Wheatstone System - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheatstone_system <comment><USER2> Charles Wheatstone was an interesting character. Obviously an extremely intelligent person, but it's a little unclear how many things he directly invented and how many were from his employees. The wide variety of his inventions is quite interesting, and the three I can think of off the top of my head; telegraph machines, railway points, the English concertina; are pretty diverse!

My knowledge is more in the concertina area of that, where I believe that Louis Lachenal is actually the source of a lot of the developments at Wheatstone before he left and set up a competing company (Lachenal). Sources are hard/impossible to come by on the internet for that, as most of the people who are experts in this are rather old by this point. I suspect that CW was a bit of a serial inventor whose attention wasn't held for long :)

FWIW I have a 1930 Wheatstone Maccann Duet concertina that I play regularly, and it is rather beautifully made.

EDIT: I was sure he was involved in the invention of railway point systems but I now can't find any references, annoyingly.

<comment><USER3> The most famous thing I know about that is named after him is the Wheatstone Bridge, which was invented by Samuel Hunter Christie...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems like it would have been easier to just take the paper tape and punch either circles (dots) or ovals (dashes) and have conductors pushed up against the tape. Whenever the conductors touch (through cut-out gaps in the paper), they transmit tone.

No need for compound levers, just some springs. And a mechanism to pull the paper at a fixed rate

</comment><comment><USER5> I would have loved for us to have at least one era of widespread mechanical computing. The World Wars jolted and sped us up too much to have some steampunk. :(

<comment><USER6> The cat whisker radio was invented in 1906, 10-years prior to WW1, which is what eventually led to the transistor-revolution.

It took a few decades before people used non-linear electronics to create negative-feedback circuits (leading to modern electrical circuits), but the groundwork to discover modern electronics as really all ready before WW1.

Apparently, the the vacuum tube diode was 1904. Not yet an amplifier, but the age of electronics is nigh. True, the 1940s made amplifiers cheaper with semiconductor circuits, but everything you do with semiconductors you could do with vacuum tubes (albeit at much higher prices, more waste-electricty, and lower reliability).

\</comment></comment><comment>

WW1 did speed things up a bit. Light-cavalry messengers were still deployed in WW1 despite the invention of cars and radios... the war made it obvious that light-cavalry was finally obsolete.

Horse-based transport required ~30% of all deliveries to be horsefeed, while oil delivered by trucks is far more efficient. Horses require a period of training: where the riders and the horses learn to work together... if a horse (or rider) died, it would be months before a new rider would be proficient and back to delivering messages.

</comment><comment><USER7> Charles Wheatstone entered into a joint partnership with William Cooke and this led to the foundation of the English Telegraph Company which eventually became the GPO.

The money he got was used to fund Ada Lovelace (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#First_computer_pr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#First_computer_program)) to translate the notes on Babbage's lectures into English and to create the notes that included the first computer program.

Subsequently the GPO funded the development of the Colossus computer by Tommy Flowers according to the work of Max Newman ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers#World_War_II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers#World_War_II))

<comment><USER8> What is the GPO. Not the US Government Printing Office I presume. Not the British General Post Office, as that seems to have been founded before the telegraph? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Post_Office](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Post_Office)

<comment><USER7> The british one! It was founded for letters, but subsumed the private telegraph companies and telephony as it evolved.</comment></comment></comment>


Growing a Language, by Guy Steele - <AUTHOR> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8860158196198824415 <comment><USER2> When I saw Guy give this talk I was absolutely floored. Both the content and the style was impressive, the hand drawn transparencies, layered one on top of the other. It was the first time I realized one could give a talk with a high degree of style, that their were geniuses in our field. Guy and Gabriel's HOPL 50-in-50 talk was also very stylistic, but not as profound in content (more like entertainment).

Definitely one of the smartest and most talented persons in our field (OO PL).

</comment><comment><USER3> Some of the previous submissions:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=68918>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=92542>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122989>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150863>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152311> <\- 7 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=626380>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=827107>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2359174> <\- 21 comments

This is a fabulous talk that I thoroughly commend. It's also, perhaps, for a slightly limited audience, but it shouldn't be. I think every programmer should see the whole thing, but most won't bother. Which is a shame.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sadly, since the talk was recorded in 1998 only generics have been added to Java. In addition, generics based on erasure may have been added as a wart that can't easily be removed.

Happily, John Rose recently posted a proposal on how value types and tuples might look when added to Java:

<https://blogs.oracle.com/jrose/entry/value_types_in_the_vm>

</comment><comment><USER5> ⍝ I'm sure that GLS knows this, but ∆ (delta) is a valid APL symbol (APL\SV) that looks like one of the primitives but may be user-defined. As I recall (it's been a while since I sat in front of a Selectric with an appropriate typeball or a real 3270 with an overflowing ashtray sitting next to it), it's unfortunately the only one, so it was understandably handwaved away.

</comment><comment><USER6> Steele's approach to computer logic is always a delight.</comment>


The Google Wave chatting tool is too complicated for its own good. - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2232311/

<comment><USER2> Google was foolish to release Wave to non-developers this early. Now you have bozos like this guy complaining about the need for features that haven't been implemented just yet, like draft mode (suppresses live keystrokes.)

On top of that, for some reason guys like these seem to want to say something about Wave, but few have anything meaningful to say, especially the empty-husk tech pundits. So they'll just spout something empty that sounds nice.

I've been using Wave for months. It's great. It's early in development. It's called a preview for a reason.

Stop comparing it to Twitter. In fact, stop comparing x against Twitter, or y against Facebook, or z as the iPhone killer, etc. Gahhhh.

Also, dupe.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dupe: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881802>

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm with Mr. Manjoo here. Check out that screenshot -- it looks like an interface nightmare similar to AOL in the 90's. Where are my eyes supposed to go? What do I click on? Personally, I find this a noted departure from the simplicity I like in Google's other products -- this looks more like outlook than it does gmail.

I'm also curious about the potential use cases for such a tool. I can see students using this a lot, I guess, but I don't know if I see anything compelling enough to make me change the way I use email.

<comment><USER5> I see it more like a personal internet forum. Forums are great tools but you can never get all your friends and family to use the same one. Maybe wave can fix that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> With regard to the real-time transmission of what you type in chat, the only benefit I see in something like this is that you potentially avoid those IM conversations where one person changes the subject, and the other person is still typing something about what you had just been talking about. It can help avoid the sometimes disjointed topic changes because you can each see what the other is actively typing. Aside from that, it seems much more like a "we did it because we could" feature, and one that detracts from the experience more than it adds.

<comment><USER7> Good job the Googlers giving the presentation almost immediately mentioned that you'll be able to turn it off.</comment></comment>


Google boss: I'm very proud of our tax avoidance scheme - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/google-boss-im-very-proud-of-our-tax-avoidance-scheme-8411974.html

<comment><USER2> Tax evasion is not legal.

Tax planning is legal, and is ordering your financial affairs so that you pay the minimum tax legal. This is sometimes called tax avoidance.

Because of the behaviour of a number of companies and rich people tax avoidance has now come to be associated with the grey area around doing bizarre financial tricks, tricks which will be changed as the law catches up, to reduce tax obligations beyond a point that most people would call reasonable.

Very few people are asking for Google to pay full taxes. But if you have staff here, and you sell services here to people here, then you should probably pay some tax on those earnings here.

Google might be able to ride out the storm - there's not very many Google stores for vandals to deface. And they're lucky that they employ all those smart people. Any laws the UK gov makes will be fairly easy for Google to hop around.

(I day dream of Google AI / GA programming competitions where the algorithms battling for survival are those that robustly reduce tax burden to a fraction of a percent.)

</comment><comment><USER3> So Larry and Sergey don't want Google to be evil, but Eric certainly does and wants it known that he's an evil overlord. Now I understand their holy trinity!

I think the UK government will enact some clear laws that hurt Google as a result.

</comment><comment><USER4> funny how the real quote is twisted, "I am very proud of the structure that we set up. We did it based on the incentives that the governments offered us to operate."</comment>


The front page of The New York Times for May 24, 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1264427825639063553 <comment><USER2> Absolutely gutting to see. And this isn't even the full up-to-date list even for one country. Considering how the government is responding to the virus here, I'm a bit worried the UK newspapers will have to do multiple-page spreads soon enough if they want to do the same.

To preempt the cynics, yes, ultimately, this gesture won't change anything. No politician will look at it and say "Wow, we really should change our ways!" and suddenly find the cure. But it's good to see the media stand behind the people and give the time of day to those who are lost forever. It's a hopeful message, if anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> Everything turned into numbers and data; X cases, X deaths. We all talk about it so easily, check every day the changes but as far as I can see we lost the connection between these numbers and what they really represent. These numbers are human beings, and the slightest changes, one change even matter a lot. This is a good reminder from NYT in my opinion that numbers are us, actual people dying. Not some random computer-generated stuff. But of course you are right, no human life can change the perception of a politician and the games they play.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In 2003 I asked the NYT to list casualties of the Afghan and Iraq invasions on the front page but they told me they were satisfied to bury them in the middle of the newspaper. It was only ever a few names at a time, and Even that not every day.

