Why Your Parents Fear Technology - <AUTHOR> http://bennesvig.com/2011/12/08/why-your-parents-fear-technology/

<comment><USER2> While I am sure that mindset of the [older] users has something to do with it, I do think that a failure of design is also an important factor.

As eyes loose the ability to focus on small fonts and fingers get less nimble, things like cell phones are a pain in the ass to use. As far as I know, no mobile phone designs have ever successfully addressed the needs of older people. They all pretty much suck to use if you're older than ~70.</comment>


Ask HN: Why did you choose to have children? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> Notice that most of the comments here are describing _post-hoc_ how having children has been fulfilling/great/worth it. Which isn't really the question - it's _not_ asking if having children was a good move in retrospect.

It's interesting that most people's minds go there. I've had this happen myself after having a son - the original "why" almost doesn't matter or rather gets overshadowed by all the other parts of it (for most people, a deep sense of purpose and fulfillment).

To actually answer the question, my partner and I came to a place where our relationship was great, jobs were great, etc - but we felt a certain "is this it?". Sure, being DINKS is a nice life, lots of travel, easy, etc. But... hmmmmmm... is this it? Amuse ourselves until we die? Stay clean and simple, have fun, work hard... hmmmmmm....

Meanwhile there was a quiet impulse in the background beckoning towards _creating_ something out of our relationship / position. It's hard to describe. Obviously biology is playing a role here. But what a wonderful chaotic creative thing, two different people coming together and making a third person.

So we had a vague sense of all that. And decided to go for it. As many other people have said in this thread, your life changes immediately and irrevocably when kids arrive, but for us it's been pure joy. Lots of chaos too.

My wife remarks that she didn't realize what a big hole was in her life before becoming a mother. That's maybe the best way to describe it. We had a sense that there was a hole in our lives, or something that would grow into a big hole if we didn't have kids.

<comment><USER4> DINK life is nice until your social circle is filled with people with kids. You can hang with younger couples, sure, but it wears out fast. The opportunities to hang with people your own age at some regular frequency greatly diminishes (cuz they are tired and have to deal with kids). There is nothing wrong with this - you can splurge on travel and self-development, retire way earlier, or what have you; totally fine and rewarding. It comes down to what you value (I like playing sports and video games with my son more than hanging out with grownups).

<comment><USER5> Just hang out with people that have kids. Better yet bring the people with kids dinner or something, they will like the change of pace especially with young children. I will probably end up doing this myself, as I have significant anxiety and depression which made having kids a no-go.

<comment><USER4> yeah, that's fine. I was just saying it's gonna happen way less than you think. Kids have routines, are picky, need attention, and parents can't always tolerate guests often because of that. Every family is different though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Edit: Before you downvote read the paragraph at the end please.

True story: I didn't want kids. I knew I was selfish and didn't want to ruin kids. But one day I pondered Psalm 127:3-5. I reasoned that if God called children a blessing then who am I to call Him a liar?

I'm glad I believed that promise. It's not been what I feared at all.

Those verses say:

Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one's youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them! He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate. (ESV)

Hey downvoters: You don't have to agree with my reasons. The OP asked why and I answered. Be a little open minded would you?

<comment><USER7> Upvoted you. People here tend to be intolerant of any religious opinion.

Edit: I'm a believer and desperately don't want children. Dunno whether this is an inconsistency in my faith or just how I'm built. This whole thread is a little maddening to me because I wish people would stop making new people, but everyone seems so happy doing it :)

<comment><USER6> I also study Permaculture, which is a science of study of the environment.

There is a paradox discussed in Permaculture: "The problem becomes the solution." Applying that to the population numbers, we may actually not have /enough/ people.

The problem of too many people becomes the solution: Get enough people acting rightly and many other problems get solved. Some Permaculturists believe the earth has the capacity for fifty billion people; it's just that current resources are so poorly managed. We may not have enough people to solve so many of the world's pressing problems.

The alternative is to treat people like weeds. But we need a path of love, not fear.

<comment><USER7> Fwiw, I didn't mean to imply that my wish that people stop making more people was due to fears of overpopulation. (We have so much empty space left! And new technologies to discover, and so on.) Rather, it's based on my own desire to not exist.

<comment><USER6> Oh, that was unexpected. The objections I've heard thus far have been about overpopulation. Tell me more about that.

<comment><USER7> It's ok, other powers at work here. The lady who I likely would be married to had I wanted children was into permaculture, so I take the unlikely turn of conversation as a little dig from Him.

> Tell me more about that.

Groaning at discussing personal stuff on HN, but here goes: I don't enjoy life or find it rewarding. I'd likely have killed myself a long time ago but don't because my life is not my own (bought with a price and so on). So how could I possibly want to create more people?

I have many philosophical arguments against creating children as well, such as violating the agency of the unborn by forcing them into existence, or considering the generations of suffering and death (and damnation of some?) caused by creating children, who will have more children, ad infinitum.

But none of that matters because God has a plan and it'll all make sense someday (after I die). So I (im?)patiently await that day.

<comment><USER6> Feel free to ping me offline if you want to continue the conversation. You can even edit your comment and remove the personal stuff if you want :-) Address: Slow Bro 904 at Gmail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't have kids yet, but my partner is pregnant now. I know I have wanted kids for a while, but I think it really kicked in in the last year. I have thought about why we both kind of felt that way. My best guess is that I have reached a point in my life and career where I can recognize that my utility to the world has peaked essentially.

In maybe a non-sensical way, it seems like having children is my best remaining contribution to the world. Maybe I can make a slightly better version of myself and teach him how to be a better person than I was. Otherwise, it seems like what I have learned and all the knowledge I have accumulated will essentially be wasted. What was the entire point after all? If I don't pass down all of the things I have learned, then what was really the point to ever learning it or experiencing it? And I am not talking about things you can learn from a book, I mean the lessons of life experiences.

Not sure if that is a great reason, or even if it is really the reason. Just my guess from introspection on it. Why is it that I felt now was really the time?

<comment><USER9> By your logic, wouldn't adopting be a better way to help the world? You would still be able to pass on your knowledge and attempt to create a better version of yourself, but you wouldn't be producing yet another person straining the resources of the world. Not to mention the massive value added to the life of your adopted child.

<comment><USER10> Do you really consider having kids and adopting to be interchangeable? I am asking honestly. I think it is hard to raise a kid, and adoption makes it much much harder (opinion based on anecdata)

<comment><USER9> I don't consider them interchangeable. But the thread is about people's reasoning for deciding to have children and so I asked a followup question about a specific reason where I thought for that particular reason, adoption might have been the "superior" option." I understand it's a complicated decision.

That being said, I can definitely see why adopting a "troubled teen" would be more difficult than having your own kid. But is adopting a baby really that much different than having your own?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Neil Postman wrote, "Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see." As a humanist, I don't have invisible gods or an afterlife to comfort me into apathy about the human condition. If I want the world to be a better place, I have to make it so and having children is an important dimension to that.

We've limited ourselves to two because my wife and I are both full-time software developers and we can't handle "being outnumbered" as we like to joke, but raising two boys is a remarkable experience. I've experienced many kinds of love in my life, love for family, romantic love for my wife, but this new kind of love for our children is so powerful and pure. It's so precious, drives me to be a better person for them, and I am so grateful to experience it.

</comment><comment><USER12> We didn't 'choose' \- but having a child was the best accident that ever happened to us.

I had a miserable childhood, and having an awesome and joyous time with our three children has redeemed my hurt - it's part of my memory, but no longer important.

Having kind, wise, and creative children has given me hope for the world that comes after me - and I'm grateful that have the responsibility to raise them.

It's also helped cured many of my neurosis - I don't procrastinate, I set goals, I get up in the morning, I'm not a gloomy pessimist and I'm not at irrationally angry.

And even though children are expensive - I'm richer because I have better character traits.

My kids saved my life by taking my own greed for my own life away from me - <USER2> live for them and my wife. I never knew that existed.

<comment><USER13> Well said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think it's one of those things that's difficult to understand until you actually have them. I don't think I could have conceived of the joy and happiness I would experience having a child before actually having them.

I've got a 9 mo old, and planning to have a couple more. It's a hard to explain feeling of fulfillment and completeness, except one where I didn't realize something was missing until I actually had them. That said I look back to the time when it was just me and my wife and really enjoy those memories too, but those have their place, time and duration and when you have kids you realize that they are something with their own relish that you can enjoy too.

I'm also somewhat superstitious/quasi hippy so I believe kids bring their own karma and destiny into the worlds, which, when interacting with your own life can change it for the better or worse. Not necessarily a reason to have them per se but an observation nonetheless.

Overall it's been an amazing experience. I love coming home to see my little guy, and make him smile which makes me smile in turn. They are amazing little AI machines. And you can't help thinking And helping them become whatever they are meant to become in their fullest actualization.

<comment><USER15> Is there any way you can think of to get a proxy for that feeling without actually having kid? I want to gather more data on whether I want to be a parent, and yet all parents tell me "you won't know until you try it."

What if I try it and don't enjoy being a parent? The cost of a child being stuck with an unhappy parent is too much to risk it.

<comment><USER16> That question shows how far away you are from understanding it.

There is in fact - no other way.

It would prove much harder than you think. It's like describing a color to someone without using the name of the color or pointing to it. Or since you presumably don't have children, it's like trying to describe a color that doesn't exist.

Don't believe the whole dog/cat comparison. That's totally broken.

