British Regulator Urges Home Births Over Hospitals for Uncomplicated Pregnancies - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/world/british-regulator-urges-home-births-over-hospitals-for-uncomplicated-pregnancies.html <comment><USER3> I found the word "slightly" here to be misleading:

"The risk of death or serious complications for babies was the same in all three settings, with one exception: In the case of first-time mothers, home birth slightly increased that risk. Nine in 1,000 cases would experience serious complications, compared with five in 1,000 for babies born in a hospital."

0.5% versus 0.9% is nearly a doubling of risk. That looks significant to me, not slight at all.

And the base rate (~1%) is large enough to make the impact worth considering. (Where on the other hand, a doubling of risk in airplane travel, a very low- risk activity, would not be worth worrying much about.)

The guidance given takes this into account, differentiating between first-time and repeat mothers, but the article sidesteps it.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's only uncomplicated until it's not. The solution to avoiding unnecessary surgery is not to physically locate farther away from _all_ surgery.

Midwives can do their work in a hospital room down the hall from surgical facilities just as easily as they can in your bedroom 20 minutes away from major life-saving surgery.

<comment><USER5> This is, of course, the obvious counter-argument, but even in cases of complication it's usually not a problem getting EMS there in time. In parts of the US, midwifery is illegal, but there are places like this ([http://www.ncbirthcenter.com/](http://www.ncbirthcenter.com/)) that provide midwife services in a natural, homelike setting, but which also have hospital privileges and an OB/GYN on staff in case anything goes wrong. There's another important bit, too. Doulas ([http://www.dona.org/mothers/](http://www.dona.org/mothers/)) are becoming much more popular, in an effort to provide a similar kind of support through labor & delivery as a midwife might, but within a hospital setting. We used one with our two children and it was really calming to have someone around who wasn't hospital staff AND had experienced hundreds of births AND was there to do whatever my wife needed throughout.

My mother-in-law is a retired nurse midwife who delivered >600 babies in England & Scotland during her career before moving to the US. I don't know if it's still true, but she tells us that in the UK, midwives have special privileges for things like transportation -- free bus/train/subway, and the ability to hail a cab and get a free ride if it's necessary. This may not be true any longer. She relocated in 1969.

<comment><USER6> Can you expand a bit on what you mean by "midwifery is illegal"? To me, that sounds as odd as "dentistry is illegal" ...

<comment><USER7> I suspect he means that in some jurisdictions, you need to be a licensed medical practitioner of some sort, so the traditional "on the ground" experience of midwives by itself won't qualify.

<comment><USER8> In the UK a midwife is a qualified registered specialist nurse.

It's a protected term - you can't call yourself a midwife withoutthe qualification and registration.

Most midwives are employed by the NHS.

Obviously they're not doctors - they can't prescribe medication or perform surgery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It should be noted that in the UK, as opposed to the US and Australia, most births don't have doctors present. Births are normally monitored by a midwife in a maternity ward, as opposed to a doctor in a ob/gen clinic. So the move from a hospital setting into a home setting is not such a big leap in the UK.

<comment><USER10> Actually, that's the same as Australia: standard procedure in public hospitals is two midwives in a maternity room with 1 doctor on call overseeing the whole ward.

But moving to a home setting still seems like a poor choice. Even ignoring the higher fatality rate for home births, having the doctor available to sew up the 20% of "normal" deliveries involving vaginal tearing seems like a good move.

<comment><USER11> That's a good point. Our son was delivered by a midwife but due to his size (10 pounds) the OB/GYN came in after to repair the damage caused by delivery. I'm more that a little grateful for that. :O

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My wife and I decided to try for a home birth since she had had basically a perfect pregnancy. It may turn out to be the worst decision we ever made. She ended up in second stage (pushing) for 6 hours due to an awkward presentation and was rushed to hospital in an ambulance. She suffered a pretty bad tear and was seriously traumatised by the whole experience - she still has flashbacks almost a year later.

3 months later she suffered a prolapse as a result of the labour. Prolapse is the huge dirty secret of vaginal delivery - one woman in two will suffer some degree of prolapse as a result of childbirth, but probably only one in 5 of those will have it badly enough to have symptoms. But once you have it there's basically no cure and it can be hugely debilitating. My wife has always been very active, when she was younger she was going to try out for the Spanish national handball team, she has always run a lot, and so on. She will never run again, she shouldn't lift any weight at all (not even our daughter), she is basically an invalid by her previous standards. Her sex life has been severely compromised due to nerves in the vaginal wall being crushed - <USER2> will never improve either. All this was probably not 100% avoidable but we could have massively improved her odds if we had had access to accurate information ante-natally.

Natural childbirth is the biggest lie we have ever suffered from. If we had known then what we know now she would have had an elective caesarian, and I recommend everyone consider it.

<comment><USER13> You are arguing from emotion rather than logic.

<comment><USER14> It's called "empathy", and it's a very valuable cognitive skill. Of course it achieves optimal analytic results when balanced with detachment, causal analysis, and hard statistical reasoning.

But better to have too much empathy than too little -- or none at all.

<comment><USER13> Having empathy is different that saying that my bad experience should make you consider a c-section.

<comment><USER14> Of course. But I didn't read that as the main point of the post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As long as it's a choice it's OK. But if it is forced onto women by circumstances or even propaganda then it would be a huge step back. I witnessed my son's birth (5 hours with no complications) and I could see how much suffering was saved by an epidural - which would not be an option with a home birth.

<comment><USER9> I agree that it should definitely be a choice.

That being said, a significant portion of the pain is from giving birth on a hospital bed - or just lying flat in general. It is said (as a man, I have never given birth) that it is less painful, and therefore less in need of an epidural, if the birthing is done in a upright or crouching position. Like how an orangutan does it : [http://youtu.be/JfVnFJDjUyQ?t=30s](http://youtu.be/JfVnFJDjUyQ?t=30s)

The very idea of lying down for a birth dates back to the 18th century, when some French king wanted to see the birth of his heir. Of course men were not allowed in the birthing room, so he had to peek through a hole in the wall - or something like that. And the queen had to be in a position that allowed the king to see, so she was lying down facing so the king could see what was going on.

<comment><USER16> Having witnessed the process, something tells me that a significant portion of the pain is not caused by laying down. So, citation please.

<comment><USER17> I would like to cite Newton here. Specifically his work on gravity as it applies to motion.

<comment><USER18> I believe parent meant that position doesn't change size. It may be faster, but one way or another the pain does come from pushing the baby out and potentially making lots of damage to someone's crotch in the process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _"Yes, it's a very expensive way to deliver healthy babies to healthy women," Dr. Baker said about hospital births. "Saving money is not a crime."_

This is not a knock against the UK or US healthcare systems at all.

What worries me about this type of thinking is that you're looking at the cost/benefit in the aggregate. Of course, when you're running a national health system you have to. However, this is also happening in the US (the biggest US insurance companies cover 30M+ lives).

You can describe the cost/benefits overall, but it's (mostly) impossible to at the individual level. Sure the average overall survival for an expensive cancer drug might only be 6 months, but if you look at the data you'd likely see that the range if 15 days to 3 years.

Health authorities might make the call that 6 months of additional life isn't work $XX,XXX dollars, but for some of the patients whose life is extended 2-3 years, it certainly is worth it. But in the end, the call is made to not fund the drug.

I have no idea how to solve this issue. I think linking outcome with genetic information is super helpful (it's already being used), but dam, there are a lot of folks out there that could have been helped, but won't be.

<comment><USER17> NICE is not perfect, but it is not bad at this problem.

Triage is not fun, but even with infinite money it is still necessary, and with finite money it has to be coldly pragmatic.

So NICE has a standard limit of £20,000 per QALY, or up to £30,000 per QALY, if certain extenuating conditions are met.

A QALY being: _" A measure of the state of health of a person or group in which the benefits, in terms of length of life, are adjusted to reflect the quality of life. One QALY is equal to 1 year of life in perfect health. QALYs are calculated by estimating the years of life remaining for a patient following a particular treatment or intervention and weighting each year with a quality of life score (on a zero to 1 scale). It is often measured in terms of the person's ability to perform the activities of daily life, freedom from pain and mental disturbance."_

<comment><USER19> The NICE system is a good implementation of rating cost-effectiveness, but it still has the aggregation issue.

If NICE determines that a drug isn't cost-effective, no one gets it (unless you pay out of pocket), regardless if it would have helped that individual patient.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The state of Oregon did a study of the relative risk, and the results aren't pretty: [http://www.skepticalob.com/2013/03/oregon-releases- official-...](http://www.skepticalob.com/2013/03/oregon-releases-official- homebirth-death-rates-and-they-are-hideous.html).

<comment><USER13> That is a biased source of information.

<comment><USER20> She's describing a study commissioned by Oregon, conducted by a midwife.

