Why Johnny Can't Code Good [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xyZeovFqCA <comment><USER2> A lot of hate in this presentation and a lot of generalizations. There are fantastic programming books. There are colleges doing a fantastic job teaching computer science. Making broad generalizations without solid statistics to at least back them up is usually not helpful.

<comment><USER3> I'd agree... there is a lot of toxic gray-beardery here.

His argument for why he dislikes Go and Javascript is ostensibly "they are easy to grok"...

I don't think this presentation was made out of ill-will or spite, but I think this presentation leaves little room for the mediocre; and frankly if a field is devoid of mediocre performers, you end up with a handful of gray-beards in a code cloister.

This is where, I think, the programmer mentality and the human empathy understanding are out of balance, and lead to false truths about how humans ought to behave.

I sorta like his point about contributing upstream, but again, I think that he neglects the fact that that isn't a straight-forward process to someone new to a language. He brings up that "the Rust community is welcoming", but (a) that doesn't really apply to most communities and (b) especially when you're just starting and haven't had too much exposure, you probably haven't witnessed (or realise you have witnessed) a bug in the 4 (often mature) standard libraries you regularly use.

<comment><USER4> I remember BASIC was the subject of regular derision from experts. Nothing helped me get interested in programming with such a gentle learning curve as BASIC. Where it lacked in every other area, it excelled in making programming accessible with immediate results.

<comment><USER3> Visual Basic 6 got me hooked in grade school... nothing more rewarding than being able to write a GUI app and short little games in minutes :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Teaching is not the problem. Anyone can pick up a free online book (I like to recommend SICP or HTDP) and learn everything they need to be a professional programmer. This isn't medical school where you need 8 years of education and experience before you can begin to practice your profession with a limited chance of killing someone.

Teaching CS is hard but I think the root of it is our ability to teach people how to think. Learning to program is easy compared to the problem of learning how to think algorithmically. Nobody fails CS101 because they can't remember the syntax of function definition, they fail because they can't figure out which functions they need to write to make a ball dance across the screen.

<comment><USER6> > Nobody fails CS101 because they can't remember the syntax of function > definition, they fail because they can't figure out which functions they > need to write to make a ball dance across the screen.

In my experience that isn't that case. I TAed CS101 while I was in grad school and there were a lot of folks that had a really hard time with the concept that a missing semicolon or comma would make the program not work. I heard: "why doesn't it just know what I mean" more then I would have thought possible.

I think learning the strictness and structure of programming is actually harder then you think when people have never done it before.

<comment><USER7> Why do we embrace the strictness and structure of these languages? Why aren't a line break and a semicolon equivalent?

Learning may be easiest in a scripting language like Powershell, where all libraries are loaded by default and semicolons don't matter. Errors like missing commas are often pointed out explicitly in the error message. The JIT nature of the console allows for very agile learning. For any given operation, there are usually at least 2 ways to do something. Variable types are optional and very flexible. Finally, the help system can auto-build a rudimentary help page for any function, even custom functions you've written with no help section, giving a basic idea of inputs and operation.

<comment><USER8> _Why do we embrace the strictness and structure of these languages? Why aren 't a line break and a semicolon equivalent?_

Because, to put it bluntly, that's just how the machine works. The language uses semicolons to delimit statements so that you can break long statements across multiple lines, or have multiple statements in one line. They are very similar in function to full stops and semicolons in English (which is coincidentally another language where newlines and semicolons are _not_ equivalent.)

"But why can't it just figure it out?", you ask. Look at the "automatic semicolon insertion" rules in JS for an example of how trying to "make it easier" only leads to more complexity and confusion.

The "strictness and structure" is inherent in the way computers function, and I think getting used to and even embracing it earlier rather than later is very important for being a successful programmer.

From personal experience, Powershell syntax is quite frankly ridiculous even for an experienced programmer, nevermind all the "behind your back" things it does that leads to subtle and very confusing bugs (especially around character encoding)...

<comment><USER7> Both Powershell and Javascript are "curly-bracket" type languages. Yet semicolons are only mandatory in one. Why?

(Powershell can have nightmarish encoding problems. "Why did my file change from UTF-8 to "UTF-16LE BOM"? Is that why Powershell can't read the file?")

<comment><USER8> PS is meant for interactive use, which is why using the newline to terminate statements makes sense (and then they had to introduce another separator for multiple statements on a line, along with a way to break up a statement across multiple lines.) JS is not.

The amount of PS "semicolon vs newline" discussions and articles (as well as those about JS's ASI) shows the downside of this additional complexity and the confusion it causes --- contrast this with C or C-derived languages like Java, where the only statement terminator is the semicolon (and block statements end with }.)

In general, you can see languages designed with interactive use as a primary goal (bash, cmd, PS, Python, ...) tend to also use a newline as a statement terminator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Video is 48 minutes, and in a format I find very difficult to follow and stay engaged. Here are the bullet points from the slide deck:

Who's Johnny? \- Can't create something without examples. \- Almost never upstream patches to what they use. \- Industry's definition of a healthy ecosystem wrapped around "Johnny".

Extreme Time Preference. \- Problems in software are not 0-60 times. \- Optimized for triviality.

Can't Hire Out Of This Problem. \- We don't know how to interview well. \- Many interview practices are odious.

"Hire Only The Best." \- Complete nonsense. \- Nobody can sustain being extremely picky about their hires. \- Everybody else "hires only the best". \- This isn't a plan, it's a mantra. \- There's no competitive advantage here unless you have a lot of money and are willing to churn your hires. \- Burn & Churn doesn't select for experienced employees. \- Doesn't charm them either.

What We're Unwilling To Admit. \- Much of our work is boring and easy. \- Some find a niche and are not often obligated to skill up. \- Might learn new tools, but don't develop in a lasting and general way.

Coders Don't Know How To Learn. \- Never learned how to learn properly. \- Can be difficult to get programmers to eat their vegetables. \- Knowing is not the same as ability.

Coders Don't Know How To Teach. \- Create false narratives around how they learned. \- They recommend books, resources intended to project [or increase their own] prestige more than to help the student.

Teaching Is A Skill. \- Takes practice. \- Almost everyone is bad at it for quite a while. \- Without expertise, extremely unlikely to be successful. \- Students won't tell you they don't understand forever.

Teaching: Topics. \- They teach topics that have prestige associated with them. \- Not covered: skill building.

Teaching: Methodology. \- Talking isn't very useful. \- Dialogues work best as remediation/unsticking.

Teaching: Time \- Difficult to parachute in for an hour a day. \- Can't do much with that time without foundation of work.

Software Is Bad At Writing. \- Very few books go through substantial review. \- Fewer act on it in a meaningful way.

Programmers Are Literate But Can't Really Read. \- Like not being able to retain a novel in your mind. \- Can't incorporate mental model of what they read. \- Stunts growth. \- Writing checks their knowledge and skills can't cash. \- Perpetual rediscovery of idiom.

Employers Aren't Doing Their Part. \- Expect highly skilled programmers to drop out of the sky. \- Substantive on-the-job education or training is rare.

Training Makes Business Sense! \- Training is software moneyball. \- [Photo of a person not recognized by transcriber.]

Company Incentives \- Programmers (rationally) change jobs. \- Companies aren't often keen on investing deeply into training. \- Conferences are about it, actually.

Training As A Culture. \- Wouldn't you rather work at a company that invests in the training of its people? \- How much easier would hiring me [be] if your company had an uncommon reputation for internal training and education?

Anthony Grafton. \- [Photo of a person not recognized by transcriber.] \- Recently listened to a talk of his about the history of books, reading, and digitzation. \- He has concerns about how people read today. \- I share his concerns. \- I strongly recommend Grafton's "Codex in Crisis" talk at Google.

Programmers Are Illiterate. \- It's worse than the situation with books and broader society. \- We're an amnesiac culture.

Learning To Read Code \- [Photo of Haskell Almanac book.]

Make A Mess, Clean It Up! \- [Photo of a person not recognized by transcriber.] \- [URL http www folklore org]

[Video from *Defender: 1980 Classic Arcade Game"]

Don't Train How You Play. \- Train harder, be more focused and structured.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's really unfortunate that this is what's passing the bar as a non-technical talk at /\C. Some of the LC talks are given by brilliant people, but talks like this make me think they've got a very weak review process for management talks or business talks.

After watching it and taking some notes, the biggest problem with this talk is that he loads a bunch of untrue and unfair garbage up front to pander to the local culture of dismissive shitbirding on everyone else outside of the room.

Skip to 22m in to skip all the predictable Chris-Allen-makes-fun-of-everyone preamble and get to the meat of his talk, the substance of which I agree with.

For those who can't stomach it even at 3x speed the way I just powered through, I've got a summary:

\- Businesses make bad decisions about the longevity or sustainability of their business practice. They're compose of directors and VPs trying to work on a quarterly OKR schedules for wins to justify their outrageous 200k-250k salary options, so it's a vicious and competitive environment.

