AirBnb's new site design - <AUTHOR> https://www.airbnb.com/ <comment><USER2> To be honest, I never had any interest in trying AirBnB services. I never saw the allure of staying in someone else's rundown apartment or guest bedroom. I mean who wants to be that stranger in the other room? THAT SAID, this website did change my mind a little bit. I still don't think I'd like to stay in someone else's home but this website has demonstrated that there are some really amazing places you can stay in for very low costs. If I could get over my own hangups about being in other people's home, I'd definitely give AirBnB a shot after visiting this website.

It comes off as a luxury hotel website, or one of those 'ooh la la' HGTV tv shows where they show you cool, abstract homes you'll never live in. This is a good thing.

To the topic of site speed, is it really an issue to non-web-geeks? Do normal users of the web really know what a slow website is? Anyone know of studies or stats on what an average internet user considers is a slow page?

UPDATED

The website has done a good enough job of convincing me this is a legit service where it's customers are happy. I've decided to give AirBnB a shot. Going to plan a trip utilizing their services this evening. Wish me luck.

<comment><USER3> > I mean who wants to be that stranger in the other room?

It feels just like a hotel. You usually get towels and your own separate room.

Usually you're travelling so you don't really spend much time there unless you're sleeping.

I stayed in the lower east side for only $50/night, so its definitely worth it.

<comment><USER2> I agree, I am not usually in my hotel room very often if I am on vacation but that raises the point of, if I am hardly in the room, who cares where I stay? I know this flies in the face of my point of being hung up on being in other peoples homes, but why not just stay in a cheaper motel (if available)?

To be honest, I'd really like to try it one day. Some of those locations look great and the prices are very reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I see heavy web pages like this it makes me worry about the state of front-end web design.

According to YSlow, the site came to 3.5MB, which is quite large when compared to the average home page. The site took at least five seconds to load on my fast dev machine, which is far too long.

The nail in the coffin for me, however, is that this site does not work in older browser, namely IE7. I've worked with large clients and we've made sure that everything works in IE6 and above because they make the cost back from sales within hours. A large company like airbnb simply cannot afford to not support older browsers and I firmly believe that they'll lose a ton on money on their lack of support.

All in all, I'm disappointed.

<comment><USER5> It loaded for me in ~2 seconds, on a 2010 Macbook Air. I think we're at the stage where 'heavy' pages are permissible, and even advantageous at times.

<comment><USER6> It loaded for me in ~30 seconds on a 2011 Macbook Pro. I don't see what your loading experience has to do with anything. Different people have different connection speeds in different parts of the world (my connection speed varies within the same building depending on congestion, etc).

That said, all the fancy pictures do look very nice, and certainly draw you in like no other travel site that I've come across (when it eventually loads).

<comment><USER5> _I don't see what your loading experience has to do with anything._

I was responding to anecdotal evidence with contrary anecdotal evidence. In the big scheme of things neither really means anything, but it would be pretty tedious if I had to test a statistically significant number of machines every time I altered a page layout.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ughh, I really don't like it. I felt lost right away. I use to think about Airbnb's design a lot when designing on my own because it was simple and told you directly what you wanted. Like dropbox for example. I don't get the complication here.

PS: This should be #1 on HN...

</comment><comment><USER8> As an Airbnb host, I'm worried that this new homepage has too much going on. The old design really emphasized the "Where are you going?" search box, which led quite naturally on to the listing results page. Also, many of my guests are making bookings on-the-go in countries with less than ideal internet connectivity. So page size definitely matters, and 3.5MB is pushing the limits.

I do really like how the check-in/check-out date widgets slide out from the search box when you click it, though... makes the interface feel responsive and de-clutters the search box.

Luckily, the rest of the site hasn't been touched other than to add the "Wish Lists" feature (which I like so far).

</comment><comment><USER9> Dear Airbnb team and design crew, you did a great job! The landing page is great and I´ve always been waiting for the infinite scroll solution for your service you implemented right now. Especially I really like the Picks and Collections which have their own style and a cool font. Is your designer featured on dribbble? For sure, these images are becoming the "Google Doodles" of airbnb.

I think the whole website looks nice & furnished right now and underlines the community culture. Maybe you can still tune the city listings page a little? They grey containers right here <http://www.airbnb.com/s/San-Francisco--CA> could be improved.

@airbnb: do you plan to offer the "Wish List" in combination with a gifting function, so that a user can gift his girlfriend or whomever with X nights in Wish List place younameit? I think if you integrate that into Facebook "X just gifted Y with Z nights in this beautiful room (link) in City Awesome", it would be nice.

<comment><USER10> Kelli Anderson did most the visual graphics in Airbnb Picks: <http://dribbble.com/kellianderson>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love the new wishlists and how you're featuring people's lists on the home page. Probably a nice lightweight way to get people engaged with the site.

Some feedback - when I'm on a wishlist, it's actually pretty difficult to navigate to the listings themselves. I click the listing name and see a pop up that really only has one call to action - the "Save to Wish list" button. The listing name links just link you back to the wish list - in fact, the only way to actually view the real listing is to click the price tag. Maybe I'm missing something, but if I see a listing that looks interesting, I'd like to be able to view the listing and possibly book it.

<comment><USER12> You're right, increasing engagement is a goal here. Regarding your feedback, under the Wish List button is the location, map, and 'Book it' link. All three take you to the listing. Keep the feedback coming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This makes me think that their "supply side" is fully stocked and that they really just need people to book nights on existing inventory. Kind of seems like they are neglecting the supply side and focusing on the demand right now, by putting the "list your space" all the way in the top right with a small box.

<comment><USER8> Definitely the case. They've put a lot of effort into bringing on new hosts this past year, to the point that I've noticed a distinct slowdown in bookings recently. I'm all for Airbnb focusing on demand now. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It looks nice but it also looks very busy.

One thing I will never understand though, is a design that includes infinite scrolling _and_ a footer. I finally got to the footer because the refreshing locked somehow, but it seems that it's just supposed to add more listings forever.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There new feature Wish List may have something to do with the redesign. More here --> [http://blog.airbnb.com/hello-world-im-an-airbnb-wish-list- yo...](http://blog.airbnb.com/hello-world-im-an-airbnb-wish-list-youll-love)

</comment><comment><USER15> I love how the long-scrolling tiled design sucks you into exploring all their offerings. So much easier to do that via scrolling than by clicking around through the site.

Great use of two design concepts to remove barriers to and simplify the core customer experience.

