Tailwind CSS: From Side-Project Byproduct to Multi-Million Dollar Business - <AUTHOR> https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduct-to-multi-mullion-dollar-business/ <comment><USER2> They deserved it, and I'm pleased with their results.

When I started my _paid_ online editor for Tailwind CSS ( [https://tailwind.build](https://tailwind.build) ) in November 2019, and someone posted a link to my Show HN on Discord, Adam replied:

"bums me out when other people get stuff released using my tools before me because i have to invest so much time into building the actual OSS its all built on :/"

And this ruined my happy launch day :)

When I read that they make much more money, I am again in an emotionally neutral state ;)

Congratulations!

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that really feels like the exact wrong attitude to have. If you don't want people to build money-making products on top of your OSS, either license it that way or make it closed source. Period. I don't see any reasonable grounds for complaint here.

<comment><AUTHOR> This isn't really what I was saying when I made that comment (in a personal conversation among a small group of friends).

I love that other people are building things on top of Tailwind and I think it's great. I was only describing my own emotional state and how much pressure it makes me personally feel to finish our commercial projects, and how stressful it is to feel like there's not enough time because my time has to be split instead of being able to just focus on the commercial tools.

Purely just me commenting on my own stress and being vulnerable among friends, not any sort of commentary on the ethics of other people building things on my OSS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't understand tailwind. The entire point of CSS is to separate style from structure. How does applying composable utility classes to all of your HTML elements differ from the old days of using HTML attributes for styling?

Edit: So after looking into it a bit more, and specifically the section in the documentation about extracting components, I understand where they're coming from a bit better. Extracting repeated compositions of utility classes into reusable components or named classes is exactly how I use other CSS frameworks such as bootstrap or foundation. I'm seeing the major difference between tailwind and other CSS frameworks as being the lack of pre-defined UI components. The minimalism is obviously a big advantage for performance, but otherwise I still see little difference between Tailwind and other CSS frameworks.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sold on the idea, but there is one major difference: you constraint yourself to a set of values. This attains two goals:

(1) You have to think less. Try "margin-top medium", look at the result, "oh it's too much", try "margin-top small", look at the result, ok fine. No px- fiddling.

(2) It produces more consistent results (i.e.: things tend to look nicer).

What doesn't win me is that, while I see the increase in development speed this brings, I don't see how would you handle maintainability (i.e.: what happens when the design needs to change?). I suspect the trade-off here is that you just renounce to such redesigns and commit to the idea that you'll rebuild the entire thing if/when the time comes (tech advances so quickly in this space that you may want to do it anyway).

<comment><USER6> both 1 and 2 are trivial in scss using presets for colors, spacing, font sizes.

margin-top: margins(xl);

<comment><USER5> True, but this also misses part of the point:

\- Once you are in the "margin-top: xxx" part, nothing prevents you from saying "just this time" and writing some px (or whatever) value, either because you don't remember the options at your disposal, because none of them feel exactly right or whatever. Using tailwind you would have to create an entirely new size definition, which is a big hassle. That is, using scss does not actively push you to this particular "pit of success" whereas using tailwind does.

\- Responsive handling is much more verbose in scss. Consider "sm:mt-2" versus "@include responsive(sm) { margin-top: margins(2) }"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder what they'll do with their money and success.

I'm reminded of LogoJoy - a single founder company that started sucking in huge amounts of cash revenue, which the owner spent on employing people and offices and growing a company and getting investors who recommended they rebrand, destroying much of the value and revenue of LogoJoy. I bet that founder is wishing he stayed a single person company and just banked all that cash. [https://betakit.com/looka-lays-off-80-percent-of-staff-as- fa...](https://betakit.com/looka-lays-off-80-percent-of-staff-as-failed- rebrand-from-logojoy-cut-revenue-in-half/)

So I wonder which way these guys will go. Will they bank the cash and buy houses and have a quiet and happy life, or will they spend it on employing people and growing a business and getting investors to try to make more money?

<comment><AUTHOR> No plans to go the VC route. We've hired three people now — two developers focused almost entirely on open-source, and another who splits his time between our commercial projects and contributing in our OSS community by answering questions, writing documentation and guides, etc.

We keep a few hundred grand in the bank as a payroll cushion but everything else gets pulled out and put in our personal bank accounts. We're both millionaires and financially independent at this point, and are only continuing to do what we do because we really enjoy it. We're building a small team so we have more freedom to pursue other fun R&D-style projects while still delivering on what our customers and community are asking for.

<comment><USER8> Big fan of tailwindcss and paying customer of tailwindui also. The decision to purchase was at least in part based on your active engagement with users on the discord channel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Adam, Steve, have you considered building a marketplace for Tailwind UI, and focus more on guidance and quality control on the design side instead of building out all the components yourself?

It could help with the creation of interactive components for all ecosystems, like those that are tightly coupled to a specific ecosystem considering that it's not only frontend frameworks, but also backend frameworks that have their own LiveView version or way to do components now (e.g. Elixir Phoenix has Surface which is like writing backend React components, Rails has view components).

Supporting all those combination yourself seems daunting, and it would suck to see components for React or LiveWire/Alpine, but not other ecosystems that aren't covered by the skillset of your team.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've tossed it around, but ultimately we believe that our customers buy Tailwind UI because Steve and I designed/built it, and we've built a lot of trust in our community over the last 4-5 years. I wouldn't want to be a full- time QA person either.

Hoping instead that we can find the right small team size that lets us do more of this in a first-party way, and selectively support the tools we find people ask for the most.

Could definitely see a world where we work with experts in different technologies to port our stuff over and maintain it under some sort of retainer agreement though, just don't see us ever giving up any of the actual UI design or initial implementation work.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for replying, love your stuff.

I bought into it because as a designer I got interested in SaaS, and my impression was/is that you have a perspective on design edgecases that most traditional or semantic html devs lack because they're more focused on content sites and blogs.

Keep up the work, but don't forget smaller frameworks. Your last suggestion with the retainer agreement sounds good!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow 2 million dollars with Tailwind UI, I would never have imagined that would be possible when it was first pre-released with only a few templates five months ago. Congrats!

<comment><USER11> It's worth every penny! It's saved me so much time on new projects and just been a great resource to study and learn from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Everybody talks productivity. I completely agree. I was so much quicker with Tailwind CSS than any other approach I was familiar with. But let's talk about maintenance. I had to go back to a project I completed 6 months ago to change a few things and boy do these classes look like a mess!

</comment><comment><USER13> Great story. Also debunks the commonly held belief that developers won't pay for code / libraries / components.

If you're an open source maintainer, this is a pretty good example of how to monetize your work.

</comment><comment><USER14> Played around tailwind css this weekend, pretty good and enjoyable. There's some quirks that make it slightly annoying to use with a static site generator that takes in markdown files and converts them to html. In this case it becomes annoying to style these files via something like tailwind.

For simpler projects there's tachyons as well, which shares a similar philosophy and is a bit simpler in scope.

<comment><USER15> Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but can't you just use @apply to set up all the classes your markdown parser might output?

<comment><USER14> Yes that's the only way to do it, but then you kinda cirumvent the whole tailwind philosophy. The tailwind typography package is an attempt to fix this, but right now it's annoying to use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Really happy for them. Tailwind is so good that it's actually made my website designs 5x better. I'm able to translate my thoughts into pixels so much faster and more accurately with Tailwind than with any other CSS system/framework.

If you haven't tried it, you should. It definitely looks really silly (inline styles?!?) but it's so powerful.

</comment><comment><USER17> TLDR: I've written a moderately complex app using Tailwind and only had to write 33 lines of CSS.

I've been using Tailwind to build a moderately complex app, and for me the killer feature of Tailwind is that _most of the time I don't have to think in CSS_.

It's not that I can't think in CSS - I've written lots of CSS over the years. However, as someone putting together a UI, I want to think in terms of slightly higher-level constructs. With Tailwind I almost never need to think about specific pixels values, weird browser quirks, or how breakpoints are handled. Instead, I can think almost entirely about how to achieve the correct behaviour.

I work with ClojureScript so I have hot reloading and fast feedback, and I can build a moderately complex UI component in a few hours. Not having to context- switch into CSS really helps me to stay in "flow". If there's some very specific design feature that I need, then I can still write some custom CSS, but this is sufficiently rare that in a 10k SLOC project there are 33 lines of hand-written CSS.

</comment><comment><USER18> I sincerely hope the creators avoid falling into the VC honey pot. At their current scale they're on pace to build a sustainable business around the core open source library. Growing beyond their UI component library toward an open marketplace (a la Noun Project) should be easily doable in the low 7-figure revenue range.

</comment><comment><USER19> Good job on the milestone: personally I have never tried Tailwind, still on Bootstrap... Guess I am old-fashioned...

<comment><USER20> We still find Bootstrap unmatched for training content creators and developers, while making completely custom templates. The utility classes in Bootstrap get us far enough that most CSS specificity is flat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm very impressed that they sold $2m so quickly. Especially given that these are lifetime packages, not SaaS, it's really impressive. It means ~8000 people became their customer in just a few months! That really blows me away, and I'd love to understand more about how they pulled that off.