\- Businesses then try and skip the part about building a sustainable tech org by appealing to, "We hire the best." This is expecting great engineers to parachute in from Valhalla to go to war for you. It's unrealistic.

\- Between this style of technical evaluation and absurdly fast product cadences (all free of consequence, no liability expressed or implied), organizations don't feel they need to care too hard about building deep skill in anything but their most core business interest because most of the work is "trivial" (and to his credit, Chris includes a lot of his own work in this).

\- Businesses could actually improve infrastructure to eliminate this trivial work, but this requires more sophisticated tools, techniques and designs and these are considered risky.

\- This is then used as a justification to remove all technical mentorship and tutelage from the system and only hire specialists.

\- And then the industry forms a tight orbit around tools and practices that are deleterious to anything but a short-turnover org like the modern Google.

And for the record, Chris is one of those folks in the community who's made a reputation for being dismissive and cantankerous. It's his natural personality to make even good and insightful points like this hard to watch.

It's too bad the lambdaconf folks didn't give him feedback to just cut his talk in half. If he had started at 22m it would have been a HELL of a talk. Instead he needs to erect an effigy and shove it in a wicker man with bees to appease his (and perhaps his audience's, given the laughter?) love of punching down on folks with less formal CS knowledge.

<comment><AUTHOR> >love of punching down on folks with less formal CS knowledge.

I care more about practices and tools, really. Stuff like being comfortable with patching a library, reading the code you use. I don't have any formal CS knowledge, no credits, no degree. I don't really understand type theory beyond the basics of cardinality and whatever I had to learn for the book.

It's a shame you dislike me so much, we very much agree on things like the value of training and education.

<comment><USER9> Chris, you called my wife stupid because she was pregnant and said the reason I was supportive of women in the industry is because her stupid pregnancy hormones splashed on me, because I was being stupid.

This is not the way to make friends and influence people. Still, I've given you as fair as shake as I can. I'm not the only person who found the first half of your presentation to be off putting. Unlike them, I extracted some of your key points and laid them out in a tl;dr.

> Stuff like being comfortable with patching a library, reading the code you > use.

This is where our agreement diverges. Many people will not or cannot engage the open source world. Given how many folks don't use licensing, I'm always skeptical of working for them for free as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Holy shit what? The last memories I had of interacting with you that could be related to what you're talking about:

\- You talking to me about potentially working at your company

\- Soliciting pictures of your greyhounds

\- Congratulating you on either the pregnancy or the birth of your child

I checked out our shared Twitter history, we talked a fair bit in the past but I wasn't able to find _anything_ like this. I used this search: [https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=kirin...](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=kirindave%20bitemyapp&src=typd)

I mean this sincerely — are you _sure_ you didn't get me confused with someone else? I was definitely a dick from what I can see from the Twitter history and I apologize. However, I cannot remember and cannot find myself ever saying or implying something as horrendous as what you're describing here.

>This is where our agreement diverges. Many people will not or cannot engage the open source world.

Oh! Don't need to! People use OSS regardless of engagement with the wider community. I'm talking about stuff people do on their work hours like vendoring a library and upstreaming a patch. I'm not talking about off-hours. For people that are uncomfortable with or contractually unable to upstream a patch, knowing how to hack on the libraries you use is still a big improvement. Many don't!

<comment><USER10> > I checked out our shared Twitter history, we talked a fair bit in the past > but I wasn't able to find _anything_ like this.

> I mean this sincerely — are you _sure_ you didn't get me confused with > someone else? I was definitely a dick from what I can see from the Twitter > history and I apologize. However, I cannot remember and cannot find myself > ever saying or implying something as horrendous as what you're describing > here.

[https://twitter.com/bitemyapp/status/477359528510382080](https://twitter.com/bitemyapp/status/477359528510382080)

      [@bitemyapp] @KirinDave my first workflow video is up to
      1,535 views on Youtube so far. Who knows how many people
      have used my guide. I'm feeling good.

      [@KirinDave] @bitemyapp It is not about your traffic, it is
      about their excitement. Get over yourself.

      [@bitemyapp] @KirinDave Drinking the haterade tonight. Some
      of those pregger hormones transfer over?

      Should ramp up theft of Clojure library authors >:)

      [@KirinDave] @bitemyapp Yeah I'm hysterical that's real cool.

That covers a portion of the claim. (I'm trying to stay out of actually passing judgement on bitemyapp or his ">"-quoted defence or KirinDave's earlier claim.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it needs judgment passed, that was shitty! Thank you for finding this.

Dave: I was out of line and there was no point for me to be dick-waving with you like that. I can't say it's possible for me to read everything you did into what I said, but it was a shitty thing to say regardless. I apologize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As comments on the video are disabled, I'll state here that this guy's body motion was making my dizzy. I had to occlude him with another window to watch the video.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, they certainly don't teach presentations anymore. Stop moving side to side!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I completely agree. Whether or not he's gatekeeping a bit by shitting on Go and JavaScript, and whether or not he's promoting his book about haskell.

I totally agree. It's when I'm lost that I've learned the most.

I've very frequently thought of myself as overpaid, I've come to the conclusion that it is tenacity which makes me as well paid as I am.

The worst parts about being a software engineer are setting up development environments, thats a hurdle a lot of people break on before they cross over.

When it's that single fucking space that breaks your jQuery code and you can't figure out why your code isn't working, but eventually you realize you didn't put that space between the id and class, that's a hurdle people break on before they cross over.

When it's the fact I spent ten hours already this weekend building a god damn gulp file with literally zero visible results to anyone but me, thats a hurdle people break on before they cross over.

So maybe I don't agree actually, maybe I think tenacity is what allows us software engineers to do what we do, or at least to get where we are, I definitely agree that people a lot of engineers I work with are very hard pressed to break out of their defined boundaries.

I've always been that person, and I've never been that person. I always take on projects I know nothing about, but when I'm sitting there looking at a blank file I often find it extremely difficult to figure out what to do.

Reading code is _hard_. It's unbelievably hard. And languages like Go which I've never worked with promise to make it easier through their reduction in the possible pathways one might do something. Compare that to Ruby where there is literally almost always at least two different ways to write the same exact piece of code. Or compare that to C where you're literally allocating and deallocating pieces of memory for your data structures.

He is absolutely right in that A) teaching is very hard B) employers shouldn't expect gods gift to mankind to people to be the only people they'll hire

But in a world where the average retention rate is as low as it is, should employers invest more in us?

He's right that civil engineers go through a lot more than we do to call themselves engineers, but are they dealing with architectures frequently featuring tens of millions of interacting features (lines of code)?

So while I have come to literally no conclusion here, I wonder, is he right that doing things ends up being far more valuable than reading about them? I sort of think so because I just spent ten hours on a gulp file which will show no gains to anyone except myself, but I also read four articles on how JavaScript works at the engine level this morning and plan to apply those principles I learned both to my own code and to code reviews in the future.

At the end of the day we should all discard what is cruft to us, and learn from what is not, and it will be different for all of us.

</comment><comment><USER14> In my experience, the fundamental reason why most programmers are bad is because they don't have experience running real companies. The ones who do can consistently make the correct technical decisions almost every time even they have zero knowledge or experience with whatever problem they are trying to solve beforehand.</comment>


Show HN: StartupWeekend pitch - open source music player and radio - <AUTHOR>

Being a coder and desk jockey like many of us, I spend a lot of time plugged into my music collection or the "radio". The problem is that I don't trust iTunes after losing my history in a system crash. The cloud should solve that and also be available online, but comes with unfortunate restrictions.
My plan for this weekend is to build an open source, web based, music player, and social radio. This may sound like a tall order, but we will have a working demo in two days and all of our work will happen on github for everyone to see. (https://github.com/comster/disco)
If you're a javascript hacker or frontend designer who's interested in building a better music app and social radio, join team disco.js!
[end pitch]
[For example of the radio feature, see turntable.fm .]
The technology stack is all javascript. Node.js, Mongodb, and Backbone.js are the weapons of choice. Obviously my goal is to meet and learn from hackers at the event, but this is also a chance for me to shamelessly plug my open source platform as a service framework that I'm putting together (https://github.com/comster/house). It's just a bunch of open source components put together to provide a basic app development platform. The goal is to minimize your dev time on the server, so that you can focus on the application experience. This weekend gives me a chance to prove it can support a complex app like disco.js, and to get feedback from other developers and hopefully improve the architecture.
I'm looking for hacker feedback!  Thanks in advance :) <comment><USER2> Solution already exists: google music. Or store your music on the cloud, or backup your computer, or use Pandora.

Good luck with your web based, social, radio but open source thingy-ma-bob.</comment>


How Silicon Valley Became a Den of Spies - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/07/27/silicon-valley-spies-china-russia-219071 <comment><USER2> > Occasionally, Chinese intelligence activities in San Francisco burst into > plain view. Consider the story—and it is an incredible one, also told here > for the first time—of the 2008 Olympic Torch Run.

> ...

