Announcing TypeScript 3.1 - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescript-3-1/ <comment><USER2> Is TypeScript worth learning? I know that is a loaded question, but I need to ask it anyway.

I am super frustrated with lack of screens for python. I don't want to pigeon hole into an ecosystem where I am limited to a certain platform like Java/Kotlin or even (dare I say) Swift (no real web, still need JS). As a single developer, mostly hobby, I want options for all the things!!!

I have been migrating my Python scraping to JavaScript with node, puppeteer, and it has been quite illuminating, and the speed is ridiculously better. Furthermore, I can easily turn my scrape into a desktop app with electron with an api that is consumed by a mobile app with react-native. Long story short, I can now think about making some of my Python ideas into cross platform desktop apps with mobile versions as well. Not super easy with Python.

The question is would TypeScript be even better for a long term bet?

<comment><USER3> It solves all the issues I have with Javascript, that are all related to its weak and dynamic type system: awkward, unwanted type conversions all around, tons of "undefined is not a function", and lack of IDE integration. So, yes, it's definitely worth it, even for small projects. And it's not like it's hard to learn once you know javascript, anyway. It's nothing more than a superset of the language.

<comment><USER4> > that are all related to its weak and dynamic type system

It doesn't make JS strongly typed though. It's still possible to compare different types, it still allows type coercion,truthiness and what not. It add type definitions, but it does not turn Javascript into a strongly typed language.

<comment><USER5> It actually does disallow various type coercion operations that you can do in JS, even when they're arguably useful. For example `1 == "1"` doesn't typecheck:

[https://www.typescriptlang.org/play/index.html#src=const%20x...](https://www.typescriptlang.org/play/index.html#src=const%20x%3A%20number%20%3D%201%3B%0D%0Aconst%20s%3A%20string%20%3D%20'1'%3B%0D%0Aconsole.log\(x%20%3D%3D%20s\)%3B)

So while there are still things like truthy/falsy values, the type system is stronger (not just static) in some sense compared with JS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For me, Javascript now means Typescript, thanks to all who contribute to this great language!

</comment><comment><USER7> TypeScript is fine. I used it for about half a year when wokring on an Angular app. But for new projects with React now I seldom see the need to include it.

Sure, TS gives you a little bit better autocompletion in VS Code, you can document your function signatures a little bit better and you can catch a few trivial type errors — but it also has some costs: Extra set up, extra build steps, the need to also import type definitions when including a library, cluttering the code with interfaces and type definitions.

I find the extra value it gives over PropTypes in React is pretty low. And while types in function signatures arguably increase understanding, elaborate interface definitions, sometimes in their owen files with the need to import them, can clutter up the code and be a detriment to readability. Also, VS Code's auto completion is very good even without TS.

<comment><USER8> Static vs dynamic typing aka catching type errors on compile and not on runtime. Easily refactor code and all references there of. I would also say that I'm faster using TypeScript BECAUSE of autocompletion, implicit code documentation through types, etc. The cost you listed are solved during the setup of a project.

I can just talk for myself, but I started a project at work and pushed for TypeScript. We now have automatically generated Swagger-clients fully typed, with a GraphQL layer infront of it with generated types for queries. Basically everything is typed now and I don't have to test or check incomming data or guess what kind of object I have to expect from our backend. The tooling is so good now, that the benefits outweigh any setup hassle you have upfront IMHO.

<comment><USER7> Good points. I'm not against using TS, I just think the it should be aknwoledged that it does have costs. The nice thing about TS is that once included you can use it as much or as little as you like (for function signatures only, for instance).

I also think project scope and team size is important -- the larger these are, the more I would consider TS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems like a pretty small release in comparison to previous updates. Probably a good thing, though - it demonstrates that the language as reached a very mature state with few remaining gaps.

<comment><USER10> Now it just needs to become the official JavaScript's strong mode. :)

<comment><USER11> Seriously: this language is amazing. I have to admit I was a holdout for a while, but TS has been fantastic to work with compared to Flow

<comment><USER12> Good to know.

I dad the impression Flow was the better approach, but using it wasn't nice.

<comment><USER13> For a brief period Flow had more type algebra (type unions and intersections) and better inferencing, but Typescript has greatly shrunk the gap between type system capabilities where the differences are much fewer, and rarely anything that matters for most projects.

Flow was popular for the ability to put all of its type annotations in JS comments and not need a transpilation pass. Typescript also added a mode that supports that.

Flow was popular for the slipstream integration into Babel as the type- stripper was just an "ordinary" Babel plugin. Typescript now supports this as well.

So for the most part a lot of the old impressions that Flow was the better approach are out-of-date, and par-for-par Typescript is an equal approach (if not a better approach, depending on your preferences/needs, and due to things like the fact that there are vastly more Typescript type definitions than Flow definitions in the npm wilds now).

<comment><USER12> Ah.

Yes, I read about how TypeScript is a more classical approach, and Flow would use "flow based" typing or something, which was a more modern approach. Also, it came out of the box with non-nullable types.

While I had the impression the TypeScript language designers didn't deem these features to be important, they added them anyway.

<comment><USER13> I don't think it was ever a matter of "not-important", Typescript and Flow started from two different perspectives and took different routes to get to what today is a somewhat more converged place.

Overall, I also don't think it's "modern" versus "classical" that much. In terms of the different philosophies it's "language" versus "linter" / "compiler" versus "observer", and there is a huge spectrum of options there.

Typescript starting from a place of prioritizing "green field" development at first, where teams had the option to start fresh or similar. Like CoffeeScript or Dart, it wanted to provide a good way to organize and develop new code. (Unlike CoffeeScript or Dart, the "pure superset" approach still provided easier migration; I worked on several projects where conversion was simply rename .js to .ts and then fix compiler warnings until it worked again.) Taking the compiler approach also provided an early focus on providing some transformations to the code. In Typescript projects I typically don't feel a need for Babel, because Typescript handles everything I want in terms of "downlevel" transforms to support the version of JS in browsers.

Flow starting from a place where you've got a huge line of code investment into an existing codebase, can't "stop the world" to migrate and absolutely need to start "linter style" evaluating data types.

Over time Flow has picked up more reasons to use a cleaner syntax for type annotations than what just comments alone can deliver, driving more Flow projects to adopt Babel transforms for that (in addition to whatever other Babel transforms a project wants).

Over time Typescript has wanted to get better at migrating existing JS code. The team proved the language worked great for greenfield projects, and got a lot of interest from customers internally and externally to extend that make it a lot easier to do grayfield work. Also, Typescript found its "pure superset" proved better than expected at evaluating almost all JS. This pushed Typescript to power more and more IDE intelligence features for both JS and TS (in an increasing number of IDEs, beyond even the Visual Studio family). That in turn pushed more JS mode features and support in the language, and increasingly better type inferencing and flow control analysis especially when working in large forests of untyped JS.

As for the typing systems themselves, "modern" versus "classical" almost is descriptive, from a certain point of view, modulo the fact that both typing systems are "ancient". Typescript started from a type system that started out seeming more in common with the C++/C#/Java family of "Object Oriented" typing systems, whereas Flow started from a place of being much more directly inspired by the "functional" ML family of type systems. (Though calling this more "modern" than the ALGOL-style "OO" type systems belies the fact that the ML family dates to the 70s and about all of our type systems have equally ancient roots; and that like Typescript versus Flow, in a larger sense they've done almost nothing but slowly converge over the intervening decades, learning and growing from each other in both directions.)

Typescript didn't start with a lot of the more abstract or higher level type algebras, partly it seems because they wanted to work towards it from a "pragmatic" standpoint of build something that works, find out where the new pain points, build something that works to fix those, and iterate as so forth.

Flow started very directly with a powerful abstract type system (with well known inferencing techniques) that was theoretically sound, but arguably not as easily pragmatic to what you might consider the average developer, which is exactly why you would expect Flow to have an early lead from the perspective of the type system.

