The underappreciated role of muscle in health and disease [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/84/3/475.full.pdf <comment><USER2> _However, over the past few years it has become evident that changes in the metabolic function of muscle itself plays a more direct role in the genesis of insulin resistance than previously appreciated._

This makes logical sense. Given that people with CF do not process fats correctly, tend to be severely underweight yet are highly prone to developing CF Related Diabetes, fat just about can't be the right explanation as to cause.

On the other hand:

 _The central thesis of the glucose–fatty acid cycle is that elevated plasma FFA concentrations limit glucose uptake in muscle by inhibiting the oxidation of glucose (33). Thus, according to this theory, the genesis of insulin resistance lay entirely with the increased availability of FFAs, and the muscle responded normally to that signal to limit glucose uptake and oxidation._

Can anyone tell me: If you are chronically insufficiently oxygenated for some reason (like lack of lung function), would that contribute to this process? I mean, it sounds to me like insufficient oxygenation of the system would play a role here.

Any takers?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a good example of why the focus on developing magic pills that aim to curb obesity is so silly[1].

Body composition and strength are just as important, if not more important, than weight, especially as one ages. The reason this is ignored is that there's only so much you can do to significantly improve your body composition and strength without exercise and healthy eating.

> Nonetheless, the maintenance of adequate muscle mass, strength, and > metabolic function has rarely, if ever, been targeted as a relevant endpoint > of recommendations for dietary intake.

It's kind of sad that the "official" recommendations basically ignore what even the most inexperienced personal trainer could tell you.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8736567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8736567)

<comment><USER4> A magic pill that could curb obesity would deliver hundreds of billions of dollars worth of improved health outcomes in the US, regardless of whether getting everyone to put on more muscle would be preferable. (And that's not even accounting for the fact that people who hate exercise lose utility even if you can convince them to do it.)

<comment><USER3> You seem to be assuming that the health conditions and costs commonly associated with obesity are all primarily _caused_ by obesity. I'd suggest you consider the possibility that obesity is just as likely to be a symptom of poor health as it is to be the cause of it. On this point, there are plenty of people who aren't obese who have cardiovascular disease, diabetes, etc.

There's a lot we don't know about the human body, but based on what we do know, it's asinine to believe that folks can eat horribly and live sedentary lifestyles without serious consequence. That, however, is what magic pill research effectively promises.

<comment><USER4> > I'd suggest you consider the possibility that obesity is just as likely to > be a symptom of poor health as it is to be the cause of it.

I gladly acknowledge that possibility, but you should acknowledge the likelihood that the medical community is roughly correct in its belief that obesity does in fact cause a huge number of health related problems _regardless_ of whether this is "primary". My claim above does not rest on obesity being the dominant factor.

> it's asinine to believe that folks can eat horribly and live sedentary > lifestyles without serious consequence.

Misunderstanding someone's claim and then suggesting that their beliefs are asinine is not a good way to get people to engage productively with you.

<comment><USER3> First, please don't pretend that the "medical community" is a homogenous body that produces broad consensus on complex matters. There is and always has been a significant amount of debate amongst medical professionals on a variety of topics.

The topic of cholesterol provides many examples of this. For years, it was widely believed that raising the levels of HDL cholesterol would reduce the risk of heart disease. On that belief alone, many doctors regularly prescribed niacin to patients. Yet a few years ago, a study basically revealed that while niacin did raise HDL levels, it didn't reduce heart disease risk[1]. What's worse, more recent studies have revealed that niacin may have exposed patients to unacceptable risk[2].

To be clear: if you were ever diagnosed as having low HDL cholesterol, there's a good chance that your doctor would have recommended that you consider a treatment that not only would have been ineffective but exposed you to risk. All based on a widely-promoted hypothesis we now have ample evidence is flawed.

On the topic of obesity, there is growing evidence that obesity is not the cause of a significant number of the most expensive health problems thought of as being caused by or strongly associated with obesity. Take Type 2 diabetes. Recent studies[3] show that it's a very complex condition, and genetics likely plays a more significant role than thought. Somewhat disturbingly, a longitudinal study published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine found that "An intensive lifestyle intervention focusing on weight loss did not reduce the rate of cardiovascular events in overweight or obese adults with type 2 diabetes." That calls into question the notion that even weight loss is a panacea for Type 2 diabetes.

You may not like my use of the word asinine, but if you're going to suggest that a magic pill for obesity "would deliver hundreds of billions of dollars worth of improved health outcomes in the US," you should at least have some evidence to back it up. To do that, however, you have the very high barrier of establishing that a) obesity in meaningful part causes the costly conditions promoted as being obesity-related and b) reduction of obesity would provide a significant enough benefit to eliminate a meaningful portion of the costs associated with these conditions. More and more research shows this is not the case.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/health/policy/27heart.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/health/policy/27heart.html)

[2] [http://www.cbsnews.com/news/taking-niacin-for-the-heart- may-...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/taking-niacin-for-the-heart-may-pose- serious-health-risks/)

[3] [http://consumer.healthday.com/diabetes- information-10/misc-d...](http://consumer.healthday.com/diabetes- information-10/misc-diabetes-news-181/obesity-isn-t-sole-cause-of- type-2-diabetes-691898.html)

[4] [http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1212914](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1212914)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting, I never realized muscle played a role in helping recover from critical injuries such as head trauma.

</comment><comment><USER6> There are several interesting aspects of this article, but it could have used a little more editing. As I read through, I can hear my 7th grade English teacher saying, "structure and grammar." This lack of attention to detail makes me wonder what else might have been overlooked in the study.

</comment><comment><USER7> So would this imply men should be healthier than women? Body builders healthier than other types of athletes?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don´t think the article is proposing "the more, the better". Rather, it is emphasizing that muscle mass is much more that pure force production or aesthetics in that it plays a key role in maintaining a healthy metabolism.

Replying to your question: if you compare two identical women differing only in their percentage of muscle mass, yes, one is healthier than the other.

As for the body builders; this is a tricky question, but I don´t think they are healthier than the general population...muscle mass being completely irrelevant.

<comment><USER8> _if you compare two identical women differing only in their percentage of muscle mass, yes, one is healthier than the other._

Depends what you mean by "healthy." Plenty of overweight people live long lives.

I don't think anyone would disagree that muscles are desirable and that exercise helps, or that being overweight is a bad thing. But there's quite a lot of disagreement about the severity of the problem. If you look around, there are many old and overweight people. They got to that point without having the kind of muscle mass you're talking about.

A more persuasive approach is probably to focus on the benefits, rather than the implied downside of not having "health." For example, I had no idea that exercise would have such a profound effect on my brain. My mind is sharper when I exercise compared to when I don't. At least, it was true for me. Could be placebo effect, but, then again, the placebo effect is measurable, so sometimes it helps.

<comment><USER9> He meant statistically, he didn't mean that a pairwise comparison of all females would provide no counterexamples.

<comment><USER8> I'm talking about the definition of "health." "Health" isn't a precise term.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why your Uber app is lying to you about available cars - <AUTHOR> http://bgr.com/2015/07/28/uber-app-lying-cars-visual-effect/ <comment><USER2> This article is outdated and it's simply incorrect. There are no phantom cars, there were caching issues previously but they should have been resolved.

The support representative's response is wrong and appears to have been contrived. When you're dealing with support volume on the scale of Uber, you're bound to get some tickets that are answered incorrectly.

Other than having access to some internal tools for account lookups, support staff at Uber (and many other companies) do not know anything more than what is publicly available. It's why an Apple live chat saying "yes, iPhone 7 will have a larger screen" means nothing.

</comment><comment><USER3> When I open the app it has some cars on the screen and tells me the time estimate for someone to get to my location. As long as the time estimate is correct, do I care where on the screen the cars are?

</comment><comment><USER4> This is blogspam from last summer. The original article was posted here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9958852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9958852).</comment>


Introducing Scrapy Cloud 2.0 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.scrapinghub.com/2016/05/04/introducing-scrapy-cloud-2-0/ <comment><USER2> Hey, Valdir from Scrapinghub here! Feel free to ask any questions you might have about the platform.</comment>


Mapmaker, Artist, or Programmer? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/08/mapmaker-artist-or-programmer/3132/

<comment><AUTHOR> Btw, the flickr in question: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/>

</comment><comment><USER2> Hi, I finaly registered to hacker news only to congratulate you and ask how did you make these? I love Data and love to see new ways of displaying it, this is an awesome idea, I'd like to try and make things like these for a hobbie, care to show me some pointers?

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd love to see some of the code behind these maps. Are they rendered with mapnik? How practical would it be to make some of them live and interactive? Especially now we have vector graphics in the browser.

<comment><USER4> I really should clean up the source code and release most of it. The toolchain for most of them is kind of ridiculous: giant flat text files feeding through Unix pipelines and Perl scripts into PostScript files and Ghostscript. A lot of them would be better if they were interactive in the browser but I need to do the work to make it happen.

<comment><USER3> Wow, that sounds quite scary. I'd love it if you did release the source though, it'd be a great project for me to build an interactive version. (Whether or not it would get further than any of my other side projects is another matter :) Anyway, my email is in my profile and I'd be very interested if you did release something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are these evergreen? ie, can the data-sets be updated, etc. FWIW, I think they are conceptually intersting.

