What's the point of writing good scientific software? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bioinformaticszen.com/post/whats-the-point-of-writing-good-scientific-software/

<comment><USER2> A large portion of my job, and my team's job, is programming for research at a university. We get "researcher code" that was used to write a paper, and turn it into something for the next set of researchers to build on. There are several other groups at this university that do the same thing.

I'm starting to think, there may be a field of study here. I regularly take software that "proves" some hypothesis or "shows some good results", tear it down, and throw some engineering at it, only to find that the results are not reproduced, or the benefits are severely diminished. Then I have to go track down the why... because until I can show it, it is assumed my fault.[1] The results of some of this are probably paper worthy themselves.

I think a useful field, or useful conference at least could be built for people in this typeof postions, studying the meta effects of software on research. How can we report the issues found, or the updates to the numbers, without putting black marks on the reputations of people who actually are doing good work?

Another interesting phenomenon that is worth study is that the refactoring/rewriting process often gets real results, but it turns out the mechanism for the improvement isn't what the original researcher thought/claimed. It is something perhaps related, perhaps a side effect, and so on. There needs to be a way to recognize both the original researcher, the programmer who found the issues, and the follow-up researchers who did some more determination of the problem.

[1] This isn't as antagonistic as it sounds. It is actually a nice check on my own mistakes. Did the differences in what the researcher did and what I did introduce some strange side effect? Did I remove a shortcut that wasn't actually a shortcut and I misunderstood? A hundred other things on both sides... Research has a large component of "we don't know what we're doing, axiomatically so", and as such it is a decent way of finding out more info.

<comment><USER3> case in point:

The Effects of FreeSurfer Version, Workstation Type, and Macintosh Operating System Version on Anatomical Volume and Cortical Thickness Measurements

<http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0038234>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been debating about whether I want to open-source the scientific code I've been writing. A lot of it could be useful to other people in the molecular dynamics field.

I recently introduced my advisor to Github, and he thought it was a good idea; however, there were a few hesitations. The first, most importantly, is the likeliness of a bug. If you put your code on a very public website like Github, there is a chance it's going to be scrutinized by everyone in your field.

Now, unless you are one of the best programmers who has ever lived, there are bound to be bugs in your software, and when someone discovers them, it could have a deleterious effect on any journal articles you've written that used that code. The issue is that even though most bugs do not lead to significant changes in results, you would still need to redo all of your data to make sure that is the case. The software industry has long recognized buggy software as a reality, but I don't think the scientific community is as tolerant of it (hence the reason a lot of people hide their code).

For my MD simulations, I use the well-known LAMMPS package. Bugs in it are discovered all the time! (<http://lammps.sandia.gov/bug.html>). So I think there needs to be a collective realization among the scientific community that these are bound to occur and authors of journal articles can't be persecuted all the time for it. A lot of computational work is the art of approximation so I would just lump "human incompetency" under one of those approximation factors.

Despite this risk, I think I'm still going to release my code at some point as I would personally welcome critique and improvement suggestions. I'd like to think I'm a better coder than most scientists since I've been coding since I was twelve in multiple language paradigms and have won a major hackathon, but eh, who knows. I'm quite sure my _environment_ isn't up to industry standards because I've always coded solo rather than in a team.

<comment><USER3> holy moly. It sounds like you don't want to release your code because someone else might find a bug that you missed (and that might have a "deleterious" effect on your journal articles).

You would rather leave potentially incorrect work standing than have a bug corrected?

What the f*ck has happened to science.

<comment><USER5> ___What the fuck has happened to science._ __

This is fairly standard in the science industry (I use the term deliberately). I get rated (in nuclear and particle physics) on how many papers I've published, what indictions of recognition I get from my peers and at which conferences I've been invited to speak. Short of something like a Millennium Prize or a Nobel (one-in-a-million, and both still very political), there are almost no direct rewards to accuracy or importance.

Academics tend not to be the people with the most understanding or the best direct insight - they're the people with the most friends on committees and who do the most fashionable things (usually badly). And so they appoint new academics who are a little bit worse than them (no point in opening yourself to competition - instead bring in people who are going to be grateful to you!) and the cycle continues.

<comment><USER6> This is what turns me off so much from academia. Is this really that typical at most universities? I know that there's always been a large emphasis placed on publishing in high-impact journals (and often), but isn't the open publishing movement beginning to have an effect, albiet rather small?

<comment><USER5> Not that I have seen. In fact, in my experience, even publications are not all that important! In the UK and Germany both it seems to be 30% of what you know, 60% of who you know and 10% luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would say that you should look at what stage you are in your career and what your goals are. If your goal is to become research faculty, you should focus on getting high impact papers out of the door--software is a tool for helping you do so.

If you find yourself re-using that bit of code, then it may be worth cleaning it up and making it maintainable. If people start sending you requests for it, then it may be worthwhile open sourcing it, documenting it, maintaining it, etc.--but only if you have time.

I do make open source scientific software as part of my job, but I'm at a later stage in my career and it's not something I would have a science postdoc work on--it's just not fair to them and their career prospects within science...

Recently, someone asked for some reduction code that I've developed and I realized that while it was documented, I didn't have time to refactor it and clean it up--finally, I just put it on github and told them to contact me if they had questions--they were happy to have it as a starting point for what they wanted to work on. So, if you believe that you've made something worthwhile, but don't have the bandwidth to maintain it and other people might find it useful, sometimes it might be better to just put it out there and let people play with it--no guarantees, but it may help someone else get started...

You can get a large number of citations in some subfields for writing commonly used software--but it may or may not help your career. For example, I have friends at various institutions around the world that tell me that their management gives them no credit for developing useful software (complete with lectures, updates, documentation, etc.)--they just release it because they feel they should and most of them are also already tenured in their positions.

Good luck!!!

<comment><USER8> I agree there's little direct credit given for developing software, but it can be helpful for early-career researchers to gain name recognition. Even if nobody knows your actual work, if you wrote some software lots of people use, it makes people feel like they know you from somewhere.

Admittedly, it's tricky to do, since that name recognition only really matters if you can _also_ manage to publish enough papers. Realistically grad school is more likely for that than during a postdoc or as an assistant professor. Some grad students manage to release some widely used software (well, usually "widely" in a particular niche), which I think does help them build up more prominence than someone in their career stage might otherwise have had.

On a different angle, having produced some reasonably decent software can be a nice thing to have in your back pocket if you ever consider moving to industry. Having N papers and one decent software package is probably a better academia-to-industry transition CV than N+2 papers and no software packages.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that producing a piece of software many people use is great for your career. I think, on average, most software is never downloaded or used. So, given this prior, is it a good investment of my time to flesh-out documentation and examples rather than just enough to get it published?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "I have previously believed that converting any code you've created into a open-source library benefits the community and prevents reinvention of the wheel [...]

I have however started to realise that perhaps something I thought would be very useful may be of little interest to anyone else. Furthermore the effort I have put into testing and documentation may not have been the best use of my time if no one but I will use it. As my time as a post doc is limited, the extra time effort spent on improving these tools could have instead have been spent elsewhere."

From a purely selfish perspective, I've found that documenting and cleaning up my own code benefits me in the future. Even if it's a one-off, single-purpose utility that I'll never use again in the future, I often find myself needing to borrow bits of code from my old projects. ("Oh, I solved this problem before. How did I do it? Let's dig up that old, old project...") At which point, present-day me benefits if my past self bothered to actually document things and make sure they're reasonably robust.

There are countless other reasons (moral and pragmatic) to document, test, and open-source one's code, of course! Many of them more important than the ability to crib one's old code, I'd argue.

But the author seems to have considered (and discarded) them...

<comment><AUTHOR> I am the author of this post. I don't disagree with anything you wrote. Several posts on my blog say exactly this. The software I wrote however is open source on github [1], has it's own website [2], has man pages for each command [3], example projects [4] and three screencasts guiding how to install and use it [5].

