The Large Number of External JavaScripts on ProductHunt Websites - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/metric-tech/the-number-of-external-javascripts-on-producthunt-websites-will-shock-you-974890a312c#.w31ju6u5n <comment><USER2> I don't use Product Hunt for that sole reason - it kills my browser!</comment>


ThinkPad X220 MacOS High Sierra Installation - <AUTHOR> http://x220.mcdonnelltech.com/ <comment><USER2> I used MacOS for years and loved it. But now have been on linux (on both Mac and a X220) exclusively for a few years and I'm honestly confused as to why a developer in this community would even think of not running Linux full time.

I have seen people here address this before, but it's always like a list someone from Lebanon would write after moving Costa Rica - never really that things are wrong on the other side of the fence, just that it's different. Stick it out a bit and the pain of those differences melt away.

If I had to shift to MacOS now it would be far far more painful than the shift from Mac to Linux.

<comment><USER3> No distributions with truly great out of the box defaults, too much time tied up in configuration, too few Linux app developers with a user-oriented mindset and obsession with getting all the details right. Also, just generally death by a thousand cuts with ridiculous numbers of small annoyances.

With a Mac I can have it set up to my liking and be working in little more than an hour. Under Linux (and to a lesser extent Windows) it's a multi day project.

<comment><USER4> That is incorrect. I really urge you to try Fedora 28 today (you can liveboot).

I have had Mac users use my laptop for a little while and love the usability. Everything simply works. I use Skype Web and Zoom to do videoconferencing ...and obviously all the Slack-like tools work great.

And you have the choice to buy spectacular developer focused hardware like XPS or ThinkPad laptops.

<comment><USER5> I am using linux/unix for 25+ years, but the desktop just never works for me. I'd echo its just death by a thousand cuts.

The usual suspects: fonts, video drivers, sounds drivers, various USB devices supports, sleep/wake issues.

And lack of basic apps, like a good multitabbed SSH/RDP terminal.

<comment><USER6> I honestly can't believe what I'm reading here. Is it still 1999 where you live!?

<comment><USER7> I started using Linux around '97ish and agree with the parent too. The problem for me wasn't investing the time in tweaking a new installation, but apt-get dist upgrade (whatever it's called these days) would eventually break my system...in very bad ways.

<comment><USER4> I hear this a lot. And mostly from Ubuntu victims. I have not reinstalled my Fedora XPS 13 laptop for over 4 years. I have clean upgraded 3 times.

Fedora is spectacular and has been spectacular for many years now. The driver support is brilliant. It was one of the first distros to have absolutely seamless integration with RAID mode NVME (which was something the XPS set it to).

I will be very surprised if you have to "tweak" your laptop. Everything that you have in OSX is already there - including nightmode, etc... the works.

And here's the cool part - customizing Fedora is a browser extension away! [http://extensions.gnome.org/](http://extensions.gnome.org/)

<comment><USER8> Breaking upgrades are not distro-specific, but mostly user specific.

It usually breaks for users, who do not respect package manager and what it does, break their installation with misc convenience scripts and tweaks run as root, and then wonder, what went wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cached version here [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5quDiFp...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5quDiFptFSsJ:x220.mcdonnelltech.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER10> 10 years ago I dualbooted OS X 10.4 and Windows on a Thinkpad X60, and I remember searching for (and in some cases, even writing) drivers was the most difficult part. These days, if you need macOS for whatever reason and don't have a Mac, it's probably easiest to use a VM --- VirtualBox can boot, install, and run an unmodified High Sierra with only a few minor configuration changes to the VM's "hardware" to make it more Mac-like.

<comment><USER11> > with only a few minor configuration changes to the VM's "hardware" to make > it more Mac-like.

Any link to do this? I've tried a number of times and still didn't work :/

<comment><USER10> [https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/309654-run- vanilla-o...](https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/309654-run-vanilla-os-x- el-capitan-sierra-high-sierra-or-mojave-in-virtualbox-5xx-on-a-windows-host/)

I believe SMCDeviceKey and the product names/serial numbers are the critical part. The OS doesn't mind the rest of the virtual hardware.

<comment><USER11> Wow. Cool, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For anyone looking for PC guide: [https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/unibeast- install-macos-hi...](https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/unibeast-install- macos-high-sierra-on-any-supported-intel-based-pc.235474/)

I recently build one and it's super easy. My build: z370m + i5 8400 + 240g ssd + 16g ddr4. Benchmark is near 2018 MacBook Pro 15-inch.

Total cost: $550

</comment><comment><USER13> I love when minor version breaks almost all basic Homebrew packages on macOS. I really wonder why would anybody who claims to be a developer run macOS for work! You can buy even a better looking and spec'd HP for a fraction of the MacBook price, run Linux on it, and be happy. Even Windows 10 now is a better develope platform! The arrogance of Apple is not something we should put up with anyway!

<comment><USER6> I'm a full time Linux user and a big fan but come on - claiming that minor updates don't randomly break things is pretty dishonest. It's true for all 3 major OSes.

<comment><USER14> Sure, it can happen on all systems. But Homebrew is not a good package manager.

How about major breakage because of the installation of a new program? Like having installed programs that uses readline in version 6 and installing a program that needs readline in version 7?

Homebrew will happily upgrade readline to version 7 and install the new program but thus silently breaking the programs using readline with version 6.

Edit: Every program and library involved has been installed with Homebrew.

<comment><USER13> It's not Homebrew that breaks but Apple for not caring about backward- compatibility. But honestly, Homebrew is a joke of a package manager, which, unfortunately, is the best on macOS.

<comment><USER14> This time it's not Apple's fault.

Every program and library involved has been installed with Homebrew.

<comment><USER13> It actually is. Apple should embrace Homebrew or at least offer an alternative.

<comment><USER14> Apple's alternative is using DMG.

I'm the first to blame Apple for various stuff but you can't blame Apple for using OSX in a way that Apple hasn't intended and isn't supporting.

If you're not happy with the pre-installed unixy stuff you are (still) free to add your own.

Which Homebrew allows you to do in a very Apple way. That is, works mostly as intended and almost OOTB but if you are a power user you will soon run into various problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As someone who still loves macOS but is getting really turned off by the rising costs of owning a Macbook and design compromises you have to put up with, I really hope solutions like these continue to develop and grow.

If I could slap macOS on a Matebook X Pro, I'd switch tomorrow.

<comment><USER16> Agreed. It's not even the cost I take issue with, it's the design compromises. I want a professional device Apple, not a toy fashion product.

I like macOS, but Apple's making it incredibly difficult to take their product line seriously lately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "If you encrypt your boot drive with FileVault it will be necessary to connect a USB keyboard when booting to input your password. An EFI driver for the built-in X220 keyboard is not yet available."

Stuff like this is why Hackintoshes are sadly still super frustrating.

<comment><USER18> See it positive. At least it's possible to encrypt the filesystem now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Judging by how hard this site is slammed... Apple should take note. A bunch of people love their software but the death grip and lack of choices in their hardware is the biggest thing we dislike

<comment><USER20> Apple should take note because a cPanel+Wordpress shared-hosted blog had downtime?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> [https://web.archive.org/web/20180804023219/http://x220.mcdon...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180804023219/http://x220.mcdonnelltech.com/)

</comment><comment><USER22> The ThinkPad X220 is a great machine, but I'd avoid the cheaper version with the TN screen. The IPS version is so much better. But, in any case, if you're used to retina screens (from mobile/tablet devices), then the 1366x768 resolution of the X220 or the MacBook Air might feel cramped or blocky.

