There Is No Excuse for How Universities Treat Adjuncts - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/higher-education-college-adjunct-professor-salary/404461/?single_page=true <comment><AUTHOR> I'm an adjunct, and I've written about various aspects of being an adjunct (e.g. here: [http://jakeseliger.com/2014/12/22/how-do-you-know-when- youre...](http://jakeseliger.com/2014/12/22/how-do-you-know-when-youre-being- insensitive-how-do-you-know-when-youre-funny/)). But I'll add that there is a very good "excuse" why universities treat adjuncts how they do: because they can. When people stop signing up for grad school and/or to be adjuncts, universities will have to offer better pay and/or conditions.

Until that happens, universities won't. Markets are clearing.

<comment><USER2> It already is happening. So many graduates see the higher level of skill they have and the _joke_ of a salary that adjuncts make and 'nope-ing' out into industry. Academia is going to starve itself of it's best performers by low pay and horrible standards for adjuncts and tenure track positions alike.

<comment><USER3> I have a PhD in CS and seriously considered staying in academia. I really enjoy teaching, so I would have been okay with making less than I could with an industry job. But it's not the pay that pushed me to industry, but the shitty contracts you get. I don't want to change cities or even continents every two or three years. There are no permanent positions available at all and even five year contracts are very rare.

<comment><USER4> Given a stable‡ industry market wage job, would you ever become a part-time adjunct based on your enjoyment of and passion for teaching?

‡ Presumably perceived by you as equally as permanent as a five year academia contract.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My mother is an adjunct math professor at three universities in the Western NY area. She teaches 7 classes to support the family while she's also going for her PhD (she's got like a 3.98 GPA or something btw).

The thing that gets me is that we look around and the campuses have millions to put up for new buildings and infrastructure and sports, etc. But here they can't give my mother a full time job with benefits.

Education is nothing more than an industry. They don't care if I pass or succeed, as long as they've got a job at the end of the day. I'm convinced of that.

<comment><USER6> Where I'm from an adjunct is an assistant professor. That is somebody who already has a PhD. Does adjunct mean something different in the US?

<comment><USER2> An assistant professor is a full time position. An adjunct is like the contractor/part time version of an assistant professor. The result is that adjuncts typically teach at multiple institutions, for example an R1 research university, plus a couple of local community colleges because 1 or 2 classes at one school is not enough to pay a livable wage.

In regards to credentials, in the US they can either have a PhD, be pursuing a PhD or have completed their Masters, but it depends on the institution's requirements to teach (and the classes they are teaching). You wouldn't have a Masters grad teaching graduate classes or an ABD teaching PhDs. Most well respected higher education institutions require a PhD to be an assistant professor (full time) but only be pursuing a PhD to be an adjunct/part time assistant professor teaching undergraduates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm faculty at a regional university in the U.S. Our enrollment is dropping by 5% a year, and short term positions are becoming the norm. Tenure track positions are risky in that once you've got somebody with tenure, it's difficult to get rid of them (intentionally). Short term positions give universities flexibility. We are not a Harvard or Yale with billions of dollars in endowments. Tuition is 80% of revenue, and our existence in 20 years is in no way guaranteed.

I don't know how many universities are flush with cash and are just being stingy by using adjuncts, but where I work (small regional university), we have intense budget pressure. We'd have to raise tuition a lot to cover the cost of converting adjust to tenure-track positions.

I don't like how adjuncts are treated, but seeing the problem from our administration's point of view, I know why we have so many adjuncts.

<comment><USER5> They're dropping for various reasons, I'm sure. But first and foremost because a bachelor's degree isn't worth anything anymore. Both my sister and my father have Bachelor's degrees and my dad's a janitor and my sister's a nurse. Granted, a nurse isn't that bad, but cleaning up people's feces on top of everyone in the practice being against her going to school to become a doctor (so she doesn't have to "ask permission" or clean up after people anymore) is a disgrace. And for my dad -- he's working with the lowest of the low. It's just awful that someone can bury themselves in 100k of debt to barely make more than minimum wage and clean up shit.

<comment><USER8> Your sister doesn't sound like a nurse to me. An RN doesn't clean up feces.

<comment><USER9> They absolutely do in the US if the situation calls for it and more appropriate staff aren't immediately available. You can't leave someone sitting in their own feces for an hour just because the CNA's are currently busy with other patients and you're somehow too good to do the dirty work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you intern as a CS major, you will probably be paid somewhere between $10-$25/hr. If you intern in Hollywood, you will make a nominal amount.

Does anyone find this surprising? There is a practically unlimited amount of programming work to be done and not enough programmers to do it all. On the other hand, there is a finite demand for movies and a very large number of people who would like to do it.

Many people would like to be professors. Unsurprisingly, this depresses the wage. What else is to be expected?

Adjunct salaries will rise and/or more tenured professorships will be offered when either consumer demand rises or supply falls. Anything else is just wishful thinking.

<comment><USER11> >There is a practically unlimited amount of programming work to be done and not enough programmers to do it all.

I certainly find that statement surprising, considering that most of the programming work already done is economically useless. Unicorn-balloon inflation is not a real job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are many good points in this article, and I agree about the general gist that adjuncts are not well-served in this situation. That being said, I think that the article sets up an artificial binary between adjuncts and tenured faculty. There is a whole third leg of employment that is contingent full-time teaching. That is to say, one-year professorships, and lecturer/instructor/preceptor positions that employ people full-time, but without assurance of continued employment in the year to come (indeed, often with an explicitly NON-renewable contract). There is a large chunk of academic teaching from faculty who make an okay (not great) income for a year, but have no security for years to come, and are forced to go through an extremely grueling application process year after year (see this article from Slate.com on more about that process: [http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/09/how_do_...](http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/09/how_do_professors_get_hired_the_academic_job_search_explained.html)).

<comment><USER13> The "visiting assistant professor" treadmill is definitely in the same badness league as adjuncting. Another trap is the "tenure track positions" where no one actually gets tenure, and they end up being re-advertised every three years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I used to be a tenured professor (senior lecturer) and while universities treat adjuncts badly they also don't treat tenured professors any better. While the job has a lot of good points respect from your employer is not one of them.

At least here in Australia tenure really doesn't exist anymore. If they want to get rid of you they just wait for the next departmental reshuffle (these seem to occur every couple of years) and eliminate your position.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a dangerous trend (especially since I've noticed other articles questioning a University education altogether).

I was first alerted to it by (of all places) The magic-the-gathering professor:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcQ4KIOqNic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcQ4KIOqNic)

(bonus if you're looking for some great magic-the-gathering videos)

</comment><comment><USER16> Paying them more would increase tuition. Maybe colleges should shift the funds from elsewhere but that not as simple as just paying them more.

What is never talked about in these articles about the plight of the adjunct is that adjunct professor is supposed to be a fun side gig. Almost charity work. You are supposed to do it for the experience. I'd had many adjuncts at northwestern when I was getting my law degree. They were partners at major law firms. They mad millions a year. They would have done this job for free. Maybe they did.

My wife considered adjuncting at her old college for the same reason.

It seems a huge part of this problem is some are treating these jobs as real, life supporting careers. They aren't meant that way. Maybe colleges are taking advantage. But these adjuncts are also taking advantage of themselves willingly.

<comment><USER17> Adjuncts are supposed to fill in the gaps when there are more classes than can be taught by the full time faculty. The real problem is that as admissions increase, rather than creating more tenure track jobs, they create an adjunct position for 1/3 the pay, and use the other 2/3 to create an administrative position. From the article:

"Even while keeping funding for instruction relatively flat, universities increased the number of administrator positions by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, 10 times the rate at which they added tenured positions. In the old days, different professors would take their turn as dean for this or that and then happily escape back to scholarship and teaching. Now the administration exists as an end in itself and a career path disconnected from the faculty and pursuit of knowledge. Writing a few years ago for this publication, the Johns Hopkins professor Benjamin Ginsberg described colleges and universities as now being "filled with armies of functionaries—vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, deans, deanlets, and deanlings, all of whom command staffers and assistants—who, more and more, direct the operations of every school." So while college tuition surged from 2003 to 2013 by 94 percent at public institutions and 74 percent at private, nonprofit schools, and student debt has climbed to over $1.2 trillion, much of that money has been going to ensure higher pay for a burgeoning legion of bureaucrats."