<comment><USER15> If it's impossible to understand, would it be reasonable to think that it's irresponsible to become a parent? How come we make so many other career and financial decisions with much thought and data, and yet the decision to take on one's biggest responsibility can be made without understanding it at all?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think my wife and I came to the conclusion at the same time. We were a little too infatuated with our cat and found that there was a growing vacuum in our lives that was appearing despite most other things being constant. It was the feeling of wanting to create something. As a subconscious trigger, the nerdy part of me started thinking about getting into AI. One day, we had a very brief discussion in which we agreed to let it happen.

Though it had been difficult at times (twins) and each day is a new challenge for them and for us, we made the right choice. My wife is sitting with them building Lego houses as I type this.

</comment><comment><USER18> I guess most people have children because thats the default? Maybe a better question is "why did you choose not to have children"?

<comment><USER19> Ask HN: Why did you choose not to have children?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510584](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510584)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wasn't really into the idea of having kids but I had one because my wife wanted to and I liked being with my wife. I went completely bonkers for the kid and now want to have as many as possible.

<comment><USER21> This pretty much describes me too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Best choice I ever made.

There is more to life than success, money, and personal ambition (make a difference).

Being a father is the highest form of true selflessness. It's like you transcend even your own desires.

<comment><USER22> That's interesting that you feel that way. I am not trying to diminish your belief. Clearly it is true for you.

However for me, having children is the most profoundly selfish thing I can imagine. Creating another person to give myself fulfillment and purpose. Especially considering how difficult climate change and AI will make life for the next generation or two, I feel morally compelled not to have children.

However, as I said, I recognize your experience is different. It's interesting how different.

<comment><USER16> Do you have children?

What's funny is you even think of having kids through the focus of you, like you could find purpose. That's seriously self involved man. It's not about you.

From a distance drowning looks a lot like swimming. Swimming is fun and enjoyable, where as drowning in a desire for personal fulfillment isn't.

Get in the water (have kids), it may surprise you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I suspect, subconsciously, it's the closest thing we have to immortality. If I have kids and foster a good relationship, I might be remembered after my demise.

<comment><USER24> Now, if you haven't watched coco... I suggest you get on it right away

</comment></comment><comment><USER25>
      I didn't exactly choose to have children. When I was younger, I suffered from a series of highly debilitating health issues (the details of which I will not go into here) and a young woman chose to take advantage of the situation and become impregnated.

      Now, don't get me wrong; I love my children dearly. I did not chose to have them in any normal sense, however.

<comment><USER26> Same post, but readable:

> I didn't exactly choose to have children. When I was younger, I suffered > from a series of highly debilitating health issues (the details of which I > will not go into here) and a young woman chose to take advantage of the > situation and become impregnated.

> Now, don't get me wrong; I love my children dearly. I did not chose to have > them in any normal sense, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I haven't had children yet.

I want to because some of my greatest memories were with my dad. I want to enable someone to experience those feelings, and experience the other side of them as well.

<comment><USER28> I didn't want to because all of my worst memories were with my parents. Now I have a baby I always think about ways I can be a better parent than mine were.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Once you have kids you "cross the vortex" and cannot accurately remember life before them. Even after you have them, you start forgetting the time when they were in a previous phase as they progress. The lack of sleep doesn't help retain the memories.

So we can only share details and justifications about why we enjoy the present state of parenthood. I think one that I come back to a lot is "because somebody did it for me". I.e. I am doing my small part carrying on the human experiment, helping my new humans figure it out in the early stages. There seem to be a number of things in life that you can feel like you understand better now having been personally in charge of cleaning up another human being's poop.

It is a wonderful thing, of course not without stresses and challenges.

</comment><comment><USER30> Duty and support. As a Hindu we believe that it is impossible to pay the debt you are born with to your parents for looking after you and raising you unless you have children yourself. Hence we are bound by duty for society, to parents, ancestors and also for support later in life.

<comment><USER4> what happens to infertile couples? adopt?

<comment><USER30> That's a whole other thing with debt, everything is based on dharma and karma, so if it's your bad karma that you are infertile (for whatever past life reason) then it is the dharma of other people to help you and also for you to seek out other ways. Adoption could be one way the Garuda Purana enlists various alternatives for example for those without kids and who else can do their final rites etc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Kids? Just say no:

[https://aeon.co/essays/having-children-is-not-life- affirming...](https://aeon.co/essays/having-children-is-not-life-affirming- its-immoral)

<comment><USER32> Doesn't this just make the argument that having kids is bad for them? That doesn't affect whether or not it has a positive impact on the lives of the couple.

Also, this assumes that you ascribe to the anti-natalism viewpoint, which to me seems like as much of a thought experiment as nihilism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I didn't plan to have kids, but I then read something that clicked in my head, it was along the lines of "if you don't have any children, your life is like a dead-end road". I had/have several arguments against having children (inevitable death, crazy world, etc), but the dead-end road analogy made me rethink everything; not in a egocentrical way, but made me think of how my life is great and special and how I can give someone else the opportunity to continue it, just like my parents did with me.

</comment><comment><USER34> Simple answer: Because the world is full of stupidity and I wanted to do something about that.

Complex answer: I feel that its important to continue the progress of evolution, and my personal life has been very evolutionary: I've lived on multiple continents, learned a couple of languages, discarded any participation in my native culture, and discovered that ultimately all culture is a lie. Cultures are a lie that persist only in the telling.

I've done a lot of fulfilling things in my life, and I've done quite a few stupid things - I too am full of stupid. I'd quite like the world to be a better place in 10 years, in 20 years, and in 50 years .. and one of the only ways I can feel as if I've contributed to actually pushing things in a positive direction is to have children, teach them the lessons I've learned, and let them loose on the world. Some would consider this an egotistical, arrogant, narcissistic point of view, but I do believe my children will bring something to the world that wasn't there before. At least, that is the hope.

And amongst all the crazy chaos and stupidity, when I think about what really gives me tangible hope, its children. Whether my own, or other children, the experience of witnessing a child learning something I've come to take for granted, and instantly pushing my own understanding beyond the curve with a simple comment or two that I would never have considered, has been enough to motivate me.

Children are hope, manifest.

Without hope, all is lost.

</comment><comment><USER35> From an Asian perspective, children are a pension scheme and insurance policy. It's a child's duty to support their parents on their old age.

My mother in law is semi paralyzed, and we support her. But it's hard because my wife is an only child.

Also due to this cultural setting, there are few old folks homes, whether government or private. Some are run strictly too where an old person can't play with their phones at night, etc.

There's the Asian businessman aspect too - a father builds a legacy, and the children take the business the father has established and expands it. It's a fantasy, especially for those born with less of an advantage, who are ambitious but want to pave the way for their children to live out those ambitions.

From a religious perspective, a pious child will pray for their parents and keep them out of hell. So it's an afterlife investment as well.

Materialism aside, children are fun. They're cute. On a rough day at work, it's nice to have someone miss you.

They're nice to have around the house and nice to share the home with. What's the point of becoming rich without someone to share it with? The spouse only lives for so long. You need someone to be with in your 90s, someone to visit you when all your friends are dead.

</comment><comment><USER36> Spent a large portion of my life devoted to making things, programming being a great career for anyone with that compulsion. But nothing was quite as astonishing as the idea of making a person, and more than that, creating brand new _love_ out of nowhere, at a time in your life where it's possible to think the amount of love in your life has plateaued.

There were other, worse reasons - at the time I felt like (vaguely) intelligent people had an Idiocracy-style responsibility to try and make more clever people, which isn't a point of view I like at all, looking back. However, I _do_ think the world needs more _compassionate_ people, which I think we've so far achieved. I also had a strong belief that I wanted to do a better job than _my_ father, which isn't a particularly good reason to have kids, but there you go.

It's a funny, difficult decision really. It's a very big commitment for an introvert to make - I don't think there's a lot of advice out there for geeks looking to procreate, who value their 'me' time very highly. And more generally people don't talk about the negatives, which leads new parents to doubt themselves when they hit the many, many rocky bits. There's a balance of _wanting_ to have kids (perhaps for unfulfilled emotional needs), and thinking you _should_ have kids that I suspect is impossible to get right.

Whether there's a good decision procedure to know if you'd be a good or happy parent, I have no idea. If you think about everything you've ever seen a person close to you do, good or bad, and imagine all those behaviours crammed down into a frenetic 12 hours, every day, for a very long time, does that seem fun to you?

</comment><comment><USER37> * In a stable relationship

* Because I thought I could be a good dad

* Because I thought I had enough education and would enjoy teaching a mini person

* Selfishly, assuming you do a decent job, you'll have someone to help when you're older. Not as a carer but someone who can take major decisions on your behalf

* Because the world needs more scientists and I figured I could brainwash a new one

</comment><comment><USER38> Context: My wife and I are software devs (C# / Java, Groovy, Pyhton, R), we chosen to have a kid at the end of 2014 after living in some countries together for 5 years, in 2016 we welcomed our first child. The first reason was that we considered our relationship strong enough to give an opportunity to a human being to be raised in a love home. We are very different from each other but always we try to solve our differences with several conversations, so we thought that a child raised with the ideas of diversity, dialogue, fun and social compromise will be a good way to improve the world. We are also considering to adopt in the future. The last reason was personal and cultural, in my family I am the only brother that decided to have children and I love the idea of teach alongside with my parents some of the important lessons that I learned from them.

</comment><comment><USER39> I was and am in the best relationship of my life and she asked. Can't say I agreed without trepidation as I've not been around young kids since I was one but it felt right. I think it was one of the best decisions of my life. A hell of a lot of work that isn't always very fun but ultimately the most rewarding adventure.