I did this because I wished that all bioinformatics software had this attention to usability and documentation. However now I wonder what was the point of all of this if no one ever ends up using it? I could have done the minimum for publication then spent this time working on finishing other manuscripts I have waiting.

As I wrote though, I agree with what you wrote in your comment. I just don't think there is any incentive for post-docs in academia to prioritise writing good software over pushing out additional papers.

[1]: <https://github.com/michaelbarton/genomer>

[2]: <http://next.gs>

[3]: [https://github.com/michaelbarton/genomer-plugin- view/tree/ma...](https://github.com/michaelbarton/genomer-plugin- view/tree/master/man)

[4]: [https://github.com/michaelbarton/chromosome- pfluorescens-r12...](https://github.com/michaelbarton/chromosome- pfluorescens-r124-genome)

[5]: <http://www.youtube.com/user/BioinformaticsZen>

<comment><USER9> Instead of, "But the author seems to have considered (and discarded) them"

I ought to have written, "But the author has considered them and concluded that their benefits don't outweigh their costs in his case."

I totally support what you're saying! IMHO it's definitely not worth it to document/open-source/etc code at the cost of one's career or happiness, especially when the code is of questionable utility to others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used to call the scientific software that I was writing, "paper-ware".

You aren't building a system for other users, you aren't really doing anything other than one-off analysis to create charts, which will be explained in a paper.

Things have changed somewhat since the early 2000's, but the concept remains the same. Nowadays, for interesting or controversial results other scientists want to be able to verify your results. However, that is usually more related to your data and how you processed it, rather than your software algorithms (which should be explained in the paper, and can be recreated from that).

So do these systems need to have reams of documentation? Probably not. However, if you leave the system for two years and come back to work on it, or figure out how it used to work, then you best have enough commenting with a thorough readme about some of the decisions you made and why. It's more analogous to scripting rather than software engineering.

<comment><USER11> On the other hand, if you put good software out that people use, _it counts as a citation_. The most cited prof in the dept I graduated from maintained a widely used program for astronomical simulations.

<comment><USER4> Seriously? That's intriguing... If you wrote a very popular scientific library, how much would that impact your career compared to, for example, a Nature publication?

(I ask this because, for me, I think the former is much more likely than the latter.)

<comment><USER12> They serve somewhat different purposes, but an influential library will have far far more citations. At least in bioinformatics, that's the only way to get a large number of citations, because at their core bioinformaticians are tool builders! For example, samtools has ~1400 citations [1]. The original BLAST paper is around ~44k citations [2].

However, there are a ton of bioinformatics libraries released every year, and almost none of them gain any traction. Nature publications are far more frequent than important new libraries, and you need more political clout to get the library popular than you need to get a Nature paper.

Really, you need to gauge usefulness and interest of your library before you devote a ton of time to it. It's a lot like a startup's product.

[1] <http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=samtools>

[2] <http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=BLAST>

<comment><USER6> I think this is more a comment on how the system is broken. Researchers should be notified of new libraries in their area. At the very least, they should be able to consult a single site that everyone uploads their code to (think Github for science with more emphasis on exploration). Academic journals are not the only channels carrying useful information.

<comment><USER12> It's not the discoverability of the libraries that's the problem, it's that the utility of these libraries is generally not that great for anyone except the authors. One common type of library handles data transformation, normalization, and maybe even workflows. These abound. But they are rarely useful in other people's hands, because to extend them and actually get any work done, you need to spend as much time learning them as it would take to write it from scratch. And the advantage of writing it from scratch is that you know it intimately, and all of its assumptions and flaws, which you don't know about somebody else's code, even if it's extremely well documented. Take something like Taverna [1], which is probably very useful to some people, and had been recommended enthusiastically to me by many people, but after spending three hours reading documents and searching the web, I could not get it to do what I needed to do, so I wrote a simple one-off bash script that interfaced with our cluster system. Alternatively I could try to hack in loops, but that's going to take me 10x as long, will require me to interact with many other people who obviously don't understand my problem since they did not consider it a fundamental need, and may not even be accepted back into the mainline, at which point I'm off on my own fork and lose the benefit of using a common code base. Waiting 1-10 hours to hear back from the dev mailing list is unacceptable when you're trying to get work done.

Is it more important to get the result, or to use other people's code? Reinventing the wheel is a minor sin compared to not getting results.

[1] <http://www.taverna.org.uk>

<comment><USER6> I just think that very much depends on the field and the problem domain. Taverna seems like it's more targeted towards academics that don't know how to code, and that most people that use it are comfortable staying within its limits. I mean, you definitely are going to have a level of project specificity that is much higher than say, that found in the web development world. In science, many people are searching for the existence of new problems, not just the answers. Why build a gem for email integration if the next best method of communication will likely come out next week? The problem with this thinking is that it perpetuates itself. I don't write the library that only you would find useful because I don't think it's worth my time. In return, I never receive anything useful because everyone else has adopted that same mindset. As some others pointed out, I think the problem rests in the lack of best practices and poor comp sci education among researchers. Teach proper library construction and test-driven philosophy, and I think you'll see a lot more people become comfortable writing and publishing libraries. Cobble together some basic documentation, keep an eye on its use, and contribute more accordingly. You're never going to escape writing custom scripts, but there are more well-defined problems out there that could use standard solutions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Like everything else in software, code quality should be feature-driven. Write the minimum to do what you need to. If you find that your code's poor quality is becoming a problem (whether because it's slowing your own development down, or other people aren't using it and you want them to, or whatever reason), do something about it then, but not before.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. As an individual this is what everyone should do. Just write the software to get to the next publishable unit. I think however this leads to poor quality software for the field as a whole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "I have begun to think now that the most important thing when writing software is to write the usable minimum. If then the tool becomes popular and other people begin to use it, then I should I work on the documentation and interface."

That. Like someone pointed out, I find that documenting and testing the key parts (that is, those I know at least I will reuse) is always a good investment of my time and prevents major headaches down the road. I've been experimenting with project structures that clearly separates the set of tools and functions that will be reusable, and those that are one shot. I focus all my testing efforts on former, and cut myself some slack on the latter.

Btw, I speak from a "scientist" perspective, and nothing I say applies to professional software engineering (I mean, I don't think it does).

</comment><comment><USER15> This is debatable, but IMHO your job as a post-doc is to learn new things about biology and publish papers on what you've learned. If you can document your code along the way, that's great. But if it's taking up a bunch of your time then it's probably a misguided effort.

<comment><USER16> No, your job is to contribute to the science of biology (or whatever). If you can have a large impact building specialist tools, that's a legitimate scientific contribution. This is commonplace in e.g. astronomy, where a PhD or postdoc could be part of a team building an instrument. The student is long graduated before the thing gets first light, so doesn't directly discover a damn thing about galaxies or whatever, but their instrument is a fine contribution. Science software is the telescope of tomorrow. (And today, but it doesn't scan so nicely.)

My bona fides: I helped create a widely-used software system in my field, and have received reasonable credit for it as a scientific contribution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A big concern for me has always been correctness. You're more likely to make mistakes and miss edge conditions in sloppy code. There's nothing worse than communicating some positive/inspiring results, only to find out later that you had an elusive computational bug in there that invalidates the results.

This reminds me: A man was seen cutting a tree down with a dull bladed axe. A bystander asked him "Why not sharpen your axe first?". The cutter responded "I don't have the time!".

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with respect to writing correct scientific software. I think in many cases though bugs are not found because who is going to download the software and test the conclusions? Unless it's a very big result, e.g. an arsenic backbone for DNA, few academics will spend the time to validate others results in this level of detail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm curious, is there a place where you can submit your software to the community and tag it as relevant for doing A, B, C. So that others can use it to do the same or even build it further. I have limited experience with software in your field - but it seems like there isn't a good way to find tools already built to address your needs, or at least close enought? Am I wrong or miss something?

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I know, nothing like this exists. It could be useful though. There are a few publications that do critical comparisons of scientific software. The assemblathon is one example of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I was just thinking the other day about how good academic software is getting. And how useful it is to society that masters and PhDs are making software for the research.

