the old ones were excellent, but these days they are built to a price due to PHB's running the show.

Does everybody need to compile the entire system? I would have thought that you would use build & test servers, naturally very beefy servers for the build server(s).

I would suggest dual or even triple screen configs for the engineers, SSD + rotating rust drives, lots of RAM.

If you really want to impress potential new hires (and burn thru cash), 27" iMacs with Retina 5k displays. Unfortunately there are no 5k 27" Thunderbolt displays.

</comment><comment><USER4> Save money on machines, but buy good monitors.

</comment><comment><USER5> What're you doing? Does it require something more than standard laptops or desktops?

<comment><AUTHOR> I want nice machines. We are doing c++ programming, so fast compile times is preferred. I basically want fast cpu, lots of memory, SSDs, and large monitors. We aren't making games though, so we don't need beefy GPUs

<comment><USER6> Then you want many cores. Link still seems to be single core, but with 6-12 cores compiles fly. I have a 6 core xeon machine at work (so 12 compiles at once); some have 12 core (2 xeon processors).

We just spec it out and have a local shop in Mountain View build them.

<comment><AUTHOR> What is the name of the shop? Can you share your specs? Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd skip the Lenovos.

</comment><comment><USER8> cheap ones. Figure out how much power and storage your crew really needs, then buy workstations that are only modestly above that capacity.

Even when you're funded it is important to keep a lid on your expenses.

also cheap, slow computers make performance problems in your code readily apparent.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a small engineering-only team and I want everyone to have nice machines. I am just wondering where the best place is to buy them.</comment></comment>


Riak 2.0 released (CRDTs, strong consistency and more) - <AUTHOR> http://basho.com/introducing-riak-2-0/

<comment><AUTHOR> I am incredibly excited by these new features. Maps and sets make far more CRDT use cases possible than the previous counters.

I think the list of deprecations is pretty exciting too. Fitting for a major version increment that lots of older cruftier things are getting shuttered or replaced with newer, shinier parts :-)</comment>


Something crazy is happening at Backify. Watch out - <AUTHOR>

Last night I got a cancelation notification from Backify for their free service and a few hours later this came to my email: "Dear <My Name>
We are writing to you regarding BACKIFY.COM who you recently created an online backup account with.
BACKIFY.COM was a reseller of Livedrive (http://www.livedrive.com). Livedrive provided the technology and service behind the product offered to you by BACKIFY.COM.
We are writing to inform you that BACKIFY.COM is no longer a Livedrive reseller and the services that they purchased from our company on your behalf have been terminated. If you are using a service provided by BACKIFY.COM and powered by Livedrive then this service will now have stopped working.
We would also like to advise you that we have received a number of complaints about BACKIFY.COM from their customers and from industry organizations. We would like to advise you not to provide any credit card information to BACKIFY.COM. If you have provided credit card information to BACKIFY.COM then we would suggest contacting your card provider and informing them that your card may be used fraudulently. If BACKIFY.COM have charged your card for services not provided you should contact your card provider and ask them to initiate a chargeback procedure.
Please note that this advisory is being sent to you in good faith because we feel you should be informed that BACKIFY.COM is no longer a Livedrive reseller and of the complaints we have become aware of. No contract exists between yourself and Livedrive and we are not able to assist further in any dispute you may have with BACKIFY.COM.
If you have installed the online backup software provided by BACKIFY.COM we highly recommend you uninstall it from your computer by following the steps below:
On Windows: Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel and select Add/Remove Programs (or 'Programs and settings'), select Livedrive and select uninstall.
On Mac: Go to Finder > Applications and delete the Livedrive application.
Please note that any data you backed up using BACKIFY.COM cannot be retrieved and we recommend you establish an alternative backup service immediately.
Livedrive does provide a very similar online backup service to the one provided by BACKIFY.COM and you can read more details and, if you wish, signup for a trial on our website at http://www.livedrive.com. Please note however that we do not provide a free service as BACKIFY.COM did.
Other online backup vendors you may wish to consider include: Carbonite.com iDrive.com Mozy.com
We are sorry for the inconvenience this situation may have caused you.
Kind Regards
Livedrive Limited " <comment><USER2> There's a popup on backify.com now asserting some quite different details of this story. Who's telling the truth... who knows.

