Introducing osquery - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/facebook/osquery <comment><USER2> Link to announcement and existing discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8528460](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8528460).</comment>


What we've learned about arrested NSA contractor Harold Martin - <AUTHOR> https://www.cyberscoop.com/harold-martin-arrested-nsa-shadow-brokers/ <comment><USER2> Well, this is unbiased again.

From the article:

"Martin learned to speak Russian at some point in time and proceeded to communicate with unnamed individuals online in Russian and potentially other foreign languages."

From the actual report, quoted in the same place:

"The Defendant has also communicated online with others in languages other than English, including Russian, and in June 2016 downloaded information regarding the Russian language as well as other foreign languages."</comment>


Artificial Stupidity - <AUTHOR> http://wiki.c2.com/?ArtificialStupidity <comment><USER2> I was surprised by the Dijkstra quote on that page:

 _" The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."_

Here is an interesting discussion/context of this quote: [https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/ak4sn/the_quest...](https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/ak4sn/the_question_of_whether_a_computer_can_think_is/c0i01re)

I think we can conclude that this quote is not at all _against_ the developments of AI or ML at that time or now.</comment>


Facebook is your husband. Your abusive, invasive, controlling husband - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/Feca2dkKro8 <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting talk on how Facebook fits into a left analysis of capitalism and what work needs to be done to find something better.

tl;dr facebook is like your husband in the patriarchy and replacing it with something better is hard due to the pennybags attack.</comment>


Automattically Blackballed  - <AUTHOR> http://www.designcrumbs.com/automattically-blackballed <comment><USER2> Your URL had a double t. It (now) leads to the same URL and page as this submission.

<comment><USER2> Oops. Meant for <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5126514></comment></comment>


I work in the environmental movement. I don't care if you recycle - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/28/18629833/climate-change-2019-green-new-deal <comment><USER2> > I hated the industries that placed him

People need to take responsibility at some point. All of us enable these industries. Without consumers purchasing their product directly, or indirectly (for example, via electric cars that use electricity derived from fossil fuels), these companies would not be in business. They started their businesses because there was demand for their product; industries do not create demand. They can augment it, certainly, but some level of demand must exist.

Moreover, half of these environmental disasters are driven by directly by people wanting to purchase more stuff for less money.

<comment><USER3> > People need to take responsibility at some point.

Such as by enacting environmental laws.

Advocating for boycotts as the only course of action is equivalent to letting the behavior continue, because they hardly ever work. If you want results, you need collective action - i.e. laws.

<comment><USER2> Enacting environmental laws enforces a boycott by forcing individuals to consume less of the thing. Any regulation on oil (which I'm not particularly opposed to) has the effect of increasing the prices of the things derived from it, which forces less consumption since people cannot afford it. Either way, the oil company is harmed. A similar thing can be achieved (albeit with more money for other government programs) by placing a consumption tax on oil and oil-based products. Great! But, that does not obviate anyone of the fact that their desire for oil-based products is what keeps these billion dollar companies alive. That is the reason why the exist

The article places the blame for the current situation on the oil companies. This is ridiculous. The oil companies started to meet a demand, not because some group of people met and decided to ruin the environment and then convince people they needed oil, which is what anyone accepting the article's main point has to believe.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it's that simple anymore, as there are other forces at play. The political influence of large, established industries can make sure that things stay as they are and the consumer demands will be met by them, not by new technologies. People don't demand _fuel_ cars, they demand _affordable, reliable long range_ cars.

Same holds for electricity, people don't demand electricity from a specific source. But currently some sources meet the demands more than others. Legislation could lead to alternative sources becoming better at meeting people's demands i.e. becoming cheaper, reliable etc.

Generally, large industries have momentum which keeps them going, and therefore the way the meet demand is not necessarily the optimal way for consumers/the environment.

<comment><USER2> > Legislation could lead to alternative sources becoming better at meeting > people's demands i.e. becoming cheaper, reliable etc.

So the argument here is we can legislate scientific progress?

That's ridiculous

<comment><USER3> Indirectly, you can. Fund research, or change regulations/taxes to make more environmentally friendly sources cheaper (if you're of a libertarian bent, you can think of this as pricing in the externalities). Since the alternative energy source is now cheaper, it receives more private funding, both for capacity construction, and for research.

<comment><USER2> Okay, but in none of these scenarios is the 'oil industry' the bad guy. They are simply one industry providing one good that people currently desire with great fervor. All your solutions, ultimately still require personal change. That is fine, since that's the way this will get solved, but none of your points even make much sense.

For example, in my area, our electricity is already generated cheaply by renewables, but we end up being required to pay the state mandated electricity company for 'distribution'. This unnecessary intrusion into the free market on behalf of the state is ridiculous, but again, the oil industry isn't to blame. Firstly, because the utility company is not an oil company, and secondly, because the ultimate bad guy is the state, not any private company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a strange problem. Your actions individually are inconsequential. Logically your individual contribution to the environment is minimal vs the benefite you gain from using energy intensive resources. Thus it is actually logical for you to drive a car or use energy.

Each individual acting in his or her self interest in a rational way brings irrational destruction as a collective action. That is the tragedy. The tragedy of the commons.

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

<comment><USER6> It's also a problem too large to place solely at the hands individual consumers or decision makers. The political economy is rigged against the 99.999999999%. Look how hard he US is fighting against changes to simply decrease gun mass killings and violence. Even if all the voters in the democratic-ish countries voted as a bloc, it wouldn't be enough. Countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and China and the international mega corporations can/will override those choices with their choices and endowments.

He closed his article with this:

"All I need you to do is want a livable future. This is your planet, and no one can advocate for it like you can. No one can protect it like you can."

It would take a Herculean effort to make a dent in this. Every act of the industrial revolution through to today has contributed to the carbon in the air. It will literally take more than all of the energy expended over all that time and those actions to sequester the carbon released since the industrial revolution. And not even that would get us back to where the planet was before we started releasing carbon.

<comment><USER7> > The political economy is rigged against the 99.999999999%.

You realize that's ~13x than the number of people on Earth, right? If anything was rigged against everyone but the singular top person in the world, it would only be rigged against the bottom 99.999999987% (vs 99.999999999%)

<comment><USER6> That's well within the tolerances for my eye-ball guesstimate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Best quote:

> When you consider that the same IPCC report outlined that the vast majority > of global greenhouse gas emissions come from just a handful of corporations > — aided and abetted by the world's most powerful governments, including the > US — it's victim blaming, plain and simple.

</comment><comment><USER9> > Stop obsessing over your environmental "sins." Fight the oil and gas > industry instead.

To be honest, I don't really know how I personally can fight oil and gas industry. But I know how to stop driving. And flying.</comment>


How to get File Size in C++? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bfilipek.com/2019/01/filesize.html <comment><USER2> old problem, new solutions, hopefully with C++17 it's much cleaner</comment>


First US Measles Death in 12 Years - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-33373466

<comment><USER2> Well done to the anti-vaccination crowd.</comment>


Sony to Eliminate 10,000 Jobs, 6% of Workforce, Nikkei Says - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-09/sony-to-cut-10-000-jobs-worldwide-6-of-workforce-nikkei-says.html <comment><USER2> I expected more.

Sony lost every battle—video games, smartphones, cameras, TFTs. Maybe they still lead the professional broadcasting arena.

<comment> hippee-lee I can't even down vote but I'll offer an a different point of view.

(lose every battle) != (lose entire war)

Perhaps this a a proactive measure to eliminate some bagage that accumulated during the succeses they had in the areas you mentioned above. Perhaps this is an opportunity to refocus on the areas the have recently lost but still have competitive technology?

Fwiw - this is a reaction to the phrase "Lose every battle" more than anything else. Also, I looked around and I don't own anything by sony and can't remember the last thing I bought from them so perhaps they are still going to lose the war.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm more surprised that 10,000 people only represented 6% of their workforce.

</comment><comment><USER4> Remember when Sony made inspirational products that everyone wanted?

<comment><USER5> I definitely don't. Maybe at 24 I'm too young to remember those days? All I know about Sony is rootkits, lies, lack of security, exploding batteries and pompous execs that think their customers are idiots.

But given their size, I suppose that growth must have come from innovation in decades past.

