Never trust a corporation to do a library's job - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/message/never-trust-a-corporation-to-do-a-librarys-job-f58db4673351?repost=HN2 <comment><USER2> Hang on, this article links to instructions on how to do some of the things it claims can't be done.

It complains that the news archives frontend is gone, but then links to the page which explains how to do the same things using search: [https://support.google.com/news/answer/1638638?hl=en](https://support.google.com/news/answer/1638638?hl=en)

It also complains that groups is dead because you can't search by date... but the exact same method used in those instructions works just fine: [https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Agroups.google.com+a...](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Agroups.google.com+after%3A1995+before%3A1999&biw=1485&bih=952&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1995%2Ccd_max%3A1999&tbm=#tbs=cdr:1%2Ccd_min:1995%2Ccd_max:1999&q=site:groups.google.com+linux)

The article claims that books scanning is slowing and links to an article which says it's still going in some places, but explicitly says that it's slowing down because some of the libraries are running out of books that need scanning.

It links to an old quartz article from 2012 claiming that "20% time is dead". After the first three paragraphs, that article links to the rebuttals: [http://qz.com/116196/google-engineers-insist-20-time-is- not-...](http://qz.com/116196/google-engineers-insist-20-time-is-not-dead-its- just-turned-into-120-time/) [http://qz.com/117164/20-time-is-officially-alive- and-well-sa...](http://qz.com/117164/20-time-is-officially-alive-and-well- says-google/)

I'm not all that interested in arguing the title point of the article, but when an article provides a whole stack of "evidence" and superficial investigation reveals that most of it does not support what the article claims, I question the motives of the author.

<comment><USER3> Hi! I wrote the article. First off, I find it disingenuous that you don't mention you work for Google. But, hey! I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that it was a simple oversight.

Addressing your comments:

1\. Google News Archive is, without question, a dead project. No new material is being added, no new development is being made, and it's unsupported. They removed the News Archive and homepage and redirected it to News.

The method Google suggests for web search isn't limited to news articles, making it effectively useless for research. (It shows _everything_ indexed in Google.)

You can search for some newspapers in Google Search, but it's impossible to find any date before January 1970, order by date, or filter by publication. You're stuck with post-1970 date filtering for all papers, ordered by relevance. [https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agoogle.com%2Fnewspape...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agoogle.com%2Fnewspapers+%22the+Berlin+wall%22&es_sm=119&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A%2Ccd_max%3A01%2F01%2F1970&tbm=)

For reference, these were the options that were available in News Archive Search: [http://www.library.illinois.edu/hpnl/images/newspapers/gna_a...](http://www.library.illinois.edu/hpnl/images/newspapers/gna_advanced_screen.gif)

2\. I didn't say Groups was dead. I said it was effectively dead for research purposes, which is true. For example, you can't search or filter by date across groups anymore: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/linux](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/linux)

In your example, how would you propose (for example) finding the first mention of Linux on Usenet? You can't, at least in part because the option to order by date is completely broken: [https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Agroups.google.com+a...](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Agroups.google.com+after%3A1995+before%3A1999&biw=1485&bih=952&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1995%2Ccd_max%3A1999&tbm=#q=site:groups.google.com+linux&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1995,cd_max:1999,sbd:1)

Not to mention, only a fraction of the total posts are indexed and available in Google Search. For example, changing your query to limit to 1995 only results in 70 posts. There were many more than that being posted monthly in 1995 in comp.os.linux.advocacy alone.

3\. It's entirely plausible that Google's library partners are running low on books, though that doesn't explain why the project appears to be completely dormant. As I mentioned, the official blog stopped updating in 2012 and the Twitter account's been dormant since February 2013. It doesn't seem like any book's been added in the last year -- no new books from January 2014 to today: [https://www.google.com/search?q=a&biw=1146&bih=933&source=ln...](https://www.google.com/search?q=a&biw=1146&bih=933&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F2014%2Ccd_max%3A&tbm=bks)

4\. The 20% time thing is interesting. As a Google engineer, I imagine you'd have a better perspective on that than I would.

Former employees have explicitly said that 20% time no longer exists in the way it used to, and current employees, including here on Hacker News, say that it exists but only on top of your existing workload (effectively making it 120% time). I tend to trust them over a PR person, but really, that was a brief aside in my overall article.

The fact that a tiny fraction of the former functionality of a service is possible, albeit with an obscure and user-unfriendly method, does not detract from the overall point:

Google's current priorities don't appear to be in archiving the past.

<comment><USER2> Sigh. Standard disclaimer: nothing I write here has got anything to do with my job, I'm not representing my employer in any way. I _cannot_ talk about anything I know personally. I've also never worked on any of these projects. However, I can read, describe, and link to public material on the internet like anybody else.

In all honesty, I have no interest in the news archive projects; I read an HN link, followed some of the links in it, and said "this isn't what I was promised on the previous page". It sounds like you just made a second attempt at writing the article. I suggest you take the original one down and put this one up instead; it stands up to at least the completely superficial fact- checking of reading the links in it, which makes it a significant improvement - although it now appears to be a list of fairly straightforward bug reports. (I like bug reports. Bug reports are actionable.)

Engaging with the subject would require substantially more effort on my part to research and investigate what's going on here, because I don't know anything about it beyond what I read in links here. I'm not going to do that. However, I would encourage anybody with an interest in this subject to do the research and write up their findings.

<comment><USER4> Saying that these problems look like bug reports is dismissive of the depth of the problems. Stopping development of products and removing access to features isn't unintentional, and a lot of people have already complained about each of these problems over the years. Andy's article is making a larger point that what has happened to these products is part of a pattern, that Google is not being as responsible in stewarding its information as its mission statement said it would try to be.

<comment><USER2> > Saying that these problems look like bug reports is dismissive of the depth > of the problems.

Personally I completely disagree with your priorities. I think a bug report is far more valuable, since people can act on bug reports and make things better, while I would not anticipate any meaningful action as a result of speculation about mission statements.

<comment><USER5> That makes me wonder why the Chromium bugtracker appears to effectively be a black hole, if the bug reports are so "valuable". I don't think I've ever gotten a single response to my CSS calculation bug report.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why isn't archive.org distributed P2P at this point? Instant, massive, redundancy.

Let me download some software and allocate how much of my drive space i'd like to help them with. The software would then intelligently use that space as their distributed backup system. Then they can focus on collection and collation with one less thing to worry about.

<comment><USER7> I'll assume IA has 20PB+ of unique data today, going by [https://archive.org/web/petabox.php](https://archive.org/web/petabox.php)

Let's guess that the average person can contribute some 300GB of their disk space. If IA wants to keep a minimum of 5 copies on the network (probably a safe number given how many people will be constantly dropping out), they need (20x1024x1024x5)/300 = 349,525 people contributing their disk space. That doesn't seem even close to attainable.

<comment><USER8> If the goal is perfection rather than triage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a good example of narrative trumping reality, and we geeks are every bit as susceptible as anyone else.

The actual thesis of the article is that Google is losing interest in archiving efforts. Perhaps true, perhaps partially true, perhaps false, or perhaps unsupported either way. Entirely valid and worth exploring.

The second thesis is that the Internet Archive is doing good work. Great!

The title, however, is "Never trust a corporation to do a library's job". A generalization which no article can prove or disprove. Just dogma.

Why must we make these leaps?

<comment><USER10> Correct or not, the articles thesis is more like you can't know which corporations to trust with archiving, therefore you can't (or shouldn't) trust any. It's not possible to determine, a priori, when or if Google will decide that archiving is no longer interesting.

Apparently reports of the demise of googles archive are greatly exaggerated, although the fact that they are plausible represents the danger.

<comment><USER9> s/corporations/organizations

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The Internet Archive also seems to be building a Usenet archive, though the site doesn't seem clear about their plans or status:

[https://archive.org/details/usenet](https://archive.org/details/usenet)

I also found The Usenet Archive, which claims to be "much larger scale" than Google's: [http://www.theusenetarchive.com/](http://www.theusenetarchive.com/)

Are there others?

</comment><comment><USER12> I struggle with something similar. Building reocities was a one-time affair, hosting and maintaining it really starts to add up. But I'll keep it alive as long as I can and as long as it is being used.

<comment><USER13> Hi, jacquesm. Can we talk about mirroring reocities?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> archive.org is awesome but it has limits on what it can archive. Many of the sites I look for there have broken images or missing flash elements and with more and more sites using complex javascript the limits of what archive.org can curate are only going to become more of an issue.

There is tons of stuff from the 90s that is gone. For example, back in the day there were a few audio shows that were recorded in realaudio. archive.org doesn't capture that stuff. I was going through the archives of bluesnews.com for a project and found all these references to interviews with people like Carmack and Romero and other more obscure people and the audio is just gone. I tweeted at one of the guys who owned the company and he says the harddrives are in storage and he wants to get them online again one day but that day may never come.

Another example, gamespot used to have some good articles about the history of things like rts games and such. archive.org has most of that stuff but not all. I messaged the people doing the tech support on the site about it and they were like "yeah, that was a few site upgrades ago" and had not interest in trying to get that stuff back online properly.

With joystiq and tuaw shutting down it is only a matter of time before aol just pulls the plug on those sites, too.

<comment><USER15> All that is true but it was also true before digital media. While saving "everything" (whatever that means exactly) may or may not be a laudable goal there are always going to be practical limits to what any organization can realistically achieve for the reasons you cite and others. I could probably name any number of online magazines that have gone belly-up or at least restructured and old content in CMS systems is effectively gone forever as a result. I'm not sure how you would even approach archiving a complex site with high fidelity.

