Firms Behind Collapsed FIU Bridge Faced Accusations of Unsafe Practices - <AUTHOR> http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/fiu-bridge-collapse-construction-firms-accused-of-unsafe-practices-10176596 <comment><USER2> This is where engineers have to be involved in the regulation process.

Unfortunately, I think regulation should be adaptive rather than restrictive.

I do not know the answers to that. Any form of construction is hard but their should be some process where you can streamline routine checks.

For all I know, this could have been a freak accident. Who knows.</comment>


Hack carefully around radiation: hospital unintentionally  irradiates patients - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cedars13-2009oct13,0,1200257.story

<comment><USER2> Hard to believe hospital procedures allow them to change the power settings on an x-ray device without doing any regression testing.</comment>


Isaac Newton's prediction that the world would not end before 2060 (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/in-1704-isaac-newton-predicts-the-world-will-end-in-2060.html <comment><USER2> If you're interested in this topic, you should also have a look at this article ([https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/januaryfebruary/feature/...](https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/januaryfebruary/feature/newton- the-last-magician)) and Keynes' wonderful lecture on the topic. In fact Newton was pre-Newtonian in terms of scientific rigor. You can perhaps say similar things about most revolutionary scientists, i.e. rarely do they fully realize the y have wrought.

I think Newton being the "Last Magician" fascinates/frustrates people because currently we (think) that there is such a clear divide between scientists and mubo-jumboists, the latter perceived to be rather idiotic. In fact, most topics have pretty clear labels classifying them into one or the other: diffraction - science, tarot - MJ, etc. How could Newton, the epitome of reason and the greatest scientist ever lived, dabble in the latter? Of course, the labels were not so clear at his time.

<comment><USER3> I recently encountered this video about an interesting possible reaction that could have been done by alchemists that might explain where the idea of turning lead to gold came from (in particular, wanting gold as an end product is no surprise, but why _lead_ specifically as the source?): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzsdORUPk48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzsdORUPk48) It doesn't quite use period materials, for safety and convenience reasons, but I was satisfied that the described reaction could have been done, with more effort. And it does take "lead" and turn it into something that seems awfully close to gold. If you don't have an atomic theory of matter and understand how elements work, you know, I would submit that it's not even that "magical" of a thought to think that you're so close and surely there's just one or two last tweaks you can do to get there.

It's very easy to imagine that as being part of the inner mysteries of a mystery religion: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco- Roman_mysteries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Roman_mysteries)

Now turning lead into gold is pure 100% unmitigated magic, because we know a lot more stuff. But if we didn't know that stuff, it would not be an obviously magical belief.

<comment><USER4> I now worry that coming up with a cure for all cancers is a magical belief.

<comment><USER5> Don't worry: there's no requirement for one single cure-all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Complaints about the headline aside, it is the perfect sort of doomsday prophecy story. It is far enough away that the people who pulled it out of Newton's writing will be forgotten, its near enough that the reader could imagine being alive at that time and wondering what would happen. Erich von Däniken exploited this in his "Ancient Astronauts" stuff, predicting the Mayan's called it with a 2012 extinction event (whoops :-).

Since you only get _one_ end of the world prophesy (when it passes you're a crackpot and everyone who believed you now hates you intensely) you need to pick it to land post retirement at least since you'll not have any credibility afterward. Predicting '2060' (and yes I know Newton wrote no earlier than) as the folks who have used Newton's works to date it, being a bit more than 40 years away will have all of these folks retired by then. My guess is they will really try to milk it for all it is worth in the 2040's.

<comment><USER7> This idea was explored at the beginning of Ghostbutsters II when Venkman interviewed someone who didn't leave enough time to print paperbacks of his prophesy. One should always think about the economics of a doomsday before committing to a specific date.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If knowledge is, as one common philosophical notion goes, 'true, justified belief', then Newton clearly 'knew' nothing about 2060 as he fell severely short of justification.

It's a shame we can't be equally confident about the prediction also failing the 'truth' aspect. Depending on what exactly one might mean by 'world', it's uncertain to an uncomfortable degree that _our_ world won't end by 2060.

</comment><comment><USER9> Wasn't something happening in 1999 and then in 2012? There's a Wikipedia page on failed doomsday prophesies. Check it out.

<comment><USER10> Here's a link for the lazy:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of Kepler's Mysterium Cosmographicum: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysterium_Cosmographicum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysterium_Cosmographicum)

</comment><comment><USER12> O, so it's not going to be Sep 23, 2017 then.

From the Christian perspective, what Newton is referring to is less about the world that's ending than what will be beginning.

</comment><comment><USER13> In other words: Newton, brilliant of a lot of things, not so on many other things. We need to accept that, as his attempts to produce gold and invest his money show.

For the record, something very bad will happen by the third Sunday, of the third month, of the 2033 year. Not necessarily on that day, but by then.

<comment><USER14> > as his attempts to produce gold and invest his money show.

Isn't that just called an "entrepreneur" these days?

<comment><USER13> On the gold thing maybe I was too harsh...shouldn't judge him because I read Wikipedia some 300 later.

But, basically a great actor or scientist's opinion, outside his field, shouldn't be given extra attention or credibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There seem to be some misgivings in the headline. Newton predicted the world will certainly not end before 2060. So the headline should be, "In 1704, Isaac Newton predicts the world will not end before 2060"

<comment><USER16> Sure, but then I wouldn't have clicked.

<comment> surrey-fringe Please don't post jokes on HN.

<comment><USER16> Unfortunately, that wasn't a joke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Flagged because the title isn't just misleading, but completely wrong. Newton did not predict the world would end in 2060, he claimed that the end of the world would not happen until at least 2060, precisely to challenge claims that it _would_ end in the nearer future (way back in the 1700s).

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree the headline shows unnecessary certainty. Likewise, "world ending" and "apocalypse" aren't necessarily the same thing, especially when it comes to someone with nonconformist religious views like Newton. But I would counter that it isn't "completely wrong," at least based on Prof. Snobelin's commentary, which the article links to:

[https://isaac-newton.org/statement-on-the-date-2060/](https://isaac- newton.org/statement-on-the-date-2060/)

Here's a relevant quote:

"Since Newton believed that the 1260 years corresponded to the duration of the corruption of the Church, he added 1260 to 800 A.D. and arrived at the date 2060 for the "fall of Babylon" or cessation of the apostate Church. It seems that Newton believed the fall could perhaps begin somewhat before the end of the 1260-year period and continue for a short time afterward. Whatever the precise chronology, Newton believed that sometime shortly after the fall of the corrupt (Trinitarian, Catholic) Church, Christ would return and set up a 1000-year Kingdom of God on earth."

So yes, it would be more accurate to say that "Newton predicted the apocalypse would happen sometime around the year 2060," but I don't think the headline is completely off base here.

</comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen Headline is very misleading.

It is true that, as an unorthodox theologian, Newton investigated the bible for signs of when the world would end, and announced it certainly would not end before 2060 to dispel continually recurring myths (from the Christian standpoint) that it would end soon.

</comment><comment><USER18> (Almost) obligatory: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yis7GzlXNM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yis7GzlXNM)

 _... hiding up inside his attic on some Harry Potter business / The Universe is infinite, but this battle is finished_</comment>


Show HN: Decaffeinate converts CoffeeScript projects to modern JS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/decaffeinate/decaffeinate <comment><USER2> I don't understand the trend to move from Coffeescript to ES6. I like both, but I write Coffeescript for its concision. I have no issue compiling Coffeescript to ES6 as a separate build step, but I'm not going to write ES6 myself. That said, I'm sure a project like Decaffeinate has brought a lot of beloved Coffeescript projects into the hands of ES6 developers who wanted to contribute.

<comment><USER3> ES6 has eliminated most (though not all) of the pain Coffeescript solved. I work on a large code base that went from Coffeescript -> Typescript (mostly manual, some decadfeinate), and typesafety has been a huge boon for our developers. For smaller teams/codebases, you might be happy sticking with Coffeescript.

<comment><USER4> I see ES6 or especially Typescript as essentially a recreation of ES4/Flash AS3, with some renaissance-era Javascript footguns attached. You've got classes, various class based OO features, optional typing major industry support, probably improved performance coming soon, etc...

Coffeescript was a bit different. It meant _fewer_ lines of code, not more. It had significant whitespace and some other Python-inspired idioms like array comprehensions and object comprehensions. Most importantly, Coffeescript was a new language and didn't have to re-implement deleterious Javascript features like the == vs === distinction, undeclared vars leaking to global scope, baroque keywords like "with", etc...

That said as others have pointed out, ES6 did borrow _many_ good features from CS and CS is slowly dying. Fortunately other languages like Elm and, to a lesser degree, Reason have offered even more compelling "footgun free" alternatives.

<comment><USER5> > It had significant whitespace and some other Python-inspired idioms like > array comprehensions and object comprehensions.

Modern JS has standard HoFs (on arrays) and an iteration protocol.

> undeclared vars leaking to global scope

Strict mode (which syntactic ES6 features enable by default e.g. class contents are in strict mode always).

> baroque keywords like "with"

Which can trivially be linted away.

> ES6 did borrow many good features from CS

Not really from CS, rather from similar (much older) sources CS got them from.