Look at RapidMiner (developed at U. Dortmund), Stanford's CoreNLP, and the brat rapid annotation tool. These are better than a lot of commercial tools. They are more text-analytics than bioinformatics, but same diff.

</comment><comment><USER20> Funny, I was just comparing the incentives for releasing scientific software to those of releasing well: [http://multiplecomparisons.blogspot.com/2013/02/making- data-...](http://multiplecomparisons.blogspot.com/2013/02/making-data-sharing- count.html)

And now I hear this questioning the value of writing up and polishing scientific software!</comment>


Y Combinator En Español - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT6Be34q-4RGljatnDHoO8w <comment><AUTHOR> Hi Everyone, we've talked to over 1000 founders in Latin America and while they know Y Combinator, they are not able to consume their online videos and podcasts. To solve this, we launched an unofficial YouTube channel in Spanish for YC. Our first video was uploaded today. Customer Pitch vs Investor Pitch - Michael Seibel dubbed into Spanish.

[https://youtu.be/4HS_67o9Zpg](https://youtu.be/4HS_67o9Zpg)</comment>


Nanoparticles from tattoos circulate inside the body, study finds - <AUTHOR> https://www.phys.org/news/2017-09-nanoparticles-tattoos-circulate-body.html <comment><USER2> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17584640](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17584640)

</comment><comment><USER3> I stick with blackwork only, and mostly lining and minimal shading.

Turns out my aesthetics are also probably quite useful!</comment>


Highest-Paid CEOs Run Some of the Worst-Performing Companies - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2016/07/25/ceo-pay-total-shareholder-return/ <comment><USER2> I'm willing to believe that CEO pay reflects poor governance practices to some degree, but this study fails to prove anything. As a simple alternative explanation for the data, suppose that companies that are performing badly have to pay more to attract CEO talent since the proposed CEO is taking on reputation risk if they fail to turn the company around. Then you'd expect exactly what the study found; the more highly paid the CEO, the lower the corporate performance.

This report should have looked at how CEO pay in one year affected company performance the next year and vice versa.</comment>


Vandalize your GitHub wall with Git-Art - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mikegroseclose/git-art

<comment><USER3> Love it. I've always felt like my github wall was misleadingly sparse (since the vast majority of my work is in private repos). This is a nice way to add some flavor.

</comment><comment><USER4> Debate could be had as to whether you should be allowed to modify your GitHub history like this. Personally, I think its a good thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had similar thoughts when creating this, but in the end I felt like it would promote using GitHub as a place where you keep your toolboox / have fun - <USER2> less a place where recruiters will blindly look at your "streak" count to decide whether you are a good developer or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Keeping bad recruiters away from our GitHub accounts one picture at a time.</comment>


A former Gawker editor on the Hulk Hogan verdict - <AUTHOR> http://genius.com/summary/www.nytimes.com%2F2016%2F03%2F19%2Fbusiness%2Fmedia%2Fgawker-hulk-hogan-verdict.html?unwrappable=1#annotations:8840931 <comment><USER2> > just because something makes you uncomfortable does not mean it shouldn't be > published

Nobody would agree with this as a justification for publishing female celebrities' private pictures and videos. Nobody calls that "telling the truth" or whatever.

I think the point about the public's interest in protecting elites' privacy is interesting, though.</comment>


Business Idea: Online Community Integration - <AUTHOR> http://philip.greenspun.com/business/online-community-integration <comment><USER2> This is an idea that I've had for years, and the opportunity is so ripe the damn thing about writes itself.

In fact, without reading this, I just asked HN if anybody else would be interested in collaborating on something just like this.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=896015>

Aside from the business opportunity, it gets down to who owns your friendships and your communications with them, you or some service? I say that that the farther away we get from each user owning his own social network and correspondence the farther we're going towards another monopoly situation that will take drastic action to fix. So this isn't just a business idea, it has some serious roots as well.

<comment><USER3> A side project our company (Citrusbyte) has been working on is OpenFriends (<http://getopenfriends.com/>). It is an universal friending system, which then can be subscribed to by various services (myspace, facebook, forums). We've been busy with our day jobs (consulting), so we haven't had a chance to polish it quite as far as it could be but your comment about users owning their own social network immediately made the connection in my head. Check it out, and shoot any feedback my way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is essentially what we have been writing at friendbinder [<http://friendbinder.com>] for a couple of years now. There are also a number of other systems attempting the same thing. One of the key issues is lack of standards in the APIs and RSS/Atom are not designed for this.

<comment><USER5> Hey, i like this. It looks like a cheap copy of Friendfeed, but it is what Friendfeed should have become. Friendfeed focused on lifestreaming instead of aggregation. I'd just need Tumblr integration and i could ditch Friendfeed.

Way to go!

<comment><USER4> FYI, as it happens, it's not a copy of anything, friendfeed didn't exist when we started. It's just taking us longer because we don't have ~10 ex-googlers working on it.

Your right it's what FriendFeed should have done/become, though for some reason they didn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _The only non-standard challenge presented by this project is the need to develop screen-scraping regular expressions for individual online communities that are run on custom software._

My spider-senses are tingling. I don't like the sound of this one bit.

I do like the sound of aggregated community, though, but here's an interesting question: how many communities is the average real person part of, these days? Aren't half of them on Facebook now? Plus, doesn't Google Wave.. sort of.. provide an alternative? Or maybe that could be the ultimate destination, the viewer if you will, on this stream of aggregation.

<comment><USER7> I'm starting to see the beginnings of an new trend here. Since Google Wave does everything and replaces everything on the internet, I have a feeling that all new startups and business ideas will garner the response, "Doesn't Google Wave do this already?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think I must have missed something. This doesn't seem like a new idea at all.

The existing methods are described as either RSS or one giant site (ala Facebook) and the solution is described as a giant news aggregator (with some social based filtering) coupled with each community site integrating OpenID.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've wanted something quite like this. I want to be able to discuss any topic with a group of thoughtful people. Most communities instead restrict solely by topic. Basically, I want the old usenet back.

I'm not sure if the best solution is to scrape a bunch of communities, or just create one central site, that becomes so powerful it sucks in all the great/people conversations (eg wikipedia).

</comment><comment><USER10> comments on the article at the author's blog: [http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/10/21/why-cant-i- che...](http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/10/21/why-cant-i-check-all-of- my-online-communities-on-one-page/#comments)

</comment><comment><USER11> It is not until half way through that one realises . . .

> "The only non-standard challenge presented by this project is the need to > develop screen-scraping regular expressions for individual online > communities that are run on custom software."

. . . that the whole idea has a notable form: a simple, mundane problem, hiding a big, hard problem. If you could solve the hard problem you would think you could do much more than help Joe Average with photography and flying.

> "This can be done on-demand."

It is perhaps a test of one's bias: from a business viewpoint, you probably would not think anything of it, but technically it is naggingly unsatisfactory.

It would be a great idea if it found some neat shortcut for the big hard problem that happened to specially fit the particular mundane problem . . .

<comment><USER4> Create an API, implement it in WordPress, phpBB, moveable type and get everyone else to implement it - then writing an aggregator would be a lot easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Isn't this essentially a more fully developed friendfeed?

</comment><comment><USER13> This looks a lot like what <http://ubervu.com> is doing

</comment><comment><USER14> <http://boardtracker.com/></comment>


Mental Fatigue and Getting to the Next Level of Performance - <AUTHOR> http://traderfeed.blogspot.com/2009/08/mental-fatigue-and-getting-to-next.html

<comment><USER2> The question was interesting. But I was hoping for some kind of answer.

</comment><comment><USER3> This man speaks very much in the same patterns and of the very same things that poker coaches do. Considering that both are risk-based (and math-based) actvities, I'm not terribly surprised.</comment>


Ask HN: What ten high technologies are you most thankful for? - <AUTHOR> I'd say in no particular order: the personal computer, the internet, google search, github, the world wide web, spotify, machine learning, web browsers, typescript, and react. <comment><USER2> In no particular order: Vaccines, indoor plumbing, the powered loom, torrent/distributed file sharing, the bicycle.

