Net Neutrality will die, so let's take the profit out of killing it - <AUTHOR> https://www.cringely.com/2017/11/22/15471/ <comment><USER2> I wish he had explored this concept more:

> The concept of Net Neutrality is bound in the idea that Internet Service > Providers (ISPs) are common carriers like the phone company. Phone companies > like to claim they have no knowledge of — and therefore no responsibility > for — the words that are carried over their phone lines. They serve Ruth > Bader Ginsburg and the Russian Embassy alike — just as long as both pay > their phone bills. Tony Soprano and Tony Stark are the same in phone company > eyes. And this is true of the Internet, too, at least for the next month or > so, because the FCC under President Obama declared Internet Service to be a > common carrier. That's about to change, and with it the requirement that all > Internet bits be treated equally. People who are willing to pay more will > soon get measurably quicker Internet service. And big bandwidth users like > Amazon and Netflix will have to pay more to avoid having their signals > slowed down.

If the ISPs suddenly become not common carriers, do they then become _responsible_ for all the content? If that is the case, then we can make non- net neutrality really expensive for them.

<comment><USER3> > If the ISPs suddenly become not common carriers, do they then become > responsible for all the content?

No, "common carrier" is an overloaded concept that implies some responsibility for the thing being carried in other contexts (e.g. maritime shipping) but does not imply what you're suggesting in this one. Remember, US ISPs were not classified as common carriers until mid-2015.

<comment><USER4> DSL started life considered a common carrier, it wasn't until 2005 it was reclassified, to match a previous decision that cable internet wasn't a common carrier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This argument doesn't make any sense. The isps would just deprioritize the zero tier traffic so you couldn't use it effectively. It's only faster because of how things work today.

Nobody would care about being able to watch Netflix via zero tier if it's faster to watch without it (which the isps would most certainly ensure).

I also think it's nieve to assume that large tech companies want neutrality.

Sure, companies publicly say that they are for it but if they could pay to prevent new competitors (without the same capital resources) from challenging them it's my hunch that they'd gladly do so.

They aren't on our side.

</comment><comment><USER6> This problem is never going to go away as long as ISP are private companies.

Think what would happen if your power/utility company was driven by profit and not solely to provide a critical service.

Internet access should be de-privitized, the free market isn't going to fix this ever and this battle is going to just going to repeat itself every 6-12 months until they win.

<comment><USER7> Because we should trust government to provide Internet access? That would certainly make it far easier to monitor. And instead of fixing the problem that not everyone has a choice of ISPs, that would ensure that _no one_ has a choice of ISPs, so when the _one_ ISP that exists is terrible there's no recourse.

I do think it might make sense to treat _fiber_ as infrastructure, so that we could then have numerous competing ISPs _everywhere_ that just need to light up the fiber that's already there. That seems like an improvement.

<comment><USER8> I wonder how MVNOs for cell phone services came to be. There you have multiple companies competing while using the bigger networks. I would like to see the same for ISPs where Comcast would rent their infrastructure to other companies that then can compete with different plans. 1

<comment><USER9> Be careful using mvno as the model. In the US, many of the mvnos have shaky financials and often end up as a subsidiary of the carrier (Virgin Mobile USA, Boost, Cricket)

<comment><USER8> At least there is some competition and variation in plans. For example, I have a 2GB plan with unlimited voice and text on T-Mobile. Not bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This analysis collapses because the OP fails to realize that the big players (FB, Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc) don't benefit from net neutrality nearly as much as the long tail of sites and services. ISPs know that an internet service without FB is worthless, so they're motivated to work out deals and create bundles. It used to be ESPN and HBO, now it's Google and Netflix.

<comment><USER11> > realize that the big players don't benefit from net neutrality

Yeah, the big players don't realize this is stupid.

Who says they won't get fleeced by the ISPs?

Having your business rely on a monopolist that could antagonize you will most likely backfire.

"Oh but they are the incumbents" who do you think is easier to extort, the small startup or the bigger company? I hope Fb is charged for all their auto play videos

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The assumption that they won't simply block VPNs "because China does that" seems naive. "VPNs are only used by {pirates|terrorists|pedophiles|etc}!" could easily be deployed as a smokescreen for this change.

And, if you have a valid work use case, simply get the "Enterprise" package for your home network, where the exorbitant cost is covered by your employer!

<comment><USER13> I think its more simply a matter of them everything everything slow/inaccessible unless you buy the _advanced video_ package that includes Netflix, Hulu, YouTube" Which service tier is going to include the ZT VPN option?

And what if you're NOT a tech worker who has an employer to cover the "Enterprise VPN" tier? Good luck with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't see how handing one company a monopoly over all internet traffic is going to be better in the long run.

What the US needs, is competition. Monopolists can afford to screw their customers, competitors in an open, transparent market can't. Let ISPs advertise that their connection to Youtube/Netflix/etc is not throttled like it is with Comcast/etc, and chances are many people will switch.

<comment><USER15> Except that isn't an option for the overwhelming majority of people. Odds are you have one choice for broadband, maybe a choice for dsl, and that's about it.

Competition _cannot_ occur without low (or ideally 0) entrance costs. The investment required to lay cable, let along bother to run your ISP, is such that there will never an open market.

<comment><USER16> Laying cable isn't the only way to deliver internet service. Wireless ISPs are a thing.

<comment><USER17> That isn't realistic in this decade for rural/remote areas. Satellite internet also failed because of the unusable latency incurred. The only way to guarantee bandwidth is a physical connection because spectrum bandwidth is finite, whereas point-to-point bandwidth scales nearly linearly with more physical channels.

<comment><USER18> > That isn't realistic in this decade for rural/remote areas.

Not OP, but I recently lived in a rural area and had 3 options for Internet:

      * Mediacom cable with permanent 20-50% (or more) packet loss

      * CenturyLink DSL at 1mbps (not a typo)

      * Local wireless company, 7mbps, no packet loss

About 2 decades ago I worked for a different wireless ISP (same rural area) that delivered the best local service by FAR. (Cable wasn't yet an option, and satellite had crazy latency.) So wireless was superior ~2 decades ago in that rural area as well as recently, for many people. So I don't know what you mean by wireless being "[unrealistic] in this decade for rural/remote areas."

My position is that municipal fiber is the way to go, but give wireless ISPs credit because they're helping a lot of people get on the Internet who would barely have connectivity otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This would be a better article if it didn't read like an advertisement for ZeroTier. It could easily be replaced with a generic recommendation to use a VPN at all times (which I already do), and the end-result would be the same.

<comment><USER20> I'm the founder of ZeroTier and just saw this article. I've spoken to Bob a few times in the past and while we appreciate the mention there wasn't any coordination. (We'd have timed it to not be right before a holiday. :)

I think what he's arguing is that fully encrypted p2p overlay networks would be the next step beyond privacy VPNs, and would be more powerful. Basically if we "encrypt all the things" then ISPs will only see opaque encrypted traffic and will be unable to effectively implement really fine-grained traffic prioritization/de-prioritization.

What he suggests would be possible. People and services could join public ZeroTier networks and you'd have this flat "meta-Internet" where everything was encrypted and all traffic looked the same.

I don't think this is a silver bullet. ISPs can still make deals with big players like Netflix, Google, Facebook, etc. and offer them at a higher speed on the "clearnet." Other traffic would be relegated to the "other" category that would be slow-laned on non-premium plans. This applies to more conventional privacy VPNs and anything else just as much as it applies to ZeroTier.

<comment><USER21> I think there's a fundamental technical problem here. ISPs theoretically provide you with the shortest, least congested route. Overlay networks _either_ go straight to the same destination (subject to the same throttling), or bounce off some other host for privacy laundering. Then you're dependent on that host to have a good connection to Netflix instead.

It's always going to be worse than going direct.

<comment><USER20> Mostly agreed. The only real hope is to more substantially disrupt the ISP market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So, the problem I can see with this is that (by my understanding) ZeroTier will naturally try to set up a direct connection between the two communicating endpoints, encapsulated in whatever encryption. This means that all the NetFlix traffic will _still_ be originating from NetFlix IP addresses. Therefore, even though the content is encrypted and non-inspectable, it can still be identified as NetFlix, and throttled.

<comment><USER23> Makes sense. The only hope left is a "Hero ISP" who voluntarily decides to not participate in the prioritization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> ISPs want to turn the internet into TV. You tell us what sites you want to visit and we'll tell you what that will cost.

How far can the ISPs go before Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, just offer an always on VPN service to get around the ISP's blacklisting of sites you haven't paid to visit?

Android on Nexus and Pixel phones has a wifi assistant that secures the connection when you're connected to public wifi; which kinda sounds like an automatically initiated VPN.

</comment><comment><USER25> Let's kill it by having semi local wireless mesh networks. That would be enough for basic web (mail, irc, average website).

<comment><USER26> using whose spectrum?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> So the answer is to for everyone to use a VPN? That won't happen.

It seems to me that if the ISPs are no longer common carriers, then they are able to choose what content they transmit.

That choice must surely come with responsibility, and they are therefore responsible for the content they transmit.

I suggest another way to remove their profits; flood them with illegal content and sue.

</comment><comment><USER28> I immediately thought of cjdns[1] being used to implement this idea. Dos anybody know how ZeroTier compares to it?

[1] [https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns](https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns)

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm still waiting for someone to come up with a compelling reason that it should be _illegal_ for me to buy a "Facebook Only" internet service.

<comment><USER30> Yeah, cause that's what's going to happen. Remember the heydays of cable TV when you could pay for just what you wanted!?