<comment><USER6> i bought a sony walkman radio in the early 80s. still have it, use it every day, use it in the bathroom where it is subject to hot and humid conditions. it's now over a quarter of a century old and works fine.

in the 80s the build quality of sony was legendary. in the 90s they were still excellent and most people i know preferred them over an alternate brand. but minidiscs and even before that d.a.t. showed they preferred a locked down environment that favoured sony and not their customers. mp3s were the nail in the coffin for many folk that i know and people went elsewhere. i stopped recommending sony back in late 90s. cd and dvd burners speeded up the process when sony products refused to handle them.

the rootkits, lies and lack of security were just nails in the coffin.</comment></comment></comment>


Intel NUC 10 First Impressions - <AUTHOR> https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/231146/intel-nuc-10-first-impressions <comment><USER2> The biggest priority with small computers like this is thermal throttling. This doesn't talk about that at all, but whether you are buying a tiny case that barely fits a mITX motherboard or one of these, handling thermal throttling is the difference between a computer that feels smooth and one that feels more like a raspberry pi with UIs, video and web pages.

I've gone down the rabbit hole with both a NUC and an AMD APU and thermals are everything. There are lots of BIOS options to control dynamic overclocking and throttling on both to make them not generate so much heat, but allow them to run much hotter before they throttle. Then there are windows power settings as well. Anyone who expects to plug them in and get the best performance is unfortunately going to slam into reality.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really don't mean this as a silly question, but it seems like most of his frustrations could be solved with a powered USB 3.1 Gen 2 hub - I don't imagine any of his USB devices are individually pushing 10 Gbps.

</comment><comment><USER4> Can we get a non pay walled article? "Hey there your Adblocker is showiing" lol...

<comment><USER5> Switch from uBlock Origin to a combination of NanoAdblock (forked from uBlock) and NanoDefender. NanoDefender is basically an "Adblock-Blocker Blocker" that gets rid of most stupid "Turn off your adblock!" annoyances like this.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nano- adblocke...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nano-adblocker- firefox/)

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nano- defender...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nano-defender- firefox/)

You can run NanoDefender with uBlock, but there are more steps to set it up and no real benefit.

They make versions for NSAoogle Chrome too, for people who have never heard of Edward Snowden / PRISM / etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> They'd be nice with ecc ram.

</comment><comment><USER7> TL;DR:

"Boohoo one USB3 port is changed to USB-C" QQ

Recommend waiting for the real review.</comment>


Visual Programming Languages – Snapshots - <AUTHOR> http://blog.interfacevision.com/design/design-visual-progarmming-languages-snapshots <comment><USER2> If you think of a programming language as a set of tokens and production rules (a grammar), then can't every programming language have infinitely-many visual representations, including "pure text," "blocks/pipes" and "Jacob's Representation"?

Does it make sense to call a programming _language_ "visual"?

What if I represent a C program by a sequence of smells... The translator device reads the text from start to end, converts it to a token sequence, and emits a different smell for each token. Does that mean C is a "smell-based programming language"?

If the tokens get read by a text-to-speech program, does that make C an "audio programming language"?

What about a different _visual_ way to represent C programs (besides the usual text way)? Maybe we replace each token with a colored block, where each token has its own color.

Can't we dispense with the notion of a "visual programming language"? There are programming languages, and for each language, there are many ways to represent its programs.

<comment><USER3> Except that:

\- most text-based programming languages have no purely graphical counterpart.

\- Most purely graphical programming languages have no purely textual counterpart.

\- a graphic language is generally meant to abstract at a higher level and by doing so it has bigger trade-offs than a lower-level textual language (that's why most graphical programming languages are specialised and those that are too broad in their applicability domain generally fail to be useful).

Your suggestions kind of miss the point: it's not about the visual representation of basic tokens. If that's your goal, then of course you could represent any token and syntax with colour, sound, smells but it wouldn't solve any problem: you would still have to use the complete original syntax, and your colourful additions would not offer any improvements to basic textual representations of the code.

Graphical programming attempts to solve other types of problems. Generally, they try to hide some complexity behind a particular paradigm. Some are useful to help in learning because the building blocks can look like a concrete representation of something more abstract, like having a kind of C-jaw that represents a loop.

Other systems will help alleviate complexity using domain specific visual languages that would be difficult to represent textually: electronics for instance, or connection between musical equipment, or animations engines, etc.

Bottom line is that yes, they are all languages but while most textual programming languages are versatile and generally allow any level of complexity, graphical programming languages are sometimes better fits when the domain is much narrower.

They also generally operate at a different abstraction level.

<comment><USER2> Fine, but give me a program in any programming language, be it "text-based" or "purely graphical" and it's probably possible to translate it into a representation that's vice versa. (Problems arise when a representation is too abstract: ambiguity can occur.)

Program representations are like city maps. There's only one city, but there are many maps: the subway map, the map of post offices, the map of gas lines, the map of Wi-Fi coverage, and so on.

I will agree that different representations have different capabilities and use cases. However, text is also capable of great abstraction, e.g.

z2 = BesselJ(n, z1)

<comment><USER4> You're kind of stretching the definition of "language," though. Programming language grammars are defined textually.

Do you think, for example, that a (useful) pictorial representation of Haskell code can be derived simply from the language grammar?

Sure, the map is not the territory, but you can also say the language is itself the map, and the territory is something way more abstract, like "computation."

Perhaps you can take the semantics of Haskell and invent a graphical syntax for it, perhaps even strongly inspired by the textual syntax of Haskell. But it wouldn't be straightforward, and any obvious, straightforward attempt would probably be terrible.

In other words, I don't think it's obvious that there is a "deep structure" of programming languages that can be worked on directly in a wide variety of formats. Unless you count the AST as such a structure, in which case graphical programming is reduced to graphical tree manipulation (which admittedly is the path taken by many of these examples).

<comment><USER5> Dataflow languages (like the one I developed: [http://www.nitrogenlogic.com/docs/palace/](http://www.nitrogenlogic.com/docs/palace/)) seem like they would have a fairly straightforward mapping to/from a purely functional language like Lisp.

<comment><USER4> That looks cool!

By the way, the more I think about this, the less I seem to know even what a "language" is.

Is Lisp a language? No, it's a family of languages, but even Scheme is a language known for its minimal grammar and its infinite extensibility. A common critique says that one programmer can't understand another's Lisp code because there's such a great potential for redefinitions and domain-specific syntactic extensions. If Lisp has a slogan, it's "code is data." Is Lisp a meta-language, or even an anti-language?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think there is a balance to be struck between visualizing various aspects of a program (control flow, data flow etc.) and retaining the control available to developers writing their programs as text stored in files. It does seem strange in some ways that we're still dumping text into files in 2014. A given function might interact with classes and functions defined in 10 different files, and we can only view two or three files at a time.

It seems like programmers compensate by creating a mental model of their program as they try to memorize how it will execute. (The comic _This is why you shouldn 't interrupt a programmer_ comes to mind: [http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt- interrupt-...](http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-a- programmer))

I'm actually working on a plugin for Visual Studio roughly modeled off of Code Bubbles to see if it's practical to solve this problem. ([http://codeconnect.io](http://codeconnect.io)) I think text is the best way to express exactly what you want out of a program, but the way we're interacting with that text can be improved.

<comment><USER7> It's been done a few times before :) For example, check out the debugger canvas: [http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/4a979842-b9aa-...](http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/4a979842-b9aa-4adf- bfef-83bd428a0acb)

The problem ends up being that you're trading one form of cognitive load for another and it turns out that given our text-centric view of writing code, locality ends up having a lot of importance (which is lost in the model you're suggesting). There are lots of other issues with it at a practical level too. I've never seen an input model that works well with lots of disconnected little editors, for example. How do you navigate between them? How do you lay them out? What happens when the graph is disjoint? How do I get to some point in the flow of the program? What if I need multiple things that aren't directly related next to each other? How do you even determine relation?

After having implemented this in various forms about 4 times now, I'm fairly convinced this is one of those things that makes good intuitive sense, but bleeds to death from a whole bunch of paper cuts in practice.

The one case where this _does_ seem successful though is in the step-wise debugging case. There's a very definite flow, locality matters a lot less, and debugging is an inherently mouse-oriented task - all the things you need for a zoom-based infinite canvas to work out.

<comment><USER6> CodeCanvas and Debugger Canvas are two projects we've definitely consulted while building this thing.

We've solved some of the practical problems you've described. The new C# compiler Roslyn makes determining relation fairly trivial, something that I'm assuming proved difficult in Clojure(script) and Javascript.

