Famo.us is now open source - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/famous/famous <comment><USER2> We participated in the private beta and wrote up a simple (I hope) post of the basics of developing a Famo.us app here - [http://blog.percolatestudio.com/engineering/the-future-of- ja...](http://blog.percolatestudio.com/engineering/the-future-of-javascript- animation-with-famous/)

The closed nature of their 'open source' project can be frustrating at times. Having said that and despite all the hype, famo.us is sitting in a pretty unique position in the html mobile web scene and frankly I'm more excited about it than any of the alternatives (sencha, jquery mobile, etc).

It's early days, I wouldn't write it off yet...

<comment><USER3> I like how you sumed it up

> Famo.us is built around a neat idea: by directly using the CSS matrix3d > transform in combination with the window.requestAnimationFrame function, you > can describe the complete layout and animation of your app in a way that's > hardware accelerated with consistent performance.

> It's a stroke of genius, but in order to implement that simple idea you need > a sophisticated math library to help translate your app's UI into the series > of matrix transformations that get pushed to the GPU. This library is > Famo.us.

<comment><USER4> It's a stroke of genius, yes, that others have had before now. Lime.js did this three years ago (mapping animations to hardware-accelerated CSS). Cocos2Dx-Javascript does this one step better by bridging into actually-native rendering code. Three.js has DOM-with-CSS-transformations. IIRC someone implemented hardware-accelerated CoreAnimation in Cappuccino using CSS transformations. So, not really new. I'm curious to see what new ideas they DO bring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hate to be "that guy," but what is Famous? [http://famo.us](http://famo.us) doesn't say anything on the index, and the About page is broken. Is it just a library? Toolchain? A real product?

<comment><USER6> It's a platform that is supposed to solve the problem that HTML5 promised by subverting the DOM with a custom rendering engine (A port of the Unity Engine to JavaScript). It basically allows you to run a web app at native app performance, cross platform all in your web browser.

Demos - [http://demo.famo.us/](http://demo.famo.us/)

Codepen Examples - [http://www.codepen.io/befamous/](http://www.codepen.io/befamous/)

edit: Also found this - [http://famo.us/about](http://famo.us/about)

<comment><USER7> "allows you to run a web app at native app performance"

I would say "promises" instead of "allows". It is still experimental.

<comment><USER6> I've been at every event since early Dec and I was in the private beta and while they are still working some things out, you wouldn't really be able to tell if some of these demos were obj-c or .js from what they have built.

I feel like the engine reminds me more of the slickness and responsiveness of a Window Mobile 8 interface as opposed to an iOS interface with how smooth some of the scrolling is.

<comment><USER8> For those of us who haven't used WM, is that a good thing or not?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The about section of the website is completely blank for me in the latest firefox. The docs and the guides pages on famo.us redirect me to a login page. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER10> No you're not.It's pure hypeware, after 3 years of development and 5+ millions in VC funding they cant set up a simple gh-page with a basic tutorial and exemple on launch day... Big backlash against this framework starts in 3,2,1...

<comment><USER11> It's not hype. They just want to control the on-boarding of the open source community. The apps at the launch event tonight show a lot of promise for Famo.us being a better framework over Angular for mobile apps.

<comment><USER12> Just like their super-exclusive events in SF that you had to compete for tickets online in order to see the SDK early. Or their beta signup form that I tried years ago, which never delivered an actual beta.

Never mind that, I'll just put my name at the end of this new 74k+ long waitlist. I'm sure this whole thing is just a really long on-boarding process.

<comment><USER13> Pretty much my experience too. Years ago when we we're still betting on HTML5 and not Native. Years ago when users weren't statistically spending more time in apps than browser for mobile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great news! But the fact that their own website is broken on Safari on iOS7 doesn't give me much hope that this is easy to develop for [http://famo.us/](http://famo.us/)

<comment><USER6> That site is using just a plain express app on node.js, it's not using famous.

[http://dotheyusenode.herokuapp.com/?url=famo.us](http://dotheyusenode.herokuapp.com/?url=famo.us)

<comment><USER15> The site does use Famo.us, it's a 'front-end' framework.

[http://famo.us/assets/famous.js](http://famo.us/assets/famous.js)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It is about time. I've been looking forward to trying out Famo.us' Javascript engine to see what all of the hype was about and how they were achieving those remarkable benchmark scores on mobile. I am going to dig into the code tonight and find out what makes it really tick. Fantastic and exciting.

<comment><USER17> don't forget to share your findings )

<comment><USER16> I was planning on writing up a little blog post after I've finished peeking under the good definitely!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's very interesting to see this being announced now. The space of "native- to-the-web"-frameworks is very noisy lately. I wonder which moves the other developers of frameworks, especially in regards to Web3D games, will make next: Artillery? Goo Technologies? Scirra? Ludei? PlayCanvas? Impact? ...?

There is quite a bunch of free engines already out there: Babylon.js, Copperlicht, CubicVR, TheeJS, ...

The native engine builders: Epic, Crytek and Unity are also adding some more pressure on the game sector in this field with their announcements to also move into the web and alter their price schemes.

</comment><comment><USER19> I like Famous but there is so much buzz around it. ThreeJS had CSS and SVG rendered before they even started.

Some projects, thanks to VCs gets too much marketing that put main players under their shadows. MeteorJS is the same.

<comment><USER20> It would be unfair to call Meteor's and Famous' marketing "the same". Some facts:

\- Nobody knew about Meteor before their HN launch[0]

\- Famous appeared at conferences, TechCrunch Disrupt and others with demos of periodic table[1] (which was a ported example from ThreeJS)

\- Meteor launched on HN, people loved it, and only then they raised VC and announced it [2]

\- Famous announced their funding and sometimes dropped news of various partnerships with "hardware partners" they cannot disclosure. [3]

\- Meteor was open-sourced and available with documentation since the launch. They changed their licensing from GPLv2 to MIT later but it all was open[4].

\- Famous is open-sourcing their 1-commit repo after 2 years of private beta and now their documentation is in private beta as well.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3824908](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3824908)

[1]: [http://gigaom.com/2012/11/25/famous/](http://gigaom.com/2012/11/25/famous/)

[2]: [https://www.meteor.com/blog/2012/07/25/meteors- new-112-milli...](https://www.meteor.com/blog/2012/07/25/meteors- new-112-million-development-budget)

[3]: [http://us5.campaign- archive1.com/?u=4656ba2b0a364690c8530bc1...](http://us5.campaign- archive1.com/?u=4656ba2b0a364690c8530bc1e&id=5a55fd61fa)

[4]: [https://www.meteor.com/blog/2012/04/20/mit-license-http- requ...](https://www.meteor.com/blog/2012/04/20/mit-license-http-request- package-made-with-meteor)

<comment><USER21> Releasing collapsed git histories when going public is not without precedence. See the initial public commits from meteor, react and angular:

[https://github.com/meteor/meteor/commit/d69c2d1f198ab08a26a2...](https://github.com/meteor/meteor/commit/d69c2d1f198ab08a26a2b3bad07ccfa6f31d37da) [https://github.com/facebook/react/commit/75897c2dcd1dd3a6ca4...](https://github.com/facebook/react/commit/75897c2dcd1dd3a6ca46284dd37e13d22b4b16b4) [https://github.com/angular/angular.js/commit/c9c176a53b1632c...](https://github.com/angular/angular.js/commit/c9c176a53b1632ca2b1c6ed27382ab72ac21d45d)

We had a reason for doing so. From now on all future development will be out in the open. The docs specifically were supposed to be made available without logging in, but we were short on time. They nicely designed docs will be made available tomorrow. In the meantime, there are guides available in the [https://github.com/famous/guides](https://github.com/famous/guides) repo and all the source is JSdoc-ed. Check out the code and try making something with it.

disclaimer: I work for famo.us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Glad to see this out. I've been waiting on famo.us to become available for quite a while now. Exciting stuff.

Now, where is the documentation? The readme from the repo points to a docs folder that does not exist, and links to the online versions of documentation lead me to login-only pages... registering only puts me in line for access.