<comment><USER18> There is some truth to what Ginsberg asserts (i.e., administration could most certainly be leaner at a lot of places), but the notion that administrators are disconnected from "the pursuit of knowledge" is a bit weak in my view. A lot of the reason for the growth of Ginsberg's "administrative class" can be attributed to the growth of research programs at universities. Administrators are primarily there to worry about real-world issues that most faculty can't be bothered with in the cut-throat world of publish or perish. These include checking regulatory issues (i.e., establishing policies for IRBs and medical research), aiding in grant preparation, outreach efforts, and balancing academic freedom with legal issues. These are all things that faculty do not have expertise in, as PhD programs do not train them for these kinds of responsibilities. Frankly they shouldn't worry about these things- they're there to do research or teach, not draft a policy. You could argue that administrators might be overcompensated perhaps (especially at the upper- level), or that there might be too many of them, but their necessity as a distinct organ of the university is indisputable in my opinion. The halcyon pre-70s days when faculty could regulate a university on their own are gone (and it's questionable whether or not they ever did a particularly good job at this to begin with).

It's possible that Ginsberg doesn't really see this as much because he lives in the world of political science, which doesn't require nearly as much support infrastructure since it is so theory-centric.

You also might want to take what Ginsberg says with a grain of salt for the very reason that he's a tenured professor with a salary of around $157k a year ([http://web.jhu.edu/administration/provost/docs/JHU%20Fact%20...](http://web.jhu.edu/administration/provost/docs/JHU%20Fact%20Sheet%202011-12%20v8b%20NS.pdf)) while most administrative positions (perfectly fireable at the first sign of economic trouble!) at JHU are in the $40k-$50k range (based on Glassdoor). He's not quite the victim of brutal administrative oppression that he claims to be.

<comment><USER17> I don't think the Assistant Vice Provost of Academic Student Affairs Outreach has any role so pragmatic as aiding in grant preparation. I think they spend most of their time responding to emails and attending meetings about recruitment strategies and whether the college is sufficiently committed to diversity.

I would also say the fact that Ginsberg is not a victim only bolsters his point. He really has nothing to gain by making these statements.

<comment><USER18> I think that you're missing my point a bit with respect to Ginsberg's not being a victim. As I attempted to express earlier, he is perhaps correct about the value of upper-level management in universities (just as some management in modern corporations have dubious merit). When it comes to issues such as the adjunctification of academia or the tuition spiral, however, university professors share in the culpability by commanding 6 digit salaries and lifelong employment. It's not really fair to throw many extremely useful and necessary administrators under the bus when they make a 1/3rd of what a professor makes without any of the job security or power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Many articles regarding the mistreatment of part-time academics have been making their way onto hacker news, and I feel that this isn't really going to change any time soon.

More and more, universities are there to create a "brand image", not provide decent education. This is why there is such an emphasis on administrators, because decent academics just want to learn more and teach, not try to sell you on a whole host of rubbish.

This is why things won't improve. If you have institutions that aim to provide more luxury to their students, so that they have "great college memories", then how do you expect colleges to pay more for better teachers.

</comment><comment><USER20> So if someone is willing to teach a class for $2000 per semester, they shouldn't be allowed to?

I've tried to get into adjunct teaching, but there are so many applicants that it's almost impossible. Supply and demand. Adjuncts are paid what the market dictates, and that's ok.

<comment><USER21> Problem is a two-way street. Making only $2000 a semester may deter an adjunct from 'going the extra mile'. Not that a full-time professor would do so because they're full time. However, a low wage doesn't necessarily encourage the adjunct to do more than the minimum.

Also, if you figure that the department head will just fire and hire until they find someone what will put in that extra time you're kidding yourself. They work on semester contracts, firing and hiring over and over again will be throwing too many new/untrusted people into the classroom only to start-over in another few months, not to mention the lag-time between hires. What ends up happening is the department heads will maybe bring in a new candidate the next year if there's a lot of complaints against an adjunct, but otherwise they just keep the same scheduling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am glad that employers that mislabel employees as independent contractors are paying for their mistakes, but I am always a little disappointed when these articles appear.

I am an adjunct professor, but I also have a full-time job as a programmer that has spanned almost 30 years. Wikipedia says "adjunct professors are often nominated in recognition of active involvement with the appointing institution, while they are employed by government, industry, a profession or another institution" and that definition fits me perfectly.

Sad articles about the "plight of adjuncts" come out frequently, but I hope people understand that there is another side to the equation. The opportunity to work with motivated and passionate students that really care about the material is absolutely amazing, and it is a great way to give back to the community. I have stayed in touch with a lot of students over the years, and it is incredibly gratifying to hear how their careers have developed.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's completely clear to me that universities using adjuncts as consultants are violating federal laws and likely many state laws as well. Like most other such problems, the only solution is a major class action lawsuit like the one against Uber. I have no doubt whatsoever that given a fair trial, any competent judge or jury would see abuse here, if for no other reason than they are forced to work at specific times in a specific place. There is just absolutely no way you can justify this as consulting work when they cannot decide either the time or location of the work being done. There are other obvious violations but these are so egregious, it's revolting. Of course, you have to see the lawsuit to its conclusion because the Labor department doesn't give a shit about labor laws being broken and will tell you as much when you try to bring that up.

</comment><comment><USER24> The solution is get on the administration track [https://www.higheredjobs.com/salary/salaryDisplay.cfm?Survey...](https://www.higheredjobs.com/salary/salaryDisplay.cfm?SurveyID=30)

e.g. Chief Student Financial Aid Officer $83,726

<comment><USER24> ...actually when you think about it - if the market forces argument was all there was to it administrators would be getting paid very little to, there's an abundance of administrators

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Think of it as capitalism in action.

At least it's a step up from "do you want fries with that?"

<comment><USER26> It's funny how the most essential work in society is under constant pressure of debasement. Feeding people is considered an ignominious job. Teaching people too is constantly debased. Now it's affecting higher education. The neoliberal transformation of capitalism decouples the value of goods and services from their value to humanity and instead pegs them against markets. Markets no longer merely transmit information about value. They are the _definition_ of value. This is the ideological difference between liberal free market capitalism and neoliberalism; at least the former paid lip service to the idea that truth and value are ours to define. Not so. Capital determines value.

Universities are capitalist entities. They are trying to compete and appreciate in value for their shareholders. The market has replaced whatever value systems justified universities in the past.

<comment><USER27> Erm... isn't the actual root cause of the problem raised in TFA _the opposite of debasement_? Namely excess supply of people who're willing to go into academia to "do the most essential work in society", whatever the terms, as a sister comment from an insider pointed out? If the perceived value of being in academia was low enough, the market would force the universities to treat adjuncts better.

Also, aren't most or at least a great many of the most famous universities non-profits, competing for donations instead of trying to maximize shareholder value? I hear that in for-profit education, the average student is treated better and so is the average lecturer (you want to please your students whose money feeds you and you want to attract lecturers whose primary motivation is financial and who're good enough to please your students, so the for-profit institution kinda has to treat both well to survive.) Somebody living off donations, on the other hand, only has to please people donating the money (and someone living off taxes only has to please government officials), while pleasing either students or the teaching staff is no longer essential.

(I don't have firm or specific opinions on how higher education should be run, in general, just commenting on your points.)

<comment><USER26> > Erm... isn't the actual root cause of the problem raised in TFA the opposite > of debasement? Namely excess supply of people who're willing to go into > academia to "do the most essential work in society", whatever the terms, as > a sister comment from an insider pointed out? If the perceived value of > being in academia was low enough, the market would force the universities to > treat adjuncts better.

this eerily sounds similar to the kind of logic i was rejecting. this is an appeal to the logic of markets and the assumption that they are efficient to derive truth. this is exactly neoliberalism. at least in old school liberalism we could acknowledge markets' shortcomings via externalities and the idea of market failure! Otherwise i think the sibling comment is a good response.

<comment><USER27> Neither your comment nor the comment you cite replies directly to mine - meaning, neither of you addresses the question what happens if people refuse to work for universities at the current level of compensation (perhaps some do not have a better option right now, but those who studied STEM certainly do.) I claim that comp will have to go up, boom, problem solved. Where am I wrong? What other solution would you propose that cannot be circumvented by the employer as long as the employees are willing to help circumvent it, for the same reasons making them willing to accept a raw deal now?

Instead, your comment in particular rejects what I said because it's "neoliberalism." All I said was that employers will tend to give you shit as long as you take it, be it for-profits, non-profits, government or individuals. I don't think that's quite the same as denying externalities or market failure or generally arguing about neoliberalism and other abstract concepts at a great distance from the issue at hand.

