Why subscriptions are the future of journalism - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/thoughts-on-media/selling-ads-is-a-short-term-strategy-here-s-why-subscriptions-are-the-future-of-journalism-6721226d52ca#.g1o3c99ud <comment><USER2> For me, subscriptions wouldn't be great. There aren't many sources where I appreciate a wide enough range of their stuff that I would want the "buffet" model of paying for access to everything they have.

As an example, I really like vice.com's reporting and perspectives on Syria, ISIS, etc. However, I'm not a fan of their reporting on other topics, like gun violence, environmental issues, etc.

I would be much more excited about micropayments where I pay only for what I care about. In the same way that I like "on demand movies" over say, a subscription to HBO.

<comment><USER3> Micropayments are locally good for you, but might have a global effect of making news providers chase just the things that people will provide the micropayments for, creating another variant on the "Buzzfeed" problem, just with a different focus.

Although, to be honest, I'm not sure how to fix that problem. Trying to create a system that provides news people need instead of news people want is a fundamentally hard problem when those two things don't overlap.

<comment><USER4> For me the solution is a Netflix like. (Newsflicks?) You subscribe to Newsflicks and can then access all the articles from journalism sites that partner with Newsflicks.

<comment><USER5> Blendle does this, and is now expanding to Germany. They seem to be doing pretty well. [http://www.blendle.com](http://www.blendle.com).

<comment><USER6> PressReader does this at a much bigger scale than Blendle. It's truly Netflix- for-newspapers-and-magazines. 5,000+ titles, full versions, current day, all- you-can-read model. It's paid for either by personal subscriptions ($30USD/month) or sponsored access is provided by businesses (airlines like Qantas and Virgin Australia, thousands of major hotels around the world, 20,000+ libraries, a partnership with Uber in France for the Cannes Film Festival, etc.) Users can download full titles onto their own device and save them for later reading too.

Full disclosure, I work at PressReader. But it surprises me sometimes when we're not mentioned in these conversations. We do huge business internationally, have millions of active users, have been profitable for years, and are growing at an absolutely insane rate. It's a win-win business model because readers get content (often for free since it's sponsored by a brand they're a customer of), publishers make money (we pay royalties when their content is read), and brands have the opportunity to offer something tangible and personalized to their customers.

<comment><USER4> I can only read content for 14 days after publication then it can be accessed? I have to pay by the publication in addition to pay by the month? No, this seems like a horrible service for a home consumer. Someone references an article from WaPo or NYT from six months ago and my expensive subscription service can't even reach it?!

<comment><USER6> You can read up to 90 days of back issues, full-version. If you have a subscription ($30USD/month) it's all-you-can-read unlimited access to everything. If you'd like to purchase a single issue instead of subscribing, you can, but the subscription model gives you full access.

Better yet, visit the PressReader HotSpot Map and you'll see all the places you can get full access to PressReader for free. You just have to access it while you're connected to their WiFi: [http://www.pressreader.com/hotspot/map](http://www.pressreader.com/hotspot/map)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like the idea of subscriptions, and I do think they have more of a chance than advertising as far as being a sustainable way to make money for ads goes, but they won't be the future of journalism as a whole.

Why? Because to a certain degree, the majority of standard journalism simply isn't commercially viable. I mean, look at the kind of articles most news sites run. Just plain old news, few if any opinions, only valuable because it's a somewhat quick way of finding out what's going on.

How are subscriptions going to work for that? Why would anyone pay for plain old news when social media sites and aggregators (like Hacker News and Reddit) give you the same information for nothing? If you purely want to know what the latest Apple product is, when a new game will be released, what two celebrities got married or who won the football game, then why pay for an article about it? It's already all over the internet for nothing, thanks to people willing to post about that stuff for free.

This subscription thing only works for fields where news is difficult to report (say, from a war zone) or where the author's opinion/insight itself is valuable (read, not entertainment/gaming journalism). Unfortunately, this makes up a far lower percentage of journalism than some people like to believe.

<comment><USER5> Edit: while I could remove this comment in 'shame' over posting it before reading the article (written by the cofounder of, uh, The Correspondent), I'll just leave it up...

I agree that low-quality journalism will have difficulty applying the subscription model, but personally I won't mourn their disappearance. I stopped actively reading most main-stream newspapers a long time ago.

The Correspondent, on the other hand, a Dutch online newspaper, is doing pretty well with subscriptions. Their approach (and tagline/motto) is to go 'beyond the whims/delusion of the day' by only publishing a few good articles a day, instead of the deluge of articles, often rewritten Reuters/AP items giving you piecemeal, context-less updates on different issues.

Their approach is about having a number of correspondents, each in charge of a theme that the staff considers important, or that the readers have suggested ([https://decorrespondent.nl/correspondenten](https://decorrespondent.nl/correspondenten) for a list, google translate should give you an impression of the various themes). Quite often pieces by guest writers are published too, but usually still under one of these themes.

Quite often they'll publish a series of articles, diving into one topic, or write an article as a response to reader feedback (one example being the Operation Easy Chair, which they also published in English and as an eBook: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789987](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789987)).

So far they seem to be doing pretty well, which is amazing considering that it's (almost) entirely in Dutch, and entirely reader-supported. I think they're working on an English version as well.

One could argue that it only works because their audience mostly consists of educated readers with a decent income, but I'd argue that 'non-educated' readers would often be better of with little to no news instead of the crap they're presented with through the low-quality papers. And if demand for such news is large enough, people will end up willing to pay for it when it's gone. Finally, there's acceptable news coverage provided on public broadcast as well.

This will suck for many journalists, but I wouldn't be surprised if the decent ones will be happy with whatever alternatives pop up. Most decent journalists I know are miserable at the papers they work for, for various reasons. The Wire's last season, while perhaps a bit too slanted against mainstream newspapers, does a pretty decent job outlining many of the problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I believe that ads are killing journalism. The focus is not on creating good content, but mainly create content that will be clickable and sharable. Unfortunately, in our world, there is no direct correlation between good and sharable content. I'm definitely willing to subscribe to media outlets focused on informing and providing great content to their readers or do some micropayments, basically pay for the content I read and care about.

</comment><comment><USER9> One problem with subscriptions is privacy. One could argue that currently it is difficult with all the ad tracking but its possible. With subscriptions, state agencies will have an easier time knowing your preferences just by following the money.

<comment><USER10> You can always use a VPN, register with a dummy email account, and pay with a prepaid credit card if you're concerned about such things. Alternatively, subscribe to everything so your preferences disappear.</comment></comment>


Python Bytes Podcast – Episode 11 - <AUTHOR> https://pythonbytes.fm/episodes/show/11/django-2.0-is-dropping-python-2-entirely-pipenv-for-profile-functionality-and-pythonic-home-automation <comment><AUTHOR> [https://pythonbytes.fm/11](https://pythonbytes.fm/11)

* Pipfile, pip, and virtualenv * Django 2.0 dropping Python 2.7 support * attrs for cleaner classes * Python benchmarking and profiling * Getting Python 3 into more distributions * Home automation with Home Assistant</comment>


Washington state has passed the country's toughest net neutrality legislation - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/40537222/washington-just-passed-the-countrys-toughest-net-neutrality-legislation <comment><USER2> The best line for me was:

"Just because the FCC claims it has the power to preempt state laws doesn't mean that it actually does," says Hansen. "I can claim that I have the power to manifest unicorns on the Washington State Capitol lawn. But if you look outside right now, there are no unicorns."

I hope it succeeds.

<comment><USER3> Don't worry. The Republicans are running everything right now and if there's anything they support, it's state's rights

/s

<comment><USER4> I'm as partisan as they come. And am only too happy to pile on. But I also remember the Clipper chip, SOPA, PIPA... My own state representative voted for internet voting along with the herd after promising me he wouldn't without checking with me first.

Fair play, rule of law, fare and impartial courts, etc. are not partisan issues.

If we bring the heat, they'll see they light.

<comment><USER5> > Fair play, rule of law, fare and impartial courts, etc. are not partisan > issues.

"State's rights" of the kind the person you're responding is joking about are a partisan issue in the United States.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I always found it amusing that the FCC claimed they didn't have a right to regulate Net Neutrality, but they do have the right to prevent individual states from regulating Net Neutrality.

<comment><USER7> One can hold that under a limited, federal government structure there are things the Federal government must not do (because it is either explicitly barred from it or it is not one of its explicitly enumerated powers), and that the same constraint applies to the States.

For instance, under the US constitution, freedom of expression limits all levels of government.

<comment> Paul-ish FCC != Federal government. The FCC chairman claims that the FCC is not the correct agency, but rather the FTC.

<comment><USER7> This seems so concrete-bound... Moving to the conceptual level, since the initial F in each agency name stands for "Federal" \-- in what sense are they not part of the Federal government? are they somehow not subject to the limits imposed by the Constitution?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I live in WA and am amused. I didn't hear anything about this until now.

This isn't quite the same issue as NN, but in Seattle we had a single ISP monopoly (Comcast) until quite recently. Centurylink has started offering fiber in the last few years, but before that there was an uninterrupted decade where Comcast was the only viable broadband option for most homes.

(A number of vendors offered DSL, but it was extremely slow and typically not price-competitive; a small number of vendors offered very fast internet, but only in condos / apartment buildings in or near the downtown core.)

<comment><USER9> We have the same issue on the other side of the state in Spokane. In the majority of the metropolitan area, Comcast is your only viable option. Where I live, I can get up to around 250 Mbit Comcast or 1-5 Mbit CenturyLink.

<comment><USER10> In the north-central part of town (Garland 'hood) I'm getting 40Mb service from CenturyLink and it's generally pretty reliable though throughput really drops during the mid- and late afternoon. I didn't know that Comcast offered such high data rates here though so thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ironic posturing from the state that Comcast paid to ban municipal ISPs.