"LiveDrive Account Closures

As all Backify members know now, LiveDrive has closed all the accounts. We would like to clear the situation up with our customers.

As many of you know, you were unable to change/reset your password for the last 10 days or so. This was due to an error in the LiveDrive API. We made multiple contacts with LiveDrive through email and phone to get this sorted out. Their tech support kept us saying that their "dev team" is working on it. But the "dev team" could not sort out the issue in 10 days.

Apart from this, their payment system failed on November 8. What that means is, we could not create any more new accounts, because their payment system kept declining all of our credit cards. Again, we contacted LiveDrive multiple times, but they could not sort out the issue in over 7 days.

We contacted them again yesterday and protested with strong words about the delay in providing a solution to our problems. We asked them to either resolve the issues, or to close our account and refund us. They responded today by terminating our reseller account and all the accounts we have created.

As for the email they sent to our customers, we assure you that you do not have to worry about your credit cards being used fraudulently. We did not store your credit card numbers in our system. And about the payments that you have already made, we will refund all of them over the next few business days. You do not need to file any disputes or chargebacks with PayPal or your bank."

</comment><comment><USER3> Weirdly I went to <http://backify.com./> by accident and I got someone called Conrad's LiveDrive page.

</comment><comment><USER4> Just got this now, I only registered to test it out (and used a random password since everyone was complaining about them storing passwords in plain text).

Interestingly the email sent to my from Backify said the service will continue operating till Nov 22nd.

Personally I use Backblaze for my home stuff, and LiveDrive for my work stuff (More features like file version tracking and briefcase)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm not suprised.

I wouldn't trust backify.com or livedrive.com for the reason that they sell "unlimited space" for a flat fee. There is no such thing as unlimited.

The Backify guy(s) obviously never heard of this and tried to offer a free service of _512 GB_. After all, LiveDrive service was for "unlimited" space. What's a couple hundred gigabytes anyway?

<comment><USER6> There is no such thing as unlimited.

 _However_ , if you were to take p(x) as the pdf of people needing exactly X storage and take the standard assumption that the integral over it's domain (0->infinity) = 1, then you can work out the expected amount of storage required per customer (integral of xp(x) over it's domain). Now as long as the cost required to host that expected amount of storage is less then the amount they are being paid, well then, they still make money.

But what usually happens is that they take various 'measures' to cut off the right tail of the pdf to make it more profitable. That's dishonest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've found that CrashPlan is the best of online backup- I can backup attached external drives as well as my entire computer for a complete backup at a reasonable price. I'd suggest that people also wait a bit until Black Friday, where they sometimes discount their plans even further...

</comment><comment><USER8> Anyone help me out to get this straight? Livedrive provides very similar online backup service to the one provided by backify, is this the main reason why they terminated their reseller service? Or was there something else?</comment>


Richard Stallman's Disgrace - <AUTHOR> https://daringfireball.net/2019/09/richard_stallmans_disgrace <comment><USER2> I'm sorry but people seem to forget what the archetypal geek looked like in the 80s. Fat, smelly, eating burgers in front of his computer all day, awkward and drooling at the sight of any woman.

From what gruber is writing, it looks like RMS just happened to be talented enough that people actually let him behave like this and still talk to him and let him have a social life (as opposed to the other ones that simply didn't leave their room or their desk).

Let's not make every people from that era criminals or jobless. Just let time do its work and just wait until they retire.

<comment><USER3> That's not true, it some BS cultural narrative with a couple data points that allows people to other that which they fear to be a part of. It's the tech equivalent to artist are tortured geniuses.

More importantly, I would much rather have no power "geeks" pushing toxic sex/race/gender politics out of fear and awkwardness then the structural crap being pushed on mass by big tech companies with huge gold parachutes for bad actors.

I grew up loving the ideas of RMS, but for every RMS behaving "nerd", there were 4 Ivan Sutherland, Grace Hooper, Alan Kay, Ajay Bhatt.

<comment><USER2> Well, no. There's definitely some kind of truth behind it. Wanting to spend most of your life in front of a computer , barely talking to anyone was considered something very weird until it became common in all kinds of jobs.