</comment><comment><USER40> We wanted children but were putting it off, actually I was putting it off with the excuse that we had to get in a more stable financial situation. That was just an excuse, the reason was immaturity on my part. I wasn't ready yet.

Got a well-paying job, there were no longer any obstacles that could be used to rationalize, so with some apprehension we decided it was the right time to try. After a few months she was pregnant. Our son was born 6 years ago, I was 27 at the time. We also have a daughter now.

It hasn't been easy, we don't rely on family or outside help to raise them, mostly, and there are other things you simply can't predict. But such is life. No regrets, life is much richer than before. Children add a new dimension to life.

All the delays before we finally committed to having children seem so pointless in retrospect. We were just putting off moving on in life.

</comment><comment><USER41> I doubt anyone chooses to have children in the sense you are thinking. The biological urge and societal pressure is so huge it is almost always a question of when not if.

Can I suggest a better question would be "why did you choose to have _more_ children?" And did the reasoning change from n+1 to n+2 ...

</comment><comment><USER42> We didn't so much 'choose to have children', we just chose not to abstain from having children. We did choose to have sex and from sex you can get children. There are all sorts of things you can do to try to keep them from being conceived but they are generally boring, unhealthy, tedious, unpleasant or a combination of those.

As to why we did not choose to abstain from having children - which in my opinion would be the real choice to make given that having children is the normal result of two healthy people of fertile age and opposite sex having intercourse - I can but say that I wouldn't be here to argue this point if my parents had made the choice to abstain from having children. I quite like being here. This might sound trivial but it really isn't, just give it some thought.

</comment><comment><USER43> We had a health scare that led us to accelerate our timeline (we had always planned to have kids). My wife and I had our first kid at 30, second at 33. The trend these days is definitely to wait till much later, but I can say that I look forward to having the kids fully grown and on their own when I am in my early 50's as opposed to my 60's.

That said as my Dad always said, there is no convenient time to have kids, which couldn't be more true.

Having kids is an amazing journey, but not for everyone. I totally respect people who choose not to have kids. With kids, at different times you will think it is the best and worst decision you've ever made. Lots of highs and lows. But ultimately it is very gratifying and helps you to better see the world beyond yourself.

</comment><comment><USER44> Context: First child is due in two months and a day.

I always assumed I wouldn't have kids, because I just never wanted to. And then my brother had a kid, and I met someone who I thought I could actually be a decent co-parent with, and the combination made me think it was totally doable.

On top of that, I read about a longevity study which showed that connections in old age are the biggest correlation to happiness. And when I imagined myself aged 70 with kids, and aged 70 without kids, the first one made me feel a lot happier.

I'm totally aware that having kids tends to cause a dip in happiness to start with, but I'm fairly confident that I'll feel a lot happier, and better about my place in the world, with children than I would without.

</comment><comment><USER45> Tone: deliberately somewhat inflammatory, in the hopes of sparking a discussion; this is in addition to all the "standard" reasons people give.

Because most traits, including IQ and conscientiousness, are strongly heritable, and therefore assortative mating + smart-people-not-having-kids is one of the worst large-scale social dynamics happening today. Because people who deliberately choose not to have kids when they are otherwise capable (financially, mentally, physically) are free-riding on the hard work of everyone else.

<comment><USER46> Seems to me it's the people that have kids that generally free ride on society, not the other way around (not that there's anything wrong with that). Also, it's incredibly authoritative to expect people who are capable to have kids. Romania tried that in the 70s and 80s with Ceauseascu banning all contraception. Well the people gave him the only Christmas gift a person who bans contraceptives ever deserves: execution. That was the greatest Christmas in Romanian history.

<comment><USER47> There are other ways to influence this. The biggest problem society can face in this regard is _unsupported_ children. No snobbery here but this is a problem we can throw money at. Better schools, better class sizes, free school meals to combat malnutrition, adult education to fight multi-generational unemployment.

Middle class families are already doing their bit here. Additional income taxes on DINKs (via higher base rates and breaks for supported children) could really help the next generation of lower class children, and therefore society as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Because every ancestor of mine has made the decision to do it, and it is astoundingly presumptuous of me to think that if I have the opportunity to raise kids well that I shouldn't follow their lead.

Another way to put it: if my offspring keep the strain alive, maybe my genetic code will live to see the end of history.

I now have two kids, and the thing that will overwhelm me with emotion is the fact that I brought into the world beings that will both suffer and die. But I never blame my parents for doing the same.

</comment><comment><USER49> The condom broke.

</comment><comment><USER50> Partner expecting 6th in May. I'd look at it the other way round, does anyone who has children ever regret it? Personally, like the vast majority, not for a second.

<comment><USER51> Is that true though? It's very socially unacceptable to publicly admit you regret having kids, not to mention very damaging for the child if they found out. There have been anonymous forums (Reddit AMAs come to mind) where people have admitted they regret having kids.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Through college and my late 20s, I wasn't interested in having children. When I got married 5 years ago, I was happy just learning to live in marriage. About a year in, we started talking about what we saw in the future. Over many conversations, discussions of our financial situation, family medical histories, and feelings, we decided that we both saw our family growing beyond two people. It just felt like the natural next move.

</comment><comment><USER53> I have wanted to have kids since I was ten. I am in the process of having them as early as I can and will have as many as I can afford or until my wife loses interest. The main bottleneck is finding the right person for you, with shared values and overlapping timelines. Once you have that, and you want to have kids, why wait? Why have success, if not to share it?

I wanted to have kids to get fulfillment from the mentorship and difficulty. I like to be behind the scenes, helping other people find success and fulfillment, and primarily just providing a platform for them. I like to do it on a small scale, with big impact. I like to pay for things for the people I care about and watch them become independent of me. All of those things I learned relatively early on and led back to the pattern of paternalism and altruism in parenting. So I think I had the drive before I identified it as kid-having.

I am not surprised at all that a lot of people are choosing not to have kids. Many people seem disinterested in it and that to me leads to lose-lose situations between the parents and kids. Many divorces seem to be based on the fact that they only got married in the first place because of an accidental child and then tried to do the "honourable" thing. If you don't want to have kids, don't try to make yourself, just live somewhere where that is normal and OK.

As a person, I tend to find meaning in a few select activities. I like work, I work a lot, I enjoy it intrinsically and deeply. I always felt I would find meaning in kids in a way equivalent or more so than I do in work. I find no meaning in most friendships, institutions, "changing the world", cultural traditions, status, etc. I just care about learning, working and having a big impact on a small group of people around me (ie. family).

I think most people these days are too cautious when it comes to having kids though. You really don't need to both have six figure incomes, own a house and be in your mid-to-late thirties to be "ready". I think that culture is shifting back though, as people who wait until too late have more fertility issues and find it very tiring to keep up with the kids. It takes a village to raise a child, you can't replace the village with two rich middle aged people, that seems to just be a recipe for more misery than people who do it sooner.

I would choose this again 100%. I would always advise people, if you want to have kids, and your partner doesn't, find someone who does because those feelings don't go away. If you don't want to have kids, really really work to avoid having kids, because feeling like a victim combined with this process must be the definition of hell. It's not something you can be non-committal about. It's, do I want to be all in on this, or not, one must decide.

<comment><USER54> > I think most people these days are too cautious when it comes to having kids > though.

I was talking with a woman just this morning about her kids, one starting having kids at 13 and has 8 now and the other is 14, stays out till 3am (when she comes home at all) and is probably on the fast track to becoming a baby making machine.

I think a lot of people are entirely not cautious enough when it comes to having children.

<comment><USER55> The people who need to be cautious tend not to be, and vice versa.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> For me it was this simple: Because you can cross everything off your bucket list—climb the highest mountains, sail across the ocean, become rich and famous, whatever—but you'll forever miss out on countless other milestones and experiences if you never raise a child. IMHO, a bucket list that doesn't include kids will always be a bucket list that is half empty.

</comment><comment><USER57> We didn't choose, we just didn't prevent.

However, the impact was much greater than we had imagined. The sense of responsibility increased my work efficiency (income) at least five fold, the affection bound us all together like nothing else ever did before, and brought out the parental qualities I never thought I had inside me.

...and after two years, the second one is on the way... :)

</comment><comment><USER58> If I'm being totally honest - probably a combination of "biological imperative" and "cultural values".

I wouldn't change it for the world, but it's not like we sat down and did an exhaustive analysis of the impact that it would have on our lives before we made the decision. We both wanted kids, so we had them. QED.

</comment><comment><USER59> The "choice" to have children is the lizard part of the brain at the task its been optimized for the last 500 million years, reproducing.

Some people try to rationalize the choice, but it is a primal driving force. It can also been seen as the desire to have sex. Although in some configurations there are less than optimal results.

<comment><USER59> That being said, I have found the process to be the most fulfilling of my life. It has helped that we have made enough money to keep us comfortable and allow our children to attend private schools, daycare, etc.

There is a balance, many of my sons don't really have a relationship with their fathers. Seems to be less of an issue with my daughters friends. I suspect I could have a much larger net worth if I had worked more. But I am glad I made the choice of spending as much time with my kids as I could.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Everything is awesome except the sex which only happens about once a month and half the time results in... dissatisfaction, so I'm on the fence when it comes to such a massive commitment, but leaving her would close to kill me so... Maybe it doesn't matter since sex seems to take a massive backseat after the kids show up?

<comment><USER58> For me, I wouldn't say that it takes a backseat, so much as that _everything_ takes a backseat due to the immediacy of the needs of young children.