The convergence towards very similar type systems after all that work shouldn't be surprising either, as the drive for more robust type descriptions has indeed pushed Typescript to continually pragmatically iterate, and the realities of the dynamic JS language Typescript tries to type involves a need to describe with types a very wide and diverse range of behavior.

Both approaches have their advantages. Arguably, Typescript's "pragmatic" focus I think has helped Typescript end up with the lead that it has in type definitions across the JS ecosystem. Both because the ramp to more advanced/abstract type features is easier for a wider spectrum of developers (in my experience even relatively junior developers can write a Typescript definition file relatively well; Flow that's not necessarily the case from what I've seen, which Flow tries to balance by making inferencing more powerful and definition writing less necessary) and also that the pragmatic/iterative approach in the language itself reflects in a more "perfect is the enemy of the good" attitude in type development in general. (It's fine for a type definition to only describe ~90% of the API/behavior/quirks of a library if that's good enough to get the job done. You can come back and tighten up that remaining 10% in the next pass, or when the next type system features gives you a knob you need to help get it more accurate to how it behaves.)

That turned into maybe more of a ramble than I intended, but maybe there's some useful perspective there.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for that thoughtful writeup :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love Typescript and the type system is getting pretty powerful. I would like to use it more in commandline utilities, but then I find the JS event loop makes sequential commands annoying, or REPLs need trampolining etc.

There is nothing in typescript that actually ties the type system to the event loop. I would love the Typescript language applied to a runtime that was ok with blocking IO.

<comment><USER15> For CLIs I end up doing something like:

async function main() {

}

main().catch(e => { console.error(e); process.exit(1); });

Async/await is what I want, more than blocking, because frequently to make a CLI fast I need to do things in parallel. I'm often working against a network filesystem though, so doing as much FS stuff in parallel has a big payoff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What is the lowest ceremony way to start building a TypeScript SPA? I would love to avoid Webpack if I can :)

<comment><USER17> Parcel has first class support for TypeScript. It's amazingly simple: [https://hackernoon.com/zero-config-typescript-bundling- with-...](https://hackernoon.com/zero-config-typescript-bundling-with-parcel- ef76fabcbfe3)

<comment><USER18> First class? Parcel uses Babel to transpile. Ugh. [https://github.com/parcel- bundler/parcel/issues/954](https://github.com/parcel- bundler/parcel/issues/954)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Glad to see that adding properties to functions will be easier now. I've been tripped up by that a few times before, and was always surprised at how painful it was to type such a relative common JS pattern.

</comment><comment><USER20> I was kind of hoping that they would get rid of null or undefined (or both). While I understand that null and undefined are not the same, are both truly needed? Seems like a missed opportunity to make the language cleaner. They seem redundant when you have exception handling, which I think makes the flow of the code easier see.

Could they be removed?

<comment><USER21> Part of the premise (and I think this is very noble) is that they are trying to be descriptive of what JavaScript is, not prescriptive of what anyone wishes JavaScript should have been. (That said, I don't even understand what you mean by saying that both null and undefined seem redundant when you have exception handling... how do you represent "this exists or it doesn't exist" in the type system if you can't do a union type of "X" and "null"? I don't see how exception handling has anything to do with null/undefined.)

<comment><USER22> > how do you represent "this exists or it doesn't exist" in the type system if > you can't do a union type of "X" and "null"?

Like this, pick your flavor:

[https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/option/enum.Option.html](https://doc.rust- lang.org/std/option/enum.Option.html)

[https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/Optional...](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/Optional.html)

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnet/api/system.nullable-...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnet/api/system.nullable-1)

[https://wiki.haskell.org/Maybe](https://wiki.haskell.org/Maybe)

If you don't want to follow links: Instead of having nulls, have a type which is either a discriminated union (not possible in JS) or is a (isPopulated, value) pair, and accessing the value is an exception if isPopulated=false.

Granted, that would be an extremely breaking change for a JS-compatible language, which would make it in fact incompatible. But answering the question, that's it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Another case of just blatantly ignoring semver[0] and only increasing the minor version while including backwards incompatible changes!

[0] [https://semver.org/](https://semver.org/)

</comment><comment><USER24> self plug: i wrote a "corelib" for typescript: [https://www.npmjs.com/package/xlib](https://www.npmjs.com/package/xlib)

right now it's only meant for nodejs use (it's too big for browsers) but I use it successfully in my production code, and have been using it for years, so it's got that for it :)

i plan to add proper browser support (minification, tree shaking, etc) when i do my next client side project, but that's still at least a few months off.

</comment><comment><USER25> Can we have a CLR backend now ?</comment>


Google Gives Free Security Keys to Activists, but Not If You're in Iran or Syria - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kxy4p/google-titan-keys-iran-syria-cuba-crimea-sudan-north-korea <comment><USER2> I usually like Motherboard but this is sensationalist anti-Google BS.

>>Google may be simply trying to stay in line with export legislation—it's not totally clear if providing these devices to people in these countries would violate any US or international embargoes or export laws

It's understandable that Google's legal team would look at this and say, embargo laws are hard and this is new tech that involved cryptography so let's not risk violating those laws and make sure we don't send our keys to embargoed countries.

Or in other words, let's not risk helping activists around the rest of world by sending what turns out to be embargoed tech to embargoed countries.

<comment><USER3> Google is most definitely trying to stay in line with embargo rules. It is illegal to export anything to Iran without an explicit license. And this is one of those few laws that permits piercing the corporate veil to go after those involved in the export. Google execs, project managers, and maybe individual engineers, can be gone after directly if they chose to send these things to Iran or Syria.

Motherboard is trying some kind of shaming ritual on Google, but it won't work, because those laws are very potent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Remember when RSA was considered weapons-grade and illegal to export from USA? Well...apparently the future's still distributed pretty unevenly.

<comment><USER5> The future is asymmetrical

<comment><USER4> Always has been. Some episodes tend to resurface, though...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why on earth would you trust a security key given to you by google. Especially if they sent it to YOU and obviously know that this key is now associated with YOU and only YOU?...

<comment><USER7> Because the purpose of that security key is to allow you to securely identify yourself to Google?</comment></comment>


Launch HN: Thematic (YC S17) Customer Feedback Analysis via NLP - <AUTHOR> Hi! I'm the CEO of Thematic, http://www.getthematic.com. We analyse customer feedback to tell companies how to increase customer satisfaction and reduce churn.
We are one of the handful of companies that got into YC through the Startup School, and (I have to say) the only company that signed YC itself as a customer!
I have a PhD in NLP and ML and was consulting when two large media companies came to me with a problem: They collect tons of customer feedback in free text as part of their NPS surveys, but don't have the time to sift through the responses.
This turned out to be common. Most companies collect feedback but, especially in large companies, nobody reads this data, and definitely not people who are in charge of strategy. Customers are screaming what's wrong and what they want, but nobody is listening.
I tried a few open-source packages but found that none worked well. Developed on canonical text like news article or Wikipedia, they either failed to understand the variety of expressions, or were too hard to explain. I wrote a new approach capitalising on my PhD and new Deep Learning approaches. It's completely unsupervised: just needs raw data but, unlike topic modelling, produces clear and specific themes. My husband Nathan joined as a co-founder and for the next year we learned how to solve this problem in a way customer insights professionals find valuable.
Those media companies became customers and we quickly bootstrapped into a profitable startup. This is when Nathan signed up for YC's Startup School. We grew 20% in those 10 weeks, loved the accountability and the focus. Our mentor suggested we apply for YC, which seemed like a crazy idea, but we gave it a go.
Fast-forward another 2 months, and we are just before Demo Day! Thematic grew 3x in that time, and we are working with brands like Vodafone, Air New Zealand, Stripe, Ableton, and Manpower Group.
Hope you found our story interesting, and happy to answer any questions. <comment><USER2> Suggestions to your business growth:

Surveys are the bread and butter for many market research companies. Most of the corporates / enterprises typically engage with smaller to larger (and many a times multiple) MR agencies. These MR companies can benefit from your service. To explore these companies, you can check out the MR members directory list from ESOMAR ,the voice of the MR (www.esomar.org), perhaps a membership / participating in their events may help you. Other site is agencyspotter.com

Explore publishing an article at the Greenbook blog run by Leonard Murphy which is very relevant to this case and he also runs the IIEX events globally ( [http://iiex-na.insightinnovation.org/](http://iiex- na.insightinnovation.org/) ) where tools /services such as yours are very much the hot thing..