I remember when i started freelancing 10 years ago, people would say things like "oh, you don't look like a developer. i mean, we can talk to you normally". And that was based on their personal experience with their own IT department.

And i know teachers in coding schools that regularly have to make public announcement asking people to take showers every morning. I couldn't believe it when they told me that, but apparently they had to.

<comment><USER3> I'm sure one could place those first two sentences at the start of any defense of a stereotype.

      I remember when i started freelancing 10 years ago, people would say things like "oh, you don't look like a developer. i mean, we can talk to you normally".

I know so many tech workers with that exact story open. Telling individual they are the special exception is how we maintain stereotypes. "My preconceptions aren't wrong, this is just atypical" is the first rule in the book.

And people's interactions with their IT departments are always so strange. People don't like being at fault for productivity lose so they shift blame. I've seen people blame the computer or even the IT guy for issues they do not understand and balk at the explanation as "not normal." Those same people wouldn't accuse a doctor of not speaking normal for using medical jargon. But the stakes and the power dynamics are quite different in medicine.

While I care about my hygiene a fair bit, if I was in a coding academy and someone had the audacity to treat a group adults like children and basically tell them they don't understand how to keep their bodies clean... I would demand a refund and tell that individual off for the self-serving infantilization of others. There are a million reasons why someone's odor is more noticeable then what most are accustom too. Simply assuming "nerds don't shower, so I'll give em a little hand" is all kinds of wrong.

They can't shower but they can build infrastructure, right?

<comment><USER2> Stereotypes don't come from nowhere.. in the case of nerds, i don't know of any sociology studies performed by researchers on a nationwide scale, so i guess personal experiences is all i can provide. They do mostly confirm the sterotypes.

<comment><USER4> Beware of No True Scotsman. Of the people you know personally, who do you consider a nerd, other than those who confirm the stereotype?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This highlights the 'the emperor has no clothes' syndrome where people will just ignore the bad behavior of a person because of their position or stature. Many times people will comment in confidence to close friends, because of the fear they will be vilified with a public response of the issue.

It seems to me that this is more modern day anomaly driven by too much hypersensitivity in our social interaction where we self censor to avoid the most minor appearance of being critical or aggressive.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is this the case that decades of bad behavior "caught up" with the "clueless geek". Or SJWs picked the time and place to execute him?

<comment><USER7> It's the case that the clueless geek's bad behavior in this instance happened to intersect with the Epstein affair via Marvin Minsky.

I know people like to imagine "SJWs" have arbitrary power to ruin mens' lives on a whim, but no... there was already plenty of smoking kindling around RMS when he decided to light the match on himself.

<comment><USER6> The linked article is a rehash of RMS's bad and gross habits, 3rd party anecdotes about "creepiness". No meat. No sin. If RMS had been a level-2 dipshit, he'd been counseled by HR and not even fired.

What I see is, yes agreed timing perfect (Epstein/Minsky), to slander, destroy that which is different, "gross"/"weird", etc.

When did it become OK to beat up on the Aspy kids? Oh, right SJW makes it OK...

<comment><USER7> I don't know what "no meat, no sin" is supposed to mean, but most people with RMS' history of creepy and harassing behavior would have been fired long ago. Hell, the bad hygiene _alone_ would get most people fired.

<comment><USER6> It means thank goodness you aren't the HR director. You don't go around harassing people because of hygiene. You don't fire people because of _3rd hand_ reports of creepiness. You don't slander someones reputation just because you _read_ somewhere about things that purportedly made him look really bad.

It simply isn't true; thankfully labor law doesn't make a crime out of bad smelling-ness and unsubstantiated creepiness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What a mean and nasty article, irrespective of Stallman.

<comment><USER9> Seriously? That's your takeaway here?</comment></comment>


Predictive modeling of U.S. health care spending in late life - <AUTHOR> http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6396/1462 <comment><USER2> I wish when my models had low predictive value I could just claim the underlying process was inherently unpredictable! From reading the abstract, it sounds like the study just established that the authors can't accurately predict annual mortality using Medicare claims data.

It's erroneous to claim that the 25% of spending in last year of life is all futile care, but this study doesn't quantify how much is or isn't futile care.