</comment><comment><USER23> Such a strange "launch" presentation; 3d is an obvious center piece and 40 minutes in, zero real demonstrations of the actual tech. No, the simple examples in "famo.us school" don't count. It looked similar jquery easing.

No visuals, just a bunch of beta devs talking about how great everything looks..

<comment><USER6> Here are a few links to some demos and some code examples on Code Pen.

Demos: [http://demo.famo.us/](http://demo.famo.us/)

Codepen: [http://www.codepen.io/befamous/](http://www.codepen.io/befamous/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is there anywhere to actually get a real demo of this product? Something that isn't a WebGL tech demo, but an actual example of an actual app written using this?

<comment><USER25> I think the closest thing to that would be their "Tweetus" demo. [http://demo.famo.us/tweetus/](http://demo.famo.us/tweetus/)

<comment><USER26> Wow, that Tweetus demo is SO clunky, like a bad Flash site :/

<comment><USER27> what browser are you using?

<comment><USER28> So famous is only for fast javascript browsers? That says it all... damn #hipstercoders.

And yes, it works fast on chrome, dog slow on Firefox. Since when did we decide to collectively ignore Firefox users because we want to use some fancy shmancy JS framework so we can write our code using an "opinionated" approach? And I quote "opinionated" as that is precisely how the readme describes the "famou.us" way of building "rich, fast web applications".

<comment><USER29> It's working fast on firefox for me.. but that means it arguably says worse things about the framework if performance can be so drastically variable from one person and browser to the next.

Didn't famo.us show off some fancy spinning sphere thing a year or so back? I seem to recall that working wonderfully smoothly on my (Galaxy Nexus) cell phone. The demos all available now are terribly slow and jerky and really don't sell the tech in the slightest.

<comment><USER30> It seems to heavily rely on graphics card support. Enabling linux graphic drivers in chromium changed it from barely working to silky smooth for me. I haven't figured out how to do the same in firefox yet though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> A lot of the links from the repo README are broken or in an invite-only area. The main docs I've seen are the markdown guides here:

[https://github.com/Famous/guides](https://github.com/Famous/guides)

The biggest disappointment is what seems like less-than-rock-solid desktop browser support. Support for iOS and Android only with "Broader support for more browsers is coming"?? (After all the discussion of not releasing until everything is rock solid?) I noticed it with some of the initial demos that didn't allow you to rotate the element chart using your mouse, but it worked fine on an iPad. For all the talk of 3d, I don't see anything on par with a three.js in the source.

Seems like React + a physics engine...

<comment><USER32> Desktop? I thought they were building for phones.

[http://m.infoworld.com/t/mobile-development/famous-were- buil...](http://m.infoworld.com/t/mobile-development/famous-were-building- better-phonegap-236267?source=footer)

<comment><USER31> Their marketing: "Famo.us provides a powerful JavaScript framework and developer tools designed to build rich, fast web applications." Yeah, it looks like it's mainly targeted toward mobile devices, not that it was clear before today. Earlier reports mentioned desktops together with mobile, like this one: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/10/famo-us-is-a-gaming- engine-...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/10/famo-us-is-a-gaming-engine- for-3d-interfaces/) "...it works on nearly any platform, including desktops, Android, and iOS."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The dynamics of which technologies find longevity on the front page is always intriguing. Erlang/OTP 17 was top for a short while, this random javascript framework hitting the top?

How is this more useful than a language/platform rev?

<comment><USER34> It's not a random framework. It's been worked on and talked about for 1-2 years now.

<comment><USER33> Maybe I gloss over most JavaScript framework posts, but first I've seen (and remember) for this one in the last year or so.

My general point is genericX.js seems to get a lot of up votes here relative to other language/framework topics .

<comment><USER35> Well, I think it's because mobile web is still a huge opportunity, and mobile website rendering still leaves a lot to be desired. If they deliver a simple- to-use framework that enables a superior UX on phones (looks like it, though we still need to see more), then that's naturally going to be very interesting to a startup/entrepreneurial crowd like hacker news. I've been following them since the periodic table example and am still eager to see it fully open up.

I also totally dig meteor as a huge step-up in how to build web applications. I think they solve a big problem that most people are still working on (react also looks interesting)... not having to duplicate your business logic and rendering code. I think that's a huge benefit to getting things done quickly. Plus you get real-time rendering of data changes in your app, largely for free.

So I wouldn't call these genericX.js libraries. I think they are enabling new opportunities and are worth the interest they're generating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> More demos are at: [http://demo.famo.us/](http://demo.famo.us/)

Facebook Paper: [http://demo.famo.us/paper/](http://demo.famo.us/paper/)

Yahoo Weather: [http://disrupt.famo.us/1022e61cbff3fe1fc382a81a2d6e2396078a6...](http://disrupt.famo.us/1022e61cbff3fe1fc382a81a2d6e2396078a6731e64a1da228ac1ac32a609ed1bbdfecaebd0a123a20e202c39ce607778a89fa91763100a3fa24520bf5e8f758/)

Rise: [http://demo.famo.us/rise/](http://demo.famo.us/rise/)

<comment><USER3> The Paper demo is quite impressive on my phone (iPhone 5s). Anyone who struggled with touch events in an HTML app should be impressed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Famo.us announced two things at the launch event tonight:

\- github repo is now public

\- they're letting in the first 75k devs to famo.us community website tonight

The first 75k devs will get 3 invites.

The website contains what they're calling Famo.us University. Tutorials, forums, IRC, etc.

The explanation for letting in 75k devs at a time is to not overwhelm the community with new devs. They want to be responsive to the first batch and train them so the first batch can support other batches. It's pretty brilliant community management and a sane approach to being able to actually deliver on the hype over time.

<comment><USER37> I think they are only letting 500 people in. There are 75k on the list. I signed up 2 years ago and I am number 74606. Looks like it will be at least a few months till I can look at the documentation

<comment><USER21> 500 or so per day. This number may be adjusted up or down depending on whether we are feeling overwhelmed. However I expect it to rise over time as those that get in early help those that get in later (IRC, forums, etc.). We're planning on getting everyone access within 40 days or so.

<comment><USER37> Had hoped to give this a try for our new product. Too many uncertain timelines I think to give it a try.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Do we have more details on what is famo.us? It says "opinionated approach".. How does it compare to ionicframework.com for instance?

<comment><USER39> It reminds me a lot of writing Cocoa applications but with javascript instead of Objective C.

<comment><USER40> I thought that was Cappuccino?

[http://www.cappuccino-project.org/](http://www.cappuccino-project.org/)

<comment><USER10> I love Cappuccino ! i really wish it'd take off, but the objective-J thing is a bit hard.Why not provide a pure JS interface?

<comment><USER41> Have you heard of MontageJS [http://montagejs.org](http://montagejs.org) it takes most of its inspiration from cocoa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Er, fail? No examples still at link given, and About page also blank, as others mentioned. Would like to try this, but not sure I want to invest the time without seeing some working examples first...

<comment><USER43> You can see some examples here [http://demo.famo.us/](http://demo.famo.us/) and [http://www.codepen.io/befamous/](http://www.codepen.io/befamous/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> How frustrating is the registration + queue to read the docs =(

<comment><USER45> The docs (gudes) are on GitHub too: [https://github.com/Famous/guides/tree/master/dev](https://github.com/Famous/guides/tree/master/dev)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> for those unclear, the countdown is just for their University, forum etc. The code itself is all out there. Clone the repo, init and update the submodules, and go!

They also have a yeoman generator

[https://github.com/Famous/generator- famous](https://github.com/Famous/generator-famous)

</comment><comment><USER43> I've been stuck at position 79992 for the past 10 minutes ... I just want to see the docs and guides!

<comment><USER47> This is a countdown? I haven't seen the number change at all; I was under the impression it was just your fixed user number. Then again mine is lower (758xx) and I only just signed up... I could've really used some hints here.

EDIT: The "mystery" over a lot of this is just making me less interested at this point. Sorry, marketers.

<comment><USER24> > EDIT: The "mystery" over a lot of this is just making me less interested at > this point. Sorry, marketers.