<comment><USER22> I bought the $150 package. It's easily saved me $150 in hours I haven't spent tinkering with design. It's a great value proposition. I don't use tailwind CSS; just the designs.

<comment><USER23> Yea, i'm already planning on buying it tbh.

I'm a backend dev and, while i can do frontend - and i usually am picky about design, i don't _want_ to design, especially during prototyping.

I'm planning on learning Tailwind for post-PoC styling, but buying the Tailwind Builder (Lifetime) for early PoCs to get styling out of my way.

I really like the offering of not just templates, but transitioning my templates into my final product _when i want_.

But, i haven't used any of it yet. We'll see, but it's definitely worth the $99 license _(to me)_ if it even remotely pans out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As the maintainer of several very popular open source projects in the infra- structure space, I was initially impressed by hearing the team had gotten 2M USD in revenue over three months, but then read they'd already brought in 2M USD in the previous two years, totalling 4M USD over ~2.5 years.

If I could figure out a value-stream like these two gents, then my OSS work would be on another level. This isn't your classic "Indie Hackers SaaS" or viral eBook stuff.

Hats off to you. I'll be the first to buy your eBook :-)

<comment><USER13> I think the key leap they took to generate revenue was to build out a fully- baked, batteries-included product based on their open source library. Sure you could build out the components in Tailwind UI yourself, but a lot of people will pay the $250 to have a solution that "just works".

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Has anyone considered using utility-style CSS combined with semantic class naming? Example:

      .profile-card {
        @include tailwind-css-1
        @include tailwind-css-2
        ...etc...
      }

This way your html has semantic classes but the definition of the classes uses something like tailwind instead of raw CSS. One level of abstraction. Seems the best of both worlds?

<comment><USER26> You mean this? [https://tailwindcss.com/docs/extracting- components/](https://tailwindcss.com/docs/extracting-components/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What a feel-good story.

TailwindCSS and TailwindUI have been huge time savers for my project. It's nice to hear the origin story!

</comment><comment><USER28> Wow, a huge success from Tailwind UI project. I would never imagine that Tailwind UI could bring in so much revenue. I think Tailwind CSS is a niche CSS framework that's why I am working on project similar to Tailwind UI. More competition is good for customers. Still invite only tho.

</comment><comment><USER11> > _" In classic developer fashion though, I spent the entire week making > decisions about the tech stack, and had maybe one full day at the end to > actually hack on the real functionality.

> One of those decisions was what to do about the CSS."_

And it worked! Adam is living the dream.

</comment><comment><USER29> Thank you, Adam, for developing Tailwind CSS. I've been using it exclusively for my side projects since the start of the year. The thought of going back to a less utility-based CSS system (and/or SASS/LESS) leaves me cold.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm a customer of Tailwind UI and I have to say I'm very inspired by this post. Great product, solves a real problem. It's bound to reach this point. Great work!

</comment><comment><USER31> We used Tailwind for our newly launched SaaS, so thanks for that!

</comment><comment><USER32> Congrats Adam and team! We've only been using Tailwind for a few months but honestly its completely changed how we approach design.

</comment><comment><USER33> Amazing. I'd never expect that a CSS library can make so much money. Maybe there's always a market for UI libraries.

</comment><comment><USER34> How do they handle the licensing of JS and CSS ?

</comment><comment><USER35> to be honest it is top-notch product, I am using it since "utility-first CSS framework" era, and it's awesome.

</comment><comment><USER36> i suck at design and good css. tailwind has made my frontend work not suck as much. love it, thank y'all

</comment><comment><USER37> Good for them, tailwind is a great lib :)

</comment><comment><USER38> Hello Tailwind UI,

We are really pleased for you.

You really are an inspiration to us that made us create the idea of [https://Frontendor.com](https://Frontendor.com) HTML Library and keep going to the end and not giving up about our dream.

Thank you so much. Frontendor Team

</comment><comment><USER39> Tailwind UI is still in preview with very few components. There's no way it generated 2 millions. No even 10k. This is a gross publicity stunt.

<comment><USER40> The bundle is $249. If you don't think 8k people would pay that to have lifetime access to components that look great and allow you to build a great looking website in hours, you don't really understand the dev market.

As a developer, Tailwind UI is a god send, I've been waiting for years for a _great_ looking CSS framework with pre-made components

(Also, they had a pretty big audience already after selling Refactoring UI which is a really useful book for developers that can't design, like me)

<comment><USER41> Exactly. $249 is peanuts compared to the time saved not spent on these components each and every time (for multiple projects even).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Congratulations! I would highly recommend removing that extremely annoying, disruptive and useless "Get Early Access" banner at the bottom of every page on your website (including documentation). GitLab used to have a very similar banner (don't remember exactly what it said). I wrote to them and eventually they have gotten rid of it (I like to think that it was, at least, in part, due to my criticism :-).</comment>


How PHP became such a huge success - Talk with Rasmus Lerdorf - <AUTHOR> http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/pc/how-php-became-such-a-huge-success-633591

<comment><USER2> PHP became such a huge success for a few reasons. It's easy to deploy. You just have .php files that execute code in <? ?> tags. It has a bunch of framework-type things built in such as all the database connector functions, session handling, and it returns HTTP responses easily.

What really bothers me about this article is that the author goes after Rails without knowing anything. He says that Rails is slow. That simply isn't true when compared to PHP frameworks. Rails is many times faster than CakePHP. And Rails has a ton more features. It's all well and good to just spout off that Rails is slow, but actual investigation proves that in the real world it isn't true.

See: <http://video.merbcamp.com/public/katz3.mp4> <http://avnetlabs.com/php/php-framework-comparison-benchmarks>

Lerdorf doesn't even seem to know that scaffolding really isn't Rails. He just comes off as someone who doesn't actually know or get the technological landscape.

<comment><USER3> > It's easy to deploy.

Yup. This is the reason PHP is trouncing Python. Python should be where PHP is, right? But it isn't. If you ask the Python folks for easy deployment, they'll go into a lecture about how it's ugly, or a hack, or not general enough. And then they'll start telling you about how you should be using WSGI.

You: "I like vanilla."

Python: "What? Vanilla? There are better flavors than that. C'mon. Let's get you some nice strawberry."

You: "But I don't like strawberry.

Python: "Well, you should! It's a great flavor! How many scoops would you like?"

You: "[Sigh]. 2. Sugar cone, please."

Python: "Here you go!"

You: "Hey, this is a wafer cone. And it's only one scoop. And it's sherbet!"

Also, learning to make a scripting language spit out some html is easy. Learning how to get various apache modules built, configured, and installed -- or convincing an inexpensive ISP to do so -- is a whole nother ball of wax.

AFAICT, PHP did deployment right, and is still making "better" languages look like they can't get their act together. I should be able to drop a .py file into my docroot and a _persistent_ apache-managed python should execute it (when it's requested) and spit the results back to my browser. It's astonishing that we don't have that.

You: "I like vanilla."

PHP: "Here you go. Vanilla. Also take these napkins -- it's a little drippy."

<comment><USER4> Websites are a small corner of the Python world, but _all_ of the PHP world.

<comment><USER3> Everywhere I look, when new programmers ask what language to learn first, they are most often told to learn Python.

C is too low-level, Perl's too old and crufty, Ruby's too trendy, Scheme is too esoteric, Haskell's too difficult, Lua doesn't have enough libraries, Java's too verbose and corporate, ... the list of reasons not to go with other languages is a mile long. Note: PHP is usually never even mentioned.

Then the new programmer asks what language they should use for web programming. At this point, everyone looks at the floor, scratches the back of their neck, clears their throat a bit, and says that, well, you should probably use PHP because that's what everyone else is using.

So, in most corners of the programming world, many experienced programmers are recommending Python.

You know how to get "everyone else" to use Python for web development? You make it easy to deploy -- just like PHP.

<comment><USER5> I usually tell people "Use Python and Django" when they ask me what language they should use for web programming.

I agree though, Python apps should be _much_ easier to deploy on the web. Just because it's currently the best solution doesn't mean it can't be better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We previously had a poll here of which languages have the best "innards" or something like that.

I wonder what a similar poll on languages with the best "outards" would be (i.e. documentation, learning curve, simplicity of initial setup, time from total n00b to achieving your first actual goal, friendliness of the community, etc.)

While I don't enjoy PHP as a language, it clearly excels at all of the above. I'm not surprised that it has a large user base.

<comment><USER7> Friendliness of the community? I've not seen it. I've found the internals group to be particularly unfriendly, though perhaps that's not the one you meant.

<comment><USER8> I imagine they would be quite defensive based on the amount of hate they must receive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cool. I don't care much for PHP, but I worked with Rasmus briefly at Linuxcare, and he is a cool guy.

And, when it comes down to it, PHP has made it possible for more people to do more things with the web than before it came into existence, so you do have to give it some credit. With the caveat that it's easier to write those kinds of nice things when I'm not currently being forced to deal with any PHP:-)

</comment><comment><USER10> Perhaps this explains the hate for PHP by "real" developers:

"It tends to be that code wins. If two groups are arguing, but one group has an implementation and the other doesn't, well, the implementation wins. It almost doesn't matter how braindead it is; if we should have the feature, but we can't agree on the implementation, we'll go with whoever builds it."