Maybe I'm totally wrong, but I'll never know thanks to that paywall.</comment>


Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2016/04/office-technology-assessment-congress-clueless-tech-killed-tutor/ <comment><USER2> These are also (largely) the same Congresspeople who voted to reduce funding to NOAA, because, as it turns out, weather satellites are a good source of evidence in favor of man-made climate change.

<comment><USER3> Hopefully at some point they'd get too dumb to be able to enter the congress and something a bit cooler will ensue from the imminent anarchy... In the meantime, say "hi" to Trump.

<comment><USER4> > too dumb to be able to enter the congress

You might have just lowered the bar right down beneath the grass there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An OTA, if it still existed, wouldn't hire college-dropout Facebook engineers. It would be staffed with mid/end-career PhDs who came up through Boeing, IBM, etc. Because that's what the government hiring process considers "qualified." You think they are going to see eye-to-eye with the tech industry on hot- button issues like copyright, patents, etc?

<comment><USER6> This isn't my experience from going through the USDS hiring process, although that's a branch of the White House's Executive Office, not congress.

Disclaimer: No degree, 15 years in tech, was considered qualified.

<comment><USER7> The USDS is a very new and fundamentally different organization from most of what the US has ever done with tech.

<comment><USER6> Agree, and a model which Congress would be wise to adopt...if Congress had competent guardians at its helm. But I digress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The problem was that the OTA was reality-based and reality has a well-known > liberal bias.

Speaking about bias ...

<comment><USER9> Thats a satirical line from Stephen Colbert.

<comment><USER4> And Colbert said it right to George W. Bush's face in a speech at a White House Correspondents' dinner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yes, but don't ignore the root cause. Politicians make decisions based on what will get them re-elected, or whatever will get them the best post-career lobbying position. Their self interest doesn't always overlap with what's best for the country. Most of the advice they got from their 'advisors' probably fell on deaf ears anyway.

<comment><USER11> Except that most of the issues they're looking for advice on, are things that most voters don't care about. Basically, it used to be a battle of information with lobbyists putting their (often biased) viewpoint, and then the advisors, who are at least paid by the public and theoretically looking out for the rest of us, putting in their view.

Now you just have different lobbyists weighing in on these issues and no one out there thinking about it who isn't already bought by someone trying to make a buck off the public. It should worry at least some of us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's much easier to ignore the facts when you remove them from the environment.

</comment><comment> awinter-py I don't know, it only takes jason chaffetz 3 tries to say COBOL

[http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4541987/cobol](http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4541987/cobol)

</comment><comment><USER13> Unfortunately, the US Congress is a failed institution: proudly ignorant, uncooperative, and inwardly focused.

It pains me to say it, but that failure is one eventuality the second amendment to the US Constitution contemplated.

<comment><USER14> The second amendment was crafted with the express purpose of allowing American citizens to defend themselves against a tyrannical, oppressive government, using that force as a last resort to maintain their freedom.

I don't think "LOL the internet is a series of tubes" quite qualifies.

<comment><USER15> No. That's a rather modern invention of the 1970s. It was to create a state militia, that's why it talks specifically talks about a "Militia" (capitalization original). It's prima facie absurd to think that the very document that defines treason as "levying war against [the United States]" and talks about using "Militia to [...] suppress Insurrections" would also codify insurrection as a good thing.

<comment><USER16> A Militia is armed people. Because Militias were a good thing for the people, a right to bear arms shall not be abolished.

But anyways, the reasoning is just reasoning. The right is pretty clearly spelled out and stands on its own.

<comment><USER17> A Militia is not necessarily "any group of people with guns and a grudge against the government."

<comment><USER16> No, but it is at least that. (People with guns.)

It certainly isn't conscripts, or people being loaned weapons to defend someone else's holdings - it's free people defending themselves with their own tools.

<comment><USER15> Militias were instruments of the state, and they are never DIY volunteer organizations. These were conscripted government funded, organized, and partially armed organizations. Who had canons? The state. Who had funded the militia? The state. Who headed the militia? The state governor. Who declared that all able bodied men 16 and older served in the militia?[0][1] The state. Who declared that all men needed to purchase a weapon?[1] The state.