Check out Unilever Foundry [https://foundry.unilever.com/](https://foundry.unilever.com/) . You can sign up and explore if you can help solve some of their problems with your solution. They select and fund Pilot projects

Twitter hashtags to get your tool noted in the MR industry #mrx #newmr

Ads / promotions: check out [http://newmr.org/](http://newmr.org/) , [http://www.greenbookblog.org/](http://www.greenbookblog.org/)

Explore if you have complementary business synergies to present with [https://www.zappistore.com/](https://www.zappistore.com/) (e.g your product could be a part of the Zappistore platform as an App.)

Best Wishes, N.Sankar [https://www.linkedin.com/in/nsk007](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nsk007)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, this is super helpful, thanks! I will check out these resources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Congratulations and best wishes!

I for one really liked the demo and the blog - specifically, (a) I have great exemplars for what you mean by "theme", and (b) this post[1] shows great insights into your thinking about the problem faced by your customers

> Developed on canonical text like news article or Wikipedia, they either > failed to understand the variety of expressions, or were too hard to > explain.

It appears to me that the current methods and resulting tools are heavily dependent on the problem formulation (or domain in general). Moreover, no matter how fancy your technique is (or "how deep is your net"), the resulting model won't work unless you take specific steps to train it on data from the domain.

Yes, what I just said sounds borderline truism. However, I am more interested in discussing why it is so? Here's my initial thinking:

Let us look at (one of) the definition of Machine Learning, from Prof Tom Mitchell's textbook, "A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P, if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E."

Here, experience E can be loosely considered as the amount of data you have for training - obviously, more data (i.e. training) should improve learning. However, the abstraction of T and P hides an important underlying problem of specification - or in other words, formulation of T (and E).

Thoughts?

> I wrote a new approach [capitalizing] on my PhD and new Deep Learning > approaches.

I hope we get to see some of your insights in a paper or article (or blog post :)

[1] [https://www.getthematic.com/post/visualizing-customer- feedba...](https://www.getthematic.com/post/visualizing-customer-feedback- three-alternatives-word-clouds/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your thoughts! Definitely sounds like an interesting thought to explore.

I like to think about ML in terms of how children learn language: through observation in their environment. The training data is a simulation of that environment.

Glad you liked the website and the blog post!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really enjoyed reading about your company on Idealog ([https://idealog.co.nz/technologymonth/2017/08/meet- thematic-...](https://idealog.co.nz/technologymonth/2017/08/meet-thematic-new- zealand-startup-making-waves-y-combinator)). It was especially great to see how you bootstrapped and found product-market fit rather than just raising a bunch of cash for an idea that may or may not be applicable in the real world. Congratulations on the launch and your success with YC. Go Kiwis!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much! Appreciate the kind words. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congratulations on your launch! This is very interesting and it's something that has great applicability. Being in financial services, we collect a ton of feedback and audio but not enough manpower to process it all. I love the themed approach but am curious about the subthemes. Would you be able to shed any light on that?

I'm also happy to make introductions if you're ever thinking about expanding up north to Canada.

<comment><AUTHOR> Subthemes are basically more specific versions of the themes. Check out an example on our Twitch demo: [https://demo- twitch.getthematic.com/#!/demo/main/dashboard/2...](https://demo- twitch.getthematic.com/#!/demo/main/dashboard/2/visualization/1) You will see a base theme "use chat", with subthemes like "chat in landscape mode", "chat on a tablet", "type in chat" etc. Does this help?

Thank you so much for the offer of introductions. Definitely interested, as we sell internationally, not just in the US.

<comment><USER5> Thanks. Would subthemes almost/always fall under the context of the overarching theme?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great tool, this is an area I've been looking forward to more automation in.

I might have missed it on the website, how does pricing work?

Also, do you have any integrations with other tools like Intercom or Zendesk to ease data-sharing? A monthly insights report generated directly off of my main customer support tool can replace hours of manual work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Our pricing is custom, it's a subscription model. A monthly report is quite a common use case. We have a Zendesk but not yet an Intercom integration. Happy to talk further, please feel free to request a demo via our website getthematic.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Love this! When I was at one of the big tech companies years ago, we tried to do something like this for reviews for all the products, and see how they stacked up in the marketplace. Was a really challenging problem to do in an automated way at scale -- definitely wish we had a solution like this!

Do you guys see yourselves sticking to a model that spits out analysis, and let customers decide what insights to gain from the data? Or could there be a path where eventually it lets users take specific actions based on the data?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a really interesting point. I think what you mean is operationalising the analysis. We let customers decide what those actions are and then provide integration to help this happen. For example, one customer has a call center that receives an email from Thematic each morning stating which customers are likely to churn based on themes they mention. They call them up first.

<comment><USER7> Ah, that's awesome -- the point on integration especially is a big one.

The more ways clients can hook the insights into their CRMs/workflow/user base, the more they can "operationalize it", as you eloquently put it, and make it a part of their workflows, the way the client you described does with their call center. I love it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How do you go about evaluating the accuracy of the themes and action items? Do you create a test set with obvious themes and actions and check the results for example?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question! Accuracy of themes is subjective. We run several studies where we used opinions of several people on what the themes should be and then compared the overlap between people with the overlap Thematic has with each of them. This is also referred to as "indexing consistency" in Information Science.

You can check specific examples in our white paper: [http://www.getthematic.com/net-promoter-score- verbatims/](http://www.getthematic.com/net-promoter-score-verbatims/) (Don't need to download it, the bulk of the results is published on the page.)

In practice, some customers have read samples of responses and expect certain themes. Others have manually tagged them in the past. They compare their results with their fundings and can see straight away if our results are accurate and reliable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> would you say that your solution provides a sentiment analysis, similar to Quid, or do you focus on action items and things that product managers can actually address?

<comment><USER10> We do provide sentiment but the main benefit is definitely the themes which form the action items that can be addressed.

We show what areas to improve, not just how people feel (although that is important in deciding)

<comment><USER11> Great product and congratz on your success so far!

Would you mind please elaborating a little more on how you're thinking about theme-specific sentiment (for the NLP students here :) - is it along the lines of Socher's aspect-specific sentiment or something else?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I saw there were samples but is this similar to how BloomBerry comes up with "topics" for popular questions for a keyword? They use some sort of NLP extraction of noun/verb phrases.

Example: Most popular topics/themes related to Vodafone: [https://app.bloomberry.com/questions;q=vodafone](https://app.bloomberry.com/questions;q=vodafone)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing out! Bloomberry has some useful themes, yes, it does look similar. Good to know they exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is super cool, I also appreciate the demo's you have on your website (airlines, MBA schools etc.). Makes the end result super clear.

I don't know much about NLP but are you _only_ using unsupervised learning on the raw data? I would think you would need an NLP layer as well that sorts out basic synonymical issues, phrasing differences etc.?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! No training data is required to use Thematic and customers don't need to tell us what they want to find in the data. Hence we say "unsupervised". And yes, we extract synonyms and paraphrases from raw data.

However, we do have tools to review and adjust the results of Thematic by hand. For example, we have an internal drag and drop interface. Some customers really like to change the themes based on their view of the data. But it also helps to remove any inaccuracies, e.g. an incorrectly merged theme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Are you planning to provide your service as an API to other companies that want to wrap a product around your work?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, not currently, but maybe in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Congrats and good luck!