<comment><USER13> The study was a retrospective study, they looked at data from birth certificates that did not sort out planned and unplanned homebirths and did not sort out the type of midwife (trained vs untrained). Here is a better study to consider: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22015871](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22015871) .

<comment><USER21> I think if you want to do a good study, you need to compare a system where home births are the default (like in Netherland) with one where hospital births are the default, but the health care situation is otherwise comparable.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Made in China" products accounted for only 2.7 percent of consumer spending - <AUTHOR> http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2011/el2011-25.html

<comment><USER2> [http://www.evolvingexcellence.com/blog/2011/08/the-fed- disho...](http://www.evolvingexcellence.com/blog/2011/08/the-fed-dishonest-or- dumb-you-decide.html)

These guys call BS on the Fed's numbers, and then ask why the Fed deliberately made this complex calculation in a way to deceive what is really happening

<comment><USER3> Well I'm not sure who to believe, but leading off their rebuttal with, "I am not going to begin to decipher their convoluted logic" does not inspire confidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Of course. Its _cognitive bias_ at work. People are always discontent with their government. Failing to properly understand economics and politics, people exaggerate things to find reasons to accuse the government.

<comment><USER5> If you exclude services, then 35% of consumer spending is on imports. I think that number matches up more closely with peoples expectations. That said, oil really distorts that number.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why aren't consumer electronics products in there? It seems to me they are only picking those with a high chance of being made in America.

Also, does this "made in America" refer to the whole product or just the packaging/assembly, while the components are still made in China?

<comment><USER5> It isn't labeled in the chart, but the text of the article notes that electronics fall into the durable goods category along with cars, furniture, etc... So they are including all imports, not cherry picking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Consumerism != Capitalism

</comment><comment><USER8> 75% of motor vehicle purchases were "Made in America"? That is astonishing. Unbelievable, even.

<comment><USER3> I don't think that's what it means. I might be wrong, but I got the impression it meant that 75% of the total money spent on motor vehicles ultimately stays in the US in some fashion. Either because it was assembled here or because of dealer commissions or because it costs money to hire US companies to move the cars from the port to the lot, etc.</comment></comment>


The Last Great Steam Car (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://www.damninteresting.com/the-last-great-steam-car/ <comment><USER2> > It is true that the technology poses some difficult problems, but one cannot > help but be curious how efficient a steam car might be with the benefit of > modern materials and computers.

It's easy to shrug off questions like this, placing them in the category of "if it were feasible, someone would obviously be doing it already", but it's still interesting. Having read a pretty extensively about how steam locomotives work, and some additional reading about steam power in general, it's interesting to read this article and catch small windows in to the overall progress of steam during the era. For example, reading the remarks about closing the steam circuit reminds me of the progress made in condensate and heat recovery developed in steam power at the time. Really remarkable to see that in something as small as a car.

As an academic exercise, I think it'd be really cool to develop a "steam powered auto challenge". Of course, no one is going to get behind it because steam is not a green technology, but sometimes we can learn important lessons from the past. Working on a completely unrelated technology and studying its progress can teach us lessons about the development of current technologies.

<comment><USER3> Because the combustion products must transfer their heat to water before the energy can be used, I think there is an inherent limitation on the efficiency of a steam engine as compared to internal combustion.

I was interested in steam cars for a while, I have a manual to a Stanley Steamer and a short book published by Lindsay on them.

However it was reading the history of steam that is in the opening chapters of Lyle Cummin's "Internal Fire" and his description of the limitations of steam and sterling engines, that I came to think there was a fundamental reason behind it.

The Doble and Stanley era cars seem to have gotten about 10 mpg.

On the other hand, they do have a possible advantage in being able to consume a variety of non-standard fuels. There may be a niche market for that, which given the relative size of the car markets in 1925 vs 2015, is quiet huge and could support a sizeable company.

<comment><USER4> This is far less of an issue than you might assume. Modern steam engines can have around 48% efficacy and combined cycle power plants can hit ~60% where IC engines rarely top 35% with cars generally averaging less than 25%.

A much larger issue is trying to scale this down. Power plants are optimized for efficiency and cost not weight, where IC engines can be very light relative to their power output.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUg_ukBwsyo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUg_ukBwsyo)

( 1925 Doble E-20 Steam Car - Jay Leno's Garage )

<comment><USER6> It is a fantastic automobile and a great video from Jay Leno, whom we all owe a debt of gratitude for preserving our technological legacy, similarly to Bill Harrah from a generation earlier.

Imagine what a Doble could be with a few processors handling all the complexity....

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As recently as 2008, Scania and Volvo were eyeing steam for powering trucks: [http://www.nordicgreen.net/startups/article/ranotor- develop-...](http://www.nordicgreen.net/startups/article/ranotor-develop- steam-engine-powered-hybrid-trucks-together-scania-and-volv)

</comment><comment><USER8> A Doble engine powered this airplane:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw6NFmcnW-8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw6NFmcnW-8)

<comment><USER9> It's really cool how they can arbitrarily turn the prop on and off like an electric aircraft, even reversing its direction. Might this be one of the earliest examples of thrust reversal for breaking? Also, could this be a more efficient arrangement than IC engine+prop governor?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Also interesting, North Korea's wood burning trucks developed out of necessity due to oil sanctions :

[http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/how-north- kor...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/how-north-korea-fuels- its-military-trucks-with-trees/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Was I the only one who saw this as a sorta commentary on how we might be looking at combustion engines in 100 years? It will probably seem ridiculous that we were burning smelly fuel.

</comment><comment><USER12> Bill Leer, inventor of the Leer jet, spent millions in the early seventies on a modern steam car as a solution to the oil crisis.

[http://www.progressivevalues.blogspot.com/2009/05/great- lear...](http://www.progressivevalues.blogspot.com/2009/05/great-lear-steam- engine-you-never-got.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Steam is primarily an engine driven by gas pressure (as are most combustion engines). I see the compressed air car as an evolution of the Steam car. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_car](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_car)

</comment><comment><USER14> Probably one of the most interesting articles I've read recently. Well written and to the point. Bookmarked that site.

<comment><AUTHOR> His entire site is like that, and full of fascinating articles - the more recent of which also have audio readings.

Wasn't expecting this post to take off the way it did, but glad for him. He does a really nice job on these stories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Steam is cool, yes, I love the history behind antiques and the insight into their periods of history, but electric is SOOOO much better. Steam does not give instantaneous torque, nor the ability to precisely control individual wheels / motors. I just can't see steam making a comeback.

Electric = exponential

Steam and ICE = incremental

<comment><USER16> Steam does give instantaneous torque (once it's built up pressure, that is).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Something wrong with the text margins?

<comment><USER18> Overfull hbox? :P I think they fixed it now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Published 24 October 2006

<comment><USER20> Steam car technology hasn't advanced much in the last 9 years.</comment></comment>


Major Azure Outage - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/AzureSupport/status/1124046510411460610 <comment><USER2> Public clouds _will_ have outages - that's not the point. What's most concerning about this outage is that it is across all regions. That violates the fundamental assumption, of developing for the cloud, that failures in every region are independent.

If regions fail independently and a failure in 1-2 regions brought down my system, that's my fault. But if region failures aren't independent and a global outage such as this is possible - well, that's pretty bad.

<comment><USER3> Yup, fully agreed. _Nobody_ can keep sql instances or hosts up forever. They will go down. Further, humans work on this stuff. Humans make mistakes. Bad config push, bad code push, lightning hitting a data center, human vandalism, etc. will happen.

What _shouldn 't_ happen ever is that your entire cloud goes down because somebody pushed a bad config change to a service that serves _literally your entire cloud._

Microsoft clearly hasn't architected everything to be region-independent. There are things that will always be somewhat global, but Azure seems pretty bad at this. This isn't the first time even in the past 12 months that they've had a global outage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Man... Azure seems to be an order of magnitude worse than AWS and GCP when it comes to reliability.

Seems like they have tons of global dependencies within their services which cause these cascading failures rather often... Seems like only a few months ago we were reading about a global outage that affected auth?

Regardless: Godspeed to the engineers working to fix this.

</comment><comment><USER4> On a more serious note, how would your entire network, worldwide go down? Are there really no independent zones (that are unaware of each other)? That can't be good.

<comment><USER3> Global dependencies. Something in DNS had a dependency on something central within Azure, and when that breaks, you're done for.

I'm not in the cloud provider game, but it seems like it would be important to audit and ensure that there are _no_ critical cross-region dependencies. I assume GCP and AWS do this regularly?

It seems like there are some things that _have_ to be somewhat global (IAM comes to mind), but minimization of that seems important.

IMO this is the most embarrassing non-security thing that can happen to you as a cloud provider.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I tell my clients Azure had another outage they're going to demand we move to another cloud service. Looks like I'm in for a looong couple weeks.

<comment><USER6> What are you going to tell them when the other cloud services have their inevitable outages?