Even if the Library of Congress, say, took the task on with good funding, lots of things wouldn't be preserved. (And I'm not sure I would like seeing the government in this role in any case.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> One of the paragraphs:

"Even Google Search, their flagship product, stopped focusing on the history of the web. In 2011, Google removed the Timeline view letting users filter search results by date, while a series of major changes to their search ranking algorithm increasingly favored freshness over older pages from established sources. (To the detriment of some.)"

I don't know if this is what they mean, but I can search by date just fine:

[http://imgur.com/e1tEq4M](http://imgur.com/e1tEq4M)

Perhaps it's just not as clear of a view?

Overall, I agree with the article, but we have the internet archive for the internet, perhaps it's time for another organization for everything else. I am sure there are those organizations, but they don't seem all that large or effective.

<comment><USER17> I think the difference is that the date search is for finding stuff that was originally posted / crawled in that date range. (I believe) the original comment was regarding searching some HTML, for example, as it was at that date.

That is to say: if you had a page that changed over time, you would be able to search for that page as it existed in a particular date range, not just searching for a page that was posted / first crawled in that range.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can't really disagree with the basic point. Expecting a for-profit organization--even if they're Google--to reliably over a long period of time provide an archiving service that's mostly a money [EDIT] leak isn't a realistic hope. The fact that it's embroiled Google in a number of ongoing legal disputes doesn't make it any easier.

On the other hand, it's not as if anyone (other than the Internet Archive of course) has exactly been stepping up to the plate. There's also the question of what a library is for these purposes and what do they have the right to do with respect to archiving copyrighted digital text and media.

<comment><USER18> Deja News used to archive Usenet. They got bought by Google. It's now not possible[1] to specify a date range when searching Google Groups.

They took it, they broke it, and now we can't use it properly.

[1] [http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/73179/how-do-i- sp...](http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/73179/how-do-i-specify-a- date-range-when-searching-google-groups)

<comment><USER15> That's sort of the point of the article, no? And it's not like Deja News was likely to stay functional in any case.

It's probably also worth pointing out that before Deja News and Google were ever involved, a large chunk of Usenet came close to being lost [1] and significant chunks of it have been in any case. So it's not as if preservation necessarily happens in the absence of corporate involvement either.

[1] [http://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/](http://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/)

<comment><USER19> What I don't understand is why companies aren't held accountable for their _obvious responsibilities_. Google _has_ to publicize these archives. It shouldn't be up to them if their public records are publicly accessible. I was born on this planet and I have the _right_ to be able to get a copy of any Usenet archive Google has. For free. Whenever I want.

I really really hate them for locking up this data (like so much its not funny, like major humanitarian crime imho).

<comment><USER20> I don't see how Google should have any responsibility wrt. Usenet.

Google is not the only party having Usenet archives. They are not even in any way special. They aren't the "official" archives, just as Deja wasn't.

If you're really interested in getting your hands on Usenet archives, going way back to the Ice Age, there are plenty of ways to do so.

Especially with the huge Hamster community ([http://www.tglsoft.de/freeware_hamster.html](http://www.tglsoft.de/freeware_hamster.html)), who are archiving almost fanatically, you should be able to get virtually everything you'd want just by asking nicely.

Other parties who certainly have archives are all the major news servers.

<comment><USER11> > Especially with the huge Hamster community > ([http://www.tglsoft.de/freeware_hamster.html](http://www.tglsoft.de/freeware_hamster.html)), > who are archiving almost fanatically, you should be able to get virtually > everything you'd want just by asking nicely.

What is the Hamster community? It sounds interesting. The link points to some software that could be used to help archive, but doesn't say much more (at least browsing around the Google translation of it).

<comment><USER20> Hamster is a local news and mail server for Win32.

It's comparable to sn on Linux: it acts as a reader, not as a "real news server" (IHAVE/SENDME).

So people could use it with their regular Usenet account on a dialup PC.

And since it's scriptable (alas, in some own script language), people extended it in lots of ways.

<comment><USER11> Thanks. How does "archiving almost fanatically" fit in with that? Or is this archiving culture just coincidental?

<comment><USER20> Coincidental. I haven't kept my archives, even though at one point I had sucked postings for several nights (all of de.*, and the Big8, I think).

But others kept their "purple data" religiously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is it just me or is the way back machine behind a 2400kbps modem? When I try it either doesn't work or it takes minutes to load.

I can also say that hard experience has taught me to fear nonprofits. A corporation makes money by satisfying needs as well as from rich people financing it. Non profits are financed by rich people so you are working 100% for the 1% instead of 99%.

You see all the same niggardlyness with nonprofits but at least in a corporation it is possible you can improve your service and make money and get rewarded for it. Nonprofits tend be lose-lose or no deal.

<comment><USER22> On the other hand: [http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com](http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This sort of question will become obsolete, once data are freely available. 4TB tarball with Usenet archive. And nice ecosystem of open-source tools for mining.

Already happened with maps thanks to Open Street Map.

<comment><USER15> Usenet's just an example. Its hosting at another site with better search tools could (I assume) be dealt with relatively easily given that it's pretty much just text. There may, of course, be issues of which I'm not aware. After all, this hasn't happened.

By no means though is the ongoing archiving and sharing of petabytes of complex web sites and other information repositories a simple problem even if the data were readily available and the issues associated with rehosting copyrighted material worked through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Don't be Google" is a good motto. [http://doonesbury.washingtonpost.com/strip/archive/2014/06/0...](http://doonesbury.washingtonpost.com/strip/archive/2014/06/01)

</comment><comment><USER25> You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

<comment><USER26> Personally i think Google's mission is much more heroic.

<comment><USER27> One of the article's main point was that the mission has changed, its no longer about "all the worlds information" because it (storing old historical information) doesn't help their business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The Internet archive is a 501c(3) corporation, isn't it?

As an aside, its new interface is utterly terrible with JavaScript turned off.

<comment><USER29> Why would you turn off JavaScript?

<comment><USER30> Security and better performance on cheap hardware are two reasons I turn it off by default and only enable it when I really need it.

<comment><USER13> You should turn it on when browsing archive.org - you'll really need it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I just played Oregon Trail through the browser with my wife and daughter taking turns! So much fun!

</comment><comment><USER32> Two very cliché anti-Facebook and anti-Google articles on the front page today. Slow news day?

</comment><comment><USER27> A library is a public institution and thus is not really the same as thinking it as a "non profit". It could be thought of an organisation that the public has shares in, that the public are the angel investors in. Thus, we, the people, have an investment in a library. Allowing a private corporation to run a part of our institutions effectively dilutes the investment of the angel investors.

This changes the thinking about money and sustainability from non-profit, charity through to for-profit to one of a public ownership.

The lessons that we the investors (and thus as a kind of board member) in our public institutions are making is that big public spirited helpful corporations are ultimately corporations, and will ultimately behave as such. And we should never allow our investments to be diluted in this way again.</comment>


A touch of magic: Controlling Kitematic & Docker with a touch display on the RPi - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hypriot.com/post/a-touch-of-magic-controlling-kitematic-with-a-touch-display-on-the-raspberry-pi/ <comment><USER2> Awesome!</comment>


Interview Ari Lerner about AngularJS, FullStack and Book Writing - <AUTHOR> http://yedingding.com/2014/05/06/teahour-51-angular-with-ari-lerner.html

<comment><USER2> I collected all the various definitions of full-stack i could find online. it's basically meaningless.

[http://wayfinder.co/pathways/535e46a318fbce1100cf7f2a/the- va...](http://wayfinder.co/pathways/535e46a318fbce1100cf7f2a/the-various- definitions-of-full-stack)

<comment><USER3> It's basically recruiters saying "I want a candidate that can write a js app on the client,the html,the css, and can write all the server side code for it,manage the server,the deployment,the db, lead a team and do project management, all at the same time..." which of course is impossible.

Thankfully recruiting never is about what's possible... especially when it comes to the salary that should go with the "fullstack" requirement...

Now devs calling themself "fullstack" is another story...

<comment><USER2> You'd be amazed how much of that running an active open source project prepares you for.

Other than myself, I know a couple of dozen developers who can comfortably refer to themselves as full-stack.

But those people are never going to even talk to recruiters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> OT: for a second, I thought there was a smudge on my screen.

[http://unicodelookup.com/#、/1](http://unicodelookup.com/#、/1)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. Sorry I mess that.</comment></comment>


Microsoft bans employees from using Slack, discourages AWS and Google Docs - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-bans-employees-from-using-slack-has-aws-and-1835770652 <comment><USER2> This is a weird non-article to me. It sounds more just like a CISO policy with SDLC components to provide reasonable guidelines to use the systems they already use and support. If you had a company hosting all of your source code on a private GitLab and you then found out a bunch of people were using the public GitLab, you would be annoyed.

You have to set some guidelines about what people use in very large organizations.

<comment><USER3> Also, I think it makes sense for Microsoft (or another company) to use their own products (such as their Teams service as a replacement to Slack). Best way for the company to know what their customers experience.

<comment><USER4> I dogfooded[0] once and don't remember any channels or mechanisms for our feedback. (Of course the devs would see crash reports.) And no one admitted that we were even eating the dog food.

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

<comment><USER3> > And no one admitted that we were even eating the dog food.