I work on the same, just for my own company to automate customer interaction (well, at least 99% of it).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Yes, there are many applications beyond customer insights. We are dabbling into these also. What's your company?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Congrats on the launch! I think I saw you talk recently in NZ, sounds like you have an exciting path forward

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> You guys hiring? I'm not a PhD or anything, just an undergrad with an interest in NLP.</comment>


Batch script for removing telemetry updates for Windows 7 and 8.1 - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/xvitaly/eafa75ed2cb79b3bd4e9 <comment><AUTHOR>
      iyx commented on 5 Sep
      Anyone here with updated list of spying updates? Most comprehensive script was probably aegis-voat but it is not worked on anymore.
      It's free out there to be forked by someone and continued https://github.com/th3power/aegis-voat

      iki commented 2 days ago
      @iyx there's maintained fork https://github.com/CodeMason/aegis-voat</comment>


Refurbishing the Rancilio Silvia Espresso Machine - <AUTHOR> https://coffeeforums.co.uk/showthread.php?46197-So-I-ve-bought-this-bucket-of-rust-and-dirt&s=7993b6edd4cd9f61b497fd528bdaa664 <comment><USER2> Nice work to OP. There's so many super high quality espresso machines out there that will outlive me. When one of those classic machines is paired with a quality grinder and fresh beans, you will be brewing coffee better than many coffee shops (especially the chains).

Around 5 years ago I restored a La Pavoni Europiccola manual lever espresso machine to working order. I bought it off of a "parts only" ebay listing for $200. It turns out it just needed new grouphead and base gaskets, some rustoleum, and some simple electrical work (new power switch and thermostat). After getting over the initial learning curve, this machine has consistently given me some amazing espresso shots, all while on a tight budget.

If you're interested in seeing more of these kinds of restorations, check out these videos from the Orphan Espresso guy, who is incredibly skilled:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_Ymz8YJpcE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_Ymz8YJpcE) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_k-08sVlPw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_k-08sVlPw)

<comment><USER3> As the owner of an older europiccola and a quick mill qm67, I've been eying this: [https://www.flairespresso.com](https://www.flairespresso.com) which seems really need. the europiccola always struggled with managing steaming/overheating issues when doing multiple beverages. (Boiler was small), so I got the QM67. But this seems like it might be perfect for the times when you want to make just one shot.

<comment><USER4> I have a flair, a temperature controlled kettle, and a bellman stovetop steamer. The grinder I have was good for pour-overs, but isn't really up to espressos, but even so the espressos and cappuccinos I've been able to produce make my kitchen my favorite place to go to get caffeinated.

More often than not I'll make multiple beverages with it in a row. It's good enough that I'm frankly worried that when I finally upgrade to a proper machine it won't feel worth it. I had been looking forward to getting my fancy espresso machine eventually, so this is weirdly disappointing.

<comment><USER5> FWIW, I have a proper espresso machine, and I've considered downgrading to a Flair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm from Italy and it's the first time I see this brand. Anyone could explain why it costs an order of magnitude more than a Delonghi with similar specs?

<comment><USER7> Rancilio primarily make coffee machines for coffee shops. The Siliva is a cut down version of a shop coffee machine. It's targeted for home enthusiast or a place expecting to make the occasional coffee.

If you compare it to a regular home coffee machine the Rancilio contains more metal. The portafilter (the thing with the handle that contains the basket where the coffee grinds are put) is the same as their shop grade machines. It's big and heavy and feels solid like it'll last a long time. While if you compare the portafilter of a regular home coffee machine they often feel cheap and flimsy. The switches on the front feel industrial too. With the exception of a few bits (as noted in the article) the exterior is mainly stainless steel. While other home coffee machines at similar price point (and above) are far more plasticy.

The Siliva is often a good introduction for home coffee enthusiasts and hardware hackers alike. They're often recommended on coffee snob forums as a result. They're fairly ubiquitous so getting parts is straight forward. IIRC The manual contains circuit diagrams. It's easy to open and tinker with too. The most common modification is adding a PID controller to regulate the temperature.

The machine itself is straightforward but fills a niche. The next level up of more expensive home enthusiast machines generally cost at least twice the price. The next level up of coffee machine generally includes a PID and often twin boilers, so you can use one boiler for shots and the other boiler to foam milk. While with the Siliva as it's only got a single boiler you have to do your shots first, then switch it over to steam mode.

If you look after Siliva it can last for 10 years or more (I've had mine that long and it's still going on). I really want a duel boiler machine, but I'm trying to figure out which ones are good at the moment.

It'd say a Delonghi with similar specs is aimed at someone more causal. The kind of audience George Clooney is targeting with Nespresso. While the Siliva is not aimed at someone who just wants a coffee. You have to learn how to make decent coffee and for that it needs to be paired with a good grinder.

<comment><USER8> The metal content is the main difference, DeLonghi (and every other popular home espresso machine )are almost entirely made of plastic. Boiling water in plastic leaches harmful chemicals into the espresso and add subtle flavors that shouldn't be there. The DeLonghi level machines are built to last a few years and be replaced while the commercial machines can easily outlive their owners.

<comment><USER9> At the same time I heard at least certain years of the Silvia used solder with lead. _shrug_ Pick your poison?

<comment><USER10> I had an almost unused 2012 model still lying around and had it tested by a local government lab. I took the water sample myself (so it does not officially count because it's not "certified") but after speaking with the head of the lab about the procedure.

Result: _Waaaayyyy_ over the (German) limits for lead in drinking water.

I wanted to sell it but added to the post that I wanted to wait for the results, and that I would scrap it and not sell it if there was lead. There were several people who still wanted to buy it. As someone who has had to have treatment with chelators, albeit against mercury, I have seen what those academic and abstract warnings "there is no amount of lead (or mercury) that does not do damage" mean in practice: With my (university clinic researcher) doctor's consent I continued chelation far beyond any of the "limits" (i.e. when tested levels had fallen below any official limits in urine or blood I still continued, for years). It STILL had an effect, and it was recognizable in objective symptoms, not just subjective ones.

For almost 100% of people the dangers of lead (or heavy metals or environmental poisons in general) are way too abstract to be taken seriously. I've given up - actually I never really seriously tried, and if so only by short comments such as these and never to anyone in person in order to not ruin relationships - to convince anyone. Those poisons don't make you sick in small quantities, they just, very, _very_ gradually, make you function worse. Since this is 100% correlated with aging, since it takes a long time, all those effects will a) be part of your life, you got used to it gradually, b) attributed to age. Only if you do were to do something really extreme such as what I did (had to, was forced to by circumstances) would you be able to see a difference. For what it's worth, my doctor too thinks this is vastly under- recognized and a much bigger problem than even the vast majority of doctors think. The only reason I now it was not "stress" or "age" is because a long list of quite common ailments is completely gone now, from occasional small localized short cramps to psoriasis to warts to only mention three common ones.

I would not buy that machine. There are lead-free alternatives. I have a Vibiemme Domobar (with PID). This particular machine uses copper everywhere, even all the small parts of the E61 brewing group, which I've only ever seen with brass parts everywhere else. I had its water tested too, no lead whatsoever, but elevated copper - which is a non-issue (the body has far better mechanisms to handle copper, since it's an essential metal, reflected in the official limits in drinking water, which are several orders of magnitude higher for copper).

<comment><USER11> > Result: Waaaayyyy over the (German) limits for lead in drinking water.

Is this a sensible comparison to make? You will likely be drinking at most 120ml (4 shots) of rancilio espresso per day, which is around 4% of your daily ~3L recommended water intake.

How high were the results, anyway?

<comment><USER12> > Is this a sensible comparison to make?

There is no such thing as "safe lead exposure limit".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've had one of these machines for ~10years and she's still going strong. Combined with a good grinder the RC makes great coffee. The design is simple but elegant and the end result very satisfying.

