Internet abuse culture is a tech industry problem - <AUTHOR> http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/35416.html

<comment><USER2> I'm going to agree completely with this, and with this:

[https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/this-industry-is- fucked/](https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/this-industry-is-fucked/)

... and I'm going to be un-PC and explain why I think this is such a problem. My explanation is un-PC because I am going to talk about reality here and reality isn't PC.

So here you go:

The computing industry contains a large number of introverted, socially alienated males -- or at least males who _were_ this way at some point earlier in their lives. Many were abused -- and _it is abuse_ \-- in school by bullies. Needless to say, girls wouldn't talk to them and probably still don't. It's not the girls' fault. If they did talk to them, they'd be abused too. Jr. High and High School are torture rooms where violating clique boundaries and social castes results in both physical and emotional abuse.

Two problems emerge from that.

One is the very predictable subconscious chip on the shoulder that these folks have. Now that they're no longer socially alienated abuse victims but upwardly-mobile professionals, there's a powerful temptation to reverse the abuse and heap it out on the sorts of people they felt rejected, slighted, and insulted by when they were young. This unfortunately includes women -- pretty much _all_ women. It's a deep subconscious imprint and as anyone who's ever done any work trying to change themselves knows it is _hard_ to shed deep imprints.

The second problem is related but a bit different. It's tough to develop your social skills once you fall into the trap of alienation. It's a chicken or egg problem: you need human contact to develop your social abilities and empathy, but when you're alienated people systematically deny it to you. Once a pariah, you become more of a pariah. (Writ very large this is one of the mechanisms behind racism, classism, and sexism itself.)

Many socially alienated individuals -- again predominantly males in this particular case -- independently discover a simple and elegant solution to that problem: _be an asshole_.

Being an asshole is easy once you get up the gumption to do it. This loss of fear sort of happens naturally-- you reach a certain age and realize nobody is going to stop you. Being an asshole has a surprising result: people start superficially deferring to you. It also allows you to kind of batter your way into something superficially resembling a social life, or at least to ascend to higher social ranks in things that can serve as proxies for a social life such as business or academia.

Being an asshole is so easy that it often takes the place of developing real social skills. Why bother challenging your deep negative imprints and developing yourself as a human being? Just turn up the volume and the problem seems to kind of go away... that is until you try to do something like form a deep long term relationship or actually build a team of people who can work together for the long haul.

Those two factors -- one circumstantial and one path-dependent -- are I think responsible for most of the misogyny and other general assholery that infests our industry.

I also think these two factors explain the lack of social conscience shown by our industry. After all, "normal people" are the enemy. They beat the shit out of you as children. (I was, for example, held down and urinated on once for being a "dork.") So why should you care if your company is systematically destroying their income and replacing it with nothing? Fuck them. Disrupt away. Of course none of that is ever spoken or even explicitly thought. It's well in the realm of subconscious emotional motivation. Hurt people hurt.

P.S. my children won't attend public school unless it's a last resort for financial reasons.</comment>


Single People Should Not Do Startups - <AUTHOR> http://startupnorth.ca/2011/07/21/single-people-should-not-do-startups/

<comment><USER2> What a load of shit. So the argument basically reduces to:

"You can't be a startup founder and date, therefore it's better to do a startup if you're already in a long-term committed relationship."

Ummm... how about "I'm single and I'm willing to forgo dating for 'x period of time' until my startup is established and running" OR, even better, "I'm single and I'm willing to forgo dating for now, until my startup exits, I'm rich, and I can live the billionaire playboy lifestyle and take my dates on exotic trips to fun places, etc., etc. yada yada."

Doing a startup means making sacrifices whether you're single or not, this article contributes nothing to value to the discussion of who should and shouldn't be running a startup, IMO. Then again, my take on this discussion is that there really isn't anything to discuss to begin with: You should run a startup... _drumroll_ If you want to run a startup.

<comment><USER3> Even better: "I'm single and I'm willing to pursue meaningless one-night stands and shallow two-week flings until my startup is established and running." This has the benefit of keeping you physically satisfied while being 100% emotionally connected to your startup.

<comment><USER4> * This only applies to the nontechnical founders.

<comment> wh-uws Not true. Technical people can do it too. Its a learned skill like everything else

<comment><USER5> Its also a very time-consuming skill to master at 11am+ at which point you have enough brain power to drool over an ugly girl at best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm sorry, I have been single throughout the majority of my time in a startup, including part of the time being CEO. So I feel like I'm speaking with some authority.

Dating forces you to go out and meet people of the sort that you won't meet in your office. It ends up having a substantial sales component, too -- keeping track of leads, worrying about which ones run cold, trying to close deals, etc.

Dating is an excellent distraction, and besides -- as a smart ambitious male, I'm seeking a smart ambitious female to be a partner in crime. And guess what, she's probably spending her 20s pouring her heart and soul into her career too.

We circle-jerk so much about "OMG being in a startup is SO INTENSE" but have you ever talked to law students? first-year associates? Med students? Students getting PhDs in super-competitive experimental science fields, like molecular biology? they're all putting in crazy hours too.

And we all love our work, and if we're intellectually curious people, we LOVE hearing about others' work. So no, you're not BORING on a date -- boring on a date is talking about how you and your friends got SO DRUNK last weekend. Boring is "yeah, then I watched back-to-back seasons of 30Rock". Boring is not "here is my plan for total world domination".

Working all the time at your passion makes you, female or male, _more_ attractive to potential mates -- if you're looking for the right sort of person.

<comment><USER7> It's that last line that bugs me, you've made a sweeping statement about what you want being right. You've decided what everyone should want and how their relationship should work. You speak authoritively for yourself.

<comment><USER6> I didn't mean "right" as in "this person is more correct than others", I meant "compatible".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Having kids adds to this – all your problems melt away and disappear as you chase your kids around or play some silly game_

Why are kids a better distraction than sex? o.O

<comment><USER9> One lasts significantly longer than the other?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is the dumbest article.

A) Knee deep in a startup and can't date? That's what Korean massage parlors are for. Not to mention that dating sharpens your social skills that would otherwise languish while fighting with your spouse about having to do a week of 18 hour days and all the stress related with that.

B) I did a startup married and it contributed to the divorce I got after I left it.

C) I've gotten more play using the startup angle then I can even care to count. It's all about packaging and presentation my friend.

<comment><USER11> Any Korean massage parlor recommendations?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Working on a startup was one of the contributing factors to the decline and failure of my relationship.

When we were supposed to be spending "quality time" together on weekend afternoons, I kept thinking about how much work I could be getting done. I had to bail on vacation or event plans to spend more time on my project. I kept saying "just another couple weeks, then we launch." But the project dragged on and by then, it was too late.

At the time, I wasn't single, but I wasn't married or cohabiting with kids either. Not sure if that's considered "dating" or not. Anyway, I'm sure many people are capable of balancing their work and their romantic life, but in my case it as untenable. Depending on what kind of relationship you have, what your personalities are like, and what kind of work you're doing, it can really hurt you.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hey all - I am the writer of this piece on startupnorth - my name is Dan Morel, I am at @dpmorel. Annoyingly I caught it on Hacker News probably too late to have an impact on the comments.

Probably all of you folks complaining below find the arguments absurd and abnoxious because they discriminate against you (being a single, young, male doing a startup).

Well, guess what, most of the entire startup eco-system is discriminatory and proclaims similar absurd arguments against people with family... and its doubly so against women.

So if you don't have the mental capacity to appreciate irony, than go f yourselves.

</comment><comment><USER14> All of the listed factors also apply to marriage. While I am single, it seems like marriage is HARD all by itself. It takes time, effort, communication, and patience. Adding a start up on top of this is going to make it more difficult (although I would never say impossible).

What's more, running a start up is a formative experience that will likely change you. It would be challenging, though by no means impossible, to have a successful marriage while the character of the two people who form its basis are changing.

</comment><comment><USER5> How true. I must say, if I had to date right now, I think I'd want to hang myself. And sometimes just having to take care of my daughter forces me to just stop doing work and focus on life for a minute.

Ah sleep, the mythical two headed unicorn with golden hoofs for ents.

</comment><comment><USER15> hold on a minute... same thing happened to me. my little girl was running around until 11pm, when we both felt asleep and i woke up at 3am. :)

also funny to mention that i had to run home this afternoon too..., but i have to say... many missing pieces are coming to my mind when i play or watch my kid... and not when i'm fighting a tech related problem.

you do have to manage your time anyways...

i recently stopped working for clients and do start up something. until now i say startups and families do work together. i'll keep you guys posted! :)

</comment><comment><USER16> While I agree with the part about being a boring date and working too much to be interesting, he totally left out the part about being unattractive due to being completely broke.

<comment><USER17> Money is overrated in terms of attraction. Perceived status is what matters (for men), and money is often correlated with status but doesn't directly lead to it. A socially skilled entrepreneur who's broke but confident will do far better than a highly paid socially inept geek.

<comment><USER16> "Socially skilled" is similar to "good at picking up girls," so I guess I would agree because that's close to a tautology.

I'm just saying that when a girl figures out you work 12 hours a day and live off of $25K a year, much of which comes from credit cards, it is a bit more of a "con" than a "pro" in their mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> it's always fun to see one unbased broad generalization about startups countered by yet another unbased broad generalization about startups...

