The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely - barry-cotter https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513817302799#bb0180 <comment><AUTHOR> All of my grandparents come from big families. My grandmother on my father's side comes from a family of 12 children.

Yet my grandmother only had 4 children and my father only 2, and now I only have 1.

This is an anecdote, but I don't think heritabiliy has anything to do with it.

Large families simply happen due to poverty. When poor, you want more children because there's strength in numbers. Plus the women are staying home and can afford to have children.

Nowadays access to contraceptives is common and in Europe for example it's not feasible to have a lot of children due to costs (property, education, women having to eventually quit their job, etc).

Anyway, I think the evolution of poverty is a much greater predictor of population growth than anything else.

<comment> barry-cotter If a trait is not strongly selected for but variation exists it will be maintained in the population. See height, hair colour, propensity to gain weight, etc.

Then you change the environment so that the trait is under strong selection. The people living in Scandinavia 3,000 years ago couldn't digest lactose. Now ethnic Scandinavians who are lactose intolerant are basically nonexistent. It's at above 99% homozygotes.

Imagine taking a population and killing everyone over 18 under 1.8m and doing this for four generations. Assuming anyone was left after the first generation the fourth generation will be substantially taller than the first.

Desire for children was never under strong selection pressure before because desire to have sex led to children pretty reliably up until the birth of the demographic transition in France in the ~1700s. Now it is under selection pressure, everywhere with reliable access to contraception so the people who like children are going to have more children, and their share of the population will grow.

> Large families simply happen due to poverty. When poor, you want more > children because there's strength in numbers. Plus the women are staying > home and can afford to have children.

This will be news to the Mormons, Amish, Hutterites and the Hasidim among a number of Orthodox sects of Jews. Large families do not just happen due to poverty. Some people want more children and arrange their lives around that.

<comment><USER2> If it was advantageous for us to have lots of children, then women would have a dozen at a time, rather than one. There are plenty of mammals that do that. There's clearly a tradeoff there and the selective pressures for humans tend to lean toward fewer. Not sure where we'll end up, but time will tell.

<comment><USER3> I think there _was_ such a selection pressure when we were nomadic hunter- gatherers. Agriculture is a very recent development anthropologically, so we were still in the mode of one-kid-per-pregnancy, though multiple might have been advantageous. It's possible we developed higher fertility due to that, but we didn't have enough time for that new pressure to kick in.

<comment> barry-cotter It's been 5,000 years since the dawn of agriculture. If multiple births were fertility increasing they'd be, if not normal, at least common in some groups. You don't even get 1 in 3. Single births are clearly not being found wanting by the Blind Idiot God.

<comment><USER3> Not necessarily. Mortality of mothers is higher in multiple births; maybe that's a counter-pressure (fewer children). Children do worse as well ([0], [1], [2]). Ladies are not built to carry more than one child, especially considering the size of our children, and agriculture has been such a blip on the evolutionary/anthropological timescale that we have not had time to evolve so significantly as to change our basic reproduction.

[0]: [https://watermark.silverchair.com/151663.pdf?token=AQECAHi20...](https://watermark.silverchair.com/151663.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAkMwggI_BgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggIwMIICLAIBADCCAiUGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMNDbyu9VK0lVH1VRPAgEQgIIB9nVdpx5WY2VFTM3siR6zUpI0NIrJ8G9sLgHflEENvKJn66C3kpwvmovR88zIGT4Zf1EjM37ovBkwyBefyQUyxX2tV9MlM9OHvTxWrEG41Otg_iehqYE75eFXqRmaREkeDxT_ISS78RZiRXb-i6WkAIIleISQsmOwkTX_aGVOTOkFKNtHYQXN69Db- DMkH_Qh_wtjf6TLPgDfnShgZ8_YwcfGThvT1EwSpazZAHxh82Bfn8zKsfuwaEsObTJsVAuYACQcigL0RYheX7RHBn42fW2eq6IdG6702SQWhlpEfeTuez0kPQ- r-Jh44nomPMhRLMZMtXrtYVkXfDFCs3m1le7xk9YLjvNKZDdJ- LvJwtp9ouuvl1cQajuaSPN6VI5sD2SjGkd5NDs1CAaODx9hwmhKL-6S_WyMlktkw9keaDWvnIRyjLjiTO1AOHs_eURKqxutChnO9xeQYOwKjgJBrT5vt9hMPao9Weab89ykbOwiApEo4NGBAxHY4PGdgm8K_1O8N18g_De- fFCTeY7gMp0OYbWDAxEMRLrKNdTl1ON9sAU488gm7D6FHCQ71yPmc5ucl_aVoTm4sb85QLxJykbamXeBKCIr40bB_0M59bG37P1swc6dWvojGic6c5Vqr9HwB- ItUGp8afq2_zBBOMBTV7Ih4FU)

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5541191/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5541191/)

[2] [https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/4/4/e004514](https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/4/4/e004514)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is ridiculous.

The replacement fertility rate to maintain population before modern medicine could be closer to ten than two not so long ago.

War, famine, disease, accidents, and infant mortality made it so surviving until you were old enough to start having your own children was rare and women were often pregnant or nursing continuously as long as they were fertile.

The premise of heritable fertility driving population and reproduction rates in humans is really far off. We're not having litters of kittens.

If it were true fertility rates could not possibly have dropped so far in so few generations after modern medicine and the insane reduction in violent death rates seen in the last thousand years.

<comment> barry-cotter > The premise of heritable fertility driving population and reproduction rates > in humans is really far off.

Yes, until reliably accessible contraception fertility was driven by the desire to have sex.

> If it were true fertility rates could not possibly have dropped so far in so > few generations after modern medicine and the insane reduction in violent > death rates seen in the last thousand years.

This assumes no change in the environment, when it has manifestly changed. In this new environment in which desire to have children leads to having more children, on average, the desire to have more children will be selected for.

<comment><USER5> I agree, however this doesn't necessarily mean that average fertility will rise again. The environment could keep changing faster than the genes can adapt. Also "desire to have children" might be difficult to encode in DNA so genetic adaptation to the availability of contraceptives might be really slow.

<comment><USER6> This is the strongest (only?) counterargument I've seen. I don't believe it will happen soon though. Politicians only do something when doing something is less controversial than doing nothing and that's pretty far off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In rural societies, children are productive members of the workforce and the care of the aged depends on having surviving children. This encourages large families.

In urban societies, children are expensive to rear and educate until they can become productive, and the care of the aged depends on social institutions. This encourages small families.

However, if urban societies socialize the cost of rearing and educating children, then that disincentive will be removed and families may become larger. Ethnic subgroups with strong extended families and religious solidarity tend to have larger families, even in urban settings.

</comment><comment><USER8> admittedly i havent read the whole article, only the abstract, but: assuming that children from larger families will partially inherit the trait for having larger families themselves seems like a leap to me - arent family sizes in less developed societies generally considered to be either due to religious superstition or because more children = more workers to provide for the family a la victorian times? Once these factors diminish as a society develops, I would argue (from a position of ignorance) that the "traits" governing a bigger family (fertility) are environmental rather than genetic.

<comment><USER9> I found this very strange as well, so I skipped down to the section that discussed this:

> In countries that have undergone the demographic transition, twin, adoption > and family studies have pointed to a substantial genetic effect on fertility > (Fisher, 1930; Kirk et al., 2001; Kohler, Rodgers, & Christensen, 1999; > Murphy, 1999; Murphy & Knudsen, 2002; Rodgers, Hughes, et al., 2001a; > Rodgers, Kohler, et al., 2001b). For example, Fisher (Fisher, 1930) found > that a woman could expect 0.21 additional children for each additional child > that her mother had, and 0.11 additional children for each additional child > that her grandmother had. From this, Fisher suggested that the heritability > of fertility at that time was 0.4 (40% of the variation in fertility is > explained by genetic factors). Summarising research conducted through to > 1999, Murphy (Murphy, 1999) noted that the heritability of fertility > averaged around 0.2 in post-demographic transition societies, with the > estimates increasing in recent periods. Kohler et al. (Kohler et al., 1999) > examined data on Danish twins born in the periods 1870 to 1910 and 1953 to > 1964. The first period covers the demographic transition and the second the > end of the baby boom. In the first cohort, the heritability of fertility in > women varied from close to zero in the pre-transition period to as high as > 0.4 to 0.5 during the demographic transition. Estimates of heritability > remained strong for the 1953 to 1964 cohort. From an analysis of data for > Danish twins from the 1950s, Rodgers et al. (Rodgers, Kohler, et al., > 2001b), attributed slightly more than one quarter of the variation in > fertility to genetic factors. Rodgers and Doubty (Rodgers & Doughty, 2000) > found a median heritability of 0.33 in a contemporary United States > population, and heritabilities for underlying desires, ideals and > expectations ranging between 0.24 and 0.76. Where measured, the variance > attributable to shared environment in low-fertility populations was > generally lower than the genetic effects (Kirk et al., 2001; Kohler et al., > 1999; Kohler, Rodgers, Miller, Skytthe, & Christensen, 2006; Zietsch, Kuja- > Halkola, Walum, & Verweij, 2014). However, the relative balance of genetic > and shared environmental factors can change quickly over time (Kohler et > al., 1999; Kohler et al., 2006).