Do you know why? That seems to be a weird thing to refuse to admit.

<comment><USER4> It was presented as saving license costs by not using the standard product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > along with tools such as the Grammarly grammar checker

That one makes a lot of sense, it's basically a keylogger in your browser, that's also a recommendation I've made a lot. If you need to use their service, use their web-version on their website, and paste in the text you want to check.

<comment><USER6> I see ads for this all the time, and it's absurd to me that it's primarily marketed towards native speakers of English. All the ads have college students writing essays. If you're in college and you can't conjugate properly, I don't even know what to say.

<comment><USER7> That's an incredibly judgemental attitude. Being in college doesn't mean you have to be able to write to perfection.

<comment><USER6> Most people write terribly when they're freshmen, including me. A big part of the college experience is learning how to write well and write persuasively. You get better by doing it repeatedly and having an instructor provide feedback, even it means getting a few Cs and B-minuses along the way. That's how human beings learn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can the submission title be fixed to make more sense within the allowed character count?

The article title is "Microsoft Bans Employees From Using Slack, Has AWS and Google Docs on a 'Discouraged' List"

Suggestion: "Microsoft Bans Employees From Using Slack, Discourages AWS & Google Docs"

<comment><USER9> This title is wrong, they ban the non-enterprise version of Slack and encouorage the use of Teams over the enterprise version. The real change that should happen is changing the link from the Gizmodo article to the Geekwire article it links to that actually contains this information.

<comment><USER8> True but you can only fit so much info in the title. How would you suggest the post, even the geekwire post, be titled on HN?

Even an ellipsis at the end of the current title would make much more sense.

<comment><USER9> "Microsoft Discourages Employees From Using Slack, AWS & Google Docs" is shorter and seems more accurate because of Slack not actually being banned. The actual bans all appear to be for legitimate compliance reasons rather than "don't use competitors", even Github is banned "for Highly Confidential types of information, specs or code" though they presumably have an on-premise instance of Github they use for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This sounds extremely clickbaity. Of course MS will discourage its own employees to use a cloud other than its own (which makes up a huge portion of its total business). The 'prohibited' section just sounds like sane steps for any business to take; copy pasting business secrets into a blackbox translation service hoping they don't save what was pasted seems like a pretty big security risk.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is SOP at most Big 4. It does strike me as funny, though, that MS would ban Slack/GDocs, that Google bans basically all non-Google cloud products, yet both companies are trying to convince other large firms that cloud is the future, on prem is dead, and that their data is safe with them. Seems hypocritical.

<comment><USER12> "Do as we say, not as we do."

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This was discussed previously on HN[0] before being subsequently flagged down for being rather misleading even _after_ a title change to mention that it is _" Free"_ Slack that is being banned.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20250426](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20250426)

</comment><comment><USER14> A bit clickbait. MS bans and/or discourages, where appropriate based on what's employees are working on, using tools that do not meet security policies, like crazy browser plugins that literally snoop everything you type.

Slow news day, I guess?

</comment><comment><USER15> Microsoft bans the non enterprise version of Slack because of compliance reasons.

<comment><USER10> I work for a big company (also technology, but not same area as MS), and we also ban slack for the same reasons.

<comment><USER12> That makes sense. However, I've noticed that some free products are more tolerated than others, like Trello. I wonder why that is - one can suck out data from Trello cards just as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They ban certain versions of Slack that are not secure enough, they allow the enterprise version (though like most companies building competing products, it's discouraged over their own software.

</comment><comment><USER17> Why MS prohibits the use of Grammarly?

<comment><USER18> Because it will have access to confidential information. It's essentially a keylogger.

<comment><USER17> I agree, totally forgot about this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Even GitHub is on the list, which makes me think it's an outdated document maybe?

<comment><USER20> Github is only on there for sensitive content - which makes total sense.

Basically this article can be summarised as:

> _large organisations have company policies about which tools you can use to > protect their IP from being leaked_

Microsoft isn't alone in that department either. Lots of businesses do the same. It's just a natural part of compliance for any large organisation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd be very surprised if microsoft doesnt acquire slack in the next 2 years

<comment><USER7> The CEO Stewart Butterfield has already said he doesn't intend to sell, based on his bad experience of selling Flickr to Yahoo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Going back to the old days when then only smartphone you could use as an MSFT employee was Windows CE based I see.

Granted it lasted for only a few years but it annoyed a lot of people.</comment>


Rate/review Newsbrane.com - personalized news recommendation - <AUTHOR> http://newsbrane.com/

<comment><USER2> No, it won't replace HN. It would need good content and less fluff to start. Additionally, it would need a way to quickly scan through the article headlines without having to deal with article content so that you can more easily skip the filler articles. In short, this might be a nice alternative to digg.

<comment><AUTHOR> OK, thanks.

What I'm understanding from your post is that the front page needs work. Is this accurate -- you didn't see anything you liked on the front?

(Edit: I also understood that you want to be able to scan the headlines, and that's something that I'm interested in too.)

There's lots of high-quality content in the site (we pull from several hundred RSS feeds), but you are going to have to train it for a while before Newsbrane will learn what you think constitutes quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I generally like the layout.

I assume the tabs on a story are to represent duplicates? You might want to make them more subtle or not make them at the top. When a tabbed link is shown first on the page, it looks like the entire page is tabbed, and it also makes the site confusing (e.g. is the entire site about Dinosaur comics?).

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, that's great feedback, thank you!

The tabs show you the same story from different sources. Dinosaur Comics appearing twice with the same content is a bug, oops. :) I agree they can be confusing, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to represent this information without being as confusing.

<comment><USER3> If you put the "tabs" at the bottom of each story instead of the top, or even on the side, it would probably avoid the confusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> UI wise I like being able to scan titles quickly, so I can skip content I'm not really interested in. Your site feels like it's just another blog, not a news site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Useful feedback - thanks!

If you want to quickly skip stuff, the shortcut keys (J and K to go up and down) might be good for you. :)

Other than that, we've considered making a condensed view before -- it seems like that might be valuable.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey! We created Newsbrane because we were frustrated with the skew between the popular stuff and the quality stuff on social news sites like this one and Reddit. Easy-to-upvote stuff gets to the top quickly, which is not always what you want.

Newsbrane learns your personal tastes, so it avoids this problem. Now whatever's at the top of your recommendations is completely up to you, and if you don't like it, you can change it with a few downvotes. It learns instantly, so just refresh the page after making a few votes either way.

We wrote a more detailed article about this "lowest common denominator problem" and how Newsbrane solves it: <http://blog.newsbrane.com/?p=4>

Anyway, if you'd try Newsbrane, I'd be appreciative. If you send us feedback -- UI suggestions, security flaws, whatever -- I'll be VERY appreciative. Emailing email@example.com is the easiest way for me, but feel free to post here if it adds to the discussion! I intend to respond to every piece of feedback.

The main question I want to answer is whether it can replace Hacker News for you. If not, why not?

When you first sign up, you'll have to spend a little time training Newsbrane before it's useful. A good way to train it, if you know what you usually want to read, is to click 'Add Subscription' and add the Hacker News feed (or whatever other feeds you like), and vote on the recent articles there.

Good luck!

<comment><USER5> I'd like to offer a small observation about how you are pitching your idea to this group:

I know you are thinking about how to unseat the competition, but asking people to try out your tool with an eye toward abandoning something that we like is not the best approach, in my opinion.

I don't want to "replace" Hacker News. I assume that I am not alone -- many people are very loyal to HN, and like the community and the information found here. We're not looking to dump it in favor of something else, although if it's a compelling product I might use it in addition to HN.

<comment><USER6> Yes - suggesting that your product might "replace" HN creates preconceptions in my mind before I get there. I see the link, I imagine startup relevant topics, I see dinosaur comics. WTF? Fail.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops, sorry to give you the wrong preconceptions. If you train it by voting a bunch, you can make it give you whatever topics you like, startup news definitely included. If you don't have the patience to train it, I've heard that feedback before, and that's an axis along which we don't have a good answer yet -- though hopefully we will soon!

<comment><USER6> Thats okay, marketing is a learned skill.

You might try making some profile templates that I can start with. The landing page could say, if you like Hacker News, click here, if you like XKCD, click here, etc. Clicking would copy the profile of a user that you have pre-trained with items that are like that site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Well, I changed the title of the post in response to feedback that we were setting the wrong expectations.

The old title was "Rate/review -- can it replace HN for you?"

I'm still interested in answering that question, but it's not because I hate HN -- I love it, especially the community -- it's because I feel like there's a niche for personalized news.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's ugly as hell. While I see what Newsbrane is attempting to do, it's failing miserably when it comes to execution.

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh, that's fair -- we haven't ever hired a graphic designer or UI designer, and we definitely need it.

Thanks for being honest!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Explicit up/down voting is a bad idea. You should remove that and concentrate on implicit behavior acquisition.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello!

I agree that there's a lot of stuff we can do without requiring users to give us specific feedback. And we're doing some of it, and we probably will do a lot more in the future.

But when I'm looking at a news site, I often find myself thinking "this is good" or "I am not interested in this", and Newsbrane allows me to express that preference. It's not the only way we get data into the recommendation engine, but it's an important way.

Why do you say it is a bad idea?</comment></comment>


Show HN: a web-based xkcd-style comix editor - <AUTHOR> http://cmx.io <comment><USER2> Disappointed the top comments are criticizing and discussing the browser limitations.