<comment><USER14> This is exactly why I bought one: there's no shortage of people with old ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very random that this made it to the front page. There are a lot more interesting espresso restorations out there. [http://www.espresso- restorations.com/GS.html](http://www.espresso-restorations.com/GS.html)

<comment><USER16> I have an E61-based machine that feels like it's at the end of its life. I think the cam and push-rods are so worn down that the valves aren't opening fully anymore.

I wish there were more resources dedicated to fixing stuff like this because it feels terrible to throw it away and buy a new one (especially when a new one is $1500 or more).

<comment><USER17> The pushrods in the e61 grouphead are easily replaceable parts that are expected to be replaced as part of maintenance, as is the cam. The only complexity is that "e61" covers a bunch of groupheads from different manufacturers that require slightly different lengths, so you need to get the right ones for your exact machine.

Here is one guide [http://coffeetimex.wikidot.com/e61-group- servicing](http://coffeetimex.wikidot.com/e61-group-servicing) but there are also videos on youtube.

<comment><USER16> > you need to get the right ones for your exact machine

That's my problem. I have a Nuovo Era Cuadra and it was never a very popular machine.

<comment><USER17> You don't necessarily need the exact ones for all the parts, for some just having the same length is enough. If you pull yours apart and measure things you can contact someone like espressoparts.com and see if they have something that will fit.

<comment><USER16> Yeah? Thanks for the suggestion. I'm going to take my machine apart and come up with a list of stuff I need and see if it's worth fixing. I bought it in 2011 and used it almost every day since then, so it's definitely in need of some attention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hah - I just yesterday spent an hour disassembling my Pasquini Livietta to figure out what was wrong with it. Replaced the group head seal and now the thing seems to be happy again. The thing is surprisingly trusty as long as you take care of it, and I had a thought that I bet I could keep it running until I can pass it down to my kids.

</comment><comment><USER19> Interesting! When I worked for a coffee roaster, there were two kinds of people looking for the Silvia: home espresso enthusiasts with too much money and cheapskates looking to add espresso-based drinks to their businesses.

I'm glad the poster enjoyed the project, because there's no way on Earth it was worth the money.

<comment><USER20> So what's the recommendation to get instead, if the Silvia is too expensive?

<comment><USER21> Breville BES920 XL. Espresso machine done in a modern way. Dual boilers, three PID controlled heaters (boiler, steam boiler, grouphead). Makes excellent espresso with almost no fuss, very forgiving. You still need a good grinder with stepless control, but other than that it's super easy to dial in. This is my third machine and by far the best. I considered an E-61 machine, but that design dates back to the 1960s and controls temperature and extraction with pressure-stats, cams and rods and thermal mass. The Breville is a modern design in that it achieves these goals with micro-controllers, sensors and actuators. I don't know if it will last the 10 years my Ponte Vecchio spring lever did, but that took a lot of upkeep. The Breville has needed nothing for the two years I've had it so far.

<comment><USER22> Good luck!

I got a Breville Dual Boiler a few years ago and it was ok if temperamental for 2 years and 4 months. Then it died suddenly.

I had to pay Breville ~$400 for an out of warranty repair and drop it off personally at the local repair centre. The repair took two weeks and it died with the same symptoms a few days after I picked it up.

Breville refused to refund me for the repair attempt and it took escalating to get them to ship me a brand new replacement with 3 to 4 weeks estimated shipping.

I bought a Rocket instead and when the Breville showed up a month later sold it on Craigslist to cover a small portion of the wasted time and money.

The Rocket is much simpler but much more consistent. My wife a chef loves it but hated the Breville.

The Rocket did cost more but with regular home maintenance and an occasional service should last 15 to 20 years.

<comment><USER21> Sorry to hear that. I understood some of the earlier ones had issues. I'm hoping you were sincere with that "Good Luck!" because I really like this machine and hope it lasts.

<comment><USER22> Yes I was sincere. I enjoyed the machine, the support experience after it failed was appalling.

<comment><USER21> If it's any comfort that is still better than the support I got for the Ponte Vecchio. I did all my own work, including soldering a crack in the boiler because that was the only possibility. One vendor would not sell me parts because they claimed to be the only "authorized" vendor and I had purchased it elsewhere. The other sold me a series of parts over years and years, but discontinued that a couple years ago which is what prompted me to get the Breville. I gave the Lusso to my son and found another parts source, so it lingers on. I'd say it was down waiting on parts at least two weeks of every year I had it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I had one of these and it's built like a tank and produced amazing coffee. Sadly it couldn't come with me to Japan. Would definitely consider getting another one at some point in the future...

</comment><comment> david-cako I did a PID mod on mine when I bought it around 5 years ago and love it. Built like a tank, and looks more commercial than similarly priced machines if that means anything to you.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have two Saeco Vienna Plus machines. These have what appears to be a pretty decent grinder built in. The machine brews a decent shot, but the electronics are probably not very precise (who knows the temperature, and the brew length is controlled by a basic potentiometer that seems inconsistent). ]I wonder if these are good candidates for some interesting hacks...Does anyone have any experience with these? I'd love to get a Silvia but I like the idea of the built in grinder.

<comment><USER25> I've been using one for 3 shots daily for 5 years. Paid $150 cad for it used when it was 8 years old. Had a proper service done once. It is leaking quite badly now, time to crack it open and find out where from!

I agree with other poster that if the grind is too fine it doesn't have the pressure to get water through it. To be fair a super fine grind and packing a shot in to the stove top unit also results in a lot of steam coming out the safety pressure release valve.

<comment><USER26> Try a different roast too if you haven't already. Really dark ones seem to clog up more. I like dark roasts and lots of crema and became expert at clogging the machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have a used Rancilio Silva that's in fair condition, and want to sell it, any ideas where and for how much?

<comment><USER9> Single data point: I sold my 2009 model in the Netherlands for 175EUR in late 2017. Original price when new was about twice that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anyone know of any good places outside of eBay for getting ahold of less expensive fixer-uppers?

</comment><comment><USER28> Where is the finished project pictures? It doesn't look like there are on the thread.

<comment><USER29> They're on the second page, e.g. [http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=sxf3te&s=9](http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=sxf3te&s=9)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Funny to see that the problem was a faulty switch. My own Rancilio Classe 6 has had at least two different switches spontaneously short/blow out. Electro- mechanical switches are like 1930's technology...is Rancilio pushing the make- it-cheaply effort 5% too hard?

<comment><USER26> I think it's the use they get. An early one would be 20+ by now I think. Similar age grinders from Mazzer also seem to burn out their switches. This suites me fine as they then get sold as having burnt out motors, which I don't doubt can happen, but I'm yet to see it and have bought several dead. Repair, respray and then they usually just sit in a line for months as I like them too much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've always wondered what was in my rocky. This was great to see...

<comment><USER26> Open it and clean it and it transforms things. They get pretty gross inside. Mine seemed to need tightening periodically or the grind would be too coarse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Hi OP! You should consider 3D printing the grouphead plastic cover!</comment>


The Careless Ones - <AUTHOR> http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2013/10/24/The-Careless-Ones.html

<comment><USER2> Uncle Bob is spot on. I see software people ship half complete "minimum viable" things for the sake of shipping something even if it is terrible and incomplete.

If we all made our art, our craft, with more care, the world would be better off.</comment>


An Inconvenient Truth about Smart Cities - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-inconvenient-truth-about-smart-cities/# <comment><USER2> We are a culture obsessed by the _how_ , not the _why_. A picture of people walking or biking to work does not fit our idea of the "future" as well as one where we ride around in slick glass pods. We have grown custom to doing even the simplest things orders of magnitude less efficient than they need to be.

We are also a culture obsessed by image and impression. Look at the image at the top of this article. Images of futurist cities like this drive me nuts, am I looking at a pimped up motherboard or a city where people actually live? What if a sustainable and livable city doesn't look very exciting on picture?