PS - the Frank Lloyd Wright collection, for anyone who missed it:

<https://www.airbnb.com/wishlists/frank-lloyd-wright>

Also, looks like Jack Dorsey is a fan of houseboats and the occasional mega- yacht:

<https://www.airbnb.com/wishlists/3182046>

</comment><comment><USER16> This type of redesign is not needed. Full redesigns are rarely needed. In my opinion, they should have spent several months changing small pieces of their site and testing how well people respond to the changes.

</comment><comment><USER17> My first thought (before clicking): Why would they redesign their site? Their site, and all their related apps, look really wonderful.

After clicking: Still looks great, although now the landing page looks like grooveshark :)

</comment><comment><USER18> Yikes, it looks more like a Gilt/Fab site than something I'd feel comfortable renting my place through. Resizing is a disaster, which is weird because this site would be easy to media query up.

<comment><USER19> I personally like the look of the site. I think it is a bit overdone, but still visually pleasing. I completely agree with your resizing comment though. In 2012, if you are going all out on a redesign, the site should be responsive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I simultaneously dislike the design (too busy, too big, silverlight, moving, etc.) and am more likely to use airbnb (because the great photography reveals some awesome rentals, although usually far away places I'd be unlikely to go). I wonder if that's what they were going for.

<comment><USER12> Where are people getting silverlight from? There's no silverlight on the site.

<comment><USER20> Something pegs my CPU when I browse the site on Windows in IE, but not on OSX. I have silverlight and flash on the windows browser but not on osx, so that's what I assumed it was (based on someone else having mentioned silverlight); I guess it's something else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Searching support is pretty broken. It seems to return lots of links that are gone. For example, I searched "favorites" and the top two results (a page on favorites and a page on wish lists) don't work. And they were the ones that had the info I needed.

</comment><comment><USER22> Next month's post: Wimdu's new site design <http://wimdu.com>

</comment><comment><USER23> Beautiful design. I like how it focuses on the imagery (as it should) and once again great typography.

</comment><comment><USER24> The first click on a link works, the second does not (tested on latest stable Chrome).

<comment><USER25> Same for me. It keeps freezing as well. I am pretty floored they they decided to use silverlight... why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's a new homepage, not a new site. The profile pages are unchanged.

</comment><comment><USER27> Square Up is the url for Square's website. It should also now be used to describe sites that outright copy it's style. "Hey, you go to www.abcdefg.com? looks like they squared up!"

</comment><comment><USER28> They seem to be using Backbone.js now

</comment><comment><USER29> This should also be called "Responsive design fail".

</comment><comment><USER30> Hate it. It looks like some kind of interior design site than a site that allows me find places to stay... or list my place. I scrolled down and down hoping to find some meat, but no - just more glossy nonsense.

More importantly, I was about to list my place on the site. It's a nice looking house in London, but no - it dose NOT look like something from an interior design mag. Clearly my house does not meet the required standard. Better not list it.

<comment><USER31> > It's a nice looking house in London, but no - it dose NOT look like > something from an interior design mag. Clearly my house does not meet the > required standard. Better not list it.

This is a fair point, I worry it might get lost in the first half of your post!

<comment><USER30> Agreed. It was a very testy post I shod just learn to avoid posting while in a bad mood.</comment></comment></comment>


MakerLisp: Embedded Lisp Machine - <AUTHOR> https://makerlisp.com/ <comment><USER2> This is exceptionally cool, but even for someone like me who has disposable income, a deep love of retrocomputing and several years of Lisp experience... it's just very expensive. For the machine, GPIO headers and USB keyboard support (really the bare minimum for interesting things) its over $300.

You have to really, REALLY love offbeat baremetal lisp machines to throw down that kind of cache for a system where your USB controller is probably more robust and powerful than the entire rest of the system put together. Hell, I'm pretty sure my TV's remote control clocks faster when it's on...

<comment><USER3> The price will come down, soon, as soon as I can build a batch of about 50. I'm thinking of creating a mass buy sign-up, so I can put in a big order and offer them at a reduced price. Or some sort of credit on future purchases for those who buy now. I'm open to suggestions, and ideas on what is an attractive/competitive target price.

<comment><USER2> I appreciate that you're doing small batch SBCs and that adds up. As an artistic accomplishment, I love your work.

I think that for me personally, the outer envelope for a SBA (with the ability to use a USB keyboard and some sort of minimal display attachment) is $150.

The GPIO expansion and the cute case are fine as secondary things and I wouldn't mind giving over for that.

I don't know if there is some sort of uart option for serial comms on the board, I didn't see that called out. But if there is you perhaps want to mention it is your option for folks buying on a tighter budget.

<comment><USER3> Yes, there is a USB/UART on the CPU card, I think I do mention it, but not as directly as I should. Once you have the expansion board, then real terminals or computers with serial ports are possible too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There were various Z80 and MOS 6502 microcomputer Lisp implementations written back in the '80s, some commercially released at the time, some readily accessible nowadays. [https://www.wisdomandwonder.com/link/3787/how-small-can- a-sc...](https://www.wisdomandwonder.com/link/3787/how-small-can-a-scheme- implementation-be#comment-497) [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.scheme/Z_2...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.scheme/Z_2fxEuq4wc)

(There's one that I'm horribly, horribly overdue to get back to the authors about archiving on the Internet, actually. Anyone who's based in North America and happens to have the hardware and the expertise to recover data from both 5.25" and 8" floppies in some CP/M format?)

<comment><USER5> The first Apple ][ LISP I ever played with was "MICROLISP", written in APPLESOFT BASIC, included with the Apple Software Bank Volume 3-5, published in 1978 (despite the Internet Archive listing saying it was published in 1974, which would have been impossible since the Apple ][ was launched in 1977).

Text APPLESOFT BASIC source code -- It's only 201 lines! Beautiful!:

[http://apple.rscott.org/tools/view.htm?crc=e7d8e947136190aa&...](http://apple.rscott.org/tools/view.htm?crc=e7d8e947136190aa&n=6)

        60000  HOME : PRINT "MICROLISP/16-JUN-78": PRINT "COPYRIGHT 1978 APPLE COMPUTER INC"
        60010  PRINT "IT WILL TAKE APPROXIMATELY 1.5 MINUTES"
        60027  PRINT "TO INITIALIZE THE ARRAYS."