The main point that differed a "militia" from an "army" was that it was a part time affair, and not a standing army. The threat antifederalists cared about was a standing federal army imposing its will on the state government. It was never about random dudes getting upset at the government. Although there was plenty of that too. (The Whiskey and Shay's rebellions come to mind.) It's just that the founding fathers would send the militia in to arrest them. To romanticize the colonial and early state militias as rugged individualists ready to stand up to The Man is simply ahistorical.

[0] [http://academic.udayton.edu/health/syllabi/Bioterrorism/8Mil...](http://academic.udayton.edu/health/syllabi/Bioterrorism/8Military/milita01.htm) [1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_Acts_of_1792](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_Acts_of_1792)

<comment><USER18> _Who had canons? The state._

Now that I know is not true, there were (wealthy) private individuals owned canons. Heck, that the Congress has the power to "To ... grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal" acknowledges that private entities had armed ships.

Partly armed is correct, and a screwup there helped ensure that Washington, D.C. got burned in 1814 (too much bureaucracy in issuing flints etc.).

But it's also the case that, as you note, "all able bodied men 16 and older served in the militia", and as is still the law, all who are 17-44 years of age are members of it: [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/311](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/311) (and in modern legal interpretation, men is generally read as men and women).

But these quibbles aside, your general thrust is correct. So much so, per Galvin's _The Minute Men: The First Fight: Myths and Realities of the American Revolution_ [http://www.amazon.com/The-Minute-Men-Realities- Revolution/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Minute-Men-Realities- Revolution/dp/1597970700) the British in Massachusetts were completely outclassed in war fighting experience, they'd put garrison troops there, and many of our men had gained experience in what we call the French and Indian War.

<comment><USER16> If the Militia is strictly governmental - the reserves essentially - why would it warrant a constitutional amendment allowing the soldiers to keep guns at home?

How would a governmental Militia (ie British) have proven useful to the Americans and warranted this specific clarification?

I'm not an American, but it seems pretty clear that the people on the ground at the time meant "because we won our freedom from tyranny by being able to call up an army of the people, and may need to do so again, everyone shall be able to keep arms handy".

<comment><USER18> Indeed, except for the first bit being a dependent clause.

And behind that is some politics: our Founders were supremely suspicious of standing armies (we didn't really have much of one until the Cold War) and "select militias", which were groups of armed men selected by some criteria (like being a loyal Tory) instead of "everyone" answering the call up.

Some of the Founders wanted us to depend entirely on a militia system, but others, including the supremely important George Washington, commander in chief during the Revolutionary War, said no way, Regulars are required for serious wars. And his and the other experienced commanders opinions could not be denied, so the dependent clause, very unusual in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, was a sop thrown to the pro-militia only group.

<comment><USER16> > Indeed, except for the first bit being a dependent clause.

I'm not sure exactly what you're saying. This line implies you think it is not a dependent clause but later you say it is...? Also, what is the impact you're implying?

But anyways, the only actionable piece of the 2nd is "the right shall not be infringed".

> And behind that is some politics: our Founders were supremely suspicious of > standing armies [...]

Rightly so. But the original reasoning behind the laws aren't the laws. For better or worse.

It's been acknowledged that people have this right (to keep and bear arms) and you cannot take rights away.

For instance, we can't reinstate slavery, even with another amendment. It's not like the 13th amendment made it illegal; the amendment forced the government to acknowledge that it does not have that power and cannot enact slavery - those orders would be illegal.

A vote to repeal the 13th would be unconstitutional in its very nature because it recognizes a right. Unlike repealing the 18th establishing prohibition, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Really interesting read, thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER20> The original article is at: [http://www.wired.com/2016/04/office-technology- assessment-co...](http://www.wired.com/2016/04/office-technology-assessment- congress-clueless-tech-killed-tutor/)

<comment><USER21> Yes. Url changed from [https://boingboing.net/2016/04/21/why-is-congress-so- clueles...](https://boingboing.net/2016/04/21/why-is-congress-so-clueless- ab.html), which points to this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "The problem was that the OTA was reality-based and reality has a well-known liberal bias."

That's cute.

No, actually, it's bureaucrats that have a liberal bias. Meanwhile, in the absence of the OTA, we've been busy building laser weapons and missile interceptors.

<comment><USER23> You (and Boing Boing) are mischaracterizing what OTA said about the Star Wars program.