Eventually they just stopped printing them at all.

<comment><USER4> I'm not trying to belittle those deaths and they should have put them on the first page, but didn't 5000 Americans die in Iraq? At this rate Coronavirus will kill 100 times that :o

<comment><USER5> Deaths in a war like Iraq were entirely preventable - no choice to go to war, no US deaths in Iraq.

<comment> dao- Pandemics are preventable. Pandemics escalating domestically is preventable.

<comment><USER5> Indeed, though the newspaper in question was all-in for the Iraq War initially while it has never been cheering on the pandemic.

[https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/26/pressandpublis...](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/26/pressandpublishing.usnews)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dao- Reminder that the US is undercounting, so 100,000 had died a while ago without anyone noticing that milestone:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/cov...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/covid-19-death- toll-undercounted/)

<comment><USER6> What really boggles my mind is to consider the next "milestone". The US lost 116,516 in WW1. We're probably less than 2 weeks from reaching that on paper, and probably past that in blood.

We passed 9/11 (on paper) on Mar 28. We passed Vietnam (on paper) on April 20. We're now passing WW1. This is the true scale that's completely evading our imaginations.

<comment><USER7> Following World War I the Spanish (lol) Flu killed almost 700,000 in the US.

<comment><USER6> It's somewhere around 400k for ww2. I'm really hoping these numbers don't become relevant. I was simply trying to make unimaginable numbers, imaginable.

<comment><USER7> I don't know that they're unimaginable. Right now the death count is about 1.25 times the death count for the 2017-2018 flu season. At any rate it fits within a context of many other illnesses and pandemics, and it makes much more sense to compare this virus to those rather than deaths from war (though there are discussions you could have about the direct relationship between the two in specific cases).

I'm not saying that you're doing so here, but evoking the language of war is a common rhetorical tactic. When you compare the deaths from this disease to wartime casualties it causes people to analyze them in similar ways, when the two have mostly non-overlapping causes, remedies, and knock-on effects. I actually believe that's what the New York Times is attempting to do with today's front page, and I think it's something to be avoided.

Edit: disregard if this turns out to be a bioweapon

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It makes me wonder. What if the U.S government had information about a terror attack that will happen in few months and thousands coud die from it, how will they act?

Probably in a lot more serious way than how they act towards this virus.

The world will become a safer place if we spend more on science and less on buying weapons

<comment><USER9> They'd empower the TSA to do more security theater. Much easier to pass, and gets a lot more visibility than science funding.

<comment><USER3> They've actually done this, adding taking travelers' temperature to the theatrics!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good one that the NYT also pushed the don't wear mask propaganda back in january/february. But hey people forget quickly

</comment><comment><USER11> Also the NYT: The Imperial College study forecast up to 2.2 million US deaths. (But that seems pretty unlikely at this point.)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/world/europe/coronavirus-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/world/europe/coronavirus- imperial-college-johnson.html)</comment>


Create New File in Finder. A script for Alfred App - <AUTHOR> http://ianisted.co.uk/new-file-for-alfred

<comment> w-ll See, this blew my mind.. I haven't owned an OSX device in some time, but recently picked up a mini to do some iOS work.

Now... I gotta give it to Apple, MOST of the interface is very slick, and sexy.. But.... I feel like they treat more heavy users as second class citizens. (And developers as 3rd).

Things like NO New File and NO easy way to copy the path out of finder drive me up a wall. I mean, thisn't new stuff. I shouldn't have to install a separate script to add a file to the directory im at in finder. This is -slash- should be stock in finder.

/rant

<comment><USER2> > Things like NO New File and NO easy way to copy the path out of finder drive > me up a wall.

While I don't of a way to copy the path to the clipboard, dragging files (or the proxy icon in the title bar) to the terminal will put the path there. That's usually sufficient for me.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A new version of the extension is now available. A better version of my new file extension is now available, thanks to a commenter on my blog. <http://ianisted.co.uk/new-file-for-alfred-2>

</comment><comment><USER3> I use and like Alfred but I think most of the people here are comfortable with terminal and uses it a lot. The touch command is way more easier, fast and "portable".

<comment><USER4> I use DTerm. You can assign a hotkey to invoke a terminal "sheet" at the top of any application window. It's great for performing tasks that are naturally faster in a shell, while working in GUI apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm gona file this under "tools I didn't know I needed until I saw it". Great job!</comment>


Ask HN: Non-localized email addresses OK? - <AUTHOR> Our startup is making our first foray into another country. We've just finished setting up our .com.au servers and we're starting alpha testing.
I'm curious to hear international folks' opinions about email addresses. Is it reasonable to provide email addresses like email@example.com, or should we parameterize* those to instead refer to email@example.com on the Australian site?
In case it makes a difference, this is for medium-to-large contract B2B work.
* Perhaps I should have said "parameterise" ;-) <comment><USER2> If B2B and internal working communication if the primary usage I think .com best as it feels more international company. Plus will save hassle if you have employees moving between countries as you grow.

If email supports B2C or will remain fixed regardless of employee movement I'd run the local domain address as it should help filter request origin.

I own the .com of my name (based in Australia) and do some marketing consulting. Someone owns the .com.au. in the same industry. I receive the occasional email from their business leads so people definitely confuse.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unless you are going to have "Perzon Onely" at "firstname.lastname@example.com" and "Perzon Twoly" at "firstname.lastname@example.com", I would recommend using only the main .com version while providing forwarding from any non-.com to the .com. In other words, if there is no intent of having the same name mean different people or different departments on the different locations, then they should all use the same location's address.

</comment><comment><USER4> If clients use the com.au domain on the web, the mail addresses should exist there also, because you can bet someone just remembers "contact@companywebsite", but an alias (so email@example.com ends up at email@example.com) is probably fine. It might look different once you start providing support for different countries with different languages.</comment>


Silverlight 3 available now - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/software/70860/silverlight-3-available-now <comment><USER2> There's a lot more information on Scott Gu's blog: [http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/07/10/silverligh...](http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/07/10/silverlight-3-released.aspx)

summary: HD media, graphics acceleration from GPUs, codecs: H.264, AAC and MPEG4, IIS Media services [free] helps to steram media (like the demo link from the article above), more UI controls, deep linking with maintenance of back/foward buttons in the browser, better text rendering and font support (i wonder what new font types), more networking API stuff for WCF...

and then on the tools side, they made improvements to blend: intellisense, prototyping designers, 'behaviors', and imports from photoshop & illustrator

</comment><comment><USER3> It's generally said that it takes until version 3 for a Microsoft product to be any good. They've done a remarkable job in reaching this magic milestone just a year and a bit after the first release.</comment>


Open source Covid-19 Dashboard. Unique stats. Country comparison. Trends. etc. - <AUTHOR> https://www.trackavirus.app/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've released a dashboard for analysing COVID-19 data across the globe. You can compare data by country and see daily changes. More features are coming. It's an open source project - everyone is welcome to contribute.

Key features:

* Growth rate week on week * Country comparison * Daily increases * World snapshot</comment>


Theora On Nokia N900 with optimized ARM and DSP code - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mjg.im/2010/04/16/theora-on-n900.html <comment><USER2> Does anyone have a reference on the slow fragment shader they ran into? I've not done much with the OpenGL ES hardware out there, but even the lowest end desktop GPU can handle such things without blinking. I wonder if it's a driver issue more so than a hardware capability issue.

<comment><USER3> <http://github.com/kinetiknz/plogg/blob/master/plogg.cpp#L495>

<comment><USER4> The "obvious color conversion" shader is 18 cycles on SGX530, the "slightly optimized routine" shader is 20 cycles, and if you take the "slightly optimized" shader, remove the lowp and mediump qualifiers and stick a "precision highp float;" at the top of the shader, you get a 7 cycle shader, which by my calculations should be able to meet your fill rate goal.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the suggestion. I made the suggested changes (check github for the latest) but it doesn't seem to be significantly faster than the other fragment shaders (within 0.1 FPS over a 150 second video). I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to investigate the performance/behaviour of the OpenGL pipeline on the N900.

How'd you come up with the cycle counts? I'm new to GLSL, so any documentation beyond the spec would be super useful to me.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Book flights with Trippeo (exclusive rates) - <AUTHOR> http://trippeo.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, CEO of Trippeo here. We just released our flight booking portal this morning where you can book flights (and track expenses) with Trippeo. We don't re-direct you to a 3rd party booking site - you search and booking directly with Trippeo. We have secured some pretty decent rates for North American flights and I welcome you to give it a try. You'll have to sign in to Trippeo to view the flight portal.</comment>


New Vista Activation Bug Not Reported Yet - <AUTHOR> http://forums.microsoft.com/Genuine/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2206707&SiteID=25 My brand-new laptop woke up with Vista updates and a screen that my key was no longer genuine.   The individual key on the bottom of the laptop didn't work any better than the Dell OEM key it came with.  After trying System Restore from the Repair prompt during reboot, I'm told I can't restore because a file already exists.  My system diagnostics and hard drive are 100%.  It seems the WGA saga continues. <comment><AUTHOR> I defended Vista in response to Matt's post. Well, my brand-new laptop decided to wake up from sleep and install multiple Vista updates overnight. Now, a message shows my key is no longer genuine. The individual key on the bottom of the laptop didn't work any better than the Dell OEM key it came with. After trying System Restore from the Repair prompt during reboot (via a Dell Tech's prompt), I'm told I can't restore because a file already exists. My system diagnostics and hard drive are 100%. It seems the Windows Genuine Activation saga continues--it says the status of my operating system is unknown. It suggests I... revisit the same page again and find out the same thing.