For a weekend project, this guy created a UI that deals intuitively deals with angles, bezier curves, dependent relations between objects, and turns it all into HTML, and you guys are that butt hurt it only works in Chrome?

<comment><USER3> While I agree with your message, I don't think "butt hurt" is the most appropriate term you could have used here.

<comment><USER2> Sure, while yes, these people don't actually seem "offended" as "butt hurt" would somewhat crudely imply, your need to assert such a pedantic issue is the very essence of my original point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Man, this is amazing.

Think about the endless possibilities. On top of that it will be possible to build a library of objects like: "NormalGuy", "Ninja", "Tree" and so on.

Then it will be cool to programmatically move them. No Idea if that is feasible or not. Maybe not, but I will say otherwise.

Then we could describe an environment in which they could act in a declarative way. We could add simple behaviours shaped on top of simple goals. Those goals could be described in a similar way as the environment. If we tie a behaviour to an animation we have small drones of "Ninja" that act on themselves (well..kind of).

Or we could move those animation with the keyboard. I mean, at this point possibilities are just to be enumerated.

At the end it will be like a DSL to describe animation and behaviour and environment. Like an engine for videogames, animation, even smart behaviour (not mentioning AI and similars)

I don't know, I smell something really great behind that think that you built.

<comment><USER5> forgive me if i've missed any sardonicism, but you might be interested in learning you are describing Flash in thorough detail.

<comment><USER4> ahahah, yep you are actually right. A big difference, probably the only important one, is that you could read, and modify, the source using the same medium (the browser). So the gap for people to play with that is almost zero. This is probably one of the forces that have allowed the Internet to become what it is today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "STOP! WebKit is required here. The Comix Editor was tested under Chrome. It uses some webkit-specific tricks."

WebKit - the new IE.

<comment><USER7> The main problem with IE wasn't that it was an exclusive product incompatible with other browsers. The problem was that it was bad. I'm not a fan of people only supporting WebKit, but at least WebKit browsers are _good_.

<comment><USER8> I used IE briefly in 2000 and 2001, before Mozilla (0.9) became usable enough and Phoenix came out; back then (IE 5.5 to IE 6.0) it definitely was the best browser, by far.

<comment><USER9> It was the most _forgiving_ browser, with a quirks mode that handled broken code like a champ. But Opera was the best browser, and if your code rendered correctly in it, it would probably render correctly everywhere else (except maybe Netscape 4, an abomination that took too long to die).

<comment><USER10> Opera was also commercial. At some point there was a free adware version, but I think that was later than 2001. After IE, most people stopped paying for web browsers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, combine this with <http://xkcdgraphs.com> and you've got the ability to do a pretty good Randall Munroe impression!

<comment><USER12> I thought the Randall Munro personality came from the writing. Stick figures are not the hard part.

<comment><USER13> but they are the seasoning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's my problem.

It works, fairly well. But I spent about 15 minutes doing one panel, trying to figure out the minor nuances. I kept thinking to myself "I could do a whole comic in about 5 minutes in photoshop" as I adjusted the person's location, arm, speech, etc (and that was just modifying the characters that were already in the scene). In the end it was just not worth it in my mind.

Also, imagine creating something like Randalls "Click and Drag" comic (xkcd.com/1110/) -- how would you create all these custom objects in the editor without changing it into something similar to an HTML5 web-photoshop, at which point you might as well do that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this a prototype and definitely not for everyone. It has many downsides. I agree Photoshop gives you full pixel control.

I think it has some upsides too. You may treat comix source as html code and apply tools we have for coding today, eg. diffs, version control, collaboration via github. People may also collaborate on library of items, actors and their poses, so you don't have to re-create them or copy&pase all the time. Also localisation will be a snap. And it will possibly allow animations in the future.

Actually I built this for a bigger project. I want to explain Bitcoin technically in the form of XKCD comix. This won't be one-off comix strip. This will be something like wiki/book which will evolve and I hope it will attract other contributors (not necessarily graphic designers).

<comment><USER15> OP is missing the point - the markup idea is brilliant.

The WYSIWIG will come in it's million forms later and you shouldn't focus on it.

I just need comix.vim and I'm good.

I'm imagining real time comics. Chat comics. Comic discussion forums. It's endless! ;)

<comment><USER16> > Chat comics.

It'll be 1996 all over again: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat>

<comment><USER17> Damn, good memories of that, forgot what it was called!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think its brilliant. I love the balance you've created between the visual editor and the markup.

Have you considered this as an educational tool? This is a fun and useful introduction to HTML and markup languages in general.

Would it be possible to highlight the relevant markup node when you've selected an object in the visual editor? That would be neat from a learning perspective.

</comment><comment><USER19> I love the scribbly cubic beziers you have going on for the speech bubbles. Moving around their control points makes them dance a little. Great stuff.

<comment><USER20> Reminds me of that part from Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle talk.

Those who have seen it will know what I'm referring to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> To go along with it, making XKCD diagrams in Mathematica: [http://blog.wolfram.com/2012/10/05/automating-xkcd- diagrams-...](http://blog.wolfram.com/2012/10/05/automating-xkcd-diagrams- transforming-serious-to-funny/)

</comment><comment><USER22> This is neat!

Unfortunately, the editor does not work for me. It makes Chrome crash the page :(

I'm running Chrome 24.0.1312.69 on one of those new Dell XPS 13 Ubuntu machines running 12.04.2 LTS. Is there any other information you'd want for debugging, or pages to try?

</comment><comment><USER23> It's like <http://yUML.me>, but better :)

<http://yuml.me/e5d8e14e>

[http://yuml.me/diagram/scruffy;/usecase/edit/[Bob]-(This%20i...](http://yuml.me/diagram/scruffy;/usecase/edit/\[Bob\]-\(This%20is%20a%20shit%20comic\),%20\[Phil\]-\(Agree!\))

T

</comment><comment><USER24> Aw, snap! Crashes chrome 24.0.1312.57 on Ubuntu 12.10. I tried opening the console to get additional info, but it doesn't show anything.

<comment><USER25> This is one of the coolest things about HN. There's a link there, and it crashes your browser. Instead of getting angry, you try to help the person whose creation crashed your browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Brilliant. But... now wait for a deluge of tenth-rate internet comics!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Good news. Comix Editor will work on Opera soon. And without my work :-)

[http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move- to-...](http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-webkit)

</comment><comment><USER27> This is awesome! Okay,I agree with others that say that photoshop is easier, and that most people ( _ahem_ , like yours truly) would make crappy comics. But...c'mon...an _xkcd_ editor?!?!?1!! hecka cool

</comment><comment><USER28> The source shows quite clearly why the HTML community needs try to address the adoption of namespaces in HTML5 ASAP, maybe not in the current form but in some simplified form.

I feel uncomfortable with the use of non-namespaced tags and squatting on common terms. For example, cmx.io uses tags like <scene>, <label>, <drawing> and so on. I really would prefer it used something like <cmx:scene> or <c:scene>, so that it would be possible to mix CMX tags with other libraries that use similar tag names.

</comment><comment><USER29> Bravo! How difficult was it making the characters posable?

</comment><comment><USER30> It'd be cool if changes in visual editor would focus & highlight the changes in text and vice versa.

</comment><comment><USER31> Great project - really easy to use and works well. As other comments have said there's tonnes of potential / additional functionality which could be added, but this is a great start.

For anyone interested, here's my play: <http://cmx.io/#4949114>

<comment><AUTHOR> You made my day :)

It reminds me I have to build some feed with published comics :)

<comment><USER31> Thanks, you made mine too - it's rare that I can find a library which I can create something with within an hour of coming across it, and this is also my first contribution to the world of memes, so chuffed that I got to do it using such a great utility. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with next.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Better idea, draw the comic by hand in 5 minutes (I think everyone can draw stick figures), photo it, desaturate and add high contrast in gimp, voila. No webkit required :)

</comment><comment><USER33> This is fun, but for it be useful in production the control scheme would need to be made more GUI-like. Great start!

</comment><comment><USER34> Why do I also get a Windows Media Player extension warning? Surely, JS + CSS doesn't need WMP help?

</comment><comment><USER35> This is really neat. It would be cool to combine it with one of the JS-based presentation engines.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, that was actually my original plan. I wanted to make slides explaining some Bitcoin concepts, but I wasn't able to draw a comics. This actually started as a small hack on top of impress.js :)

Hey K., do you remember? You interviewed me back in 2009 for a Bespin position :-) The world is pretty small. Hope you are doing well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> And now, someone should create an AI capable of mimicking XKCD humor, and viola! Automated xkcd!

</comment><comment><USER37> Cool. Take it a step further and make it so we don't have to edit the HTML/CSS code.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey folks, thanks for all your great comments and watch out for v0.2 :)

</comment><comment><USER38> Science not included.

</comment><comment><USER39> Stick some IRC behind this and instant Comic Chat!

</comment><comment><USER40> Well done! That's really impressive work.

</comment><comment><USER41> This is awesome. Such a great idea!

</comment><comment><USER42> This is great, nice work!

</comment><comment><USER43> bootstrap is everywhere

</comment><comment><USER44> This little comic I "created" some time ago is never going to be so relevant again so here it is [inmature humor ahead]: <http://i.imgur.com/EnXc9e9.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER45> Any known issue with Chromium?

I just get an error message saying that the page script was taking too much memory and was stopped.