<comment><USER4> HoFs are not array comprehensions and array comprehensions aren't supported in ES6.

[https://gist.github.com/sleepyfox/1879845](https://gist.github.com/sleepyfox/1879845)

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Array_comprehensions)

<comment><USER5> > HoFs are not array comprehensions and array comprehensions aren't supported > in ES6.

Neither of these is a claim I made so I'm not sure why you feel the need to point these out.

However native HoF obviate much of the need for comprehensions, especially combined with terser "arrow functions". Languages like Smalltalk or Ruby do just fine without comprehensions for instance.

<comment><USER6> If you quote the fact that coffeescript has significant whitespace, list comprehension and then in response say that javascript has HoF and iteration protocol, it does sound like youre trying to counter the point, so it seems like for someone to bring up the fact that they are not identical is fair game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mixed feelings about CoffeeScript, as ever.

ES6 obviously deals with some of the issues that CoffeeScript was intended do. That's awesome. Unfortunately, it's still difficult to go back to what seems like the relatively baroque syntax of Javascript afterwards, as someone who has a bit of a vendetta against over-syntax. SO MANY BRACKETS.

In particular, there was CJSX - JSX with CoffeeScript. Writing React components using it was an absolute joy in comparison, and helped eliminate a lot of noise – making it much more obvious what a component was doing.

But yeah, it's been hard to convince others that it's worth the investment, when honestly it's really just a personal preference at this stage.

<comment><USER8> > SO MANY BRACKETS.

                                    })
                                  })
                                })
                              })
                            })
                          })
                        },
                      })
                    })
                  })
                })
              })
            })
          },

Whatever do you mean?

<comment><USER9> Promises returning promises (or async/await which is just sugar-coating for promises) solves this very cleanly in my experience

<comment><USER10> I agree. Promises have solved most our team's nesting issues.

It's incredibly clear, allows clean and concise error handling, and is easy to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love CS and I see myself using it for another 5 years. The aversion developers have had to CS never were legit reasons. If you put all your time in ES6 and CS, I think you'll be more productive in CS.

The only issue I foresee is tools being built around the use of ES6 that compel you to abandon it.

I've learned that less is better. I don't use JQuery, I don't use Lodash. I don't use React, I don't use ImmutableJs, I don't use Webpack or CommonJS. All of these tools are more a burden that a blessing and you just end up stacking on 100 dependieces asking "Is this really better?"

I learned this lesson with Cucumber/RSpec/Caybara and etc.. I started asking why I had to use these over plain old TDD and so I used TDD for a month and I found out everything was totally fine.

I don't even really use Arel in ActiveRecord. I just write raw SQL that serves JSON directly back. I made it easier for me to organize SQL in partials just like views and to injects variables and conditions into my SQL.

I went to great lengths to evaluate all these tools because as a work-form home contractor I can afford the time, and the "what if" really bothers me.

I still working in Rails with Sprockets and CS and I write all my SQL by hand.

Less is Better.

All these kids want to do a bunch of busy work and for no good reason. It makes the feel productive.

I have tried dropping CS but the difference in productive was too great to drop. Its not that I'm married to CS its that it does what it says. It makes your JS concise so you can be more productive.

I felt AngularJS dying and so I spent 3 months researching React and building client apps in React. I just didn't get all the work extra work and settled on Mithril.

The hardest thing was giving up writing HTML-like templates like I did in AngularJS but I remember that was my first aversion to AngularJS where I swallowed the medicine. I had to swallow more medicine to unlearn that. Mithril paird with CoffeScript makes writing markup in CS a joy. If I had to do that in regular JS I could see why people would be compelled to use ugly JSX.

<comment><USER12> > All these kids want to do a bunch of busy work and for no good reason. It > makes the feel productive.

This is pretty patronizing. Not everybody who uses these tools are "kids who just want to do busy work". In fact, I'd argue that "kids" (or more accurately, "new developers") are the least likely to want to do busy work, as they'd prefer to be able to build stuff fast. (And for the record, I feel like I suddenly started doing a whole lot LESS busy work once I got decent with React.)

I generally agree that "less is better", until you have to start re-inventing solved problems.

> I learned this lesson with Cucumber/RSpec/Caybara and etc.. I started asking > why I had to use these over plain old TDD and so I used TDD for a month and > I found out everything was totally fine.

RSpec is just a testing framework though? It's not something you chose instead of TDD...

<comment><USER13> >I generally agree that "less is better", until you have to start re-inventing solved problems.

I think the takeaway is that _before_ you assume you have an "unsolved problem" due to all the buzz/hype around $HOT_LIB, study a little more, try it with the upstream, make sure it's really necessary before you get a tortured contrivance of a stack in place. Consider the cost of adding more dependencies and whether the functionality you're getting from the third party lib is really worth it.

Let's be honest, the core problems you're likely to run into on any given day are probably "solved" pretty reasonably by any language that's at the appropriate level for the problem space and has seen significant use over the last 10 years. You're more likely to be reinventing the wheel by pulling in $COOL_GITHUB_PROJECT than you are by taking a few more lines to implement with the stdlib.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Shameful plug: [http://invig.io](http://invig.io) is a a wrapper around decaffinate, lebab, prettier, eslint, to to squeeze more modernness out of legacy js/coffeescript codebases and make them standardjs.com compliant

<comment><USER15> That sounds excellent (especially if it supports await!). Slightly off-topic:

I love standardjs.com. It takes an enormous amount of chutzpah to look at jQuery style guidelines, idiomatic.js, AirBnB and every previous JavaScript style guide and declare the name of your own new thing is `${standard} ${languageName}`

<comment><USER16> "Standard" (the name is _very_ hard to tolerate) not being configurable with questionable defaults (no semicolons!) and being JS-only (no TS or CSS support) makes Prettier[1] a better option. It has a VS Code extension which works great.

[1]: [https://github.com/prettier/prettier](https://github.com/prettier/prettier)

<comment><USER15> > Prettier parses your JavaScript into an AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) and > pretty-prints the AST, completely ignoring any of the original formatting*. > Say hello to completely consistent syntax!

That's excellent. Thanks for the recommendation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> CoffeeScript has some nice feature, especially as compared to ES5, but I always found it a tad too clever. The fact that {} are optional in a bunch of places makes it very difficult for me to parse mentally.

Other weird coffeescript quirk: "x isnt y" is not semantically to "x is not y".

<comment><USER18> People overuse {}-free object literals in CoffeeScript. In function invocations, and other in-line cases, use {}!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Oh thank god.

CoffeeScript was an important crutch and stepping stone but we're maybe 2 years past where it has been past it's prime and this will make updating and improving legacy projects a lot easier.

Personally was never a fan of it - it used too many Ruby idioms for my taste and produced noisy code that was a pain to debug (at the time) - but it did spur the development & adoption of other, better, systems (ESNext transpilation, TypeScript, etc)

</comment><comment><USER20> I did an experiment about a year ago when I re-wrote part of LiveScript's code emitter to produce a babel-compatible AST rather than javascript code. It would then pipe the AST to babel's generator and produce the final JavaScript. The benefit was that I could then use any babel-compatible toolset and still write code in LiveScript. ESLint worked with almost no tweaks necessary. Theoretically, you could also use Flow and TypeScript with this approach.

Anyway, I didn't have enough time to finish the project, but somebody took the idea and did most of the work [0].

[0] [https://github.com/dk00/livescript- next](https://github.com/dk00/livescript-next)

Would love to explain more, but have to board the plain now :) These links might help:

[https://github.com/gkz/LiveScript/issues/821](https://github.com/gkz/LiveScript/issues/821) [https://github.com/facebook/flow/issues/1515](https://github.com/facebook/flow/issues/1515)

</comment><comment><USER21> This thing made me use React in 2013 (when JSX was still weird): [http://blog.vjeux.com/2013/javascript/react- coffeescript.htm...](http://blog.vjeux.com/2013/javascript/react- coffeescript.html)

Now JSX is not weird anymore, it's just horrible.

</comment><comment><USER22> The folks behind this have been at it a long time. I first used decaffeinate over 18mo ago and while it was already quite helpful then, it's come a tremendous distance since. Very tricky problem to solve well; bravo!

Somewhat surprised nobody has mentioned the upcoming release of CoffeeScript 2.0, which outputs ES6 natively: [http://coffeescript.org/v2/](http://coffeescript.org/v2/)

It's in beta2 now and ready for trial.

</comment><comment><USER23> Never understood the appeal of CS, JavaScript just isn't painful enough to warrant it. Been happy to watch it's slow exit from the mainstream.

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=coffeescript](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=coffeescript)

<comment><USER24> Meaningful indentation. I love python and I'm really not sure why other compilers/interpreters ignore indentation since it's the de facto way of how people express structure in any computer language.

Also when CS happened, JS didn't even have classes. Half of the ES6 features are CS inspired.

<comment><USER19> > Also when CS happened, JS didn't even have classes.

And it only has class _syntax_ now. Classes in JS are still prototypical inheritance under the hood (and probably always will be).

> Half of the ES6 features are CS inspired.

This is rewriting history. Most of ES6 was under active development before CS was a thing. It's more accurate to say that the same modern languages features inspired both (with ES6 thankfully being less Ruby-like).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> CoffeeScript is still relevant to me, mainly because of the sparser syntax. For React, I wrap the components in functions to create syntax that is even a little clearer than JSX, but still valid CoffeeScript.