Many of the other issues are user interface/user experience problems that are better demonstrated than explained. Unfortunately, our demo isn't quite polished yet. We're showing it off at our school symposium in mid-March, so we should have something to show before then.

Would it be alright if I ran the demo by you when we finished it? Much of our inspiration for the idea came from CodeBubbles, Code Canvas and the original Light Table demo, so it's interesting to hear that you've decided against it.

<comment><USER7> One of my 4 implementations was the prototype I did at MSFT that became the debugger canvas :) Me and a few others built it after I saw the original Code Bubbles demo.

> The new C# compiler Roslyn makes determining relation fairly trivial, > something that I'm assuming proved difficult in Clojure(script) and > Javascript.

I had access to the language models then too, but the thing is relation is not always written directly into the code. This was the point I was making about locality. In a world with mutability, you can't really know what matters. We tend to cope with this by putting code that relates near each other (in the same file, in the same parts of a file, etc), but that relation isn't made specific in the call chain. It could be, and usually is, buried under several levels of indirection. The lack of locality really frustrated people, because the mainstream models we have for programming don't directly relate to flow and so it ended up being a square peg in a round whole kind of thing.

> so it's interesting to hear that you've decided against it

I've decided against it for the way we program now... :) Flow as a general concept is a very good one, and anything that can make that explicit would be wonderful. But we can't program with rampant mutation and callbacks and expect it to work out.

<comment><USER6> >One of my 4 implementations was the prototype I did at MSFT that became the debugger canvas :) Me and a few others built it after I saw the original Code Bubbles demo.

Haha yeah I've actually encountered that project. There are few things I've wanted open sourced as badly as Codeporium. A decompiler only gets one so far.. (You seriously come up all the place when it comes to extending the editor: [http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en- US/e536bc...](http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en- US/e536bce3-30f9-4e7f-b322-b3835a487bb0/how-to-create-an-editor-with-a- projection-buffer?forum=vsx) haha)

>I've decided against it for the way we program now... :) Flow as a general concept is a very good one, and anything that can make that explicit would be wonderful. But we can't program with rampant mutation and callbacks and expect it to work out.

Fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love how the screen shot of labview is literally the shot NI uses from an article giving an example of what not to do [1]. Labview has its quirks but its not as horrible as that screen makes people believe

[1] [http://www.ni.com/newsletter/51735/en/](http://www.ni.com/newsletter/51735/en/)

<comment><USER9> In my experience with Labview you still spend a lot of your time arranging cables and boxes.

I'm sure practical visual programming will be a reality some day, but for now writing code is the best we have.

<comment><USER10> "In my experience with Labview you still spend a lot of your time arranging cables and boxes."

"I'm sure practical visual programming will be a reality some day..."

I don't follow how you get from the first sentence to this conclusion. Seems to me spending a lot of time "arranging cables and boxes" is pretty inherent to the whole visual programming idea.

<comment><USER9> What I'm saying is that I hope someone will come up with a way of making programming more visual without the tedious aspect of arranging cables and boxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When I see something like this, and comments debating the idea of it is a language/programming at all I think of this presentation: [http://worrydream.com/dbx/](http://worrydream.com/dbx/) and the author of the link of this thread also uses one example that was used in the presentation.

We could have a bunch of different cool things to use for programming, but with a majority screaming "no, that's not programming" we kept ourselves from some really neat inventions.

<comment><USER12> > majority screaming "no, that's not programming"

I think this has something to do with one of Clarke's Three Laws ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws)).

> When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is > possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is > impossible, he is very probably wrong.

I talk and think a lot about democratization of software development.

People I talk with who really want to program but couldn't get past coding really like the idea of visual programming environments where they don't have to deal with the compiler/interpreter.

When I talk with people who are experienced, they feel there is no advantage to programming any other way than writing code.

From my experience, we have not gone too far in improving the development of software for many many decades and Bret Victor does a good job of pointing this out. I think the way we code now, and specifically how we build out software frameworks, is flawed.

We engineer software frameworks that contain both mechanism and business "objects" when software frameworks should only contain mechanism.

Software frameworks should be coded to be used by non-coders: not by other coders.

Really, a domain agnostic visual language will be hard to develop when it is representative of how we code now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> All of the "block" style visual languages are just Lisp with colored blocks instead of parentheses.

Alice, App Inventor, Blockly, Hopscotch, Intentional Technology, Lamdu, Minibloq, Scheme Bricks (obviously), Scratch.

I've built these sorts of things before to let users define logic through a web interface. I think that's about the extent of their usefulness.

The dataflow languages seem much more interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> They are like lisp without cons/cdr, higher order functions, or homonicity. Oh, wait, they aren't like lisp at all.

<comment><USER10> I'm not familiar with those languages, but are you sure those environments don't include the things you mention?

Even homoiconicity, I don't see why you couldn't write a program to manipulate the blocks (or whatever) on the screen to create a new program.

I don't know if those environments support such construction, but I don't see any reason why it would be particularly difficult to implement.

<comment><AUTHOR> None of those VPLs include those features; they would be too complicated for their target audience. They only resemble LISP in that they mostly are procedural (some of them are rule-based, but you can do rules in LISP also given its Turing Completeness).

There is a VPL based on LISP, I forgot the name, but you could definitely say it is LISP then.

The point was that saying these were all like LISP is like saying they are all like machine code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A couple I'm aware of that aren't in the list:

\- Aardappel (visual functional programming) [1] \- Widget Workshop (something like a cross between The Incredible Machine and visual programming) [2]

[1] [http://strlen.com/aardappel-language](http://strlen.com/aardappel- language) [2] [http://www.old-games.com/download/3399/widget- workshop](http://www.old-games.com/download/3399/widget-workshop)

<comment><USER15> Widget Workshop is what got me into computers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A few years ago there was an MIT research project about a visual programming language where the program was represented as directed graphs. Does anyone know of such an MIT project from the early 2000s?

There were a few things that set this programming language apart from most of visual programming environments. First of all it was a proper programming language and not a toy project. The graph structure visualized recursion and re-use of variables very well. The code could be evaluated and edited at the same time by collapsing parts of the graph. You could collapse every iteration of recursion in the graph.

The most striking difference with normal programming languages was that all names were purely optional documentation.

Too bad I can't remember the name of this project. I remember seeing a presentation video of this project which got me really excited. It was a language by computer scientists, for computer scientists and not something done for kids or designers to get their first baby steps in programming.

Out of the ones on the list, AppInventor/Blockly/Scratch is definitely my favorite. There are different puzzle pieces for different syntactic structures, statements and expressions in particular. The puzzle pieces are colored by the type of the expression they represent. This makes it easy and obvious which piece fits where.

</comment><comment><USER17> Something I wish was here was the spread-sheet style event programming interface in the old Clickteam programs, Multimedia Fusion/The Games Factory. I used to make so many complex games and other programs using that in the early 2000s; it was very powerful and I'm not sure why it never caught on in a big way.

[http://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/wp- content/uploads/2009/0...](http://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/wp- content/uploads/2009/03/event-editor.jpg)

The rows are events and the columns are objects; you fill in a cell with how the object should react to the event.

<comment><USER18> I had a similar experience with Klik'n'Play. Before I ever wrote a line of code, I made a bunch of (crappy, tiny) games with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A couple that I did not see on the list but also come to mind:

\- Windows Workflow Foundation (used for building .Net based service flows) [1]

\- ArcGIS Model Builder (used for geospatial processing automation) [2]

\- Sextante (open source geospatial processing that plugs into QGIS) [3]

\- GRASS GIS Modeler (open source geospatial processing that plugs into GRASS GIS) [4]

[1] [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/vstudio/jj684582.aspx](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/vstudio/jj684582.aspx)

[2] [http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#//0...](http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#//002w00000001000000)

[3] [http://sextantegis.com/](http://sextantegis.com/)

[4] [http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/manuals/wxGUI.Modeler.html](http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/manuals/wxGUI.Modeler.html)

<comment><USER12> Added.

<comment><USER20> There's one or two on this list of dataflow languages I compiled some time ago that you don't have included: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/461796/dataflow- programm...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/461796/dataflow-programming- languages/949771#949771)

Specifically: SCADE, AudioMulch, [BLOK], Shake, Max/MSP and Epecco. There are also some programs with visual programming elements: Voreen, Blender and ANKHOR FlowSheet.

Links/screenshots in the stackoverflow answer.

