Ask HN: Has political correctness in tech gone too far? - <AUTHOR>

It feels as if there is a mob of silent assassins lurking on twitter and media outlets looking to out anyone who says anything that isn't glowingly politically correct.
They are sort of like "political trackers", except they are targeting mostly white, male programmers - but in reality - anyone who disagrees with their narrative (whatever it is) is a heretic.
I find it offensive that there are claims of sexism in OSS and tech.  Codes of conduct. I feel like I can't give an opinion, or even make a mistake speaking without being stared down or ruining my career.
I don't want to be politically correct. But it looks like they only way to survive is to be that.
Am I the only one who feels like outsiders are assaulting tech for their own selfish agenda, and we were already diverse by design decades ago? <comment><USER2> "I find it offensive _to suggest that people that I don't identify with might just be having a harder time in my industry_. [...] I don't want to be _inclusive and considerate of other people_. But it looks like they [sic] only way to survive is to be that."

</comment><comment><USER3> There are quite a few nebulous claims here. Which 'outsiders' do you feel are 'assaulting' tech? What is their 'selfish agenda'? What do you feel they have to gain by targetting white male programmers?

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm torn on this issue. On the one hand I've never noticed anything which is often stated as "blatant everyday sexism". Even when I've started looking for it I was never able to see the things described in these discussions. On the other hand I cannot simply say "you don't notice it, so it doesn't happen" .. maybe here in Germany things are different than the states (which seem to have - just from the reports read here - a massive gender equality problem) .. maybe not. I have no idea.

After that long(winded) introduction: You have a right to state your opinion. You don't have the right to state it without someone saying "that sucks". Whatever you say, whatever you do, will have consequences. And that is a good thing. Consequences remind you that there's nothing free in life. And if your opinions are not worth fighting for - why do you hold them?

</comment><comment><USER5> While I agree that this 'gotcha culture' stuff is nonsense, being offended that there are "claims" of sexism just means you're not paying attention. Do you know any female programmers? The amount of bullshit my wife has had to deal with makes me crazy. It's mind boggling what a lot of women have to put up with.

Yes, of course some people blow things out of proportion but it's nuts to say tech is some magic bubble where people are blind to differences. I believed that when I was a lot younger but I'm not blind and cannot believe it now. There are too many guys who act like jerks to women for no reason or are unprofessional / creepy in the workplace even when told about it.

The key is, don't be a dick and do your best to treat people equally. That will get you pretty darn far.

</comment><comment><USER6> > we were already diverse by design decades ago

What do you base that on? The opposite has been documented numerous times. See the most recent example, this link, [http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is- cod...](http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/) at the bottom of section "2.6 What's With All These Conferences, Anyway?"

These are contentious issues, and HN is good at quality discourse on many topics. But this one is IMHO not among them.

If you're asking "am I the only one who..." then no, you won't be. But that's a particular phrasing. "Am I correct or justified in this" is not the same question or the same answer.

</comment><comment><USER7> IT used to be diverse. It simply isn't today, which makes the trade vulnerable to this sort of manipulation. While political correctness is the generally agreed-upon method to display tact and awareness of others, it is easy to abuse for selfish, misguided reasons. Harpies, those who abuse political correctness and strict adherence to social rules, are a long standing group that infest every culture on earth.

</comment><comment><USER8> The one thing that bugs me about this is that we're placing political concerns over technical ones.

Instead of what you can _do_ being the sole decider of how you fare in this industry, the focus is being shifted more to what you _are_ \- what your gender is, what your skin color is.

I don't understand how anyone thinks this is a positive development. What you are has _zero_ impact on the quality of work you produce. If what we're optimizing for is the best code, the best design, the best solutions to problems, spotlighting literally anything else other than what directly answers those questions doesn't make sense.

Note: This particular rant is not directed at the diversity programs being launched as of late. Increasing the amount of people getting through the door can only possibly be a good thing - it would be a loss for everyone if the next Swartz or Uriel didn't enter the industry just because they were black or female and they thought everybody would think less of them for it.

On the other hand though, I don't want to see quality standards lowered to accomodate them - the next Swartz or Uriel will be known for what's awesome, not because the standard for what's awesome was lowered in a misguided attempt to get people in.

The first is an admirable goal, the second is a crying shame.

Also, a thanks to whoever decided that this isn't a topic worth talking about. Way to help out!

</comment><comment><USER9> This discussion is useless without specific examples. Who/Where are these politically incorrect people who are having their careers systematically "ruined" to the scale that one would think that "tech" itself is under siege?

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't think claims of sexism in tech are unfounded. You can find sexism in any industry. I do believe that the overt political correctness does hinder others from expressing opinions that might seem "problematic".

It has gotten to a point in my workplace where it is very hard to not be politicaly correct for the sake of fun, without being "set straight" by select coworkers.

Edit: it's incredibly sad that this was flagged. We can't cover our ears to controversy, we have to be open to it and discuss it.

</comment><comment><USER11> > _Ask HN: ... political correctness in tech_

> _... on twitter and media outlets_

Twitter and media outlets are tech? Examples would help.

</comment><comment><USER12> Others, those with their 'selfish' agendas, perceive this is about economical and corporate justice. You might disagree. If others are attacking, let them. Don't be in a position that they can affect you. If 'they' are many, don't give them ammo, don't tweet, blog, etc. I'm not saying cower but be wise, understand yourself more, etc.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm sorry you find it offensive that there are "claims of sexism in OSS and tech." Maybe you should find an industry that doesn't care about gender equality or making strides to create a better working atmosphere for everyone. I'm sure whatever _that industry is, will appreciate your opinions and political incorrectness.

_ Maybe you should try academia?

<comment><USER11> > _Maybe you should find an industry that doesn 't care about gender equality > or making strides to create a better working atmosphere for everyone_

Construction, drywall, plumbing, fixing cars, or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.[1]

\---

[1] [http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/more- than-350-femal...](http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/more- than-350-female-rcmp-members-seeking-class-action-suit-alleging-decades-of- discrimination)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This post will be flag-killed soon, and rightly so (I'm flagging it myself), as these discussions usually bring out the worst in the HN community, with some truly amazing displays of unchecked misogyny.

My opinion: absolutely not. Right now tech -- especially software, especially in the Bay Area -- is suffering from extreme sexism. That sexism is real, measurable, and hurts the industry tremendously. Sexism and privacy are the top two political concerns of the software industry at this point in time. Anyone disputing that is either burying their head in the sand or unaware of what sexism is. Software is currently the _only_ white-collar industry where women participation has been consistently dropping for over two decades. Sure, whenever there's a just cause, it can be taken too far. But so far, the verbal abuse directed towards some white men in the industry -- occasionally perhaps unjustifiably -- is puny compared to the damage sexism has caused our industry.

Also, I don't like the term political correctness, as it's just a pejorative used to denote any cause that you disagree with or consider unimportant enough.

</comment><comment><USER15> No, political correctness has NOT gone too far. You just don't know the correct way to think. And the only reason you would think or ask questions is because you're a racist, and sexist and a bigot.

You just can't understand social issues at all because you're privileged and your opinion is invalid. Unless you can prove that you're in one of the protected groups who are victimized by you just by you being white and/or male and/or not poor, you should be fired immediately.</comment>


Mozilla Firefox 10 Bug Fixes - <AUTHOR> http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/10.0/releasenotes/buglist.html <comment><USER2> Not a lot going on in these updates now that they come so often...</comment>


Daily Stormer has officially retreated to the dark web - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/24/daily-stormer-has-officially-retreated-to-the-dark-web/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand why they are choosing to host on tor instead of choosing to use a bare IP address if they can't get domain registrar to issue them a domain name. Surely it is easier for their readers to type a dotted quad address in a standard web browser than to install tor and type in a 32 character base32 address.

<comment><USER3> Their IP address could still be revoked by a hosting/server provider for violation of ToS (or any other reason). In addition to that, there's a lot of security and usability problems, like using TLS without a valid domain name, having the IP change over time, having websites impersonate them, etc. Instead, if they use a tor hidden service, it's must more difficult for a single entity to take them down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And by doing so, it will now become essential for them to widely disseminate the steps needed to get on the dark web, thereby enabling a lot of people to go underground, where it will be harder to monitor and report on their activities.

<comment><USER5> It's not as if law enforcement doesn't know about the dark web, doesn't already monitor it and hasn't successfully raided it before. Anywhere Nazis can go, Feds and activists can go to.