<comment><USER2> Use Ubuntu.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's actually a good answer. I can install Ubuntu and try to run Vista inside VMWare inside it, and only when I need it.

<comment><USER2> Thats exactly what I do, but with Windows XP

<comment><USER3> I do the opposite - run Ubuntu inside VMWare on a WinXP host.

At the time I bought my computer, Linux didn't work well on it - no drivers for the wireless. So by running XP as the host, I could let Microsoft handle the drivers and then have VMWare mooch off them via bridged networking.

It's probably better now, but I've gotten used to this setup, so I see no real reason to change until I get my next computer.

<comment><USER2> What I use is VirtualBox, not VMWare.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


EA Drops Out of E3 - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2016/01/27/ea-drops-out-of-e3/?xid=yahoo_fortune <comment><USER2> Eh, this isn't really much of a story. I had to go to E3 for work back in 2002, 2003, 2004 and I've heard from former colleagues that the show has drastically changed...and not for the better.

I wouldn't be concerned about other companies dropping out and trying to pull people away from the LACC, there isn't much space for other companies to run their own large invents in lieu of renting space at E3</comment>


Nate Silver Finds Unusual Patterns in a Polling Firm's Data. Was it fabricated? - <AUTHOR> http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/09/comparison-study-unusual-patterns-in.html <comment><USER2> This is pretty damning stuff. In a well-functioning media environment, it would be sufficient to seriously damage the credibility of the pollster involved (Strategic Vision), or at least shift the burden to them to explain their behavior.

Instead, we already see clues about what will happen: the pollster is threatening a lawsuit, which will be a sure loser but nonetheless drain resources and time from its target (either Nate himself or fivethirtyeight). The polls from the offending pollster will, I'm completely certain, be reported with utter credulity in the 2010 election cycle and beyond. The fact that the books are cooked will not even be mentioned in media reports, and will ultimately matter not at all.

This is because we simply do not have a well-functioning media environment.

<comment><USER3> I think their lack of disclosure has already severely damaged them.

Ultimately, in this case it would seem the damage will be pretty brutal unless Nate Silver was wrong. Either they don't sue and don't disclose and the result is no one trusts them enough to pay for their polling (after all, what's the point in paying for a poll if it's going to come under question afterwards?) or they'll sue while not releasing the support for their polls/data on their merits - and that also opens them up to discovery which could be even more damaging.

The best case scenario at this point is if they can publicly prove Nate Silver is wrong. And based on their policies in the past of not releasing the additional supporting data, I suspect this won't happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> With newspapers suffering so much, it's refreshing to see a blogger taking the time to perform investigations like this. We need more of this.

<comment><USER3> My sense has been newspapers have been suffering so much _because_ they don't take the time to perform investigations like this. This is hardly the only example with the Acorn videos quite recently for instance. We do definitely need more of this.

<comment><USER5> The trouble with the Acorn videos is that they're a partisan attempt to discredit the opposition. While the videos themselves seem legit, I'd rather not leave exposes of political groups up to their political enemies. Political enemies only want to discredit their opponents--they're not interested in truth, and for every Acorn video there's a Swift Boat smear campaign with no basis in fact.

<comment><USER6> > The trouble with the Acorn videos is that they're a partisan attempt to > discredit the opposition.

We already know how the civility argument works. The tea-party folks are bringing violence to US politics and the G20 thugs are crumpets and milk.

> While the videos themselves seem legit, I'd rather not leave exposes of > political groups up to their political enemies.

Bully for you, but they're pretty much the only folks willing to do the work.

If you don't like the way news is made, make your own.

<comment><USER5> I wasn't making a civility argument and I don't have the time in my life to fix every social problem I can identify.

Do you have a constructive point to make? You've taken everything I said completely out of context and made completely irrelevant responses. As it happens, the last sentence is the central point of my comment, and serves to motivate and justify the preceding two sentences. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear enough.

Maybe it would be useful to me to remember that a lot of people read English as if they were finite automata--once they read a given sentence they get their heads into a given state, even if the sentence immediately following it provides essential context to what I actually meant.

<comment><USER6> > I don't have the time in my life to fix every social problem I can identify.

I didn't say that you did. However, you do live in a world with those nasty social problems....

> Do you have a constructive point to make?

My point is that either you just bitch or you set up unreasonable constraints. The difference between the two or your reasons for them may be important to you, but the end result is pretty much the same.

> You've taken everything I said completely out of context and made completely > irrelevant responses. As it happens, the last sentence is the central point > of my comment, and serves to motivate and justify the preceding two > sentences.

Oh really? Let's review that last sentence "Political enemies only want to discredit their opponents--they're not interested in truth, and for every Acorn video there's a Swift Boat smear campaign with no basis in fact."

That sentence says that you find it likely that the Acorn tapers managed to capture some "fact" and may have been interested in truth. Yet, that's not good enough for you. Since the folks with appropriate motives aren't doing the work, dismissing folks with "bad motives" means that you're going to do without.

Someone else already pointed out that your "no basis in fact" statement is false so it's unclear why you'd bring up that sentence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Particularly interesting is the further analysis done in the comments where similar statistical methods are used to analyse other polling agencies' results. Nearly every single one seems to line up to look almost exactly like the Quinnipiac results, further damning Strategic Vision. But what interests me more is the question of exactly _why_ this distribution comes up; it's not Benford's Law, since probabilities aren't a power-law distribution, yet it seems consistent across multiple sources.

</comment><comment><USER8> A true statistics hacker. I love reading his analysis--he was the go to source during the election for anything poll related.

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's a bit more on the subject: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846514>

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems to me that if there were one data source I would expect to _not_ be consistent with Benford's law it would be polling data. Benford's law is usually seen in numbers that follow some skewed distribution. Polling data groups around maybe 45% depending on the number undecided. I don't know what I would expect, but polling extremely close races, or polling close to the election, I would expect to see lots of high digits (6 7 8 9). I wouldn't expect many 41 or 31 (those questions are uninteresting) so the 1s come from mostly 51s.

He may be right, but I'm going to need a little more convincing if someone wants to assume that polling data would exhibit Benford's law.</comment>


Mixpanel/WePay Tech Talk: PHP Inventor Rasmus Lerdorf (Live Video) - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/12416792

<comment><USER2> here's the description of the talk:

Join mixpanel, WePay, and Hacker Dojo as Rasmus Lerdorf takes a close look at Wordpress and Facebook's HipHop PHP compiler as examples in teaching a systematic approach to benchmarking, profiling, and optimizing web applications.

While his examples are PHP-specific, many of the tools like Callgrind, strace, vmstat, and others are applicable to any UNIX-based web app.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> also, here are the slides: <http://talks.php.net/show/dojo/></comment>


Fedora on RISC-V bootable disk image - <AUTHOR> https://fedorapeople.org/groups/risc-v/disk-images/ <comment><USER2> Seems a good time to re-mention the ever impressive Fabrice Bellard and his RISCVEMU [1] which ran an early version of Fedora already half a year ago. You can even run it in the browser [2] ... and there's a version with X in the browser too! [3]. RISCVEMU is pretty fast but I don't know how it compares to QEMU (ironically also originally by him).

[1] [https://bellard.org/riscvemu/](https://bellard.org/riscvemu/)

[2] [https://bellard.org/jslinux/](https://bellard.org/jslinux/)

[3] [https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?cpu=riscv32&url=https://...](https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?cpu=riscv32&url=https://bellard.org/jslinux/buildroot- riscv32-xwin.cfg&graphic=1)

EDIT: formatting

</comment><comment><USER3> What kind of hardware does one run this on. Are there SBCs in the wild running RISC-V? Or are people running this in emulation? I've been a little out of the loop in terms of what's available.

Exciting to see any movement on there being more / more open architectures out there. Would be amazing if there were ever workstation competitive performance from RISC-V

<comment><AUTHOR> We're likely a year or longer away from high performance cheap RISC-V boards. As the sister comment mentions, the HiFive Unleashed will run this, but it's an expensive development board, likely won't have great performance, and will probably have bugs (going from my experience with other pre-release hardware).

However there _is_ a very stable QEMU branch (see readme.txt file in the link) which supports multiple vCPUs and is fast enough for development if your host hardware is reasonable.

The image has all the things you'd expect from a Linux development environment: you can ssh in, there's GCC 7.3.1, Perl 5.26, Python 2 & 3, you can create user accounts, use systemd etc.

<comment><USER4> Out of curiosity, is there a difference in performance between an x86-64 Fedora under QEMU and a RISC-V one?