<comment><USER10> That is still looking at pre-1970s populations, where the female workforce even in advanced countries was much smaller than today and the religious element was still largely hegemonic.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I'm not sure that this data is completely relevant, especially given that the birth rate in the US has gone down something like 25% since 1970.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Al-Khwarizmi If this is true, then how do they explain population stabilization in, e.g., Europe, and other developed areas?

Why shouldn't what worked for Europe work for the rest of the world?

<comment> barry-cotter Population didn't stabilise, anywhere, ever. Nothing "worked" for Europe. Most of Eastern Europe is losing population to emigration. If you look at breeding populations rather than geographies you see some populations growing and others shrinking. You don't see steady states.

The population behaviour of the British and that of descendants of those resident in Britain in 1900 are not the same thing. Focusing on nations obscures that fact.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi Sorry, I didn't make the best choice of words. With "stabilized" I really meant "stopped growing". And indeed, in practice this has resulted into shrinking, not a steady state.

<comment><USER11> Fertility rates declining for several generations is not stabilization. It's a bump in the road while humanity evolves resistance to whatever it is about modernity that causes us to have fewer children.

<comment><USER12> I don't think humans are every going to evolve past being a K-selected species.

<comment><USER13> Human females can easily have over 10 children each, so we are R-selected compared to a lot of species like Bonobos. Just a minor behavioral adjustment and we'll growing by a factor of 5 per generation, that will never happen to Bonobos who can only get pregnant every 5 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Could someone with more time than me summarize how they reached the conclusion that fertility was heritable? It seems very counter-intuitive unless I'm misunderstanding the precise meaning of "heritable" that enables them to draw this conclusion.

<comment><USER15> So far the consesus was that migrants from traditonally child rich societies, acclimated already a generation later at local lower levels if prosperitiy and education level was reached as well. So it's the economy and social stability through the state that replaces children as the only "pension and care" provider for retirement.

FRANCE: "We show a convergence towards French standards that differs across groups of origin. Women of Southeast Asian descent deviate from the fertility pattern of their parents, while those of Turkish descent preserve their parents' cultural heritage. These different paths of adaptation between groups partly reflect cultural distance between parents' country and host country. They also depend on family social capital, family structure, and family values. Access to a higher level of education is a crucial factor in erasing differences between groups" [https://hal.archives- ouvertes.fr/hal-02081758/document](https://hal.archives- ouvertes.fr/hal-02081758/document)

<comment><USER16> I suspect that "Southeast Asian" women observed had different religion than those where "fertility pattern of their parents" is preserved.

Not all religions have the same effect on the outcomes, ignoring that in the studies is misleading.

<comment><USER17> What it is pussyfooting around is that there is not that drastic of a drop in fertility rates of muslims.

I guess it shouldn't be hard to conceive where Islamic parties start having a major voice in elections because of demographics.

<comment><USER15> By numbers, global fertility/population trends and religion are not a "muslim" one, that's a made up western "identity" problem. If anything it's catholic to evangelical sectionism, if you look at Western Africa.

Overall religion is secondary at best, but economically weak tribal/familiy social nucleus cultures vs established nation states that provide reliable social safety not just for relatives.

"It's the Economy, stupid", look at fertility rates of Saudi Arabi, Iran, UAE Poland vs Nigeria.

<comment><USER17> The post that I was replying to was talking exactly about fertility rates of second, third and beyond generation immigrants in Netherlands.

And what was found is that females from south-east Asia had a big drop in fertility whereas Turks continued to have large families, comparatively.

So, no, the above research specifically disproves your argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have always wondered whether something like this could be observed.

I wonder, shouldn't this be already observable? I would look not at the median/mean fertility, but on the outliers on the upper end. If the share increases/becomes more expressed in social groups that are not associated with a large number of children otherwise, one should see indicators that the theory is has some thruth.

Also, we are talking about heritability and entire generations. If such trend can be identified, I would expect it to be very small and take time (measured in generations) until it will have a real effect.

<comment><USER19> This study ([https://www.pnas.org/content/114/5/E727](https://www.pnas.org/content/114/5/E727)) measured the speed at which selection against cognitive ability is occuring in the Icelandic population (they measured this genotypically rather than phenotypically). The rate at which it occurs is meaningful on the scale of our lifespans. Same is probably true for fertility rates, but as fertility is being selected for directly (rather than the indirect effect on cognitive ability) it's probably even more rapid.

Then this study more directly measured fertility's rate of evolution: [https://www.pnas.org/content/115/1/151](https://www.pnas.org/content/115/1/151). They used UK Biobank data (genetic data from 157,807 female and 115,902 male unrelated samples). They found the 'Age at First Birth' is the most strongly selected trait in the British population. So in the future we can look forward to a world filled with teenage mums.

That this is not obvious to everyone is just a testiment to how little people understand about evolution.

<comment><USER20> > That this is not obvious to everyone is just a testiment to how little > people understand about evolution.

Exactly because things are not obvious, they need to be explained. As long as you do not explain the things you call obvious, you cannot judge if people do not understand a topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is the opposite of what Hans Rosling says in his book Factfulness.

According to Hans Rosling's findings family size is linked to child mortality which is linked to poverty. When mothers see their children die then they want to have more children. When they see their children grow to adulthood then they have fewer children. You can also play with the data yourself on his site [https://www.gapminder.org/](https://www.gapminder.org/).

He also looked at family size relation to culture and religion and found even in religions that promote large families, family size is still declining.

Family size has dropped world wide everywhere except for Africa. There is an unfortunate link between poverty and family size in Africa. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is tracking this exact issue.

I am not a data scientist, but the heritability of large families seems a difficult thing to pull out of the data when environment plays such a large role. In my personal family history child mortality and religion did play a large role in family size. We all now have small families.

<comment><USER22> This is a 20+ year recollection...but while working on a Masters in Public Health, we learned that the only causal factor that could be linked to both number of children birthed and age at which a woman gives birth to her first child is the education level of the mother. That is, as women in a society have greater access to education, they postpones when they have their first child and in the end have fewer children in their lifetime.

<comment><USER21> Yes - Hans also said the same thing although indirectly.

His life work was reducing child mortality (under the age of 5.) He discovered that the biggest factor in reducing child mortality was the education level of the mother. It turns out that most child deaths are preventable if the mother understands how to prevent the death. For instance, dehydration due to diarrhea and vomiting can be prevented by sanitation. Also access to vaccines is linked to the education of the mother.

It goes without saying that access to birth control also plays a big factor. Melinda Gates tells a story about how she was talking to a group of African women about vaccines and what they really wanted was birth control so they could plan their family. They couldn't use condoms because culturally it implied they had AIDs. This also seems linked to education.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm sceptical of this result. Most previous research suggests that in countries where immigrants are able to assimilate, second-generation fertility levels converge with local social norms: [https://paa2008.princeton.edu/papers/80042](https://paa2008.princeton.edu/papers/80042)

<comment><USER11> Those immigrants haven't started the evolutionary process in question, since they have, by definition, only been exposed to a modern developed economy for one or two generations.

<comment><USER20> Which "evolutionary process in question" do you mean? Isn't the point that it is NOT about an evolutionary process?

<comment><USER11> The premise of the article is that fertility is heritable, which means an evolutionary process is taking place that will overcome the demographic transition.

<comment><USER20> > The premise of the article is that fertility is heritable (...)

Actually, that was the conclusion, and is exactly the thing that is being disputed.

<comment><USER11> The person I'm responding to is disputing that people in developed economies are evolving to become more fertile by pointing to the fertility rates of recent immigrants, which fall within a couple of generations. I am pointing out that these recent immigrants have not gone through multiple generations of selection for fertility in a developed economy, so the fact that their fertility rates drop upon arrival does not invalidate the hypothesis.

<comment><USER20> And I was responding to your claim about the premise of the article? How is the original post relevant in that respect?

Anyway, the point is still: if someone makes a claim, they should be able to back that up. That is not done in the paper, and also I cannot find a post by you explaining the reasoning for your hypothesis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner describes (extremely well, it´s a great book to read btw.) the evolution of Finch beaks on the Galapagos Islands. There was one particular Finch/beak size that had relatively small families and population growth, and was clearly being outcompeted by other, better adapted Finches.

Until there was a severe drought, when that type of beak was able to take advantage of a neglected source of foods, which wasn´t accessible to the other Finches - who were more sucessful, but only when there was abundant easy food. After the resultant die-off this particular Finch subtype dominated of course.

A lot of the discussion of evolutionary traits implicitly assumes an adaption to an unchanging environment, but that is very unlikely to be the actual situation, especially as in adapting, the adaption itself can change the larger environment.

</comment><comment><USER24> Well, the finite nature of the world makes its population stabilization likely.

<comment><USER25> There only needs to be enough resources to advance technology enough to enable space colonization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Some anecdotal data.

My father's parents had 8 surviving children.

My mother's parents had 8 surviving children.

My parents had 4 surviving children.

I have 4 children.

My siblings have, on average, 3 children, and will probably have 3.5 over time.

My cousin's have on average 3.5 children.