<comment><USER4> That's not the point, it's that it now becomes imperative for them to teach others how to access the dark web. Eventually, if you push enough groups to the dark web, the government will feel pressured to regulate the dark web. No, I don't know, but they will certainly try

<comment><USER5> There are already plenty of extremists on the dark web... Daily Stormer and their readers are more a drop in the bucket than a watershed, and they're not even breaking any laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not true. They are back on the "open" web under a new domain.

<comment><USER7> Am sure, even that will be banned in no time. And if they go to dark web there won't be any traffic. Most of their audience isn't familiar with dark web. Guess it's the end for them.

<comment><USER8> _Most of their audience isn 't familiar with dark web._

How do you know this?

Having them in the public eye would be better for society.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. In my opinion - When peeople are pushed into dark holes, they start thinking dark thoughts. They think they're being persecuted and they will lash out even more.

I say this as someone who began to appreciate other cultures because I was exposed to them - I have no idea how I would have turned out if I was more isoloated. It might not have been good.

<comment><USER10> > I say this as someone who began to appreciate other cultures because I was > exposed to them - I have no idea how I would have turned out if I was more > isolated. It might not have been good.

While I'm still on the fence concerning the 'keep them in the open' theory when applied to societies, I think you make an excellent point here when it comes to exploring possible solutions to the problem.

I've had both the fortune and misfortune to spend much of my life in very different kinds of cultures (traditional & muslim, very liberal & mostly atheist, etc.) and to spend at least the first 25 in a very insular Evangelical environment (with full conviction, I might add!). I've 'hung out' with the richer parts of society (not much though) and been part of the 'poor' (within a rich society though), and explored many fringe communities.

Of course through all that I've had my privileges and I'm sure I still have many blindspots. I don't have the illusion that I've become 'world-wise'!

But what I _can_ confidently say is that with every new culture, subculture, class, and religion, my thoughts and judgments became milder and more understanding, even though my beliefs have remained relatively 'rigid'.

For example, I would've easily vilified white supremacists if not for the fact that the two white supremacists I've had as friends were wonderful, knowledgeable people who somehow, at least from my perspective, fell in with the wrong ideas and crowd for entirely understandable reasons. I truly could not hate them despite their hateful ideas. One of them, pretty much by accident, ended up becoming friends with a 'non-white' and is now no longer a skinhead.

The reason why I'm on the fence about the 'keep them in the open' approach is that I'm not sure that the old rules and mechanisms of shame actually work in this internetted society.

But as far as solutions I at least strongly believe that broad experiences and _significant_ human connection are much more effective than shame. And regardless of what we might think of shame as a useful way to 'shun' bad ideas, we can work on ways to increase the human connection.

Storytelling nights are one avenue. Entertainment that humanizes the other can be another (Black CJ from San Andreas comes to mind - I am convinced a huge portion of racists bought and enjoyed that game anyways in part because the racism is 'just' facade for them. A way to identify with something, but not necessarily part of their identity).

Anyways, your statement got me riled up and then this happened...

(PS: CJ in GTA: San Andreas struck me as a good example not because CJ is the best kind of black protagonist - there are plenty of iffy issues surrounding GTA - but rather that GTA is one of the few games that _everyone_ has. Identifying with CJ is better than nothing perhaps.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How come it's so difficult for daily stormer to find a hoster but al quada, isis et al have no problem?

<comment><USER4> Well, politics for one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why don't they use NameCoin or Ethereum DNS?

</comment><comment><USER13> They've made a powerful enemy of the Internet.</comment>


GPUVideoDecode on Linux is impossible without patching - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=463440 <comment><USER2> This bug was closed three years ago, with the following

"Today we don't have a Linux GPU decode owner, so we have chosen not to activate something which we have no one to support and may have to break arbitrarily in the future for ChromeOS."

Is there anything to suggest that has changed?

Did someone offer to do it and were turned down?

I've seen patches but no offer to maintain the subsystem, etc that i can find. But maybe i missed it? I only did a few searches of the relevant mailing lists.

(Also, in my experience commenting on 3 year old closed bugs is not the way to make anything happen)

(For those wondering, the actual patch set appears to be tracked here: [https://chromium- review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/53...](https://chromium- review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/532294) )

<comment><USER3> >(Also, in my experience commenting on 3 year old closed bugs is not the way to make anything happen)

Perhaps not, but this seems to be the only avenue available to many.

What would you suggest people who encounter a problem such as this do if they personally don't have the ability to personally fix the problem themselves?

This isn't an issue specific to chromium or even google. There are a lot of projects that seem to have an inside and an outside with those on the outside rightly-or-wrongly feeling unheard.

<comment><USER2> "What would you suggest people who encounter a problem such as this do if they personally don't have the ability to personally fix the problem themselves?"

There's a difference between getting someone's attention, and then them disagreeing with you.

If you are trying to get attention, i'd go with the mailing list in this situation.

If they just disagree with you, sometimes, you gotta accept that someone doesn't agree with you about the product vision and let it go (this assumes your constraints - they don't have ability/time to fix themselves). They will either be right or wrong, and it will succeed or fail.

"This isn't an issue specific to chromium or even google. There are a lot of projects that seem to have an inside and an outside with those on the outside rightly-or-wrongly feeling unheard."

Sure, and i think companies/people should be very clear with governance models, participation models, etc. I also think they should be very clear about things like this.

Actually one of the hugest clashes i often see is open source projects that _do_ have a product vision end up clashing with minorities of their user bases who don't fit in that product vision (either due to changes or never fitting in the first place), etc. Those clashes often seem much more emotional for people.

(I honestly don't know enough about chrome anymore at all to know whether that's the case. I'm only talking about the general situation you are describing).

A lot of the inside vs outside cases that i've seen fall into "product vision decided inside, you are welcome to participate if you want but we aren't changing it" style of project.

It's more rare (though i've seen it) to see "we have no vision of where we are trying to go but we still are going to semi-ignore random contributions/etc. We're gonna make it so you think we might care, but not actually try enough that anything happens "

Worse, a lot of the time the latter prevents other competing projects from existing because people spend time trying with the existing one then are too burned out to do anything else.

The product ones often at least give straight answers, even if people hate the answers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems totally reasonable. Google is primarily focused on building Chrome -- a product, with business oriented product goals. Anyone using Chromium has already agreed to be a tag-along. That was always part of the deal.

In general I find the category of folks who -- won't use Firefox, but want to pretend they're not basically just using Google Chrome -- to be very strange indeed.

<comment><USER5> I mean, there's a whole host of browsers based on chromium that are not chrome: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Other_b...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_\(web_browser\)#Other_browsers_based_on_Chromium)

That said, I agree that you're basically just using chrome.

I happen to use chromium for work because I do development for extensions and it's nice to keep chrome around as my primary test browser and chromium as my daily driver.

Plus I can dig through the source on chromium and recompile locally (admittedly, not super fun) to see if I might suggest additional extension features/apis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> afaik Firefox doesn't do GPU accelerated anything on Linux either (ref: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726) [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727) )

<comment><USER7> Which is by far the biggest pain point of using Ubuntu on my XPS 13. YouTube absolutely destroys battery life if I watch it in my browser. Only solution I've found is to watch Youtube videos with mpv, but I feel a bit bad about that because it deprives the creators of ad revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Before anyone chimes in with "just fork chrome".. just to give you an idea of the magnitude of the project. The chromium source code has some 16k cpp source files. Millions of lines of code. All the libraries combined the source advancea at a rate of thousand commits a day. You fork chromium now and tomorrow you're already way behind on merging upstream changes. It takes serious engineering effort just to be able to build that behemoth.

And yes the OpenGL drivers are unstable and no, Khronos CTS passing doesnt mean anything wrt stability. The most trusted gfx platform is currently DX11 backend in libAngle.

<comment><USER9> >It takes serious engineering effort just to be able to build that behemoth.

Not to mention resources. System requirements for building on Linux:

" >>A 64-bit Intel machine with at least 8GB of RAM. More than 16GB is highly recommended.

>>At least 100GB of free disk space."

[https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...](https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs/linux_build_instructions.md)

<comment><USER10> Heh, amusing about the memory requirements. The vast majority of chromebooks are 4GB ram. I suspect less than 1% are 8GB ram (they cost 3x as much as the 4GB models).

<comment><USER8> The large memory requirement is mostly due to the linker. Not a runtime requirement per se.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Imposible to read this page from an iPhone. Can't zoom out.

</comment><comment><USER12> Isn't ChromeOS based on Linux, and, therefore, all Chromebooks affected by this?

<comment><USER13> If you read the comments someone points out that they are using the exact same drivers for intel stuff on ChromeOS that people like me are using on on Thinkpads (it has an nvidia GPU but I rarely use it, next machine won't have) with no issues.