Yeah it's really starting to like this is more of a marketing company than a technology company, trying to milk some publicity but doing a really bad job of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The render tree document is pretty interesting [https://github.com/Famous/guides/blob/master/dev/2014-04-09-...](https://github.com/Famous/guides/blob/master/dev/2014-04-09-render- tree.md)

</comment><comment><USER21> Beepe was built in famous:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beepe- phone/hcfncm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beepe- phone/hcfncmkiaffeiicmpkaajdibigffgnfc?hl=en-US)

</comment><comment><USER48> I can't seem to get paste the fact that the UX seems confusing to me...

A lot of progressbars for animation also don't include visual feedback (except a number changing).

</comment><comment><USER49> Seriously Javascript? Pretty much everything is broken, try submitting on the register page without any fields ... the bad request is not handled :P

</comment><comment><USER50> Can someone explain why this is better than threejs?

<comment><USER51> three is a 3d engine (ish) - famo.us tries to also provide ui layers and such in a complete framework (that allegedly also includes physics, the works, etc)

<comment><USER52> If that's so the code looks like a mess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Launch video from tonight

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmQMVjCVZBo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmQMVjCVZBo)

</comment><comment><USER54> Seriously, check out the demos, [http://demo.famo.us/](http://demo.famo.us/). Pretty impressive.

<comment><USER55> Tried the first three, neither worked in Opera (Desktop or Mobile, the normal ones). Like.. at all. No fallback, nothing. I read the disclaimer that they are experimental, but still. The framework itself should cover you here and provide some sort of fallback (or better yet work).

<comment><USER56> Same here.

Makes it too hard to find what is it really about, how good it really is, and whether it is for you or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Anyone know why the text is so blurry in Chrome?

<comment><USER58> Half pixels; the dreaded "dubstep effect." They should be rounding the translation values before applying the matrix, at least on elements with text at screen depth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Wow! The demos are just bloody mindblowing

</comment><comment><USER60> _> Small examples of using each component are available at examples repo_

The link gives a 404.

</comment><comment><USER61> Why is there a line for material that is openly accessible in github? This seems stupid.

All their audience are developers who can basically get it off of github.</comment>


Searching for the "grey market" foods of New York City - <AUTHOR> http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/city/food/216541-searching-for-the-grey-market-foods-of-nyc <comment><USER2> Sassafrass isn't restricted because of cancer risk, it's restricted because it can be used as a precursor to MDMA (ecstasy).

<comment><USER3> Well it is a giant cancer risk. It contains large amounts of _safrole_ and other carcinogenic compounds. When it was banned, in _1960_ [0], MDMA wasn't yet as much of a "club drug" as it later became.

[0] [https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/roc/content/profiles/safrole.p...](https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/roc/content/profiles/safrole.pdf)

<comment><USER4> The article appears to contradict that sassfras contains _large_ amounts of safrole:

> _Safrole may be ingested in edible spices, including sassafras, cinnamon, > nutmeg, mace, star anise, ginger, black and white pepper, and from chewing > betel quid; all of these substances contain naturally occurring safrole at > low levels (IARC 1976, Archer and Jones 2002, HSDB 2009). Safrole is also > present in herbal products derived from the sassafras tree, including the > creole herb gumbo filé (Carlson and Thompson 1997). The concentration of > safrole can be reduced during the cooking process (Farag and Abo-Zeid 1997). > Based on common ingestion patterns, the estimated daily intake of safrole is > 0.3 mg (Rietjens et al. 2005)._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Kind of a fun article, but I felt the premise of, "I track down illicit foods" was diluted somewhat when most of the foods turn out not to be illicit.

<comment><USER6> For some strange reason I felt compelled to read all the way to the end. But it didn't start off well; I think I would have been content to live out the rest of my life without hitting up Wikipedia to see what "cheese mites" were.

<comment><USER7> On contrare, I'm glad I did. Because I would've guessed something was up with cheese that looked like this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mimolette1.jpg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mimolette1.jpg)

My cheese doesn't so I'm... probably OK. Haha.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Though I recently found out you can get it at a bourgie EV restaurant, I regularly frequent a joint in Brooklyn that will make kibbe naya (Lebanese lamb tartare, essentially.) You have to call ahead and you have to know the guy. It was the same way when I lived in Sydney. A few joints had it but it was technically against health code.

When I get it at my BK joint the owner will sit down at the table and eat it with us. And he generally makes so much that it's essentially all you can eat.

<comment><USER9> I've not been to Lebanon, but what you're describing sounds an awful lot like çiğ köfte: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Çiğ_köfte](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Çiğ_köfte) . You should give it a try if you can find it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What, no Kinder Eggs?

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting note at the end: "I was also able to dispell the long-held rumor that opium poppy was legal to grow and purchase if only intended for "ornamental purposes."".

One can easily buy dried pods of papaver somniferum, found on the first few result pages of a google search. I wonder if this is an enforcement oversight, a loophole, or a scam?

</comment><comment><USER12> It's a little strange the subtitle used is "Salmiakki". That's the Finnish term for salty liquorice but that section discusses it in general terms, not from a Finnish perspective. It just so happened that the version he tried was salmiakki from Finland.

<comment><USER13> Yes that threw me off at first as well. When I lived in Denmark I was used to the candy and recognized the picture immediately but I haven't heard it called that before.

Ah now I miss the proliferation of licorice in everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> No haggis?</comment>


The Symmetry of JavaScript Functions - <AUTHOR> http://raganwald.com/2015/03/12/symmetry.html <comment><USER2>
      s/diameter/circumference/g</comment>


Barriers to scala adoption - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/articles/barriers-to-scala-adoption

<comment><USER2> I liked the comments about immutability in the article, even from an OOP standpoint. After having read the "Eiffel" book 20 years ago, and being exposed to programming by contract and class invariants, the whole java-bean concept made me want to vomit. "Here's an object" -- too bad it's not good for anything yet, but eventually it will be! (good luck). Beans have to be almost the #1 anti-pattern in Java.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Another language I don't see mentioned above is Fantom. Some say that > already is a simpler language that offers improvements over Java without the > overwhelming power of Scala, but it hasn't been widely adopted. There are > many theories for this, my own is that it maybe doesn't offer enough new > stuff for someone to make the effort to switch. Scala clearly does add a lot > of value, so that should be a lesson for newcomers. Offer enough new stuff > for people to be interested.

I'm glad he at least mentioned Fantom. I haven't done much other than play around with it, but it seems like a much prettier "better" Java than a lot of the other contenders. I've never understood why it hasn't "caught on." Maybe he's right, maybe it just isn't different enough to be compelling.

<comment><USER4> It's kind of like nemerle, a ML-inspired language with lisp-type macros for .NET, very cool but you don't hear anything about it.

Basically, for JVM environment you have a lot of noisy judgments around language uptake: the big 4 (scala, JRuby, groovy, clojure) and the little 3 (Ceylon, kotlin, gosu).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like Scala, though I just dabble in it. But I have a few thoughts on why it will be difficult for it to be mainstream.

One of its greatest features require a meaningful rethink of the JEE stack. Actors passing messages seems to not really work in a one thread to one request world where you should fork new threads.

There are too many ways to do the same thing in it. Manipulating maps or list can be done with various features of the collection library. This becomes the Java version of Perl. Some developers will use $_, some prefer variables and they each prefer their own ways. It can make it hard for one developer to pick up where the other left off.

Finally, the documentation seems to be more complicated than necessary. The Scala version of JavaDoc available on their site is almost a difficult to navigate as MSDN. From here we go to the books about Scala. These take careful reading to glean even the most basic structures (took me a while to figure out that the primary constructor is all of the lines between the {} of a class that isn't encapsulated by a method declaration).

<comment><USER6> _Actors ... seems to not really work in a [JEE setup]._

Then don't use Actors, you can still use the rest of the language and you're still a lot better off than Java.

 _There are too many ways to do the same thing in it. ... This becomes the Java version of Perl._

Problems that only manifest once you have a large code base aren't barriers to adoption. Mainstream languages would be a lot better if they were! After all, Perl became widely adopted, so this didn't hurt Perl from being adopted and may even have helped.

