Emacs is special regarding UIs - <AUTHOR> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-09/msg00286.html <comment><USER2> One begins to understand the advantages of this approach after 10-15 years or so.

I feel that I am constantly being forced into new "UI paradigms", and it isn't always a change for the better. I started with DOS (Norton Commander, anyone? to this day there is no comparable tool), then Windows 3.0 and 3.1 (which was mostly garbage and I did not enjoy the UI at all). I then started using Linux and discovered Emacs. When I could afford the extra megabytes of memory, I would also run X11. As years went by, I switched to the Mac.

These days I'm worried about what will be taken away from me, especially with Apple and their insistence on removing ports, the idiotic "Touch Bar" instead of function keys — but also with Linux, where the shift away from X11 means no more remote applications, and the (increasingly broken) approach of gluing everything together into a big mudball means that if you're running anything that isn't "mainstream", things break and you are very much on your own.

But I still have Emacs and I'm fairly confident that it will remain available and running on every platform I decide to switch to. And that I will be able to run it (with reduced functionality) on a text terminal.

<comment><USER3> The shift away from X11 means no more forwarding X11 applications over ssh, which is slow at best and buggy and insecure at worst. A small price to pay for eliminating tearing and actually-secure screen locking. There are valid criticisms of the move to Wayland but I don't really think this is one of them; if you really need remote access to graphical applications you almost certainly should not be using X forwarding.

<comment> GuB-42 At work, we do X11 forwarding all the times. We have a wide variety of UNIX machines and we often need to run several graphical applications from different machines (not a remote desktop).

X11 forwarding works with the latest Linux distros as well a 20+ year old systems running motif apps. Note: the old systems are now virtualized but we still need them, I work in the aeronautic industry and these are the time scales we are working with.

I don't know of any replacement, at least not one with that level of adoption. Again, we really want to run graphical applications on a server, not a remote desktop.

And BTW, things are getting troublesome. More and more Linux apps integrate accelerated web browser components and these tend not to play well with X11 forwarding.

Love the irony of using a remote display to show an Electron app BTW.

<comment><USER4> Not just Electron, even QT as well performs horrible over X11 forwarding in recent versions...

Things seems to be going backwards in this area..

<comment><USER5> When I was at Qt I spent a decent amount of time porting the native rendering engine from Qt4 to Qt5. It should be available and work relatively well. I have retired from the Qt project, but it looks like the code is still there in the repo. [1] You might need to tell the configure script to build it. To use it, set the QT_XCB_NATIVE_PAINTING environment variable.

[1] [https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtbase.git/tree/src/plugins/platf...](https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtbase.git/tree/src/plugins/platforms/xcb)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, it's interesting how many people seem to have their own takeaways from this, many of which seem to have missed the original point of the post (I wonder how many actually read the post). The author of the post on gnu.org is blind (and the "Raman" he referred to is T. V. Raman, a blind mathematician who I met ages ago when he gave a presentation at the Portland TeX Users Group meeting about adapting TeX for presenting mathematics to blind readers. Raman, in fact, wrote a reply to the message where he wrote:

 _> A lot of baggage gets applied today when folks talk about "Accessibility", but to me the touch-stone of a truly Accessible system is one where you dont have to ask what interaction modality someone else is using e.g. witness email, where the persons participating in a conversation never need ask "Did the person I am talking to use Braille, speech, or something else", similarly, someone who has a hearing impairment can send you email without you ever needing to know that he cant hear you._

I feel like too many developers treat accessibility as an afterthought rather than a central concern.

<comment><USER7> It is an interesting historical note that T. V. Raman won the ACM best doctoral dissertation award as a blind scholar [1]. I take an active interest in accessibility partly because my wrists hurt. Technologies initially meant to help blind people have turned out to be useful for people with other conditions as well. [1] [https://awards.acm.org/award_winners/raman_4110221](https://awards.acm.org/award_winners/raman_4110221)

<comment><USER8> Are there any particular technologies that have helped you with your wrist issues?

<comment><USER9> Not OP, but I periodically swap my mouse hand, and that seems to be enough change to ward off my long-standing wrist issues. That and a proper mechanical keyboard with decent travel in the key stroke are necessary for me to do this long term.

<comment><USER7> Yes, I do this as well. The improvement is significant, and the relief, noticeable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Emacs is not a text editor, it's a platform independent VM which can run your scripts with a text UI.

E.g. do you want keep an eye on some information which can be fetched from the net? You just write a script which regularly fetches the info and puts it into a buffer, so you can take a look at it anytime, and then regardless of platform you have that info readily available just by installing your own emacs config file.

It's much easier to write such things in emacs than curating various different scripts in various languages (python, etc.) which all require their specific support which is either available or not.

<comment><USER11> > It's much easier to write such things in emacs than curating various > different scripts in various languages (python, etc.) which all require > their specific support which is either available or not.

I disagree. I've been using Unix/Linux for 25 years, I've met maybe 1 or two people who know or use Emacs, whereas almost everyone knows enough to do some scripting.

I'm also guessing that installing and configuring Emacs is way more work than installing Python. And any gained Python knowledge will pay you back tenfold more than learning Emacs.

<comment><USER12> Honestly, getting going with emacs:

$ sudo apt install emacs $ emacs

From there it's learning some keystrokes. Payback? Almost immediate. And you can use it to work with Python, or any other language. After that, maybe reading a couple of howtos and installing a few add-on packages and customizing your configuration. Payback? Almost immediate. It's really productive.

<comment><USER13> > From there it's learning some keystrokes

Learning Emacs is VERY clearly not this trivial... to use Emacs to any extent where it's more useful than it's competitors, you have to learn the models it works in, a new programming language- and then there are a LOT of keystrokes

<comment><USER14> I... uh... am almost in some sense ashamed to admit this, but I've been using emacs for about 23 years now, and I still don't program elisp. I can just about diagnose errors in my not-very-complicated .emacs with a bit of googling, and that's about it. I've read about it, and I understand the basics, but I know nothing about the APIs and have no experience in it past one-liners.

It probably is a good idea to learn it, in some sense, and you'll probably have to pick up at least the basics that I've picked up, but it's definitely not a commitment to learn a new language.

<comment><USER15> Using Emacs without knowing eLisp is like owning a race car but always driving it in first gear.

<comment><USER14> I can deal with that metaphor, if "a race car in first gear" is still faster than a lot of other cars.

Plus, it's the same race car. I've programmed half-a-dozen languages quite seriously in emacs, and I'm not changing editors the whole time. So, while I may not know elisp, I do know a fair amount about emacs and don't have to relearn how to do a lot of things in a new IDE every three years... or, worse yet, discover that entire features are missing because "nobody" has ever used an editor that had them. (I'm not sure I could live without macros of some sort in an editor.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is somewhat oblique to the content of the post but "special" is about right. "Unnecessarily obtuse", particularly from a contemporary perspective, might be a less kind way to describe it. I could say the same about the documentation which, frankly, is not great at making you immediately productive. It's written like an academic treastise, not a tutorial for a piece of software that exists to help you get stuff done and where learning the software is not an end in itself.

I've recently started making a relatively determined attempt to become proficient with emacs due to increasing frustration at poor performance from both VSCode and Sublime Text when working with larger projects and, I'm not going to lie, it's hard going.

Take something as basic as working with multiple windows. Emacs has concepts of buffers, windows, and frames, but windows and frames are diametrically opposite in concept to windows and frames in client side web development.

That's not too difficult to grasp but, say you're in dired, and you want to open a file in a new OS window (in emacs-speak this would be a frame). You'd think you could just move the caret over the filename and hit some key combination to open that file in another window (sorry, I mean frame). Possibly you can but the nearest I've managed to get so far is (from memory) C-x 5 f, which brings up the minibuffer prefilled with the pathname of the directory you're browsing in dired, and then you have to start typing the filename (which, granted, will autocomplete), which seems somewhat redundant, and only then can you open the file.