<comment><USER46> Same here (Version 24.0.1312.56 Ubuntu 12.10 (24.0.1312.56-0ubuntu0.12.10.3))

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Marry me.</comment>


Show HN: I built an iPhone app that matches colour of iPhone 5c/5s - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tick-tock-set-many-timers/id695055694

<comment><USER2> Do users have to set it manually, or did you find a way to determine the colour programmatically?

<comment><USER3> There appears to be a private API for that: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8463212/detecting- color-o...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8463212/detecting-color-of- iphone-ipad-ipod-touch)

Not sure if this is how it was done; likely a user prompt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Simple, beautiful, free! I love it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Beautiful app, congrats!

If I may ask, how do you get the color?

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice one.</comment>


Ask HN: MVP - minimum viable programmer - <AUTHOR>

I get the occasional query from young programmers about what stack I think they should learn or focus on. Mostly, the answer is situational. But we can elevate the response to dogma ... maybe that would be fun. I have a bias towards full stack. I recognize a specialist path exists, but I think it should be the ambition of the few (and they will know when they are "chosen). Even then, they would benefit greatly from the stack. Here's what I think everyone should add to their toolbox:
1. "Almost doesn't need to be said" category: html, shell (i.e. bash), uml, familiarity with multiple tools (editors, IDEs), some server knowledge.
2. A scripting language: In 2013, I guess the best candidates are Ruby and Python. In my book, Python gets the nod.
3. Web skills: And by web skills, I really mean competency in javascript and css. Understand naked js and css. You need to at least "get" jQuery. Digging deeper here? My vote goes to LESS for css and Angular for a js framework.
4. Java: I put Java in a category all by itself. This is the hammer in a programmer's toolbox. Understanding how to really design, write, and deploy Java applications is probably the single biggest step any programmer can take. Lots of people don't really like Java ... but they know it well enough to know why. It just informs so much in 2013. And if you work in the enterprise, its pervasive.
5. SQL: By sql I don't mean just crud statements. Know more. Much more. The db is behind everything. Knowing how to access it properly and efficiently will inform your ability to design db structures and your code (whatever language).
6 (Bonus) One more thing: Competency in the above makes you a useful corporate drone, a cog in the machine. We all want more than that. Pick one more thing: a framework (RoR, django, web2py, spring, play)? another language (scala, would be my pick)?
TLDR - Basics, Python, JS/CSS, Java, SQL, ? = future <comment><USER2> I think this is a good start if you are saying "minimum viable web developer". Plenty of programming doesn't involve the web.

In the context of web development, though, I'd add/change:

1\. Decent familiarity with HTTP.

2\. Fairly good Linux skills. I guess this may not be applicable if you want to stick with the .NET stack, but most developers are going to use something like RoR, Node, Java, etc in their lifetime and those, for the most part, are hosted in Linux environments.

3\. I like Java more than the average developer, and agree that it can be really useful for getting your foot in the door at a lot of places, but I don't know that it is important enough to be required for the MVWD.

</comment><comment><USER3> Minimum viable [web] programmer.

An base understanding of TCP/IP and networking is pretty important in this context as well.</comment>


For those at northerly latitudes, Comet NEOWISE up in the evening now, too - <AUTHOR> https://earthsky.org/space/how-to-see-comet-c2020-f3-neowise <comment><USER2> I was a fourteen year-old astronomy geek for Halley's Comet in 1986. What a complete dud it turned out to be.

This comet is amazing. Get out and see it while you can!

Here's a picture of it this morning in Raleigh, NC (not my picture):

[https://i.imgur.com/qKXjHnU.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/qKXjHnU.jpg)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/raleigh/comments/hpsv6f/comet_c2020...](https://www.reddit.com/r/raleigh/comments/hpsv6f/comet_c2020_f3_neowise_bracketed_by_the_raleigh/)

<comment> blinding-streak Good intentions here but I think this is a little misleading. That photo almost certainly is a long exposure shot that enhances the visibility of the comet. That same poster also posted this image, which is what it looks like to the naked eye (i.e. it barely registers):

[https://i.imgur.com/2Il4yJN.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/2Il4yJN.jpg)

I too remember Halley's comet viewing -- my dad was super excited to see it. It was underwhelming.

Comet Hale–Bopp though, in 1995, was awesome.

<comment><USER3> Comet Hale-Bopp was one of the most magical sights I've ever witnessed. You could see the long, majestic trail with your own eyes, entirely unaided. No binoculars, telescope, or long exposure needed. It was huge, and it stayed with us for awhile.

Hale-Bopp felt like a celestial dragon or an ethereal god that came to visit. I spent hours outside looking at it. It was mesmerizing.

NEOWISE is pitiful in contrast. I'm hoping I get to see another comet like Hale-Bopp in my lifetime. It made me understand why ancient societies ascribe such meaning to astronomical events.

The other remarkable space event in my life was the total solar eclipse a few years back. The entire world changed for a moment, and the corona was like a glittering chromatic jewel suspended in the sky. I will travel wherever the next total solar eclipse takes me - they're not to be missed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Saw it over the rooftops from my bedroom window at the weekend. Wonderful.

Topped a great week. All the main planets were strung across the early morning sky like Christmas lights.

</comment><comment><USER5> In Belgium, because of the light pollution, it's impossible to see it with the naked eye.

I could, however, catch a short time-lapse of it with my camera:

[https://youtu.be/tq_CEIFzh70](https://youtu.be/tq_CEIFzh70)

Something I don't get is that the comet will come closer to earth in the next days; however, the astronomy sites say it will lose intensity. How can that be possible?

<comment><USER6> The comet is getting farther away from the sun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Article claims it's binocs only, but I have seen it with the naked eye two mornings in a row (09 and 10 July).

<comment><USER8> I could see it with the naked eye in a severely light polluted area but this was after confirming its location with binoculars, I'm not confident I would have found it otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I followed earthsky for sometime, and then stopped. Now I've been following Universe Today. The author is intelligent, but something is lacking - and I'm not sure what.

Can others provide a list of review of RSS worthy space blogs?

<comment><USER10> I like Portaltotheuniverse.org's rss feed. Always something interesting to read.

[https://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/rss/all](https://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/rss/all)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For those curious about the first image [0] and it's caption ("Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project captured Comet NEOWISE on July 7, 2020, along with the International Space Station (dashed line)")

The dashed line is not the ISS but a plane. The ISS doesn't blink ;-)

[0]: [https://earthsky.org/upl/2020/07/Gianluca-Masi-comet- NEOWISE...](https://earthsky.org/upl/2020/07/Gianluca-Masi-comet-NEOWISE-Rome- Italy-7-7-2020-e1594141387754.jpg)

<comment><USER12> The dashed line may be an artefact of how such a long exposure is captured - where multiple shorter exposures are taken and stacked on top of each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For some reason the charts showing when and where to see it are missing from the page for me. This is with no ad blockers installed, oddly enough. . I'm at 33° N., so I'll check out the morning sky for now, but would like to get more detail about when to see it.

<comment><USER14> Try wolframalpha.com, enter e.g. "Comet NEOWISE Berlin, 4a.m." (no quotes, replace Berlin with your location and the time with the time you want to watch) and scroll down until you see an image of the sky with the position of the comet on it.

Good luck and enjoy!

<comment><USER15> It interpreted "Neowise" as a reference to the one that was discovered in 2014. To get the right one, "Comet C/2020 F3 Berlin, 4am"

<comment><USER14> Thanks for catching that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The location of'neowise' is shown in Stellarium today (near the Moon) for those using it.

<comment><USER17> I've always been a fan of Heavens-Above for this kind of thing...

[https://www.heavens- above.com/SkyChart.aspx?lat=47.6&lng=-12...](https://www.heavens- above.com/SkyChart.aspx?lat=47.6&lng=-122.2&loc=HN&alt=0&tz=PST)

[https://www.heavens- above.com/comet.aspx?cid=C%2F2020%20F3&l...](https://www.heavens- above.com/comet.aspx?cid=C%2F2020%20F3&lat=47.6&lng=-122.2&loc=HN&alt=0&tz=PST)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My daughter and I found a hill outside of the city. We could barely make out a smudge in the sky with bare eyes, but binocs and dSLR managed to capture it. Fun!

<comment><USER18> Here's the best image we could get: [https://imgur.com/a/ZOmP3k4](https://imgur.com/a/ZOmP3k4)

<comment><USER19> Excellent!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Northerly latitudes is relative. Here at over 61 deg N it does hardly get dark these days. So sky watching is still on hold for a couple of months.

</comment><comment><USER21> Hypothetically... if you wanted to launch a rocket from the ground and catch this thing... not gonna happen?

<comment><USER22> It has a retrograde orbit, and its orbit is highly inclined as well. You would have to fight against the Earth's orbit to catch up to it, and would have negligible opportunities for gravitational assists.

Every probe to the outer solar system has leveraged multiple gravitational assists. These would be off the table. Basically your only options is building a super monster rocket and force your way to it based entirely on pure thrust. The rendezvous maneuver would be a monster as well.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but you're probably looking at assembling something in orbit if you _really_ want to go visit the thing.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the info, I figured as much but good to know more details. "Alright guys, you have the entire world's money, let's do it".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Northerly latitudes? The sun doesn't set so how am I supposed to see this?

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't get why every Starlink launch, every comet, every ISS or GPS flare I have to download another app / spend ages trying to track down how to see it.

Isn't there like a Monkey script I can grab to add to an app that people can just post?