</comment><comment><USER12> Has there been a resolution as to who was generating the fraudulent comments on the FCC proposal? I believe they're real I've just been wondering why someone/some organization would do that, unless it was some conspiracy by the ISPs, but they don't need fake comments when they have lobbyists.

</comment><comment><USER13> It would be interesting for someone to identify regions in states that have similar internet conditions before NN. We might have some interesting data to peruse if the curr situation holds for a few years.

</comment><comment><USER14> Here's a question though that maybe someone with a little more legal savvy may be able to answer - does this ban bandwidth caps?

</comment><comment><USER15> This is great news. Now we can compare what ISPs do in NN states verses non NN states.

</comment><comment><USER16> I really don't understand this law. ISPs offer me faster internet for a higher price. But is illegal for ISPs to offer Netflix faster internet for a higher price. What is the distinction?

In any event, this is pure virtue signalling, since the federal government clearly has supremacy over state laws for national telecommunication networks, and this will be overturned by the courts.

<comment><USER17> No, you can't pay your ISP to get "faster internet", only to get more bandwidth between your wall and whatever backhaul provider owns the physical fiber lines. There is no way to make the internet "faster" other than reducing the number of hops you have to make to get to the destination, or by increasing the speed of packets on the networks, which should already be roughly speed of light. Therefore if they are proposing "fast lanes" it isn't about speeding you up, but rather about slowing everyone else down.

Net Neutrality doesn't prevent ISPs from selling more bandwidth to netflix, it only prevents ISPs from treating the traffic differently due to the identity of either the sender or the receiver. This means that Comcast can't slow your traffic down just because you are sending data to and receiving data from netflix instead of using Hulu (which they partially own).

<comment><USER16> The article states, "All internet service offered in Washington would have to be free from blocking or throttling of legal online content. Nor could it be subject to a system of premium-priced "fast lanes" that offer better bandwidth to content providers that pay extra for the privilege."

So, the law does prevent ISPs from offering "faster" internet, however you define it. I still don't see the distinction between allowing consumers to pay for faster internet, but prohibiting content providers from doing the same thing. I pay more for 250 mbps. Why can't Comcast offer Netflix additional speed for more money, which would be illegal under this law? As I understand it, slowing down your competitors is already illegal under the FTC rules.

<comment><USER18> I think that "fast lanes" are about (say) Netflix paying for more _downstream_ bandwidth.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Reimplementing Etsy's statsd for fun and profit - <AUTHOR> http://www.streppone.it/cosimo/blog/2013/01/net-statsd-server-perl-port-of-flickr-etsy-statsd/

<comment><USER2> statsd is fantastic. I have used both the node.js version and the python version. I actively prefer the python version. Now it seems you have written a perl version.

Fantastic.</comment>


Ask HN: Where to find good mobile devs? - <AUTHOR> I am planning on building a small side-income project. I would build the website and backend. If it is profitable enough and made sense to have iOS and Android apps, I would like to have them. However, I won't have time to build the apps while working on the website and api, in addition to my fulltime job and other responsibilities.<p>Where is a good place to find iOS and Android devs that may be interested in working together for a side income project like this? <comment><USER2> I feel the need to prefix this with 'I'm not joking' but really, try the highest rated craft ale pub in the city</comment>


Client ID in Forwarded DNS Queries - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-tale-dnsop-edns0-clientid-00 <comment><AUTHOR> Privacy implications here are huge, and dnsmasq already has this implemented.</comment>


Microsoft Patent Application for 'sudo'?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20091111094923390

<comment><USER2> It doesn't so much sound like sudo as:

      1) User attempts non-permitted action.
      2) Computer informs user about the policy problem.
      3) Computer displays list of accounts that are permitted to perform the action.
      4) User enters a password for one of the permitted accounts.
      5) Computer proceeds.

Trivial and obvious to ones skilled in the art, but not exactly sudo.

<comment><USER3> Except for the bit about listing accounts with the proper rights, this has been a part of OSX for as long as I can remember. Certainly before April 2005. Is it really that easy to patent a well-known process by adding a trivial thing?

<comment><USER4> Surely this "trivial thing" is what is being patented though. I mean let's say hypothetically MS sues Apple, well Apple can say sure there are similarities but we don't do the accounts bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does someone know the backstory on Groklaw? From the domain name, I presume I'm supposed to trust them about legal issues; that, for instance, they might have some legal training.

If they do, it's not in evidence here. "Dude. It's sudo. With a GUI. For dummies." Presumably, the author knows that it's valid to take an existing idea and patent an improvement on it.

The author also wisecracks about the likelihood that Microsoft wants to collect a "toll" on everyone else's use of sudo. Leaving aside the fact that Microsoft _isn't patenting sudo_ , surely the author realizes that if Microsoft wanted to patent troll the rest of the industry, they have a huge arsenal of far better patents to do it with?

<comment><USER6> Groklaw came to fame during the SCO crisis and offered great insight into the workings of the trial. PJ is|was not a lawyer but a para-legal who tracked the proceedings and converted all the legalese to human-speak.

<comment><USER5> I don't see a byline on this post. Did PJ write it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I remember when one of my friends told me that Intel had a trademark on the letter i. Of the alphabet. I grinned. Then he opened an Intel spec manual for some chip or other, and right there on one of the opening pages was a trademark statement for the lower case letter i.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks like a patent for a novel user interface to sudo, not sudo itself.

<comment><USER9> You are right. I am not sure whether the claims as listed are novel and non- obvious, but they are definately not patenting sudo.

In fact the interface they present is quite more complex than sudo. It looks like it shows you a bunch of other accounts and asks you whether you would like to log in as any of them.

<comment><USER10>
        su - [username]

<comment><USER11> Switching to a named user you know and starting a login shell isn't the same as presenting a list of possible users who have the privilege.

One possible hypothetical Unix equiv would be:

        command
        <failure message returns 'sudo -l' from everyone that does have access>
        <user interface to PAM-type app to prompt for credentials and 'sudo -l <command>' as one of the above users>

This doesn't exist as far as I know.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New York City: Data Science's Best Bet for Growth and Opportunity - <AUTHOR> https://blog.insightdatascience.com/new-york-city-data-sciences-best-bet-for-growth-and-opportunity-5349983e0490 <comment><USER2> I live and work in NYC as a JS developer, and I feel like it's a great place to be. The community is strong here and there's a lot of diversity in what people do, technical or not, within the tech community. The amenities are good and I walk to work and honestly the rents are not that bad. Manhattan is the most expensive, but if you want to save money Brooklyn, Queens, NJ, etc. are cheaper and all linked by (mostly working) public transit. One of the biggest factors keeping me here is the public transit and the fact that I don't need to drive and sit in traffic.

<comment><USER3> As someone living in SF I've been seriously eyeing NYC for a while now. It just seems like an overall better city.

The roads are better, the people seem more varied, there's even more things to do outside work, there are seasons (god I miss weather), and the tech scene is probably almost as strong.

But are there many startups? It almost seems these days more startups are coming out of Europe than out of NYC.

<comment><USER4> You may want to consider a gentle reintroduction to "weather", especially East Coast winters. Snow is fun when you're on a ski vacation. Decidedly less so when it's wet and getting whipped into your face by the wind as you trudge to work.

<comment><USER5> The winters in NYC really aren't that bad. Yes occasionally it snows but the storms that dump inches of snow are infrequent enough to be novel. When it's cold it's cold but if you're wearing the right jacket that isn't bad either.

<comment><USER6> > The winters in NYC really aren't that bad.

I still have nightmares about those hidden pools of half frozen brown sludge that accumulate at street corners that turn your shoes pitch black if you accidentally step in one!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> NYC has a great ecosystem of experienced people who know how to program, know math, and understand how businesses/product work. In this regard there are many amazing qualified data science practitioners.

But, the data science startup scene is not really thriving in NYC yet. Compared to the Bay Area, I see two main issues: a lack of data scientists with strong software engineering skills, and a lot less angel money (probably due to very few large successful exits).

<comment><USER8> >>lack of data scientists with strong engineering skills >>less angel money

absolutely. this article is a great 30k feet up review of the scene and what you add is true.

i operate NYC but literally live 100s of miles away as my affordable housing policy, because I am building an open data science consultancy that is revenue driven.

what i'd add happens is that your scientists and tech people are a step removed from the real-world disciplines put in their petrie dish. they are not working in business settings, but institutional ones, because there isn't quite a silicon valley thing, and public-private-partnerships in NY mostly mean corruption, not innovation.

that said, what makes the NYC scene really amazing is that most of us are doing our part as a civic project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> NYC has a much more diverse business environment than the Valley and that grounds the tech industry a lot more to focus on solving problems. There's much less acceptance of "Uber for lawn gnomes" app companies and a lot more pressure to deliver true value (in my observation).

</comment><comment><USER10> As someone who grew up in the NYC area, and who is currently feeling the crushing suffocation of SF Bay Area cost of living, I'd love to go back. But aren't the problems similar? In order to afford to own a home I'd likely have to live in Pennsylvania and commute 2+ hours--not much different than in SF. Plus, my understanding is that back east, tech is what companies use rather than what companies make, so at most companies you'll be in a supporting role rather than building the products. Is this true or are my assumptions outdated?

<comment><USER11> If you can afford a child's closet in SF, you can afford a small house in NJ that is far closer than the 2+ hours you'd need to spend each way from PA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In case anyone wasn't aware of the existence, the Open Data Law[1] means that there are lots of fun data sets to play with [2]. Plenty of fodder for data science projects. And if you want to get involved BetaNYC is one of the larger civic hacker communities.