<comment><USER23> Note that these screens are fairly upgradeable, its not that challenging or expensive to swap a higher resolution IPS panel into a Thinkpad, even on the newer models.

<comment><USER24> Anything higher resolution requires a hardware mod which taps into the docking connector. The internal display interface cannot support higher resolutions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> After scanning the cached article, I'd say that the content is quite good but not unique. Since the site is slammed, interested hackers can peruse these sites for insight:

(1) [https://www.tonymacx86.com/](https://www.tonymacx86.com/) (has hw suggestions) (2) [https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/](https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/) (3) [https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/68p1e2/rambling...](https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/68p1e2/ramblings_of_a_hackintosher_a_sorta_brief_vanilla/) (old but lauded)

The space has made rapid progress in the last few years.

</comment><comment><USER26> Isn't a "little" insecure having to rely on random kext and random internet files to run your base system? Or are they always open source or something? I know very little about MacOS

<comment><USER27> It's not that different from running any software from the internet.

<comment><USER26> "[..] They (kexts) run at the OS's highest privilege level; ring-0."

<comment><USER27> Why would that significantly increase risk?

<comment><USER26> > It's not that different from running any software from the internet.

I don't run "any" software as root or with even more privileges, so _I_ would classify random kexts from the web as a highly critical threat. Of course you could be victim of an exploit even without willingly granting privileges but that's not really relevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great guide, even with the hosting issues. I've read a lot of guides on this topic, and this is probably one of the best, because it's written in a way that is accessible for someone that isn't super-technical.

The instructions can get hard to follow on common Hack sites, just because they're so detailed. So kudos to the well-written set here.

</comment><comment><USER29> Obviously there's demand for that... "The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later."

</comment><comment><USER30> As a geek I'm always excitedly reading these and I've done a couple of hackontosh laptop conversions over the years just for the hell of it, but in my limited opinion (and mind you I always converted older laptops) there's not much that i think would come close to the perfection that is the Apple hardware and software combination - it's somehow just such wonderful devices and despite me really wanting a more unique and cool (maybe small and tablet based) MacOS device, i don't think I'll ever truly move away from Apple hardware. Do others feel the same?

<comment><USER31> From a hardware point of view, I don't get it. There's this laughable failure where macOS lacks drivers for the keyboard and touchpad: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=geGmC1xI4zo](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=geGmC1xI4zo)

MacBooks also seem to be configured to spin the fan up at 81 degrees C, which is a ridiculous temperature to do so.

I get that their software is probably second to none, but they have major issues on the hardware side.

<comment><USER30> Mmm. I'm not sure I've ever noticed those particular things. The Mac experience just feels like amazing craftsmanship somehow. Could it be that because they sometimes push the envelope a bit in terms of design or technology that in every generation of macs there are 1-2 items/areas that could be better?

<comment><USER32> I'm convinced that the only way you could think this is if your use case for the Mac is basically entirely browsing the web, and even for that the OS is typically broken in one or more unbelievable ways. I remember that for three point releases in a row (a couple years ago when I had to use macOS for iOS builds, which were at that point not reliable enough to automate), Exposé was severely broken in a different way for each consecutive release. Then there was that issue where you could log in as root by pressing return enough times, and that time when they literally showed volume passwords in plain text in the hint field. Over the last 5-8 years, I've seen OS X become noticeably slower in almost every way, such that hardware upgrades don't seem to do anything but keep up. On top of that, the new Macs are severely affected by thermal throttling, even during intermittent/reasonably idle use, and virtually none of the use cases they cite for them in the marketing wank actually turn out to be viable on the hardware.

iOS has seen a similar trajectory, with ever worsening performance, and bizarre bugs (betraying the kind of software design, namely no design at all, it takes to publish mistakes like this on such a regular basis) like the recent full system crash when you type the word "Taiwan".

It seems to me that the only way to come away with the opinion that the "Mac experience" is polished and carefree, is to use so little of the Mac that you have to wonder why you aren't just using a Chromebook.

<comment><USER30> Nah I don't think so. I use lots of apps and feel like quite a "power" user; office suite, slack, Dropbox, iTunes, terminal, text editors, of course lots of browsers and stuff (don't do Xcode or IDEs but do do Occasional programming and scripting in editors), and I hate working on windows even the all-in-one surface pros have felt way short for me compared to Macs . And Chromebooks I feel would do the same but they do seem like a good idea (like the surface tablets did) and I should give it a go to truly see... but I feel the Apple products are very "special" compared to other things, and I think that's how many others feel too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > I'm honestly confused as to why a developer in this community would even > think of not running Linux full time.

Xcode and Xcode click tools for developing iOS, tvOS and macOS apps?

Try that on Ubuntu. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm assuming this works because the Thinkpad X220 and the early Macbooks had a very similar chipset.

Coincidentally, this is also why the first and second generation Macbooks, along with a handful of Thinkpads, are among the few laptops that can install Libreboot:

[https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/](https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/)

</comment><comment><USER35> I've stopped playing with OSX86 around 10.5 release because system on my old machine couldn't get permanently audio and graphics out of Realtek HD and ATI Radeon x1600 back then. Kexts were nuked each time after Apple was releasing upgrades and I just didn't wanted to fight with all that stuff. JaS 10.4 release was on the other hand always working perfectly for me.

No idea how the whole project has progressed from that point onward but I wish Apple would release an official OSX as alternative to Windows and Linux but that's obviously not going to happen.

Later on, I've managed to buy eMac with 800 MHz PowerPC 7445 and ATI graphics (10.4.11 was the last version); recently I've got OS9 installed and discovered the resources of macintoshgarden.

</comment><comment><USER36> We hugged it to death

[https://web.archive.org/web/20180804023219/http://x220.mcdon...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180804023219/http://x220.mcdonnelltech.com/)

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm curious to know if TrackPoint scrolling works nicely (or at all)

<comment><USER38> It does. The TrackPoint actually works pretty well under macOS on the X220. Not quite as smooth as it does with Windows, but definitely usable.

<comment><USER10> When I Hackintosh'd my X60, one thing I liked about it rather more than Windows was the pointer acceleration --- which if you search online, everyone else seems to hate (although they might be using regular mouses, in which case the sensation is quite different.) IMHO a TrackPoint really feels better with acceleration than not, because it makes it more sensitive; otherwise it gets tiring pretty quickly to shove the pointer around the screen, or you lose pixel-precision for small movements if you set the full-screen speed high enough to make big movements easily.

<comment><USER39> For those that hate the acceleration, one can download and install the SteelSeries ExactMouse package, I have it set to always disable mouse accel. Works great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I use OSX at work, but every time I needs to tab between two apps with multiple windows open (ie: two terminals and two editors) I consider switching to Linux.

</comment><comment><USER41> One thing it seems no one has mentioned in the Linux vs. MacOS flamewar is that Linux is ugly, while MacOS, while maybe not beautiful, is inoffensive at worst and elegant at best.

I use Linux and Mac almost equally and for CLI apps I'm pretty happy with either one (although Mac is a bit better), but for GUI applications I'll go with Mac every time.

If you have to stare at something all day, the esthetics of it become important.

</comment><comment><USER42> I guess GoDaddy do not allow normal traffic spikes.

</comment><comment><USER43> Any change requires some hardship. Look here for how to effect that change from a designer/social activist to use linux. [https://ar.al/2018/07/16/changes/](https://ar.al/2018/07/16/changes/)

</comment><comment><USER44> Does the trackpad response on one of these installs "feel like" a Macbook trackpad?

</comment><comment><USER45> the hosting environment appears to have already exceeded its quota. mirror, anyone?