<comment><USER29> Yes. If only we'd made it illegal for cable companies to sell cable packages back then.

<comment><USER30> If only we'd have required line owners to wholesale access to other service providers. We wouldn't have had to made packages illegal because there'd have been actual competition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> why ZT tho? like, you could accomplish the same type of overlay system using i2p. there's performance issues to work out to be sure, but if its literally impossible to tell who is talking to who it gets a lot harder for isps to control anything.

</comment><comment><USER32> Write your representatives and ask them to repeal the FCC

</comment><comment><USER33> For me, this article brings to mind a statement that Rand Paul maid several years ago. I thought I'd reference it here for others to consider as well.

05/2011: "Paul: 'Right to health care' is slavery" [https://www.politico.com/story/2011/05/paul-right-to- health-...](https://www.politico.com/story/2011/05/paul-right-to-health-care- is-slavery-054769)

> "With regard to the idea whether or not you have a right to health care you > have to realize what that implies. I am a physician. You have a right to > come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. You are > going to enslave not only me but the janitor at my hospital, the person who > cleans my office, the assistants, the nurses. … You are basically saying you > believe in slavery," said Paul (R-Ky.), who is an ophthalmologist.

10/2017: "The Problem of Doctors' Salaries" \- [https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/25/doctors- sal...](https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/25/doctors-salaries-pay- disparities-000557)

> Policymakers have a number of tools to use to introduce more competition, > weaken the doctors' cartel and get their pay more in line with counterparts > elsewhere.

<comment><USER34> Did you mean to comment on this post?</comment></comment>


Internet of things: Making sense of the next Mega Trend with graphs - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/269840#1/the-internet-of-things-explained-making-sense-of-the-next-mega-trend/

<comment><USER2> $28 Billion dollar market sounds high. More than four times all of mobile? Maybe in time.

<comment><AUTHOR> $28 Billion actually sounds low to me</comment></comment>


If You Want a Job Tomorrow, Cultivate Your Career Today - <AUTHOR> http://blog.polyglotprogramming.com/2009/11/6/cultivateyourcareertoday

<comment><USER2> The article seems to take the ageism in the industry for-granted. Excellent article, otherwise.

<comment><USER3> Ultimately hiring decisions are made in most organizations by people who got out of tech and into management early in their careers and believe that that is the "successful" career path. When they look at an older engineer, they see someone "unsuccessful" (and either don't care about or more likely don't even understand his or her technical accomplishments).

This isn't going to change any time soon and it's wise to prepare strategies in advance.

<comment><USER2> You might be right, but I would like to see more discussion on the topic. Is the ageism a result of actions by non-programmers, or are programmers contributing to it too?

Few days ago a guy complained about having to write code during the job search process. Most comments I read here on HN were not sympathetic to him. He was advised not to send out as many resumes, show more passion etc etc. "Show some code" is a totally different request than "Show me the code for this exact problem I made up" - yet many programmers here were commenting as if they have never had to do a job search.

My point is that before blaming others, it might be good for the community to introspect and see if the cause is truly from outside.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like what he says about learning a new language every year and I sincerely _want_ to do that. However if you're in a Java shop and are learning Ruby/Python on your own, how do you keep from forgetting it. If you don't use it, you lose it right?

<comment><USER5> The important thing is to learn the concepts and structures that programming languages indirectly talk about.

If you understand the differences between the OO _concepts_ in Java, Ruby and Python, then you'll find it easy enough to pick up the surface layer (the syntax) of the languages.

<comment><USER3> This is true but a large part of "knowing" a language is knowing its standard library, where to find the function you need, and which of several similar functions is the exact one you want. The syntax you can learn in a day, but the libraries need time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The list of things to do seems shortsighted to me. I can't imagine guys like Donald Knuth or Linus Torvalds caring much about agile methods and the new language of every year. I think it's more like a list of things to do that worked for him.

Other than that I agree with the main idea of the article...

<comment><USER7> Guys like Knuth and Torvalds are not primarily concerned with gaining employment, because their resumes are already pretty much at peak impressiveness. There are not many people in their class. The alternative to spending all your time on the project that you're famous for (if, for example, you are _not_ famous...) is to spend time doing some of these things.

<comment><USER8> I've got a follow-on question related to this though:

If you _do_ have all the skills he listed, how do you make the leap into doing real top-level creative work?

For example, one of the top links on Hacker News now is a profile of Brad Fitzpatrick, and it's pretty much accepted that he's done some industry- changing work (LiveJournal, memcached, Mogile, OpenID, Pubsubhubbub, etc.) But if you were familiar with his work c. 2002, it wasn't all that impressive. Yeah, he was a good programmer, but he just ran a website with some modest success. Several of us have done the same.

I've heard the same applies to other leading programmer luminaries, eg. John Carmack.

Somewhere along the line, some programmers start really distinguishing themselves while others remain merely "good". And I don't think it has to do with ploughing all your efforts into one project. People like Brad Fitzpatrick, Jamie Zawinski, Paul Buchheit, or Rob Pike are known for _multiple_ contributions. Is it just the cumulative effects of time, or is there something specific they do with their time that propels them from good to great?

<comment><USER7> I don't know how to be successful on that level, but I've a hunch that paying more than the slightest attention to things like "job", "resume", etc severely lowers your chances. Also, one thing I noticed while reading Coders at Work recently: while some people are brilliant, some seem like they're merely good, and happened to make the right decisions. Those decisions always seemed to be the risky ones, but we don't see what similar decisions they went the other way on, nor the hordes of similar programmers who were cautious or unlucky.

And maybe there aren't such hordes. I dunno.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good article, but also guard against excessive egotism. People who think they're big shots because they started an open source project, have a blog have some followers on Twitter are not always that great.</comment>


Docker Puts Focus on Container Security - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/16/docker-puts-focus-on-container-security-tools/ <comment><USER2> I don't know that the YubiKey support will make a huge difference, but user namespace support is huge. Running services as root -- especially important things, like web servers, or virtual machines, or containers -- is a big no-no in security.

Kudos to the Docker team for proactively fixing a complaint I've heard a few times from security-minded people!

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately the daemon model bites again: On a host running any docker containers with user-namespaces, you can't run containers with net or ipc from the host.</comment></comment>


New Emails in Clinton Case Came from Anthony Weiner's Electronic Devices - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/us/politics/fbi-hillary-clinton-email.html <comment> o0-0o Remember that Huma Abedin also had her devices seized as part of this investigation. Likely, the emails are on her device.

<comment><USER2> or she used his to avoid subpoena / foia etc

<comment> o0-0o Not sure why you're being downvoted, but you're 100% correct. The 10,000+ emails they are now looking at came from a shared computer. I wonder if Carlos Danger turned them over to the NYPD. The FBI still doesn't have a warrant for them.

<comment><USER2> It's looking like Preet and his colleagues found them, informed Comey and said "us or you, your choice".

There's no way Comey would do this without external pressure - he's Clinton Foundation through and through [1]. He was brought in to clear Bill for the 140 pardons issued on his last afternoon in office (some very unsavoury folk in that - inlcuding Marc Rich) [2]. Jimmy Carter called it "disgraceful" [3]

[1] [http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential- race/2016/09/10/e...](http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential- race/2016/09/10/exposed-fbi-director-james-comeys-clinton-foundation- connection/)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controvers...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controversy)

[3] [http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/23/us/clinton-pardons- democra...](http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/23/us/clinton-pardons-democrats- this-time-clintons-find-their-support-buckling-weight.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ok, as someone from outside of the US, I'm still not getting the issue here?

So she put some e-mails on a private a server and she deleted them. I actually couldn't care less.

What is the deal here?

EDIT: thanks all for the responses. I have to say, from afar, the Occam's razor in me (which i accept will be different for all) says that if Clinton was involved in corruption it is likely we would have heard about it by now ... like Bill and his lady ... like Trump and, well, everything ... like Nixon ... etc. No one involved in serious corruption does it my e-mail (I presume).

<comment><USER4> The allegation is that she was using private email to conduct official government business while she served as Secretary of State (one of the highest-ranking positions in the government; chief diplomat).

This was likely done to avoid requirements to turn over emails in cases of FOIA requests, or I think a few other conditions. There's supposed to be some degree of transparency in government communications.

By itself, that alone isn't _too_ bad, I think. But the other reason why government officials should use government infrastructure for communications is security.

Messages that were classified after-the-fact (not at the time) were found to have been sent to/from Clinton's private server. I believe some messages that were classified at the time were also there, but were improperly marked, so someone could plausibly claim they did not know they were classified.

EDIT: There were in fact many emails properly marked as classified at the time. Some marked top secret. This definitely demonstrates carelessness. [http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/286513-fbi- direc...](http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/286513-fbi-director- clinton-emails-were-marked-and-classified-at-the-time)

Further, after she received a subpoena from the FBI to turn over all emails on her server, 33,000 emails were allegedly deleted. This doesn't necessarily mean anything, but could indicate a cover-up of something shady or even illegal.

For the most part it's just a lot of speculation and character judgment. Even if this second investigation doesn't find anything illegal, it shows someone trying to shield themselves from public scrutiny at best, or potentially trying to cover things up at worst.

<comment><USER5> > This was likely done to avoid requirements to turn over emails in cases of > FOIA requests, or I think a few other conditions. There's supposed to be > some degree of transparency in government communications. > By itself, that > alone isn't too bad, I think.

Really? I think it demonstrates clear intent to deliberately avoid a federal law (the FOIA). Clinton appears to value keeping her behavior secret over protecting classified information.