I am still waiting for someone to finish a Python bytecode VM or transpiler for javascript which is actually worth using...

<comment><USER26> > waiting for someone to finish a Python bytecode VM or transpiler for > javascript which is actually worth using...

What is that? Running JS in a python VM?

<comment><USER25> No, by that I mean a VM to run Python bytecode, running in the browser. There is at least one project which tries to do that, but it's not really useable.

The point would be to have access to a large part of the standard library, the full Python data model and a good integration with the javascript platform. Only then would there be a reason to use it.

<comment><USER26> Oh. Now I get your point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Oh how the tables have turned

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm assuming "modern JavaScript" means ES6. Has anyone used this, and does it produce readable code?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, "modern JS" is meant to be the catch-all term for ES6/ES7/ES2015/ES2016/ES2017. In this case, you need ES2016 to run code produced by decaffeinate, but anything in the latest language version or at stage 4 is fair game and might be added in the future.

Producing readable code is certainly the intent! Realistically, you need to clean some things up by hand to make it pass lint and look nice, but I think overall it does a pretty good job, certainly much better than the CoffeeScript compiler. You can always play around with it by typing/pasting code into the online repl: [http://decaffeinate-project.org/repl/](http://decaffeinate- project.org/repl/)

<comment><USER29> You mean only ES2016 from that list?

> Producing readable code is certainly the intent!

This is hilarious! Transpiling from the most readable JS alternative to ES6? Then you need to clean up some things, making it ready for yet another transpiler called Babel? And then everything is OK?

Show me how you are going to make this pretty:

      if does.that?.prop?.exist then console.log 'yes, no crash!'

<comment><AUTHOR> > You mean only ES2016 from that list?

No, I was intentional about my description. People tend to be informal when talking about JS versions, and all five of those terms might be used to describe decaffeinate's output. IMO it's best to just say that decaffeinate produces JavaScript, and not any particular old version of JavaScript.

> Show me how you are going to make this pretty

Soak operations (anything with a question mark) are probably the hardest to convert to JavaScript, especially when they're chained. Here's what decaffeinate gives today:

[http://decaffeinate- project.org/repl/#?evaluate=true&stage=f...](http://decaffeinate- project.org/repl/#?evaluate=true&stage=full&code=if%20does.that%3F.prop%3F.exist%20then%20console.log%20'yes%2C%20no%20crash!')

And here's an open bug with thoughts on making those look better: [https://github.com/decaffeinate/decaffeinate/issues/336](https://github.com/decaffeinate/decaffeinate/issues/336)

But many people have still found decaffeinate useful since the vast majority of real-world CoffeeScript (at least from what I've seen) tends to convert pretty well, and even in difficult cases, it's better to safely get it in JavaScript first and then clean it up than to rewrite everything by hand.

<comment><USER29>
      if (__guard__(does.that != null ? does.that.prop : undefined, x => x.exist)) { console.log('yes, no crash!'); }
      function __guard__(value, transform) {
        return (typeof value !== 'undefined' && value !== null) ? transform(value) : undefined;
      }

oh my..

This was 1 line of CS, how to clean this up without a chance of creating bugs?

How on earth is ESxxx an improvement on CS anyways? It's just not true, it's a leap back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's going to be very interesting to see if Atom decides to fully make the move to JavaScript / ES6+

<comment><USER31> CS is one of the main reasons I haven't contributed more to Atom.

I guess when Atom was started it made sense to use CS, not anymore. Hopefully Github will switch to ES6/7 or TS.

<comment><USER32> also this

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Wasn't JA updating CS again recently? Has anybody tried to use it after using ES6/7?

<comment><USER34> Hasn't the community (finally) learned that simply transposing a better syntax onto JavaScript does not solve or help programmers in a meaningful way like the way that static typing does? Or is me hoping that a community will collectively reach a realization like this a pipe dream?

<comment><USER35> Patronizing? I've mostly switched to TypeScript from CoffeeScript for the time being, because types are indeed a huge boon, but a better syntax is meaningfully helpful and my preference any day would be for some merger into typed CoffeeScript.

<comment><USER34> Yeah, I guess TypedCoffeeScript would be better than just one or the other.

<comment><USER36> For what it's worth, I've found that F# has a similar 'feel' to what I'd expect from a typed CoffeeScript. I'm not sure exactly why; it's probably just the look and shape of the code, along with the lack of brackets.

Writing React apps in F# using Fable is pretty nice, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> how is this different than running the compiled CS output through lebab [1]?

[1] [https://github.com/lebab/lebab](https://github.com/lebab/lebab)

<comment><AUTHOR> You lose a lot of information going from CS -> ES5 -> ES6, so decaffeinate has an inherent advantage since it knows your original code. With decaffeinate, it converts classes to classes, destructures to destructures, array spread to array spread, etc. Also, the CS output destroys all inline comments and all formatting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> In 3-5 years will we get "FreeRange" to convert typescript to "modern" JavaScript?

</comment><comment><USER39> I love this. We've truly come full circle. Does it support a compile to Typescript step?

<comment><AUTHOR> bulk-decaffeinate ( [https://github.com/decaffeinate/bulk- decaffeinate](https://github.com/decaffeinate/bulk-decaffeinate) ) supports an outputFileExtension option that can make it so the resulting files end in .ts. But really, the main thing to do when converting JavaScript to TypeScript is adding types, which decaffeinate is much less qualified to do. But if you're going to move from CoffeeScript to TypeScript, JavaScript is probably a pretty important intermediate step.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Remember when CoffeeScript was "modern JS"?

The whole JS stack switches every 2 years or so?

I mean, it actually switches faster than that and that's what everyone jokes about (JavaScript fatigue and what not). But a full turnover of the stack is about 2 years?

</comment><comment><USER41> People might not know but CoffeeScript 2 is out already and supports the ES6 syntaxes. I've been using it for a large Vue.js SPA (with webpack) and some small projects, it really improves the development and saving me a lot of the time.

[https://github.com/coffeescript6/discuss](https://github.com/coffeescript6/discuss)

</comment><comment><USER24> Last time I tried it did not support cjsx -> jsx, as far as I can tell, so it's useless for migrating React code bases.

<comment><AUTHOR> Take a look at depercolator, it's a wrapper around cjsx-transform, decaffeinate, and some other things:

[https://github.com/bugsnag/depercolator](https://github.com/bugsnag/depercolator)

There's an open decaffeinate bug for CJSX ( [https://github.com/decaffeinate/decaffeinate/issues/1009](https://github.com/decaffeinate/decaffeinate/issues/1009) ) but I suspect it'll be really hard to do anything better than just running cjsx-transform and then running regular decaffeinate.

To get JSX on the JS side after decaffeinate, you can use the create-element- to-jsx script from [https://github.com/reactjs/react- codemod](https://github.com/reactjs/react-codemod) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is great. I had a hard time dealing with CoffeeScript code. CoffeeScript tools are behind the state of the art in JavaScript.

<comment><USER43> This is a cautionary tale for developers that flock to the flavor-of-the-month tech (CoffeeScript used to be all the rage in 2013!), only to find that the mature tech not only caught up but completely eclipsed it in 2017.

<comment><USER44> Jeremy Ashkenas (author of coffeescript) helped bring es6 up to par. You can see the influence of coffeescript all over es6 in the class syntax, string interpolation and destructuring.

It would be wrong to say that the investment we (as an industry) made in coffeescript was a waste. Far from it.

<comment><USER5> > Jeremy Ashkenas (author of coffeescript) helped bring es6 up to par.

By spending basically the entire runup to it poo-pooing it?

> You can see the influence of coffeescript all over es6 in the class syntax, > string interpolation and destructuring.

Yeah it couldn't be the dozens of languages which have been doing that since the 80s and which browser developers were already mining for extensions no sir, Coffeescript invented having a class keyword (which is why it was already a reserved keyword in JS), invented string interpolation which it lifted directly from Ruby (according to its own doc) and from which JS string templates diverge both syntactically and semantically, and invented destructuring (and will I'm sure soon invent pattern matching).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Can you give an example of a CoffeeScript file being transcribed to modern JS :)? I just want to see which syntax I prefer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, here's src/main-process/atom-protocol-handler.coffee from the atom codebase (it's a really long URL because it includes the whole source code):

[http://bit.ly/2rIhFD4](http://bit.ly/2rIhFD4)

In this case, the __guardMethod__ usages should probably be rewritten by hand after running decaffeinate.

In general, you can paste any code into the left side of [http://decaffeinate- project.org/repl](http://decaffeinate-project.org/repl) to get output on the right side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Doesn't Coffeescript convert Coffeescript to JS? `coffee -c input.coffee`.

<comment><USER47> Yes, but it's not "modern JS" and it's not meant to be edited.

This tool converts it to modern JS (ES6) that has classes, template strings, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> coffeescript is best for doing a specific thing on a page. for spa it's different.</comment>


Richard Stallman: Let's Limit the Effect of Software Patents - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/11/richard-stallman-software-patents <comment><USER3> This is really impressive. It's a cogent, insightful articulation of the current situation, including the realistic constraints (e.g. that Supreme Court ruling re: private privileges), and a practical suggested solution that could actually be implemented in the current political environment. Don't always agree with Stallman, but this one's well done.