<comment><USER46> [http://web.archive.org/web/20180804023219/http://x220.mcdonn...](http://web.archive.org/web/20180804023219/http://x220.mcdonnelltech.com/)</comment></comment>


The Timbre – Podcast Reviews and Discussion - <AUTHOR> http://www.thetimbre.com <comment><USER2> So which podcast do I have to subscribe to, to listen to these reviews?

<comment><USER3> Hear This - [http://thetimbre.com/category/hear- this/](http://thetimbre.com/category/hear-this/)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Learn Clojure from your Browser - <AUTHOR> http://clojurekoans.herokuapp.com/ Noir/Cloud9 port of Clojure koans by Aaron Bedra of Relevance https://github.com/functional-koans/clojure-koans <comment><USER2> Neat idea, but most of it doesn't work when you click run and the java interop fails with stacktrace. Also- where is the output?</comment>


The Web's Simplest Weather Forecast - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2008/11/27/the-webs-simplest-weather-forecast/ <comment><USER2> It's already on the top page, first rank... and the author is actually replying in the comments.

<comment><USER3> In other words, dupe.</comment></comment>


The Independent Discovery of TCP/IP, by Ants - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/the-independent-discovery-of-tcpip-by-ants/ <comment><USER2> Article is about rate adjusting, not packets.

\Theory We can only perceive nature's algorithms after we've worked them out for ourselves, because we don't know what to look for in the noise. Therefore, we are surrounded by incredibly clever algorithms, unbeknownst.

<comment><USER3> Also, I would write _by humans_ , not _by ants_.

One could also have a deep philosophical discussion whether ants actually can discover anything (how much consciousness/ability to abstract/... is needed for that, and do ants posses it? Or maybe, do ants lack it, but ant colonies have it? Or is it DNA that discovered it using a genetic search algorithm?)

<comment><USER4> Have you heard of the China Brain thought experiment?

<comment><USER5> I assume you are referring to Searle's "Chinese Room" [1] thought experiment

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

<comment><USER4> No, China Brain. It is more analogous here.

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

<comment><USER6> It's interesting that both "thought experiments" take essentially the same form - layer a fully working consciousness (defined either by being able to pass the Turing test or by actually emulating a brain on the physical level) onto a bizarre and improbable substrate that, strictly speaking, is too small to contain it; then gawp at the improbability of the arrangement you've constructed.

Dennett has a good rebuttal to this whole class - he notes that is not at all intuitive that a _brain_ should be conscious. Open up someone's skull and look at the pulsing meat, and try and convince yourself that there's a mental universe in there. You may as well say "it's just stupid atoms bumping around - how could that be conscious?"

You either believe in a) supernatural souls, b) the mystical consciousness- granting power of meat, or c) minds are independent of their substrate.

<comment><USER4> I think a and c could be the same. Why not believe it?

<comment><USER6> Yeah I thought that as I was typing it, but I was procrastinating and didn't have time to fully flesh it out so I hit submit anyway!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Discovery of TCP/IP is a significant overstatement. The ants perform flow control based on the number and frequency of ants returning from a known source.

They of course have no concept of out-of-order delivery, retransmitting lost ants or even having to deal with ants accidentally duplicated as they walk their paths.

<comment><USER8> > retransmitting lost ants

That's not an issue to ants and their problem.

<comment><USER9> Actually it is. The article seems to describe an algorithm with a catastrophic failure mode where no (or not enough) ants return. Without retransmission the ants just hang around waiting for a returning ant. So there must be some sort of retransmission.

<comment><USER10> With no retransmission you limit the number of dead ants though. If you continue to send ants you're going to get lots of dead ants in certain situations, so you'd need a more complex algorithm than simple retransmission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting on one hand, nothing new on the other.

Complexity through a few iterations of a very simple algorithm is one of the corner stones of Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science"[1] and has independently been proven feasible by VPRI's "STEPS" project [2].

I had to google (again) for documentation on STEPS and it's not the document I was looking for, but one of the for me astonishing insights was that correct text flow in typesetting is just a special case of a cellular automaton. If anyone finds the document that highlights this, I'd be grateful for a link.

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

[2] [http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf](http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf)

<comment><USER12> > If anyone finds the document that highlights this, I'd be grateful for a > link.

probably this one : [http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2010002_lobjects.pdf](http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2010002_lobjects.pdf) ?

<comment><USER11> Not the one I meant, but still interesting. Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Comparison with TCP is forced. What ants actually do is regulate how many workers to send based on how quickly they return. TCP does this, but also much more.

</comment><comment><USER14> Even just looking at the flow & congestion control by it self, it's not similar to TCP. Or at least the article didn't go into details. How does the decrement and increment of the rate is being done. In TCP we have the congestion window. Which is increasing and decreasing as a function of the state of the algorithm (slow start, congestion avoidance) and the occurrence of packet-loss or perceived packet-loss by the algorithm. In the article it's not clear how Ants are adjusting the amount of ants out there.

</comment><comment><USER15> I thought ants discovered how to build java applications?

</comment><comment><USER16> BT Labs at Martlesham and Prof Peter Cochrane was exploring packet routing based on similarities to ant colonies back in 1994.

</comment><comment><USER17> It is the other way around. IP routing was inspired by the emergent behaviour of the ant farms.

<comment><USER18> Regardless of whether that's true, this article is talking about flow control, not routing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wouldn't the technical term for this be "End-to-end congestion control" and transmit window adjustment, instead of "TCP/IP"?

<comment><USER20> Kermit supported sliding windows, not x/y/zmodem. Best technology analogy is probably:

[http://www.kermitproject.org/](http://www.kermitproject.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > This article was first published on February 3, 2015

Ah! I thought I had seen it on HN before... :)

<comment><USER22> The story has been submitted many times:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=TCP%20Ants&sort=byDate&dateRan...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=TCP%20Ants&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

No previous submission have generated any discussion, or garnered many points.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Useful when you're lost in a Jungle ;)</comment>


Cheese from the same proteins as milk, but from genetically modified yeast - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/04/diy-biotech-vegan-cheese/ <comment><USER2> Amateur cheesemaker here - coincidentally the research side of commercial cheesemaking is already doing very similar things because separating milk into its constituent components is more profitable than actually making cheese. I attended a class about a month ago where the message was that in the future we won't make cheese from milk, but rather we'll start with just those caseins that have been extracted and concentrated. The thinking is that even the water in the milk may have other commercial value apart from just the cheesemaking, or at a minimum can be captured and used in lieu of needing an additional water source. Wish they would have gone a little deeper on the science in the article - they mention chymosin for example, but as far as I know the vast majority of chymosin used in commercial cheese production today is already vegan (at least in the US - Europe not necessarily).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Why so at cow's milk? "They also hope to engineer cheese based on the milk of the narwhal, the most outlandish mammal they could imagine."

</comment><comment><USER3> So, the real question is if the target audience is against using actual cow's milk, don't they have a heavy correlation to the anti-gmo crowd?

<comment><USER4> I'm a vegan who's motivated by opposition to animal agriculture, so I enthusiastically support research like this (and think it's the most promising path I've heard of to a vegan human future). I went to a vegan advocacy organization event a few months ago where this topic came up, and other attendees shared my enthusiasm for this kind of research, but the diversity of views and motivations in the vegan community makes me wary of claiming that that means this is mainstream.

To answer your correlation question, probably yes -- but vegans' attitudes toward "tampering with nature" vary widely from the view that it's the worst possible thing humanity can do, on through to the view that it's the _best_ possible thing humanity can do (e.g., David Pearce), with a broad spectrum in between. (I don't have an ideal example of the former group in mind, but I could mention Sea Shepherd's Paul Watson, who advocates deep ecology and opposes GMOs.)