<comment><AUTHOR> It is even better when using anecdotal evidence to support an unbased board generalization. It was designed to be a sarcastic humourous post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yes, the boring drones who work in regular 9-5 jobs are more interesting than people trying to impact the world

</comment><comment><USER19> Single Person Start-ups. Two - Founders Start-ups. Three - Person Start-ups. etc. It's all about context. Are you a rock and roll band? With or without a drummer? Are you making a film? Are you starting a cricket team? Are you opening a restaurant? Are you starting a media group? There is no magic number, never was, never will be. It's a simple equations of what skills are needed to start, and how many people at a minimum are needed. Are you Evils, The White Stripes or the The Beatles.

So while I do appreciate the anecdotal stories, I'm not sure the unequivocal conclusions are really warranted or necessary.

<comment><USER20> You may be right, but it would be nice if you'd actually read the article rather than just the headline.

The OP wasn't talking about a startup founded by a one-person team - he was making the claim (defensible or not) that single people - that is, people not in relationships - shouldn't do startups.

Whether that's a good claim or bad one - and I happen to think it's debatable at best - your commentary would be much better received if it actually addressed the point of the article rather than the headline.</comment></comment>


Does the White House Have Wi-Fi? - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/chris-dannen/techwatch/does-white-house-have-wifi

<comment><USER2> Uh, no. Certainly not connected to anything that could possible access security sensitive data.

I can tell you for sure that defense contractors do not even have internet access from secure areas. Everything has to be screened and brought in on CD.</comment>


Cryptocat rejected by Apple - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/kaepora/status/416692818959024128 <comment><USER2> Sure, because apparently it's experimental. Owning an iPhone for 4 years, I bought an android device and the first thing I notice is that half the apps I use are very unstable. The quality of the software is way behind the iOS.

Link: [https://github.com/cryptocat/cryptocat/issues/542](https://github.com/cryptocat/cryptocat/issues/542)

<comment><USER3> That's a pretty amazing hyperbole from kaepora (twitter description of incident vs actual e-mail response from Apple). And later, Apple accepted the fix: [https://github.com/cryptocat/cryptocat/issues/542#issuecomme...](https://github.com/cryptocat/cryptocat/issues/542#issuecomment-30551640)

Kaepora is so full of himself, I'm not sure how anyone takes what he says or the apps he writes seriously. Glad that people are putting stock in more consistent developers these days ([http://tobtu.com/decryptocat.php](http://tobtu.com/decryptocat.php)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, in my opinion the real problem here is Apples lack of transparency. It's totally fine if they block an App, but at least they should be open about it and communicate to the world why/what the reasons are.

As we've seen in recent news events, when agencies/companies are not transparent, what happens is: corruption. Bad things happen when people are prevented from seeing what's going on behind the curtains.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best way to generate revenue on a blog - <AUTHOR> I am an owner of a blog that is having 100k page views & 60k unique visitors per month. I have not started to generate much revenue and was wondering what some people are doing to generate revenue on their blogs? <comment><USER2> [http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/surviving- an...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/surviving-and-thriving- amidst-adblocker.html)

Though I wish I had your traffic. I think I would be making a lot more money if I had good traffic.

</comment><comment><USER3> If I were in your shoes with all that traffic, I'd implement a micro-paywall charging ~$1/read. If you're on Wordpress you can use CoinTent which allows a set character limit on preview/teasers which show the beginning of the content & charges to keep reading.

<comment><USER4> That assumes that the content is actually worth $1/read. For example, blogs with pictures of cute cats get huge amounts of traffic, but if they start charging for access, 100% of their visitors will go away and find the same content for free somewhere else in about ten seconds. Most technical blogs have the same problem: for example, if you have a blog about Python programming, you're probably one of thousands. It's hard to compete with all the free content that's out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My experience: Partnership with commerce in area of interests, with affiliate links + free products for me.</comment>


Abbott Labs uses copyright law to shut down open diabetes monitoring software - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2019/12/12/they-literally-own-you.html <comment><USER2> My wife (33 years old) was just diagnosed with type 1 diabetes last month. A healthy, under 120 lbs 5 foot 4 woman, who busts her ass for our young children, now has to learn how to keep her blood sugar in check with 4 shots and 6+ finger stick tests per day. Worst of all, accidentally taking too much insulin, or not accounting for unknown variables such as stress, illness, exact carb count of meals, snacks, and exercise, can and will kill you quickly.

I'm disgusted with the current technological advances (aka lack of them) in the diabetes space. The limited tech out there to support an "artificial pancreas" was initiated by a community of hackers [1], and is only supported by a handful of outdated insulin pumps. The manufacturer (medcom) has since "fixed" the vulnerability that allowed outside control inputs. There are a couple decent continuous glucose monitors out now, one by Abbot la s, another by Dexcom, but this only solves half the equation. A true closed loop system feeds continuous glucose monitor readings straight into an insulin pump to administer, algorithmically, microdoses of insulin. This completely eliminates the risk of hypoglycemia and effectively forms an artificial pancreas.

The only reason I fear this kind of tech isn't readily available for all type 1 diabetics is sadly, what's the profit motive to big pharma? They are making a _killing_ off of crap solutions currently available. Trust me, you'd think decades old insulin and glucose meter supplies are affordable by now. These low tech items cost 1000s a month (insurance paid portion).

1) [https://openaps.org/](https://openaps.org/)

<comment><USER3> Check out Loop [https://loopkit.github.io/loopdocs/](https://loopkit.github.io/loopdocs/) it's an iPhone app and works with Omnipod in addition to the old Medtronic pumps. My wife uses it and it's a game changer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Impeding medical progress so that they may profit. And the expensive legal firm _knows_ the complaint is without merit. They are knowingly lying about the law, to make their client money, and make life harder for sick people.

None of the people involved should get to hide behind the corporate facade. Abbott Labs' CEO is Miles White: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_D._White](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_D._White)

It's unclear who the head of the law firm is, but they have offices in a few major cities: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkland_%26_Ellis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkland_%26_Ellis)

<comment><AUTHOR> LAw firms typically don't have executives and shareholders like a regular corporation, but are structured as partnerships.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was able to test the Freestyle Libre device for a couple of months for a friend's research. While I don't have diabetes, it was very enlightening to have constant access to my body's glucose (and indirectly glycogen) levels. I had a near-real-time data stream.

I have practiced intermittent for over a decade, using an 18/6 split. It was so amazing to see my glucose nose dive around midday, then rise and stabilize after about an hour. I assume this was my body switching its energy source from depleted glycogen stores in the liver to lipid (fat) gluconeogenesis.

I know this isn't what the device was designed for, but this would be a complete game-changer for bespoke diet/well-being plans. After a bit of trial and error, you'd know exactly when and what to eat.

After the research ended, I honestly felt like I had lost a sense. My body was running in blind mode again. I would have continued using the device, but at retail, each sensor is around $70 USD.

I hope for a future in which wearables and wireless body monitoring devices become the norm, rather than the exception. There is so much data to be gathered.

Sucks that Abbot has killed this OSS project.

<comment><USER6> Why does the sensor not last forever, but only two weeks?

<comment><USER5> It's an over the counter device with a subdermal needle. The device needs a blood sample, so it gets fouled by our organic bits. I imagine risk of infection is a large part of the short life span of the product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems similar to tactics used by patent trolls. Basically showering you will bullshit you have to defend in court knowing it is bogus and relying on you not being able to fight it. The twist is that they're using Copyright rather than Patent law. I wonder if this is how they're trying to get away from the increased scrutiny of patent abuse.

<comment><USER8> How they shutting it done if it's open source. Is there anything that can be done?

<comment><USER9> The repository owner can file DMCA counterclaim; once they have done so, GitHub will reenable the repository after 2 weeks unless legal action is initiated (not just filing a DMCA).

[https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/guide-to- submi...](https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/guide-to-submitting-a- dmca-counter-notice)

I especially liked this:

> _We won 't refuse to process an otherwise complete counter notice if you > don't include this statement; however, we will know that you haven't read > these guidelines and may ask you to go back and do so._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Time for the SciHub of Git repos?</comment>


Vire.js: Vimeo Event Firing jQuery Plugin - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mojotech.com/vire

<comment><USER2> There is an alternative that allows for CSS declaration of the time: <http://hitchjs.com/describe/jdorra.mediatime/1>.

Example: <http://www.hitchjs.com/test/mediatime.html>

<comment><USER3> True, but this is for HTML5 and not vimeo integration

RTFM -____-

<comment><USER2> <http://vimeo.com/blog/post:268> <http://vimeo.com/blog/post:334>

<comment><USER4> hint.js wont work with the HTML5 player for vimeo and certainly won't work for the vimeo flash player.

Vire, however works for both. All with one line of code! Try it before you knock it!

<comment><USER2> I never knocked. I only said "alternative".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey your fork me link takes me to <https://github.com/mojotech/vire> which is giving me 404.

<comment><AUTHOR> Github is unfortunately down right now....

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> incredible.</comment>


Steve Jobs is Watching You - <AUTHOR> http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/08/steve-jobs-watching-you-apple-seeking-patent-0

<comment><USER2> Firstly, please get rid of the caps in the title (and the spelling error). :(

Anyway, I'm not sure how this is spyware. Properly implemented, this is no different than systems that already exist to take photos of someone when they have stolen your device. I think the EFF should wait until this is actually implemented (or not!) and then see what the actual end result of it is.

<comment><USER3> This is _literally_ spyware;

1\. It aims to function without the user's knowledge.

2\. It aims to collect data about the user for use by a third party.