In concrete terms, I believe the someone quitting a bad job or not taking it in the first place is better off than someone who does take it and then broods about the debasement brought about by neoliberalism or whatever the supposed root cause of their condition is. In other words, my angle is more productive than yours as a basis for action.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


ColorZilla - Firefox plugin for Web Devs - <AUTHOR> http://pages.colorzilla.com/welcome/new/?firefox/220.127.116.11/-/2.0#whatsnew

<comment><USER2> If you have the Web Developer plugin installed try 'Information > View Color Information'

It gives only the basic info and not all the features of this plugin but it may be enough.

</comment><comment><USER3> I refuse to download any color scheme plugin from a site that uses blue headlines on a black background.

</comment><comment><USER4> I still can't use the eyedropper function in my Ubuntu. :( Anyone had success?

<comment><USER5> Before reading the comments I tried it too and found that it didn't work for me either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> funny.. because i just reverted to firefox 2 today because colorzilla and firebug would crash FF3 every 15 minutes.

Reverted because this is an invaluable tool...

</comment><comment><USER7> I use it everyday. Great extension.</comment>


Optimizing Lifted Bitcode with Dead Store Elimination - <AUTHOR> https://blog.trailofbits.com/2018/07/06/optimizing-lifted-bitcode-with-dead-store-elimination/ <comment><USER2> The blog post has a fantastic visual explanation of store to load forwarding, along with a few other concepts.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can anyone from McSema comment on why it's moved from paid solutions for CFG recovery? It's amazing that an open source project depending on other open source projects for its main function has to rely on either IDA Pro or Binary Ninja to function. The support for radare is abysmal and not even merged.

<comment><USER4> > Can anyone from McSema comment on why it's moved from paid solutions for CFG > recovery?

Plainly, because radare's CFG recovery is not reliable enough for us to use. It's not a production quality tool when compared to IDA or Binary Ninja. CFG recovery is an extraordinarily complex problem and doing it right requires a team with commercial support behind them. Altruism simply does not get you far enough for the grind of developing effective CFG recovery.

Similarly, McSema itself is not free either. We're being paid by the US Government. It requires a team of people with decades of experience in programming languages and compilers working together for years. We're lucky to be in this position, but it could have easily gone the other way. Not every project out there has a sponsor willing to make it free.

The teams behind IDA and Binary Ninja don't have some other, enormous business producing profits to support them (say, advertising). In order to spend the person-decades of time required to build these tools that our entire community relies on for our jobs, they need an income stream to work on them.

> The support for radare is ... not even merged.

I'm not aware of any pull requests for radare support. You're welcome to submit one and we'll consider it. However, we'll expect the author to continue supporting it as McSema grows since we can't use it for our projects (it's not reliable enough).

I will note that we have an open PR for DynInst-based CFG recovery but we're still working with the author to review and approve it. [https://github.com/trailofbits/mcsema/pull/386](https://github.com/trailofbits/mcsema/pull/386)

<comment><USER5> Would you mind describing some of the cfg recovery problems IDA can solve that open source tools can't? This sounds quite interesting.

<comment><USER6> IDA has a ton of hacks in it that arent exactly common or public knowledge. There are hundreds of anti-debugger/dissasembler instruction sequences that will crash or stall or corrupt analysis tools. To even identify all the instructions which can be used for control flow, which alter which flags and how, for multiple architectures, is a royal man hour grunt work marathon. And as we see with the latest round of speculative load exploits, a lot of branches cannot even be predicted appropriately because they could be using exploits relying on undefined behavior..side channels. So the whole issue of perfect control flow analysis is a more mechanical one than a pure abstraction based one. When OllyDbg was first built it was the same way. Oleg put thousands od hours into whack a moling every issue. Most people like elegant endeavors based on some core principles. In static analysis of complex ISAs, the core principle is documenting 10000 species of moths, not finding that they all have wings..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How much did this affect performance?</comment>


Serious Jolt [audio] - <AUTHOR> https://kerningcultures.com/serious-jolt <comment><USER2> The entire podcast series and premise is actually very interesting and couldn't be more relevant in these times:

"As children of the Middle East, we have grown up surrounded by regional and international media that pigeonholes the Middle East and North Africa into politics.

We are taking back control of our narrative to tell stories that reflect the depth and richness the Middle East offers. To tell the kinds of stories in which we can actually see ourselves, the kinds of stories we want to discuss with our friends over warm cups of coffee on cozy sofas. Because we love stories - really good stories, and there are so many from our region just waiting to be told."

</comment><comment><USER3> Very cool story. When I was in Turkey I asked my guide where the country grew its coffee. I was surprised to hear that it didn't - it's always got it from Yemen. Turns out that Turkey getting coffee from Yemen has always been a thing going back thousands of years, perhaps the longest continuous trade arrangement in history.

</comment><comment><USER4> The startup coffee business in Yemen amidst the current war, and one man's mission to revive Yemeni coffee for global markets.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can anyone explain why it's called kerning cultures? It's a great story, but definitely nothing to do with typography :).

I wasn't able to google a different meaning for the word that made sense in context, and couldn't find any explanation on the page.

<comment><USER6> it took me literally 5 seconds to find the answer: [https://kerningcultures.com/what-we-do/](https://kerningcultures.com/what-we- do/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hey everyone, I'm one of the creators of the Kerning Cultures episode Serious Jolt. This was one of my favourite episodes to produce -- I'm happy to answer any questions!</comment>


SSH VPN on OS X with SSHuttle in 3 minutes - <AUTHOR> https://www.koszek.com/blog/2017/04/09/ssh-vpn-with-sshuttle-in-3-minutes/ <comment><USER2> Very, very useful trick, especially if you already have Homebrew installed. And at this point, who hasn't? Get it at [https://brew.sh](https://brew.sh)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it saved my ...

Whenever I don't have time to do the fully blown VPN, I'll be using that.</comment></comment>


Vim Kata Number One - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wekeroad.com/2010/05/24/vim-kata-one?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wekeroad%2FEeKc+%28Rob+Conery%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> I'm working on an Editor Alike Tutorial project.

The idea is to bring about world peace by collaboratively creating a tutorial which can only be coped with using a sufficiently powerful editor. It should look impossible to do in notepad and nano, for example.

One criterion is that the tutorial text not play toward specific features of one or another editor, but toward the proper mindset of an editor as an _editor_.

Another is that it has to be fun.

Any vim users want to help? Or emacs users disturbed at the recent flurry of vim articles?

</comment><comment><USER3> There are a few instances of unnecessarily keystrokes in this exercise. Moves to the start of the line for a command that will act on the whole line (0shift-D, 0shift-V, 0dd). The 0's aren't required for those. Also a few times it switches to command mode when the editor is already in command mode based on the last step. 0shift-V2j selects 3 lines, not two.

<comment><USER4> Is shift-d supposed to effect the whole line? Default 7.2 vim on winxp shift-d goes from the cursor to the end of the line making 0shift-d the correct thing for me to delete a line.

The 3wcw to change a misspelled word is also incorrect(for me at least it should be 03wcw)

<comment><USER3> You're right, the 0 is required. Now I think about it a little more, if you want to delete all the characters on the line, but not remove the line, then 0shift-D might is good. I tend to do ddO for the same operation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool idea. But consider: if you move around platforms (I use 3 every day) then a uniform experience is actually more productive. Training my nervous system to a set of "katas" that work in precisely 1 environment is not very helpful; in fact just the opposite.

<comment><USER6> One of the nice things about Vim in particular is that it's incredibly uniform across platforms - far more consistent than Windows keyboard shortcuts versus Mac shortcuts versus Linux shortcuts. Vim's download page is quite... extensive:

        http://www.vim.org/download.php

Another advantage of learning Vi is that since it's been such a popular choice for decades, there's a reasonable chance of a "vi emulation mode" being available in other environments; the Komodo IDE has one built-in I believe, there are third party solutions for Visual Studio, Outlook and Word, even a system-wide Input Manager plugin for OS X.</comment></comment>


Startup in Dental EHR looking for a technical cofounder - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3ZAQvx9O5U&t=2s <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm a dentist and MBA grad from Haas looking for a technical cofounder for my startup Smile Standard, we currently have $2 M revenue and I'm actively fundraising.</comment>


Looking for Talents - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> What is this?</comment>


Introducing the Parse x AngularJS Boilerplate - <AUTHOR> http://blog.parse.com/2013/10/17/guest-post-parse-x-angular-js-boilerplate/

<comment><USER2> This is the same stack I've been using for a project at work, I was exited to see the Parse SDK wrapper but apparently it's a thin one. In my current project I have attempted to create a wrapper completely Parse-agnostic in hopes to be able to switch to another provider my changing a little config, it does the basics for now, but I'd have to rewrite it as it's a little tied to this specific project.