<comment><USER4> It may even be more practical than hinted at in the article. You have to get massive support (either from industry or special interests) for legislation to happen in any way.

Industry - Google, Apple, Microsoft, and others would probably be in favor of something like this, because it would promote more development on their systems if developers feel completely safe from patent trolls. It would also be seen as a good publicity move from any of these companies.

<comment><USER5> _It would also be seen as a good publicity move from any of these companies._

It would definitely help convince me of the sincerity of their claims that they maintain their software patent portfolios for defensive purposes.

<comment><USER6> The fact is, it's just bad business not to patent software as a defensive measure against competition, at least when you make enough money for the people with patents to sue you first. This doesn't mean anyone likes being in that position: I think some of them, at least, would appreciate being able to implement competing technologies without licensing them.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I'm well aware that defense is _a_ reason for patenting things. I think it gets much easier to see that as the primary reason for doing so when the companies which do it the most also work to reduce (as opposed to increasing or exercising) the offensive power of patents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This makes no sense. Is Stallman so focused on software that he isn't considering the implications of continuing to apply broken software patents to hardware?

FPGAs? Is an algorithm implemented on a FPGA a software or hardware implementation?

Sufficiently popular software algorithms like mpeg4 (including avc) are often implemented in ASICs for speed. Stallman's suggestion does nothing to help in those cases.

What if Intel introduces new instructions that assist with some patented algorithm but do not carry out the complete algorithm? Software completes the algorithm using the chip instruction. Is that covered under Stallman's software patent immunity proposal?

The dichotomy between software implementations and hardware implementations is unhelpful. If you oppose software patents on principle, whether because you think they're harmful or because you think they're math and are not supposed to be patentable in the first place, why let the camel's nose into the tent by campaigning to allow hardware (ASIC?) implementation patents, but not allowing pure-software implementations?

Perhaps this is better framed as an economic argument. If cost were no object, more algorithms would be implemented in ASICs. There's a limit to the total chip area you'd want to fit into a computer, but a lot of algorithms could be implemented in a few custom ASICs. It's likely that some of those algorithms would be covered by patents. Stallman's proposal seems like discrimination against algorithms that are important enough to make faster execution worth a lot of money.

If software patents are not valid, and I don't believe they are valid, then allowing them to apply to hardware implementations is just applying a band-aid and punting on the real issue. Stallman's proposal may be pragmatic, in that it reduces risk to most start-ups and other entities worried about violating patents in software, but it sustains the confusion about what software patents are and whether they can be valid. I think there's more at stake than the money at issue in patent lawsuits every year. I think broad appreciation of the value of open culture, and recognition that algorithms should be part of that, is worth more than any extra value companies might be able to extract from hardware implementations of patented algorithms due to artificial monopolies created by patent protection.

<comment><USER8> It's not a perfect solution, and (like most things in the patent system) it's an obvious ugly hack, but it would be a lot better than the status quo. Do you have a realistic alternative that's better?

(I just realized: you may be in the dubious position of being less pragmatic about something than Richard Stallman. It's not often someone can say that!)

<comment><USER9> This "ugly hack" is a hole you can drive a truck through, and one can be pretty sure the patent lawyers will find an aircraft carrier, load it up with trucks, and drive through it collectively.

It's silly to assume no change in behavior, any legal counsel from that point on will advise in favor of patenting the hardware implementation, and instead of patented software running on commodity hardware we'll end up with patented "appliances" and "reference hardware implementations" with broad claims extending to other types of hardware implementations.

<comment><USER10> I agree with this, mainly on a simple premise:

If you start an arguement at two extremes, and give ground where your opponents do not, you weaken your position and put the compromise between them more in their favor. And when you keep giving ground, you keep showing a willingness to concede defeat, and your opponents will just ignore you. If you stand your ground, you are a stalwart wall of opposition that needs to be confronted, rather than ignored, eventually.

In many cases (gay rights, civil liberties, patent law, equality / freedom) that stalwart position may require multiple generations. You don't get instant results when dealing with the entrenched status quo that is horribly wrong. But when you give ground you render your entire argument and stance illegitimate because your opponents can dismiss you as you keep conceding ground and giving up on your positions.

Patents, as a whole, are archaic and bad. The turnaround time for any new discovery is now a matter of days, or months, rather than the years it would take in centuries past to distribute and market goods and services. In the digital world, everything is already information, it is all number patterns in electrical terms, and we _had_ a track record of _not_ letting people monopolize knowledge and information in the realm of mathematics before, and the digital era should never have been any different in my opinion. Of course, it is my opinion and all. But I remain dilligent in my stance for it.

I have lost a lot of respect for Stallman because it seems in recent years his dialogue has propagated a lot of "buts" in his arguments. He concedes ground on what he believes in and _that_ illegitimizes him more than anyone calling him cookey would in my book.

<comment><USER11> The classic name for the "Keep moving the extremes so people's opinion converge on the gradually moving middle" is called the Overton window and politicians try to employ it all the time:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Surprisingly realistic suggestion from the "radical" Richard Stallman.

<comment><USER13> RMS has been in the business of providing realistic solutions to problematic legal environments for 30 years.

Nothing to be surprised about.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. The GPL (in all of its various incarnations), for all of its faults, is a fantastic example of a practical, usable solution to a real problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> No one seems to have picked up on the strategic impact of the proposal, it neatly excludes many of the more sympathetic pro-patent entities from the picture, in particular the pharmaceutical industry and hardware manufacturers. They needn't bother to oppose it, because it has no effect on them, whereas they may oppose further barriers to granting patents on principle just in case it affects them.

Personally I'm not extremely in favor, as I'm anti-patent/copyright in general, but it makes sense for someone whose primary goal is software freedom.

</comment><comment><USER16> tl;dr: "We should legislate that developing, distributing, or running a program on generally used computing hardware does not constitute patent infringement."

He goes on to say "generally used computing hardware" is the opposite of "special-purpose hardware" but I think that definition needs to be really explicit.

Of course then, would anyone in Congress actually pass such a bill?

<comment><USER17> Is a GPU "special-purpose hardware" when used for graphics, but general purpose when used for GPGPU functions?

<comment><USER18> I think that a scientific/mathematical definition would work in this case - <USER2> you can simulate a turing machine on that particular machine, then it is considered a general purpose machine. Otherwise, its a special purpose machine.

<comment><USER19> But you can't actually simulate a TM on any machine with a fixed amount of memory. And any "special purpose" computing hardware would have at least a little memory. So I don't think that distinction works. Unless it only applies to machines with expandable memory? Technically, if it were hot swappable, the memory would be unbounded. But nowadays, the SD slot on phones is often under the battery, if it exists at all.

<comment><USER20> I mean, you can't simulate the weather exactly, but that doesn't stop us from writing "good" approximate simulations. It's not hard to simulate a TM, even if we can't build a real TM (unbound memory).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> rms did a great job with GPL, fighting copyright with copyright - though v3, with patent conditions, has not seen universal adoption (because too late? or a more fundamental problem?)

A distinction with surgeons is their work is not reproducible at near-zero cost; so shielding affects only _n_ surgeons, not all developers and their users (i.e. "most people"). Also, people generally don't die because developers can't code a particular technique. He might get a foothold in software in surgical _equipment_ , but I bet the shield doesn't apply to them.

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't agree with Richard. I don't see the case for treating "software" and "hardware" differently. Patents were invented as a way to protect intellectual property and to derive revenue from it. They are an incentive for innovation. They're just being abused mostly by patent trolls.

Patent trolls acquire a large number of bogus patents, sue companies and in most cases settle confidentially. Most companies don't like risk especially when their core business process is threatened. So they settle even if there's a good chance the patent could be challenged. It's not a fair fight...

To limit this abuse we could make patents non transferable meaning you can sell the right to use the invention but you cannot sell the invention. Some will argue that patent trolls could work on behalf of inventors to help them enforce their patents but I think most inventors are more reasonable than the lawyers specializing in patent trolling. There might also be a way to mitigate this risk with some regulation, ideas?

<comment><USER23> Amazon would still be the only site offering 1-click checkout and Apple would still have the only phone with Slide-to-Unlock. These are just as important as patent trolls.

<comment><USER22> What do you mean by as important as patent trolls? Amazon patented this process and is using it for the benefit of their customers, what's wrong with that? Another company could offer 1-click checkout if they

\- pay royalties. \- or own another patent amazon is infringing as a mean to disuade amazon from suing.

Maybe the problem here is that these patents you are referring to seem overly simple and shouldn't be somebody's IP but what seems trivial and intuitive today could have been very innovative at the time they were patented.

<comment><USER24> > Amazon patented this process and is using it for the benefit of their > customers, what's wrong with that?

What's wrong with it is that no competitors can use the same idea without paying Amazon (assuming Amazon would even agree to license it).

What is the benefit to society of preventing someone other than Amazon from implementing 1-click checkout? Do you really think that "innovation" would never have been created without the protection of patents?

<comment><USER22> I agree that innovation should be more openly shared and licensing should be somehow regulated but I do think there will be less innovation in a world without patents especially in a capitalist world. A lot of the innovation is fueled by research financed by the private sector. Remove the incentive to invest and you reduce the financing and as a result innovation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I suggest that rather than limiting effects of patents, it is easier to exclude obvious ideas. By this, if two identical ideas are submitted as patents within a designated time frame, then the patent is not novel enough.