It's also full of things to trip you up, like the key bindings for switching to another (emacs) window and killing a buffer - both fairly common operations - being far too similar and easy to confuse for a newbie.

It just seems so deliberately contrary, but I'm hoping the investment will pay dividends given time and persistence (this is, however, approximately my fourth or fifth attempt in 20 years to learn emacs, so we'll see).

<comment><USER17> As a long time emacs user, I can confirm that emacs is terrible... and everything else out there is deficient. I can write custom code (ew, elisp) to determine how to switch between buffers (test buffer and code under test) and I can run my tests and find operations and the like in a first class buffer and a dozen things like that which are just incredibly painful in other editors.

Also I hit Cx-c by mistake thrice a week.

<comment><USER18>
      ;;; Make it more difficult to kill emacs accidentally
      (defun my-kill-emacs ()
        "Confirm before 'save-buffers-kill-emacs'."
        (interactive)
        (if (y-or-n-p "Really kill Emacs? ")
            (save-buffers-kill-emacs)
          (message "Aborted")
          )
        )
      (global-set-key "\C-x\C-c" 'my-kill-emacs)

<comment><USER19> Dude, `M-x custom-set-variable RET confirm-kill-emacs RET TAB`

<comment><USER20> Or just unbind it, you won't typo `M-x kill-emacs`...

<comment><USER17> TBH it actually helps me a little. I seldom lose any work at all, and I have to remember to commit editor config changes somewhere persistent. :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Emacs + org has the potential to be the dream environment for everybody with a hacker mindset: Automate everything that has to do with text: Journaling, writing todo lists, parsing your Kindle highlights file (`My Clippings.txt'), writing project outlines, doing web research and saving your searches, notes, thoughts, summaries in Emacs via org-capture, drafting papers in org-mode, creating (text-based) tables and overviews, writing tech documentation with embedded screenshots, and many many more.

What ties all these notes and files together is Emacs Lisp: Write Lisp functions to automate most of what you do. - Previously I used Python for that, but Elisp is so much more fun to automate text-based workflows.

I would have to write a book to summarize all the ways this can transform your interactions and workflows with your computer and especially with everything text.

Edit:

After twenty years of using all sorts of text based databases and PIMs (AskSam, NetManages ECCOPro, various outliners, Outlook, Evernote, Omni{Focus,Outliner}, Bear Writer App, Ulysses App, and half a dozen other tools) I have come to realize that nothing beats Emacs + Org + Lisp.

<comment><USER22> I hate org.

I use emacs 25/7, I hate org.

Something about it rubs me the wrong way, yet I use it but only the basic parts. I think it's that I can't wrap my head around the mental model of it, and since it encompasses 2000 topics (trees, timing, workflow, states, agenda, journaling, tagging) it's like a mountain of mud before my eyes.

<comment><USER23> Well you don't even have to understand it fully, that is what is great about it.

What it is good for is that it gives you maximal freedom in organizing things the way you want. When I start out with a new org file, I just make lists and add functionality when needed.

While with most other todo/organizing applications you tend to be forced in some framework. This is how you should organize, and when you want to deviate things become cumbersome.

And then the other good thing is that editing is FAST (I use evil mode), in most other organizing/productivity tools you have to click a lot. Simple things become a chore quickly.

Freedom + speed = gold

<comment><USER22> oh you're assuming that not using org means using another organizer[0].. I just stopped organizing :D

who knows, maybe one day I'll finally see the light

[0] and I fully agree that most systems are way less ergonomic than emacs

<comment><USER23> Haha yeah I also never planned, I hated it. Still do actually. But one day I was fed up with the chaos in my life, dirty house and minimal productivity that I decided.. I need structure. I realized that the time I invest in structure pays itself out, because I spend less time goofing around. And so started the great journey in finding the best todo system. I started with paper, then google calendar/tasks, todoist and load of other apps until I finally went back to paper. The apps were just too cumbersome. Paper was simple and worked, but unfortunately paper itself is difficult to organize. I always avoided orgmode because well.. I was scared of emacs but eventually decided to give it a go, see what happens. And it was what I have been looking for all along: a simple and flexible system. And vim keybindings are a big bonus :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Most of the comments seem to be missing a very important point from the post:

> As a blind user, I can write a special mode which does something specific, > say, implement an IRC client. Almost all my work can instantaneously be used > by sighted people using their graphical toolkit.

This goes well beyond the ability of the author to create software that is accessible for both sighted and blind users. It is stating that support for both audiences is handled elegantly by the same toolkit, so you aren't creating an adversarial situation where serving the needs of both groups of people requires some form of compromise in the user interface or necessitating significantly more effort. (I would imagine that some care is required, but Emacs developers are going to address it anyhow since the program is intended to run in graphical and non-graphical environments.)

I suspect this support of multiple environments is part of the reason why there is an esoteric collection of applications that run within Emacs. As an example: it is possible to read ebooks in Emacs, with formatting and images being supported in X and gracefully handled in a terminal.

</comment><comment><USER25> Emacs and org-mode is frequently mentioned on HN as being awesome, but I don't feel like I could ever switch; I've got enough issues with vim already.

For one, all the keyboard shortcuts and commands that you have to learn; I don't know if I have the capacity to learn all that anymore, not without deliberate practice, while in modern editors you can get by with keyboard + mouse and slowly learn some new shortcuts here and there.

Second, it feels like you have to spend a lot of time to set it all up.

Third, will it replace an IDE? Error checking / linting, autocomplete, fast navigation, auto-imports, loads of things like that that seem to just work out-of-the-box in e.g. idea.

<comment><USER3> I feel like it's pretty safe to say [https://github.com/hlissner/doom- emacs](https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs) mostly solves of these concerns for Vim users in 2020. If you really can't spend any time learning a few help keys then I guess I can't recommend anything, but you're here commenting so I bet you have some time :).

Seriously, check out Doom, whether you use neovim, Emacs, VS Code, or nano (Doom has quite good Emacs and CUA bindings as well). It's brilliant to the point where I'd describe it as Emacs with sane defaults. I guess it probably can't match the more niche IDE features but LSP and friends are bridging most of the gaps.

You can finally safely ignore claims that beginners should roll their own emacs configs thanks to Doom. That strategy is good for learning if you're used to diving into unfamiliar systems but you can learn just as much by starting with Doom and working your way inward anyway. The community is great, just like the larger emacs community.

I can't stress Doom enough; it gets better often not by the day but by the hour. Henrik is a machine.

<comment><USER26> > I feel like it's pretty safe to say [https://github.com/hlissner/doom- > emacs](https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs) mostly solves of these > concerns for Vim users in 2020

I use both doom emacs and neovim, and I'd say: not really, at least not for me, there are some Vim features evil doesn't emulate properly, or at least it doesn't work like in Vim. Off the top of my head, I write in many languages, but absolutely hate the US international keyboard for accented characters, guess what? Vim has built-in support for digraph[0] by using Ctrl-k and iirc this is a motion keyboard shortcut in emacs, and since I like and use org-mode a lot, I'm always frustrated when I have to type in another language. Another one was with the various Terminal emulators packages in emacs, although this one was solved recently[1], whereas in (neo)vim it works flawlessly ootb.

0: [https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Entering_special_characters](https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Entering_special_characters)

1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24243031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24243031)

<comment><USER27> [https://github.com/emacs- evil/evil/blob/3f3b2fea87172f155e5f...](https://github.com/emacs- evil/evil/blob/3f3b2fea87172f155e5f91d75f0fb69d8648acf2/evil-maps.el#L369)

It's defined in Evil (which Doom uses directly).

Seems like you just need to figure out your bug.

<comment><USER26> Thanks for pointing this out, seems the "bug" is exclusively with org-mode, which is too bad because I don't usually need this feature outside of org- mode.