I'm curious to hear if anyone has done a similar effort or is serious about starting.

<comment><AUTHOR> I saw something similar here [http://ericterpstra.com/2012/10/example-crud- app-starring-an...](http://ericterpstra.com/2012/10/example-crud-app-starring- angularjs-backbone-parse-stackmob-and-yeoman/)

But there is a big tradeoff for API user experience if you want to make it 'switchable' to another service.

Alternatively, for switching, there's this: [https://github.com/stevegraham/parseport](https://github.com/stevegraham/parseport)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Do you have better docs on the Parse query calls. Im new to Parse and trying to figure out how to customize the query / collection inside of this. Trying like equalTo and those type of methods I just don't understand what part of the code to use. Do I write a custom service to pull it in or do I use ParseQueryAngular in a directive?

<comment><AUTHOR> checkout Monster.js, there is an example there. Basically all your queries should be methods on the collections/models. Each data model is defined in their own file extending the ExternalDataServices service. No need to create a new service for every model.

This is the most common feedback we've had so we'll improve the docs in time.

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This could simplify a lot. Love it.

I wanted to get into trying both things so coupling it makes me happy and more incline to get into both.

Thank you for sharing and congrats on making it into the Parse blog!

Amazing stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks jaime, we're here if you need help getting started

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was searching something similar toady and it is here. Great.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks mate, happy to help @arush on twitter

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Never considered a backend in the cloud before, and as I'm just getting into Angular I'll definitely give this a try. Nice one guys!

<comment><AUTHOR> cheers andy, give it a shot and post here if you have any questions

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just started testing BAAS last week. This speed up our process. Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> no problems dude, let me know if you need any help @arush

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting angle.

</comment><comment><USER9> Seems like it's gonna be a matter of minutes to build a webapp now. Good stuff

</comment><comment><USER10> This looks interesting, I've wanted to get into AngularJS

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great place to start. Also a great place for mid-large size apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great work boys

</comment><comment><USER12> wow. this looks awesome. badass job!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks buddy

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> awesome demo!</comment>


Ask HN: Video of Apple Keynote? - <AUTHOR>

Hey Folks, i missed the keynote yesterday. Can't seem to find a decent video of the event. Does anyone have a link?<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> <http://www.apple.com/apple-events/september-2012/>

<comment><USER3> Maybe there is even a version around, which a Linux user can watch?

<comment><USER4> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KROYfsNl59U>

<comment><USER3> Thanks, but I have to add one more requirement: Should be viewable in Germany.

"Dieses Video enthält Content von UMG. Dieser Partner hat das Video in deinem Land aus urheberrechtlichen Gründen gesperrt." Copyright issues ... :(</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What Is a Facebook App Developer Worth? Wall Street and Sand Hill Road Disagree - <AUTHOR> http://www.pehub.com/89369/what-is-a-facebook-app-developer-worth-wall-street-and-sand-hill-road-disagree/ <comment><USER2> Facebook app companies can be very different (team, expertise, products), so comparing valuation just based on number of monthly active users is pretty inaccurate. Google's acquisition of Slide is an example where the valuation (nearly $200M) was based on the founder, the team and their experience -- not their MAU.</comment>


Deranged Cat CTO (with now fixed links) - <AUTHOR> http://www.petitecloud.com/index.jsp

<comment><USER2> None of it is funny</comment>


Managing fleets of connected devices with Phased Rollout - <AUTHOR> https://mender.io/blog/managing-fleets-of-connected-devices-with-phased-rollout <comment><USER2> Nifty, does it auto-retry on failure?</comment>


Surowiecki on Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38392/#

<comment><USER2> This looks like a longer rehash of Krugman on Bitcoin [1], until you realize that it was first published in August and was actually Krugman's inspiration.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2969568></comment>


Social media filters mess with our perceptions so much, theres now a name for it - <AUTHOR> https://us.cnn.com/2018/08/10/health/snapchat-dysmorphia-cosmetic-surgery-social-media-trend-trnd/index.html <comment><USER2> PhotoShop'ing disrupted by AI</comment>


Struggling farmer who planned his own funeral - happy-go-lucky https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-46644440 <comment><AUTHOR> So farmers kill themselves because of glut/over production? And debt.

What is wrong with this picture?

Why would anyone want to farm?</comment>


Techcrunch Editor Discloses Investments, Admits To Conflicts Of Interests - <AUTHOR> http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2011/04/like_it_or_lump.php

<comment><USER2> How does this sit with them generally not writing about most startups? That's going to be either a valid reason competitors don't get a mention or a convenient excuse to hide behind, with no way for anyone outside to know the truth.

As disclosures go it seems kind of hollow in that context.

</comment><comment><USER3> I no longer have a truck large enough to haul the size of the grain of salt necessary when reading Techcrunch, so this disclosure (or is it boasting?) doesn't bother me nearly as much as it once might have...

</comment><comment><USER4> Do think startups pay TC to get a write up?

<comment><USER5> Yes, in a variety of currencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Isn't this just completely both ironic and fucking enraging given all the bullshit they stirred up during " _angelgate_ ".

First, we have Arrington's ultra-ego, then we have his teams utter lack of editing, and the fanboism, favoritism and petty gossip - and most of these anecdotal rumors may be at minimum corroborated via such revelations.

The valley needs a site _like_ techcrunch to capture and publish industry info in such a highly dynamic industry... we just don't need it to be techcrunch _specifically_.</comment>


So Long, MSDN Blog - <AUTHOR> https://ericlippert.com/2019/03/21/so-long-msdn-blog/ <comment><USER2> In addition to this, on the blogs that were migrated to the new platform (such as Raymond Chen's Old New Thing) all of the comments have been purged. That's extremely unfortunate because those comments had a lot of useful technical commentary on the blog posts.

<comment><USER3> That's terrible. Those comments were alternately hilarious and informative.

<comment><USER4> Well, except for Yuhong Bao most of the time... (:

Oh, and we can't forget xpclient wanting his old Explorer search style back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The is highly unfortunate and a bone-headed move by Microsoft. But it does highlight two points that often get missed now that we rely on the web.

1 - If you don't host your own content then you have no control over it. Microsoft deleted all their blogs. YouTube and Facebook will one day cease to exist. This comment and all of yours will disappear once news.ycombinator.com is defunct. If you want something to last, host it yourself or be prepared to recreate it somewhere else every few years.

2 - Once you publish something at a URL you control (see point 1), you have a responsibility to keep it available at the same URL. Nobody is going to hold you to it but you will break 3rd party sites that link to you. Microsoft really dropped the ball here.

<comment><USER6> Today I can enjoy reading several thousand years old books like Herodotus travels.

Within the same distance into the future, most of today's knowledge will be gone.

<comment><USER7> I doubt you're ready the original manuscript though. You're reading copies of copies, there is no reason why content on the Internet will not continue to be copied in the same way.

<comment> mark-r It's a matter of scale. You can only make a copy of the whole internet by committing to that purpose, and there's only one outfit that does it in a public manner. I can't imagine what it would take to duplicate that database right now, and it increases every day.

<comment><USER8> They already have one official mirror.

[http://web.archive.bibalex.org/web/](http://web.archive.bibalex.org/web/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One favorite trick of Microsoft IT is to delete old instances of SharePoint servers for projects. Where "old" is maybe 3-4 years.

Goodbye design documents. Goodbye test plans. Goodbye user studies. Goodbye meeting notes. Goodbye just about everything interesting except for the source code of the project. And _backups_? "What is this word you are using . . . ''backup''?"

Which is why I just checked _everything_ into source control and told the PMs they could bloody well learn how to use Source Depot.

<comment><USER10> Text files for specs and feature lists combined with a proper git blame/log make for fun time during multi-year project reviews.

<comment><USER11> lol I can see why a PM would be averse to that. Can you imagine if time estimates on the work item basis had an audit log?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Comment he leaves in the post:

 _But at the time I left Microsoft, I was told that .NET management no longer considered my blog a valuable asset, and that I should stop working on it on company time, and that they had "community PMs" who would be owning the relationship with the programming community._

 _Around that time I was also told, funnily enough, that I should never mention Windows on my blog, because the Windows marketing team wanted to own all communications with developers about writing software for Windows._

 _I really enjoyed my time at Microsoft; the people I left behind were amazing, and I miss working with them. And none of the above is high on the list of reasons why I left Microsoft. But middle management was_ _weird_ _, man,_ _weird_ _._

<comment><USER13> I can't see this comment in any of the post; care to give a link reference?