<comment><USER2> Is the user, in this case, a thief? If so, and it's a switch you enable, it seems pretty benign to me.

(But, before discussing this more: it's not spyware -- or anything -- if it only exists in a patent application.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is old (published august 2010). What are the sources of this article?

While I am certainly leery of this sort of thing and would not be surprised if it was at least partially true, it seems like bullshit to me.</comment>


Ask HN: What to do after years of being a hikikomori? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
The last few years I have been living as a hikikomori in a tiny apartment in my parents' house, using my savings to invest in the stock market. However, in a few months I will be broke. And I don't know what to do to prevent it...
Some background: I have been a loner since my early childhood and never had any friends. Somehow I was never interested in others; legos, and later books, were far more interesting. And there has always been this feeling of not fitting into "systems" like family, school, or workplace. Maybe I am somewhere on the autistic spectrum.
At first, my "career" followed a traditional path: school, IT apprenticeship, CS bachelor at a university of applied sciences, job as a web dev. This entire time was characterized by constant struggles dealing with others, and boredom, starting with the apprenticeship. The break came after I got fired from the job after less than a year. What followed were months of depressions. Somehow I stumbled upon "The Intelligent Investor" during those dark times and that probably saved me. I started with investing and have been doing so since then. The firing also turned me into a hikikomori, however, in practice not much changed. In my spare time I have already been a "part time hikikomori" since the end of my apprenticeship, when I moved into the apartment.
With the dwindling of my savings, I thought getting a job as a dev would have the highest probability to avert the financial troubles. But so far I didn't even manage to get a single interview. I guess it is because of the outdatedness of my tech skills and/or the long time since my last job. Combined with my low success rate with interviews in the past, it now looks almost impossible for this approach to work. Two other approaches I currently follow are learning/reading about solopreneurship and option trading, though the outcome of both is uncertain. Are there other approaches I miss and could try? <comment><USER2> I don't think that solopreneurship or option trading make sense giving your starting point. You are better off refreshing your skills and looking for jobs most downmarket.

Another alternative to look into would be a coding boot camp with good follow- on support. You'll breeze through the technical stuff, get up to speed, and have help getting introductions to companies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your answer. Do you mean most downmarket in the IT sector, or the market in general?

Good idea about the coding boot camp, I have to check whether there exists such a camp in the region.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I meant 'more downmarket'.

Obviously, you'll be at an advantage if you can leverage your existing skills and passions. While that could be in tech, I am sure there are also situations outside of tech per se, where you might find appropriate work - pretty much every medium sized company needs an active website these days.

When looking for bootcamps, A) talk to graduates and find out where they are working. Many bootcamps are ripoff and B) look for the ones that have industry pipelines in place, since this pipeline is the actual value they bring you. Some are so well set up to place graduates, that they don't even charge you until you get a job.

Good luck.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Dealing with 'global' burnout - <AUTHOR> Hello all,
First of all I'd like to apologise for asking here as it feels like a pretty well trodden path at this point, but it feels like the last direction I can turn in.
I have worked hard, sacrificed, done everything that I can, and still, there is a wall, it's just not possible, it seems.
I am reasonably young, with a job that pays well relatively, but badly absolutely. I work full time and am able to save 70% of my income in a large city. I live with my long term partner who is the love of my life.
I will never be able to afford a home and have children. I will never be able to afford even a 2 bedroom flat with space for me and my partner to coexist.
This is causing me extreme emotional turmoil, a burn out, whatever you want to call it. It's a mixture of anger, helplessness, and a lack of desire to do anything, because suddenly it feels as if success is impossible, as if everything is pointless.
I can see a doctor, or a therapist, but they can't fix the external situation, they can only medicate me.
I've considered 'running away' to a country with a low cost of living. This is the most viable option so far. But I'd have to leave her behind, and I can't face it.
I can try to find a better job, but I already earn far in excess of the median - realistically it feels like this part of the economy has just failed, which makes me frustrated with capitalism, and has me questioning everything.
I can give it up and start campaigning. I can buy a field, build my home, and wait for them to come and tear it down. But what use is that, knowing that it's ultimately futile?
I can give up on the idea of ever owning my own destiny, of ever being able to fulfill my potential, of ever being anything other than a productive unit to be consumed. At that point, why live? <comment><AUTHOR> I have been 'burned out' before, but this time it feels different. Somehow it feels as if it's literally impossible to make a life for myself in my own country, any more. Being locked out of the housing market entirely feels like my homeland has been stolen from me, the most basic necessity of shelter becomes an ever-present treadmill.

I'm just so full of anger, sadness, everything, with the whole situation - what do I do? Do I just turn off my emotions, go to work, come home from work, go to work, come home from work, wait decades for the pieces to fall into place?

What makes all of this worse is that inevitably comparisons are made with humanity as a whole - that lots of others are in this situation. And to me, that's simply terrible, but I have to turn off thinking about that, because otherwise I'll spin out completely. I can't even look after myself.

</comment><comment><USER2> > I can give it up and start campaigning. I can buy a field, build my home, > and wait for them to come and tear it down. But what use is that, knowing > that it's ultimately futile?

I think you're going quite far with assumptions and drowning in bad thoughts. That is something that probably you should talk to the therapist about. I'm not even sure who "they" are in this case.

But for some more practical response: you're talking about two extremes - always renting in a large city, or running away to a low-cost country alone. What about just moving slightly outside of the city _with_ your partner? What about saving the 70% for an out-of-city house/flat downpayment?

Even countryside in an expensive country is pretty cool and lets you live a slower life. (written from a pop. 2k village)

<comment><AUTHOR> I already live at the maximum reasonable distance from the city (3 hour round trip commute) and a 2-bedroom flat is completely unaffordable. I could possibly get a tiny 1br if I knew that I could secure employment for a decade or if I got a massive pay rise.

Everyone else I know in my peer group has completely given up and seems to be set for a life of renting forever - I earn almost double them.

I can live somewhere completely uncommutable and work remotely. That means leaving her behind.

It's two issues. I stay with her and kill myself (not in the 'suicide attempt' sense, but in the literal keeling over due to stress sense), I leave her and actually kill myself (due to the absurdity of having the fucking economy tell me that I can't be with my partner because she doesn't care to be a serf forever).

It's just fucking money, you know? Numbers. Pictures of faces on paper.

Less flippantly - money represents claim checks on society. In the context, that means that society doesn't want me, or many others like me, because we're not worth it.

<comment><USER3> What's wrong with renting? I rent. I've always rented. And I think it's silly to buy.

But I live on the opposite side of the pond from you. Only old people here are obsessed with owning a home.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry.

I can't respond to this right now, not properly. Maybe someone else will. It just makes me angry. I can give you a short response.

I don't mind renting. It's cool. I like the concept. I like choosing to rent.

I don't like being forced to rent - I don't want to pay my landlord's mortgage - I don't want to move all of my stuff every 12 months - I want to put up shelves, paint, whatever. Make a home. Install a dishwasher. I don't want my children, if I ever have children, to move all the time. I want them to have a bedroom, not 10 different bedrooms throughout their life.

I get what you're saying. I'm not you. I won't ever be you.

<comment><USER3> How much money would you need to buy a modest home you and your partner would be happy with? Is it truly out of reach?

Or is it something that will take a long time?

Also, how much money would it cost to buy a modest home a very short commute from where you're likely to work for the remainder of your life?

And what sort of work could get you _there_?

Are you a programmer?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like you're in your twenties. I felt like that too. Probably everybody does.

If you save just half of that 70%, it'll grow to be quite a bit of money. It just takes time.

And frankly, if you're living with the love of your life -- you're already rich.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I appreciate it. I know. I felt that before. It was long distance. I was happy.

That was the plan. But, it felt so much easier, in the abstract. To go to work every day knowing that I'm giving up all of my free time, that I'll be 30 before I see the return.. it seems so absurd. I know even that I'd be more productive, if not for all of this stress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why can't you run away _with her_ to a country with a low(er) cost of living?</comment>


What is the future of blogging? - <AUTHOR> I felt very sad that the FCC killed Net neutrality. I run a blog. Most of my visitors are from U.S. I am pretty sure my ad revenue is going to be very low in future. Is there any precautions should I take? Is blogging career over? Please, serious replies only. <comment><USER2> I don't think you have any rational reason for fear. It's nonsense to think that your blog is going to be a victim of net neutrality. It's a blog! It isn't like you're trying to run a Netflix-style service that depends on sustained high bandwidth transactions.

While there are legitimate complaints about net neutrality, it's pretty clear that there are huge amounts of FUD going around. The ones that might ought to be concerned would be Spotify-type startups or other businesses that depend on high data rates.

<comment><USER3> This is evidence that net neutrality is an imagined monster for a lot of people.

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean I am too paranoid?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Serious reply? Here you go: Wait for the things to come.

Reason: Nobody can predict the future. Why are you relating your ad revenue with Net neutrality and are "pretty sure" about the outcome? Are you afraid ISPs will block your site in particular? Else, you could always move your blog to a bigger (non-throttled) network or other host.

<comment><AUTHOR> > move your blog to a bigger (non-throttled) network or other host

Could you please elaborate? Should I move my blog to different hosting provider?</comment></comment>


The Future of Firefox: No Tabs, Built-In Ubiquity - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_future_of_firefox_no_tabs_built_in_ubiquity.php <comment><USER3> Err... what?

* I hope they don't copy iTunes, with its extremely slow interface, lack of features, lack of extensibility, lack of options... etc...