<comment><USER6> That's certainly not provable, though - she's said she did it so that she could use the device of her choice (Blackberry), not to hide from FOIA. Not sure how easy it would be to establish intent, there.

<comment><USER5> I'd like to see a grand jury get the opportunity to decide.

<comment><USER6> That's rarely how it works, though. If the prosecution can't find enough evidence to warrant taking the case to court, they won't. The accused being a very famous politician doesn't change that logic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If they're randomly finding Clinton related e-mails on Weiner's devices that are relevant to their investigation, seems like they weren't trying that hard in the first place.

<comment><USER8> it might be the cynic in me, but I have trouble myself thinking that a presidential candidate (especially one associated with the currently empowered party) is going to get the same scouring precision that the FBI gives to 'Mr or Ms. Random Bomber'.

<comment><USER7> Not even 'Mr or Ms. Random Bomber', other servicemen have been charged and sent to prison for mishandling classified information, intentional or not. The FBI's argument that they couldn't find a precedent for prosecuting anyone under those circumstances is is simply a lie. It's the double standard here that is troubling.

<comment><USER9> Service members are subject to the UCMJ which, AFAIK, has different provisions on the subject.

<comment><USER10> I held a mere SECRET security clearance last summer (not even TOP SECRET, which is what Clinton has) and I had to go through weeks and weeks of training, aside from many friends and relatives being interviewed. The consequences of using personal devices to send even just OUO (Official Use Only ---- not even classified) information was pounded into our brains. We were told countless stories of people getting their clearances revoked and being fired for using personal USB drives, let alone _servers_.

No matter how you spin it, Hillary is either the most incompetent government official in the US, or she intentionally broke the law. I would bet more than 99% of individuals who hold clearances would agree with me.

<comment><USER11> While your experience is much more like the standard for handling classified material I don't know if it's comparable to what those in the leadership at the state department experienced given the findings in the OIG(1) report that came out earlier this year. They looked some twenty years of record retention policies at the state department and concluded.

"Longstanding, systemic weaknesses related to electronic records and communications have existed within the Office of the Secretary that go well beyond the tenure of any one Secretary of State."

"the Department generally and the Office of the Secretary in particular have been slow to recognize and to manage effectively the legal requirements and cybersecurity risks associated with electronic data communications, particularly as those risks pertain to its most senior leadership."

It seems likely that you and others in similar positions are under more scrutiny than those in leadership, at least that's what I get out of that report.

1: [https://oig.state.gov/system/files/esp-16-03.pdf](https://oig.state.gov/system/files/esp-16-03.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What I don't understand is the apparent oxymoron: Classified Emails.

Email is horribly insecure. Why would anyone use it to exchange classified documents?

<comment><USER13> Encryption, or, like the US DoD, a separate network (NIPRNET for non-secret, SIPRNET for secret). But yeah, you wouldn't or shouldn't be using typical email systems for classified communications, certainly not systems outside of your security's control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> to summarize (and not included in the article)

so far: it's 3 emails, not from clinton, nor her email server, and from a device used by anthony weiner.

<comment><USER15> What other source did you get this information from? How are the 3 emails on Weiner's device tied to the Clinton investigation?

This NYT article just has an anonymous "federal official" saying "thousands" of emails. But given the official in question's anonymity, we don't know if they have a political axe to grind and are spinning quotes for maximum disfavorability to Clinton, etc.

<comment><USER14> pete williams is reporting this on msnbc and being relayed by other reporters on twitter.

trying to find the 3 email source (and relayed by other reporters on twitter). thought i heard williams say it on msnbc but can't find video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> All the 33k 'missing' Clinton emails are available in Utah complimentary by NSA Cloud. Not sure why they haven't accessed them by this point.

Edit: from +2 to -3 in less than 10 minutes?

No reason to suppress the truth. Hopefully investigators access them eventually and investigate them as they legally should.

<comment><USER17> If you think the NSA has everyone's emails squirreled away in their teensy little data center then you do not understand the scale of email.

<comment><USER16> Like when Snowden documents showed just that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> An endless parade of drama and hyperbole...

<comment><USER19> Amen. Preach it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Chinese domain and punycode - <AUTHOR> I was checking domain availability in China and I wondered..... Am I really registering the puny code version of the domain?  Like xn--p8sr6e67h0r1c.cn? And does .cn and .com also convert to punycode? <comment><USER2> Yeah! All domains are ultimately punycode at the end of the day. Makes all kinds of weird stuff possible, like [https://xn--i-7iq.ws](https://xn-- i-7iq.ws)</comment>


The Extended Mind [1998] - <AUTHOR> http://consc.net/papers/extended.html

<comment><USER2> Fodor has a great response to this in the LRB:

<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n03/jerry-fodor/where-is-my-mind>

(Not to this specific paper, but the general idea.)</comment>


Google division aims to fix public transit in US by shifting control to Google - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/27/google-flow-sidewalk-labs-columbus-ohio-parking-transit <comment><USER2> The problem with this is that public policy decisions are being made in secret, without any transparency other than what the press can dig up. Why not discuss this publicly?

<comment><USER3> Because public/private partnerships are a terrible idea designed to channel public money into the pockets of the wealthy. You can only make that kind of terrible policy public after it's too late to change. See the Chicago parking meter debacle for an example.</comment></comment>


Linux from Scratch 10.0 - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/news.html <comment><USER2> The project itself was discussed a couple weeks ago here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24238015](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24238015)

and a month before that here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23787526](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23787526).

If curious see also:

2019 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20149111](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20149111)

2016 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11829373](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11829373)

2012 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4488162](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4488162)

2012 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3677350](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3677350)

2011 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3171448](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3171448)

2010 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1779665](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1779665)

<comment><USER3> The fact that it, got "promoted/voted" to the front-page(again) is that not in itself proof that is is valuable and still worthwhile to be submitted again ?

<comment><USER2> No, it's definitely not in itself proof of that. If we went with that standard, the front page would be mostly dupes. The few most popular/sensational stories would get upvoted over and over again. And then the threads would mostly be full of complaints about the dupes.

Posts about new releases by well-known projects are something of a grey area, but if you want to read a long explanation of how we treat them, one is here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071428](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071428).

<comment><USER3> Thanks @dang. I also read your linked thread. I now better understand your original comment and HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great resource for those building embedded systems and want to understand how everything is really put together.

Did this years ago and learned a ton, that said I'd probably never do it again. Once you know, you know. And sometimes you wish you knew less.

<comment><USER5> I did it about 20 years ago. It was basically copy and paste. Very little explanation of why are we doing this and what are the options. That is my memory of it.

<comment><USER6> I also did it 20 years ago, but I got a lot more out of it. As each piece went in, I looked at it and what it did, and understood it as part of the whole that was built at the end.

If you don't do it reflectively, and simply copy and paste command lines, then I agree, you're not going to get anything out of it.

As it was, I had to debug a few build issues here and there, with version drift; that too was educational.

The biggest thing to come out of it for me, apart from understanding the Linux boot process better and a greater appreciation for chroot, was getting comfortable with ./configure [options] && make && make install for installing software from source.

<comment><USER7> Exactly my experience, around 4 years ago

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I never followed this but in ca 1995 I built a Linux boot / rescue floppy disk from scratch. The amount of confidence this gave me with Linux was insane, and I benefit from it to this day.

<comment><USER9> I have similar experience. I did couple LFS build around 2000 and the understanding of how everything is put together profits to this day.

I would suggest anybody thinking seriously about Linux (if you want to call yourself devops or SRE) to go through a full build at least once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> While it isn't LFS I've been building custom OS distros with bitbake/openembedded for a work project recently. I'd be curious if someone here has done both LFS and used bitbake/OE to see what their thoughts are comparing the two.

</comment><comment><USER11> I am eager to try this out. As a self-taught developer, I'm in a big turtles- all-the-way-down phase and I feel learning the ins-and-outs of Linux will give me intellectual satisfaction.

I would appreciate some thoughts on whether to go by the systemd route or the non-systemd route. The pros and cons.

<comment><USER12> Do non systemd, then do systemd

<comment><USER13> Is it possible to do the systemd book and then non-systemd?

I did the systemd one a few weeks ago and I think that besides a few small affordances for some systemd quirk, the main issue was installing all the prereqs for building systemd (namely meson, ninja, which openrc probably doesn't require).

They give a nifty tar command to snapshot the disk, which could help create a "fork point" for the setup. `pixz` is very helpful addition in this case (e.g. `tar -cp $LFS | pixz -9 > my_backup.tar.xz`)

<comment><USER14> If you install to a VM most also have snapshot features you can use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I put together and maintained a from-scratch embedded distro in the 2006-2010 time frame. I took a hint or two from Linux from Scratch.

I introduced the idea of using quilt for applying all the patches. I've noticed more recently that OpenEmbedded and Yocto do the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've often wondered how one can do this. Good resource.

<comment><USER17> I followed it as a teenager. LFS is excellent at teaching you all the ins and outs of how linux works. As you build your own linux distro, you get a great feel for what goes into standard distros.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> LFS and buildroot taught me a lot about how linux is build from scratch. A very valuable learning experience. Thanks to both projects for their work.

</comment><comment><USER19> They used to have a live CD for this but not anymore. What kinda setup does anybody who does this go for? I been wanting to try LFS for a while.

<comment><USER17> You just need a linux distro. I did it back in the day with mandrake linux.

Probably easiest to start with ubuntu.