Doing a google search on the above comment leads to this HN comment...

<comment><USER12> [https://ericlippert.com/2019/03/21/so-long-msdn- blog/#commen...](https://ericlippert.com/2019/03/21/so-long-msdn- blog/#comment-94836)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's been a lot of MS content I've noticed disappearing lately. A lot of resources related to Internet Explorer for example (the Microsoft Connect bug tracker, and some MSDN blogs). Yeah IE is (almost) dead by now, but there has been a lot of useful technical knowledge there.

BTW. Today is a great day to donate to the Web Archive:

[https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/)

</comment><comment> mark-r Microsoft has for years shown very little regard for keeping links valid. Bookmarks to anything they host are almost worthless, they rot so quickly.

<comment><USER15> The bookmarks to dead links are still useful to have any chance of finding the content on the Internet Archive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> just posted:

"UPDATE: The (awesome) Scott Hanselman informs me that there has been a "hiccup" during migration, and that the intention was to archive the MSDN blogs in a read-only format with the same links; they should be back soon."

<comment><USER3> Indeed, Scott has been thoroughly awesome today. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> _" As far as the business goes, I make a lot more in royalties on my beginner C# videos that O'Reilly distributes than I do on all my book royalties and editing fees."_

(E.L., in the comment section apropos wishes for a book)

<comment><USER3> By a huge margin! And putting together that beginner course only took me a couple of months working in my spare time, and recording it only took a couple of days in O'Reilly's studio.

I still edit my friend's programming books, but I sure don't do it for the money.

<comment><USER18> Hi Eric, Thanks for all the hard work you did (and doing) putting high-quality technical content on the web. I always consult your blog (or, in all laziness, your SO repertoire) first when in doubt with C#. You're hands down the best explainer of cs-things ever.

<comment><USER3> Thank you, that's a kind thing to say. I find that if I cannot explain a topic clearly to someone else, I probably don't understand it very well myself. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Never trust another company to handle your data. Look at what happened to MySpace or any other defunct social network.

</comment><comment><USER3> And it's back. Thanks to Scott and Dan and all their colleagues for their prompt attention to this matter.

</comment><comment><USER20> Reposting this comment from Eric's blog for more context (PM on the Developer Relations team. We have been migrating blogs since 2017 and enabling employees to export / migrate their blog. To your specific issue, ex-employees that want their blog posts can email me dan(dot)fernandez(at)microsoft(dot)com and I'll route to the support team. This does not include comments as the MSDN/TechNet blogs are not GDPR compliant (aka the right to be forgotten).

As for why, other community sites like TechCommunity are driving blogging at Microsoft for individuals, while product teams are looking to group official blogs (Windows, Office, and Visual Studio), and for blog posts that were really tutorials, moving them to open source documentation on [https://docs.microsoft.com](https://docs.microsoft.com) on GitHub. Customers ran into a number of issues where blogs provided out-of-date content/guidance that lead to support issues. For example, of the 16k+ blogs, 86% had not been used in 18 months and thousands were created with no posts or only a single blog post. Cheers,-Dan

<comment><USER3> Thanks Dan, much appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> To be fair, Microsoft is doing a great job with their new docs site, and I can't blame them for wanting to centralize and refine the search ranking toward their new pages.

Some still have thin content, but I've been pleasantly surprised to keep finding the new docs as the top search results. Just a year or two ago, it was a crap shoot.

As an example, here is the top result for "C# Synchronization Primitives" [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnet/standard/threading/o...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnet/standard/threading/overview-of-synchronization-primitives)

</comment><comment> dao- last Archive.org snapshot of Eric Lippert's MSDN blog:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20190301145321/https://blogs.msdn...](http://web.archive.org/web/20190301145321/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ericlippert/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Microsoft completely messed up the awesome Sysinternals forums when it was migrated to Technet.

</comment><comment><USER23> If his blog was now finally moved including the comments, why has oldnewthing lost all its comments?

</comment><comment><USER24> For years I'd comment code using links to reference material, like the API documentation for an API call being made. It was very handy. Links to Microsoft online documentation, however, tended to go stale very quickly. And it didn't just go stale, it would disappear (google could no longer find it). A lot of COM/ActiveX documentation has disappeared. I don't understand why Microsoft does this.

<comment><USER25> They don't want people to keep writing COM/ActiveX code, and they don't want search engines to point you to such pages, so why would a commercial entity spend money to keep those pages around?

Hosting costs may be peanuts for them, but there's also maintenance. Even if they don't bother updating the look of the site, there's the fact that old sites eventually run on no longer supported technologies that may only run on unsupported OSes, both potentially riddled with security vulnerabilities.

<comment><USER3> I take your point, but VS twitter is this week running a series of short videos with Larry Osterman about how awesome COM is, which seems to argue against this theory.

That said, lots of times Microsoft's left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.

<comment><USER6> Hi Eric, I also find this theory quite strange, given that UWP is COM.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Next WordPress - <AUTHOR> https://wsvincent.com/the-next-wordpress/ <comment><USER2> First of all, Wordpress is known to fix security issues quickly and platforms with many developers have more eyes on the code so it's only natural that they have a LOT of reported vulnerabilities. This does not mean that it's "inherently" insecure.

A static site can't enable...

\- User management (Members)

\- On-site-comments (That Search engines can find)

\- Voting (Polls & Ratings are very popular on Wordpress!)

\- Carts (For selling products)

\- Any user submitted content

...without 3rd party services that rely on JS.

This means that you rely on several external services for the site to have these features and in the end, the costs will be higher than running it on Wordpress.

But it could possibly be easier to maintain, be more secure, have higher performance and the dynamic parts wouldn't all fail at the same time so the uptime of the core site could be better.

<comment><USER3> > This does not mean that it's "inherently" insecure.

It's a pretty strong indicator though.

<comment><USER4> Not really. Sometimes you hear about the WordPress security vulnerabilities that are patched, but still exploited, and this is mostly a problem with people not keeping an eye on security updates.

Combine that with the popularity that WordPress has drawing in people who know enough to program themes and plugins, but not enough to program said themes and plugins securely (avoiding simple SQLi and XSS) and you get the perception of an insecure system that WordPress has.

<comment><USER5> Also the blame falls on actual users not keeping plugins up to date or using one's from dodgy sources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The most uninformative article I've ever read that was on the home page of HN. It's full of misconceptions and assumptions (that every WP based site can be be replicated with static site generators, that 'WP is inherently insecure' and so on).

<comment><USER7> The article simply doesn't meet the standards of HN and only spreads popular misconceptions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would love to maintain our websites with a static site generator and manage updates via pull requests to our version control system.

I don't have a single user who would understand that sentence. That's why we use WordPress.

<comment><USER2> Maybe with a pre-configured, cross-platform App - It might be "easier", but then you'd have to have it auto-update as well.

While with any dynamic CMS, it's just - go to this site and login.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > WordPress itself is an inherently insecure platform.

Linking to regular security updates for a system is proof that that system takes security seriously, not that it is insecure. I'd worry about an open source project that didn't have regular security updates.

Also, "inherent" is silly to use in this context.

</comment><comment><USER10> > Static Site Generators are a new, hybrid approach to web development

It's like Movable Type never existed.

</comment><comment><USER11> I generally disagree with most of the arguments here, but the last part of this article makes a good point that the business owner (person buying website) usually doesn't make the decisions about the technology that gets used. This is especially true for SMBs (I'm excluding the DIY/hacker-types here).

I built a WordPress plugin inside of HubSpot called Leadin (it's now their HubSpot Marketing Free product). The idea was to build light weight marketing automation for Very Small Businesses. We started on WordPress because most small businesses use it. We incorrectly assumed in the beginning the business owners would be the decision makers on whether or not to use our product. We quickly found out it was usually the web development agency/consultant they worked with who would install it for them, then explain the value of the product. We eventually shifted our marketing to focus heavily on agencies which became our main acquisition source.

Agencies like to use WordPress because it's customizable enough to easily build what their clients need, is the same interface across every site and has a huge ecosystem of the add-ons that their clients what. Until you can replicate the WordPress 3rd party developer ecosystem it will remain the dominant player. Also, static sites can't do all the things WordPress does, like polling, comments, shopping carts, etc. you'd have to rely on a third party for those components and when you add up all those, I'd think that would be more than $100/year in subscriptions. It's easier and cheaper to have it all centralized in WordPress which is why agencies choose to use it. If you can charge a retainer too, the holy grail for agencies because it's reoccurring, predictable revenue, you're essentially getting paid to just keep things updated and make sure they don't break or get hacked.