Ten is a lot.</comment>


The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-16/churchill-was-more-villain-than-hero-in-britain-s-colonies <comment><USER4> FWIW, the (in)famous "I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas" quote was in reference to tear gas. Ultimately banned for use in warfare by international treaty, but still commonly used today in civilian matters.

[https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/churchills-1919-war-...](https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/churchills-1919-war- office-memorandum.html)

<comment><USER5> More than "for what it's worth", that's an important difference. The full quote puts a very different spin on Churchill's position.

The article: "When some British officials objected to his proposal for "the use of gas against natives," he found their objections "unreasonable." In fact he argued that poison gas was more humane than outright extermination: "The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum.""

The full quote: "I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas.

I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected."

While Churchill's use of "poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes" certainly sounds abominable, he does primarily seem to be advocating for the use of non- deadly tear gas rather than something deadly. On the other hand, he also seems to be saying that he'd be OK with escalating to a more deadly gas if for some reason the non-deadly approach wasn't effective.

<comment><USER6> If the use of gas is so reasonable, one wonders why he only supports using it against "uncivilized tribes".

<comment><USER7> Well to be honest I'm sure Churchill would not have any qualms of using gas against the Irish or the Welsh.

<comment><USER8> He probably didn't think much of them either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The one party that seems to go unscathed or are even in power positions are the princes that chose to ally with the British to retain their kingdoms. The Last Nizam went to become an MP for a long time. His violent Razakar militia morphed into Political party and wins every Parliamentary election in Hyderabad. The Scindias of Gwalior are power players in both the INC and BJP. There are numerous other royal descendants that have FAT fortunes and local name recognition and political cache.

Indians can hate Winston Churchill all they want, and they can beg the liberal leaning administrations of Oxford and other British academia to throw away busts of Churchill. All the while naming colleges and universities after people who allied with British and treated their population worse than British have treated Indians.

Winston Churchill is a villian but the Indian allies of British are the worst scoundrels.

<comment><USER10> > The Last Nizam went to become an MP for a long time.

Osman Ali Khan was briefly the titular head of post-accession Hyderabad but was never an MP.

> His violent Razakar militia morphed into Political party and wins every > Parliamentary election in Hyderabad.

MIM as a political entity predates the Razakars. And I'd say the present day AIMIM has as much in common with it's predecessor as the Congress has with it's pre-independce avatar, which is not much.

<comment><USER9> Osman Ali Khan was M.P. of kurnool.

<comment><USER10> That was a different Osman Ali Khan, not the Nizam: [https://archive.siasat.com/news/former-mp-osman-ali-khan- pas...](https://archive.siasat.com/news/former-mp-osman-ali-khan-passes- away-196027/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > "History," Churchill himself said, "will judge me kindly, because I intend > to write it myself." He did, penning a multi-volume history of World War > Two, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his self-serving fictions.

One of my favorite conspiracy theories is the idea that Churchill and Roosevelt conspired to allow the attack at Pearl Harbor to occur.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Harbor_advance- knowledge...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Harbor_advance- knowledge_conspiracy_theory)

<comment><USER12> I would not be surprised if this was true, or at least had a significant amount of truth to it. It reminds me of the Zimmermann telegram that brought the US into WW1. The UK and the US both knew that Mexico was not going to help Germany (what with a Mexican revolution going on and all that), but the telegram was a convenient enough excuse for the US to join the war in Europe anyway.

The parallel here is that the US and UK are both waiting for the enemy to make a huge blunder (Germany trying to get Mexico to attack the US, or Japan attacking Pearl Harbor). Getting the US into the war was one of the top priorities of Churchill's government. And Roosevelt really wanted to help (the Lend-Lease among other things).

So this information, that Japan is about to attack, comes along, why would you stop it? Plus; how would you stop it? You can argue that revealing it was about to happen publicly would be enough for President Roosevelt to argue a war against Japan. But maybe he felt if Japan actually got to attack, he could also argue for a war against Germany?

<comment><USER13> > _" Plus; how would you stop it?"_

Well the primary targets, the carriers, weren't present. That was fortunate for America, to put it lightly. With the carriers missing, the attacking Japanese pilots focused their attacks on Battleship Row, against which they did severe damage.

It should be noted however that after the first attack wave, the USN managed to put up very dense anti-aircraft fire that impeded the Japanese attackers and probably saved thousands of American lives. If the Americans at Pearl Harbor had been given even just an hour of warning before the first attack wave, they would have been in a much better position (the anti-aircraft fire they could have organized before the first wave would have been even more effective than what they managed to muster after the first wave.)

If you're interested in the details of the battle, this youtube video is exceptional: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6cz9gtMTeI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6cz9gtMTeI)

<comment><USER14> The US broke the Japanese crypto and naval signals well before the war. I'm curious how they missed the boat (no pun intended) on the massive attack.

I vaguely remember the radio operators mistaking it as nothing which delayed the defences - as the hundreds of aircrafts came into view on radar. But beyond that how could they not have intercepted the planning beforehand?

I'm not suggesting a conspiracy just curious.

<comment><USER13> The Opana Radar Site on the north corner of the island detected the Japanese aircraft approaching, and the radar operators there reported it to their command. However this report was confused for a formation of B-17s that was scheduled to arrive from that general direction. The size of the detected formation, which might have revealed the confusion, was not properly communicated.

This incident was a subplot in the 1970 film _Tora! Tora! Tora!_ , which may be where you heard it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here's an interesting article which gives some response to the accusations made of Churchill's actions during the Bengal famine. It's short and well worth reading, although it clearly is papering over Churchill's racism.

[https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/in-the- media/churchil...](https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/in-the- media/churchill-in-the-news/indias-famine-would-have-been-worse/)

<comment><USER16> [https://xi.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/267rzg/what_e...](https://xi.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/267rzg/what_exactly_caused_the_bengal_famine_of_1943_and/)

> Churchill certainly did not engineer the famine in Bengal, but he was > ultimately responsible for the lack of a relief effort for it.

[https://xi.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6zi5fx/was_ch...](https://xi.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6zi5fx/was_churchill_and_the_united_kingdom_more/)

> It is hard to say where British incompetence, obsession with the war effort, > and active cruelty begin and end. My read of the evidence is that official > rice production statistics were wrong, and the British let millions of > people in Bengal die because the war was more important, but there's a lot > of debate about what actually happened.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/83oijk/was_c...](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/83oijk/was_churchill_really_a_racist_war_criminal_as/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Although the linked article by Tharoor only touches on the Indian connection, here's an article by Johann Hari that takes a broader view: [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/not-his- fines...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/not-his-finest-hour- the-dark-side-of-winston-churchill-2118317.html) ("He may have been a thug, but he knew a greater thug when he saw one") — interesting bit of trivia: "[Barack Obama's grandfather,] Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and was tortured on Churchill's watch".

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd be surprised if it's actually "a mystery" to anyone why Churchill is considered a hero of democracy.

</comment><comment><USER19> > In 2017, Tharoor put the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the > same category as some of "the worst genocidal dictators" of the 20th > century, saying that Churchill is "one of the more evil rulers of the 20th > century only fit to stand in the company of the likes of Hitler, Mao and > Stalin. Churchill has as much blood on his hands as Hitler does. > Particularly the decisions that he personally signed off during the Bengal > Famine when 4.3 million people died because of the decisions he took or > endorsed.

The author has toned down his message in this piece whilst still banging the same drum. And I'm not sure why. The guy was flawed, sure. He was both a renowned wit and a racist, who had to make some unbelievably hard decisions during wartime. One of those decisions unfortunately exacerbated a famine already well into the making[1], a thing Tharoor seems to ignore each time he brings it up. Instead he imagines that Churchill himself pushed a button saying "no shipping grain there because I'm racist" rather than than as a result of the nearly 1 million tonnes of ships lost in the Indian Ocean in a single year, stretching already stretched supplies to breaking point as the Allies continued fighting a war on 6 fronts across 3 continents.

