China announces ban on ivory trade by end of 2017 - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-38470861 <comment><USER2> For data on elephant populations and the effect of ivory bans or increased demand, check out: [https://elephant-atlas.org/](https://elephant-atlas.org/) \- including an API. The counts come from an awesome program called the Great Elephant Census ([http://www.greatelephantcensus.com/](http://www.greatelephantcensus.com/)).

Disclaimer: I work for The OCR

<comment><USER3> I am largely uninformed on this topic, so maybe you can answer a dumb question:

If ivory is in such demand to the point that it has a large black market, why aren't there more attempts to domesticate and breed elephants for ivory? It seems like with selective breeding you could eventually breed small elements (that don't eat a lot and take up too much space) that have large tusks (and produce a lot of ivory).

<comment><USER4> The most obvious reason is they are difficult to breed in captivity. They have very long lifespan, long reproductive cycle, low birth rate, and high infant mortality and stillbirth (at least in captivity).

They also don't require a lot of space just because they are physically large... They require a large amount of space because they are elephants, so making them physically smaller wouldn't be helpful in reducing their space requirements.

That's all with ignoring all the impossible logistics, massive capital investment, and animal welfare concerns.

<comment><USER5> Also growing them in labs does not seem feasible. Some are trying though [http://pembient.com/](http://pembient.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They need to go further and ban any and all exotic animal trade for the quackery medicine and delicacy markets.

<comment><USER7> As well as put in place some animal cruelty laws. You would hold your head in your hands if you saw what happens. For dogs, for example, they will tie their front legs together BEHIND their back (YES, DISLOCATING THEM), and leave them tied up like that with a tin can over their mouth until they're ready to deal with them. They'll even hold the dogs legs like a "handle" while carrying them around. I've never seen cruelty like it...

<comment><USER8> I'm not really squeamish, and I'm cognisant of the cultural difference but.. I would caution people against image searching for tied up dogs in the context of China unless you're prepared for some pretty shocking stuff.

<comment><USER9> The way that the Chinese treat animals is despicable. We in the US aren't far off, but they take it to another level.

<comment><USER7> Yeah if China became like the (highly imperfect) US it would still be a major win.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> You should also check out [https://reddit.com/r/babyelephantgifs](https://reddit.com/r/babyelephantgifs). We just finished a fundraiser for David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (an elephant orphanage in Kenya) in collaboration with the UK branch of the organization. But you can still donate!

[https://www.reddit.com/r/babyelephantgifs/comments/5gm1pl/he...](https://www.reddit.com/r/babyelephantgifs/comments/5gm1pl/hey_rbabyelephantgifs_lets_talk_about_all_the/)

DSWT even made a special video for this fundraiser [https://www.youtube.com/embed/ogJprDLQFl8](https://www.youtube.com/embed/ogJprDLQFl8)

Just check out for example this little orphan [https://www.instagram.com/p/BOi9KfJDSKz/](https://www.instagram.com/p/BOi9KfJDSKz/)

The situation is really bad, if the next 10 years are as bad as the last 10, elephants will be basically extinct in the wild. This will have wide reaching consequences as elephants are keystone species which means that they are extremely important for their environment. If they go away, ecosystems will collapse which will cause further unrests in the general region.

[http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140114-elephants-the- fores...](http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140114-elephants-the-forest- gardeners)

Furthermore, money poured into the black market tends to end up in the wrong hands (read terrorist groups) [http://www.nationalgeographic.com/tracking- ivory/article.htm...](http://www.nationalgeographic.com/tracking- ivory/article.html)

<comment><USER10> If no one told you that elephants had gone extinct, would you, or the average person ever know? Being serious here no down votes plz.

I'm all for being nice to animals but tbh untill we can feed "starving kids in Africa" maybe limited resources would be better directed for humans and not elephants (ie enforcing bans / going after black market).

<comment><USER11> There's a lot more humans than elephants, and a lot of these humans should be taking better care of themselves and their environment. I'd rather my resources go to elephants who are suffering at the hands of humans than to humans who are irresponsibly destroying everything around them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is really great news! But we can go even further, let's continue with banning Rhino horn markets (would we call it keratin markets rather than ivory?). Keratin would be primary component here, the same protein that makes human fingernails also is what composes Rhino horns.

[http://www.latimes.com/world/africa/la-fg-vietnam-rhino- traf...](http://www.latimes.com/world/africa/la-fg-vietnam-rhino- trafficking-20160926-snap-story.html)

In Vietnam and some of China there are some who cling to a belief that eating the Rhino horn will cure/prevent cancer or increase libido. Those who believe this probably aren't aware that eating their fingernails would have the same effect.

<comment><USER13> International trade in rhino horn has been banned (via CITES) since 1977. China banned the domestic trade of rhino horn in 1993. A similar ban is in place in Vietnam. You literally cannot ban it any further.

If you want to ban the "keratin" market, make sure you promptly dispose of your woolen sweaters.

<comment><AUTHOR> > You literally cannot ban it any further.

Eeeeh, even the definition of the word banned is very debatable. It definitely hasn't been flat out banned everywhere. And China did have pretty lax laws regarding this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There have been quite a few downvotes for suggesting that illegalization may not be the best remedy.

What are people's thoughts on something like: [https://youtu.be/YUA8i5S0YMU](https://youtu.be/YUA8i5S0YMU)

tldw:

Controlled trophy hunting big game is one of the most effective ways (sadly) of protecting the hunted animals.

<comment><USER15> If you are interested in thoughtful debate on that topic, watch (listen?) to this debate that I heard on the radio a while back and was able to find [1]. My girlfriend and I were on the way back from a run and ended up sitting in the driveway for a good 30 minutes listening. I was leaning towards one side already but not so much that I wasn't open to the arguments of the other side, but I was really impressed overall with the format and the quality of the arguments on both side. I felt one side had a significantly better supported stance but it was really pleasing to hear a quality debate on the topic. Well worth the listen.

[1] [http://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/hunters- conserv...](http://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/hunters-conserve- wildlife)

<comment><USER16> Have you listened to many i2 debates? I've only ever heard one many years ago, can't remember the topic but it was absolutely fantastic, have always intended to check out some others.

<comment><USER15> This was the first and only one but I couldn't tell you why I didn't immediately go and find more. I think I will now that I have tracked this one down, it feels even more important now given the level of discourse we typically see. I would love to see more people exposed to these kinds of debates, if I was a teacher or involved in schools I would love to play things like this for students.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Good move, but that gives those traders about 12 months to "kick up the volume" of ivory traded.

After that, it becomes a typical black market affair, kinda like trade in stolen art works.

<comment><USER18> China's effort to reduce shark fin soup consumption was incredibly effective. I hope this will be equally successful.

<comment><USER19> ... and apparently one of the most effective strategies was using Yao Ming and Jackie Chan as spokespeople against shark fin consumption!

<comment><USER20> I remember the day Mr. T convinced me not to do drugs.

<comment><USER21> Public awareness campaigns were key in stopping the ivory trade within the United States (before it was ramped up again by the Chinese). Demand is the real problem, and creating the image that ivory (or shark fin soup) isn't cool is extremely effective.

<comment><USER13> Calling public awareness campaigns "extremely effective" is a vast simplification of the matter. Public awareness campaigns are good at pushing a substance towards being banned. Once a substance is prohibited, it is subject to the "forbidden fruit" effect, which I've mentioned below [1]. Additionally, if public awareness campaigns continue under a ban, they're likely to induce a "boomerang" effect. For instance, the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign may have promoted drug use and pro-cannabis attitudes in the young [2]. Crazy, right? Well, California did just legalize marijuana!

My guess is that parent is obliquely referring to that phenomenon.

In my chosen domain of rhinos, it is starting to look as though the public awareness campaigns run from 2008 to 2014 very well could've accidently spread the message that rhino horn is rare, risky, and desirable.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13287393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13287393)

[2] [http://findings.org.uk/docs/Ashton_M_1.pdf](http://findings.org.uk/docs/Ashton_M_1.pdf)

<comment><USER22> So, speaking about your chosen field, Save the Rhino International and the International Rhino Foundation think rhino horns won't solve the problem:

[https://www.savetherhino.org/rhino_info/thorny_issues/synthe...](https://www.savetherhino.org/rhino_info/thorny_issues/synthetic_rhino_horn_will_it_save_the_rhino)

What is your response to this? I really want to save rhinos too, and I'm not sure how to help. I've donated to both of those organisations, and I kind of want to figure out how convince Vietnam that rhino horns absolutely do not cure cancer. Why do you think synthetic horns will work instead?

<comment><USER13> Not to besmirch SRT and IRF. They're good organizations that know a lot about rhinos and ecology. However, I have my doubts about their grasp of markets, psychology, history, and statistics among other things.

For instance, from 2008 to 2014 they pushed the message that rhino horn was being used for medicinal purposes. As early as 2012, some intrepid investigators started to make the case that that wasn't what was driving the poaching crisis. There is now a growing consensus that Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) was a red herring all along [1, 2].