I think we will see sharper divisions between environmentalist vegans (especially advocates of deep ecology) and animal rights/animal welfare vegans over time. I don't know how the population breaks down in the west today, or how many people have even had to think about it that much.

<comment><USER5> Your last sentence is pretty interesting to me. After months of prodding from my girlfriend to go vegan, the book 'Abundance' and the chapter on the water inefficiency of factory farming is what finally turned me. It was reasonably easy for me to justify carnivorism as naturally occurring, harder to justify water waste with so many humans going thirsty. Without even starting down the emissions road.

That said, looking at it now (and especially once synthetic meats come online, out of cost efficiency if nothing else), I think our children might look back on the practice of animal slaughter as being pretty horrifically barbaric.

<comment><USER6> >with so many humans going thirsty

Where are there humans going thirsty? Honest question.

<comment><USER7> In places where they don't have water purification plants. Also in places that are becoming uninhabitable to humans. Think expanding deserts and such.

<comment><USER8> Isn't that an infrastructure problem? If we use less water in California that doesn't mean less people will be thirsty in South America.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. California's drought has literally zero effect on anybody else. Maybe a bit on people downstream of California's rivers and such.

So the consideration that "people are going thirsty" should have zero effect on how Californians deal with their problem. It serves nothing more than as an emotional device to make people feel bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A similar idea in the works is using bacteria to produce sugar and other nutrients. One company claims they can make more than 30 times as much sugar per acre as regular agriculture.

Some discussion and links on that here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/31zo1r/a_future...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/31zo1r/a_future_of_food_and_why_cities_wont_need_much/)

</comment><comment><USER10> From the standpoint of animal welfare, I think milk and cheese are some of the least offending products. For about 7000 kilos of milk "only" one cow has to live for a year, and birth one calve. With about a 50% chance of this calve being raised for slaughter. And both cow and calve also yield meat. Compare that to the one chicken per chicken.

If you don't want to go vegan, but reduce your animal welfare "footprint", avoid meat from small animals like pigs and poultry.

<comment><USER11> This belief is unfortunately misguided; there is much suffering involved in industrial milk production [1]. It begins with the cow being separated from its calf, usually when it is just newly born. The cow generally responds by searching frantically for its lost calf, repeatedly crying out for it until its throat becomes sore. The cow might also become sick and lose weight due to the separation. It continues with the milking process, which is painful and terrifying for the cows, as evidenced by their response. Milk-producing cows have been bred to maximize milk production, which means they have oversized udders that lead to illness. These are just a few examples of many. Generally speaking, cows in the dairy industry lead a short and exceedingly miserable life.

If the goal is to minimize suffering without going vegan, I think that wild- caught fish provide the least offending animal-based food. But wild-caught fish are generally bad from an ecological perspective.

[1] See for example [http://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/real-talk- milk/](http://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/real-talk-milk/) , [http://www.farmsanctuary.org/learn/factory- farming/dairy/](http://www.farmsanctuary.org/learn/factory-farming/dairy/) , and the documentary films Earthlings and Food Inc. A quick google search will reveal many more sources.

<comment><USER12> I've spent time at an organic dairy farm, and I was not upset by anything that I saw there. Although it's not a natural way of life for a cow, the animals were treated very well. There were some processes that cause the animals short-term pain, like removing horns to ensure they don't hurt each other, but there was definitely no long-term suffering; certainly not around the milking process.

I do completely agree that the vast majority of milk production is done in an unethical way and I find mass-produced milk to taste terrible, but I've done my research and I am satisfied that milk can be produced in a responsible way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article mentions proteins can be produced by yeast, but an additional fat (such as palm oil) will need to be added. Yeasts don't produce fats? Can something else be modified to produce fats identical to milk fat? A plant maybe?

<comment><USER14> E. coli can be genetically modified to produce fats. Yeast can too. The fat content is just more varied requiring many different yeast clones to be developed for production.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What about making a human without human? To those who try to outsmart nature: Would they like to be produced without human?

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm anti-GMO, anti-dairy, pro-cheese, and pro-beef (so Im not in the vegan crowd at all)... yet I'd at least try this especially if it produced high quality cheeses on par with the best unpasteurized cheeses I've had.

Why am I anti-diary? The pasteurization process produces denatured proteins (linked to cancer), contains hormones that are not biologically inert for humans (we are not baby cows), and contain huge amounts of lactose (a sugar that some people are allergic to, and is not a particularly good thing to have in our diets).

The production of most hard cheeses and some soft cheeses tends to remove a lot of the hormone and lactose content, as well as some of the denatured proteins. Cheese does not require pasteurized milk, nor does it benefit from it in any way, as cheese was the first viable method for long term storage of milk.

<comment><USER17> >I'm anti-GMO,

Why? The overwhelming scientific consensus is that it's perfectly safe.

>The pasteurization process produces denatured proteins (linked to cancer)

I think someone may have been playing a joke on you when they told you this. Denaturing proteins is a critical part of the digestion process. Our body can't really do anything with proteins that maintain their secondary/tertiary/quaternary structure through digestion.

> [lactose] is not a particularly good thing to have in our diets

What makes you say this? Sure, some people don't produce lactase and can't digest it, but it's fine for the rest of us.

<comment><USER16> No, the overwhelming scientific consensus is it must be proven safe first on a case by case basis, and that GMO in of itself is not good or bad. However, it is not the science I am worried about, it is the willingness of companies to put profit before human lives.

Denaturation of proteins is, as you have said, removing the secondary/tertiary/quaternary structures. However, that doesn't mean that the pasteurization process produces the same resulting denatured proteins our body does.

Lactose is a sugar, and we simply do not benefit from diets high in sugars and carbs.

<comment><USER18> > it must be proven safe first on a case by case basis

Do you hold "natural" foods to the same standard? On average they tend to have far more genetic variation away from "known good" genomes, yet I don't know anyone who thinks that clinical trials are warranted when Farmer Bob's corn cross-pollinates with Farmer Joe's corn.

> that doesn't mean that the pasteurization process produces the same > resulting denatured proteins our body does.

It's possible that there's a significant difference, but assuming we process denatured proteins similarly a reasonable null hypothesis that one probably shouldn't reject merely on the basis of a single p=.049 study. Just how strong is the evidence that convinced you it causes cancer?

[https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/everything-we-eat- cause...](https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/everything-we-eat-causes- cancer/)

> Lactose is a sugar, and we simply do not benefit from diets high in sugars > and carbs.

Yeah but you didn't mention sugar and carbs in general, you mentioned lactose specifically. Why? Was it just an example (it didn't come across that way)?

> contains hormones that are not biologically inert for humans (we are not > baby cows)

I remember looking up the concentration of the hormone in human milk for comparison and finding that it was 50x higher than what people were whining about in cow milk. Do you think human milk is dangerous too?

<comment><USER9> >On average they tend to have far more genetic variation away from "known good" genomes, yet I don't know anyone who thinks that clinical trials are warranted when Farmer Bob's corn cross-pollinates with Farmer Joe's corn.

Some real world examples of foods being dangerous is Solanine in potatoes. All potatoes contain a small amount of it, and they can sometimes mutate or be accidentally bred to contain harmful amounts. Tomatoes also have small amounts of solanine and tomatine, especially in their leaves.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Auden on No-Platforming Pound (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/02/27/auden-on-no-platforming-pound/ <comment><USER2> This is such a fabulous retelling. I don't know much about Auden other than a general sense that he is very well respected. What is hard about these days is that most of the visible voices arguing for the same POV as Auden's appear to have more in common with Pound than Auden (if my impression of Auden is correct). Are there any visible examples of people well-respected by progressives that would be on Auden's side of the argument?