I can't find an MP3 of the original cassette tape it was distributed on ;), so you'll have to suffer with the DSK image file:

[http://apple.rscott.org/tools/dldsk.htm?crc=e7d8e947136190aa](http://apple.rscott.org/tools/dldsk.htm?crc=e7d8e947136190aa)

HN discussion of 6502 Language Implementation Approaches (dwheeler.com):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18376842](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18376842)

[https://dwheeler.com/6502/](https://dwheeler.com/6502/)

Documentation from Apple Software Bank Volume 3-5:

[https://archive.org/details/Apple_Software_Bank_Vol_3-5/page...](https://archive.org/details/Apple_Software_Bank_Vol_3-5/page/n15)

Program Name: MICROLISP

Volume Number: 3

Software Bank Number: 00398

Submitted By: 0le Anderson

Program Language: APPLESOFT II

Minimum Memory Size: 32K Bytes

The following discussion assumes the user is already familiar with the principles and technical vocabulary of the LISP language.. The user should consider this document more as reference material on how MICROLISP differs from other versions of LISP, and what features it implements. A good reference for learning LISP is Weissman's LISP 1.5 Primer (see Bibliography). We also can recommend Friedman's The Little LISPer as an enjoyable introduction.

MICROLISP is a cassette-based microprocessor implementation of an interpreter for LISP, a programming language useful for symbol processing. The MICROLISP interpreter is written in APPLESOFT II BASIC. More complete documentation will soon be available when Hayden Press publishes a book on Microlisp by Ole Anderson. This book will include an annotated source listing of the interpreter, an explanation of its theory of operation, a detailed reference manual, an application section describing how to do graphics from MICROLISP using BASIC, a short LISP primer for the inexperienced user, and a bibliography of LISP literature useful to the MICROLISP user.

Many programming languages (BASIC for example) have been created to deal primarily with numerical data, and programs written in those languages can solve a large range of problems. But there is an equally interesting area of programming that deals with symbolic data.

If you want to be "in" with the artificial intelligence crowd, you might consider learning a symbolic manipulation language. Symbolic data might be chess positions, equations (treated as equations, not as expressions to be evaluated), or natural-language sentences. LISP is a language for list processing (hence the name: LISt Processor). Lists are the data items of LISP, just as numbers are the data items in BASIC. Because list elements are symbols not restricted to numbers, LISP makes it possible to solve many types of symbolic manipulation problems as easily as simple numeric problems are solved in BASIC. LISP is used primarily for artificial intelligence applications such as processing natural-language input, performing symbolic differentiation and integration of numerical formulas, and proving mathematical theorems. MICROLISP is a version of LISP that will allow you to learn the elements of LISP by writing and executing LISP programs.

BASIC goes a long way toward making the power of the personal computer available to the average person, but it lacks several critical features found in many other high-level languages: naming of subroutines and calling them with parameters, use of variable names with more than the first two characters significant, recursive subroutines and dynamic allocation of variables. These features are all found in MICROLISP.

Implementing MICROLISP in BASIC means that LISP programs do not execute very rapidly. However, it makes it possible to see how the language has been implemented. On the other hand, APPLESOFT II supports real (floating point) arithmetic, string functions and trigonometric functions, and these are all available to the MICROLISP user (often they are not available in larger versions). Another convenient feature in APPLESOFT II is the ability to PEEK and POKE memory locations, and to CALL machine-language routines from BASIC. This is often useful for interfacing special hardware and for applications where speed is critical. Another reason MICROLISP was written in BASIC is for tutorial purposes.

Many personal computer users desire to learn about the techniques involved in implementing high-level computer languages. This program is an example of a complete language processor which accepts characters typed from the keyboard, builds symbols from them, and processes these symbols according to the syntax of the LISP language. Thus, it uses many of the important algorithms employed by all other interpreters, compilers and language processors. MICROLISP can also be used as an educational tool for introducing elementary list-processing concepts.

<comment><USER5> Also from David A. Wheeler's 6502 Language Implementation Approaches (archive.org-ified to the time the links were written, or best approximation):

[https://web.archive.org/web/20181112182918/https://dwheeler....](https://web.archive.org/web/20181112182918/https://dwheeler.com/6502/)

Lisp/LOGO

The "skimp" page also includes a list of several 8-bit LISP implementations, including several for the 6502 [1]. This discussion lists more [2]. One useful implementation discussion (of many!) is R. Kent Dybvig's "Three Implementation Models for Scheme". University of North Carolina Computer Science Technical Report 87-011 [Ph.D. Dissertation], April 1987 [3].

neslisp [4] is a small subset of Lisp that generates 6502 code (NES); the as of version 0.1 it is released under the GPLv2 license (and thus is open source software). An older version is available via neslisp on Google code [5].

Picobit [6] (GPLv3) looks interesting. You program in Lisp (specifically a variant of Scheme) on a larger system; it then compiles to a VM that runs on the target. Currently it does not support the 6502, but the system is designed to be portable and it looks to me that it'd be relatively easy to port to a 6502.

Lysp [7] (MIT license) is another small implementation of Lisp. It doesn't directly support 6502 and is in C, but it's small... so it might not be hard to transliterate. A related program from the same developer is Maru [8], which can self-host. This could be a reasonable starting point for creating a 6502 Lisp.

Turning the Apple //e into a lisp machine, part 1 [9] refers to this Lisp interpreter for the Apple //e [10] (MIT license). They also show a clever bootstrap approach: they send code via the audio jack (!).

There's more that can be done; Lisp was originally developed in 1965, on even smaller systems. The book "Lisp in Small Pieces", Program Transformation in Lisp [11], this Scheme page [12] and these details on implementation [13] are all of interest. R. Kent Dybvig's "Three Implementation Models for Scheme" [14] shows how to implement Scheme while still keeping most stuff on the stack. Tagging could be difficult, but an alternative (that I believe was done for early Lisp implementations) is to partition the memory into regions; to determine the tag, just check which memory region it is in. It might be possible to start with PicoLisp [15] to create a 6502 version. There is a trivial ACL2 implementation of Lisp (GPL) [16] that I converted into Common Lisp ( compiler [17], run-time [18]; See Wolfgang Goerigk's "Compiler Verification Revisited" [19] for more).

I know that there was an "InterLISP 65" available for Atari's 6502-based line.

Various full LOGO implementations were available as well.