</comment><comment><USER12> I wrote a post about a Serverless CMS architecture that is a good follow up to this article: [https://www.aerobatic.com/blog/a-serverless-cms- architecture...](https://www.aerobatic.com/blog/a-serverless-cms- architecture/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I think the author assumes that all wordpress sites are simple blogs. Woocommerce alone powers 30% of e-commerce sites.

<comment><USER14> What makes you think that? The word "blog" is nowhere in the article. It's clear to me they're talking about WP the platform.

<comment><USER13> wonder how one does a static e-commerce site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Snipcart is one option for e-commerce for static sites.

[https://snipcart.com/](https://snipcart.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I believe Medium is the next Wordpress because not only allows you to publish but also to consume in an elegant and productive way. The recommendation engine is quite good and the daily newsletter sent by email is good enough to make me want to check the stories right away. They make an extensive use of images that really adds to the user experience.

I used to be a Wordpress fan but now Medium has caught my attention.

So in essence it is not about the technical platform, it is about effective production and consumption, and Medium hits the nail on both.

<comment><USER16> The context is sites with custom features. Medium isn't in that market. Medium is the new Blogspot.

<comment><USER17> Or xanga, or livejournal, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wordpress isn't just a thing that people use. It's a gravity well of humanity's non-technical web authoring aspirations; matter keeps accreting there in the form of plugins and feature additions. Escaping it at this point is going to be difficult for most people, similar to how sending satellites into orbit is infeasible for most small businesses.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's more precise to say "problem" when you mean something bad, and not "issue," which is neutral. I am pretty sure that "issue" is a bureaucratic euphemism.

It seems the higher up you go, the worse language gets:

      Technician: "The server is on fire!"
      Manager: "Uh . . . the server has a 'problem.'"
      Senior Director: "Ahem, the service has an 'issue.'"
      Owner: "You mean my server is on fire?"

Actually, maybe it's middle management.

</comment><comment><USER19> I would like to see a simple but extendable cms which would be mostly static but the non static parts would be handled by aws lambda or gce functions or something similiar.

<comment><USER20> Seems a lot more complicated than Wordpress for not a lot of gain?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Just adding DatoCMS ([https://www.datocms.com/](https://www.datocms.com/)) to the list of CMS specifically designed for static websites (shameless plug)!

Here Netlify is listing all the available products in this niche, both commercial and open-source: [https://headlesscms.org/](https://headlesscms.org/) Things are moving.. slowly :)

</comment><comment><USER22> > Lektor is file-based by default, so updating content does not require a > cloud server at all but merely access to the root file itself, which can be > stored on a service like Dropbox or Google Drive. A developer can use a > local server to generate dynamic content and a full-featured site, but the > CMS, which is currently a simple Mac app, simply updates the original file.

This. This would be something phenomenal. The problem with WordPress and services like it, is that they take your content, package them into something they can understand and hides them under their pillows.

Inverting the control, like what the OP says -- where the user _owns_ the content, that can be plugged into layers like WordPress, looks like the path towards the future.

I made [http://hexopress.com](http://hexopress.com) with a similar vision. It is not yet a full blown shape of what I have in mind, but it cuts the concept well.

</comment><comment><USER23> whatever static site has a backend for your clients, it's potential security problem.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was recently considering creating an IDE specifically for WordPress with built-in completion, tips and mapping for people who are skilled at programming but new to WP development. Would anyone use it?

<comment><USER25> Have you tried Pinegrow?

<comment><USER24> I had seen it before but didn't realize it included a WP theme builder. Thanks for the heads up!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> $100 a year is too costly?</comment>


Come Get Your Free NSA Reverse Engineering Tool R - <AUTHOR> https://www.rsaconference.com/events/us19/agenda/sessions/16608-Come-Get-Your-Free-NSA-Reverse-Engineering-Tool <comment><AUTHOR> NSA's Rob Joyce is presenting GHIDRA, a reverse-engineering tool developed by the NSA. They're apparently making it free to the public.

I wonder if it'll be open source. It should be public domain software but if the NSA used contractors for development, that muddies the waters a bit.</comment>


Atlas Smug | Alex Payne | Jacobin - <AUTHOR> https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/atlas-smug/ <comment><USER2> A dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7907535](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7907535).

</comment><comment><USER3> Imagine it's 1940 or 1950 and someone starts asking "Who is going to own the computers?"

The answer is that everyone is going to own different robots. The whole point is that a robot is going to be so much more efficient than a human, that for less than 1/50th the cost of a median house a human could buy a robot that could create enough economic production for his whole life.

There will be challenges, since many people live paycheque to paycheque, but ultimately a very simple Basic Income (backed on land taxes, ideally) would catch those that would fall in the cracks.

I used to worry about robots a lot more, but I don't really anymore. The rich just want the poor out of the way while they become more rich / powerful. The most effective way of doing that is to just pay the poor people off while they start organizing greater and greater things.

The real thing I'm worried about is actually hard AI. I can't predict its motivations.

Edit: You guys fundamentally don't get it because you don't understand that I'm arguing about _economics_.

> This isn't a question of who is going to own a dishwashing robot. Its a > question of who is going to own the means of production.

People are going to, at the very least, own their own means of production. Look at it from an economics standpoint, at the margin, why would I buy a chair rather than get my semi-intelligent android robot to cut down a tree, plank it, and build it. The chair would have to be essentially free. Then who cares who owns the means to production. At the margin I could always revert to having my personal robot build it.

Furthermore, I would argue that most of the computers that make most of the value in the world are owned largely by everybody. I have a computer that I use to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on, and it will be the same with robots. People with vision will direct machines of greater sophistication towards and end they desire.

Whether you own something or rent it is always going to be a economic decision. I own my Macbook Pro and I installed Ubuntu on it, but even if I was renting it, that doesn't change the fundamental nature of what I'm saying.

I used to think that we were marching towards this awful grey future where 99.9% of people were going to be treated like cattle and ultra-corps were going to be running the world with all their machines. Most people talk like this is what's coming, and, barring AI, I no long think this is the case.

Edit2: I wrote my first edit when I had negative points, now it seems to have positive points, which is why I opened up the edit with "you guys don't get it".

<comment><USER4> >Imagine it's 1940 or 1950 and someone starts asking "Who is going to own the computers?"

You can manipulate bits and bytes at home, great, but these robots are industrial producers that make things, are subject to regulations, etc. This isn't a question of who is going to own a dishwashing robot. Its a question of who is going to own the means of production.

The funny thing is that your answer is antiquated. What computer do I really own? My android phone that is controlled by google, managed by a telecom carrier, and all of my data at google. Or all the servers I work with that are VM's at some cloud provider? We're not landlords anymore. We're renters.

<comment><USER5> > We're not landlords anymore. We're renters.

This is why I like Plex instead of Netflix. Netflix has more movies after all, for a subscription.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The premise of this article is entirely wrong. We haven't had a 'massive deregulation', taxes across the west have rose, as has regulation and centralisation. THAT is why conditions for workers have declined. THAT is why the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, there may have been some limited de-regulation here and there, but we are no where _near_ an actual free-market situation. For somebody to come along and decry de-regulation as the problem, in this environment, is absolutely absurd.

<comment><USER6> Exactly! I've read a lot of posts recently claiming the 'free-market' is the problem. Well, I can't think of many countries in the world who have a currency not owned by the state, a banking system entirely independent of the state, a country with a real, none-fiat currency, a country with minimum to no forms of tax etc. It just isn't the case, and it's not heading that way by and means either. I'm not sure where people are getting this from

<comment><USER7> _Exactly! I 've read a lot of posts recently claiming the 'free-market' is the problem._

Yeah, it's a symptom of the kind of elitism that modern day "leftish wing" / "liberal" types (as opposed to classical liberals) are infected with, where they believe that if only we'd let them micro-manage every little detail of society, the economy, culture, etc., then we could live in a "perfect" world where everyone is uniformly happ and "none suffer".

The thing is, that's never been possible and I don't think it'll ever be possible... and if it were possible, it's not desirable. "Uniformly happy" also means "uniformly sad" and "uniformly oppressed". None for me, thanks.

<comment><USER6> Perfectly put! I got down-voted to -6 karma for challenging that attitude, good to see someone who agrees at last.