The other thing that struck me is that the letter exchange between Cerf and Auden came pretty close to wrestling with the paradox of tolerance. Like, if one's work can be separated from their belief, then why would Auden refuse to work with Cerf? I'm sure Auden would have had a distinction to bring up on that matter, though. I guess Auden wasn't arguing that Random House should be shut down.

Was the most recent US conviction for treason really in 1952 (wikipedia)? That's really something.

<comment><USER3> Treason is defined in the US Constitution: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."

The United States has not been in a state of war since 1945, so very few people alive could have possibly committed treason, unless they did so as a child. No person under the age of 75 could have committed treason.

<comment><USER2> I think your definition implies that the only way to be an Enemy of the United States is if the United States is in a state of war (which we can stipulate we haven't been stated as an official declaration of war since 1945).

Is that reading backed up anywhere legally, that the definition of an Enemy only applies during a state of war from an official declaration of war?

<comment><USER3> Well, if we prosecuted treason against a person for acting on behalf of a foreign power -- naming them as an Enemy of the United States -- it would be trivial for that power to interpret the prosecution itself as declaration of war. So be careful what you wish for.

Here, here's a related article by a law professor at my alma mater: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about- tre...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about- treason/2017/02/17/8b9eb3a8-f460-11e6-a9b0-ecee7ce475fc_story.html)

<comment><USER2> Thanks, that is a convincing article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The greatest beauty of this exchange is the degree to which each exercised free association. Cerf did not wish to associate with Pound, and Auden felt that this wish was insufficiently justified and, in turn, chose not to associate with Cerf, causing him to have to go back on his actions.

Ultimately, I see most modern de-platforming as being very similar, with the significant difference that it is not at all civil (which is ultimately easy to factor out for me).

For what it's worth, I may well choose to not use some piece of software because I dislike the leadership. That is a free choice. I may well tell my friends why I made this choice and they may well go along with me. The company may then choose to fire the leadership and alienate those who like them, or choose not to and alienate me and my friends. It's all free choice.

So, overall, I'm not too upset about cancel culture. It's for those of us who sympathize with the cancelled to create spaces where they can continue to thrive. And if we do it right, and if we are right that they are unfairly cancelled, then we will have a weapon that will beat the uninformed in the market. If not, we fail, and the rest of humanity thrives.

Ultimately, the Brendan Eich situation is like this. I don't like that he donated against gay marriage. I didn't stop using Firefox over it. I didn't start using Firefox over it. But by my principles of liberty, I could reasonably have said "I will not work at Mozilla or use Firefox so long as they permit this unless they end their association with him" and they can reasonably have said "Okay, don't. Your loss." or "Okay, we fired him". After all, we are just free people choosing whom we would like to associate with.

<comment><USER5> A number of people have been fired from their jobs because of the cancel culture. It's that "de-platforming" that most concerns me.

While people have the right of free association, that right needs to be exercised responsibly. Is refusing to work with a man who apposes gay marriage is responsible? How about refusing to work with a Trump supporter, or evangelical Christian?

<comment><USER4> These are reasonable questions. I find myself aligned more with Federal rules here than the rules of my state, California. I believe that the things about oneself that are generally immutable should be out of scope (the Veil of Ignorance trumps the Free Association). Examples are: racial identity (and however this manifests - skin colour, hair, whatever), biological sex, age, disabilities, genetics.

Things that I think are borderline but should be protected are stuff like religion. This is a tough place for me because I know that because of correlation in ethnicity and religion you can proxy discrimination for race through these so I take the L on the fact that I don't want them protected but I don't have a way to reasonably differentiate them from race-discrimination.

Political affiliation is a protected class in California, and I struggle with this a little. It isn't hard to imagine that there is a world where some race, let's say Centaurians, are generally discriminated against and they have a party: The Equal Rights for Centaurians Party. Discrimination against ERC affiliation is discrimination against Centaurians, just proxied through political affiliation. I don't think that's good for our society.

Any way, my ultimate guide star is free individuals being able to achieve their greatest freedoms without non-consensually intruding on others, so based on how society is organized at any given moment, I think the practice might be to protect political affiliation or to not do so. Ultimately, it may just be the case that sufficient of us decide not to use your product because you're a Trump supporter and then you die. That's life. You can't make me buy your product. That's a much greater sin. Maybe the law constrains your employer to not fire you and so we keep boycotting and you then die and are replaced by a company that doesn't act like you. FWIW, if it were me, it would depend on the situation.

Perhaps that's why it's good for CA to do so, because it is overwhelmingly Democrat-voting. If there were many powerful parties, one could imagine it would be less necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For everybody who is trying to relate this to current controversies, read W. H. Auden's letter of Feb 2nd.

" I agree with you

"a) That Art and Politics (and Morals) are not unrelated, but the relation is in the work itself. There are works of fairly high aesthetic value which present attitudes which are poisonous, and they present a problem to a publisher, and he has to decide whether the public are grown up enough to enjoy the first without harm because they are sufficiently aware that the second is poison.

"But this is not, I believe, the issue in the Pound case. E.g. The contents of the poems in no way resemble the contents of the broadcasts. [That is, the poems were lyrics that had nothing to do with fascism or the war.]

"b) An artist, or any other figure, who acquires some special status in the community, has a special responsibility. But that, surely, only means, that if he behaves badly or criminally, his act should be judged more severely. I get very exasperated with the people who argue that Pound should be acquitted or let down gently because he is a poet, which is obviously nonsense. The only claim for leniency can be exactly what it would be for any other criminal, on the grounds that he is mad, which is a matter for the court and the medical experts, not the public.

"Actually—it is a very minor point—I have never met or heard of anyone who, out of admiration for Pound's work, embraced his political opinions though I know, and I'm sure you do, of several who share his opinions but would certainly be incapable of reading his poems."

</comment><comment><USER7> In a similar vein, recently there is a trend of comedians making it very clear at the beginning of their sets that their job is to tell jokes and push the boundary of what is acceptable, as this is what the audience is explicitly paying them to do, and that these jokes do not imply that they have the same beliefs. They have to say this because people have complained and tried to de- platform comedians for their jokes.

</comment><comment><USER8> Reading this gave me a lot to think about, and I'm definitely feeling persuaded to be more sympathetic toward giving good artistic work a platform even when the creator has views I find abhorrent.

But I think we need to carefully consider the scope here, as well. Auden was so adamant about including Pound's work because he believed the work itself had strong literary merit (even though he wasn't a huge fan on aesthetic grounds), and did not advance or espouse Pound's fascist views. If Pound's poems had been all about loving and spreading fascism, my reading of his letters suggests Auden would have advocated for dropping them.

Certainly there are modern cases we debate here on HN where there are parallels to the Pound situation, and I'm convinced we sometimes (often?) make the wrong decision. But many of them involve deplatforming people who are using that platform to spread racist, sexist views and/or spread lies and misinformation. There is no artistic merit to that sort of thing, and being tolerant of that is a threat to a just, equal, equitable society.

Regardless, we still must be cautious when giving a platform to a toxic person who creates non-toxic art, because if we give that person fame, they will be granted more reach and access to spread their toxic ideas as well as their non-toxic art. For this reason, I generally won't come down too hard on an organization for deplatforming someone whose work itself is seemingly unobjectionable.