* No tabs: They must use tabs in some confused and different way than me. Generally I have one window per browsing task, e.g. one for Gmail, another for HN with tabs of articles and comment pages I'm reading, etc... ironically it was much easier to work with 10+ tabs before the changes of Firefox 3 where they would scroll off the screen because of their fairly large minimum width... Maybe if people are using one window only, and trying to keep their mail, social networking, online radio, and everything else under the sun open all day, they might get confused, but this is sort of a solved problem. Just open another window.

* Taskfox/Ubiquity: umm, what? Most searches I do in Firefox go right to the built in search box with a simple Ctrl+K, couldn't be easier. I have over the years, starting in Firefox 2, added a few keyword searches to the location bar, because I don't like changing the search box. I have w for wikipedia, and so on. This seems similar, but I'm not sure of the utility of opening Wikipedia in a tiny dropdown... how is that faster, easier to read, or any other good quality? It seems like some kind of half hearted attempt at taking an autocompleting command line and adding some that useful on the web, but I don't see anything... _useful_.

* Possibly unrelated gripe: I took a while to "upgrade" to Firefox 3 from v2 because I didn't like the "AwesomeBar" and a couple of other interface changes. While I am mostly used to it now, I still can't reliably get the AwesomeBar to autocomplete some URLs. It seems to fixate on the first match, often not displaying the second match until I actually type the full URL, if at all. Not to mention the fact that even when it works, its not as fast as the Firefox 2 behavior of naively autocompleting visited URLs. I don't need to autocomplete my bookmarks, that's why they are bookmarks! I click on them!

I like Firefox, I have since Phoenix 0.4 or so, but I really don't know what they're doing anymore...

<comment><USER4> Highly recommend "Tab Mix Plus" for FF3; I set the minimum width to be about the size of the favicon plus 1-2 title characters, and let tabs stack in rows rather than scroll off the sides.

<comment><USER5> I'm a fan of the "fisheye" tab add-on that does the expando Mac dock-like thing when you have a mazillion tabs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm just going to come right out and say it: No tabs = fucking insane. I haven't tried it but I don't want my browser to navigate like iTunes.

Then again, it's just a mockup. Should be interesting to see where they go in the future though.

<comment><USER7> I've seen the Tree Tab AddOn and didn't think I would like it but it is much better than having a whole bunch of tabs open, which tend to get squished up when you have a lot open.

Also, with certain themes the active tab can be hard to see, they all look the same, the active tab should be indented or darker but some themes make them all look so similar it's hard to tell, that's not so with Tree Tab.

<comment><USER8> I have to second this. I've been using the Tree Tab addon for months now and have a hard time going back. I definitely wouldn't want to be without it for any widescreen monitors (e.g. every laptop I own).

I now, on average, have ~20 tabs open. When doing lots of fast research or having a very multi-tasking day, it will hit 40 or so tabs. But it doesn't feel like hell, it feels great, because they're all organized in trees/collapsible, and are just a very visible/readable list on the left side.

In normal Firefox or Chrome, I never let myself get more than 15 tabs deep because they're not organized in a meaningful way and feel like unsearchable clutter. With the tree-style tabs on the left, it's really easy to organize/reorganize them and feels more normal to have lots of them open at once if you need.

I unofficially challenge everyone reading this to try that tree-style tab addon for a month and see if you feel more productive/efficient using that over the top-style tabs. It will feel slightly weird at first, but give it that week/month and I bet you'll prefer it when you're done.

Here's the link if you need it: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/5890>

___Edit_ : If you're not convinced, tell me which is easier to skim quickly.

This:

      * GMail, thorax
      * Active by Milest...
      * thread sync - Google Sea...
          * MSDN - WaitForSingleObj...
      * Twitter / Home...
      * CNN.com - Breaking N...
          * Congressman came under fire in ...
          * Jailbird ruffles features ...
      * hello - Google Sea...
      * hacker news - Google Sea...

or this:

> GMail, thorax | Active by Milest... | thread sync - Google Sea... | MSDN - > WaitForSinglObj... | Twitter / Home... | CNN.com - Breaking N... | hello - > Google Sea... | Congressman came under fire in ... | hacker news - <USER2> > Sea... | Jailbird ruffles features ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Personally, I'm not too fussed if Mozilla goes in a crazy direction and Firefox loses popularity now. It's served its primary purpose by opening competition in the browser space which was dominated by Internet Explorer and turning it into a true open platform available on multiple operating systems and encouraging the development of the web and open standards. The Webkit- based browsers (Safari, Chrome) and Opera also exist and are at least at parity with Firefox. Even Internet Explorer isn't that bad these days.

As a mockup, I strongly dislike it. It's trying to be "fashionable and prominent" by imitating iTunes rather than thinking that people want a lightweight minimalistic browser that stays out of the way and doesn't interrupt your workflow. Hell, I'd argue that's what people actually want from a music player, but no-one has yet to come up with a viable user-friendly option that does that, music players are free, and too many people have had their hand forced by Apple lock-in to make innovation easy.

I firmly think Firefox has been getting worse and I blame 'interaction designers'. All of FF3.5's innovations are pretty terrible: I find the fact you can't close the final tab frustrating, the moving "add tab" button is annoying and poor for usability (since it's hard to discover as it keeps moving), and Firefox's private browsing mode and tab tearing are both outright half-baked and nowhere near as pleasant to use or as intuitive as Chrome's. Their treatment of self-signed SSL certificates still leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth as it shows that those in charge of ease-of-use only care about flashy features and not core functionality that prevents startling the user with features with cryptic error messages. Even after using the combined history button in FF3 for months, I still find jumping forward to pages frustrating and unintuitive, I think it's terrible they still don't provide a UI for removing custom words accidentally added to your Firefox dictionary, their support when accessing RSS feeds in-browser is still hilariously poor compared to every other browser, and still think the Manage Search Engines dialog is unnecessary clunky. It's increasingly as though they're not trying to solve the real problems I have in Firefox but rather focusing on needless annoying flashy features directed by some self-proclaimed "usability guru".

If this is implemented, I'd probably either move back to Opera, a browser I haven't used since the early versions of Firefox (then called Phoenix) was released, stick with FF3, or await the inevitable fork.

That said, I don't understand their sudden obsession with innovation. Mozilla have never been innovators, least of all when it comes to their UI. They've grabbed low-hanging fruit (e.g. extensions which you basically get for free via Mozilla's design, spell checking) or reimplemented the features of other browsers, mainly Opera's, and got the credit for them (e.g. tabs, download manager, search engine integration, AwesomeBar, Private Browsing).

</comment><comment><USER10> I see Ubiquity as one big UI experiment, which is nice. Windows NT and OS X aren't the last words on GUI.

That said, I'd like to see some data guiding these decisions. Does Firefox report back to the mothership about tab usage?

Their central argument for this UI, in the article at least, appears to be this: "Reichenstein argues that tabs were a good solution for an earlier age of the Internet, when users hardly ever had more than ten tabs open at any given time. Now, however, as browsers are slowly turning into operating systems, a new paradigm for organizing this information has become necessary."

Is this true? Does this jive with data about how people actually use browsers and tabs?

I have no idea, but I want my experiments to be backed by data, you know?

</comment><comment><USER11> FTA: "Reichenstein argues that tabs were a good solution for an earlier age of the Internet, when users hardly ever had more than ten tabs open at any given time. Now, however, as browsers are slowly turning into operating systems, a new paradigm for organizing this information has become necessary."

Actually, I prefer the task bar paradigm in my OS as well.

</comment><comment><USER12> No tabs.

((begin-rant) No tabs. As part of installing Firefox, I turn off tabs.

because...

\- most people that I've asked don't want tabs

\- most people open one browser window at a time, may be five, but that's pushing it.

\- the tab bar (and all those other bars) use up screen space, valuable screen space, really really valuable screen space on hardware you don't know about.

\- there are already a number of various alternatives to the tab bar:

       windows: the Windows task bar, the Mac OS X Dock/Expose, and whatever your Linux does which is usually similar to the Windows task bar

       screens: Linux workspaces, Mac OS X Spaces

But, none of these reasons will stop you.

because...

You like tabs. And, you installed Firefox yourself. And, you are a power user, uber-geek, hacker extraordinaire. You gravitate towards the most popular user interface of the year which may at the moment be tabs although they were kind of popular a long time ago in Lotus Notes but Lotus Notes is definitely not popular, anyways you may even decide to use this one type of user interface for everything because you are an egoless hacker god. So go ahead use tabs, just remember the rest of us, and remember that tab stands for Take A Break. (end-rant))

</comment><comment><USER7> One thing I miss using Firefox over IE is the ability to move everything in the menu, bookmark, address bar onto one line to maximize screen space. With Firefox you can choose Customize but only drag items to and from its toolbar. Unless I'm misinformed there doesn't seem to be anyway to have everything on one line.

I also miss the ability to double-click on for example "ycombinator" in new.ycombinator.com to highlight just it and then type in whatever I want and still have "new." and ".com/..." still there untouched. I believe the Windows version of FF does that as well as IE.

<comment><USER13> I've got everything on one line, like this:

File Edit View History Bookmarks Tools Help [Y|<http://news.ycombinator.com/> *|v] [G|v| Google ]

Just drag the address bar and search to the top.

<comment><USER7> Sorry, I failed to mention that I use Linux, hence the "I miss" part of my rant.