<comment><USER12> Thank you for the list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In Lectura 7A of SICP[1], Sussman opens the lecture by talking about how programs can be thought of as character-stream descriptions of a wiring- diagram for some kind of machine. And he actually goes on to talk about the notion of visual programming languages (he didn't think they were a good idea). It's interesting to see these screenshots of visual languages. I must say that I agree with Sussman's reasoning for not liking them (difficult to edit them and they take up a lot of real-estate).

[1] [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and- comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer- science/6-001-structure-and-interpretation-of-computer-programs- spring-2005/video-lectures/7a-metacircular-evaluator-part-1/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Great list, thanks for making this!

One that's missing, though, is Max/MSP, a visual programming environment focused around music & other media. It's used heavily by many experimental musicians and artists.

<comment><USER23> As much as I like playing with Max and PureData, I think they also highlight some of the many problems with the whole "Visual Programming" thing.

They don't play well with version control and are a nightmare to debug. The developer will also quickly hit a point where the visual nature of the tool becomes more of a hindrance than a help, when they're left drowning in a tangled mass of pipes and boxes.

I would really love to see a fresh take on this idea and an attempt to address some of the above problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Awesome to see Nuke on there. A few other 3d apps to consider:

\- Houdini (by far the most applicable)

\- Maya (2012+ offers a 'node editor' but has always operated on a DAG.)

\- Katana (not widely used, but an amazing piece of software)

\- Flame and Smoke (similar to Nuke)

<comment><USER25> Definitely. Houdini is nodes everywhere. Nodes within nodes within nodes :-)

Could maybe add Softimage ICE to that list.

Also check out Grasshopper3D for procedural modelling.

Blender has a regular flowgraph for it's compositor and shading networks (and soon for particles, I think). Plus there's the logic bricks thing for it's game engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Cool!

It has Morphic with a snapshot of Squeak which is fair enough but it'd be nice to also include Self[1] which is where Morphic came from and which has I think a nicer implementation[2] of visual programming.

[1]: [http://selflanguage.org/](http://selflanguage.org/) [2]: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYEKO7JcmLE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYEKO7JcmLE)

<comment><USER12> Added self. It was hard to find a good screenshot though.

<comment><USER26> I'll see if I can do one and send it to you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> We also developed our own visual programming system for our free iPad app GamePress ([http://www.gamepressapp.com](http://www.gamepressapp.com)). Our system works like a flow chart of actions and events. Designed for tablets. It is fairly powerful as well, with lots of great additions being added.

</comment><comment><USER28> It's interesting that there appear to be two main ideas: text coding but with less typing and more syntax highlighting (Squeak), and "draw a network" (LabView, Pure Data).

<comment><AUTHOR> There are actually more than a few themes:

* Structured editing environments beginning with the Cornell Program Synthesizer [1] and including environments like Alice Pascal [2], which introduced code completion (I think). You could even include Scratch in this area, though it might be more about rules.

* Data flow languages as you mentioned

* Direct manipulation environments (e.g. Morphic)

* Spreadsheet environments (e.g. Forms/3 [3], Excel, AgentSheets [4])

* By demonstration (e.g. Chimera [5])

* Rule-based systems (e.g. KidSym [6], Kodu [7], ToonTalk [8])

* ... some of the more unique systems based on other paradigms ...

[1] [http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~fischer/papers/synthesizer.pdf](http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~fischer/papers/synthesizer.pdf)

[2] [http://www.templetons.com/brad/alice.html](http://www.templetons.com/brad/alice.html)

[3] [http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~burnett/Forms3/forms3.html](http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~burnett/Forms3/forms3.html)

[4] [http://www.agentsheets.com/](http://www.agentsheets.com/)

[5] [http://kurlander.net/DJ/Projects/Chimera/resources.html](http://kurlander.net/DJ/Projects/Chimera/resources.html)

[6] [http://www.sigchi.org/chi95/proceedings/papers/ac1bdy.htm](http://www.sigchi.org/chi95/proceedings/papers/ac1bdy.htm)

[7] [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/kodu/](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/)

[8] [http://www.toontalk.com/](http://www.toontalk.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Nice visual snapshot or what's out there, good selection with all you need in simple site and wiki links as well, lovely.

<comment><USER12> Thank you. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm most excited to see some real world usage of FlowHub [0] / NoFlo [1]

[0] [http://flowhub.io](http://flowhub.io)

[1] [http://noflojs.org](http://noflojs.org)

</comment><comment><USER31> Maybe this style of programming never takes off either because of inertia or because the programmers themselves are wired to a certain way of thinking (I am going along the lines of programmers being more "right-brained").

If you want to see visual programming pick off, try giving it to people who are somewhat analytical but more creative (don't let programmers make your product successful). For example, designers or even artists.

Another good way to evaluate it is to see what a designer can do with a tool like: www.divshot.com

I have been singing this for a long time, but I think success in visual programming (for the web) will come when you can clearly separate the frontend and backend and let the magic happen then (meaning, see the results thereafter).

Writing code itself won't go away, but why write code for mundane tasks anyway? (Why write out the entire table/list display when you can simply take a generic one and modify it with some mod tools).

The thing we all need to do though is realize that writing a lot more code doesn't actually make you more productive (even though you may feel that way).

Also, with such technologies available, are programmers themselves not being luddites?

</comment><comment><USER32> I think Yahoo! Pipes and other data mashup tools could be included in this list.

<comment><USER33> And Max ([http://cycling74.com/products/max/](http://cycling74.com/products/max/)) which was its design inspiration

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> All experiences I have had with visual programming have been counter productive, (with the exceptions of creating GUIs). I think some things are suited to visual environments - things which need immediate feedback, other things are not.

Think about using Unix. For copying one or two files, or renaming the, use the GUI. Need to do the same with 100 files? I think most competent people would naturally go to bash, and write a for loops, or small script. For these things it is easier. (And I am fairly sure that most desktop environments have a had more time spent on them than most visual programming "languages"). Likewise Visual query builder in SQL can build a basic query fairly quickly and easily, but once you know the syntax well, it is probably a lot more efficient and powerful to use text.

</comment><comment><USER35> The only non-text programming model that ringed a bell for me so far is subtext[1]. I still hope someone will extend it to a complete development environment with all the APIs needed.

[1][http://www.subtext-lang.org/](http://www.subtext-lang.org/)

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't see the visual language that comes with Lego Education's WeDo robotics listed [1]. It's a great language for teaching kids to program robots, my daughter (who is five) will sit for hours trying to make new things with it. It's not always robot programming, mind you, you can have it play sounds and present images in loops as well as make robots move and sense motion.

[1] -- [http://www.legoeducation.us/eng/characteristics/ProductLine~...](http://www.legoeducation.us/eng/characteristics/ProductLine~LEGO%20Education%20WeDo)

<comment><USER37> Lego's old "RCX Code" language also not there, where sequential instructions hung vertically off of the event "clothesline." [http://www.joschs- robotics.de/jochen/seminar/svkohkp4.jpeg](http://www.joschs- robotics.de/jochen/seminar/svkohkp4.jpeg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I think it is better to call it model-based development rather than visual programming. Apart from those visual tools (e.g. Alice) which can be used to teach children the programming concepts, there are serious tools such as Simulink and SCADE (missing from the list) which are used to develop safety- critical applications in medical and aerospace fields. The reason to use these tools is to allow experts in other disciplines to specify an abstraction of their designs for computer.

</comment><comment><USER39> Cryengine also have VPL similar to Unreal's Kismet. [http://media.moddb.com/images/articles/1/25/24522/FG_Tutoria...](http://media.moddb.com/images/articles/1/25/24522/FG_Tutorial_img_5.jpg)

There's also Virtools by Dassault Systèmes. [http://images.gamedev.net/features/reviews/virtools/Image1.p...](http://images.gamedev.net/features/reviews/virtools/Image1.png)

</comment><comment><USER40> Most of those languages even look like imperative (flowcharts) or object- oriented code (objects connected by wires).

If someone is in a such project it might be a good idea to show what are the benefits over looking at code beside subjective aesthetics.

For example ladder logic and LabVIEW look like a wiring diagram, which is excellent because their niches are electrical engineering. Minecraft is excellent as a game developing platform because you see the game you are developing right away.

</comment><comment><USER41> Great list, thanks for putting this together!

My own project ([http://flowlab.io](http://flowlab.io)) is a visual programming language for 2d games.