I think one of the important things you can do to build a lasting marriage is to make sure you put your spouse ahead of your children on a regular basis, even just in small ways. You have to maintain the intimacy in your relationship even when it's not easy to do so. There's nothing wrong with locking the bedroom door once in a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> For me it was a sense of obligation which was brought home after reading this in the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins: No doubt some of your cousins and great-uncles died in childhood, but not a single one of your ancestors did. Jerry Seinfeld then cemented my fate with "Don't break the chain".

</comment><comment><USER62> I choose to have kids because I wanted to see the world through their eyes, it is like getting to both re-watch the world and see it through new eyes all at the same time. And, better yet I get to play along, learn, and just be amazed. I love it :).

This is also a reason why I got married, although under some other reasons.

</comment><comment><USER63> I met the right person at the right moment in my life. Before that I didn't want to procreate at all. It was not thought through, it suddenly just felt like the right thing to do. Have not regretted that decision for a single day of my life.

</comment><comment><USER64> Are there any women in this thread? As a male, would love to know more about the female perspective.

</comment><comment><USER65> Life finds a way</comment>


Ask HN: At what point do you think about branding? - <AUTHOR>

I'm wondering at what point as a company that you start to think about branding? Do you incorporate first and then work out logo, letterheads etc once your product / service is up and running? <comment><USER2> It really depends on multiple factors - is the company service or product oriented?

Product companies generally tightly associate the brand of their product with themselves in the beginning.

Service oriented companies generally focus more on their mission first.

The mission: What your business objectives are within a reasonable time period usually with an associated timeline.

The vision: Sometimes lists unattainable goals but generally focuses more on goals for the future.

In the end, you have to know what the business is about and where they are heading to 'brand' them.</comment>


Southwest's Seven Secrets for Success - <AUTHOR> http://www.portfolio.com/business-travel/seat-2B/2008/07/08/Why-Southwest-Succeeds <comment><USER2> This article neglects to mention that Southwest also hedged it's bets by buying a bunch of oil back when the price was still relatively low so they are flying on 2 dollar a gallon gas so to speak.

[http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2007/11/29/southwests-oil- hedg...](http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2007/11/29/southwests-oil-hedge-could- save-it-1-billion-or-more/)

hence the can undercut competitors prices until those contracts for cheap oil run out.

<comment><AUTHOR> They mention it on Page2.

<comment><USER2> So they do.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: How lucky is your birthday when playing the lottery? - <AUTHOR> https://web.jackpocket.com/lucky-birthday <comment><USER2> This looks like a good idea, but 1- why do you need my phone number? 2- i dont want to share this website on my fb feed; but if I do not, I cannot see "any" detail whatsoever.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like spam</comment>


Hacking the human in the age of social distancing w/ ex-FBI agent - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/cZ0vN0em6DI <comment><USER2> Liked the advice from Joe Navarro, ex-FBI agent, best selling author, on body language particularly in the context of virtual meetings.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great video. How do you increase your negotiation odds using body language when the other person is wearing a mask?

</comment><comment><USER4> It's been hard enough navigating social skills before social distancing...

</comment><comment><USER5> Panel of experts, valuable advice (especially in the current context)</comment>


What NYC really needs: A support group for founders - <AUTHOR> http://foundersanonymous.tumblr.com/ <comment><USER2> frankly I think the whole east coast vs west coast thing in startups is stupid. You can do your startup from anywhere in the world....as long as you have a decent internet connection.

You want support? Come to HN and ask for advice. You want to do some collaboration with someone? Email/skype them. You want to listen to speakers/discussions about startups? Hit up mixergy.

Why is it in the age of the web, we still try to localize everything?

The only thing that really matters "localization" wise...is capital. Because in SV you have a ton of people investing in startups. While in NYC, the same people are investing in the stock market.

That's the only difference....being able to raise a ton of money quickly, simply by being local to the people who actually want to invest in tech startups.

<comment><USER3> "Why is it in the age of the web, we still try to localize everything?"

Because I still think there is something to be said about discussing things over lunch or while having a beer. Is it necessary? Of course not. But there is still something really nice about developing an in person, human connection.

<comment><USER4> People often ask me why I want to move to the west coast if I want to work on an internet business. After all, you can access the internet from anywhere.

The best analogy I've come up with is to say that it's like being a talented actor living in rural Arkansas. Sure, you can act from anywhere, but living somewhere that encourages and supports your talent (like Los Angeles in the case of acting), can make all the difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure a support group is exactly what is needed -- there are a bunch of those around (nextny comes to mind, and has been around for years).

However, I do agree that the startup scene is rather fragmented here in NYC. While there definitely are neighborhoods with higher concentrations of tech startups (SoHo, Chelsea, and Dumbo come to mind), there really is no 'startup district', if you will. We don't have a neighborhood like, say, South Park, where you have a ton of smaller startup companies concentrated into a fairly small area, or even a common district home to all the large tech companies, like the bay area has. We do have a financial district, fashion district, theater district, diamond district, jazz district, etc etc.

While not totally necessary, I do think having a physical center where similar types of businesses call home is really an overlooked part of the success of an industry. It creates a community and helps facilitate a natural type of networking, solely because people doing similar things run into each other every day. Plus the after-work drinks in the neighborhood bars would probably breed even more natural business deals/partnerships. I saw that happening a lot when I worked on Wall St -- you'd be tripping over other hedge fund guys at the pubs after work, just because of the nature of the neighborhood.

That said, I'd purpose somewhere like Gowanus in Brooklyn, where leases are cheap and the neighborhood is only now starting to be developed. Lots of Gowanus also has tax incentives associated with it, as it is one of the Empire Zones. Not to mention you're close to the third largest subway stop in the city, making commuting easy. Prospect Park is a short walk away as well.

The neighborhood is bound to change to a business focused area within a couple of years anyways, once the stadium for the Brooklyn Nets is built a couple blocks away at Atlantic Yards. Might as well make it a tech-centered district.

<comment><USER5> > We don't have a neighborhood like, say, South Park, where you have a ton of > smaller startup companies concentrated into a fairly small area, or even a > common district home to all the large tech companies, like the bay area has.

Where is this "common district home to all of the large tech companies, like the bay area has" that you're referring to?

If you're thinking of Mountain View, Palo Alto, or San Francisco, you're talking about a fairly large area that is also home to lots of other things. If you're thinking of some neighborhood in SF or Berkeley, you're missing a huge fraction of the startups in the Bay Area.

<comment><AUTHOR> They did say South Park and I believe that and SoMA have most of the startup action, don't they?

<comment><USER5> > They did say South Park and I believe that and SoMA have most of the startup > action, don't they?

I doubt it. (I've never heard of "South Park" and I've been in the Bay Area for years. I thought that SP was a reference to some NY district.)

SoMA may have about as many startups as NYC, but that's not enough to be "most" in the Bay Area.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.nbcbayarea.com/around- town/debates/Best_Startup_N...](http://www.nbcbayarea.com/around- town/debates/Best_Startup_Neighborhood_South_Park_vs_Professorville.html)

You should really go check South Park out, it is a pretty part of town too.

<comment><USER5> That reference says that South Park is a part of SoMA, a part that I worked in a couple of years ago. (SF is "famous" for folks inventing neighborhood names. They often do so to try to influence real estate values.)

Like I said, SoMA, let alone South Park, is not where "most" Bay Area startups are, even if it has more than the most popular NYC district.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What NYC sorely needs is a place to get a good burrito.

Group hugs and talking about our feelings, and how sometimes when no one at the startup is looking we cry just a very little bit?

Go back to California, hippie!

<comment><AUTHOR> try: <http://twitter.com/calexicocart> for a good burrito. :-)

<comment><USER6> I will, but I've been hurt before! That's where NYC could really use a support group.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm in the target audience for something like this, though I live in a suburb and not in _The City_.

It sounds awesome and I plan to sign up at my first opportunity.

<comment><AUTHOR> cool - you're more than welcome, as soon as we set this up.

<comment><USER8> I'm interested as well. But I'm a little confused about the next step. Your post leads me to believe we're all supposed to contact you? I get the feeling that's not what you really want (for attendees)

<comment><AUTHOR> hah - no. slight oversight, there.

join the google group: <http://groups.google.com/group/founders-anonymous>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> nextNY may be close to what the author envisions: <http://www.nextny.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> nextNY isn't only founders, and is a little too big now. it is a great group of people, just not as close knit as what i'm proposing...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> isn't there the NYC meetup thing every monrth?</comment>


Nines are not enough: meaningful metrics for clouds - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/06/19/nines-are-not-enough/ <comment><USER2> > _List the good outcomes you want, and the bad outcomes to be avoided_

I feel like sometimes you don't know the bad outcomes, until they happen. E.g., years ago, my team had a fairly big outage/issue caused by S3 reads taking multiple of 60s. (That is, our latency graph had very large spikes right over 60s, 120s, 180s¹. These were reads in the typically in the 10 KiB to 100 KiB range, sometimes as large as single-digit megs — i.e., they should take milliseconds, maybe a second, not 3 minutes. It took a significant amount of back-and-forth² as it either only effected our bucket, or just nobody else noticed. But it slowed our ability to process down that we built up an incredibly backlogs. (Processing a file had previously taken <1s, and was now taking over three minutes in some cases, a 200x slowdown!)

This is _still_ not covered by the S3 SLA.

Also had a different cloud provider where the "Create VM" API returned 200 OK. The VM never finished booting. The SLA was over the 200 OK, not the actual completion of the task. Basically, _exactly_ the example in the article, with a real world "we're paying for _this_?" provider.