LFS walks through isolation when you are building the system, so it doesn't really matter what you start with.

<comment><USER20> At this point I'd recommend starting with Manjaro. Nothing compares to the AUR.

<comment><USER21> You don't need the AUR for LFS.

<comment><USER22> Well, the ultimate achievement when building an LFS system is to plug it to an existing package manager so you don't have to keep updating stuff manually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Found a typo: "gccc-10.2.0" is supposed to be "gcc-10.2.0".

<comment> jagged-chisel ah, the GNU Crazy Compiler Collection

<comment><USER24> isn't that GCC :)))</comment></comment></comment>


If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It - <AUTHOR> http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?IfSmalltalkIsSoGoodWhyDoesNobodyUseIt <comment><USER2> I worked on two Smalltalk projects in the early 90's at two different companies. Both efforts were abandoned for C++. Some of the issues we encountered at the time:

* Numerical computation was too slow. Numbers used to be objects and all numerical computations followed object messaging. Ouch! This was eventually remediated but not before we'd dropped Smalltalk.

* Garbage collection was S-L-O-W. Your workstation would randomly freeze 30-60 seconds. It was that bad.

* The built-in windowing environment was an albatross in the early days of Windows and OS/2\. Customers wanted a native look-and-feel not the weird (to them) Smalltalk window manager.

* Not everyone had yet bought into object-oriented programming, much less making everything an object. This was really bizarre at the time - even code was an object. Makes sense now, but few people were thinking that way then.

* It was strange. C++ seemed safer since everybody at the time knew and was comfortable with C programming. Little did we know the pitfalls awaiting us when using C++! :)

In the end I think the Smalltalk experience left such a bad taste in everyone's mouth that when these issues were resolved no one was interested in going back and giving Smalltalk a second look. Nowadays Smalltalk lives on in Objective-C. In fact one the shops I was in abandoned Smalltalk for Objective-C, which is one of the few instances I know of people using Objective-C outside of the Apple ecosystem.

<comment><USER3> The windowing system depended on the flavor of Smalltalk; Smalltalk/V Windows, which I used circa 1991-1992 used the native GUI. I forget what I was using on our Unix boxes, but it used X (or possibly Motif, I forget).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The question is moot -- Smalltalk isn't so good.

Back in the 90s we were developing sales force automation software in VB3 (ugh!) which was by no means wonderful. Our stuff ran far faster on modest hardware than similar Smalltalk software running on (by the standards of the time) ludicrously powerful hardware. Delphi, when it came out, was far, far better still.

Smalltalk also seems to have accumulated annoying cruft faster than it got useful. Another large Smalltalk project I was involved in (as a UI designer) suffered from multiple incompatible class hierarchies. I wanted to make different controls that did similar things look similar, but it was impossible because some controls inherited from a 1-bit graphical library and couldn't be rendered in color, others from a 4-bit graphical library and couldn't be rendered in 256 colors, and others didn't respond to certain events in certain ways (e.g. action on mousedown instead of mouseup). It was an absolute nightmare.

The language may be fine, but the implementations of it were slow and bloated, and the class libraries were a disaster area. (Of course, the main company pushing Smalltalk at the time was IBM, which probably says something.)

<comment><USER5> Even IBMers didn't really like it. I heard similar stories of complexity over dynamicism turning into a 'Message Not Understood' fest. Maybe they didn't really understand the language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd say there are two currently popular languages that are significantly influenced by Smalltalk: ruby and ObjC.

They are both quite different languages, but both very heavily influenced by smalltalk.

ObjC is mainly popular because it's the language you have (or until recently had) to use to write for iOS -- although many developers come to like it for itself, and it certainly has been succesful at Getting Things Done. (I believe iOS itself is written in it as well, if not OSX too?)

Ruby had no such vendor lock-in, so the only reason to use it originally was if you liked it, although at this point the large library of open source available for it encourages it's use. (Of course people had to like it enough to write that open source for it, something got the ball rolling and kept it rolling)

Both ruby and ObjC take different things (with some overlap), but there are some things that _neither_ takes from Smalltalk. Looking at the things neither takes from smalltalk (eg the "program as image" that means you can't just use a text editor to inspect or use effectively in a generic version control system)... probably suggests some possible answers to why smalltalk hasn't been more successful.

I am not familiar enough with Smalltalk to be confident in my suspicions, but comparing to the more popularly succesful languages ruby and ObjC is probably a fruitful avenue to answer that question.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't use it because at this point it's alien in the world of modern computers. Back when Smalltalk was in its prime it wasn't just a programming language, it was essentially your operating system, complete with its own graphics system, window manager, etc. This hasn't changed, but instead of being the basis of your system it's essentially another OS running on top of whatever your poison of choice is.

I think today the concept of the Smalltalk image and workspace has pretty much killed it, not the language itself. I use git for version control, I use GNOME as my desktop environment and IntelliJ as my IDE of choice, trying to do anything in smalltalk requires I transport myself back to the 90's.

GNU smalltalk is the closest we have to a smalltalk implementation that works well in modern computing environments, but there's a big lack of interest in the project.

</comment><comment><USER8> I liked Smalltalk and saw it used well and used badly, but I don't think it is anything about Smalltalk that was the problem. It was the Smalltalk vendors that mostly screwed it up. Thousands of dollars per seat just wasn't worth it. It didn't help that some companies regarded it as "secret weapon" and kept its use hush-hush (I've heard the same thing about APL derivatives, but have no idea if that is just urban legend).

I figured if someone had built a VB like environment for Windows and priced it at $99, it would have done well. Closest I saw was Dolphin, but they did the old "database connection extra" crud. I wonder how many development environments have died due to that one pricing checkbox.

Smalltalk could be fast. Smalltalk/X was pretty speedy.

(PS - totally ignoring the native platform look and feel was foolish in the extreme)

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure whether native look and feel is ever important point. At the moment I cannot think of any enterpise-ish application that does not ignore native platform look and feel.

And for both Delphi and now .NET, there is significant market for third party components that look purposefully non-native.

<comment><USER8> I think the native look and feel is important because the emulated interface always seem to have flaws and added to the training cost of users. Each new version of Windows would bring problems for the emulated interfaces where the tools using the native widgets didn't have the same problem. Worse, something like Squeak which is basically running a foreign OS in a window with garish colors.

I know a lot of enterprise apps go off into the weeds, but their success is driven by external factors. Successful tools really need to appeal to a broad group of developers.

I really think a native widget version of Smalltalk that included the database access could have done a fine job, but it always seemed with Smalltalk that the NIH syndrome was so high and they could build their own things better. Its like they didn't respect any platform they were running on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I worked in a Smalltalk shop, smalltalk is not that great. I've discussed it at length, my problems with it. As a language it is impressive what they built at the time. In practice it was a terrible pain in the ass with tons of "ravioli" code everywhere. The language has no qualms with letting you wreck havoc within the standard base classes, which makes integrating anothers code almost impossible.

<comment><USER10> Oh I do want to add that it is a language behind a paywall as well. Which i find rather strange. Being charged as a customer to one) use their language and two) being charged per user we allowed into the environment.

Because Smalltalk is an enclosed runtime (similar to Java, but much worse). We had to tell them how many users would be using non-developer editions of the runtime and they charged us for that.

<comment><USER11> I don't find that strange, as I remember the days we had to pay for every single one of our tools, including distribution royalties.

Open source kind of killed this way the industry used to work forcing companies to find other ways of revenue, except for big corporations that kind of still work this way.

<comment><USER10> _cough_ borland _cough_ :) Oh I guess, i just felt it was strange that Cincom still charges a significant amount of money to run their stuff, per seat and per server pricing.

When you look at the market of tools today. Historically speaking, they were par for the course.

<comment><USER8> There is a big difference in pricing between Borland and Smalltalk vendors. I remember the Turbo Pascal / Turbo C pricing and how it really made quality compilers accessible. Smalltalk never had that revolution.

Anytime you need to "call for pricing", you know its going to cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Put simply: because the things that made Smalltalk great are now part of modern stacks. Dependency management, interactive development tools, object- browsing IDEs, plus virtual machines improved significantly. Why go back to Smalltalk when we have all of these things with the language of our choice today?

<comment><USER13> Because smalltalk integrates those things together better than any other language / environment that has them?

<comment><USER12> Don't get me wrong - I'm thankful that I got to use Smalltalk in my career. It was incredibly expressive and productive - maybe the most productive I've ever been. But, time marches on. There are simply more people working today on python / node / <pick_your_favorite_here> to maintain and improve those tools plus making it easier to find a <language> programmer over a Smalltalk programmer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like the idea of it.

I recently tried out Pharo with a simple, achievable goal in any language worth using these days: fetch a document from a website, parse it, and display all the href's with titles. It was a very pleasing experience!

I basically evaluated the code I'd expect to use to fire up this application in a scratch area. Naturally it didn't work. It dropped me into an interactive debugging session. From there I just started writing and compiling the missing methods and objects. I kept doing this until my original evaluation just started working. No recompilations or context switches between editors and compilers and the like. Best of all I could just close down the image and take a break. When I booted it back up everything was right where I left it.

If given the opportunity to use it on a project I'd give it a shot. It was one of the most refreshing computing experiences I've had since I got hooked on Common Lisp.

</comment><comment><USER15> Cost. Smalltalk was proprietary and very expensive. Had the Smalltalk houses made open source free versions and monetized with consulting instead of software sales, I suspect things would be different.

The technical issues people cite are not so different with the dynamic languages that were much more successful (Perl, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, etc).