> Most brazenly, said former intelligence agents, Chinese officials bussed in > 6,000-8,000 J-Visa holding students—threatening them with the loss of > Chinese government funding—from across California to disrupt Falun Gong, > Tibetan, Uighur and pro-democracy protesters. (They even provided these > students with a box lunch.) "I'm not sure they would have pulled out these > stops in any other city, but San Francisco is special" to China, said a > former senior U.S. official.

It's wild, but the same thing happened in Canberra, Australia. The CCP organised thousands of Chinese students to support Beijing and counter-protest pro-Tibet protesters.

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of an incident from my college days. An international student association put on some sort of cultural appreciation event. Students from other countries would perform songs or dances or poems from their homeland.

This was around 2004 or so. I don't remember the political climate being very charged, or at least not at my engineering school. There were blogs but major social networks hadn't yet taken off.

So at this international student event, a guy goes up and says he's going to do a song from his home country, Taiwan. He doesn't get much farther before a Chinese student runs onstage, grabs the microphone away from him and yells into it "Taiwan is not a country!"

<comment><USER4> >at this international student event, a guy goes up and says he's going to do a song from his home country, Taiwan. He doesn't get much farther before a Chinese student runs onstage, grabs the microphone away from him and yells into it "Taiwan is not a country!"

Sounds like battery to me. Should have had this student arrested, charges pressed, and ooops - criminality makes you lose your student visa.

Fuck anyone who abuses America's hospitality to try to take away someone's 1st Amendment rights.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I confess to having a certain fondness for reading into the secretive nature of Chinese perception operations.

How does one efficiently solve this problem however? If we, in a case like the pro-china counterprotest described in the article, decide to nab the guys off the street on counts of suspected espionage what is the repercussion we should all fear? Bad press? Chinese students and engineers pulling out of the US tech sector? While I feel terribly conflicted about a government that exerts such fear on their people as someone who wants to believe in the individuality of a person, surely the repercussions of countering Chinese espionage aren't any worse than say...investigating Russian social media influence?

<comment><USER6> > Chinese students and engineers pulling out of the US tech sector?

I'm sure the ones who were coerced into participating in the counter-protest wouldn't care enough to hop on the next plane home.

Has to be kind of disheartening, minding your own business when all of a sudden you get a knock on the door and a "request" to trample all over the civil rights of the citizens of your host country "or else."

<comment><USER2> > Has to be kind of disheartening

My impression is that most Chinese students wouldn't have a problem doing this. "Civil rights" aren't really a thing in Chinese thinking, and the "patriotic education" in China does an excellent job at convincing them that the Dalai Lama and Falun Gong are evil, and Tibet and Hong Kong and Taiwan are indisputably part of China.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Society has to avoid McCarthyism (a 'reds under the bed' panic). This is what China wants and it plays directly into the propaganda. They want false accusations and race based panic.

Authoritarian states stealing advanced technology will be multigenerational challenge, but it's a solvable problem. But we must stick our values while we solve it.

The first thing to change the cost/benefit analysis of theft. This means evidence based prosecutions conducted transparently with real jail sentences.

Technical solutions can help. All business producing innovation need long term high quality logs for all activity (you need to know who downloaded what software source code and when)

Perhaps the most difficult to overcome problem comes from Patriotic Education, which is state sponsored brainwashing starting from kindergarten (since 1990) leaving a potentially indelible effect on the psyche of graduates of the Chinese education system. A well rounded study of history and understanding of national strategies is needed to see through any government's propaganda (but the propaganda from the government of China in particular). This study is something we all can benefit from.

Every culture agrees stealing is wrong. Threats and coercion are wrong. On this issue the moral high ground clearly belongs to the US. But we need to be careful to always keep the moral high ground and never alienate people who have done no wrong.

The centuries old idea of letting people into our country to work and by adopting a few values become accepted as as American as any other is a powerful global piece of soft power. But powerful nations will always try to exploit to cheat America out of the technology it develops.

We must understand China's long term strategy and fight back using our moral high ground, which includes a transparent legal system. We must see through China's propaganda (it says it is not a perpetrator but instead a victim of hacking. The truth is, it is both.)

<comment><USER8> I wonder if it would be helpful to mandate civics education for university students on student visas.

Even so, just as a store can survive some shoplifters, surely American industry can survive some IP misappropriation, perhaps with some light assistance from a tariff system or deduction against foreign aid payments?

<comment><USER7> > I wonder if it would be helpful to mandate civics education for university > students on student visas.

We need to make sure everyone - whether they are international students spending 4 years studying, immigrants in the workforce, or locals who have been here their whole lives - feel welcomed in this country and develop a strong positive affinity to their new home (whether or not they stay forever), and especially the values we try and represent.

We can make people feel more welcomed and included as individuals: we can try and include more newcomers and students in our own social circles.

I'm a bit skeptical of trying to reverse brainwash people with a western patriotic civics education, but a mandated program to teach newcomers their rights and how the (in principle) mostly fair and transparent legal system works is probably a good thing.

Each student or immigrant from Russia or China are individuals with their own unique motivations, personality and temperaments. It's absolutely unfair to paint them all with the same brush but they are clearly still vulnerable to a powerful authoritarian government which can threaten and coerce them to act against the US.

Also, for every strategy the west develops, the government of China will have a counter strategy. Fortunately, I think we can win this fight.

> Even so, just as a store can survive some shoplifters, surely American > industry can survive some IP misappropriation, perhaps with some light > assistance from a tariff system or deduction against foreign aid payments?

I suspect a systematic, state sponsored attack on US IP (particularly future technology) from a competent government is greater threat than you think. Remember that a strong economy funds all other parts of government.</comment></comment></comment>


Nook Dethrones Kindle according to Consumer Reports - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/gaming.gadgets/06/17/consumer.reports.nook.kindle/

<comment><USER2> Tablets and phones should have a reader mode, where you can read ebooks in something like e-ink. I'm thinking about some sort of transparent display for the normal color whiz-bangery that we have now, which would disappear to reveal the e-ink display behind it.

I seem to recall a transparent display technology posted here awhile ago.</comment>


Where oil rigs go to die - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/02/where-oil-rigs-go-to-die <comment><USER3> Absolutely beautiful read about the life cycle of capitalism and beautiful machines, thanks for posting it!

> I asked him if it ever seemed a pity to break up such monumental and > characterful structures. Did he look at Winner in the way that I had come to > look at her, in the way her former crew looked at her, as something > dignified? Sari said the only emotion he could feel about Winner was relief, > when she was gone, on schedule. But not long ago, he acknowledged, he had > had a wobble. It was over those two young Ensco rigs – Ensco 6003 and 6004 – > that had come out of Brazilian waters. When Sari won the right to scrap > them, he took the unusual decision to sail the rigs under their own power > from South America to Turkey. "I piloted one myself, for the last mile to > Aliaga. I wanted to try it out." Sari mimed adjusting thrusters, striking > buttons. "Everything was like new, all the controls." They demolished Ensco > 6003 and 6004 over the course of about 10 weeks. "Beautiful machines. > Beautiful machines," Sari said.

Afterwards, To get a better appreciation of how dangerous the job of ship breaking actually is, I looked for some videos.

"Scrapped: Chittagong Cutters" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fqrRhqv0Iw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fqrRhqv0Iw)

"The Ship Breakers" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdYK2vb6McE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdYK2vb6McE)

<comment><USER4> A couple of oil rigs recently sailed past my office a few months ago. On a small break in the park grounds checking how the magpie nest was doing with some colleagues we saw them sneak past.

We were all surprised how fast they went. Not fast fast, but in the space of 10 minutes, or so, could clear several hundred meters; the visual comprehension that something we know can move but should not, is. A contradiction of logic and intuition.

<comment><USER5> My parents used to own a small condo on a small shipping channel on Lake Michigan. The scale of ships is incredible. There is nothing quite like standing on the fourth floor of a building, and looking at something that is much larger than the building you are in navigating a narrow curve in a river without assistance.

I've lived in Chicago for my entire life, and I often think about how amazing it is that we as people have constructed things as large as skyscrapers and highways. But oceangoing vessels can be just as large, and they _move_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Shipbreaking has some similarities with electronics recycling in that it's hard work ideally requiring some significant precautions, but if you forego those precautions and employ hordes of desperate people in a jurisdiction that either doesn't care or is just happy about the jobs, you can get that done half a world away for more bang for your buck.

Then again, in that respect, it has similarities with many other kinds of labor as well.

It's fascinating to see that, though challenging, the owners in this case were persuaded by factors other than just money, and this work was performed at a place that appeared decidedly less dystopian than what you see on the tidal beaches of Southeast Asia.

Great article, though. This is the long-form content I like to read. It informs by painting scenes and portraying moods. It's not just obligatory anecdotes, but prose that takes you there, makes you see an issue through the different players' eyes, and makes you think.

<comment><USER7> I think that requiring robust safety is the best way to both combat aggressive offshoring and help the environment and prevent the race to the bottom in working conditions.

"The power of habbit" showed that once you got safety pinned down you can expect for it to spill over in other parts of person life.