[1] skimp: [http://web.archive.org/web/20100131151915/http://www.ip9.org...](http://web.archive.org/web/20100131151915/http://www.ip9.org/munro/skimp/)

[2] discussion: [missing]

[3] Three Implementation Models for Scheme: [https://web.archive.org/web/20160817185323/http://www.cs.ind...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160817185323/http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/3imp- abstract.html)

[4] neslisp: [https://web.archive.org/web/20160319025751/http://gomez.yell...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160319025751/http://gomez.yellowcouch.org/lisp/) sources: [https://web.archive.org/web/20160619185108/http://gomez.yell...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160619185108/http://gomez.yellowcouch.org/lisp/src/neslisp-0.1.tar.gz)

[5] google code nelisp: [missing]

[6] Picobit: [https://web.archive.org/web/20150106110223/https://github.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150106110223/https://github.com/stamourv/picobit) current: [https://github.com/stamourv/picobit](https://github.com/stamourv/picobit)

[7] Lysp: [https://web.archive.org/web/20180929064442/http://piumarta.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180929064442/http://piumarta.com/software/lysp/) source: browse: [https://web.archive.org/web/20170507045957/http://www.piumar...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170507045957/http://www.piumarta.com/software/lysp/lysp-1.1/) download: [https://web.archive.org/web/20180929064442/http://piumarta.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180929064442/http://piumarta.com/software/lysp/lysp-1.1.tar.gz)

[8] Maru: [https://web.archive.org/web/20181206222700/http://piumarta.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181206222700/http://piumarta.com/software/maru/) source: browse: [https://web.archive.org/web/20181206222700/http://piumarta.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181206222700/http://piumarta.com/software/maru/maru-2.4/) download: [https://web.archive.org/web/20181206222700/http://piumarta.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181206222700/http://piumarta.com/software/maru/maru-2.4.tar.gz)

[9] Turning the Apple //e into a lisp machine, part 1: [https://web.archive.org/web/20190109003417/http://blog.nulls...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190109003417/http://blog.nullspace.io/apple-2-lisp- part-1.html)

[10] google code turtles: [https://web.archive.org/web/20180611002847/https://github.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180611002847/https://github.com/hausdorff/turtles) current: [https://github.com/hausdorff/turtles](https://github.com/hausdorff/turtles)

[11] Program Transformation in Lisp: [http://www.findinglisp.com/blog/2004/06/program- transformati...](http://www.findinglisp.com/blog/2004/06/program- transformation-in-lisp.html)

[12] this Scheme page: [missing]

[13] these details on implementation: [https://web.archive.org/web/20180801195133/http://library.re...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180801195133/http://library.readscheme.org/page8.html)

[14] Three Implementation Models for Scheme: [https://web.archive.org/web/20190503102138/https://cs.indian...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190503102138/https://cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/papers/3imp.pdf)

[15] PicoLisp: [https://web.archive.org/web/20181124064229/http://www.softwa...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181124064229/http://www.software- lab.de/down.html)

[16] ACL2 implementation of Lisp (GPL): [https://web.archive.org/web/20090217043459/http://www.cs.ute...](https://web.archive.org/web/20090217043459/http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/acl2/v3-1/distrib/acl2-sources/books/workshops/1999/compiler/)

[17] compiler: [https://web.archive.org/web/20160320015734/http://www.dwheel...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160320015734/http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting- trust/lisp-demo/mycompiler.cl)

[18] runtime: [missing]

[19] Compiler Verification Revisited: [missing] citation: [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=369101](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=369101) buy chapter: [https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4757-3188-0_...](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4757-3188-0_15)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another 'bare metal lisp' is [http://www.ulisp.com/](http://www.ulisp.com/) , which has some fun demos and is supported by different hardware, 16 or 32 bit. It's also a single .ino file, e.g. [1]

[1] [https://github.com/technoblogy/ulisp- arm/blob/master/ulisp-a...](https://github.com/technoblogy/ulisp- arm/blob/master/ulisp-arm.ino)

<comment><USER7> Just a word of warning, I tried this right now and I'm 55% sure I just broke the arduino. Upload failed, resetting does nothing.

<comment><USER8> I've never heard of this happening before, and I can't even think of a way in which uploading uLisp could break an Arduino, but contact me directly (my email address is on the uLisp site) and I'll try and help you sort it out.

<comment><USER7> I can't see how that would break it either, hence the low confidence percentage!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Related impractical fun: you could fit a small Lisp (such as standard R7RS Scheme) in some PC motherboard flash chips used for the BIOS/bootstrap, using Coreboot. Maybe ThinkPad X200 or a Coreboot-friendly Chromebook.

<comment><USER10> In the Lisp community, there's an infamous story of a Lisp Machine made out of Nokia Communicator (the early, DOS-based model with 80186 cpu) by Timo Noko using Nokolisp.

What happened was that the DOS flash image got corrupted somehow, so Noko implemented missing bits in his lisp implementation and made the phone boot directly into it. Since all the software he used was written in his Lisp, there was not much of a difference in usability :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I played with this thing for like a half hour at Vintage Computer Festival a few months back, it's a very cool thing. The computer packed fully in to a case built around a VGA display and usb ortholinear keyboard, and in to a shoulder bag. The "Lisp Machine" itself speaks serial in/out. The keyboard plugs in to a USB-to-Serial interface, and the screen in to a serial terminal to VGA emulator.

Cool stuff, and the creator's goal of creating a machine for interactive learning with a hand-coded scheme-alike is pretty wonderful.

EDIT: It looks like it went on sale two days ago and the full kit is already listed as out of stock. Hopefully they can increase stock. I've wanted one of these since I first put eyes on it.

<comment><USER3> I'll adjust the stock count on Tindie, I have a few more than what is shown there, but I am getting low and I have to order more parts soon. Thanks for your interest and positive comments !

<comment><USER11> Just grabbed one, thanks much

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Super cool. But ... Not a single code example. No GitHub repo. Is there _any_ info available other than those single page PDFs with no info?

<comment><USER13> [https://github.com/hww/makerlisp](https://github.com/hww/makerlisp)

<comment><USER3> I didn't make that github repo, I don't know who did. But it's old. The most recent archive on makerlisp.com is from a few days ago. Go there if you want the most recent stuff.

<comment><USER3> This is a snapshot of the source preview I put up just before my trip to the Bay Area Lisp & Scheme Users Group in February, before I had shipped any products. Apparently someone was just trying to help me get more exposure. I have no problem with this, the attributions and links are all correct and it is a proper snapshot. As a reading / demonstration example, to get the feel of the system, this is fine. But I update the archive on my website every few days, and that's where you can find the latest version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is a talk about MakerLisp at BALISP (Bay Area Lisp & Scheme Users Group)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad9NtyBCx78](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad9NtyBCx78)

</comment><comment><USER14> Waiting for Teensy 4.0 (currently in beta testing[1]). Probably will make an amazing lisp machine. 600Mhz CPU, usb, all Arduino compatible.

[1] [https://forum.pjrc.com/threads/54711-Teensy-4-0-First- Beta-T...](https://forum.pjrc.com/threads/54711-Teensy-4-0-First-Beta-Test)

</comment><comment><USER15> A bit off topic, but does anyone recognise the USB keyboard shown in the photos?