</comment><comment><USER16> A lot of people point out here Smalltalk is not great. I personally don't know either ways, because I haven't used it.

However, I do want to point out that adoption and quality need not be correlated. Haskell, for e.g., was relatively obscure till recently (and even now I would say very few people use it). But it is absolutely amazing compared to most mainstream languages.

The article linked makes some excellent points about business and other considerations and how it influences adoption of any language/tech (other than the quality itself).

The question itself can be reframed either as "Is Smalltalk good?" or "Why does noone use Smalltalk?"

<comment><USER17> As a haskell user, I would say that you're overstating how amazing it is. The language is certainly fantastic, but the tools are so awful that it almost makes me willing to use go! GHC takes ages to compile code, as well as easily a couple of GB of RAM. When you're longing for the days of C++ because your build time was so much faster, something is seriously messed up. Cabal mostly stinks, ocaml's cabal inspired packager is far better despite being much newer and having fewer resources invested into it.

The community is borderline insane when it comes to style, so you basically have to use a huge complicated emacs setup with a bunch of plugins just to be able to produce code that meets the bizarre style guides without manually messing with spaces all the time. That last point shouldn't matter since for your own code you can just pretend it is a normal language, but as soon as you want to make a change to an open source library you're stuck.

Much of this is similar to smalltalk, where the language itself was good, but trying to use it would drive you mad.

<comment><USER18> > GHC takes ages to compile code, as well as easily a couple of GB of RAM. > When you're longing for the days of C++ because your build time was so much > faster, something is seriously messed up.

IMO, that's only true if what you get out of the compiler provides the same or less value as what you get out of the compiler for competing options. OTOH, the whole reason people choose Haskell over other languages is value-add from Haskell's compilation process. Spending some clock cycles at build time for that is, IMO, worth it.

<comment><USER17> You are assuming that it is necessary to take many minutes and GBs of RAM to compile haskell code. There is no reason to believe that is so. Especially since other haskell compilers are much faster. It is 100% certain that GHC contains at least one memory leak that has been unaddressed for years. Simply put, absolutely nobody has put any effort into making GHC fast. Only into making it produce fast output. Ocaml gives you 90% of the benefits of haskell with 10% of the compile time (actually faster than that, but close enough).

<comment><USER18> > It is 100% certain that GHC contains at least one memory leak that has been > unaddressed for years.

That's clearly a problem.

> Simply put, absolutely nobody has put any effort into making GHC fast. Only > into making it produce fast output.

OTOH, as annoying as it may be to developers, on the assumption that code will be run more frequently than it will be built, that seems like priorities being in the right place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A lot of times people like the idea of a thing more than the thing.

Meanwhile, a lot a people hate on C++, which they're only able to do because they learned its nuanced spec, which they only did because it had already reached critical mass in the wild, because it worked everywhere and was, despite the complaints, comprehensible, if hard to get perfect in the language-lawyer way.

<comment><USER20> This argument reduces to saying that anything popular and widely used _is_ actually better than anything unpopular but beloved by language enthusiasts. This simply isn't the case. Many, many factors beyond merit contribute to language popularity and usage.

<comment><USER21> You have to have a metric for 'better'. If its 'utility' then yes something popular is better than something unused.

<comment><USER22> Thus my motto for PHP: It's better than nothing at all. Usually ... FML.

<comment><USER23> Despite its warts PHP does have very valid merits that make it popular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Maybe Self was the best chance. We all know that java has won, but Self could have been Java (and thus the success of smalltalk). Maybe my understanding of this history is imcomplety, if it is please help me out.

Java should never have reached where it is today. Im not hatting on java btw. Just historiclly speaking, java was a embeded language that was pushed for the internet. At the same time Sun had the well advanced Self project in devlopment. One of the major reasons that java was selected was its small stack based bytecode.

Self was the hotbed of compiler research and could run rings around java. Self is a small language and you need less lines of code then java. Self would probebly not have been much heavier on the wire.

So why did the people at sun push Java and not Self? I can not explain it. The only explaition, is that they just did not know what they have. Anybody has a better idea, is there something I completly misunderstand?

<comment><USER25> Java probably won because of its C-inspired syntax. At that point smalltalk was falling behind and C++ started to take off. To me Java was always meant as a better C++. At least that is my guess.

A lot of the people behind Self went on to work on the JVM JIT and later the Chrome V8 engine. Self produced many influential ideas in the JIT space like polymorphic inline caches and deoptimization and stack rewriting. Some of the papers published by the Self group at UCSB are fascinating.

<comment><USER24> The syntax is something, but they could easly have written another parser for sell and make it look very C like. That would have been 100x less work.

Many of the people that worked on Self later worked on Strongtalk, that was bought and is the bases for the current JVM, and yes now everything that was in Self is in the JVM.

So my point is, why not just start where they ended up anyway. In one of David Ungars talks he said something like "they probebly just didn't know what they had". Thats about the only thing that makes sence, but maybe somebody knows more then me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The reason I don't is because it takes its philosophy too seriously. My absolute top nit-pick with that philosophy is: it doesn't compile to an .exe/elf.

Using Squeak as an example, it is very-much a virtual __machine __. If I want to work on a new project, I might have to create a new VM image or something. It 's like an OS and language boiled into one thing, which simply doesn't work.

There are more classical approaches to SmallTalk these days, but most of the literature on the language is oriented toward the Squeak approach; dedicating half the bloody book to working within the OS! Just let me use Vim, I don't want to use your shoddy editor!

</comment><comment><USER25> Smalltalk is a little shrewd in some ways as outlined here. Self has already been mentioned as a great alternative (and the related papers are amazing IMO and influence most modern JITs).

But there are some other really interesting alternatives that IMO keep with the spirit: Io (io-lang.org), Ioke (defunct now, ioke-lang.org - some awesome ideas IMO) and Squeak which is being actively developed.

I'd recommend checking out some of these, I think you can easily install io via brew on Macs and used to be able to install joke as well. They improve syntax and/or add significant language features.

<comment><USER27> The Java HotSpot compiler was originally worked on for Smalltalk before SUN bought the company. It along with the ideas from SELF certainly helped improve JIT systems and dynamic compilation solutions in the late 90's and all thru the early 2000's

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I haven't checked others but the publishers O'Reilly offer something like 8,000 titles related to IT. Open to correction but I can't see a single one on Smalltalk or Pharo. Is this simply because no publisher can see any return on investment? What do the Pharo developers think about this?

</comment><comment><USER29> The consultants who can sell it to gullible managers have moved on to selling something else.

<comment><USER30> That something else was Java.

One of the answers could be that almost every OO language borrowed some concepts form Smalltalk and implemented them in a less "cryptic" (or esoteric) way. Take a closer look at that Objective-C. Erlang's (non-OO) modules and message-passing primitives were also influenced by Smalltalk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Kinda reminds me of LaTeX. It's my favorite way to write documents ever since I learned the language, it's so much more precise than word processors, but most people still defaults to them.

</comment><comment><USER27> Smalltalk was and is used for many advanced, super complex and difficult to understand requirements based systems. Much as Lisp and Scheme are. It sprang the ideas of full OO onto the programming community, it's guru's brought us Agile development techniques, Refactoring tools, ChangeSets (Git has this now), Everything is an Object and many other ideas and concepts prevalent in today's languages and tools. Many languages freely admit the inspiration of Smalltalk to their ideas and have expanded on Smalltalk's ideas. Some people have continued to expand Smalltalk itself. Even it's original creator (Alan Kay) hopes for a better system than Smalltalk, but even recently he says he hasn't seen it yet and has called Lisp the "the greatest single programming language ever designed".

Company's like JPMorgan (Currency Trading), Booz Allen & Hamilton (Currency Trading), Sprint (Network Topology and Configuration), Digital Switch Corp (now Alcatel) (Digital Cross Connect), TenX Technologies (C source code maintenance and analysis tool), American Express (Full IDE for a custom in- house Credit processing language) and Nortel (Meridian PBX line Configurator as well as Configurator for the Nortel Wireless Modules used in cell towers) have used Smalltalk to great ends and gotten competitive advantages and accomplished great things with Smalltalk.

There were lots of others projects that used Smalltalk to create systems that they had failed at previously or did not want to tackle due to the enormous complexity. OO and specifically Smalltalk gave them a way to implement these systems in an Agile way, long before Agile Manifesto was dropped onto the world. Remember ST at the time embodied the most mature implementations of the OO paradigm and it's power was not meet for many years. No other language gave the bang for the buck overall. C++ was still being standardized thru the early 90's. At the time and up until Borland shipped their Turbo C++, most compilers were incompatible with one another and/or generated C code because they were based on ATT's C-front system, which itself was being fluidly developed.

I worked on those examples listed above for those companies and knew of many others working on other projects. I also happened to work with C++ from 1989-1993 while porting tools such at SUN Tooltalk and SUN Net License to IBM's AIX boxes as well as Porting the Mentor Graphics ECAD products and core libraries to AIX and DEC Ultrix and OSF/1\. We had 14 hour compile times, even with 128 Meg of memory (which at the time was huge) using the $150K box on my desk. I had also worked with Obj-C on the NeXT systems and IBM RT system and several OO Lisps including CLOS.

Each of those systems had good points and enabled different things, but Smalltalk and the tools it provided and the amazing productivity that we were able to accomplish was amazing. Fixing bugs in the debugger, stepping back one call on the stack-trace and continuing on (no stopping the whole program and starting again) [Fix and Continue that worked every time, not just some of the time like the C++ and Java versions), adding capabilities to the system itself, being able to inspect and see anything at any time, seeing all the code for the system and adding to that were amazing and still are.