</comment><comment><USER11> Because cheap webhosts support it. I would never have bothered learning PHP were it not for them.

</comment><comment><USER12> Python is great for small apps or server scripts. For building large-scale enterprise apps, it's a NO-NO. The code can become unmaintainable. I can't say the same for Java, Ruby and PHP apps though.

</comment><comment><USER13> > If two groups are arguing, but one group has an implementation and the other > doesn't, well, the implementation wins. It almost doesn't matter how > braindead it is

I'm the least bit surprised.

</comment><comment><USER14> I detest PHP, and have been lucky enough to mostly avoid working with it. But I'm currently leading the development to convert an 80k line PHP app to Rails, and I'm absolutely shocked at how fundamentally flawed PHP code is from the perspective of general best practices in software and web development and also computer science. PHP code is so bad that it deserves it's own section on dailywtf.com.

I think PHP has been successful because it's the Visual Basic of the web. Just like in the 90's with the programmer "holy war" between Visual Basic "developers" versus everyone else(C++ mostly). At that time the number of "pseudo-developers" dwarfed the number of "real" developers, and so Visual Basic ended up being used for all kinds of stuff, in companies all over the land, and for all kinds of software for which it was totally inappropriate.

It was termed "Virus Building" for good reason, and not just because M$ software was so exploitable. With Microsoft dominating the desktop, they were able to embed Visual Basic everywhere. It's the oldest trick in the book: if you can be the distribution platform, your default tool set will end up being the most used simply because people are too incapable and lazy to tweak and customize software themselves. To paraphrase Steve Jobs' remark about people reading: "people don't tweak anymore".

There's been a similar demographic split on the web for the past decade. The number of web developers who know nothing about software engineering in general dwarfs those who know best practices, computer science and stuff like that. Add in the sweet spot of the entire hosting industry defaulting to Apache and the LAMP stack, PHP got to be the default tool, like Visual Basic on Windows desktops. It's totally impossible to "win" against these kinds of numbers--we can only wait for the platform to change, then PHP will be dead, just like how Visual Basic is now "dead".

Perhaps the whole "cloud computing" hoopla and mass move to VPS will pull the rug out from under PHP in the next 2 years.

<comment><USER15> _"I'm absolutely shocked at how fundamentally flawed PHP code is from the perspective of general best practices in software and web development and also computer science. PHP code is so bad that it deserves it's own section on dailywtf.com."_

I assume that your 80k line app must have been written very poorly. Like any other good language PHP can be misused to create horrifying spaghetti code. That doesn't mean the language is no good.</comment></comment>


Man counterhacks paypal phisher, deletes data, warns other victims via phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/io76r/i_received_a_scam_paypal_verification_email_this/ <comment><USER2> I was a little surprised that the legality of this was questioned, so looked it up. In Roman Law tradition this kind of action would apparently be called "periculum in mora". An example would be that you enter another person's apartment without consent, because you noticed a strong smell of gas on the other side of the door.

The OP in the linked article had strong reasons to believe that the people who submitted their credit card data were in imminent danger of large financial damages if he did not stop the fraud quickly.

Apparently (and to my surprise), in the US the idea of "periculum in mora" only applies to law enforcement agents ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exigent_circumstance_in_United_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exigent_circumstance_in_United_States_law)), though. Does that mean you would have to let the apartment explode if the police is too slow to show up and stop the gas leak?

<comment><USER3> yes, it may technically be illegal, but that is why we have trial by jury. unless the story sounded made up, i can't really imagine anyone convicting someone that smashed a window or broke down an apartment door to save someone's life.

but really, who would vote this guy guilty of illegal access to a computer system when he was clearly helping phishing victims? and who would press charges against him in the first place, the hosting company where the phishing site was hosted?

<comment><USER4> Jury nullification (basically what you're referring to here) was a major justification of juries in the first place as it was thought to be a check on state power, but of course the state has neutered it over the last century along with most other checks on its power. Jury nullification is mostly a memory at this point and juries are generally instructed only to consider whether the defendant actually broke the law as such - not whether the law itself is just.

<comment><USER5> Remember that jury nullification was often used to acquit whites of killing blacks in a time and place when killing a given black could often have been seen as something akin to shooting a raccoon or other vermin.

(This is why violating someone's civil rights is a Federal offense in modern American law: Homicide is a state offense, and the juries in the relevant state courts of that era would not convict for certain kinds of homicide. Federal courts were not nearly as prejudiced.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I haven't been over to Reddit in a while. Is this really what it's like now?

I remember when I left, /r/programming read pretty much like HN does now, with an occasional mean comment or joke thread left alive to get in the way. The linked thread, though, has no actual discussion. It's just a bunch of people making silly jokes. Sad to see it go that way.

<comment><USER7> Usually when I tell people about reddit, I tell them to skip the front page and go straight to the reddits page and find topics that interest them.

The front page has too many cat pictures and crap for my taste these days. Hopefully they eventually have the time to implement one of the solutions I suggested to alleviate the problem.

<comment><USER8> What solutions did you suggest?

I've actually been showing up regularly at NYC's reddit events, and made quite a few friends in the community, but I don't really load up Reddit anymore - too much junk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reddit's down. This appears to be the same thing.

<http://imgur.com/vNqt3>

</comment><comment><USER10> Anyone have a mirror?

<comment><USER11> This is the image linked in the post: <http://i.imgur.com/vNqt3.png>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Man gets 18 years in prison for hacking account and inflicting unfathomable psychic damage, making his victim feel vulnerable in their own home.

</comment><comment><USER13> Commenting on an aggregator to a link to an aggregator with a link. Feels like Inception. Someone should post this on digg and go to the 3rd level.

</comment><comment><USER14> When did "found out that an FTP password is 'password'" start to be something that is a 'counterhack'? Except in Hollywood movies?

Replace the headline with 'Guy that seeks naive people for his phishing site is too dumb to use his own software'.

<comment><USER15> Hmm. I wonder if I could do a Fermi estimate on the amount of time wasted by this pointless discussion? Let's call this Rob's Fermi Hack on Hacking "Hack":

\- We'll start with a semi-reasonable approximation of the number of forums in which people have discussed the word "hack": usenet threads, mailing lists, social news sites. I like 100,000 for this number. Do you think that's too high? I'm thinking that we have to count everything that's been around since, oh, 1995 or so -- since hackers didn't really seem to care about the definition of the word before then.

\- Then we need the mean number of times that this discussion has taken place on those forums. According to my semi-private little search engine for HN, the query `comments with "hack"` returns 45,000+ results, going back to 2008. Amusingly, the oldest result is about exactly this same debate. So let's use 100 for this value, because why not?

\- Next we need the mean number of replies generated each time this comes up on one of these forums. Let's say "3". I like "3", because my comment here is the third in the thread started by your comment, and I expect my comment to so dazzle readers with its brilliance that nobody else will bother responding. So, 3.

\- Finally, we need some kind of time estimate for time-blown-masturbating- about-"hack"-per-comment-per-forum. I'm skewing the curve a bit here with my comment, but that's because I'm a sucker for meaningless gratification. Anyway, let's say 2 minutes for this, because I haven't used the number "2" yet. (I think Fermi is now spinning at relativistic speeds in his grave.)

So we get: 100,000 * 100 * 3 * 2, for 60,000,000 minutes, or 1 million hours, which would probably be enough to write and polish an entirely new operating system from the ground up.

And that would be a neat hack.

(FWIW: I agree with you, especially when the word "hack" found its way into all kinds of silly little timesaving tricks -- "hack your breakfast routine by using paper bowls!" -- but, at this point, seeing someone mention that they disagree with its usage _every single time it's used_ is even more annoying. That battle was lost. The horse is dead. It's time to stop beating it and move on.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Responding to one illegal action with another illegal action is not exactly praiseworthy in my book.

<comment><USER17> Your book stinks. Standing by while people are taken advantage of and robbed should not be praiseworthy in anyone's book.

> Essentially on discovering I had the power to stop this illegal act without > causing any harm, I felt morally obliged to do it.

This guy is a real human and a good man. You sound like a robot, legality is black and white and you don't even bring morality into question.

His entire comment: [http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/io76r/i_received...](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/io76r/i_received_a_scam_paypal_verification_email_this/c25boxw)

<comment><USER16> When did I ever say anything about standing by?

<comment><USER17> My sincere apologies, that was a big and incorrect assumption on my part.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why 2015 Was a Breakthrough Year in Artificial Intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-08/why-2015-was-a-breakthrough-year-in-artificial-intelligence <comment><USER2> I am old enough to remember three A.I. booms and two intervening "winters". The first boom was picking all the low hanging fruit like playing checkers, moving blocks, solving word problems. The power of computers in the 60s and 70s was pitiful. Then the easy stuff was done for while.

The second boom was expert systems and logic super computers. Those systems never worked that well and A.I. went into long sleep.

Now its supercomputer data mining and greatly improved neural networks.