I believe they're wrong about biofabricated horn too. If you're interested, you can read my rebuttal to their objections here:

[https://sosv.com/why-pembient-is-confident-in-synthetic- rhin...](https://sosv.com/why-pembient-is-confident-in-synthetic-rhino-horn/)

TL;DR: We have Nobel Prize-winning theory (Akerlof, 2001) underlying our proposed intervention.

[1] [https://twitter.com/savetherhino/status/798885174520016896](https://twitter.com/savetherhino/status/798885174520016896)

[2] [https://wildlifejustice.org/cn/overlooked-rhino-horn- demand-...](https://wildlifejustice.org/cn/overlooked-rhino-horn-demand- decorative-purposes-china/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I always wondered- why is the ivory market not flooded with fakes? Everything is faked in china, this is a valuable good- is there no way to synthesize dentin flood the poachers out of the buisness?

<comment><USER24> There is a startup trying to do just that... bioengineer rhino horns, tusks etc.

[http://signup.pembient.com/](http://signup.pembient.com/)

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the mention! We're mainly focused on horn at present, but I do mention ivory here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13288580](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13288580)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Woot! Thank you China! Elephants are my favorite animal and it's sad to see such magestic creatures slaughtered for such nominal things. Or any animal for that matter. Shark fin soup? Seriously what a waste of a needed predator.

<comment><USER26> I once saw shark fin soup on a high-end restaurant's menu in Dubai, sometime in 2013. I asked a waitress and she said they weren't serving it any more. The menu hadn't been updated, so the change must have been recent. I was pretty disgusted by the whole thing to be frank.

<comment><USER27> I wonder if they just tell that to foreigners who ask questions.

<comment><USER26> I wasn't a foreigner: I lived in the UAE for 14 years. Besides, she was pretty taken aback when I asked, and I made sure to convey my surprise at the dish.

<comment><USER28> So is there any reason in particular that the thought of eating something containing shark fin "disgusted" you, but all of the other animal parts on the menu were just fine?

The level of hypocrisy in this thread is incredible. Save the elephants, save the sharks, save the whales; I guess because we think those animals are coolest/cutest they get a pass. Guess what other animals are smart? Pigs. They can do math and make good pets and we mow them down by the millions. How about cows? They are sacred in some countries, I bet someone from India would be "disgusted" that they sell dead cow in American restaurants!

<comment><USER26> Whales are endangered. Sharks are killed solely for their fins. Same goes for elephants and their tusks.

Cows and pigs are killed humanely, and used efficiently, with a clear goal in mind: feeding humans.

I'm disgusted by shark fin soup because of wastefulness. Why kill a living being if you're just going to use an insignificant part of it?

We can argue about this all day, but in the end, it's all relative. Until we can come up with a synthetic and affordable alternative to meat, this is going to continue, whether you like it or not.

<comment><USER28> Whales are not endangered. Some types of whales are endangered. In fact, most Humpback species were removed from the endangered list.

[http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2016/09/07/492976575/...](http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2016/09/07/492976575/most-humpback-whales-taken-off-endangered-species- list)

Good for you that you're disgusted by someone else's culture, I'm sure they feel the same way about you. I am just sick of the hypocrisy that so many people show. Ever kill a mouse in a mouse trap? That's a life gone for no reason, you should be ashamed.

Seems like everyone has an opinion on just which animals are okay to kill and which aren't. That's cool if you want to think that, but you are basically saying "I think its okay to kill these animals but not these." and everyone has a different line.

<comment><USER26> My bad regarding whales then. But still, I believe whalers don't "use" the whole whale, right? It used to be blubber, not sure what it is now.

Dude, living in this beautiful and multi-cultural world is a great blessing, but you have to offend someone's culture eventually. There is simply no way to satisfy everyone, which is why this whole PC movement is silly imo.

Yes, that's basically it: you may think no animals should be killed, while I think that some should be killed. But the "winner" is the one who convinces the most people by providing the most compelling arguments.

As it stands, the majority agrees that cows and pigs must die to feed humans. They also agree that sharks should not be killed for their fins, elephants should not be killed for their tusks, etc.

Now, we may end up being wrong about cows and pigs (unlikely, given history and research), but this will appear over time rather than overnight.

<comment><USER28> Whale hunters in Japan (where they have gotten a lot of criticism in recent years) most certainly do use the whole whale, or at least most of it. They eat the meat; so it's no more wasteful than eating a cow, pig, chicken. It may have been the case that they used to just harvest the blubber, but don't think it's cost effective to even do that any more (crude oil is way, way cheaper).

I'm not sure where I ever said no animals should be killed, quite the opposite in fact. I don't have an issue with ANY animal being killed. However I realize that some people DO have an issue with only certain animals being killed and not others; that is the hypocrisy.

It seems the basis of your entire argument is that you just want to do what the majority says is okay to do. That's a cool way to live your life I guess, but at least try to think for yourself every now and again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sorry but I find most comments here @#!@ing inane.

We kill millions of pigs every year (intelligent animals) and farm millions of cows (Extinct many many animals through environmental destruction through use of large amounts of land) but we expect China to care about the second hand effects of the ivory trade.

Where they still have millions living in poverty, we are rich (speaking as a westerner who eats meat, not all of HN)

We love to be racist don't we?

I guess if we convince the Chinese the Rape of Nanking was cows and not elephants they can become like us.

</comment><comment><USER30> Am I the only one shocked to learn that ivory was still legal in China? I know China has a reputation for being a bit dystopian, but I thought this was one of those things that everyone agreed on.

<comment><USER31> I think the bar for real-life dystopias are considerably higher these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> For people wondering why it will take til the end of 2017, compare: the egg "industry" tosses all male chicks into blenders (yes, while alive), and have promised to stop doing it by 2020: [http://www.vox.com/2016/6/9/11896096/eggs- chick-culling-ende...](http://www.vox.com/2016/6/9/11896096/eggs-chick- culling-ended)

That's 3+ years, and hundreds of millions of baby birds shredded alive.

</comment><comment><USER33> Coincidentally I watched a new documentary last night on Netflix named "The Ivory Game" ([https://www.netflix.com/browse?jbv=80117533&jbp=0&jbr=6](https://www.netflix.com/browse?jbv=80117533&jbp=0&jbr=6))

Heartbreaking documentary on the massive killing of elephants for ivory and how futile all of the efforts the African nations are taking to try to stop poaching and killing by local farmers.

Investigative segments include a Chinese journalist undercover with WildLeak talking to the Chinese criminals involved in the massive illegal ivory trade.

I hope this was instrumental in getting the Chinese govt to actually set a ban date for ivory. Currently their regulation are so lax and so corrupt that it's easy for the "legal" ivory dealer to launder illegal ivory in order to sell millions of dollars worth every day.

Did you know over 1000 Kenyan and other African game rangers have been kill in the protection of elephants by poachers. Terrible.

</comment><comment><USER34> "by the end of 2017"?

This must be a joke. Why not earlier? Why do they have to wait a whole year to enforce a ban like this?

It's almost like "China announces ban on human trafficking by end of 2017". Yeah, let's give criminals some time to find new career opportunities!

<comment><USER35> Considering they need to inform everyone of this, think of strategies to effectively combat ivory trading, etcetera, 1 year is a very small time period.

<comment><USER36> Wouldn't it be better if they finalized their plans before announcing something like this? this could very well make the poachers ramp up whatever they were doing, me thinks.

<comment><USER31> So they should be less transparent?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Again? They have already banned the ivory trade a few times, do they actually mean it this time?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not all of the bans are the same. You might be referring to the ban that was announced late 2015 (IIRC) which was a temporary ban for a year to see if it works.

<comment><USER37> Meh, they do this a lot. Every year they talk about how coal will be banned in Beijing next year, or that they'll stop harvesting organs from condemned prisoners, and so on. Just for them to repeat the same pledge next year. The Chinese gov promises arent credible, and something isn't a sure thing until they really do it.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The Chinese gov promises arent credible, and something isn't a sure thing > until they really do it.

It's a first step. I think that this is slightly different from either of those because

a.) the money in this industry and the number of people depending on it is only a fraction of those of coal mining

b.) people will never need ivory the same way they need organs

Even though they do have a long way to go, promising that they will do something about it is the first step.

<comment><USER37> They (the families in charge) own most of the ivory themselves and this is just like promising to be good. Remember when Xi's entourage stocked up on ivory on an official trip to Africa?

[http://qz.com/292268/chinese-officials-allegedly-smuggled- iv...](http://qz.com/292268/chinese-officials-allegedly-smuggled-ivory-out-of- tanzania-on-president-xi-jinpings-plane/)

Like they need convenient access to organs for Guanxi oriented transplants, they want nice ivory to decorate their villas. The fact that they aren't subject to Chinese law (until they are expelled from the party) anyways makes this very easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> OK... how about rhino horn? Compared to rhinos, elephants are in zero danger. Not defending poachers, but this is the wrong thing to prioritize. (Also cheetahs, and probably a lot of other species)

<comment><AUTHOR> > Compared to rhinos, elephants are in zero danger.