<comment><USER16> I don't think it's a Minivan, could be a Vortex. If you search for "split spacebar 40 keyboard" you can see similar commercial and custom boards.

It's what's called a 40% layout (as in 40% of the keys of a standard 104 key board). To save space it doesn't have a number row, you have to use a fn key to type numbers.

It's not ortholinear, as another poster claimed. See the Planck keyboard for an example of that.

(PS If you're the type of person who can fall down a rabbit hole for a subject with lots of lore to learn and that allows infinite customization, you should probably avoid the world of custom mechanical keyboards ;)

<comment><USER17> I am that kind of person and have already spent way too much money on this. By this time next year I'll have an atomic purple Iris with mito laser keycaps that light up on individual key presses. I'll also have an ergo infinity with symbiosis space cadet 2 keycaps. All that I've built myself, hopefully without issues.

The real kicker is the waiting. If delayed gratification made a noise it would sound a lot like cherry mx switches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like the concept, but does anyone know why the old Z80 was chosen instead of a newer processor?

<comment><USER19> eZ80, not original Z80. Three stage pipeline, higher clock speed, can address 16MB of memory, available up to 50mhz clock speed.

It's a neat processor.

<comment><USER3> I chose this processor because it was available for under $10.00 and had the capability of addressing at least 1 Mb of external RAM. Regardles of architecture, when I searched, there were only two processors that I could buy on Digi-Key or Mouser that had these parameters, and they were both Z80 variants ! And then, bonus, it can also run retro software. It has been an exceptionally easy and capable processor to use. And although I'd always like more performance, for the kind of of software experience I'm trying to recreate, it's plenty.

<comment><USER19> Looks like a good platform for Fuzix

<comment><USER3> Yes, I would love to get Fuzix on the platform. Do you know anyone who would be interested in doing a port ?

<comment><USER19> You could probably just send Alan Cox a free board and see what he does with it :-) I imagine it's not a hard port.

I'm no Z80 coder, and not a Fuzix user. Just watching from a distance.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Working with smart people and knowing your role - <AUTHOR> https://benabhishow.simplecast.fm/6 <comment><USER2> Simplecast crashed from the traffic :( time to setup our own site probably.</comment>


Resetting PHP6 (or: Unicode claims another victim) - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/379909/26c35a974b1bbd65/

<comment><USER2> Wow. Considering PHP is used primarily for generating HTML, UTF-8 is the de- facto standard encoding for unicode on the web, and PHP files are usually ASCII or UTF-8, going for UTF-16 seems like a phenomenally bad idea. I can see how UTF-16 looked promising back when it was still UCS-2 and there were no surrogate pairs. These days though, UTF-8 and maybe UTF-32 seem to be the realistic choices when working from scratch; UTF-32's advantage in some areas is probably too weak to make it a real contender unless your strings are literally linked lists, not codepoint arrays. (i.e. you don't care that it uses 2-4 times as much memory or storage)

<comment><USER3> One advantage of UTF-16 is that unlike UTF-8, very few characters you encounter in Real Life invoke surrogate pairs. So for the cost of a one-bit flag per string you can assume two bytes per character in your string operations for the overwhelmingly general case.

<comment><USER4> "So for the cost of a one-bit flag per string you can assume two bytes per character in your string operations for the overwhelmingly general case."

Thank you for that clear and concise explanation of the dangers of using UTF-16.

Yes, I know that wasn't your intention, but it was the end result. One of the most dangerous library failures you can have is a function that works 99.99% of the time. Or in this case, 100% of the time on the input the English- speaking developer provides but distinctly less than 100% in the field.

In this specific case, you can't actually optimize anything because all your optimizations are _bugs_. You can't just divide by two for character count; that's not an optimization, it's a bug. You can't just multiply by two for a substring operation, because you might chop a character in half, that's a bug. And so on. You'd need a separate type that indicates you've scanned the string to verify it never has split chars and now you might as well be on UCS-2, and that has its own dangers w.r.t. working 99.99% of the time.

Much better to use UTF-8, where the dangers are much more apparent, all you have to do is leave the base ASCII case and you're testing UTF-8. Even I, an English-speaking developer, manage to test that case (once I know it exists, anyhow). There's still ways you can screw up but you're off to a much better start.

<comment><USER5> Right. From what I have seen, the majority of Java code out there is broken in _exactly that way_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the author has missed the larger problem. The PHP development community is completely dysfunctional. I don't think that a project of the magnitude of PHP 6 is possible without fixing that fundamental problem.

Why is it dysfunctional?

\- every discussion leads to bikeshedding (and almost none of the bikeshedders actually commit code to the Zend engine)

\- there are 'rules', but they don't apply to most people (ie the 5.4 thing in the article)

\- no firm hand to guide them (Rasmus has deliberately not provided this)

\- the mailing list has a complete lack of civility

\- highest concentration of poisonous people to non-poisonous that I have ever seen

\- votes for everything

\- patches are not discussed, either pre or post commit, so the code is bad, and people won't work on it.

I was so glad to be the hell out of there.

<comment><USER7> Dude, it's PHP.

<comment><USER6> This is the root cause of the problem. Since it's PHP, you can't get really good developers to work on the core. The people who love PHP and the people who have both the desire and skill to do the work described are separate groups.

<comment><USER8> Considering that it is as widely adopted as it is though, you'd have to agree that they succeeded in spite of all these hurdles.

PHP is a band aid, but as a band aid it served it's niche remarkably well, imagine if clojure or some other better designed language would attract such an enormous following and would be so easy to deploy.

Even today mod_php runs rings around mod_wsgx in that respect (and it's already a lot better then mod_python).

PHP has _tons_ of shortcomings, but it is relatively good at what it does, and that's what drives it forward, not the people behind the project. Say python and everybody things 'Guido van Rossum', say Clojure and 'Rich Hickey' jumps to the foreground.

As long as I've been using PHP I would have a hard time coming up with the full name of it's lead developer. That 'lack of personality' and the chaotic development process may actually contain some hidden benefit.

Absent a strong leader there will be many people pushing and pulling in different directions, it may have gone too far but there is a lesson in there somewhere.

<comment><USER6> I'm not discussing the success of PHP. It has done well. However, if you are suggesting that PHP has been successful _because_ of its lack of a leader, I think you would need to justify that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of the number one bugs in web apps is assuming that characters can just "flow through" your application, as the article claims is a common case. Sure, if everything is UTF-8, it might work. But the fun comes when some of your data is us-ascii, some is iso8859-1, and some is utf-8. Now treating your data like binary is going to result in a garbled web page. So don't do it; decode data from octets to characters when it comes in your program, manipulate internally as character strings, and encode characters to octets when you output your data. Text is not binary!