This has several advantages:

1\. The number of educated people have risen considerably that we are filing more patents in a decade than the past 100 years. Even if there weren't patent protection, ideas will still continue to be created. By getting rid of the first past the post problem, we are effectively saying we will not grant an exclusive patent for something that someone else could have invented.

2\. This scheme does not impact on the R&D that requires long term investment. e.g. pharmaceuticals.

3\. It makes "idea patents" easy to invalidate. e.g. using a phone to play music.

<comment><USER18> unfortunately, obviousness is a very difficult thing to test for.

May be a test for obviousness is that an expert in the field is able to deduce the "inner workings" by only observing the result of applying the patent.

Thus, a pharmaceutical patent would continue to be effective under this test (you can't really tell the inner workings of a pill by looking at the pill). However, you can tell the inner workings of a bloody rounded corner, or using a phone to play music.

I say this, because patents were intented to incentivize people from hiding their secret ideas so that society at large benefits. If your idea can't be hidden, then there is no need to grant any monopoly.

<comment><USER25> Say before wireless, you had to check your email over a wired connection. Someone patents the idea of checking email over radio waves. If multiple people came up with the same idea, and lodges the same patent within 6 months of one another, then it is not worthy of a patent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I like his suggestion, and it's rare to actually hear a new idea in how to resolve the patent problem.

However I find it odd that in the preamble he points out Apple, but presumably something like an iPhone would easily fall into the class of special purpose computing equipment, so Apple's case would be unaffected by it. In fact, it might even encourage mobile phone platforms to become more locked down and restrictive so as to avoid falling into the definition of a "general purpose" computer. Thus there could be a very dangerous backfiring of this if the definitions were not clear and broad.

<comment><USER27> The way that I read it would be that the iPhone could definitely be patented. However apps in an app store could not.

So you could have something like the slide to unlock patent. It could bind software shipped as part of the base operating system. But app developers could implement that same feature in an app and be fine.

Far from perfect. But a definite improvement.

<comment><USER28> The way I understand his idea is that a phone is a general purpose computer. If Apple wants to patent slide-to-unlock, they can only patent a hardware implementation (i.e. a chip that only does slide-to-unlock, which is clearly a ridiculous idea).

Then I can come along and write software for Android that implements slide-to- unlock, and I am not infringing because my implementation is software only.

The end result of this means that Apple's slide-to-unlock patent would become worthless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Perhaps it's because I'm tired and I'm not understanding correctly but what is the practical difference between Stallman's suggestion and simply abolishing software patents?

<comment><USER30> He says you can't revoke existing software patents legislatively, so abolishing the ability to get NEW software patents would take 20 years to fix the problem (for the existing ones to expire). By saying those existing patents can't be enforced the problem is fixed now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Personally I think the FSF should go full dystopia: promote and strengthen software patents.

They are so influential right now, and are changing the very fate of the infrastructure of this planet.

It isn't just about money, it's about how the whole ecosystem is poisoned. Either there needs to be massive reform sponsored by the major corps. or small countries will start to break out of treaties to promote "IP freedom" for shell corps.

<comment><USER32> I figured one way to protest the system would be to get a bunch of bogus patents and troll, while opposing software patents and pointing to your suit as an example of why the law is broken.

Not sure if that would be legally viable though. One would have to contact a lawyer and ask.

<comment><USER31> I've always wondered if corporations lose certain lawsuits on purpose to change the outcomes of future cases.

<comment><USER33> Not really a viable strategy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Here are a few reasons why the patent system isn't useful for software: A) Almost no one in the industry comes up with innovative solutions to problems by reading software patents from the last 20 years. They do it by implementing their own solutions or improving existing solutions.

B) There is already a powerful force that has promoted innovation in software much more than patents, and that is open source. In fact, most of the web sites on the internet are powered by a stack of open source software. Therefore, innovation would take place in this industry even if the government didn't offer a 20 year monopoly to anyone who can disclose a non obvious idea to the public.

C) The purpose of patents is to promote innovation by encouraging the inventor to disclose the details of the intention to the public, in exchange for a 17-20 year monopoly on the implementation of the invention. However, since the industry moves so fast, inventions which are not obvious when patented become extremely obvious "incremental improvements" several years later. This combined with A completely defeats the positive side (to the public) of the compromise, but keeps the negative side of the compromise -- namely the monopoly. The latter costs society in the form of litigations, intimidation of small companies, and injunctions against useful products made by big corporations.

D) Software patents encourage patent trolls to file an invention and lie in wait, or sell the patent to someone who will lie in wait. Meanwhile, they discourage actually implementing technology, because it can infringe on any number of patented inventions. We all realize how much implementation and execution is more important than a mere idea. Thus, it might actually be thwarting the very thing that it's supposed to promote: actual implementation. In the words of Fred Wilson, it is a "tax on innovation".

E) By contrast, open source encourages actual IMPLEMENTORS of software to not only disclose the effect to the public, but release a functional piece of software which actually implements the innovations. Moreover, many Free Software licenses compel those who make use of this software to release their own software in turn. The result is people building on each other's work, promoting implementation and execution over simply disclosing ideas. This aligns much better with the interests of society at large -- and the original purpose for patents.

F) The industry moves too fast for the patent office to keep up not only with the state of the art (they have almost no chance), but even the state of PRIOR ART, leading to many patents being granted that don't satisfy the obviousness or prior art requirements. Sometimes dozens of patents are approved for the exact same thing. As a result, the cost to society is pushed into the legal sector, causing lengthy court proceedings rather than patent office actions.

G) When a small company is sued, even by a patent which can be invalidated, it can often be intimidated into entering a settlement (an unfair situation), or in fact defeated because it didn't have the funds to find the prior art. But even in cases where there was no prior art and the patented invention was in fact not obvious, chances are 99% of the time the "infringing" implementation was developed completely unaware of the patent's existence. See points A, and C. Therefore, the positive side of the compromise (to the public) was completely superfluous, but the negative side hits with full force and effect (see point F).

H) Large companies now spend billions of dollars to acquire patent portfolios for purposes of intimidation, defense against ... patent litigation, and anticompetitive practices -- by which I mean not competing on actual quality and price of the products, but rather trying to artificially reduce the quality and increase the price of the competing products. The costs to the consumer are obvious. Moreover, the costs to shareholders include money that will never be used for actual innovation, but simply the above purposes.

All in all, there are many reasons to abolish software patents in the USA.

<comment><USER28> Exactly, and Stallman's proposal represents a viable path forward to effectively abolish software patents.

It avoids the messiness of invalidating existing patents or determining during patent examination which patents are for software and which patents are for hardware. Effectively, it shifts that determination to the implementer.

If I'm able to implement a patented idea in software, then it was a software patent. And I'm not infringing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I am not very familiar with software patents, just business process work.

If you write a program in say... python which is open source. You can patent that program even though your work is based of something that is publicly available? Or can you only patent additional libraries/new languages?

<comment><USER36> Implementation is not required and are not in fact what is actually patented.

An implementation can implement something that is patented, but that does not mean the implementation is itself patented.

MS Word is not patented, but implements many patented concepts.

<comment><USER35> hmm, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Nice. If there is a hardware patenet, just re-implement it in software and you are safe.

<comment><USER28> Exactly, this is how I understood his proposal. Simple to understand exactly what is and isn't allowed.

Many people here seem to be focusing on how patent lawyers would find new ways to write software patents, or focusing on whether hardware would still be patentable. That misses the point.

If I can implement a patented idea in software on commodity hardware, I'm safe. Simple!

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I don't understand why the comments here are saying this is a "practical", realistic solution. This sort of legal trick might help deal with the law as it stands (personally, I'd much rather see algorithms made unpatentable and wait 20 years), but a vastly greater obstacle is convincing Congress (or a court) that these patents should be eliminated in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is about as likely to happen as a law that comes right out and invalidates software patents. Or ends women's suffrage. Or requires everyone to wear blue pants on Thursdays, under penalty of death.

It's an interesting thought experiment, but treating it as more than that is a mistake.

<comment><USER39> Bad law can change if strongly opposed. It just _seems_ impossible. To pick an extreme example, slavery was as old as humanity, and backed by very powerful, rich, and organized special interests, until it was strongly opposed, consistently, for decades.

<comment><USER40> It could be argued that the Industrial Revolution was making the system of mass human labor obsolete. One moneyed elite against another does not a popular struggle make.

A better example, one that was purely social, was when Prohibition was enacted in the United States (alcohol being about as old as humanity). Preachers were calling for prisons to be torn down as they would no longer be necessary with the passing of the Demon Rum.

Then again, perhaps that's not the best example either. How about we just settle on someone noncontroversial like Gandhi?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> In a recent job interview I was asked to code a doubly linked list as part of the coding part of the interview. Linked lists are patented, did me implementing this break the law?

<comment><USER42> Is it ?? what is the patent number.

<comment><USER43> US7028023? ([http://www.google.com/patents?id=Szh4AAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...](http://www.google.com/patents?id=Szh4AAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract#v=onepage&q&f=false))

<comment><USER8> That only covers linked lists that have multiple "next" pointers, so you can traverse it in more than one order. It's still stupidly obvious, but does not cover singly-linked lists.