Grandparents: Asian.

Parents: Asian and lived in Middle East half their life.

Me and siblings: Living primarily in Middle East.

<comment><USER27> "Asian" is too broad to be a useful descriptor of ethnicity or culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Catastrophic climate change makes it very unlikely that people in the future will breed with similar success as in the past. Especially poor areas that today show high fertility will be hit hardest by changes over the next twenty to fifty years.

<comment><USER29> Isn't your reasoning backwards?

We know that improvements in living conditions lead to reduced fertility. And climate change will worsen living conditions, not improve them. So if areas with poor living conditions have high fertility now, why would even worse conditions (due to climate change) reduce their fertility? Sure, the outcomes and quality of life of the children will be even worse than it is but I can't see how that will impact rates of reproduction.

<comment><USER28> Sufficiently bad conditions lead to children starving and women not surviving labor.

<comment><USER30> In bad conditions humans breed more. There was a ten year famine in Ethiopia yet there wasn't a single year in which the population actually dropped. People stop breeding when they know their offspring will survive

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The main factors currently in determining family size is not genetically heritable, but cultural. Culture appears to be heritable but that is just because culture tends to be passed down.

Culture can change fast in either way, towards more children or less.

This does not mean we will be stable but rather culture matters.

For example soon as a member leaves a conservative religion stream and shifts to a more liberal streams their fertility instantly drops in one generation. Israel's government even models this in their demographics projects as the flow between religious streams of Judaism is the biggest fertility modifier in that country.

This does means in part conservatives will inherit the earth because liberal culture right now cause smaller families but this is culture. I think liberals have to fix this.

Also if a women gets an education her fertility drops and the more education the lower the fertility. This means uneducated women (for whatever reason, religious or other) will inherit the earth. If educated women tend to be those with more genetic talents, and in aggregate this may be the case, then this is quite a problematic trend long term.

I think the trends to who has fertility and who doesn't isn't great and should be a real topic of conversation. As a society currently we do not deal with this head on.

<comment><USER20> >> Also if a women gets an education her fertility drops and the more education the lower the fertility. This means uneducated women (for whatever reason, religious or other) will inherit the earth. If educated women tend to be those with more genetic talents, and in aggregate this may be the case, then this is quite a problematic trend long term.

So is there any reason to believe that last "if" is true? Why would that be a problem anyway, as we can simply make sure schools are in good shape to educate those children, no matter the education level of their parents?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> How about a counter effect?

Many couples today reproduce with the assistance of reproductive technology. This releases selection pressure, so low-fertility genes proliferate.

</comment><comment><USER20> The authors seem to have a background in economics, does that really fit the research topic of that paper?

<comment><USER20> One of the sources: [https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0126821)

>> This finding implies that individuals with genetic predispositions for an earlier AFB had a reproductive advantage and that natural selection operated not only in historical, but also in contemporary populations. The observed postponement in the AFB across the past century in Europe contrasts with these findings, suggesting an evolutionary override by environmental effects and underscoring that evolutionary predictions in modern human societies are not straight forward. <<

Yeah, so basically we got a simple model by two economists vs. decades of empirical data?

It'd be funny if it wouldn't sound like a scientists version of the "immigrants will have a lot of children and replace us" lie.

<comment><USER19> Because that never happened before in human history:

[https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Who+We+Are+and+How+We+Got+Here&re...](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Who+We+Are+and+How+We+Got+Here&ref=nb_sb_noss)

<comment><USER20> What exactly is your point?

<comment><USER20> Sorry, my mistake, forget it. I should have read your other comments first before replying.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Peer to Peer coding: Platform for developers to talk and peer code - <AUTHOR> http://techwithdut.com <comment><AUTHOR> Thought some of you guys would be interested,had to pivot multiple times to where I am now.</comment>


Migrate Jest to TypeScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/facebook/jest/pull/7554 <comment><USER2> Interesting move. If major projects within Facebook are migrating away it seems pretty likely that Flow is on the way out.

Which I think would be a good thing, it seems like a lot of projects and libraries haven't fully embraced either because it's unclear which to choose. In this case I don't think the "competition makes them better" aspect outweighs the downsides of having a fragmented community.

<comment><USER3> So, I was one of (or I suppose the only...) person in the linked issue arguing that competition is useful, and that it makes sense for Facebook's products to be tied into the same ecosystem.

As others have mentioned, when Flow was first launched, TS had an extremely limited type system (e.g. no null checking, no union types). Of course this has improved a lot over time, as the two have converged, but there's still a long way to go for either project to allow JS reach the level of correctness and expressiveness of, say, OCaml or Haskell.

Flow has consistently for the past few years been bringing new ideas to the table from this algebraic data types background, which often have ended up proving to be good ideas, and are in various stages of trickling down to TS.

I worry that if the ecosystem becomes completely dominated by TS, the overall focus will end up back where TS started: rudimentary OOP inspired types, without the underlying goal of overall correctness, which Flow strives for, while TS openly eschews in favour of "pragmatism".

<comment><USER4> You can't have the same level of correctness as ocaml if you want to maintain the compatibility with JavaScript. Typescript type system is unsound for this reason. You can't have anything approaching ocaml correctness when in typescript all objects with the same shape are interchangeable.

<comment><USER3> Yeah I realise you'd never reach the same level of soundness due to the limitations of the underlying JS (although presumably you could get close with a subset?). But that's why it's an interesting challenge, and I think what Flow has shown is that it's possible to get a lot closer than had previously been imagined.

If everyone just accepted the argument 4 years ago that "JS will never be sound" then maybe today TS would still just be Java style `interface` annotations for classes. It's not like the Flow team has reached a ceiling at this point... there's still plenty on their roadmap that would continue to improve soundness and expressiveness.

> You can't have anything approaching ocaml correctness when in typescript all > objects with the same shape are interchangeable.

Could you elaborate? Flow has recently switched to exact objects by default[1], which I would have thought would be enough for a sound approach?

[1] [https://medium.com/flow-type/on-the-roadmap-exact-objects- by...](https://medium.com/flow-type/on-the-roadmap-exact-objects-by- default-16b72933c5cf)

<comment><USER4> For example in typescript this is valid:

        type A = {name: string}
        type B = {name: string}
        function print(obj: A) { alert(obj.name);}
        let a: A = {name: "hello"};
        let b: B = {name: "world"}
        print(a);
        print(b);

This is because of typescript structural equality and I think that the same applies to flow given your link. Obviously if I want a function to accept an email I don't want the same function to accept an address, but in typescript you can't guarantee it because you have no way to get rid of structural equality as far as I understood.

<comment><USER3> Ah I see. That can be achieved since Flow 0.51 with opaque types[1][2]. It seems like TypeScript hasn't yet caught up with this functionality[3].

[1] [https://medium.com/flow-type/hiding-implementation- details-w...](https://medium.com/flow-type/hiding-implementation-details-with- flows-new-opaque-type-aliases-feature-40e188c2a3f9)

[2] [https://flow.org/en/docs/types/opaque- types/](https://flow.org/en/docs/types/opaque-types/)

[3] [https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/15807#issueco...](https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/15807#issuecomment-301196459)

<comment><USER4> Yup that seems to help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The TypeScript team really made the right call by adding support for TypeScript syntax to Babel. Ever since that got merged, the floodgates have opened: more and more projects support TypeScript by default or practically only requiring you to flip a switch, making the cost of adopting it (if you don't need to spend time learning it as well) practically zero. No matter how small the project, if I start a new one today, it will be written in TypeScript.

Adoption is now at a point where it is exponential: more projects adopting TypeScript, resulting in more typings being available, resulting in more projects adopting TypeScript.

If there's one thing you can focus on to learn as a Javascript developer in the near future, I'm sure it is TypeScript.

<comment><USER6> As an uninformed typescript dev, can you explain to me how TS Babel support changed things? I understand its mechanical implications, but I don't see why it would matter for adoption.

<comment><USER5> For example, it made it much easier for projects like Create React App to add optional support for TypeScript. When they added support, that just involved adding an optional extra step to the compilation process (checking whether you violated the type constraints) to make sure you actually get the benefits of TypeScript. Other than that, though, TypeScript projects using CRA use the exact same infrastructure when they use TypeScript, and the compiled output should be similar.

Before, this would have involved replacing Babel with TypeScript for transpiling. This means projects could have slightly different results depending on whether they were using TypeScript or not, increasing the surface area for bugs and adding an extra step to the debugging process.

<comment><USER7> Doesn't create react app use webpack behind the scenes?ts-loader already worked pretty well? Not sure how that affected anyone using Babel In a built pipeline, but the announcement made it sound like there were tons of people doing bespoke balbel-only builds.. Have not experienced that myself.

<comment><USER8> Babel is a commonly used plug-in Webpack though. So I am guessing all projects that used Babel/Webpack got TypeScript support for free. It's a TIL for me, definitely going to have to look into this. Sounds exciting.

<comment><USER5> Note that "TypeScript support" in Babel means that Babel can now strip the extra syntax that is part of TypeScript applications. It doesn't actually parse them.