They never claimed it would be impossible to shoot down a missile or that any of the technologies involved could not be made to work. Instead, OTA found it was unlikely a program that would be effective against a large scale Soviet first stike could be deployed within the desired timeline.

History has proven them correct.

You can read the actual reports here:

[http://fas.org/spp/starwars/ota/](http://fas.org/spp/starwars/ota/)

There's a reflexive tendency on HN to dismiss government-directed technology efforts. But a quick look at the advisory panel on the September 1985 OTA ABM report should convince anyone the report authors really did consult with experts in the field:

Guyford Steve, Chairman President, Universities Research Associates

Solomon Buchsbaum Executive Vice President AT&T Bell Labs

Ashton Carter Kennedy School of Government Harvard University

Robert Clem Director of Systems Sciences Sandia National Laboratories

Sidney D. Drell Deputy Director Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

Daniel J. Fink President D. J. Fink Associates, Inc.

Richard Garwin IBM Fellow Thomas J. Watson Research Center

Noel Gayler, Admiral, USN (Ret.) American Committee on East-West Accord

Colin Gray President National Institute for Public Policy

George Jeffs President North American Space Operations, Rockwell International

General David Jones, USAF (Ret.) Former Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff

Robert S. McNamara Former President of the World Bank

Michael M. May Associate Director-at-Large Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

H. Alan Pike Program Manager, Space Stations Lockheed Missiles & Space Co.

Frederick Seitz President Emeritus The Rockefeller University

Robert Selden Associate Director for Theoretical and Computational Physics Los Alamos National Laboratory

Marshall D. Shulman Director Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union

Columbia University Ambassador Gerard C. Smith President Consultants International Group, Inc.

Sayre Stevens Vice President System Planning Corp. Maj. General John Toomay, USAF (Ret.) Consultant

Seymour Zeiberg Vice President Research and Engineering Operations Martin Marietta Aerospace

<comment><USER18> _You can read the actual reports here:

[http://fas.org/spp/starwars/ota/](http://fas.org/spp/starwars/ota/) _

Actually, I can't, for all the links are dead.

So I don't know how they scored success. I score it:

Integral to winning the Cold War, which we did.

Deterring a first strike, because the Soviets couldn't choose which of their warheads would get intercepted. This is very important because the triad made a successful first strike, that is, one with minimum retaliation, extraordinarily difficult in the first place.

Preventing maximal damage to cities and infrastructure while civilians huddle in their shelters (which we could have built, and stocked with a years worth of food, for 1/3 of the annual DoD budget of the period).

Failing our building shelters, preventing _all_ civilians in their cities and such from getting nuked. That one is iffy, especially since:

At the other end, you could define it as none of the 40,000 warheads in their inventory hitting us, but I know that's not what the proponents of SDI claimed it was capable of.

Note, I was something of a player in this arena during the period in question, including editing the Arpanet ARMS-D mailing list in the 1982-3 period, debating it with the best anti-s MIT had, you're not going to convince me by a raw appeal to authority, especially as filtered through such a notorious organization as the OTA.

<comment><USER24> Just delete wws from the links, they will start working fine after that.

<comment><USER18> Thanks.

From [http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1985/8504/850403.PDF](http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1985/8504/850403.PDF), the Executive Findings (all of which I skimmed), the OTA Findings section (all of which I read):

At the end of 1: _While it is certainly possible that defensive technological development could outpace the development of offensive weapons and countermeasures to defenses, this does not appear very likely._

Ignores the economic issues, the Soviets, especially with our successful campaign of economic warfare focused on energy, could not afford to build a new BM fleet (we can quibble about mid- and terminal ranges, but boost phase intercept (by far the highest payoff) counter measures tended to require new boosters).

2 is not in conflict with the Reagan Administration (you indeed need Civil Defense, and we still need it).

3 is very speculative, but, in the end, that's actually what happened. Before the decisions about deployment that SDI proposed to be able to answer in the '90s could be made, the USSR was no more, as was much of its BM fleet (besides the draw-downs, it was a shame about how a solid third of the most dangerous RS-36/SS-18 Satan missiles were exiled outside of the Russian Federation).

4 likewise negated, USSR collapsed, we didn't deploy.