 _Finally, the documentation seems to be more complicated than necessary._

I agree, and this is a problem for adoption right now. The documentation is the opposite of K&R's book on C. However, this can change easily, since third parties can write books about Scala. It's not like changing a language feature, where it takes a committee 10 years to actually make the change. Anyone can write a book, and we're starting to see that: the O'Reilly book on Scala is a really good introduction.

<comment><USER7> >Problems that only manifest once you have a large code base aren't barriers to adoption.

Ye Gods. Of course it is. If your code base is small you can pretty much get away with using _anything_. It's only when the code base is large enough to make maintenance challenging that differences between code paradigms start to matter.

If scala is only good for the sorts of projects PERL can handle, why would I stop using PERL?

<comment><USER8> In my view, Scala is good for projects where using Java is too complicated and you can use better abstractions.

I would argue that Scala helps to keep your code base smaller and easier to manipulate (due to extra type safety). In any language, a big codebase needs coding standards and the project develops it's own "culture". You have the same multiple approaches problem in Java: how do you search for items in a collection?

<comment><USER7> >In my view, Scala is good for projects where using Java is too complicated and you can use better abstractions.

I have yet to run into a project for which the use of Java is too complicated, and I'm concerned the designers of Scala have made a few mistakes of the kind you see in C++, like operator overloading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't use Scala but I appreciate the fresh ideas it has brought to the Java /JVM ecosystem. Think Jetlang Actors modeled after Scala actors or Functional Java library etc. or even Google Guava ,which although has nothing to do with Scala but promotes a succinct programming style.

Keep up the good work !

</comment><comment><USER10> Would it be ok to mention we're hiring Scala people in Canada? firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER10> Or better: <http://getgush.com/jobs>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The problem with scala and other non mainstream but powerful languages is that they are just ugly; no amount of marketing and feature lists will make them attractive because aesthethics are hard wired into our brains; at a low level ugly equals misery and pain, at a higher level its just an indicator of maintenance problems. Perl got away with it because at the time because there were not many options for scripting, now Python and Ruby are now dancing on its grave.

<comment><USER12> > The problem with scala and other non mainstream but powerful languages is > that they are just ugly

You seem to be implying they all are ugly, as if mainstream languages are chosen for their beauty?</comment></comment>


Get more out of your Netflix subscription - <AUTHOR> http://feedflix.com/ <comment><USER2> This is the site I am working on - I'd greatly appreciate feedback from HN on what you guys think.

Btw, RWW covered FeedFlix a couple days ago: <http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/feedflix.php>

<comment><USER3> 1) This site really looks cool

2) It's easy to use, so kudos - I sent the link to my girlfriend and she set it up in no time flat.

3) There is no three, but I'd like to say again that this is a pretty cool application.

<comment><USER2> Hey, thanks icey. Let me know if you have any other thoughts or ideas to make it better.

<comment><USER3> The only suggestion I would have is to somehow allow friendlier URLs. I would really like feedflix.com/icey for example. It would be worth signing up just for that.

<comment><USER2> Hi icey - while that's definitely possible, here's a simpler way:

Right now the username you get (typically something like xy-12345) is actually your Netflix username. So all you need to do is to log in to your Netflix account and set your Netflix username to "icey" and FeedFlix will catch up on the next refresh and your page will be feedflix.com/icey from that point on.

Makes sense? Let me know if it doesn't.

<comment><USER3> Well... That's just awesome.

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This app is awesome. If there is anyone on the fence, I assure you that your time will be well spent checking this out.

</comment><comment><USER4> I enjoy the idea a lot. Really nifty.

</comment><comment><USER5> wow, good job. looks really good and fulfills a need. wish i had thought of that ;)</comment>


Ask HN: What is the psychology behind why we like containers or boxes? - <AUTHOR> The more I'm looking at business success the more I'm realising that some successful businesses are based on their ability to contain a raft of solutions to a single product or solution. e.g. I buy an iPhone because I know everything it can do without needing to make a chain of decisions about CPU, memory, display quality etc...<p>I'm after some books to help understand: Why is this? What about the human psychology yearns for things being wrapped up neatly? Where does this come from in nature? Conversely, why do some of us like to tinker and not be bound to containers? Are there natural examples of this? <comment><USER2> Simplification. Our lives are deeply complex lists of Stuff that needs thinking about, working on, worrying about, etc..

It is a great relief to have several items on the list encapsulated into just one.

It's also deeply practical. Imagine trying to manage a container ship without containerization.

</comment><comment><USER3> Okay, so you're not talking about the psychology that makes The Container Store profitable then... But something ambiguously broader.

I'm not a psychologist -- this may be so broad is to be a philosophy question instead -- but humans like simplification and stories.

Some of that may be thriftiness with biologically-expensive brainpower, and some of it may be tied to our core mechanisms for understanding the world with cause and effect.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well designed "box-like" services and products allow people to save energy and time by not thinking too much. Brain takes a large portion of energy our body needs, so preferring these kinds of products is akin to preferring a motorcycle instead of a bicycle. It all comes down to all organisms propensity to not waste energy whenever possible.

<comment><USER5> Is it? Most people prefer bicycles in my experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd point you to Jordan Peterson's "Maps of Meaning" course.

In a couple of words: as a human, you have an objective (be successful, be sexier, make more money, etc.) and things around you will be either tools or obstacles.

An example of a tool or "container" would be a car. It encapsulates a machinery and abstracts getting you from point A to point B. If it breaks, it leaks the abstraction and now you have to go out of your way to fix it.

"Containers" that work are tools that help you achieve your objectives.

For the second part, why some of us tinker: my theory is that we believe this knowledge will help us attain our objectives in a faster or easier path; it's an investment. For example with more knowledge, we can improve our containers or fix them faster when they break.

Bottom line: It's all about humans trying to attain their objectives and using abstractions for it.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's a fact of language. A noun is a container for a thing or concept that gives us a handle on experience.</comment>


Mystery over monster star's vanishing act - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53235909 <comment><USER2> "overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out"

The idea somehow came to me that if the earth was going to be destroyed in the near future by some random event, and earth was the only place with intelligent beings in the universe, something would affect probability, such that weirder and weirder things would spontaneously happen. I can't exactly explain the connection but it's based on vague thoughts about "quantum immortality" and the uncertainty principle. I feel like if I were a decent writer I could make it into a fantasy/SF short story.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Me, I'm hoping for a Dyson Sphere :-)</comment>


French: The Most Productive People In The World - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/are-the-french-the-most-productive-people-in-the-world-2009-8 Winning is not about working hard. It's about working smart... and less. <comment><USER2> While I enjoy a good yarn as much as the next guy, the logic doesn't follow.

GDP per capita is simply total GDP divided by the population. GDP is made up of Consumption, Investment, Government Spending, and Net Exports. A large porportion of any of those factors can increase GDP.

Government Spending in France, a component of GDP, was 53% in 2001 ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_France#Rise_and_decl...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_France#Rise_and_decline_of_dirigisme)). Without doing a deeper online search, it might even be higher today.

Government Spending should not be seen as a good long-term item to focus on to increase GDP. If their metric of "Productivity" is based largely on Govt. Spending, which it is, then that's not sustainable in the long-term, and will change drastically in the future.</comment>


Fantastic Timers: High-Resolution Microarchitectural Attacks in JS (2017) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://gruss.cc/files/fantastictimers.pdf <comment><USER2> It's apparently a pretty controversial position to have now, but I'll say it again:

Leave JS off by default. Whitelist sites that absolutely need it. Running completely untrusted foreign code on your hardware has been, is, and likely will continue to be a source of security problems.

As a bonus, you get to enjoy much faster-loading, nearly ad-free and cruft- free pages on almost every site. Now couldn't be a better time to try it out.

<comment><USER3> I'm astonished at how fast websites are without JavaScript. I just turned it on today to make an order on EBay and I was immediately annoyed by how slow and sluggish it was. Why aren't there programs to buy stuff on the internet?

There are some other minor pain points though. Why can't I collapse comments here on HN without JavaScript?

There are more examples of minor issues that seem to be completely solveable by a statically defined markup language. Mozilla, where are you when we need you?