<comment><USER3> It's different this time!

<comment><USER4> I think GP is saying it actually is different this time.

<comment> m-photonic I don't think there's going to be a winter this time. The current boom may only take us so far, but there are a couple more booms on the horizon that in all likelihood will be cusping well before this one is finished.

<comment><USER5> Care to give any examples of those upcoming booms?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Back in 2005 I suggested that it would be interesting to build a system that would play any game without being given directions (that blog post has since disappeared from the web). This, and not image recognition, would mean intelligence, I thought at the time: you can't truly tell a donkey from a dog without having some general knowledge about the world donkeys and dogs (and your AI) are living in.

The academic image recognition machine though seems unstoppable and yes it does seem to improve over time. I honestly don't know what the limits of "dumb" image recognition are in terms of quality, but calling it AI still doesn't make sense to me.

<comment><USER7> > but calling it AI still doesn't make sense to me.

That's the core problem of AI, no matter what progress is made, it's instantly called not AI anymore while the goalpost of what AI is is continually being pushed out to not this. The real issue of course is what don't how intelligence actually works so it's impossible to set a fixed goalpost of when AI is truly achieved.

<comment><USER8> > The real issue of course is what don't how intelligence actually works so > it's impossible to set a fixed goalpost of when AI is truly achieved.

No, the real issue is that people still think, intuitively, that there's a little homunculus in their head making the decisions. Each time we build something that doesn't look like a homunculus, we've failed at attaining "real" intelligence...

<comment><USER6> Making decisions is not that complicated, neither is it interesting. Your iPhone can make a decision to kill a process that takes too much system resources while in the background. What's more interesting (and what seems to be the main function of the so called homunculus) is being aware of your own location in space and time, as well as remembering previous locations. In other words, having some model of the world and knowing your place in it is what computers haven't achieved yet in any meaningful way.

<comment><USER9> So, map building is now what will _truly_ define AI until it's also just another technology.

<comment><USER10> How is map building AI? It's a pretty mechanical process. Start somewhere, make some measurements, move along, repeat. At what point is there any notion of intelligence involved?

<comment><USER9> It's deeper than you describe...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_mapping)

... but I agree that there's nothing in particular that distinguishes it from other problems.

My comment was satirical in nature. SLAM is an interpretation of what the parent comment had described:

 _" [B]eing aware of your own location in space and time, as well as remembering previous locations. In other words, having some model of the world and knowing your place in it[.]"_.

There is a general pattern of statements of the form "We'll only _really_ have AI when computers X", followed by computers being able to X, followed by everyone concluding that X is just a simple matter of engineering like everything else we've already accomplished. As my AI prof put it, ages ago, "AI is the study of things that don't work yet."

<comment><USER11> Or it could be, a system capable of reasoning its way to doing X would be intelligent, but you can also teach to the test, so to speak, and build a system that does X without being generalizable and thus satisfy X without being intelligent.

<comment><USER7> > Or it could be, a system capable of reasoning its way to doing X would be > intelligent, but you can also teach to the test, so to speak, and build a > system that does X without being generalizable and thus satisfy X without > being intelligent.

Which is exactly what we do with many kids today; makes you wonder how many times we might invent AI and not know it because we don't raise it correctly so it appears too dumb to be considered a success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I see no AI breakthroughs. I see image processing.

<comment><USER13> Image recognition requires AI. It used to be believed that it was simple. A famous AI researcher in the 50's once sent a bunch of grad students to solve it over the summer. They then started to realize just how complex and impossible the task was.

60 years later, we have finally made general purpose learning algorithms, vaguely inspired by the brain, which are just powerful enough to do it. And because they are general purpose, they can also do many other things as well. Everything from speech recognition, to translating sentences, or even controlling robots. Image recognition is just one of many benchmarks that can be used to measure progress.

<comment><USER14> Relevant xkcd: [http://xkcd.com/1425/](http://xkcd.com/1425/)

<comment><USER15> Thanks to that, I found [http://xkcd.com/1428/](http://xkcd.com/1428/). That is genius.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 2700 deep learning projects at Google... What are they doing, besides the obvious? What's a good ball-park estimate of the number of "projects at Google"?

<comment><USER17> 2700 doesn't strike me as remotely crazy. I'm guessing that some of those projects all serve the same goal, e.g., for their speech system, they have: acoustic modeling; language modeling; named-entity recognition; intent classification; domain classification; grapheme-to-phoneme conversion; language detection; wake-word detection. This ignores other stuff that happens around speech (for example, I know they were using a CRF to label different types of numbers for training their spoken-to-written form converters, which AFAIK are still using WFSTs, although at this point I wouldn't be shocked if both of those systems were converted to DNNs). So let's take an estimate of 10 DNNs for their speech systems. Per language, so make that 200 DNNs to support 20 languages. This ignores that they have separate models for YouTube, voice search (one model for on-device and a cloud-side model), voicemail.

Their machine translation system probably has a similar # of DNNs, and there you have to deal with language pairs, rather than single languages. Let's call it another 400.

That's two side-projects. Then you pull in query prediction, driverless cars, all kinds of infrastructure modeling, spam detection, all of the billions of things that are happening in ads, recommendations, I haven't really even mentioned search yet... Honestly, if I'm right in assuming that the cited figure is really "# of DNNs that do different things", then I'm surprised it's not higher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why are there no units on those graphs?

</comment><comment><USER19> I'll believe it's AI when the speech recognition error rates finally start dropping again.

<comment><USER20> Speech recognition barely improved since the 1990s.

We had Dragon natural speaking on a 133MHz Win95 PC (offline of course). After training it for like 10min it worked better or equal as good as Ford's Sync car assistent (offline) and Siri/GoogeNow/Cortana. Well all these services licensed the Nuance speech technology which they got from buying the company behind Dragon natural speaking software. The Ford board computer runs WinCE and has only 233MHz and is still sold in many 2016 Ford cars around the world. And with cloud hosting, to scale the service each users gets only a small amount of total CPU timeslice anyway.

What I want is an offline speech recognition software on my mobile devices! So do I have to install Win95 on an emulator in my smartphone just so my multi- core high end smartphone can do what a Pentium 1 could do in 1996? My hope is on open source projects. Though most such OSS projects are university projects with little documentation how to build the speech model, little community, on an outdated site, written in Java 1.4 and no GitHub page. There is definitely a need for good and competitive C/C++/(native code) TTS and speech recognition project.

<comment><USER21> > Speech recognition barely improved since the 1990s.

I find it hard to believe, do you have any citations for that - or is that just your gut feel?

A cursory search shows a 26% error rate[1] for Dragon NaturalSpeaking in the year 2000 (beaten by IBM in the same report at 17%).

By May 2015, if Sundar Pichai is to be believed, Google has an 8% error rate[2]. In my books, 26-to-8% (or even 17-to-8%) is far from _barely_ improved.

1\. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC79041/#!po=1.562...](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC79041/#!po=1.56250) Table 3, General Vocabulary

2\. [http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/28/google-says-its-speech- rec...](http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/28/google-says-its-speech-recognition- technology-now-has-only-an-8-word-error-rate/)

<comment><USER19> > By May 2015, if Sundar Pichai is to be believed, Google has an 8% error > rate[2].

Much of the Google's stuff is for search term recognition only. It's functionality on general dictation is nowhere near that good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is an old article. Posted December 12, 2015.

<comment><USER23> That's less than a month ago?</comment></comment>


Thiel's college dropout plan scrutinized by '60 Minutes' - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57437953-93/thiels-college-dropout-plan-scrutinized-by-60-minutes/?tag=mncol <comment><USER2> The problem with college education in America is that we have stigmatized vocational school.

Some people just aren't meant to be academics, and that's fine. They will never excel at school. So let's teach them something that is useful to society like plumbing or electrical of HVAC.

And now for an anecdote: I was paying a plumber for a job once, and after I handed him $1000 for the 4 hours of work he had done, he told me that his kid (who had been his apprentice for the job) was in college on a sports scholarship, but planned on taking over the family plumbing business upon graduation because it was far more lucrative than anything he'd be able to get with his college degree in humanities.

<comment> throwaway55-33 The high wages of the plumber are naturally a function of supply and demand. They are often in part a result of a dearth or even a complete absence of competition.

If there were an overabundance of available skilled plumbers in every community, the wages might drop.

Needless to say, in any given US community there is often a shortage of available skilled plumbers but rarely a shortage of young people with college degrees.

PayPal, Thiel's claim to fame, had one competitor: X.com. And they merged.

<comment><USER2> This is a fair point -- if vocational school were more widely promoted, there would be more people with vocational training and the wages would go down. However, I still think it would settle into a reasonable level of compensation, and regardless, there will always be a base level of demand to be met as long as we keep using electricity and indoor plumbing.

<comment> throwaway55-33 What I find interesting in your anecdote is the son chose to attend university and develop his talent as an athlete before starting full-time work as a plumber.

Even though the university experience might not have a monetary "return on investment", he chose to pursue it.

Now, it's also worth noting he's on scholarship. Whether that was the deciding factor in his choice to attend we cannot be sure just from what you've told us.