I guess it's easy, you can repeatedly bring this up and tap into some anti- english sentiment within your countrymen. But why? The man can be both a hero and a villain in different parts of his life. You can appreciate the man of the hour whilst understanding that his views and actions in other parts of his life where outdated and by modern standards pretty disgusting.

You can also appreciate that without him WW2 may have gone very, very differently for both Europe _and_ India. And maybe there is something to be thankful for in that. Personally I would think the Nazis would have done a lot worse things, and held even worse views.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#February...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#February%E2%80%93April_1942:_Japanese_invasion_of_Burma)

</comment><comment><USER20> Three million Indians died while food sailed West. [http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992...](http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992,00.html)

The death tolls in the East during the Second World War (far greater in China than in India certainly) are absolutely staggering. Churchill's policy in Bengal was Mao-esque in malice and incompetence.

<comment><USER21> Which policy, specifically?

The only policy I know of was mobilizing the military to transport food and aid to the famine stricken regions during wartime.

I suppose you're suggesting that more food and resources should have been diverted, regardless of the consequences elsewhere, and without concern for any other event unfolding at the time in the region.

Genocidal? I don't think so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Churchill was no saint, I don't think any sane person anyone would elevate him to such - but he's no war criminal - and no villain to most.

Churchill was a nationalist, an unreformed victorian, an imperialist - <USER2> yes, a racist too.

The Bengal famine of 1943 was 1.5m deaths, this in the midst of a war that killed 85m people. I'd also point out that in the context of India - a country which in 1943 had around 400m people living in it - in other words .375% of the total population.

I'd also like to note that in 1949, India inflicted partition on itself, the greatest humanitarian crisis (almost) no one has heard of before - <USER3> displaced 14m and likely killed another 200k - 2m - again, on a country of around 400m people.

I consider it a zero-sum game to try to judge people by modern standards, it is meaningless - and lessens their very important contributions in history. History is in my opinion about clearly stating facts, and letting individuals form their own opinion.

I consider Churchill to be a great man - just as with Stalin and Roosevelt, whatever failings he had as peacetime a leader, are overshadowed to a significant amount by his wartime successes.

I also point out, that Churchill was not perfect, he was a lousy, lousy theatre commander.

<comment><USER23> "I'd also point out that in the context of India - a country which in 1943 had around 400m people living in it - in other words .375% of the total population."

When you want to trivialize the death of 1.5 million people, it's better to use even larger denominator like the population of the entire world.

<comment><USER24> Compared to the total number of people who have ever died or will ever die...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I guess beating up on Churchill is the latest in the "Let's oversimplify history and find some new villains" game.

Fair enough. Times change.

A related article: [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/14/winsto...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/14/winston- churchill-history-brexit-john-mcdonnell)

</comment><comment><USER26> If anyone is interested to learn more; the author of this post has debated "Britan does owe reparations" in Oxford Union Society here : [https://youtu.be/f7CW7S0zxv4](https://youtu.be/f7CW7S0zxv4)

This talk has many facts not even commonly known to Indians.

</comment><comment><USER27> The article says:

 _" Thanks to Churchill's personal decisions, more than 3 million Bengalis died of hunger in a 1943 famine. Churchill deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles, meant for yet-to-be-liberated Greeks and Yugoslavs. "The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious" than that of "sturdy Greeks," he argued. When reminded of the suffering of Bengalis, his response was typically Churchillian: The famine was the Indians' own fault, he said, for "breeding like rabbits." If the suffering was so dire, he wrote on the file, "Why hasn't Gandhi died yet?"_

People argue it wasn't Churchill's fault. Specifically [1], which says that the fall of Burma to the Japanese cut off Indian import sources and the wartime element meant "tough decisions" were made. It argues that in peacetime things would be different.

That really doesn't make sense. If you look at the history of famine's in India under British rule [2], over 35MM people died due to famines, and the majority of those are due to imperial mismanagement. In democratic governments, you can vote out people who aren't solving the problem. Not so in colonial societies.

This source [3] puts it clearly:

 _" Throughout the autumn of 1943, the United Kingdom's food and raw materials stockpile for its 47 million people - 14 million fewer than that of Bengal - swelled to 18.5m tonnes.

In the end, Mukherjee writes eloquently, it was "not so much racism as the imbalance of power inherent in the social Darwinian pyramid that explains why famine could be tolerated in India while bread rationing was regarded as an intolerable deprivation in wartime Britain"._

To us Indians, Winston Churchill _is_ Hitler and what happened in Bengal _is_ an Indian Holocaust. It is appropriate to call it "revisionist history" because the Indian and more generally Eastern perspective is not present in modern history. That is slowly changing thanks to modern scholarship and I think we will view Winston Churchill very differently in 50 years.

All men are flawed. Churchill did some very good things for England, and some very very bad things for India, Kenya, etc. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, etc. very all very charismatic and had strong leadership characteristics, but you cannot praise them publicly for "their good parts." It is crazy to me that we still do that with Churchill.

I was glad when Obama sent the bust back to England.

[1] [https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/in-the- media/churchil...](https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/in-the- media/churchill-in-the-news/bengali-famine/)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_I...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_India_during_British_rule)

[3] [http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/2010/10...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/2010/10/how_churchill_starved_india.html)

<comment><USER28> Fascinating thanks, I never knew about this, so I became curious about the causes:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Debate_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Debate_about_causes)

It certainly seems like an area of controversy, but is it so clear cut that it was Churchill's fault? It seems like the main takeaways are:

> _Academic consensus generally follows the FEE account, as formulated by A. > Sen (1977) and A. Sen (1981a), in describing the Bengal famine of 1943 as an > "entitlements famine". On this view, the prelude to the famine was > generalised war-time inflation, and the problem was exacerbated by > prioritised distribution and abortive attempts at price control,[323] but > the death blow was devastating leaps in the inflation rate due to heavy > speculative buying.[324][AZ] This in turn caused a fatal decline in the real > wages of landless agricultural workers,[325] transforming what should have > been a local shortage into a horrific famine.[326]_

If that's the case, was this clearly foreseeable or not, and were there alternatives? And it continues:

> _More recent analyses often stress political factors.[BA] Discussions of the > government 's role split into two broad camps: those which suggest that the > government unwittingly caused or was unable to respond to the crisis,[327] > and those which assert that the government willfully caused or ignored the > plight of starving Indians. The former see the problem as a series of > avoidable war-time policy failures and "panicky responses"[138] from a > government that was spectacularly inept,[328] overwhelmed[329] and in > disarray; the latter as a conscious miscarriage of justice by the "ruling > colonial elite"[330] who abandoned the poor of Bengal.[331]_

The article doesn't mention if there's a current academic consensus on whether it was inept wartime panicking or conscious, however.

Is the narrative of "Churchill as Hitler to India" really justifiable, or just as simplistic as Churchill as Savior? I'm genuinely interested here, since I was never taught about this, and also curious why your comment is so downvoted.

<comment><USER29> Your quoted excerpt intrigued me. The quoted scholar is none other than Amartya Sen, the Bengali economist and intellectual (Nobel prize in Economics, now at Harvard).

Born in 1933, Sen was 10 years old at the time of the famine and witnessed it firsthand. He later investigated the cause of the famine and published articles and finally a book on it. This research led to the notion (simplifying here) that famines have a key component that is distributional in nature - that economic or social conditions (like income inequality) can cause a relatively small food shock to turn into a famine. This is what he found in Bengal.

Sen's essays in _NYRB_ ([https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/amartya- sen/](https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/amartya-sen/)) are excellent. The Mukherjee book (source [3] in the GP comment) placing blame for the Bengal famine on Churchill received a mixed review by another author ([https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/12/23/did-churchill- le...](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/12/23/did-churchill-let-them- starve/)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Meh. It's sad, but the structure of the universe is probably such that one cannot become a leader of millions without being a villain.