<comment><AUTHOR> The x86-64 one is likely to be using KVM (assuming the host is the same) so it would run at least one order of magnitude faster.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Are black holes made of dark energy? - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-09-black-holes-dark-energy.html <comment><USER2> So this is something I was thinking about recently. Given that quantum harmonic oscillation indicates that quanta are actually defined as harmonics of a fundamental frequency, what if dark matter is simply all energy at a frequency that isn't a harmonic? Likewise, what if dark energy is simply the quantum harmonic oscillator that is our universe undergoing damping? That is to say, it's not so much that space is expanding as it is that the frequency of our universe is diminishing: lower frequency = higher wavelength, which appears to us like space is growing. The graph of an oscillator undergoing damping looks an awful lot like models of dark energy expansion of the universe.

If this were the case, we could think of black holes as nodes on this wave.

<comment><USER3> No. The solution to the problem you are proposing is well known and is part of any (advanced?) QM course, and it doesn't involve dark matter or dark energy.

In an harmonic oscillator (an ideal perfect spring with an ideal punctual mass) the energies are (2n+1)ħ/2*ω. They are all multiples of the minimal value for this oscillator. Note that it is a different set of values for each oscillator.

Each of these energies is associated with a wavefunction with a well defined energy. Combining all these wavefunctions you can represent any wavefunction. (The technical term is "orthonormal base", or simply "base".) This is easy to prove. More details in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_harmonic_oscillator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_harmonic_oscillator)

So if you try to put the oscillator in a state that is not a wavefunction with a well defined energy, the state can be represented as a linear combination of the wavefunction with a well defined energy, and it will evolve following the laws of QM. It will not get transformed to dark energy or dark matter or get lost by damping.

If you later make measure the energy of the harmonic oscillator, the arbitrary wavefunction will colapse to a wavefunction with a well defined energy, and the probabilities are easy to calculate knowing how the initial state was decomposed in wavefunction with a well defined energy. If you measure the position or speed, the calculation is similar but there are a few more technical details.

In a more realistic system like an Hydrogen atoms, the energies are not multiples of a minimal value, the energies are like -E0/n^2. The corresponding wavefunctions are a base anyway, so any initial state can be decomposed in wavefunction with a well defined energy (that sometimes are calles "orbitals", but sometimes more general states are called "orbitals"). So there is no a fundamental frequency, there is no a minimal energy that is the divisor of all the energies, there is no dark energy.

In atoms with more electrons the calculations are more complicated, there is no nice formula for the energies, but is anyway possible to decompose any initial state without using dark energy.

<comment><USER4> Interesting question, but also interesting answer. Thanks for the detailed response!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As usual, phys.org makes claims that go way beyond what the actual paper justifies. The actual paper is here:

[https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab32da](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab32da)

The phys.org article says "Two University of Hawaii at Manoa researchers have identified and corrected a subtle error that was made when applying Einstein's equations to model the growth of the universe". A more accurate phrasing would be that the researchers have _proposed_ a modified model. Whether their proposal is valid remains to be seen as other researchers in the field check their work.

<comment><USER6> I've always felt that phys.org is a reliable, less-sensationalized source for interesting science articles. Is it common for them to "make claims that go way beyond what the paper justifies"?

<comment><USER5> _> Is it common for them to "make claims that go way beyond what the paper justifies"?_

I've seen it enough times that it doesn't surprise me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is actually a pretty well known, but not generally accepted alternative theory of dark energy called backreaction [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back- reaction#Cosmology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-reaction#Cosmology)

</comment><comment><USER8> > _In 1998, two independent teams of astronomers discovered that the expansion > of the Universe is accelerating, consistent with the presence of a uniform > contribution of Dark Energy. It was not recognized, however, that GEODEs > could contribute in this way. With the corrected formalism, Croker and > Weiner showed that if a fraction of the oldest stars collapsed into GEODEs, > instead of black holes, their averaged contribution today would naturally > produce the required uniform Dark Energy._

Hmmm, if this is true, then it means it's possible (in principle) to engineer the expansion rate of the universe by either preventing or causing the collapse of stars in a certain way. See the concept of Star Lifting: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting)

</comment><comment><USER9> Where did the dark energy come from? Before collapse these are just normal big stars, we cannot detect dark energy from them, but after explosion they suddenly become GEODE teemed with dark energy? I am a bit confused.

<comment><USER10> Dark energy is simply a theory with a classical hidden constant, which solves all the measurements and theories, but does most likely not exist.

Until a better theory explains more (like the Mond or a better gravity theory), it will stay with us for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm reminded about Mach's principle [0]. Its interesting to see a connection between local structure and then something more global.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach%27s_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach%27s_principle)

</comment><comment><USER12> _One consequence of this study is that the growth rate of the universe provides information about what happens to stars at the end of their lives. Astronomers typically assume that large stars form black holes when they die, but this is not the only possible outcome. In 1966, Erast Gliner, a young physicist at the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in Leningrad, proposed an alternative hypothesis that very large stars should collapse into what could now be called Generic Objects of Dark Energy (GEODEs). These appear to be black holes when viewed from the outside but, unlike black holes, they contain Dark Energy instead of a singularity._

</comment><comment><USER13> I only have up to university quantum (so no GR), but my understanding was that dark energy was believed to be equally distributed throughout all of space.

How would a GEODE produce such an effect?

<comment><USER14> I haven't done any physics past high school but isn't dark energy basically "Our equations don't work out, let's give our error term a name and act like it's all good"?

I'm sure this is oversimplified or outright wrong, can anyone correct me?

<comment><USER15> The reality is closer to:

We have a lot of observational evidence that the equations are very accurate.

But when we put all the mass we know about into the equations, the result of the equation doesn't match our observations.

Since we have a lot of evidence that the equations are very accurate, then it's more likely that there's more mass we haven't accounted for.

(at least for dark matter)

<comment><USER16> That's dark matter, dark energy is something else entirely, with much flimsier data and evidence.

<comment><USER15> whoops, I thought they said dark energy/matter

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just a clarification, the article states that GEODEs are _not_ black holes, they just look similar from the outside since they are almost dense enough but not quite.

</comment><comment><USER18> Does dark energy or dark matter box-in our way of thinking?

Have we actually proved scientifically there's a force or physical matter acting on something and it's not just being obscured from our vantage point?

Isn't dark energy/matter only visible at huge scales? Is there any pictures of dark energy or matter in any localized system? We didn't even know the correct color of Pluto until we got close, how could we know if something isn't actually there, or spacetime just twists and contorts for the sake of it without outside interaction/gravity acting on it?

Isn't there also a chance we're in a literal simulation of Plato's cave allegory until we see stuff up close? Not in the sense he meant it, but in the sense we're using assumptions/tools that involve inference. Wouldn't this risk assigning character/classifications to things that don't turn out to be true in the end?

<comment><USER19> _Have we actually proved scientifically there 's a force or physical matter acting on something and it's not just being obscured from our vantage point?_

\-- In the case of dark matter, the answer is yes. Dark matter has been indirectly observed from the gravitational lensing of the dark matter shrouds surrounding galaxies - notably in situations where the shrouds of two colliding galaxies separate from the galaxies themselves. It's a "picture" as exact as many things astronomers have observed.

<comment><USER4> > in situations where the shrouds of two colliding galaxies separate from the > galaxies themselves

TIL...

That's the first time I've read that. Sounds interesting, have you got any links?

<comment><USER20> Sounds like he's talking about the bullet cluster...

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

Although that's a colliding pair of galaxy clusters. I'm not currently aware of any examples of this effect being observed for just two galaxies.

<comment><USER4> Awesome, thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Interesting to see a causal connection from local scopes to universal. I've been thinking about the converse. A fair number of theories of black holes, like the event horizon firewall, depend on interaction with cosmic background radiation. If fundamental properties of black holes are tied to the circumstances of the formation of the universe they live in, and those properties end up, and those properties are also tied to quantum gravity, that would mean there's an interesting connection between the three story of the universe's formation and it's fundamental laws. I realize I'm pretty deep into crackpot territory, even with all the if's, but it's at least a fun idea.

</comment><comment><USER22> A shower thought after watching some recent _PBS Space Time_ videos: if the (hypothetical) inflaton field of the early universe is associated with certain high energy density conditions, could the interior of a black hole (specifically the region near what would be the singularity under vanilla general relativity) reproduce those conditions and return the inflaton field to the inflation-era state?

Related thought: what would it look like from the outside if a patch of the universe returned to inflation? Does it make any difference from the observer's POV if this change occurs inside or outside an event horizon?

</comment><comment><USER23> What is meant here by "exotic crust" of the black hole. I assume it's something _inside_ the event horizon

<comment><USER16> These objects would no longer be black holes, and would not have event horizons.

LIGO and other detects are not able to tell the difference. Black holes are assumed based on the mass, event horizons have never been detected, just [mathematically] assumed.

<comment><USER24> Does this not count as detection of an event horizon? Or is it just considered strong circumstantial evidence?

[https://eventhorizontelescope.org/](https://eventhorizontelescope.org/)

<comment><USER16> No, that is not evidence of an event horizon, it's not circumstantial evidence either because it pre-supposes the existence of one.