My immediate second thought was, what more could be done? [in a good way]

<comment><USER4> I've tended to make them statically, but I really ought to go back and update some of them with more data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> programmer == artist

</comment><comment><USER7> It's really beautiful. But it's practically useless.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, and sorry the maps aren't useful to you. They're artifacts of the process of trying to understand the world, and maybe someday I'll make it all the way there.

<comment><USER8> The maps are _not_ useless. In fact, they are tremendously valuable. If that is not observable, the fault lies in the observer.

I believe LIVE versions of the maps are a tremendous idea .. would you consider building a site replete with such an effort? Live versions of many (if not all) of your maps would make a tremendous contribution to the way our mobs conceive themselves.

(Perhaps this is something for ifft&co..)

<comment><USER4> I would love to make live versions of these, but the rate of data coming in is slow enough that they don't work very well in real time—even New York only has one geotagged tweet every 4 seconds, so using it would mostly be sitting and waiting for something to happen. A retrospective of the past day would probably be practical and might be useful, though.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Crisis in Higher Education - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/featured-story/429376/the-crisis-in-higher-education/?a=f <comment><USER2> It's amusing to see experts say it may work for STEM courses but won't work for liberal arts classes.

I'm finding Coursera's Modern American Poetry class to be extremely engaging, and it's entirely due to the quality of the instructor and his team. He's got endless enthusiasm for his subject, the method in which the class is delivered, and in teaching as many people as possible to love poetry.

It's a shining example of what's possible with the right teacher.

The lesser professors out there had better up their game, whatever their subject. The competition is here, and its fierce.</comment>


Rasterization in One Weekend - <AUTHOR> https://tayfunkayhan.wordpress.com/2018/11/24/rasterization-in-one-weekend/ <comment><USER2> An alternative approach that is probably faster and simpler (no matrices or dot products), although slightly "less correct": [http://www.gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from- scratc...](http://www.gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from- scratch/filled-triangles.html)

<comment><USER3> That's cool! Although I'll take linear code with bunch of matrix-vector products over bunch of branches any day :-)

As you may know, where this algorithm of 2D homogeneous rasterization really shines is in how it simplifies the triangle setup by deferring the perspective-divide until later rasterizer stagee. It's tricky for cases where (w <= 0.0f) so explicit clipping/generating new vertices and handling all the additional vertex attributes is not needed. In reality, there is no mat3::inverse() or even per-vertex attribute bary calculation so it fits rather easily and elegantly to the rest of tri. setup. The original paper I link there explains greatly how for HW the gains can be even bigger.

<comment><USER2> Super interesting, thanks :) My rasteriser is admittedly optimised for requiring the most basic math possible, as it's mostly an educational resource.

<comment><USER3> No problem! You've got some great resources there too! :) I had problems running some demos though.

<comment><USER2> Hmm, mind telling me which ones, which browser, etc? My contact info is in my profile if you rather do this privately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's been 5+ years since I worked in it, but the well-tuned version of openswr.com was competitive with discrete HW, ca., 2012. This isn't "rasterization in a day"; it's more like "a team of professionals over 18 months" who had done two prior rasterizers on Larrrabee, including working directly with Mike Abrash & co.

<comment><USER3> That's impressive. In some synthetic scenes or actual applications?

I think careful and elaborate design and scalability can get you a long way, but the thing is, without relaxing some API rules (e.g. rasterization order) which makes a rasterizer robust, you're gonna have difficulty keeping up with HW eventually.

<comment><USER4> We started with Quake III, Minecraft, etc. and were able to maintain "game play FPS" (800+), but nothing like a high end discrete card. Where SWR really shined was on high end HPC visualization software, where discrete cards (if they didn't crash/hang) could only maintain 1-2 FPS. SWR could get 12-17 FPS. Such applications are strongly bandwidth limited.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It continues to frustrate me that no one seems to have a better name for this process than "rasterization".

It frustrates me because that word very clearly _seems_ to say "turning non- raster data into rasters". This process does this, but so does ray-tracing. For that matter, various algorithms for turning 2d vector data into 2d raster data would also seem to be covered by "rasterization", like filling triangles with scanlines, or the like.

Just another lost battle, I suppose.</comment>


A brutal week for credit markets - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/09/BUI3VFD7R.DTL <comment><USER3> "Instead of focusing on cutting interest rates and pumping liquidity into the banking system, he says, the Fed should be forcing banks to disclose and realize losses and raise capital."

This is so true - the Japanese mortgage downfall of the 1990's was only made worse by the fact that the banks did not purge their loses and move on (with the government only making matters worse by helping them hide it), effectively prolonging their recession.

Right now the Fed is pumping so much money into the economy, and a lot of it is, ironically, going into commodities due to fears of inflation (oil, metals, etc) driving up prices even more - shooting ourselves in the foot, effectively.

I'm really curious about the impact on software/technology though still - <USER2> anyone see this seeping into their various sectors of technology they work/have companies in? There was a WSJ article talking about how programmers were doing an effective "flight to quality" in terms of jobs (moving to big companies in preparation of a recession). Any more observations?</comment>


Single-shot link discovery for terahertz wireless networks - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15761-4 <comment><USER2> That is pretty clever. I agree with the authors that it will be really challenging to build one to many tranceivers in the THz spectrum, a thousand little masers all shooting out isn't exactly comforting for the folks with a fear of electromagnetic radiation.</comment>


Enough women in Coders at Work? - <AUTHOR> http://gigamonkeys.com/blog/2009/09/22/women-coders.html <comment><USER3> I have an honest question, I hope this doesn't get taken the wrong way. Is it possible that women just aren't as interested in writing software as men are? I don't think that there's some kind of artificial barrier preventing them from getting in to it; I think if anything, most male programmers would _love_ having some women around.

I mean, there are women doctors, lawyers, politicians, executives, accountants, etc etc etc; don't you think it's possible that there aren't many women in this industry just because they're not all that interested in it?

I personally think it's a little intellectually dishonest to insist that both genders have the exact same preferences, wants and needs. We understand the differences in gender in every species in the animal kingdom (including the times when there aren't differences), but we refuse to apply a modicum of critical thought to ourselves.

<comment><USER4> I recommend this video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5ObAgkqicQ> to everyone here. Note she was interested in programming from a young age, but nobody encouraged her to be an engineer.

<comment><USER5> No one encouraged me to be an engineer either (doctor? yes. lawyer? yes. engineer? no.). I'd wager that many people here were actively discouraged in some way from going down the path of technology or entrepreneurship.

Most nontechnical parents who see their son _or_ daughter spending countless hours on a computer just think that he or she is wasting his or her time.

(That last sentence would be a good place for those mythical gender-neutral English pronouns.)

<comment><USER6> Your parents aren't the only ones responsible for encouraging you. I'm sure your interest in technology originally came from some inner drive. But a hacker can only get so far without a community of peers, whether it be your colleagues in college or others at meetup groups or friends on IRC or others on Hacker News. These communities become the crux of not only your technical development, but also your motivation. I've seen more than a few girls in college give up on computer science because it was harder for them to make friends in class or join a group to do problem sets with. There is definitely SOME problem here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My kid has been in day-care for four years now and has been cared for by at least 25 different teachers. Not one of them was male. How can we correct this egregious disparity?

<comment><USER8> That disparity is pretty egregious. Modeling for children that men can also give care is actually pretty important.

<comment><USER9> I agree, the lack of male teachers is a far more serious problem than the lack of female coders. Too many boys nowadays grow up without fathers. If they don't have any male teachers either, they'll hit puberty before they meet anyone whose behaviour is worth emulating.

<comment><USER10> How about if they just emulate the female role models in their life?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _My experience is that people, starting from when we are kids, do notice gender and that the path of least resistance is to do what other people of your gender are doing. So if you're a girl interested in programming and you see very few other girls and women programming, that's going to be a obstacle for you to overcome._

For what it's worth, I think it is important for children of either gender to see role models of either gender - i.e. I think it is good for girls _and_ boys to have female geek role models, male primary school teachers and so on. I think it promotes a certain amount of gender blindness, which is a good thing.

That said, the author beating themselves up about this is unnecessary - <USER2> don't think tweens/early teens (when such exposure seems to count the most) are the main audience of his book.

If you ask me, one real problem is the fact that many female geeks chose gender-neutral or male pseudonyms online. I understand why they do it, but this reduces the already-small visibility of the gender further.

<comment><USER12> There are hardly any pseudonyms in this thread that _aren't_ gender-neutral. frossie? boggles? roundsquare? dandelany?

<comment><USER11> Well that's my point - since most people here are male, failing any other clue, a person could assume everybody is male and not be proven wrong.

For what it's worth, of the examples you listed: I am not posting under a pseudonym, it's my real name (trivially googlable) and not at all gender- neutral in my culture - and personally I don't think Dan Delany is _that_ gender neutral :-)

<comment><USER13> No one knows if your name represents you though - I could be "redbloodedmale17" and still be a 40 year old woman. I thought dandelany was from "dandelion", possibly feminine, even if it is Dan Delaney then Dan could be for Danielle (f), Daniel (m), Danika (f), Dante (m), ... on the internetz know one knows your a dog.

Woof!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You can't ask "Do I have enough of X?" without first defining "enough".

So... what's "enough" women in programming? Anyone want to cross that minefield?