<comment><USER7> I'm not the parent, but I maintain services on both AWS and Azure, and in the last few years, I can definitely say the outages on Azure have been more frequent and more severe. The only AWS outages I recall are S3 and the Dyn DNS issue that brought many other providers down too.

<comment><USER8> The Dyn DNS outage was easier to explain. Half of the internet is down, it's not just AWS.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. As an AWS customer, that outage didn't really bother me because it was obvious it impacted many other unrelated services too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/](https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/status/) was just updated, showing "Network Infrastructure" is down across the board.

</comment><comment><USER10> Azure SQL is totally down for us, Storage (tables/blobs/queues) is mostly down. Seems to be a DNS issue, and this wouldn't be the first time Microsoft has been brought down by DNS.

<comment><USER11> Same. Name resolution is failing but intermittently, changing from second to second whether it resolves or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Azure SQL is totally down for us as well. Unable to resolve the DNS for it, both from within azure (kubernetes pods) and from outside (my laptop).

EDIT (23:37 Oslo/Norway): connectivity is restored for us now

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm seeing some recovery of services in West US

</comment><comment><USER14> Things have been back up for several minutes.

<comment><USER15> Things are not back up for me. And looking at Twitter, it looks like things are still broken for a lot of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Recovery started in Europe (AMS)</comment>


Show HN: Surprisr – We know how to keep your girl happy - <AUTHOR> http://www.surprisr.co/

<comment><AUTHOR> thoughts?</comment>


We've launched Swifto today - <AUTHOR> http://www.swifto.com

<comment><USER2> What an amazing service! You were far more reliable than my boyfriend. You were there when I needed you.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks awesome! Good luck...</comment>


Shipping a 1.0 product isn't going to kill you, but it will try - <AUTHOR> http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2006/04/20/10.html <comment><USER2> FWIW, the Basin is a pretty good restaurant.</comment>


Out of work again; seeking your advice - <AUTHOR>

So I just lost my job today - not enough work to keep me busy, apparently.
I'm so frustrated with my career path, and I'd like to seek your advice on how to get someplace.
I was diagnosed with ADHD five years ago at the age of 30. Having undiagnosed ADHD was a major cause of job difficulties in the past, as well as making poor choices (working short-term contracts in the late 90s, for example).
I have worked (via contract) for some nice names - Microsoft, Texas Instruments. I have a wide range of experience in tech support / helpdesk, web design, web applications.
I'm slowly increasing my programming skills, but I am self-taught. I speak PHP and Python.
I'm not amazing at web design - although my various clients have all been happy. But I don't have the skills to make those Photoshop templates I see. On the other hand, I think I do a pretty good backend... so I've been trying to focus on that.
I'm a computer generalist - I think I fit well in situations like I just found myself in: For example, the company wanted to take photographs of all their products. I'm not an expert photographer, but I knew enough to get the camera to get good results - and they were ecstatic with the results.
But right now, I'm looking at being out of work again - thank goodness my wife works. I can't afford college when I'm unemployed; and with my resume, companies looking for experienced developers overlook me - and companies looking for entry-level tend to want a degree.
If you were in my shoes - what would you look for? What skills would you work on? What direction would you head in? Do you have any advice?
I'll be glad to answer any questions you have (i.e. to be able to give better / more specific advice).
Thank you for your consideration. <comment><USER2> I don't know where you are, but one thing I'm noticing a lot of in this part of the world (Southern Ontario) is local, outsourced IT companies. GeekSquad, sort of, but independent generalists. You can help people figure out their desktop computers, and put together a small website for them and maybe program their phone system, etc. Any small business has a ton of tasks they could benefit from having a 'digital handy person' type of role.

So you could start one yourself, or look to the ones that already exist to see if they're hiring. Being a generalist, having experience with a lot of different disciplines, being self-taught those are all desirable qualities.

I also think that generalists make for good community managers, especially with a bit of experience developing and support. You're able to translate well and understand both the community's point of view and that of the developers.

With a few years of technical experience, if your resume isn't opening doors - for either experienced or entry level positions - I think it's worth considering some extra help. Consider a resume expert or consultant. Requires money outlay, so possibly hard to justify but you might be able to fake it out a bit by working with recruiters and getting their feedback. It is subpar, but free.

Google for 'Let's All Find Awesome Jobs', it's a cheap digital book that has a ton of great advice.</comment>


Ubuntu for phones officially launches with 13.10 - <AUTHOR> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SaucySalamander/ReleaseNotes#Ubuntu_for_Phones

<comment><USER2> Can someone explain how well is Ubuntu supported on mobile phones (thinking on Samsung Sx series)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ubuntu for phones install page --> [http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/install](http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/install)

Galaxy Nexus (GSM) and Nexus 4</comment></comment>


Behind the Scenes of Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/behind-the-scenes-of-mexicos-sinaloa-cartel-w475345 <comment><USER2> _Two thousand firearms are illegally exported from the United States to Mexico per day, fueling the country 's catastrophic conflict as much as the billions of dollars of demand created by the miserable failure that is drug prohibition. At dawn in a parking garage, an off-camera seller hands over a small arsenal of bubble-wrapped assault rifles and boxes of high-caliber military ammunition new from the factory. Thunder rolls and lightning flashes as the smuggler's car, laden with weapons, crosses the border with no questions asked, barely even rolling to a stop. "Drugs go up," Beriain says, "guns come down."_

Who needs CIA conspiracy theories?

<comment><USER3> Lovely. He claims it's 2000 firearms per day, so more than 700000 per year. A 2013 article puts the number at around 250000[1]. Time for a war on firearms, maybe?

[1] [http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation- world/world/article24...](http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation- world/world/article24746863.html)

<comment><USER4> Is the US even manufacturing non-military firearms at a rate sufficient for 2k/day to slip out through smuggling? That seems extraordinarily unlikely.

<comment><USER5> There are more guns in the US than residents. 2k/day is peanuts.

<comment><USER6> ...except these are going to a very small group of people? And very likely not collectors or hunters.

<comment><USER7> in texas you can go on armslist.com and buy guns from individuals in a face to face sale. The only paper trail is your contact through armslist. no doubt they are taking advantage of this as well as having mules to legally buy the firearms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The solution is clear, de-escalate the war on drugs, reform sentencing guidelines, invest in treatment instead of interdiction.

Yet the incoming AG and his inner circle are intent on reversing the progress made to this end over the last decade or so, and instead want to take us back to the policies of the late 80s and 90s. We know where that got us. The private prison companies must be salivating over what's to come.

<comment><USER9> _he private prison companies must be salivating over what 's to come._

Indeed, we might say the new administration is like Christmas for them:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/opinion/under-mr-trump- pr...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/opinion/under-mr-trump-private- prisons-thrive-again.html)

With sugar plums dancing in their heads:

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/05/trump-sets- priv...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/05/trump-sets-private- prisons-free)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I read this book a couple of years ago, highly recommend it. [https://www.amazon.co.uk/El-Narco-Bloody-Mexican- Cartels/dp/...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/El-Narco-Bloody-Mexican- Cartels/dp/1408822431)

The narco epidemic in Mexico is morbidly fascinating and thoroughly depressing as someone who's travelled to Mexico and loves the country and its people.

<comment><USER11> I just finished reading Dreamland which I also thought was good.

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dreamland-True-Americas-Opiate- Epid...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dreamland-True-Americas-Opiate- Epidemic/dp/1620402521/)

This book has more of a focus on American pharma industry but still has lots of interesting insider insights.

<comment><USER12> Also excellent:

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28187234-wolf- boys](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28187234-wolf-boys)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's interesting why Canada has not suffered the same fate as Mexico? Could it have something to do with a Government that believes in the rule of law and a citizenry that respects that?

If I were to lay blame on anyone then I would have to lay it at the feet of the Mexican Government. There corruption has no boundaries. They bleed the Nation of not only it's wealth but it's future.

It's easy to play the victim and blame everyone else for your problems. Mexico has to take a hard look at it's system and find someone who is willing to deal with the corruption.

<comment><USER14> Well if you watched Narcos, cocaine had to transit from Columbia through Mexico. Seemed like every part of the feeding tube of drugs gets wrecked by it.

<comment><USER15> Hate to do this, but since it's a common mistake also repeated in the reply, it's Colombia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Forget CIA conspiracy theory. This is just fallout from US problems. Mainly de-industrialization, health care tied to employment, and the War on Drugs.

<comment><USER17> The war on drugs connection is obvious, but how does our shitty health care system play into this?

<comment><USER18> It's one of the causes of opiate addiction. Prescribing opiates is cheap, actual face time with doctors is expensive.

<comment><USER16> Yes, that's what I meant. Proscribe opiates => patient stops complaining. Cost is $20/mo instead of many $thousands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder where more emphasis would work: Greater searches of stuff coming into America, or greater searches going out? stop drugs, or stop guns, pick one. Which would make the most impact?