And if I were Zed Shaw, this is the part where I'd threaten to kill you if you don't meet my demands.

<comment><USER9> Actually, the real problem is mixing Windows-1252 and UTF-8, while working with tools that assume your Windows-1252 is really ISO-8859-1. ASCII, after all, is just a subset of UTF-8, so there's no handling required for it if you're already assuming UTF-8.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _PHP was slated to gain a goto keyword_

How on earth did they decide this was a good idea? The points about getting rid of register_globals and safe_mode are great, but why add a _feature_ to a programming language that is highly likely just to result in lots of awful code?

<comment><USER11> There are ways to use goto effectively... in fact, the other day I was working with an awkwardly nested try/catch that would have read much clearer as a goto (and more efficiently; an empty Exception was being used to trigger the catch).

I've seen this problem "solved" with a do while false and a break, but isn't that even hackier and less expressive?

At this point I think goto-phobia is well understood enough that adding it for occasional use wouldn't ruin the language.

<comment><USER12> Ruby distinguishes between begin/rescue (analogous to Java's try/catch) and throw/catch. I never understood it until discovering that throw/catch is perfect for dealing with nested cases where rescue or break fail. Also, it works through function calls and isn't interpreted as an error, which makes it great for cases like Ramaze's redirect or render calls; unlike in Rails, they interrupt execution immediately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I expect this pretty much kills PHP 6 in Japan.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is anybody interested in buying my book "Definitive guide to PHP17"?</comment>


Daniel Kahneman Admits Priming Studies are Underpowered - <AUTHOR> https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/comment-page-1/#comment-1454 <comment><USER2> TL;DR

>> We computed the R-Index for studies cited in Chapter 4 of Kahneman's book "Thinking Fast and Slow." This chapter focuses on priming studies. The results are eye-opening and jaw-dropping. The chapter cites 12 articles and 11 of the 12 articles have an R-Index below 50. This result confirms Kahneman's prediction that priming research is a train wreck and readers of his book "Thinking Fast and Slow" should not consider the presented studies as scientific evidence that subtle cues in their environment can have strong effects on their behavior outside their awareness.</comment>


NYT promotes questionable study on Google and the media - <AUTHOR> https://www.cjr.org/the_new_gatekeepers/nyt-google-media.php <comment><USER2> > Several observers noted the story was timed in such a way as to provide > maximum publicity for a bill that the New Media Alliance has been promoting > to Congress, called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. The > proposed legislation would exempt newspaper companies from competition laws, > which prevent industry-leading entities from collaborating to set prices. > The NMA argues this would allow publishers to lobby Google and other > platforms for better financial compensation together instead of > individually.

On one hand, you can't make this stuff up. A "competition" bill that exempts companies from competition laws. On the other hand, this is the problem with the "content middleman" business. By leveraging its near monopoly over eyeballs, Google can negotiate to receive an outsized share of the revenues from people viewing say NYT content, relative to the value Google adds to the transition.

That is also why I welcome the rise of competition in movie/TV streaming, even if it means subscribing to multiple services. The value added by any particular streaming service is pretty minimal. (Except for Netflix original content, Netflix is streaming say NBC's content from Amazon's servers over Verizon's wires to an app using video codecs developed by Sony/etc.) Netflix, etc., isn't adding nothing, there is a value to the curation and licensing deals, but it's status as a middleman would allow it to wrestle a much larger share of the profit from the transaction than the share of value it adds.

<comment><USER3> Except netflix will probably die and you'll get the choice between 2 bullies : amazon and disney.

Also I have a hard time feeling sorry for the traditional press. They spend decades killing their own reputation and now paying the price. They could have had web sites so reputable, so popular, that they would have been the news hub. Instead they turned internet into the bad guy, kept publishing political agendas and sensasionalist headlines and hoped we would suck it up as we did when they were king of the hill.

<comment><USER4> Naive question: What makes you think that Netflix will probably die?

<comment><USER3> Amazon and disney just have more firepower. Amazon has the expertise in hosting, disney in content making. Amazon can drain customers with prime, and disney with the existing portfolio. Both have infinite cash to aquire and create new licences.

No matter how good I think netflix is, and despite their now long and good track record, they are entering a new fight bare handed against machine guns.

<comment><USER5> Amazon doesn't seem to be seriously trying. Prime Video is a wasteland.

And Disney doesn't own all the content. Netflix need only be the streaming provider other content makers choose.

<comment><USER6> > Disney doesn't own all the content

But they own about half (Disney Studios, Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar, 20th Century Fox, Searchlight, NatGeo, and I am sure I forgot a dozen others), and they might never licence it to a "competitor" again unless they are forced to do under some sort of FRAND unbundling of content and distribution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > After quoting the head of the News Media Alliance, David Chavern, as saying > newspapers deserve a cut of that $4.7 billion,

> One of the most glaring omissions from the report, mentioned by a number of > media-industry observers, is the ad revenue newspapers generate from the > pageviews they get via Google News and Google search. The search company > says publishers get more than 10 billion clicks every month (the value of > which differs depending on the publisher). When asked for comment, the NMA > tells CJR the purpose of the report was to look at how much Google benefits > from news, not the opposite.

Uh, so it sounds like Google deserves a cut of the ad revenue directed via Google News then.

Man, there's no trustworthy journalism left, is there?

<comment><USER8> One blemish is not enough to cast away the entire credibility of the source. NYT has published a lot of original reporting that has proven to be true, but of course that doesn't matter on this conversation at all, doesn't it.

<comment><USER9> It's not just about that, it's more about signal to noise ratio and the impact of their stories. When one deliberately adds a spin to specific categories of news, it's easy to prove them manipulative and thus, not trustworthy. The fact that they currently report correctly on the things outside of their agenda is not that relevant since it's just a matter of time before it becomes their agenda as well. Media should strive for objectivity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Straightforward" extrapolation is the worst! Reminds me of the RIAA damages numbers often quoted in courts

"Well, it was a $2 mp3, and ~100M copies were downloaded, that's $2 * 100M = $200M in lost revenue/damages!!"

As if 1 download = 1 guaranteed lost sale. On the contrary sometimes 1 download = 1 future sale where there was none before!

By that logic the easiest way to make a million is just to download (or copy) a $1 mp3 1M times - congrats, you now own $1M in assets!