<comment><USER14> Oh, that's just the change that Firefox made for its linux build, due to the different interfaces for different operating systems (such as pasting with middle click, and autoscroll being off). If you go into about:config, you'll find a key called "browser.urlbar.doubleClickSelectsAll", and it should be true in linux but false in windows.

Also, you can still move stuff around on the toolbars, just like in windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The actual posts (<http://informationarchitects.jp/designing-firefox-32/> and [http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/firefoxnext-tabs-on-the- side...](http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/firefoxnext-tabs-on-the-side/)) are much more insightful than this blogspam. The prjor suggests that the iTunes- style design could be more of a "default landing page" than an actual tab replacement and a way of uniting the sidebars together. I could live with that.

</comment><comment><USER15> It is a sensational headline. They are just mockups and things could change drastically.

That said, it may be a good idea. I'm sold on tabs now and has never been a fan of sidebars, so I'm not very enthusiastic about it. Also what will happen to all those firefox extensions with sidebar functionality ?

</comment><comment><USER16> Looks like Opera to me.

</comment><comment><USER17> English text reads from Left-to-Right. So it would make sense to put tabs and not use the iTunes navigation bar -- it would be a waste of real estate.

</comment><comment><USER18> Oh god, not Oliver Reichenstein. That guy is an absolute know-nothing clown - the typical useless twittering "expert" with a pretentious self-chosen job title (he is an "Information Architect" but a non-programmer) and no clue about how the world actually works but willing to spout nonsense to anyone that listens - which they unfortunately sometimes do. He's like the Joel Spolsky of information architecture, _sans_ the actual technical skill.

I don't even want to type one more thing about this nong. I refer you to a (badly written, ranty) thing I wrote last year about one of his more ridiculous articles: [http://fukamachi.org/wp/2008/06/09/the-revolution-is- not-ove...](http://fukamachi.org/wp/2008/06/09/the-revolution-is-not-over-it- hasnt-even-begun/)

Don't pay any attention to him please.</comment>


Comparing Haskell Web Frameworks - <AUTHOR> http://edofic.com/posts/2014-02-23-haskell-web.html <comment><USER3> Yesod is surreal.

I experimented with it at one point and tried to change a form field from required to optional. Boom! The whole application wouldn't compile...

The properties of the form are reflected in the type system and changing required to optional changed the type. That means I had to track the effect through the application and everywhere that just assumed the data was there had to be updated to handle both cases.

It was so restrictive and confusing I gave up for the time being (until I learn Haskell better), but it was an eye-opening glimpse of the power of types.

<comment><USER4> That's actually one of the reasons I like it. Instead of allowing your application to live in a half-working state, you're required to fix such things.

While it might not be as instantly gratifying and being able to refresh and see the page is still working, in the long run it saves a lot of headache.

<comment><USER5> I would strongly prefer to work in an environment that detected the error and gave me the power to trace through the app to resolve it _while still letting the damn program run in the mostly-working state_. The mental cost to review hundreds of lines of code to work out the implications of every change before you can _see_ any results is a problem - it breaks the creative flow, it prevents experimentation.

<comment><USER6> _The mental cost to review hundreds of lines of code to work out the implications of every change before you can see any results is a problem - <USER2> breaks the creative flow, it prevents experimentation._

Type errors don't require such a mental cost. Once you learn how to actually read the error messages it becomes almost brain-dead simple. Compile, jump to the error message (hopefully your editor can help here), fix, recompile.

 _it breaks the creative flow, it prevents experimentation._

I disagree. What prevents experimentation is the fear of the unknown regression. Strong types give you the reassurance you need to boldly refactor without worrying that you'll miss something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I personally haven't tried the alternatives, but did research them when before I initially settled on Yesod.

Coming from a background of web dev'ing in Python and PHP, I've come to absolutely love Yesod. What I love most about it is that when it compiles, I'm 99% sure it works the way I intended it. This is a huuuuge plus, since I've been used to always having to test in runtime, which adds a lot of overhead and possibility for oversight.

This might just be me falling completely in love with Haskell and type inference (not just static typing, Java -.-..), but I'd wager that for any larger codebase/project, the gain from the time saved debugging, would make Haskell (and IMHO Yesod) the optimal choice.

<comment><USER7> Nitpick: Haskell IS statically typed.

<comment><USER8> I think he's saying he likes the type inference in addition to the static typing (no inference in Java).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some more annotated resources:

1\. [http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Web/Comparison_of_Happsta...](http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Web/Comparison_of_Happstack,_Snap_and_Yesod)

A relatively complete listing of resources comparing the three major framework/libraries. A lot of this information is outdated, sadly.

2\. [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5645168/comparing- haskell...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5645168/comparing-haskells- snap-and-yesod-web-frameworks)

A SO question about comparing Snap and Yesod where both maintainers chime in. The major point of talking here is the Yesod style "Template Haskell" configuration.

3\. [http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/l0fne/what_should_i...](http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/l0fne/what_should_i_use_for_web_programming/)

A similar question posed to /r/haskell with a great comment by yogostoth demonstrating Yesod.

4\. [http://softwaresimply.blogspot.com/2012/04/hopefully-fair- an...](http://softwaresimply.blogspot.com/2012/04/hopefully-fair-and-useful- comparison-of.html)

A relatively balanced view comparing the three feature by feature. Again a bit outdated, but well-informed.

5\. [http://softwaresimply.blogspot.com/2012/12/haskell-web- frame...](http://softwaresimply.blogspot.com/2012/12/haskell-web-framework- matrix_20.html)

And finally my favorite summary of the whole thing: the Web Framework matrix which considers each as a web programming embedded DSL and talks about their relative merits in a 2x2 table.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yesod looks very interesting.

If I jump ship from Scala + Play framework to Haskell, Yesod will be my first choice, batteries included and then some.

Anyone know if a Haskell IDE is in the works? Certainly would help to be able to mouse hover-view type, or mouse click-go to source declaration a la Eclipse/IntelliJ/Visual Studio, etc., particularly for beginners, imagine that's a pretty big time sink in learning the language...

<comment><USER11> There is eclipsefp. [http://eclipsefp.github.io/](http://eclipsefp.github.io/)

<comment><USER10> Thanks, am an Eclipse user so this might be just what the doctor ordered ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sorry for the hijack, but if anyone has any tips on Haskell debugging, please share. I loved Yesod, and get such satisfaction when it compiles because of the confidence it gives me that its working as intended. I love the type safe routes :) But I find debugging to be 99% what I do and I am terrible at it.

Also, any decent Haskell IDEs out yet? I'm using emacs purely for the syntax highlighting. I tried leksah but I gave up trying to configure it properly on my box.

<comment><USER13> You should study Haskell types. Debugging anything in Haskell without a basic understanding of the type system is _daunting_.

Additionally, Yesod relies heavily on quasiquoting and template haskell which can lead to some very cryptic code and errors. I generally prefer Snap for this reason and many others.

<comment><USER12> I find I spend most of my time on the engineering than in understanding types. (I recommend 'Types and Programming Languages by Pierce for general type stuff and Typeclassopedia for Haskell specific). Though I confess Yesod is the first real time I've seen quasiquoting and template haskell before. I haven't yet got a familiarity of what certain errors mean. 50% of the time when I get a compile error, the error message seems to be off on a complete tangent and is nowhere near where the actual error was.

Eg. I had some problem where a Data.Text was being passed into a function where Data.Text.Lazy was expected (Network.Mail.Mime.simpleMail for the record). The error message was deep in the internals of Data.Text.Lazy rather than in my code. I had to play a ridiculous pecking game of using undefine on each time I use Data.Text in turn in order to find which particular Data.Text was causing the error and then explicitly force one particular argument type to be a Data.Text.Lazy. I didn't feel like the compiler helped me at all.

Stepping through a program linearly doesn't seem possible (though not entirely sure why not) so I have no intermediate or step through capability. I also can't (normally) just stick in a println in the middle of a function or view the data structures at any particular point of the program. These are two tools I use all the time with Java and C#, but in Haskell I am rendered blind.

<comment><USER14> [http://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-18.104.22.168/docs/Debug-T...](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-188.8.131.52/docs/Debug- Trace.html) is what you want to use for emitting debug text or debug data dumps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've used Yesod for a small webapp. The type-safety is amazing.

For a simpler project, I've used a small subset of Snap. Well, the HTTP side was simpler: it was a game with the front-end completely in JS, and the server in Haskell; all Snap did was shunt JSON back and forth through a few routes for creating a new game, getting the updated game state, posting a move, etc.

Both are nice, depending on what you need, but for your average Django or RoR developer, Yesod gives the most bang for the buck in terms of learning a completely different paradigm.

</comment><comment><USER16> `Applicative`'s `<|>` should be `Alternative`'s `<|>`. Alternative is to Applicative what MonadPlus is to Monad. Actually MonadPlus can be defined with just Applicative laws and no Monad laws, that's why MonadPlus will be replaced by Alternative in GHC 7.8.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a nice introduction but doesn't really cover much. As a primarily web dev who's just learning some haskell I'd be happy to hear more about data models, controllers, view, etc, whatever there is.

<comment><USER18> That's why all the documentation to those projects is linked in this brief intro. Yesod has an entire book too [http://www.yesodweb.com/book](http://www.yesodweb.com/book) though I haven't read it, I assume it covers what you're looking for

<comment><USER17> Very nice thanks. I guess I was just being lazy :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a beginner, if you're looking for something a little more familiar try Scotty - [https://github.com/scotty-web/scotty](https://github.com/scotty- web/scotty)

It's just like using Sinatra or Express. It doesn't provide any url type- safety or magic, but that is also why it is easier to use.