A way to think about it is to consider TypeScript to be a linter, like ESlint - but one that you can help by annotating your code with e.g. the types of values you expect it to get passed. Babel can now strip those annotations before it transpiles your code, but you still need TypeScript to do the actual "linting". See [https://vincenttunru.com/TypeScript-vs- Javascript](https://vincenttunru.com/TypeScript-vs-Javascript)

<comment><USER9> It's more than a linter though. The Typescript compiler can handle the most common usage of Babel, namely targeting older runtimes.

If you set the build target to ES5 you can still use modern features like async/await and it will rewrite them using a regenerator function that runs on older platforms.

<comment><USER5> Sure, it _can_ do that - but in CRA's setup, it doesn't; Babel handles that for you. Babel's TypeScript support allows CRA to re-use its Babel pipeline, and the linter metaphor was meant to help people understand that.

Like most metaphors, it's not a one-on-one match.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like TS. I really do. It makes life nice and easy to catch bugs quite quickly and also makes you think about your code quite a bit more (which I guess makes you a bit slower but it's important enough so it's ok).

What is annoying is when you are stuck on something and can't continue because you can't figure out the type of a specific object (and you've disabled any / or you are on the strictest settings).

I was recently stuck on ReactJS + Redux + Redux Saga and it took me a while (~ 1 day) to figure it all out (and I'm still not 100% sure if I did it right). It was fine when I disabled the strictest settings for a bit but it's definitely annoying (asking for help in Typescript, React, Redux, Saga and elsewhere didn't really help at all).

<comment><USER11> I basically do two things to make sure type checking doesn't slow me down:

1) Use _emitOnly: true_. This means that if your code has type errors, it still compiles. And you can fix the type error later.

2) Never use _any_ directly. Not all _any_ s are equal. Some are there because you don't have the time to figure out a proper type annotation. Others are there because you _can_ express a proper annotation, but think that it's just not worth the effort. And some _any_ s are there because the type system is not capable of expressing the type you have in mind.

What you want to do is to clearly annotate your intention when you're typing something as _any_. So what I do is to simply disallow directly using _any_ , and instead, use a few global type aliases that better communicate my intention:

      type $FixMe = any // Fix this type, preferably before accepting the PR
      type $IntentionalAny = any // This `any` is intentional => never has to be fixed
      type $Unexpressable = any // TS cannot express the proper type atm

I often put these aliases in a defs.d.ts file and use them instead of _any_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I much prefer TypeScript than JavaScript, but TS can still allow shitty code, such as:

* Using the type 'any'.

* Using the immediate value `undefined` (JS is mental in the fact that it has two kinds of null... and with TS there's really no excuse for using this one, however TS compiler doesn't complain).

* Using very ugly, or very easy to be misleading, typeguards (granted, TS doesn't have decent typeguards, see [https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/28337](https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/28337) ...).

For these reasons, I applaud JS people moving to TS. But I will not recommend any other people (non-JS) to use TS at all.

<comment><USER13> I very rarely see TypeScript developers actually use `any` (usually to reflect something like something parsed from arbitrary JSON that needs to be interrogated rather than just type-asserted) and in my experience it's a rare shop that doesn't use `strict` for everything to at least force it to be called out and checked in code review.

`undefined` and `null` seem conventionally used to mean different things amongst the TypeScript developers I know. `null` is typically used to denote something that is consciously known to be nonexistent; `undefined` is not rarely, in my experience, used at all except as a check against something coming in from untyped modules. I'm sure there are people who honor this more in the breach than the observance, but this is pretty consistent in my experience.

Personally, I've moved to TypeScript for most of my personal projects, away from both Ruby and C#, and it's _fantastic_. (Some things remain more appropriate for the JVM, typically Kotlin, but that's OK, too.)

<comment><USER14> > I very rarely see TypeScript developers actually use `any` (usually to > reflect something like something parsed from arbitrary JSON that needs to be > interrogated rather than just type-asserted)

Even that example usage of `any` should be less common, now. I think `unknown` (which is fairly new) is better there.

<comment><USER15> Is it? My impression is that `unknown` type doesn't solve that specific problem.

        const out: unknown = JSON.parse("{a: 1}");
        if (out && typeof out.a === 'number') console.log(out.a);

gives the error:

        [ts] Object is of type 'unknown'. [2571]

<comment><USER16> Pretty sure you're missing a typeof check for 'out'.

<comment><USER15> I'm pretty sure I'm not.

        const out: unknown = JSON.parse("{a: 1}");
        if (typeof out === 'object' && out && typeof out.a === 'number') {
          console.log(out.a);
        }

gives the error:

        [ts] Property 'a' does not exist on type 'object'. [2339]

It's a completely unnecessary check, anyway: `out &&` is sufficient to exclude `null` and `undefined`, which is all that's needed to ensure that `out.a` won't crash. I challenge you to give a single input to `JSON.parse` that would crash my code without the `typeof` check.

<comment><USER16> I see what you mean. I guess unknown just doesn't work that well with inline type checks for objects, although in that case you probably want a function anyways. Using the `in` return type you can do something like this:

      const out: unknown = JSON.parse("{a: 1}");

      interface MyStructure {
          a: number;
      }

      function isMyStructure(toCheck: unknown): toCheck is MyStructure {
          return toCheck instanceof Object && 'a' in toCheck;
      }

      if (isMyStructure(out)) {
          console.log(out.a);
      }

This will give you no type errors, and gives you the benefit of having a re- usable function for this validation. I just discovered this today. I seem to have missed it in a recent release note.

<comment><USER15> Oh, yeah, that feature's existed for years; it's called "user-defined type guards".

[https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/advanced- types....](https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/advanced- types.html#user-defined-type-guards)

Unfortunately, it doesn't work in `checkJs` mode, and I always wish I could do it inline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like plain Javascript more. I guess those who are from Java/C# background would like TS.

<comment><USER18> > I guess those who are from Java/C# background would like TS

Been using dynamic languages almost entirely for the last 20 years. I love TypeScript. Starting to wish the other languages I worked with had optional types.

<comment><USER6> Good optional types that is. Python, my love of the last 15 years, is finally adopting optional typing but it's an atrociously bad system compared to typescript, to the point that I am seriously wondering if the language will ever have a decent typing system.

Having to import basic types, use awkward syntax, etc... Blergh. I really hope we can be more pragmatic and learn from typescript.

<comment><USER19> > Python ... I am seriously wondering if the language will ever have a decent > typing system.

Considering that everyone seems to use six to target both Python 2 and 3, I am seriously wondering if the language will ever advance at all.

<comment> basil-rash I don't think we'll get a Python 4 in the foreseeable future ([1] goes into more detail, from a core CPython developer's perspective). But that doesn't mean it can't advance, just that everything will be forwards compatible. Think C and C++, or even ECMAScript, for that matter.

[1]: [https://opensource.com/life/14/9/why-python-4-wont-be- python...](https://opensource.com/life/14/9/why-python-4-wont-be-python-3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> But both Flow and Jest are both developed by the Facebook team. First of all, like the author, I didn't say Flow is bad than TypeScript. Secondly, I moved from Flow to TypeScript last year. Anyway, this going to have a huge impact on Flow ecosystem.

<comment><USER21> FB devs show that there are no dogmas, only different solutions to different problems. Flow has its merits and was a good start as an experiment back then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a TypeScript Jest consumer can't complain, though @types/jest is pretty good.

I would be much more excited if they opened up Jest to be more "programmable" though. Dynamically creating tests and etc(before you ask, I was looking into wrapping an existing bash test framework in Jest). Perhaps the move to TS will make more of the internal interfaces feel public?

</comment><comment><USER3> Something which I think could be helpful for the overall ecosystem, and allow both type systems to coexist and thrive, would be more attention put into tools which transpile code and type definitions between the two languages. The two most popular projects that I could find[1][2] are unfortunately incomplete and have not received any real updates in months.

[1] [https://github.com/joarwilk/flowgen](https://github.com/joarwilk/flowgen) [2] [https://github.com/bcherny/flow-to- typescript](https://github.com/bcherny/flow-to-typescript)

</comment><comment><USER22> This is awesome. Just yesterday I was asking around the TS community what good (opensource) CLI with plugins/extensions were there that were written in TS. I was looking for code I could use as learning and inspiration. I was led to vscode and angular-cli, which are both in github. Funny enough, they are also mentioned in this PR's comments.

Jest, once/if migrated will be another great addition. Hopefully that will happen soon. The community would really profit from great inspirational codebases (CLIs in my case) written in Typescript.

<comment><USER7> Vscode project is a beast with some pretty unintuitive module boundriea due to their platform separation and not bothering to export anything separately (like their IPC system)

Check out the CLI for TypeORM. It uses yargs which has pretty good types, and I have used it successfully a couple places now (internally). No plugins or extension examplea though last I looked :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> So how long until the best parts of TypeScript are subsumed into JavaScript, and TypeScript is discarded like CoffeeScript?

<comment><USER24> CoffeeScript and TypeScript are different enough that I don't think TypeScript could possibly have the same fate. CoffeeScript was all about syntax sugar, but 95% of the value of TypeScript is the typechecker that runs in your dev environment (editor, CI, etc) and has no business running in the browser. I sure hope we don't get to a world where every browser needs to implement a standards-compliant typechecker; that would be both architecturally questionable and greatly slow down improvements to the type system.