¹I'm simplifying. It was weirdly actually 70s, 130s, and 190s. I can only presume that's a 10s timeout and _n_ 60s timeouts, somewhere.

²Woe unto the person who doesn't come to support with request IDs. My impression the whole time is "these guys can't see their own response latency?"

<comment><USER3> I did service work at a big corp for years, and we would've loved to take a problem like yours. I'd always want the tickets that came in with some interesting, visible pattern and a client who's already done some analysis. Much more fun than taking 6 hours telling a room full of panicky executives how important their problem is to me, before getting to the 10 minutes it actually takes to solve it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can second the sentiment in this article about SLA/SLE being very hard to define. For example, my company originally agreed to an SLA with a customer regarding API response time. The problem was that the SLA was a flat 500ms and didn't take into account the nature of the possible queries. It's possible to request up to 18 months worth of data, which is never going to return to 500ms.

I had to spend 6 hours analyzing data to figure out what factors of a query actually impacted response time. It required me re-learning advanced spreadsheet skills to find correlations in log data. We're now in the process of rewriting the agreement because this analysis was not done at contract time.

This is a topic not really written about that much.

<comment><USER5> Not for your particular case of a long reply but response times SLOs are usually measured in percentiles ("90% of responses within 500ms")

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Altitude, extent, velocity, humidity, temperature, pressure, droplet size, electrical charge, acidity, pictorial similarity and fluffyness.

<comment><USER7> It only now dawned on my why Digital Ocean's VMs[1] are called droplets...

[1] not 100% if that's what they are.

<comment><USER8> They are VMs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> No one has achieved two nines yet.

Embarassing recent downtimes for Google and AWS.

<comment><USER10> I've been trying to convince my boss that 'nine fives' is a perfectly acceptable target.

Seriously, some systems only need to be up when people are actually using them. It doesn't matter if they don't work out of hours or over weekends.

<comment><USER11> > Seriously, some systems only need to be up when people are actually using > them. It doesn't matter if they don't work out of hours or over weekends.

OTOH "out of hours" or "over weekends" is a very good time to make batch processes happen, so for some business services it might be better to not be up during hours, but reliably be up outside of them.

An other issue with that is when the service is used internationally / globally, or even just by 24/7 businesses, and even "over weekend" becomes not necessarily a thing.

<comment><USER12> > An other issue with that is when the service is used internationally / > globally

This also often happens prematurely. If the team in the US needs live data entered in Asia then there's not much you can do, they system has to be global. But an often overlooked option (today) is running multiple instances of the same software with each only needing nine fives in it's region. Even if you do need live data it might be better to have another process shuffling it between international instances. Also helps with latency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The only real SLA is the ability to vote with your feet and go to another provider that satisfies your business needs, or conversely to increase your investment with a particular cloud if you are satisfied with their performance. Providers know this, and they know that even if they wanted to, they can't capture all the possible values that are important to your particular business in numerical metrics. They also know that what is important to your business might not be important to another one, and therefore that it is hopeless to try to capture the entire gamut in a single set of metrics that are universally applicable. Any attempt would be futile, so it's best to stick to simpler metrics and let businesses and customers decide for themselves whether a given cloud meets their particular needs. SLA violation penalties hurt a little, but the real pain comes when you lose business.

</comment><comment><USER14> Over the years I've found that a lot of the confusion surrounding computers can be cut through by seeing them as a kind of factory. An elegant system or piece of software looks like an elegant factory, while a clunky or over- designed system or program is like a Rube Goldberg machine.

What makes good sense in leasing unused factory capacity would make good sense in leasing cloud resources, eh?</comment>


Help, I'm clueless about Web Service scalability  - <AUTHOR> http://scobleizer.com/2008/10/05/help-im-clueless-about-web-service-scalability/

<comment><USER2> Scalability is a way of asking "how do you engineer something well?". If you're a software engineer with enough experience, the answer is that making something scalable has no silver bullet. You just "write good software". So what does that mean?

In part, it means encapsulating your design and code at a mid to low level of granularity. If you are strict with encapsulation techniques (following pure OO and message passing design is a solid method) it doesn't matter what languages or libraries or databases you use in each part as you simply rewrite/replace components as they become bottlenecks.

This approach allows you to get a full system bootstrapped without need to optimize components ahead of time.

The whole point of a web service is that you have a simple API and others don't care about how you implement internals. So taking an API-centric design approach is key. This approach is not new to the fact that we call the API a "web service" these days. The same tried and true software engineering methods are called for.

If you don't like the above answer and want a more concrete answer on how to make something scalable, then just study erlang ;).</comment>


People often use the word 'you' rather than 'I' to cope with negative experience - <AUTHOR> http://exactlyscience.com/archives/11689.html <comment><USER2> Blogspam of

[http://www.ns.umich.edu/new/releases/24689-it-s-really- about...](http://www.ns.umich.edu/new/releases/24689-it-s-really-about-me-not- you)</comment>


U.S. iPhone users will spend an average of $88 per year on apps by 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/27/u-s-iphone-users-will-spend-an-average-of-88-per-year-on-apps-by-2020/ <comment><USER2> kind of misleading I have netflix but I don't really count that as 100% a phone expense.</comment>


Ways David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest Predicted the Future - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/the-5-impressive-ways-david-foster-wallaces-infinite-jest-predic/ <comment><USER2> Very interesting novel...brilliant stream-of-consciousness style that reminded me much of Joyce...

While reading it I sorted the tech he described in his own invented terms and compared them to what's available now... there are many parallels...

I recommend reading it...

If you need priming listen to his 2013 commencement speech--This is Water-- delivered at Kenyon College...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL- ydFMI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI)

<comment><USER3> The speech was delivered in 2005, and published as a book in 2009. Also, David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008.

<comment><USER2> Noted...thanks...note to self: slow down and verify details when you're enthused...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nearly all of the 'predictions' outlined in the article are present in Stand on Zanzibar which was first published in 1968.

</comment><comment><USER5> For fellow people on HN, if your have not read Infinite Jest I very highly recommend the audiobook version of it. I was not able to get through it reading it as its such a large book but I found the audio version quite enjoyable.

<comment><USER6> How does the audiobook handle the endnotes? I tried to read it once and the endnotes were often pretty important.

<comment><USER7> While there isn't a specific section covering endnotes, they are interspersed sparingly as tonal changes in the narrator's voice. This effect is used in other readings of his works and is easy to follow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> related: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-michael/donald-trump- is-u...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-michael/donald-trump-is-ushering- _b_8334542.html) ("Donald Trump Is Ushering In the Infinite Jest Apocalypse")</comment>


Need a place to crash? Stay at the Hacker House - <AUTHOR> http://www.airbnb.com/airbeds/show/5593 <comment><USER2> Be sure to have them show you the light fixture of death.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. Can someone post a picture of this?

<comment><USER4> <http://twitpic.com/1p1cd>

Our roof leaks and has consequentially filled a lighting fixture with water. The switch reads: TURN THIS ON AND (you might) DIE. Nobody's tried it yet.

Honestly, the hacker house is a bit of a dump.* But we're all in good company and have a sense of humor about the situation. I wouldn't have it any other way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks awesome. This is another example of why I'm glad I moved from Australia to the Bay Area.

<comment><USER6> How difficult is it to move there? I am finishing up my Masters degree this September and want to go to California for at least a year to work.

But it looks to me that you can only get H1B visa's which makes you totally dependent on a single employer without the ability to change jobs.

Do you have citizenship?

<comment><USER7> You can change jobs when you are on H1B. It is L1B (intra-company transfer from a foreign country) where you can't.

<comment><USER8> I'm a citizen, so grain of salt.

AFAIK, You need to be careful about changing jobs though, if you are out of work for some amount of time (a month?) your visa expires on you.

<comment><USER7> IANAL etc...

You are correct that out-of-work is a very bad place to be as an H1B holder. But USCIS allows you to interview for a different job, apply for visa transfer to the new company and quit the old company _after_ the visa transfer is approved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I get goosebumps just thinking about someday realizing my own "hacker house" ahhhh beautiful!

Keep it up guys.

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems like <http://www.couchsurfing.com/> is a bit more mature than airbnb.com, but airbnb.com looks more technically competent.

<comment><USER9> When I read "mature" I thought you meant in demeanor, but now that I look at the site, I am guessing all you meant by it was ... older/more established?

I like the inviting-ness of airbnb, and sheer simplicity. For me it is much more welcoming, and thus motivating (to go out and explore) than the vibe I get from couchsurfing.

to each his own.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I mean that CouchSurfing has an existing community that has already gone through a lot of the growing pains that social-network sites go through, and come out with a reasonably functional group; it's pretty rare for people to get robbed or raped through CS.

<comment><USER11> They are quite inspiring, about to break 1 million users. I think there is a clear divide though - Couchsurfing states in their philosophy that they are not a free ride alternative to a hotel. Airbnb currently operates/markets as an alternative to a hotel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My new apartment is starting to look a bit like this. 3 laptops, 2 netbooks, a big desktop, scanners, printers, etc... and there's only 2 of us. Time for a clean out :)

</comment><comment> old-gregg Question: where did you guys get those working tables? They seem cheap enough and _perfect_ for workstations: fairly deep and easy to move around.

<comment><USER13> ikea

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So it's a YC/Hacker slan-shack.

That's cool but stuff like that has been going on in geek fandoms for decades.

</comment><comment><USER15> Love the idea. Will be looking to implement something like this soon.

</comment><comment><USER16> Breck, is that you on the left side of the picture? Glad to see you're doing well.