If you're not, then you should be aware that you've started something you can't finish, asked a question you've written into the preconditions that you can't answer. That's not necessarily useless, but it's less useful that asking questions you at least _might_ be able to answer

I don't have an answer. But I wanted to ask the right question.

As with all definition questions, there are multiple valid definitions of "enough". I am seriously interested if you think you have one.

I think this is actually a very important question to ask, despite the third- rail nature of it. If we have a "goal" of "more" women, how will we know when we've succeeded? If we can't succeed, it isn't much of a goal, and if we can't tell if we succeeded, then how can we measure progress (objectively or subjectively)?

<comment><USER15> Is the question really about how many women programmers there are compared to men? I was hoping it was more of a "what can we do to make people in general feel like programming is less intimidating/closed off to them, and not just a niche subject?". Not just to women or to young girls, but to everyone. I suspect the number of women interested in programming would rise if we address that, and that would also attract the men that felt like programming was interesting but just not possible for them for whatever reason. Hell, it'd address the gender imbalance _and_ issues with (or the complete lack of) good CS education starting from kids at a young age to college and beyond at the same time.

A lot of times I feel like a statistical fluke being a female coder, but I go to a gym with lots of classes for kids, and I have their parents and the kids themselves (a fairly even mix of girls and boys) ask me how to get started programming and learning more about computers. They don't have the resources to learn this in their schools. Their parents don't know anything. They don't know where to find anyone that can be a mentor besides me. It doesn't always have to do with gender. That imbalance might just be a side effect of a bigger problem.

<comment><USER14> "Is the question really about how many women programmers there are compared to men?"

I don't know. Is it? My post just riffed on "enough", and briefly mentioned "more". There's no hint of a measure. That was by design.

If it isn't, what _is_ the goal here?

(I'm not trying to be a jerk, or really addressing you specifically. I'm trying to Socrates the conversation up a bit, except unlike Socrates I don't really know where I'm going. This conversation just goes in circles with too many people saying "What we have is bad!", but that's not, well, to borrow a word from another culture, _actionable_.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The trend is not a reflection on Coders at Work but on the industry as a whole. No need for apologies.

<comment><USER17> Saying "That's the way it is, no need to worry about it" is a great way to maintain the status quo and not promote any change.

<comment><USER18> and saying "there aren't enough [insert gender/race/other meaningless criterion] in here, so let's add some" is a great way to be full of shit.

<comment><USER19> What you've done here is to create a straw man by asserting that gender and race are always meaningless criteria. Adding more developers who don't happen to be white and male to the workforce and to books like these helps to _create_ more developers who don't happen to be white and male to the workforce, which aside from being good for those particular people can only lead to a wider variety of ideas in the memepool, which can only be good for those of us who care about ideas. That would be those of us reading this site, unless I've missed something.

<comment><USER20> _can only lead to a wider variety of ideas in the memepool_

That's rather a weakish argument, I would think. I suspect that people coming from different cultures would be far more likely to think differently about things than someone who comes from the same culture but happens to have a different set of genitalia.

Mind you, I'm just pulling this out of my ass myself, so it's entirely possible I'm wrong. Haven't run across any studies about this sort of thing in my casual perusals of the net, though.

<comment><USER21> "Mind you, I'm just pulling this out of my ass myself, so it's entirely possible I'm wrong. Haven't run across any studies about this sort of thing in my casual perusals of the net, though."

Still, this is common enough reasoning put forth to have "diversity" in programmer squads and gatherings.

I recall looking at a picture of the Clinton White House staff (I think, or cabinet maybe), where the intent was to show the range of sexes and skin colors. Look, diversity!

Yet, as a read the names, I was thinking "lawyer, lawyer, lawyer, not sure, lawyer, lawyer, ..." and wondered where, exactly, was the diversity?

What is the argument that a geek with black skin will have different geek ideas to offer than a geek with white or yellow skin? Or that genitalia confers a unique technical point of view?

I prefer to be among a technical group where there's a diversity of informed opinion, but I'm skeptical that such diversity has a correlation with sex and race.

I'd prefer to hang with a mixed crowd of Lispers, Smalltalkers, PHPers, and embedded system developers, than a Rainbow Collation of nothing-but-Java developers.

<comment><USER22> Modded up, but please no PHP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have been fortunate enough to work in an environment where fully half of the developers were women. It was in state government, which is to say, outside industry. My strong suspicion is that sex bias has little to do with the work, but much more to do with the attitudes of corporate software development, which are (inanely) time-to-market driven.

</comment><comment><USER24> Women have different and distinct priorities in life.</comment>


The White House shares their web API standards on GitHub - <AUTHOR> http://thechangelog.com/the-white-house-shares-their-web-api-standards-on-github/

<comment><USER2> "White House APIs aim to balance a truly RESTful API interface with a positive developer experience (DX)."

Aren't those two things on the same side? When/how would they be in conflict?

</comment><comment><USER3> What's a true RESTFul API without HATEOAS?</comment>


Greenland's receding icecap to expose top-secret US nuclear project - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/27/receding-icecap-top-secret-us-nuclear-project-greenland-camp-century-project-iceworm <comment><USER2> Bloody typical of the US. They get permission for a climate monitoring station and construct a military base instead, leaving tons of toxic waste behind with no thought for the people who live there. I hope Greenland is able to secure from the US government all the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to clean up their mess.</comment>


Hi,I'm a 19 year-old starting a new music streaming service, would love feedback - <AUTHOR> Hi guys!
I'm a 19-year old freshman at UC San Diego, and I'm just about to get my first startup, Galiboo, off the ground, which actually started as an infectious side project about 2 years ago during 10th grade.
I've always been a huge music listener, but around 10th grade, I began to realize that discovering & sharing the music I love became quite a manual process that involved a lot of manual searching & playlisting.
In short, I found the countless music streaming services that exist today (whether its Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Youtube Red, etc.), to have more or less the same function: to curate a catalog of millions of tracks in one central location, that their users can then browse, search, & access (which actually revolves around a lot of manual work for users).
As a result, I thought it would be cool to create a music streaming service that worked differently:
- One that focused on less searching, and more listening.
- One that could automagically bring its users the music they love, when they needed it, so that they didn't have to manually playlist & search for songs--whether it's motivational tracks for kicking butt at work, or relaxing music for unwinding after a long day.
- One that could make sharing music with friends as fun & easy as a single tap.
And so, I set out to build one.
I've been passionately working on this project since 10th grade, primarily building the "music-understanding" AI technology that powers this service, enabling it to understand the music tastes of its users at an unparalleled level.
And now, I've almost finished building the beta version of the app, and I thought it would be awesome to get your thoughts & feedback on this idea/startup!
http://www.mysongsnap.com/
Thank you so much in advance for giving me your valuable feedback! <comment><USER2> FWIW... I use Spotify quite a lot, and when I first open the app, I'm immediately presented with pre-curated playlists that seem to cater what I might need at that time.

On a Sunday morning, I get 'Sweet soul Sunday' or 'Easy Love Songs'. At 9am on Monday it's 'Concentration Music' or 'Background Synth Songs'. Around 2pm, you start to see 'Workout Mix'.

Then you have 'Daily Mix 1', 'Daily Mix 2' and so on which are automatically created playlists, based on what I've listened to. They themselves are generally categorized into rough timbres or styles.

I think Spotify actually employs 'agents' that curate and search for new music for a given style or scene. I think Apple does too.

I very rarely search on Spotify. I've never created my own playlist.

If it's relevant, I would consider myself well versed in music. I studied it during my younger years, and whilst I don't these days - it's a passionate hobby of mine.

I just wanted to mention this, as you've mentioned things you want to do, that Spotify already does well, in my opinion. I can't speak for the other services.

That being said, maybe you could do it better. So I don't mean to discourage you.

If you could build something exactly like Spotify, that allows me to filter out songs with explicit content I would snap that up in a heartbeat. LOL.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi telebone_man, thanks a lot for your feedback! I'm learning a lot from users like you, which is awesome!!!

The main difference in my service is that we don't do any manual curation using "agents," since the public editorial playlists can actually be quite generic, and not as personalized as creating a mix just for you, based on your tastes.

So, we've basically built an AI tech that can accurately understand music like humans.

Using this, our service can better serve you the right music for your moment, since it can understand your tastes much better (by understanding the music you like/listen to) & serve you the type of music you want, on-demand.

For example, you can tell the app to play some "relaxing music," and we'll instantly serve with you with music that's relaxing (which we didn't have to manually curate for you; it''s done on the fly by our A.I.).

As a result, you're not limited to any editorial selections, and the music you get once won't be the same as what someone else gets, etc.

Also, as another example, if you don't like to listen to aggressive, explit- type tracks, we can automatically learn that & improve the recommendations you get instantly, since our music-understanding AI can pickup the fact that you're not really into explicit-type tracks.

I've explained a bit more on how my service is a little different than Spotify in the comment I've posted above.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this!

Once again, thanks a lot!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice work. I can only give you one piece of advice, get a lawyer. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hey I live near UCSD (recently graduated) and I've love to talk more about what you're doing. Feel free to ping me - details in profile.