Not sure what is up with Chromium just recently in light of the potentially breaking adblockers thing but I'm happy that Firefox are back in the game (not that I ever stopped using them, Chrome/Chromium is only for dev and testing on my machines) since the single largest browser vendor also depending on advertising for the vast majority of it's income is a massive conflict of interest frankly.

Firefox for Android has gotten really good and with ublock origin and the lack of constant "sync everything to google forever" nagging makes mobile web much more pleasant.

<comment><USER14> isnt Firefox planning that same ad blocking breaking change?

[https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/10/26/firefox-chrome- an...](https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/10/26/firefox-chrome-and-the- future-of-trustworthy-extensions/)

<comment><USER15> On that page they say "Extensions that request access to all websites still get installed with that access, so the default behavior has not changed." That seems counter to the whole discussion about Chrome's changes yesterday.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Since Opera is based on Chromium, could they add hardware acceleration and use it to get an edge?

</comment><comment><USER17> Stop using Chrome.

<comment><USER18> Use Firefox.

<comment><USER19> Same problem, because webrtc.

Now if you had a patch vs Firefox that actually makes libva usable for everything, sure, go ahead, even add a checkbox in settings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wish Firefox would already implement GPU accelerated video decoding / encoding. Right now WebRTC is very CPU heavy since acceleration is missing completely.

</comment><comment><USER21> Cowards.

</comment><comment><USER22> What about using the Windows GPU code and then going through the Steam Proton Windows to Linux layer?

<comment><USER23> This seems worse in every way than just enabling libvaapi, which is already somewhat supported, except for being specifically disabled on non-ChromeOS Linux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It sucks.</comment>


How New York's Postwar Female Painters Battled for Recognition - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/08/how-new-yorks-postwar-female-painters-battled-for-recognition <comment><USER2> It's against the site guidelines to editorialize titles, so please don't do that.

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

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

(Submitted title was "Why Are We Still Ignoring Lee Krasner?")</comment>


SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-03/spacex-crew-dragon-docks-with-international-space-station <comment><USER3> Congratulations to the team at SpaceX!

They are opening the hatch right now on the stream if anyone here wants to watch along [https://youtu.be/21X5lGlDOfg](https://youtu.be/21X5lGlDOfg)

<comment><USER4> I really hoped they would hide a rubber face hugger next to Ripley, but I doubt it. Such a missed opportunity.

<comment><USER5> If I were those guys up there, I would check the chest cavity, just to be sure..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fantastic, very impressive.

But somewhere inside (my little star-wars/trek spirit), I wish that it was not so tricky. That we all could just travel and explore the universe.

Everybody always talk about how difficult it is in space and how much better earth is. Wish the debate would be more about all the possibilities in space or on other planets. What can we do with zero gravity? For all the bad things with living on Mars, could there be some amazing benefits, new materials and so on..

<comment><USER7> I honestly don't see any benefits to living on Mars until every inch of space on Earth is used up. Everything about living on Mars is hostile to life. Doing anything there like mining and manufacturing will be orders of magnitude more difficult and for what? To say we are somewhere else that looks like the Atacama but infinitely more difficult to get to? It seems silly to be trying to rush to a place that wants to kill you when we have a great place here already that we could just stop messing up.

<comment><USER8> Yea, I think a good demonstration is Antarctica. Antarctica is both much more accessible and much more hospitable than Mars. But there's very little human activity there.

It's hard to imagine there's an economic case for Mars or the Moon while Antarctica remains undeveloped.

<comment><USER9> Antartica is not a stepping stone to further and greater endeavors out into the cosmos It's more of a "dead end", cosmically speaking. This is why it doesn't have same interest or appeal.

There are also other reasons. You can't learn about the possibility of life on other planets in Antartica, and seek to answer one of the greatest questions of all time: "are we alone?". You can't closely study another planet in Antartica. You can't be a brave new explorer seeing incredible places for the very first time in Antartica. There are far less new scientific and engineering challenges in Antartica whose solutions will greatly benefit everyone here on Earth. And so on.

Note, these things are true for any next-gen space endeavor in our corner of the solar system. It doesn't have to be Mars, or even just Mars. For example, we could build larger and more advanced facilities and machinery in LEO, while also building a small base on the moon and exploring Mars for the first time.

<comment><USER10> Antarctica is a great place to do science, and the majority of the activity at the US South Pole base is currently astronomy. Mars and the Moon will pass through that sort of phase before they might become actual colonies.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I don't mean to put down Antartica. I think the research we do there is very cool, and we should keep doing what we can there. But it isn't even close to an alternative to humanity pushing further out into space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm sitting on my couch, just idly watching live footage of some people doing stuff 200 miles above me. Above the place I will spend the entirety of my life. Watching them do complicated things that, if we're lucky and don't destroy ourselves first, will ensure our species becomes multi-planetary. Maybe even space faring someday.

Life is weird.

<comment><USER12> I watched Free Solo not long ago, yesterday I watched Falcon 9 launch then land flawlessly and today I watched Dragon 2 dock with the ISS.

It's mind boggling how apt humans are to what should be impossible.

<comment><USER11> Oooh, I'm eagerly awaiting that film to screen in Berlin later this month! I loved Alex's TED talk. Just that little taste had my palms very, very sweaty.

<comment><USER13> Which film?

<comment> Joe-Z Apparently there's a documentary coming out about Alex Honnold's free solo ascend of El Capitan. It's called "Free Solo"[1]

[1] [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7775622/?ref_=nv_sr_1](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7775622/?ref_=nv_sr_1)

<comment><USER14> It was already released and won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature at the 2019 Academy Awards.

It's something that you should consider viewing if you have the chance. The cinematography alone is worth the price of admission // rental.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/24/movies/oscar- winners.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/24/movies/oscar-winners.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My "cool things to do once in a lifetime" list just got a new item - <USER2> SpaceX send humans to ISS. There is this strange urge to actually witness my species achieving great things.

<comment><USER16> That's definitely neat, but why not aim higher? Depending on your age?

I'm in my 30s: My goal here is to live on Mars. SpaceX's colony is aimed at being able to support 1M people, with something like 80,000 leaving Earth each Mars transit window on a BFR/Starship. Save some money now, wait 20-30 years for them to get the initial _hard colony built_ and then buy my ticket.

Might not work, but I think I'll at least get close. You can definitely aim higher than watching them send people to ISS! That'll happen in the next few months/years, but _so much more_ is happening after that, like the 7 people going around the Moon, or the first Mars launches on Starship, etc!

Woo!

(and lol that this is at -3, I'm just excited about stuff okay? no need to bury it deep underground and hate it so much!)

<comment><USER15> I like you ambition. However I seem to become more conservative and nostalgic with age. The thought of going on a one-way trip to Mars when you are 60 is scary. It is probably too cold and monochromatic for my taste.

But thank you for the idea of longer term goals - "Experience zero-gravity and see Earth from outer atmosphere" is now on the list.

<comment><USER17> Virgin Galactic might make that happen sooner than later.

<comment><USER18> They've been promising that since spaceship one, 15 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Do you ever wonder how people felt when they say Magellan or Captain Cook set off? Or, when they watched the Apollo missions happen?

I'm guessing that this is what it felt like. We're at the dawn of a new space age.

<comment><USER18> Soyuz takes people to the space station every few months, has done for years.

Why is this specific mission new?

<comment><USER3> It costs about $81 million USD per seat round-trip to go to ISS on Soyuz. SpaceX is doing the same for around $58 million per person (last I read). That alone is a HUGE deal. And that cost is expected to drop as SpaceX gets more comfortable with launching humans, whereas Soyuz has been raising prices.

Not to mention that it's increasing the number of countries and rocket designs that can send people to and from the ISS. Without alternate launch providers, if some flaw were to be found in Soyuz or political issues begin to get in the way of launches, then the US could find itself unable to get astronauts to and from the ISS safely.

Boeing is also in this race, and will be sending up humans to space in their Starliner soon as well, it's still up in the air which will get to the with humans on board ISS first.

<comment><USER20> A cost reduction of less than 50% for something that the Russians have been doing routinely with 1960s technology is akin to Magellan setting sail? I like SpaceX but man the spin is blinding.

<comment><USER21> The cost reduction is relative to the price Russia charges, not compared to their costs.

Supposedly[1], it was $23 million in 2007. but Russia raised the prices since then. The cost of the Soyuz to the Russians could well be lower than SpaceX still.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20090604111935/http://www.kommer...](https://web.archive.org/web/20090604111935/http://www.kommersant.com/t795701/r_3/n_25/Space_Rocket_Launch/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Nice that it went flawlessly, the first stage landed back well, and they reached the ISS a bit ahead of time. They even did some intentional back and forth maneuvers to test the dragon. Do they need more tests before the manned flight?