<comment><USER27> Works for me in my org-mode and evil but I'm not using Doom.

Fwiw use-package is pretty magic and reliable these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> To me the main 2 primitives that make Emacs the extensible crossplatform app/platform/os/whatever you want to call it are these:

* everything is a buffer, which in essence is a grid of text, that's the UI primitive, if you can render a grid of text you can probably build an emacs UI easily.

* every action/command is an elisp function that operates on these buffers

Combine these two and you can create pretty much anything. Code written in elisp that outputs buffers.

An analogy with the modern web as a platform: elisp is the JavaScript and buffers are the DOM.

</comment><comment><USER29> For those with wretched joints (me), Spacemacs[1] is a way to have all that org-mode[2] functionality, the joys of magit[3] and have it all work well over SSH.

Leave all the icons to their fans.

[1] [https://www.spacemacs.org/](https://www.spacemacs.org/)

[2] [https://orgmode.org/](https://orgmode.org/)

[3] [https://magit.vc/](https://magit.vc/)

<comment><USER30> After finding doom-emacs, I love that even more. Almost instant startup, non- broken magit key bindings, doom doctor etc.

[https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs](https://github.com/hlissner/doom- emacs)

<comment><USER31> It seems like doom-emacs is the new way to go. I feel quiet sad about this cause I spent some time to switch to Spacemacs and now I have to move to another emacs distro.

<comment><USER32> Why do you have to move? Are you using the dev-branch Spacemacs or master?

<comment><USER31> master cause I want something stable.

<comment><USER32> I'm on dev and it's quite stable, imo. Then again I'm not a spacemacs poweruser so...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I can think of a few UI styles Emacs doesn't support (to my knowledge) – line mode terminals, block mode terminals (such as IBM 3270 and 5250), and HTML.

Now, whether any of those UI styles are actually _worth_ supporting is a completely different question. But it is not quite as universal in support of different UIs as this email claims.

(You can technically write line mode applications in Emacs Lisp, try `emacs -batch -l dunnet` for an example. But most Emacs functionality is not available in line mode, the core text editing functionality certainly isn't. There is also a HTTP server available for Emacs [1], so you could use it to implement a HTML-based user interface, but once again the vast majority of Emacs functions are not available over HTTP)

[1] [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HttpServer](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HttpServer)

<comment><USER34> Interesting ... has anybody tried a browser based (which is what I presume you mean by HTML) front end for emacs?

EDIT - just to be clear, I'm talking about emacsclient, talking to a emacs server. Not an actual full blown emacs implementation that's just stupid.

<comment><USER35> With the new Chrome filesystem API it should be possible to make a full browser implementation.

Let's just hope they don't have annoying GDPR and other popups when you're trying to edit a file.

<comment><USER34> You shouldn't even have to need filesystem API if you're just using it as an emacs client connecting to an emacs server.

Your remark about GDPR is kind of strange ... not sure what that would have to do with anything ... GDPR applies to people and organisations, not their tools.

<comment><USER36> The requirement to advertise "we use cookies" and spam you with popups when you visit a site is frustrating for highly technical users.

OP is saying that Emacs-as-website would be frustrating if it had those popups.

<comment><USER34> You don't have to do that unless you're hosting a public site ... and even so if it's a private session and you'd logged in this wouldn't be required. Logging in is seen as a tacit acknowledgment that you consent to being tracked, cause how would I have. A personal session otherwise.

The cookies warning is all about notifying the casual reader who might otherwise believe they were passively browsing static content.

<comment><USER37> > Logging in is seen as a tacit acknowledgment that you consent to being > tracked

Logging in means you get a single cookie (a login/session cookie), that cookie is necessary and thus a functional cookie that you can't say no to. All other cookies (and basically every form of tracking) still isn't allowed without consent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I wish to profess my love for terminal emacs. I do not take it for granted. Hear ye. Any editor so powerful that also humbles itself to a 100x30 terminal without losing any power is pure class. This program deserves praise. I pray that GNU emacs will continue to support a text-only interface for many years to come and when at last the elisp fractal is no longer fit for purpose, I pray that its mechanics will be absorbed by the great neural network that will learn everything.

</comment><comment><USER39> I thought it will be a criticism how everything seems _off_ with the Emacs GUI from the copy-paste to the font rendering to the way scrolling is done, etc. I'd guess it managed to be so cross-platform by re-implementing everything, kinda like Java Swing but with less care for design.

Now I understand how having a scriptable and text-based foundation would help with accessibility, just Emacs wins no UI contest.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if I'd call it _re_ implementation when the original Emacs is older than DOS and GNU Emacs, still maintained today, is older than Windows (1985). Emacs's keybindings, font rendering, and scrolling were just as valid then as any other approach. Let's at least avoid comparisons to Swing :).

You can bind copy-and-paste as well as any other text wrangling functionality to whatever you want and there are ways to make it behave like other platforms without too much difficulty. But why hamstring Emacs' copy and paste by limiting it to the simplistic version we're used to when you can copy to multiple registers and have a searchable history of copied text?

Font rendering uses Harfbuzz in the latest version and is quite good in my opinion, there's even color emojis. Scrolling is certainly better than any terminal emulator I've used, although there's no smooth scrolling. I guess everything is _off_ if you're comparing it to a browser, but modern browsers aren't exactly paragons of UX either. But if you're comparing prettiness options like these, yeah, Emacs loses to VS Code. All Microsoft had to do was build a text editor on top of a browser engine to get those features :). I'd say Emacs is more extensible, though. Lisp machines and all

<comment><USER39> I understand, but 35 years have passed, no need to stick to the original implementation that long.

I'm a super basic user and nowadays basically have Emacs open all day just for org-mode. Nothing else.

To me it seems a terrible text editor and has an UI that's foreign on macOS and Ubuntu. It's unclear to me under what OS/Window manager/etc Emacs fits right at home. It seems out of this world.

I can imagine there may be some configuration that would fix some of these problems, but I just use Emacs as it comes out of the box.

<comment><USER40> A reason to stick so closely to the original model is that it has lasted 35 years. There are few other programs that have lasted as long without feeling an urgency to change with the times, and mostly by the base system being similarly stubborn about changing or by being incredibly simple.

The fact that it's, essentially, the same on every OS I use it on is another selling point. I bring my .emacs file and make minor tweaks for different OSes (due to where files/programs are if absolute paths or relative paths in the user home directory are different). It always works the same once I've made those small changes (and they are small, and once done my Windows .emacs is good on any Windows box). Again, there are few other programs like this. At a minimum, you often end up with subtly different keybindings (macOS using the command key, Windows using control, and Linux using control or alt) and subtly different layouts that break workflow and habit.

<comment><USER41> Yep! Main reason I use emacs is that I can use just about the same workflow when I'm programming in python, C++, etc. in different environments like windows gui, windows WSL, linux GUI, linux terminal, remoting through ssh, ssh into docker container, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> IMHO emacs is kind of a Rorschach test w.r.t. Lisp. Some people really like programming in Lisp, and for them getting emacs to do what they want is fun and rewarding, particularly but not exclusively regarding interface affordances. I personally fall into this category. The fact that it has very similar keybindings to readline/bash (especially important if you spend a lot of time popping on and off servers that don't have your dots and thus choose not to customize the shell too much) and macOS is a huge bonus.

But I totally get that this is from outer space for another group. Vim is a great alternative for people who want a more opinionated editing wizard mode, and VSCode is really competent at interacting with remote filesystems and supporting lots of languages for the GUI crowd. It's a great time to be editing text.

<comment><USER43> I'm a (neo)vim user that's been playing around with various Lisps lately. CL and Scheme interaction is worlds ahead in Emacs, but even with evil-mode, I'm having a hard time. There's lots of places where it just stops working, and I have to remember Emacs bindings. Emacs 27 and 28 are more responsive, especially on Windows, but vim actions are near instantaneous.