Initial feedback: I'm kinda confused by mysongsnap vs galiboo? Like other commentators have mentioned my first thoughts are to find what differentiates you from pandora, spotify, or even youtube and what additional value you can offer beyond similar existing services. I think your landing page did a great job of communicating your initial proposition but I'd wish you explained more HOW you're 100x better than Spotify Radio and Discovery weekly.

I did poke around your demo at galiboo and some of the tags seem contradictory? Like simultaneously being 'Emotion-Pleasant / Comfortable Emotion-Arousing / AwakeningEmotion-Powerful / Strong' and I could definitely forsee this almost being an API service.

Overall I think if you can execute+deliver there's people who are definitely interested in better music discovery and I'd love to see it happen!

<comment><USER5> Hey testb! Thanks a lot for your feedback! It's awesome to know that you're from UCSD also!!

I would definitely love to talk with you, but I don't see any contact details under your profile..

To address your thoughts, sorry for the confusion! Songsnap is the name of the music streaming service and Galiboo is the name of my startup.

Also, out of curiosity, which name do you think would be better for the music streaming service? :)

Moreover, I've given a little info of how I'm different than Spotify, Pandora, etc. in my comment above.

I would absolutely love for you to check it out!

It's great to know that you tried out the demo!

The main tech that powers my music streaming service (and makes it a lot different & better) is an AI that can extract emotions/tags from music (which is the thing you saw at demo.galiboo.com).

In fact, the tags it output actually have weights associated with them (indicating their relative importance), which I don't visually show in the demo. I just realized that this can probably cause a little confusion!

Also, the funny things is that I have actually built an API for it: apidocs.galiboo.com

But I wasn't sure if developers in general would love to use it.

What do you think?

Also, I would love to connect with you! I couldn't find any details on your profile, but it would be nice if we could connect another way!

Thanks a lot!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good work for getting this far.

I've built several music-related services and apps. A couple of points to think about.

\- What is the source of your music?

If you are planning to setup deals with record labels to stream their content...then good luck.

If you're planning to use an existing service (e.g. stream songs from Spotify) then make sure you have an incredibly-tight agreement. The old adage "Never build a business using someone else's platform" exists for a reason.

\- Why is your app 100x better than curation than Spotify and Apple?

TBH you should remove this wild statement because it's most likely not true. Perfectly matching music to mood is _incredibly_ difficult, to the point of impossible, so for a brand new unknown app to make this claim just rings out alarm bells.

____

Rather than trying to be a fit-all music discovery service, maybe try and think about a niche you're passionate about.

For example, [https://www.soundshelter.net](https://www.soundshelter.net) focuses purely on personalised vinyl recommendations for house & techno DJs.

</comment><comment><USER7> Might want to have a hero image that isn't 4.2 megs, holy hell

<comment><AUTHOR> lol, sorry, but thanks for the note! I clearly missed that while rushing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How does it work? How does it know what I like? Or not like? It's a web app, Android, osx?

I like Spotify because it has the discover playlist that I always seem to find one of two songs I like in it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi ibdf, thanks for your feedback!

I've described my service in my comment to the original post above, and how's it different from existing services. It is a mobile app.

In short, however, my music streaming service basically tries to serve you the right music to go along with what you're doing (commuting, exercising, etc.), using an A.I. technology that can accurately understand the music you listen to.

Using this A.I. tech, we're able to understand your music tastes much better, and give you a "discover weekly"-like experience, on-demand.

Hope that clarifies, and would love to hear any other thoughts/questions you have!

Thank you so much for your questions!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It sounds you are building something like Noon Pacific ([https://noonpacific.com/](https://noonpacific.com/))?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi bernardino, thanks for the feedback! I checked out the link you posted, and I'm actually doing something very different.

I've explained a bit in my comment to the original post above.

Would love to hear your feedback on this!

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sounds a lot like Pandora.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys, thanks a lot for your feedback!! I certainly should have done a better job of communicating my service's core value/distinction! In short, the main idea behind my service is that, whenever you open the app throughout the day, we'll instantly curate and provide you with different music mixes that align with your tastes and go along with what you're doing (such as upbeat tracks for commuting to work, relaxing music for the evening, etc.).

So when you're at a cafe, for example, we can automatically detect that and instantly serve you with "focus" mixes of songs that you'll love, without having to pre-curate a public, editorial playlist of focus tracks (which aren't personalized to YOU).

In fact, a main point in our service is that, unlike Spotify & Apple Music, we actually DON'T manually curate public editorial playlists (since this can lead to generic & unpersonalized recommendations). Rather, we've built an AI technology that can accurately extract emotions/moods from music, which can help you discover more of the music you love-- on-demand.

For example, you can tell the app to play some "relaxing music," and we'll instantly serve with you with music that's relaxing (which we didn't have to manually curate for you). As a result, you're not limited to any editorial selections, and the music you get once won't be the same as what someone else gets, etc.

Finally, it's actually different from Spotify in many ways:

On a high level, Spotify Radio operates by playing you similarly-liked music, based on the tracks that you & others like/dislike. This can sometimes leads to uninteresting recommendations, since just because you like rap and classical doesn't mean you want to listen to both at the same time in a radio session! However, as mentioned before, I've built an AI that accurately extract emotions/moods from the music you listen to, enabling my service to not only better understand your personal tastes (as opposed to using "similarly-liked" songs like Spotify Radio) but also serve you with music that actually sound similar.

So if you don't like to listen to aggressive, rap in the night, we can automatically learn that & improve the recommendations you get instantly.

We don't use playlists, since they're static and don't instantly adapt to the user's tastes & behavior (and are often manually curated & created once per day/week). Rather, we're able to use our A.I tech to act as your personal music "concierge," serving you an ever-changing music mix that dynamically adapts to your likes, in real-time.

We're also different from Pandora, because Pandora is a service that's more oriented towards artist-based music recommendations, whereas the main point of our service is to get you the right music that aligns with your tastes & what you're currently doing at the moment (your context), whether it's commuting, exercising, unwinding, etc.

Does this give you more insight into my service, guys? What do you guys think?

Once again, thanks for your feedback!! I've learned a lot from you guys so far! Really appreciate it!

</comment><comment><USER11> If you can't even host a secure website, I'm sure your service is seriously lacking in many, many, many ways.

<comment><USER12> Don't be harsh. They are 19 years old. You can only learn so much in a short amount of time. And there is a lot to learn in software development.

<comment><USER13> Just check "Let's encrypt" and you'll be cover.</comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: I'm going to work full-time on free software. Thank you - <AUTHOR> I wrote up a blog post yesterday about this:
https://drewdevault.com/2019/01/15/Im-doing-FOSS-full-time.html
But I wanted to stop by HN and share a special "thanks" to you. The support, feedback, and patronage of the Hacker News community has been a great boon in these past few years. The community here is really something special and I'm thankful for your support. <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920604](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920604).</comment>


Chip Credit Cards Give Retailers Another Grievance Against Banks - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/business/chip-credit-cards-give-retailers-another-grievance-against-banks.html <comment><AUTHOR> The claim is that the new cards slow shoppers down. All the more reason to promote Apple Pay which is much quicker than using CCs even when the CCs are swiped.</comment>


How would you change your favorite programming language to make it better? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fogus.me/2011/04/26/my-favorite-interview-question/ <comment><AUTHOR> I recall being asked a variation: Given your two _strongest_ languages, which features from each one do you miss when programming in the other, and why?

I find it interesting to that the question "Which features do you miss when using a language?" is not equivalent to "Which features would you add to the language?" The former feels like it speaks to my vision of my personal style, while the latter can be construed to include all of the pragmatic concerns of adoption, such as features alleged to assist large teams of indifferent programmers or features that would break backwards compatibility.

<comment><USER3> I like to ask both, but the question in the post is much better for generating multifaceted followup discussions much in the vein of your points.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> C# is pretty nice though perhaps not my favourite language. One thing I found nuts about it is that you need to check whether anything is subscribed to an event before raising it. If you raise an event that nothing currently cares about, you get a NullReferenceException!

So if a tree falls in the forest with no one around then the universe implodes.

<comment><USER5> Anders isn't a huge fan of events, apparently ([http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Anders- Hejlsberg-Q...](http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Anders-Hejlsberg- Questions-and-Answers), around 56:00). I always just initialize events with an empty delegate in personal projects, which is very much the wrong thing to do but it saves me the null ref headache.

I would personally like to see `var` available in private and internal class members (properties, fields, and methods). There's a lot of pointless repetition that could be eliminated. (Obviously, you want to be explicit about the interface defined by a class' public members).

I also consider Tuple<> a missed opportunity, I'd like to see another whack taken at it that veers closer to structural typing. The existing tuple type is very unwieldy once you start returning or storing it, and I feel a pretty good alternative could be built on the principles of `var` and anonymous types.

Picturing something like:

      static tuple SomeMethod(){
        return new tuple { SomeNumber = 1, SomeString = "hello" };
      }

      static void Main(){
        var t = SomeMethod();

        Console.WriteLine(t.SomeNumber + " "+t.SomeString);
      }

Whereas Tuple<> forces you to write that with ItemX scattered around.

<comment><USER6> Except for that 'tuple' after 'new', how is <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/bb397696.aspx> different from what you want?

<comment><USER7> Anonymous types can only be used for local variables. They cannot be returned from procedures, passed as parameters, or assigned to fields.