<comment><USER3> They still need to do an in-flight abort test, which i'm super excited for.

They are going to send the whole thing up a second time (I believe they will be using this EXACT Crew Dragon capsule after it comes back down), but this time they will abort the launch mid-flight around max Q which will trigger the capsule to eject safely away from the explosion behind it.

It's going to be quite the sight, and if everything goes to plan the first stage will basically be blown up and the dragon capsule will rocket away in a "Cool guys don't look at explosions" style!

<comment><USER23> For anyone that hasn't seen the ground abort test: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_FXVjf46T8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_FXVjf46T8)

It's pretty rocking.

<comment><USER24> I wonder if this one is still valid (for the human certification) as it was done with a very different capsule. Wasn't there a new one since?

<comment><USER3> Yeah the current Crew Dragon is different and needs to be "re-certified" for at least some things. NASA wants the exact configuration used to be validated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> When I was a kid I always thought about what it would be like growing up in the 60s - ultimately watching a man land on the moon. I tried my best to live vicariously through documentaries. I'm humbled to be around during this boom.

Watching a launch live in 1080p? With footage from the craft and booster? Truly amazing.

</comment><comment><USER26> Amazing achievement. Next step is a successfull return to Earth on 8th March.

</comment><comment><USER27> > No astronauts or humans were on board the maiden flight, which completed the > initial link to the ISS about 5:51 a.m. Eastern time.

Is there a difference?

<comment><USER28> First astronauts where animals. [https://www.space.com/17764-laika-first- animals-in-space.htm...](https://www.space.com/17764-laika-first-animals-in- space.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> On a tangent..

if advances in space travel are to be done by private means, does paying company profits become the new tax to do the things that government previously did?

Is there a presumption that the rich/corporations "know whats best" for humanity?

</comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone else find the title confusing? What's a "Crew Dragon"?

<comment><USER31> It's a dragon spacecraft, but with configuration for crew. Hence Crew Dragon

<comment><USER3> To explain a bit more, this is "Dragon 2", the second (major) version of SpaceX's capsule.

It has multiple configurations, one for crew, one for cargo, and possibly others.

This launch was significant as it was the first time they sent the crew configuration up as a demo and had it do automated docking procedures to dock (the old dragon had a more complex and manual docking procedure).

For simplicity sake, they tend to refer to this one as "Crew Dragon" to signify that it's in the crew configuration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Congratulations to SpaceX!

</comment><comment><USER33> Is it weird that the title brought only one word into my head: Shadman?

</comment><comment><USER34> "No astronauts or humans were on board the maiden flight"

<comment><USER35> This got me giggling too

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> It looks like we're finally getting the spacecraft we previously only experienced in Sci-fi. It must've been a surreal experience for the astronauts and cosmonaut entering the capsule for the first time.

</comment><comment><USER37> Congratulation to SpaceX.

That being said, we should take a step back and stop drinking the Elon Musk Koolaid. This has been done flawlessly by Russian Soyouz hundreds of times over the last decades (with almost no failures). This has also been done with the Shuttle.

<comment><USER38> Docking to the ISS? Sure. But a reusable first stage? _That_ has tremendous implications and had never been done.

<comment><USER37> The landing of first stage is definitely worth celebrating. But I honestly don't get all the hype about today's news:

\- SpaceX already sent multiple times almost the same capsule to the ISS before for cargo. Today's launch is just a small modification of those ones.

\- Soyuz is mundanely sending astronauts all the time to ISS.

<comment><USER39> It isn't _almost the same capsule_. That was discussed during the post-launch press conference. It's almost a complete redesign and they actually regretted not using more of Dragon 1.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Managing Translated Texts - <AUTHOR> We have come to the conclusion that we need a separate program to manage the lifecycle of the translated texts that appear in our software. We're looking for features such as the following:
* The ability to query for all texts that lack translation in a given language. * The ability to bulk export/import texts/translations so that an external translation specialist can work with them. * For each text we would like to track its source. Was it written by a programmer, a business specialist or an external translation specialist? * The ability to query for translations that are outdated (i.e. the default English text has changed since the translation was made). * Both a gui (so that non-programmers can work with it) and an api (so that the build pipeline can interact with it).
We're considering building it ourselves as it's a fairly simple program. However, we already have so many other things we would like to work on so we would prefer to purchase existing software if we find any that works well. We're also open to the possibility that we might be approaching the problem in the wrong way.
Do you have any experience with software like this? How do you manage your translations? <comment><USER2> We've been working on a translation system that handles some of these things. It's a CAT front-end for translators, with tests stored as plain JSON on Github. The idea is to leverage git's version control and other features as much as possible. Our use case is translating texts (Buddhist scriptures), but we also use it for UI. The software is just coming together, so check it out, [https://github.com/suttacentral/bilara](https://github.com/suttacentral/bilara)

\- _The ability to query for all texts that lack translation in a given language._ No. Our project has a very large number of texts, so everything is assumed incomplete. Would it be possible track this via Github, I wonder?

\- _The ability to bulk export /import texts/translations so that an external translation specialist can work with them._ Sure, just pull from Github.

\- _For each text we would like to track its source. Was it written by a programmer, a business specialist or an external translation specialist?_ Every translation edit records the Github user.

\- _The ability to query for translations that are outdated (i.e. the default English text has changed since the translation was made)._ No, but that would be awesome. Ideally the translator would be notified. It shouldn't be hard to do this using Github notifications.

\- _Both a gui (so that non-programmers can work with it) and an api (so that the build pipeline can interact with it)._ We have a front end GUI built with LitElement, and ArangoDB for search and translation memory. For the back end, apps consume the JSON data, there's no formal API yet.

In addition:

\- You can hook anything you like off the translation segments: notes, variants, markup, etc.

\- It has a publication model so the translator and site manager can publish any text or keep them as drafts.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.transifex.com/](https://www.transifex.com/)

Query for all texts that lack a translation: this is the default behavior in the translation interface.

Bulk export/import: there's an API and a CLI client for it. You can also make it automatically pull new strings to translate from a git repo. (Not sure whether it has to be public, in our case it is.)

Track the source: for changes made through the web UI, this happens automatically. If you use the API, changes will be attributed to the account associated with the API key.

Query outdated translations: those are treated as untranslated. But if the change in the source text was small, you'll get the old translation as a suggestion and can adapt it.

Downsides: not open source, free plan has limitations (but it's enough for our project), some questionable UI choices (I recently had to explain to someone how to join the translation team for an additional language, because the link is extremely tiny)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like it might be roughly what we need. I'm going to dig a little deeper. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am using google spreadsheets to generate localized sites at www.pagews.com (The sheets for the site translations are public if you want to check an example)

The service convert the sheets to JSON and use them on the generated site content, I detect changes based on the hash for the cell and then the JSONs are published and versioned.</comment>


How to choose an FPGA dev board. A guide for 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://thedatabus.io/fpga-buying-guide <comment><USER2> My hope is we see io put to better use. Frankly DisplayPort is one of the best, most useful, easiest to use, highest bandwidth connections you can get, with a streams based architecture that supports many manners of interesting use. It seems OT to my following comments, is indeed pretty apes to oranges, but still one of my weirder but better hopes for ways we get fpga & other systems talking interestingly cheaply atop existing everyday consumer tech, which seems to be required for costs to be earthly & useful for integration. Go more open (no licensing fee & flexible) specs.

FMC tends to be big bulky & stupid expensive. PMOD is great for interfacing microcontroller shit, but this is FPGAs we are talking about. Throughput monsters with high speed serdes & rather fast regular io. These two longstanding options put you at a high very expensive end, or a pretty so so low density low data rate low cost end.

Which is silly. Everyone & their uncle is trying to push better high density connectors. Almost none have a community around them.

Very small & not a big community, but one example of an active much denser & higher throughput, there is syzyg.

[https://syzygyfpga.io/](https://syzygyfpga.io/)

Also just a about out to the incoming io specs. There's a very big win when we can get better at stitching together systems & cxl, ccix, opencapi, & gen-z are each massively compelling new io/coherency systems.

</comment><comment><USER3> > I strongly suggest completely disregarding anything to do with the processor > for your first few projects and use only the FPGA part of the device.

I cannot disagree more strongly. Working with a hybrid software+logic project will teach you so much about both the similarities and differences between the two worlds.