But nontheless he is investing his time at the university when he could be doing plumbing jobs and making money (or, by analogy, working on a startup that a certain VC has an interest in).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was a finalist for Thiel's 20 under 20 program last month (i was rejected). During interviews, I met the other finalists and current fellows who dropped out of school for this program 1 year ago.

The two main problems I saw:

* Their projects were much more academic than entrepreneurial. About half of the fellows are working on very technical projects like making better CAD software, robotic bioautomation, microorganisms to solve global warming, etc. Many seem like they'd be better served in academic environments

* Most of the current fellows do not seem self-sustaining, which may become problematic at the end of their fellowship

IMO it's a good program for the few that are working on startups and need some cash to be able to drop out of school, but I worry that it's doing a disservice to the academic oriented fellows.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm commenting as a high school senior who has a few start up plans and is still going to college this fall.

First off, I take fault with the entire "college is overpriced" deal - that's only without financial aid. Harvard costs 60k sticker, but costs around 20k or so after financial aid (with 2/3 of people receiving aid). If you make 150k a year, you'll pay 10% of your income on tuition, it's not a massive 60k expense for most people.

But secondly, life's always about thinking, and it's always going to be about thinking. For purposes of developing education, nothing develops thinking like college, literally. We have no other social institution that fosters the same long-term interaction, learning, and application as college. But even more importantly, college is crucial for general life development, for learning about the world, meeting girls/guys, and all of the misadventures that we tend to take lessons from.

I have over 2000 hours of research in an emerging field, and I'm interested in starting a company on it, but it's not worth skipping college over. It may be worth taking a gap year (which seems more in line with the original Thiel philosophy) but I'm sure I'll have time to fit in a budding startup after classes. If the startup looks promising, and becomes less risky, then sure, it's worth taking a break from college. But until that point, college is a great investment; if you're going to invest in anything, why not invest in yourself?

But with all that being said.. the Thiel application has a few major similarities to the college app process. Thiel recipients probably did well in school, maybe in math/science competitions, have good ideas and are communicative. These skills probably got them into top schools (Ivy/MIT/Stanford). But because the Thiel program is a selection process in itself, it still provides some guidance and is at least better than an unstructured 4 years of skipping college.

Oh and one more thought: people will always care about credentials, which prove that you can do what you say you do. Starting a company, participating in Thiel, or going to a top school all count as credentials - but dropping out of college doesn't guarantee any of those three, and in that sense, is a very risky decision.

</comment><comment><USER5> "The average plumber makes as much as the average doctor" , _really_?

I assume somebody is using a very creative definition of one of those.

<comment><USER6> Plumbers make a LOT of money. Source: just knowing plumbers.

<comment><USER7> right. And its a mistake to conflate, "income" with "reported income for income tax purposes".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I tested out of High School a year early and moved to Los Angeles to focus on only what I wanted to do: Act, write, direct. I'm probably not representative of everyone in technology without a college degree, but nevertheless, when I realized Dream #1 wasn't happening, I tool my tech experience in retail to the start-up world, and then settled in to a decent career, which is only getting better with time. Part of me agrees with all this, but with a grain of salt. It's not the path for everyone. Put me in a room of geeks and I can hold my own; put me in a group of more well-rounded folks, fans of opera and the like (tongue in cheek, folks), I couldn't hold my own and would be bored to death. But that's not just due to personal taste, but a total lack of exposure.

My mother never encouraged me to go to school and I spent all my time in my room reading SciFi and Fantasy novels. But I was very smart, and now that I have a kid of my own, I see that same intelligence in her and, guess what, I'm sending her to college. No matter what. She'll have opportunities to do great things, and I wouldn't fault her for pausing college to work on a start-up company, but I would fault her for not finishing school, even if it took a decade or two. See, I want her to be able to sit in that room with all the socialites and hold her own, as easily as she could in a room full of geeks. That said, until the United States improves its view of education and makes some radical changes, my daughter will NOT be going to college in the States. Maybe University of Helsinki? :)

Good luck to all the Thiel Fellows. I think it is needed, for both an _alternative_ and as a reminder to folks in the States that there is a serious problem with the education system...

</comment><comment><USER9> > _"We have a bubble in education, like we had a bubble in housing...everybody > believed you had to have a house, they'd pay whatever it took," says Thiel. > "Today, everybody believes that we need to go to college, and people will > pay -- whatever it takes."_

And now we have a bubble in technology, and investors need naive kids churning out products so they can catch lightning in a bottle. And they'll pay whatever it takes.

<comment><USER10> I think you're both right. Thiel is right that most folks don't need to go to college and it's horribly over-priced, etc. You're right that we have a lot of investors with a large personal self-ish financial interest in having as many developers and engineers, especially younger/cheaper ones, available to execute on their startup ideas and/or to "invest" (buy lottery tickets on) in them. So you're both right. No contradiction.

<comment><USER11> But look at it from a student's point of view. In case he gets a useless education and a huge loan, the student's life is ruined. If he gets some money from a "me too angel" and works on a non idea and fails... he still gains valuable experience and knows more about the real world and programming and a wealthy guy becomes a little less wealthy. From a student's point of view this is probably the best time to learn and let some one else foot the bill ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does the average plumber make as much as the average doctor? Some quick googling gives the average plumber salary as about 40K. [1] The same site will give you a bunch of doctor's salaries by specialty the lowest one of which seems to be about 170K for a general practitioner.

[1] <http://www1.salary.com/Plumber-I-Salary.html>

<comment><USER13> He was probably talking about lifetime earnings and not yearly income. If you factor in the 11-19 years of additional training and lost income that doctors go through and make a plumber work the same amount of hours as a doctor, then I bet their lifetime earnings will be close.

Heres a post comparing doctors to UPS drivers, which shows what i'm talking about <http://www.er-doctor.com/doctor_income.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> People frequently talk about college as if you can only go when you are 18.

If a budding entrepreneur skips college at 18, he can still go back later.

Skipping college at 18 still may not be the right thing to do... but these conversations frequently overplay the finality of the decision.

</comment><comment><USER6> Has he actually paid anyone with his deal yet? Just curious.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, three of my friends are "Thiel fellows". You can check out all of them here: <http://www.thielfellowship.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does the average plumber make more than the average college graduate? That is the real question. If it's even close, especially after accounting for student loans, that is an indictment of the current higher ed system.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think he (Thiel) is probably right.

<comment><USER18> I think that you should explain why you feel this way instead of simply asserting your (possibly) gut reaction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> My friend and I were debating this topic today. We both agree that ideally, a well rounded education in the arts and sciences is optimal. However, is it necessary for the skilled completion of many trades? I don't think so.

I think high school has started to fail as an educational mechanism.

Let's face it: There are many, many stupid people in the world who will never be that bright. Be it from biological or parental reasons, there are many who will not grasp intricate logic, higher math and philosophy, etc.

Also, many students are capable of beginning higher education in high school. Programming, engineering, even medical studies could be started in the teen years of the brightest students. But we're not fulfilling that potential at the moment.

tl;dr high school should be more challenging, and we should accept that not everyone should go to college.

<comment><USER20> The problem is that nobody is ready to determine their career path at the end of grade school.

<comment><USER21> Germany finds your argument unpersuasive: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:High_schools_in_German...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:High_schools_in_Germany)

<comment><USER22> FTL: "As the German school system differs slightly from the Anglo-Saxon system, these high schools are Gymnasiums. This corresponds more likely between high school and college. The university exam, the "abitur" is often compared to a high school diploma in the United States, it is academically closer to the associate degree of a US college"

So, I don't see how Germany is any different.

<comment><USER23> It is weird seeing Germans contrasted with Anglo-saxon, since both the Angles and Saxons were German tribes originally. I guess there has been a lot of 'water under the bridge' since then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why don't we ask plumbers what they think of a college education? And how it feels to go through life without one. Do wealthy plumbers want their kids to skip college to become wealthy plumbers?

<comment><USER25> For people who are good with their hands, don't enjoy academia and don't navigate institutions and bureaucracies well (whether from temperament or lack of access to that kind of knowledge in the family etc.), the trades are a kind of passport. They let you earn a healthy income, find decent work almost anywhere in the world (provided you can get a visa etc.), and ultimately set up an independent business and earn as much as you're willing to work for.

To be frank, I think programming may be better suited to a trade-oriented approach for many people, with only a relatively small academic oriented aspect for things like discrete mathematics.</comment></comment>


Announcing Rust 1.31 and Rust 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.rust-lang.org/2018/12/06/Rust-1.31-and-rust-2018.html? <comment><USER2> I think this was marked wrongly as a duplicate which hindered its visibility. A real shame because this was the most important release of Rust since 1.0.

</comment><comment><USER3> So much good stuff in this! People are justifiably psyched for NLL, but I'm personally happy to see the module system changes, since the peculiarities of the original module system were my foremost misgiving about Rust 2015. I also can't wait for const fn to become more capable; it's so much cleaner to write compile-time logic as normal Rust code rather than macros, or (ugh) an explicit code generation step.