Elephants are definitely NOT in zero danger. Certain species of Rhino are definitely virtually extinct (for example, there are only three known remaining specimen of the Northern white rhino [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_white_rhinoceros](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_white_rhinoceros)) but elephants are in a pretty bad shape too. If the next 10 years are as bad as the last 10, they will be virtually extinct in the wild.

Furthermore, IIRC, the biggest consumer of illegal rhino horn isn't China but Vietnam.

<comment><USER39> How do you define elephants "in the wild"? Some African countries cull their elephant herds due to overpopulation. These tend to be on reserves, but we're talking massive chunks of land that would be considered "wild".

<comment><AUTHOR> You can interpret "in the wild" is as places where the rangers might not be aware of all the specimen living in the reserve.

Even though some of these are technically reserves, some of them are pretty large

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsavo_East_National_Park](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsavo_East_National_Park) is 13,747 km2/5,308 sq mi.

The park rangers have only a rough idea of how many elephants live in the reserve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This was long time coming, and hopefully they'll do a lot against the black market as well.

</comment><comment><USER41> Way to go China. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER23> We banned the hunt for dodos, T-rex and mammoths in Germany last year. Wasn't easy, but government heroics, they are possible.

Esoterics kills.

</comment><comment><USER42> Why not end of 2016?

</comment><comment><USER43> how about rhinoceros horn trade?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> > I think people on HN perceive hunting or ivory trading as something bad such > as human trafficking. It isn't.

They both involve exploitation and suffering of intelligent and sentient being for selfish reasons.

> My great-grandfather was an Ivory trader

Your grandfather was a scum and no amount of mental gymnastics will change that.

> With increasing government regulation and heavy handed attitude of > regulators the entire industry got pushed underground.

Illegal markets tend to be a lot smaller than legal markets (in terms of amount of goods purchased at least).

> As far as Ivory trade in Kenya is considered the people who take money from > the western world to conserve are often the leaders of the cartels who > smuggle ivory.

Welcome to corrupt governments? Does the fact that laws cannot be enforced 100% mean that we don't need them?

> The result of the ban would be further exploitation of the poachers and > hunters

You should start a charity to support these poor souls /s.

> and yes they are going to poach elephants at faster rate.

Can you explain to me why the poaching crisis wasn't this bad until 2008 when CITES lifted restriction on ivory sales?

This whole discussion reminds me of this Onion video

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKccr8g1xCU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKccr8g1xCU)

<comment><USER44> I respect how passionately you feel about this topic (and share some of the same feeling), but obviously "Your grandfather was a scum" (a) is completely off limits here, and (b) helps nothing and persuades nobody. Since you care deeply about your cause, you shouldn't undermine it by venting like that. In any case, please don't do so on HN.

We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13287741](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13287741) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Only if bans worked!

<comment><USER30> They do, sometimes. It depends on barriers to entry. It's hard to ban marijuana or alcohol, because it's so easy to make. Relatively true for meth as well. But you don't see many people doing quaaludes anymore because it's not easy to make. Additionally, a ban like this doesn't have to be 100% effective to be worth the trouble. The time frame is also important. Saying "bans don't work" is absurdly reductionist.

<comment><USER45> So what bans have worked so far ? all the verbal sophistry useless unless you give a proper example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> What will happen to the people who hunt/trade ivory. Specifically, those who live in villages and depend on it as a source of income. Will there be assistance to wean them off elephant hunting.

I hope they get new skills and do not poach other animals.

<comment><USER47> This is like saying, in response to a crackdown on mugging, "I hope the muggers get the assistance they need to get new skills and not move on to other crimes."

I'd prefer if the poachers actually all got arrested, and got new skills breaking big rocks into smaller rocks.

<comment><USER46> Reading material for you from the president of Columbia, citing the failures of the War on Drugs.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/18/colombia- unite...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/18/colombia-united- nations-assembly-war-on-drugs)

""We need to provide social and economic alternatives to small growers of illegal crops and other vulnerable communities in order to create the necessary conditions to bring them back to legality," wrote Santos in an opinion piece in the Observer."

And your analogy of the mugging is invalid. In mugging there's two parties, the mugger and the victim. The war on drugs is the closest analogy. It is an illegal trade, just like ivory. There's three parties. The grower, seller, and buyer.

If you do not get the grower, in this case, the ivory hunter, a legal path to providing food for their family, it will be a failure, just like the crackdown on cocaine for the last 30 years.

<comment><AUTHOR> > We need to provide social and economic alternatives to small growers of > illegal crops and other vulnerable communities in order to create the > necessary conditions to bring them back to legality,

We don't want legality. The reason why the situation is really bad currently is because back in 2008, CITES lifted restrictions on ivory sales which allowed several African nations to sell their ivory stockpiles to China and Japan. The current situation is believed to be a direct result of this and the demand has skyrocket since then.

In 80's, there was a similar poaching crisis, what eventually put an end to it was making as much of the trade as possible illegal.

War on drugs and poaching are similar only on the superficial level. Read my comment below where I talk about it.

<comment><USER48> The "them" in this sentence is the farmers not the drugs: the quote is arguing for giving the farmers a path to a legal livelihood. Similarly the parent is arguing for legal alternatives to poaching as desperate, starving people will always care about feeding their families more than an arbitrary law.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, thanks, I did have a hard time understanding that sentence.

It's true that the people need something else to feed their families, however western and Asian countries will have an easier time banning these products than providing these alternatives.

If the demand goes away, so will the supply.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chrome DevTools can do THAT? Part II - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1DNljLkRpe9LIDfcqcpHzdLvEOyuVH4d1y9dtAJBr1I8/preview

<comment><USER2> fucking seriously? Why would you want to use a WEB BROWSER to debug an iOS App?

Why is it when a company like Apple puts out iTunes, with only vaguely related functionality, people scream its bloat.

When Google does it, they can't wait to give Eric Schmidt a fucking reach around.

If you want to debug an iOS Apps' traffic, use a HTTP Proxy Debugger. If you want to debug a server-side app, use a debugger or a decent IDE that supports debugging.

This concept of putting everything into the browser is exactly what led to Windows Update being a part of IE in Windows.</comment>


Functional Programming for Java Developers (now online) - <AUTHOR> http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/-/9781449312657

<comment><USER2> This is great, but with the full two-way interop and low overhead (just add the .jar for Clojure) that functional JVM languages provide, is there really any reason to deal with the pain of doing FP in _Java the language_? When you don't have real closures, map/reduce/filter and other HOFs become rather tedious and inflexible.

<comment><USER3> is that what this book is about? I though it was about FP principles without any specific implementation. How do you actually do FP in Java? anonymous inner classes everywhere?

<comment><USER2> Well it covers good FP principles, but it's about Java-the-language implementations of them. So it's full of lots of code that might scare me away from FP if I were a "Java programmer".</comment></comment></comment>


Binvis.io: visual analysis of binary files - <AUTHOR> http://binvis.io/

<comment><AUTHOR> See this blog post by the author showing his earlier work in visualizing binary files: [http://corte.si/posts/visualisation/binvis/index.html](http://corte.si/posts/visualisation/binvis/index.html)</comment>


JooJoo Tablet Is a Real Piece of DooDoo - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/reviews/product/pr_joojoo_tablet

<comment><USER2> JooJoo was dead on arrival when they came out with a price tag that was double the expected price

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow. Tough crowd. This is a first product from a new company going up against the established leader with a track record of putting out amazing products. Maybe cut FusionGarage some slack, eh?

The review itself is a little strange: _Where the JooJoo does score is in the picture quality of its gorgeous touchscreen. Scrolling is pretty smooth (although not quite as fluid as the iPad) and videos play beautifully, thanks to the included Flash support._

[... a little later ...]

 _Watching video on JooJoo comes with its own set of quirks and glitches. Bring up YouTube or Hulu clips and they look fine in a small window, but click into the full-screen mode and you'll get more stalls and sputtering than a health care bill moving through Congress._

So, which one is it... is the video beautiful or stally and sputtery?

Anyway, I hope they sell a few of these or raise more money to iterate and make it a worthy competitor to the iPad.

<comment><USER4> > So, which one is it... is the video beautiful or stally and sputtery?

Screen/Picture quality is unrelated to video quality. The frames may looks gorgeous but if you only have 5 of them a second it won't be great video ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm somewhat conflicted about the claim that there's no apps. It seems that the JooJoo was meant to be one of the first devices to think of the browser as the only necessary gateway to your apps. If we take the browser and web apps into consideration the JooJoo has access to thousands of apps.

I personally think it's wrong to suggest that a "native" app is the only form of app for a device. We were moving forward so nicely until the iPhone and iPad showed up. It feels that we're moving backwards, back into the land of the fat clients and desktop. Sad.