CPU+software+fabric DMA+logic accelerator == win

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're talking about people who already know atleast one of digital design or firmware design (writing bare metal drivers etc) then your advice makes sense. But if I were a beginner trying to understand how digital logic design works, the whole Processor + Programmable logic and the complex interfaces between them can overwhelm me and take me away from exploring the base digital logic that is implemented. It will be a much more enjoyable experience to create something in the programmable fabric first and then think about how you can interface it with normal software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Funny that it doesn't mention the wide variety of very cheap prototyping kits from Crowd Supply -- including Fomu that fits entirely in your USB socket. FPGA kits on CS start at $15.

My disappointment with the FPGA world is how stuck it is in the "emulate an ASIC" rut. These things, physically, could change their whole logic and connectivity design on the fly according to instantaneous requirements, but everybody assumes you have to load them up once at reset and leave them that way. Each switch-point setting is just a flip-flop, no different from any of the ones in the LUTs.

Manufacturers enforce this treatment by providing only serial access to the switch-point settings in their tooling, but there is probably a lot of room for more flexibility, at least in some.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm all for cheap stuff for beginners but what good is an fpga board without a lot of peripherals? I mean the whole point of dumping your design into an actual fpga is to see it doing something. If I were just learning to desing, doing so would be very much possible in the software tools itself, if I'm able to succesfully go upto bitstream generation without errors and meet timing, it means my design is going to work on a physical board too. I'm open to changing my opinion on this though.

<comment><USER4> There are also cheap peripherals, as daughter boards or integrated. See for yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This article aims to guide you in your search for a suitable FPGA development board which can often lead to you pulling your hair out!

<comment><USER5> I've only just got into FPGAs thanks to the Mister project, thankfully the people in charge of that project made a good choice for me. What they've achieved with the DE-10 nano to me is some sort of tech voodoo and I'm not easily impressed these days. £100 for the board and £30 for an SDRAM chip and I'm in retro gaming nirvana everyday. I've got a pocket sized, low power device that nearly boots instantly, pretty much perfectly plays every old machine from the the Spectrum up to the NeoGeo and GBA. RGB and VGA output, works with my Arcade stick, DS4, SNES/NES classic controllers, etc. Anyone with any interest in retro gaming who hasn't yet dipped their toe in the water I urge you to give it a go. It's probably the most exciting and vibrant open source community I've immersed myself in for many years.

<comment><USER6> A lot of the old silicon created in the 80's are unobtanium -- particularly certain chips in the Amiga hardware line.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > DO NOT fall into the 'Write code in C++/Python and run it on FPGA' trap. A > lot of youtubers seem to be promoting stuff like that for beginners these > days which is just sad.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of this statement. Imagine if people said in programming, "Don't fall into the Rust/Python/.NET trap. Use Java."

<comment><AUTHOR> Well comparing the FPGA world to the programming world cannot get any meaningless. If you read up about the state of HLS tools as of today, you will find enough experts telling you that they're nowhere near finding actual use in the industry, most of them only end up taking away the control you have over the design and all of them use way more resources when implemented than HDLs.

On the other end you have beginners asking stupid questions like 'okay how do I print hello world using python on this FPGA?' instead of thinking about the digital logic design that goes into it. Which is why I discourage the beginners from using anything but HDLs.

If anything HLS can be a good tool for professionals who already know what they're doing and understand what they're giving up by using an inherently sequential (programming) language to model inherently parallel hardware. They are in a position to use it as a tool to rapidly prototype their design and make incremental improvements thereafter, not beginners.

<comment><USER6> > If you read up about the state of HLS tools as of today, you will find > enough experts telling you that they're nowhere near finding actual use in > the industry, most of them only end up taking away the control you have over > the design and all of them use way more resources when implemented than > HDLs.

> On the other end you have beginners asking stupid questions like 'okay how > do I print hello world using python on this FPGA?'

And why is it not simple? Dogma? Industry standards? Drinking the FPGA vendor kool-aid?

What's wrong with having "print('hello world')" run on a micropython running on a risc V core on an FPGA? Because that's not an optimal solution? Are you serious? To me that seems like an awesome first step.

<comment><AUTHOR> The first thing one needs to understand is that FPGAs are highly specialised tools. They're only used in cases where extraordinary performance is required, more than what processors can provide, just because there are tools nowadays that let you print hello world doesn't mean it's a good idea. The entire thought process behind digital design is very different from that of programming.

<comment><USER6> Whether or not that's a valid critique, it puts you as a gatekeeper to who can or cannot learn what an FPGA can do.

Sorry, I believe knowledge should not have gatekeepers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


e7: a new Lisp dialect inspired by Python - <AUTHOR> http://e7code.org/doc/progress-report.html Also see http://e7code.org/ <comment><USER2> I ran into the author of this a few months ago at a SuperHappyDevHouse party. He's a pre-IPO Googler and is now working on developing this Lisp dialect.

I'd like to propose the "Graham-Tiedemann Law": All Lisp hackers who get rich will go on to create their own Lisp dialect.

/ _dislodges tongue from cheek_

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're in NYC next month (Aug. 14, to be exact), you might be interested in Perry Metzger's presentation:

_"Otter, a new dialect of Lisp. Otter is strongly influenced by Scheme and Python, with some bits of inspiration from Common Lisp, Perl and other languages thrown in, as well as some strange ideas Perry came up up with on his own."_

(see the LispNYC site for details on the meeting: <http://lispnyc.org/home.clp>)

</comment><comment><USER4> Cool. Interested in PG's take on it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also see <http://e7code.org/>

</comment><comment><USER5> What's PG always say..? Something along the lines of, "If competition springs up around what you're doing, you're doing the right thing"?</comment>


Jolla - <AUTHOR> http://jolla.com/ <comment><USER2> They seem to put a lot of effort into telling you things other than "what is this thing?"

It sorta looks like a phone. Is it a phone? "Jolla is powered by Sailfish OS." Sweet. How is that relevant? It must be important because it spends the rest of the page telling you about the OS.

I'm back here, with honestly no idea what it is. Probably not the impression they want to leave on people, assuming (as a guess) that this is a consumer product of some kind.

It seems they put the engineers in charge of designing the website.

<comment><USER3> For the people who are genuinely confused, Jolla is a company that sells smartphones, their first smartphone is also called Jolla; it runs Sailfish OS, which is effectively a fork of the Meego operating system which Nokia used in its N9/N900 phones, before they switched to Windows Mobile. This is not very surprising, because Jolla is a Finnish company principally made up of ex-Nokia engineers, including a lot of the people who created the N9 in the first place. Sailfish OS stays closer to Linux than Android, using Wayland, Qt/QML, PulseAudio etc, and adhering to the Linux Standard Base specification. It also comes packaged with an Android runtime based on Alien Dalvik, so that it can run Android applications (similar to Blackberry 10), although it won't have access to Google Play or the Play Services APIs. The phone is being launched this week in Finland, and there are plans for release in the rest of Europe, and in China, though not so far in the US.

Edit: Some more technical details about the OS: [https://sailfishos.org/about- technology.html](https://sailfishos.org/about-technology.html)

<comment><USER4> Please forward this paragraph to their web folks. Just put it right at the top as a first-read. Then everything else makes a lot more sense.

<comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure they can't use "Nokia" in their advertisements.

<comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure they can say jolla is the phone, sailfish the os, and that it comes from meego tho. and everything else without mentioning even Nokia. heh.

<comment><USER5> I just did experiment and asked my wife what OS is running on her phone. She has no idea. She owns N9.

<comment><USER7> I'm a software developer with 20 years of professional experience, 18 of them on Linux, and 33 years of time spend immersed in technology every day, and I didn't know the N9 ran Meego until I read the paragraph above. I was somewhat aware of Jolla and Sailfish, and vaguely aware it had Linux somewhere there, but only barely.

They probably should not mention the OS very much, and focus on getting people to recognize the brand and reasons why they should want the phones, and only mention "Linux" and "Meego" far down the list.

<comment><USER8> Stock N9 doesn't even run Meego (proper). It runs Harmattan, a transitional system which is more Maemo than Meego underneath. Nokia planned to evolve it into Meego proper, but never did since it soon sunk into the oblivion of WP. Some parts of Meego (not Harmattan) were forked by the community as Mer, and some other parts (namely Meego Handset) as Nemo. Sailfish is built on Mer and parts of Nemo, adding its own UI on top. All this (including historic evolution of Moblin and Maemo to Meego) can be pretty confusing for those who didn't follow these developments. See also this chart: [https://github.com/kumadasu/tizen-history](https://github.com/kumadasu/tizen- history)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For those who are wondering why this is up on the front page: Jolla is launching their first handset tonight in Helsinki: [http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/jolla-sailfish-os- phone-...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/jolla-sailfish-os-phone- november-27-release/)

I always wondered why Jolla is getting so little love from HN. To me and from a geek / hacker point of view, Jolla is an awful lot more interesting than Android.