Despite the name, no event horizon was directly photographed. Partly because event horizon's are not actually visible LOL.

The photo taken can not distinguish between a true black hole, and a super massive object of the same mass.

We just assume that if you have that much mass there is no force that is capable of preventing it from becoming a black hole.

But, that's not proof that such a force does not exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> For the last few days I've been trying to make as many associations as possible between (the big bang, the progression of the universe, and the end of the universe) and a black hole's progression. For some reason this makes me think yet again that the universe might be inside a black hole.

<comment><USER26> Is that black hole inside another black hole?

<comment><USER27> turtles all the way down ....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Generic Objects of Dark Energy... Is this exotic matter with negative energy?

</comment><comment><USER29> Anyone have access to E.B. Gliner's 1966 paper describing a GEODE?

<comment><USER30> I think this is it: [http://www.jetp.ac.ru/cgi- bin/dn/e_022_02_0378.pdf](http://www.jetp.ac.ru/cgi-bin/dn/e_022_02_0378.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Dark energy is a placeholder word to explain a phenomena scientists can't understand. Before Einstein they didn't know what the medium was for light waves. For water waves it is obviously water, what does light use to travel through? They created this phrase called "ether" light traveled through "ether". Dark energy and dark matter are exactly the same case.

<comment><USER32> Physicists don't actually call it dark energy, that word is for journalists. Physicists call it the cosmological constant.</comment></comment>


On Go - <AUTHOR> http://dehora.net/journal/2013/06/01/on-go/ <comment><USER2> The lack of exceptions just seems like a total bear to me. I wrote C for 10 years and did tons of stuff like:

        Open file "foobar.dat". If that fails, abort with this error.
        Read the first 4 bytes into x.
          If that fails, abort with a different error.
        Seek to byte x. If that fails, abort with yet another error.

and so on, and so on, over and over again. Python's exceptions are a huge improvement over this pattern of timidly asking permission to do anything. The fact is there are so, so many occasions where you want to abort a computation if one of the many steps along the way goes wrong. Something like Haskell's Maybe monad is a good way of attacking the problem too.

But Go has neither. It seems to just offer the bad old clumsy C way and say, "Deal with it." To those who have written real Go programs, I'm honestly wondering: how is this not a pain in the ass?

<comment><USER3> Unlike C, Go isn't overloading what is returned, it has an extra param, and the language has been baked to handle doing like initialization and checks in single line if statements. It does force the developer who might actually have a clue what the exception is and how to fix it to handle it, but IMHO this is a good thing. Go forces lots of things like this (not using an import, won't compile; not using a variable, won't compile).

Honestly, compared to the exception hellscapes I have had to deal with in Java and C++ --- it seems like the path of least surprise. Which incidentally has been my favorite things about Go, the low number of surprises.

A lot of using Go in real work has gone against my expectations. There are a lot of things I initially saw as huge warts (lack of exceptions, generics and import versions), but I liked channels enough (Erlang background) to give it a shot. So far, I have been delighted by using it as a stack (build cycle, deploy method, terse C'ish syntax).

<comment><USER4> The problem with this "forcing" that go does is that it ALSO includes _, which means it's inevitable that lazy developers will get tired of handling error and just shunt it into _.

<comment><USER5> You can't stop people from being lazy. Look at all the Java and Python code that forcefully ignores exceptions.

It _is_ something that can be caught with static analysis, however. Someone recently put together an appropriate tool[1] for Go, in fact. It seems to work very well.

[1]<https://github.com/kisielk/errcheck>

<comment><USER6> To be fair, the ability to use static analysis for error code checking is not something that is unique to Go. There was a paper recently on doing this for C (which found hundreds of bugs in the Linux kernel due to incorrect error code handling):

<http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~liblit/ghc-2011/ghc-2011.pdf>

(Incidentally, the hard part of this analysis is not verifying that you checked the error, it's verifying that you propagated the error codes properly—that requires analyzing higher-order control flow.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A tip from someone that just recently started using Go: read the spec! I wasted some time early on trying to learn things that are very clearly and simply spelled out in the spec. The Tour + Spec is really all you need if you're a somewhat experienced programmer.

The spec is well written and tiny compared to most languages, and it's probably the only thoroughly accurate and complete Go reference at the moment.

Step 1. <http://tour.golang.org/> Step 2. <http://golang.org/ref/spec>

<comment><USER8> Effective Go (<http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html>) and Go by Example (<https://gobyexample.com/>) are also great. The former is especially so if you want to learn Go idioms and understand why things are done. It's a good complement to the spec.

<comment><USER3> For some reason, I really enjoy showing this slideshow to people -> [http://blog.menfin.info/Presentations/20120709_Golang_introd...](http://blog.menfin.info/Presentations/20120709_Golang_introduction) ... it is short, gets across a lot of the core ideas very quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love how the dialogue on HN about Go has gone from pessimism and largely uninformed criticism, to regurgitation of the team's own talking points ["simple, orthogonal features"], to a more nuanced appreciation of what trade- offs Go makes.

Hopefully these are individual developers shifting through a continuum of enlightenment, rather than the conversation itself migrating to a more enlightened population.

This last question is testable, of course, though sadly HN does not offer an official API.

<comment><USER10> Those of us who think that Go is a truly sad language to release at modern times (nullability everywhere, no parameteric polymorphism, no sums, products for errors instead of sums, ...) have just lost interest in explaining over and over again why a new language without those features belongs in the 1970's or 1980's, and not modern times.

The crowd that remains is mostly composed of people who have never used an ML- style language (Haskell, OCaml, F#, SML, ..) and come from a background of C, Java and Python. Go is definitely an improvement over these languages in many areas.

<comment><USER3> As a pragmatist and someone who enjoys Haskell and F#, I find your comments very academic. There will always be less popular, feature packed fun languages like Rust, Haskell and OCaml, and there will always be teams that use them to great advantage (Jane Street). But IMHO, lots of these systems are a little creaky in the support structures (cabal for example) and deploy features.

That said, I think a lot of what makes Go great is because of its simplicity, lack of surprises, and general lack of cleverness. You can get your hands around the language features very easily, in mere hours.

Beyond that, I think the ease of building tooling on top of the AST (or in general), the ease of deploying code to production, the build speeds, the inclusion of go get and fmt, the policies around imports and variable use (use or lose) all add up to be more than the sum of its parts. It is very obviously built by a team looking to use it in production, on real projects, as soon as possible.

<comment><USER10> > But IMHO, lots of these systems are a little creaky in the support > structures (cabal for example) and deploy features

Cabal used to be horrendous. Now it's just mediocre, and better than the distribution tools I've seen in the Python world (e.g: easy_install). Much better than the lack of distribution tools in the C and C++ world.

> That said, I think a lot of what makes Go great is because of its > simplicity, lack of surprises, and general lack of cleverness. You can get > your hands around the language features very easily, in mere hours

nil everywhere is an easy to explain language feature. It might be easier to explain than pattern matching. It's definitely worse though.

I'm not saying that Go has no strong points in its favor.

It has plenty surrounding it that you mention.

It's just sad that this is all around such a poor language.

<comment><USER3> The horror of python dependencies, build and deploy (I currently am working on a 250k+ LOC python project) is part of what made me really love what is around the edges of Go.

There is a lot of "worse" in Go. It seems the "worse" choices were for 3 reasons: (1) make the language simpler, and (2) make the compiler / tooling simpler to build or (3) ship a production usable product in X time. I think all might yield benefits in the long term.

Getting angry about a "poor language" is pointless, there are hundreds. It seems people get more angry that it might get popular more than their favorite language. For a bit, I was a bit of a stick in the mud about Go because I was hoping Erlang (maybe with Elixir) would take off. After that I was worried it might get popular before Rust had a chance to get off the ground.

But, after having spent some time with it -- I have grown to like its odd, pragmatic mix of tooling and features.

<comment><USER10> I didn't say I was angry. I said a new language that repeats past mistakes _again_ is sad.

The authors of Eiffel went ahead and paid a very dear price to fix their nullability-everywhere. The C# author says if he could go back in time and fix one design mistake in the language, it would be the nullability-everywhere mistake. That it is responsible for a huge percentage of field issues with C#.

Yet Go was designed after these, and still put in nullability everywhere.

Seeing society pour tonnes of resources into a bad language, when we could all have benefited from these resources being poured into a good one is sad. Having a new language with new approaches and ideas is great. But one that we already know will create poorer quality software, not so great.

What a huge waste of talent and resources we're seeing here.

P.S: Cabal is not really so bad anymore.

My experience when using "cabal install <pkgname>" is generally 90% success, and 9% failures that I can fix by a simple "cabal unpack" on some overly restrictive package to fix its version constraints and carry on.

<comment><USER11> Fixing the "null" issue isn't straight-forward. If you eliminate it completely, then you need to add sum types to the language. If you provide nullable pointers in addition to non-nullable pointers, then you're adding complexity to the language by having two different kinds of pointers. It's a trade off. The Go designers chose a different side of that trade off than you would have. That's perfectly reasonable.