[1] [https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doitt/initiatives/open-data- law.pa...](https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doitt/initiatives/open-data-law.page)

[2] [https://opendata.cityofnewyork.us/data/](https://opendata.cityofnewyork.us/data/)

[3] [https://beta.nyc/](https://beta.nyc/)</comment>


Paul Romer's "Charter Cities" - <AUTHOR> http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/can-charter-cities-change-the-world-a-qa-with-paul-romer/ <comment><USER2> This is profoundly silly, only very intelligent people can be this silly.

 _Q.

What makes you confident that land and a good charter are all it takes?_

His answer is long but it boils down to _Because!_

My god, if only it were that easy to create competition among governments, if only it were that easy to create the peace and stability necessary for economic growth.

If only you could just convince Mugabe or Kim Jong Il to give a chunk of land and let you administer it for everybody's benefit.

This is a variation on the underpants gnomes' strategy. But instead of step 2, step 1 is missing.

Step 1. ????

Step 2. A safe piece of land with attractive legal and/or physical infrastructure.

Step 3. Profit.

<comment> barry-cotter Eh, I agree on the low likelihood but I think the massive value creation from a success renders the expected value high enough for it to be worth campaigning for. The problem of binding a sovereign is very real whether the titular sovereign (whoever, Namibia, Haiti, Cuba) or the world-sovereign (the US, obviously) to their stated policy is, ah, rather difficult.

Also, Dubai. Not shining bright at the moment but really 30 years ago there was practically nothing there and it hardly has Western standard rule of law even now, but look at what's there.

One way of setting this up I could see would be some country with massive illegal immigration problems setting up an SEZ without freedom of movement to the metropole, and allowing free immigration to that along with some very minimal law enforcment. I know Greece has insane immigration from illegals and it's not going to stop. Imagine they take some barren Agean rock, ~ Manhattan sized and allow free immigration with no minimum wage or constraints on voluntary contract for people over x years of age. Eastern Mediterranean New York in 15 years.

I think you overestimate the difficulty of physical infrastructure, that's a solved problem, throw money at it.

<comment><USER3> _I know Greece has insane immigration from illegals and it's not going to stop. Imagine they take some barren Agean rock, ~ Manhattan sized and allow free immigration with no minimum wage or constraints on voluntary contract for people over x years of age. Eastern Mediterranean New York in 15 years._

What if the result winds up looking less like New York or Hong Kong and more like Mogadishu? There are no guarantees that this bold social experiment might not wind up going wrong in all sorts of ways. What will Greece do if it finds it suddenly has an impoverished crime-ridden city on its sovereign territory?

<comment> barry-cotter Deport everybody. Or just leave it there. Mogadishu/Somalia isn't even that destabilising to East Africa which _mostly_ has more or less functional states. Also, the only reason Somalia doesn't have a stable internationally recognised government at the moment is that the US has a hate on for Islamists of any stripe. If they hadn't put so much effort into the puppet Transitional Government and the invasion of Somalia by their Ethiopian client Somalia (possibly absent Puntland, probably absent Somaliland) would no longer be a failed state, it would just be a _really shit one_.

Seriously, imagine the Cosa Nostra take over the running of AgeanManhattan, protection rackets and all. Now, what do you call them? The government. They're a subsidiary government of Greece, which holds ultimate, internationally recognised sovereignty over AgMan, but whosoever holds the monopoly over the use of force is thus legitimate and sovereign.

Also, seriously Greece is not a terribly impressive first world country but it is one. I wouldn't be surprised if they had paramilitary police units sufficient to subdue a dense, networked city of 6 million. I figure 20K would do it easily. They would more or less definitionally have total air superiority, which combined with large well trained, armed and co-ordinated police/soldiers would render any putative contest grotesquely one sided.

Also, these people wouldn't be citizens, they'd be guests/subjects. No vote, no political power, no constituency. The Greek police don't play very nice with _Greeks_. I imagine the Greek Army would be nastier.

(Leaving to go to bed, will reply to any reply tomorrow, hoping there's a discussion here when I get back, ciao)

<comment><USER3> _Deport everybody._

I'm not too familiar with Greek politics, but I'm sure there's a sufficiently large bleeding-heart constituency which would oppose any cruelty to the huddled masses just offshore.

 _I wouldn't be surprised if they had paramilitary police units sufficient to subdue a dense, networked city of 6 million. I figure 20K would do it easily. They would more or less definitionally have total air superiority, which combined with large well trained, armed and co-ordinated police/soldiers would render any putative contest grotesquely one sided._

Well yes, I'm sure they're militarily capable of doing it, but it's still enough of a headache that it seems to push the risk/reward ratio of this Aegean Manhattan firmly into the "not worth the effort" category.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> barry-cotter An incredibly long, well reasoned and cited, highly vitriolic and personally insulting to Romer take on the "charter city" idea. (Really, I'm not kidding it is _incredibly_ long.)

Summary: There is an English word for charter city, and it is colony.

[http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/08/from- cr...](http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/08/from-cromer-to- romer-and-back-again.html)

<comment><USER4> I disliked almost everything about the tone and content of that article -- at first. His vitriol at the beginning is juvenile, bombastic, etc.

When he starts citing the case of the Belgian Congo is where the article becomes readable.

But when he writes in the imagined voices of Cromer et al -- well, that's good reading. He was making his points there, and not (just) bloviating. (<\-- new word)

Then, carried away by the religious zeal that unpopular truths to often engenders, he drifts into 'papau new guinea people are neanderthals', and 'all third-world countries are dependent on foreign aid and protection,' etc. Huh.

The guy writes like a crank.

But, hey, some people call Wolfram a crank, and yet I'd rather have read him than not.

<comment><USER5> > Then, carried away by the religious zeal that unpopular truths to often > engenders, he drifts into [falsehoods]

This problem is endemic to MM's work, but I still consider him worth reading. It's important to read him critically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Think about the truly important changes in political systems. Back in the middle ages, suppose that someone described a legal system that enforced rules and contracts that everyone had to obey, even the country's leaders. What would informed opinion of the day have been? Great idea, but it will never happen. No question it was hard to pull off, but it did happen._

The shadows of Thucydides, Aristotle and Polybius (among others) may question the quality of the "informed opinion" ...

</comment><comment><USER7> I loved this. Don't understand why all the other top-level comments are so negative.</comment>


The Joy of (Outdated) Facts - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/books/review/Nicholson-t.html?ref=books <comment><USER2> Single page - [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/books/review/Nicholson-t.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/books/review/Nicholson-t.html?ref=books&pagewanted=print)

<comment><USER3> Looks like you need to use the "single page" link instead of the "print" link on the nytimes website: [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/books/review/Nicholson-t.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/books/review/Nicholson-t.html?pagewanted=all)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "My "New American Cyclopaedia" (1872) tells me that in 1855 there were 25,858 people in New York who could neither read nor write, and 21,378 of them were Irish. This may well have been true, but why exactly did it need to be emphasized? Well, I think we might hazard a guess."

Emphasis is justified emphasised because it is clearly significant. The question is censoring by omission warranted?

Obviously this doesn't undermine the article as a whole, but whilst political correctness is fine, let's not make it a redefinition of reality. It is either patronising or delusional. (Of course deliberately censoring the fact would of course be patronising as well).

</comment><comment><USER5> > With hindsight, we can always see through the dubious "authority" of such > historical sources. Few things look as unstable as the rock-solid > certainties of previous ages. Since encyclopedias are supposed to be > balanced and disinterested, the bias often seems even more naked.

Oh, he comes so so so close to what I wanted him to say, but he didn't say it! He was right there, but couldn't pull the trigger on, "...and our current sources are almost certainly as biased."

Actually, I'll go a step further - the official story of the present is almost certainly entirely false, but so is the "official story" of history. If you read primary sources, it quickly becomes obvious that the explanation behind most important events understood now is at best glaringly incomplete.

Here's a major example:

The United States was one of the closest allies of Japan for up to three years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. America supported the Meiji Side during the Meiji Restoration, which was Japan's civil war that switched from control by Shogun (head military and on-Earth leader) to control by Emperor (head of everything in the religion of the time, but had been not involved with earthly affairs for the 250 years prior to the Meiji Restoration). The post-Meiji Japanese government and American government got along really, really well and were great trading partners. As of 1939, Japan was importing 80% of its oil and more than half of its scrap metal from the United States, buying lots of arms and ships too. (America sold arms to all parties in WWII prior to 1940 - the English, French, Germans, Russians, Nationalist Chinese, Communist Chinese, Japanese, and a few more places)

Then... in 1941 the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. WTF?

Really, WTF? That'd be like the United States bombing one of Taiwan's military bases in 2014. That's four years from now. How the heck would that happen?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_Control_Act#.22Moral_emb...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_Control_Act#.22Moral_embargo.22)

Hmm...

Also not covered in that article - besides the embargo, the United States declared Japan "a hostile nation" and started moving troops, equipment, and weapons into Hawaii and the Philippines (the Philippine Islands were owned by the USA at the time).

To try to give you an example of the scope of this, this would be a lot like if Iran said that no OPEC countries could sell oil to the United States, declared the United States an enemy of Iran, and started moving tanks and soldiers to the Iran/Iraq border. The U.S. might not attack, but would anyone be surprised if they did?

Now, there's two points worth mentioning. First, is that whenever I tell people about this, the most frequent thing I hear is, "Yes, but Japan was doing evil things." Okay, sure, I agree with you. But the United States have had favorable relations with a lot of countries that did a lot of evil things in history, including the Soviets who were considerably more evil than the IJA, and including European powers when they were at war and committing genocide in various different times and places in history.