I think Auden went a bit too far in hyperbole, at times: dropping a work from further publishing runs is not remotely like burning books. In the first case the original prints are still available. This is even more true nowadays when so much is digitized, and copies of old works are essentially free.

<comment><USER9> It is one thing to support the literary works of someone who has views that are disagreeable.

It is quite another to continue that support when the person takes actions that are treasonous on the one hand, and supportive of murderous and barbaric activities on the other.

The world was engaged in an existential fight for the very ability to speak freely at the time. Many people lost loved ones in this fight, and the cost was very high.

And Pound decides he's going to lend his talent to the people killing of Jews and anyone else who got in the way of the fascists.

<comment><USER10> It's one thing to go after a possibly mad poet to make a point.

But while this was happening the US had shipped Von Braun and other Nazi scientists over to the US, IBM's practical contribution to the Holocaust was being quietly forgotten, the industrialist Thyssen - who provided substantial funding to Hitler and could be argued to have made WWII possible - was being allowed to live a very comfortable life having been punished with a fine of just 15% of his net worth, and there appeared to be little interest in investigating the role that US industrialists and bankers, including the grandfather of George Bush, had played in association with Thyssen and other industrialists. In fact many of their confiscated assets were quietly returned.

Against this background Pound's actions had exactly zero influence on the course of the war and the fate of the holocaust victims. The real causes were elsewhere. And not only were the people responsible never deplatformed or otherwise challenged, many never faced any significant criticism of their actions.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworl...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar)

<comment><USER9> Nice whataboutisms.

What the people running the US government and other allied governments did after the war in the face of the massive Soviet threat really has nothing to do with this case.

<comment><USER10> That's an interesting attempt at a whataboutism of your own.

Perhaps you can explain how a fascist propagandist was supposed to be involved in the "massive Soviet threat"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _The relation of an author to his work is only one out of many, and once you accept the idea that one thing to which a man stands related shares in his guilt, you will presently extend it to others; begin by banning his poems not because you object to them but because you object to him, and you will end, as the Nazis did, by slaughtering his wife and children.

As you say, the war is not over._

<comment><USER12> The Slippery Slope was a fallacy back when Auden wrote this, too.

<comment><USER13> There should be a fallacy for just randomly talking about fallacies. The Fallacy Fallacy.

Do you also not believe in linear regression because it's a slope? Trend: not a thing.

<comment><USER14> This isn't "randomly" talking about fallacies at all. The very definition of a slippery slope argument is the assertion that a relatively small, perhaps not so controversial, decision will lead inexorably to a horrifying conclusion:

> Begin by banning his poems not because you object to them but because you > object to him, and you will end, as the nazis did, by slaughtering his wife > and children.

That is absolutely a slippery slope argument, and I would argue it is, in this case, also fallacious.

Auden's argument here is "the Nazis did thing X, you are doing thing X, therefore you will commit horrifying atrocities the same way the Nazis did." But when restated that way -- and I will absolutely argue that it is a fair restatement, if much less poetic -- the argument's weaknesses become a bit more evident. I'd also argue farther than Auden's argument is _unsound,_ in that his first premise is extremely shaky: by saying "because you object to [Pound]," he is rather explicitly drawing a comparison between objecting to someone because of their _actions_ \-- e.g., supporting fascists who were literally at war with America and its allies -- and objecting to someone because of their _nature_ \-- e.g., because someone is Jewish.

I don't doubt Auden's earnestness and sincerity here, but I'm absolutely not persuaded that a publisher dropping an author over outspoken political stances they vehemently disagree with is a first step toward totalitarianism.

<comment><USER2> But maybe there's another Fallacy Fallacy here. I mean, we're all very good these days at pointing out slippery slopes. But that doesn't necessarily mean that all slippery slopes are invalid, does it? After all, isn't it _possible_ that there are some matters where giving that first inch thereby makes it easier to give that second inch?

<comment><USER12> The slippery slope fallacy isn't that the first inch makes the second easier; it's that the first inch will unintentionally result in the second inch. It's a fallacy of assuming that certain consequences _will_ result from that initial step, contrary to the intentions behind the initial step. Auden isn't claiming that Cerf _wants_ to slaughter Pound's wife and children. He's claiming that the decision to ban Pound's poems will ultimately result in the slaughter of Pound's wife and children at Cerf's hands; that's what happened with the Nazis; _quod erat demonstratum_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> c.f. P.G. Wodehouse, defended by George Orwell.

[https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell- foundation/orwel...](https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell- foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/in-defence-of-p-g-wodehouse/)</comment>


Ten Things a Serious JavaScript Developer Should Learn - <AUTHOR> https://benmccormick.org/2017/07/19/ten-things-javascript/ <comment><USER2> Well I'm disappointed that "1\. You should know the core language" does not include reading the actual language spec! Especially that this is apparently aimed at _serious_ developers. ES 5.1 spec is actually quite simple and contains a lot of interesting information.

While books are nice to read at first the real "meat" is always in specs. Tangential but I noticed a lot of developers I meet do not read the actual RFCs or white papers... D'oh.

<comment><USER3> Maybe the core spec is simple, but I can't tell you how many times I got burned by "unexpected" behaviors. At this point I think the undefined/underspecified parts of the language are larger than C. Which is generally why I don't have a lot of nice things to say about javascript.

<comment><USER2> Well isn't this natural that they are unexpected to you if you did not read the document that specifies what is expected?

I'm interested by the undefined behavior you mention. While JavaScript clearly has some counterintuitive mechanics they are pretty much... deterministic. Could you share an example of what is undefined? I assume you mean "C/C++"-like "undefinedness".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 0\. Learn something other than JS so you have a reference point before you go on to tell everyone everything should be rewritten in JS ?</comment>


LilyPond architecture (music notation software in Lisp) - <AUTHOR> http://lilypond.org/web/about/automated-engraving/?? <comment><USER2> I just asked the LilyPond documentation editor (also known as "my brother") and LilyPond isn't completely written in Lisp; it's a "rather unholy" combination of Scheme and C++.

This is, however, still an improvement on the early days, when it used TeX as well...

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure why they bothered with C++ at all. The essay says the parsing code is 6000 lines of C++. It seems that if they wrote the whole thing in Scheme, they would have gotten that way down, and then the parsing would have been extensible as well.

Oh well, at least they got it half right. ;)</comment></comment>


The Journal That Couldn't Stop Citing Itself - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/article/The-Journal-That-Couldn-t/233313 <comment><USER2> So what?

The journal isn't citing itself _per se_ , but the works of authors that it published. The editor making the citations isn't citing his or her own personal prior work.

If the citations are useful and relevant, that's fair game. The journal has published a lot of papers, and the editorial references those papers.

It was probably convenient for the editor, owing to the familiarity with the published content of their own journal.

(If some of the references were _circular_ , that would be comically noteworthy.)

Presumably the point here is that the editor doesn't care about researching papers which do not appear in their journal. That's could be a justifiable, if arrogant, point of view. ("Anything _potentially_ worthy of publishing in this field arrives on the doorstep of our journal, and anything _actually_ worthy is published. Ergo, if we need to cite anything, we mostly just need to look through our journal.") If that is actually true, then the editor is justified in heavily citing from their own journal. :)

<comment><USER3> In theory, the journal could also tell authors who have submitted articles that their submissions don't have enough citations. And to go back and revise until they do. That wouldn't be so entirely out of the ordinary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> First paragraph:

"The Journal of Criminal Justice has been on a roll. Once considered a somewhat middling publication — not in the same league as top journals like Criminology and Justice Quarterly — it is now ranked No. 1 in the field according to its impact factor, which measures the average number of citations a journal receives and is meant to indicate which titles are generating the most..."