Allowing JavaScript only on certain sites is not a good solution. First, it leads to unfair conditions and thus centralization. Second, the appification of the web including it's consequence of ever increasing dependency on certain software that is outside of the control of the users continues.

<comment><USER4> > Why can't I collapse comments

Features like this could easily be a declarative feature in HTML. e.g. something like:

            <action type="show,hide" for="foo">

            </action>

 ...

Unfortunately, development of new HTML features like this mostly stopped when a major browser developer decided to try to fight with Microsoft for the desktop/mobile markets by changing webpages into software.

<comment><USER5> You don't even need that. You can work some magic with CSS to hide/show and even rotate/flip elements using inputs.

> input:checked + div { display: none; }

Some people don't like that either though. :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Woah!

Summarizing:

...

Goethem et al. exploited more accurate in-browser timing to obtain information even from within other websites, such as contact lists or previous inputs.

...

Oren et al. recently demonstrated that cache side-channel attacks can also be performed in browsers. Their attack uses the performance.now method to obtain a timestamp whose resolution is in the range of nanoseconds. It allows spying on user activities but also building a covert channel with a process running on the system. Gruss et al. and Bosman et al. demonstrated Rowhammer attacks in JavaScript, leveraging the same timing interface. In response, the WC and browser vendors have changed the performance.now method to a resolution of 5 µs. The timestamps in the Tor browser are even more coarse-grained, at 100 ms .

In both cases, this successfully stops side-channel attacks by withholding necessary information from an adversary. In this paper, we demonstrate that reducing the resolution of timing information or even removing these interfaces is completely insucient as an attack mitigation.

...

Our key contributions are:

– We performed a comprehensive evaluation of known and new mechanisms to obtain timestamps. We compared methods on the major browsers on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, as well as on Tor browser.

– Our new timing methods increase the resolution of ocial methods by 3 to 4 orders of magnitude on all browsers, and by 8 (!!) orders of magnitude on Tor browser. _Our evaluation therefore shows that reducing the resolution of timer interfaces does not mitigate any attack._

– We demonstrate the first DRAM-based side channel in JavaScript to exfiltrate data from a highly restricted execution environment inside a VM with no network interfaces.

– Our results underline that quick-fix mitigations are dangerous, as they can establish a false sense of security.

<comment><USER4> > reducing the resolution of timer interfaces does not mitigate any attack.

> quick-fix mitigations are dangerous, as they can establish a false sense of > security.

This demonstrates - again - the danger of treating security as default-permit. This blacklist-style thinking is very common, but it is _guaranteeing_ eventual failure because _you cannot enumerating badness_ [1].

Limiting the granularity of performance.now _assumes_ that providing any timing information at all is safe. It's the same basic misunderstanding of what it means to design for security I hear way too often whenever a new security issue is being discussed: someone always asks "Is this an actual problem in the wild, or whining about some hypothetical that isn't a 'real threat'?" So what; future threats are nt limited to only the attacks we know about today.

As I sain in a recent comment[2], the thing that nobody really wants to talk about is that it isn't possible to know the behavior of programs a Turing complete language without running the program. Declarative documents in HTML+CSS were safe, but trying to run potentially malicious Turing complete programs safely is _provably_ futile endeavor.

[1] [http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/d...](http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/dumb/)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15708099](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15708099)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why high precision timing was ever introduced into browsers is beyond me. I don't see why timers should be more accurate that millisecond precision or why the timer should return different values when polled more than once in the same execution context (as an event based language).

Edit:

> Unlike other timing data available to JavaScript (for example Date.now), the > timestamps returned by Performance.now() are not limited to one-millisecond > resolution. Instead, they represent times as floating-point numbers with up > to microsecond precision.

What a terrible idea. If this kind of profiling is needed, it should be better off as a feature of the browser developer tools, not a built-in function.

None of these examples are compelling to me either: [https://w3c.github.io/hr- time/#introduction](https://w3c.github.io/hr-time/#introduction)

HTML 5 audio has its own standards as does drawing. In fact, a high-precision timer is the worst solution to any of those problems.

<comment><USER8> It was introduced because " _web developers are building more sophisticated applications where application performance is increasingly important. Developers need the ability to assess and understand the performance characteristics of their applications using well-defined interoperable measures._ " [1].

Browser-engine makers, like WebKit, were itching [2] to implement this, so they participated early on.

The proceedings of this W3C working group were conducted in the open; their mailing list archive is public [3].

For a cute and oblivious early message, see this post [4] from July 2010. Luckily it was eventually followed up by the first wave of enumerated privacy concerns [5] in October 2010.

[1] [https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web- perf/2010Jun...](https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web- perf/2010Jun/att-0002/webperf.html) [2] [https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web- perf/2010Jul...](https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web- perf/2010Jul/0012.html) [3] [https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web- perf/](https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web-perf/) [4] [https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web- perf/2010Jul...](https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web- perf/2010Jul/0009.html) [5] [https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web- perf/2010Oct...](https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web- perf/2010Oct/0027.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Someone once suggested the risk in opening email attachments was analagous to the risk in running executable code (e.g., Javascript) from websites. Each can expose the user to a multitude of vulnerabilities. The argument against this comparison at the time was that Javascript from websites, unlike email attachments, could be run in a "sandbox". Even if the code could not be trusted, it was "safe" because it was "isolated".

Today, many users do not run Javascript because all too often it exposes them to excessive advertising and resource usage. Now, after researchers defeated KASLR with Javascript, and with Meltdown and Spectre being implemented in Javascript, there are additional benefits of not running third party Javascript.

</comment><comment><USER10> That was extremely quick. Did they have this paper up their sleeve, expecting browsers to implement these kind of mitigation?

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I didn't write the paper, but had goose bumps (in a scared, WTF kinda way) after reading through it. Thanks for the comments so far...

I got the link to this paper from Luke Wagner's post [1] on Mozilla's Security blog regarding Spectre, and migrations being implemented in Firefox. I had a strong sense of foreboding after reading both the post and the linked PDF for a few reasons:

1\. The overall tone of the post is pretty dour because a veritable Pandora's box has been opened by these findings.

2\. The team doesn't really know how to fix the issues surfaced without performance penalties.

3\. Not every attack vector is known to the research and browser development community!

4\. Firefox (and other browser vendors) strongly believes that the web as a platform holds a great deal of promise. For this to become a reality, browsers need to perform close to native speeds. High fidelity timers are deemed pivotal to the performance equation even though they risk the overall security of the system. This is why Luke and team are going to invest heavily in fixing these issues as they are reported.

This last point is key, and it surfaces the inherent Catch-22 faced by browser vendors. They need to balance performance and security considerations for the web platform to succeed. And right now, security is being sacrificed at the altar of performance.

This brings me to the question that I have been noodling over all week long: Is the notion of the "web as a platform" an anachronism? Can we ditch this idea because native apps have won?

More insightful and influential folks in the HN community should chime in here with their perspectives.

1\. [https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/03/mitigations- lan...](https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/03/mitigations-landing-new- class-timing-attack/)

Edit: light wordsmithing

<comment><USER11> Personally I am betting my horse on the native side.

My web development projects were a pleasure back when it was all about HTML/CSS instead of trying to duplicate an OS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was wondering how can I use SharedArrayBuffer to implement the high- resolution timer. It's just consist of a dedicated thread keep incrementing the counter memory on SharedArrayBuffer. Read the counter value in SharedArrayBuffer from other threads and it's effectively a high-resolution timer.

It can achieve 2 ns resolution.

</comment><comment><USER13> So this paper appears to have been published on 2017-12-23 (according to [https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-70972-7_...](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-70972-7_13)), which was ahead of the Specter and Meltdown disclosures. Truly unfortunate timing for the browsers implementing mitigation, huh.

It seems that one of the covert channels described here has been fixed (SharedArrayBuffers) but many of the other ones have not. The passive reading of data from timing-based side effects (like CSS animation as described in the paper) seems particularly hard to avoid in general. HTML5 video will have the same vulnerability, I bet.

</comment><comment><USER14> I had a depressing feeling this was coming.

Are cache timing attacks just inherently impossible to stop? It's sure starting to look that way with the last couple years of security research. Seems like every mitigation that gets thrown up is knocked down immediately.