</comment><comment><USER42> Here are some more:

1\. [http://slidetocode.com/](http://slidetocode.com/)

2\. Thyrd: Which combines spreadsheet and infinite zooms in a very interesting way. [http://thyrd.org/thyrd/](http://thyrd.org/thyrd/). Some screenshots are at [http://thyrd.org/thyrd/paper/](http://thyrd.org/thyrd/paper/), but the video works better to understand it.

</comment><comment><USER43> Another one that is missing is Touch by Derivative ([http://www.derivative.ca/](http://www.derivative.ca/)). This is the language that Plastikman, NIN and Rush use to power the video projection, lights, smoke, etc in their live shows. It is not unlike Max/MSP, but has amazing video playback and projection, and supports lots of external devices.

</comment><comment><USER44> HyperCard could be added to the list

[http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/25-years-of- hypercard-t...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/25-years-of-hypercard- the-missing-link-to-the-web/)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard)

<comment><USER21> It is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Gem Cutter for Open Quark CAL:

      http://openquark.org/
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_Framework
      https://github.com/levans/Open-Quark
      http://resources.businessobjects.com/labs/cal/gemcutter-techpaper.pdf

</comment><comment><USER46> Great work! +1 for including minecraft :)

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm pretty sure the HyperCard screenshot is not actually a screenshot of HyperCard, but a screenshot of an early Mac control panel. In the link it seems like it's an example of what things looked like on the machine on which HyperCard was originally written to run, not HyperCard itself.

<comment><USER12> I'm looking and it is hard to find a good example. Something like this maybe? [http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.03/03.10/HyperCa...](http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.03/03.10/HyperCardProgramming/img003.gif)

<comment><USER48> You can find plenty of screen shots of HyperCard applications (or rather, "stacks", as they were called) by using Google image search.

But HyperCard wasn't really a visual programming language. Indeed, it wasn't a language at all (the language is called "HyperTalk"). Anyway, HyperCard did allow you to design user interfaces in a slick visual way. But the code is purely text based. You can see example code at the HyperTalk wikipedia page

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Was mentioned in the article, but often overlooked. Drakon is an old school FOSS diagrams-based visual-editor that outputs C (and Java, C#, Erlang...):

[http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/](http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/)

</comment><comment><USER50> Very nice! I see you've got Simulink, but you could consider adding the associated state machine editor Stateflow: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateflow](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateflow)

</comment><comment><USER51> Very cool! My current project at my day job is a visual programming language designed for automated testing using our hardware, and apps. So its great to find some inspiration for ways to improve our product.

</comment><comment><USER52> I think Macromedia Authorware was pretty big for a while: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_Authorware](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_Authorware)

</comment><comment><USER53> However, now it's time seriously think about programming robots. I want tell computer what I want to do and the computer shall figure it out by itself, including writing code.

</comment><comment><USER54> Max is also a popular visual music programming system [http://cycling74.com/products/max/](http://cycling74.com/products/max/)

</comment><comment><USER55> You should add Nengo [http://www.nengo.ca/](http://www.nengo.ca/), since it is one of the forefronts in neuromorphic engineering

</comment><comment><USER56> Would Sikuli count here? I fully expected to see it mentioned.

(www.sikuli.org)

</comment><comment><USER57> I think Alfred's Workflows would fit in here.

[http://support.alfredapp.com/workflows/](http://support.alfredapp.com/workflows/)

</comment><comment><USER58> Automgen ([http://www.irai.com/a8/a8asi_e.pdf](http://www.irai.com/a8/a8asi_e.pdf)) is another one.

</comment><comment><USER59> And this is why you don't interrupt a programmer in the zone, all that graphical representation has to be in your head

</comment><comment><USER60> This list is amazing. To experienced programers, what it's like to make a serious project using any of these?

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm a huge fan of Sikuli (sikuli.org). It's a little clunky but the concept is pretty powerful.

</comment><comment><USER62> App Inventor for Android looks a lot like the interface used in that "code for an hour" idea.

</comment><comment><USER63> Thank you for putting all this together. Very interesting!

</comment><comment><USER64> <3 Quartz Composer

</comment><comment><USER65> Bret Victor's?

[http://vimeo.com/64895205](http://vimeo.com/64895205)

The stupid Discus thing they use does not let me comment(What a terrible UI).

</comment><comment><USER66> What, no LabView?

</comment><comment><USER67> Maybe it's just me, but I find it way, way, WAY harder to see what's going on in those screenshots than it would be if I had actual code to look at.

<comment><USER22> It's not just you, I've heard this before, but I personally don't agree. Obviously it's very subjective and depends on how you learn/think - I'm a visual person so these types of environments have always made a lot of sense to me.

Also, don't forget that most of the complicated-looking ones are showing a large program - the equivalent of hundreds of lines of code. Just like you to see a portion of code on your screen at any given time, to work on these you'd zoom in to the relevant portion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> All I can say about this is thank you.</comment>


Mining Bitcoin on an Apple II - <AUTHOR> https://www.twitch.tv/8btc <comment><USER2> Looking at the code I am reminded of how grateful I am for high level languages and the absolutely insane number of libraries I can use to do perform so many complex yet fundamental tasks at ease without writing code for them.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not just that it's slow, it also uses a lot of energy compared to the amount of calculation that it does.

Apple II: 0.43 Mips @ 17W

RPi3B: 1822 Mips @ 1.2W

So I wonder if there is a solution as energy efficient as modern hardware, but as slow as 8 bit machines.

<comment><USER4> FPGA with limited clock speed?

<comment><USER5> FPGAs aren't particularly energy efficient compared to ASIC implementations of the same hardware.

<comment><USER6> This is the point of FPGA in consumer products right? Ship the DVD player ASAP see if it sells then spin silicon.

<comment><USER5> Generally you don't ship FPGAs in consumer devices you plan to sell in high quantities, as they're very expensive in addition to not being very efficient. Small FPGAs or CPLDs can be used for low-volume devices to avoid the huge non- recoupable expenses of an ASIC spin -- because of the specific requirements of the application.

They're almost exclusively used for prototyping ASICs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well, the code is not perfectly optimized: [https://github.com/option8/8BITCOIN/blob/master/HASH.s](https://github.com/option8/8BITCOIN/blob/master/HASH.s)

For example: CLC ROL A can be replaced by ASL A

<comment><USER8> Create a pull request! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://github.com/option8/8BITCOIN](https://github.com/option8/8BITCOIN)

Also [https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1157302995169796096](https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1157302995169796096), via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20595014](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20595014)

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.twitch.tv/8btc](https://www.twitch.tv/8btc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If there's a successful hash, does it ATDT to the Bitcoin BBS to upload the block via Zmodem?

<comment><USER11> Just make sure to ATM0 first, or you might wake the parents when it dials in the middle of the night.

It's much more effective than trying to cover the modem with a pillow when you're sneaking upstairs for more late night Tele-Arena on Argus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I guess I have some mood issues this morning, but the first (and about the only) thought that came to my mind is basically frustration about how pointlessly we spend energy that comes from burning something as precious as oil and how it increases the entropy and ultimately leads to heat death of the universe...

<comment><USER13> So sorry for your mood, I feel you. Hope it improves.

About entropy and heat death. Let me offer an alternative story.

Imagine heat death as a universe-wide network of "points", all oscillating the tiniest bit possible. Imagine also that this is the maximum size the universe could expand to. Now, at this point, if there was any, even a tiny small contraction of the universe, it would start a full on contraction/heating up process. Maybe you can call that the anti-BigBang. And if that happens, there would be an infinite loop between the BigBang and the BigCrunch. Life would probably come back at some point and heat death wouldn't be such a bad thing after all ;)

Hope you enjoyed that story. Would love to hear your thoughts on it. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can someone crunch some numbers about how long it may be until it finds a correct hash? Is the heat death of the universe first?

<comment><USER15> At current difficulty, 2 hashes/second gives about 614 trillion years to find one block. Not quite the heat death of the universe, but wikipedia says all stars in the universe will have exhausted their fuel.

<comment><USER16> At my current electric rate that would cost me $912,997,246,800,000 in electricity to find a hash.

<comment><USER16> And $47,261,000,000,000,000 in electricity to watch the stream that long.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


PgElevator - <AUTHOR> Dissatisfied with pgAdmin, we started to develop a new frontend for PostgreSQL as part of Google's "Angular Attack" hackathon.
We would love to have your feedback on it. We are planning on open sourcing it on the following days.
Hackathon's Project Page: https://www.angularattack.com/entries/1965-elevador10
Screencast:
http://youtu.be/BzSVDTjphVQ <comment><USER2> PgElevator should be the name of a chatbot that gives personalized Paul Graham-esque advice in exchange for your elevator pitch.