<comment><USER8> >I think that requiring robust safety is the best way to both combat aggressive offshoring and help the environment and prevent the race to the bottom in working conditions

As far as I'm aware, this is how the North Sea sector (which has hundreds of rigs that will eventually need decommissioning) is regulated. Environmental and occupational standards are rigorous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's a documentary called _Workingman 's Death_ about the worst jobs in the world: not in an amusing Mike Rowe way, but jobs that are backbreaking, pay a pittance and regularly kill in horrible ways. And there's no commentary, no soundtrack, just unstaged video footage, ambient sounds, and people talking about their jobs and why they do it.

One of the segments, _Brothers_ , is about the Gadani shipbreaking yards in Pakistan: [http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xr722r_working-man-s- death-...](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xr722r_working-man-s-death- brothers_news)

The other episodes are worth watching too, particularly the Indonesian sulphur mine and the Nigerian butchery. The first of these is also a tourist attraction, and they film tourists doing it for kicks while the workers talk about seeing their friends make a single misstep, fall into a sulphur pit and boil to death in front of their eyes.

</comment><comment><USER10> I was a system engineer for some electronics subsystems for rigs like Winner on the Norwegian continental shelf for 3 years.

Will try to check back on this thread in 30 minutes if anybody has questions that I can answer.

Edit: just checked, no questions. At work in a few minutes so I won't have time now.

<comment><USER11> What sort of comms did these rigs use? Satellite?

And how advanced were the electronic systems on these rigs? I suppose they had to run everything from SCADA through to heating for accommodation blocks?

<comment><USER10> _What sort of comms did these rigs use? Satellite?_

It depends. Satelite was often a fallback. When they where moored and in operation they would often use microwave-link to a nearby "access point" (another more permanent rig with fiber connection to shore).

 _And how advanced were the electronic systems on these rigs? I suppose they had to run everything from SCADA through to heating for accommodation blocks?_

I only know about the radio and radar systems. I would describe the ones I supported as reasonably simple except for the fact that signals had to pass through a number of networks belonging to our customers, our customers suppliers and even competitors before reaching their destinations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Michael Glawogger, an Austrian documentary director, who died tragically in a car crash in 2014, made a 2005 documentary partly about Pashtun workers in Pakistan who dismantle ships. The part about the ship-breaking workers starts at about 1:21:10 and lasts about 25 minutes. It's really fascinating - <USER2> highly recommend it. The documentary is called "Workingman's Death". Actually, the whole documentary is really good: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478331/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478331/)

<comment><USER13> Glawogger died from Malaria. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Glawogger#Death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Glawogger#Death)

<comment><USER12> Weird. I distinctly remember at the time that it was reported as a car crash, but everything I can google now agrees with you. Ok, he died from malaria. I also loved his comedy movie "Contact High" (2009). Basically a European stoner movie that IMHO is much better than any of the Cheech and Chong movies!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is just the top section of the oil rig. The bottom section is left in place - and this is where all the nasty polution lurks

The awarding of contracts for deep sea drilling should be tied too responsible clean up

<comment><USER15> The ship in the article is a drilling rig. What you're referring to a production platform.

One is mobile and needs to sail around the world. The other is stationary and will stay in one place.

<comment><USER16> Wikipedia has a pretty good graphic depicting the difference under the water: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Types_of_offshore_oil_and...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Types_of_offshore_oil_and_gas_structures.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Something I wondered from this, was about the salvage master Sylvia Tervoort:

How the heck does one become a "salvage master"?

I guess it has more to do with the fact that there are a ton of jobs out there that are mostly "unknown" by ordinary people. Maybe it also has to do with location (ie, you're more likely to know about the idea of being a "salvage master" if you live near any place that has such companies as employers).

At the same time I wondered "did she wake up one day and decide to become a salvage master?" \- and how do you go about doing that?

There are many jobs like this, all with somewhat obscure titles; some you can see how someone might fall into this line of work (ie - working up the ranks, or horizontal transition from another area, etc) - but others seem like they'd require such a strange set of disparate skills (as is alluded to in the article) that you have to wonder just how one lands that kind of work?

It's not for me (though the idea of world hopping to supervise and assess ships for salvage does have a certain "romantic" appeal - but I know that's a false idea) - but obviously it is for others. How they get such a position, though, is the question in my head...

<comment><USER18> _You learn this job by doing it. There are no training courses, and so you learn from the experience of your team members._

[https://careers.boskalis.com/testimonials/sylvia- tervoort/](https://careers.boskalis.com/testimonials/sylvia-tervoort/)

I found the description of her character fascinating. It reminded me of another character whose book I read years ago:

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004RVNHYE/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004RVNHYE/)

Freighter Captain, by Max Hardberger. Here's his wikipedia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Hardberger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Hardberger)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The BBC had an interesting article about the big Brent platform being removed from its legs (which are being left in place) - this was done by a specially built ship:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland- business-3974...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland- business-39747670)

</comment><comment><USER20> That really is a long read but a nice one. Great picture of the rig atop Hawk as well.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you're interested in more reading in this style, is recommend "Deep Sea and Foreign Going" by Rose George, an account of the modern container shipping industry and the old world of shipping that it replaced, seen through the eyes of the writer as she sails on a container ship.

After reading this article I actually had to check it wasn't by her - both of the authors have a similarly wonderful style of melancholy prose.

</comment><comment><USER21> Having a designated place where ships go to get recycled is probably a good thing. At least you can control the amount of environmental impact.

<comment><USER22> Sad to say, but the amount of environmental impact, at least on a local scale, might be best represented on a logarithmic graph.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Pule did it, I did it – we do this, as humans, we humanise seacraft. Vessels > are christened under bottles of fizz. They're given nicknames and ascribed > character.

I find interesting that by even reading about boats one tends to humanize them but it seems to not happen with planes and cars.

Probably it has to do with the long relations kept by crews and the ships they sail in.

<comment><USER24> I wonder if it's an increased sense of permanence, habitability and sometimes magnitude that allows it to happen.

Some boats become decade long institutions, and living aboard a 'thing' that is dynamic and alive with motion is probably very emotive.

Even small sailing vessels are often designed to be lived aboard and occupied for days or weeks on end.

Cars and planes can be very transient in comparison.

<comment><USER24> I am a car enthusiast and even I try to keep my cars at arms length, knowing they could (and have been) totalled and whisked away in an evening for no better reason than someone glanced at their phone for too long.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wouldn't old cheap oil rigs be a great starting point to establish an artificial island (and then, a country) in international waters? The shallow waters 400km west of Namibia seem like a good spot.

<comment><USER8> Aside from the fact that it's been tried and has largely failed (see: Principality of Sealand), it isn't a workable idea for a number of technical reasons:

\- an old, cheap rig may be nearing the end of (or has surpassed) its fatigue lifetime. Corrosion, subsiding into the soil, etc. are all factors too. It might be outright unsafe to occupy.

\- expanding one platform into others or into an artificial island is a monumentally expensive and challenging task; it's not going to happen for some fantastical micronation project.

<comment><USER26> > expanding one platform into others or into an artificial island is a > monumentally expensive and challenging task

Oh, come now, just string up some rope bridges between them and hunker down on your platform when the weather gets choppy. You need to play some Zelda games or watch Waterworld to expand your imagination!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I thought SpaceX could use these as a sea platform for rocket landings. It just might be too cost prohibitive but there definitely seems enough of them around to salvage.

</comment><comment><USER28> off shore drilling stocks have been great shorts over the past few months. However, they all seem to be over extended to new lows. If oil pops back they could whip back, so be careful.

</comment><comment><USER29> why not repurpose those rigs into housing? there are refugees looking for homes, or 1%ers that want to live where there are no refugees.

<comment><USER8> \- going offshore to a rig is not something that's done lightly; often getting there involves a helicopter trip, for which every passenger has had a multiple-day training course (HUET+BOSIET). This training costs a lot, and obviously the helicopter transit costs a lot too. It's also risky.

\- these rigs being decommissioned are quite possibly structurally less safe and have not been upgraded or designed with the safety features of more modern rigs

\- there's limited accomodation space

Or, if you were suggesting that they might be repurposed once near/ashore:

\- there's plenty of existing disused space that could be converted to housing;

\- decommissioning often means breaking the rig into pieces to be brought to shore, so the expensive cleaning and reconfiguration necessary to turn it into a shelter might not even be possible with a bunch of rig "chunks"

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wanted to throw my shoes at my monitor after reading this.</comment>


XMPP Turns 12 - <AUTHOR> http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/01/05/jabber-celebrates-12th-birthday/ <comment><USER2> After all these years, XMPP is still a PITA to implement.

Starting at the lowest level, XMPP streams are framed by the 2nd level elements in an XML document. Clients and server must keep an XML parser open for the lifetime of the connection. If you don't have a parser like expat available, then you either need to dedicate a thread to the connection or use ugly regex style hacks to handle the framing. Almost any other framing mechanism in use today would have been easier to use (null bytes between messages, length prefixed messages, and so on).