I don't think you appreciate arguments for pragmatism. I write plenty of C and Go code. I rarely run into null pointer errors in Go, while I run into plenty of them in C. It's possible to mitigate the Billion Dollar Mistake without encoding it into the type system.

This null issue has come up plenty of times on the Go mailing list. Search for the billion dollar mistake, and you should find some responses from the Go devs.

> But one that we already know will create poorer quality software

We do? I think you meant, "I believe it will create ...".

<comment><USER12> Adding sum types to the language is not a bad thing. In fact, it's a great thing, even outside of nullability! It would also make error handling much neater--and not a special case--in Go. Sum types also have a natural symmetry with structs, and in language design (just like in physics), I figure symmetry means you're on the right track.

Of course, to make both of these reasonable, you would also have to add parametric polymorphism. And while you're at it, you may as well throw in full type inference. (I mean, why not?)

These aren't gigantic changes, and it's already well-understood how to implement all these efficiently--OCaml has it all, along with a fast compiler that outputs fast code.

But Go doesn't. I really wish Go had taken more (i.e. _some_ ) inspiration from OCaml.

Also, ignoring the merits of this particular case, I don't agree that a decision is reasonable just because it's the "different side" of a tradeoff. Virtually _any_ choices can be recast as tradeoffs, but there are still wrong decisions to be made!

<comment><USER11> I know all about sum types. I love them. My central point was to show that removing nullability is a trade off rather than a freebie. I thought the context of the discussion made that clear. I feel that you did not address my point other than to say, "well yeah, but it's wrong."

> These aren't gigantic changes

Then we have a fundamental disagreement. Adding sum types and parametric polymorphism would drastically change the language. I am _not_ claiming that the change would be for better or worse.

> Also, ignoring the merits of this particular case, I don't agree that a > decision is reasonable just because it's the "different side" of a tradeoff. > Virtually any choices can be recast as tradeoffs, but there are still wrong > decisions to be made!

Could you point me to authoritative sources that state how languages should be designed?

Going by the character of your post, it seems like you don't care much for the cohesion of a language design. The Go devs care about this, _a lot_. So saying "we should add feature X, and while we're at it, Y too" without stating how those features will integrate with the rest of the language just isn't going to cut it for people who care about the totality of a language design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My biggest issues with Go are compatibilities with the C ABI and the lack of shared library support. I have not looked in a while, so I may be wrong, but here are my big questions: 1. Can C invoke a Go-compiled and exported callback/function? 2. Can I build a Go .so/.dll invokable via C or other non- Go FFI methods? 3. If I build a commercial Go lib for others to link with, how can I distribute it without distributing the Go source?

<comment><USER3> I suspect unless someone gets real exciting about this and modifies one of the toolchains, this won't happen in the near future. You can do (1) with some ugly syntax. Regarding (2) and (3) -- I know some projects are happening in both those spaces, but haven't kept up with them.

<comment><USER14> As far as I know, you can call from C(++) into go, as long as the outermost layer (main) is go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Everybody compares Go and Python. How is it so? Go compiles to a binary, implements static typing, got rid of classes, got rid of exceptions, and added lots of special purpose keywords on top of reinventing C's syntax. The only similarity I see is the "import" statement.

<comment><USER16> They both approximately match up on mental effort /friction/hassle for me, which largely seems to be coincidence since they _do_ have dissimilar feature sets. For example, it use to be that I would use Python when I thought that C (my language of choice) was going to be too much of a hassle; now I use Go when I think that C will be too much hassle.

I think this accounts for a large portion of the Go<->Python talk you see.

<comment><USER17> Keyword arguments with default values is the one Python feature that makes my Go code more verbose than my Python code.

      def f(a=11, b="some default", c=55.5, d=D()):
        #...

      f(c=44.4)

becomes

      type Config struct {
        a int
        b string
        c float
        d interface{}
      }

      func f(c *Config) {
        a := 11
        if c.a != 0 {
          a = c.a
        }
        b := "some default"
        if c.b != "" {
          b := c.b
        }
        c : = 55.5
        if c.c != 0.0 {
          c := c.c
        }
        d := new(D)
        if c.d != nil {
          d := c.d
        }
        //...
      }

      func main() {
        f(&Config{c: 44.4})
      }

<comment><USER5> I just solved a similar problem in a slower but fairly general way. It's not appropriate everywhere, but it works well for the use-case I built it for.

I can't share the actual code, unfortunately, but by using struct field tags, reflect, and json, you can end up with code that looks something like this:

        type FArgs struct {
            A int `def:"11"`
            B string `def:"\"some default\""`
        }
        func f(margs map[string]interface{}) {
            var args FArgs
            SetupArgs(margs, &args)
            // ...
        }

If f() is being called in a tight loop, your overhead can be enormous, but outside performance-critical code, it's probably good enough.

<comment><USER17> You're not just losing performance but also static type checking.

<comment><USER5> Not really. If the passed-in or default value doesn't convert to the field's type, SetupArgs panics.

Edit: Variations on this that offer compile-time type checking of passed-in values are possible, too. My use case wouldn't work well with that, though, because the function needs to be called by other functions that would have no clue about the FArgs struct.

You could instead do a version that just swaps in a default for any nil fields.

And in any case, you've got a lot more safety than the original Python code, no?

<comment><USER17> _"And in any case, you've got a lot more safety than the original Python code, no?"_

Only insofar as your approach puts the values back into a struct that can subsequently be used in a type safe manner. Arguably that's better than having no type safety at all.

But I think my main gripe with your design is that it is not just less type safe and slower, it also comes with more mental friction and verbosity than what Python does.

Granted, it's a lot less verbose than my Go code, which makes it a good solution in some scenarios. But in my view it's not a good general replacement for default keyword args and you didn't claim it was.

<comment><USER5> I certainly wasn't arguing it was a perfect substitute for default args, just that it was easier to manage than the example you gave.

The application I'm currently working on is mostly a direct port of Python code to Go. Python code I originally wrote. You needn't tell me it fails to accomplish all the things Python's default args do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I (a go noob) somehow got the impression that you're supposed to version your API when writing go libraries. ie, your library should be github.com/501/foo/v1 rather than github.com/501/foo. Can any go users comment on whether that's expected practice?

<comment><USER5> I suspect you got this erroneous impression due branches based on the version of Go they are compatible with.

Many projects maintain branches named for the Go version they are compatibile with, and the 'go get' tool automatically fetches the appropriate branch.

<comment><USER18> Actually I think I may have first picked it up from this vclock library: <http://labix.org/vclock>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Erlang does automatically parallelize over multiple cores. By default it will start one Erlang VM thread per core which work together to run the Erlang system. The Erlang VM also does automatic load balancing over the threads and even tries to shut down threads/cores if it detects they are not needed. It is possible to control how many Erlang VM threads you want at start-up and to lock them to cores as well, though the latter is not recommended. But as I said there is no need to do this.</comment>


Ask HN: Why shouldn't platforms be responsible for what they host? - <AUTHOR> The Communications Decency Act pretends platforms are somehow different from publishers. ISPs and such, sure, I see a benefit in not holding the way to get to the internet at large accountable for all the things one might encounter there.
Individual websites, though--Twitter, Facebook, example.com--how are they somehow different from traditional publishing platforms? If NBC decided they were going to allow anyone who felt like it broadcast anything they liked without supervision or editing, it would be shut down once the first reports of, "Hey, NBC is showing me child pornography and beheading videos" came in.
Social media's argument appears to be, "well, we just provide a free speech platform for horrible things. And after we cause damage and people complain, we take bad content down. In N years we'll have AI that can scan things that are posted before anyone else sees them, so we can ban things secretly, which is somehow compatible with our free speech mission."
Meanwhile, NBC has already figured out what every hacker ought to know. Blacklists don't work, whitelists do. Someone has to be responsible, experience whatever the content is first, and make a decision to broadcast it or not, and take the heat if they make a bad choice. It feels like tech execs are just piling ramparts of code and rare earth between themselves and any responsibility.
What's wrong with a world in which someone at youtube has to approve each cat video before posting it? Where if you want to post a live video of yourself murdering muslims, you have to get your own domain hosting account? <comment><USER2> Are you young to pay YouTube to hire the thousands of moderators that are going to sit and manually approve videos all day long?

There is nothing "wrong" with a video. You could argue about the morality of the action itself, but that's a separate issue.

We as a collective have made a sort of common agreement that it's beneficial for internet platforms to be open and free from the tangles of traditional regulations.

Questions about should or should not don't have any meaningful use in the real world. If you want internet platforms to be more strictly regulated, then use your voting rights to make the changes you want to see in the world.

I don't see any sense in censoring a video of death and destruction. If you don't want to watch it, then don't watch it. If YouTube doesn't want it on their platform, then they should have the right to remove it. If they want to host it, then public outrage shouldn't force them to remove it, unless they do it out of their own accord for marketing and public relations reasons.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not arguing to pay YouTube to hire thousands of moderators. I'm arguing that YouTube should not be allowed to post content without taking responsibility for it. If YouTube can't find a way to act responsibly, why should it be allowed to function at all?