Cities are complex adaptive _social_ systems that we are nowhere near fully understanding. Formulating a vision of a city with its base in a technological ideal ("smart") just shows how disconnected you are from reality and how setup you will be for complete failure.

<comment><USER3> _> We are also a culture obsessed by image and impression. Look at the image at the top of this article. Images of futurist cities like this drive me nuts, am I looking at a pimped up motherboard or a city where people actually live? What if a sustainable and livable city doesn't look very exciting on picture?_

Jane Jacobs addresses this topic at length in Chapter 19 of _The Death and Life of Great American Cities_. Here are the first few paragraphs (the whole book is a worthwhile read if you have the chance):

-

 _When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities._ A city cannot be a work of art.

 _We need art, in the arrangements of cities as well as in the other realms of life, to help explain life to us, to show us meaning, to illuminate the relationship between the life that each of us embodies and the life outside us. We need art most, perhaps, to reassure us of our own humanity. However, although art and life are interwoven, they are not the same things. Confusion between them is, in part, why efforts at city design are so disappointing. It is important, in arriving at better design strategies and tactics, to clear up this confusion._

 _Art has its own peculiar forms of order, and they are rigorous. Artists, whatever their medium,_ make selections _from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist. To be sure, the artist has a sense that the demands of the work (i.e., of the selections of material he has made) control him. The rather miraculous result of this process—if the selectivity, the organization and the control are consistent within themselves—can be art. But the essence of this process is disciplined, highly discriminatory selectivity_ from _life. In relation to the inclusiveness and the literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence._

 _To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life._

 _The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy. In its place, taxidermy can be a useful and decent craft. However, it goes too far when the specimens put on display are exhibitions of dead, stuffed cities._

<comment><USER4> >"Jane Jacobs addresses this topic at length in Chapter 19 of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Here are the first few paragraphs (the whole book is a worthwhile read if you have the chance)"

That's a seminal book in urban planning and policy. I was happy to see it mentioned in the discussion. There was also a good documentary of Jane Jacobes that was released last year(she would have 100) called "Citizen Jane: Battle for the City"

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3699354/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3699354/)

<comment><USER5> Cool. I will have to check that out.

Urban planning is complex. One can simultaneously be aghast at some of the worst excesses of Robert Moses' highway visions and mum on the impact of, say, Lincoln Center on the then-existing neighborhoods.

And, as I alluded to in another comment, an organic/livable city doesn't necessarily equate to one that's as inexpensive to live in as potential inhabitants would like it to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ancient Greeks famously started new cities with a... city square, and built around it. This is because public matters were most important to them and focusing on private matters was the definition of egoism and a bad citizen.

Whenever I hear about another smart city project, it seems to be done for show. There are pictures of architecture, vegetation, various mechanical systems or circuits. As if people living there didn't matter. Everyone will fit in and it will be great because concrete will do the thinking for you.

<comment><USER7> But we are not living in 2000 BC anymore. Public matters can be solved in distributed ways since the 1990s via public websites. What is happening right now is a much more fundamental change in the way cities operate.

1\. The third social space (restaurants, cafe's, etc) becomes more and more irrelevant due to delivery services. So you can enjoy restaurant food within the comfort of your home. As a result urban space used for restaurants will likely decrease.

2\. Retail is dying for a long while. Currently 10.3% of urban retail space in Singapore (where I live) is not used. Tendency increasing. The only thing working against the trend are co-working spaces, accelerators and incubators.

We have to come to terms that instead of building cities for cars we need to build cities for mobile humans with a cellphone.

<comment><USER6> Maybe it works like that in Singapore. Personally, I think it's a pity. Ancient Greece was far from an utopia - even "enlighted" Athens used slave labor in nearby silver mines and regularly voted to declare wars on other peoples. But some solutions were thought-provoking.

By moving public matters to a website you move them out of sight. Out of sight, out of mind. People think less of common good, and how the city should work. Public matters become distant, abstract and impersonal.

Many people value restaurant not exclusively for the food - which can be a bit stale or cold if it's delivered to you - but also for the service, pleasant atmosphere and sometimes to meet interesting people. And to show off.

I don't know how it works in Singapore, but in a traditional shop you can examine goods you'd like to purchase, try them on, ask questions, or even negotiate a little bit. In my country it's rare that a shop's website has accurate and complete descriptions for all items, or even photos from all sides. A shop may have a contact form or a person answering questions through instant messages, but you can't know if he/she is active and not on a coffee break. To make a perfect shop website you have to make special cases to emulate many kinds of service that you take for granted entering a physical shop.

Delivery works well for easily defined items like books that don't have many variants, such as books, and even then if you know precisely which book do you want. A recommendation system might or might not give you valuable suggestions. In a shop or library, you can browse a book or ask the librarian or clerk.

In some ways, delivery shops and shops in general are very inefficient. For example if you buy physical books, everyone must have their own book, whereas in a library one copy can be used by many people. In some ways it's much more efficient. Digital books are even more efficient, but publishers fight very hard to create artificial scarcity and disallow copying, which is next to free in cost.

But a digital version of a soldering iron, a hammer or climbing equipment won't suffice, and this could be handled similar to a library, even for a fee. These items are only needed occasionally in most homes - if you run your own workshop, it's another story.

<comment><USER8> > _Maybe it works like that in Singapore. Personally, I think it 's a pity. > Ancient Greece was far from an utopia - even "enlighted" Athens used slave > labor in nearby silver mines_

Considering that the US didn't allow poor people to vote until the mid 19th century (which ancient Athens allowed), didn't allow blacks to vote until much later, and women to vote until 1920s, and it still had slavery until 1860s -- that is, 2 and a half millennia after those ancient Athenians, I'd say they were quite ahead of the time in their democracy.

<comment><USER6> We agree on women and blacks. But good arguments have been made (weasel words because I don't remember the source) that a democracy where EVERYONE can vote is very susceptible to populism and demagogy. Under this system, two idiots are worth more than a genius. People living under a rock, not knowing what's going on in the neighborhood, let alone the country, are worth just as much. How to deal with that ?

One way is by restricting who gets to vote. Should clinically insane people be allowed to vote ? How about criminals ? But where to draw the line ? Another is similar - some wise people would get more votes. Third way - provide decent free education to everyone. It has been achieved on a small scale (Finland), in fact Finnish education is much more than that.

I'm sympathetic to the Karl Popper's definition of democracy:

 _It is wrong to ask who will rule. The ability to vote a bad government out of office is enough. That is democracy._

and

 _I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence 'democracy,' and the other, 'tyranny.'._

also

 _Democracy cannot be fully characterized as the rule of the majority, although the institution of general elections is most important. For a majority might rule in a tyrannical way. (The majority of those who are less than 6 ft. high may decide that the minority of those over 6 ft. shall pay all taxes.) In a democracy, the powers of the rulers must be limited;_

<comment><USER8> > _We agree on women and blacks. But good arguments have been made (weasel > words because I don 't remember the source) that a democracy where EVERYONE > can vote is very susceptible to populism and demagogy. Under this system, > two idiots are worth more than a genius._

The idea behind democracy, at least real athenian democracy, is that it doesn't matter who is an idiot and who is a genius.

Not just because they are all people, but mainly because since they are all to be affected by the decisions of a vote, they should all have a say.

If anything, when one was "too much of a genius" or too distinct from others, it was viewed with suspicion, and they could see themselves ostracised (with "ostraca" being the ancient greek word for sea-shells, but also the shards of pottery using for voting, upon which athenians wrote the names of people to exile from the city) [1].

(And come to think of it, some of the most disastrous, self serving, society destructing, laws and ideas, come not from "idiots" but for very clever and well educated people).

So democracy is not about "finding what's best". It's about people participating in it, whether their thinking (or lack thereof), having equal say on what should be done in their community.