<comment><USER3> That's what I initially thought this was!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Playing devil's advocate here, but why should I waste my time on it if the source code is not even available yet? Please make a 0.1 minimal release with clear and easy installation instructions and show me the code, and I'll be interested. But yeah, looks nice and usable. Hope it succeeds, since pgAdmin4 is taking too long to have any kind of public release.

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks nice. A honest question tho, why? What is the use case for such tools? I usually don't want to have non-techs messing around in the DB and for me personally i don't see a benefit to the command line (i actually assume to be able to do way less than on the command line)

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have great experience and knowledge in command line tools, I believe using psql is a good way to go. Psql is a great tool, but I also would like a better gui.</comment></comment>


This Is the Worst Way to Build Rapport, According to New Data - <AUTHOR> https://www.gong.io/blog/this-is-the-worst-way-to-build-rapport-according-to-new-data/https://www.gong.io/blog/this-is-the-worst-way-to-build-rapport-according-to-new-data/ <comment><USER2> original URL doesn't work

[https://www.gong.io/blog/this-is-the-worst-way-to-build- rapp...](https://www.gong.io/blog/this-is-the-worst-way-to-build-rapport- according-to-new-data/)</comment>


First CubeSats to travel the solar system snap 'Pale Blue Dot' homage - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/15/first-cubesats-to-travel-the-solar-system-snap-pale-blue-dot-homage/ <comment><USER2> Anyone else annoyed by the big X in the top-right corner that covers the text (on mobile)? Techcrunch, please lose it.</comment>


A Look at 8+ Free LaTeX Editors - <AUTHOR> http://www.charlietanksley.net/philtex/editors/

<comment><USER2> thanks for taking the time to review these editors. I was using TeXnik center while in windows, I switched to TeXmaker and now I will be trying emacs

<comment><USER3> Seconded, this is an excellent summary. I've tried many on this list (mainly use LyX), but a few I hadn't come across.</comment></comment>


Elon Musk of SpaceX: The Goal is Mars - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0801-morrison-musk-spacex-20120801,0,3838907.column <comment><USER3> I'm a contrarian, a-social person. if everybody were running left, I'd run right. I completely despise hero-worship. It ruins people's critical-thinking skills. But if I were to have a living hero, it'd be Elon Musk. The man rocks. Seriously. The guy has nailed every interview I've ever seen of him.

Having said that, I'm concerned that we focus a little too much on Space-X. As much as what Elon is doing is awesome, I'd feel better for the species if we had 3 or 4 competitors very close on his heels. I know that he has competitors, but as far as I know none of them seem to have the long term vision and dedication to reusable, scaleable architectures that he has.

I don't want to trade having all of our eggs in a basket labeled "NASA" with having all of our eggs in a basket labeled "Space-X"

<comment><USER4> > _But if I were to have a living hero, it'd be Elon Musk._

I _do_ have a living hero, and he _is_ Elon Musk.

Has anyone noticed the parallels with Schwarzenegger, and the differences?

When Arnold was a young athlete, someone asked him "so what do you want to do with your life?" He said: "I'd like to be a bodybuilding world champion. Then I'd like to become an actor. Then I'd like to do politics."

He nailed every single one of those goals. But please notice those are the ultimate goals of the individual ego (more precisely, of the male ego): physical power, fame, money, and political power. He's basically Conan in real life.

Now, Elon Musk also made a list of the most important issues to solve - <USER2> ones most important for the planet, for humanity as a whole, not for the little individual ego. We need a clean environment, we need energy, and we need to put some of our eggs in another basket.

And then he went on knocking them off the list one by one. First PayPal, to achieve financial independence. Then Tesla Motors (good for the environment), Solar City (energy), and SpaceX (Mars colonization). And he's willing to risk his own life to achieve those goals.

I've no doubt, Elon Musk is up there among the greatest. If he makes it to Mars, one day kids will learn his name from the history books.

<comment><USER5> It does seem all very noble except when you remember that SpaceX sees itself as a military weapons company. In almost every interview, amongst the background hype, he makes a mention of defence.

<comment><USER6> Rocketry is a dual-use technology; it can be used for good (satellites, exploration, science) or for launching explosives around the world. Paints are also a dual-use technology; it can be used for good (art) or evil (it can get you high).

Do we label every paint manufacturer a drug dealer because they have a product that can be misused?

<comment><USER7> _evil (it can get you high)_

-_-. You could have come up with a less politically charged example than that (perhaps any arbitrary blunt, heavy, or sharp object?).

<comment><USER8> He could have chose graffiti, but regardless his still had a very valid point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Would you go to Mars?

I would. The first flight would be risky; if I felt comfortable that the company's mission will continue, that my kids have grown up, then I'd be on the first mission."

I love that the risk of death only frightens him from a view point of responsibilities. As the father of his children, and apparently the father of humanities future in space.

<comment><USER9> May I ask why I'm being downvoted here? What rule of HN did I violate?

<comment><USER10> Not sure. I was going to post this same quote to comment on it. I can only imagine what it must feel like to want to be the first man on Mars and actually have the ability to do it.

<comment><USER11> Reminds me of the plot of Heinlein's _The Man Who Sold The Moon_ , in which space-loving entrepreneur Delos D. Harriman builds a company big and capable enough to send a manned rocket to the moon, only to find out that his board of directors won't let him go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >The thing that got me started with SpaceX was the feeling of dismay — I just did not want Apollo to be our high-water mark. We do not want a future where we tell our children that this was the best we ever did.

Glad someone has this motivation.

<http://xkcd.com/893/>

</comment><comment><USER13> "We choose to go to Mars. We choose to go to the Mars in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too." -John F. Musk :)

<http://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm>

</comment><comment><USER14> One viewpoint I haven't see talked about is that Mars+ not only reduces extinction dangers via redundancy but also stabilizes Earth's geo-political landscape by extending the notion of local. A widening of the overton window.

Mars could be a place to start again, to get things right without all the historical cruft. And the culture, the kind of person who would take that kind of risk has to be interesting. We have examples of this turning out well from the past.

Back on Earth, this would have a uniting effect by completely changing the playing field. I expect Fox News would call for something to be done about those anarcho-socialist martians and the superiority of pure Earthicans. Paranoid military planners will be concerned about scenarios where Mars attacks earth, especially with the outflow of all those entrepreneurial, intelligent, individualistic, explorer psyches. Sounds dreary right? But at last we would be thinking at a global level!

<comment><USER15> I don't believe in this at all.

I think it is probable that China start to colonize Mars before US has the ability to. Next, they start to claim area after area, while also dominating the earth economy. It will not stabilize the geo-political landscape - it will complicate it.

<comment><USER16> I'm an American, but I don't feel US has the god-given right to be the only super-power in the solar system for the next few hundred years.

If China establishes colonies, good for them. When England colonized America, it began the downfall of Spains empire (more or less), but no one is crying that Spain didn't become the global power it 'should' have become.

<comment><USER17> That's the spirit! To hell with us!

Did it ever occur to you that:

1\. No Chinese would ever think such self-hating thoughts.

and

2\. Such thoughts did not originate from your own reasoning, but were learned through various channels?

It's not like it matters, as Martian colonization is less likely than human extermination via a robot takeover, but still...

<comment><USER18> 1\. While I happen to be American, not all of "us" on HN are. In fact, I have a friend from China who is part of the HN community.

2\. How is wishing that all of humanity makes progress rather than just your own country self-hateful? Isn't that the ideal?

3\. I know a lot of Chinese people who went to the U.S. for undergrad and really care about both countries, which is a counterexample to your #1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Most inspiring capitalist on Earth. With the ressources he won on the last biz, he shoots further each time. Now he takes it where NASA & Government left it, and puts money & private interests at work to go for... Mars

Edit: I am no native english speaker but seems to me Musk personifies the expression "pushing the envelope"

<comment><USER20> I agree with you completely. He is a truly remarkable man. As an aside, that is the correct use of the phrase, in case you were wondering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> That gap between the effects that the work Musk is doing could have and the effects of most startups are attempting to do is incredible.

He makes you want to step up whatever is it that you're working on.

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the more important meta things he's doing is calling BS on the dull Soviet apparatchik MBA mentality.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I cannot believe how right this guy is about absolutely every single thing.