Anyone who's had the chance to own a Meego device knows how incredibly talented and passionate the team behind Jolla is. I'm really looking forward to see how the OS and apps feel on Jolla. The OS also appears to be a lot more open and hackable than Android (although the proof will be in the pudding so we'll see how it all pans out).

<comment><USER10> Probably hasn't been getting much attention because so far it is vaporware (until you can actually buy a device, it's not all that interesting), and it's a member of the complicated Maemo/Moblin/Meego/Tizen/Mer/Sailfish family that keeps on promising great things but seems to be reinvented every year and never actually delivers a working or supported ecosystem. Yes, a few devices have been released in that family, but have been immediately EOLed (the N900, DOA as it was released just as Nokia decided to go Windows only) or sold only as specialized developer previews or whatnot.

This whole family has been promising lots of things for a long time, but never seems to actually deliver, while you can get an Android phone in any corner store.

I might get interested once I can actually buy a device and write an application for it. Until then, I'm going to be extremely skeptical of this whole family of devices since they seem to consistently over-promise and under-deliver.

<comment><USER9> As far as I can see from a completely outsider perspective, the Maemo / Meego / Jolla team have always been severely under-resourced, have always been the underdog and have always deeply suffered from the political turmoil happening above their head while they were at Nokia.

One thing they have never been however is vaporware. They have always delivered. And what they've delivered, particularly with Meego, was superb. Meego was especially impressive given that in the last few months before its release, they had for all intent and purpose already been fired from Nokia. That they managed to pull together, keep working on it and release something of that caliber when they knew that Meego had no future at Nokia is pretty incredible.

It's obvious that Jolla is extremely unlikely to ever go mainstream. But that's not the point. They're clearly a team of talented, passionate and persistent hackers that can create products that manage to be delightful to use, open source and very hackable. That's why I find the lack of interest from the HN community, which is usually all over these type of projects, to be surprising.

<comment><USER10> So, you're right, it hasn't been entirely vaporware. The N800, N900 and N9 did ship, and were pretty impressive.

But when the N900 shipped with Maemo, they then announced that they were changing a large portion of the stack, from GTK to Qt, from dpkg to rpm, from Maemo to MeeGo. So the software stack was pretty much obsolete as soon as it shipped. Then the N9 was released after Nokia had cancelled development on MeeGo, so it was pretty unclear if the platform had any future at all.

Now it's been two more years, and I've heard a lot about Tizen and Mer and Sailfish and Plasma Active and so on, but I haven't actually seen any hardware running them that's generally available.

So yeah, it's pretty impressive what they've done with the resources they have, but I really don't want to invest time and money into a platform that's going to disappear or be reinvented in another year.

<comment><USER11> The Maemo-MeeGo transition didn't simply replace technical innards; it completely disrupted the Maemo user community, which relationship was negligently bungled by Nokia management. (Although it may also have been due to Intel's influence via the Moblin contingent.) Weep for maemo.org, which once upon a time was the best friend Nokia ever had.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >Jolla brings you the best of both worlds – super intuitive Sailfish OS apps and the latest Android™ apps.

The recent article on OS/2 [1] makes me wonder whether such compatibility (which, as I understand, is full and not selective) is actually good for them. Either way, tough, I wish Jolla success; I'd like to see Sailfish OS [2] on an actual device.

[1] See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6792010](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6792010). The short of it is that the Ars Technica article claims OS/2's compatibility with Windows made developers less inclined to write native applications for OS/2\. Some discussion on whether that was the case can be found in the comments to this response to the article: [http://www.os2museum.com/wp/?p=2144](http://www.os2museum.com/wp/?p=2144).

[2] [https://sailfishos.org/](https://sailfishos.org/)

<comment><USER13> As long as their business is based on selling hardware, it might not be a problem. Then they are not competing with Google in mobile OS development, but with Samsung etc.

Sailfish OS could then allow them to differentiate from other handset makers, without advertising it as such. In other words, market the capabilities, not the Sailfish "brand".

<comment><USER14> Would Sailfish also run apps that use google play services?

<comment> shawn-butler No, not as far I know.

Jolla CEO Tomi Pienimäki went on record last month stating that devices will ship with its own app store partner, Yandex [http://store.yandex.com](http://store.yandex.com) I believe, not Google Play.

So apps consuming Play Services might work if a user was able to install the play services .apk, but I guess this would not be in a supported fashion.

Seems all very murky. Jolla claims full Android compatibility but I don't believe it has Android(™) compatibility. Would be a good developer FAQ.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One of their implicit pitch is that Jolla is "surveillance free". And it can run Android apps. I think these two features are good enough to spark an interest. The spec looks also impressive. But freedom doesn't come cheap at almost $550. Nonetheless, a very exciting development.

I'm also waiting for Firefox OS to mature and produce more devices.

I can't wait to drop Android. Each release takes more freedom away from the user and gets increasingly integrated with whatever social, cloud, data milking services they have at their disposal.

Funny how _freedom_ becomes a competitive advantage for startups against the big and evil Internet giants.

<comment><USER16>
      One of their implicit pitch is that Jolla is "surveillance free".

Bullshit. Unless the phone can lie to the phone company about which cell tower its connected to, or some magic like that, it's not going to be anything like "surveillance free."

<comment> king-coconut I think he ment that if you want to use the phone, you are not forced to use a ecosystem monitored by USA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> FYI: those who wonder about the technology, check out these sites:

* [https://sailfishos.org](https://sailfishos.org)

* [http://merproject.org](http://merproject.org)

* [https://wiki.merproject.org](https://wiki.merproject.org)

* [http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-an...](http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-android-gpu-drivers.html)

* [http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/05/wayland-utilizing-an...](http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/05/wayland-utilizing-android-gpu-drivers.html)

Jolla.com is more consumer oriented, so that can puzzle some who look for technical details. It's probably good to provide some links to the above from the Jolla.com. You can give them feedback, they are even present on Diaspora*: [https://joindiaspora.com/u/jolla](https://joindiaspora.com/u/jolla)

</comment><comment><USER17> Perhaps I'm not in the know (I'm not) but it took me way too long to figure out it was a phone and not some UI overlay/Android enhancement suite.

<comment><USER18> It's like a lot of things that appear on HN... strange and unfamiliar words without context. Yep, a smartphone.

<comment><USER19> It's the title's fault, OP made no effort to explain what he was linking. Pretty annoying actually.

<comment><USER20> That'd be editorialising the title which is expressly discouraged by the site moderators.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It would be awesome if Jolla would become a successful company after Nokia sold out to MS (because it seems like Jolla is a continuation of what would have been Nokias route without MS). Also i only heard good things about the N900, i love linux, i hope the handset/os is "free"... and 399€ doesn't seem to be too expensive. Also it looks well designed.

Good luck, Jolla Team!

<comment><USER22> I think 400 euro is a lot for a device with these specs though. They are letting a huge number of devices "fly under them"(be cheaper) and the average consumer doesn't give a damn if the phone runs Sailfish OS or Android.

Nevertheless, I too wish them luck :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It really bothers me that they didn't do something about the flickering infrared light in the video. I know it's not going to show up in real life, but that's going to confuse some people who aren't aware of the fact cameras can see some things we don't.

</comment><comment><USER24> Hint: most global mega corps block youtube. Host videos locally for product demos if you can pay for the bandwidth. You will reach a bigger audience.

<comment><USER25> Is Vimeo a good alternative, or is it also blocked?

<comment><USER26> Vimeo is terribly slow, at least from here in India.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What is interesting is that anyone that comes here, likes it (I do from what I see) and goes to check on the Mer Project where this work stems from will see their git repos have been largely untouched for two years. [0] I find that strange because I had to search a few pages into their wiki to even find that URL.

I wish people who liked Meego would support the latest update to the truly free OpenMoko project. [1] You can build your own upgrade or buy the whole thing in an old GA02 case (the second revision OpenMoko phone).

I am waiting out for pocket change to buy one of those. Buy a real open handset and fight the power guys!

[0] [http://gitweb.merproject.org/gitweb](http://gitweb.merproject.org/gitweb)

[1] [http://projects.goldelico.com/p/gta04-main/](http://projects.goldelico.com/p/gta04-main/)

</comment><comment><USER28> > To get back to Home from any app, swipe from either side of the screen.

I don't think it's a great idea to reserve the "swipe from side of screen" gesture for the OS. Especially the left-swipe is used in many apps to reveal a menu, which is a UI-pattern I like a lot.

Anyway, looks interesting, would love to try one out!