I am not trying to say what video should be censored. I'm saying that if you host the thing, you should be held responsible for it. A large tech company shouldn't be able to say "hey, we made it easy for anyone to do this thing, heck, we even pay them to do it, but we have no responsibility for what they do because we made it too easy for too many people to do it and, uh, we don't want to pay people to look at all this garbage."

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _If NBC decided they were going to allow anyone who felt like it broadcast anything they liked without supervision or editing, it would be shut down once the first reports of, "Hey, NBC is showing me child pornography and beheading videos" came in._

Probably not, just like Youtube hasn't been shut down because some disagreeable content showed up.

 _Meanwhile, NBC has already figured out what every hacker ought to know. Blacklists don 't work, whitelists do._

That completely depends on your definition of "work". If "work" includes _not_ having false positives that block things that should't be blocked, or not unnecessarily delaying the time it takes to publish something, then neither option is terribly good.

 _What 's wrong with a world in which someone at youtube has to approve each cat video before posting it?_

1\. It doesn't scale very well

2\. The decisions would almost certainly be wildly inconsistent, subjective, and controversial. Which is to say, it would be, at best, a marginal improvement over the situation today.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gawker, a publisher, was shut down because it reported on Hulk Hogan's sexual activity. I think we can assume that larger publishers would be shut down for more outrageous content.

Yes, obviously, manual approval of content does not scale very well. Scaling is not a good in itself.

Decisions will only be as "wildly inconsistent, subjective, and controversial' as the people responsible for them. This should allow for consistent, objective, and responsible people to rise to the top in the decision making process, no?</comment></comment>


Show HN: God-i ... Share Life as it Happens - <AUTHOR> http://www.mygodi.com

<comment><USER2> This is cute. I don't know if I want one, but it's a cute idea.

Your reward structure is screwed up, though:

      $99 - QUICKEST BACKERS · 1 God-i · At $100 off of List Price
      $149 - EARLY BIRD SPECIAL · 1 God-i · At $50 off of List Price
      $189 - IndieGoGo SPECIAL · 1 God-i · At $10 off of List Price

I think you meant, $99 gets you $10 off, $189 gets you $100 off. I see 4 people have already signed up at the $189 level -- I guess they didn't read carefully :-)

I think I would want to know what the list price was going to be before I would chip in for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Dear ScottBurson, Thanks for your comments. The List Price will be $199, so QUICKEST BACKERS will get $100 off, EARLY BIRDS $50 off and IndieGoGo SPECIALs will get $10 off. I know for sure that some people signed at the $189 level to support the "God-i" project. I will follow your advise to include clearly the List Price. Thanks again for your time to review. Mr.Q</comment></comment>


Move over Graphene? Here Comes Borophene - <AUTHOR> https://www.realclearscience.com/quick_and_clear_science/2020/07/28/move_over_graphene_here_comes_borophene.html <comment><USER2> > Unfortunately, borophene looks to be more difficult to produce than > graphene.

That said, as an ignorant person regarding graphene, it seems graphene never "took off" as mass-produced material so I wonder what actual applications with graphene can be seen in the wild, regularly produced and commercialized or embedded into some market product? It's been 15 years anyways, I hope borophene is not just graphene 2.0 in that sense.

<comment><USER3> _> That said, as an ignorant person regarding graphene, it seems graphene never "took off" as mass-produced material so I wonder what actual applications with graphene can be seen in the wild, regularly produced and commercialized or embedded into some market product?_

It's a chicken and egg problem. No one has really bothered to put graphene into a mass manufactured product because of supply issues and no one's got the resources to accelerate work on the supply issue because there's no demand. Actually using high quality graphene to e.g. improve the performance of a capacitor or a battery cathode/anode by a few percent is really easy once you are sure that any money invested in doing it at scale won't go to waste because of supply issues.

Aluminum when through the same exact process in the 1800s so it's a natural consequence of the intersection of economics and science. I've got an old Scientific American from right after the Civil War with pages of people talking about this new wonder material aluminum and how it will change the world of metallurgy forever (and how useless the "machine guns" were during the war and the repeated discovery of heat treating asphalt and a bunch of other cool stuff). It wasn't until the Bayer and Hall–Héroult processes were invented in 1886-8 that aluminum became cheap enough to use in every day things. It took something like 60 years from first pure piece of aluminum for mass manufacturing to become practical but only 30 years before it changed the face of transportation and war.

<comment><USER4> Really this sounds like a problem of missing government intervention. The government could treat graphene like corn until all the industries have built up around it

<comment><USER5> How about instead of building and shuttering a billion dollar chat app every 2 years google puts some resources into it in the interest of diversification. All these tech companies are gonna need ever more batteries and Google would be well ahead if they can make the best ones.

<comment><USER6> Because rebranding a chat app as it evolves instead of calling it '2.0' doesn't imply you have spare resources to _check notes_ utterly revolutionize battery technology out of nowhere.

Google's CFO's strategy has been to incubate those ideas and either sell them to industry or spin them off with independent investment after the, say, first $10 billion in costs.

<comment><USER5> It's not anything specific to Google. Tech is awash in cash and breakthroughs have been lacking. This seems like an obvious opportunity yet no one seems to be going for it.

<comment><USER7> Google supposedly is doing exactly this in some fields, e.g. Quantum computing. But I don't know enough about Quantum computers to tell if that effort is producing anything of value, I'm leaning towards no at this point. Maybe just throwing cash at a problem isn't as easy as it seems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ohh noo. Now all my "Graphene? More like Borophene." jokes are obsolete.

<comment><USER9> I don't get it

<comment><USER10> [https://youtu.be/zaxH4xeMGzM](https://youtu.be/zaxH4xeMGzM)

<comment><USER11> Damn, please put a disclaimer before the link.

Some of us can't stand Adam Sandler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really wanted to see Buildings that were 4x lighter, aeroplanes 5x lighter, solar cells > 50% efficient, Chips sped up by 5x beyond 7 nm, Solar desalination getting 10x cheaper but i have settled for the fact that Graphene is never going to be cheap enough to be mass produced unless by luck someone invents a process that works.

It will be restricted to niche applications based on its cost of production at a given point of time assuming it does provide enough benefits at that price point.

</comment><comment><USER13> Aren't most boron molecules very toxic?</comment>


Fetch – Lead enrichment bot for Slack - <AUTHOR> http://fetch.amplemarket.com <comment><USER2> Looks awesome, just one tip: Would be cool if the example code works, would be very nice for people to test with.

      curl "http://email@example.com" -i

      HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
      Connection: keep-alive
      X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
      X-Xss-Protection: 1; mode=block
      X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
      Content-Type: text/html
      Cache-Control: no-cache
      X-Request-Id: 6b8f10ff-306f-46e1-9aa8-212ae0c8f6db
      X-Runtime: 0.010891
      Server: WEBrick/1.3.1 (Ruby/2.2.4/2015-12-16)
      Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 20:45:40 GMT
      Content-Length: 0
      Via: 1.1 vegur

<comment><USER3> +1, I also tried loading that page, I want to see what the information it returns is without needing to hook up into a Slack instance or give access to my leads!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this really a common use case? I don't often have sales people (or others) come to me and say "hey, I wish I had lead enrichment built into Slack." Do others have this as a common use case?

</comment><comment><USER3> Step #2 in the "how it works" on your main website landing page misspells "assistant" as "assitant".

</comment><comment><USER5> The generic privacy policy along with the free price concerns me. What is their plan for monetisation?

</comment><comment><USER6> How does it compare to Clearbit's? [http://blog.clearbit.com/slack- notifier/](http://blog.clearbit.com/slack-notifier/)

Seems to have a little less information from the gif.

<comment><USER7> (SalesOps perspective)

Any decent size, scaled sales operation would want the enrichment data in their CRM, actually "burned into" the lead record, and then just displayed in Slack with a link back to their CRM.

We use a combo of Clearbit and Zapier to get this done. It's a zero code solution also. Clearbit is very inexpensive, but definitely not free.

I get the sense this is good for the no-CRM or pre-SFDC sales operation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is cool. Must be motivating to see it throughout the day. Companies normally charge for that kind of prospect details. What's the data source?

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks like a Slack version of LeadBoxer ([https://leadboxer.com](https://leadboxer.com)).

</comment><comment><USER10> How much does this cost?

<comment><USER11> It says that it's free.

<comment><USER10> Cool, they maybe just added that. I command-f'ed for "free" and "pricing" (maybe I typod?).</comment></comment></comment>


The Incompetence of American Airlines and the Fate of Mr. X - <AUTHOR> http://dustincurtis.com/incompetence.html

<comment><USER2> The mistake Mr. X. made here was not about caring about his job or even criticizing his employer. _He contacted an outsider, with his company's email server, ostensibly on their behalf._ At bigco, you just can't do that folks. _Everything_ that leaves corporate walls must be vetted by legal, (and probably marketing too). There are lists of 100's (maybe 1000's by now) of innocuous seeming words that you just can't use. Language, nationality, gender, and racial issues all must be considered.