(This is Drew, who used to run DULUG back in the day when you were working on Free Culture stuff).

</comment><comment><USER17> heard of couch surfing, but this sounds way cooler!</comment>


Take a feather and a candle: spring cleaning in 13th century Haggadah books - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2017/04/take-a-feather-and-a-candle-why-thorough-spring-cleaning-is-so-important.html <comment><USER2> _All hamets (leaven) that is in my possession, that I have seen and not seen, that I have beheld and not beheld, that I have removed and not removed, let it be nullified and like the dust of the earth._

This could be fun as a basis for a meditative approach to debugging.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is another interesting wrinkle to the described process. What if you miss a bit in the house? Something in the couch cushion perhaps. Uh oh!

Well, the super Orthodox Jews have a solution. Yes, you should make a good faith effort to eliminate all of the hamets in your house, but you can exploit a loophole! Hamets in your house, but not owned by you, are OK, so rabbis in these groups have a list of non-Jews willing to buy all remaining hamets in your house for $1.00 (or other small amount). They then own them and you are in the clear. There is a special term for these people, but I don't remember it.

But what if you later (after Passover) find a box of crackers you missed and you actually want them? No problem because the loophole has a loophole. The buyers don't actually pay you the $1.00, they just pay you a penny as a down payment. As part of their service, they then deliberately don't pay you any more, default on the contract, and, the day Passover, the box of crackers are actually yours again.

<comment><USER4> you're confusing 2 things. before passover, Jews make a declaration claiming that all crumbs and other hametz not found should be like dust.

if however someone had something valuable, like a bottle of whiskey, then they sell it.

<comment><USER3> Looked it up. You are right..."sell" it, as in the temporary sale I mentioned above. Reference:

[http://www.chabad.org/holidays/passover/pesach_cdo/aid/1689/...](http://www.chabad.org/holidays/passover/pesach_cdo/aid/1689/jewish/Selling- Your-Chametz.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Spring cleaning is something funny to someone that comes from a country (Brazil) where people usually do a thorough cleaning on a weekly to daily basis (by themselves or hiring cleaning maids in the case of the upper classes).

<comment><USER6> From what I've seen, it's common place to clean thoroughly every week lots of places.

The idea of "spring cleaning" is much more thorough than anyone would do week to week. For example taking everything out of every pantry and storage area, washing the backs of cupboards and storage, throwing expired things out, polishing metals, varnishing, etc.

It does probably have more currency in climates where the weather would keep you cooped in for months over winter, and thus happen on the first chance to give everthing a good airing and bry properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Am I missing something or is this just a clickbait title?

</comment><comment><USER8> tl;dr: Jewish men help clean the house one day a year

<comment><USER9> can you tell why it is so important?

<comment><USER10> Who said it is?

<comment><USER11> It's right there in the title.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's only talking about religious people; extrapolating religious norms to the whole ethnicity is kind of unfair.

<comment><USER13> ...Especially when about a fifth of said ethnicity is basically atheistic as well; quite a diverse bunch really, from ultra-orthodox 'Haredi' to a purely cultural identity.

<comment><USER14> _quite a diverse bunch really_

In comparison to who?

<comment><USER15> Christianity, where the definition effectively prohibits someone from being both an atheist and a christian.

<comment><USER13> To be fair, I'm not sure that Islam is too enthusiastic about atheists proclaiming for it either... to put it mildly.

<comment><USER16> "There is no god but God" does seem to offer some wiggle room for atheists, but maybe that's an inadvertent loophole.

<comment><USER13> It might, but I think the current climate in much of the Islamic world, while not the crazed image many have, is actually pretty brutal to people within the religion who are seen as blasphemous. From what I know, and I have to admit that this isn't as much as I'd like, the process of proclaiming your faith pretty much involves accepting the existence of god, prophets, the "punishment of the grave," that kind of thing. My impression is that if you're seen to have lied about that, you're lucky just to be outcast.

tl;dr It really doesn't pay to be seen as an "apostate" in Islam, at least in most places at this time.

<comment><USER17> > From what I know, and I have to admit that this isn't as much as I'd like

In general when you're talking about a group of a billion people you should avoid generalisations, especially if you also need to say that you don't know what you're talking about.

<comment><USER14> What did he say that was wrong? He didn't say all parts of the Islamic world are brutal to apostates, he just said much of the Islamic world is. And that's absolutely the case. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam#Apostasy_in_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam#Apostasy_in_the_recent_past)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: How do you monetize your website? - <AUTHOR> http://snaptalent.wufoo.com/forms/can-you-really-make-money-from-blogging/ <comment><AUTHOR> I asked a similar question before. My idea is to pool the results and share my findings with everyone thats interested.

So, if you've used adsense or other sites before - take the survey!

Thanks

<comment><USER2> A more general "how do you make money?" might be more interesting and relevant to startups since we're not all focussed on blogging (the actual survey you're linking to survey "can you really make money from blogging?" and lists external ad networks as the only options. Many startups make money by providing services directly to users.

Thanks for getting the ball rolling in any case, this is neat info to gather.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Related question, what's a good way to move from free pre-release to non-free non-pre-release?</comment>


The Gyllenhaal Experiment - <AUTHOR> https://pudding.cool/2019/02/gyllenhaal/ <comment><USER2> author here if anyone has q's</comment>


Marcus Hutchins Stopped WannaCry – He Deserves a Pardon - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/opinion/marcus-hutchins-wannacry.html <comment><USER2> Keep in mind that Hutchins had no idea what registering the domain would do at the time of registration. It was pure dumb luck that it turned out for the best, it could very well have been a disaster. In fact he even admits that he went through a panic phase after domain registration where he thought he'd triggered the malware [1]. Which makes all the "He's a hero" articles bogus if not amusing to say the least.

"After about 5 minutes the employee came back with the news that the registration of the domain had triggered the ransomware meaning we'd encrypted everyone's files (don't worry, this was later proven to not be the case), but it still caused quite a bit of panic."

This nytimes article is just terrible. Absolutely terrible. Sarah Jeong should be ashamed. After this and the way she treated Naomi Wu [2], I don't think I'm going to be giving her any journalistic credence.

[1] [https://www.malwaretech.com/2017/05/how-to-accidentally- stop...](https://www.malwaretech.com/2017/05/how-to-accidentally-stop-a- global-cyber-attacks.html)

[2] [https://medium.com/@therealsexycyborg/shenzhen-tech-girl- nao...](https://medium.com/@therealsexycyborg/shenzhen-tech-girl-naomi-wu-my- experience-with-sarah-jeong-jason-koebler-and-vice-magazine-3f4a32fda9b5)

<comment><USER3> > Hutchins had no idea what registering the domain would do

This doesn't seem like a good faith reading of the situation. The blog post you link to as a source for this claim describes how he was doing something he'd done thousands of times before in the service of tracking and disabling botnets, and that he considered it to be his job. But you make it sound like he was a total amateur who saw a domain name string and registered it on a whim with no intuition as to whether it would be more likely to do something helpful or harmful.

It sounds like he did in fact know a lot about what he was doing, such that he could make sensible inferences under uncertainty in the middle of a time- sensitive crisis. That's the best we ever get to expect from someone.

<comment><USER2> That's exactly what he did, registered the domain on a whim with no actual facts to back his decision. I think that much is obvious.

My reading of the situation is also based on additional data that's public if you care to look. His skill level and intuition can be extrapolated if you watch a few of his youtube videos. Or if you happened to talk with him on IRC. You'd realize he's little more than a script kiddie.

Hutchins is not what he has been portrayed as by the media.

<comment><USER3> It seems weird to simultaneously argue that he shouldn't get a pardon because he's a dangerous hacker, and also that when he was being a dangerous hacker he was just a skill-less script kiddie kid.

<comment><USER2> There are lot of script kiddies in the malware-for-profit business, it doesn't take a lot of skill really. He's not at the bottom of the barrel but he's definitely not very far from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As much as I like Malwaretech, and followed him long before WannaCry was around, stopping malware isn't a reason for a pardon.

Arresting him by waiting until he came to the US rather than issuing when they knew they wanted him should be a reason, or the fact that when the crimes were commited he was a minor. But being famous for stopping malware is no reason to pardon someone.

All the best to him though, I still can't believe it's legal to detain people for so long without a trial.

<comment><USER5> Pardons can be issued for any reason, or no reason. They are entirely at the discretion of the executive

<comment><USER6> Parent was arguing whether or not a pardon _should_ be made, not whether it _could_ be made, which or more or less orthogonal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I see many infosec individuals supporting Marcus out of the idea that many have dabble in black hat activities in the past, and that exploration and "playful" hacking shouldn't result in years of prison time. However I feel that carding and fraud should not be seen in the same light. Marcus has admitted to creating malware with the sole goal of immiserating many to enrich himself and his co-conspirators. You don't code webinjects for the thrill of surpassing security.

</comment><comment><USER8> I normally really like what Sarah Jeong has to say but . . . I don't think typically criminals get pardons just because they do something nice later on in life? And I mean not that later on either? Would he deserve a pardon if he had gone and worked all day in a soup kitchen for two years? On some level, that would actually demonstrate a higher level of altruism, because stopping Wanna Cry was definitely in his own personal best interest -- his fame as a result has surely been good for business.

>But Mr. Hutchins, had no stomach for an interminable fight, and pleaded guilty last week to two counts under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Wiretap Act,

How do we know that it's not just because he thought he was most likely to be convicted and didn't want to roll the dice?