It would be nice if the browser could accept and execute TypeScript code (that is, ignore the type annotations), which would avoid the need for a transpile step, but that's a relatively minor improvement, and would certainly not be a replacement for TypeScript itself.

<comment><USER25> FWIW, "the browser" already type checks Javascript.

Where a compiler would throw an exception, the Javascript runtime creates/destroys optimizations.

For example, '1 + a' type checks 'a' and optimizes the assembly if 'a' is a number. As soon as there is some other type represented by 'a' the runtime deoptimizes that method.

If the runtime could just throw an exception in those situations and keep the typed optimization a lot of our Javascript might run faster.

<comment><USER24> Browsers certainly collect runtime types of variables in hot code paths, but that's pretty different from the whole-program static verification that TypeScript does. TypeScript is designed to have an expressive and flexible type system, and typechecking a large codebase might take tens of seconds or minutes, not something you want running every time any user loads your site.

That said, including types in JS could be useful as a hint for the optimizer, but at least in TypeScript and Flow, the types can always be wrong even if no errors are reported (e.g. from misuse of escape hatches), so the runtime would need to double-check them.

<comment><USER25> I agree with you. They definitely should keep doing "type checking" lazily.

From what I understand, it would be a lot cheaper if types were built into the language, and the runtime's contract could trust the type and if it is wrong then undefined behavior occurs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't understand.

Why not Reason?

<comment><USER24> In addition to the "more approachable to contributors" answer, Flow and TypeScript are easy to port between, since they're both light extensions to JS and have almost the same syntax. I've done a Flow to TS port a few times and almost all of the code stays the same, it's just accounting for little differences in the type system details. Switching to a completely different programming language is much more work and much riskier.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: when are the comment scores coming back - <AUTHOR>

i find it hard to filter through comments <comment><USER2> The issue of what to do about comment quality on HN was brought up in a thread by pg just twelve days ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696>

He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."

The current experiment of not showing comment scores on comment threads started even more recently. My guess on the timing is that the current experiment (and perhaps other experiments) will continue until it is clear what kind of settings on HN do the best to encourage all of us to upvote good comments (that's the crucial step) and NOT upvote mean or dumb comments. Check the bestcomments view of HN content

<http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments>

to get a look from time to time at what comments are receiving the most upvotes.

P.S. Please help everyone's filtering (which is still reflected in comment vertical placement in a thread) by upvoting the comments that the most thoughtful and informative.</comment>


Ask HN: legally start a Bay Area startup without being American? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a Canadian, and have worked in the Bay Area on various visas since 2005 or so. Now I'd like to start my own venture here, but I don't yet have a Green Card. What are the options?<p>Some have advised that I create some sort of corporation, technically owned by an investor or someone else I trust, of which I'm an employee. That's a bit scary to me for obvious reasons. At the moment I don't have an American co-founder I trust enough. (I know that according to pg's criteria this means the whole thing is a non-starter anyway, but let's assume that I'd get some co-founders later once I had a spiffy proof of concept.) <comment><USER2> Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

As a Canadian you have some visa categories open to you that others do not. I don't know anything about those so cannot comment on them further.

However, the US has the E-2 Treaty Investor visa for situations like this - see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-2_visa> and <http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/types/types_1273.html> .. Canada is a treaty signatory. There's quite a lot to it, but essentially it allows you to enter and work within the US to control an investment. Investment must be "significant" with respect to the sort of business it is (so if you were opening a steel mill, $200k probably wouldn't cut it, but a software company? Theoretically it could be as little as $100k). There was a post linked from HN recently about a British group of guys who used the E-2 successfully to set up a company in the Bay Area.

Alternatively, you could work on your company in Canada for a period of a couple of years then open a US branch/subsidary and transfer to it through an L visa.

The short story, though, is that it's really, really hard and generally rather expensive, unless you have access to some Canadian focused visa class I'm not aware of. Going to work at an established American company is not particularly hard (assuming you have a degree) but anything beyond that involves a great deal of pain. I've been investigating moving to the US as a self employed person for about six years now and am still not close to discovering a good route (with "save $250k in cash" as my current, tricky to attain fallback position).

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I know, the only benefits of being Canadian are the TN visas and a slightly faster route towards H1-B status. But both of those are for professionals working for some sponsoring company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hi, I've been in the same shoes as you.

As far as your options: having an American co-founder or business agent is a good start.

However, regardless of what option you choose to pursue to enter the US as a Canadian, I would recommend if you are bootstrapping your own venture, that it would be best to get to profitability or at least a promising product before exploring your options for working and living in California. It is not only expensive, but very time consuming to work out the details. It's definitely worth all the trouble, but focus on your company and product first.

I hope it works out for you.

</comment><comment><USER4> Don't take this as legal immigration advice, but:

1\. Create product on the side while working for someone OR move back to Canada and work on it full-time

2\. Start an LLC (non-US citizens can do this, and C-corps)

3\. Raise money or become profitable (actual amount varies, some say $200k or more)

4\. Find a business co-founder and other employees

5\. Sponsor your visa and come back to the US or go fulltime with your own co.

6\. PROFIT !!! (oh, wait, that was step 3...)

I'd suggest getting the proof of concept done, and then worrying about everything else. Execute first, ask questions later.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think that unless you are investing a large sum to start this business and can indicate that it will benefit the local area (e.g. that it will employ a lot of people), your best bet would be to get a job and have your employer sponsor your immigration.

On that note, it may just be (substantially) easier to start your business in Canada. Are there specific reasons you want to start your business in the Bay Area, aside from personal preference?

<comment><AUTHOR> The reasons to stay in the Bay Area are mostly personal. I have more friends here than back "home" now. I can demo to people every day of the week if I want. I like the city and the culture. And this is an amazing area for the concentration of talent that I'll eventually want to bring on board.

I have lived in Vancouver and I'm not going to knock it, all kinds of cool things have come out of there, and the lifestyle is great too. But where is my Maker Faire? My functional language discussion groups?

To me, this is an attempt at lifestyle design. If I just wanted to grind away at something without my friends and preferred hangouts in close reach... well, that's not enough right now.

Perhaps the idea of 'lifestyle design' is incompatible with starting a new venture. I suppose I have to just sacrifice _everything_ for the good of the idea?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why not be a Toronto-based startup, also doing busines in SF?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I don't know what you mean by "doing business" in SF. If you mean the LLC is technically founded in Canada and just happens to have an SF branch, maybe that would be fine. But, that seems legally dubious to me.

<comment><USER7> Why not just startup in Toronto? I'm actually a Bay Area boy who lives in Toronto; I came here to do his Master's at U. of Toronto. I've stayed ever since working for a startup, and my roommate is about to start a company with his fellow labmates as well. There is a great community of startups here, and lots of amazing talent from U. of Toronto and Waterloo.

<comment><USER8> Care to point out a few examples - just genuinely curious. In 02 things seemed pretty dry - mostly finance or glorified IT gigs.

<comment><USER9> <http://startupindex.ca/startups/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hey bro, i am singaporean, and I have a bay area startup. My co-founder has a green card. I started a company,and I am working here on a temp work visa. Not ideal, but works. let me know if you want more details</comment>


macOS 10.15 Catalina: The Ars Technica Review - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/?p=1523649 <comment><USER2> Reminder: 32-bit apps will not work in Catalina. If you use your computer as your main work machine, hold off on the update. You're bound to run into a random forgotten app you use every once in a while that's no longer supported.

To see what's still 32-bit on your mac, go to:

Apple icon > About this mac > system report > applications > then click the 64-bit column to sort. No will be 32-bit apps.</comment>


What happened when we got subpoenaed over our Tor exit node - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2015/08/04/what-happened-when-the-fbi-sub.html

<comment><USER2> Noisetor (sub-project of the Noisebridge hackerspace in SF) received an identical subpoena, and had the same results. We contacted our legal counsel and subsequently the FBI to explain the whole "we can't provide this information because tor" at which point they dropped our requirement to testify.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you want to run an exit node then this is, I think, required reading: [https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tips-running-exit-node- mini...](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tips-running-exit-node-minimal- harassment)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is barely content. "We got subpoenaed and our lawyer told the FBI we didn't have any logs and they never contacted us again." Ok, great.

<comment><USER5> I think this was an extremely useful thing to know. Having a good lawyer on your side helps. Thats is the lesson I learned.

<comment><USER6> how do you know the lawyer is good? i agree her letter was effective in this instance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "And that was it" .. so far. I think they're getting a little ahead of themselves to assume they're in the clear simply because they haven't heard anything.

Unless they did hear something extremely definitive and simply decided not to share that with us in the way they did the command letter.

<comment><USER8> Let's see. The subpoena was issued on June 12, 2015. They were supposed to appear before the grand jury on July 1, 2015. The article was posted on August 4, 2015.

So they clearly missed appearing before the grand jury on July 1, and didn't get arrested for it. But yeah, it's a bit too soon to assume that no other shoes are going to drop...

<comment><USER9> There's only one other shoe that _could_ drop, which would be an assertion that hosting a Tor exit node is illegal in general. I doubt the Feds want to argue that directly where it could be directly opposed.