Second, enforcing that "moral embargo" cost the United States thousands of Americans dead and millions of dollars... and now it's not talked about any more. I think it's worth talking about and knowing about. The official story learned about WWII is that "Japan was evil and totally psycho, so despite the fact that they were already at war with a half dozen countries across multiple fronts, they attacked the largest neutral power in the world who was formerly their close ally." Which... doesn't add up. The "Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because they're totally crazy and psycho" angle was always wrong, but few people know it now. I mean, they'll know it in the year 2300 or whatever, just like we understand why Rome took out Carthage now, but I'd say modern knowledge and understanding about events is often biased, and it's worth comparing our understanding to an early primary or secondary whenever possible.</comment>


Voynich manuscript decoded by computer scientists using AI - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/mysterious-manuscript-decoded-computer-scientists-ai-a8180951.html <comment> xl-brain I think the claim in the title is a little overstated. Every few months, there is a claim that it has been solved, only to conclude that more work needs to be done. The remember the last time it was solved:

[https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/voynich- manuscript...](https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/voynich-manuscript- solution/)</comment>


Reacting, Responding & Initiating - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/11/reacting-respon.html

<comment><USER2> I don't mean to be rude or obnoxious, but out of curiosity, who is Seth Godin and why are his posts often on HN?

<comment><USER3> Marketing guru. Sold YoYoDyne to Yahoo in the first dot-com bubble (hmm, that sounds familiar ;-)), became Yahoo's VP of direct marketing, published a bunch of short & pithy marketing books, and now blogs a lot of largely-content-free- but-occasionally-insightful posts.

<comment><USER4> Only the last three (not counting Meatball Sundae) are short and pithy. Some of his earlier books are legitimately pretty good.

<comment><USER3> "Short and pithy" and "legitimately pretty good" aren't mutually exclusive. I actually like a lot of his later books. His blog posts are pretty inconsistent, though.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Oracle Killed Java - <AUTHOR> http://andrew.codeusa.net/post/74532443014/oracle-killed-java <comment><USER2> Oracle's got nothing to do with the failure of the Java applet sandbox. The problem with the applet sandbox is simple: it was designed before anybody really understood modern secure C programming --- integer handling, memory lifecycle, concurrency.

The major browser projects all host a very similar attack surface --- a programming language with content/attacker- controlled code hooked up to a whole bunch of crazy bells and whistles. The browsers barely, just barely, have a handle on that attack surface. And the modern browsers have all rearchitected in the last 5 years specifically to address the problem, which is something the Java applet maintainers have not done. Who in the world is surprised that _doubling_ the browser attack surface creates problems?

It's long past time we put Java applets out to pasture.

</comment><comment><USER3> I tend to agree if we're talking about client-side Java served up through a browser. But client-side Java has been going downhill for years. Server-side Java on the other-hand is alive and well.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yet another link-bait title...

It should be 'Oracle killed Java APPLETS'

<comment><USER5> Given that Oracle now tries to make you install Ask malware (adware? Same thing..) with every "So you want to get security fixes, eh?" updates..

No, the title's totally fine. Oracle sucks balls and killed Java. I'm still having it installed (interested in Clojure, for example), but I actively make sure that people around me Do Not Use It.

Java as a platform on the desktop was killed by the company that is

a) unable to advance the language and platform, to make it 'state of the art' again (right now, it's ... old-fashioned and limited, if you're looking at competing platforms)

b) actively trying to get malware on your machine because .. why not, you're already installing stuff from those clever people, maybe another browser toolbar would be totally fine?

<comment><USER6> Pretty sure Sun was doing Ask Toolbars with Java installs [1]. And Ask Toolbars are not malware, they're not even adware. They don't compromise your computer. The shady thing it does is change your default search engine to an Ask.com search result that has more, and less noticeable ads. That's a pretty shitty thing, not user friendly, but it's not "malware" and it's not "adware." I worked on the Ask Toolbar and there was no tracking information other than your general non-personally identifiable stats gathering like one would use on a website with Google Analytics.

[1] [http://www.quora.com/Java-programming-language/Why-does- Java...](http://www.quora.com/Java-programming-language/Why-does-Java-for- Windows-include-the-Ask-Toolbar?share=1)

<comment><USER7> Changing the default search engine in a user's browser when they did not consciously ask for it counts as malicious data corruption in my book. Can you even begin to imagine how much damage and confusion that causes for "old people"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Java applets were dead before Oracle acquired Sun. Too heavy, too slow, and by the time they stopped being too slow it was too late.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've never used python for anything serious. I'm shocked to learn about this python functionality that duplicates webstart or applets. Being able to hand out a link that will download an interpreter and then run my script in a secure way (with self signed code no less) is a really slick feature.

That or the author is playing a dirty rhetorical trick.

</comment><comment><USER10> _" While this is great in theory, for java its pointless. The contents of a jar can be extracted just the same as any zip format, signatures removed and resigned all without any issue._"

Completely false? Resigning a jar with authenticated signature will turn it into a self-signed jar and will then display the nasty warning as it should. This security measure works very well: if you want to run stuff in the browser, use js+HTML5 (or GWT). If you have legacy java code that you must run in the browser, get it signed properly and it will run. This is universally an incredibly good thing given how flakey java applets are.

</comment><comment><USER11> Applets were invented at a time when there was competition between language- level sandboxing (Java) versus code signing (Active X).

Today we understand that you need language-level sandboxing, OS-level sandboxing, permissions enforcement, code signing, and a way to revoke bad apps. (Android store, for example.) And it's not really enough.

Most of us have moved on, but I think Oracle deserves some credit for doing _something_ to protect the people who still must rely on applets for some reason (probably legacy apps).

</comment><comment><USER12> Can't believe the author mistook 'effected' with 'affected'. Never had seen that happening in the wild.

</comment><comment><USER13> Orcale does not care about the desktop - and Sun never managed to make it user-friendly (e.g. annoying Java Updater popups on every start, trying to install the ask toolbar, etc). However, Java will stay significant on servers and on Android (as Dalvik).

<comment><USER14> But Dalvik is not Oracle's thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Would it be a possibility of having a 3rd party Java app registrar which isn't Oracle, using OpenJDK?

Because $300 a year is a little steep, the open source community could do this much more efficiently.

<comment><USER16> It's not neccessarily $300/year.

I got a code-signing cert (for the applets at eMusicTheory.com) for $75 plus the annoyance of proving my company was legitimate. Here's the guide I used as a starting point: [http://srcbin.blogspot.fr/2010/04/tucowscomodo-code- signing-...](http://srcbin.blogspot.fr/2010/04/tucowscomodo-code-signing- certificate.html)

People who want to make a point about the awfulness of an option they're _not taking_ don't usually search very hard to find the best price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Java in the browser has been dead for years, or should've been. Sure, lots of people are still stuck with it for legacy apps, but no one likes having to use it. Good riddance.

</comment><comment><USER18> I thought applets were buried almost half a decade back.

</comment><comment><USER7> When the author claims self-signed applets run in a sandbox, I believe that's incorrect. Even the warning shows the sandbox becomes disabled.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, that's wrong.

UNsigned applets by default run in the sandbox; signed applets (including self-signed) run with full permissions unless you specify otherwise in the HTML and in the JAR manifest (where you can explicitly request sandbox-only execution).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Shame on you for writing applets. Personally I'm glad this cr*p is being killed off. Java belongs on a server.</comment>


The Grill: MIT Professor Hal Abelson on the Hot Seat - b-man http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/298758/The_Grill_MIT_Professor_Hal_Abelson_on_the_Hot_Seat

<comment><AUTHOR> I see those Nerd Pride pocket protectors at Boston Lisp each month. Abelson's collaborator, Gerry Sussman, is oft seen sporting one.</comment>


The Axis Of Eval: Why I ignore Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://axisofeval.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-i-ignore-clojure.html <comment><USER2> What an interesting perspective on language development.

It's funny how the biggest detractors of clojure seem to be those that should be cheering it on, the people that use LISP.

Clojure _is_ a lisp, like it or not, sure it's not common lisp or whatever other dialect you prefer, but that shouldn't matter too much.

LISP used to be leading, now it is lagging and this person seems to be somehow proud of the lag.

LISP is as much a way of thinking as it is a programming language and Clojure is representative of that way of thinking. The implementation details are really just that, details.

So ignore clojure - and any other modern attempt at bringing LISP in to the mainstream - and decades from now you might wish that you had not, because you lost your chance at shaping the future of the language that you profess to love so much.

<comment><USER3> We're detractors because we care...

I like Clojure, I've used it for a number of projects. I've given money to rhickey. I think it is very promising.

It has a lot of good ideas and it is very refreshing to see people tackling current issues in a dialect of lisp. It is also nice to see a lisp with market traction.

That said, there are a lot of things that are 'unproven' about it.

It isn't clear that shared state immutability and transactions are 'the way' to tackle concurrency.

It isn't clear that Clojure's macros are really better than Common Lisp's macros.

It isn't clear that we really want to be tied to the JVM/NET architecture.

(Or that the concessions made to do so are reasonable... stack traces, tco).

I think I could go on if I wanted to.

A large number of features implemented in Clojure are still research topics...

It grates me when proponents of Clojure tout it as 'a modern dialect of lisp,' implicitly asserting that other lisps are in some way decrepit, aging relics from the 80s.

The truth is that Clojure is modern compared to almost ANY programming language, calling it 'a modern dialect of lisp,' while potentially true, is doing a disservice to Clojure, as well as to other lisps which are under active development.

<comment><USER2> Why is naming something 'what it is' doing it potentially a disservice?

What arguments are there to say that clojure is _not_ a modern dialect of lisp?

The JVM came about pretty recently (on the LISP timescale), software transactional memory has been around for a while but afaik no mainstream lisp- like language implements it, and so on. That all says 'modern' and 'new' to me.