<comment><USER22> Wasn't he responsible for PayPal? I'm not even sure a trip to Mars would make up for that.

<comment><USER23> Musk was responsible for PayPal. However, he wasn't responsible for the mess it turned in to. Musk even mentioned in an interview that he PayPal has gotten much worse than when it started out. Features that were in their minds since PayPal was founded still haven't been implemented to this day. It's kind of disappointing, seeing how it could have been a great device to speed up payments worldwide.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Go to Mars. I'll at least watch the video. We need the wild west with space helmets. We need big impossible goals. Or else it's just us here talking and warring over one marble running out of raw materials.

I am encouraged by the recent progresses. The upcoming rover landing is a big test. If they can master robotic rocket landings and material transport on the surface we are making progress.

My wife has set a rule that no children we have are allowed to leave the planet before they are 18.

</comment><comment><USER25> As cool of a guy as Elon seems like, I find myself way more excited about what Planetary Resources is doing.

I get the space tourism aspect. People want to try new things, and especially things no one has ever done before. But that aside, I don't really get why we, as a species, should be expending such enormous effort trying to send a few live human specimens off the planet at this point-- not while we can develop totally awesome robotics technology that leverages the resources of outer space to usher in the post-scarcity era right _here_ , in the totally best place in the universe for a human being to live.

I know we don't have to choose one or the other, but I wish someone with Elon's charisma was out there pulling for the "Space sucks, send robots" angle.

<comment><USER26> I think it depends on your end goal regarding space travel.

If your end goal is to mine resources in space, then yes, using humans seems like a waste of time and money.

However, if your goals are more along the lines of colonizing other planets, or setting up research stations on other planets, than dealing with issues around transporting humans through space is more important.

<comment><USER27> At the moment, isn't the bottleneck our colonization ability, rather than our transport ability? We've gotten to the moon multiple times, but nobody has solid plans to build a permanent moon colony.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I saw Buzz Aldrin talk. He said that we have to make three successful manned missions to Mars and back before we can think of colonizing it. Three indicates we have solved the fundamental issues of safety, sanity [1], and propulsion. I believe Elon Musk and SpaceX will do it.

[1] Russia has begun training astronauts for the 500-day project by experimenting with placing them in isolation

</comment><comment><USER29> > "There must be some ability to experiment to advance the state of the art. > In the early days of aviation there was a great deal of experimentation and > a high death rate. We don't want that — the public would not be accepting — > but by the same token we can't have a situation where no deaths are ever > allowed, because that would put innovation in a coffin too."

Whoa. Talk about a cold equation. I can't make up my mind whether I'm impressed or creeped out that he's willing to go public with statements like that. He's definitely laying bare his thought process, right down to factoring in public reaction.

<comment><AUTHOR> So it's okay for people to risk their lives deep sea diving, climbing Everest, etc., but not here?

It's not like the people doing this wouldn't know _exactly_ what they were doing and how dangerous it was.

<comment><USER29> I'm really more surprised that he's willing to go public with the fact he considers "some deaths" an acceptable byproduct of what his company is doing, because if they do happen, it can and probably will be used to paint him callous and possibly to call him responsible.

Basically, he's coming across as somewhat unapologetically nerdy - he's giving a pragmatic answer, prefering to be blunt rather than sugar-coating it. But it's a sort of short-term pragmaticism, because it can hurt what he's trying to do in the long run. I sort of like it, but at the same time it's so unusual for a man in his position that I can't help but feel surprised, and possibly put-off. It's more of a comment on how PR-optimized CEO behavior has conditioned my expectations and how Musk challenges them, I guess.

<comment><USER30> Maybe malaise of current generations can be best summarized as the lack of willingness to take such risks. Do you think that people flying the first planes didn't have similar thoughts? What about those first crossing the Atlantic oceans?

As with an generation there are those who are not complacent, those who will take the risks needed to move us forward. Now they just have the ability to communicate the desire to a large number of people quickly.

Many test pilots probably have flown with far less assurance than he will have should he go. Man breaking the sound barrier was an inevitability and I bet there were more than enough ready to try, the same will be when it comes to going to other planets. Mr Musk is just putting it out there now

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> When I first watched the movie Prometheus my first thought was that there is no friggin way we are going to be traveling planets and have that level of advanced technology by 2089. After listening to Elon Musk and seeing the types of steps he is taking, perhaps Prometheus was not as far fetched as I originally thought.

</comment><comment><USER32> We need more entrepreneurs like this guys, really trying to solve hard problems that can secure the long lasting existence of humanity.

<comment><USER15> The long lasting existence of humanity requires a team effort. It is laughable to believe that an individual can do it.

<comment><USER33> Our team needs leaders. Nobody said they had to work alone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Bah, Mars. I'd rather live on the Moon. Less gravity, closer to Earth.

Both places require pressure suits, but the Moon is a hard vacuum, which means you can do the usual vacuum industry tricks, while Mars has just enough atomosphere to rule out vacuum applications, but not enough atmosphere to breathe. Maybe in five thousand years we will have terraformed a breathable atmosphere, but in the near future it will be a neat place to plant a flag, like the top of Everest, but certainly not a place you'd like to live.

<comment><USER35> I think its actually harder to live long-term on the moon than mars, although much easier to get too. With no atmosphere and a 28 day sun cycle, there's lots of radiation and heat to deal with along with that 14 day night where solar doesn't work. The rovers that are on mars right now wouldn't last long on the moon at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> >"I think it's really important that we stop sending college and graduate students back to their home countries. If you're trying to create a company, it's like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion. There's certain special skills, especially in advanced engineering, that are the limiting factor in creating new companies; we send these people home after training them in our graduate schools.

One of the toughest things I've found is to recruit top-notch manufacturing talent. That's where I've had to go overseas. For a few decades, it just wasn't where the smartest kids in the class in America went. We had far too many smart people in the U.S. go into finance and law!"

Interesting. I thought only U.S. citizens were allowed to work for SpaceX, but Elon actually had to go overseas to recruit top-notch manufacturing talent.

With the introduction of multiple bills recently to retain foreign talent such as the STEM Jobs Act, Startup Act 2.0, STARS Act, The Fairness for High- Skilled Immigrants Act, it's good to see some progress made to solve this problem.

</comment><comment><USER37> I remember having a series of books as a kid, iirc they were titled, "world of tommorow", or something like that. They talked about big-vision things; fusion, transportation, asteroid mining, and terraforming Mars by planting genetically-engineering algae on it's polar caps. Glad to see us finally taking steps toward that vision.

</comment><comment><USER38> A couple of observations:

1 _Where will that electricity come from? - I think solar will be the largest source [he owns a solar company, SolarCity]._

With someone like Elon Musk it's believable that "he owns a solar company" is not a disclosure of bias, it's putting his money where his mouth is.

2 He doesn't come off as ideological at all (eg government vs corporate technology) except where relevant to his goal. He's trying to make electric cars & go to mars. Those are the areas where he's thrying to have an impact, here he has strong opinions. Otherwise, he lives in the world as it is. He doesn't get baited into comments on the political, financial or regulatory structure beyond where it applies to the stuff he's doing

</comment><comment><USER39> I love how lucid and articulate Musk comes across as in these interviews. He's a great spokesperson for entrepreneurs and technologists, and he's cool to boot. I'm sure a generation of kids will be inspired by his example.

</comment><comment> eric-hu Single page article:

[http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la- oe-0801-mo...](http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la- oe-0801-morrison-musk-spacex-20120801,0,3336380,full.column)

</comment><comment><USER40> The next-page links are small and easy to miss, so here's the full article on one page:

[http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la- oe-0801-mo...](http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la- oe-0801-morrison-musk-spacex-20120801,0,3336380,full.column)

</comment><comment><USER41> Aim for the sky and you'll reach the ceiling. Aim for the ceiling and you'll stay on the floor.

</comment><comment><USER42> What Elon Musl do with SpaceX is cool but he would be more interesting for all the people if he stayed in Tesla and has the same vision!

<comment><USER43> I watched an interview ("fireside chat", they called it) of him early in July, and he was talking about this very thing. Basically he said that he loves both SpaceX and Tesla, but he realizes that SpaceX has the potential for much greater impact on humanity as a whole than Tesla. He also said that, for this reason, if there ever comes a time when he must focus his energy on one company, it would be SpaceX.</comment></comment>


Should a Self-Driving Car Save Passengers, or Kids in the Road? - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/survey-polls-the-world-should-a-self-driving-car-save-passengers-or-kids-in-the-road/ <comment><USER2> Trolley problem is one of those hypothetical made up questions that self- driving cars will never need to think about.