<comment><USER20> When I crossed the border from US to Mexico in a UK registered red camper van, there was no border from US to Mexico. I was meant to hand in some documents to show the van and family had left the US but we managed to get into Mexico without seeing any US customs / border. Speaking to the Mexican side they said the US border controls was about 2 miles back up the road so we didn't bother and just carried on South.

So probably a bit of room for some searches on the US side

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here's episode 1: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9krnFldmkE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9krnFldmkE)

<comment><USER22> (Spanish with no subtitles)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's a shame the video linked to is blocked.

<comment><USER21> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9krnFldmkE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9krnFldmkE)

<comment><USER23> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This article fails to talk about the cause of the situation in Mexico, and that is American involvement:

[http://fightthefuture.org/article/america-and-the-mexican- dr...](http://fightthefuture.org/article/america-and-the-mexican-drug-trade/)

In the article they mention that the three most dangerous countries for reporters are Mexico, Syria and Iraq. Well no shit, those are the three nations the CIA/United States are systematically destroying for corporate greed, or do you really believe Assad on the eve of peace negotiations when everything is going his way would bomb his own people. That's insanity.

<comment><USER25> >>or do you really believe Assad on the eve of peace negotiations when everything is going his way would bomb his own people

Its going his way _because_ he bombed his own people. Although for a full disclosure they are different ethnicity. Saddam Hussein did similar things.

<comment><USER26> Well it's a question of framing. If America is in fact world's police man who protect the rights and freedom of all citizens of the world then America routinely bombs its own Arab citizens and destroys millions of lives to protect their rights.

<comment><USER17> Even from that perspective the US still doesn't use chemical weapons on people.

The only use of weapons of mass destruction by the US was in WWII, and nukes weren't consider off limits yet. Since then we helped to get them banned in as many places as possible, and in general find them too indiscriminate.

Just like the world community agreed chemicals were a bad idea after WWI. Countries using the WMDs use them once in one war and found them so reprehensible that everyone gets together afterward and an agrees that these are too much even in war against hated enemies.

Anyone using any WMD after the hard lessons about them have already been learned is so evil that it is trivially easy to get many armed nations, even those with only the loosest ties, to attack them.

Consider: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weapons_of_mass_destru...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weapons_of_mass_destruction_treaties)

<comment><USER26> Again framing:

[http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/02/14/the-united-states- used-d...](http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/02/14/the-united-states-used- depleted-uranium-in-syria/)

<comment><USER25> I'm calling bullshit on your train of thought. Frame ain't reality, buddy. The magnitude of Assads participation in first inspiring chaos in Iraq, then purging the Syrian people, and an increasingly brutal hold to power, far out weight any minor US involvement.

<comment><USER26> We were talking about using WMDs. When I in fact showed that WMDs were used in the same country by perhaps your country you changed the target to Assad. Well okay, again framing:

> The magnitude of Assads participation in first inspiring chaos in Iraq,

The Iraq war would qualify as the BIGGEST factor in inspiring chaos in Iraq.

> then purging the Syrian people, and an increasingly brutal hold to power, > far out weight any minor US involvement.

Assad is trying to hold on to legitimate power where the US is attempt to purge Syria of his government using terrorists relabeled freedom fighters who have destabilized the entire country. This began as a small movement during Arab spring which was mainly due to food price problems which were out of Assad's control due to the global economy. The situation has totally deteriorated due to American intervention, as it always does. If America never supported the so-called freedom fights, significant human life and livelihood would've been spared.

In the end I don't believe any one in the situation is a good guy. They're all scumbags playing realpolitik.

<comment><USER27> > Assad is trying to hold on to legitimate power where the US is attempt to > purge Syria of his government using terrorists relabeled freedom fighters > who have destabilized the entire country.

I think you are widely overestimating both the US involvement and its degree of control over the actors it has links to. I'd be surprised if the main sponsors of the various anti-Assad factions (Saudi Arabia and Qatar) had anything like firm control of the factions they are funding.

<comment><USER24> I think you don't understand just what America does in the world. Look up MKUltra, Bay of Pigs, the 73 Coupe in Chile, School of the Americas, Iranian- Contras, the BP/US/UK overthrow of Iran .. I mean the list is seriously as long as you want to make it.

The CIA created ISIS. The Congresswoman from Hawaii, who has visited Syria, even says as much:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qdf2WH4g9k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qdf2WH4g9k)

<comment><USER27> I am not naive about what the US has done and still does. But reading a "list" is not nearly enough. Studying the US support to anti-Soviet forces will tell you much about how funding various insurgent groups goes, if the fact that US- trained forces have a disturbing tendency to sell their hardware to the highest bidder and have as yet to demonstrate any degree of success was not enough of a hint.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Dealing with things you don't excel at? - <AUTHOR>

As a founder, how do you deal with things you know you aren't great at? For example something which needs to be done, but you yourself can do it mediocre at best - there's no money to hire someone to make it great for you.
Do you try and work on it for hours or days hoping to sharpen your skills and attain a better version, or do you give it your best shot on the first try and move on to the next thing?
I'm worried about spending too much time on something that's futile, but I'm also worried about having something that doesn't look great representing my company. <comment><USER2> I'm not a founder, but the exact same problem comes up at large companies as well. Get it done quickly or get it done fast, get it done right or get it done as well as you know how to.

It really comes down to how much you're going to gain out of this solution, how long it's supposed to (or will) stay in place, and what it will cost you to do it right. Cost is not only a function of time and real dollars, but also opportunity cost that you could have been doing something else.

You may not have to worry about something that doesn't look great representing you. How often is it seen? Internal? Quick and dirty, it's probably going to change in the future anyhow. Do the people seeing it care that much? For example, an admin interface (unless it's part of the reasons you buy) may not have to look good, just get the job done. Only 1-2 users in a company would see that, and the rest see the other interface. You have time to make it better later.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the excellent advice. Do you think for a beta product, skimping on various things will haunt you even after you go live? Or do you think everything is easily replaceable, and no one will even remember?

<comment><USER2> Well, it depends on what the product is exactly. Some of my internal tools it doesn't matter if we gut the whole thing so long as at the end the same functionality remains. However, if it's the core of your product, then that should probably be done correctly, even if it takes you a while. Side features (changing passwords, logins) can evolve over time.

I can tell you no one will remember, but that's false for certain values of users. New users will never know the difference. Old users may welcome the change, or despise it. There's a delicate balance between something you know is better for them, and users being stuck in their ways (some justified, some not). See the Office Ribbon. How many people complain anymore about that? In the beginning though, everyone was up in arms. To some extent that's because there was nowhere to move to except Office, but over time the changes become the new norm and people accept that.</comment></comment></comment>


Americans' Mobile Connectivity - Pew Internet Survey - <AUTHOR> http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/5-The-Mobile-Difference--Typology.aspx?r=1

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought this might offer sort of a market survey for many entrepreneurs designing a startup. But I didn't bother reading beyond this abstract [there's link to a _full report_ in html or pdf]... once I read that this March 25, 2009 report used data from a survey that was completed in December _2007_ !

Seriously: That sort of lag between data collection and analytical report cripples its value to all but historians. I find that Pew often address important issues. But "timing is everything".</comment>


Ask HN: Accurate Movies/Shows? - <AUTHOR> Every movie featuring computers or programming is an absolute mockery of the field, to anyone who has ever written a program or turned on a computer.  Most of the other fields that I have any knowledge of are similarly bad.<p>Are there any movies or TV shows which are accurate representations of the people and professions they depict? <comment><USER2> A couple I'd recommend:

1\. Mr. Robot: It's a show about a psychotic hacker, and many of the tools and programs used on the show are real.

2\. Halt and Catch Fire: A show that follows a group of men and women during the early computer boom in Texas during the 1980s.</comment>


The surprisingly complex reason you never see emoji URLs - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/02/23/the-surprisingly-complex-reason-you-never-see-emoji-urls/ <comment><USER2> Punycode (the way Unicode maps to DNS names) is pretty clever. Characters for a given language are close together, so Punycode optimizes for encoding characters close together. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode)

Here's an example from the RFC: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3492#section-7.1](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3492#section-7.1)

        Unicode:      他们为什么不说中文
        DNS:          xn--ihqwcrb4cv8a8dqg056pqjye
        utf8 base64:  5LuW5Lus5Li65LuA5LmI5LiN6K+05Lit5paH

Let's see if HN will link these:

[http://.ws](http://.ws) -> [http://xn--ls8h.ws/](http://xn--ls8h.ws/)

edit: Nope, it strips (!) emoji from comments.

<comment><USER3>

</comment></comment><comment> martin-adams I registered a smiley + camera .ws for my vlog (.ws -> [http://xn-- vu8hnq.ws](http://xn--vu8hnq.ws))

It's a fun thing, but not very practical. Not even I can remember which variation of smiley I used, plus different devices render them differently so it can be hard to remember or recognise.