A cool project I stumbled across is Aniseed[0], which thanks to Neovim's Lua bindings, lets you control neovim with Fennel. I haven't done anything noteworthy yet, but for the first time it actually seems like it would be fun to write my own plugins.

[0] - [https://github.com/Olical/aniseed](https://github.com/Olical/aniseed)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Slightly off-topic, but people here seem to like that stuff: The author has a personal website[0], which is a gem from the "old internet" \- a wild mix of technical stuff, pet cat pictures, and some personal history.

[0]: [https://delysid.org](https://delysid.org)

<comment><USER45> Very interesting! Made me curious about how a blind person codes (accessibility technology). Aside from that, I am also curious as to why you characterize the website as from the 'old internet'. It looks like a modern minimalist static site to me. Not what I would expect from a 90s site. What do you consider as the distinguishing features of old internet vs the modern version?

<comment><USER44> Well, my classification of it as 'old internet' is of course subjective. To me it feels like many newer websites appear more clinical, in both, positive and negative ways. I think it's way less common now to mix personal stuff like pet photos with more professional topics like coding. Poeple who post both usually do this on different platforms (social networks vs. personal blog).

From a technical point of view, the website makes heavier use of tooling that nowadays are used less, because there are alternaltives. One example are actual hyperlinks and different pages, whereas today there's some trend towards keeping more content on a single page and use buttons to navigate it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> What's the difference between what's being described here and the web?

(In particular, Electron-based local applications which of course have a cross-platform web-based UI.)

I'm not saying they aren't different, at the very least, Emacs prioritizes text, while the web prioritizes multimedia. But I'd love to hear other peoples takes on the differences.

<comment><USER47> The Webstack is far more complex than anything emacs offers. Emacs has just a wall of text with some special markup, but there is not concept of layout for this text, and all navigation is usually separate from the wall of text, making accesability significant simpler to handle.

In emacs there is a beginning and an end, and you just follow the flow. In webstack you have elements, which have a position and if you are lucky they are tagged with their purpose. If not, it's up to you to figure out whether this is for navigation or content or advertisement or some other navigation or comments, which is more another kind of navigation... Basically there is just no really realiable structure with the web. Sometimes there is something, sometimes not, sometimes it's this way, next week it can be that way...

And even worse are dynamic site where parts of the site are loaded on demand. So you need a complex setup of tools to handle those content, instead of simple text-search and cursor-moving.

<comment><USER48> You could construct the same kinds of problematic UIs in Emacs too... it's just that Emacs is not as widely used as the Web and its users don't have such varying demands and use cases for it, so it's not as common for that to happen.

The Web is also designed around a linear flow of text. The Web also provides opportunities to make navigation semantics clear. The Web also implicitly supports keyboard navigation everywhere. etc. Although many websites try to work around those principles, is that a problem with the web or just the websites people are using today?

<comment><USER47> > You could construct the same kinds of problematic UIs in Emacs too...

If you do it on purpose, then maybe, but not to the degree of what webstack offers. People already have a hard time to handle org-mode-hierachies and folding...

> The Web is also designed around a linear flow of text.

No, that went out the door when CSS was added. Now it's designed around random positioning of little boxes. Some boxes contain linear text, some contain media, most contain even more little boxes.

Emacs does not have those boxes in the first place. The only boxes it has are outside the document, avoiding this whole class of problems for accesability.

<comment><USER48> Sure it does. First of all, you can lay text anywhere you want in a buffer, thus letting you create whatever little boxes you want. Plus, it has support for images and even arbitrary GTK widgets in that buffer too.

Remember before CSS, people just did the same thing anyway with tables. CSS only made easier what people were already doing. I am sure the same would happen to Emacs if it ever became a widely used piece of software.

<comment><USER47> > Sure it does. First of all, you can lay text anywhere you want in a buffer,

Does the emacs-api directly support this or is it just some hacked up solution everyone must do on their own? Of course can you emulate boxes and any kind of layout-sytem, but whether it's a general supported solution or just some ugly hack that has no backing in the general culture of a software, makes a significant difference. It's the difference between 99% of all encountered content is problematic for accesability or just 1%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is something Richard Stallman has advocated for. Free software was not just about the availability of source code, but also about making sure software can function well on lower powered devices, lower bandwidth environment, or people who cannot use the same kind of interfaces.

There was an essay discussing this ... but I do not recall it now.

</comment><comment><USER50> Not that it's anything like Emacs, but would SIM Application Toolkit be considered kind of similar? It provided almost a lowest-common-denominator user interface for apps, which could actually run in the smartphone era, although with practically no advantages over a native app.

<comment><USER51> You'd be surprised to hear STK is still in use even today by big mobile operators. Some even go as far as to launch campaigns to install STK applets on millions of devices and customers have no idea this is happening in the background.

<comment><USER52> Yes, all the "eSIM" over-the-air management uses the STK for example. But to be fair, the user interface part is no longer used. The part of the STK still in use is what is required to support remote management functions between the network operator and some applet on the SIM card. The user is out of the loop, and it's perfectly fine for a modem not to support the user interaction part of the STK.

<comment><USER51> I actually work within the eSIM ecosystem and other sim related activities. And, yes, some mobile operators do indeed use the STK UI today, it's not limited to background tasks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Emacs is a manifestation of the ITS user interfaces. They all relied on text because that's all that was available back then. They also used control characters, Altmode/Escape/Meta, and prefix arguments.

</comment><comment><USER54> Emacs Lisp is slow. There has been a multi-decade effort to make Guile support ELisp, and using Guile to make Emacs more performant.

Cross platform UI, with a faster Lisp, would allow Emacs to be even more special.

<comment><USER55> As a non Emacs user, is the speed of Emacs Lisp a frustration in typical day to day usage?

<comment><USER56> What are you using now? If VScode or Atom you won't feel any degradation. If vim or SublimeText, some things will take few extra dozens of milliseconds. You could test the Doom Emacs, which is trying to be a feature-full emacs environment optimized for speed.

<comment><USER55> I've been using Vim for a very long time now, recently adding CoC has slowed things a bit however I am quite fond of some of the features, so I might start enabling it only when I want those.

I'm not looking to encouragement to change (after 20 years in Vim that ship has likely sailed for good), I was just curious if the speed of Emacs lisp was a frequent bugbear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> One of the nice things about the terminal is that things stay consistent for decades or more - people are not chasing fashion trends all the time, as is happening with the Web and graphical UIs.

Nobody is being forced to use a particular style and color scheme and we don't have repeated redesigns which remove functionality for the sake of user friendliness or minimalism.

<comment><USER58> This. Plugins deliver value much more than graphical design. I also often tell myself that working in emacs is exhausting because it displays only valuable information => my brain works 100% of the time when I'm in front of it :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Some of its paradigms are plain stupid.

C-Z (in the GUI) triggers minimise of the window.

In a shell, that's fine. It suspends the process. In a GUI it is just bloody annoying. There's a perfectly good minimise button if I want it. This is just a frustration every time I fat-finger C-X. Which is used so frequently it's just asking to be pressed by accident.

<comment><USER60> I don't rate this shortcut either, but there's an easy fix for your .emacs:

        (when window-system
          (global-unset-key (kbd "C-z")))

<comment><USER59> Thanks, that will certainly reduce my frustration a little bit!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> How does emacs UI work? It seems like each script is registering commands it can run in context of mode, and then you can bind key combos to commands. How do textual UIs do things like layouting of controls, updating of values and handling async requests?

<comment><USER61> > How does emacs UI work?

Emacs has the idea of _buffers_ which are the actual window panes that you can view. The _buffer_ has data in the form of text which has properties in much the same way a block of html can have properties. An emacs-lisp function has full access to do anything it wants with the buffer. For example it can insert contents, change the font family, change the bit of text into a button with a callback. This is exactly how syntax highlighting/semantic highlighting works in emacs, you just change the styling for bits of text [1].