</comment><comment><USER4> Meta: why is this marked as a duplicate? Where's the other submission of this URL?

<comment><USER5> Probably [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18619754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18619754)</comment></comment>


Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/how-harvards-star-computer-science-professor-built-a-distance-learning-empire <comment><USER2> It should be noted that such a slick class has had the priviledge of being granted the kind of institutional suport which is extremely rare across higher education today, at least in the West. Being allocated the same module for 13 years? Having it be the only module you teach? Having an entire _production team_ at the ready?

It's a mistake to think this is one man's achievement, and a model to universities everywhere of the kinds of quality that can be achieved if they give their staff a break from the endless restructurings, precarity, admin, overwork and burnouts that characterises the vast majority of their situations.

<comment><USER3> > Having an entire production team at the ready?

THIS. So much.

Having just done an online talk, I can tell you that the audio-visual stuff was _BY FAR_ the most annoying.

More expensive webcam, add _way_ more lighting to my office, get an expensive lavalier mic (highly recommended for lectures--earphones with boom mics drive me nuts as the monitoring has enough delay to be annoying--probably could remove that with a $500 audio interface that has DSP monitoring), learn OBS, realize my laptop has nowhere _near_ the power necessary to drive OBS, build a new Desktop machine outfitted for video (that barely even _notices_ OBS), relearn OBS now that it works beautifully, realize that I don't know even a fraction of OBS but have to get things done, record the lecture, and finally have it presented in potato-cam because the people running the thing have laptops with less power than mine and can't playback the hi-res video I sent them.

The lecture maybe took 40 hours to do. Maybe.

The A/V--probably 120+ hours. And probably will take another 120+ the next round because I'll be more capable with the tools.

<comment><USER4> This begs to normalized and sold as a package for both providers and consumers.

<comment><USER3> The problem is that this effectively requires that you set up all the equipment in a place and make people come to that.

Not a great thing in the middle of Covid.

However, once Covid passes, perhaps WeWork should try this with all their real estate to avoid going bankrupt.

<comment><USER4> That's an interesting idea with WeWork.

I'd think that despite variations in environments in a home, there are either 1) enough accommodating tools to normalize (e.g., lights that have a variety of settings) or 2) the majority of the processes required to handle the variations are figured out (e.g., in consistently poor lighting, you need package B instead of package A).

I see some hardware packages for home studios going on sale, but nothing to the level of hardware/software integration necessary for the most effective online instruction/discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Take aside the crew that does all the filming and editing and the fact that they can have guests like Zuckerberg or Ballmer,and you have a passionate tutor,who is willing to go extra mile. When I was at school, I only had 2 teachers like this- won't forget them for my entire life. At uni, most were so so( as the whole uni itsel) and often more interested in anything but teaching. However, briefly,we had an ex HSBC guy,who was the finance professor. The guy was funny, captivating and knew his shit inside out. When asked why he left banking,he did say he was finding academia more interesting. And he was a perfect fit. A lot of people are good at doing research but they may not be very good teachers,or not at least in the setting most of us are familiar with( large audiences,one guy delivering knowledge). I had a chance to watch som recorded lectures from MIT, Harvard,and some other famous institutions and the quality of teaching some( not all though) manage to deliver is exceptional.

<comment><USER6> Agree. I have taken classes with over 40+ professors (close to 50, but I have also taken two or three classes with some profs) in my undergrad and grad school. Out of them, I can recall ~5 being pretty good instructors. Being a professor does not guarantee one is a good teacher/instructor.

The thing that sets apart good instructors from mediocre ones is the passion they have toward teaching (esp. the good ones seem to have empathy as in they want students to succeed and understand the materials that the instructors themselves probably took a good amount of time digesting when they were in students' shoes).

<comment><USER7> Can confirm this. I taught for a bit (coding bootcamp, 1 year). I was super excited my first 3 months (it normalized after that) and during the whole year I had a lot of empathy in the sense that I felt their pain. It's easy to feel someone's pain when you yourself felt it a great deal as well back then.

I was at my best during those first months. Experience and empathy all help but I could notice how being only slightly enthusiastic was hindering my performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Taking CS50 feels similar to watching a movie that has an auteur's fingerprints all over it. Every word in the lecture, every technology, and every problem set has been carefully crafted to fit together to create a cohesive experience.

College instructors everywhere should take the course to see what the zenith of multimedia online education looks like.

<comment><USER9> I've watched some of the lectures of CS50 in the past, and the one question that has always come into my mind is this: "How do these lectures help you learn at a deep level?" I already knew most of the material, so I found it to be an entertaining review, but that's different from a beginner needing to learn new material at a deep level. I kind of think it'd be a nightmare to take good notes while watching his lectures. I'm not bashing the lecture style, but if I were a student, I'd prefer a good textbook to those lectures.

In contrast, I watched all the lectures of Martin Odersky's functional programming MOOC. I learned a ton from that even when I'd already seen the material. His presentations were lower tech, with less razzle-dazzle, but my goal was to learn. His presentations are optimized (intentionally or not) to facilitate good note taking and later application.

<comment><USER10> 1\. There's a companion C book for the course 2. The labs go into much more detail compared to lectures 3. The psets can be Nintendo-hard; you'll be doing devilish pointer stuff by week 3 or 4.

The happy-go-lucky, flashy tone of the course is completely misleading. It is a challenging course, so much so that it's been the subject of numerous cheating scandals from students caving under the pressure over the years.

As for depth, this is a first intro to CS meant not only for CS majors but for people from other domains (Econ, humanities, hard sciences, what have you). The style is meant to cater to people who might not be _a priori_ fascinated by flipping bits. Still quite a bit of people decide to concentrate on CS after taking the class, so it must be doing something right in that sense...

The course is not mandatory for CS concentrators, so if you already know your fundamentals you can jump right into CS51 (functional programming) or CS61 (intro to systems), which are outstanding courses but much more terse in style.

<comment><USER11> You are conflating the pre-Malan intense weedout "I survived CS50" CS50 with Malan's kinder gentler easier more superficial CS50.

Malan's innovation was to change "Intro to CS" from "let's see who knew CS before they got here" to "Intro to CS"

<comment><USER12> Word. The 1990's CS50/CS51 course enrolled both students who'd gotten a "5" in the CS AP and students who didn't know what a for loop was. It felt like learning to swim while simultaneously drowning.

<comment><USER13> The even sillier split-audience course in the mid 2000s was CS121, the intro CS theory course.

More or less a math course, but required for CS students, the audience included a mix of advanced math students (including e.g. some IMO winners) and programmers without any math background.

The result was that half the class felt it was incredibly easy and slow-paced (at least for the first month; later the problems got tedious and fiddly for everyone), and the other half was completely overwhelmed.

<comment><USER14> As referenced in sibling comment, I took 121 a bit earlier than that, with Prof. Lewis. Of course he taught from his "Turing's Face" textbook, which is widely touted as accessible to students with high school math. By the time I took 121 I had quite a bit more math than that so I can't recall whether that is true. I agree with your "tedious and fiddly" assessment, but I don't see any way around it. CS is a tedious and fiddly subject anyway, but the fiddly tedium in this case is related to foundational truths about computation rather than trivial details of particular algorithms (...or, at less ambitious schools, _APIs_ ). Frankly, I hope it's never the case that a student could graduate Harvard with a degree in CS (or applied math) without mastering the material that Prof. Lewis taught in CS-121.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Malan sees it differently: it is wasteful, he said, to have thousands of > teachers, in computer science or other fields, all doing the work of > devising similar curricula. Good programmers spend much of their time > "refactoring" software—editing it to reduce inefficiencies, or "code bloat." > Malan's teaching method pursues a similar objective. "I don't think we want > just one introduction to computer science and one introduction to psychology > or any such field," he said. "But there's probably a number around > dozens—hundreds—that makes more sense?" Rather than threaten the livelihoods > of professors or the independence of institutions, such consolidation would, > Malan believes, free teachers to do their best work. And holding online > courses to the same standards as in-person ones would allow students beyond > the small, predominantly privileged groups who enroll in places like Harvard > to access the highest-quality instruction.

100% agreed with this, and this is something I've often thought about. An unbelievable amount of work is spent replicating the same curricula, lectures, and course materials over and over and over again. Think of how many calculus textbooks there are for example: there's thousands in English alone, as math professors are incentivized to spend years of their lives writing a textbook they can then have their students buy every semester, and thus create a second revenue stream for themselves.

There aren't a million encyclopedias anymore; Wikipedia has pretty much dominated that space. We need something in the education space to fill that niche as well. Imagine how much better an experience most students will have if, instead of watching a random teacher out of millions teach a subject, and using one out of thousands of textbooks, they are instead watching the absolute _best_ lectures and using the single best _amazing_ compendium textbook of knowledge for the subject material. There are some projects that are trying this (e.g. the Wikimedia Foundation has Wikibooks), but none are that successful yet. I can think of a variety of reasons why, mostly having to do with inertia, but the reasons why it should succeed are far more compelling.