I would only use it as a gimmick right now, where I can use short URLs in say tweets.

</comment><comment><USER4> I thought it was rather simple: Because as a human, I have no idea how to enter this URL in the browser.

<comment><USER5> You can bring up the emoji picker in most input fields with ctrl-cmd-space on osx, or by using the onscreen keyboard in windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > How do you keep the domain system clear and intuitive for users?

We have non-latin TLDs now, so I don't buy this.</comment>


Try z shell - <AUTHOR>

Try something new today, risk and hassle free.
Paste:

  $ curl -L https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/raw/master/tools/install.sh | sh
 (you'll need to have git installed)
Explore:

  https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh
  https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/tree/master/plugins
 Not your cup of tea? Remove:

  $ uninstall_oh_my_zsh
 Since I'm quite possibly preaching to the choir, veteran zsh users: what plugins are you running? <comment><USER2> I'm currently using git, brew, zsh-syntax-highlighting[1] and z[2]

1: <https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting> 2: <https://github.com/sjl/z-zsh></comment>


Unprovability comes to machine learning - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00012-4 <comment><USER2> It's funny to note that the first author signed a boycott [0] for publishing research in Nature's new journal (Nature Machine Intelligence) covering AI topics but is one of the first to publish there.

[0] [https://openaccess.engineering.oregonstate.edu/signatures](https://openaccess.engineering.oregonstate.edu/signatures)

<comment><USER3> Step 1: Sign the Nature boycott.

Step 2: Get boycott popular. Less people submitted to Nature.

Step 3: Submit to Nature. Accepted due to less competition.

<comment><USER4> This is a News and Views piece, published in the journal Nature, about a paper in Nat. Mach. Int. The distinction is important.

<comment><USER5> That is an important distinction, but in this case the problem still applies.

The boycott doesn't apply to Nature, and arguably doesn't apply to non- publication writing like News and Views. Rather the boycott is of Nature Machine Intelligence, and the first author of the underlying paper in NMI is a signatory on the boycott list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It sounds like we can too determine its practical effect, which is zero. No real-world machine learning algorithm can use the real numbers. We can not obtain them to feed them as input, our real-world machines can not process them if we could, and if we got real-number-based answers, we could not use them. Whether the universe itself is or is not based on real numbers, we do not have access to them either way. Our real-world machines only have access to the computable numbers (and only a subset of them, at that).

I'm only speaking to the practical impact.

It's possible someone will find some way work this down into something practical, but I'd be fairly surprised. Real machine learners get finite data, for which the continuum hypothesis is irrelevant.

(I assume the original authors fully understand this.)

<comment><USER7> That's like saying that the undecidability of the halting problem has no practical effect because real world computers are actually finite state machines and not turing machines. This argument is true in only the most superficial way.

I haven't read the paper and so don't know how applicable it is, I just don't like your argument.

<comment><USER8> The undecidability of the halting problem has no practical effect.

<comment> pure-awesome That statement is too strong.

The practical effect is that you should not try to build an algorithm to detect infinite loops in general (though you wouldn't need undecidability for this, per se. E.g., NP-completeness of the halting problem would probably have been sufficient to kill attempts at a general algorithm dead in the water).

Of course, it is true in specific cases that you can decide whether a given program halts, and, indeed in almost all practical instances if you know how to solve a given problem then you should be able to construct an algorithm to solve it which provably halts. (Not including, of course, things that depend on environmental inputs, something that computes whether a given number satisfies Goldbach's conjecture, etc.)

There is, of course, enormous theoretical value in the undecidability of the halting problem, and in Kurt Gödel's undecidability of a general axiomatic system. And this theoretical value guides future theoretical research which is likely to lead to further practical value in future - which indicates a practical effect in the long-term. Also, of course, it indicates that an attempt to build a general theorem-prover is a useless endeavor (though approximate / specialized theorem provers are, of course, possible and indeed exist).

In particular, Gödel's undecidability has quite real implications for an Artificial General Intelligence which would have to reason about mathematics in general, and about its own thought processes in particular. Under classical mathematical reasoning, such an AI would be unable to "have confidence" in its own reasoning process. However, if the assumptions are relaxed from statements with 0/1 truth values to statements with probabilities, and time-independence of truth is relaxed, it is possible to define an agent which is able to assign (almost) consistent (actually "coherent") probabilities to what its own beliefs w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶l̶i̶m̶i̶t̶ ̶(̶a̶s̶ ̶t̶ ̶g̶o̶e̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶i̶n̶f̶i̶n̶i̶t̶y̶)̶) are at time t. See [https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03543](https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03543) for more details. This is probably the strongest such statement that can be made in this class of arguments.

<comment><USER9> To be more concise. The undecidability of the halting problem has no practical effect, barring usual considerations about fundamental research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The actual paper: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-018-0002-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-018-0002-3)

(I find the actual research paper easier to understand than the news coverage.)

</comment><comment><USER11> I much prefer Yedidia & Aaronson's paper that explicitly builds a Turing machine whose halting behavior is independent of ZFC:

[https://www.scottaaronson.com/busybeaver.pdf](https://www.scottaaronson.com/busybeaver.pdf)

<comment><USER12> Isn't this an effective argument that ZFC's axioms are "not enough"?

<comment><USER11> I'm pretty confident that no set of axioms could make every Turing machine's halting problem decidable. From the paper:

"consider a Turing machine Z that enumerates, one after the other, each of the provable statements in ZFC. To describe how such a machine might be constructed, Z could iterate over the axioms and inference rules of ZFC, applying each in every possible way to each conclusion or pair of conclusions that had been reached so far. We might ask Z to halt if it ever reaches a contradiction; in other words, Z will halt if and only if it finds a proof of 0 = 1. Because this machine will enumerate every provable statement in ZFC, it will run forever if and only if ZFC is consistent. It follows that Z is a Turing machine for which the question of its behavior (whether or not it halts when run indefinitely) is equivalent to the consistency of ZFC. Therefore, just as ZFC cannot prove its own consistency (assuming ZFC is consistent), ZFC also cannot prove that Z will run forever."

This argument works for every axiomatic system: there will be a Turing machine whose halting problem cannot be proved in it. If there wasn't, you'd be able to prove that the consistency-checking machine would halt, thereby proving that the system is consistent, which is impossible per Godel incompleteness.

<comment><USER13> Indeed, precisely that is true.

The shocking conclusion of Gödel's incompleteness theorem is that the problem that our logical foundations are incomplete is _inherently unfixable_ ; any extended system of axioms will have new statements which are true but which it cannot prove.

(That said, there are certain sub-areas of mathematics where we can prove that every true result in one of these sub-areas is actually provable from a certain system of axioms adapted to the given sub-area. But there is no way around Gödel's incompleteness phenomenon if one wants to encompass all of mathematics (and even arithmetic with natural numbers suffices to yield the incompleteness phenomenon).)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Though I haven't analyzed the particulars of this article or the paper -- I can say: we already know that compression is incomplete. That is: we cannot know the actual Kolmogorov Complexity of a piece of data due to the halting problem. It shouldn't be surprising then, that programs of a certain schema, Neural Networks, suffer from similar issues. One could suppose that neural networks that are less code-parameterized, and more data-parameterized (weights), would be less prone to having divergences. Well, it's already established that the more data-like NN aren't turing complete, and aren't powerful enough to solve the kind of problems that we really want to solve (AI.) We have to turn to Hopfield Nets, Boltzman Machines, and RNNs for that. The learning/training process for these nets is pretty much encumbered by their capabilities. That is, exploring a field of numbers is one thing. Exploring a field of code? Code<->Data is the one function in the entire universe that is the most non-linear. It is the one function that cannot be described concisely by mathematics. It's like Wolfram terms, "computationally irreducable." The closer a NN reflects an actual space of turing-complete functions, the farther it is from actually being trainable. Alas...we willl figure out middlegrounds as we have already.

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

<comment><USER15> What do you mean by divergences?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The author puts Gödel's Incompleteness and the Continuum hypothesis on the same level, which is misleading. The continuum hypothesis is unprovable in our current mathematical foundation ZFC, but there are extensions to ZFC that either make the continuum hypothesis true or false.

Incompleteness is a property of every sufficiently complex formal system and thus poses a general constraint in logic.

That a particular learning problem is not provable in ZFC is not that surprising. Connections between learning and Incompleteness are way more interesting (and there is a lot of pseudo-research going on, "proving" that humans are not simulatable by computer etc.)

</comment><comment><USER17> How would this affect the practical nature of the problem? Also, why is this novel? All machine learning algorithms can be implemented on a Turing machine, so they all are subject to the halting problem.

<comment><USER18> > All machine learning algorithms can be implemented on a Turing machine, so > they all are subject to the halting problem.