<comment><USER6> I think people forget that the iPhone was originally supposed to be an app- free environment (at least for 3rd parties) and instead rely on web apps.

<comment><USER7> That's an extraordinary claim, given that it's more likely that the secretive & perfectionist Apple might have merely been quietly finishing and documenting the SDK, only using the web apps story to placate developers and buy time.

<comment><USER6> Blast from the past.

[http://www.tuaw.com/2007/01/10/apple-vps-confirm-no-3rd- part...](http://www.tuaw.com/2007/01/10/apple-vps-confirm-no-3rd-party-iphone- apps/)

<comment><USER7> Misdirection is a part of their secretive nature. They don't telegraph their punches. Instead, we hear Jobs say that they can't think of what one would do with a tablet beyond reading on the toilet and that people don't read anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a review on Engadget (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1243630>) that's mostly the same story.

After all the drama that happened with this tablet, it's really a sad ending to what started out as a potentially great product.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if the reviews would be any different had the tablet been released under its original moniker CrunchPad?

<comment><USER4> Yes.

if it had met the originally price point

and specification

(in all seriousness I suspect if the _exact same_ device had come out in a blaze of glory from Arrington then the press would have delighted in cutting it down to size)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting that the major problems with the JooJoo can be fixed by a better linux, whereas the major problems with the iPad... can be fixed by a better linux. ;)

</comment><comment><USER11> I have to wonder if Arrington saw that the product wasn't turning out like he had hoped and quietly decided that he didn't want the TechCrunch name on it. Maybe that's why he didn't commit to a contract because he wanted the relationship to dissolve while also making it appear that he was the good guy by being pushed out of the relationship.

In any case, you can be sure that Arrington is at least a little happy that the CrunchPad is not going up against the iPad.

</comment><comment><USER12> "Commenters will likely tear into this review, accusing Wired of being biased toward Apple (we're not) and unfairly bashing a perfectly good product (which this isn't)."

Its funny that the author exactly captures the spirit of his review in one sentence. It really feels like - "the iPad, despite its many flaws, is wonderful. The JooJoo, despite its many strengths, is awful."

<comment><USER13> The reviewer points out five things which shape her verdict:

      - too heavy
      - too slow
      - short battery life
      - limited usefulness beyond browsing the web
      - awful UI

Those seem like rather basic requirements to me. Most if not all people simply won't buy a device with those kinds of drawbacks. Make no mistake, the iPad has very real drawbacks – I don't see how this review ignores those – they just might not be the same category of drawback. Lacking a USB port is hardly the same as having a awful UI.

<comment><USER9> except you can't add a usb port via a software update

<comment><USER13> Your point being? I don't see how that could change the review – it seems pretty impossible to me to review software based on what's possible, not on what's there.

<comment><USER14> Really? I've seen plenty of reviews that contain some variation of the line "...but X should be easy to fix in the next firmware/software update, and if they do that then..."

<comment><USER13> You can write that in a review ('coz it's true), I just don't think you would be a very good reviewer if it influenced your verdict.

I just looked at Engadget's iPad review again and they heavily scold the iPad for lacking multitasking – mentioning that the fix should be easy sounds much more like a criticism than a defense. If the iPad doesn't get any leeway for lacking software features the Joojoo shouldn't get any leeway for its lacking UI.

<comment><USER14> The amount of leeway one gives should be related to how easy the problem is to fix. Fundamental problems with the hardware should not be judged equal to easily fixed software bugs when counting pros and cons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> But can we stick Chrome OS or Android on the JooJoo?

<comment><USER16> Theoretically. See <http://www.androidx86.org/> and <http://www.android-x86.org/> and others.

Where you may run into problems is finding drivers for pieces of the JooJoo hardware. JooJoo claims to be running a "custom operating system", which Wired reported is actually linux-based. [http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/first-look-joojoo- is-...](http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/first-look-joojoo-is-no-apple- ipad-killer/)

If it is truly custom, you likely would have substantial hurdles making it run linux/android. If it is a customized linux port, you would have a hope of finding drivers. Given the short and ugly history of the JooJoo, I would not expect cooperation from Fusion Garage.

<comment><USER10> Honestly, nothing I've seen about the operating system leads me to think it is actually very custom (insofar as you would call the EeePC's Linux "custom"). It probably just ships with a kernel compiled with the touchscreen drivers, and other drivers. Seeing as how the touchscreen drivers apparently aren't the greatest, I'd like to see someone write better ones, and then just write a replacement OS for the JooJoo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I can't trust a Wired review of an iPad competitor. This whole thing of magazines and newspapers clearly championing what they think is their next meal ticket isn't ethically sound.

<comment><USER18> Engadget video review: [http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/05/fusion-garage- joojoo-revi...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/05/fusion-garage-joojoo- review/)

You can see for yourself how buggy the UI is.

<comment><USER19> Guy says the choppy flash is due to "not having hardware acceleration for flash," which is flat out wrong.

Choppy flash video is well known to anyone who's tried to watch Hulu on a Linux machine that isn't, say, a quad cpu dual core 4ghz with 16gb of ram. (and even then, it only hits about 22 fps) </slight exaggeration>

<comment><USER20> I've heard the "no Flash hardware acceleration under Linux" repeated a lot but can't find any concrete info.. could you elaborate?

<comment><USER21> [http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2010/01/welcome_to_the_th...](http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2010/01/welcome_to_the_thicket.html)

[http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2010/01/solving_different...](http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2010/01/solving_different_problems.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > The tablet runs a custom operating system based on Linux.

That's an amazing claim. Or you don't know what an Operating System is.

</comment><comment> PG-13 Title should be: CrunchPad Table is a real piece of DooDoo :)</comment>


Outlook.com DNS records disappeared - <AUTHOR> http://outlook.com/ :-( something went wrong Sorry, we can't get that information right now. Please try again later. If the problem continues, contact your helpdesk<p>---<p>dig outlook.com<p>; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> outlook.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 62938 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0<p>;; QUESTION SECTION: ;outlook.com.			IN	A<p>;; Query time: 33 msec ;; SERVER: 10.51.20.100#53(10.51.20.100) ;; WHEN: Fri Nov 22 09:37:02 2013 ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 29 <comment><AUTHOR> I especially loved their status page during the outage:

      current health
    	CRM	No issues
    	Exchange	No issues
    	Identity Service	No issues
    	Lync	No issues
    	Office 365 Portal	No issues
    	Office Subscription	No issues
    	Rights Management Service	No issues
    	SharePoint	No issues

<comment><USER20> That's an executive console.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Edit: It's back up now.

Yup, it's pretty broken, though it is still up some places.

Outlook.com:

      Grapevine TX, United States (bigguy.gte.net) - <USER19>
      Sacramento CA, United States (CalWeb) - Down
      Providence RI, United States (Verizon) - <USER19>
      Pasadena CA, United States (Mindspring) - <USER19>
      Mountain View CA, United States (Google) - <USER13>
      Vancouver BC, Canada (Radiant) - <USER19>
      Recife, Brazil (Hotlink Internet) - <USER19>
      London, United Kingdom (Legend Comm) - <USER19>
      Lille, France (Nordnet) - <USER19>
      Merzig Saarland, Germany (Probe Networks) - <USER13>
      Milan, Italy (BT Italy) - <USER19>
      Ankara, Turkey (TTNET) - <USER19>
      St. Petersburg, Russia (Uni of Tech & Design) - <USER13>
      Karachi, Pakistan (Supernet) - <USER19>
      Delhi, India (Tikona Infinet) - Down
      Bangkok, Thailand (TOT) - Down
      Petaling Jaya, Malaysia (Clear-Comm) - <USER19>
      Beijing, China (China Unicom) - <USER19>
      Sydney NSW, Australia (Exetel) - <USER19>
      Collingwood VIC, Australia (Pacific Internet) - <USER19>
      Auckland, New Zealand (ICONZ)  - <USER19>

[https://www.whatsmydns.net/#A/outlook.com](https://www.whatsmydns.net/#A/outlook.com)

<comment><USER22> Did something change yet? I'm in Vancouver and have no problem going to outlook.com... that's what is down, right?

<comment><USER23> It depends on what your local DNS has cached. Also, I'm finding that 1 out of 5 of their DNS servers is still responding from my location (not too far from Vancouver).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Based on what I have heard, the issue was caused by a bad active directory GPO that caused firewall rules to refuse DNS requests. Neither outlook/xbox/etc would have had any control over it.

I heard that the issue has since been solved internally from 4.30 PST, though DNS changes often take time to propagate externally, taking TTL settings and ISP caches into consideration.