What baffles me the most if when they refer to what we have now, in the west as a 'free-market'. What we have is the end product of the social-democrat era of conflating big business and big government.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Please send in examples of trolls' comments - <AUTHOR>

I'm experimenting with algorithmically identifying trolls and other Internet Stupid People™ and automatically filtering their comments from blog threads, etc.
I have two issues: (a) what to consider as a 'troll' vs. someone genuinely asking a simple question; and (b) getting a corpus of these comments as examples.
So I'd like to invite HNers to submit real examples of dumb/mean/bad comments. You can do it here, but I'd rather they were emailed to <firstname.lastname@example.com>. If you include your name, in the From header or in a signature, I'll credit you publicly when I post about my results. (Unless you ask otherwise.) (If you include the URL of your website, I'll include a link, also.)
I'm not looking for made-up examples, however representative you think they are. I don't ask for a URL to prove their authenticity, but please don't submit your own deliberately-trolling comments. <comment><USER2> Try visiting the tech blog site, Engadget, and reading through the comments, particularly the comments about Android and Apple devices.

The numerous flame wars and hate comments were what drove me away from the website.

(By the way I have nothing against the writers or editors creating the content for the website; they are all fine people in my opinion. My issue is with the quality control, or there lack of, of the comments moderation.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why not just crawl HN and pick out all the comments that are greyed out?

<comment><USER4> Very often comments will get downvoted on HN not because they are trolling, but because they are simply wrong, off-topic or not a popular point of view.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, that's a good point. I think you might have better luck viewing any heavily down-voted comments in popular threads.</comment></comment></comment>


23 Typefaces Join MoMA Permanent Collection - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/arts/24iht-design24.html

<comment><USER2> Information from MOMA itself, including a list of the typefaces and pictures of them all: [http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2011/01/24/digital- fo...](http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2011/01/24/digital-fonts-23-new- faces-in-moma-s-collection)

And here's the brief list of typefaces: OCR-A, New Alphabet, Bell Centennial, ITC Galliard, FF Meta, Oakland, Keedy Sans, FF Beowolf, Template Gothic, Dead History, HTF Didot, FF Blur, Mason, Mantinia, Interstate, Big Caslon, FF DIN, Walker, Verdana, Mercury, Miller, Retina, Gotham.

(Trivia: Oakland [EDIT: duh, no, FF Beowolf; thanks, _prs_!] was designed by Just van Rossum, brother of Guido van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language.)

<comment><USER3> Minor correction: FF Beowolf rather than Oakland was designed by Just van Rossum.

[http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=...](http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=139326)

<comment><USER4> Minor correction: Beowolf was designed by Just van Rossum _and_ Erik van Blokland.

It was written in Postscript and was the first typeface to dynamically change every time it printed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> MoMA website has the list of typefaces (scroll down) as well as pictures: [http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2011/01/24/digital- fo...](http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2011/01/24/digital-fonts-23-new- faces-in-moma-s-collection)

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting that more than half of these 23 fonts are from just three designers: Carter, Hoefler and Frere-Jones. Carter alone accounts for 30%. Carter's Georgia, not included here, is an unsung masterpiece of a display font, tarnished a bit by ubiquity, sure, but still so easy on the eyes.

<comment><USER7> Georgia will forever be ensconced by the schoolchildren of the nineties as the best font to subtly enlarge Times New Roman, lengthening a school-paper, without actually changing the point size.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Incase anyone is wondering about the shirt in the article photograph: [http://www.experimentaljetset.nl/archive/john-paul-ringo- geo...](http://www.experimentaljetset.nl/archive/john-paul-ringo-george.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Any non profits looking for one click financial transparency? - <AUTHOR> I've been considering an idea to make it easier for non-profits and local government to transparently declare their financial records.
I thought you could use Europe's open banking api to automatically connect to a bank account and display transaction history, which would the be easily linkable or embeddable into your site.
I have a couple questions:
Do non-profits want this? Or are the more useful ways to be transparent?
Is this robust enough, it'd be pretty easy to create another bank account to do fraudulent activities. Is there away to make it more robust?
Is there a better way to solve this problem? <comment><USER2> I recently set up a non-profit and consulted with lots of people in the field. I found out that most non profits have overheads of 15-30%, which I found to be pretty shocking. I think a majority of the public would too.

In some cases there are real reasons why overheads need to be this big, thats ok. But managing this communication has got to be a pain in the ass, I think most of the product would be around catering for this and not true transparency.</comment>


POTUS's Orwellian Image Control - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/12/opinion/obamas-orwellian-image-control.html

<comment><USER2> I don't see the problem, not for me the citizen. Sure, news outlets want access. But I don't really care to see photos of the President in meetings, I have my own meetings to go to.

I think on balance the health of the nation would rise in some vague way if we just didn't give so much of a fuck about what celebrities are doing every day. And yes, the President has devolved to celebrity status; we know this, because as the article points out his handlers are trying to closely manage his image via photos, among other things.

He could greatly improve his image by managing his effectiveness and truthfulness.</comment>


Do programmers read books? Or is the book industry dead? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I buy programming books on subjects peripherally related to what I do when they go on sale and then read them later when I have time. When Codys went out of business last year I was able to get an OCaml book and a half dozen odd graphics books for a few dollars. I still haven't found the time to read them thoroughly. That said, I just ordered <http://www.lua.org/gems> since I do a lot with Lua these days.</comment>


Lemon – An embeddable, lightweight programming language in ANSI C - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lemon-lang/lemon <comment><USER2> The documentation [1] appears to come from a very ordered mind. There's something very appealing about simplicity.

I see more similarity with Python than either Java or C, except for the braces and semicolons.

The description says that everything is an object, even types, though there's no way to specify types in the function prototypes so far, it seems. (Whilst that is what you would expect from a dynamically typed language, it can still be useful for optional type checking, or for later optimisation (AOT or Jit), or to make it easier to efficiently add methods for existing "types".)

Actually, what I can't quite see from the documentation is how one calls methods, whether it is necessary to put methods inside the classes, whether they dispatch only on the first argument or an implicit "this", and how inheritance is handled.

So I guess this is all at a very early stage of development.

[1] [http://www.lemon-lang.org/documentation](http://www.lemon- lang.org/documentation)

<comment><USER3> > So I guess this is all at a very early stage of development.

That should be the top link

<comment><USER4> Submitters here have developed a truly odd habit of posting a github link when a project has a site with actual documentation. And then, we get random, angry posters (visible elsewhere on this page) who don't notice the link to the actual site at the top of the github page.

<comment><USER5> Or who think "if the github is in this state, the site's probably terrible!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How about this link instead, since the GitHub page has no info about the language?

[http://www.lemon-lang.org](http://www.lemon-lang.org)

<comment><USER7> I agree. Maybe [http://www.lemon-lang.org/documentation](http://www.lemon- lang.org/documentation) ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not to be confused with SQLite's Lemon parser generator:

[https://www.sqlite.org/src/doc/trunk/doc/lemon.html](https://www.sqlite.org/src/doc/trunk/doc/lemon.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Why is the `var` keyword required in function arguments if it's dynamically typed and there's no other possible option?

<comment><USER10> This is a complete guess, but maybe so they can treat it the same way as normal variable declarations

<comment><USER7> Might be. Probably reusing the same pattern matching code in function definitions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice seed for random number generation used here: [https://github.com/lemon- lang/lemon/blob/9a0b3dbc854532b31f7...](https://github.com/lemon- lang/lemon/blob/9a0b3dbc854532b31f731a15f57365972d0cac73/src/lemon.c#L274) I'm not sure because I haven't read very far yet but I wonder if the lemon standard lib allows lemon code to change the seed?

</comment><comment><USER11> Went to the doc directory and got this:

 _TODO: Add Doc_

Could developers please stop doing that? These 'agile development' and 'release early and often' mantras have really gone overboard.

Why would anybody use a programming language with zero documentation for anything? Are we supposed to guess the language and its features from a single five-line hello world program?

<comment><USER12> > Why would anybody use a programming language with zero documentation for > anything? Are we supposed to guess the language and its features from a > single five-line hello world program?

As someone who has done a handful of compiler/interpreter projects: I don't think that they expect anyone at this point to be using that language. They're targetting it at language geeks like myself (who go and dig around the source, which I just did). Maybe in some years' time this project will reach a stage where end user docs matter.

A little more verbose readme would have been nice, though. Things that I did not find out by looking at the examples/docs, but I care about:

      * what paradigm? imperative, functional, etc?
      * interpreted or compiled language?
      * what's the target? interpreter, a bytecode VM, LLVM, compile-to-C, native codegen?
      * static/dynamic typing? type inference?

By looking around the code, I _think_ that this is an interpreted language with dynamic typing that's implemented with a stack-based bytecode virtual machine. Not unlike Lua, Python or Ruby, that is.