<comment><USER11> Or police talking about seizing X million dollars worth of drugs where they're getting their valuation from street value but seizing the drugs in wholesale quantities from the manufacturer - and ignoring the fact that a large portion of the labor/risk that contributes to that price hasn't actually happened yet.

<comment><USER12> Well, they usually say that it is its "street value", and is pretty accurate of how much money is being taken away from the drug economy.

<comment><USER13> Will it be taken away though? Wouldn't the prices just adjust to the supply that is now significantly smaller?

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure drugs are that perfect of a market. The buyer doesn't really have visibility into price/quality across sellers and drug buyers are not always rational, two conditions for perfect competition.[1]

Actual economics is far more complex than the simple supply/demand curve taught in 101 classes.

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

<comment><USER13> Sure, it certainly won't immediately adjust perfectly, but when authorities close some route or bust a large shipment, there will likely be some price change because of limited supply, increased risk (and cost) for transportation, right. It's not like drug buyers will just say "oh, you don't have any this month? okay, see you in six weeks".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So many studies make such bald and ridiculous assumptions but never get called out for them. Or the results of "studies" where the methods aren't even public!

Linking to a "study" to validate a point is so easy and trivial. I can find studies that validate any position I need. But having "a study show" makes my argument seem truthful and academic. In that regard, "studies" seem to have a cargo cult where people happy collect and link to them but never bother to validate them.

Did they not bother to actually run the numbers by anyone at all? Did it being a "study" magically make it pure and true?

</comment><comment><USER16> In a nutshell, Elizabeth Hansen's Harvard research group got it right...

"Internet platform economics were going to swamp the majority of publishers no matter what—there is (almost) no market for their products any more; not because they couldn't make one, but because that's not how internet economics work."

[https://twitter.com/ehansen02/status/1138077051934707714](https://twitter.com/ehansen02/status/1138077051934707714)

</comment><comment><USER17> Any time I see an article in a "mainstream" news outlet on a topic I'm familiar with, the inaccuracies make me cringe. The more familiar I am with the topic, the more inaccuracies I spot. The charitable interpretation is that news outlets have been so decimated by changes in their business model that they can't afford good editors. There are plenty of less charitable interpretations.

<comment><USER18> Sounds like the Gell-Mann amnesia effect[1]. We notice the innacuracies in the fields we are familiar with and then readily believe stories outside of our expertise.

Disclaimer - reporting is critically important and by and large journalists are doing their best to understand and describe incredibly complex and esoteric subjects. It's always good to remember there is a lot more nuance behind just about every story than surface level would indicate.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell- Mann_amnesia_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect)

<comment><USER19> >reporting is critically important and by and large journalists are doing their best to understand and describe incredibly complex and esoteric subjects.

No, by and large they absolutely aren't doing their best. If they were the Gell-Mann amnesia effect wouldn't be so prominent because it's trivial to run stories by experts on topics. Most reporters are crunched for time and just churn out crap as fast as possible.

<comment><USER20> Which expert on journalism production processes did you query to verify that statement?

<comment><USER21> You can simply observe the output and see the bias. Its not a theoretical matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The NYT is yet to publish a correction to an article publicizing a comically erroneous study suggesting a relationship between Facebook use and attacks on refugees in Germany: [https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/08/fa...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/08/facebook- causing-anti-refugee-attacks-germany.html)

They have been running smear campaigns against tech companies for years and then act dumb and ask about the change in sentiment towards them.

<comment><USER23> But yet, we give them credibility on political stories? That's what makes no sense to me, we call them out on stories in which we have close experience, but we accept their stories on politics as if they were "objective," because they happen to support our own bias. A story biased against the president: totally true, it's "respectable" journalism. A story pushing an anti-Google agenda, "what were they thinking, this isn't true!" People want to believe they are right and they find outlets that agree with them and claim them "objective." A conservative thinks Limbaugh is correct, a liberal thinks Maddow is correct. It's a circle jerk of self congratulation that leads to sharply partisan hatred. Unfortunately there isn't a Walter Cronkite to find the objective middle.

<comment><USER24> Well, I don't think there are many people left who give them any credibility on political stories outside of those looking for an echo chamber. They are Fox News for people who identify as "progressive intellectuals".

<comment><USER25> That's MSNBC, not NYT. In fact, their coverage goes out of their way to support centrist positions. (Unless you're discussing their opinion columns, which include everyone from Gorbachev to Sean Spicer to Chelsea Manning.)

<comment><USER19> >their coverage goes out of their way to support

"Out of their way" as in it's difficult for them to support anything other than leftist views? Do you not see the problem there?

<comment><USER25> To be more verbose, giving plausible deniability to actors who are clearly malicious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> NYT has been systematically attacking US tech for years. I'm curious why.

I ignored it for the most part, until I paid more attention to their hypocritical advertising, user tracking, and the unforgivable dark patterns they use to throttle unsubscribes - the state of residency feature flag for online unsubscribe / forcing the subscriber to hold on the phone for an hour before triaging them to a sales rep. Fuck you NYT.

</comment><comment><USER27> This article is solid sanity check on the NYT story discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20146090](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20146090)

</comment><comment><USER28> Why don't these news publishers come together and make a competitor to Google News? Google News is a poor product. It cannot do basic NLP things right, like properly grouping related news. The titles that are chosen as the first ones to display often don't convey the story. Irrelevant or extremely partisan stories are prominently listed. "More stories like this" or "fewer stories like this" does nothing. The publishers could ban Google News from displaying their headlines and include snippets on their service, so they wouldn't even need to compete fairly. To me it seems that they are scared to losing short term traffic and lack a long-term vision.

<comment><USER29> Absolutely none of the things you listed are anything close to "basic". Those are things that newsrooms full of talented and well-coordinated professionals regularly get wrong, let alone software algorithms. You're listing massive, completely unsolved problems and acting like they're table stakes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > and the figure quoted by the Times—without any critical assessment > whatsoever—appears to be based almost entirely on questionable mathematical > extrapolation from a comment made by a former Google executive more than a > decade ago

They definitely have a point, without putting a tremendous effort into this, one must have to use very speculative mathematical extrapolation. Although I'm not sure whether it would ever be worth to put additional mathematical rigour into this because that would be a lot of work.

Speaking of myself, for many years Google News has been my starting point for using the internet and self-speaking for getting myself a news update. News sources have become replaceable and I was always thinking: oh nice, so I'm always reading articles from various sources/perspectives, so this must eliminate virtually all bias.