I think the argument should be the other way around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I bought into this article until "the field of machine learning, although seemingly distant from mathematical logic" and then I sold it all.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm curious about the applications of this to machine learning in public policy. In papers like Big Data's Disparate Impact ([https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2477899](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2477899)) we see misguided and underbudgeted policymakers using very sketchy and very opaque ML algorithms to, for example, decide who stays in prison and who does not.

If we can prove that the "decision problem" of who stays in prison and who does not is _undecidable_ , invariant of the specific implementations of the ML algorithm, this could make a case for stopping such overreaches of ML.

</comment><comment><USER21> As the authors say in their paper, "[a] closer look reveals that the source of the problem is in defining learnability as the existence of a learning function rather than the existence of a learning algorithm". Algorithmic decision making under uncertainty is NOT the same thing as finding learning functions over infinite domains. Sometimes such a function does not exist. Why should it? Although the authors seem pretty much aware of this fundamental shortcoming in their analysis, they nevertheless go ahead and publish a whole paper about learning functions! This has a name, intellectual fraud.

</comment><comment><USER22> > Because EMX is a new model in machine learning, we do not yet know its > usefulness for developing real-world algorithms. So these results might not > turn out to have practical importance.

I don't think that's the correct conclusion. More likely, all learning models have unprovable problems so the choice of model is not important wrt the existence of unprovable problems.

Really, this is not a surprising result. All mathematical systems gave unprovable problems. ML is a mathematical system and no exception.

</comment><comment><USER23> Can someone explain the meaning of the sentence: ``All distributions in this text are finitely supported over the σ-algebra of all subsets of X'' ? On the one hand, it is impossible to define a probability measure on the σ-algebra of all subsets of [0,1]. On the other hand, if a distribution is finitely supported, then there is no point in using a σ-algebra different than what is generated by its support, right?

</comment><comment><USER24> Conclusions emphasize on no practical use for machine learning algorithms but in the way learnability is defined and treated while using mathematical models to describe it. Some of this mathematical models could result in undecidable algorithms if the wrong model is chosen

</comment><comment><USER25> The idea that machine learning is a subset of mathematics is very dangerous. In the real world the data is never prepped and clean, and the system is complex and interacts with humans and society at many levels.

<comment><USER26> ..could you elaborate? Are you saying ML is dangerous because it's based on mathematics, and math is too clean to handle real world data?

<comment><USER27> I think it's just that calling it "maths" tends to give a false sense of certainty where none is warranted.

Example: All the really clever math you use to make an encryption algorithm is all 100% correct. Then all the really clever math you use to show that it would take the heat death of the universe to crack your clever encryption is 100% correct. The user uses 'password' as the key; How does your crypto stand up to a brute force? Is that your algorithms fault? Did your difficulty proof lie to you?

I know key length is a well understood. In terms of how algorithmically "valid" real world data that can otherwise torpedo entire complex systems, it's as good an example as any.

<comment><USER28> Machine learning is literally mathematics, or more specifically, applied statistics. However, human stupidity can never be ruled out of the equation. Not calling something mathematics while it simply is mathematics is obfuscating the issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Because EMX is a new model in machine learning, we do not yet know its > usefulness for developing real-world algorithms. So these results might not > turn out to have practical importance. But we do now know that we should be > careful when introducing new models of learning. Moreover, we might need to > look again at the many subtleties that can come up, even in established > learning models.

In other words, "Machine Learning" here is a buzzword, without which the paper would probably get less attention.

<comment><USER30> How do you come to the conclusion that ML is a buzzword here? It's natural to publicize interesting new research that grounds a field -- as statisticial learning theory does for machine learning. Historically, Ben-David and co- authors have produced foundational work on the implications of SLT in ML.

<comment><USER29> The problem is that the model was invented in this paper itself, and doesn't actually seem to relate to any actual ML algorithm. Admittedly, I didn't read the paper itself so this may be the overreach on the article's part.

<comment><USER31> I don't think that can be true. If it was, it were like this:

Hey guys, here's an algorithm. Oh by the way, we can not prove that this algorithm does something useful, and their can you.

 _gets published in nature_

Talk about bang for the buck

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> For me, the interesting conclusion is that there are things that humans are mathematically incapable of knowing.

<comment><USER28> >For me, the interesting conclusion is that there are things that humans are mathematically incapable of knowing.

Define

>mathematically

>incapable

>knowing

These hastily drawn pop-sciency conclusions are part of the problem why ML/AI has garnered so much media attention these days ...

<comment><USER32> I probably should have used the word "implication" instead of "conclusion". My thought process was that there are certain input functions that the learning structures within the human neural network can't discern.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What Slack bots are you using? - <AUTHOR> We started playing with the "retrobot" (https://github.com/remy/retrobot) and it has been super useful so far. We run it before our weekly review meeting so everyone can give feedback and vote. It has a "summary" command to get the next-steps.<p>Are you using another bot that boosts your team productivity? <comment><USER2> We're using: \- Meekan for intelligently scheduling meetings \- GrowBot for acknowledging team members' achievements \- Trello and Drift both have great Slack integrations which we use frequently. \- Yala is a bot we're building for automatically scheduling posts to social media at the perfect time. yalabot.com</comment>


95% engineers in India unfit for software development jobs: study - <AUTHOR> http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/95-engineers-in-india-unfit-for-software-development-jobs-study/article9652211.ece <comment><USER2> While the 95% claim might be somewhat accurate, I would not trust any studies by Aspiring Minds, which conducts the AMCAT employability test. My college's training and placement department recently forced everyone to answer it ("for practice"), and the quality of the questions was surprisingly poor, from English questions that were grammatically incorrect themselves, to computer science questions with all options incorrect and the worst: computer programming questions about obscure C# APIs (along the lines of "what are the parameters and the return type"), a language which pretty much no one answering the exam has ever learnt.

It's also almost exclusively used by the kind of third-grade mass-recruiting consulting companies that have given Indian developers a bad name. Which is not a surprise, since colleges (including mine) have picked up on this, and now specifically train students for such exams. Even for technical roles (supposedly, although I think spamming StackOverflow hardly qualifies), the online test rarely contains a computer science / computer programming component, and new recruits are commonly expected to undergo year-long training at their own expense even after being hired.

My dislike for Aspiring Minds is hard to put into words. It's strong enough that I would refuse to work for a company that uses them, out of fear of the unchecked incompetence of my future coworkers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hard to trust a private study conducted by a company whose interest is in convincing businesses that they can't effectively hire without their tests and certifications.

Even if the figure is true, this is not the right starting point for discussion. Also, we can do better with direct links to studies, rather than bad journalism digests.

<comment><USER4> It sounds like it may be worse than that. According to someone who took the test[1] they then also offer students the chance to pay to retake for better scores.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/66kb3c/95_engi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/66kb3c/95_engineers_in_india_unfit_for_software/dgj9pid/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you hire a sweatshop you should expect a sweatshop quality. In a lot of cases hiring these sweatshops (TCS,Wipro,Tech Mahindra etc) is just to save money that can be then paid as bonuses to useless managers.

<comment><USER6> Having worked for TCS, I 100% agree (US base of operations in Milford Ohio). I gtfo of there in 1.5 yrs, but holy hell was it a shit show. The thing I learned is that many businesses will not respect the iron triangle. They will hire the low bidder, expect it to be done quickly and beat the quality out of them. TCS was all over that kind of work.

<comment><USER5> It's a sad thing because it's damaging serious businesses like telcos,banks,insurance companies. But I guess the wheel is still in motion and we can keep many people employed.

<comment><USER7> _> It's a sad thing because it's damaging serious businesses like telcos,banks,insurance companies._

Doesn't matter if it's damaging to the business in the long run, it makes their quarterly results look great, and that's all Wall Street cares about. Headcount is down, profit is up.

Who cares if their business logic will be a hot mess in 2 years because everyone competent got fired? Everyone high up will have already collected their performance bonus.

Far too many companies are afraid to take long term decisions which are better for the company but worse in the short term. This was cited as one of the primary reasons for Dell to go private again:

 _" My partners at Silver Lake Management and I successfully took Dell private a year ago in the largest corporate privatization in history. I'd say we got it right. Privatization has unleashed the passion of our team members who have the freedom to focus first on innovating for customers in a way that was not always possible when striving to meet the quarterly demands of Wall Street."_ [0]

[0] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/michael-dell-going-private- is-p...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/michael-dell-going-private-is-paying- off-for-dell-1416872851)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've worked with low-level Indian programmers, and they did write some crazy code. There are also really good ones.

I refuse to believe this article, though. It seems very much a clickbait title/article to get visitors to their website. Any study can prove pretty much anything.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd be curious to see the success rate for US-based engineers as well. I suspect it would be higher, but not by much at all. In my experience, outside of the prestige companies and communities, most of the people in our field are dangerously unskilled.