<comment><USER36> Pootch was asked to implement a doubly linked list, ie a linked list with axillary pointers that allows an alternative transversal.

<comment><USER8> Ah, I misread. In that case it _is_ claimed by that patent, but this almost certainly wouldn't hold up in court, because there's so much prior art for doubly-linked lists.

This situation would be laughable if it weren't backed up by the force of law.

<comment><USER44> How does answering an interview question violate/infringe any patent (valid or invalid).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_infringement>

states " The definition of patent infringement may vary by jurisdiction, but it typically includes using or selling the patented invention. In many countries, a use is required to be commercial (or to have a commercial purpose) to constitute patent infringement.[citation needed] "

<comment><USER45> Perhaps it could be an example of indirect (contributory) infringement if the company used his interview solution in a product (ie. he facilitated their infringement)? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributory_patent_infringemen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributory_patent_infringement)

Pretty unlikely in this case, but I can think of interviews where I had the same concern. MegaCorp posed a problem they were having (eg. preventing radar self jamming), I told them one solution I knew of, but I was very careful to point out that it was patented less they turn around and use it.

So I share the parent's question: Can you be held liable for infringement due to a job interview answer?

<comment><USER46> Patents are not trade secrets. There's nothing illegal about communicating the contents of a patent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Yo Richard, just get rid of IP and everything fits.

</comment><comment><USER48> Stallman's behind the times, data is where the action is. He shuld be advocating for open data, software is so yesterday.

<comment><USER49> open data is important. sure. but it is certainly orthogonal to open (or free) software.</comment></comment>


Apple tries to bring order to a world of online chaos - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/technology/blogs/untangling-the-web/apple-tries-to-bring-order-to-a-world-of-online-chaos/20100601-wucn.html

<comment><USER2> Does that mean that Apple is the authoritarian and Microsoft the anarchist? ;-) I know that's a bit of a mental shortcut here but it is an interesting idea, isn't it?</comment>


Application-Level Consensus [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://weareadaptive.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Application-Level-Consensus.pdf <comment><USER2> Jane Street uses the same approach to build their exchange [0]. Like the doc says, it can be great to replay some sequence of messages in dev to reproduce issues, and to give fault-tolerance to the system.

One downside is that, if all your nodes are using the same application code, simply replaying the log might not help as all nodes might hit exactly the same bug with the same sequence of transitions.

[0] There's an overwiev of their infrastructure here [https://youtube.com/watch?v=b1e4t2k2KJY](https://youtube.com/watch?v=b1e4t2k2KJY)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing the video and great talk btw. Brian, the speaker, actually asks the audience (around minute 20 in the video) if anybody use paxos for the matching engine. What I'm talking about in the article is exactly that: we're just using another consensus algorithm (Raft) which is significantly simpler to implement than Paxos.

LMAX use synchronous replication in their exchange: [https://www.infoq.com/presentations/LMAX](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/LMAX)

<comment><USER4> What kind of latency does the consensus add? We are looking at adding fault tolerance to our matching engine but can only afford 10-15 micros.

<comment><USER4> Related to the latency question, I just watched the Jane Street video (very nice!) and he mentioned that they use operator-initiated failover and he didn't know of anyone using a consensus based approach because it adds an extra hop. Does your Raft-based failover solution do automatic failover?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is very interesting. I have no doubts that not having to deal with fault tolerance at the application level compensates for the efforts to put in place this architecture. And yes, in my opinion, "application-level consensus" is the perfect term to designate this architecture.

<comment><USER6> I agree. One place where application-level consensus is fairly common is in Elixir applications, mostly thanks to the crdt implementation that's nicely wrapped up by Phoenix.Tracker in the phoenix_pubsub library.

This is used by the Phoenix project's Presence module to provide a distributed notion of what users are 'present', but it's also used by others to do service location using hash rings, or implement a dht, etc. I've used it for master election and failover on a few projects for little services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hi there!! looks like there was some minimal mistakes on the text and the document was updated: [http://weareadaptive.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/04/Applicat...](http://weareadaptive.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/04/Application-Level-Consensus.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> Try 'Edge-Coherence'.</comment>


USS Nebraska Submarine Embark November 2008 - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/ThomasLeeSlides/uss-nebraska-submarine-embark-november-2008

<comment><AUTHOR> Slides from a visit to Ohio Class Nuclear Trident USS Nebraska submarine. Go to slide 22 for interesting pictures

</comment><comment><USER2> holy cow, I served with CDR Lahti on another ship 10 years ago!

<comment><USER3> Which boat was that? (I was based in Groton about 10 years ago...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They have two armed guards on duty, 24/7, in the missile command centre _on the submarine_!?

Jesus. That's .. serious.

I come from a Navy family so I love this kind of thing. The pictures of the sub looming out of the fog were particularly cool. But I was surprised by how low-tech a lot of the onboard controls seemed. Or maybe that's just what they want us to think ...

<comment><USER5> Low-tech? Maybe. One, it takes a long time to design and commission a new modern naval vessel, aircraft, or even a tank. A decade or more. So most on- board electronics, including CPUs and displays will be outdated at any given time — somewhat outdated to possibly very old. (Side note: I've always been amazed at how quickly new ship and plane designs came out in war-time in the 1940s, but they were much simpler then and evolving much more rapidly. Can't really compare a P-51 Mustang to an F-22.)

Two, I don't really want the Navy finding bugs in the latest hardware. Better run an older, well-tested CPU than find a reactor control system crashing because of a f00f bug. :)</comment></comment>


Tired of managing disposable email?  With flick of a switch, new tool to manage - <AUTHOR> http://e27.co/2013/03/25/create-multiple-email-aliases-with-email-anonymizer-tool-maskr/

<comment><AUTHOR> Try it out directly at: www.maskr.me</comment>


Drug Traffickers Are Spoofing Border Drones - <AUTHOR> http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2015/12/DHS-Drug-Traffickers-Spoofing-Border-Drones/124613/ <comment><USER2>
      The ShadowHawk uses military-grade encryption and changes
      GPS frequencies every half second, according to Buscher.

That doesn't sound true - the GPS satellites don't do frequency hopping, you get 1575.42MHz, 1227.60MHz and that's it. All the linked paper says is that you can use the precise time from a GPS receiver to start up a different radio system that needs precise timing.

<comment><USER3> LOL "Military Grade". Anything that is labeled "Military Grade" means it has gone through a long, bureaucratic specification and procurement process. The spec is obsolete by the time it actually gets anywhere. With the pace of progress these days, "Military Grade" means "5 years old."

<comment> FLUX-YOU I'm starting to think the same of healthcare software, except we call it "Hospital Grade"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > UAVs helped in just 2 percent of apprehensions on the southwest border. The > audit came out just as DHS was asking Congress to give it $443 million for > another 14 Reapers, also called Predator Bs, which the agency received.

So we spent $360m (at least, probably more due to creative accounting cited in article) on spoofable, hackable, drones since 2005. Then, instead of waiting for an audit, Congress greenlights another $443 to purchase 14 more of the same 2% value added drones which were designed to carry out strike missions in Afghanistan.

Why?

<comment><USER5> Why do you think? Because that's what's on offer by the military contractors who have manufacturing plants in those senator's districts -- so that's what they buy.

Or, if you prefer the faith-in-humanity answer: career politicians don't have an understanding of statistics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's plenty of aviation navigation methods aside from GPS, some of which will fit on a small processor. We've been doing optical/radar terrain map following for decades in cruise missiles for example. There's also inertial, celestial, VOR/NDB/TACAN, ADF and others. A smart navigator will use multiple methods; if one of its methods begins to disagree from the others, it can be downweighted.

<comment><USER7>
      >> inertial, ...

A nice discussion of inertial navigation capability ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752294)):

        Consumer grade MEMS ...are not sufficient for intertial navigation, ...

        At around the $2K-30K you get systems that can
        provide accurate navigation for up to 2 minutes or so.

        Aviation grade IMUs ... maximum horizontal position drift of 1.5km
        in the first hour of operation. These will run 100K and up.

<comment><USER3> One uses inertial systems to cover for disruptions in service of the other systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Harden against attack". You mean "correct defects in design". The phrasing here implies that the state the drones are in is an acceptable one for most situations, just not this one. But it's an unacceptable state for any drones to be spoofable at all.

</comment><comment><USER8> Note that Iran captured a RQ-170 drone back in 2011, possibly using GPS spoofing, so obviously using the encrypted military GPS signal isn't a perfect solution.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incident)

(How did they do it? Who knows. Maybe they jammed the encrypted channel, and spoofed the civilian channel, so when the drone fell back onto the unencrypted channel it was receiving bad navigation information)

<comment><USER9> What strange is, if you read the article, an Iranian engineer claimed that it was GPS spoofing, but the US claims it's primary means of navigation is an inertial navigation system (which seems highly believable given up sketchy GPS can sometimes be).

Plus the Iranians have a video of it smoothly landing at an Iranian airbase (which completely discredits the US's assertions that it crashed, and broke up).