<comment><USER25> They did release a new version of their Active Directory service in Azure yesterday. Wonder if its related.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, dropping all your NS records from your domain will do that;

      $ dig NS outlook.com

      ; <<>> DiG 9.9.3-rpz2+rl.13214.22-P2-Debian-1:9.9.3.dfsg.P2-4 <<>> NS outlook.com
      ;; global options: +cmd
      ;; Got answer:
      ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 8538
      ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0,   ADDITIONAL: 1

      ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
      ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
      ;; QUESTION SECTION:
      ;outlook.com.            IN    NS

      ;; Query time: 28 msec
      ;; SERVER: 10.51.20.100#53(10.51.20.100)
      ;; WHEN: Fri Nov 22 09:58:48 EST 2013
      ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 40

<comment><USER23> SERVFAIL doesn't mean they dropped the records (that would be NXDOMAIN). It does mean their nameservers aren't responding.

<comment><USER26> ...which can be verified (as I did earlier in another thread) by querying the nameservers directly.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6778272](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6778272)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Apparently it was due to Azure dying: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/21/azure_blips_offline_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/21/azure_blips_offline_again/)

<comment><USER28> No, backwards. Azure outages were caused by DNS problems. [http://gigaom.com/2013/11/21/another-bumpy-day-for- windows-a...](http://gigaom.com/2013/11/21/another-bumpy-day-for-windows- azure/)

[https://twitter.com/scottgu/statuses/403670409406468096](https://twitter.com/scottgu/statuses/403670409406468096)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Do they never learn? I am suddenly remebering distant flashbacks to 2001 when microsoft wiped out hotmail for 24hrs with a massive DNS screw-up:

CNET: Microsoft blames technicians for massive outage (2001) [http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-251427.html](http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-251427.html)

Wired: How, Why Microsoft Went Down (2001) [http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2001/01/41412?...](http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2001/01/41412?currentPage=all)

Can you imagine in those days, everyone was on hotmail, gmail hadn't even been invented yet.

<comment><USER30> And that's why I run my own mail server nowadays. Privacy, control over data, and at least I'm responsible for my own downtime without impacting more than a few people. Decentralisation for the win, in my opinion.

Also credits to my ISP for allowing hosting of my own server, running native IPv6 and of course opening port 25. Xs4all is a really cool ISP to have in the Netherlands :)

<comment><USER31> _Xs4all is a really cool ISP to have in the Netherlands :)_

I heard they had gone downhill recent years, resembling more of the regular commercial ISPs, but good to see they still have something going for them.

We definitely need more ISPs like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Who's scroogled now?

[http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/cat/Scroogle...](http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/cat/Scroogled/categoryID.67575900)

This is so embarrassing.

<comment><USER33> this has nothing to do with the scroogled campaing though...

<comment><USER34> Maybe if Microsoft wasn't wasting its time trying to spread slurs about competitors, it could actually spend that time creating interesting software, building viable new products, and making sure it doesn't f*ck up its own DNS records. Or maybe someone's making that point for them ...

<comment><USER35> Yes, ALL the developers (judging by your comment, who are no doubt better coders than you) at Microsoft are working on the new marketing campaign. Jesus christ, viable new products, perhaps they should just start making beer delivery apps on the rails stack, that'll prove themselves right? That 4chan thread the other day was exactly about guys like you.

<comment><USER34> Fair point. My original comment was poorly worded; I obviously didn't mean to imply any of the things you're claiming here. I merely (over)reacted out of extreme frustration with a marketing campaign that I can barely believe someone at Microsoft sanctioned. Whatever any of us think of Microsoft (I'm obviously not their biggest fan), you have to admit that this is a low, LOW move, and something that probably never would have happened were Bill Gates still in charge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Looks bigger than this. It's ns*.msft.net.

<comment><USER37> A friend of mine working at Microsoft mentioned this afternoon the Redmond campus had a full network outage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I was unable to resolve any hostnames from my Azure machines from 4:20-4:40 Central time. I'm assuming this is all related.

This about sums up how I feel about Azure: [http://i.imgur.com/ESakkWk.png](http://i.imgur.com/ESakkWk.png)

<comment><USER39> Wow. Your screenshot is giant.

<comment><USER38> Cmd+shift+4 on a retina MBP. Not sure why it does that...

<comment><USER40> It's because the metadata saying to render the image @2x is lost when imgur serves the PNG back to our browsers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Google's DNS cache will drop them in 250 seconds...

</comment><comment><USER41> It looks like a lot of their other services are down too.

Edit: Also, the Xbox One is launching tonight so if their Live servers are down...it won't be pretty.

<comment><USER21> Xbox Live is down. Just posted on Reddit: [http://www.reddit.com/r/xbox/comments/1r6axx/anyone_else_not...](http://www.reddit.com/r/xbox/comments/1r6axx/anyone_else_not_able_to_connect_to_xbox_live/)

What a bad time for this to happen for Microsoft. It's almost too badly timed for it to be a coincidence, if I were an attacker with access to Microsoft's DNS' this would be the perfect time to launch an attack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Will negative caching of DNS records prevent a quick recovery? If so, for how long will the negative records be cached?

</comment><comment><USER43> Damn the guys at the NSA are trying to get on xbox live.

</comment><comment><USER44> This probably explains an error we were getting on a Node.js app running on Azure websites. Simply creating a new AWS.S3 instance was throwing this: Error: getaddrinfo ENOTFOUND at errnoException (dns.js:37:11) at Object.onanswer [as oncomplete] (dns.js:124:16)

</comment><comment><USER45> It'll be interesting to find out the root cause, assuming it ever comes out. Malice or stupidity? Did someone do an oops within the Outlook team (or some other team), or are they under attack?

<comment><AUTHOR> My guess is someone messed up when making a change to their DNS

<comment><USER45> DNS problems are at least partly affecting the microsoft.com homepage as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> unreal, i was editing a document, when it bombed on me, guess i should been editing locally!

</comment><comment><USER47> Oh man, this is epic.

</comment><comment><USER48> Pro tip for anyone trying to check if a DNS record is working: do an NS lookup in cmd (Windows) in interactive mode. Set the server to the IP of a root DNS zone network (you can find these on Google) then enter that. Now do an nslookup for the domain you want.

<comment><USER26> Actually no. The first step would be to go directly and query the nameservers set in the whois record (not the registrars which could be wrong but the registry).

For xbox.com that is:

Name Server: NS1.MSFT.NET Name Server: NS2.MSFT.NET Name Server: NS3.MSFT.NET Name Server: NS4.MSFT.NET Name Server: NS5.MSFT.NET

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> While looking at this, I saw some other temporary DNS fails as well, including HN, Google News, and Twitter. But all came back quickly, except for Outlook/Microsoft domains. (I'm in Minnesota)

</comment><comment><USER49> I have my domain at outlook.com and my MX record points to edcb3f68479b498ee412acc8524def.pamx1.hotmail.com and I am getting no return for that. There is a big outage somewhere

</comment><comment><USER50> Not a good day for this to happen. Xbox Live is impacted as well.

</comment><comment><USER51> It's working just fine for me. I use Outlook.com mostly as one of several back-up email accounts. I tested it by sending a message to my Gmail account, and all is well.

</comment><comment><USER52> Yeps, a lot of Microsoft services are down. I'm in europe and can't reach outlook.com, microsoft.com, windowsazure.com and probably a whole bunch of other services

</comment><comment><USER53> I have no problem accessing Outlook.com, Office 365, Skydrive, or any other Microsoft website. The problem many be regional...or it may be with your ISP.

<comment><USER54> There's a lot more than one person complaining on twitter. I've seen reports from New Zealand, Kansas, my linode in Dallas, Oregon, etc.

<comment><USER55> Yup. I'm in Iceland and every microsoft service is unreachable, except my regional version of microsoft.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Yep - [http://mail.office365.com/](http://mail.office365.com/) is down for me in New York.

</comment><comment><USER57> ' Grapevine TX, United States (bigguy.gte.net) - Down' So we definitely didn't hear it down the grapevine?

</comment><comment><USER58> It reminds me of the following quote - don't attribute to malice that you can attribute to incompetence.

</comment><comment><USER59> Technet DNS entries was gone for mediacom DNS servers about an hour ago in Northwest FL.

</comment><comment><USER60> I was having some issues connecting to technet earlier, perhaps related?

</comment><comment><USER61> Down when accessing from Central FL (SouthEast US).

<comment><USER62> It's up in North FL

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> status page [https://status.live.com/history](https://status.live.com/history)

</comment><comment><USER64> Yep, Xbox Live is down here in the UK.

<comment><USER64> Back up already :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> CodePlex is down too? (in AUS)

</comment><comment><USER66> oh no. Where will I go now to find information on gentleman enlargement pills?

</comment><comment><USER67> Can confirm Sydney is down :(

</comment><comment><USER68> Still up in Toronto

</comment><comment><USER69> Down in Melbourne

<comment><USER70> Up in Melbourne Australia (on AARNet).

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Down in MN.

</comment><comment><USER72> is up in Pune, India

</comment><comment><USER73> fixed in japan</comment>


Seth Godin on Iminlikewithyou: Learning from flirting  - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/12/learning-from-f.html

<comment><USER2> "a. there's a generation that has absolutely no patience for the interfaces you and I love."