The title is misleading in that "Nobody" is not the right word for the title. It's safer to say "few" people use it. But those that do have reasons as diverse as why there are so many languages that programmers use now and why the number of languages being created is going up. We as programmers use languages for many reasons, including their relative power, alignment with our own thought processes, libraries available, community, religion, syntax preference, etc.

Don't buy into group thought when looking at any language. I also think that no one language is going to solve all your problems. Much like we have AWK, SED, etc. we can use the language that helps us in that moment. Smalltalk is just one of those languages that is available and for many uses it still is very applicable.

Sam Griffith Jr.

<comment><USER28> "it's guru's brought us"? I think you mean "its gurus brought us".

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It might just be waiting for the creation of the framework that will make it sexy and popular... like what Rails did to Ruby.

</comment><comment><USER33> For the same reason more people use lottery tickets than index funds for retirement</comment>


The Diminishing Returns of Multitasking - <AUTHOR> https://tebanvargas.com/2016/06/16/the-diminishing-returns-of-multitasking/ <comment><USER2> A few weeks ago, when I was struggling with focusing, HNers had a lot of advice which I tried to take, including to try out the pomodoro technique (set a timer for a task, give yourself a break at the end of it). Others also suggested setting a timer for a task and sticking to it, or creating a work plan for the day.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11804035](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11804035)

After two weeks of using it that technique, I found the number of hours I've spent on working, both on projects and on hobbies increased by 6x. Even my weekends feel a lot more productive in terms of getting certain fun project I want done. And I reduced the number of hours on social media, YouTube, and gaming. I also spent more time calming my brain through meditation and spent a little less time on the computer.

I think a big part of all this is being very concerted in not allowing certain work times to be interrupted by e-mail/Slack/text or random thoughts that pop in my head ("Hey, I feel like going on Reddit/YouTube!"). And the fact that I was creating a structure where none existed before.

Subsequently, because I worked longer hours, I got tired more easily in the evening. So I ended up sleeping earlier and waking up at a regular time.

And then I never considered perceiving self-discipline as a muscle (as others mentioned in that comment thread), but by creating more structure via the pomodoro technique and just believing that keeping that focus could make it easier in the long run, I have definitely found it easier to keep true to my work hours even when I hit a road block.

</comment><comment><USER3> Smith makes this exact same point in Book I of The Wealth of Nations.

"[...] the advantage which is gained by saving the time commonly lost in passing from one sort of work to another, is much greater than we should at first view be apt to imagine it. It is impossible to pass very quickly from one kind of work to another; that is carried on in a different place, and with quite different tools. A country weaver, who cultivates a small farm, must lose a good deal of time in passing from his loom to the field, and from the field to his loom. When the two trades can be carried on in the same workhouse, the loss of time is no doubt much less. It is even in this case, however, very considerable. A man commonly saunters a little in turning his hand from one sort of employment to another. When he first begins the new work he is seldom very keen and hearty; his mind, as they say, does not go to it, and for some time he rather trifles than applies to good purpose. The habit of sauntering and of indolent careless application, which is naturally, or rather necessarily acquired by every country workman who is obliged to change his work and his tools every half hour, and to apply his hand in twenty different ways almost every day of his life; renders him almost always slothful and lazy, and incapable of any vigorous application even on the most pressing occasions. Independent, therefore, of his deficiency in point of dexterity, this cause alone must always reduce considerably the quantity of work which he is capable of performing. " [0]

[0]: [http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN1.html#B.I](http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN1.html#B.I), Ch.1, Of the Division of Labor

</comment><comment><USER4> Like any skill, some people will naturally be better than others, as an expression of Evolution. Those with an aptitude may find it beneficial, while others may find it torturous. Sometimes articles like these feel like they're written by the latter.

Capitalism specialized labor where it was cheaper - mass production. This has since been automated. Subject matter experts have always been valuable, but such diverse experience is hard to come by.

Moreso it's about having to wait for the technology. Waiting for the page to load. Waiting for the program to load. Waiting for the IDE to load. Waiting for 1 million FOR loops. And having something else to work on while you wait. Or just something to read, or watch. Maybe even for a personal project in an unrelated field, or just to be a more interesting person.

> A person who dominates a set of skills in both breadth and depth. In other > words, this person possesses a lot of skills but excels in 1 exclusively.

Better to excel in all skills in the field than one exclusively. Even better to excel in a multitude of skills across numerous fields. But such diverse experience is, of course, hard to come by.

<comment><USER5> You can discuss the definition of multitasking: let us call it task switching until we can actually analyze properly what our brain is really doing. That said: I am very good at it; I get way more done than if I would focus. This is because of the nature of my work and the way I am (raised?). I can switch between a lot of things while keeping context including coding. I do notice this processs list has a maximum though: with 3-4 in depth project chats, 1-2 business chats, coding and browsing (the latter usually relating to all the former) I notice I am full. And I also notice that textual discourse is far less load than oral or oral+visual on task switching. If I do meetings in person or skype calls I basically get nothing done: it is slower and I cannot switch (a lot) because I miss things.

<comment><USER6> What things do you code?

<comment><USER5> Web, apps, embedded for work and for hobby apps, (toy) programming languages, games, retro assembly and Arduino hardware.

<comment><USER6> I think you should see different number of tabs/windows open for different problems.

There are things in you list that need communication with someone (web and apps - I'd wager they are underspecified). I think you do not need communication working on retro assembly.

I am working on IDE supporting two dirty old languages, VHDL and Verilog. I need three things opened: Visual Studio, PDF of standard under question and orthodox file manager [1] in the tests directory. Having internalized a great deal of VHDL, I do not need it's PDF opened too often. So, there are two things for me to work with: run tests in VS, occasionally look at problematic source code with OFM.

I also need a great deal of silence around me, otherwise I cannot concentrate deep enough to make good decisions and implementation of dirty old languages badly needs extremely good decisions.

[1] [http://softpanorama.org/OFM/index.shtml](http://softpanorama.org/OFM/index.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An interesting read on the subject, although not exclusively focused on multi- tasking, mostly US-centric and at times a bit wordy, is "The Organized Mind" ([https://amzn.com/0147516315](https://amzn.com/0147516315)) by Daniel J Levin, a professor in Psychology.

Among other things, he explains why multitasking seems rewarding: it "creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation".

<comment><USER8> Multitasking also enables point harvest in exams. Young you, and teachers too, will think its a given optimization to en force. Later you realize it has downsides.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> While multi tasking is one of the great myths of our current age, the idea of focus is quite quickly catching up. Both, when pushed to the extreme, are different sides of the same coin.

For a long time computers the public where using also did not multi task, but you could still browse a website and chat with your friends and not notice the switching.</comment>


Show HN: Amazon Search on Steroids - <AUTHOR> http://www.jeviz.com/ <comment><USER2> The power feature I am most looking for, and which I think this site could implement well, is cross-category search. If I want, say, ECG leads, manufacturers and vendors will list them in, variously, Industrial & Scientific, Health & Household, Electronics, Computers & Accessories, Professional Medical Supplies, or even the pervasive Tools & Home Improvement category.

Many of these sub-categories have useful filters that aren't available in the general product list, but if I want to use them, I must open tabs for each category.

If this site could do a union on all the categories, offering sub-filters where available, filtering in the products that meet those filters and categories, out the products that have different categories, and in the products that have no categorization at all for that filter, that would be very useful.

On the other hand, if Amazon would just do a better job of curating the metadata on all these products, that would be great too. Maybe it takes a full time effort for a few people to maintain the compatibility lists for all the phone cases on Amazon. But that has to be more efficient than having thousands of under-informed consumers try to repeat that work over and over again...

<comment><AUTHOR> It is really hard to do with, even API requires department for extra features. What about dividing screen with iframes and search for several(at most 4) categories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Would be swell if sellers' book descriptions could also be searched; I've found some gems that way: [https://tinyapps.org/blog/nix/201112010700_amazon_wget.html](https://tinyapps.org/blog/nix/201112010700_amazon_wget.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Never thought that, I will look into it. Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I always thought it would be nice to sort by stars x reviewers or stars x log(reviews) -- something like that. Something that better balances rating and popularity. One of the most annoying things in amazon search by rating is scrolling through screens and screens of products with one user giving a product 5 stars.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, I find it amazing that this still hasn't been addressed. "Sort by Average Score" should definitely factor in the number of reviews. It's an easy fix from a technical perspective because you can also sort by number of reviews. Just combine the two!

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely good idea, currently I redirect to Amazon and it is not easy with even with Amazon Advertising API because when you request amazon only turns 10 products and for another 10 you need a new request. You need to request lots of pages to calculate it and Amazon has request limits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A few things:

\- The interface is overwhelming. While I understand that you aim to surface power, I think you're not targeting a specific power well enough to cater to a user's needs. For example, if you aim to help a user find deals, you should develop an interface that targets that super power.

\- Related to ^, I'm wondering why a user would ever need some of these features... like why would I want to search by hidden keywords?

\- Re: branding. I feel like you haphazardly went for a 5-letter dot com, when you could have done something more memorable like amazonhunter.com

<comment><USER7> Yes but he would be shutdown instantly if he used "Amazon" in the url

<comment><USER8> JungleSearch or JungleHunter would be decent compromises.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Personally I like the interface and think dumbing it down would be a mistake. I would recommend adding a "minimum reviews" filter, as I sometimes sort by avg rating but get things with 2 or 3 reviews that are probably fake anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> I found most of sort features by try and error. I will look into it if Amazon provides it I will implement it.Thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER10> Oh, you're not running the search over your own data?