<comment><USER6> It may be that the only true solution is to replace / re-engineer CPUs with these vulnerabilities expressly in mind, and guarded against.

Until then (and that will probably take a while obviously) it's probably going to be a cat and mouse game. I would expect a lot of patching. Future discoveries probably won't have the luxury of a 6 month coordinate / fixing window.

On top of that this is drawing a lot of attention to a particular area which will likely have a snowball effect as more and more exploits are found more and more will search for them.

Finally, If the mitigation strategy is 'don't let a javascript application be able to accurately know how much time something takes' and for 25 years that has not been a serious fundamental design consideration (quite the opposite to the point that a super accurate one was given freely in the form of `performance.now`). It seems like this is one big messy ball of yarn to untangle.

<comment><USER15> "It may be that the only true solution is to replace / re-engineer CPUs with these vulnerabilities expressly in mind, and guarded against. "

No such way that anyone knows about exists without huge performance loss. Without changing existing software/programming/etc paradigms, it is, IMHO, quite unlikely such a way exists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It is interesting that all security measures that Tor developers implemented gave them exactly nothing. The researches were able to get the same 2ns resolution as with stock Firefox.

I wonder if the measures in FF to counter the Spectre will fire any better.

</comment><comment><USER17> I was wondering when we'd see a paper like this since I saw the post on Firefox reducing timer resolution. My immediate thought was "there have to be other ways to get good enough timers to mount these attacks". Sure enough..

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice timing. This follows up well from my previous HN comment, that timers are everywhere. Pretty much any operation that has a small predictable time can be used as the basis for timing something else.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm pretty sure a timer on a webserver is going to be good enough to determine if an item is cached or not in the client. The time difference between cached and not-cached is huge.</comment>


Walmart is in advanced talks to acquire online men's retailer Bonobos - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2017/4/14/15304234/walmart-bonobos-acquisition-jet <comment><USER2> Now that's interesting. With Amazon creating their own online brands this is a clear attempt for Walmart to compete for an entirely different market from their current in store labels.</comment>


Startup Quote: Kyle Bragger, co-founder, Forrst - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/2144283109

<comment><AUTHOR> Get a mentor in the applicable field if you're at all unsure of what you're looking for.

\- Kyle Bragger (@kylebragger)

<http://startupquote.com/post/2144283109></comment>


Galaxy S8 is not going to feature a 3.5mm headphone jack - <AUTHOR> http://www.sammobile.com/2016/12/06/exclusive-galaxy-s8-is-not-going-to-feature-a-3-5mm-headphone-jack/ <comment> jack-r-abbit Damn it! I am really enjoying my S6 and kind of just assumed I'd be getting the S8 when it comes out since I'll be due for an upgrade by then. But I am not on board with removing the headphone jack. I don't know who is asking for phone makers to keep shaving a mm or 2 off the thickness each iteration, but I would much rather have a headphone jack in a slightly thicker phone. I don't like wireless headphones because they are just one more thing that I have to keep charged. I don't know what I hate more: Apple for leading the way on stupid things or other makers for following them.

(I actually still wish I had a physical keyboard.)</comment>


How does SOPA threaten Stack Overflow? - <AUTHOR> http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/114005/133693 <comment><USER2> I was once the registered DMCA agent for a large organization. All of the registered agents are listed on the US Copyright's Office website so that rights holders can look-up the names and addresses to send notices when an IP address within that organization is found to have content that is thought to be infringing (P2P, music, movies, etc).

Fewer than 1 in 10 came to me (the person registered to receive the notices). Subcontractors working on behalf of rights holders would send notices to any email address that they could find. Some went to retired employees, transferred employees, etc. It got so bad that we put a comment in ARIN that specified the agent's contact address to try and stop it. Didn't work.

The DMCA requires a proper notice be sent to the registered agent and grants the organization safe-harbor. It is very well defined. Here is the official list of registered agents (the one and only list... but DMCA subcontractors don't read it):

<http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/list/a_agents.html>

<comment><USER3> Most of them are bots, and I doubt your note in ARIN was even being read. They seem to love to look up the abuse contact for an email address, and send their notices there. A large number of them make no attempt to find the registered agent. Sadly, this works for them, since I would imagine most ISP's just forward on the notice to the registered contact.

I wonder what would happen if you ignored a DMCA notice sent to the wrong contact. Would it be invalid?

<comment><USER2> The entire purpose of the portion of the law (DMCA) requiring valid notices be sent to registered agents is so that notice is given to the correct person at the organization so that swift action may be taken to investigate and potentially remedy the alleged copyright violation. How else do you think the organization would know to respond?

Rights holders and their subcontractors can't just email anyone in your domain (the janitor's office) and expect action to be taken. The law (DMCA) is very explicit about this. Notice must be given to the registered agent (PERIOD). However, you should ask your legal counsel what they which to do with invalid notices. Some will want the organization to respond anyway, others won't. It depends on whether or not they wish to waste money spending time following-up on invalid notices. I can tell you this though, a notice sent to email@example.com is not going to stand up in court unless email@example.com is indeed the registered agent.

The point is that if they can't be bothered to obey the DMCA and take the time to look-up the proper published registered agent, why should new laws be considered that let them get away with even worse laziness and accusations?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I participated in the recent EFF push for contacting elected representatives regarding SOPA. I customized their pre-packaged letter greatly, adding both my experience and qualifications and expounding on the distrust from the tech industry to SOPA.

The response from my (Republican) Congressman was a form letter telling me I was wrong, and regurgitating a the pro-SOPA talking points.

I've been contemplating a rather severe letter in response, but I haven't gotten to it as I don't believe anything I can say to him will be effective.

<comment><USER5> Mr Congressman, you have lost my vote forever. Furthermore, I will be campaigning on behalf of $OPPONENT who still believes in freedom and our greatest liberties. The fact that we have great men like $OPPONENT proves American democracy still works.

<comment><USER6> "Lost my vote forever" is, I'm sure, the kind of meaningless spiel they hear everyday. It would likely have the same effect on a congressman that saying "meat is murder" has on me - instant tune-out.

A response informing the congressman of _why_ he's wrong, citing loss of jobs and liberty while threatening innovation, all in the name of an ever-growing government keen to erode our rights in the service of special interests, would likely hit enough republican talking points to at least merit a moment's consideration. Which, at the end of the day, is probably the best you could hope for.

<comment><USER5> That's assuming that this comgressman believes his talking points. I'm of the opinion that many talking points are for _other_ people to believe, but the ones saying them do not believe in them. The subject matter just doesn't affect them. Why would a politician who has been bought by Big Media care about innovation, loss of jobs/liberty, or erosion of rights?

Hit them where it hurts. Threaten _their_ job. If you lose your job due to their legislation, they'll just blame their opponent and tell you to stop begging for handouts.

<comment><USER7> Threatening their job is one thing -- it's when you say that they've lost your vote _forever_ that it becomes too far, as they might feel that they have no choice for recompense to gain your vote back.

In short, it's going too far, and even if it isn't, certainly seems like an idle threat.

Saying something more like "I cannot vote for any candidate who supports this policy or any like it" is perhaps a more effective statement to make.

<comment><USER5> A fair point. I like your wording.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Did anyone ever think we'd see the day where we were using DMCA as an example of the preferrable alternative?

<comment><USER9> Yes, it's strange isn't it? But since the big media copyright lads want to go further than the DMCA, that would imply it was OK. And the USA has the DMCA now, how has the last 10 years been for internet freedom? Not too bad, so it probably wasn't that bad.

<comment><USER10> How much freer would the Internet have been if the DMCA had not been passed? Think of all the hours YouTube alone spends in policing itself and handling copyright takedown notices and imagine those hours spent improving YouTube or coming up with new video sharing services.

The current copyright regime is tolerable. Tolerable and good are worlds apart.

<comment><USER11> YouTube would not exist today without the safe-harbor provisions of the DMCA. It would have been sued out of existence years ago.

The DMCA did not create copyright law, it modified it, and pre-DMCA, YouTube would have had no protections.