It's been over half a year since I last visited IILWY... this time it almost gave me a seizure. I'm amazed that at age 23 I have already hit a complete generation gap.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that seemed like a totally unsupported assertion.

The fact that a seizure-inducing website exists is not evidence that people _want_ seizure-inducing websites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> IILWY is an interesting site but I almost never go to it because all that Flash means that my CPU is running at 100% at all time and fans get really loud (and I'm on a MBP which means my computer is silent almost all the time).

<comment><USER5> I think it is your computer. My Linux box doesn't even hit above 10% CPU on that site, and it isn't as powerful as an MBP.

<comment><USER4> It's the Flash. It's horrible on a Mac.

<comment><USER6> I'd consider it rather a problem to have a dating site that supported only Windows and Linux users.

At least Mac users tend to be attractive...

<comment><USER7> Is that because they are good at improving their pictures with Photoshop?

<comment><USER6> Only if Photoshop works live, in person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am not sure, but I think this site lets me play Pong with people's faces?

</comment><comment><USER8> Dating sites have at least a 2:1 ratio males:females, while the advertising has a 1:10 ratio. Any innovation in that sector will have to do something about that problem, rather than the problem of images not weirdly flying around enough.

<comment><USER9> Our startup is a dating site. We have 60% male and 40% female. We've focused on women, thinking that if there are women, men will come.

<comment><USER6> Then they'll roll over and go to sleep.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> site breaks the back button and doesn't seem to really present any way of fighting the overwhelming network power of facebook/myspace.

in southern california, myspace is for the unwashed masses (who would have been using aol in 1998), facebook is for college kids, and everything else can go fly a kite.

flash interface makes me want to die. then again myspace makes me want to die, so what do I know?

<comment><USER5> My first impression is that it is more like a virtual online space than a 'site'. A nightclub, instead of a Wally World. It doesn't feel as dirty as Myspace.

<comment><USER11> I think I'd say its more like Chuck E Cheese than a nightclub.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Now for a solution for ugly people?

<comment><USER12> Aren't they all? Pretty people don't need the internet. They just go out in the real world and take their pick. (Or so I've heard)

<comment><USER7> Almost everyone on iilwy seemd rather pretty (ok, so I only looked at the girls)...

Maybe there is a boom for photographers coming up, as everybody will have to spice up their online appearance.</comment></comment></comment>


Underscores are stupid - <AUTHOR> http://devblog.avdi.org/2012/05/15/underscores-are-stupid/ <comment><AUTHOR> This misses one point when comparing Lisp to languages like Ruby. Lisp does not have infix notation. Therefore, you never have to worry that "foo-bar" (the symbol) could ever be confused with "foo - bar" the operation subtracting bar from foo. That's because in Lisp, foo-bar is written "(- foo bar)."

Since a Lisp programmer spends all his time writing "(- foo bar)," when he sees "foo-bar," his brain easily parses it as a symbol, and he never needs to wonder whether it should actually have been "foo - bar" with spaces to separate the infix operator from the symbols representing variables.

<comment><USER3> I don't think this has anything to do with infix versus prefix. It works in Lisp because the reader knows (roughly speaking) that symbols are terminated by whitespace or parentheses.

If you wrote a version of Ruby that was still infix but where you needed to put spaces around all symbols, then "foo-bar" would work fine there, too.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are echoing Avdi's point. I understand it, I just happen to disagree with it. If Lisp was an infix language, then yes foo-bar would mean something different to the parser than foo - bar because of the whitespace.

But what's also at stake is whether that language would be readable to humans without mistakes. Part of what makes Lisp work, IMO, is that you never try to type foo - bar, so you never run into an accident by mistakenly typing foo-bar and having the parser think you meant a hitherto undefined symbol.

Whether that's a worthy tradeoff is a matter of opinion, and I'll take Avdi's word for it that he believes the benefits of calling symbols foo-bar outweigh the odd time you might type the wrong thing. I'm just pointing out in addition to the "whitespace is the separator" argument you both make, there's also the "foo - bar doesn't mean foo subtract bar" argument.

<comment><USER4> "you never try to type foo - bar"

Unless you have a function called "foo", and you want to pass it the subtraction function as it's first parameter and the value "bar" as its second. In which case (foo - bar) is perfectly valid, reasonable, and completely different from (foo-bar).

Even though Lisp is not an infix language, foo-bar does mean something different to the parser than foo - bar because of whitespace.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know that, but it's highly incidental to my point, as I'm sure you're aware. It's obviously true that (foo - bar) is legal, as is (foo-bar), as is (foo - bar + bash), as is (foo-bar + bash) and so on, but they're still much less likely to be mistaken for foo-bar in an infix language.

I'm sure you knew perfectly well that I meant you never type foo - bar meaning foo subtract bar :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting that he calles dashes "ordinary, easy-to-type, recognizable, [and] visually unambiguous."

What he's referring to as a dash is actually a hyphen (-), which is pretty ambiguous when compared to the en dash (–) and em dash (—), both of which require modifier keys to type (and are frequently used in prose, to counter another of his claims). Fortunately, I've never seen em dashes or en dashes used in code.

<comment><USER6> He's discussing this in the context of writing code, not typography. I think it's fair to assume we're starting with the premise that we would only choose characters that are easily typed on common keyboards. Choosing uncommon characters in programming languages, such as en-dashes and em-dashes, is choosing to deliberately make our lives more difficult [1].

I think it's pretty clear from the article that his comments were meant to be taken in that context. If he'd chosen to preempt the pedantic readers by making that context explicit, it would have only diluted the article with noise that most people would rightly assume is implied by the context.

I don't know what your keyboard looks like, but mine doesn't have en- or em- dashes on it, and I wouldn't even consider them for a programming language syntax.

[1] Even when using en-dashes and em-dashes in prose, they can often be typed with multiple consecutive hyphens, e.g., '--' and '---' in LaTeX.

<comment><USER7> Well, the author himself is pretty ambiguous.

While most of the article talks about code, the author mentions underscores being ambiguous in the context of underlined fonts. (I don't even think my text editor [for code] supports underlined fonts.)

He also mentions only using shift once or twice per sentence when writing prose.

So it would seem that the author is just hating on _ in all contexts. Which is kind of silly. (Though I'll admit, the point of it being improperly handled with underlined fonts is certainly a valid complaint.)

<comment><USER8> _I don't even think my text editor [for code] supports underlined fonts._

Well, mine does, and I used to have a co-worker who actually used it for coding. So there you go. :-)

<comment><USER7> Come to think of it, I do know some editors that support HTML rendering inside comment blocks.

How would you use it for coding, though? Unless you stripped it before the compile phase I would think any formatting in a rich-text format would choke up almost any interpreter or compiler.

<comment><USER6> It doesn't need to be rich text. It can just be the way the editor does syntax highlighting. Say, for example, underline all function names. The compiler won't know anything about this style and will therefor not choke on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Semicolons. Underscores. Spaces. Tabs. Every couple weeks it's some new minutiae profiled as the cause of all the world's problems. Don't people have better things to focus on than this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Some people are detail-oriented. How can you expect Mr. Grimm to obsess over corner cases in his code but shrug at what he perceives are problems with representing it?

 _The people who think only in terms of the "big picture" while glossing over the details are not programmers. They are "architects."_

EDIT: This second statement is probably not correct. I would use strikethrough if I could. But the first statement still rings true with me, many programmers are detail-oriented, which means that they care about lots of things other people would consider irrelevant. Whether this is, on the whole, a good thing or not is another matter. But I do not think it is surprising.

<comment><USER7> I feel that you're mostly right. However I think we all focus on different details, to an extent.

For example, I'm a great typist so the underscore key has never really bothered me.

But to call the author out on being detail oriented would be inane of me. I myself don't like keyboards that have small backspace keys. I also still hate OS X for having the window control cluster on the top-left corner.

I know I certainly get paid to think about the details. The only variable here is _which details._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What colour do you want your bikeshed painted today?

I for one, don't like the "->" operator in C. It requires two characters and the use of the shift key. I would like that the next standard just used "." for all member access and let the compiler work its magic and guess what needs to be done.

Of course that would break a sizeable amount of legacy code, but who cares about that anyway. The important is that the code looks good, especially if I enable drop shadows and anisotropic filtering in my editor.

<comment><USER11> I like the arrow since it reminds me sometimes that I'm working with a pointer and not an object on the stack

<comment><USER12> Pointers aren't always to objects on the heap, they can be pointing to locations on the stack as well.

<comment><USER11> Right, but I don't know what you're disagreeing with since I never said that they only point to the heap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of the most efficient everyday optimizations I've made in the past few years was to adopt the lisp-style naming convention for my local file system hierarchy. Removing all capitalization and special characters (other than the dash) makes navigating via CLI much easier. And having a predictable naming scheme means I rely on tab completion slightly less too, as I have more predictive capability regarding how I might have named things in the past. More generally, treating my home folder as, essentially, an exposed API for which I'm the primary consumer has paid dividends.