That's why ancient athenians besides mass popular vote, they also gave some high official positions by lottery -- so anybody, at random, can get a chance to get to them (for a term).

> _People living under a rock, not knowing what 's going on in the > neighborhood, let alone the country, are worth just as much. How to deal > with that ?_

Accept it.

[1] Aristedes a.k.a. "Aristedes the just" was a renowned state-person, who everybody considered trustworthy and just (hence the nickname), and he had done much to prove himself so over the years. (...). Once, when there was a vote for ostacizing, (...) it is said that an illiterate voter who did not recognise Aristides approached the statesman and requested that he write the name of Aristides on his voting shard to ostracize him. The latter asked if Aristides had wronged him. "No," was the reply, "and I do not even know him, but it irritates me to hear him everywhere called 'the Just'." Aristides then wrote his own name on the ballot.

<comment><USER6> But the Founding Fathers were more inspired by Sparta than Athens (source: documentary by History Channel). Sparta had not just a constitution and voting, but also a couple of institutions:

      *  two kings (equivalent of president)
      * apella (public voting for males over 30...)
      * ephors (ministers)
      * gerusia (elders... so senate ? In practice they held the most power and Sparta was an oligarchy)

Remember that Athenians voted to sentence Socrates to death. Philosophers delighted in trolling, and Socrates specialized in inconvenient questions. Soon they regretted that because they needed his advice. But it was too late.

* * *

The issue is not that the decisions aren't perfect. Ignorant people are disturbingly easy to manipulate into voting. Stupid people can be outright dangerous. I think Carlo M. Cipolla argued it best: from social perspective, a stupid person is a person who causes harm to you while not getting any benefit for it or even getting hurt himself in the process.

Maybe (instead of age requirement?) there should be some kind of "public affairs" test based on knowledge of what happened in the last few years ? Something like that.

<comment><USER9> Then you end up back at Jim Crow laws. Look at how much 'voting fraud' is being used in certain states to apply conditions to voting and how it affects turnout.

There is just no good way to do such tests in a fully enfranchised democracy. It's like parent tests or licenses people occasionally think of, ive thought it myself 'no way should that scumbag be allowed to breed' when reading about terrible abuse etc., but again those rules can and will end up applied to social undesirables and who decides that?

Rosa Parks was socially undesirable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Back in the day when Bill Gates was CEO of Microsoft and was hitting the big money, I remember hearing about his building a huge $5M house (when a million dollars was a million dollars) that would have digital-everything and be 100% buzzword compatible. This was probably the 1990s.

I'm wondering 1) how it went then; and 2) is the house now obsolete after just 20 years?

A house being obsolete in 20 years is one thing, but a whole city being obsolete is quite another.

<comment><USER11> Not just obsolete. Think about all the security issues appearing only 5 years later. I sure hope all "smart city solution vendors" are _required_ to provide _lifetime updates_ , and there's also a mechanism to switch the maintenance of those products to some other company if the original companies go under. It shouldn't be like "Hey, so now we'll go bankrupt. Good luck with our DRMed proprietary products, though!"

This is why it's so important for governments to move towards open source solutions as much as possible _despite_ the "high-cost of switching and training" and whatnot. Technology is going to be ingrained so much more in our institutions in the future. And it's going to be _way_ more expensive to solve issues if there is proprietary products lock-in.

<comment><USER12> To be the contrarian on the subject: this is also already the case with machinery. If the company i bought the water heater from goes bankrupt, there's no way to get spareparts and i have to replace the thing once one plastic nubbin breaks. Not much different if there's no one there to patch its openssl version.

<comment><USER10> If we wanted to make a low-maintenance, low-energy city, we'd use the LOWEST technology possible to get the job done. Round-a-bouts, not "smart traffic lights".

My personal view is that to see the cities of our near future, go to practically any big city in Asia today. High population density, everybody (whole families and and their farm animals) racing about on small motor scooters. Not a bad standard of living, but nothing like what we in thew west are used to (I'm in Australia).

Segways and flying cars are too expensive to make, too hard to fix, and too expensive to run. Ditto for maglev trains running in vacuum tunnels under cities.

<comment><USER13> As someone who loves in an area with both, traffic lights and roundabouts are very different and solve different problems. One critical thing lights offer is you can drop in a pedestrian crossing sequenced to the lights. These days you would use puffin crossings (sensors check the crossing is clear of pedestrians before giving signals back to motor traffic, also the cross/don't cross indication is mounted where pedestrians looking at it are also facing the nearest lane of motor traffic, increasing safety). On the other hand roundabouts are great for junctions where a lot of traffic enters the junction but most doesn't conflict.

In some scenarios it makes sense to have both lights and roundabouts, in extreme cases it even makes sense to fit roundabouts on a circle of roundabouts which then have lights at peak times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The inconvenient truth about anything smart is that it actually takes a lot of caring and feeding from very few experts (expensive) who actually understand the technology.

The end result is that economic laws put practical limit on what you can achieve with smart. The smart aspect of things needs to generate enough savings for the economic entity to be able to muster the experts to fix things, as they inevitably break in various ways. And it only happens if the entity is large enough.

Every, say, home could be made smarter, and the total savings would be probably big. But we won't do that as individuals, because for each of us, the cost of the expert is scary compared to the tiny savings that we can individually achieve with it. If we would organize (that is, create a larger economic entity), then perhaps it would be possible. But organization causes additional costs, too.

<comment><USER15> The smartest things I own are not digital at all. My plain old mechanical garden tools, my hammer, saw, mechanical kitchen equipment handed down to me from Grandma... The dumb things I have are all digital. They're finicky. They're unintuitive. They break in a few years, and it's almost always the electronics that are to blame.

My dad spent his career as a general manager in manufacturing. He had some machines that were over 100 years old, still running like a champ. The newer ones caused nothing but headaches (but did run more efficiently when they were working). When someone came to him with a problem, the root of it was almost always TMDE (Too Much Damn Electronics). I used to make fun of him for being a stodgy old fart...

But after spending ~20 years as a software engineer, I'm beginning to think he was right.

<comment><USER16> Sometimes I think that the Hacker News crowd overlooks how terribly fussy tech can be. For those with technical literacy, spare time, and a genuine interest in electronics, figuring out how to get their <insert smart device here> working again probably isn't that big of a deal. However, if you are not this person, you are probably better off sticking with the analog version. At least for now.

<comment><USER17> There's mostly no way you're going to fix recent compact electronics with integrated SoC and fused screens at home. It would require absurdly sophisticated tooling, and would make no financial sense at all. Virtually nothing on sale these days has components far apart enough on the board for you to replace with a basic soldering iron. Not that the trend towards gluing everything together would let you access the boards easily in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The inconvenient truth about existing cities is we have let them become completely dominated by technology, in particular the car.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm not sure about either the skepticism or the enthusiasm: we have, throughout history, built cities according to the "modern" standard. From the greek squares, to medieval towns with only space for a small handcart, to the car-centric cities in the US. And as we go, we improve them based on our knowledge: will we get it "right" this time? Of course not! But that's not the purpose of these projects. Can we try, see what comes out, and adjust as necessary?

Putting all these posts beforehand sounds to me like waterfall development, where cities are naturally built in an "agile" way. See Rome, for example :)

<comment><USER20> Ah, but Rome was not built in a sprint!

I think the main point is that fancy IoT gadgetry counts for very little compared to the things that really make a city work: infrastructure for power, water, sanitation, and transportation; places for people to live, not for gadgets to watch them.

<comment><USER21> > Rome was not built in a sprint!

Now I have to have this T-Shirt to wear to sprint planning meetings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It is not only about connectivity. The smarter city becomes, the more question of privacy arise. While it shouldn't be a stopper for further digitalization, cross-integration and overall efficiency tuning, putting it in the recipe should be done right now. I like the solution by Hannu Rajaniemi in his masterpiece Quantum Thief: every citizen in City of Mars had a complex "gevulot" (a complex set of a keychains, like in PKI), where he can decides what to share, with whom and for what time. There were news from Canada about designing similar system for national ID and other important documents. But the part of online-selection every time what to share is important in my opinion. We'll see what future will make of that.