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "I don't think it's a great idea to reserve the "swipe from side of screen" gesture for the OS."

In iOS 7 a gesture from the left side towards the right navigates back in an app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can anyone comment on how free this device will be? From what I recall, Sailfish is partially free software, but contains proprietary software as well which is a real shame.

<comment><USER30> What is your alternative?

<comment><USER5> Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch

<comment><USER31> The Firefox OS phone (Zte Open) has proprietary stuff.

<comment><USER32> Are there any phones that do not require proprietary drivers? I am not aware of any.

<comment><USER31> Yes. The most free one is OpenMoko, even the baseband firmware: [http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2012-July/0672...](http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2012-July/067276.html)

(runnig non-certified baseband firmware is illegal in many places however, from spectrum use regulations)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I value my smartphone a lot, but I find it hard to get excited about this smart phone vs that smartphone. Android, Samsung android fork, iPhone, WinPhone, whatever. They're all good, they all roll out a faster better version every year. They all have twitter, facebook, email, maps, search, a camera, app store. etc. Oh yeah, and SMS and voice calls too.

So why should we get excited about this flavour of hand-held connected computer? What's the USP?

<comment><USER5> Linux ? (not just Linux kernel)

<comment><USER33> Linux is a good thing, but Linux as a thing in itself delivers a lot of geek cred and is a good platform for other software, but it is not a feature that gives phone users any value. Will the average buyer know or care?

Is it more stable? Cheaper? Android phones are stable and cheap already. Does it run new kinds of apps or run existing apps faster? Make coffee and wash dishes? What does it do for me that my current phone does not?

<comment><USER5> I absolutely agree with you. Still you have asked personal question "So why should __we__ get excited" and I made assumption that __we__ as hackers. If __we__ as people - IMHO nothing interesting about this phone from average user perspective. N950 and N9 were interesting phones for me as geek (because of QtQuick) but QtQuick performance gain is not that important/significant if compared to HTML(5).

The only reason why I love different brands than Android is to play with something interesting and different. That's why Firefox OS looks particularly interesting for me currently with my simple needs and low dependence on Google.

<comment><USER33> Good answer, thanks. "real linux" is a feature for a certain group of people. ... as is "low dependence on Google"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Suggestion: add a text "elevator pitch" on a front page.

Forcing me to watch video is a sure way to Ctrl+F4

<comment><USER35> Yeah, I didn't realize there was more than the video until I read these comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Does no-one answer phone calls from their Mom anymore? Just me?

<comment><USER37> I was very saddened because of this and called my mom immediately with my Android.

Jolla - For people who don't answer to their mothers.

That's a strategy. Not necessarily the best, but strategy at least. I was a little bit lost because they were boasting so much about "Yoyo get Sailfish and you can run Android apps". Like in Blackberry phones before they realized they have to "reclaim their success".

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The Peek and Pull features exists on the iPhone - but the directions are reversed.

Changing the directions means that app developers cannot develop the same app for both iOS and Sailfish since they have to place important information that shouldn't be covered up by notifications, or shouldn't be interacted with in a way that could activate the notifications menu, on the bottom in iOS and on the top on Sailfish.

Is there any benefit to changing the directions notifications come from?

<comment><USER39> Developing the same app for both platforms is a Bad Thing. I want Android apps on Android, iPhone apps on iPhone. Mixing never works out well in the long term.

<comment><USER40> Sure, but realistically not every organisation has the capacity to develop entirely different apps for every platform. And especially not for minority platforms like Jolla.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> As a (still happy) n900 user looking for an upgrade path to a decent open phone with modern hardware, I'm hoping that Sailfish gives you command line/root access.

Realistically that probably won't happen in this first iteration, but I've held out for long enough now to be able to wait another 6 months to see what happens. A hardware keyboard would also be nice, the bigger the better, but you can't have it all...

<comment><USER3> As I recall, there is some talk about using the 'other half' feature of this to attach a hardware keyboard. A quick search reveals:

[http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=91535](http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=91535)

<comment><USER41> Ah, I'd misunderstood the 'other half' in that case, thinking it just to be a fancy name for the rear case with a 'colour feature'. There may be hope yet, although nobody seems to know if that command line/root access is possible.

It's entirely possible that the Maemo/Google search queries I've run may be letting me down, it'd be great if the Jolla documentation made some mention of this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I have no idea what the web design of the type Jolla has, but it's getting old really fast. Yes, it looks neat at first, but then it's confusing. Crashplan recently did their update with the same style.

I'll shut up now if I'm the only one bothered by this trend.

<comment><USER43> I think it's mostly just weird because the fixed header doesn't have a border or anything along the bottom to let you know where it ends and the content begins. I see no reason for it to be fixed at all to be honest, the content isn't extremely useful. I also wish more sites would do min-height media queries before fixing elements to my screen. The header and footer here are pretty greedy with the spacing on this site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Am I supposed to be impressed by this? "truly open and gesture based OS". I thought the open card has been played and dead already. And don't iOS and Android both have plenty of gestures? I didn't see anything new at all.

<comment><USER45> Of course they are not selling open software but a hardware product (which may or may not be locked down).

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I wonder how the name is pronounced.

My first language is Brazilian Portuguese, but I tend to read it in Spanish because of the double "L". But that in turn would make it sound like the Portuguese version of "cork", like a bottle cork.

<comment><USER47> "Yol-la" probably confers the intended spelling in English. The word Jolla is Finnish and means a small boat. It's a reference to the famous burning platform memo.

P.S. I was one of the 450 guys who got their phone today. Got it literally 20 minutes ago.

<comment><USER48> Can you confirm it's got LTE _everywhere_? (6 continents)

<comment><USER47> I cannot. They didn't really speak about it.

However my first impressions as a developer:

It is a breath of fresh air that instead of fiddling with AndroidSDK and having to deploy an apk my first test of their toolchain was simple compilation -> scp the binary into the phone and run it in dev mode terminal (or via ssh from a desktop).

They naturally have a full fledged packaging system like apk but the point is that it's not forced upon us. My phone is now basically (just like N900 was) just a Linux running on arm platform, with fancy UI for consumer usage on top.

<comment><USER49> How restricted are you? Can you get root on it?

<comment><USER47> There are practically no restrictions whatsoever. You have root as soon as you enable the developer mode from options. You can even flash your own images to the device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> It will be interesting to see if customers see Jolla as a continuation of Nokia's handset business. Lots of people liked N9 and Meego, and when that product was killed it was out-selling Nokia's Windows Phone products.

</comment><comment><USER51> Weaker than S III hardware to run Android apps for 400 euro? Did I miss something?)

<comment><USER30> You missed that it is not designed as a lower-cost Android phone?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Why should I buy this device now? 400EUR a lot of money and on Twitter they write: Calendar sync is not supported at the moment. MMS is not supported at the moment. We do not have DLNA support at the moment.

<comment><USER53> You cannot buy it now, thus... If - I'm speculating - we 'normal' people can buy the device in spring it will have more features.

(I'm interested as it's linux based, and a good alternative to the closed apple world and the dominant 'Android-one-Google-data-collecting' universe.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> The UI is pretty, but it's dropping frames like crazy during your demo video. It's super smooth _most_ of the time, but not at the critical times. Horseshoes and hand grenades, etc.

</comment><comment><USER55> Anyone else really distracted by the extremely messy desks. Who honestly leaves a wet, browning apple core just sitting on their desk. That's just going to be a sticky bloody mess later.

<comment><USER56> That's hilarious. Not to knock the phone, which may or may not be quite good, but I was also more interested in the things on the desk than the phone. Who's the person who said, let's put the apple in there? I'd like to know more about that decision as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> _> User-replaceable battery_

OH. GOD. YES!

</comment><comment><USER58> I like how the video gives us the heads-up about how easy it is to accidentally hang up on your mother.

</comment><comment><USER59> While trying to open the video to full size, some was cut off, I found Google's 'Stats for Nerds' on right click. Not expecting that, but gave me a chuckle. As for the phone I don't think it is wise to do promotions with no word on availability.

</comment><comment><USER60> All I learned from the video is that this is a phone for people with very messy desks.

</comment><comment><USER61> "A new beginning." And a web site and video that look exactly like every iOS and Android device ever made. For HN readers, there's some geek cred here, but as a consumer product, they need some marketing help.

<comment><USER62> This is the new beginning after the burning platform company has finally been sold to Microsoft. Alternatively the new beginning for maemo/moblin/meego/whatever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Liked what i saw. Easily better than any iphone ad of recent times.