I do guess it creates some sense of adventure having to seek it out.</comment>


Top YUI training videos for new developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.wappworks.com/2012/02/24/top-yui-training-videos-for-new-developers/

<comment><USER2> You know, it's annoying to see people that post in order to promote their own web site. Rather, since "wappworks" all you've ever commented on, I assume you're connected with it somehow.</comment>


Opinionated piece about Google Go and Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/05/google_go/print.html

<comment><USER2> older, more active discussion is here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2518609>

</comment><comment><USER3> Ok. Fine, Go is a great language. But nodejs' popularity is also due to the fact that I don't have to learn yet another language. I already know javascript fairly well and adopting nodejs was a matter of hours, days, not weeks or months.

So sure, heavy cpu multi-threaded apps might run better on Go. But I'm not running in that court anyway.

<comment><USER4> Right, node's popularity has to do with all the javascript guys that have felt left out all these years finally getting their shot at the backend.

<comment><USER5> You sound angry with all the javascript guys who can now dance on both sides of the stack. What's up with the hate? JS is on the move, and maturing. Hell it even looks ok as coffeescript. Good for everyone right? I'm a Haskell/Python "lover", and a designer (I like beautiful code like I love beautiful typography), and I really like where JS is going right now.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Robots Could Be Awesome Whistleblowers - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/why-robots-could-be-awesome-whistleblowers/381216/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> Not entirely sure whether this was satire or actually serious.</comment>


OpenSSL CVE-2010-5298 / CVE-2014-0198 - <AUTHOR> http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-2192-1/ Two more vulnerabilities patched so expect to be seeing package updates soon.
The 4 year old CVE-2010-5298 is described  as
"Race condition in the ssl3_read_bytes function in s3_pkt.c in OpenSSL through 1.0.1g, when SSL_MODE_RELEASE_BUFFERS is enabled, allows remote attackers to inject data across sessions or cause a denial of service (use-after-free and parsing error) via an SSL connection in a multithreaded environment."
The more concerning part obviously being data injection.
CVE-2014-0198 is described as "A null pointer dereference bug was discovered in so_ssl3_write(). An attacker could possibly use this to cause OpenSSL to crash, resulting in a denial of service."
Clearly in the wake of heartbleed OpenSSL is undergoing serious scrutiny; and hopefully this results in a wider attitude change:
Just because something is opensource doesn't mean someone has audited the code for you, it's there you can read it yourself ... 20:20 hindsight eh?
Ah well sleep is truely for quitters ... headdesk <comment><USER2> This doesn't seem all that important. There are numerous bugs around most software out there which can cause it to crash. It's not good, but it's also not the worst one out there.

If it was that bad, it would have been fixed earlier. It was reported first in 2010: [https://rt.openssl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=2167&user=gues...](https://rt.openssl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=2167&user=guest&pass=guest)

It was also fixed a few weeks ago.

Edit: Just noticed that the openssl bug tracker passes the username and password in the URL. Oh dear...

<comment><USER3> At least no google results for anything other than guest show up.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> r/netsec threads on CVE-2010-5298:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/22whnm/openssl_useaf...](http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/22whnm/openssl_useafterfree_race_condition/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/23pggy/all_versions_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/23pggy/all_versions_on_openssl_vulnerable_to_this_one/)

RH Response: [https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2010-5298](https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2010-5298) see the BZ links closed as "not exploitable"</comment>


Show HN: I started a literary magazine for machine-generated text - <AUTHOR> http://curatedai.com <comment><USER2> This is very interesting.Do you mind sharing more about it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course-- I have long written poetry, and recently have had some fun writing software that writes poetry-- specifically, recurrent neural nets. I found that there are many people out there doing the same, and rather than just try to disguise these pieces as human works, I wanted to provide a place to enjoy the peculiarities and progress of machine-written literature.

And so CuratedAI.com was born. Our goal is to collect and showcase the wide array of software-mediated textual work that is being written.

Personally, I find that it is a great exercise in post-modernism; reading machine-generated pieces, I can't help but read meaning and intent into them. But, in a sense, they are the perfect post-modern texts-- the author necessarily does not have intent, and meaning is brought by the reader. Of course, the author of the author has certain intents, but that is several steps removed.

What else can I tell you?

<comment><USER3> This is pretty neat. There was a short piece on NPR a few weeks ago about AI poetry [1]. The goal was to make your AI poem indistinguishable from poetry sent in by listeners. The AI stuff was good, but the judge could tell every time what was written by a human and what was written by the machine. Interesting stuff.

[1] [http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/06/27/480...](http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/06/27/480639265/human- or-machine-can-you-tell-who-wrote-these-poems)

<comment><AUTHOR> I hadn't seen that, thanks! I think the giveaway right now is that machines don't understand how to tell stories-- the language sounds humanoid, but there is no point. It's actually very similar to listening to a child tell a story, where everything makes sense, and things are even described, but you're left feeling, "...so?"

<comment><USER3> Anytime.

That (similarity to a child telling a story) is an interesting comparison. I usually chalk up being able to immediately identify AI content as some kind of low grade, literary uncanny valley. Comparing it to the way children tell stories feels way more optimistic (because children grow into proper storytelling fairly quickly).

<comment><AUTHOR> Optimistic, but also based in experience-- my 2.5 yo sounds just like a neural net, full of non-sequitors, misplaced phrases, and a skewed sense of what others are interested in ;)

<comment><USER3> Heh that makes sense. Do you expect these AI capabilities to grow until their poetry is indistinguishable from ours? I think i'd be a little sad about that. I'm all for AI synthesizing the hell out of some new molecules or curing a few diseases, poetry though...that feels like our thing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft Office Cross-Platform Architecture – Scale 2014 - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFmByeQ_ulo

<comment><AUTHOR> found from: "How Microsoft is Taking Office Cross-Platform" \- [http://goo.gl/qHNbmE](http://goo.gl/qHNbmE)</comment>


Virtual reality Jobs at Apple - <AUTHOR> https://jobs.apple.com/us/search#&ss=virtual%20reality&t=1&so=&lo=0*USA&pN=0&openJobId=37025954 <comment><USER2> With a capital J in the title, this reads as a really creepy attempt at resurrecting "the leader".

<comment><USER3> This is a good example why I dislike this american style of Capitalize Almost Everything in Titles. We can use bolder and bigger fonts these days to highlight titles.

<comment><USER4> Reality should have been capitalized or jobs shouldn't have been. The title as written implies Steve Jobs.

Virtual Reality Jobs at Apple

Virtual reality jobs at Apple

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'll bet anyone $5 that Apple is developing a VR (and/or AR) product for release.

It's not hard to figure out. Tim Cook has been in the media saying (I paraphrase slightly) "wait 'til you see the things we're working on that no- one is talking about yet, tee hee". There are more or less exactly two possibilities here: either Apple has come up with a product of a whole new kind which no-one or almost no-one has thought of before, or it's trying to repeat its Macintosh/iPod/iPhone/iPad trick of taking a product category which people have been talking about and trying to make happen for years and actually releasing a successful, polished product which appeals to consumers. Now, the last time Apple released a genuinely novel product it was HyperCard and Ronald Reagan was president of the USA. (Or arguably it was the Newton, in 1993.)

<comment><USER6> But gaming? Though iDevices are huge for gaming, you can definitely tell it's not in the company's DNA.

<comment><USER7> VR isn't necessarily about gaming. Generally there's huge opportunities for novel user interfaces.

<comment><USER6> The use of "not necessarily" implies that gaming is essential to VR, though.

<comment><USER8> It just implies that most people think of VR in that context.

<comment><USER6> Hm, yeah, I agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Scenekit and Metal both indicate a heavy investment in 3D graphics. VR display technology is a logical next step.

Replace all that C++ crap with Swift, and you have a great rapid game development platform.

<comment><USER10> They keep putting laptop-grade video cards into all desktops but pricey Mac Pros though.

<comment><USER11> I recently bought a PC desktop for some Oculus rift coding. Even my cat doesn't wanna hang out too long on top of the machine, that's how hot it gets. I think that burning > 100 watts on a GPU is just not the way to go forward with graphics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Really nice find!

As only a single result comes up (and that in the App category), I assume this is just a measure taken by Apple to cover it's bases in case VR takes off (though I'm not sure how iTunes for Occulus Rift is going to work).

But of course, Apple might have an entire hardware/software team poking at VR as we speak, and they're just one guy short.

<comment><USER12> > ...just a measure taken by Apple to cover it's bases in case VR takes off

I don't think Apple engages in that kind of speculative R&D. It's R&D is directly geared into product development (there are probably arguable edge cases). That's why it's R&D budget is so tiny compared to companies like Googe and Microsoft. I can't see them investing much in a huge, complex and poorly defined area like VR unless thay have some pretty specific ideas in mind.

<comment><USER13> It's still 4 billion, that's more half a dozen universities (not top tier, but average ones).

<comment><USER12> Wow you're right, it's shot up a huge amount in the last couple of years! Apple has traditionaly kept a very tight reign on R&D. Frankly it's hard to see how they can expand R&D spending that fast and keep it under tight management control. Interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "VR" gives two hits, _App Engineer_ and _Senior Software Engineer_ , with "VR/AR development"

Apple has lots of prototypes going on all the time, judging from their myriad patent applications, so this doesn't mean that much, in itself...