Like it or not, at Bigco International, _everything is a press release._

Personally, I would have given the guy a warning. What he said was quite harmless and almost certainly common knowledge, but we don't know the whole story here. He may have been warned before, or AA burned by this type of thing before or both. Its unfortunate, but understandable. In the name of tolerance and acceptance, we've built one of the most intolerant and litigious societies ever. This is just one of the many sad side effects.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, this is a great reminder: Work email is strictly for work, personal email for everything else.

<comment><USER4> Or: Don't work for mega-corps for which every email is a press release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ouch. I have top-tier status on AA, and they will be getting a note from me about this. Not cool.

That said, I am still confused as to why Dustin thinks AA's website is so relevant to its business model. Their website is not very Web 2.0, it's true. But, they make up for that... I can fly non-stop from Chicago (my home airport) to thousands of cities around the world on AA quite cheaply. They have three-class international service, which means I can use frequent flyer miles to get a really nice seat once in a while. They have lounges. They have international partners where my status benefits can be used. I get free domestic upgrades to first class. They have customer service that cares. (I have never been greeted by name on Southwest, but it happens rather frequently on AA.)

So anyway, the legacies are not totally incompetent. I fly at least every month and I would never even consider WN or JetBlue. The fare is about the same, and I have no chance of receiving anything other than a middle-seat on the back of a 737. No thanks. Perhaps the website UX is nice, but the rest of the trip won't be. And when I'm in a metal tube for 18 hours, I don't really give a damn about how much AJAX the website had.

(I am a little defensive here, I know. AA has been really nice to me, so I feel that they deserve some compliments for that.)

<comment><USER6> _"Their website is not very Web 2.0, it's true."_

One of the original reasons why I disagreed with Dustin. Slick Web 2.0-y goodness does _not_ imply a better user experience. Copious amounts of whitespace is easy on the eyes, but also doesn't automatically imply discoverability or readability. I know first-hand of at least one top-50 website that is very Web 1.0 but absolutely excels at what it does.

<comment><USER7> Amazon?

<comment><USER8> Google!?

<comment><USER9> Hacker News?

<comment><USER10> Craigslist?

<comment><USER11> RyanAir (especially apropos, albeit not top 50)

<comment><USER12> imdb?

<comment><USER13> idk, my bff jill?

<comment><USER5> Reddit?

<comment><USER13> My apologies...had a little too much coffee this morning. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I hope Virgin hires this guy and makes a media event out of it. I will now never fly American Airlines ever again in my life. This sincerely pissed me off.

<comment><USER15> Spare the boycott for a cause which merits it. AA just lost a competent and passionate employee and announced themselves as a lousy place to work for creative people.

<comment><USER16> Why spare the boycott? It's not like it's difficult to avoid buying American Airlines tickets, and frankly, it sucks to fly with them anyways.

<comment><USER17> Rickety old planes and charging for things that are free on other airlines (headphones, drinks). What's not to love? Did I mention the competent and attractive staff?

<comment><USER18> > _Did I mention the competent and attractive staff?_

I realize that you're just trying to rag on AA, but I don't like the implication that 'unattractive' people shouldn't be airline employees.

<comment><USER17> It's not the physical attractiveness of the staff I'm talking about, it's the lack of enforcement of a dress-code/personal hygiene policy. AA is the Walmart of airlines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Its amazing how someone so obviously passionate can be completely screwed over by such bureaucracy. Do HR departments ever have humans running them?

<comment><USER20> Sadly, the sole purpose of an HR dept. is to keep a company from getting sued. The bigger the company, the more that's their sole focus.

This guy admitting anything but the most perfect of environments and purity of process, while not a firing offense to normal folk, opened a vector for the possibility of the hint of something bad being done. So he had to go.

<comment><USER21> _Sadly, the sole purpose of an HR dept. is to keep a company from getting sued._

When that company is a US company, then yes, because of the sue-on-sight culture that has grown there. The same thing wouldn't have happened if this was Air France, Scandinavian Airlines or Iberia Airlines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A bit off-topic, but Dustin Curtis' site really _hurts_ my eyes reading on my MacBook pro... I have a really hard time reading his text, and when I look away, I have very pronounced stripe patterns in my vision.

<comment><USER23> I have the exact reverse here. I _love_ sites and applications that use a dark background; bright backgrounds are like staring into a lamp. It probably depends on the environment you tend to read in; I usually read in a darker room.

<comment><USER22> I'm quite OK with a lot of dark sites, but this one produces an insane "buzzing" feeling. Might have something to do with the gray-ish text. I couldn't get through the entire article even if I wanted to.

I'm reading in a dark-ish room right now. I suspect it may have something to do with the type of monitor used to view the site, because on mine the physical effects are very pronounced.

<comment><USER6> I agree. I can't put my finger on it, but the white/red text on the page positively _glows_ at me, not in a pleasant way either. It feels like I'm staring at a lit light bulb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> From <http://dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html> (struck-out): "Fire your entire design team, if you have one."

I guess AA took some of that advice to heart here.

I can only hope this guy does land a job someplace where the company culture isn't completely and utterly fucked all across the board, all the way from the hangar to the board room.

</comment><comment><USER25> More interesting to me, the email that got the guy fired: <http://dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html>

An articulate explanation of how good intentions at big companies can often be implemented only slowly.

<comment><USER26> Also a good argument for never putting someone's email up directly on the Web - you've got to paraphrase _if_ you think anyone might ever object to it.

And, yes, that's depressing.

<comment><USER27> Also a good argument against using company email for personal correspondence.

"AA searched their exchange database for the text I posted, found the guy, and fired Mr. X on the spot."

<comment><USER28> And try not to use a company computer for anything except work. Big corps usually have spyware installed on their computers so they can track everything you do.

The last place I worked had software that took a screenshot of your desktop every so often, and the boss could remote into your machine to see what you were up to. I didn't find out till my last day, it explained why he was so good at busting us when we were on facebook

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is nothing but positive, actually. Someone who is passionate, thoughtful, and caring about his trade will have a _much_ greater impact, career, and reward at a different organization than the one described by <http://dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html>

</comment><comment><USER30> From the point of view of the management - this is someone who wrote an article about the company having big time bureaucracy, lot of teams that don't talk to each other and hinting that the company culture is all messed up. well, what can one expect.

<comment><USER31> And firing him obviously confirmed that notion. AA just got Streisand'd

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> its ironic that he signed the reply off with

         Very truly yours (and hoping I don't get fired for being completely incompetent),

but yeh I hope it turns out positive, the guy seems to have a good attitude and is apparently talented, so will be nice to have people like that at companies where I can actually get the benefits of someone caring about ui

</comment><comment><USER33> IMHO, any employee not on the customer service team that reaches out to customers should be awarded not punished, given that it's done somewhat reasonably. In most cases filing a complaint with the customer service people would get you nothing - you need to talk to the ux designer.

<comment><USER18> Maybe AA's customer service or PR team is unionized, and this was just a CYA maneuver? (I realize that this is a _huge_ stretch, just saying...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> _AA searched their exchange database for the text I posted, found the guy, and fired Mr. X on the spot._

As upsetting as this is, it's just not that big of a surprise. Some companies take non-disclosure very seriously. Why didn't Mr. X just use gmail? I can't imagine discussing any company's internals on their own email system.

OTOH, maybe Mr. X just committed corporate suicide by email. That's one way to escape the insanity.

Thanks for the update, Dustin. I sure hope Mr. X lands on his feet fairly soon and I applaud your contribution. I like to think that integrity still trumps idiocy.

<comment><USER35> I wondered that as well and assumed he used his corporate account to make his identity claim more credible.

<comment><USER36> He could have emailed Dustin from gmail then told Dustin to make a throw away email that he would email "hey Betsy, hope the trip went well. Did you bring me back any chocolate from Switzerland?" Done. Verified and completely secure.

<comment><USER8> This however is an idea usually reserved for hindsight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> And this, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is a lesson in why establishing a brilliant culture in your company is of utmost important. It's amazing to me to see all the praises in this thread for JetBlue and would be interesting to see a case study comparing the differences in culture between the two brands.

</comment><comment><USER38> _> Very truly yours (and hoping I don't get fired for being completely incompetent)_

Last line from his email, ironically.

<comment><USER39> That is not ironic. I expect people to use words they don't understand anywhere else, but come on hacker news, I expect more from you and the people who comment here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm not sure why no one's mentioned this but isn't Dustin responsible for having Mr X fired?

It seems the proper thing to have done would be to make the email untraceable to Mr X rather than just anonymizing the name.

</comment><comment><USER41> _There's a common attribute that makes for good designers, good engineers, good employees, and good companies. For a long time, I couldn't figure out what it was. Was it practice? Was it skill? Was it innate ability? Turns out, it's none of those. It's taste._

Steve Jobs also cited 'taste' as the fundamental difference between Apple and Microsoft. His high-and-mighty attitude almost made me want to puke, as Dustin's does here.</comment>


Tutankhamun's Blood - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/matter/9fb62a68597b Why everyone from the Mormons to the Muslim Brotherhood is desperate for a piece of the Pharaoh <comment><USER2> Pharoahs, DNA, family feuds and a little bit of show business? This story has it all!</comment>