Also, I apologize for derailing my own comment, but what is up with the grammar in that paragraph and the one before. "amid complex legal questions that could have gone been appealed"? I've never seen an NYT piece with this many errors.

<comment><USER9> > I don't think typically criminals get pardons just because they do something > nice later on in life?

It is this very question that the article poses, and it goes so much deeper than merely tech. "Do the sins of your past define you as a person today?"

Abraham Lincoln was likely raised as a racist and likely believed in racism for at least the decade that his parents' beliefs dominated his. Clearly his actions redeemed not only himself, but humanity; and I therefore believe that the person _today_ is the more important person.

I've seen countless examples of people who have said stupid shit in the 90's or the 00's, who have changed their ways, who have been slaughtered by the larger internet. If you are to be ridiculed by Earth, why change your ways at all? Lose if you do, lose if you don't. If change is the goal, why attack people who actually change?

I struggle with my biases daily, I learned them from the South African government, but by hell I will better them and forget them. I am not the same person today as I was yesterday, nor are you and nor is Hutchins.

<comment><USER8> Reform is only one of the four major reasons for incarceration. You've addressed that he's reformed, and I'll stipulate that he has for the purpose of this discussion. I don't think that alone is enough that we should give him a pass. Plenty of people reform before they are convicted of any crime. Most murderers would never reoffend and sincerely regret their actions. But nobody speaks of letting them skip jail solely on this basis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> People that hacked and released NSA exploit: still free

People that weaponized NSA exploit and released Wannacry bitcoin ransom: still free (I think?)

People that weaponized NSA exploit for Monero mining: richer than Wannacry creator and still free

People that made silly exploit at NSA: still free

Moral of the story is dont get caught.

</comment><comment><USER11> He's gotta get in line between Edward Snowden and Reality Winner

<comment><USER12> Snowden can't be pardoned since he hadn't been convicted.

<comment><USER13> I wasn't around then but, if I'm not mistaken, Nixon hadn't been convicted when Ford pardoned him shortly after assuming the Presidency.

 _ETA:_ According to Wikipedia [0]:

> _The pardon may be granted before or after conviction for the crime, > depending on the laws of the jurisdiction._

It seems that, in the U.S. at least, one _can_ be preemptively pardoned.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's a mirror, courtesy of me reading a lot:

[http://archive.is/HYwbc](http://archive.is/HYwbc)

</comment><comment><USER15> This is low quality writing. And the author seems ignorant of the subject matter. I expect better from the New York Times.

<comment><USER16> Please elaborate a little more as your criticism is unsubstantiated.

<comment><USER17> The article makes it seem like he's a hero who was intent on stopping WannaCry, so should be pardoned for crimes he commited when he was younger. The reality is that he had no idea what registering the hard coded domain name would do, and got lucky that it was an ineffective method of VM detection that was effectively a kill switch. For all he knew, registering the domain name could have made the malware self-destruct and delete all the encrypted data. People shouldn't be pardoned for accidentally doing something good.

<comment><USER18> > People shouldn't be pardoned for accidentally doing something good.

Following the same reasoning we should remove the nobel prize to Alexander Fleeming because trying it was "just good luck". In the end we would all live in a ungrateful and miserable society.

This sends a strong message that you must care just for your own problems and let the other people fall, or you have a fair probability of be punished by being a smartass</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pat - A Sinatra style library for Go - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> <https://github.com/bmizerany/pat>

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome - thanks for sharing!</comment>


Show HN: Don't Hunt Me – Avoid Getting Hunted on Product Hunt - <AUTHOR> https://donthuntme.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I created a small script that detects users coming from Product Hunt and blocks them + redirect them back to PH.

Product Hunt became a huge part of a product launch and at getting traction. But it can be ruined by a premature hunt.

I hope this tool will help some people or maybe start a discussion at PH to address this problem for all product developers.

The snippet is available on github as well if you'd like implement it yourself: [https://github.com/marcantoine/donthuntme](https://github.com/marcantoine/donthuntme)

</comment><comment><USER2> Wow I wish I knew this earlier.. some of PH hunters already posted our product when we are not ready yet and it didn't get featured... This is brilliant :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow! nice one! Those PH hunters are getting out of control

</comment><comment><USER4> Good job! Nice and simple. :)</comment>


Currying is not idiomatic in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://2ality.com/2017/11/currying-in-js.html <comment><USER2> Some of these points are true of currying in general -- IMO most of the time you can't tell what's a function call and what's a curry (Haskell people would say "its the same thing!"). However, separating these concepts leads to a lot of super interesting results. I wrote about this in this blog post: [http://tolmasky.com/2016/03/24/generalizing- jsx/](http://tolmasky.com/2016/03/24/generalizing-jsx/) . I argue that the JSX syntax makes for an awesome syntax for currying.

Edit: Some follow up articles:

1\. Using this scheme, you can actually have default parameters in currying: [https://runkit.com/tolmasky/default-parameters-with- generic-...](https://runkit.com/tolmasky/default-parameters-with-generic-jsx)

2\. An example of how to apply this to Babel syntax trees: [http://runkit.com/tolmasky/generic-jsx-for-babel- javascript-...](http://runkit.com/tolmasky/generic-jsx-for-babel-javascript- ast)

<comment><USER3> >Haskell people would say "its the same thing!"

Haskell can get away with this because it is a pure language. If you have `f a b`, you do not really care when f gets evaluated (or, at least, when you do care currying is generally not what makes figuring it out difficult). Even without currying, Haskell makes it difficult to know when a function is evaluated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It _can_ be idiomatic in Javascript if you choose a functional style.

I think Javascript has become a _kitchen-sink_ language. It is, as you say, a language that affords many styles. If you pick a sub-set of the language that is functional you can see that currying is quite idiomatic in that context.

That being said I think library support is a necessity when choosing a more functional approach in Javascript as the "core" experience in JS caters to an imperative, C-derived language (as per many of the examples). If you work with Ramda you can get most of what you need today to make working with currying, and it's compositional capabilities, pleasant.

Consider _R.curryN_ :

        const add = R.curryN(2, (a, b) => a + b)

You can now call this:

        add(1)(2)
        add(1)
        add(1, 2)

And you have options in terms of order of parameters:

        const sillyAdd2 = add(R.__, 2) // a silly example
        sillyAdd2(3) // => 5

And if you want even more flexibility there is Fantasyland[0] and Sanctuary[1] among others.

Javascript is fertile ground, in my experience, for getting developers to experiment with and adopt functional programming paradigms.

[0] [https://github.com/fantasyland/fantasy- land](https://github.com/fantasyland/fantasy-land)

[1] [https://github.com/sanctuary-js/sanctuary](https://github.com/sanctuary- js/sanctuary)

</comment><comment><USER5> In my experience, currying using helper libraries also makes debugging more difficult, as you have to step though higher order functions and cannot always easily tell how the argument values were calculated. This can be mitigated somewhat and the tools are improving but I generally found that, the more clean I made my JS code using functional programming concepts, the more difficult it was to debug when everything went wrong. And without a type system, I had to debug much more than in a lanague like scala

<comment><USER6> It is funny, because this is the argument against most use of macros in lisp. To the point that everyone knows that macros make it harder to debug code.

The lost part, is few people actually "debug" in the "interactive debugger" sense of the word anymore, such that many things that were frowned upon in lisp and related languages are now getting a lot of exposure. And I feel it is truly sad how few people know how to step through a program nowdays. (Obviously projecting some. Maybe I'm in an odd corner where nobody uses an interactive debugger, but it has been a long time since I found coworkers that were used to using one. And, in this, I'm including REPL based workflows. Yes, I know they are strictly different. I just feel they are in the same family for this discussion.)

<comment><USER7> When the abstraction stack gets high enough, stepping turns into a bit of a minefield - if you step into where you should have stepped over, you can get lost in irrelevant weeds. Microsoft and some others have tried to put step barriers in code that prevent accidental step into for this reason ("only my code").

But it's also a change in coding conceptualisation. Personally I understand things from the ground up, from composition of very low level components. I find it hard to reason about a system's performance and failure modes without doing so. But increasingly developers have only a surface area knowledge about the things they use, and instead know a lot in terms of breadth instead of depth. This approach is more effective for building something quickly by duct taping disparate things together, and this is the majority of modern commercial coding. These people don't need debuggers: it gives them too much information. They need examples, and they code by idiom and analogy instead.

Things like event dispatchers and async also greatly diminish the power of the debugger.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. And I actually fully agree with this being a strong reason not to use macros in lisp. Made a bit more important there, because stepping through a macro involves not just being in other code, but jumping between phases.

That said, my main point is that where many folks used to advise caution, such that instead of promoting lisp, they would create new languages where they could hide some of the magic, it seems that people are gung-ho on many of the higher abstractions now, regardless of the mental costs they bring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure that idiomatic is a very rigorus idea when it comes to progamming languages. Anyone have good reads in that vein?

<comment><USER9> It's not a rigorous idea, but I'm not sure what you might be wanting to read about, exactly. However, given that most of the language features that the article described are relatively new to the language, or are proposed language features, I think the author has a strong claim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Has anyone read the semantics of the linked partial application proposal [0]?

> Note that this also means that more involved references are captured in > their entirety and should be stored in a local variable if they may have > unintended side-effects should the partially applied function result be > called more than once

            const a = [{ c: x => x + 1 }, { c: x => x + 2 }];
            let b = 0;
            const g = a[b++].c(?);
            b; // 0
            g(1); // 2
            g(1); // 3
            b; // 2

`a[b++].c` is not evaluated until the partially applied function `g` is called. Event `a[b++]` and `b++` are not evaluated.