<comment><AUTHOR> No I am directing to Amazon with right search query url.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I agree that the interface is way overwhelming. It's very hard to see what the text boxes are for because the labels are positioned so funny. I was also not expecting it to open a new window to Amazon. I thought the results would stay on your site (like on CCC). Also, how do you pronounce the name of the site anyways?

From a functionality standpoint, I think this works great. I wish amazon would let me search by all these features. This saves a ton of time and headache with searching amazon.

One final thought. It would be great if it supported smile.amazon.com. I support the "Youth Competitive Programming Circle" with all my purchases. It would be nice if all the links went to smile.amazon.com instead of straight amazon.com.

Overall I like it. Keep at it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback. I will add smile url option. Jeviz is pronounced like first parth of these words ge-neral and vis-io

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am the author of jeviz.com. Currently it is only for US locale. Immediate benefits are you have more options for search sorts. For example most choose a department and select "Most review" sort option to sort by number of reviews which is not visible in Amazon.com site. When you login you can save your search parameters and synch your mobile, desktop search parameters. There are about 50,000 categories in Amazon you can do full text search for categories. There is advanced book search more accessible than Amazon advanced book search. Please tell me what are the features you want more.

<comment><USER12> I like how you use the tour to explain the interface. Since you seem to be targeting power users although they could probably figure it out as you go along it makes it slightly less intimidating.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I target power users but even power users needs introduction I think. You can end the anytime by clicking End Tour button. It won't show up again unless you clear your browser cache.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is it possible to search for books that have been blurbed by certain authors? For example, if I'm interested in a list of books that Donald Knuth, or heaven forbid Gary Shteyngart, has blurbed and recommended, how would I go about doing that? Often the product descriptions will have blurbs or reviews from various sources listed on the Amazon page to induce individuals to read the book or atleast permit it to capture their attention.

<comment><USER2> > blurbed

What does this mean? Is it a typo for blogged, a new social network used by Knuth and Shteyngart, or a word I've never heard of?

<comment><USER14> I think he means the quotes praising the book that appear typically on the back cover of a physical book. [https://susanleighnoble.wordpress.com/2012/09/18/writing- an-...](https://susanleighnoble.wordpress.com/2012/09/18/writing-an-awesome- book-blurb/)

<comment><USER15> I think they may refer to the actual Amazon page, found under "Editorial Reviews". For example, from a random book I found.

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385542364/ref=s9_qpp_gw_d...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385542364/ref=s9_qpp_gw_d99_g14_i4_r?ie=UTF8&fpl=fresh&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=&pf_rd_r=2VTHTMFBDX8J4H9DN6BZ&pf_rd_t=36701&pf_rd_p=6aad23bd-3035-4a40-b691-0eefb1a18396&pf_rd_i=desktop)

Editorial reviews by Oprah, someone from the NYT, People, NPR etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Say I want to search a shirt of specific brands only e.g. "Calvin Klein" and "Versace". If I misspell the name, Amazon won't complain, rather it'll show the incorrect brand name in the left pane. Would it be easy to add auto- suggest for brands so that I get the name right.

<comment><AUTHOR> Auto complete these features are not provided by Amazon but I really thinking of implement it myself. Thank you for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> LOVE this! Thank you for sharing.

I've wondered, is there a way to combine book format searches? Books have Paperback AND Audio CD, for example?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Let me check if it is technically possible if so I will implement it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author of jeviz.com here. All started with a question on Quora [https://www.quora.com/What-kind-of-features-would-you- like-t...](https://www.quora.com/What-kind-of-features-would-you-like-to-see- in-Amazon-Product-Search)

<comment><USER18> I'd really like to search by product dimensions.

<comment><USER15> Is this tongue in cheek?

<comment><USER18> No it was an idea I submitted here 2+ years ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7542631](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7542631)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice job :)

Sad though, once one considers what Amazon has begun as: a search engine...

And yes, somehow and for some reason most ecommerce sites are not good at filtering their data on more criteria in categories...

<comment><USER20> Amazon has hundreds of millions of items, search at that scale is not as easy as it is for a few thousand books. E-commerce search is not the same as google search. Relevance by words and associations like google creates is much different than how people search when shopping/exploring.

If you have a better way to do it, Amazon is hiring and I am sure they would love to hear your ideas.

<comment><USER21> I am not so sure they really care about changing their search.

They only recently started to change their recommendation stack, after years of using outdated technologies. I think it is somewhat similar with search.

It's not so much that "it's complicated at their scale" as "It works somewhat okay, which translates into X hundreds of millions of $, so don't touch it".

I know they could (and they most probably do) run A/B tests, but the thing is, how do you run MVT tests on such a large infrastructure, with such a varied catalog, etc...it all gets very complicated at their scale, just from an org perspective.

Many "power users" complain about the state of Amazon search, but I doubt the average joe really cares about that.

A more recent (and with a much smaller catalog) player, zalando (rocket internet) has a modular org and a modular approach to their stacks and they, apparently, change or update their tools much more often than Amazon.

I am pretty sure zalando being more "agile" come from their much smaller size (both in inventory, turnover and org).

Large organisations have a harder time moving than smaller ones, after all...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Amazon CA locale is requested and I will add it ASAP. Any locale you want to see?

<comment><USER22> Amazon DE would be perfect! Great tool btw!

<comment><USER23> Selam Ceyhun,

I'd be a constant user for Amazon DE. Can help you out with testing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Selam, Hakan. I would be very happy if you can help as I don't even speak German. Thank you keep in touch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How are you planning to monetizing? Are you an amazon affiliate?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I am an affiliate. I am putting my tag to searches.</comment></comment>


Tesla is building up in-house insurance as Model S tops most expensive to insure - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2018/05/29/tesla-insuremytesla-insurance-model-s-most-expensive-car/ <comment><USER2> I'm surprised collision isn't even higher, there are so many stories of body repairs taking incredible amounts of time because of no part availability. Few certified shops and even fewer available parts means good luck getting your repair done.

Plenty of examples:

[https://www.driving.co.uk/news/features/tesla-owners- facing-...](https://www.driving.co.uk/news/features/tesla-owners-facing- extended-wait-repairs/)

<comment><USER3> How does that raise rates? It just annoys people whose cars are in the shop for longer than usual.

As for the number of shops certified to do aluminum repairs, yes, that's an issue for all aluminum-bodied vehicles.

<comment><USER4> If you have an insurance policy that pays for a rental car while your car is being repaired, the cost of a long repair delay could add up pretty quickly.

<comment><USER3> No, because the insurance policy rental car $$ runs out first. Trust me on that one, personal experience.

<comment><USER5> Really depends on the country also since Tesla will not fix anything beyond the slightest of cosmetic damages you have pretty much pristine cars getting totaled by the insurers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a big incentive for him to improve safety. If he can provide his own insurance, and reduce the cost of accidents, he can undercut the industry in another way. It also prevents an industry that would potentially suffer in a world of safe, self driving cars, from attempting to shut him out the way auto dealerships did.</comment>


Yep, Facebook Takes Control Of Fb.com Ahead Of Mail Launch - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/12/fb-com/

<comment><USER2> I love TechCrunch. This article links to another article that's an hour old that says mail.facebook.com shows the Exchange webmail portal, and so the new Facebook mail thing is going to be Exchange. Nope guys, that's where the people that work at Facebook get _their_ webmail.

Breaking news: Facebook's employees use email!

<comment><USER3> Though it would be pretty interesting if FB integrated with Exchange to sync facebook event invites (calendar) and facebook contacts. Would bring Exchange to the "normal" person - probably be a smart move on Microsoft's part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pointed out in the comments: Why not use fb.me, which they already owned? fb.me is shorter and easier to remember ("facebook me" being a colloquialism these days, firstname.lastname@example.com doesn't sound bad at all). And it subtly encourages people to go back and use the Facebook website instead of sticking with raw email, which I guarantee will be an underpinning to whatever secret email "project" they are finishing up.

<comment><USER5> fb.com is just two letters for most people.

I cant imagine why facebook the site and facebook-mail have to be in different addresses. Most likely the mail feature will be surfaced within the facebook UI. Right now, fb.com redirects to facebook.

The Fb.com address is probably just a convenience for both facebook and its users.

<comment><USER6> There is a an argument for having separate domains so that official correspondence from a website is not easily spoofed. Consider someone creating an account 'firstname.lastname@example.com' or something similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> for a few seconds there I was worried that Microsoft might have teamed up with FB to create some strange web portal that included social media, email and documents. nightmare stuff...

still, I didn't expect FB to be using Exchange

</comment><comment><USER8> fb.com will jsut further confirm FB asa _platform_

The addition of the features that they have in their roadmap, such as video hosting, email, payments, apps etc really make a compelling case for a long haul plan.

With the recent defection of high level googs - it is clear what is planned.

</comment><comment><USER9> OMG HOW EXCITING!!!11111111</comment>


Ask HN: Do you consider people buying into Bitcoin today as 'early adopters'? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Most would likely fall into a "speculator" definition, as they don't actually use bitcoins for transactions - therefore they aren't really "adopting" bitcoin, but rather are just stock piling something in hopes it goes up in value in the future.

I.e. if I buy 20 new xboxes but leave them sealed for resale before Christmas, I'm not really an early adopter, instead i'm just a speculating opportunist, even though I did purchase the consoles the day they were released - the same time the "early adopters" did.