<comment><USER31> You can ignore any villainy by this formula. "All leaders are villains, so I'm turning my attention elsewhere." As Edmund Burke or someone said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

Also, it relies on equating hard moral choices with villainy. A hard moral choice is making citizen A hungrier so citizen B doesn't starve. Villainy is robbing citizen A to enrich citizen B because you like B more.

<comment><USER30> As a single individual, it's probably more effective to work on local ethical issues than to try to do something about global villainy. There are a few people in very special places and times who have the ability to make a global effect (Wikileaks comes to mind), but that's quite rare.

Yes, we can denounce villainy that occurs on the global stage. But in truth that's almost entirely virtue signaling. We look good, but there's no difference effected in the world.

Do something that makes a difference. Despising Churchill is useless, even if he deserved it (which is dubious).

<comment><USER32> > But in truth that's almost entirely virtue signaling. We look good, but > there's no difference effected in the world.

This isn't true at all. The collective fiction that makes up civilization depends on this.

Saying you believe in free speech, even though free speech is a national policy decision, is not virtue signalling if enough people do it. Saying you're against racism isn't virtue signalling if that makes the community as a whole more loudly against racism.

If everyone becomes cynical and refuses to "virtue signal" as you pejoratively call it, it swings the door wide open to the government ignoring our rights since the people have collectively already decided to give up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is garbage. The real villains are Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax. They would have condemned half a billion people to death just to give Britain a few extra years of peace.

<comment> YinLuck- Half a billion foreigners should be worth less than 1 Briton to a British leader.

<comment><USER34> We've banned this account for trolling. Would you please stop creating accounts to break the site guidelines with?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> You may not like what he said around WW2 but anyone who recently moved to the Bay Area will love his take on landlords, from 1909:

> Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light > turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off > in the mountains -- and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of > those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other people and the > taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a > land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his > land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes > nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from > which his own enrichment is derived.

The whole thing is worth a read. [http://www.landvaluetax.org/current-affairs- comment/winston-...](http://www.landvaluetax.org/current-affairs- comment/winston-churchill-said-it-all-better-then-we-can.html)

<comment><USER36> Property taxes?

At least where I live, land values are assessed annually, and the owner is obligated to pay a percentage of that value. Those tax funds are used for the very improvements mentioned, as well as usage-based utility fees for the services.

<comment><USER37> Not in the UK. We have a system that's vaguely related to the value of the house, banded so that expensive property is under-taxed, and usually capped by central government. It's quite a mess.

<comment><USER38> And, since 2013, starting to disproportionately affect the poorest too.

[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/16/counci...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/16/council- tax-austerity-local-services)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Sounds like ideologic revisionism to me.

<comment><USER40> Only because we easily dismiss the evil perpetuated in the colonies, push those things under the rag, and revise history to rewrite Hitler as the only evil in the world.

It's understandable to some degree. After all, Churchill and colonialists just enslaved and killed inferior third world peoples (who cares about them), while Nazi Germany occupied and killed westerners...

<comment><USER41> What I find most curious is that exactly one of the groups the Nazis systematically slaughtered went from being widely regarded as an acceptable target for racist degradation to being given a country, despite ~2,000 years of being treated as _literally_ the servants of Satan, while the other groups the Nazis targeted only gradually gained equal rights.

What's up with that? I wish we could give every disadvantaged group something like that. Although hopefully we'd learn lessons from creating the modern state of Israel and avoid a repeat of the six day war.

<comment><USER37> The Israelis weren't entirely given Israel, they took it at gunpoint ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947%E2%80%931949_Palestine_wa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947%E2%80%931949_Palestine_war) ). Anti-semitism is still a real problem and there are plenty of people willing to claim that the k word is "acceptable".

What was unique was the coordination of the diaspora to achieve the founding of the Jewish state.

<comment><USER41> As always, the world seems to be messier and more complicated than I realise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> > His record in Britain's former colonies more closely resembles that of a war > criminal

> Churchill has the blood of millions on his hands whom the British prefer to > forget.

If only citations mattered to people.

> Churchill was one of the few British officials in favor of bombing Irish > protesters from the air, suggesting using "machine gun fire bombs" to > scatter them.

A thought without action. War gaming is common. You suggest a full range of ideas and only use the most sensible option.

> In fact he argued that poison gas was more humane than outright > extermination: "The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life > should be reduced to a minimum."

Referring to tear gas. And they never used it! He was war gaming.

> Churchill was an open admirer of Mussolini, declaring that the Italian > Fascist movement had "rendered a service to the whole world."

That's called politics. Politicians have to flatter less than savory world leaders all the time.

> "the superiority of [the British] race" and that those who resisted would > "be killed without quarter." He wrote happily about how he and his comrades > "systematically, village by village, destroyed the houses, filled up the > wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the > crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation. Every tribesman > caught was speared or cut down at once."

He was a war correspondent -- a journalist. He has to say these things. Coverage of wars is always heavily censored and filled with propaganda.

> He fantasized luridly of having Mahatma Gandhi tied to the ground and > trampled upon by elephants.

Gandhi was asking for Indian independence while Imperial Japan was invading Bengal. Not great timing! In Churchill's eyes, Gandhi was sabotaging the war effort and breaking up the empire that he loved so much. Churchill and Gandhi were political enemies. No doubt every one is guilty of wishing this on their opposition... Hell, there's a common fantasy of killing "baby" Hitler in America.

> Thanks to Churchill's personal decisions, more than 3 million Bengalis died > of hunger in a 1943 famine.

Ignoring the fact that Japan was attacking India through Bengal... Bengal is a casualty of war not a "personal decision" of a racist imperialist. The author conveniently ignores the fact that Churchill asked the US for food aid to end the famine... The US refused because it was not possible to provide aid. So Churchill ordered Australia to begin shipping food but Australia's capabilities to ship food were not great because of...you know WORLD WAR 2. Should Churchill have ceded India to Japan? Would Japanese occupation been better for Indians? Not in China's experience!

</comment><comment><USER43> Turns out when you save the world from Hitler, you don't have to be a paragon.

<comment><USER24> Whenever I say that about Stalin, people get mad at me.

<comment><USER43> stalin was worse than hitler. caused much more death and misery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> That asshole Churchill sent the Black and Tans into Ireland. They and the Auxiliarys committed grevious human rights abuses...he's no hero.

</comment><comment><USER45> While we're Churchill-bashing, let's not forget his legacy as First Lord of the Admiralty. He had the bright idea to force the Dardanelles by landing at Gallipoli. Utterly futile, terrible loss of life, particularly among the ANZAC corps, no military gain.

<comment><USER46> I believe his original plan was to force the passage using naval firepower; the landings were a compromise with the Navy, who didn't want to lose all their old battleships.

<comment><USER45> Not clear on how the original plan would have been better? If I recall correctly it was tried and abandoned because the passage was heavily mined.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Churchill isn't the only one or at all unique. What major imperialist leaders wouldn't fit the label "war criminal"? Or much worse: the founding fathers of the US weren't exactly saints either. The systematic pursuit of slavery over hundreds of years makes war criminals and their acts almost look like child's play. This in no way is limited to the past. Leaders today fit that description just as much. People love war criminals. That's why they vote for them.

</comment><comment><USER48> Perfect article. High time people dismiss the self proclaimed heroic version of western history and know the reality. A person with noble prize deserved to be hanged till death in an Indian jail.

<comment><USER34> This comment breaks the site guidelines, which say " _Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive._ ".

If you'd please review [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and follow the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.</comment></comment>


Did Drupal and Drupalgeddon Lead to Panama Papers Leaks? - <AUTHOR> http://drupal.ovh/drupal-panama-papers-leaks-mossack-fonseca <comment><USER2> This is just speculation on the part of this web site. You can patch the software and that will not change the CHANGELOG.txt. Please post again when you have proof.