<comment><USER12> And without a fair use exception to copyright, search engines like Google could not show matching web site excerpts in their results.

Imagine search engine results that consisted only of URL's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thanksgiving was the cutesy (but needed) Upgrade Your Parents' Browser Day.

$winter_holiday_of_choice should include a Explain SOPA To Your Parents Lunch or something - we need to get as many level-headed against SOPA as possible.

<comment><USER14> Funny how people use "$winter_holiday_of_choice" to avoid religious bias, but end up ignoring the literal half of the planet where the holiday happens during summer. Not complaining, just pointing out the futility of the exercise.

It would have made sense if SOPA was an American problem, but as it stands it threatens the internet for the whole world because of hosting locations and origin of technology companies.

<comment><USER15> > _"Not complaining, just pointing out the futility of the exercise."_

So you're saying we should go with $solstice_holiday_of_choice ?

Just because they didn't abstract sufficiently doesn't mean that abstraction is _necessarily_ futile.

<comment><USER13> $december_reason_to_see_the_parents then. :P

<comment><USER15> Ahh, but then you're still excluding any culture not using the Gregorian calendar... ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The fact that its even possible for this law to be considered should give people another hint at how dangerous and negligent our "representatives" are. Other obvious hints are apparent also, such as the Patriot Act and about 100 other things I won't mention.

People just need to face reality. Its a corrupt system. The government is full of fraudsters and even mass murderers. I know its hard to accept that, but that's the truth.

The other problem is that its the very structure of our government and society that creates these outcomes over and over again.

We need to do some agile engineering on society, starting from base premises.

<comment> brown9-2 What would you change about the representative form of government?

Any government consisting of representatives of the people will end up proposing and debating laws that certain segments of the population sees as "bad" at times.

It's a test of how well the government works if the people can voice their opinion and have an effect on Congress's debate. If this happens and curtails the law, then government is working.

<comment><USER17> _What would you change about the representative form of government?_

At this point, I'd probably ditch it as unworkable, and replace it with a more meritocratic, less corruptible form.

 _It's a test of how well the government works if the people can voice their opinion and have an effect on Congress's debate. If this happens and curtails the law, then government is working._

No, it isn't. SOPA is an obvious exercise in moving the Overton Window. The bill(s) that follow it -- including those that will eventually pass -- will seem innocuous by comparison, regardless of their content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is great but surely we need to be targeting a wider audience? SO is made up of tech enthusiasts, I imagine a large percentage of them have heard of SOPA and understand the issues. However they probably represent a tiny fraction of the population.

Really we need the eBay's, AOL's and Craiglist's of this world to be running campaigns like this, getting the message out to the more casual internet user.

<comment> jim-greer Craigslist might actually do it... I doubt AOL or eBay ever would.

<comment> jim-greer I tweeted to Craig Newmark and he answered positively - here's hoping: <http://twitter.com/#!/craignewmark/status/141604875581657088>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Odd they didn't do this on the day that every other site did. Or has it been up since then?

<comment><USER20> we're a little bit slow!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The whole SOPA and PROTECT IP thing is a power play to leverage the Internet community into a compromise which would allow the acceptance of a removal of anonymous internet usage.

</comment><comment><USER22> Very good, I already had a lot of respect for SO now I have a lot more!

</comment><comment><USER23> The global internet is quickly becoming a more powerful entity than all the rulers in Congress. Congress will not stop trying to put a leash on it. The more powerful the internet gets, the more you will see Congress trying anything to establish control. Child pornography, digital rights, copyright, Chinese hackers, national security, containing the terrorists, fud... Congress will use military force if necessary if the global internet challenges its supreme authority as global sovreign. Which one day it will.

<comment><USER24> These kinds of comments may scare away large numbers of level-headed people from standing up against SOPA. Do you honestly think that the emergence of a global super-entity to serve as a niche to all kinds of low-lives is a good thing? Because if you are, then a lot of people who are aware of your position will be against whatever you stand, which of course means that you will lose potentially valuable allies against SOPA.

Let's stand against SOPA, but let's not get too radical while doing it. The Internet is not a savior of "the people" or a second coming of anything. No one will save us but ourselves.

<comment><USER25> _Do you honestly think that the emergence of a global super-entity to serve as a niche to all kinds of low-lives is a good thing?_

Tell us how you _really_ feel. Don't worry though, I'm confident that the government will eventually find a way to expunge all the undesirable "low- lives" from the net.

<comment><USER24> Spreading paranoia about the government is a classic tactic of disaffected "little" people, whether they are of the right or of the left.

There are plenty of things that are wrong with the government, but being paranoid and bitter is not the way to fix them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm used to seeing a close button on these types of messages on Stack Overflow. Kind of a nuisance to have it stuck there even after I've signed the petition. Maybe if it were a different color, or I hadn't been trained to read all of the yellow status messages on each SO page, it would be less annoying..

<comment><USER27> The system messages don't have a close button, they're usually used for important site status updates such as "There will be a short network wide outage starting on date at time for system maintenance".

The use of the tool for memorials to Steve Jobs or for political messages like this is extremely rare.

It's a good thing that you read the status messages. Normally, they're important.

<comment><USER28> The problem is that if they keep using them for politics or for other things that aren't system messages, people will start ignoring them. "Ugh, that's that bar that just shows dumb political messages."

<comment><USER29> Yes, system messages shouldn't be abused like this. They are supposed to be the exception not norm. Even though the message gets to the front of your attention on every single page, it would have been better if this was to be placed as a community ad or a blog post.

Seeing that this is directed to the US users of Stack Overflow, I am not sure what the rest of the world should be doing other than spreading the message.

To play devil's advocate, since SO has dumps of their data under CC, anyone from another country can still get the content.

The community and the system of asking and answering questions are threatened, the previous data will still be around.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Day Series: The Day we turned down TechCrunch for DEMO - <AUTHOR> http://thedayseries.com/post/663456412/the-day-we-turned-down-techcrunch-for-demo

<comment><USER2> Definitely should have told TC that you got into DEMO. TC has an expedited process for companies with a conflict, including acceptance to DEMO. They would have let you know ASAP whether or not you would be invited had you told them the situation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't know there was a process. Would have agreed with you even without knowing that :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We were in a quite similar situation a few years back.

The main decision factor should be: which conference will give me the most long-term exposure. I still don't know the answer to that one, by the way, even after all these years.

I'm also very curious to hear feedback from this year's TechCrunch Disrupt. Being in New York, did it generate as much buzz here in the valley as TC50 did?

PS: those days are part of what makes startups fun.</comment>


You're never going to have a legacy, so give up trying - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/work/1528262/youre-never-going-to-have-a-legacy-so-give-up-trying/ <comment><USER2> This is a good nutshell reminder of an apparent key fact of existence.

This has been known and lamented for more than 2,000 years. Read Ecclesiastes.

       Everything is an iteration of
       what went before.  Things only
       seem new because our memories
       are short.  No one remembers
       what happened last week, let
       alone last year.  We forget
       everything and our children
       remember even less.

("Nothing New Under the Sun: A Blunt Paraphrase of Ecclesiastes", Adam S. Miller)

<comment><AUTHOR> The last few minutes of Martin Scorsese's (wildly uneven, but still) _Gangs of New York_ found a good way to tell the same story 100% visually. The movie starts with a huge street fight between the followers of the two characters at the heart of its story, Bill the Butcher and "Priest" Vallon, battling over who will control the streets of 19th-century New York. Then at the end we see their tombstones, and in a sped-up time-lapse we see those stones get overgrown and forgotten as the modern city of New York we know today grows up around them, fading out on one last shot of the completely overgrown headstones -- with the Twin Towers looming over them, as if to say, _this too shall pass._

You can watch the ending here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-8Lu7MRjQs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-8Lu7MRjQs)

It's a really good little example of visual storytelling.

<comment><USER3> That was a great ending. Also brings up an interesting thought. If something that gruesome and important to New York's history has been largely forgotten after 150 years, then there will eventually come a time when 9/11 (your mention of the Twin Towers made me think of it) is all but forgotten by society and its residents (assuming New York still exists as a city in hundreds of years) and some future filmmaker could do a similar timelapse starting from where the Gangs of New York timelapse ended.