It sounds like the tl;dr is: the incentives created by how 'impact factor' is measured caused the journal to game the system by citing itself ad nauseum.

</comment><comment><USER4> Only avaliable to subscribers.

</comment><comment><USER5> The publisher that couldn't stop paywalling itself...

<comment><USER6> Who? :P</comment></comment>


Why passion is not what you need in a programmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.stochasticgeometry.ie/2008/03/31/the-case-against-passion/

<comment><USER2> You're just battling a strawman here. Nobody uses "passion" to mean "ignore everything and only care about coding". Passion means you care about your work, and care about the outcome, as opposed to being a drone who just cares about getting a fancier job title or "just paying the bills".

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Also, none of the coders I know are passionate about _programming_. Rather, they're passionate about making cool stuff.

As the saying goes, programming is not a what, but a how. Hackers don't get passionate about the act of coding any more than carpenters get passionate about driving nails.

<comment><USER4> Whoa...is this true? I thought I was like this because I'm not a hardcore developer.

<comment><USER5> It's true for the great majority of programmers I know (good and bad), but it's not true for me. I care a great deal about programming and I'm not particularly interested in making cool stuff. So there are both sorts.

I'm interested in programming as a tool to give myself a clearer mental model of language, mathematics, computation, and thought, and I'm interested in writing and reading code that I find artistically aesthetic and elegant.

(Then again, I wouldn't call myself a 'hacker'. I think 'hacker' implies a large degree of making-cool-stuffmanship.)

<comment><USER3> Interesting. So, out of curiosity, are you just not particular about projects? If you had to choose between two arbitrary projects to work on, on what criteria would you base your choice?

<comment><USER5> I updated my comment to answer the obvious question of what I am interested in. I program to fulfill my practical needs and for work, but I really am interested mostly in learning as I do it and in producing code that is really high-quality, beautiful code (to the degree that the problem domain, my ability, and my personal taste allows.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not to pile on, but the article also seems to somehow assume that passion and diligent practice/training/hard work are mutually exclusive

<comment><USER7> The writer doesn't 'assume' that they're mutually exclusive; he explicitly makes that part of his argument:

 _"Passion? Has no place in the process at all. Yes, you can use it as a motivation – but it's worse than useless if you want to actually succeed. Passion is fleeting, transient, momentary on the timescales that achievement requires. For motivation, you need something deeper and more permanent – and more, you need something that lets you be dispassionate at the same time as remaining motivated."_

His argument is that 'passion' is detrimental to the kind of diligent practice necessary to acquire mastery of a subject. So you can disagree with the thesis of the essay, but you can't really claim that the author is ignoring such a critical aspect of the argument.

<comment><USER8> Okay then, I disagree with that critical aspect of the argument and dismiss as laughably false the following claim: _Passion is fleeting, transient, momentary on the timescales that achievement requires._

I offer the following thought experiment to justify my position: Pick any ten people that everyone agrees have achieved something notable. They could be Olympic athletes, business people, and so forth. Now approach a control group of people who are ignorant of our argument and ask them: "Which of the following ten people are passionate about their sport/business/vocation/what- have-you?"

If on aggregate 25% or fewer of the ten are judged to be passionate, I will concede the point. If 75% or more are judged to be passionate, I claim that passion and achievement are not mutually exclusive.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough, but your thought experiment boils down to a survey of people's opinions on the definition of 'passion'. Essentially, you're arguing that the subordinate definition of 'passion' is more valid than the top-line definition of 'passion' (in my dictionary -- see below), and I think that's pretty unconvincing, as arguments go.

When we refer to 'passion' colloquially, we're usually referring to something so intense that it cannot last for long (e.g. 'passionate love'). Even if you, personally, don't believe this is true, it's become the basis upon which certain wankers in our industry exploit their youthful and naive employees. I think this is the core of the essay, and it's a valid observation, irrespective of the definition of 'passion' that you happen to prefer. So the definitional debate is a dodge for the real issue: there are a ton of "entrepreneurs" these days who are dressing up exploitation in a fancy suit, calling it sexy, and describing it with words that are conventionally used for love.

\---

Now, as promised, the definition rom my Mac-tionary:

passion (n): 1) strong and barely controllable emotion: _a man of impetuous passion_

I grant you that the third and fourth bullets below this definition concern 'enthusiasm', but it's still quite important that the _derivation_ of the word is from Christian theology, and ultimately from the Latin 'pati', which is 'to suffer' (the implication being that 'passion' is a form of suffering for a cause). I think that's intersting, in the current context.

<comment><USER8> English is what people make of it. My blog was subtitled "passionate programming" for six years. Never once did I think of passionate programming as something one suffers for a few hours or days then burns out of with disillusion.

Have I been wrong all these years?

In any event, the second part of your reply is far more interesting, especially in conjunction with a recent HN front page page article suggesting that founders should give employees a bigger taste of early stage liquidation events.

For that reason, I am upmodding you.

<comment><USER7> No, I don't think you were wrong. (Unless you're one of those people who used the word to mean _"willing to work really hard to make me rich"_ , in which case, you're both wrong _and_ evil. ;-))

I think that a lot of well-meaning people (like yourself) were using "passionate" in the 'enthusiasm' sense. My feeling of this essay is that the author was taking on the people who mean it in the _other_ sense. Personally, I think they're much more common.

<comment><USER8> Well, it's rather contextual. If you tell me so-and-so is passionate about women, I am inclined to assume he or she has many temporary passions for many different women. If you tell me they're passionate about women's issues, I am inclined to think this is a matter of conscience that is likely to last a lifetime.

But just to be clear, if I was thinking passionate about making money in the business of software, I'd say that :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't understand how passion for programming/software dev/hacking in general means that its your only focus in the workplace or a signal that you should be taken advantage of.

I'm passionate about programming because I am passionate about making stuff. I'm not very handy(carpentry, etc), so in this case a computer, editor and programming language scratches that itch.

Contrary to the post I think that this is a fairly good indicator of how I am in the workplace and why I work for a (what a believe to be)cool startup. It gives me an opportunity to scratch this itch at work so when I am there it has my full effort/attention.

</comment><comment><USER10> This article is nonsense.

Passion generates ideas. Ideas have the potential to make life (and programming technique) more intuitive all around.

Get a new job. Don't hand out your single perspective gripes in the form of fact.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think this is way off the mark. Professional (and I do believe pg has a good essay on this) suggests standard approaches to problems and suits and such. Passion about programming is what drives a programmer to solve that last bit of the problem at 2 am. These are the people that you want on your team.

On the other hand, if you are building an enterprise software organization, you are more likely to look for a suit and tie than passion in a programmer.

To answer the question _What does it take to be a good programmer?_ I would say that first the passion or drive required to work on a problem that seems impossible in an environment where 50% of the time 80% of the stuff is broken.

<comment><USER12> Also, if you are building an enterprise software organization, your primary concern might be something different than having a team that builds the best software possible. The goal may be to get the bare minimum done for minimal cost. So passion may be necessary to build truly great software, but not all organizations that build software are necessarily trying to build great software. I suppose that speaks to the passion or lack thereof in management.

<comment><USER13> Incidentally if greatness can be measured in bugs per line of code (which seems a reasonable, if not complete metric) then NASA writes some of the greatest software of all time, and I suspect they aren't often up at 2am hacking away on it willy nilly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I saw the large, red, bolded sentences centered between paragraphs, and my mind just filtered them out, assuming it was an ad.

It took me a minute to figure out that the bold red text was actually relevant content.