<comment><USER3> I appreciated your comment. It's easy to overlook definitions and categorically group things based on simple criteria checking. People who are currently buying BTC is a shared characteristic of (1) speculators, (2) early adopters, and (3) probably other actors.

Regardless if they are speculators, does their initial reason for adoption matter to the definition of an early adopter? Speculators may at any time become users, and normal users may at any time start speculating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I consider the people buying into Bitcoin today as lesser fools.

The people buying into Bitcoin tomorrow are greater fools.

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

<comment><USER5> The greater fool is the one holding the bag when nobody else will buy it; People buying in today could very well be the greater fool -- time will tell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If by 'early adopter' you mean 'in it before the price skyrocketed', then yes.

I don't _believe_ I'm a slow learner, but it took me about 1 year from first learning about Bitcoin to becoming comfortable enough with the technology to speculate on it.

I honestly believe it will replace Gold as a store of value, but it will take a very long time for the general public to understand it enough and/or trust it enough that they'll sell any amount of gold for bitcoins. But when they do, perhaps in a slow process that peaks around 15 years from now, the value of a single bitcoin could end up somewhere around $300k.

I personally estimate the likelihood of this being around 10-15%. So yeah, I'm still buying more today.

<comment><USER7> Gold and BitCoin don't compare well. Here's why. Sure, gold is "useless", except for the fact that its value is historically verified (over centuries) and culture-independent. If nothing else, it's used in jewelry (and drugs, and electronics).

There aren't many elements on the periodic table, and even fewer are viable as metallic currencies: rare enough to have value in small weight, not so rare as to be foreign (historically) to many cultures. Gold has a visceral, visual advantage, too: it's the only yellow metal.

On the other hand, anyone can launch a new cryptocurrency. There's no natural monopoly there. The _idea_ is valid, but all Bitcoin has to defend itself against competition is the brand/reputation. And people hate Bitcoin because it was clearly set up to favor early adopters for no good reason.

<comment><USER8> If it hadn't favored early adopters... there wouldn't have been early adopters.

<comment><USER9> Well, it has favored the early adopters a few magnitudes too much. I am not comfortable with someone holding 10% of currency.

If Satoshi came out of the high tower and announced plans for his stash, I would feel a little bit better. When/if BTC hits 1m/BTC his stash would be worth 2T and that is a lot of claim checks on society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are around several hundred thousands of bitcoin users. There are more than 7 billion people. Bitcoin is in the very early phase.

For comparison: first GSM call was made in 1991. In 1994 subscribers hit 1 million, nowadays there are several billions. Would you consider someone with GSM phone in 1994 an early adopter or not?

<comment><USER11> There are also tens (hundreds?) of thousands of piano tuners. Does that mean piano tuning is in the early phase?

<comment><USER10> Bitcoins are arguably useful to everybody, unlike piano tuners.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nope. Early majority now, especially with it getting big in China.

Innovators were the early miners who invested in actually taking BTC from 0 to 1.

Early adopters were those who got into it prior to 2013 when most of the mainstream considered it a scam or were otherwise scared off by the price instability.

With the recent government hearings I'd say we're right at the start of the early majority phase.

</comment><comment><USER13> Bitcoin market adoption looks like a skyrocket curve compared to other tech. Hence the early adopters window closed a while back during the first 4 years when 50 coins were being mined every 10 mins.

</comment><comment><USER14> There are two early adopter classes that I think matter in this sort of case.

First are what I'll refer to as technologists. No elaboration necessary, you get the gist.

Second are Jane & Joe consumer.

People buying into Bitcoin today are early adopters as far as consumers are concerned, and they're years behind on the technologist scale.

Bitcoin has reached enough publicity at this point that a former business partner of mine - she's in her mid 60's, and is a very very light user of technology, that hasn't yet joined Facebook, has never once used Twitter, has heard / read about Bitcoin. She is a CPA, so we had an interesting conversation about the implications of Bitcoin. She gets the premise of digital currencies, but not exactly how Bitcoin works (why mining exists, who controls it, how the encryption works, and so on).

Publicity wise, Bitcoin is quite widespread, it has spent months in the mainstream media at this point. Consumer adoption is clearly still in the first inning however.

</comment><comment><USER15> Yes, from utility point of view it's still just a protocol and an experiment. Many iterations of applications will be built on it before it becomes mainstream. As an investment, early adopter days are over.

</comment><comment><USER16> No. While Bitcoin is still insanely young, it is hardly at the early point by which I would say this is still an early adopter phase anymore.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm seriously wanting to invest in Bitcoin. I think in 8 years the price of every bitcoin will be around 100k each.

</comment><comment><USER18> Price is about to hit $1,000/btc - def. NOT early adopters, more starting to go up towards the bell curve.

</comment><comment><USER7> People won't remember Snapchat's fall from grace or Groupon's mediocre twilight. They'll be talking about Bitcoin (and however it busts) in 2050, 2100 even. Not because it will be worth a damn. It won't go to zero. It will be a neat novelty "good" that is fully electronic. It will hold some value, just like Black Lotuses would still be a part of gaming history if no one played Magic anymore.

Still, I expect it to tank. It might have enough relic power (as the first, if not the best) to hold a value around $50 million in toto (or $6/BTC). Why? Because the forced deflation is a Dick Move of epic proportions: favoring early adopters for no good reason. As it turns out, Dick Moves damage your reputation in the long run, and all Bitcoin has is a brand. What stops someone else from creating a new cryptocurrency without the hard upper limit?

There is something interesting about it, which is it reminds us that we truly really have no fucking clue where value comes from. Nation-states? Companies? Total abstractions, many fraudulent or flimsy. Bitcoin has some transient value because some smart people solved a hard problem, but there's no long- term brand advantage or natural monopoly. But it's still pretty fascinating that smart people can create so much value (often "of out nothing", but sometimes genuine). Or take Magic: cardboard probably worth a billion dollars in totality. The first trillion-dollar business is going to be one that recognizes the value of the time of high-talent people and somehow provides direct access in a _scalable_ way (independent of social networks, because well-connected, talented people are already in-place). I've had a rough idea of how that might work-- a call option exchange on high-talent peoples' time, see [http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/fixing- employ...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/fixing-employment- with-consulting-call-options/): -- but I admit I have no idea how to scale it (or even deal with the ethical assurance issues).

<comment> bitcoin-truth > Why? Because the forced deflation is a Dick Move of epic proportions: > favoring early adopters for no good reason.

No good reason? Does there have to be one?

If the protocol succeeds despite your assertion that there is no good reason to favor early adopters, will you change your mind that the reason was immaterial?

[http://paste.lisp.org/+307S](http://paste.lisp.org/+307S)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> My parents know about Bitcoins. Officially, you are no longer an early adopter.</comment>


Reading the Posix standard for Unix functions is not straightforward - <AUTHOR> https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/POSIXReadingIsHard <comment><USER2> Btw reading the standard might not even be possible as the "Read HTML edition online" button/link on [1] does nothing when it should take you to [2] I guess. The downloads for a zipped HTML archive doesn't appear to work either.

[1]: <[https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/>](https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/>)

[2]: <[https://publications.opengroup.org/c181>](https://publications.opengroup.org/c181>)</comment>


Show HN: Heap's iOS Event Visualizer – Set up analytics just by using your app - <AUTHOR> https://heapanalytics.com/ios-event-visualizer

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm one of the founders of Heap. We'd love to get your feedback on the product.

You might be used to writing event-tracking code in Mixpanel or Flurry, and having to push an update to the app store just to start tracking those events. With Heap, we're tracking touch events, gestures, action methods and more automatically. Now we've built a visual interface that lets you define those events by interacting with your app manually.</comment>


My father, Aaron Swartz, and Assigning Blame for Suicide - <AUTHOR> http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1282

<comment><USER2> I think there's a misplaced oxford comma [http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qpg3UFOQzhI/TupPzcLeQZI/AAAAAAAAAD...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qpg3UFOQzhI/TupPzcLeQZI/AAAAAAAAADI/IReqJR8DWy8/s1600/oxford%2Bcomma.png)

I mistook the headline as Aaron Swartz kid writing this, which is not true.</comment>


RAGE, which showcases the new id Tech 5 engine, gets a terrible review by Ars - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/10/rage-is-the-gamiest-game-that-ever-gamed.ars

<comment><USER2> Historically id has never been known for deep characters or good stories. To me their games were just advertisements for their engines.

I would have been surprised if Rage was able to match worlds from companies like Bethesda, Bioware (before the EA buyout), or Obsidian.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't want to bag out on id.. but the games they've done in the past that qualified as FUN - the basic premise was to just kill wave after wave of bad guy/demon/robot type soldier guy. Their games have never been very "deep", but they have been fun to play. This looks to me like they felt a bioware style game was more appropriate but have none of the bioware talent for making engaging story/dialogue.

I'm sure I read somewhere that id were no longer going to be in the game of tech licensing, but I could just be mistaken.

<comment><USER4> It's my impression that they're holding out on open sourcing id Tech 4 until after the release of Rage, so it would make sense that they still intend on licensing id Tech 5.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What did the reviewer expect from an iD game?

Glad to know they've still got it though. Maybe I'll end up making my first video game purchase in years...

</comment><comment><USER5> The story tomorrow isn't going to be the bad reviews, it's going to be the fact that almost nobody seems to be able to actually play the game. There are tons of graphics issues and crashes. It really looks like they botched the launch (on Steam, anyway.)</comment>