Moving up a level, the use of XML namespaces is over designed. XMPP uses unique namespaces for each type of connection (client to server, server to server, component to server). This provides no benefit to any party and is ugly for server developers where they need to deal with all types of connections.

I could go on. I have not even gotten to the application layer (RFC 3921).

Other protocols have warts, but not like those that I have encountered in XMPP.

<comment><USER3> Agree. To pretend that XMPP is some sort of success is crazy. After 12 years, it's hardly used compared to other protocols.

The protocol is amongst the worst imaginable. Over engineered crap.

<comment><USER2> XMPP does have a lot of use (Google Talk, Facebook chat, Chrome browser sync, ...) and is the most successful non-proprietary instant messaging protocol.

I wonder what the state of the world would be like today if XMPP had been more approachable for developers. Would we still have instant messaging silos like MSN Messenger and AIM?

<comment><USER3> In what way is IRC for example proprietary?

Yes, to a certain extent GTalk and facebook chat have taken a little market share from other IM clients (Not sure how much, maybe 10%?).

But XMPP is nowhere when it comes to group chat.

<comment><USER2> IRC is not proprietary and I did not say that it is. I think it's great that you are using IRC in your project.

Overall, there are many more active users of XMPP than there are users of IRC. When I say active users, I mean users who send and receive messages. I am not including users who only have the chat widget open on Gmail.

<comment><USER3> > "Overall, there are many more users of XMPP than there are users of IRC."

I'm skeptical. Post some figures if you have them, especially on volume of chat. Idle users mean nothing.

<comment><USER2> Earlier in this thread you estimate that GTalk and Facebook have 10% of the instant messaging market. Does IRC have more users than 10% of the instant messaging market?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Back in '99, I was working in the Instant-Messaging and Chat-On-Page sector. Let me tell you what I observed back then:

The IETF group working on IM was comprised of people from Netscape, Microsoft, AOL and a few others. At that point, AOL owned the IM world through AOL Messenger and (then recently acquired) ICQ. Microsoft was starting to make a dent with MSN Messenger after they started bundling it with the O/S and everything.

I was following the IETF discussions and mailing lists, and after a couple of months realised that the people on these lists had no reason to make things happen -- on the contrary. Everyone wanted AOL to open up the ICQ/AOL networks; they wouldn't. Everyone was already working on their own IM protocol, and didn't want to share it with the others -- they just wanted the OTHERS to share THEIRS. The discussions were long and pointless, revolving around semantics and irrelevant scenarios.

XMPP/Jabber developer was among the participants. The suggestions were full of flaws, complex and inefficient to implement, and no one liked them. But he was the only guy releasing code. And after a couple of years (sometime in 2001 IIRC -- I was no longer closely following it) it actually became usable.

It is still inefficient; it is still too complex for what it does; But for the last 9 years or so, it was the only option for a documented protocol with an open source implementation that you could find cross-platform clients for and install inside your own network.

And that's a win.

</comment><comment><USER5> Jabber, the universal chat protocol latterly known as XMPP^w^w^w^w^w^w^w^wThe federated message passing network known as XMPP.

The virtues of a realtime decentralized but federated message passing network... reduced to "chat".

Yeah, the chat network turns 12. Congratulations XMPP folk.</comment>


The Onion quits print - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20131108/NEWS06/131109836/onion-quits-print <comment><USER2> I'll shed a single tear because I have nostalgia for the print version, but this isn't really such bad news. The Onion has evolved, not died. They grew quite successfully into digital (especially with video & social media), and they're now completing that transition by cutting off what has by now become a vestigial distribution channel.

<comment><AUTHOR> I dunno, unless The Onion has an incredibly forward-thinking managerial class, then this cutback -- as well as the previous ones (including in its own hometown in Madison, WI) -- are reluctant measures taken in the face of budget shortfalls, i.e. these are cuts to the bone, rather than trimming the fat. And while fat organizations aren't exactly ideal, I think the expectation that the Onion maintains its finest group of writers while going through this kind of restructuring is unrealistic.

But to go back to the nostalgia thing, I'll miss a world in which you could carry around a newspaper made up of _completely fake news_.

<comment><USER3> In this case would you rather they allocate budget to a print edition, or use that same allocation for writers?

The OP was about cutting the print edition, and I'm hard pressed to believe there were any articles exclusive to the print edition.

As some might say, nothing of value was lost.

<comment><AUTHOR> The latter, of course. My point was that if The Onion is at all like any organization, particularly in print media, then its cutting of the print editions is less a forward-thinking move than a "Shit, well, gotta do what we can to survive"...It's not that cutting to survive is _bad_ , I'm just saying that it's a situation in which what actually survives the cutting still has a major fight to survive ahead of it, and will likely not equal what it was in better days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reading The Onion every Saturday morning at the diner was one of my favorite habits. Their brand of satire works so well in the context of a traditional newspaper.

Since they shut down print in New York City, I missed that a lot. I tried looking at the web site on a tablet over breakfast, but the presentation ruined it for me.

While I was an avid reader of The Onion since college in the '90s, I've moved on. The web site just isn't as funny—partially because their writing has deteriorated, partially because it's just a web site.

I guess they'll continue to show up in my Facebook feed as friends from high school forward their stories with lots of emoticons and LOLs all over them. Maybe I'll look now and then, like I'd look at something from Cracked, The Chive, The Oatmeal, or whatever. Shame to see them go out with a whimper.

<comment><USER5> Their videos are great, especially their series genre parodies. Sex House and Onion Talks are my favorites. Their brand of surreal/sardonic humor translates well to television.

<comment><USER6> Sex House is the pinnacle of entertainment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I live in Madison where reading the Onion in print was just sort of something one did! It was a sublime experience, and a lot of its satirical focus came from the newspaper form. The articles would be cut out and put on refrigerators or bulliten boards. The website is just not the same!

<comment><USER8> Yup, I was floored when the waitress at the Marigold Kitchen downtown brought me my meal _and_ a copy of the Onion!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Onion was _in_ print??

<comment><USER10> They've actually been around since 1988, initially only in print. I have personally never seen a print copy, either.

<comment><USER11> One of my high school teachers had stacks of Onion compilation books in the classroom.

I was kicked out of that class more than once.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> True story: in the '90s, I used to buy print editions of the Onion for $1 at the Tower Records at Bay and Columbus in SF.

How times change.

<comment><USER13> Whenever I'm in Santa Cruz I pick up a copy of "Comic News" \- they typically are in a newsrack machine with a broken coin mechanism. (There's a hole that you put your $1/copy into, honor system.)

[http://thecomicnews.com](http://thecomicnews.com)

There is absolutely nothing like print for some things...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> While I do like that everything is moving towards paperless, I hope we keep archives of all our knowledge in some permanent form. Should a world wide power failure or some other catastrophic event occur and we were "sent back to the stone age", the amount of knowledge we would lose from losing the internet is unimaginable.

<comment><USER15> If humans were still around after being sent back to the stone age (without 100% infrastructure destruction), how long would it take to figure out how to generate enough power to boot a computer? I would hope that there are enough humans who know what electricity is even at a basic level to be able to get some generators running within a couple of years. Even still, there should still be a few power sources left that would just require fuel and the flip of a switch.

If it's catastrophic enough that the event destroys all of our computers and generators forever, I would be doubtful that humans would still be around in any capacity where knowledge would be an important factor.

<comment><USER14> It's not just booting a computer though. Hypothetically, if Silicon Valley is wiped from the planet tomorrow at the same time as a massive EMP killing all electronics on earth simultaneously (extreme), its assumed we could get most of that data back. I'm guessing we'd lose a significant amount of information though.

The real loss would be the engineers -- without people manning these systems I'm not sure we're getting that data back very quickly. What if you lose the key players -- the people who have the passwords, the knowledge, and control over these systems? It's losing the combination to the worlds most valuable vault, but the vault is digital and restoring it takes privileged information.

<comment><USER15> That's true. I would assume that we would be able to regain most of the basic "this is what makes us the 21st century" information. Almost everything else, in my mind, would be of questionable value to the new society. If Facebook went dark, if Google went dark, Yahoo, Microsoft, hell even Wikipedia; yeah there'd be significant loss and it would take a long time to recover from. But the benefit of the information age versus the destruction of the Library of Alexandria is that you can't just destroy the Library and all that knowledge is gone. There's a wealth of information and culture on my computer alone. If the biggest sources of knowledge were gone tomorrow, individuals would be able to rebuild the basics of the information age very quickly. We might be set back to 1970, but without the literal decimation of the human population, there's no way we'd be set back to the stone age.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's just a matter of time before someone starts a service to print out all of these online-only sites so you don't have to read them on a screen.

<comment><USER17> Ideally in broadsheet or tabloid form, with layout that can be specified by the content producer!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> A long time ago, I held edition #1 of this paper in my hands while attending school in Madison. Then, in a complete lack of foresight, I threw it into the trash. Still, it's good to see that campus paper have done so well.