A _mode_ inside emacs is a collection of emacs-lisp functions which trigger (usually on a file extension name). Typically they will set certain keybindings for specific mode-like behaviour. You always have a single _major_ mode and multiple _minor_ modes - the vim emulation layer, for example is simply a minor mode which adds the vim keybindings and emulates the vim state machine inside emacs-lisp.

> It seems like each script is registering commands it can run in context of > mode

An emacs-lisp file can be _evaluated_ in the same way as a python file into emacs. It's like a REPL - you can evaluate a file and the functions become available. There's a bit of extra behaviour which allows lazy loading et cetera, but user defined scripts are first-class and there's no distinction between them and those which are "native".

> updating of values

You can update a variable by simply evaluating the appropriate lisp function. If you want to update a value in the text buffer, you just replace/rerender that chunk.

> handling async requests

A buffer can also have a _process_ running which gets events each time the buffer is updated. When you run a command, you direct the output to a buffer and you trigger your lisp function on certain events. This is sort of how the HTTP requests work, but there's libraries which abstract some of it for you. Buffers are really just an abstraction for textual data.

Some of this is simplified, but I hope it gives you a vague idea of what emacs is.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/iemo44/wysiwygified_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/iemo44/wysiwygified_org_mode/)

<comment><USER62> In other words, Emacs has its own markup language? how does emacs know that a specific bit of text is a button, for example?

<comment><USER63> Yes, Emacs supports a limited form of "rich text". See text-mode.

It's supported by text properties [1] and overlays [2]. Character properties are special attributes attached to a single character, while overlays can attach attributes to a "region" and override old text properties (like div in HTML).

In Emacs,

> A button is essentially a set of text or overlay properties, attached to a > stretch of text in a buffer. [3]

The Emacs display engine is sorta like an HTML render engine.

[1] [https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Te...](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Text- Properties.html)

[2] [https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Ov...](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Overlays.html)

[3] [https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Bu...](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Buttons.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> code-faster unix is also User Interface Independent, but unlike emacs, it's actually used on a wide variety of interfaces: Mainframes, microcontrollers, web servers, phones (touch screen) and PCs.

<comment><USER64> Pretty sure emacs is used on all of those

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> > Emacs is the only serious program I know which manages to be truely user > interface independent, in addition to being platform-independent.

So tell me about the UX of free software speech recognition in emacs. I want to read about how to set that up and the limitations of it as I watch my 5 year-old niece interact with Alexa.

</comment><comment><USER66> > I seldomly hear this property mentioned by anyone else, so even if it > scratches OT-ness

What does "OT-ness" stand for ?

<comment> CKN23-ARIN Off-topicness

<comment><USER66> I could not find that in urban dictionary or google results.Is this commonly used in free software or open software mailing lists or did you just guessed it ?

<comment><USER67> OT for "Off-topic" is a very common abbreviation online, yes.

<comment><USER68> Is there a common abbreviation online for On-topic? If so, what is it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> A website can have this cross-modality UI property too, but most sites don't. This is partly cultural (emacs mode developers generally caring more) and partly about collaboration (it's much easier to upstream issues with an emacs mode than a site).</comment>


Mozilla quietly deploys built-in Firebox advertising - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-gets-built-in-firebox-advertising-rolling/ <comment><USER2> It was not done quietly at all. The browser also makes a huge deal about what these new tiles are and what information is exchanged. Which is something along the lines of "what percentage of all tiles clicked where ads"

The browser downloads all ads and decides LOCALLY which ads or suggestions to display - that is, it is done privately.

This advertisement is way more private and transparent than Mozillas normal third party ads programme, through google/yahoo search.

<comment><USER3> Yea came to say this, it wasn't quiet at all, its been pretty heavily debated in the community for over a year and Mozilla was very careful to maintain privacy concerns when implementing it.

<comment><USER4> "The Community" is not the only ones using FireFox. Does anyone really believe that any corporation is really being "very careful to maintain privacy concerns" anymore?

<comment><USER5> Mozilla is not a company. I actually have a lot of trust in them (unlike actual tech companies).

That trust is built on their past actions - particularly in comparison to those of their profit-driven private peers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this the same as "Suggested Sites"? If so, you just click the gear in the top right on the new tab page and uncheck "Include suggested sites". Pretty simple to disable, at least on the latest beta and dev editions.

Another tempest in a teapot like when they integrated Pocket (right click > remove from toolbar takes 2 seconds)?

<comment><USER7> > Another tempest in a teapot like when they integrated Pocket (right click > > remove from toolbar takes 2 seconds)

Except all these things that take time to learn about and remove are starting to add up and ultimately end up taking far more than 2 seconds each.

Pocket should never have been bundled in the first place and should have continued to exist as an easily installable/uninstallable addon/extension. The Mozilla governance forum has over 20 pages of people complaining about Pocket bundle-ware and Mozilla continues to twiddle its thumb claiming "just 2 clicks to remove/we asked a few people and they don't mind it":

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.governance/2...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.governance/2PYq2w8tejs%5B1-25%5D)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "That said, Firefox does send your browser history to Mozilla."

Does anyone know what url they use for this so I can host file it?

<comment><USER9> Did you misquote the article?

"That said, Firefox does send your browser Mozilla interaction history with the Tiles feature"

It sounds like Mozilla is only capturing how you interact with the tiles, not what websites you visit.

<comment><USER10> That sounds dangerously like it's "telemetry," and that's a dirty word around these parts now.</comment></comment></comment>


Snoops can tell what you type while you Skype, researchers find - java-man https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2016/10/20/snoops-can-tell-what-you-type-while-you-skype-researchers-find/ <comment> java-man Quote: "According to a paper from researchers at the University of California, Irvine; the Sapienza University of Rome; and the University of Padua, the sound of keystrokes, or acoustic emanations, can be recorded during a Skype voice or video call and later reassembled as text."</comment>


Starbucks wakes up and smells the stench of tax avoidance controversy - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/nov/12/starbucks-tax-avoidance-controversy <comment><USER2> Like most large corporations, Starbucks will use every trick in the book to avoid paying taxes. There is nothing new there. But it's interesting to see people starting to protest about it. Unfortunately for Starbucks, they operate a network of brick-and-mortar stores, which is much easier to picket than Google or Amazon.

<comment><USER3> Google has offices in the UK and Amazon has both offices and large distribution centers.

<comment><USER4> Google's offices are at the top of a large private building, no? The point is more that neither has customers coming into their stores the way starbucks does.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Labs no more - <AUTHOR> http://labs.google.com No more cool apps that we can browse via google labs <comment><USER2> I get the feeling that the bean counters are taking over Google and slashing off everything that doesn't have obvious monetization potential.

I mean, I know great people who work there, but overall it seems like they're turning into Microsoft circa 2000 - they own the industry, they buy startups and kill the products made by about half of them. Some of their products are great, but a lot of it is just an obvious monopoly enabled money grab.

I wish this wasn't the case.

<comment><USER3> You would never seen something like "Labs" from Apple, and everyone applauds them for "focus".

<comment><USER4> Apple did have "labs." One of the first thing Steve Jobs did when he returned was shut it down.

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

<comment><USER5> That explanation misses a lot of context. It comes across as a criticism, as if Jobs just didn't see the benefit of research. That's not the case. He wanted to shrink the things they focused on, so they could put their 'A' team on every project (which required less projects). The end result was having a bunch of really talented guys focusing on things that drove business value.

<comment><USER4> I didn't intend it to be a criticism, just a factual remark. Then again, I shouldn't have really compared the two. Google labs wasn't really a dedicated research wing at Google, more like cool stuff people from various teams worked on in their spare time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Context: [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind- fewe...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-fewer- arrows.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anything remotely like Bell Labs exist today? Is it simply not possible with everyone tightening their belts?