<comment> le-mark It is dynamic, curly braced, garbage collected, coroutines. Some really squeaky clean C code too. One can immediately tell this is a great code base to read and learn from, at the very least.

<comment><USER13> What's so squeaky clean about hiding a goto inside a macro?

<comment> le-mark I guess you're referring to this[1]. I'd actually call that usage svelte. The macro is undefined not far after it's use in the file, and makes the section it's in far more readable.

[1] [https://github.com/lemon- lang/lemon/blob/9a0b3dbc854532b31f7...](https://github.com/lemon- lang/lemon/blob/9a0b3dbc854532b31f731a15f57365972d0cac73/src/lemon.c#L257)

<comment><USER14> Why does it have the do-while(0)?

<comment> le-mark It's a safeguard because {} statement blocks are optional [1].

[1] [https://stackoverflow.com/a/923833/2561675](https://stackoverflow.com/a/923833/2561675)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> seems a bit similar to lua? So little information it's hard to know what interesting things the language provides

</comment><comment><USER16> Not too much documentation nor examples there, right? However, the two test files and the documentation website immediately made me think about Python and Nim at the first glance. I might give it a try as an embeddable language, it looks promising.

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting optimizations:

[https://github.com/lemon- lang/lemon/blob/master/src/peephole...](https://github.com/lemon- lang/lemon/blob/master/src/peephole.c)

</comment><comment><USER18> > TODO: Add Doc

It's not a programming language if there's no documentation. It's just a compiler implementation for a dialect of something amorphous and ethereal.

That said, I kind of like the examples on [http://www.lemon- lang.org/documentation](http://www.lemon-lang.org/documentation) and I wish the author(s) well in fleshing this out.

</comment><comment><USER19> What problem does it solve?

<comment><USER20> Looks like an attempt of a JS programmer to reinvent a lighter weight JS with aim at system programming.

If it is yet again tied to a complex, feature rich VM (a stack based one), then he went the wrong way in achieving his goal. Direct interpretation should've been the way forward for such task.

<comment><USER21> A stack based VM or direct interpretation have no real difference with regard to what you mention. Please elaborate further.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's the motivation for this language? It seems like Javascript with destructuring assignment, named function parameters, and a few miner quirks (like sentinal)

<comment><USER22> It seems like it's meant to be easy to embed in another language's code. Like embedding LUA into a C game engine to provide a convenient way to build higher-level game logic on top of the engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interesting mixture of C/C++, Python (__init__) and Javaish. Has no package manager (atleast I can't see one).

Would like to see how it compares against Lua in performance.

</comment><comment><USER24> Looks like Python with curly braces. I assume the developer is also a python dev based on the comments in his code.

<comment><USER25> No way. No Python dev would ever use both tabs and spaces...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm seeing in the source that the author prefers

type

methodName(args...)

Is this a common C-ism? I'm not familiar with this code style.

<comment><USER27> GNU style.

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

<comment><USER28> GNU style is mostly about the funny and ugly indentation of braces.

Return type on separate line is shared by many other coding styles.

<comment><USER27> Sure. It's an illustrative example that it's a common C style.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The source code is very pleasant to read - both in terms of layout and variable names.

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks like the documentation website is down right now.

</comment><comment><USER30> i'd like to see an embedded language designed to not have OO, and for the host system/language to handle the objects. I guess Lua 5.2 kinda fulfills that.

<comment><USER31> JavaScript? The original use case was exactly that.

<comment><USER30> it's too open to abuse and shoehorning of libraries etc. also you cannot embed javascript into something built in javascript it's eval.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> What a lemon

</comment><comment><USER33> Looks like a mashup of Ruby, JavaScript and tiny bit of Python.

<comment><USER34> I'm mostly seeing a lot of Python. The examples show that multiple assignment unpacks collections, functions can be called with argument name assignment, and collections can be unpacked into named arguments, as opposed to using collections to replace named arguments.

<comment><USER35> Ruby supports that too. Here's a snippet that shows named arguments, and unpacking a Hash into named arguments.

It can do multiple assignment and unpacking collections into them too, though unlike with named arguments, that will treat the collection as an Array:

        def foo bar:, baz:
            p [bar, baz]
        end

        h = {bar: 1, baz: 2}

        foo(h)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "Lemon – An embeddable, lightweight programming language in ANSI C that lacks documentation."

Uh, thanks for posting this strange link, I guess.</comment>


Ask HN: Where do you store your side projects? - <AUTHOR> I was wondering, where is the best place to store your side projects that you don't necessarily want to put on github? I was thinking a flash drive or the cloud. I also see some people using their own websites. Where do you guys put yours?<p>I might also want to use this platform as a portfolio of sorts. <comment><USER2> Bitbucket. Free unlimited private repos.

</comment><comment><USER3> For stuff I need to be remotely accessible, I use BitBucket and a commercial GitHub Private account. For stuff that can be local only, a series of local git repos.

If security is a concern, I trust a provider like GitHub or BitBucket to secure my data better than I trust myself to secure it, esp. if I also want to be able to access that data remotely.

Then there's the ability to easily convert projects between public and private. Publicize that private side project when it's ready, or privatize the open project that you want to take commercial.

There are a ton of integrations built in to GitHub (not just GitHub Pages) that to me make it a clear win for now with BitBucket a strong 2nd in my mind.

</comment><comment><USER4> Bitbucket for private repositories or create your personal git repo in 10 minutes[1], a VPS server cost 5 USD/month and there are dozens of free solutions nowadays.

If you're a lone dev, you can use 'tig' a command line tool to visualize git flow. Otherwise, Gitlab or one of the dozen lightweight httpd front-ends will do the job.

[1] 2009 blog post: [https://www.convalesco.org/articles/2009/07/24/how-to- set-up...](https://www.convalesco.org/articles/2009/07/24/how-to-set-up-a- personal-git-repository-in-10-minutes/)

</comment><comment><USER5> For private projects I have my own self-hosted installation of gitbucket.

Public projects are largely hosted on my own instance again, but also mirrored to github. (I like github, and I trust them, but equally I don't want to be reliant upon them so setting up mirroring before they die is better than doing so in a mad-panic as they fail!)

</comment><comment><USER6> I use Bitbucket for private repos. Yesterday I asked a similar question in the GitLab 8.3 release thread, and some of those answers might be useful for you too.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10781263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10781263)

</comment><comment><USER7> Everything goes in bitbucket until I am ready for it to go on github. So all of my side projects that don't fully make it end up staying on bitbucket

</comment><comment><USER8> GitHub. Although, it starting to seem weird that so many open source things are hosted there, but the actual GitHub source code isn't open source.

</comment><comment><USER9> I use gitlab for private projects, and github for public ones. Gitlab is not bad, but kind of slow when pushing/pulling.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have a hosteurope.de server that hosts all my side projects, the cost is minimal and the reliability is great.

</comment><comment><USER11> I use a combination of local git repos backed up using JottaCloud and GitHub Private Account.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have only one laptop, so I just use local git repository and then backblaze for backup.

</comment><comment><USER13> another vote for bitbucket

</comment><comment><USER14> GitLab.

</comment><comment><USER15> gogs - go git service.</comment>


Mobile TCP optimization – lessons learned in production - <AUTHOR> https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2015-08-25-tcp-optimization-in-mobile-networks/ <comment><USER4> Recent discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10116879](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10116879)

Same guy being interviewed in a software-defined-networking podcast

[http://blog.ipspace.net/2015/03/tcp-optimization-with- juho-s...](http://blog.ipspace.net/2015/03/tcp-optimization-with-juho- snellman-on.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> I got involved in a video streaming project for mobile last year. The back end had all sorts of aggressive dynamic bandwidth optimisation: start low, switch to a higher quality if you can and so on. I told the dev team they were making assumptions about internal mobile network topology that they couldn't possibly know and that it would bite them. It did. So badly in fact that there was a dispute about deliverables between them and the owner of the brand. Their solution didn't work well on some carriers and was almost unusable on others. Looking back, I'm sure it was because of some of the issues raised in this presentation.

Over a long weekend, I cobbled together a very basic ffmpeg and nginx-rtmp- module solution using fixed low bandwidth videos (about 8k per second which works on EDGE very nicely - think Africa). It not only ran better - <USER2> networks don't mind giving you a small slice as long as it's predictable - <USER3> used about half a million dollars less hardware on our side.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would love to see recommendations for service providers; what should we be doing on the server side, given the reality of mobile networks.</comment>