Tuples, on the other hand, are full-fledged generic classes. That introduces an advantage in that they're first-class entities which can be used anywhere. But it introduces a couple disadvantages, too: There's a separate class implementation for each number of elements, and implementations are only provided for up to 7 elements plus an 8th weird kludge for supporting more. And having the tuple's "official name" be Tuple<$ARBITRARY_LIST_OF_TYPES> is not only cumbersome, but also misses an opportunity to do a better job of communicating semantics.

Consider, for the sake of argument:

Tuple<Employee, int, string, double, string, bool>

versus

Tuple<Employee, int?, string, double, string, bool>

What's going on here? Are they equivalent? What are they being used for? What's up with the different types for Item2, are they equivalent? For that matter, what about Item3? Sure it's got the same type, but we've really got no idea what it's being used for. And since it's being implemented as a plain old generic class, there's no class definition on which you can lay some documentation about this stuff. Just a bunch of disembodied type declarations all more-or-less equivalent to each other.

You know that phase in a lot of beginning programmers' careers where every variable is named foo1, foo2, etc? This is in many ways the same thing, only codified and enshrined by the .NET Framework designers. Oh, and the word's "Item" instead of "foo".

Practically speaking, it means that Tuple's crippled. Sure, technically you can use it for anything. But if you're the kind of person who likes maintainable code, you really don't want to be using it for anything but the most trivial cases. You certainly shouldn't be using it in any interfaces that other people are going to have to work with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> JavaScript.

Kill the "new" operator. Make prototypes less magical (i.e. use something like `Object.create` to construct).

Secondarily, kill getters and setters. (That includes `Array#length`.) I want code and data, not code, data, and code which pretends it's data.

I don't mind the JavaScript syntax much (`function () {` isn't that difficult to type or scan through after you've dealt with it for a while). I'm fine with the small core object and function set. I'm fine with the DOM (except the getters/setters part). I'm okay with `Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty.call`; that can be swept away into a function. Just don't make me write code which looks like statically-typed classical OO spaghetti. I want dynamic prototypal functional spaghetti. =]

<comment><USER9> What do you dislike so much about constructors? I find a nice pattern using require.js (AMD) is to return a constructor function in a module, allowing the calling code to consume the module with:

var module = new Module();

<comment><USER10> The problem with constructors is that they are completely redundant and introduce unnecessary complexity. In javascript, it hardly ever makes sense to call a constructor (e.g. a Function, Array, etc.) without the 'new' keyword, likewise it makes almost zero sense to call a normal function with the 'new' keyword. So, instead of the requiring the programmers to know which function is a normal function and which is a constructor, we could simply call all the functions normally (without 'new'), and have the function return a new object (if necessary). Kinda like what python does.

<comment><USER11> Right. The "new" keyword is never necessary and is usually actively counterproductive. In Java, "new Hammer()" must allocate a new object and it must be exactly a Hammer instance, and to work around those limitations we get the joy of AbstractHammerFactoryFactory. In Python, "Hammer()" can return an existing object and it can be a subclass of Hammer; callers don't need to know the details.

<comment><USER10> In Java, it's a bit different. There, classes (`new Hammer()`) and function (`Hammer()`) are orthogonal concepts that cannot be mixed, while in JavaScript, they are one and the same thing.

In addition, AFAIK there are some funny issues in JavaScript when a constructor function returns an object that is not the object bound to `this` (i.e. the new object created by the `new` keyword).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would add coffeescript-style instance variable setting to ruby method definitions like so:

      def initialize(foo, bar, baz)

        @foo=foo

        @bar=bar

        @baz=baz

      end

Would now be:

      def initialize(@foo, @bar, @baz)

      end

This would save hundreds of lines of code in large programs-- lines which could no longer be a source of typos or errors.

Oh, also I'd make binding_of_caller work.

<comment><AUTHOR> That falls out of destructuring, so if you order def foo(@bar) now, we'll throw in a free

      {@kbar, fu: @bar, blitz: [@first, @rest...]} = someHash

At no extra charge.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps it is the wording, but I actually have no understanding of what you just said. I'm interested though, so can you expand on that a bit?

<comment><AUTHOR> CoffeeScript implements def foo (@bar, @blitz) using destructuring assignment, a general facility that applies to assignment statements, not just function calls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I will take on the challenge of Lisp then.

First it needs to have a much bigger standard library, much like Java.

Second it needs a really effective foreign function interface possibly one which allows direct call to C++. This enables the programmer to take advantage of all the libraries written in C or C++ without having to write C or C++. In particular it allows using wxWidgets, gtk, qt and native win32/64.

Finally I would fix the output of the compiler (having an image is nice, combining it with the compiler to produce an executable makes sense) since (at least for SBCL) the output is 50mb for Hello World (granted, it doesn't grow much after that).

<comment><USER14> Which Lisp implementation are you referring to? I was under the impression that some Common Lisp implementations have pretty huge standard libraries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> In C:

\- Allow labels to be followed by variable declarations or the end of a block.

\- Change switch to make each case its own block, and not fall through by default (but add a keyword to explicitly fall through).

\- Support labeled break and continue (often much clearer than goto; sometimes separating the inner loop into its own function is clearer than either, but not always).

\- Change the precedence of & and |.

\- In do/while, evaluate the loop condition within the block's scope:

        do { int a = ...; } while(a);

\- Allow variable declarations anywhere in an expression: not just

        while(int a = ...)

as in C++, but even

        while((int a = ...) == 0)

or

        getvalue(&(int a));

\- Standardize some GNU extensions such as ({ }), void pointer arithmetic, __attribute__((pure)), and __builtin_unreachable().

\- Standardize visibility.

\- Standardize Apple blocks.

\- Tuples, with quick unpacking:

        {int a, bool ok} = func();

\- Explicit control of may-alias, something more powerful than restrict.

...This is fun.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's a good question. I wish I had a favorite programming language, though. I think if you spend more than ten years in the business and you still are in love with a particular tool, you probably haven't really done anything big, or you haven't ever looked around to see how other people do things.

JavaScript is probably the language I hate the least. And I'd make some of the CoffeeScript syntax standard, and maybe bring in some concepts to keep spaghetti callbacks under control.

<comment><USER3> That's an interesting generalization there. In my time I've encountered many kinds of programmers. Some could create amazing things despite their tool or language. Likewise, there were many who created amazing things with the help of their favorite tools or langauges. It's not wrong to have a favorite tool. It's natural. However, it might not be a great idea to think solely in terms of the tool; limitations and all. This is the spirit of the question.

<comment><USER16> Perhaps I am trying to justify my bitterness. :)

Seriously, it's been an issue when I've been trying to collaborate with others on a side project. We had the question of what language to start with. Some of the interested contributors were Python consultants and insisted that not only was Python the best language, but that Python was the best community, and Python people were the best and most virtuous people. (It is a kind of activist do-gooder project, which is why that person thought this was relevant.)

This sort of opinion seems asinine to me now, and it hurts especially because I used to be one of those guys around 1998-2000 or so -- except, for Perl.

The question of what language to start with kind of paralyzes me now, because when I consider what we'll want a few months in, I see this field of leg-hold traps we're going to step in. In all directions. I almost wish I had less experience and foresight (or more courage, take your pick).

<comment><USER17> I do think that Python is the best language, but I've worked with some truly terrible languages, so I'm not going to spend any time trying to convince someone that we should use it on a program. All I ask from a programming language is a type system, arrays, functions, and scoping. Some sort of notion of class/class methods is nice, as is a few hash/set-type containers to supplement the default array container. Having done "high-level" programming in languages that had none of these features, I'm pretty content with whatever is handed to me to work with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Today, development means more and more work with external APIs, Open Source projects, and general code written by others. A huge time waster is coming back to a piece of code, and finding this: `foo(bar, true, false, true)`. Now you need to go and check the documentation of whatever you're using. IDE solve this half way with auto-complete. We sometimes use ENUMS for the boolean flags, and write yelling code `foo(bar, YES, TOTALLY, DX9_D3D_HWIN_OK_BOOL_FLAG)`. (I hate your guts DirectX). But a verbose code with argument names makes it really easy to create DSLs. Ruby wins over Python here.

`some_function arg1: val1 arg2: val2` with parentheses just to solve ambiguity.

On another note, I always did not understand why there's no For..Else construct, but then I met python.

<comment><USER19> If you are using Python, you can call any function with keyword arguments e.g foo(bar, something=True, whatever=False, blubb=True) even if it is defined using positional arguments like foo(bar, something, whatever, blubb)

<comment><USER18> Yeah, I know, but in Ruby you can drop the parentheses. And in 1.9+ instead of `:something => 'value' you can write just `something: 'value'`. Python: `make('coffee', sugar=2, with='poison')`. Ruby: `make 'coffee', 2, with: ['poison']`. I prefer Ruby's style but it's still lacking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Haskell could really need a better record syntax. I really don't know how that should be designed though...

<comment><USER8> What's wrong with `data Foo = Bar | Baz { a :: Int }` ? I'm not a day-to-day Haskeller, but I find the record syntax very nice and succinct.

<comment><USER21> One major problem is that _a_ then falls into the module namespace and is not reusable. Having a record namespace as in GHC is preferable i.e., Foo.a.

<comment><USER8> Ah; I definitely understand that (and I've felt the pain).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I ask this question as well. I work mostly with PHP developers and it's telling most of them don't have an answer or only say "consistent function argument order".