I'm not versed enough in Lisp _or_ clojure to make any statements about the macro issues.

What bugs me about clojure is on a completely different level, all those 'x done 'in clojure'' articles that really do nothing to advance the state of the art, as though doing something 'in clojure' somehow makes it worth writing about.

And then there's the 'one man show' feeling that is still very pervasive.

<comment><USER3> It is the tight coupling of the terms that is doing the disservice.

It is a modern language. -> T.

It is a lisp. -> T.

However, I only hear, 'It is a modern dialect of lisp,' when I am being told why I should switch from Scheme or CL to Clojure.

This is a non-argument (there is no spec for what a 'modern' language includes). It also has the implication that whatever I am using is in some way non-modern. (Which is an odd attribution for something which is actively developed and I do my daily coding in). Is Java modern? How about Python? Scala? Ruby? It seems like a weird non-category. When I boot up sbcl, it isn't like i'm programming in lisp 1.5.

New would be cool, or saying it has modern features, also good.

Gonna make a new spec for Common Lisp, Common Lisp the Ancient Language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most of us are not Ents. We don't have decades to wait and see how a language feature "plays out". Rather, most of us have projects that we need to work on NOW, and if a language comes along with features that help us solve hard problems, it would be a good idea to take advantage of it. Who cares if "the greater Lisp community" will approve of it or not?

(By the way, "Lisp community" is a bit of an oxymoron, IMHO; everyone seems to be stuck on his own island.)

<comment><USER5> Indeed, there is no Lisp community. The fragmentation was enough for me to lose interest in the language and several of its dialects (heavily influenced my switch from emacs to vim, too :(), as well as functional programming in general. I wish the Lisp crowd (?) would seriously reconsider their views on matters like this.

<comment><USER6> So you lost interest in Linux as well? There are probably more different Linux distributions than Lisp dialects. Which shell do you use? How about a C like language? C? Why not C++? Or D? ATS? You've decided on a scripting language? TCL? Perl? Rebol? Python? Ruby?

<comment><USER7> Perl, Python and Ruby all have outstanding communities.

Would you care to argue that the Lisp community is better than any of these?

<comment><USER8> Yes, _I_ would argue. It's refreshing to drop in #lisp and ask any technical question, of whatever magnitude, and get answers immediately.

I recommend that place to any intelligent students, researchers, language weenies, compiler hackers and system engineers. Just be informed and don't ask opinionated, loaded questions.

Elsewhere? meh, I am left to think my present company has just been introduced to computing by its $LANG_MANUAL.

There is also a lot of childish fucking around and casual piss-taking that doesn't happen among Lispers. If you expect an standing ovation because you pushed something to github, fuggedaboutit. No one will be retweeting wisdom, no one will like you on facebook, you will not be blogged about ..

Ever wonder why Lispers, and most adult programming communities don't have "Rock Star" celeb provocateurs?

<comment><USER9> _There is also a lot of childish fucking around and casual piss-taking that doesn't happen among Lispers._

Maybe not anymore, but that stuff used to happen very regularly on comp.lang.lisp during the years I paid attention to it (2003ish through 2006ish, maybe).

<comment><USER8> CLL is the elephant graveyard of Lispers. It's where old hackers go to die.

It's a messy place to be, but there are some ivory treasures to dig up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have a perspective on this: I have been using Clojure for work over the last 5+ months but I am also setting up my laptop to finish writing a Common Lisp book while I travel over the next month.

Using Clojure is definitely a nice experience and I am really excited by the future of Clojure as the infrastructure for the language evolves.

However, after hacking Common Lisp for a few days, I have to say that the tools are so very good.

I find myself preferring Clojure the language but prefer the tools and programming environment of Common Lisp.

<comment><USER11> Are you talking about Emacs or non-Emacs environments, when you say you prefer Common Lisp's?

I keep trying to tame Emacs enough to use it for Clojure and find I spend too much time on Emacs and not enough on Clojure, which is what motivates me in the first place.

<comment><USER12> After a few false starts with emacs as an IDE I finally learned it via other uses.

I recommend using Emacs for a more simple task. I started reading my mail via Wanderlust (wl-beta package on debian) and using ERC to connect to freenode (Now running rcirc.)

I know how irc works so my attention wasn't split too much and I was able to pick up the emacs stuff quickly. Now I've expanded it to be my python IDE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm glad that so many people find Common Lisp useful and practical.

I just wish they realized that at this point, _nobody else ever will_. It's showing it's age. It's incredibly idiosyncratic. Noone _new_ is _ever_ going to start loving it.

Clojure may only be a blip on the radar in the grand, glacial evolution of LISP, but it's really, really nice that there's a featureful, modern lisp that a 21st century developer can actually pick up, use, and enjoy.

<comment><USER8> Hopefully, no one will read the cutest programming book since Starting Forth, Conrad Barsk's "Land of Lisp":

[http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/dfpmq/no_starch_press_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/dfpmq/no_starch_press_releases_a_sample_chapter_from/)

<comment><USER13> It does indeed look like a great book - but it doesn't really change the fact that Common Lisp is fragmented and dated.

<comment><USER6> Really, LispWorks has its IDE ported to GTK+ and looks very nice under Windows, Mac OS X and Linux/FreeBSD. Got concurrency, too.

I'm also looking forward to see the ARM port of Clozure CL mature with the alpha version already running on an iPad.

<comment><USER13> But the mere fact that you actually need to point out that it (can) have basic cross platform compatibility and concurrency is _proof_ that it's getting dated. Modern languages assume that.

And that's only in the commercial implementation.

<comment><USER6> If you compare the features of LispWorks or Allegro CL with Clojure you will find that Clojure has a very long way to go to match those offerings. Clojure 1.2 can't even display errors without exposing its Java nature. For a start it lacks the error handling infrastructure of Common Lisp and the tools that implementations provided on top of that.

No, concurrency is also supported by free CL implementations - like CCL.

<comment><USER13> I fully admit that Clojure tooling isn't where it should be, yet. But it will be.

But the fact is that _despite_ its lack of mature tools, Clojure is more newbie-friendly than CL. That should give CL advocates pause.

As for running on Java, yeah, that's part of what it (currently) is. It's a strength and a weakness at the same time.

Once Clojure becomes self-compiling, we might see that change. I'm actually working on a toy Clojure->LLVM compiler for my own education. There are enough people who love Clojure but have a distaste for Java that I expect we'll see a native version of Clojure in the next few years.

<comment><USER14> > But the fact is that despite its lack of mature tools, Clojure is more > newbie-friendly than CL.

As a newbie, I have to disagree. Clojure has a ton of syntax to get used to, and to make it useful, you have to learn all the neat Java libraries on top of it. I found more resources and nice explanations for aspects of CL, and when I compare it against Clojure, I find I miss a lot of the nice functions and tools for CL.

Here is a fun newbie point on it: In the first hour of playing with CL, I learned how to debug it. Not so with Clojure. Trace? Step? Maybe I should be using harder-to-find online tutorials for Clojure?

Anyway, it boils down to opinion as to what is "easier". I was looking for something with batteries included that would compile to a distributable executable and be super flexible; CL fit the bill with the sbcl implementation. It successfully pulled me away from other fun languages, like Erlang.

<comment><USER8> If you're partial to the JVM, you can use ABCL:

<http://common-lisp.net/project/armedbear/>

I am in the middle of porting it to Android, but as is, you can use it to write anything non-mobile/embedded, and it can call Java libraries just as well as clojure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The Lisp process to which the author refers is not as stately and merit-based as he implies. In Scheme, the r6rs process was very difficult and divisive, and many people voted in favor of it while very publicly holding their noses. The r7rs process, if carried out as planned, will attempt to avoid the same kind of damage and will result in two language: a sparse core language and a featureful "practical" language. That larger more featureful language will be the one that is more useful outside of language research, and it is also the one that will change more over time, shielding the core language from the need to change. Scheme purists can stick with the core. Non-purists can embrace the featureful languages such as r7rs-plus (or whatever it will be called), Racket, and Clojure. Anointing CL or Scheme (core) as the final arbiter of the value of a language feature is tantamount (bucket list item #73: use "tantamount" in a sentence; check) is OK if it works for you, but it certainly wouldn't work for a lot of working programmers.

<comment><USER3> [OT aside/ignore]

"Anointing CL or Scheme (core) as the final arbiter of the value of a language feature is tantamount (bucket list item #73: use "tantamount" in a sentence; check) is OK if it works for you, but it certainly wouldn't work for a lot of working programmers."

<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tantamount>

To check it off the bucket list, I believe that you have to use it properly. It has to be tantamount to something.

<comment><USER15> Sheesh. I interrupted myself with my parenthetical expression and didn't finish the tantamount thing. Worse, now I don't remember what it was tantamount to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I guess the thing that annoys me more than anything about this blog is that the author often has great posts, but is a tangle of contradictions. For example, Clojure is bad because it ignore Common Lisp (nevermind that many of its features are inspired by CL). History is good and we should stop trying to create new things. The blog author is _also_ creating a new Lisp. People should stop creating minimal Lisp implementations (history is now bad?). The more you read this blog the more these types of things pop up. However, I get the impression that often he's taking the piss and that's why I continue to read.

</comment><comment><USER17> Don't take it too seriously. It's a kinda stupid rant. (I wrote it.)

<comment><USER18> A very ... let me say, ahistorical rant, starting at the very beginning:

" _Lisp gets lexical scope right, for example, simply because we have a head start of decades over the [line out]competition[/line out] others._ "

Case in point: LISP _didn't_ get this right in 1958 while apparently in the same year (as I read Wikipedia) ALGOL did. This caused a _lot_ of grief which wasn't resolved until 1983 when Common Lisp adopted Scheme's ALGOL inspired lexical scoping. And Emacs Lisp and AutoLISP (AutoCad), two very big (in terms of real world usage) Lisps are dynamically scoped.