</comment><comment><USER19> Aw man! I live in Chicago and there are soooo many Onion news stands; one right next to each legit stand like the tribune. And they always kept it up to date, which always made their joke that much funnier.

</comment><comment><USER20> In a way this is too bad, in the 90's I'd always pick a copy when I visited friends in Madison, WI.

But it also isn't very surprising. Free print publications are entirely reliant on print ads, which have have been having significant downward treads.

</comment><comment><USER21> Wait, this isn't a fake Onion headline?

<comment><USER22> I guess that's why the link is to another news source; no one would believe it if it was announced by their website.

<comment><USER23> Irony abounds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Awww, that's sad. I always like being able to pick up a print version when I visited "the big city".

</comment><comment><USER25> I seriously thought an Onion reporter made a joke by feeding a fake story about their print version to the Chicago Business people. I suppose when you cry wolf...

<comment><USER26> The whole article reeks of the same satire The Onion puts up every day, I thought the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Passersby will never again be amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood.

<comment><USER28> My favorite filler text of all time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> As a Canadian who's never seen or even heard of a print edition of the Onion, it blows my mind that they've been around since 1988. I thought they were just a website. Even then I'm surprised the site has been around since '96\. Even that's older than I would've expected.

<comment><USER30> I happened to stubble upon one while I was walking in downtown Toronto. I was just as surprised as anyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is a huge bummer. Whenever I don't have anything to read on the subway I grab the latest Onion.

</comment><comment><USER32> With how much the Onion appears on Facebook feeds, it has successfully evolved.

I do have to admit I was wistfully looking for this hint as a spoof, but I believe it's true. I miss grabbing the hardcopy in lieu of a watered down mini-newspaper on the way to the subway.

</comment><comment><USER33> Since many are surprised by The Onion's rich history, I'll pass along a link to the Internet Archive for some satirical spelunking...

[https://web.archive.org/web/19970107125931/http://theonion.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/19970107125931/http://theonion.com/)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20000601000000*/http://TheOnion....](https://web.archive.org/web/20000601000000*/http://TheOnion.com)

</comment><comment><USER34> I remember in the late '90s when the latest edition of The Onion would show up on the website every Tuesday (correct me on the date if I am wrong, it's been awhile). The server could not handle the load and would be extremely slow for the rest of the day.

I was excited to finally read The Onion in print when they debuted in NYC many years later. Glad they are still alive in some fashion.

</comment><comment><USER35> I did not know they had a print version.

</comment><comment><USER36> The only time I every read the print version was in Chicago, where a street hustler gave everyone in my party free copies, and then followed us asking for money.

I don't expect that's the most common use case of a free paper, but were I _The Onion_ I would find it irksome.

</comment><comment><USER37> I was kind of surprised by this. My impression was that they did well in college towns by sucking up all the advertising for local concerts and watering holes. I guess the local revenues weren't enough to offset the costs.

</comment><comment><USER38> I get it, but this makes me sad. I've been picking it up in Austin for years.

</comment><comment><USER39> Print version?!? Wow - who knew. I guess Chicagoans.

</comment><comment><USER40> Guess that means no more homeless people trying to sell me copies of The Onion on the street. Back to stolen post cards it is!

</comment><comment><USER41> The worse thing from all of this, is that now we will not have any permanent The Onion records, nor an archive.

Paper beats Silicon.

</comment><comment><USER42> I never even knew the Onion did print. Hell I never even knew they were alive since what, 1988? Damn, I really thought the Onion was just a small little website with funny articles I saw on Reddit once in awhile, but not a widely known website.

Sucks, I'd have loved to read a print version of the Onion.

<comment><USER43> It started out in print, founded back in the late '80s by a couple of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They were smart and jumped on the web very early (the mid-90s), which helped them build a national audience instead of just a local upper-Midwest one.

<comment><USER44> I'll toss in my "isn't life weird?" story...

When I was at Madison during that time, I applied at one of the 2 student papers to be a sales rep. I went on to be the Sales Manager for the paper. The guy I won out the job over decided to start the Onion with his friend.

You've never heard of me :-(

\----

When they first started, their sales tactic was that the paper was a small tabloid -ize, with the entire bottom 3 inches or so a double-column coupon book. So you just trimmed off the bottom of the weekly issue & went out to the bars/restaurants with it

<comment><USER42> Man that's something that would stick with you forever. Ugh, not recognizing opportunities in their infancy always scares me.

<comment><USER45> Personally, I think he should feel great. There's no guarantee he would have done something so remarkable if he had been the one to lose the job, but he indirectly helped get The Onion started this way.

<comment><USER44> That's the attitude!

Personally, I just think it's an interesting story I bore people with at cocktail parties.

I think people who are inclined to "start the Onion" tend to do so anyway; he may have done it on the side, or in a slightly different manner, but he would have done something similar. I don't think I really had any direct affect on his life's fate or karma</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What password manager do you recommend to friends and family? - <AUTHOR> I realize those of us working in tech have our own tastes or specialized tools for password managers. But what do you recommend for friends and family to use? <comment><USER2> I don't trust cloud based password stores. So I use pass which uses gpg encryption for your passwords.

[https://www.passwordstore.org](https://www.passwordstore.org)

GitHub has a good tutorial on generating your own gpg key: [https://help.github.com/en/articles/generating-a-new-gpg- key](https://help.github.com/en/articles/generating-a-new-gpg-key)

Using this you can encrypt your files. I store my gpg files in on a git forge. This way, I load my gpg key, clone the repo into ~/.password-store and voila! I can use my asswords/secrets across devices. It even has a utility for Android.

Besides that, I use Emacs a lot so I use helm-pass package to streamline my password discovery and copy-to-clipboard actions without exposing the password in plain view.

<comment><USER3> I wish I had your friends and family's comfort with using GPG keys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bitwarden.

Personally, I use KeePass with Syncthing but pay for a Bitwarden Family account for my spouse and family members.

I migrated from LastPass, to Enpass, and finally to KeePass. Bitwarden basically checks all the boxes for me, but I prefer to control my own data without having to run and maintain the Bitwarden server for the rest.

<comment><USER5> Bitwarden also has an option to install it on your own server

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> For most users in the Apple ecosystem, iCloud keychain is an excellent, extremely well-integrated solution. I recommend it to all of my friends and family.

</comment><comment><USER7> 1Password. Secure, good UX, syncs effortlessly on all my devices.

</comment><comment><USER8> Bitwarden, pretty much my whole family and circle of friends uses it. Great UX, mobile apps, security, and not expensive at all.

</comment><comment><USER9> I got relatives who use 1password ([https://1password.com](https://1password.com)) and are happy with. Dashlane ([https://www.dashlane.com](https://www.dashlane.com)) would be the other one I have in mind.

</comment><comment><USER10> Chromes builtin password manager. I trust that google has smart people who will do a good job of securing my passwords and my families. It has its problems but with its auto generated passwords and almost all services I use having two factor , I feel it's a good choice

</comment><comment><USER11> The discussion here is somewhat relevant: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20026297](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20026297)

I typically say:

1\. Anything is better than nothing.

2\. 1Password is pretty good.

3\. Keepass is the best if you are ultra paranoid.

</comment><comment><USER12> KeePass. It's on every platform and is free.

</comment><comment><USER13> Enpass ([https://www.enpass.io/](https://www.enpass.io/))

It is easy enough for my extremely non-technical wife to use on both her laptop and phone.

</comment><comment><USER14> I really love KeePass. I don't feel comfortable with 3rd party cloud services. There are also apps for Android and iOS to work with KeePass databases. It's everything easy.

<comment><USER15> I love the keepass ecosystem, but would never recommend it to family who isn't very computer literate, and the iOS offerings are poor, with kypass being the only full functioning one, and it's closed source and a little buggy. I worry a little bit about using it to manage my passwords.

<comment><USER14> Isn't an irony to worry about 'closed source' in Apple's iOS?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> SAASPASS ([https://saaspass.com](https://saaspass.com)) is the password manager for the more security minded.

</comment><comment><USER17> Password Safe ([https://www.pwsafe.org/](https://www.pwsafe.org/)) is an offline password manager.

</comment><comment><USER18> Bitwarden for its open source approach, security review, apps for ALL platforms and it's crazy cheap. Has been my daily driver for the past 2 years.

<comment><USER19> I wanted to write almost the exact same list. :) Such an awesome product, highly recommended!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am using 1Password for my family. I am the only "tech" guy. Others had a hard time getting onboarded and learning to use.

</comment><comment><USER21> I do not recommend any in particular because we are all different. All I can say is that I enjoyed using Authy.

</comment><comment><USER22> I've used 1Password for the last 3 years and it works like a charm.

</comment><comment><USER23> Been a Dashlane user for three years and would highly recommend it.

<comment><USER24> Finally! Someone besides me here who would recommend Dashlane. For some reason, it is always missing from these threads on HN.

Been a user for 3-4 years now, and would definitely recommend it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> 1Password, no contest.

</comment><comment><USER26> KeePass

It's cross-platform/FOSS and does not relay on cloud.