If you're unfamiliar with what came out of Bell Labs, check out this list: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_labs#Discoveries_and_devel...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_labs#Discoveries_and_developments)

Or is it the fate of software innovation that it is to be decentralized and happen in our spare time now?

<comment><USER8> Microsoft Research?

<comment><USER9> MS Research is quite good. Done lots of fundamental research work.

<comment><USER10> MSR may be the top organization in computer science today:

[http://academic.research.microsoft.com/RankList?entitytype=7...](http://academic.research.microsoft.com/RankList?entitytype=7&topdomainid=2&subdomainid=0&last=5)

<comment><USER8> Looks like IBM is quite far up there in terms of publications as well.

<comment><USER11> We keep our selves busy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Notice that the shutdown of all these projects are happening on Larry's watch. Maybe it's a sharpened focus on ideas that "matter", but Google needs to try more things not less.

From today's announcement about Q3 results, they still get a huge chunk of their income from advertising. They are dominant, but without another angle they are just asking to be disrupted.

</comment><comment><USER13> It does align nicely with Steve Yegge's post: strive to be a platform. Let people build what they need. Don't try to be everything to everybody. Less products, more services. Maybe right, maybe wrong, but Google shows that they CAN DECIDE and I applaude them for that.

</comment><comment><USER14> I can still access all code labs <http://code.google.com/labs/>

<comment><AUTHOR> ah nice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It was the fragmentation of Google that made it so amazing. So many wonderful discoveries came from experimentation, and labs was a wonderful way to organize them. Disappointing.

</comment><comment><USER16> I can't help but feel that this reflects a change in the mindset of Google – getting further and further from its scrappy upstart roots which are now long- since gone...

</comment><comment><USER17> Do they really need Labs now? Google has grown to a size where they can easily acquire promising young start-ups out in the wild.

One advantage of having Labs back in the day was that projects could have the backing of Google's infrastructure. Now, with cloud services like AWS, the bar is set low enough that anyone has access to this kind of stuff. How hard is it to start a YouTube in this day and age?

</comment><comment><USER18> The whole domain would redirect back to google.com. Last night when I went to Googlelabs.com via the newest announcement of retirement of services from google [1] was indeed the last time I visited it.

The fact that many of the labs projects are still active made it much uneasy to find those products anymore.

\---

[1]: <http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/fall-sweep.html>

</comment><comment><USER19> Google had record profits - why are they killing all their incubators?

If they kill "20% time" next then we know their best days are over.

<comment><USER20> None of the Google engineers I've met had 20% Time projects. They said 20% Time was not common for application teams because they had more visible release deadlines than the web teams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I honestly never used it, and am completely unaffected by this.

What was the most successful product that emerged out of google labs?

<comment><USER22> Not sure if this includes other services like Gmail Labs, but I relied on "attachment reminder" throughout college. It has saved me multiple times, including now in my professional career.

<comment><USER23> No, Gmail Labs is separate and is not being shut down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think they are entirely right in shutting down this outward facing display of unfinished ideas/projects.

I also think they could have done much better than just redirecting it to google.com. Instead of trying to emulate Apple, they should acknowledge that their culture is different and very nerdy. So I think what they should have done instead is to highlight that and use "labs" to instead show off their technical prowess, much in they same vein as what Festo has done : <http://www.festo.com/cms/en_corp/9617.htm>

A flapping wings robot, how cool is that?!

Google could really do something similar, and the world would love them for it. Instead they look more and more like a big corporation with all the boring "common sense" and mediocrity that comes with it.

</comment><comment><USER25> RIP Google Sets :(

<comment><USER26> The logic behind Sets actually lives on, at least for now, within the autofill feature of Google Spreadsheets. Fill a cell or two with sample data, then option-drag (control-drag on Windows) the square autofill handle.

<comment><USER27> Yes, or if you search for "Oregano" you will notice the auto-complete for subsequent searches strongly favours herbs and spices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The most disconcerting thing is that a Google search for one of the Labs projects doesn't handle this change in any elegant way. I went looking for a description of Google Sets (<http://www.google.com/search?q=google+sets>), but the most relevant links either redirect or give 404. The one hand doesn't know what the other is doing.

</comment><comment><USER29> While there's no longer a specific Labs section, they do still have Google Code, and my guess is that you'll still find the odd experiment popping up on there every now and then (and naturally gaining publicity through word of mouth).

<comment><USER30> There are still places within Google where people can run independent projects and experimental stuff. Innovation isn't dead. :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind- fewe...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-fewer- arrows.html)

</comment><comment> mkr-hn There was a great Labs feature I missed after they killed it: "What's around here?" All the button did was add an asterisk to the search box, and that still works.

</comment><comment> johnx123-up RIP. Rebirth of "Google acquisition era" (Jaiku, et al.)?

</comment><comment><USER31> It was an experiment that met it's natural end.

<comment><USER32> Google Labs itself was an experiment? That's very meta.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> What is happening to Google? I almost feel like it's going through a transformation like Walter White.

<comment><USER33> They're getting ready to cook up some new projects ;)

<comment><USER34> Wouldn't Labs be a good place to link to them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> BAD</comment>


A 390-year-old bonsai tree survived an atomic bomb - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/the-390-year-old-tree-that-survived-an-atomic-bomb/2015/08/02/3f824dae-3945-11e5-8e98-115a3cf7d7ae_story.html <comment><USER2> They mention the tree's trunk in the article but it's shaded in the photo. It's glorious: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/kjell/3388113528/in/album-7215...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/kjell/3388113528/in/album-72157615939819460/)

The National Arboretum is the coolest place I've been in DC. It's a bit out of the way, but worth the trip from downtown.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've always thought the culture and heritage surrounding bonsai is amazing. I was in a local bonsai club when I was younger and the patience required to produce a really great tree is something to be respected. Sometimes the trees will just die for no discernible reason and you just have to start over after months or years of work. Some of the oldest trees are estimated to be over 1000 years old and have been passed through generations of care takers.

<comment><USER4> I always compare software engineering to bonsai. To be happy doing either for a long time, you need to enjoy the work of becoming a craftsman for its own sake -- the things you build or cultivate can die quickly and for no good reason, and all that remains is the appreciation for the work you put in. Whenever someone asks for a fifth round of changes for a button's color, I think about a Japanese monk raking gravel. When the Tibetan monks blow away their mandala after weeks of painstaking work, I see startup pivots and acquihires.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a really interesting analogy. I struggle with the idea of working so hard on things that feel pointless and ephemeral, and that's a nice way to think about it.

I'm not sure that's the point of a mandala, but it's definitely an interesting idea to ponder.

<comment><USER5> The 'point' of mandala is _everything_ is temporary.

Something might last thousand years or a billion, but it's still going to end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One not very often discussed fact is that the effects of even an all-out nuclear war (detonation of all existing nuclear weapons) are exaggerated, for various fairly obvious reasons. The total number of people killed will be "only" 10-15%, and it will be definitely _not_ a threat to humanity as the species.

[http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/82jpr.html](http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/82jpr.html)

I read somewhere that if all existing weapons in the world were detonated uniformly over Texas, there would be still some survivors even in Texas itself.

<comment><USER7> I agree that they are overplayed for effect, but there is some math. I saw Kissinger explain it when asked about nukes killed the whole world ten times over.

The math started with WWII Germany. They kept reasonably reliable records of where and when people died during allied air raids. So someone drew up a formula linking the tonnage of bombs dropped with the number of dead on the ground. This was then extended to nukes and their power measured in thousands (kilo) and millions (mega) of tons of TNT. So bombs with explosive power greater than all of WWII (a common description) could "kill" as many people as an entire war. Kissinger was correct in saying that all the bombs in the world would not, could not, destroy everyone ten or twenty times over.

This false analogy was also part of debates during Vietnam. Many, on both sided of every argument, used the math to estimate the number killed by US bombing raids, ignoring the fact that German cities and Vietnam jungle are in no way analogous.