If you claim to have 7+ years using a language, surely there's a list of things you could add to make it better.

I think it's standard in the PHP ecosystem though.

<comment><USER23> Oddly enough in PHP the things I find most annoying aren't the inconsistent method names or parameter order. I can live with those as the documentation is pretty good and most IDE's give me a hint as to what its expecting.

The thing I find most annoying is being unable to pop the first element off an array when its returned and that when you do things like array_map it dosn't work with a method inside the same or other classes,

EG

$this->method()[0];

array_map($this->doSomething, $array);

<comment><USER8>
        list($firstElement) = $this->method();
        array_map(array($this, 'doSomething'), $array);

Yes, neither is intuitive. And the syntax sucks. And it's not as easy to read (except sometimes where a method returns a tuple; `list` is wonderful there!). But it's certainly possible...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Java isn't my favorite language, but since I use it fairly often I would love to have functions be first class.

<comment><USER25> I'd add "with" statements. No more:

      Closeable dbConnection;
      try {
        dbConnection = CloseableFactory.getConnection();
        doWork(dbConnection);
      } catch (CloseableException ex) {
        // log it or whatever
      } finally {
        // the really annoying, stupid, crufty boilerplate bullshit
        try {
          if (dbConnection != null)
            dbConnection.close();
        } catch (CloseableException ex) {
          // it's probably already closed
        }
      }

Instead, it'd just be

      with (Closeable dbConn = CloseableFactory.getConnection()) {
        doWork(dbConn);
      }

(Assuming the "with" statement eats errors relating to the instantiation/closing of the Closeable, anyway). Bliss. And I know there's stuff like Google Guava's Closeables.closeQuietly(conn);, but still, a with statement would be awesome.

<comment><USER26> If only it already existed in Java [http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/exceptions/...](http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/exceptions/tryResourceClose.html)

<comment><USER25> Wow. I hadn't looked at Java 7 much; I've been under the assumption adoption would be reasonably slow so haven't really dug into it yet. Cool!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Unless I'm talking about Erlang, my answer is almost going to be "I really miss Erlang's pattern matching". (I know it's not exclusive to Erlang, but that's where I learned it).

My dream language right now would be something with the expressiveness of Ruby and the concurrency abilities and pattern matching from Erlang.

Hmm. I think I need to go look at where Reia (<http://reia-lang.org/>) has got to since I last looked at it.

<comment><USER28> I also miss pattern matching when using other languages.

As an aside I just had a look at what stage Reia is up to. The github page says that Reia is now defunct. (<https://github.com/tarcieri/reia>)

There is also another ruby-like language on the erlang VM - <USER2> (<https://github.com/josevalim/elixir>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If I could make one change to one language I currently use a lot, it would be to add implicit returns to javascript functions.

<comment><USER14> You just mean to make a function return the value of its last expression, right? That seems like an extremely small feature. Do you just prefer it as a matter of taste, or are there larger consequences of implicit returns that I'm not thinking of?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Anonymous functions in C, in heap not on the stack.

GCC can do it, but it puts them on the stack which is limiting.

<comment><USER15> Try blocks: <http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocks_(C_language_extension)>

If you use Clang you can use them on non-Apple platforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'd combine certain ruby-isms into python, but retain pythons speed and readability. Specifically I would default dicts to return nil unless typed as strict dicts (opposite of current practice). I think the way kwargs are handled is cool and would move into Ruby. I like detatched functions way more in Python. I prefer the consistency in pass by ref vs pass by value in python, whereas in Ruby I'm never 100% sure. I like how both languages can communicate with C very easily.

Edit:

In python 0 should not equal False and 1 should not equal True. This has hit me a couple times and it is really annoying. Furthermore, 0 should be cast to True, as in Ruby. Only None and False should be cast to false.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm a Javascript user. The list of things I'd change is enormous. A few of the biggest things though, is making better object looping; it's annoying having to check each property to see if it's on the object itself or it's prototype. It'd also be nice to have a build in extend/include system, rather than having all these different custom ones people use. Put jQuery and Underscore on the same page and you have two different implementations of object extension. Seems like kind of a waste of code.

<comment><USER8> On object looping:

        Object.keys(obj).forEach(function (key) {
            var value = obj[key];
            // ...
        });

Not the best thing, but it works in less lines than:

        var key;
        for (key in obj) {
            if (!Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty(obj, key) {
                continue;
            }

            var value = obj[key];
            // ...
        }

Plus, it avoids the async-function-in-a-loop problem (which is why I rarely use C-style `for` loops or `for-in` loops now).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not quite favourite, and not a language change, but in C, C#, Java, I would change the IMO ridiculous idea to write CONSTANTS in uppercase.

I understand that preprocessor macros have to stand out because they have different semantics (arguments might be evaluated multiple times, use of ## to fabricate tokens, etc), but i do not think

\- In C, macro names are by convention uppercase

\- in C, one used to use macros to define constants

\- hence, in each C-inspired language, constant names must, by convention be uppercase

is a valid syllogism.

</comment><comment><USER33> Null coalescence in C#. Reference types must be checked before trying to access their members. So you'll see a lot of:

if (mything != null && mything.User != null) { Do.Something(mything.User.Name); }

I'd like to write:

Do.Something(mything?.User?.Name);

It's syntactic sugar, but would greatly improve readability, and a compiler could do it with no change to the runtime.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'd take python and add optional variable declaration and flexible explicit typing constraints (a variable can be declared as either having certain methods returning a certain type, or as being of a set of types, or as being of any type, but all type declarations are optional) that are verified at compile time.

<comment><USER19> You can't have optional variable declaration and compile time verification. Either you have optional variable declaration and checking is performed and runtime or you get compile time verification and make the language static.

<comment><USER13> Sure you can. The google closure library did that to javascript.

You just don't get all the typeerors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Intellisense.

Not a huge fan of C# but that part is awesome.

<comment><USER36> How exactly is intellisense a feature of a language?

<comment><USER37> While you're right that intelligent autocompletion is not a feature of a programming language, clearly it's much easier to create one for some languages than for others. It's not a coincidence that there's still aren't any really usable intelligent autocompleting editors for JavaScript but there is a number of very high quality ones for C# and Java.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> There's very little I'd change about Common Lisp as a language, but I'd kill for a modern OS X IDE for it.

</comment><comment><USER39> My favorites were C, Postscript, NewtonScript, and Objective-C. Objective-C improved C. A compiled F-Script with some way to drop back down to C would be great. NewtonScript needs a new implementation and a switch from the Pascal- like syntax.

</comment><comment><USER40> Ruby: proper namespacing, ala Python

Python: blocks, ala Ruby

JavaScript: Strong (but dynamic) typing, ala Python & Ruby

edit: formatting

</comment><comment><USER41> For the sake of argument (let ((my-favorite-programming-language (find- language "common-lisp")))):

I would like to see Lisp and *nix have babies. Take the best ideas of both and make something greater than their sum.

<comment><USER8> Care to give an example?

Are you referring to Unix tools (grep, awk, sed, cat, etc.), piping and redirection, or shell scripting overall?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> C\AL [language for MS Dynamics Nav(née Navision)] could really really use concurrency\multi thread.

</comment><comment><USER43> For language enthusiasts with hobby compilers, the question does not have to be a hypothetical. :)

</comment><comment><USER44> Python: Generic functions and real lambdas.

SBCL: tree shaker for creating executables.

</comment><comment><USER45> Better blocks in Python

</comment><comment><USER46> Adopting Ruby-style code formatting as a common idiom for Scala and Java, where I'd eliminate the usage of curly braces and instead use indentation for code blocks.

<comment><USER47> That would be python style surely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Proper lexical scoping in Python.

</comment><comment><USER49> I use Smalltalk so this never comes up. <http://redline.st>

<comment><USER50> Where is there example code? I didn't see that on the site.</comment></comment>


How do you document your mysql database tables and fields - <AUTHOR>

I was wondering how do you create documentation about a mysql database tables and fields (when building a database). Do you use any software? Or? <comment><USER2> There's two ways I create database tables:

\- either I create them through an ORM, in which case I don't document the database tables or fields, I document the object instead.

\- or I create it "by hand", in which case I use the standard comments to document the tables and the fields in my schema file

</comment><comment><USER3> There are tools that can reverse-engineer tables (and relations). For example, Visio can do it for SQL Server databases.

</comment><comment><USER4> SQL is pretty much self-documenting. But I still use hand-drawn diagrams showing how fields are related.</comment>


An Analog IC Design Book Draft - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2020/08/31/an-analog-ic-design-book-draft/ <comment><USER2> There's also Hans Camenzind's "Designing Analog Chips"[1]. Free on his website.

"During his career at four different companies he designed the first integrated class D amplifier, introduced the phase-locked loop concept to ICs, invented the semicustom IC and created the 555 timer. He has designed 151 standard and custom ICs so far."