<comment><USER27> Combining it with Keepass Tusk increases the usability for non-techs too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bitwarden all the way.

</comment><comment><USER28> Keeper

</comment><comment><USER29> I would prefer LastPass

<comment><USER5> Last pass MUST be avoided. It is closed sourced and has been exposed to hacks before

<comment><USER30> I mean open source ftw but it being closed source doesn't mean you should avoid it. What hacks I've heard nothing of the sort

<comment><USER20> This - [https://www.darknet.org.uk/2017/03/lastpass-chrome- extension...](https://www.darknet.org.uk/2017/03/lastpass-chrome-extension- leaking-passwords/)

Although, they weren't completely hacked it seems. They were fixing a major vulnerability.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Moore's Law Is About to Get Weird (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/21/information/moores-law-is-about-to-get-weird <comment><USER2> Well, none of those listed technologies is practical.

Ternary logic is really cool, but it only gets you about a 10% efficiency improvement. I think it would be awesome to go in this direction, but retooling our entire tech stack for that isn't going to happen. I mean, look at x86.

The only thing that will really make progress is molecular nanotechnology. I had always believed that reaching the end of silicon process technology would necessitate the research into MNT.

What's funny is that we have arguably already reached the end on the silicon process technology, if Intel's desktop product offerings are used as a guide. There are gamers who are building new rigs using chips that are 2 or 3 generations old, because there isn't really anything better available. What's really hilarious are the guys building systems with used Xeon CPUs from retired servers!

So I don't know what's going on any more. You would think that the profits and stock prices of all the silicon companies would collapse if they weren't able to continue producing improvements on their existing products. Intel is spending massively on R&D, but the gains are nowhere close to what we saw 15 years ago.

Note that keep referencing Intel, because they've been at the leading edge. AMD doesn't have 14nm in production, for example.

<comment><USER3> "retooling our entire tech stack for that isn't going to happen. I mean, look at x86."

I wonder if today it's easier than people imagine, but the lessons of Itanium are used as a signal to not try.

Sure there are plenty of apps which make low-level use of x86 features, and those probably aren't going to be updated. However a lot of modern software is written in languages that go through interrupters. Java, C#, Python.. if you can update the runtime, in theory the apps can be supported anywhere.

<comment><USER4> Switching to ternary means retooling not just the programming stack but the IC design stack. IC design is actually quite a conservative business, mainly because failures are so expensive.

You'd need to spend several years writing a ternary RTL synthesis, place, route and verification suite before starting.

<comment><USER5> I would expect that once silicon stops shrinking and both chips and fabs can be allowed to pay for themselves over longer time horizons we're going to see a lot more architectural experimentation.

<comment><USER6> I hope you're right. The costs of 7nm are so high that even the "big guys" are being very careful about what they do. It's become so expensive they just can't afford a miss in the market. I worry the high costs will stifle innovation and that we'll see something that's more like a tweak here and there for a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For all the interesting things happening today, this is an incredibly dull article. I'm convinced I read this same article in the 90's.

If we're going to see any developments in alternative architectures and hardware, it's going to happen in the cloud computing space. From my perspective, this is the only sector that is in the unique position to sell specialized computing services to customers on a mass scale and make great margins in the process.

There are many interesting and useful things you can do outside of Von Neumann architectures and Turing Complete systems that were never practical on PCs. Simple services like Reddis could probably be implemented with alternative memory architectures like content-addressable memory. Many useful algorithms in the data analytic and machine learning space can be compiled down the specialized hardware using using a combination of transistors and memristors.

For companies like Amazon, Microsoft + Google, there's actually a financial incentive to harmonize hardware and software much in the same way Seymour Cray harmonized the software and hardware of Cray's supercomputers. These cloud companies don't want to be constrained to selling commodity virtual machines. They want to sell you the next generation PaaS solution like DynamoDB, SQL Azure or Firebase so they can lock you into their cloud platform.

If there's a future where developers are writing code in special DSLs that's compiled to gates on an FPGA, the cloud computing guys will be exploring it because they have a huge incentive to get their customer's into the walled garden that yields better margins. If you can create one platform service that developers love and runs on cheaper specialized hardware, you'll be able to destroy your competitors and signal an alternative hardware arms race.

<comment><USER8> I think you are right on, on every point. (Including it being a dull article, at least for the audience of folks here.) This is great insight and it's something I've thought for the past few years as well.

Big cloud computing players will almost certainly move this way. Actually surprised we haven't seen more of this already. But TensorFlow and the Tensor Processing Unit were smart moves by Google and I think this is just a preview of many, many things to come.

I think IBM probably belongs on the list of top contenders to make a move. Between SoftLayer, IBM's hardware and chip design and fab partnerships, their cloud/saas businesses, and their Enterprise penetration, they're well- positioned to lead here.

I think that you're right as well that all these folks will push to create developer-friendly services and APIs backed by hardware. However, I think the real wins will come from capturing market share in the Enterprise sooner than later. If I were them and I had to prioritize between the two, I'd target Enterprise customers first and foremost. You can sell services to help them migrate and that helps you get out to market more quickly than creating a fully robust self-serve platform. Moreover, if your custom hw-backed platform can offer _either_ better price _or_ better performance, Enterprises will pay big bucks for it. Harder to get it right with self-serve first, but you certainly need to open up to self-serve as quickly as possible over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> From the article:

> "...Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors that can be > squeezed onto a semiconductor chip of a given size doubles roughly every two > years, has held true since the mid 1960s..."

I thought it was the case that Moore's "Law" hasn't held up since ~2012.

I believe Intel and others have stated that as of 2012 or so, with 22nm processes, transistor density now doubles every ~2.5 years and is likely to slow further within 5 years without more fundamental breakthroughs.

The related trend that processor clock speeds doubled every 1.5-2 years-- which is commonly mistaken as Moore's Law in lay press but is actually more related to Dennard Scaling, Koomey's Law and historical statements by Intel-- had ceased to hold as of the late Aughts as well, I believe.

Memsistors have been a promise for some time. I wonder how we will make the leap from current dense-transistor IC tech and processes to anything new, given the huge infrastructure investments in fabs, quality control processes, etc. It seems it will be difficult to scale out a new technology, whatever it is, and get it price-competitive with existing transistor-dense IC technology. Perhaps I misunderstand here though, and would be interested in thoughts from those with greater expertise in the field.

<comment><USER9> >I thought it was the case that Moore's "Law" hasn't held up since ~2012.

I thought it was before that, like 1999. I pretty sure I had an Intel Pentium III 2 GHz processor in 99. The computer I am using to type this comment is 2.5 GHz. More's law is long dead, we aren't going to see 12 GHz machines in the next 6 years.

<comment><USER10> Moore's Law has nothing to do with clock speed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is one of the most insightful things about Moore's Law I've read: [https://www.quora.com/How-long-will-Moores-Law-continue- to-a...](https://www.quora.com/How-long-will-Moores-Law-continue-to- apply/answers/605270)

Moore's Law is a limit that ultimately arises from economics. The costs to keep Moore's Law going are exponential (just like the gain), and fewer and fewer companies are willing to pay the increasingly high price.

I was always primed to believe the exponential gains were essentially "free" and came with a fixed amount of investment into the industry. Understanding that this isn't true explains why Moore's Law will end unless demand is exponentially increasing.

</comment><comment><USER12> The chemical, wetware, fluid and ternary computing concepts mentioned in the article I guess make for a good headline but seem highly unlikely.

In the short term I really think we are entering the era of accelerators. Accelerators like Micron's Automata Processor (1) for graph analysis, accelerators for compute intensive applications like Convolutional Neural Nets, continued innovation in DSPs, GPUs, etc.

Accelerators that can either outperform traditional processors or use significantly less power I think represent one of the major next steps after Moore's law. What comes next may well be a slime mold computer but I think at this point is pure speculation.

(1) - [http://www.micronautomata.com](http://www.micronautomata.com) \- actually I heard about this on HN!

<comment><USER8> Yes, almost certainly the next phase for performance-intensive computing is more specialized chips, systems-on-a-chip, and whole specialized rigs. The TensorFlow Processing Unit is a good recent example of this, as are ASICs in bitcoin mining, specialized hardware in molecular biology simulation, and more examples. This is just the beginning.

I think the interesting question is what happens after that. Not too long from now, specialized systems will run up against the same physical limits that general purpose processors have begun to hit the past few years as well, as specialized fabs increase in capability and sophistication. We see this already with GPUs.

<comment><USER13> Specialization is essentially trading off additional hardware design work--and additional software complexity--for performance. When Moore's Law was going strong, it usually didn't make sense; just wait a couple years and the next x86 generation will probably more or less catch up to whatever performance gains your specialization was going to buy you.

I think it's pretty clear that we're going to see the introduction of all sorts of specialized hardware that we already more or less know how to do but it just hasn't been worth the trouble before. But you're also right that, so long as we're still talking CMOS, this is probably a more or less one-time boost that's maybe worth a few CMOS generations depending on the specific case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One interesting avenue of research is embedded reconfigurable computing technologies like eMIPS [0]. Unlike other reconfigurable computing approaches that simply place a FPGA side-by-side with a CPU in the same package to act as a co-processor [1], eMIPS integrates reconfigurable logic directly into the processing pipeline, allowing the creation of custom processor instructions on the fly on a per app basis to accelerate apps. Pretty cool stuff.