<comment><USER8> No, the other shoe could be that they get a subpoena for all their logs of any form on the Tor machine or any machine connected to it, or something of that order.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just to be totally sure that nothing is retained, one can use Tor-ramdisk from CD on a diskless box.[0]

[0] [http://opensource.dyc.edu/tor-ramdisk](http://opensource.dyc.edu/tor- ramdisk)

<comment><USER11> That's truly minimal package. That's great. Less than 7 megabytes. I'm just way too used to see bloat.

<comment><USER10> Just to be totally clear, it's a Linux distro :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd be interested to see the actual subsequent discussion with the FBI following the initial subpoena.

<comment><USER13> There is a pretty decent chance there isn't any. Once the FBI got the Boing Boing response letter they probably checked with their tech people to see if it was true that there'd be no data and/or that it IS a TOR exit node and sent a simple 'nevermind you don't have to appear' letter. This matches with how the article is written, 'we sent this letter letter and that was it.'

<comment><USER12> The official response to Boing Boing (the resulting "nevermind you don't have to appear" letter) is exactly what I'd like to see.

<comment><USER13> The letter BB sent in response is right there in the article. It's the bit that starts with "Special Agent XXXXXX."

<comment><USER12> The official response isn't, though. (I edited my previous comment to clarify what I meant.)

<comment><USER13> Ah, misunderstood your original comment. It's probably nothing very interesting. All that is required is something like this. BB probably got something similar.

[https://www.eff.org/document/letter-confirming-subpoena- with...](https://www.eff.org/document/letter-confirming-subpoena-withdrawal)

<comment><USER12> Thanks! I've never actually seen a letter like that; I appreciate the link to a sample one.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


US Elections – Bigger Than Adult Diapers - jim-greer https://medium.com/@jimgreer/us-elections-are-bigger-than-adult-diapers-8066bcf256d8

<comment> jim-greer This piece was inspired by the comments on the How to Fight Corruption with Game Theory article I submitted this weekend - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8675489](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8675489).

It's my first post on Medium... feedback appreciated again!</comment>


Feds: Silk Road boss paid $80,000 for snitch's torture and murder - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/feds-silkroad-boss-paid-80000-for-snitchs-murder-and-torture/ <comment><AUTHOR> Holy shit.

He paid $80k to an _undercover cop_ to have someone else killed.

Incidentally: Thomas Ptacek's First Rule Of Internet Violent Crime (based on something like a decade of news stories):

If you ask someone you meet on the Internet to accept money in exchange for killing somebody, and they say yes, THEY'RE A COP.

<comment><USER2> Do any of you actually believe any of this shit? Do you realize what level of distraction we're likely reading at this point? Keep a healthy dose of skepticism for the next few weeks until everything settles down. The authorities are probably not going to be releasing the truth if they still have the means to catch other criminals in the same way they caught DPR.

<comment><AUTHOR> You think the DOJ invented an entire murder-for-hire scheme with an undercover cop in a federal indictment because they're intent on convincing message board nerds to distrust Bitcoin?

<comment><USER3> The are less-probable sounding things in the news these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The indictment is much better than the article.

An undercover agent posing as a smuggler, wants to unload 10 kilos. DPR sets him up with a major silkroad vendor who is also an employee. The undercover agent sends the drugs, and arrests DPR's employee. DPR doesn't realize that he was responsible for getting the employee arrested, and then hires the undercover agent to kill his ex-employee.

<comment><USER5> Reading the alleged DPR dialog I can't help thinking this guy thought he was some Walter White character. Or maybe I just have Breaking Bad on the brain...

<comment><USER4> It is more like the making of Breaking Bad. The FBI staged torture photos of DPR's ex-employee. I imagine Jesse's makeup artist went from his day job to the FBI.

What is funny, is DPR got away with the murder for hire plot. They tried to set him up by making him do a bank transfer. After having seen the photo's, the undercover agent thought he would send the money non-anonymously, but DPR used some now defunct Australian anonymous wire service. It took the FBI several months to locate him.

<comment><USER6> _> After having seen the photo's, the undercover agent thought he would send the money non-anonymously_

"Oh hey, you're a violent thug who murders people for money? I'm a random guy running a billion dollar underground drug marketplace. Here's my contact info..."

After seeing the photos, I'd be absolutely sure to send the money anonymously.

<comment><USER4> You are right. I was thinking of a payment that would be untraceable by a hitman, but traceable by the FBI. The payment method he used was not traceable by either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow! So his claim in the other indictment wasn't just a silly negotiating tactic. And he admitted his involvement to another person solely to try to save a few bitcoins when he allegedly had $80 million worth in his account! An amount so large that he would be lucky to be able to launder even a tiny fraction (even if he bought a car wash or laser tag arena).

This guy has been watching too many TV shows. He's actually lucky he got caught before he was on the receiving end of violent antics like his. The Walter Whites of the real world don't have a life full of adventures outsmarting criminals and staying one step ahead of the cops. They live desperately on edge until they make a small misstep that gets them thrown in prison or killed.

</comment><comment><USER8> I live in Mexico and I have seen facebook profiles of guys wearing their _insert any kind of organized crime organization related to drugs_ "uniform". Like its just there, its listed as their job sometimes, too. Like, granted not all people that list it actually do it. But still, can you imagine just doing a regular search on Facebook and having hundreds of people to arrest?

War on drugs my ass. Use of NSA privacy-breaking technology to fight "the bad guys" my ass.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why would DPR hire a smuggler?

Why would DPR delete the photo evidence, but not the chat log evidence?

Are there transactions in the blockchain that represent the payment? Can we find them?

Is this part of the story something that can feasibly be made up after the fact?

Was SR a voluntary exchange with no victims, and for DPR to do real time, would some charge like this have had to have been found?

Edit: I'm not necessarily saying I believe he's innocent, but this part of the story seems so strange to me that I really think these questions are worth asking.

<comment><USER10> For question #5, at least, the answer is "definitely not". The feds have never had the slightest bit of trouble putting completely non-violent friendly neighborhood dealers away for decades.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone believe it?

I would need to see a lot more proof... remember that Julian Assange of Wikileaks was accused of rape in an attempt to discredit him.

<comment><USER12> Is there some evidence that vindicates Julian Assange that I'm unaware of? If not, how do you know the accusations aren't valid?

<comment><USER9> Is there some evidence that says that god is not real?

That's not really a great argument... the burden of proof is on the person claiming it.

<comment><USER13> patrickg_zill is making a claim - that the rape accusations are to discredit Assange.

<comment><USER9> That's kind of sidestepping my point. He said two things:

1) There was a rape accusation

2) The accusation was made to discredit Assange

My statement that "the burden of proof is on the person claiming it" is relevant to both parts individually. Neither the rape accusation or the discredit argument have been proved, therefore judgment should be withheld on both. Just because the second is a claim that hasn't been proven, doesn't mean the first is true.

<comment><USER14> So do you, or do you not, believe that there was a rape accusation?

<comment><USER9> Yes there was an accusation, and I don't understand your point in asking.

Edit: getting pedantic with this but oh well. I guess the language "doesn't mean the first is true" was ambiguous. I did not mean to say that #2 being a claim that hasn't been proven meant that #1 may or may not have happened in the first place, I meant to say that #2 being a claim that hasn't been proved does not mean that the accusation itself, which truly was made, was true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So does this new information validate that this service that provided for the exchange of illegal narcotics was in fact evil and should have been shut down much sooner.

How does this knowledge effect the ongoing debate about digital privacy ?

<comment><USER16> No, this information is just hearsay. This is a PR campaign by the Obama administration to justify cracking down on Bitcoin and Tor.

Until DPR has tried and convicted we should assume that all reporting on this criminal investigation is lies and slander. I'm not trying to defend DPR, torture, or any of that, but we need to hold ourselves to higher standards.

This kind of news caters directly to us -- the affluent tech crowd -- and we should be especially careful. The submitters of these news articles will need to be closely scrutinized as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Obama administration is so concerned about Bitcoin that they created a fake murder for hire scheme instrumented by a fake undercover cop documented in a federal indictment that supersedes another federal indictment that _explicitly says Bitcoin has lawful uses_ , and is so concerned about Tor that... what, they stopped funding it?

<comment><USER16> I'm not saying that DPR is innocent, on the contrary. I'm saying that the government will be using this as an opportunity to shout from the highest mountaintops that decentralized systems of currency/information transfer is dangerous.

Of course, those doing the shouting will be the mainstream media -- mouthpieces of the government.

Criminal investigations are one thing, but guiding and manipulating the general populace is something else entirely. Tomorrow we will definitely be seeing lots of news about DPR, Bitcoin, Tor, and drugs -- this situation will be spun to high hell, both for supporting decriminalization and undermining it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you miss the part about how the indictment said _the opposite_ about Bitcoin?

<comment><USER16> If the media reports that -- despite DPR's unsavoury activities -- BTC has its uses then I will quickly and happily eat crow. I'm expecting the worst tomorrow, especially considering all elements in the situation have very poor reputations (Silk Road, BTC, Tor, Tor hidden services).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why the @#$@# did they let this guy go free for almost 8 months after this?