Lisp has much to be proud of, but this could easily be the single worst aspect of it historically.

<comment><USER6> ALGOL did, but it had it easy, because it was not providing closures and garbage collection. When ALGOL had lexical scoping, these things were unresearched. It took a while in the Lisp and FP community to solve this (see the FUNARG problem).

<comment><USER18> LISP wasn't providing closures at that point (1958), was it?

I've read that the LISP community was the only major part of the FP community that had trouble with this and that the other parts were always confused about why this caused such consternation with LISP.

<comment><USER6> No language had lexical closures in 1958. ALGOL had lexical scope, but not closures. So their part was easy. On a language level all the consequences were explored with Scheme in the 70s. Before that their were individual solutions found to create closures.

Read the history of the FUNARG problem (1970).

FP languages came up later. The first ML appeared in something like 1972/1973. I'm not sure if that had lexical closures. I doubt that. The Lisp community was one active part of the FP community that detected the problem and eventually found a solution. Scheme was the first language to demonstrate that (1975). Other FP languages also went that route (ML, where the first ML was implemented on top of Lisp, IIRC). The MacLisp branch took some time to adopt lexical closures. First a special construct was introduced to create a closure. In some other implementations the compiler was using lexical scope, but not the interpreter. Common Lisp was then in 1984 the next major Lisp dialect that settled for lexical scope (incl. closures) for both interpreted and compiled code.

The Lisp community (other than Scheme) had substantial code at the end of the 1970s, so there was some reluctance to move to lexical closures. Lexical closures also made the implementation a bit more difficult. The interpreter is simpler without them. There were also performance issues to overcome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This article makes it seem like Lisp is in a state of continuous evolution. In which case I don't see a good enough argument why Clojure isn't part of that.

Even more so, it kinda reads like there's one huge mainstream evolutionary branch of Lisp since time immemorial, and off-shoots are quickly reabsorbed into this. Never mind the multitudes of lisps and especially the constant Scheme-CL schism…

I understand perfectly why fans of Common Lisp won't switch, but considering CL as the head of a constantly evolving Lisp with a capital L seems a bit silly.

There's either no "Lisp", or Clojure is as much a part of it as CL is.

<comment><USER20> > This article makes it seem like Lisp is in a state of continuous evolution. > In which case I don't see a good enough argument why Clojure isn't part of > that.

That's because the author isn't saying that. The point is more like this: Clojure is a series of new mutations, and they haven't been around long enough yet to tell whether any of them will survive natural selection. We can't tell Clojure's good ideas from its merely new ideas at this stage; we have to wait for evolution to take place. That doesn't mean Clojure is doing something _wrong_ (after all, "Everyone should be writing new Lisps!"). I think the author is just saying it's not worth getting too excited about until we know what it's doing _right_.

<comment><USER19> The problem with evolution in general is that it doesn't select the best approaches, it selects the most popular ones. So if you ignore the current 'mutations', you're basically trust that the community will "do the right thing". Which I regard as rather optimistic (as is the assumption that it always did this in the past).

<comment><USER20> > The problem with evolution in general is that it doesn't select the best > approaches, it selects the most popular ones.

Not sure what you mean by this. At least in a biological setting, natural selection selects for `adaptive' features, i.e., those which best solve some problem that an organism has. (OK, it's more complicated than that, but let's take that as a working definition.) It does not select `popular' features. Rather, features _become_ popular because they are adaptive and hence selected for.

Now, programming language evolution may not always work like biological evolution, and in both cases there may be other selection pressures at work. But I don't see a reason to think that, insofar as programming language evolution _is_ like biological evolution, the `natural selection' of language features by the community would favor what's arbitrarily popular, instead of what's best at solving a common problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am not really sure whether this is an interesting critique from a broader Lisp perspective, or a stunningly epic troll to get traffic by enraging Clojure folks.

From my point of view:

* Other LISPs I have tried are not very amenable to practical usage in a modern software ecosystem. Not impossible, just a difficult fit. Could this be fixed? Sure. Why hasn't it been fixed? No idea.

* Clojure is a very practical LISP today, which drops very easily in to a modern software ecosystem.

<comment><USER16> > or a stunningly epic troll to get traffic by enraging Clojure folks.

You'll be forever wanting if your goal for website traffic revolves around enraging Clojurians. First of all, there are not enough of us (yet), and second we tend not to get drawn into these types of arguments. I guess we're too busy trying to build a great programming language. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The entire article rests on the false premise that Clojure is not a Lisp.

<comment><USER6> Depends on what you define to be Lisp.

If Lisp is the line of Lisp, Lisp 1.5, MacLisp, Lisp Machine Lisp to Common Lisp, then Clojure is not in that line. In Common Lisp I can run 50 year old code with relatively little change. CAR, PROG, ..., are still there.

If Lisp is the larger family of widely incompatible languages like Logo, Dylan, Racket, Arc, NewLisp, then Clojure is a part of that family. But they share very little - not even the syntax. Clojure is completely incompatible to any of them - but that's true of each other.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I am a big-umbrella Lisper. I am confident any Lisp programmer can pick up Clojure and be productive in it within a week.

Dylan, Logo, Racket .. used them all three. Arc, I use it several hundred times a day, but never wrote a line in it. Clojure, a good Lisp.

NewLisp? No thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A lot of programmers are either inapt or inept at making their own "batteries"; let's call them b-group programmers. Clojure's main draw over lisp (as I see it) is the JVM and all of the work that a-group programmers have contributed. It's lisp, with most[1] of the allure of an almost mystically powerful succinctness, but with batteries included.

I contend that while batteries are, in the short term, a big help to the b-group it would be better for _the programmers_ to look into whether or not they have what it takes to move into the a-group. One will never fail to learn a ton walking the hallowed halls of the a-group's code trying to figure out how that formerly black box does it's magic.

Where I currently work, for better or worse, the micro-development manager has forbidden the use of JavaScript libraries. The net effect has been that some developers have left/been let go and the ones of us that have stayed have had to learn to roll our own.

pg said it best: "Powerful libraries are a cheap way to make a new language the language du jour. (Think Rails.) They're not the critical ingredient if you're trying to make something to last; they may even hurt."

[1]: no CLOS, no Tail Call Optimization, etc...

<comment><USER2> > Where I currently work, for better or worse, the micro-development manager > has forbidden the use of JavaScript libraries. The net effect has been that > some developers have left/been let go and thous of us that have stayed have > had to learn to roll our own.

I don't think that kind of 'NIH' is very productive in the longer term but it must be a great place to work if you're _encouraged_ to re-invent the wheel.

Most places would try to avoid such a waste of resources. Maybe there would be a way to convince him of rolling your own company specific OS?

<comment><USER22> As we are now discussing my current employer and boss's decisions third party -- and given the accessibility and permanency of the web -- all I am comfortable saying is that, in the long run, having stronger developers that throughly know their code-base _can_ be a huge win.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I agree, it can be. It very much depends on the circumstances though, for most companies rolling your own ORM, framework, javascript libraries, database and so on are simply not an option, they'll be hard pressed to keep up with the demands of running their business.

Great stuff can come from that though, for instance, Django.

<comment><USER22> Maybe that's why a lot of things like 20% projects, in-house text processing capabilities (troff), and PARC projects come from large, established companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Well, I'm just going to wait and see how that entire new fangled computing thingy plays out over the coming centuries. If it's any good, it will become part of evolution and our genes will use it eventually ;-)

</comment><comment><USER24> Feels like a rant. Which doesnt even point out what exactly is wrong and how could have been done right.</comment>


Julian Assange – Public Rally Event with WikiLeaks [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QahCPwrZfJY <comment><USER2> Would be nice if we lived in a world where political elite violating human rights were able to be held accountable.</comment>


US physically hacks 100,000 foreign computers - <AUTHOR> http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2014/01/us-physically-hacks-100000-foreign-computers-20141154313871671.html <comment><USER4> > monitor units of the Chinese and Russian armies

Isn't this what they're supposed to be doing? I don't really have a problem with intelligence gathering against non-allied nation state actors.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cryMVK1PwuQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cryMVK1PwuQ)

<comment><USER5> > Isn't this what they're supposed to be doing? I don't really have a problem > with intelligence gathering against non-allied nation state actors.

Shouldn't you have a problem with them getting caught then?

I don't understand this defense of the NSA, no, its not what they are supposed to be doing. At least not anymore.

If you are in favor of the US bullying and spying everyone they don't consider an ally then you should be outraged they can't do it efectively. They got outed by a lone contractor and your "potential enemies", or however you get to call every single other country in the world to justify the spying, now have most of the technical details they need to thwart the NSA's efforts and hence make it spend lots of your taxpayer dollars in coming up with other forms of spying.

<comment><USER4> > I don't understand this defense of the NSA, no, its not what they are > supposed to be doing. At least not anymore.

What _are_ they supposed to be doing, then? Should the US just not have any spy agencies? Should it shift away from signals intelligence and focus on human intelligence like Israel does?

<comment><USER6> >Should the US just not have any spy agencies?

Absolutely. The US should interact with foreign governments via the diplomatic process, pull up all its foreign bases, and stop playing "world policeman."

Not sure why this is so hard to understand. The justifications for actions like these either fall into "but we can't be world's policeman without these intel programs" or "the other guy does it" which are both morally bankrupt.

Being a citizen of a nation state does not require me to approve of that nation's foreign policy or military actions. In fact, I'm compelled to be extra critical of these things as they are often abused and cause not only domestic issues (large tax load, dead soldiers, blowback, etc) but worldwide issues as well.