[1] [http://www.designinganalogchips.com/](http://www.designinganalogchips.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Loosely related, but the free flash game Kohctpyktop by Zachtronic Industries was very useful to refresh/deepen memories of when I studied basic electronics [http://www.zachtronics.com/kohctpyktop-engineer-of-the- peopl...](http://www.zachtronics.com/kohctpyktop-engineer-of-the-people/)</comment>


Steve Wozniak likes to do everything on his Segway. - <AUTHOR> http://www.edibleapple.com/steve-wozniak-takes-a-piss-on-a-segway/ This is pretty funny. <comment><USER2> This is a violation of his privacy. Not cool. :(</comment>


Refresher for me: The other road ahead - <AUTHOR>

http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html
Apologies to people who have read this recently, but I last read it years ago and when I decided to have a "New Year read" to motivate and focus myself I decided to re-read it.  I was struck by how prescient it is and if you have never read it, I'd strongly suggest you do.
I actually wish I'd taken more notice the first time as there are some key points in here that I should have learned from. Instead I made my own mistakes (and learned from them) when I could have learned from here. <comment><USER2> Clickable:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html></comment>


Ask HN: Successful hardware startup in entertainment. How can we go consumer? - <AUTHOR>

We're iLuminate, a bootstrapped hardware / software startup working our way downmarket from the entertainment industry, and we'd love to hear your advice on how to get our product into consumer's hands. You may have seen us on America's Got Talent Tuesday night, or the HN thread "Dancing hackers create iLuminate system for performance art" <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2606038> a few days ago. People really go nuts for the synchronized lighting, music and movement combination.
After two years of hard work and experience in live entertainment, we know we've got a solidly engineered product and a great team behind it. But none of us have experience bringing consumer devices to a large market. It's a bit daunting. Should we partner up with a company who does, perhaps licensing out the tech? Bring someone on board to run the consumer side of the business? Seek outside investment?
If you're a hardware hacker that went to the consumer market, what challenges have you faced?
Thanks to everyone in advance! <comment><USER2> I don't think going consumer is the ideal outcome, certainly not in the short term. Does the Blue Man group have a successful line of facepaint products or wacky musical instruments? HELL NO. They have an entertainment franchise. They perform shows that reliably draw an audience, and pair up with people who operate theaters, bars and restaurants. There are multiple BM groups; in fact, I see they were holding auditions in San Francisco just yesterday, and they also have a large backing staff of musicians, creative developers, marketers and admin people.

Right now, your show is the product. If you gave me the gear I could probably figure it out in an evening, and it happens that I quite like dancing, but I don't have a darkened stage to work with or loads of time to spend on it. People who go to raves and nightclubs for pleasure want to have fun and/or meet attractive strangers, so the market there is likely fairly small. Additionally, they're just as likely to throw something together on their own with an Arduino if their tastes run that way - otherwise you could just load up a truck and sell to everyone at Burning Man. Kids are a more likely target market, and more likely to spend on an affordable social toy, but to reach them you're going to have to develop manufacturing and retail pipelines, defend your IP from ripoff artists (who may well have better marketing and retail pipelines already in place, especially for a moderately simple technology like this), and pretty soon you find yourself spending 3 months of the year travelling between toy sales conventions and sweating over the consumer confidence index as you enter Q3. I think you would be way better off licensing it to an established toy company, especially considering that any product like this is more Amazon than etsy, if you see what I mean. As far as licensing goes, your negotiating power is obviously going to be proportional to the strength of your brand, and I'm inclined to think that right now your job is to burnish the hell out of that.

Finally, don't be in such a rush to put it in the hands of the public. If you do then you diminish your own achievement, because you'll just be classified as a bunch of nerds with a clever marketing campaign for a cheap gimmick. People don't value what comes to them too easily. The reaction of the host (whose name I always forget) to the mention of software engineering was that it was so clever as to be intimidating. Well, that's just fine for now. Get used to the idea of being/doing something so special that people ought to pay money to watch it. Work on getting famous. When devices like 'e-luminate' with oddly-similar looking models on the packaging start to appear, then you can launch the Official iLuminate Kitz and charge a premium for them, and devote 20% of the profits to STEM scholarships for high schools or so. For now, you want to be thinking about developing and franchising the act, whether you want to performing on New Year's Eve in NY or go on tour with Daft Punk etc. etc..

</comment><comment><USER3> Find a key person who knows the retail end of the consumer market. Having been there before, just the time invested in building simple relationships can be a major resource suck if you're starting from zero. Plus, navigating all of the oddities of dealing with consumer products (from potential certification/testing stuff) to packaging/distribution/channel sales and so on is a world of its own.

Based on my experience, also be prepared to give away a ton of product to buyers at potential outlets and spend lots of time discussing little nuanced things that will likely drive you insane :)

Your other option is to setup a retail oriented website and sell direct. It will take longer to get from Point A to Point B, but will be less resource intensive. If you can generate some basic demand in that avenue, then you can pursue QVC or some of the "As Seen on TV" marketing companies for a distribution deal.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Find a key person who knows the retail end of the consumer market.

Where's a good place to start? Most of our contacts are in live entertainment or distribution for live entertainment. We've gone to some industry conferences like LDI, but there's not much of a consumer focus.

> Your other option is to setup a retail oriented website and sell direct.

We're definitely considering this. If you had to do it over again, would you start here and move to retail channels later?

Great advice, thanks!

<comment><USER3> Talk to an executive headhunter that specializes in the retail market. Look for people who have launched roughly similar (eg electronics, not fashion) products into large retail channels.

Don't know enough about your product and company cash position to comment on the second question. If your product has the potential to hit huge sales, you have just enough time to hit stores in time for the Christmas shopping season. That would most likely be the ideal case.

Another option I was just thing of could be the summer concert series. It sounds like you might have an ideal product for pre-concert shopping/food/drinks concession kiosks. This could also be a good test market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Feel free to email me, I'll be glad to point you in the right direction. I'll need quite a bit more information though before I'd be able to give you the correct advice. If it's really good and appropriate I'll even make some intros.

Just answered a similar question in another post, take a look a my manufacturing guide. There is a big difference between being engineered well and being mass producible.

As an aside, I've moved from hardware to web/mobile software (taught myself iOS, php, and rails) because I got tired of dealing with all the new regulations and hurdles. So be warned before starting a project.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840896>.

PS: if you are looking to get it out this year you only have a month or two at most to act.</comment>


Feds Seize 130+ Domain Names in Mass Crackdown - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/feds-seize-130-domain-names-in-mass-crackdown-111125/ <comment><USER2> When they came for the serial registrants of bootleg sports jersey and fashion merchandise domains, I said nothing...

<comment><USER3> I want to make a difference. What can I say, and to whom?

<comment><USER4> I think we need a new Internet that the government doesn't know about. They move slowly and we can get another ten years of freedom if we plan this right.

(Many other posts recommend overthrowing the government. I don't think this will work because it doesn't guarantee that the new government won't be corrupt; the kinds of people that want to be politicians will always exist and will always act in the same interests.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most of the seized domains end up hosted on the Feds 'seized domain' server at 184.108.40.206.

As such, it's possible to see a list of all seized domains using a Reverse IP tool - e.g. <http://viewdns.info/reverseip/?host=220.127.116.11>

</comment><comment><USER6> First they came for the fake merchandise sites...

> The fact that the authorities have once again launched a large crackdown on > "rogue" websites begs the question why this legislation is needed in the > first place.

Isn't the difference that SOPA allows them to mandate blocking of non-US domains by service operators? I think it's pretty clear TLDs owned or operated in the US are a lost cause at this point unless other governments oppose the TLD sovereignty claims.

</comment><comment><USER7> I find it disturbing that as a non-US citizen, US restricts my access to these sites.

<comment> k-mcgrady The FBI is allowed to seize domains which are US based (e.g. dot com). If you setup your site with a domain from another country (e.g. dot co dot uk) the FBI can do nothing.

From what I have head they want SOPA to fix that by allowing them to block the domains they can't seize from being viewed within the US via a system like the one China uses.

So if you set up your site right the US government cannot stop anyone outside the US from viewing it.

<comment><USER8> This isn't the FBI, it's customs enforcement (which was moved under DHS).

<comment> k-mcgrady Thanks for clarifying. I thought the notices had FBI on them, my mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Last year: 82 domains seized This year: 130 domains seized ..waiting to see if this game goes exponential..

The funny thing is that a large percentage of those domains contain trademarked names. Can't the trademark owners go through _normal_ channels (get court judgement, then file with ICANN) to grab the domains?

<comment><USER10> Flashback to javanco.com... (search 'Javanco sun' if this doesn't ring a bell)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for that. It does seem like Javanco would have prevailed in court had Sun insisted on pursuing the domain. It does make me wonder, if that exact situation arose today, whether the outcome would have been different!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's really stupid to register domain names with "louis vutton", "NFL" or any other obvious trademarks in the name if you're planning to make money on it. Even if you're not planning to sell unauthorized goods by that company on that site, they'll still come after you within weeks, if not days. I've learned that the hard way ...

<comment><USER12> <http://nissan.com> \- <http://nissan.com/Digest/The_Story.php>

<comment><USER13> The difference is Nissan.com is not selling knockoff Nissan cars.

<comment><USER14> The point is, they're still getting sued.

The laws are being misused by the party with deeper pockets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> IANAL, and am not familiar with the procedures of law. I do know that the courts can seize property in an entirely legal fashion via due process. So this would seem to me to be analogous to seizure of a business building being used for selling counterfeit clothing.