</comment><comment><USER20> Ehm:

 _One more step Please complete the security check to access edofic.com_

Google Cache works though.</comment>


Engineer.ai raises $29.5M Series A for its AI+Humans software building platform - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/06/engineer-ai-raises-29-5m-series-a-for-its-aihumans-software-building-platform/ <comment><USER3> Anyone remember "The Grid"? I wrote a post about it a few years ago.[0] Essentially it was a scam where "AI will replace web developers!" and raised a few million in VC. Be very careful of buzz words and companies claiming to replace engineers with AI.

[0] [https://medium.com/@seibelj/the-grid-over-promise-under- deli...](https://medium.com/@seibelj/the-grid-over-promise-under-deliver-and- the-lies-told-by-ai-startups-40aa98415d8e)

<comment><USER4> Anyone actually used their builder product ? I signed up but apparently I have to 'invite' 5 or more 'friends' to get early access. Feels like a vapor-ware.

<comment><USER5> I used it (a year later than I was expecting) and it was so bad it was worthless. I brought in with low expectations and it didn't even meet them. It was slow, unresponsive and cranked out sites 10x worse than you could do in squarespace or wix if you invested 20 minutes or bought a template

<comment><USER6> Hey Matt, please email me s at engineer dot ai and I'd love to see how we messed this up. Clearly we didn't do a good enough job and I want to make sure we make it right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >Engineer.ai's "Builder" product breaks projects into small 'building blocks' of re-usable features that are customized by human engineers all over the world, making the process cheaper than the average process

There doesn't appear to be AI involved. A very good business model, but no AI.

What I expected the founder to say was "we've proven people want our product, now we can scale it even further by building the ai tool we always wanted to build," but I don't see that.

<comment><USER8> This is the part that got me: "... everyone can build an idea without learning to code"

I went to my first tech conference when I was 13. One of the hot items was a tool that made programmers unnecessary. It was targeted at cheapskate businesspeople. Decades later the company is long dead. But the suckers are still out there. They think that coding is the hard part, in the same way that they think the hard part about building a house is nailing things together. But in both cases, the part you're really paying for is expertise: good development firms and good homebuilders know how to turn hazy human desires into very specific implementations, while also shaping those desires to be reasonable and achievable.

<comment><USER9> Ideas are a dime a dozen. The hard part is always the asking the right questions and collecting the right data to filter out bad ideas and refine good ideas into practical products.

<comment><USER6> You've hit it on the nail - assembling code or building a programmatically controlled ESB is not rocket science - asking the right questions, and being able to get people to spec without knowing "how to code" or "understanding" tech is much harder. This is where have spent a large portion of our time in building out the "Studio" where you can choose templates, or problem sets and then we organize "features" and "workflow" logic behind it. The entire lifecycle is designed around the idea of an assembly process rather than a consulting - so its more prescriptive (we ask a lot of questions upfront) - its important to note that you still get connected to a human product manager, and there are designers from the capacity side (we work with over 100 dev shops around the world that give us designers and developers).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > "They charge you for every line of code, we bill you for what's unique."*

What this means to their clients is that if the client hires Engineer.ai to build something, their next client can get the same product for free. Good luck with that, Engineer.ai.

* [https://www.engineer.ai/how-it-works](https://www.engineer.ai/how-it-works)

<comment><USER11> I would be astonished if the next client gets it for free. The next client might get it for less than it cost the first client, but Engineer.ai has to pay back those investors.

<comment><USER12> False - venture capital is not debt.

They can do whatever they feel like doing.

<comment><USER13> You're confusing investment with constraint-free donation.

<comment><USER12> I assure you that I have never confused the two. :)

Venture investment at this level of sophistication typically involves the purchase of equity in a company with the general expectation that the value of the investment will increase over time, as valued by other actors in the market. However, at this stage there are little to no financial or legal negative repercussions for a company failing to meet this expectation as long as they've acted ethically. (I mean, outside of the value of equity going to zero and having to shut down the company.)

There are forms of investment, or vehicles of financing - venture debt and specific types of convertible notes - that have the expectation of repayment given a timeframe, but they're not typically what we're talking about when we talk about modern venture investment and straightforward equity transactions (like a Series A here).

In fact, YC explicitly _invented_ the SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) as a way to prevent "bad actor" investors from asking for returns from convertible notes ("repayment") and sinking companies early. The unwritten rule in venture investing in SV was literally, "don't ask for your money back," some Angels were screwing companies over by doing exactly that, so the SAFE codified protection against it into a low-friction investment vehicle.

tl;dr: Investment is not constraint-free, but there is certainly not an expectation of "repayment." It might seem a little semantic (versus, say, "generating returns") but it's important people understand the difference between equity transactions and debt - the constraints exist but they differ and, as such, incentivize behavior, growth and spend differently as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How is this AI? It looks like they're just building interfaces and then outsourcing implementations of them. I'm not saying it's not a smart strategy, but what makes it AI?

<comment><USER15> it's just to attract investors. see how the top comment is about this being the future of the universe or some other TED talk-level BS? it works.

they are just an outsorce provider. plain and simple.

<comment><USER6> small correction - we are not an outsourced providers - about 40-60% of the building process is machine operated - the rest is human - and those humans come from our network of devshops - but we don't outsource it to them - <USER2> pick the individual engineers we want to work on the problem basis our rating system. ([https://snag.gy/XgJfny.jpg](https://snag.gy/XgJfny.jpg)) will show you what experience our Capacity Partners see.

<comment><USER15> you described something that is an outsorce operator (from the end client POV)

not trying to pick on you (specially as I have nothing to gain doing so), but this is exactly how I deal with them. with the option to have the engineers hosted or remote. Add a beefy ORM with a client UI and they could also claim 50% of the work done by machines...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Replace "AI" with "software" (which for all intents and purposes it is).

> Software is the centre of every business today and the market has been > waiting for a solution that eliminates technical barriers to build software > so that everyone can engage in the new economy," said Manu Gupta, Partner at > Lakestar. "By creating a software powered assembly line combined with the > best global human talent, Engineer.ai's Builder bridges the gap between an > idea and a software product to enable it."

</comment><comment><USER17> I greatly enjoy AI startup press release bingo.

      - .ai domain name
      - No mention of how they use or define AI
      - "AI + Humans"
      - Banner picture from science fiction film (Prometheus)

(Disclaimer: I used to work at an AI startup and am generally interested in how companies market themselves)

<comment><USER18> "The most valuable businesses of the coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete."

"When a cheap laptop beats the smartest mathematicians at some tasks, but even a supercomputer with 16,000 CPUs can't beat a child at others, you can tell that humans and computers are not just more or less powerful than each other – they're categorically different."

"Palantir takes a hybrid approach: the computer would flag the most suspicious transactions on a well designed user interface, and human operators would make the final judgement as to their legitimacy."

\- Peter Thiel, "Zero to One", Chapter 12

Thiel is going long on these AI+human startups.

<comment><USER19> This quote, and the kind of thinking that engenders it (and is engendered by it), bother me.

Yeah, a cheap laptop can do arithmetic faster than 'the smartest mathematicians'. And the smartest mathematicians can do arithmetic faster than many children. Does that make mathematicians and children 'categorically different things' as well? In some trivial sense, sure, but it doesn't preclude _any_ kind of connection between the two, or require some deep new ontological commitments to model.

I'm all for the current practical approach of using 'AI technology' as a human supplemental. But I'd rather not frame it as (what I perceive) as some kind of mystic, dualistic argument. At least not until we know more about both.

I also don't really think Peter Thiel is worthy of being the keystone of any kind of _argumentum ab auctoritate_ in this particular field.

<comment><USER18> We can train children to become mathematicians.

<comment><USER19> Yes, that's precisely my point.

I've read the rest of what you have to say on this, and it is precisely the kind of mysticism that bothers me. There are no means of disproving it, it reduces to dogma in the end, but it's philosophically disingenuous to assert that because computers and people _feel_ like different things in some cases, they _must_ be, and then to argue backwards from there; it's question-begging in the original sense.

<comment><USER20> I mean it's clearly obvious that today, "AI" on computers != human. Unsupervised learning is making leaps & bounds. Even supervised learning isn't able to solve all problems better than humans even if it can do so on a staggeringly large amount of problems.

I don't think anyone is positing that that's true forever and all time. It seems reasonable to bet on AI at some point becoming sophisticated enough to outperform AI+human. I think it'll happen shortly after the point where AI can identify a new problem (or class of problems) by itself that it hasn't been taught about & then build new tools to help itself tackle that problem. After that it's the singularity because that process repeats ad infinitum. The only value-add of humans after that is if our creativity is somehow better/different than & can explore problems in ways the AI can't (& even that feels like a very short-lived advantage unless there's some crucial physical/mathematical impossibility standing in the way).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why would you write code using AI? If the AI is able to figure out requirements, why not just let it do it directly, simply speaking?

I always have a hard time to see the benefit of code-generation tools in general. If you can generate the code for a piece of functionality, you may as well abstract away primitives for that and make it a one-liner operation in the code you're writing. If that's not possible, it's probably a shortcoming of the language, framework or whatever system you're using (which is admittedly the case sometimes in the real world, because things evolve slowly).