</comment><comment><USER14> Only nerds know what underscores are? I think anybody who grew up in the early Napster/Limewire/Kazaa days knows what an underscore is because they probably downloaded a file like Michael_Jackson_-_Beat_It.mp3

<comment><USER5> And because in middle school, everyone had one in their email address and AIM screen name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> After writing a decent amount of Clojure recently, underscores do seem ugly, but I think I find commas even more annoying. I can accept underscores for the reasons raganwald mentioned, but having to write [1, 2, 3] instead of just [1 2 3] bothers me more than it probably should.

<comment><USER16> I noticed this too after using Coffeescript, going back to plain JS.

It's especially annoying when shuffling array elements or function parameter around: all items need to be separated by a colon, except for the last one, that _must not_ have a trailing comma, making line swapping a nightmare. Drives me nuts.

<comment><USER17> > all items need to be separated by a colon, except for the last one, that > must not have a trailing comma, making line swapping a nightmare

Then use a language which allows trailing commas in lists, param-lists, maps, e.g. grOOvy

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I write code slower than my typing speed anyway. This sort of typing efficiency obsession leads people to use dvorak or crazy non-standard keyboards. No thanks, not worth caring about.

<comment><USER12> Yes I rather thing that the writer has a bit too much time on his hands

<comment><USER19> Maybe because he's eliminated all that time wasted by typing underscores.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There's an easy fix for part of the problem: bind shift-space to underscore. Yes, you still require shift, but IMO it's the stretch not the shift that makes typing an underscore jarring.

         xmodmap -e 'keycode 65 = space underscore'

<comment><USER21> Unless you use Emacs (as the author seems to), in which case you have S-Space bound to starting/ending selection. But in general yes, one can rebind underscore to something that doesn't require pressing Shift.

<comment><USER22> That's C-SPC.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, you're right. I wrote without checking, I have this command in muscle memory.

:).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Writing almost exclusively in a underscore-encouraging language like Python has numbed me to these issues.

<comment><USER24> With me as well, though it is getting slightly annoying to the people I work with that it's been transferring over into some of the PHP code I have to write.

<comment><USER25> It's not as if underscores aren't used liberally in the standard library. Which is probably a hangover from C.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In Dvorak, the underscore key is where the apostrophe is in QWERTY, just to the right of your pinky. Nice little upgrade.

<comment><USER25> Yes, but it still requires SHIFT + - to get the underscore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "Underscores require me to hit the Shift key. When writing prose, I only hit the shift once or twice per sentence. In Ruby, I have to hit the shift key every few letters. Awkward. Inefficient."

There are languages that survive in spite of the heavy use of uppercase letters, without useless complains like this.

Let me repeat, in German:

"Es gibt Sprachen die trotz starker Nutzung von Grossbuchstaben ueberleben, ohne ueberfluessige Beschwerden wie diese."

Damn, I just broke my pinky..

<comment><USER28> >> "Underscores require me to hit the Shift key. When writing prose, I only hit the shift once or twice per sentence. In Ruby, I have to hit the shift key every few letters. Awkward. Inefficient."

That passage sticks out to me as well. Especially the "Awkward. Inefficient" part.

Maybe the guy needs to learn how to type, because hitting shift for me is muscle memory that requires no thinking. That Grade 9 typing class in 1984 just continues to pay dividends for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> For what it's worth, Perl 6 allows dashes in identifiers, and many of us working with the language have gleefully taken to using them instead of underscores. I can't tell you why it makes a difference, but somehow underscores now feel clumsy/ugly to me, despite two decades of happily using them in my C++ code.

</comment><comment><USER30> Hate to break it to him, but parentheses require hitting the Shift key as well. Twice.

<comment><USER25> Yeah and that's pretty horrible too...

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Any time I have some feelings, I try to clean up the emotions and use my reason. Underscores solve a lot of problem and are useful in technology and programming and then suddenly i_love_underscores.

</comment><comment><USER32> Really just a matter of convention, and dash is too heavily associated with minus. A single underscore is a permissible variable name in some languages; in Go it has a special meaning (blank identifier). Would a single dash be as well? For example, how would you interpret

        i - -

Is it i (minus) (variable named dash)? And is `i--` a legitimate variable name? Maybe Ruby doesn't have this construct, but then it would have a completely different naming contention from existing languages.

<comment><USER33> Favouring dash over underscore to break words in variable names doesn't preclude using underscores in variables names ever.

A sometimes used _ is okay. Its_using_it_almost_all_the_time_that_the_author_is_questioning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > Underscores require me to hit the Shift key. When writing prose, I only hit > the shift once or twice per sentence. In Ruby, I have to hit the shift key > every few letters. Awkward. Inefficient.

Oh my, oh my, how do people ever cope with that vile "having to hit shift" that have regular capitalisation of all nouns etc. Surely such a thing is impossible, as is hitting shift when you need an underscore.

I understand that some things _could_ be more efficient, but "hitting shift" hardly qualifies in my opinion...

<comment><USER35> I wonder how the author types all the brackets in LISP without the shift key. I'll take an occasional underscore over that mess any day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's odd that the author does not mention the truly ridiculous thing about underscores: they are a holdover from typewriters, where they were used to provide underlining by overstriking. The fact that we now have beautiful proportional-width screen fonts that support underlining—and do not generally support overstriking—makes underscores unnecessary.

And yet we insist that a programmer be able to write every modern programming language on a 50-year-old typewriter. You know, just in case.

</comment><comment><USER37> Damian Conway provides some excellent insight/advice on underscores vs hyphens:

      Personally, I'd prefer to see the English conventions carried over to
      the use of general use of hyphen and underscore in identifiers in
      the core (and everywhere else).

      By that, I mean that, in English, the hyphen is notionally a
      "higher precedence" word-separator than the space
      (or than its intra-identifier stand-in: the underscore).

      For example: there's an important difference between:

          initiate_main-sequence_detonator_phase()

      and:

          initiate_main_sequence-detonator_phase()

      The former initiates the detonator phase for the main sequence;
      the latter initiates the main phase of the sequence detonator.

      More simply, there's a difference between:

           $obj1.set_difference($obj2);

      and:

           $obj1.set-difference($obj2);

      The first is setting a difference; the second is computing a difference-of-sets.

      The rule I intend to use and recommend when employing this new
      identifier character in multiword names is that you should place an
      underscore between "ordinary unrelated" words, and a hyphen only
      between a word and some modifier that applies specifically to that word.

      Which, if applied to Temporal, would lead to:

          my $now = DateTime.from_epoch(time);

          The C<day> method also has the synonym C<day-of-month>.

          (These are also available through the methods C<week-year> and
          C<week-number>, respectively.)

          There's a C<day-of-week> method,

          The C<weekday-of-month> method returns a number 1..5

          The C<day-of-quarter> method returns the day of the quarter.

          The C<day-of-year> method returns the day of the year,

          The method C<whole-second> returns the second truncated to an integer.

          The C<time-zone> method returns the C<DateTime::TimeZone> object

      (i.e. only C<.from_epoch()> actually uses underscore).

      Oh, and the optional C<:timezone> argument to C<.new()> should probably
      become C<:time-zone> for consistency with the C<.time-zone()> method
      (or, preferably, we should jut bite the bullet and go with C<timezone>
      throughout).

      Damian

From Perl6 mailing list: [http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.language/2010/04/m...](http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.language/2010/04/msg33511.html)

</comment><comment><USER38> While I agree with the sentiment, I have two points:

1) The goal of a programming language is to be as unambiguous as possible. This is why we have syntax, and do not program in english. As soon as you use the same token identifier for two purposes, you introduce ambiguity.

Take markdown, for example:

        * Hello *world*

In this line of code, which asterisk should be considered a bullet, and which an indication of emphasis? It seems obvious to a human, but codifying it in a set of rules for a computer is another matter, which introduces complexity and future bugs. (Eg., what do you do in this situation: `* Hello* world`. As somebody who is writing a full formal lexer for markdown, I can tell you first hand that it's an extremely annoying part of the specification.)

Lisp does not have this problem, because it is governed by an extremely simple and effective set of rules:

\- An identifier can contain most unambiguous special characters, including - ! ? / + < > = etc.

\- There are no operators, only functions.

\- A hyphen by itself is a perfectly valid identifier.

\- The standard library includes a function named hyphen which performs a subtraction operation.

Taking that into consideration, it makes the entire situation completely ambiguous. `a-b` is one identifier. `a - b` and `- a b` are both a string of meaningless identifiers. `(a - b)` performs function `a` with arguments `-` and `b`, and `(- a b)` performs function `-` with `a` and `b`.

Ruby is actually interesting in that it is one of the few languages which, like lisp, does not have operators. You could remove ambiguity by doing `a.-(b)`. However, readability immediately goes out of the window. Much more so than in lisp's case. Consider this:

        (4.*(5)).+((7.*(9))./(3)).+(1) #<= the meaning of life

It's semantically a perfectly valid expression, but how long did it take you to mentally evaluate it to 42? Compare with:

        4*5 + 7*9/3 + 1

2) If you're going to be writing an article about it, please learn the right terminology. - is a hyphen. Dashes are – (en-dash) and — (em-dash). Hyphens separate contracted words. En-dashes indicate a range. Em-dashes indicate a aside, much like a parenthesis.