<comment><USER10> This is not a US vs India comparison. It is a "controlled" data set study done on Indian engineers trained in India. I am sure a separate study can surface interesting trends about US workforce as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> No.

This is a case of molding a study around trying to substantiate a predetermined (and financially motivated) goal.

Unfit to do what specific "software development" job? There are Indians working this very vast field. Presenting them with a test they fail does not change that fact.

If your study results in a claim that contradicts reality, you are at best doing it horribly wrong and have at worst terrible ethics.

</comment><comment><USER12>
      36,000 engineering students from IT related branches took [the test]
      over 2/3 could not even write code that compiles

The information missing from the report is:

1\. What stage in their IT education were they in?

2\. Was the test given in a language the students were meant to be familiar with?

I've been programming professionally for over 15 years, yet I wouldn't even be able to write "Hello world" in Haskell without having to look up a tutorial - because I've never used Haskell.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't believe this. I have worked with many offshore teams in the last 15 years, and the teams in India have been roughly on par with teams in Eastern Europe. The only advantage of European teams is that they seem to be better educated in areas outside of software engineering, like mathematics.

<comment><USER14> I'm an Indian, and the article is factually correct in that most engineers are unfit for software development albeit I wouldn't quote an exact figure.

Perhaps your experience was such because most of these "engineers" remain unemployed, take up another profession or join the Indian sweatshops (ie, TCS, Wipro, HCL, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, Accenture etc..).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This would explain the poor code quality that often comes from off-shoring.

</comment><comment><USER16> More and more software companies purely based from India deny this claim.

One of many examples competing (successfully) with (for example) California companies (who pay around 2..4x their devs): [http://enpass.io](http://enpass.io)

Disclaimer: I'm not Indian but European and not enpass owner/user/developer.

<comment><USER17> 5% of all engineers in India is still a sizable amount.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is not good journalism. Facts and figures about the study are missing and the title is absolutely click-bait inspired.

</comment><comment><USER19> Meh. "write code that compiles" means to me the ability to do zero defect keyboarding. That's not so important - being able to interpret the compiler output to say - Oh, I typoed that variable name/I missed that semicolon/etc. - that is what matters.

For me, the more problematic evidence comes from the interaction colleagues and I have with actual Indian engineers. Westerners are far from perfect, but I've had a lower success rate with Indian outsourcers. As I understand it, Indian cost of living is at most 1/2 that of western countries, so I would expect a 1/2 price differential for the same quality. But that doesn't seem to happen. I'd guess it's due to upper management failing to see the difference between the Indian quality at 1/2 price and Indian quality at 1/10 price, and choosing the latter, making the former scarce.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think a lot SWE in India might not even like writing Software. It mainly provides a way to get out of the country or at least make a decent living. A lot of these Outsourcing companies will hire pretty much any College grad and just teach them how to program.

</comment><comment><USER21> I know many really great Indnian developers. I know even more really bad Indnian developers.

I have an impression that there is huge social pressure in India to become a developer. What makes sense is because it is a good profession.

Because many of these developers have too little capacities to become a programmer, hence, there may be a stereotype of poor programmers from India.

</comment><comment><USER22> It would be interesting to see at least the full article. Anyway, even if this information is true, the 'study' is useless if not compared with other countries.

</comment><comment><USER23> I doubt their claim without stats and facts, Company falsely claiming % for promoting product

1\. have they reached 100% students? to claim 95%? no they have not reached there are 500+ colleges in a single state 2\. From which engineering year student given test, for first year most of the colleges have same syllabus for first year 3\. Company itself mentioned using automata it was found that the machine learning score was able to predict 22.6% good candidates

</comment><comment><USER24> I think you can read once. [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/indian-developers- good-india-...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/indian-developers-good-india- when-reach-usa-become-google-pratap)

</comment><comment><USER25> Related (accepted answer): [https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/5088...](https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/50884/how- do-programmers-in-the-east-see-programmers-in-the-west)

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm curious to take a look at the questions in that test. Would be interesting to see how well they are aligned with the reality of software development. Anybody got some of those questions?

</comment><comment> nv-vn I'm confused. Is this saying they couldn't write code for machine learning, or that the evaluation program used machine learning.

<comment><USER27> I think it's this: [http://www.aspiringminds.com/technology/automata](http://www.aspiringminds.com/technology/automata)

"Automata is world's most advanced and only programming assessment that uses machine learning for grading programs."

<comment><USER9> "It can be combined with our technology specific modules such as those in Websphere, Power Builder and Java Swings, to form a powerful suite to test candidates for different positions."

That pretty much sums up anything you might want to know about the nature of the test.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Has anybody here taken the automata test? Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER29> Disgustingly irresponsible reporting. All this can do is encourage racial discrimination in hiring.

<comment><USER30> The original article is from an Indian news site targeted at Indian business people. This is relevant to that audience if they are looking to hire local developers. The study is, not coincidentally, put out by an Indian company whose products are employee tests and certifications.

I'm not sure where race/national origin factors into this if all the participants are Indian. Perhaps you could point that out? I am vaguely aware of India's caste system but I don't see any mention of it in the original article.

</comment></comment><comment> arturo-k Very annoying clickbait title. Article mentions engineering students only. "Over 36,000 engineering students from IT related branches of over 500 colleges took Automata — a Machine Learning based assessment of software development skills — and over 2/3 could not even write code that compiles."

</comment><comment><USER31> It talks about college grads!</comment>


Amazon lowers outbound data charge by 2 cents - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/02/01/aws-announces-lower-pricing-for-outbound-data-transfer/

<comment><USER2> This is unfair to the packets, which are now getting less money for their work.

Oh yeah, it's only bad when Amazon tries to keep _book_ prices low.

<comment><USER3> I don't know why you're getting downvoted. I laughed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> With all the price drops this year, I doubt I'll lock in as many reserved instances next year. I locked myself into higher rates for a long time, and paid more up front than they ask now too.

<comment><USER5> I think Amazon originally intended Reserved instances as a way to give customers lower pricing in exchange for accepting some of the capacity planning risk; but that has more or less been subverted by the use of Reserved instances as a disaster recovery strategy, where lower pricing isn't a major goal. It would be nice if Amazon could find a pricing mechanism which separated these two groups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This needs more units, and perhaps some sort of absolute measure. For example "Amazon lowers outbound data charge from 12 to 10 cents per gigabyte." Or whatever it is.

<comment><USER7> It was 17c now it's 15c.

For comparison, linode is 10c ;)

<comment><USER8> Yes, but linode is relatively expensive for storage. What I do now is asynchronously move larger files to s3, while continuing to serve thumbnails and medium-size photos from linode.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if the timing has to do with all the bad press Amazon had the last few days.

Now I know this was in a pipeline for a long time, there is no way you do something like this on a whim. But I wonder if they moved up the timing of the release of the announcement in order to get some good press going again

</comment><comment><USER10> Great! About 12 percent cheaper than it was yesterday.

<comment><USER5> If you're using CloudFront and pushing over 1000 TB/month from the US and EU edge locations, the marginal price was cut by 40%.

... which I find rather annoying, really. Every time AWS prices are cut, it's the largest users who get the largest price cuts. What happened to the idea of "we can get good rates by buying in bulk, and then pass those rates on to all of our customers no matter how small they are" which AWS launched with?

<comment><USER11> Just because you didn't get the biggest percentage cut doesn't mean you still didn't get a price cut! Be grateful they are even passing this on to customers...they very well could have kept the extra .02 as added profit margin.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best books in API design - <AUTHOR> What books do you recommend on the subject? <comment><USER2> While it's ostensibly about C, David Hanson's _C Interfaces and Implementations_ (<http://sites.google.com/site/cinterfacesimplementations/>) has a lot of good discussion about API design for libraries, how to handle errors gracefully, etc. Many points apply just as well to libraries in OO or functional languages, REST APIs, etc., because questions about who should be responsible for error checking, managing resources, etc., are going to come up in any API design.

It's also a good example of literate programming, and one of the best C books I've read.

I'd also recommend _against_ _Design Patterns_, because while some of the API design discussion is good, much of it is too entangled with workarounds for quirks in C++'s object system. Visitor is irrelevant if you have multimethods, Singleton is a non-issue if you have a prototype-based object system, etc., but this isn't clear. C's lack of a specific object system makes the focus on API design clearer in CII.

<comment><USER3> dummy comment - sorry guys, i'm trying this out

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a good video available "How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters" by Josh Bloch. There's a selection of slides to accompany a version of the talk here <http://lcsd05.cs.tamu.edu/slides/keynote.pdf> [PDF].

<comment><USER5> Where is the video available?