We have yet to see any evidence that these dangerous and provocative technical programs have actually resulted in anything used to thwart attacks or other justifications from the usual defenders of the status quo. If anything, from a dollars per result perspective its a major tax dollar waste and a massive opportunity cost. If we had a Russian-like military budget my tax load would be lower and arguably allow me and others to invest and do things that can actually help domestic life, instead of watching my dollars get burned up in spy games and the slaughtering of completely innocent Iraqi and Afghani civilians over the last 10 years.

<comment><USER7> It sounds like you have a specific policy recommendation. Do you mind stating it?

<comment><USER8> Imagine all the people...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> ...And sentators are still debating bulk phone records (the first Snowden leak from six months ago) and can't even decide whether or not the NSA should require rubber-stamp court orders to access them.

What are the odds senators will debate the privacy implications of hacking routers all over the world (let alone stop them from doing it)? I'd bet almost zero.

<comment><USER10> The article didn't say they hacked routers.

> The NSA calls the effort an "active defence" and has used the technology to > monitor units of the Chinese and Russian armies, drug cartels, trade > institutions inside the European Union, and US allies including Saudi > Arabia, India and Pakistan, the Times reported.

From the viewpoint of an American: hacking the EU trade institutions, and India, bothers me. The rest is exactly what the NSA et al /should/ be doing. Saudi and Pakistan are "allies" out of necessity -- there is no history of genuine mutual trust and support.

There certainly needs to be more control of who the NSA targets, and better constraints keeping them from targeting others, but pretending that all spying is bad is silly.

<comment><USER11> Cool, let's bomb their women and children, blow up their weddings and funerals, and then let's hack their computers because they don't "trust" us.

<comment><USER12> As long as we are appealing to emotion here, let's not forget that Saudis composed nearly 80% of the 9/11 hijackers that killed our women and children and blew up our workplaces.

Saudi Arabia has done little to engender trust.

<comment> loup-vaillant Let's count.

On the one hand, put every non-US citizen killed by the US.

On the other hand, put every US citizen killed by all other countries and terrorists combined.

Guess which number is vastly bigger than the other. 5-10 thousand dead in 9/11? That's _peanuts_ , compared to the disproportionate responses that ensued. _(I 'm not saying it's peanuts in an absolute sense. It's still a tragedy, of course. Any death is.)_

<comment><USER12> Yes, let's. You take care of the non-US citizen part and I'll give you a low- ball for the US citizens killed by other countries number.

If we use this handy wikipedia page shown below we can see that US military casualties are at a touch over 1.3 million.

Let me know when you're done being facetious and/or have an answer for your number of non-US citizens killed.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualti...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war)

<comment><USER13> That's 1.3 million since 1775. In the last 50 years, we're around 7 thousand.

<comment><USER11> In Iraq alone >10x that number have been killed since the invasion.

<comment><USER13> I was referring to American numbers, as sourced in the Wiki article above. 10x that number in Iraqi/ Afghani numbers? Sure, I'd buy that.

<comment> loup-vaillant From my point of view, it was clear your comment and the GP both supported my insinuation that the US has killed far more people than it has lost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why post an Al Jazeera summary of an NYT article that has already been posted: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7061012](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7061012)

<comment><USER14> I think the NYT article didn't hit the top spot. This one has a more sensationalized title and will probably perform better. I guess you have to know your audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > _The NSA calls the effort an "active defence"_

Newspeak is real.

Even if the NSA is telling the truth about this only being deployed against foreign targets, the scale of this effort is impressive.

<comment><USER16> That's hardly newspeak. A key part of any good defense is information. Infosec to protect your own information is not sufficient.

Thus, information gathering is an active part of defensive operations.

Imagine you are an antimalware company (a real one, a good one). Maintaining a virus tank, actively trawling the internet for brand-new viruses, and studying them as they appear, would be part of an active defense against malware.

<comment><USER15> I'm not saying it's not prudent or useful, just that the NSA is framing their own malicious, self-interested actions as an innocent defensive program.

Also, spying on viruses is very different than spying on people.

<comment><USER16> Ok, and you are welcome to feel that way. I'm just taking issue with what I took to be the suggestion that the phrase "active defense" is inherently a newspeak/doublespeak sort of thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Weeeeeeeeee!"

The sound of Dell, Intel and other hardware tech stocks of US firms plummeting over the next 12 months as they realise they can now only sell domestically as nobody else in the World trusts them any more.

Tens of thousands of jobs lost here. And of course, they'll blame it on Snowden. It was classified in part because tens of thousands of jobs relied on it.

But you have to wonder if there isn't just a little bit of an air of the two- faced about this...

<comment><USER18> So it is your understanding that the US has only now just started spying on foreign countries? Capable nations have been spying on friends and foes for a long time, and they will continue to do so, exposed attempts will only change implementation. If countries decided they were not going to buy foreign technology, the majority of those countries would have no technology. You think Saudi, for example, will just start manufacturing their own hardware?

<comment><USER17> I think Silicon Valley thrived for being the centre of the best technology in the World and the assumption that as a free and liberal nation it would not be as encumbered with spyware as hardware from say, China (which last year gave us the bluetooth malware clothes iron!).

That perception is now gone. The valley will suffer. Why buy Intel when I can license the blueprints for ARM, build my own chip-fab plant for less than $1 billion and build a processor myself? And if I can do that, how much more investment do I need to build my own motherboards, displays and other components?

$10 billion? Saudi makes that in oil money in a week.

You really think they're going to keep buying US tech? The golden age for US tech firms is now over, and the idea that "of course" the US was spying is laughable: the assumption was always that the spying was targeted and not carte blanche over entire populations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow, these talking points are hilarious:

"We do not use foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of - or give intelligence we collect to - <USER3> companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line.''

<comment><USER20> Why is that hilarious? The Chinese DO that.

<comment><USER21> Are you implying that the Chinese are more transparent than the "Most Transparent Administration In History"? Or are you taking the claim at face value? Perhaps I misunderstand?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The biggest fuckup here is that the NSA allowed this kind of info about their core work, which is fully in line with their defined agenda, to leak out into the open.

The damage through the Snowden leaks is massive, he did not concentrate on the misuse of the NSA against US citizen, this reveals core assets in their spying ablities. What a setback. Might as well invite foreign entities a tour of the NSA data centers.

My guess is the next guy that tries such a thing gets treated very differently, too late for Snowden, he is too famous now. The next one disappears if there is only a whiff of a leak. Ms Manning might be a better example of things to come.

The people overseeing Snowden's work/access should be tried though. Gross negligence, massive impact on national security.

<comment><USER21> It is not unthinkable that this was an approved and planned 'leak' for any number of reasons.

Also this doesn't appear to have been a leak associated with Snowden. But it is certain that the Snowden leaks even being possible is a huge f'up on the part of the NSA who is supposed to be all about secrecy and data security.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't believe that the NYTimes article [1] supports Al Jazeera's title of "US physically hacks 100,000 foreign computers". That seems to be the total number of CNE operations, not just those using hardware devices.

> [NSA] has implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers around the world > [...] While most of the software is inserted by gaining access to computer > networks, the N.S.A. has increasingly made use of [covert radio channels]

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/us/nsa-effort-pries- open-c...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/us/nsa-effort-pries-open- computers-not-connected-to-internet.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw- nytimesworld&_r=0)

</comment><comment><USER24> Anecdotal evidence, but here goes. We sell software to countries worldwide - just recently we've had new customers state that they will not buy from us if we're hosting things on Amazon EC2 (which we do). They're insisting we distribute our software in such a way that it can be hosted internally on their own infrastructure.

</comment><comment><USER25> And yet they have very little to show for it. I'd say that at the very least there needs to be a discussion about how cost-effective this whole operation is.

<comment><USER26>
        >And yet they have very little to show for it

You mean they "possibly" have very little to show for. This article is about bugging other nations, not terrorists. There is a lot of value to the NSA if they can claim they thwarted a terrorist attack. However there is no value to the NSA to declare that they are actively monitoring, in theory, advancements in Chinese stealth research just to prove to the citizens the tax dollars are well spent.

Without knowing more about how the information was leaked and what was leaked there is no way to determine if this particular NSA activity was "worth it" or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> None of these articles about this say the source of this information was Snowden. It also doesn't seem to be his M.O. to leak about non-privacy invading bits. Like nothing here really pushes any buttons for me other than it was leaked. A separate leak?

<comment><USER28> Agree this goes against the Snowden trend. Probably not him.

But since they're claiming to hack the Chinese, Russians, Saudis, and Pakistanis, this very well could be an "authorized leak" to counter the Snowden leaks. Like, the NSA actually does go after their enemies (as well as their friends). Very few Americans would oppose to them hacking Chinese Army computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The way I see this is that it is pretty much business as usual. I think that anyone who sincerely believes that capable states do not employ similar tactics within their spy apparatus is engaging in self delusion.

States have historically spied on each other (allies and enemies). I can understand the sensationalist aspect of this as 'news', but IMHO there is nothing new here; move on.

Perhaps, someone here with a much better command of history than I do could help out with the latest time in history where the relevant technologies of the day were not key parts of nation states' intelligence gathering systems.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'll be more inclined to believe this specific claim (tiny circuit boards, 100,000 of them) once we start seeing pictures of them, teardowns, analysis, etc. 100,000 is a lot of units to keep completely secret and one assumes that the people who've been hacked don't all have an incentive to not say anything.

<comment><USER31> Yes, I'm inclined to take this news with a grain of salt (a very tiny one, mind, given the incredibleness of this entire situation) until we see some examples. As you say, you can't keep 100k devices secret.