<comment><AUTHOR> Arguably, that process has already started. To anyone who was born after 9/11 (and that was almost 18 years ago, so there are people born after 9/11 who are almost old enough to vote!), that event is already kind of an abstraction, in much the same way that the attack on Pearl Harbor is to almost everyone reading this. The passing of an event out of living memory is the first stage of that kind of transition from experience into legend.

And also, if you're interested in this sort of thing, I recommend subscribing to the blog Ephemeral New York, which highlights all sorts of still-existing traces of New York Cities long gone: [https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/](https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/)

<comment><USER4> I've been seeing a lot of headlines over the past ten or so years on how this is happening to the Holocaust, which freaks me the hell out, because my grandmother's second husband was a survivor. To think nobody could meet anyone like him anymore is disturbing.

<comment><USER5> I long for the day when there is no genocide in living memory.

<comment><USER4> To talk of "living memory" leaves the future uncontrolled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've often thought: "What if I bought a nice big piece of land somewhere, along with a digging machine and spent the rest of my days making a hole in the earth. That is my current thought on how to make the biggest, lasting impact on this earth.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately, others have already done this - extracting great riches as they did so - and left their "mark" on the planet.

Of course, without looking it up, I couldn't tell you who they were, even though some of these "big holes" are right here in "my backyard" down in southern Arizona (about the best I can tell you is that they were mostly for copper mining and...yep).

Or - take this big hole; without looking it up, do you know who made it?

[http://www.nationmultimedia.com/img/news/2017/08/06/30322996...](http://www.nationmultimedia.com/img/news/2017/08/06/30322996/7b64a5397251773aa5f978cddb4771b1.jpeg)

...got the owners a lot of diamonds, though.

Even so - they'll be just as forgotten.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe we shouldn't confuse having an impact with being remembered? In the end, most contributions are anonymous, but they're still what civilization is built on.

<comment><USER9> Indeed. It's an interesting assumption that legacy means a selfish desire to be remember. It's a very Facebook way to think.

The legacy of a teacher is presumably the great things their students do, and not their students sitting around saying "remember that maths teacher."

<comment><USER10> Everything we do matters as long as humanity continues to exist, because all of us have an impact on the next generation, and so on. It doesn't matter how small. I don't know who my great grandfather was, but I'm here because one day he decided to have sex. The butterfly effect is real.

Although there's no future for humanity in the universe, everything is for naught. But we are a hopeful species.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would bet good money that less than 1% of people can name all 8 of thier great grand parents. In other words you'll almost certainly be forgotten in a few generations, even by your own family.

<comment><USER10> However, even though nobody might remember the name of those great grandparents, they impacted the lives of others, which changed the course of the future.

Everyone is contributing to the future of humanity. Even if some commit suicide or decides not to reproduce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"

PB Shelley said it better.

"Here lies one whose name was writ on water."

And "a young English poet" said it better still.

But they never had the opportunity to create an artificial intelligence, did they? Since I know that nothing I do will endure long beyond my death, and that failure of the flesh is inevitable under current technology, I think that my best chance at a legacy will be to create an artificial consciousness that likes the same things that I like, and dislikes the same things that I dislike, mimics my behavior to perfection, and possesses the same catalog of memories.

Then it can spend an eternity doing absolutely nothing of consequence, just like I would do with immortality, if I had it. Thus, the rule of zero legacy is preserved.

</comment><comment><USER13> Years ago, from somewhere I have forgotten, I copied the following:

 _Among the first Anglo-Saxon poems, from the eighth century, is "The Ruin," a powerful testament to the brokenness inherent in civilization. Its opening lines:

The masonry is wondrous; fates broke it The courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying...

The poem comes from the Exeter Book of Anglo-Saxon poetry and several key lines have been destroyed by damp. So, one of the original poems in the English lyric tradition contains, in its very physical existence, a comment on the fragility of the codex as a mode of transmission. The original poem about a ruin is itself a ruin._

Here is another translation:

 _Splendid this rampart is, though fate destroyed it, The city buildings fell apart, the works Of giants crumble. Tumbled are the towers, Ruined the roofs, and broken the barred gate, Frost in the plaster, all the ceilings gape, Torn and collapsed and eaten up by age. And grit holds in its grip, the hard embrace Of earth, the dead departed master-builders, Until a hundred generations now Of people have passed by. Often this wall Stained red and grey with lichen has stood by Surviving storms while kingdoms rose and fell. And now the high curved wall itself has fallen._

</comment><comment><USER14> Yes, but as long as I have another breath, it matters to me what my legacy will be. I honestly don't know who Clark Gable is, but as long as he was alive he felt like a living legend — isn't that all that matters? The purpose you give yourself.

Life's a massive multiplayer game, and you decide what the definition of winning is, what could be better? If you decide there are no winners, then it sucks to be you.

</comment><comment><USER15> Quit the opposite: almost everyone has a 'legacy' and it's in the eyes of those who knew them for whatever reason.

What makes us human is our ability to transfer knowledge, wisdom, ideas (i.e. the 'light' referred to as 'lucis' in the mottos so many of our Universities) from generation to generation.

Obviously sometimes there's too much egoism wrapped up in legacy, and we sometimes embellish the legacy of the wrong folks, but that doesn't make it irrelevant.

The understanding that one's legacy does matter, in whatever one does, however larger or small, compels us to be better than we would otherwise.

Each one of us has probably countless historical figures who've inspired us at least a little bit, without them we would not know who we are.

We can't all be Newton's but we still matter.

</comment><comment><USER16> The world is our legacy, we must strive to leave it a better place.

</comment><comment><USER17> You can't help but create a legacy, even if no one remembers your name (which I personally don't care about).

Deeds echo in time forever. Even ones we think are small.

</comment><comment><USER18> I will leave a legacy, because I have kids. It may not be a very big legacy in terms of number of people, but on them my impact has been immense. (Hopefully mostly for good, but unfortunately not totally...)

</comment><comment><USER19> OTOH, people remember (in a distorted way, to various degrees, highly dependent on culture)

Genghis Khan

Attila the Hun

Jesus Christ

Buddha

Moses

A few other prophets

Archimedes

Gaius Julius Caesar

<comment><USER20> Similarly, we can ask the question: name one person from the 10th century. I bet most people would not be able to. We probably don't have one person for each of the ten centuries of the first millenium. And forget about anyone before 500 BC or so!

In a thousand years, we'll have the same question: name one person from the 21st century. Who will it be? Which of the 15-20 American presidents will even be visible? Who'll be the McKinley and who'll be the Lincoln?

I expect for the 20th century it'll be Hitler or Einstein or Churchill or MLK or someone like that. Surely not Clark Gable or Elvis!

<comment><USER3> Different professions care about different people. Musicians (and honestly, the average layperson) can name classical musicians at least as far back as the Renaissance, and those in Theatre can name classic Greek plays from well over a thousand years ago (Medea, Antigone, Oedipus Rex don't ring any bells? Oedipus Rex was first performed in 429 BC!). Philosophers can name Socrates and Aristotle (and most other people can too).

How about games? Go is 2500 years old at this point and still going strong. Sure we don't remember the name of the person who first put it out there, but there wasn't a desire to record that back then. Shigeru Miyamoto will be tied to Mario for a long, long time. Or Walt Disney with Mickey Mouse and theme parks. They might not be household names in a thousand years, but there will be historians and documentaries about them (and hopefully their works will be properly archived so people wanting to be educated on the history of film or games can still enjoy them).

If something or someone leaves enough of an impression on society, they can be remembered for thousands of years, and still be relevant to people in those fields (and even outside of those fields). It's not guaranteed to be remembered, or for the people who were involved with it to be remembered specifically, but the result can be.

And even if it's not remembered by the public at large, there are people out there who will find value in remembering and reminding people about these things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Legacy? I thought "legacy" was when you aimed to be remembered by your family and community.

</comment><comment><USER21> We all leave footprints in the sands of time, but 99.99% do it sitting down.

</comment><comment><USER22> "They say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time."

... all we are is dust in the wind.</comment>