It is unclear to me when `const g = Math.random().toFixed(?)` would evaluate `Math.random()`.

[0]: [https://github.com/rbuckton/proposal-partial- application#sem...](https://github.com/rbuckton/proposal-partial- application#semantics)

</comment><comment><USER11> tl;dr

Currying is nice when whitespace is function application and ugly and inconvenient when you have to write foo(x)(y) and the libraries you deal with aren't consistent about this. Currying in Haskell is nice for exactly these reasons.

Also, [https://www.amazon.de/Das-Curry-Buch-Funktional- programmiere...](https://www.amazon.de/Das-Curry-Buch-Funktional- programmieren-JavaScript/dp/386899369X)

<comment><USER12> Did I miss something? I see no mention of white space in this article.

<comment><USER13> The article says

"Most functional programming languages with automatic currying have syntax where there is no difference between add(1, 2) and add(1)(2)"

and goes on to talk about unidiomatic syntax.

In Haskell, the two options are "add (1,2)" and "add 1 2" The latter, curried form, involving whitespace, works because Haskell parses it as an application of a to 1, followed by an application of the resulting value to 2. This syntax is inspired by the lambda calculus, so it's not really whitespace that's the concept, just "juxtaposition of terms" implies application.

<comment><USER14> > In Haskell, the two options are "add (1,2)" and "add 1 2" The latter, > curried form, involving whitespace, works because Haskell parses it as an > application of a to 1, followed by an application of the resulting value to > 2.

This is a bit of a misrepresentation. There is nothing "uncurried" about using these parens here. It's simply making a function call on two parameters take a tuple of two values instead. There's no point to it at all and there's no real value in doing it in your APIs. I have no idea why the Haskell wiki insists on framing it like that.

Using the "curried form" has no effect on how the function call will perform or behave at all. Partially applying functions can have performance implications, though.

<comment><USER13> Consider, though, the Haskell functions "curry" and "uncurry" which transform functions between these two styles. They are different types, so I don't see how it is a misrepresentation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> >Most functional programming languages with automatic currying have syntax where there is no difference between add(1, 2) and add(1)(2).

This isn't true of any functional programming language I can think of.

What happens in most functional programming languages is that it is idiomatic to make functions curried by defualt, and only make non-curried functions when you have reason to.

For example, in Haskell, you could have either:

        add1 :: Int -> Int -> Int
        add1 x y = x+y

        add2 :: (Int, Int) -> Int
        add2(x,y)=x+y

which would be called as:

        add1 2 3     --equivalent to (add1 2) 3
        add2(2,3)

There is even functions to convert between these:

        add1 = uncurry add2
        add2 = curry add1

<comment><USER15> All functions in Haskell are curried by default

Your `add2` uses a tuple instead of currying whereas `add1` is already curried. In ghci:

        Prelude> (+) 3 4 == (+ 3) 4
        True

So you could have an `add3` just by applying 3 as the first argument.

        Prelude> let add3 = (+ 3)
        Prelude> add3 5
        8

hoogle describes uncurry as a function on pairs. [https://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=uncurry](https://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=uncurry)

> uncurry converts a curried function to a function on pairs.

<comment><USER16> > All functions in Haskell are curried by default

That's not really a meaningful statement. Functions are not really _anything_ "by default".

<comment><USER17> Care to elaborate? I'd say functions in Haskell are many things "by default":

\- Curried

\- Partial

\- Lazy

\- Values

\- Recursive

\- etc.

<comment><USER16> Let's elaborate on "curried" since that was what OP was interested in. How are functions in Haskell "curried" by default? Sure, you can write

        f x y = 2 * x + y

and that will define a function that takes an Int, say, returns a function. But why is that any more "default" than

        g (x, y) = 2 * x + y

    ?

<comment><USER15> All functions in Haskell are single-argument functions. Multiple arguments are syntactic sugar. The syntax sugar can make it confusing to talk about but if you define an `add` function that takes two arguments x and y:

        add x y = x + y

it's sugar for multiple single-argument functions.

        add = \x -> \y -> x + y

When examining it this way, the `g` function above would translate to

        g = \(x, y) -> 2 * x + y

Which is a function taking a single tuple argument. It is still "default curried" but the argument being passed in is a single argument rather than multiple so we don't expand it to multiple single-arg functions. Perhaps it is more illustrative to show the definition as the single argument it is rather than using haskell's destructuring to pull x and y out of the tuple.

        g tuple = 2 * (fst tuple) + (snd tuple)

and a ghci session for completeness:

        Prelude> let g (x, y) = 2 * x + y
        Prelude> g (1,2)
        4
        Prelude> let y tuple = 2 * (fst tuple) + (snd tuple)
        Prelude> y (1,2)
        4

So when we say that Haskell functions are "curried by default", what we're referring to is roughly the underlying single-argument nature of haskell functions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I deal with stuff like [http://package.elm-lang.org/packages/elm- lang/core/5.1.1/Jso...](http://package.elm-lang.org/packages/elm- lang/core/5.1.1/Json-Decode#map7) and I'm not sure how "auto"-currying is ever worth it when it comes at the expense of arity overloading and what else.

I'd rather have to explicitly curry functions at the callsite with anonymous functions every time.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think currying is hot...

</comment><comment><USER20> Is currying useful other than as a shorthand for "value object" creation? You can easily create the equivalent of a curried add function:

        class Adder {
            base: number;
            constructor(base: number) { this.base = base; }
            add(o: number): number { return this.base + o; }
        }

While slightly more verbose, I believe this form to be the more powerful of the two because one has access to all of the features of imperative programming and is easier to compose with other objects.

<comment><USER21> Easier to compose with other objects, but harder to compose with other functions. For example:

        const compose = (...f) => f.reduceRight((f, g) => (...x) => f(g(...x)));

        const add = x => y => y + x;
        const mul = x => y => y * x;
        const div = x => y => y / x;

        // (6x + 4) / 2
        const complexOp = compose(mul(6), add(4), div(2));

        // should return 50
        complexOp(16);

How would you accomplish this using classes?

<comment><USER20>
        class Answer {
            getAnswer(input: number) { return (input * 6 + 4) / 2; }
        }

All joking aside, you would achieve composition the same way, except using interfaces.

        interface Operation<T> {
            apply(input: T);
        }

        class Addition implements Operation<Number> {
        }
        class Multiplication implements Operation<Number> {
        }
        class Division implements Operation<Number> {
        }

        function compose(Operation<T>... operation, T input) {
            T last = input;
            for (Operation<T> op : operations) {
                last = op.apply(last);
            }
            return last;
        }

Of course, the above code is slightly verbose, but even if you could remove all the boiler plate it still doesn't look like good imperative code. This is what confuses me about currying: when translated to the imperative equivalent, it looks terrible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Currying is one of those things I haven't grokked completely. And, shit, I just used grok as a past tense verb...

I'm not sure if i just haven't drunk enough koolaid or if curriers are beyond the pale.

<comment><USER23> I find currying rarely useable in real life. Because you rarely need a fixed parameter to a function. And when you do it's solved in a better way by storing it in a state somewhere (even global variables will do in a pinch).

The closest real world example I can think of right now is calling a webservice. Which is usually something like

       const baseUrl = 'https://some.tld'
       function callExternal(resourcePath, data) {
          fetch(baseUrl + resourcePath, data)...
       }

       // and then somewhere

       callExternal('/some/path', {some: data})

With currying you could do it like this:

       const baseFun = function(baseUrl, resourcePath, data) {
          fetch(baseUrl + resourcePath, data)...
       }

       const callExternal = baseFun('https://some.tld')
       // ^ you "pin" the first argument to always be 'https://some.tld'

       // and then somewhere

       callExternal('/some/path', {some: data})

I personally have had the need to write a curried function myself maybe twice over the course of the past 17 years.

<comment><USER24> Yes, closures can be used to achieve a similar effect to currying. That said, they only work with functions you create yourself. If baseFun came from a library, you'd have to write an extra function just to close over baseUrl.

Of course, one can wonder how many times can one usefully curry with external functions, but I think that's partially a result of not having currying syntax in the first place. For example, the fact that Ruby has blocks massively influences the typical design of its libraries, when compared to Python.</comment></comment></comment>


Archeological 3D Mapping: The Structure from Motion Revolution - <AUTHOR> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4p1SsI5fon7NFVGc1I0MG03S1k/view <comment><USER2> Does anyone use some free/opensource software for this in practice? I tried the following:

\- [https://colmap.github.io/](https://colmap.github.io/) all-included and has nice GUI but dense reconstruction is currently nvidia-only

\- [http://ccwu.me/vsfm/](http://ccwu.me/vsfm/) I didn't succeed in building it, and it has restrictive license. Also comprehensive GUI

\- [https://github.com/mapillary/OpenSfM](https://github.com/mapillary/OpenSfM) promising but lots of heavy python dependencies, tricky to set up and use. Tried only old version when it didn't have dense reconstruction

</comment><comment><USER3> I would guess eventually this tech will become handheld, networked, and fully automated. Sort of a tricorder for archaeologists. A few team members "wandering" around waving the device about and eventually the system will tell you that a model has been captured at the desired level of accuracy.

Ubiquitous 3d models will make streetview look like an etch-a-sketch.

<comment><USER4> I wonder if there is a market for a quickscan of a flat's interior+exterior for a realtor; that you later send to a 3D color printing service, playmobil scale.

Maybe giving potential customers a scale model would help them materialize buying the property.</comment></comment>