5-6 and 8 are not particularly controversial.

Pretty much the same for 7, which doesn't say much to begin with.

Nowhere do I see the combination of " _OTA found it was unlikely a program that would be effective against a large scale Soviet first stike could be deployed within the desired timeline._

And _History has proven them correct._ , and it couldn't be, since the proposed decisions in the '90s were mooted by the USSR's end in 1991, which we could see coming in 1988-9 (e.g. Afghanistan and the Berlin Wall, and note how widely derided G. H. W. Bush's 1991 Chicken Kiev speech [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Kiev_speech](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Kiev_speech) was; talk about being on the wrong side of history!).

<comment><USER25> The Union of Concerned Scientists report was probably the most effective one in my mind; Panofsky and Bethe among others showed that SDI was not cost effective at the margins, meaning that the marginal Soviet costs of more missiles was lesser than our marginal cost to scale SDI up to deal with them.

<comment><USER18> I'm pretty sure _a_ UCS report was the single most bogus "scientific" study I've ever heard of, based on my memory and what I was just able to look up with Google:

It postulated that the entire battle would have to be fought by a single space battle station (ignoring for example that the Earth revolves), and therefore a huge number of huge stations would have to be built, and that we could only loft them into space at current Space Shuttle costs (as opposed to spending a fraction of the cost on building some cost effective rockets), all of this costing "hundreds of billions of dollars" (that's the key phrase to look for, and note the dollar has lost about half its value since then).

Bottom line would be that no one denied that the UCS could design an entirely impossible strategic defense system, but the construction and destruction of such strawmen are entirely uninteresting to those who care about the truth.

Marginal cost analysis are _entirely_ irrelevant to a discussion of the real Cold War as I noted above, the Soviets simply didn't have the money to do it, even if it would have been cheaper for them.

They'd spent several fortunes in equipping North Vietnam with three complete mechanized armies (1st used up piecemeal, 2nd crushed in their first invasion, when only 40,000 of the 150,000 men committed even made it back to the north, and of course the 3rd succeeded after the Congress stopped supplying ammo to South Vietnam), building their Strategic Rocket Forces, all their other military expenses, vast armies and air forces to invade Western Europe (including maintaining up to date lists of "future war criminals", about 10,000 for France), their vast borders guarded to keep their people in and us out, in such a way that even the rather distant and not precisely strategic territory KAL 007 overflew generated a massacre, the money they had to spend to buy grain every year they had "a bad harvest", etc. etc. etc. etc.

Combine that with things like our support of the _mujahideen_ , our economic warfare, our moral warfare including capturing Grenada (our denial of the Brezhnev Doctrine was a shock to the system), and it was game over. Funny how after the US President to decide to actually end the Soviet Union started the effort, it went poof in one decade....

<comment><USER25> I see. I suppose you think Vietnam was winnable then? Methinks you need to read some John Paul Vann.

Grenada was moral warfare? I am at a loss to understand you here.

<comment><USER18> Not winnable, _it was won_ , "Peace With Honor" and all that jazz, the North had given it their best shot after we'd withdrawn our troops and got skunked. Then the Congress threw away the victory. And the end game happened while I was politically aware, so I don't exactly have to read historical accounts, although I've read plenty. Note also that Vann died a little too early in mid-72 to have any final words on the subject.

Grenada as moral warfare: it was the first time the West had ever taken back any Communist territory since the Korean War (which was ultimately unsuccessful), and by force of arms at that. Many then living in the Soviet Union attested to it being a shocking action.

In general, you could say that Reagan himself was "moral warfare". There's a _huge_ difference between an opponent who's merely trying to delay your victory, and one who's determined to end you. One of the things that made George Washington such an effective and feared leader in our Revolutionary War.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> No one should trust a government agency to be an 'expert' on tech. Moving on.

<comment><USER27> That's patently silly since the government is "the" expert on much tech that only it has. Who do you think has and maintains our nuclear arsenal? You think the CIA is clueless on tech? Who again was spying on Google's internal network... idiots that don't know anything about tech? Who is performing mass surveillance, idiots that don't know anything about tech?

<comment><USER26> "agency" is the key word there. Individuals aside. bureaucrats tend to kill anything/everything.</comment></comment></comment>