<comment><USER22> Code generation can be useful if it produces provably correct code. Any abstraction you write yourself you still have to test carefully. For example it's a lot easier and safer to use something that generates statemachines from descriptions that writing your own statemachine interpreter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > AI+Humans

Sounds like just marketing bull __ __. It sounds like they have libraries and they are using them to spin up apps faster. That might have value if the libraries are good but that 's clearly not AI.

<comment><USER24> Or perhaps they use Humans first (like Mechanical Turks), and plan to replace them later by AI when the technology is there.

<comment><USER25> What if the mech Turks are like the MC simulations used for training the Alpha Go networks?

What if you stuff the Qt docs into a DL model and using the qt source code as training data? Could the network produce usable source code based on docs?

<comment><USER26> "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine [random code fragments], will the right [code] come out?"

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage#Passages_from_...](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage#Passages_from_the_Life_of_a_Philosopher_\(1864\))

<comment><USER25> Tl;dr.

But Babbage's machine was not différentiable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Getting a Theranos type vibe here where they claim some advanced technology but are just using normal stuff to get the work done. This sounds like a consulting firm essentially.

</comment><comment><USER28> I believe what this startup does is impressive:

Train a series of neural networks in order to provide buzzwords at a fast enough rate to trick actual people with more money that brain to give them money.

Getting almost 30 millions with just vaporware is always impressive. I won't be capable of doing anything similar myself.

</comment><comment><USER29> Their web site[0] claims they've already had 60MM in revenue. Curious why that impressive number pre-A round wasn't included in this article.

[0]: [https://www.engineer.ai/customers](https://www.engineer.ai/customers)

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm pretty confused by the "AI" part of this. It looks like they built a library of components and templates, and then have people snap the components together. Clever, useful to a point, but not AI.

</comment><comment><USER31> lots of red flags - the founders are supposed have exited nivio (the 'first cloud computing company') at $100m - but the company seems to have disappeared.

<comment><USER32> They claim to have raised $21m (from Videocon and AEC partners) in Feb 2012, but by the end of year the founder(s) claim to have stepped down with $100m payout (according to engineer.ai) while the company carried on and died in 2014.

I'm not an expert in this, but one of the founders is nephew to Indian billionaire Venugopal Dhoot (chairman of Videocon); according to Wikipedia and news sources he's wanted by the police since April 2018 for irregular loans between his companies accounting for hundreds of millions.

Videocon filed for bankrupcy procedures in June 2018. That connection is very sketchy.

<comment><USER33> Beyond Saurabh's family connection, Engineer.ai has no relationship financial or otherwise with Videocon or Venugopal Dhoot.

\- Disclaimer, I'm a VP E at Engineer.ai

<comment><USER32> I was referring to your founders previous company, not to Engineer.ai, didn't mean to imply there was a connection in the new company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> In my experience, there is a tradeoff between high re-usability and performance.

Building modules that can interact with any one of hundreds of other modules usually requires a fair amount of adapter code. This code comes with a performance penalty.

Maybe their market is ok with lesser performance. But I am highly skeptical that apps built this way will ever compete with apps built for a single, specific purpose.

I do hope they can advance the state of the art in some way though, because software development still feels way more tedious to me than it should be.

<comment><USER35> We need a new type of object that isn't just a clever pattern that can be reused but understands how to adapt to the program it's in, a smart object. I was hoping that's what this company was doing with AI but I guess not.

<comment><USER36> That's the best idea I have heard this year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > We created Engineer.ai so that everyone can build an idea without learning > to code

I'll believe that when I see it.

</comment><comment><USER38> Where is the AI in this?

</comment><comment><USER39> No offense but one of the founder's middle name is Dev

<comment><USER33> You know in all these years that I've worked at Engineer.ai, I never actually made that connection!

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm surprised no one has mentioned security yet. This seems like a great strategy for building software systems with plentiful security issues.

<comment><USER33> Security is definitely a topic we're super concerned about. There's an interesting tradeoff with using re-usable components - that is, if there's a security vulnerability in one component, then all apps using it are affected (for example the notable npm incident [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/12/npm_eslint/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/12/npm_eslint/))! The flip side is that one can easily detect and patch all applications affected by that vulnerability. I'd love to have a chat with anyone who has some thoughts on how to deal with this problem more effectively (email is in my description).

\- Disclaimer, I'm a VP E at Engineer.ai

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I am not an engineer. I have great respect for engineers. Engineers, however, generally have views of other professions being easily disrupted wholly by AI. But god forbid, someone suggests that engineers can be taken over by AI, and we all lose our shit. :thinking: lol.

<comment><USER42> Because when someone who doesn't understand ML and AI makes that assertion, they're just ignorantly speculating in a pointy-haired-boss sort of way. Whereas an engineer who actually works with AI will have much more realistic views on what can and can't be automated in the near futur

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Their video is so cheesy, I could only make it half way through.

</comment><comment><USER44> They literally have a "VP of blockchain" >.<

<comment><USER33> Blockchain is something we're currently exploring as a way to augment our business in order to deal with complex problems like identity management, royalty payouts, and escrowed payments. Additionally, today we can only work with developers in devshops; in the future we want to expand into the freelancer market. Dealing with freelancers at scale is a complicated proposition, as it's been super hit and miss with a well structured workflow to manage them. We're hoping we can solve that problem with a mix of automation and blockchain.

\- Disclaimer, I am the aforementioned VP Blockchain at Engineer.ai

<comment><USER44> Okay that's actually more reasonable, thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Oh yeah, the Grid 2.0 it sounds like.

What exactly is AI about this?

What did the BBC use?

<comment><USER33> Well there's a pretty big difference between us the Grid - namely that we don't believe that humans will ever get fully replaced in software development. Instead we're looking to simply automate the repetitive nature of the SDLC in order to bring down the cost and time taken for developing bespoke software. Also, we're super clear that are limitations on the kind of software that our platform can help us automate. We're specifically interested in applications that have a high degree of re-use, and we actually turn away customers who don't fit that model. For example, we'd never build your enterprise ERP system, though we'd be great at building your HR workflow app, or your order management system.

Our platform is actually made up of a collection of tools and microservices including everything from a user story management system (similar to Jira/PivotalTracker), to the assembler itself which stitches components together and creates scaffolding for applications (infrastructure and code). We use AI in a variety of ways throughout this ecosystem (my colleague @sachmans has touched upon a few of those ways above).

The BBC asked us to build their BBC Click Live app. They were launching Click in India for the first time ever, and wanted an application to allow for audience participation. Since their app was relatively simple and was composed of primarily reusable components, we were able to do it a fraction of the price and timeline that it would have taken if it was created entirely by a human team.

\- Disclaimer, I'm a VP E at Engineer.ai

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> The "building block" industry is already a decade+ old - its called AWS. Most development is already relegated to just doing the masonry between the blocks.

"Building blocks" without operational support is useless. How do you provide support for some closed "building block" contributed by someone you will never meet? Open source solves this by making "building blocks" available to everyone freely. Clouds solve this by selling you a service and you don't worry about the code.

</comment><comment><USER18> These sorts of companies are the way of the future if humans are indeed partial halting oracles:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381723](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381723)

Formal proof:

[https://www.am-nat.org/site/law-of-information-non-growth/](https://www.am- nat.org/site/law-of-information-non-growth/)

Discussion of proof:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18377525](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18377525)

<comment><USER47> You mean bullshit companies?

<comment><USER18> I mean human+AI companies.

"When a cheap laptop beats the smartest mathematicians at some tasks, but even a supercomputer with 16,000 CPUs can't beat a child at others, you can tell that humans and computers are not just more or less powerful than each other – they're categorically different."

\- Peter Thiel, "Zero to One", Chapter 12

Further discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381723](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381723)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Wow, I see a lot of knee-jerk reactions here and I think most of these miss the point - even if AI helps and writes some of the code, it will only fill out some gaps at certain levels.

Think about this: we engineers are writers of specs, the same way as product owners are writers of specs, except they do it at a much higher level.

The high level spec (lets say the top 5%) gets passed down and we fill out the ~middle 50%. What's the rest at the bottom? It's the shoulders of giants we stand on.

So the same way as we welcome the increasing abstraction levels, from machine code to C, from C to TypeScript and GraphQL, why don't we welcome this development too?

It's not probable that we will get automated away anytime soon, and if we are, well that means AI has truly advanced, certainly something to celebrate, even if it comes at a financial loss for us.

Perhaps, once we won't get paid anymore to improve ad networks, we will have the time to do something that actually improves the human condition...

Edit: can the downvoter please elaborate?

<comment><USER46> I have no doubt that better app builders will emerge in the future, but I expect them from cloud providers, not gig agencies. Look at something like Aurora from AWS - what are you paying for? You're paying partially for the functionality, but mostly for the operational support (someone else keeps the SLA intact).

My guess is they are being built with a cloud acquisition in mind.

<comment><USER48> Fair enough, I don't doubt they are trying to bullshit their way to riches, my comment was in reply to people who say it can't be done because of performance issues and such.</comment></comment></comment>


When to refactor code - <AUTHOR> http://mikemainguy.blogspot.com/2013/05/when-to-refactor-code.html <comment><USER2> Always. The development cycle should be Test, Code, Refactor, as one atomic block of work. Sarah Mei explains why this is vitally important to creating good code in her talk "Work, Play & Code", I highly recommend checking it out.