But, VR/AR seems the inevitable next step in miniaturization, as the display can be much smaller than a phone or watch etc. So I would be incredulous if Apple _wasn 't_ working seriously in this area.

</comment><comment><USER15> Apple has long been about the user experience. In fact its largely where it derives its competitive advantage. The comments regarding the Occulus Rift or "OR" are largely, I believe, a different area of VR. I cant imagine Apple pursuing a VR-Minecraft path. Rather I think Apple is trying to invent a new method of user input == replacing the KVM. Every other attempt at VR seems like a mere extension or just another thing to plug into a usb port. Apple would be foolish to take this path.

</comment><comment><USER16> Let the next 5 years of "when is Apple's VR product coming out" hype begin!

</comment><comment><USER17> at 33 minutes no results are shown for that query. was something interesting taken down?

<comment><USER18> For anyone who can't see it (try refreshing): [http://i.imgur.com/vSvOsHF.png](http://i.imgur.com/vSvOsHF.png)

<comment><USER19> "Weekly Hours: 40"

<comment><USER20> With decimals for precision, to boot.

The recruiters sure have a sense of humour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Interesting. They didn't specify Swift as one of the languages. Probably means nothing. Or...maybe it means the code you write won't be in Swift...for now.

<comment><USER22> Shouldn't really matter which language, right? How long does swift take to learn really? 2 weeks to produce good stuff 4 to be near flawless? From scratch, 3d Graphics mathematics, pixel shaders, graphics card hacks and other algorithms might take a year or two or more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Spooky, huh, this white silence.

</comment><comment><USER24> iOS on the oculus? the Apple Rift? (is facebook selling?)

<comment><USER25> VR is not sexy. At all.

<comment><USER24> I 'm not so sure about that [http://www.reddit.com/r/oculusnsfw](http://www.reddit.com/r/oculusnsfw)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is the paycheck also virtual?</comment>


Capitalism is failing us all. Could Islamic economics be the answer? - <AUTHOR> https://www.euronews.com/2019/04/16/capitalism-is-failing-us-all-could-islamic-economics-be-the-answer-view <comment><USER2> I was hoping to find more tactical examples in the article, but isn't he essentially just promoting a more progressive, transparent, loophole-less form of taxation with usury laws sprinkled on top?

</comment><comment><USER3> I am a Muslim (but not an expert), what I know is there is nothing called Islamic economics, it is just a few rules. Humans are left to decide what will work for them.

<comment><USER4> One significant economic distinction, historically speaking, was Islam's ban on usury (charging interest when lending).</comment></comment>


What Makes a Great Teacher? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/01/what-makes-a-great-teacher/7841/ <comment><USER2> Previous submission 605 days ago by the same submitter:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1036509>

(which I mention because some of the discussion last time was interesting, and because I was curious how the duplicate detector was defeated in this case).

I'm happy to discuss this issue afresh here, as HN's participation has grown quite a lot since 605 days ago, and teaching is my occupation (in a nonprofit organization offering supplemental mathematics lessons to advanced young learners).

My initial comment on the interesting submitted article is that I've always thought that one huge difference between pupils who grow up to be smart adults and those who grow up to be struggling adults, especially when siblings in the same family differ in academic success, is the effectiveness of the teachers each pupil had. If I consider the case of two pupils who enter a six-year elementary school in which each grade has five classrooms (basically the childhood experience my siblings and I had), the unfortunate pupil who gets the worst teacher in the grade each year for six years in a row will be lucky to know how to read, while the pupil who gets the best teacher in the grade each year for six years will likely be able to enter college early. Teachers make a huge difference. I'm always happy to learn how I can make a bigger positive difference for the pupils I teach.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Previous submission 605 days ago by the same submitter:_

Apologies! I actually re-read the article today for a blog post, and as I did I thought, "This is good stuff for HN." So I submitted it without thinking to see if I already had.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Some of the key points I found interesting:

\- Great teachers tended to set big goals for their students.

\- Great teachers were perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness.

\- Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.

\- Great teachers frequently check for understanding, and don't make the rookie mistake of asking "do you understand?"

\- For many highly effective teachers, the measure of a well-executed routine is that it continues in the teacher's absence.

\- What predicts success: A history of perseverance, or "grit" — defined as perseverance and a passion for long-term goals.

\- Success as a teacher: Teachers who scored high in "life satisfaction" — reporting that they were very content with their lives—were 43 percent more likely to perform well in the classroom than their less satisfied colleagues. These teachers "may be more adept at engaging their pupils, and their zest and enthusiasm may spread to their students."

\- Past performance is a great indicator of future performance.

\- A master's degree in education seems to have no impact on classroom effectiveness.

\- Important when measuring success: Were you prepared? Did you achieve your objective in five minutes (or whatever other time)?

Not mentioned in the article: A great book on this topic is "What the Best College Teachers Do" by Ken Bain. Ken does his own research into what makes a great teacher and has some fascinating findings. The huge effort that highly successful teachers put into their students is just incredible, though daunting, and gives me a lot of respect for the profession.

<comment><USER2> _A master's degree in education seems to have no impact on classroom effectiveness._

Yes. The research consistently shows that the typical master's degree possessed by a K-12 teacher (a degree in "education") adds NIL value to the teacher's teaching. But most teacher contracts entered into by most school districts give automatic raises to any teacher who has a master's degree in any subject. No evaluation of effectiveness is performed, but the master's degree gives the teacher an automatic raise. That costs school districts all around the United States billions of dollars in the aggregate, all money that could be better spent for many other purposes.

Bill Gates has commented on the wasteful spending on bonuses for master's degrees,

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/us/19gates.html> and so has Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

[http://articles.boston.com/2010-11-26/news/29286099_1_public...](http://articles.boston.com/2010-11-26/news/29286099_1_public- school-teachers-chief-state-school-officers-english)

It would be far better to give teachers raises if they do an excellent job of teaching, whatever degrees they have.

<comment><USER3> tokenadult, you're often involved in the conversations on education and math education, often with insightful comments. I'm just curious -- what is your viewpoint specifically on how one should measure an "excellent job of teaching"? Do you think it is possible to form a link between student scores and teacher effectiveness? Is it possible in particular without incentivizing behavior that brings teachers to focus on artificial goals (test scores, money), and off the actual purpose of education (actual student learning/growth)?

<comment><USER2> One thing that would help would be assessment of student learning done by persons other than the teacher, so the teacher can't give in to temptations to cheat when students are tested. (This is one reason I encourage my mathematics students to take the AMC tests and participate in other programs in which they can perform to show what they do that are not run by me.)

I think a lot more work still needs to be done on "value added," which is why I especially appreciate the submitted article. I mostly have the good fortune to teach "ringers"--the kids are already bright in math, and come to me as clients because the school lessons they receive bore them. A teacher who can take a child who was never particularly motivated by studying mathematics, and who has long since been turned off by lousy instruction,

<http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf>

which is a challenge I have rarely taken on, and who can motivate that child to child to excel is a teacher who is worth his or her weight in gold. I've requested from my friendly public library the book mentioned in the article, which had not been published at the time of the earlier submission, and I will try to find out what the book says about incentives that can be put in place in school systems to help teachers do their very best and to help learners learn better.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Clojure is not Software Conservative - <AUTHOR> http://blog.n01se.net/Clojure-is-not-Software-Conservative.html

<comment><USER3> These people try to debunk Yegge's idea by proving, point by point, how their language isn't conservative. But no matter how much counter-arguments and rational fodder they provide, it doesn't change a bit anywhere because what Yegge offers is a perception, viewpoint, an idea, a gut feeling of his with some semirandom examples for the sake of examples. And you can't attack someone else's idea or perception with rational weapons.

What matters is how well Yegge's idea strikes the chord here. "But it's an oversimplification!" Of course it is but _that's not_ the point here. The point is Yegge thinks he recognized the same driving energy between the political conservatives and conservative programmers, and similarly to liberal ones. The mindset, the kind. What's interesting is if that rings true and if so, how well it rings true.

Basically, he seems quite right, give or take a bad example or two. There are these two opposing mindsets in the field of programming whose clashes are well-known to everyone and the conservative--liberal axis quite nicely divides the camps. It overlaps a lot with the static vs. dynamic typing war but like he said, the typing wars are basically a special case of conservative vs liberal.

I can certainly recognize these daring sword-swingers and the patient fortress-builders of the programming league.

<comment><USER4> Why is "striking a chord" what matters? Shouldn't being right matter? Gut feelings may be what matters to some people, but that doesn't make those people right and it doesn't make rational people wrong. People are very capable of valuing things wrongly. This mindset you seem to be advocating here has a disturbing similarity to Stephen Colbert's famous idea of "truthiness."

 _And that brings us to tonight's word: Truthiness. Now I'm sure some of the word police, the "Wordinistas," over at Websters are going to say, "Hey, that's not a word." Well, anybody who knows me knows that I'm no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist, constantly telling us what is or isn't true or what did or didn't happen. Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I want to say it happened in 1941, that's my right. […]_

 _Do you know you have more nerve endings in your stomach than in your head? Look it up. Now, somebody's going to say, "I did look that up, and it's wrong." Well, mister, that's 'cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, try looking it up in your gut. I did, and my gut tells me that's how our nervous system works._

 _Now, I know some of you may not trust your gut — yet. But with my help, you will. The truthiness is that anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you._

<comment><USER3> You're raising an interesting question that drifts to being off-topic but I'll post a reply anyway.