<comment><USER8> IMUs are wildly expensive, and still have quite a lot of drift: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752294)

Certainly the RQ-170 _has_ an IMU, and I could believe it might use it as the primary means of navigation, but it's almost certainly corrected by GPS, which gives you a means of altering the drone's path by GPS spoofing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would be pretty "funny" if all this military hardware coming home results in countermeasures being developed by drug traffickers that ends up back in Afghanistan. These guys probably have a freer hand and more funding to develop those sorts of tools.

</comment><comment><USER11> Time to revive the old joke:

Q: How do you smuggle a nuke into America?

A: Hide it in a bale of mary jane.

</comment><comment><USER12> > _The bad guys on the border have lots of money and what they are putting > money into is into spoofing and jamming GPS systems_

GPS jammer is under $50

<comment><USER9> A unit that can jam my cellphone within a few feet is; jamming an aircraft at altitude is an entirely different class of device (if only for power output reasons).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The use of General Atomics Predators on homeland security as been a complete Fiasco.

</comment><comment><USER14> _" The bad guys" ..._ An unfortunate choice of words. Who are the bad guys in this situation? The drug traffickers? The militarized police force? The politicians supporting prohibition? Probably all of them.

<comment><USER15> Definitely the guys who butcher people and leave them in 55 gallon drums. I'm hardly gonna blame the border patrol for doing their job which is guarding the border.

<comment><USER16> Guarding the border against an import industry that is worth billions of dollars and is illegal because our political system is beholden to retrograde moralizing.

<comment><USER17> >> "...beholden to retrograde moralizing."

I wish that was the only reason for the drug war, but moralizing is probably a relatively minor factor. I claim the bigger reasons are:

1) The prison-industrial complex is large and politically powerful, and it needs drug "criminals"

2) Many recreational drugs make the working populace less productive. They'd be blowing lines of coke and screwing each other all day or giggling at Spongebob after smoking a bowl instead of diligently churning out more boxes at the packing plant. Drugs that make you more productive are perfectly legal and widely prescribed (Adderall etc).

3) Many popular drugs are easily produced at home in quantities appropriate for individual use. You can trivially grow enough weed at home to support a serious habit. The man hates that and prefers drugs that are only amenable to production on a vast industrial scale, such that monopoly, taxation, and centralized control of production are easy. Tobacco and the aforementioned psychostimulants are the _ne plus ultra_ industrial-only drugs; it's no cooincidence that they're quite legal.

<comment><USER18> I'm all for ending the horrible consequences of prohibition, but people often ignore or gloss over that a lot of the war on drugs was requested by poor communities who had to deal with the consequences of high levels of drug use. When you're poor and can't move elsewhere, you turn to the police to get the heroin junkies off your front lawn or out of your apartment complex hallways. Which is too bad because it is really a job for social workers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "military-grade encryption" lol

</comment><comment><USER20> This is silly.</comment>


Sen. Hill proposes legislation to open Martin's Beach - <AUTHOR> http://m.hmbreview.com/mobile/news/sen-hill-proposes-legislation-to-open-martin-s-beach/article_9d88f726-8ecf-11e3-8e20-0019bb2963f4.html Seeking to answer the public-access quandary at Martin's Beach once and for all, state Sen. Jerry Hill plans to introduce legislation next week that could use the government's powers of eminent domain to claim a private road to the secluded coastal spot. The proposed legislation would order the State Lands Commission next year to seek negotiations to purchase the private road from billionaire owner Vinod Khosla. If no deal can be reached by the start of 2016, Hill's legislation would order the state commission to seize the road from Khosla using its eminent domain privileges. <comment><AUTHOR> "Seeking to answer the public-access quandary at Martin's Beach once and for all, state Sen. Jerry Hill plans to introduce legislation next week that could use the government's powers of eminent domain to claim a private road to the secluded coastal spot.

The proposed legislation would order the State Lands Commission next year to seek negotiations to purchase the private road from billionaire owner Vinod Khosla. If no deal can be reached by the start of 2016, Hill's legislation would order the state commission to seize the road from Khosla using its eminent domain privileges."</comment>


'Homer' using just CSS3 - <AUTHOR> http://liveweave.com/95k708 'Homer' created using just CSS3, no images or JavaScript <comment><USER2> Amazing, very polished. It also blinks ;)</comment>


Please check out our side project, OhLife (from MeetingMix, YC S08) - <AUTHOR> http://ohlife.com/

<comment><USER2> Quick first glance feedback on the page, take it or leave it:

a) "the easiest way to" lowercase start and then "Write your life story" uppercase start. Seems weird to me. The other way around or both uppercase.

b) Top bar seems empty, maybe an actual logo (that adds some other color/shade) would chance that.

c) "See an example" needs no-Javascript fallback. I assumed a video behind it. Pleasant surprise to see something that finally showed me what it is all about. I strongly suggest not hiding that. It is below the break for me and adds a lot.

d) Ned Flanders takes away the credibility and earnesty the page build up so far. Bad!

e) "private, secure, & friendlier", the comma after secure seems out of place to me. I am not an english native but from what I know it would be more normal without it. "friendlier" is not a word, is it? Also, how is it secure if you do not tell me how you actually secure it (both for normalos and hackers please)...?

f) entry is a bad empty word. I guess you already tried to find a better one. Can't think of one myself. :-(

g) "a personal journal that you'll love to use" = you love the journal

"why you'll love us" = you love the company

h) "Oh snap, remember this?" same as Ned, does not fit the otherwise very noble theme at all.

i) The open book has a weird shape. Does not feel right to me. Maybe if it was taller?

x) No privacy policy (as a techie "only you can see your entries" screams for encryption against YOU (and/or hackers, this is important)), no contact, no nothing to make it human.

y) Privacy tainted by Google Analytics.

<comment><USER3> Re: e) (This is purely my personal opinion, but …) Anyone who uses the serial comma [1] must be seriously insane. How can you? Doesn't your brain explode? (Calm down, calm down … [2] … there, better.)

Friendlier is indeed a word, the comparative of friendly.

Amazing idea, by the way, beautifully executed and immediately captured my imagination.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma>

[2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_i1xk07o4g>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I notice that a huge part of my daily life is recorded in email conversations with other people -- it would be cool if I could forward a conversation to email@example.com and it would automatically make it a part of my journal and make it aesthetically pleasing at the same time.

Great job on the execution of this app. I have talked to others who have had this same idea, but their execution was ugly/unexcting/etc. This is clean and simple.

<comment><USER5> Taking your thought a step further, let's also save the comments you make on others' blogs and bring them into your journal/blog as well.

At the end of the day, I don't need another blog or a slight variation on blogging technology. I need something that basically blogs for me. If I can add value to my site by adding comments like this one to other people's sites (then pressing this "magic" button (maybe a bookmarket?) to automatically save it as part of my blog), that'd be pure awesomeness.

Beyond saving boatloads of time for everyone who used it, it would create a more connected blogosphere by allowing people to link their commenter accounts (like HN, Reddit, etc) to their primary blog...effectively giving people more ownership over the things they write on others blogs, increasing author recognition, etc.

<comment><USER6> _I need something that basically blogs for me._

Tumblr is pretty close to doing this, but the problem is its just context-free noise. It's echoes from a very, very noisy set of interactions that you perform. I had a Tumblr blog that harvested photos, blog posts, Twitter, last.fm etc etc. and it all meant absolutely nothing.

This isn't really blogging, it's journaling. Writing a diary is supposed to be therapeutic because you're writing down the things you dare not talk about with others (maybe not even your SO). It's not about what you do, it's about how you feel.

That's why I would like to see encryption mentioned somewhere, and pushed hard. I wrote one entry to see how it works, but I'm going to disable the notifications until I know that my personal outpourings are not actually being read by others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN - we made this in our spare time, just because it was something we wanted to use. When we told some friends about the idea though they wanted to use it too, so we decided to release it. Many thanks for checking it out.

<comment><USER7> I love the idea. Love it. Like, really excited. However, I'm not prepared to use a service like this in a hosted environment. Too many risks: you go out of business, security, privacy, etc. Plus the information just feels to personal to be sitting on someone else's server. I would love to see a quick daily prompt like this added to Macjournal or similar software.

<comment><USER7> That said, I'm sure there is a target market out there who will be more than willing to use the product in its current format. I'm looking forward to seeing where this idea goes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Accept PGP-encrypted mail seamlessly and you won't need a privacy policy except for those who like throwing their lifelog at random strangers. Be sure to use PGP/MIME to include the old message in your mailing.

Of course, setting up PGP, let alone remembering the passphrase (gasp) is a lot to ask of the typical user who needs to use his mail client as a text editor.

Otherwise, it's a cute idea, really. Please excuse cynicism.

</comment><comment><USER9> The design is beautiful, but why would I use this over WriteRoom? For years now, I've been writing at least 500 words in WriteRoom every single weekday, and I'm closing in on a year of doing it (and a bunch of other habits) without missing a single day. It's not that hard, I know I'll probably never lose my entries (time machine + dropbox backups), and my privacy is more assured. I'm just not sure I see the advantage here...

<comment><USER10> Writeroom + timemachine + dropbox. I don't think you're the target market :)

<comment><USER9> Touché. Can't believe I didn't stop to think about this :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No privacy policy is a no go for me.

<comment><USER12> I have never read a privacy policy, EVER. Am I missing something good?