Self-driving cars will learn to break and stop safely when bad things happen. They are not expected to find optimal solutions for freak accidents. If doing the default to do that kills both the passengers and kids on the street then so be it.

When brakes fail, obstacle avoidance probably works but there will be no deeper logic behind it. The choice that is made is probably just some random learned bias inside the neural network, not something well designed.

</comment><comment><USER3> In the trolly problem, a runaway trolley is moving toward five tied-up people on the tracks. There's a switch which redirects the trolley toward a single person, who is also tied up on the track.

In the deep learning world, your system classifies the five people as a large kangaroo, while the single person is classified as a STOP AHEAD roadsign.

What is the most ethical choice for the system to make?</comment>


New LED Lighting System on Flinders Street Railway Station (Melbourne, AU) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh_w4qmXAr0 <comment><AUTHOR> And a press release from the Premier's office:

[https://www.premier.vic.gov.au/shining-a-light-on- flinders-s...](https://www.premier.vic.gov.au/shining-a-light-on-flinders- street-station/)

</comment><comment> tony-allan Very cool. It will be interesting to see what sort of light shows are developed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently there are supposed to be ones for all the 'major' events in Melbourne. It's quite surprising what you can do with 1ft resolution on a building that big :)</comment></comment>


Apple Releases First Battery Case to Eat Third-Party Accessory Makers' Lunch - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/08/apple-releases-first-battery-case-to-eat-third-party-accessory-makers-lunch/?ncid=rss <comment><AUTHOR> Instead of having a case like this, I would settle for an iPhone than was a little thicker. I see diminishing return on going thinner. Just put some more battery in the phone.

<comment><USER2> Selling the case increases Apple's revenue and makes their phones sexier in the store. Apple's strategy is based on the idea that a lot of customers will buy this after a period where they were unhappy with battery life _and_ did not purchase a non-Apple branded battery case.

<comment><USER3> So, it's a band-aid, just like those hubs for the Mac Pro.

This lunacy has gone too far.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are there any web services that allow JSON import and search? - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to be able to securely upload an arbitrary JSON file to the web, and then perform a full text search on the text contained in the JSON.  If something like this doesn't exist, should I just build an open source service that does what I want? <comment><USER2> Elasticsearch takes input in JSON format. It's not quite a web service, but could certainly work for your use case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone know if there are any web services built around Elasticsearch that would do this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Algolia might work?</comment>


To chase away homeless people, 7-Eleven stores in L.A. use classical music - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-09-06/homeless-7-eleven-franchise-classical-music <comment><USER2> In Toronto, a few of the subway stations that are notorious for unsavory loiterers do exactly the same thing. When they first started doing that, I thought it was silly. But in the end it seems to actually work, because most of those stations are pretty much "by the book" and the other ones are significantly less loitered than before.

For the people just passing through, as one aught, it's perfectly pleasant. I actually wonder if it is therapeutic for the people working in those stations.

</comment><comment><USER3> surely there have to be some hobos who enjoy a bit of classical</comment>


One unvaccinated child was patient zero of a measles outbreak - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/06/19/1308169/-One-unvaccinated-child-was-patient-zero-of-a-measles-epidemic?detail=email

<comment><USER2> This will invariably lead to the argument whether government can or should mandate vaccinations.

Currently parents probably cannot be prosecuted for not vaccinating their kids. I think they should be (child endangerment comes to mind, kind of like putting the child in the car without a special car seat).

But in all likely-hood I can see easier laws being passed that might exclude un-vaccinated people from various venues. Travel (flying is not a right apparently), schools, hospitals, doctors' offices, concerts. "Show your vaccinations card and come and enjoy the music" kind of deal. Parents throwing birthday parties for their kids and checking vaccination cards at the door. Pretty strange, but maybe more viable that forcing vaccinations otherwise (forced medical treatment).

Or to look at it anther way, what is the legal precedent of parents refusing medical treatment over religious beliefs? You know let "Jesus un-break her arm instead of the doctor". Maybe this is in the same category.

<comment><USER3> > But in all likely-hood I can see easier laws being passed that might exclude > un-vaccinated people from various venues

What about people who are not vaccinated for medical reasons, such as an allergy to the vaccine?

<comment><USER4> Is that a thing? I mean, how would you know? Many vaccines are administered once or twice in a lifetime...

<comment><USER5> I believe people with severe egg allergies avoid some vaccines because of the presence of egg protein - eggs are used as bioreactors to grow the vaccine.

However, it looks like that's only the influenza vaccine, and that's not how the MMR vaccine is produced.

[http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/should-not- vacc.htm](http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/should-not-vacc.htm)

<comment><USER6> Yes, until I outgrew my egg allergy, I could not take certain vaccines. I was too young to remember which ones I could not take. I suppose that I relied on herd immunity for those specific diseases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My niece got here measles vaccine two weeks ago. Ten days afterward she came down with, you guessed it, the measles. My first reaction was utter fear that she was going to die. But the doctor wasn't at all concerned. She'll be sick, it will suck for a little while and she'll get better.

So what the hell? First of all, the vaccine gave her the fracking measles! So who is actually spreading these diseases around?! Secondly if there's no concern of it being deadly than why the endless hyperbole over the few hundred people, out of 300 million, who get it per year?

<comment><USER8> The measles vaccine is live attenuated, so in the rare case it does cause disease, it's less severe than wild type.

Measles is one of the most infectious diseases known to man. In a fully susceptible population, one infected person can expect to infect 14 other people. The reason only "the few hundred people" get infected annually now is because of widespread vaccination campaigns.

Measles used to be all but inevitable, infecting literally millions, and killing hundreds each year in the US. The only reason we have come to fear vaccines is because we as a society no longer remember fearing these diseases.

[http://www.cdc.gov/measles/vaccination.html](http://www.cdc.gov/measles/vaccination.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Question. How are vaccines different than "over-use of antibiotics" that we always hear about?

Are the constant use vaccines creating superbugs?

<comment><USER10> They're entirely different. Simply put, all a vaccine does is stimulate antibody production to improve immunity against a given disease. What you're effectively asking is if the human immune system itself is creating superbugs.

So the simple answer is "no."

<comment><USER9> What is the net functional difference between an "antibiotic" and "stimulating antibody production"?

<comment><USER11> "Stimulating antibody production" means you're protected from the antigen for some period of time, be it a virus, or at the other end of things in the case of tetanus, against the neurotoxin that's produced by the bacteria responsible for it. If there are enough antibodies in your system, they'll latch onto their specific antigen, which triggers other parts of the immune system to deal with it.

Antibiotics only work while their level in the body is high, and they pretty much are limited to zapping bacteria, by going after things that are different in them from the class of more evolved organisms that includes everything from yeast to humans (many have cell walls like plants, their protein producing machines are slightly different, etc.).

They are largely derived from compounds molds evolved to produce, to allow them to better ecologically compete (there are also some bacteria produced antibiotics, although I don't know if any are used as drugs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is HN also going to have a weekly anti-anti-vax post too? We're converting to Reddit format right?

..a place where we can all pretend we understand this stuff, suddenly manifesting degrees in medicine and/or a full understanding of the research.

</comment><comment><USER13> Who would ever have guessed?</comment>


Keycloak – modern identity and access management through OpenID Connect - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/keycloak/keycloak <comment><AUTHOR> Looks like a viable and more robust alternative to what CoreOS is doing with dex which I feel sometimes is trying a bit too hard to be everything:

[https://github.com/coreos/dex](https://github.com/coreos/dex)

Discussion and alternatives very much welcome.

Ideally it would already come with its own set of dockerfiles to generate images to be integrated with development as well as of course deployment to staging/production environments.</comment>


Show HN: Create interactive maps with one line of JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://www.chartkick.com/mapkick <comment><USER2> When I read "one line" I thought you were serving full-map images tweaked by query parameters.

(Of course I ignored the "interactive" part, but it seems like a good idea nonetheless.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't be disingenuous about what you're actually showing people here. You can claim to do just about anything in "one line" if you ignore the API wrapper and remote service doing the actual work.

<comment><USER4> I'm with krapp; it is completely disingenuous to say this is a one liner.</comment></comment>