My point was that you can't attack a perception or an idea with rational tools made for splitting things to right and wrong. You can only either resonate with his idea or not. Those who do resonate, are able to explore the idea further. Those who apply the rational tools will obviously reach a rational conclusion but that per se still can't give them decision of whether they're in or out as for the idea. It's an idea of Yegge's and simply, it's out there. It's not right or wrong, it's just there for some people to maybe make something out of it.

When you ask if being right shouldn't matter, you're assuming quite a lot about what's right and wrong and what can be known about right or wrong. The world as we know it rarely works out with facts; the problem is that facts are only facts within some commonly agreed context, and they're only true and untrue within that context.

I don't know the origin or context of the text you quoted but the author seems to play with the idea of what can you know really. For example, how much of human history is factually 100% proven to be absolutely correct? If it's not absolutely, undeniably correct then it doesn't matter whether it's 95% correct or completely false; what's left is only what we decide to (collectively) _think about_ it.

The history of the same event, such as a war, as described in two opposing nations can be very different—which one is correct? It's foolish to think there's only one and only description that is correct and even more foolish to think it must be the one which is "ours". The event affected both nations and how it hit them both is both correct. If we want to remove subjectiveness of the nations themselves and we assume there was a third, objective observer to that event, then his would be the _third truth_ , not the one and only one.

So, to come back to Yegge's idea—or to just reduce it to the old static typing vs. dynamic typing divide—how can you determine _which one is right_? How can dynamic typing be more right than static typing? How can you determine whether liberalism vs. conservatism applied to programmers is right or wrong? You can only argue for a specific point, such as whether frowning at macros makes Clojure conservative or not, but you can't extrapolate from that to make a decision of whether Yegge is right or wrong. It will come down to whether it resonates with you, or "strikes a chord", or not. If it does, then you don't care about the details and if it doesn't, then you're just arguing for nothing since you're not into his idea anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not going to submit this as a separate link, but here's Haskell: [http://blog.ezyang.com/2012/08/is-haskell-liberal-or- conserv...](http://blog.ezyang.com/2012/08/is-haskell-liberal-or- conservative/)

I want to make a bit of a snarky comment about everyone rushing to disclaim being conservative, but I think this really reflects the fact that the distinction isn't a very useful one for languages, and very dubious even for communities. If it's useful at all, which I don't particularly believe, it's only for specific people.

<comment><USER6> In this case I think the snark would be accurate. I was surprised at how the snark , "What are you? Republican?" was tossed about at my former search company. Thematically there is power in labels, and Yegge goes out of his way to attach the 'bad' label to things he doesn't like. Not much different than 14 year old boys calling each other gay on game chat boards. Take a label that is offensive, associate it with something you don't like, paint people who like what you don't like with a label that _they_ don't like. Class warfare at its most middle school.

There is a reasonable point, which is you can't argue with someone who doesn't share your definition of 'good' and 'bad'. But the labeling thing is unfortunate.

<comment><USER7> "Take a label that is offensive, associate it with something you don't like, paint people who like what you don't like with a label that they don't like."

You forgot "Then sit back and watch the fun as otherwise intelligent people buy into your frame and scramble to defend their favorite languages on HN, Twitter, blogs etc".

I am in awe of Steve Yegge's ability to conjure up an internet storm at will. Everybody gets what he is upto, but feel compelled to respond anyway.

<comment><USER8> This. This. This.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's the motivation for everyone to add noise to Yegge's obviously broken claim that you can reason about software engineering in such a one dimensional way?

<comment><USER10> He has a lot of visibility, and makes an argument that many people disagree with. Also, on the Internet there is no such thing as "obvious".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Steve is wrong about macros - they don't compose as well as functions, and that's why people don't recommend them where a function works just as well.

As far as adding new things into the language, though, Clojure does tend to be conservative. There is a lot of thought (hammock time) that goes into each potential addition, and whether the increase in complexity is worth the increase in functionality.

This seems like a good thing to me, but maybe that just means I'm a software conservative (I doubt it, since I also love Ruby).

<comment><USER3> You don't use macros to inline functions or anything. You use macros to do things functions can't do. In a program written by the Lisp mindset, the amount of code covering macros can easily grow to greater than marginal. It's just that you're not writing functions, you're writing translation rules for your own language where you can solve the problem more easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Agreed. I consider myself most comfortable in Python and I find myself uncomfortable with Clojure's liberal side more often than it's conservative side. I think I still have a lot to learn from and about Clojure but I don't think it fits very well into Yegge's spectrum. The author is correct that the most important thing about Clojure is Rich Hickey's philosophies on simplicity in code. I don't find simplicity to be a very political topic.

<comment><USER13> Have you seen the US Tax code?

<comment><USER12> Yes, and if you told me it was complex because of either the conservatives or liberals, I would call you an ideologue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Leaving aside the question about whether the suggested division between "liberal" and "conservative" is a valid one... It seems like people are not happy for their favorite language being labeled as "conservative". I don't understand why. Depending on the problem domain, "conservative" and "liberal" approaches can have their benefits and drawbacks. I used to work at a company developing software for electronic trading. If anyone said something along the lines "bugs are not a big deal", they'd get fired pretty fast, because actually bugs can be quite a big deal when they cost your customers hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not millions). On the other hand, a social networking site could probably allow such approach. Facebook seems to have embraced it: yesterday I actually had to post a comment about five times before it finally appeared. Now I know that what I witnessed was probably a result of a "liberal" approach to development :)

<comment><USER15> There are a few features from Yegge's conservative list that I wish Clojure had. For example there is some very interesting work going on to support optional static typing. <https://github.com/frenchy64/typed-clojure>

But this article was not about what is desired, but about what _is_ \-- Clojure is not currently very "conservative" according Yegge's definition, for better or worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> And I don't understand the knee-jerk reaction against being labelled software- conservative. Yegge's overarching message, where conservatism is employed to mitigate engineering risk, is a Good Thing. Also, Yegge's specific examples of liberal features are astonishingly bad.

Half of the liberal features illustrate the worst aspects of language (non-)design. Automatic type conversion, stringification, semantic nulls? Sounds exactly like PHP and Javascript.

The other half of the liberal features are either inconsequential, or actually significant to conservative languages. Bitstrings, function overloading by arity, a global namespace, convention over configuration? Sounds like Erlang/OTP. Preprocessing and DSLs? Try ML ( _Meta Language_ ), not to mention macros in Lisp-likes.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't think pointing to surveys showing few Clojure users came from Haskell/ML, is sufficient to disprove Yegge's assertion. If a language's designers came from camp A, yet the majority of users came from camp B, that does not mean the language is not strongly influenced by camp A.

<comment><USER18> Rich Hickey, the designer of Clojure, isn't from Haskell/ML background. His background is C, C++ and Java.

<comment><USER19> With a little Lisp, incl. two Java<->CL attempts: <http://jfli.sf.net> & <http://foil.sf.net>

<comment><USER20> Did nobody tell him about <http://common-lisp.net/project/armedbear/>?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Already Yegge has fouled the technical discourse. Sad.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why do people think it's useful to import badly fitting, emotionally loaded labels from politics into software? Behold the stampede of engineers running away from the "conservative" label!

<comment><USER23> Maybe a political conservative would have been able to construct the argument in a way that would make developers proud to label themselves programing conservatives.

<comment><USER13> Let's ignore political extremists for the moment.

I think the definitions of political conservative on Steve Yegge's post are pretty far wrong. If those are the commonly held beliefs among the liberal side, well, that seems like a stunning level of misunderstanding.

I think the only thing colloquially conservative about "conservatives" is that they are colloquially conservative in the amount of power the wish to cede to government.

Being a political conservative today in the US, in an ideal case at least, is about freedom and choice. Generally held beliefs are that free-markets are good in many cases, too much regulation is as bad and sometimes worse than too little, and that government is in very many cases a terribly inefficient use of resources.

In principle they do not believe in domination of the masses by a vast corpus of rigid rules. They believe a minimal set of overarching rules, and leaving much to freedom and choice.

That's conservatism in principle, from my view as a conservative. The reality of course is different, particularly for "conservatives" in office or seeking office. I personally have a hard time distinguishing one brand of politician from another.

And there are a vast array of people with sometimes bizarre beliefs that associate with one side or the other of the political spectrum, and the conservative side has plenty of them, and liberals do too.

I don't know for sure how this 'brand' of conservatism would apply to programming. I would suggest though, they would want as much freedom to express themselves as they could get.

So:

\--The idea of strong typing would rub conservatives the wrong way.

\--A rigid and inviolable set of rules and procedures and processes for how code may be written.

I'm not sure what else. My programming experience is pretty amateur. My favorite languages to work in are C, Python, and Clojure. So maybe that says something.

<comment><USER24> You are speaking exclusively of the fiscal side of the current use of the word "conservative", which currently makes no sense from the point of view of the non-political definition of the word "conservative", because it would take a fairly radical set of policy changes to achieve those goals. This is why "libertarian" is a much better word for that type of "conservatism" - <USER2> refers to the goals themselves, not to the amount of policy change necessary to achieve them. However, on the social side of modern "conservatism", it truly is about conserving status-quo in many cases, even when that approach is at odds with "freedom and choice", (gay marriage, drug laws, etc.)

tl;dr; Yegge's use of the word "conservative" is not wrong, but rather the use of the word "conservative" to describe the (usually exclusively-) fiscally libertarian portion of the modern "conservative" movement is wrong.</comment></comment></comment></comment>