<comment><USER23> Can you tell me more about this device? I'd love a link. I'm writing a story on exactly this issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I like Swedish cities because they are low-rise and had more trees, squares (usually triangles) and pedestrians. I particularly recall a wide tree-lined car-free avenue acting as a buffer zone between two parts of Malmö; people would take nice park walks in this elongated park just a few meters wide. I remember wishing that avenues like that radiated like spokes from the center so I could have had such a walk or cycle ride to work daily.

<comment><USER25> Sweden's city model hardly represents the ideal: the 1960s thru 1980s intentionally ripped the public center out of almost all Swedish towns, discouraging outside public space and attempting to make city and town centers into purely work and centralized (mostly indoor) retail spaces, with large (often multi-storey) parking spaces to enable easy car-transport to and from the suburbs (where people were supposed to live).

Take a look at the center of Stockholm: the area past the old town connecting the southern, central and western islands (Söder, Norrmalm/City, Kungsholmen) is a horrific spaghetti of motorways leading right into the heart of town - impossible to navigate on foot (pedestrians are led under overpasses, through tunnels, up and down litter-strewn stairways, and past 'unofficial' toilets. It's a truly dystopian vision of what can happen to a town when city-planners decide that cities are not for living in, and only local activism and historical accident preserved the parts of the old town that tourists now think are so beautiful and charming.

Nowadays things are improving, but the center of the city itself is still largely pedestrian and cycle-unfriendly, and many central streets have no doors, windows or stores facing the street itself: the idea was to keep the sidewalks free from people loitering or strolling around.

If you want a human-scaled model of a city that's built to encourage public space, walking and meeting, then almost any southern European town that's built to radiate from a central (traffic-free) square, ringed by restaurants and cafés, is a better example than anywhere in Sweden.

<comment><USER26> This comment makes me wonder if we've been to the same city, a horrific spaghetti of motorways? "Truly dystopian"? And which city planners are you talking about, Fleming in the 1600s or Lindhagen in the 1800s? The problem with Stockholm is that it is situated on a bunch of islands, making bridges and tunnels necessary.

<comment><USER25> I don't want to get sidetracked into our subjective impressions of Stockholm, but for the record, I live and work in the center of the town, and my preferred means of getting around would ideally be cycling and walking - neither of which are directly encouraged by the fact that during the 1960s to the 1980s large areas of the center were demolished and replaced by an extensive network of motorways and wide feeder roads directly into the city center. If you take a look at the google maps link [1] you can see the central train station over the horizon of multi-lane motorways, and looking around the panorama you should be able to get an impression of the massive network built for cars around the entire central area.

These roads don't connect the 'bunch of islands' (which are all linked by quite short bridges) they were intended to transport people living in the suburbs to their jobs in an otherwise uninhabited town, and back again in the evening, travelling by car. Trying to cross this network from the city-center to the neighboring island (Kungsholmen) involves the sort of dystopian walk I described above. Naturally there are other ways to get from one island to the other that circumvent this mammoth road network.

The center of Stockholm was viewed as unmodern and slum-like in the 1960s, and the planners at that time intended to completely remove all of the buildings and streets that you refer to: they were prevented from totally razing the Old Town (Gamla Stan) by local activists and protests, but large areas of the City were demolished and replaced by faceless office-space, with no entrances, shops, cafés or any features that would encourage people to do anything than walk or drive past as fast as possible on their way elsewhere.

These streets [2] have only begun to be 'humanized' in recent years, now that planners have seen the error of attempting to empty the city-center of all people before and after work hours - and now the process of establishing restaurants, hotels, cafés, shops and other lively street activities is really in full swing, with construction across almost all the streets listed in the note below.

But the attitude that car-traffic comes first is hard to shake for a generation of planners brought up with the feeling that masses of cars is a sign of a 'big city' and of 'city pulse' (stadspuls), so cycle lanes are generally rubbish [3] and pedestrians' needs are generally subsumed under the requirement to keep car-traffic moving (framkomlighet). Although much lip- service is now paid to cycling and walking in towns, very little is done outside of the tourist-visible areas in the center.

[1] [https://goo.gl/4sWntM](https://goo.gl/4sWntM) [2] For example: Vattugatan, Malmskillnadsgatan, Herkulesgatan, Mäster Samuelsgatan [3] [https://goo.gl/JfWRtU](https://goo.gl/JfWRtU)

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi I'm not from Sweden but from Spain, but here the trend in many cities (including mine) during the 60s and the 70s was the same as you describe, including awful crimes against cultural heritage. Wonderful "art nouveau" buildings were demolished to make room for asphalt and soulless cubes of concrete.

I often wonder what they were smoking in those decades to see such things as normal. I can understand that they thought that the car was the future, seeing all the convenience and not being aware of the full importance of the drawbacks (congestion, pollution, unhealthy lifestyle, etc.), but couldn't they at least have some appreciation of beauty?

Atlantic Hotel, A Coruña, opened in 1923, demolished in 1967: [https://i.pinimg.com/originals/56/99/92/569992a08191d5af0593...](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/56/99/92/569992a08191d5af05933cdf5aa17849.jpg)

The new hotel taking its place from 1968: [https://media- cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/04/64/ac/17/...](https://media- cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/04/64/ac/17/nh-atlantico.jpg)

Just one among many examples that give one the urge to reach for a time machine and an axe...

<comment><USER21> My first take is the maintenance cost. When labour is plentiful and cheap, you can have teams of cleaners to meticulously brush each corner in the intricate rooms, corridors and decorations of an Art Nouveau building.

When the cost with the labour force rises, you need to clean with fewer people, and faster. You need to use larger tools to cover the same area faster, and the tools require simple large shapes where, a vacuum for e.g. can easily go in any corner - hence a cube. Add the need to build fast and cheap, so concrete is it, or, after technology advances, just metal, glass and drywall - who has time to wait for the concrete to set? - so you end up with utilitarian cubes of cheap materials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke: Any sufficiently advanced smart city is indistinguishable from prison.

</comment><comment><USER28> There's been numerous attempts at "smart" cities, even in Arizona. One example is Arcosanti: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcosanti](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcosanti)

These things always sound amazing on paper. But they're always a bit lacking in person.

</comment><comment><USER29> If one person owns all the land, they (or someone they authorize) can boot anyone unwelcome. This makes life much simpler because you can sidestep a lot of issues and focus on what this really is: a pilot project.

<comment><USER30> Didn't Disney build such a city in Florida?

<comment><USER18> Celebration: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida)

A bit like Seahaven Island from the Truman show.

<comment><USER31> Which is another planned town in Florida, Seaside: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside,_Florida](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside,_Florida)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Whats the issue here. I think its implicitly obvious what style of government and particularly political affiliation these cities will have based upon who's starting them. If you think there's a chance that they will take anything from the playbook on the other side of the aisle, you are sorely mistaken. :P

</comment><comment><USER33> Reminds me of the smart home, which I'm still waiting for

<comment><USER5> Even when things work as designed (which they often don't), the problem with most Smart Home gadgetry is that they solve problems that I don't have like flipping the light switch and don't solve things I'd like done for me like cleaning up the kitchen. The interfaces to electrical equipment is the easy part. The hard part is the interfaces to physical objects and Smart Home stuff does nothing about that.

<comment><USER33> That's exactly what I think

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Getto for the elite?

</comment><comment><USER35> Yes, the current system is sooo much better. After all, it supports existence of Kendra L. Smith, the associate director of community engagement in the Center for Population Health Sciences at Stanford University its the lifestyle Kendra L. Smith is accustomed to.</comment>