I suppose (to my mind) the real question here is the due process.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm not a fan of domain name seizures, but, looking at the list of 131 domain names they have there, these ones probably aren't going to be missed.

<comment><USER17> I think that's what they call "establishing precedent."

<comment><USER16> Yep, that's why it's so clever. Make the first cases either against someone everyone hates, on that no one cares about. Child abusers in the first case, counterfeit handbag salesmen in the second.

Precedent established, then the net widens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Lack of due process is the new bully government.

Warrantless everything, seizures without oversight, treat everyone like a criminal when they travel, simply live or go near the border and lose many constitutional rights, heavily arm law enforcement under the guise of "anti- terrorism" but instead use those weapons against peaceful protesters etc. etc.

What's strange and counterintuitive is that under democrat leadership it gets worse than republican because they are always afraid of being perceived as being "weak" so they overcompensate and are even more aggressive.

What's more ironic is we are critical of other governments who do these things.

</comment><comment><USER19> Surprise! I did WHOIS lookups on some of the domains, and ALL were from China. Sometimes there is no name or address data but a phone number, and that is Chinese of course (+86...).

</comment><comment><USER20> Why seize the _domain names_ when they could nab the _people_ behind the domain names selling counterfeit merchandise?

<comment><USER21> Recent legislation allows the seizure of domain names effectively by fiat, without any tinge of due process. Arresting a physical body and putting them on trial is still burdened by such ancient, outmoded traditional ideals, and so is rather more difficult.

<comment><USER22> Does anyone know the citation of the statute they used?

<comment><USER23> 18 USC § 2323 (a)(1)(A)-(B)

[http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/usc_sec_18_00002323---- 000...](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/usc_sec_18_00002323----000-.html)

18 USC § 981(b)

<http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/981.html>

(Source:<http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/06/30/Warrant.pdf>)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What a waste of government time and resources.

<comment><USER25> Ok, I'm going to take the other side of this issue.

Private property rights for commercial use is one of the reasons why developed nations are developed. If I start a business in the US, I generally don't have to worry about someone else taking my trademark and selling fake versions of my stuff. From the viewpoint of a business owner, that's one reason why you'd setup a company in the US/Canada/Europe vs. China/Russia/etc.

I don't agree with the lack of due process, but I do think that securing economic rights to private property is a pretty dam good use of government resources.

RF

<comment><USER26> Of course, they can simply buy a new domain for $10, so this didn't actually stop anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What happens to FBI if SOPA doesn't actually pass and this kind of thing is found illegal?

<comment><USER26> This has nothing to do with SOPA or the FBI. This is done by ICE, an agency under the Department of Homeland Security, and by the DOJ, and it's been happening for over a year now: [http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-seizes- bittorrent-sea...](http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-seizes-bittorrent- search-engine-domain-and-more-101126/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I find this _extremely_ alarming. I don't engage in piracy or serve files or anything like that. But I consider domain names to be a form of property, and to see the US government taking property without giving he owners recourse is extremely troubling.

The US system is founded in innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. The requirements for this proof have been laid out and refined over 200 years. I think those requirements are not strict enough, but these seizures don't even include an actual trial, and thus deny the victims the right to defend their position, or make their case before a judge.

Earlier this year I heard about a hip-hop blog that was seized which engaged in no piracy... though it did offer songs that _the record companies_ had given him as a form of promotion.

So, not only is this being done without due process, but it is being done incompetently to boot!

I have zero expectation that this won't become-- like the "drug war" and the "war on terrorism" -- an ever widening net to where it effectively becomes seizure of politically-incorrect domains (e.g.: write a post critical of the government on your blog? have no blog the next day...)

This is literally a form of government censorship of speech. Even if some speech is "illegal" (I don't think even pirate spreading domains are illegal, though there is a good _civil_ case against them) the act of speaking is protected, and this right is acknowledged by the first amendment.

<comment><USER28> > This is literally a form of government censorship of speech. Even if some > speech is "illegal" (I don't think even pirate spreading domains are > illegal, though there is a good civil case against them) the act of speaking > is protected, and this right is acknowledged by the first amendment.

No it's not. It's analogous to the police acting on a warrant to close a store front selling counterfeit goods. This is something that occurs constantly in large cities all over the country.

If a judge would ever issue a warrant to remove a DNS name based upon speech, and it's upheld, we have bigger problems than seizing DNS names.

<comment><USER29> I'm not sure what a "DNS name" is exactly. DNS stands for Domain Name Service, and I can't figure out for the life of me what it is you are referring to.

The burden of proof for these seizures was far less than a judge-issued warrant, which is the problem with which most of _us_ are concerned. Slowly eroding constitutionally protected rights reminds me of the boiling frog that never jumps out of the pot as the temperature is raised ever-so-slightly.

<comment><USER23> _The burden of proof for these seizures was far less than a judge-issued warrant_

Meaning what, exactly?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The United States needs to be stipped of DNS root privileges immediately. This regime is completely out of control, and when SOPA passes the internet is going to require some new infrastructure to route around the US.

<comment><USER19> The DNS has to stay being controled by one or more democratic countries. As much as I like international organizations within the UN framework, but giving control of the DNS to a UN committee would make it too easy for China to just give a number of poor countries some more money to by their votes for whatever China wants to see banned from the net. Not paranoia, that is common practice, Western countries are doing it too. But at least Western governments are controlled by their populations to some extent.

<comment><USER31> Switzerland seems the only sane choice, IMHO. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I don't know how to feel about this. I really wish I could get people from _both_ sides of the issue to educate me.

From what I see and read it seems piracy is running pretty rampant. In light of that, these efforts to stop it (except SOPA, which I strongly disagree with) don't bother me. This list of domains makes it pretty obvious what they were up to. And I'm one of the few who still believes that content creators (including more than just music and movies but also software) should be able to choose how they distribute their work and how much to charge, if anything. Piracy is taking these creations and distributing them freely or for your own profit while the creator is getting screwed out of the money they should get for their work.

I also see how this sets a dangerous precident and law makers are heading down a slippery slope. There's obviously much room for abuse and cronyism.

So my question is, are we framing this the right way? The torrent sites seem to be bringing up these issues in an effort to deflect, distract from what they're doing, and sometimes even excuse it. Their actions and the actions of other illegal operators are what is causing the crackdown and creating a space for large companies and law makers to exploit with overreaching laws.

So while this stuff is definitely dangerous, how come we don't talk about making the pirates irrelevant so we can remove their excuse? If piracy wasn't so prevalent online then we could strengthen our argument while weakening theirs. The post would be more credible from any other site but coming from torrentfreak it comes off as propaganda even though I agree with them (just not what they do)!

<comment><USER33> I was strictly against piracy a few years ago. Nowadays it's a daily activity. What happened?

I realized what the media companies were actually doing, how DRM hurts the people who actually pay for the product and all these enormous sums they force people to pay for a few cases of infringement.

I don't want my money to go to these corporations, that's why I'd choose to pirate over buying today.

That said, my 6 terabytes of content contain no illegal music and just a few large American-produced movies. It's mostly anime, documentaries and Swedish TV. The anime and documentaries I have because I simply can't buy them here. There's no way for me to consume this content legally in a way that I prefer. The Swedish TV I store so that I, one day, can show my favourite shows to my future kids (I'm doing backup on backup), and I'm not even sure if that's illegal, considering I pay TV-license and all.

Well, that's my case, I'm not sure which kind of pirate I am, but I know that as long as the media companies take a large slice of the money that's supposed to go to the artists, and use it to fight against the public, I don't want them to get a single penny from me.

<comment><USER32> I get that. I have heard of how DRM hurts people and I do know that artists get screwed by their labels. But is piracy really a solution? Are you really protesting or are you using that as an excuse to make yourself feel better? Though the artists do get screwed by labels, piracy also hurts them. I admit that a few years ago I acquired a large collection of movies of music through piracy. These days I feel differently.

This is tricky because I see your point but there also has to be a better solution. I feel like these reasons stifle progress that may solve your problems. Do you think if piracy were curbed a lot then maybe some company would take advantage of a space In the market and somehow let you get content you can't in the US? Maybe even these companies supporting SOPA may do it? Maybe I'm naive. Ive got some reading to do for sure on this. Thank you for honestly answering my question.

<comment><USER34> > _I have heard of how DRM hurts people and I do know that artists get screwed > by their labels. But is piracy really a solution?_

In the UK it is a criminal offence to bypass copyright protection measures, but it is a civil offence to download a movie. Thus, it is more illegal for me to go and buy a DVD which I then play on my Linux laptop than it is for me to just torrent it. (Whether anyone bothers to actually enforce these laws is another matter)

<comment><USER35> > Thus, it is more illegal for me to go and buy a DVD which I then play on my > Linux laptop than it is for me to just torrent it.

Huh. I have several hard drives filled up with dvds that I've ripped. I always that it was at least slightly less illegal (if not completely legal) for me to do that than it would be for me to just torrent the content.

On the other hand, I'm in the US, so things may be completely reversed here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This safely falls under the idea of "legal plunder".

Could you imagine the screaming and wailing if a .gov domain got jacked?

</comment><comment><USER37> The Internet is under attack. We need Eben Moglen's freedom box:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgu8NUm5Zxk>

Forcing a website off the internet is like snatching my vocal chords out of my neck when they are about to vocalize something objectionable.</comment>