</comment><comment><USER64> OK, all the garbage in the video is really, really strange. It completely distracted me and kind of grossed me out. I don't know who thought that was a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER65> That looks cool and all but please get Swype on board. I find it an indispensable part of mobile use nowadays and any US without it is seriously missing out.

</comment><comment><USER66> it will be interesting to see how this competes against the Chinese competitors in this arena. Just yesterday Gionee announced the E7 for about the same price. A phone that includes a camera sensor from a point and shoot.

[http://www.gsmarena.com/16mp_gionee_elife_e7_claims_to_be_th...](http://www.gsmarena.com/16mp_gionee_elife_e7_claims_to_be_the_best_android_cameraphone- news-7262.php)

</comment><comment><USER67> Looks cool but I wish it had beefier hardware specs.

<comment><USER68> What are you missing concretely and why?

<comment><USER69> Just compare it to the Nexus 5 at the same price point. Half the memory, probably lower res screen, the sd card slot is great but I don't think it justifies a $100+ price premium.

I'd rather see Nexus 5's flashed with Ubuntu Phone / Plasma Active / Tizen / Sailfish than all these companies trying to batch order hardware of their own that never has the economies of scale Google could pull off.

<comment><USER30> You aren't comparing apples to apples. It's pretty clear that Jolla was never intended to _launch_ as a lower-cost competitor to Nexus 5. That makes it a bit silly to criticize it for not being one, particularly at launch. How long has the Android platform had to bring costs down? A long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Why couldn't Ubuntu do that?

Is it because device manufacturers won't put trust in anything but the Android brand?

</comment><comment><USER71> Finally a great Mobile OS for Python ?

</comment><comment><USER72> A phone for messy people? Why put so much junk in the video to defocus viewer's attention?

</comment><comment><USER73> If you know some finish guy, you will definitely understand that this mobile is going to rock.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'll be getting it as soon as they'll confirm compatibility with T-Mobile LTE.

</comment><comment><USER74> I really wish we could edit submission titles to be more informative.

</comment><comment><USER75> > GSM/3G/4G LTE* (Works on 6 continents).

What, no service in Antarctica?

</comment><comment><USER76> Do we seriously need another mobile operating system?

</comment><comment><USER77> When does this mobile technology gonna saturate?

</comment><comment><USER78> mhm..

\- FirefoxOS is just web

\- Ubuntu Phone is cool and gestures

\- Windows Phone is pushed by Microsoft's money

\- Jolla / Sailfish is ..

Sorry I don't see a killer feature :(

</comment><comment><USER79> $400 ? nope.

</comment><comment><USER80> So I watched the video, and I still have no idea what Jolla is.

I was not impressed by anything in the video, but that's besides the point.

If you're a technology company, this hipster crap is ok, but you need to start with explaining what it is and how it's better. Showing a bunch of gestures does nothing - Android can do that.

<comment><USER81> You have to click one link on the front page to a short summary of what Jolla is.

One link.

One.

Of, you can just scroll down.

That's it.

<comment><USER82> "Jolla is powered by Sailfish OS, a truly open and distinct mobile operating system. Navigate effortlessly with the gesture-based user interface and load the phone with top Android™ apps."

I assume you are talking about this? Because that really told me nothing worthwhile.

I wish these (horribly to use scrolling) sites would just give me link that takes me to a half page description that explains in some detail what the heck they are talking about.

<comment><USER83> What do you mean nothing worthwhile? Isn't that exactly what it is? A _phone_ with an OS that isn't Android/iOS/Windows/Ubuntu/Firefox? What other description are you expecting?

<comment><USER82> > Navigate effortlessly with the gesture-based user interface

What's that? I can turn my Android into a "gesture-based UI".

> load the phone with top Android™ apps

Performance of non-native apps? Emulation layer or what is happening?

> truly open

Every bit is OSS? Hardware specification completely available? What is "truly open".

The phone is supposed to appeal to geeks/hackers (I think?), so why does the whole website seem to be something that Apple could have done?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Kinda off topic, but as soon as I opened that page in a new background tab, it froze my browser and PC for about a minute with an hourglass before it would respond to my inputs. I thought it crashed the system, but everything is okay now. I did close the tab after giving it a cursory look because it looked too noisy and light on content. Perhaps someone can analyze how much RAM, CPU and bandwidth that page takes up. And I am rocking a quadcore computer with 8 gigs of RAM.

Sigh, the more the hardware giveth, the more the new fangled web pages taketh away.

<comment><USER85> I have an old laptop with Core 2 Duo and 2 gigs of RAM. Had no problem with the website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> i don't know about you but it TRIES to look like ios7, i say LET IT GO - smart-phone business is OWNED by Apple, the sooner we accept that the sooner we can move on to a TRULY different thing - this includes Android too, just DIE you're NOT "original" \- instead of coming up with NEW ideas you try to rip-off one another and it's getting annoying [most of the time the company that started the idea WINS]

in summary: \- it's a phone [i think] \- looks elegant \- looks simple to use \- it's smart [i think --- am thinking a lot aren't i :)] \- android apps [hope it's better in security than Android] \- gesture based [OMG, didn't see that one coming]

sound familiar - well it should - iPhone which STARTED all of THIS!

NOTE: am not even an iPhone user, Blackberry [Loyal to the end :)]

CONCLUSION: BORING!

PLEASE if there's something NEW about the OS and the HARDWARE tell me!

</comment><comment><USER87> So this is an Android fork with UI improvements?

<comment><USER88> It's a phone from a small finnish company with a new (as in not MS, Google or Apple) operating system, that happens to have an Android compatibility layer, so you can run native Sailfish apps and Android apps.

If you happen to have heard of the N900, it's the team who made that one. They founded their own company after Nokia sold its soul to MS.

<comment><USER89> Nokia had a soul? It was a corporation.

<comment><USER90> Corporate social responsibility could be thought of as (a part of) a soul of a company.

[http://www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/people-and- planet/st...](http://www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/people-and- planet/strategy/reports/sustainability-reports/)

<comment><USER89> It's not a person. Microsoft has statements like that. Why don't they have a soul? I'm actually not trying to be flippant. I think that people need to question their assumptions about "companies as people"...Nokia didn't "have a soul". It was a business. The fact that people think it did reflects more on their marketing than anything else.

<comment><USER90> Have you seen Hank Poulsen's documentary about precious materials that make it into mobiles? He referred to Nokia as a company that does not do bad and is responsible.

If only to force/guilt-trip companies to do better and be responsible to their workforce, customers, supply chain, country etc., I am going to talk about companies and their _soul_.

[http://bloodinthemobile.org/](http://bloodinthemobile.org/)

<comment><USER89> OK. Fair enough. That doesn't not make Nokia a sentient entity with "a soul".

It's a business that has a fair degree of social responsibility in its business plans.

My point with this isn't to be pedantic...I'm trying to say that referring to them in this way plays into the larger picture where it is in all businesses interest to have us refer to them as a person. They aren't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> My opinion is: "wat"

</comment><comment><USER92> I was wondering why a condom site was on HN, then I entered and saw it was the mobile phone one...

Too bad for them their name (at least in Brazil) still sounds like a condom name though. (the most popular condom in Brazil is named "Olla")

More on topic edit:

> The original Finnish design, with no front-facing buttons, stands out from > the pack.

Only me find this... ironic? I mean, almost all smarphones now come without front-facing buttons (a design I hate by the way, specially when your hands are wet or oiled for whatever reason, or when you sneeze in the screen and it go ballistic).

<comment><USER93> Um, iPhones, Androids and Windows Phones all have at least one front-facing button, either physical or virtual.

<comment><USER94> Blackberry has no front-facing buttons and also uses only a gestures-based interface.

<comment><USER95> And I think that was a strategically terrible move. They're trying to come from behind and they launched with a non-intuitive interface that makes the phone unusable in a demo.

You put a Z10 in a user's hands without the tutorial enabled and they're just helpless.

<comment><USER94> For new users perhaps it is a bit of a leap for them to take, but don't you think they can overlook this fact because they know they are working with a new operating system? Once you understand how the BB10 OS works its nice to use. The same thing happened recently with Windows 8 when everyone had to learn how to use the gestures for tables. The main point however is that jolla doesn't stand out from the pack just because they have no front-facing buttons...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


De-Sneering My Life - <AUTHOR> https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4129 <comment><USER2> I find it weird that someone like Aaronson takes reddit seriously. Reddit is a hivemind where the most have no opinion or worldview of their own. I'd be surprised if there are 4 people out of "two thousand Redditors [who] hate Scott Aaronson so much" who even know what Aaronson does.

Reddit attracts those (in droves) who like super loud people (often ignorant) to think for them. Talking to them is like spitting against the wind. I simply do not visit reddit.</comment>