It was long enough that he attempted to put out another hit... it looked like a con in retrospect, but someone might actually be _dead_ because of this delay.

What were they thinking?

<comment><USER18> It's a good question, but I suspect maybe they just thought the risk of this particular alleged attempted hitman-hirer _successfully_ hiring an actual hitman was low. That is, if you have to hire this done, you probably shouldn't. Most who are satisfied with the services of hitmen they've employed, have already killed multiple people themselves, or they're at least plugged into one or more criminal enterprises that utilize violence regularly.

I don't have any particular knowledge of any of the above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I find the hitman idea rather silly. I will preface this by saying, that I do think there are, in some organized groups, probably such thing as a hitman. A loner, on the internet...don't count on it.

So, you pay $40,000 up front. That's then mine to walk away with. Or heck, I can then threaten to go to the cops unless you give me the other half. You surely wouldn't go to the cops about this little scam, right? You obviously don't have the fortitude or skill to do it yourself or you wouldn't have paid me, so I'm not worried about you coming after me. That would only leave you to hire another nonexistent hitman, to come after me, who would without doubt be a cop or fellow scam artist.

Seems like this isn't a good idea to begin with now, doesn't it?

</comment><comment><USER20> He paid for it, but for what it's worth, it did not happen. Certainly not a good idea regardless...

I do wonder about the name Dread Pirate Roberts though... I feel there has to be at least one other DPR.

<comment><USER21> Supposedly there has been at least one another person who was the original founder and who was bought out by the dude they arrested. Lemme find sauce.

EDIT:

Here's something [http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/meet- th...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/meet-the-dread- pirate-roberts-the-man-behind-booming-black-market-drug-website-silk-road/2/)

<comment><USER22> In the complaint filed in SDNY, the FBI spends a couple pages detailing the reasons that they believe Silk Road only had one owner, and why the "sale" was just an attempt to confuse people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Somehow I thought it was a known thing, that outside of the movies, if you found a hitman, that is willing to do the deed, he's either a con artist or an officer of the law.

</comment><comment><USER24> Seriousness aside, this would make one hell of a show. I bet someone is working on a script right now.

</comment><comment><USER25> I guess using Occam's razor doesn't apply to this case. Because a lot of people seem to be in complete denial about this whole thing.

What's most likely? That he in fact _was_ running the Silk Road and _did_ do these deeds that we see provided as evidence to a court system, or that it was all made up and it's just "too neat", and it was all a grand conspiracy to frame this guy?

</comment><comment><USER26> This story does not add up. It makes no sense, and I don't believe it.

</comment><comment><USER27> Another article on this story says that the cops seized $3.6 million worth of bitcoins when closing Silk Road. Wondering what they'll do with all these bitcoins... selling then to crooks or twins?

</comment><comment><USER28> ... And now we have a lead on a Breaking Bad replacement!

Get Netflix producing and Vince Gilligan writing and I will pay for a season upfront.

Please?

</comment><comment><USER29> what a moron. this guy really thought he could run a cartel from a library without getting his own hands dirty.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think the whole story will have serious consequences for the poor BitCoin.</comment>


Why I left my job to teach you how to code - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/snakecasts/why-i-left-my-job-to-teach-you-how-to-code-be66a96eac11 <comment><USER2> I wouldn't mind paying for advanced python classes, but the beginner stuff wouldn't benefit everyone, but some people will love/need it, so it has to be there. Add ORMs, Numpy/Scypy...etc if you can.

<comment><AUTHOR> ORMs, yes. That's part of the Python course. I plan on adding specific topics once the whole web side of things will have been covered as at some point, there will also be blocks focusing on data science. But... one step at a time :-)

<comment><USER2> Sounds cool! I'm not sure if there is a user breakdown by use case (web, data science, scripting...etc).</comment></comment></comment>


Ed: Text editing with media widgets - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/the-grid/ed <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_\(text_editor\))

      $ ed --help
      GNU Ed - The GNU line editor.

      Usage: ed [options] [file]

I know, there's other problems in the world, but I wish people would look around a bit before they name their things.

[http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man1/script.1.html](http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/script.1.html)

Typescript is another one that bugs me, although that's even less worth a rant, because it isn't the name of an old program, it's the name of the default output file for an old program.

Harumph!</comment>


Show HN: A Pattern for Async EventHandlers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/veleek/til/blob/master/csharp/a_pattern_for_async_eventhandlers.md <comment><AUTHOR> I was just thinking about this the other day while looking through an MVVM framework that I was interested in using. I thought I'd see if there was an easy way to implement this.

I copied the TIL repository pattern from another Hacker News post and thought this would make a good write up. I'm interested in getting feedback from anybody about whether they think this would be a reasonable way to implement this pattern.</comment>


Barclays.com now redirects to home.barclays - <AUTHOR> http://barclays.com

<comment><USER2> I wonder if the funding of dictators like Robert Mugabe and Teodoro Obiang and laundering money for Iran and North Korea while conjuring numerous schemes to avoid paying taxes is in their citizen report this year.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like it would be wise to also redirect www.home.barclays.com...

<comment><USER2> why?? the hold point is that they just got a .barclays tld...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder why they are still using www?

<comment><USER5> I wondered why they are using www.home.barclays and not just www.barclays as most people are used to www. It _means_ it is a website to many people.

<comment><USER6> I wondered why they aren't just using 'barclays' without any subdomain.

Turns out A and MX records are prohibited on "dotless domains": [https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2013-08-30-en](https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2013-08-30-en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Even more interesting they don't appear to be listening for HTTPS traffic...</comment>


Ask HN: how to debug python... I miss visual studio - <AUTHOR>

Having moved to python only recently at home from C# I'm trying to adjust my programming style, however there seems very little in way of an introduction as to how to debug in python.
pyDev seems to be the standard and using frameworks like Flask gives  nice compile time errors but really I miss the real-time debugging with break points...
how do YOU debug in real-time with python? <comment><USER2> I typically don't but I have used <http://winpdb.org/> in the past.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wing IDE Pro gives you an excellent debug environment (the best I have seen)...</comment>


How do you find the time to do everything? - <AUTHOR> https://ask.metafilter.com/325975/How-do-you-find-the-time-to-do-everything <comment><USER2> I don't find time to do nearly any of the stuff on this list, to be honest. I used to be upset about that, but now I really don't care anymore.

I put a priority on free, easy activities that overlap with each other. For example, I rarely exercise, because when I do, I usually get injured or don't get a big reward from it.

Instead, I eat less and cook my own meals more. I cook with my gf, I cook with my parents. So now I save money, increase my health, and increase my time spent on fun hobbies.

I've given up on the notion that life should be some grand amazing thing. I think you should heavily appreciate the small successes in life ("I cleaned the house today!") rather than chase the perfect career, perfect body, perfect spouse, perfect image etc.</comment>


mParticle Raises $15M Series A Led by Social Capital - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mparticle.com/mparticle-raises-15-million-series-a-led-by-social-capital/ <comment><USER2> A much needed solution for mobile marketers. Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER3> Sockpuppet/promotional voting and commenting isn't allowed here. We ban accounts and sites that do it, so please don't do it.

</comment><comment><USER4> This will make history!

</comment><comment><USER5> Congratulations!!</comment>


Visual neurons don't work the way scientists thought - <AUTHOR> https://scitechdaily.com/visual-neurons-dont-work-the-way-scientists-thought-much-more-complicated/ <comment><USER2> I love that these mice are watching the famous Touch of Evil intro shot.

"Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering, Pinky?"</comment>


When Fortnite pwnd Google: the most overlooked story of the year - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90275838/when-fortnite-pwnd-google-the-most-overlooked-story-of-the-year <comment><USER2> The part people still seem to be overlooking about this story, which isn't really mentioned in this article, is that Epic has already stated the Epic Games Store is launching on Android in 2019. So they weren't just challenging Google's 30% cut for their own app, they're going to give everyone _else_ a chance at only a 12% cut on Android too.</comment>


Roll your own toy UNIX-clone OS - <AUTHOR> http://www.jamesmolloy.co.uk/tutorial_html/index.html <comment><USER2> Stylistically, there are a huge number of things wrong with this. The idea is good, but if you actually write code this way you'll have a slow, unmaintainable mess of a kernel.

The biggest issues that jump out at me are the horrible overuse of magic numbers (#define is your friend, especially when working with the GDT and IDT) and the disabling of interrupts and paging when copying an address space (the latter of which is slow and the former of which prevents concurrency -- imagine how well Linux would work if every fork() were terribly slow and stopped the world -- doing this in even a halfway reasonable way is not hard). Inline assembly is also a really bad idea for portability and maintainability, the latter of which you at least care about for a toy kernel. I'm also not sure why they are disabling interrupts so much in general... and on and on.

Again, a very interesting read for kernel-development-n00bs, I'm sure, but a lot of their code is very, very, terrifyingly wrong even for a toy kernel. Our OS class has students write a kernel somewhat like this one; the class provides a list of things which you are not to ever do, ever, oh god, or you will fail. This article does a staggering number of those things.

<comment><USER3> Do you know of anything we can have a look at which gives a better overview of kernel architecture?