</comment><comment><USER15> It seems like the majority of posts I've read about "passion" in programming are aimed at discouraging people from becoming programmers. Or to put it another way: encourage people whose motivation for becoming programmers is mainly to get a well-paying job to pursue a different vocation.

The article might've been more interesting if the author had discussed it in terms of discipline being more important than passion.

</comment><comment><USER16> no passion -> no fun -> no superb code.

Many good things spreads from playing. You can do good things with N professional programmers, but they'll not think out of the box, they'll not be imaginative. You'll be good but not outstanding.

And when I talk about superb code I'm not talking about the code itself, but from the point of view of users.

</comment><comment><USER17> The response linked in the comments from the author of the original blog post he's complaining about sums it up pretty nicely:

[http://itscommonsensestupid.blogspot.com/2008/04/passion- doe...](http://itscommonsensestupid.blogspot.com/2008/04/passion-does-not- mean-total.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> There is more than one way to skin a cat. (There is more than one way to be motivated about work.) Why do some assume their way is the best way, or only way? It works for you; great, thanks for sharing. Now don't diss other peoples' motivating factors.

</comment><comment><USER19> Surely passion can be the motivation for all that training and effort?

</comment><comment><USER20> "[W]hen you get prostate cancer and the oncologist puts you into the IMRT machine to zap an area close to your gonads with a dozen different beams of radiation, you'll probably find yourself hopeful that a professional wrote the controller's software rather than someone who was always chasing the next hot thing in computing (and maybe never worrying about stupid dull things like documentation, specifications, tests, code reviews, quality control or that sort of old-fogie stuff)"

+1

I think it may be helpful to extract a couple of more layers from the analysis model.

Clearly software "engineering" has been confronting the expected (required!) transition from an art and craft discipline to a full blown industrial discipline, and in my reading, the OP is really (only) addressing the required mindset and the necessary changes in self-perception of the practitioners.

Equally clearly, we are still confronting the transition and frankly are stumped by some very (very!) fundamental issues that need to be resolved before software "engineering" can be industrialized to meet the industrial scale demand for software. (Consider: data persistence and logical process impedance mismatch; concurrency; etc.)

So, in my view, to argue uniformly against "passion" (we all know what it means: software geek born to code ;) based on a completely fanciful projection of the process of software development to the analytical test bed of a _established_ , _industrialized_ , nearly-scientific, discipline, such as any sort of applied physics (MechE, EE, whatever), chemistry, etc. is inherently flawed.

Yes, you don't need (nor want!) "Fuck you" starlets with attitude in your engineering department. But that is precisely the type of personality that is going to be constructively useful _on the road to industrialization of software development_. Because it is the "passionate" geeks that typically produce breakthroughs, and that is what we need as of now.

Once we have solved the conceptual problem of how to produce software as an industrial product, then would be a more appropriate time to focus on the ideal psychology of a "worker" in the software engineering industries.

</comment><comment><USER21> SEMANTIC FAIL.

From a dictionary:

Boundless enthusiasm: _His skills as a player don't quite match his passion for the game._

The object of such enthusiasm: _Soccer is her passion._

<comment><USER22> Yep, semantics. The author is focussed on the transient connotation that 'passion' can (but doesn't necessarily) imply. Substitute 'intrinsic motivation' or 'disciplined enthusiasm' and we're all in agreement.</comment></comment>


Steve Wozniak: I Never Criticized New iPad, Reporters Got It Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://anewdomain.net/2013/10/26/steve-wozniak-never-criticized-new-ipad-reporters-got-wrong-exclusive/

<comment><USER2> >"It's a tiny thing but the upgrade from three quarters of a TB to 1TB of SSD made the difference for me. Once, I had a MacBook Pro with many tens of gigabytes available get bricked by some upgrade … (all) because it didn't have enough spare storage room. So I don't want to be close to full on (storage, ever)."*

I wonder what he wants all that storage for. I'm a bit nuts about how many Coursera videos I download and keep and I buy media via Amazon, but I can't even imagine needing 10 gigabytes of storage on my laptop.

<comment><USER3> I think you're having a unit problem. Just an OS install takes at least a few gigabytes, and even SD video (at decent quality) is going to be around 1GB/hour. An HD movie will easily be 4-6GB. And if you've got, say, Xcode installed, there goes a few GB, too. Common Adobe media applications are over a GB these days. Even VMware Fusion is more than half a gig.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The congenital inability of the alien creatures who grow into reporters to accurately quote subjects of their coverage has been known since long before anyone alive today was born.

In the hopefully-unlikely event I'm ever a target of reporters, there are absolutely no circumstances in which I would speak to them. I would, however, pass out cards with a single quote I would be pleased to see printed far and wide: "The press cannot be trusted."

</comment><comment><USER4> > Reporters were to blame, he told me. In Wozniak's experience, the UK press > has shown itself to be "the worst in the world for mischaracterizing what I > say." Wozniak also wrote via email today:

And I can assure you "reporters" are not going to do any follow up or apologize for making stuff up. Articles are not even signed anymore ... As for the UK press, there is nothing left but tabloids, of course they 'll be going for the drama and the sensational ...

<comment><USER5> Well, I'd really like to know what he actually said to the reporters before deciding who's right. There are lots of crappy reporters and lots of good ones. All we have here is Woz's claim that he was misquoted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Doesn't matter. Clicks registered, snark impulses satisfied, ad dollars exchanged - the system works, and everyone got what they came for.</comment>


Show HN: Hackeroo now also works as online RSS reader with a read later function - <AUTHOR> https://hackeroo.co/ <comment><USER2> Font hurts my eyes... Recommend to use sans serif fonts for readability.</comment>


How Search Engines Cope With Real-Time Data - <AUTHOR> http://cacm.acm.org/news/53948

<comment><USER2> I upvoted the story before reading the article, just because I saw the *.acm domain and thought meat awaits.

Really disappointing. No actual discussion of the real technology, only a plug for OneRiot and Scoopler, neither of which has nothing more than fluff.</comment>


Biden Is Losing the Internet. Does That Matter? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/technology/joe-biden-internet.html <comment><USER2> A couple of facts:

1\. Clinton also "lost the internet" and still won the popular vote by millions.

2\. Sanders "won the internet" in the primary and it did not translate into votes for whatever reason. It did of course translate into money, though.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> > Mr. Biden's biggest problem is structural. Most of our online political > communication takes place on internet platforms that are designed to amplify > content that provokes strong emotional reactions, often by reinforcing > tribal identities. Mr. Trump's unfiltered, combative style is a natural fit > for the hyperpolarized audiences on Facebook and Twitter, whereas Mr. > Biden's more conciliatory, healer-in-chief approach can render him invisible > on platforms where conflict equals clicks.</comment>


EBay Password Update - <AUTHOR> http://www.ebay.com/reset

<comment><USER2> > We take security on eBay very seriously

Very seriously.

No mention of most of my personal information having been stolen. Thanks ebay!</comment>


Evangelical Jerry Falwell Jr. to head Trump education task force - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-falwell-idUSKBN15G5F4 <comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this may be political but Education is a fundamental building block of Civilization, and if DeVos and Falwell get their way, the damage in the US and beyond they can inflict in the future is terrifying.

<comment><USER2> And the ancient Greeks executed Socrates for "corrupting the youth." How was he corrupting the youth? By making them think. Scandalous! At least we won't have to be concerned by Jerry Falwell Jr and Betsy DeVos "corrupting the youth"!

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha! A lovely observation and I will file it away. "In the immortal words of Socrates...I drank what?" \- Real Genius (film)</comment></comment></comment>