<comment><USER8> Quite; particularly considering that the strategies of the bombings were reversed.

In WWII, Germany was bombed so that strategic bombers (B-17) attacked strategic targets (civilians and factories in cities), and tactical bombers (P-47) attacked tactical targets (tanks or trains near combat).

In Vietnam war, Vietnam was bombed so that strategic bombers (B-52) attacked tactical targets (jungle with suspected Viet Cong activity in combat area), and tactical bombers (F-4) attacked tactical targets within strategic targets (a bridge in Hanoi).

And WWII was the last "good" war for Americans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Since it was so close to the blast, wouldn't it still be radioactive, like Marie Curie's journals?

<comment><USER10> No. Airburst nuclear bombs for the most part don't make things radioactive, air pretty much can't become radioactive (pure water also can't become radioactive, although you can mix radioactive elements into it of course).

Ground blasts are worse, but it's the ground itself that becomes radioactive, not the things that are far away and are affected by the blast.

And no one purposely does ground bursts, because they don't do a good job of damaging things with a blast - most of the energy ends up reflected into space, or absorbed into the ground. (I guess a terrorist might want to, since they don't have military strategic goals.)

The material of the bomb itself is radioactive of course, but there isn't usually all that much of it, and it's dispersed quite widely.

Her journals did not become radioactive because they were neutron-activated, but because they were contaminated by radioactive material. But there's a limited amount of that, so only a small amount of material becomes radioactive that way.

(Note: I'm speaking relatively here, if you have a sensitive enough detector you'll find stuff of course. That's one of the things that makes people so scared of radiation - it's so easy to detect at even minuscule levels, while far more dangerous things are harder to detect so no one reports them.)

<comment><USER11> Water can and does become radioactive through neutron capture breeding tritium.

However, neutron flux falls off quickly with range, and for an airburst explosion it would not have been high enough at the surface to cause significant neutron "activation" of local materials. Almost all of the fallout from the blast came from the material in the bomb itself.

<comment><USER10> That's true, but atom bombs make very very little tritium.

To make tritium you need to start with deuterium, which is already rarely made by atom bombs. So you have two rare events that have to happen in sequence.

So that means that atom bombs pretty much don't make any.

<comment><USER11> Right, quite true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the value of this tree is in the idea that one day America might give it back to Japan as an act of peace, since it is clearly a very special organism and the value of the act would truly communicate the idea of transcending the causes of hostility. Exchanging such a beautiful life form as an act of peace would surely be the penultimate act of bonsai...

<comment><USER13> Quibble: surely that should be 'ultimate act'. The meaning of 'penultimate' implies a further ultimate act. Since bonsai are essentially immortal, you would never be able to tell if an act involving one was penultimate?

<comment><USER14> Essentially immortal? The article seemed to indicate the expected lifespan of this tree was around 200 years, despite it having lived nearly twice that long.

<comment><USER13> There's no biological limit to their age - only accident/disease statistics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I get trying to humanize stories, but Moses Weisberg does nothing for this story. I spent as long reading the article as trying to find out why this guy was interesting... other than he once walked a bike past it.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've been getting into bonsai also. If anyone reading this wants to do a meetup, it'd be fun to get together with tech bonsai people in Portland.

<comment><USER17> Why not just get together with tech folks over tech, and bonsai people over bonsai, and cross-pollinate your life a bit? :)

<comment><USER12> Umm .. wouldn't that be not cross-polinating?

<comment><USER18> He's suggesting jchrisa cross-pollinate his life with people other than "tech people".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For some reason, I worked on a bonsai farm for a few years. The old trees are amazing as they are beautiful. We had some in the 200 year range, no more than 18 inches tall.

I still visit the farm in my mind 30 years later.

</comment><comment><USER20> I love the arboretum! Remember going there as a kid growing up as my mom is obsessed with trees. That bonsai exhibit is spectacular in every way.

</comment><comment><USER21> Looks like radiation makes it stronger. Theoretically some pine species can have around 700 years lifespan. As it comes out from dendrochronological data. But America is the first here - meet Nevadan pine <i>Pinus longaeva</i>. The oldest known living specimen is a tree, somewhere in the White Mountains of California. The tree was sampled by Schulman in the 1950s. Its great age, 5,060 years. Its still there.

<comment><USER21> To those downvoting me. I spent 2 years planting pines in experimental plantations to study radioactivity effects on pine in mixed forest plantations in 1993-1994. So I know a thing or two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Am a bit disappointed that there are no respect here for the origin of the bomb and its success.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Events_on_the_ground)

Does the HN realise there is anotehr world outside of Silicon Velley ??

<comment><USER23> What exactly are you looking for and why would you expect to see it in these comments?</comment></comment>


Java on 1000 cores (in one box) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgxCb7fjauE

<comment><USER2> If you would rather just read the slides instead of watch the video, they are here: <http://www.azulsystems.com/events/vee_2009/2009_VEE.pdf>

<comment><USER3> Still, I advise people who are not time-constrained to watch the video. There are a lot of interesting remarks slides don't capture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good talk on chip design issues to support lots of cores, particularly to support Java garbage collection. Azul has paid a lot of attention to avoiing cache misses, such a zeroing objects in the cache instead of with memory writes. It's interesting how cpu design has moved away from complex instruction pipelines to multitudes of simple cores.

Azul's market is enterprise Java (replacing Cobol) so massive support for threading makes sense. I dont think threads are a general cure for parallelism, such as with simulations, vision, AI, and the like. The brain for example has billions of processors and trillions of interconnects. Scheduling a few billion threads isnt going to cut it. Anyone have any thoughts on these issues?

<comment><USER5> Multiple concurrent threads of execution are fine as a concurrency _substrate_ , so long as you minimize synchronization between threads. They can run on independent cores with no problem.

Threads are crap as a programming model.

Something like Clojure's parallel-friendly constructs has the potential to make an Azul box shine, whilst avoiding programmer error.

<comment><USER6> Also, Scala's and LiftWebs similar (but different) actor models.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am no big fan of Java the language, but I can see these boxes being put to very interesting use with other languages running on JVM.

Anyone feeling a sudden urge to port *Lisp code to Clojure? ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cliff also gave a presentation at javaone about alternate languages on the jvm, in particular, Azul's. AFAIK only slides are available: [http://www.azulsystems.com/events/javaone_2009/session/2009_...](http://www.azulsystems.com/events/javaone_2009/session/2009_J1_JVMLang.pdf)</comment></comment>


Chatroulette's  Problem: 8 Cunning Solutions - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/chatroulettes-penis-problem-8-solutions-2010-3

<comment><USER2> A problem to some (and definitely for me if I ever used the service), but this is amazing publicity. Even with this problem, Chatroulette is still insanely popular.</comment>


Doctor Confesses: I Lied to Protect Colleague in Malpractice Suit - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/09/23/494920109/doctor-confesses-i-lied-to-protect-colleague-in-malpractice-suit <comment><USER2> > _It seems that the courtroom is not the arena for adjudication of medical > right or wrong._

we need another mechanism for improving the skills and practices of sub- standard MDs. lawsuits don't seem to work that well.</comment>


Ask HN: Am I the only one who can't create a startup at the weekend? - <AUTHOR>

I always knew that I'm no native hacker.
As I observe more and more projects announced here that were made during a weekend or in 6 hours, I know for sure:
I will never be able to create a side project in a few hours, setup a website and build the accompanying app to have it all sold before my next monday morning post at HN.
I think, I wouldn't even try this... <comment><USER2> For one thing, you should take phrases like "weekend project" with a grain of salt. People who share their projects on HN know they're facing a tough crowd, and understating their time investment is one way to deflect the inevitable nitpicks. Add to that the typical hacker bravado factor, and you can assume the real figure is well more than whatever you read.