</comment><comment><USER3> I find it hard to blame Drupal when the security patches that would have prevented access were available, but simply not applied. This is like blaming Ford when your car engine seizes up because you never changed the oil.

The text of the article betrays a troublesome double standard, saying things like:

> Because WordPress and Drupal are so mundane nowadays, people easily forget > that they are continuously online targets for malicious activities.

Of course, all websites, regardless of which software, are continuously online and targets for malicious activities.

> Since there is no single entity to blame for Drupal or many Open Source > CMSes, as opposed to commercial entities like Oracle or Microsoft - there is > no single source to point take responsibility.

If you fail to apply Oracle and Microsoft patches in a timely manner, you will get hacked on those platforms too. And it won't be Oracle's or Microsoft's fault.

> Increased awareness of web services security matters is required from the > Open Source communitities so that we will avoid large information leaks in > the future.

This has nothing to do with the Open Source communities--Drupalgeddon was patched months ago. This is simply a business that failed to pay enough attention to their technology--a situation that is sadly very common.

</comment><comment><USER4> I had the misfortune to use Drupal a while ago. It seemed like a very convenient and powerful way to get an extremely full-featured and rich site up quickly. It was only after attempting one of the frequently-required updates that I realized that its architecture was atrociously bad. I left immediately and never looked back.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand this comment. You left because the updates were frequently required? Or because some aspect of applying the updates was difficult?

<comment><USER4> The application of updates required manually updating databases. There was an easy-to-use installation procedure but the upgrade process was both not automated and very easy to break.

The developers (at least at the time) were more interested in making repeated breaking changes than they were in investing the effort to allow earlier adopters a reliable upgrade process.

My irritation was that this was the metaphorical equivalent of a business offering a fantastic deal to new customers but treating existing customers with palpable disdain.

<comment><USER5> What kind of manual steps are you talking about? Updating Drupal is usually fairly straightforward and unless you're talking about an alpha/beta release or doing a major version upgrade and definitely doesn't require manual database changes most of the time.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does your organization still use old web browsers? - <AUTHOR> I'm doing some development and honestly despite the fact that it may reduce my target audience I'm just not going to bother supporting anything but latest browsers.
I got to wondering, "how many organizations actually still use old browsers"?
So, does your organization still use old browsers, if so which browser version and why? <comment><USER2> Lots of big companies (1) are still using Windows 7 and (2) don't allow users to install their own software (no admin rights). So they'd be stuck using IE 11. (If these companies use Chrome or Firefox, they're also not likely to have the very latest version, since they need a version that's been tested with their internal applications. Auto-updating your software is very risky if a bug could disable your business for a couple of days.)

I'd suspect that there are lots of smaller companies out there who are still using Windows XP (IE 8).

Don't expect a company to change its IT policies just to be able to use your software.

(I work in the enterprise software space, and my employer's customers include lots of big companies. We only recently dropped support for IE 8.)

<comment><AUTHOR> So what browser and version does your company use?

<comment><USER2> Developers and other technical people tend to use the latest Chrome or Firefox as their primary browsers. Others (marketing, admin staff, etc.) tend to use the default system browser, e.g., IE 11.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> In my experience, if you're only targeting the "evergreen" browsers, you're probably not going to get much penetration in the enterprise space. Corporate IT is maintaining PCs for anywhere from hundreds to many thousands of users, and might well be supporting hundreds of different business applications. They value stability and future-proofing over almost anything else, and they don't care in the slightest that this policy is inconvenient for web developers who want to use bleeding edge features or for browser developers who would like to drop support for legacy functionality. The good news is that these kinds of organisations tend to have lots of money to spend and often won't bat an eyelid at spending some of it to get support for a product or service they value on the platform they are already running.

In SME world, there is less of everything to coordinate, and that means there is more flexibility and to some extent the standard software used in the organisation tends to be updated more frequently. It's still likely that anywhere big enough to have dedicated IT staff also has controlled software deployment, but at least that's likely to be IE11, reasonably recent Safari on macOS, or possibly something like Firefox LTS or a centrally managed Chrome deployment.

<comment><AUTHOR> OK so what is a pragmatic decision about which browsers to support....?

I want to make something usable by many, but I'm just not going down the path of supporting everything back to IE8 - the resource is not there to do that development.

<comment><USER3> I think it just depends on the market you want to aim for.

If you want to go for enterprise sales then you need quite a different approach to most other development work, not just in browser compatibility but in how you do things like marketing and sales and technical support. It's tough for any small business to do this, but if you can pull it off without the overheads of larger businesses then the profits can be substantial. Of course, you do have to support whatever platform your big customers are using. That could be IE11 these days; requests for compatibility with older versions of IE do seem to be fading out, I suspect because support for pre-7 Windows versions from Microsoft is now very expensive. But realistically, if you're a small outfit supplying to enterprises, you're probably working on almost a case-by-case basis anyway, and you just have to find out what each customer is using.

If you don't have the resources to handle such a demanding customer, or you just don't enjoy coding for the older browsers and want to work on projects that can use the new toys, I'd suggest aiming for a totally different type of customer in the first place. If you're writing web sites or apps aimed at home users rather than businesses then in most Western countries the very clear trend is to run Chrome on desktop/laptop and either Chrome or Safari on phones/tablets depending on whether it's Android or Apple. Safari doesn't update to add new features rapidly like the evergreen browsers, but Apple do tend to push out updates along with new versions of iOS, and in any case people tend to upgrade their mobile devices much more frequently than their desktops/laptops so the lag is less of a problem in practice than it was with IE.

Small businesses are somewhere in between, and the basic rule is that the smaller the business, the more likely it is to be using individual PCs and mobile devices rather than some organisation-wide standard, and so the more likely it is that people will be running very recent browsers. As soon as an organisation is big enough to have dedicated IT staff and central management of IT systems, which I'd guess starts around the 25-50 person scale for a lot of businesses, you're going to see much greater standardisation and therefore somewhat slower updates.

So pragmatically, if you're aiming at businesses then you probably need to support IE11 at least, but going beyond that is probably into enterprise sales territory. For a consumer market, it's almost all about Chrome and Safari these days IME, but you should probably try to support Safari as it was a couple of years ago as a minimum standard and ideally a bit further back for those who have older Apple devices that they can't/won't upgrade to the latest OS and browser.</comment></comment></comment>


Swift for Data Science / ML / Big Data Analytics - <AUTHOR> https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mon-20171023/040733.html <comment><AUTHOR> Submitted due to interesting discussion from Chris Lattner on adding Python interoperability into Swift (something I would love to see, and seems like it could work quite elegantly).

</comment><comment><USER2> This is interesting but I would prefer to see some native Swift libraries for Data Science.</comment>


FCC extends deadline for user comments on net neutrality - line-zero http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/15/fcc-extends-deadline-user-comments-net-neutrality

<comment> line-zero REMINDER TO EVERYONE: WE MUST STOP THIS. IT'S NOT TOO LATE. DO YOUR PART. YOUR CHILDREN WITH THANK YOU.</comment>


CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development - <AUTHOR> http://www.pragprog.com/titles/tbcoffee/coffeescript# <comment><USER2> Trevor, Let me know if your book will include a simple CRUD app written in CoffeeScript using Node.js. That alone would gain you a few more sales.

<comment><USER3> Hmm, I'm afraid it's a bit late to add another project to the book (there is a Node project, but it doesn't use persistence), so how about if I write this and post it somewhere else? Would you prefer MySQL or MongoDB?

<comment><USER2> Thank you! For the widest possible appeal I would choose MySQL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm the author.

I was planning to post this link later, when the book becomes available. I can't share any details yet, but look for an announcement next week. I run @coffeescript on Twitter, so you'll definitely stay updated if you follow me there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Get the "add to wish-list" button working on the pragprog.com page. Please and thanks!

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I've let the PragProg folks know. There are a few other updates pending to that page as well.