<comment><USER16> An awful lot of good teaching is interpersonal. There is a long history of didn't-work's in educational tech and often it is because the hard part is not the material, it is having students form the right mental models. That involves motivating them, adjusting the flow of information, and helping them as they go through a sequence of successive approximations. Basically, at least until now, it involves working with people.

Of course, things can change and this course is certainly very admirable. It will be interesting to see where it goes.

<comment><USER15> Absolutely, and it would be great if teachers were able to fully dedicate themselves to optimizing the inter-personal aspects of it rather than also having to do all this other work of lecture/lesson planning, coming up with curricula, etc. We ask far too much of our teachers/professors, and realistically, most of them are not going to do remotely as good of a job as Dr. Malan has here on CS50. So if you're teaching an intro CS class, use his materials rather than coming up with your own! Same for any other subject; we just need all these ideal materials to be available for every imaginable class targeting every possible age level (elementary on up). Admittedly it's a big a lift, but a seemingly necessary one.

And yes, I know a lot of this already exists to some extent, but where it gets lost is in its availability, centralization, and being targeted at teachers only rather than also being available to the students.

<comment><USER17> In theory, yes. However teachers need to adapt materials to their own style of teaching and to their audience. It can be very hard in practice to teach someone else's materials and have it be 'good' and engaging.

Think of it like cover bands. They don't play it exactly the way the original band does - they adapt it to their own style. So while the original work is 'done', there is still a lot more work to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My son took the AP version of the CS50 course last year in high school and showed me some of the exercises and videos. I immediately updated a lot of my own class materials after watching them and relentlessly hyped the edX class as a great companion to what we were learning.

The entire environment, the culture, that Professor Malan has created is absolutely fantastic and I am incredibly grateful that Harvard has made this content available.

<comment><USER19> Can you get into some specifics that you adopted? I'm listening to the pedagogy video I linked in another comment and so far my takeaway is that Harvard / Malan has a LOT of money to spend on video production, TAs, and the like. That's not easily replicable.

<comment><USER18> Sure. I really thought a lot of the early exercises were things that my students would enjoy doing, especially ISBN, Cash, and Caesar. I sent them to the CS50 web site and even showed them my own C solutions so that they could translate them. I am teaching a lot of students that have never programmed before, so one of my big takeaways is that they are not just learning Language X, they are learning lessons in programming that are applicable in many other languages.

One more thing, with the course needing to be quickly adapted to Zoom last spring, I really noticed the importance of being able to give students rubrics and tests so that they could run their code with different inputs and make sure they were getting the correct outputs. That might seem obvious, but in the past the class was often in lab mode where I could walk around the class and work with them interactively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Kinda fluffy article. This talk on the pedagogy of CS50 has more content: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVjepjUTAk4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVjepjUTAk4)

</comment><comment><USER20> "you don't need to attend Harvard" says the guy who attended Harvard. It sounds like a guy from a rich family who after failing some business, finally succeeded and then says: "if you fail, try again, don't give up". They just forgot that most people can't fail. That's a stupid advice

</comment><comment><USER21> I owe my career to Malan and his CS50 course. That's how I learned to code. I wish him only the best.

</comment><comment><USER22> " Malan's remote-teaching setup involves a host of technology, including a seven-foot-wide interactive computer screen, called a Microsoft Surface Hub"

Don't hear much about the Surface Hub these days. It's alive and well?

<comment><USER23> > Don't hear much about the Surface Hub these days. It's alive and well?

Microsoft released an updated version - the Surface Hub 2S - about a year ago. The _intention_ was this could be upgraded in-situ using a cartridge to become the Surface Hub 2X. The 2X was meant to have all the hotness Microsoft were showing off in demos at the time (it has now been cancelled - [1]).

I procured one for some R&D, it's only sold through OEMs and service providers, for around $10k (more if you get the steelcase stand and battery pack).

For what it is it's quite good: it's industrial design and feature-set goes well beyond a lot of the competition (Google Jamboard, etc), although its applications are still quite niche.

One nice feature is you can output the touch input to a connected Windows laptop, making it a (rather expensive) huge multi-touch external monitor.

[1]:[https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21119915/microsoft- surface...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21119915/microsoft-surface- hub-2x-cancel-major-software-update-features-release-date)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think it might be useful to take a sneak peak at one of the past videos [0].

I did it. I found Prof. Malan to be very, very engaging. I wish one day everyone in the world will have access to this level of education for free, and not just for CS50. For everything.

[0]: [https://youtu.be/jjqgP9dpD1k](https://youtu.be/jjqgP9dpD1k)

</comment><comment><USER25> CS50 is a really well-crafted course, and Malan is an amazing educator. Taking this class online is one of the reasons that got me interested in CS and programming.

I think that this course in particular really highlights the impact of a good teacher. In college I've had multiple professors who quickly made my dislike subjects that otherwise I would have really liked.

</comment><comment><USER26> Malan is an excellent teacher and I absolutely enjoyed the time I spent with the CS50 material.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've ended Harvard CS50 course and should say he's definitely one of the best, rockstar-like. Also seen tons of MIT, Berkeley and another courses from Coursera & Edx, so maybe can do the basic comparison.

 _Secret_ maybe in very good covering of complex stuff and teaching style: pressure, fast moving between topics, playing with auditory in tv-show format, and nearly screaming to get attention while needed.

</comment><comment><USER28> I took CS50 in 2013. Malan was a phenomenal teacher and presented complex concepts with a pace and clarity that made them easy.

</comment><comment><USER29> I met Professor Malan once and asked him for some advice on overcoming imposter syndrome. His advice was a matter-of-fact, learn the things you feel like you don't know and it shouldn't be an issue. I still feel like that sometimes, but the way MOOCs are today makes it easier to approach anything I feel like I don't know.

</comment><comment><USER30> [https://archive.is/1owAX](https://archive.is/1owAX)

</comment><comment><USER31> I agree that Malan is an amazing educator and both energetic and energizing. I took CS50 via the Extension School, and got a chance to meet him when we showcased our final project. He is very approachable and down-to-Earth.

But what was the point of contrasting his "glossy black hair" with the white hair of MIT's Grimson/Guttag? Very cheap shot, and not even subtly ageist.

<comment><USER31> Also, FWIW, I completed MIT's Intro to Programming with Python on edX before I took CS50, and recommend that learners get a decent grasp of programming principles with a higher-level language (spending a week with Scratch doesn't really count) before diving into C with its pointers, manual memory management, etc.

<comment><USER32> Honestly, although in a self-paced MOOC format you can probably get away with it, the MIT 6.001 course really isn't the place to learn programming, programming environments, etc. for the first time either. It doesn't ostensibly require programming background, but it's at a far different pace and level than the actual "intro to programming" course I took way back when in college--and I had even had a programming course in high school which was fairly unusual at the time.

ADDED: I'm also not sure what to think about C in an intro course in this day and age. Sure, as a CS major, or even as part of a good programming curriculum, understanding some of what's going on under the covers is important. But that feels like a Level 2-ish topic at this point.

<comment><USER31> You're actually right, I had also taken very basic "intro" courses locally before taking the MIT course, and Grimson was the first person to explain Big O to me. Having already done some Python and C++ probably helped get more out of that course, as well.

But some people can't drop thousands or even hundreds of dollars to have a prof or TA hold their hand as they learn programming essentials. They might have to put in more time on their own to do well in a course like 6.001, but that may be their only option. They could do Udemy courses, but the quality there seems to vary quite a bit (whereas with edX there's some built-in vetting), and a complete beginner may be overwhelmed by the number of choices.

<comment><USER32> I really liked 6.001 but I already have a fair bit of programming experience although I don't do it professionally and am not a CS major--so I got a lot out of it. MIT has a doubtless deserved reputation as being a bit of a firehose but even so, I can't imagine showing up on campus (during normal times) and learning the basics of programming including even the basics of using a command line on the side while taking not only 6.001 but an otherwise full course load.

Charles Severance's Intro course from U Michigan is a nice Intro to Python MOOC course that's geared to genuine beginners.

<comment><USER31> Thanks for recommending the Michigan course! I have mentored/tutored in the past but am currently too busy. If people contact me regarding lessons, I can politely redirect them to that course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sad to see the article did not mention the OG 1990's CS50 rockstar, Margo Seltzer.

</comment><comment><USER33> Perhaps people appreciate this course because the prestigious Harvard school is behind it. I would traduce that bias by "a good school involves necessarily good courses" . Is it true though?

<comment><USER34> My wife watched his class on the architecture of the internet. She's not technical at all but was absorbed by it to the end.

And I never told her it was from Harvard.

<comment><USER35> Which course is this? I feel like I've seen it but I'm not able to find it with an internet search.

<comment><USER34> I would like to find it too. I just related this story to my wife and she doesn't remember watching it. I said "you were enraptured, and watched the whole thing?"!

"Apparently it wasn't that memorable", she replied.

Edit: Might be this one?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_KghQP86Sw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_KghQP86Sw)

If so he's updated it since we watched.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> David Malan is such a nice person, I remember when I was taking CS50 and found a syntax error and emailed him about it and he was so kind and fixed it.