That's not to say that anyone is being deliberately dishonest. Most "weekend" projects borrow code from weekday jobs, layouts from ThemeForest, and ideas from weeks of idle brainstorming. It's easy to forget in retrospect all of the time that went into laying that groundwork.

<comment><AUTHOR> Completely agree. "Weekend" projects don't come up when you wake up on Saturday morning and are ready for sale on Monday.

My comment was caused as I observe an increasing number of these "weekend" or "side-project" messages at HN. For me it looks like the authors are too cautious to stand for their project as something that took all their attention and that still may have mistakes.

What follows is an inflationary trend that most "Show HN" posts are declared as minute-jobs and we lose the open culture of a showroom, where the other mates take your work serious and try to positively criticise it. Not long, and we have sidecars only.

I think it is not important how long one needs for a project shown here. The message transported with the timeline is else "look I'm a genious" or "sorry, all the remaining bugs are from a lack of time".

I have to remark, that I don't think of any particular posts in the last time and I know that I may include projects in my generalization that don't deserve it. This hasn't been my intention. And my original confession to be a bad hacker is still valid!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wish to express my gratitude for you posting this question.

I've been feeling rather inadequate lately because of all the posts about weekend projects. One thing I've had to try to convince myself of is that things always look different from the outside than the inside. The perfect marriage isn't always so perfect. The perfect family is often the most broken.

I'm trying to say that comparing myself to what I PERCEIVE to be the reality of others is a losing proposition. Someone will always be better, quicker, faster. All I can do is try to do what I'm able to do, little by little, day by day.

I bet people look at you and wonder how you do x in y time. Or how you do "x" at all! Your curiosity is not much different. You're looking at something from the outside - and it always appears easier from that perspective.

Keep your spirits up! You'll be fine.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wrote badg.ly a couple weeks ago, precisely to see if I could build it in a weekend. I already had the infrastructure setup, so that saved me a bit of time.

I also don't have a single user. That wasn't really the point of the exercise (I wanted to try new patterns out since I'm still learning Rails), but it reiterates what others have said - a startup and a website are two separate things.

</comment><comment><USER5> You miss 100% of the shots you don't take - Michael Jordan.

"Am I the only one who can't create a startup at the weekend?" -- your title suggests that you've tried, but your words say you haven't.

Don't disqualify yourself before you try, because until you try, you really never know

<comment><USER6> Not go off topic...but that is actually a Wayne Gretzky quote...not Michael Jordan.

Also, building reusable code is a good way to get future projects done in a weekend!

<comment><USER5> Ahh...seems I've been lied to my whole life. :). I grew up playing basketball, so I guess our coaches repurposed it for their use. Drat!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Keep in mind that the number of "weekend" startups compared to the number of people hacking on the weekend is very small. The quantity of successful weekend projects is even smaller.

Every now and then someone gets a good idea that is quick to implement and they are prepared/experienced enough to execute it well, but it doesn't happen as often as your post implies.

Stop beating yourself up! Get back to making something you think is cool!

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. -- Thomas Edison.

</comment><comment><USER8> My original idea for this venture started over a dinner. My mind had been churning on related business challenges for a couple of years. I was not only focused on highly visible opportunities, I was looking for the right time and right problem to solve. For me, this meant, how can I help my customers make a great deal more money?

I pulled a sheet of paper out of the printer, scribbled down 12-13 ideas, drew some logical relationships, circled groups, labeled the ideas and then spent about 2 months refining and testing the ideas through discussion and research.

At this point we're narrowed down to about 8% of the scope of the original concept, but that 8% is viable, has customer traction (already) and looks likely to earn 1.5-2mm per customer per year.

We expect to spend another week on the pitching to initial customers and try and get closure with our first enterprise customer in the next two weeks. How long it will take to reach the right funding, we don't know. It's enterprise software and we want to grow.

What's different here is that we haven't coded anything. We won't until we have directed feedback from our pilot customers. Oh yeah, and funding. :)

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been working on my startup for over a year. It would be nice to have the skills and resources to create a site in a weekend but I don't and I've accepted the fact that my projects will just take longer. For me, it actually slows the development process down and lets the idea mature a little, giving me time to make decisions that are well thought out. I've also been able to reminded myself many times that if it's not cool or functional it doesn't matter how fast it was built. Plus, building it's just the first step. If anyone has any successful 'over the weekend' marketing plans please send them my way.

</comment><comment><USER10> I feel building a project from scratch with nothing in a weekend is no hugely likely. Most people I figure have all there ducks lined up so they are ready to hit the ground running 6pm Friday night.

An idea, maybe a rough wireframe all IDE's and tools ready to go.

</comment><comment><USER11> I paid an elancer to make my app. He did it over the weekend. I still take credit :)

</comment><comment><USER12> Pick smaller more approachable projects / problems and you can.

</comment><comment><USER13> > I think, I wouldn't even try this...

Then maybe that's why you'll never succeed in it :)

</comment><comment><USER14> Most semi-competent developers can build SOMEthing in a weekend, but the trick is making something that actually works at scale, or works for more than a single user, or providing any kind of audit trail. In short, almost all weekend projects are a hack.

The big features that people like, the UI/UX polish that makes it easy to use, the scalable backend that lets it work under load -- those things aren't generally even considered for a weekend project.

That's not to say that there aren't some people who don't produce brilliance over a weekend, but it really is the exception, not the rule.

</comment><comment><USER15> Those people aren't creating a startup in a weekend, they're creating a web app in the weekend. There's a big difference.

Web apps don't need legal structure, a brand identity, customers, revenues, profits, hell they don't even need a name.

<comment><USER16> agreed and it's even easier to start with just you and your idea.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your most favourite editor shortcuts? - <AUTHOR> Name the editor, shortcut and what it does. <comment><USER2> You can copy and paste text by selecting it and pressing CTRL+C to copy it and then CTRL+V to paste it. It's my favorite.

</comment><comment><USER3> For standard CUA editors: Control + Shift + Arrow-key to highlight words.

But I use Emacs so everything I do is a shortcut. Maybe my favorite Emacs shortcut is actually a short-cut framework called Hydra. You enter a temporary state where all key-bindings are shadowed with custom bindings, allowing single key presses to perform anything.

</comment><comment><USER4> Vscode (and others): cmd+shift+f to search in files, and related shortcuts to navigate through the search results and quickly open the matches files. I use it literally hundreds of times a day often with regexps, especially in projects with several heterogeneous files (scripts, makefiles, Kubernetes manifests, ...). If I had to reach the mouse every time I do a project search, my productivity would plummet.

On a more meta, cmd+shift+p to open the command palette so I can execute commands by fuzzy matching, so you can do some random actions without having to navigate the UI manually (typical things I do could be view git log, stash something, stage a chunk of the file, ...).

</comment><comment><USER5> Intellij's Alt-J (multi-select) and Ctrl-W (progressive select) are the most productive for me.</comment>


Amazon-backed startup makes digital payment possible without Internet - <AUTHOR> https://retail.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/e-commerce/e-tailing/this-amazon-backed-startup-makes-digital-payment-possible-without-internet/71044782 <comment><USER2> I have so many questions after reading this. What is this "sticker" that they provide for PoS integration?

> The six-year-old startup earns revenue by charging a license fee for its > product from payment instrument issuers. From merchants, it charges a fee on > every transaction. The firm is currently at a pre-revenue stage.

So... do they have any revenue or not? I'll take it as a no.

> over 3,20,00 merchants across the country have adopted the ToneTag > technology

Okay.

The technology is pretty interesting. Many years ago I wrote a JS implementation for Chirp which used a similar audio protocol. For payments especially, though, it seems dead on the water: there is no user experience advantage at all over NFC, Bluetooth (and now UWB), and even a $10 phone has Bluetooth these days.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't really get how this works. Since it is completely offline, what's stopping someone from paying some amount, but not subtracting it from their account? I guess each party could sync the transactions when they get back online, but this seems messy.</comment>