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't really like underscores either. Leading underscores to mark member variables? That looks weird. A trailing underscore? Ugh, even worse because you can't use code completion to find all the member variables.

With that said, who cares? Don't use them if you don't want to. It might be more inefficient, but typing speed has never been the thing that slows me down while I'm writing code.

</comment><comment><USER40> As a daily python user at home and at work, I realized I'm typing a huge amount of underscores. My keyboard supports rebinding keys and programming macros (a feature I've never used until now) so I remapped an extra \ key on it so that it would type _ without me holding shift. Small change, but it's much less of a strain.

(I'm using a Kinesis Advantage keyboard.)

</comment><comment><USER41> This may solve your problem:

        my.long.name = 1
        a.short.name = 2

        one.long.result = a.short.name - my.long.name

        one.string:trim:upper

Use dots for identifiers and colons for class props and methods.

Now we just need to design a whole new language :(

<comment><USER42> At least on a US keyboard, colons require the shift key, too.

<comment><USER25> Cleanse those colons!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've got a feeling that HN crowd is lately loosing it's focus by spending it's time on "hipster" topics too much.

Page long commenting on a fluffy article ( e.g "5 * 5 - 3" beats "5*5-3" ) may be good for your mind but imho, this thing should not be on the front page.

</comment><comment><USER44> Maybe it's just me, but I never notice issues like this. Some people want to completely optimize their experience, like when Vim users tell me it's better than Emacs because they don't have to reach for the cursor keys.

I dunno. For some reason this super-optimisation of keystrokes doesn't bother me. Avoiding reaching for the mouse is good, but I don't particularly care if I have to hit shift.* Maybe I prefer to think more and type less, or something. I can't quite say.

* Admittedly the French keyboard where all numbers in the top row are shifted, and symbols are unshifted, drives me kind of crazy, but that could just be due to hard in-grained training on an American keyboard layout.

<comment><USER45> It's like the difference between wearing silk underwear and hessian underwear. Or being able to code while listening to an audio book vs needing peace and quiet. It's not a question of thinking less, or thinking more, or being more careful. Some people can put up with this stuff, and some people can't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Underscores are silly! We only use them in code to separate words in tokens because the default natural word separator, whitespace, is already used to distinguish tokens.

At my old job, we had DSL that allowed and encouraged very descriptive variable and procedure names with space in them. To implement this unambiguously the language had to exclude all the operator characters from variable names and procedure calls with a sigil. A line of code may have appeared like this:

line slope estimate = @some function( x - step size ) / ( x - step size);

Feels a bit strange at first but quickly becomes natural, especially when dealing with wordy domains (math was a bad example).

</comment><comment><USER47> My only problem with underscores is that when I read them aloud in my head, I hear a longer pause than for a hyphen, so code with lots of underscores takes longer to read, or at least feels like it does.

</comment><comment><USER48> disagree. like_underscores. concerns about using shift key seem misplaced & for those who have some form of birth defect that prevents use of two fingers simultaneously, keyboard remapping is easy.

<comment><USER49> I like 'em, too. What terrible ordeal that we must push the shift bar while typing.

Honestly, I've always found them to be more human readable than CamelCase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I think the interpunct should be revived and used as a character allowed in identifiers. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpunct>)

</comment><comment><USER51> Bravo!

Also underscores in uri strings look awful.

this_uri_is_ugly.html

vs

this-uri-is-pretty.html

I wish python allowed for dash in its script names... cannot import from module-test.py but I can from module_test.py

Thank you for posting this, I "laughed-out-loud".

<comment><USER25> The reason page uris aren't so good with underscores, is that you can loose them if they are displayed underlined as links.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I think they should make keyboards with the spacebar divided, and make the left half (or I guess the right if you're left-handed) into a shift key.

<comment><USER7> This would drive me bonkers. For some reason I've never been able to hit the spacebar on the left side.

(I mean, it's not like I'm physically incapable. I just instinctively hit SPACE with my right thumb.)

Getting used to using my left thumb would just be awkward.

I also have a nasty habit of using the LSHIFT exclusively. Even when it's not technically appropriate to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I've been thinking about trying to find a reasonable way to map the underscore to shift+space, but I'm not sure if that would somehow break some application that expects otherwise. It also seems to be quite difficult to achieve on Windows without registry hacks (I presume it would be easier on Linux, but haven't tried it yet).

<comment><USER54> It's very easy on Windows with the strange and wonderful AutoHotkey [1]. I recommend the more advanced AutoHotkey_L fork [2], but this script should work in either version.

Install AutoHotkey and then create a file called Underspace.ahk with this content:

        ; Underspace for AutoHotkey
        ; Converts Shift+Spacebar to underscore

        #SingleInstance force

        +Space:: Send _

Now launch that file.

Try Shift+Space and it should type an underscore for you.

If you want to stop the script later, find a green "H" in your system tray and right-click it.

After you try it, I'll be curious how it works out for you. Myself, after trying it for just a minute or two, I'm not so sure if I like it. I'm finding a lot of spurious underscores before capitalized words, or after a word like "I" that ends with a capital letter. That's because I've been sloppy about the timing of when I press the Shift key before or after a space.

So I won't be using this script myself (not that I need it - I don't like to code using names_with_underscores) but maybe others will find it useful.

[1] AutoHotkey home page: <http://www.autohotkey.com/>

[2] AutoHotkey_L: <http://l.autohotkey.net/>

(minor edit for clarity)

<comment><USER53> This tool looks really cool. I see what you mean about the spurious underscores... think I'll try it out for a day and see whether or not I can live with it. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> > That's a trade-off I'll gladly make if it means using dashed identifiers > instead of underscores.

Not me. I would gladly trade off having to expand all my equations for having to type underscores a few times. In fact, this is very subjective - and one could argue having to sacrifice compactness of expressions is stupid.

</comment><comment><USER56>
      All you have give up for this is tightly-packed arithmetic statements, like this:

        5*5-3

      Instead, you have to give your tokens some breathing room:

        5 * 5 - <USER2>

I don't know, that seems pretty stupid too.

<comment><USER57> and gets even worse if you bring variables into the game.

a = 5

b = 3

everybody from nearly every programming language would expect that after

c = a-b

you will find c to be 2 not nil (or throwing an exception or whatever)

<comment><USER58> I've always found code without spaces around these symbols to be very undreadable.

<comment><USER57> Yes, but in this case it's not about readability, but about extremely significant whitespace. Forgetting a space and your code has a totally different meaning.

<comment><USER59> Whitespace is already extremely significant in programming. "foo[1]" vs "foo [1]" for example.

<comment><USER57> Depends on language, in Ruby those statements would be identical. But anyway, that's no reason to make things even worse.

<comment><USER60> In Ruby those statements are the same when _foo_ is bound to an array, but they are different when _foo_ is bound to a function...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I for one love it when someone types whole paragraphs about the desire to avoid keystrokes. Every language has it's irritating quirks, none of which do I care enough to write about.

</comment><comment><USER62> Idiomatic REBOL code avoids the shift key for its commonest syntax. Code grouping (where necessary) uses '[', ']'; multi-word variables are separated by '-'; etc.

</comment><comment><USER63> I use case instead of underscore. Doesn't help the shift-issue, but reduces the length of identifiers e.g. file_not_found becomes FileNotFound.

<comment><USER64> IThinkItIsObjectivelyMuchLessReadable

I_think_it_is_objectively_much_more_readable

The difference in length is pretty small anyway.

<comment><USER14> That's a bit contrived considering you're (a) writing a sentence and (b) you use some really short words (i.e., "I", "It", and "Is"). I think for things like FileNotFound or similar its not really that different in readability, and comes down to preference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> So the problem is not the underscores but the many shift keystrokes which is a valid point. The solution is to refactor the keyboard layout.

</comment><comment><USER66> A bit late in the wagon, but have a look at <http://pogoscript.org/>

</comment><comment><USER67> I see them as the next best thing to having an actual non-breaking space, why all the hate?

</comment><comment><USER68> Truly find-file is much more readable than findFile. IMHO. Also directory? vs isDirectory

</comment><comment><USER69> Switch to a Japanese keyboard - none of the @ _ ; or : characters require the shift key.

</comment><comment><USER70> Try binding shift-space to underscore. You'll start to feel much better about it.

</comment><comment><USER71> Sorry, but when I read this article I was just thinking that some people seem to have just too much free time...

</comment><comment><USER72> Don't worry about underscores being difficult to type, just use a more ergonomic keyboard layout: <http://bitbucket.org/cheater/us_split/overview>

It's just like qwerty, but with less pain.

</comment><comment><USER73> I program in Underscore, you insensitive clod!</comment>