<comment><USER6> It's the first result on google:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not a book, but Trolltech (makers of Qt) has nice recommendations for API design:

<http://doc.trolltech.com/qq/qq13-apis.html>

<comment><USER8> A few years after that article came out Jasmine (from Trolltech) and several other devs put together a fantastic free pdf/book that I highly recommended. "The Little Manual of API Design": <http://chaos.troll.no/~shausman/api- design/api-design.pdf>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good API design is such a broad topic (because there are a wealth of programming languages and ways you can communicate with systems and code) that you're not going to find one that probably suits you without being more specific.

Lets assume you are talking about a class API (like a C, C++, Java API for example) and are just either defining a library or an interface into your application from code that is loaded from the application's runtime environment. In that case I could say what you might look into first would be good OO design and head you off into "Design Patterns" as a classic (there is also an online Java equivalent of that book which I think is "Java Design Patterns"). But then you'll spend your years as a junior and mid-tier developer obsessed with designs and which design to best use. Having the right classes that "make sense" to a developer is wise, but spending too much time with patterns isn't.

What I'd suggest is to just look at a number of APIs similar to what you want and try to create something similar. Basically you want something intuitive, so design something similar to what developers are used to. Consider what needs to be public in the API. If it isn't providing something obviously and directly related, it should be in a different library. As for deprecation of methods over time, this used to be something that was done differently than now. Used to be that you would be concerned about people continuing to use your API with older code. These days a number of groups developing (especially for applications) will force people to change and update by making their API less backwards compatible (not many do this, but enough to make it hurt- and it sucks). Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER10> If you are interested in REST API's, the best I've ever read is "RESTful Web Services" by Richardson & Ruby.

</comment><comment><USER11> Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries (2nd Edition) [http://www.amazon.com/Framework-Design- Guidelines-Convention...](http://www.amazon.com/Framework-Design-Guidelines- Conventions-Libraries/dp/0321545613/) is an interesting read and contains the result of actual work on building a large and successful framework. Has information on exceptions, naming, extensibility, and common patterns.

</comment><comment><USER12> Haven't read the book (it's on my long list), but the author has a decent blog riffing on API design ideas

<http://wiki.apidesign.org/wiki/Main_Page> <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1430209739>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What about: Service-Oriented Design with Ruby on Rails?

Any comments?

[http://www.amazon.com/Service-Oriented-Design-Ruby-Rails- Pau...](http://www.amazon.com/Service-Oriented-Design-Ruby-Rails- Paul/dp/0321659368/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1283868123&sr=8-2-fkmr0)

</comment><comment><USER13> Interface Oriented Design by Ken Pugh is pretty good (<http://pragprog.com/titles/kpiod/interface-oriented-design>)

</comment><comment><USER14> Anything by Josh Bloch

</comment><comment><USER15> SICP</comment>


TechStars 2007 - Funding program & seminars (similar to YC) in Boulder, CO - lost-theory http://techstars.org <comment><AUTHOR> Similar to the point of plagiarism in some respects (there are only three questions on their application form not copied from ours). But there are some differences:

1\. They have an official connection to VCs. No one in seed funding can afford to do this, because it means you hose 90% of the companies you fund. If you don't give them their next round, no other VC will either, because you had inside info and you didn't.

2\. They make no promise to keep doing this after this summer. YC and its network of other startups will be there to help you a year from now.

3\. They give lower valuations: $12.5k for 5% in the average (2.5 founder) case, vs $17.5k for 6%.

4\. At the end you demo to investors in the #6 startup market, whereas at YC you get to demo in both #1 and #2.

<comment><USER2> With the identical application, it doesn't hurt to hedge your bets and apply to them as well as Y Combinator. They've got nothing over YC but it's certainly a viable alternative.

Can you clarify the line about inside info and how the Tech Stars program could be bad for a company's future VC funding?

<comment><AUTHOR> If a seed firm has an official relationship with a VC, that VC will know which of their startups are best. They can't invest in all of them, since the number of startups is so much larger at the seed phase. Any they don't invest in, other VCs will know are rejects. And this is the kiss of death, because the most important thing to most VCs is other VCs' opinion.

Both Techstars and the new Lightspeed thing have this problem. At Techstars one of the founders is a VC, and Lightspeed is itself a VC firm.

<comment><USER2> It's bad if you come out of the Techstars program without any funding and a non-sustainable company, but then you're probably screwed anyways. VCs are infamously inscrutable; we hear that they are always out to take advantage of naive or underfunded companies.

If you're good enough to get further investment after Techstars, you get it from a VC that you already know instead of having to deal with the typical painful negotiations. And if Brad Feld's Foundry Group will give you money, maybe you could get Bay Area VC money. Even better, the best companies will get to reinvest their own profits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hypothetical situation but what would happen if a startup participated in TechStars or another program and then afterwards applied to YC? Would previous experience increase chances of application success or would they be passed over because it would seem they've already been given a chance?

<comment><AUTHOR> We'd consider them. We have sometimes accepted companies that have already had a little funding. We prefer companies that aren't incorporated yet, though, because the paperwork is so much simpler.</comment></comment>


KickStarter: How to Successfully Raise and Refund $34,069 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jamesleonarddeamer/a-failed-project-successfully-refunded-16f8a0c8014f <comment><USER2> It looks like the OP put a huge amount of time and money into promotion and getting backers -- only to fail on delivering the product. Is the lesson here to _not_ do that and maybe focus on product instead?

<comment><AUTHOR> Could be, hardware is a capital intensive play and a min raise on KickStarter is very hard to work with. More product focus wouldn't exactly change this.</comment></comment>


Gmail takes on Rapportive and Xobni with new People Widget - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/05/26/new-people-widget-in-gmail-adds-context-to-your-contacts/?awesm=tnw.to_18Zfa&utm_content=spreadus&utm_medium=tnw.to-other&utm_source=direct-tnw.to <comment><USER2> I gotta disagree with the comments that Rapportive doesn't have anything to worry about. This is completely a "good enough" solution. Additionally, with Google building it in house one of the largest acquisition targets just fell off the map.

I'm a Rapportive user but I do think they have a lot to worry about.

<comment><USER3> jmathai, thanks for your comment, and for using Rapportive! We think our social integration and support for Google Apps users differentiate us from the People Widget, among other things, but rest assured we're not sitting still. We've got some features coming out very soon that will give answer to this.

<comment><USER2> I never underestimate a startup. I'm sure you guys had anticipated something like this being launched anyway so it's not completely out of the blue.

Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Rapportive is still a far better product than this Google Chat widget. I'd say it's a Rapportive killer if they added LinkedIn, Twitter, FB and Tungle integration, but they would never do that.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is the first time I've heard of Rapportive, and I'm finding it pretty useful so far. If nothing else, these articles about the new Gmail feature gives them some publicity.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think as log as Google doesn't allow third party status updates like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn Rapportive doesn't have to worry to much (at least I won't switch back).

</comment><comment><USER7> Rapportive is now a tiny improvement (say from 6 to 8) upon native Gmail. Before it was a huge improvement (from 0 to 8).</comment>


Ask HN: Where's My "Flask for Cortana" or "Django for Google Now" Frameworks? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> For anyone that comes along, I have found the solution.

Flask-Ask is literatlly Flask for Amazon Alexa: [https://github.com/johnwheeler/flask- ask](https://github.com/johnwheeler/flask-ask)

</comment><comment><USER2> Pay someone.</comment>


Ioke 0 released - <AUTHOR> http://olabini.com/blog/2008/12/ioke-0-released/

<comment><USER2> The Origin mimic parallel to Io's Object clone seems like it was named like that only because he didn't want to use Io's semantics verbatim, which results in it reading awkwardly. Just use Object clone >:[ Otherwise, a very cool project

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, this is going to be interesting. I hope it takes hold, somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER4> In what way(s) is Ioke superior to, say, PLT Scheme or Clojure?

<comment><USER5> I don't think it's necessarily superior. I played with Io a long time ago, and my first thought was: "This is lisp/scheme with a different syntax."

Personally, I think embedability, its syntax, and prototype orientation are great. Especially with javascript becoming so pervasive, other prototype- oriented languages are a great addition, especially since js is not traditionally geared towards running outside a browser.

If Ioke gets concurrency right and is sufficiently fast (around ruby or python) I think it will be an awesome language. I'm very excited about it.

<comment><USER6> You might want to look at Lua. It's significantly faster than Python (particularly with the LuaJIT compiler! (<http://luajit.org/luajit_performance.html>), can also be used as a prototype-based language* , and easy embedding was its primary design constraint. It also has tail-call elimination, coroutines, closures, and so on; semantically, it's very much like Scheme with a vaguely Python-like syntax.

* The language design favors hooks (called "metatables") for adding features to the core over adding features directly, to keep it small and flexible. You can build a prototype or class-based OO system in less than a page of relatively simple code. (See _Programming in Lua_, ch. 16: <http://www.lua.org/pil/16.html> ) Or delay/force, map/fold/filter, etc.

It's also written in pure ANSI C, which means porting it is _trivial_.</comment></comment></comment>