[0] [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/project/emips/](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/project/emips/)

[1] [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/14/intel_xeon_fpga/](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/14/intel_xeon_fpga/)

</comment><comment><USER15> One thought that isn't on here:

Once the process is "mature" and isn't changing every few years, the error rate could be squeezed way down. That would make it practical and economical to make larger chips. There are cooling and power issues too but I'm sure those are solvable.

Make way for the 64-bit 128-core 1024gb RAM 12cm^2 SoC?

Call it More's Law? Or a BFC? (for Big F'ing Chip?)

<comment><USER16> >Make way for the 64-bit 128-core 1024gb RAM 8cm^2 SoC

This is already happening?

Intel Xeon Knights Landing already has an enormous 6.83cm^2 die size. It has 72 "cores," each of which has a 512-bit vector processor. In some sense, you could say that this chip has 9,216 "single precision cores." It also supports up to 384GB DDR4 RAM, which is not far from your 1024GB.

The term "core" is becoming vague, as NVIDIA refers to thousands of "CUDA cores" on its GPUs which are really vector processor elements.

China's Sunway SW26010 is also kind of a "SoC," 260 "cores" communicating via a Network-on-Chip interconnect. I think one could say that the Cell Broadband Engine processor had a similar design.

> make it practical and economical to make larger chips

I do wonder if die sizes can increase.

I'm not a hardware engineer, but my understanding is that latency is the main barrier to larger chips. The time it takes for a signal to propagate across a chip limits the clock frequency. One possibility is to replace the global synchronous clock design with an asynchronous chip design. However, from what I understand, this would make things worse because some form of synchronization is always needed - you could send back an "acknolwedge" message, but that would double the signal traffic.

On the other hand, supercomputers are regularly built with multi-socket systems and interconnects like QPI and PCIe between processors and nodes. It would seem logical to put multiple processors their interconnects on a single "SoC" and I don't know why that doesn't happen. Maybe it is because of error rates, as you say.

<comment><USER4> Asynchronous does not help you on latency at all - it's not the latency of the clock that matters. It's the data latency. This is already kind of crippling, as it takes hundreds of cycles to get anything from RAM if it's not in your cache.

Only way to improve that is to make programming languages push either data locality or dataflow like designs, which may mean giving up or reimagining OO.

Error rates (yield) are a serious problem, but if your design is uniform enough you can very well get away with just disabling bits. There's also a less obvious problem with on-chip variation (OCV) - some physical properties have a gradient across the chip. At runtime, there's a temperature gradient as well.

<comment><USER15> Or... continuing with the BFC concept... make chips with monster caches or even with all SRAM running at core speed. That's not been done in a while.

<comment><USER4> Caches effectively are SRAM. It's inherently much less dense than DRAM; I had a quick look on Intel and the largest I could see was 37Mb of cache.

<comment><USER16> It's not SRAM, but Kights Landing has 16GB of "MCDRAM" which is high bandwidth 3D-stacked DRAM. 400+GB/s throughput but latency is similar to conventional DRAM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Adamatzky seems to be churning out cookie cutter articles on slime molds and highways

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Adamatzky+highways&btnG...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Adamatzky+highways&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39)

</comment><comment><USER18> How about the breakthrough in silicene production? [1] Could we use this to start stacking transistors in the vertical direction?

[1] [http://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/materials/...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/materials/breakthrough- in-silicene-production-promises-a-future-of-silicenebased-electronics)

<comment><USER19> That will only work for passive components like caches otherwise you will see higher power consumption and heat dissipation.

<comment><USER20> That's true, but there are other options. For instance, clockless computing is one avenue worth pursuing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Moore's Law seems to reach its limit only for CPU clock. But it still moving very fast for GPU, FPGA, DDR, SSD, etc, right?

Or even in term of Network connection speed - 100mbps, 1G, 10G, 25G, 40G (at lease in data center where it matters a lot.)

The simple usb connection speed also continue to increase at a fast rate.

</comment><comment><USER22> "Nautilus uses cookies to manage your digital subscription and show you your reading progress. It's just not the same without them"

Well, no thanks. No, it is not the same.

</comment><comment> james-watson As usual, memristor based computing architecture is left out.

Intel's 3DXPoint has already brought memristor memory units to market. The beauty of memristor architectures is that they can be used for logic and storage, so you can create some radical new architectures with them.

I'm too lazy to link the talk by Stan Williams of HP, but if you google it it's the ~45min one.

This is the next architecture because it's already here. All that other stuff is vaporware.

<comment><USER23> From the article: "However, ternary computing may be spurred on by a new device called the memristor. [...] Memristors might become one of the industry's hopes for extending Moore's Law beyond the age of the silicon transistor."

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What about Quantum computing?

<comment><USER14> Quantum computing has nothing to do with what what we would consider "regular" computing. Even if it became practical, at most it would be a specialized accelerator for certain types of computation, like factoring numbers.

A decent explanation can be found here: [https://uwaterloo.ca/institute-for- quantum-computing/quantum...](https://uwaterloo.ca/institute-for-quantum- computing/quantum-computing-101)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the best keyboard you've ever used? - <AUTHOR>

My puppy had chewed a part way through my Logitech G15 cord in a few spots. It would work from depending on how I wiggled the cord. Now, it's gone.
I'm not a gamer; it was reco'd to me years ago, but I have no use for the macro keys.
What's the most comfortable keyboard (not split/"ergonomic"/whatever those are called) you've ever used? <comment><USER2> I just bought the Das Keyboard Ultimate, and I like it a lot. The keys are firm and clicky, but not as firm as I remember the IBM Model M being. I'm slowly getting used to the unmarked keys, particularly the number row. The keyboard as a whole is weighted and doesn't move while typing. It's great.

For laptops, I love the Thinkpad. I returned an Asus Eee PC for the sole reason that the keyboard was unusable, and instead bought the Thinkpad.

Despite owning a MacBook Pro, I don't like the Mac keyboard and probably never will.

In case you haven't seen the Stack Overflow post on keyboards: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/687/keyboard-for- programm...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/687/keyboard-for-programmers)

</comment><comment><USER3> Everyone seems to have a different idea about what's comfortable. I use an Apple keyboard because I like extremely short key travel. Every time I use a 'normal' keyboard now, it feels like I'm typing on an old manual typewriter.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have just moved from a G15, which I loved, to a split keyboard (a Kinesis Advantage). Despite split keyboards not being your cup of tea, I would highly recommend looking for a mechanical keyboard.

The Kinesis has mechanical switches - they are awesome and really nice to type on. The tactile sensation of the keys, with the small audible click, and the fact you don't have to hammer the key all the way down are what makes it for me.

</comment><comment><USER5> Das keyboard is right, but that's for my next upgrade.

I bought a Razer Tarantula when I was still into video games. I outgrew (not really) the games but the keyboard still holds. The keys, halfway in between a full keyboard and notebook keyboard, are laid out perfectly.

Even though I do say the Das Keyboard, I've been with the Tarantula enough to recommend it as well.

I code now, all I ever do with it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I like the apple wireless usb keyboard without the numeric keypad. It's got a small width while still being comfortable meaning there's more room on my desk, I can slide it easily but it stays in place while I'm typing, the chicklet keys are easy and fast to press and don't make too loud or quiet of a clicking sound.

</comment><comment><USER7> The keyboards on Thinkpads (laptop). You can buy standalone ones from lenovo although I've heard that they're not quite the same as the the ones on the laptops. I love them so much I've been tempted to try and buy a replacement one and build a converter so I can use it standalone.

</comment><comment><USER8> BenQ designed by BMW. I bought mine for $4.99 new on Best Buy's clearance site, but they are probably hard to find now. Here's a link to an image: <http://ncix.com/products/?sku=15950>

</comment><comment><USER9> I had a 2010 Logitech DiNovo until recently, best keyboard I have ever owned.

</comment><comment><USER10> das keyboard</comment>


OARC's Open DNS Privacy Resolver Testbed - <AUTHOR> https://www.dns-oarc.net/oarc/services/dnsprivacy <comment><USER2> Doesn't posting a link to the private key the servers are using ([0], under the Configuration heading on the linked page) compromise the privacy of everyone using the service?

[0] [https://www.dns-oarc.net/files/tls-dns/pkey](https://www.dns- oarc.net/files/tls-dns/pkey)

<comment><AUTHOR> From the FAQ:

      Q: What is OARC's Privacy Policy for use of its testbed
         nameservers?

      [...] If your DNS query data is sensitive, you should
      probably not be trusting it to an experimental 3rd-party
      research testbed.

<comment><USER2> Sure, but there is really no reason to publish the private key and make it trivial to decrypt all the traffic, right?</comment></comment></comment>