Incidentally, you could add it to your wish list on Amazon: [http://www.amazon.com/CoffeeScript-Accelerated- Development-T...](http://www.amazon.com/CoffeeScript-Accelerated-Development- Trevor-Burnham/dp/1934356786/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What experience do people have with other tools for generating javascript?

[https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of- lang...](https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-languages- that-compile-to-JS)

I'm wondering how they compare, and what people have to say.

<comment><USER3> Many of those tools (including Coco, a CoffeeScript fork which is, objectively, more feature-rich) provide features to help manage asynchronous control flow (that is, to make callbacks look more like linear code). These proposals were rejected in CoffeeScript (see <https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/350>) because they take the language too far away from the underlying JavaScript—in particular, CoffeeScript code would no longer necessarily have the same order as the JavaScript output.

For heavily async code, those other tools are well worth looking at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those unfamiliar with CoffeeScript: <http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee- script/>

</comment><comment><USER6> So here's a related question. If someone wanted to snag a developer that really understood coffeescript and js development, where should they be looking?

<comment><USER7> Someone who really understands js can pick up coffeescript in a few hours, so don't pass on a good js developer just because they haven't yet made the jump.

<comment><USER8> I don't completely agree -- I feel like CoffeeScript shares as much in common with Ruby and Python as it does with JS. I'd say a good _developer_ would be the best fit for a CS position; depending on your deployment platform, I can almost see a case where being an embedded JS programmer might actually cause issues. If all you understand is EcmaScript, all you'll write is EcmaScript. Despite its tagline being "It's just JavaScript", it's actually much more.

<comment><USER7> I knew Python and Ruby before I started with CoffeeScript, so perhaps that colored my experience. CoffeeScript is basically a minimalized blend of js, Ruby, and Python syntax-wise. But I still think someone who understands js will pretty much automatically get CoffeeScript concept-wise, at least to the level they get js concept-wise, because the central concepts of programming in CoffeeScript aren't different than js, just the syntax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is really great to see -- correct me if I'm wrong, but Trevor must be one of the biggest contributors to CoffeeScript. It's great to have someone so intimately familiar with the project author one of its first books.

<comment><USER3> I'll correct you. :)

Code-wise, I'm only a minor contributor to CoffeeScript. I wouldn't be the right person to write a book on how the CoffeeScript compiler works. (Thankfully, some of those people agreed to be technical reviewers for the book.) But I have been an active participant in the language's community from early on.

<comment><USER8> I think I mostly recognize you from CoffeeScript's #issues on Github, where your comments are cogent and insightful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hmm, no beta. Love to see a sample chapter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed; but with an availability date of 2011-06-20 we should see something soon.

<comment><USER3> The book's page has just been updated with a few excerpts: <http://pragprog.com/titles/tbcoffee/coffeescript>

Criticisms welcome. We're aware of some technical issues (most notably, there's no syntax highlighting for the CoffeeScript snippets), which will be fixed shortly.

<comment><USER9> Just bought the combo - looking forward to going through the beta! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just a a question: is there any project trying to wrap the Lua with some ruby- like sugar just like what CoffeeScript do to javascript?

I think that will be fun since Lua's syntax is ... not so sweet i think.

</comment><comment><USER11> Can't wait for beginner programmer books in CoffeeScript.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, it isn't really possible to understand CoffeeScript without understanding JavaScript, so it's not a very good choice of first language. JavaScript is. So, the book assumes at least a beginner-level understanding of JavaScript.

<comment><USER11> I have to disagree with you there. As there is a 1-to-1 mapping between CoffeeScript and JavaScript, I'd say that they are equally hairy first languages but the former has nicer syntax. The beginner documentation and workflow just isn't there with CoffeeScript yet. I'm actually not totally sure why you say that it isn't possible to understand CS without knowing JS. Is it because CS compiles to JS? If that's the case, I'd point out that you definitely don't have to know bytecode to learn Java.

<comment><USER3> Well, the "JavaScript is the new bytecode" analogy only goes so far. JVM bytecode puts few limits on what your language can do efficiently—Java, Scala, and Clojure, for example, all have great performance, despite having very different idioms. CoffeeScript, on the other hand, was clearly designed around what you can do with JavaScript. Or more precisely, what you can do while 1) producing predictable, readable, 1:1 output, and 2) getting good performance. So I think CoffeeScript is best understood in light of those limitations.

Plus, learning CoffeeScript wouldn't be much use if the docs for every JS library read as gobbledygook, right?

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I guess I was overreaching with my argument about bytecode. But, we can probably agree that it's more enjoyable to focus on writing good CoffeeScript than on writing CoffeeScript which will compile to good Javascript. Regarding the libraries, couldn't the same be said about learning Clojure without knowing Java (something which I think would currently be pretty acceptable)?

All I'm getting at is that I'd like to see CS eventually become a language in its own right rather than an extra tool for JS developers. I think this is completely feasible if we start treating it that way and create the tools and documentation to that end. I think it is a serious improvement over JS and could eventually replace JS for the common programmer.

By the way, thanks for all your work, I'll definitely be picking up the book.

<comment><USER3> > All I'm getting at is that I'd like to see CS eventually become a language > in its own right rather than an extra tool for JS developers.

Yeah, totes. Brendan Eich himself has assured me that the Mozilla folks are dedicated to adding debug support for CoffeeScript (and other compiled JS languages) to Firefox. So the underlying JS will be less and less of a concern as the tools get better.

At the same time, though, that'll probably lead to languages that go further than CoffeeScript taking hold, just as Clojure is rockin' it on the JVM despite being really far removed from Java. I like CoffeeScript a lot, but when JavaScript really does become bytecode, people will want to code in something less JavaScript-like. (Or CoffeeScript may become the new C... "assembly with syntax," in pg's words.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Now in beta! Reposted here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2507418>

</comment><comment><USER12> I still don't understand why I would want to use CoffeeScript when I can just use JavaScript.

<comment><USER13> Assembler and C.

Java and Scala.

Erb and Haml.

CSS and Less/Sass.

Edit: Walking and driving.

<comment><USER14> Asm/C and Java/scala are unfair comparisons, since they're totally different languages with different structures and idioms.

I just started using CoffeeScript for a project of mine and while it did clean up the messy look of the Javascript, it doesn't improve much upon Javascript feature-wise. I felt like I was still writing Javascript, it just looked a little better.

<comment><USER15> I've been writing CoffeScript daily for about 4 weeks now. On the first day, it seemed pretty minor. About three days in I was a believer. Now, when I write the occasional few lines of Javascript in my browser's console, it just feels so arduous to type. Whenever I pop open a Javascript library to read it, I feel like there is an assault on my eyes. I'm never going back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> -1 post it when it's ready, not when you're ready to start promoting it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I, the OP, am not the author. I posted because I was excited.</comment></comment>


Why Minds Are Not Like Computers - <AUTHOR> http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-minds-are-not-like-computers

<comment><USER2> This is such baloney I don't know what to say.

Let me just say this: the neuron is a black box. So confidant I am of this, I would be happy to volunteer for the experiment where each neuron in my brain was one by one replaced with an artificial replica.

I am serious. Call MIT, get Marvin Minsky on board, and I'm game. We can do it in Austin where I live, in Palo Alto, or at MIT. I don't care. It would just be nice to shut these anti-AI nutcases up once and for all. :-)

<comment><USER3> Right on! The question of the brain is a matter of resolution. It's precisely because we don't have enough volunteers like you that we don't understand the brain better.

The computer /is/ like the brain because the brain /is/ a computer. It's a complicated computer that has evolved over millions of years, yes, but it's also a computer. It has inputs and outputs. It regulates itself. It keeps itself alive.

Plenty of AI robots are able to do portions of these things. They can be kept alive with solar. They behave oddly, unexpectedly like humans.

AI is real and it is here already. Computers are answering questions we have been asking for a long time.

It won't be long until computers are asking /us/ questions and that's the true test of intelligence. Anyone can answer questions. Only a few can ask them.</comment></comment>