</comment><comment><USER37> CS50 is THE reason I have a software development career today. Coincidentally, after CS50, I started watching an MIT Python course. If the MIT course had been my introduction so programming, I am sure that I would have dismissed software development as "not for me". I got lucky that my first exposure was CS50 - I owe a debt of gratitude to Malan.

</comment><comment><USER38> I took the class. What didn't scale were the TAs. It took 2 months to get anything graded. Malan's response was "The TA will grade it within a week."

I suspect they've automated since.

<comment><USER39> Yep, grading is fully automated now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> The New Yorker needs editors

More of less</comment>


A Hidden Order of Reality: What Geology, Freud, and Marxism Share - <AUTHOR> http://bostonreview.net/philosophy-religion-literature-culture/gili-kliger-hidden-order-reality <comment><USER2> This is a review of a book about structuralism as idealized by Lévi-Strauss.

not even anthropologists consider it today. He published pop books and founded anthropology departments all over the world, but academically, meh.

Lévi-Strauss would be at a TED talker today.</comment>


Amazing image effects with HTML5 canvas - <AUTHOR> http://html5advent2011.digitpaint.nl/16/

<comment><USER2> Somebody has a low threshold for "amazing". The image resolution is pretty low, I'd be more impressed if you could do 60fps on a HD image.</comment>


Money making dreams and the reality - <AUTHOR> http://sanguinity.net/pictures/2010/making-money-on-the-internet/

<comment><USER2> I really sucked at market size estimation back in the day:

[http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog- images/hn/reality-b...](http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog- images/hn/reality-breaks-expectations.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> That is absolutely creepy that we used the same colors and all. I was in mspaint trying to choose between green and purple as a 'dream color,' and green just seemed more like a 'start it' color.

I wish my reality charts were more like that. I scooped up a few iPad/Kindle dev/app sites and hope to find enough time to make something out of them!

<comment><USER2> _That is absolutely creepy that we used the same colors and all._

Oh, my bad, I suppose without context that post might look like I was commenting about a pre-existing thingee. I created that image about ten minutes ago in response to yours and so used the same colors. Then a quick commit, svn update ..., and a new URL popped up on my website so I could copy/paste into HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Link doesnt seem to be working?

<comment><AUTHOR> something in the tubes went wrong! (100% cpu usage, 100% disk io), my linode got throttled

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is pretty fun, I especially liked the iPhone graph.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm hoping the Kindle will be the next gold mine!

<comment><USER5> No way man. The iPad is the next gold mine!

<comment><AUTHOR> The iPad just seems like most of the apps will get converted to a larger, 'friendly' UI and keep on making revenue.

The Kindle is an open book!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This mirrors the average money-making-misadventures in the online space so well it's scary, nice job to the author.

</comment><comment><USER7> isn't the whole "my hope for this post is $1.29 from adsense" against Google ToS? Kinda implies you want people clicking.

<comment><AUTHOR> wasn't exactly what I was aiming for, last time I posted I made 1.28 ;\

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Would you mind writing up a piece about your offline affiliate marketing experience, since it seems to be the most successful thing you've done?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll do a write up tomorrow, but I'm about to head to sleep. Been refreshing the statistics page and looking at ref urls for an hour and checking out some of these news sites I've never heard of!

email me at admin @ the linked website . com and I'll either email it to you or post it. The writeup will require quite a bit of time and tweaking :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Inaccurate

</comment><comment><USER10> I really do wonder how people _don't_ make money on the internet. It's trivially easy to make it to mid six figures. I've personally found it extremely difficult to make it to 7/8.

<comment><USER11> If it's so trivially easy why don't you have 20 people do it under your direction, and to your benefit? If it's so easy why don't you just do it 10 times simultaneously?

<comment><USER10> I'm working on that. It's hard to find good people though - most people I come across are too lazy or scared of failure.</comment></comment></comment>


My quest for a dream job - <AUTHOR> In three months time, I will be completing 13 years as a software professional, and my quest for that "dream" job still continues. As a student of computer science, and while I was a fresher in the industry, I always had a vision of a dream job. The vision has only got sharper over the years, but I have got nowhere near to landing that job. It does not mean I am unhappy with my current job. I have seen many ups and downs in my career, and finally, since the last few years, I have the feeling of being in control. I am quite content in what I am doing.
So, why this ongoing quest for a dream job. Why not be happy with what I have got and let life continue like this. The answer is quite clear. I have always wanted a career that I would be proud of. Some day, when I look back at my career, I should feel that I have achieved something, that I was part of something special, something extra-ordinary. My career is just not about earning money, just not about getting jobs done, but being a part of something which affects millions of lives, being part of something which is ground-breaking. That is my dream, that is where I always wanted to reach, and I know I am quite far off from there. I have gained good knowledge, I have grown as a professional, I have earned the respect and trust of my peers and superiors, but haven't really "achieved" what I wanted to. When I use Windows, I wonder how proud the developers who have designed and worked on it, would be. Those engineers who are working on Project Loon would be so excited. Or those lucky software engineers, who work in CERN, how challenging and satisfying their jobs must be. Developing an OS, working in path breaking research teams, working on developing of new standards or being part of a kick-ass start-up, those are some jobs that would be my "dream". That is where I want to reach, and not there yet. I don't know if I will ever make it there, but my quest will continue. <comment><USER2> There's a lot of important open source stuff that can use help from experienced individuals. i.e. Tor. It probably won't pay, but you'll be doing something incredible, and nobody but yourself can stop you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much. Being part of open source is quite on top of my to-do list. I just somehow have to find time to get started.</comment></comment>


Lessons Learned Scaling the Audiogalaxy Search Engine - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiteful.com/2008/03/07/lessons-learned-scaling-the-audiogalaxy-search-engine/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious if anyone out there is doing the "Silky Smooth Searching" thing I mention in the article. Does that have a more official name?

(The idea is to use some AJAX magic to post the user's search term to the server before they actually hit "submit" so that it can be cached when they do run their search).</comment>


The Cost of Living in the Cloud - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattkiser.com/post/17633093109/the-cost-of-living-in-the-cloud

<comment><USER2> Do you really need Arq and iCloud together? Why do you need BaseCamp and Google Apps (GA has a free tier anyway). Is it critical that you have your GA and BC files synced to your Dropbox (doesn't that just defeat the purpose of the 'cloud'?). Do you need Evernote when you could just as easily use Google Docs? There's a lot of overlap here. You could really escape with Arq, Dropbpox, and free Google Apps.

</comment><comment><USER3> A lot of the listed services are redundant. I think I could hit 99% of the same functionality at half the cost using just a subset of those products.</comment>


Elon Musk: Tesla Model S will go farther on a charge - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/15/autos/elon-musk-tesla/index.html

<comment><USER2> This article is just plain wrong on a number of points. They are wildly extrapolating from a tweet. "Ending range anxiety" could be anything from performance improvements, to more accurate routing, to a better system for finding charging points.

"Tesla similarly upgraded its Roadster electric cars last year, expanding their range to almost 400 miles between charges via an over-the-air update"

While that would be incredible if true, it is not. They have announced the availability of a physical battery upgrade for the Roadster that includes a complete battery swap, drive train improvements, and other stuff derived from the Model S research.

This is ridiculous, CNN aren't even reading their own linked articles.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, the Roadster 3.0 announcement started by saying:

      The Roadster 3.0 package applies what we've learned in
      Model S to Roadster. No new Model S battery pack or major
      range upgrade is expected in the near term.

[http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/roadster-30](http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/roadster-30)</comment></comment>


AT&T Helped N.S.A. Spy on an Array of Internet Traffic - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/us/politics/att-helped-nsa-spy-on-an-array-of-internet-traffic.html?action=Click&contentCollection=BreakingNews&contentID=42716377&pgtype=article

<comment><USER2> Ongoing discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066014](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066014)</comment>


Can we make Java better already? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.prakashvenkat.com/can-we-make-java-better-already/ <comment><USER2> The really scary thing about over-engineered environments is that even when it works you probably do not know _why_. If one ecosystem makes me check in 12 files for my change, full of dozens of lines of XML, and another environment needs just a few lines in one file, which do you think will completely collapse under its own weight in a few years?

</comment><comment><USER3> Did they actually manage to make a light ORM that's more complicated than hibernate?

</comment><comment><USER4> It reads to me more of a Spring Boot issue than a Java issue per se.</comment>


PostgreSQL 10.1, 9.6.6, 9.5.10, 9.4.15, 9.3.20, and 9.2.24 released - <AUTHOR> https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1801/ <comment><USER2> wait 10.1 is like X.X.1 in the past ? They changed their numbering style.

<comment><USER3> To be snarky, X.Y.1, but yes, they changed it: [https://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/](https://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/)

<comment><USER4> Thank you for posting the link. I was wondering this myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Domination</comment>


Show HN: Interactive Conway's Game of Life with good graphics and writeup/source - <AUTHOR> http://symbolflux.com/conwayz/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's a little non-obvious because of the page layout, but scroll down for the writeup (much of it is about using raymarching as the basis for rendering an interactive application).

There are also a bunch of interesting presets via the dropdown on the right. And you can shift+click in the scene to toggle cells on/off.</comment>