If they violate their own privacy policy do I have legal recourse?

And is it even possible to write a privacy policy without loopholes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> First of all, fantastic design!

Is there any way to export posts - for example, if I wanted to share them with a significant other or another family member?

Also, and this is mainly curiosity, how do you handle sending posts from the past for the first few days where there really isn't much history?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

We don't have export yet, but we've definitely wanted to share some of our entries with close friends and family too. We'll be brainstorming around this!

Regarding past history: For your first week, we just send you your entry from the previous day. After you've been using it for a week though, and some history has built up, we'll show you entries from a week ago (and then a month ago, etc.).

Thanks for checking it out - really appreciate it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It'd be nice to have some export feature. After few months, if I will use this, you are going to have quite a lot of entries from me, and all of them are important to me, I don't want to lose them, so I'd like to be able to easily make backups to my own computer.

</comment><comment><USER15> Pardon my French but; fucking beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER16> I like it, and I signed up. I don't want to get emailed at 8pm -- that's after my internet cutoff, so I faked a timezone. But, it would be nice to just choose a time.

Also, who did your webdesign? I like it!

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll be adding the ability to change when the email is sent, and it should be out by next week. Clever workaround though!

And thanks for the design compliment! We did it all in-house, so we really appreciate the kind words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is really cool. I'm curious if _you_ can read the entries?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words! We're currently working on encrypting the entries - this is an MVP and we initially wanted to see if people like the idea.

<comment><USER18> It does say on the home page that "Only you can see your entries." If they are not currently encrypted, that would seem to be untrue.

<comment><USER19> Even if they do encrypt it, they will have to be able to decrypt them server side to send you your month old posts. That means the owners are technically capable of also reading all of your posts.

<comment><USER20> That's not entirely true. If this were purely a web-accessible blog, there's no reason you couldn't encrypt/decrypt this in the client (sending and storing encrypted text). You'd have to throw out email posting in that case though.

<comment><USER21> I think you're on to something. I look forward to the day when we are shocked by unencrypted private data accessible on the server as we do un-hashed passwords.

<comment><USER22> There are a number of online password stores where all the information is only decrypted on the client. Nothing new, just not widespread. Can't remember the name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> OhLife is one of the few apps that I use every day. If you've ever tried to keep a journal or any kind of organized daily log, I highly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm going to try to call this one now: my gut instinct says this will be a huge success. Hopefully I remember to check back a few months down the line to see how my prediction faired.

Great work guys!

Edit: I just noticed lists I email don't get formatted correctly. It's slightly annoying for such an otherwise beautifully designed layout.

</comment><comment><USER25> There is a typo in the url at the end of the How did your day go? email. Should be ohlife.com/today, not ohlife.come/today

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the heads up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> How exactly is this service better than, say, a simple text file on my own machine with a daily reminder set up through some other means?

Why would I want to use some third-party website for something so simple that I might as well do it myself? I can see some pretty annoying downsides (need to have a crypto layer because I don't want you to be able to read my journal, need to export regularly the data to my own computer because I don't want you to be able to lose my journal), but no real advantages (it's not even more convenient!).

In any case, I believe that the two following statements, at least, are plain wrong:

\- "The easiest way to write your life story": no, the easiest way is to fire up a text editor and start writing.

\- "Only you can see your entries": should read "Only you and us can see your entries".

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm not really sure I would use this. However, I really love the website design.. It's so clean. The colors are nice. The forms are simple. Maybe a little video would be nice on the frontpage.

</comment><comment><USER28> You wanna drop that ned flander out, not everyone know him

</comment><comment><USER29> I like it. Many times I've wanted to start a journal, just to record memories, but I detest writing. This makes it feel easy. We'll see how it goes.

</comment><comment><USER8> In reaction to the fact that I adore the idea despite the fundamental privacy problem (see earlier comment), here is my spin on the theme in the form of two really simple Unix shell scripts. :)

<http://www.khjk.org/log/2010/jul/journal.html>

Thank you for the inspiration!

</comment><comment><USER30> Really like the simplicity of the idea and clean look of the site. Already replied to the welcome message - waiting for it to post to the site.

I like the daily emails as I don't visit too many sites daily, apart from HN and Gmail. This will be an easy way to log all that I'm up to. I'm not sure how regularly I'll do this, but time will tell.

</comment><comment><USER31> great now I have des'ray in my head.

interesting idea... I'll give it a go for a while until someone realises I email myself everyday. Does it get angry if I don't reply?

mini feedback on home page: The 'see example' link needs to scroll the page down for me, I didn't spot the page grow and was waiting for it to load.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think the vertical spacing between the various components is too much. If you could move things up a bit it would work real well. The colors, fonts, and graphics are very soothing and welcoming. I just didn't expect to scroll down so much.

</comment><comment><USER33> I know your homepage says that all your posts are private, however, adding a privacy policy page which outlines that in legal speak would probably be good idea.

Otherwise, this looks great, and I'm looking forward to using it!

<comment><USER34> Yes, please! Tell me in no uncertain terms you will not give away, sell, or crawl my data.

I will then use it as a personal journal for work purposes. Perfect for filling out during the morning with a cup of coffee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Love the design. I just signed up. Can't wait to see how well it'll help me keep a journal.

One thing I noticed: on the login page can you make pressing tab in the login box go directly to the password input box?

</comment><comment><USER36> Pleasing, private posterous?

<comment><USER37> That is what I was also thinking. You could do that on Posterous with privacy on, you can also attach files to the email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Once you have a few entries here, we recommend printing them out, sitting by a fireplace, and reading them in Morgan Freeman's voice: "

Like a twinkie, like a twinkie.

</comment><comment><USER38> Ok, nice enough, but why would I mail my private thoughts to the cloud? Writing a small script that mails a random email by me to myself should be easy enough.

</comment><comment><USER39> Well done, great concept and already I see a practical use for it in my life (tracking a new fitness program)

Thanks guys

</comment><comment><USER40> Love the idea. Good work fellas

</comment><comment><USER41> Very cool. Does that mean YC has a vested interest in your side project?

</comment><comment><USER42> May I ask how this is different from, say, private wordpress.com blogs?

<comment><USER17> I think they clearly articulate this on the home page</comment></comment>


Facebook's Seventh Employee Shares Lessons Learned - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/qa-with-kevin-colleran-2012-4

<comment><USER2> "I've realized that it takes the product visionary to be the leader. It's not the entrepreneur who has the business background to just plan an idea. If I had been in Mark's shoes throughout the Facebook experience I would have made a lot of by-the-book decisions that would have been the wrong decisions for the company."</comment>


Is Uber Necessary in NYC? - <AUTHOR>

Is Uber really a sustainable business in NYC?  I agree that it makes tons of sense in San Fran where cabs are about as hard to find as a sober person in the Haight, but to me it seems like there are plenty of cabs in the Big Apple.  Thoughts? <comment><USER2> <http://www.uber.com/learn>

It seems WAY more expensive than regular cabs (even livery taxis), not more convenient than livery taxis, and most importantly, as you mentioned, it's not really hard to get a cab in Manhattan.

I could possibly see it working in Brooklyn and Queens, but I don't see any difference in the service they offer compare to the livery companies, so it would just be another competitor in a saturated market.

Maybe I'm just missing their edge, but as a New Yorker and a techie I'd seem myself as their prime audience and can't imagine wanting to use it.</comment>


Interactively Explore 120M Flight Records with GPUs - <AUTHOR> http://www.mapd.com/blog/2016/04/21/flying-through-flights-data-with-mapd/ <comment><USER2> The demo is nice. The other thing is that a mapd server with 8 nvidia k40s for 3000 dollars each costs around 30000 (with CPU and main memory). For 30000 you can also buy a 4 socket server with a terabyte of main memory. Even though the GPUs can access their 300gb of memory much faster and have more cores, that won't help you because database workloads (filtering, grouping, joining) is not compute-intensive enough to give the GPU an advantage over CPU cores.

My bet is that a main memory database optimized for modern CPUs will do better on even larger datasets at the same server costs.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. The demo is running off of the equivalent of a single K40. We can use 8 K80s to scale to billions of records with the same response time in milliseconds.

And database workloads are often heavily memory bound so the terabytes per second of memory bandwidth you can get on a GPU server can give you a huge speed up, and of course you have the prodigious compute power of the GPUs on tap if needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Has anyone actually been able to contact MapD? I've emailed, called, and left voicemails without any response. I'm not sure what is going on, but it's strange for a potential customer to have such difficulty getting in touch with sales.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're very sorry to hear that - did you email info at mapd dot com or sales at mapd dot com?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Aloha Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines data seems odd - thousands of negative delays?

<comment><USER5> Most of their inter-island flights are every hour all day and I wouldn't be surprised if they take off early if they have all the passengers on-board.

<comment><USER6> Bingo! I commuted weekly for years and that's exactly right. Island style departures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sounds like a fun dataset to play around with. I'll have to go look for it.

</comment><comment><USER8> The whitepaper link doesn't work for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> We tried and it seemed to be working fine. Please email us at info at mapd dot com and we'll make sure to send you one. Also would be good to know what steps you went through so we can fix if necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The demo is broken :/

<comment><AUTHOR> It looks to be working ok for us. Can you let us know what browser you are using?</comment></comment>