<http://confreaks.com/videos/2333-mwrc2013-work-play-code>

Also, if you don't have a test suite to prove your refactoring didn't change functionality, IMO you aren't refactoring, you are simply rewriting. This is the point many people miss about TDD. TDD is first and foremost about letting you refactor your code; doing TDD right gives you the best environment for writing great code. On the other hand, doing TDD wrong makes it more likely your entire code base will be very difficult to maintain.

<comment><USER3> One advantage of TDD is that encourages your code to be more easily testable. Which tends to encourage you to develop properly modular code. Code that can only be tested indirectly through integration testing (spinning up huge unwieldy hunks of context that are required for the individual sub-component to work properly) is not very modular.

Modular code tends to have fewer dependencies and tends to produce fewer side effects. All of these things make for code which is generally easier to maintain and modify, easier to understand, easier to debug, and easier to reuse. All of which tend to lead to higher code quality naturally.

A high level of unit test coverage also gives you other benefits, of course, but I thought I'd highlight these side benefits because they are perhaps the most important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 100 lines, hah....

Anyway, I don't think you need a big, complicated checklist like this. Writing code by checklist is not going to solve your problems. The more important questions are these:

\- Do you find yourself spending more time than you think you should making changes and additions (or bug fixes) to the same sections of code?

\- Do you often run into difficulty figuring out or remembering what a given section of code does?

If either of those things are true then refactoring might be a good idea. Use extract method until it hurts. Use extract method on complicated logic tests as well. Figure out where the control flow is wonky and switch to using flow based on method calls and returns to simplify things. Be ruthless. Don't be lulled into the "meaty method" trap, don't be afraid of short methods, even if they're only one line. Make your code so that it looks almost _too_ simple, as though even a novice could look at it and tell you what it does. Push until you get to a state where making changes seems almost like cheating because it's so easy. That's when you know you're in the sweet spot. Programming is about making things easier, even future programming, not about proving how incredibly skilled you are at maintaining complex code.

<comment> loup-vaillant Aand, while where at it, minimize the side effects. Avoid methods that modify objects, replace them by equivalent methods that create new objects. Likewise, expunge init() methods. Their code belong to constructors, factories, or curried functions. Basically, avoid the assignment statement: <http://loup- vaillant.fr/tutorials/avoid-assignment>

This is especially crucial when you break up your code in a myriad of small functions/methods: the whole point of refactoring was to make them readable, which means small _and_ self contained —you don't want to keep a gazillion dependencies in mind while reading and testing a given method. Avoiding side effects is a big help there, because it will make your interfaces more explicit, and your dependencies more visible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a 1134 line function with zero tests defined for it sitting open in the background which most likely scores something like 32 out of 11 on that list. I'm afraid of touching that monster...

<comment><USER5> If you touch it, it will never work again. Even if you revert all your changes.

<comment><USER6> I've had this happen often enough that when refactoring something tricky I like to copy the function and rework it. Then I'll change references from the old method to the new one one at a time and test. One of my favorite methods returned a Map<Long, Map<Long, Map<Long, Map<Long, Long>>>> with no comment explaining what any of those Long values were...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7>
        > "this 10 item checklist."
        > 11 items in the checklist

Heh, it's not often you see an off-by-one error in prose!

<comment><USER8> I guess it has to do this item 2: "Did you completely understand what cyclomatic complexity was without following that link?", I don't really see how this fits into the rest of the checklist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _You probably just want to rename variables because you don't like the previous developer's naming convention_

If the last developer named his or her variables along the lines of 'a', 'b', 'c', you're damn right I have an issue with their naming convention and I'm going to fix it.

</comment><comment><USER10> > Did you completely understand what cyclomatic complexity was without > following that link?

Seems confusing that answering "No" to this (meaning you did NOT know what cyclomatic complexity was) would be a net positive for refactoring?

<comment> loup-vaillant Probably has something to do with this: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5718455>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This seems like a checklist for when to factor, not when to refactor; he appears to be describing massive mutant code that has never actually been split into manageable chunks.

<comment> loup-vaillant Such Chtuloid horrors do exist. I have seen some. (I could tell more, but I care for the sanity of my readers.)</comment></comment>


Do You Earn Less Than a Silicon Valley Intern? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-27/do-you-earn-less-than-a-silicon-valley-intern <comment><USER2> Honestly, I feel a bit baffled by these figures. In Germany you'd need years of experience (decades? not sure) and perhaps a phd for a similar wage. Of course you can't completely compare the costs of living, but I suspect even at big firms you are more likely to be well below 1000 € as an intern, if paid at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> _sigh_ yes.

<comment><USER4> It is clear now I would be earning more if I worked as an assistant for one of those interns...and I am a project manager

<comment><USER3> I hear you! I'm a developer with 20 years experience including managing teams & production environments, and some of those outside estimates _double_ my salary.</comment></comment></comment>


Rider, the new cross-platform .NET IDE from Jetbrains - <AUTHOR> https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/ <comment><USER2> I just installed it and my .Net Core 2.0 Application worked instantly, so far I am very pleased with the performance.

One big plus I see in Rider is the same Git Integration they use in PHPStorm. In Vistual Studio Git was always a bit of a second class citizen because of TFS

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm guessing the reason you use this over VS is that it has ReSharper baked in?</comment>


Stuff Goes Bad: Erlang in Anger (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.erlang-in-anger.com/ <comment><USER2> Still a recommended book if you need to handle Erlang systems. Either as a developer or as an operator.

* Still good if you work with Elixir

* Good if you have, say, RabbitMQ or Riak in your stack

* Fred knows his stuff.

<comment><USER3> Most great Erlang resources, like this and Designing for Scalability, are very much recommended for Elixir programmers. It'd be a shame for them to disregard some of the best OTP resources just because they're in Erlang.

<comment><USER4> I'm going to go against the stream an say -1 on "Designing for Scalability". Not that it isn't a good book, but the title doesn't really reflect the contents. It's more of a beginners book on Erlang/OTP than of scalability.

<comment><USER5> Do you have a recommendation for a more advanced book on that particular topic?

I'd also love to see something from the other angle: taking a program that's already an instantiation of a complex, distributed architecture, written in e.g. C, and then rewriting it in idiomatic Erlang (or Elixir—especially with GenStage/Flow stuff) to reduce its code size while retaining the same distributed-system properties as its ancestor system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Related: [http://spawnedshelter.com/](http://spawnedshelter.com/)

<comment><USER7> That is an awesome site. Does anyone know if there's a similar resource for JavaScript that gives high and low level information about the language?

<comment><USER8> There's a "thanks" section at the bottom that linked to [http://superherojs.com/](http://superherojs.com/) which seems to be the same thing for JS : )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8330501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8330501) (3 years ago, 54 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8979267](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8979267) (3 years ago, 21 comments, dupe)

</comment><comment><USER10> Erlang (even though I only use it via RabbitMQ) forever changed how I think of reliable systems.

Hardware has always been a story of reliably operating unreliable parts. It was eye-opening to see the same concepts applied to software.

Fail fast, fail early!

(Also, Erlang did a _really_ good job of lightweight threading, and how that interlaces with things like a cluster of servers.)

<comment><USER11> > Hardware has always been a story of reliably operating unreliable parts. It > was eye-opening to see the same concepts applied to software.

Walter Bright has been advocating this for some time:

[http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/safe- systems-...](http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/safe-systems-from- unreliable-parts/228701716)

<comment><USER12> [http://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf](http://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf)

See 2.10 Related work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/do-use-something-in- an...](http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/do-use-something-in-anger)

(I had never heard this idiom before)

<comment><USER14> I've heard it mostly in military contexts, like "That ship has never fired her guns in anger", but otherwise not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't use Erlang or Elixir but I love the idea of this book. Are there any similar troubleshooting guides for other languages?

<comment><USER16> There is a book like this for Ruby (on Rails?) which I believe is the inspiration for this Erlang book. I just can't seem to find it at the moment.

It was about improving old/legacy/poorly-built code bases that are in a bad shape and need to be 'rescued'.

<comment><USER17> I have not read any Rails book ever and they could therefore not be the inspiration for this one :)

The true rationale behind the book was to give a better tool to train new coworkers that could help us operate the Erlang routing and logging stacks back when I was still at Heroku, and at the same time to provide similarly useful resources to other people maintaining similar software in the broader community.

Most of the operational aspects of Erlang were a bit of black magic, knowing where to dig through experience, having read the right kind of docs, and everyone would carry little gists of incantations and anonymous functions to run on production servers to help figure out what may be going oddly on there by correctly prodding at the VM.

I wrote the 'recon' library along with Erlang in Anger so that instead of just being black magic & oral tradition, people would have a better set of well- encoded practices to help approach the debugging and optimization of running systems.

<comment><USER16> Fair enough, the landing page and description just seemed similar to the one I remember for Ruby, that's all. Although that was more about rescuing a project rather than overcoming common barriers in a programming language.

Sounds like a great basis for an advanced programming book either way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Erlanger</comment>


Getting USB car audio working in a 2013 Honda Civic EX - <AUTHOR> https://purpleidea.com/blog/2020/08/11/usb-car-audio-in-a-civic/ <comment><USER2> > Why didn't I buy an electric car?

> Very simple!

On top of those, electric cars are just Prius without engines, nothing superior than that from automotive engineering perspective. So if you want to be eco and future don't make a compromise and go buy a Prius.

Toyota design teams being objectively suited in drawing toilet seats than cars is a separate issue.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think this should work with many other models of cars too! I hope you found it helpful and interesting.</comment>