(Although the truly paranoid might doubt the veracity of a claimed "tear down". It has become incredibly easy to accuse the NSA of doing _anything_ , and at least be partly believed. Which, ironically, is actually a pretty good cloak of secrecy in itself!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> A question - how long of a lifetime would this sort of operation expect to even have? If you're shipping units en masse out, it seems rational to expect that eventually the cover would be blown when supply chain analysts send components to a reverse engineering company and get a report back.

</comment><comment><USER33> How many personnel does it require to physically compromise 100,000 machines?

1,000 people gaining access to 100 machines a piece? 100 people, breaking into 1,000 machines? Is that per year or in general?

If one targeted individual owns 10 machines, then it's 10,000 people targeted by the program.

If this includes organizations, bussinesses, institutional computer labs and offices, then maybe it's 1,000 offices with 100 work stations each.

So, perhaps a rough estimate of the scope of the program 100 to 1,000 staff attacking between 20,000 and 1,000 targets?

<comment><USER34> More likely no personnel was required because they simply paid off American manufacturers to implant these circuit boards in computers they knew were going to be shipped and used overseas.

The bottom line, though? This isn't surprising. Nations spy on each other. A lot of nations have been engaging in a lot of phony outrage over our NSA spying who are doing the _exact same thing_ , but have managed to keep it secret. Any nation who is using imported computers in sensitive operations should know enough to check those computers for possible spy hardware.

<comment><USER35> I would be surprised if they didn't simply have them installed in all machines and only have them activated in 100,000 devices overseas. Logistically seems simpler to coordinate if component-cost is a non-issue for the agency.

<comment><USER36> That is the logical implication.

<comment><USER37> No, that is an insane implication.

<comment><USER36> If they have access to the manufacturers, it would be the simplest, minimum- effort, minimum-risk approach. It is also what I would do, given the chance.

Taking into account what we have learned this year about the extent of the activities of the intelligence services, I think we have to assume that _somebody_ (Whether the NSA, the FSB or somebody else) has compromised the manufacture of at least part of the electronics and/or software supply-chain.

I am not too sure what it would take to audit the software and hardware components in common use today?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> On the upside, my 5 year old PC probably doesn't have this tech. I bet old PC's are going to become valuable because of this.

</comment><comment><USER39> "We do not use foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of - or give intelligence we collect to - <USER3> companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line."

Right.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands >>> and has used the technology to monitor units of the Chinese and Russian armies, drug cartels

And how is that going for the Drug Cartels? Doesn't seem to have an effect on them, considering they continue to operate with imprudence.

<comment><USER40> Gathering intelligence and taking action based on that info are two vastly different things each with their own pros and cons.

Sure the US could take military or covert action against the drug cartels, but then where would American and other customers get their drugs? Who would then supply them? Sounds like a recipe for a new turf war (simply replace the existing cartels with newer, and possibly more ruthless groups) I'm not saying the US is allowing this, just that dismantling the cartels may bring a whole host of unwanted side effects.

<comment><USER41> Indeed, I'm reminded of a great Season 2 episode of the West Wing, and though fictional, points out that to go up against and wipe our a drug cartel in the jungles of Colombia would require a 10 to 1 troop ratio to secure victory. Many of these narcoarmies have over 20,000 soldiers, so we're talking quite a large expeditionary force. Certainly something to think about.

Not to mention it would be a jungle war and likely resemble insurgencies. And as you note, someone will fill that void.

<comment><USER40> Mexico isn't Columbia, and 20K poorly equipped and trained "civilian" fighters are no match for well trained, well equipped US military personal. We've heard the same arguments for years about the terrain in Afghanistan and our (I'm from the US) guys seem to do quit well even on a level playing field (see the early days after 911 when the US dropped in small groups of CIA special forces).

I loved the West Wing but feel they relied too heavily on the "Vietnam/Jungle" angle when proposing the feasibility of an actual "drug war" in Columbia. Also, the West Wing was aired before many of the US's major military actions in the middle east, which have arguably proven that the US can combat an insurgency (if they care enough to that is) and can operate in an "unconventional" manor.

I think the worries of getting sucked into another Vietnam, or getting bogged down like the Soviets in Afghanistan have been debunked. As long as the political will is there, the US military can operate successfully in almost all combat scenarios.

<comment><USER42> _" I think the worries of getting sucked into another Vietnam, or getting bogged down like the Soviets in Afghanistan have been debunked. As long as the political will is there, the US military can operate successfully in almost all combat scenarios."_

You must pick your definitions of "operate", "successfully", and "combat scenarios" very carefully here to be a useful statement.

<comment><USER40> How exactly has the US military been unsuccessful in it's recent military actions? Nation building and playing peacekeeper to a civil war is one thing, straight up military action (eliminate enemy and hold ground) is quite another. I don't think anyone would argue the US sucks at the former, and kicks ass at the latter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > The NSA said the technology has not been used in computers in the US.

But of course not. The NSA wouldn't spy on _Americans_ , would it?

<comment><USER44> >The NSA wouldn't spy on Americans, would it?

How about domestic U.S. law enforcement? FBI, DEA, U.S. Marshals, etc.? It would be interesting to know what technologies they're using, especially when there's a long-running surveillance operation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Still they're about 100,000 computers behind the Chinese.</comment>


Ask HN: Review My startup, quippd - Collaboratively edited social news - <AUTHOR>

http://quippd.com/popular
Summary: It's like reddit without downvoting, with Twitter elements (following users). People submit news or stories, and they can be upvoted. If a story is upvoted, it appears in your followers' feeds.
This is kinda what Digg 4 is supposed to work like, so we're finally releasing so that we can say "oh we beat them to the punch".
The other thing that we count on exploiting and improving in the near future is wiki editable stories. Often on reddit, etc. you will see titles that are wrong, descriptions that are bad, etc. We allow users to correct these errors.
We want to try to "curate" the news.
More information here: http://quippd.com/about/intro
Obviously, a lot of the magic happens when you are logged in. OpenID only for now.
Let me know what you guys think! <comment><USER2> Unfortunately - I don't see the differentiator of following and editable descriptions and headlines as being that compelling. Also I don't agree with allowing users to change the original posters content.. usually within the first few comments, people will give feedback, and the poster will correct it.

I know digg is building out these twitter like features.. and reddit has an add friends feature, so again. not sure if this is that compelling.

But anyways.. keep it up , and good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Reddit has an add friends feature, but doesn't actively customize your feed -- you have to navigate to /r/friends -- or click on the link at the top strip. We have a Facebook/Twitter like "feed".

Posters correcting stories on both Reddit and Digg are not possible in most cases. On reddit, changes can be made only on self posts, but the majority of posts on reddit are not self posts currently.

Allowing users to change the original poster's content is opt-in -- the original poster opts to let users do it.

<comment><USER2> on the news feed : So by default will I be seeing the most popular stories ( which is more compelling case ) or friends submitted stories. I believe that reddit does this for a reason.

on the editing: i would do some a/b testing on this , and just put an edit button for users next to the title or description and just see how many times people actually click it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it's either the Facebook way or the reddit way, right? They both seem to work fine for either userbase, I am simply betting on the Facebook way. Considering that Facebook gets 1/4 of the web's pageviews, I don't think it's tooo horrible a decision. ;)

On the editing - yeah, I would love to do that, but I'm not sure that testing this is worth it with the tiny userbase that I currently have. Is it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can't register now, but here go 2c.

For the first month or so, the reddit guys spread their posts between a handful of puppet accounts. Right now, the submissions in the /popular page are all from your account.

I think you need to find an underserved crowd to become your initial core audience. Just offering a slightly better experience won't be enough to win over heavy users from competitors.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're probably right about the puppet account thing -- it _does_ look kinda cheesy when it is just one person posting everything.

Under served crowd? Yes, probably -- definitely still looking. :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://quippd.com/popular>

Linked.</comment>


Integrating User-Centered Methods into Programming Language Design - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.04719 <comment><USER4> The authors, who are decidedly non bot-like, are exploring how HCI methods can improve the process of programming language design. They offer a method "PLIERS: Programming Language Iterative Evaluation and Refinement System.", and they "evaluated PLIERS by using it to create two different languages". Funders for the work include IBM and Ripple, a blockchain company. Table 1 in the paper is the clearest summary of the work in terms of challenges and approaches. The underlying problem is that it is expensive to get to the point where you can iterate well with users in this design space.

It's interesting to think of a programming language as a user interface. My takeaways here were that academic programming language design has a data problem, which is finding the right population of test users, and the idea of "Wizard of Oz" to simulate tool interaction. Wizard of Oz is a dev "behind the console" who is simulating appropriate responses to user actions. That's much more like the person switching the pages around as you walk through a paper prototype than an endpoint returning mocks. If I were an academic in this space I would want to see how lab approaches to design and eval compare against the sort of proposal and review cycles that I see python and golang use for language changes - the latter seems like the status quo, for better or worse.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why do those abstracts sound more and more like GPT-3 generated? Sokol would have a field day.

> Glacier extends Java to enable programmers to express immutability > properties effectively and easily. Obsidian is a language for blockchains > that includes verification of critical safety properties.

Java - <USER3>

Blockchain - <USER3>

Safety - check</comment>


Speed Matters: US Internet Speeds State by State - <AUTHOR> http://files.cwa-union.org/speedmatters/state_reports_2008/CWA_Report_on_Internet_Speeds_2008_Ranking.pdf <comment><USER2> It's telling that all the top states are the ones served by Verizon FiOS. Apparently we should all move to Rhode Island. ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm thinking about FiOS for my next apartment. Do you have it?

<comment><USER2> Nope, I'm firmly in AT&T territory, so best I can do is 6mb dsl.</comment></comment></comment>