I am really more interested in learning more about good kernel architecture and rolling one the "Right Way" than I am in getting a working but crappy kernel.

<comment><USER4> It's a C issue, not an implementation issue. Learn C well.

Alternatively, study OS kernels not implemented in C. It's all basic algorithms and can be implemented in any language, if you content with abstraction and don't mind working with emulated "devices".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My Op Sys class in school was designed around compiling your own toy 'unix' kernel and rewriting large portions of it from scratch for educational reasons. We used the Tanenbaum book and his "Minix" system. It was far and away the most informative class I had in school.

<comment><USER6> > We used the Tanenbaum book and his "Minix" system.

The 'problem' with this, if you want to approach it that way, is that Minix is not representative of how most OSes in the real world work: It's a microkernel in a world of monolithic kernels, which means studying it to learn how the rest of the OS world works is a bit like looking at electric engines to figure out how your gas-powered car runs on the inside.

(There's also the jibe that microkernels are the wave of the future, and always will be.)

<comment><USER7> The architecture really doesn't matter, in the context of a course. Understanding concepts like scheduling, filesystems, mm etc. and perhaps tinkering with a reference implementation is more rewarding for beginners, and Minix is simple enough to allow a CS undergrad to get involved rather quickly.

<comment><USER6> So, if the architecture really doesn't matter, why not use the Lions' book and teach Sixth Edition Unix, or use "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System"? Is it a holdover from the 1980s, when microkernels were still interesting, or is it because Tanenbaum is seen as a 'real' academic?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions%27_Commentary_on_UNIX_6th...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions%27_Commentary_on_UNIX_6th_Edition,_with_Source_Code)

<http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/design-44bsd/>

<comment><USER7> Because Minix is neither overly complex, nor obsolete. It nears the sweet spot between simplicity and functionality - I don't know how much of that I can attribute to its architecture. I don't think it has anything to do with academic credibility or holding grudges.

That's my opinion, of course, and perhaps my CS professors stuck to Tanenbaum religiously.

<comment><USER6> > nor obsolete

Minix is so different from most OSes in use that this doesn't even make sense.

<comment><USER7> While Minix, like dozens of OSs, is far from having a measurable market share - especially compared to Linux/Windows/BSD/etc - is also far from being either unwanted or disused. It's actively developed and promoted. Why would you characterize it obsolete based on its difference from "mainstream" OSs? _That_ doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER6> > Why would you characterize it obsolete based on its difference from > "mainstream" OSs?

I didn't. I explicitly said that the concept of 'obsolete' doesn't apply to it, because it's so different from everything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418329>

</comment><comment><USER9> The step up from this is Linux From Scratch. As a teenager, starting with a host os and loading the individual pieces of a functional linux distribution taught me a skill that has turned out to be very valuable.

Whereas the link above will help you learn the innards of a kernel, this will help you understand what packages on top of that make a functional, useful system.

<http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/>

</comment><comment><USER10> OSKit used to be the nicest way to roll your own UNIX: <http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/oskit/>

Unfortunately, the project seems to be dead.

</comment><comment><USER11> ranking bug: why is a 'dead' spam comment ranked higher than a 5 upvote comment?</comment>


Twister – Twitter meets Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://twister.net.co

<comment><USER2> Now that's cool! Only problem to overcome? Network effect. How to make this popular?</comment>


Breakthrough 'parallel reality' display technology promises to personalize world - <AUTHOR> https://www.geekwire.com/2018/breakthrough-parallel-reality-display-technology-promises-personalize-world-without-goggles/ <comment><USER2> I saw this demo in person and was more than a little surprised. Could completely change how we interact with digital displays in the future.

</comment><comment><USER3> Game changer</comment>


The myth of the panicking disaster victim - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-myth-of-the-panicking-disaster-victim-2245014.html

<comment><USER2> Lack of civilization doesn't cause people to loot or to become bullies. _Growing up_ in the lack of civilization does.</comment>


Online Sales Tax - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/06/tech/web/internet-sales-tax/index.html?hpt=te_t1

<comment><AUTHOR> The big box retailers want this because it will hurt the small, independent online businesses. This has nothing to do with generating more tax revenue, this is about controlling competition.</comment>


Security hole allows Apple passwords to be reset with only email, date of birth - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/22/4136242/major-security-hole-allows-apple-id-passwords-reset-with-email-date-of-birth <comment><USER2> Extraordinarily bad news. The damage that can be done with an Apple ID is limitless, including CC leaks, physical address, instant remote wipes of phones and Macs, you name it.

This had better be Apple's priority zero today.

Edit: When a critical hole is discovered in a system that manages the identity of the 400M wealthiest people on Earth, I'd expect this story to be ranking a little higher than page three on HN.

<comment><USER3> >When a critical hole is discovered in a system that manages the identity of the 400M wealthiest people on Earth, I'd expect this story to be ranking a little higher than page three on HN.

Apple has disabled password reset, so at least they've managed to control the exploit before it got out of hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So has there been a recent change to the Apple.com homepage? I ask this before going on an unfounded rant here...but it is __*king aggravating trying to figure out where you're supposed to even login to your account on the Apple home page. I wanted to see if this exploit worked on my account but literally could not find the login area...I had to randomly click through the help docs until it took me to the "iforgot.apple.com". The only time I saw an evident "My Account" link is by clicking on the Store tab, and even then you have to notice that the top-right corner nav has changed to include an "Account" link.

I recently had to report my iPod stolen to the cops. It's a testament to both how often cops have to deal with stolen iDevices and how confusing the Apple homepage is, that I had to have the cop walk me through how to login to my account on the Apple homepage to get to the device information he needed.

The domains apple.com, store.apple.com, secure2.store.apple.com (which you go to after you've logged in), and iforgot.apple.com all seem to use different templates, sometimes even different metrics and external code files. I wonder how much of what seems to be a unified storefront is actually a bunch of balkanized subdomains?

<comment><USER2> The Apple ID/iTunes/iCloud edifice has always been messy, yes, but I believe appleid.apple.com has always been the account management page. They've never had login UI on most pages.</comment></comment>


CloudControl PaaS add-on for cloud-based image management - <AUTHOR> http://cloudinary.com/blog/cloudcontrol_paas_add_on_for_cloud_based_image_management

<comment><AUTHOR> This blog post describes the new Cloudinary's add-on for cloudControl, a popular European PaaS provider. Ruby on Rails, Django and PHP developers can build and deploy their applications using cloudControl and use Cloudinary as an add-on for uploading images to the cloud, performing image transformation & manipulation and delivering optimized images through a fast CDN.</comment>


Hacker WatrCoolr (9 Tweaked Feeds, Keyboard Nav) - <AUTHOR> http://hacker.watrcoolr.us/

<comment><AUTHOR> After encouraging feedback from HN (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=188145>) and proggit (<http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/6j9dt/comments/>), I created Hacker WatrCoolr, which is a hacker oriented version of the original WatrCoolr (<http://watrcoolr.us>).

What does that mean? A lot of little tweaks to make the site more useful to hackers. And one big change: the general interest feeds are replaced with hacker interest feeds on Hacker WatrCoolr. Here are the current ones:

\--Hacker News of course (stories that reach the top)

\--Techmeme (stories that reach the top)

\--RSSmeme, English 12 hours (stories that reach the top)

\--reddit, programming (stories that reach the top)

\--Digg popular: software, programming, design, tech news & gadgets, aggregated

\--Slashdot: developers, books, ask, bsd & it, aggregated

\--Yahoo! Technology News Most Emailed (stories that reach the top)

\--del.icio.us popular: programming, webdesign, startups, design, tools, software, web2.0, css, reference & development, aggregated

\--ReadBurner (stories that reach the top)

(And no xkcd.)

These feeds are subject to change based on their continued usefulness and your feedback. I've been tweaking them for a week or so (as you may guess from reading them).

<comment><USER2> Is there an RSS feed for the site?

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://feeds.feedburner.com/HackerWatrCoolr>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The concept is cool but there still needs to be a point of reference. List the items under the main feed but perhaps lower their opacity. The user needs a feeling of progression, right now you get lost quite easily.

My 2 cents

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't quite follow. What do you mean by _items under the main feed_?

The idea here is one has this as their home page, or jumps on it frequently. The latest story shows automatically. Occasionally, one might go back to to the other feeds (or down in one of the feeds).</comment></comment>


GLAZ – 3D printing platform with some cool 3D visualization tech in place - <AUTHOR> http://glaz.co <comment><AUTHOR> GLAZ is a platform for designers and brands to sell their creations. Unleashing the power of 3D printing wiht the 3D visualization technology - customers are able to customize and personalize almost every aspect of a product.

GLAZ was founded by a team of 3D designers and e-commerce enthusiasts. We strive to be an innovative and cutting edge company that loves bringing exciting products to customers using the latest technology. We pride ourselves on being ahead of our competitors and one step ahead of trends.

Here is a sneak peak at our Coming Soon Page. Any feedback would be appreciated!

Co-Founders: Vlad Terin [https://angel.co/vlad-terin](https://angel.co/vlad- terin) Guillaume Lurenbaum [https://angel.co/guillaume- lurenbaum](https://angel.co/guillaume-lurenbaum)</comment>