But what has happened in reality is this:

\- many news companies closed down/were merged into other companies

\- often agency news (Reuters, AP, ...) are copy&pasted into articles

\- some online newspapers mostly put bot generated news that seems to be automatically assembled from agency news and correspondent's; the quality and readability of this is almost 0

So for me a tipping point has been reached and I switched back to going directly to news magazine/paper websites. Also I've subscribed to 2 paid subscriptions. I feel much better informed with more relevant information.

</comment><comment><USER31> If you expect better of the New York Times, you haven't been paying attention for the past few years.

</comment><comment><USER32> Huh, it's as if the NYT has a narrative they wish to push, and will use lazy/questionable journalism to do it...

Makes ya wonder what other topics they're doing this with...

<comment><USER33> WMD comes to mind.

<comment><USER34> That has more with W's threats to cut off press room access to anyone who wouldn't stick to the patriotic script they wanted everyone to follow.

<comment><USER35> Is "losing press room access" supposed to be some understandable defense of knowingly deceiving the public into a war?

Doesn't seem all that different from the days of William Randolph Hearst.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This Twitter thread on this subject from Dir of Ad Tech at The Washington Post is worth reading:

[https://twitter.com/chronotope/status/1138074631980683264](https://twitter.com/chronotope/status/1138074631980683264)

<comment><USER37> Seems weak. Media are free to make alternative adtech. Google's ad system has made them more money though.

And the above would be true even if Google News didn't exist.

The media has incredibly sloppy thinking about their business model.

What monopoly prevents the post from managing their own ads? They choose not to.

<comment><USER37> I should update this to say that AMP seems much more of a thing to critique as regards the news and adtech. Thought of this while reading today's thread on how a bug in AMP prevents links to a publisher's web page.

News sites more or less must use amp to rank, I think, which means they need google adtech.

Could be wrong, not an expert, but it seems an actual legit critique the media could make.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> ". . .this would allow publishers to lobby Google and other platforms for better financial compensation together instead of individually."

Something something collective bargaining.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is why I unsubd from the NYT and why it makes me sad: 99% solid journalism but 1% hot garbage is not a good enough ratio. Just in my adult lifetime this newspaper has materially contributed to both the Iraq War and the election of Trump, and now they use their paper to try to destroy me industry because their industry, which for decades was an abusive cartel exploiting advertisers, is having an angry death fit. I wish there were more outlets for journalism that don't have old-media baggage.

</comment><comment><USER40> The NYT recently hired someone to their editorial board who appears to be a brazen and open racist.

I don't mean some kind of innuendo racist, but someone with multiple tweets like this:

"Are <ethnic group> genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?"

The NYT excused this this as her way of "imitating the rhetoric" of those who were harassing her online.

I'm inclined to side with them because I think everyone ought to have the opportunity to address any of their past statements publicly before being condemned by "the paper of record".

However:

Anyone that's been paying attention to the news media knows that there is no way they would offer this opportunity or indulge this kind of a charitable interpretation. This article is likely proof of that, given that so many have not been offered the opportunity to comment on the way they/their videos have been represented.

<comment><USER41> [https://twitter.com/awprokop/status/1025484876278112261](https://twitter.com/awprokop/status/1025484876278112261)

<comment><USER42> I'm glad you posted this.

I was aware of the original tweet a few years ago, but didn't know the context until now.

I haven't read the referenced article so I can't comment on whether it's a valid criticism or not. But it's clearly satirical.

<comment><USER43> To be fair, she has had a steady stream of Tweets going back to 2014 that were pretty unambiguously racist (or if you're of the "you can't be racist against white people" persuasion, some other term that means something like "anti- white"), so you could be forgiven for mistaking the context in this one case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> NYT, the most prolific poster on HN, caught out again, like every month it seems. Yet they still rule the front page. When will people stand up to bad journalalism being pushed on them?

</comment><comment><USER44> Why is not only the conservative, but even the liberal media so strongly anti- tech? Google, Facebook, and the majority of other tech firms are extraordinarily liberal, far beyond the normal California bias. And not only are their executives and employees overwhelmingly liberal, the companies often act on those beliefs (by supporting various political causes, creating a certain liberal emphasis in their educational tools, etc).

Or, put another way, how did the tech firms manage to become enemies with the liberals despite being on their side in the political battle?

<comment><USER45> Someone made the believe that big tech was responsible for getting trump elected

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> NYT does itself no favors with regard to its already questionable credibility by spreading anti-tech propaganda.

</comment><comment><USER47> To be fair...

The front page of Hacker News is pretty much a Google hate hangoutfest -- so maybe cut some slack on this one...

I'm sure the NYT reporter was not acting malicious.

Maybe they will even issue correction or update in time. No one would argue that speed of social media and corrections is not ideal, but I would bet they are trying to be accurate and transparent with their readers.

I just seriously doubt the reporter and editors who published this info did so solely with the goal to attack Google by "promoting" a questionable study.

Wrong/Lazy/Dumb != Evil

<comment><USER48> No, but they published something that confirmed their priors, and didn't due their due diligence on it because it confirmed their priors and was the kind of story they wanted to write. They have to be held to account for that.

<comment><USER47> Agree. Just don't see it as malicious

<comment><USER49> Malice is completely unnecessary for the world to go to shit. Very few people are actually malicious in any meaningful sense of the term. Most bad things happen when generally good people cut corners.

<comment><USER50> I think you can assume "acting maliciously" was intended to be a catch-all for something more general, like maybe "acting in a grossly disrespectable manner", regardless of whether the intentions were actually malice or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The New York Times is no longer the steady unbias pillar it once was. They hire fresh out SJW types to do their writing and it shows. Once I finally came to that realization, I stopped taking them seriously, but I feel others have not quite reached that epiphany yet. Keep in mind they almost went bankrupt if it were not for Carlos Slim bailing them out. Then you saw a bunch of praise pieces about Slim, and you realize much of the old guard is gone. That should have been the first red flag. The NYT lives off its names legacy reputations alone, but all the quality journalism is gone, with just refined legacy veneer wrapped around very questionable bias premises for most stories.

<comment><USER52> > The New York Times is no longer the steady unbias pillar it once was

Okay, I'm open to hearing this - I've certainly noticed a decrease in quality (vs quantity - NYT still leads there) vs, say, the Washington Post.

> They hire fresh out SJW types

I'm not even sure what this means. I'm used to seeing "SJW" as an attack label that is absent actual meaning, similar to "snowflake" or "libtard", stemming from groups stauchly biased themselves. Are you using it here as an attack based on political belief, or do you have some more nuanced substantive meaning? The rest of your comment doesn't expand on this "epiphany" so I'm left uncertain as to your argument.

<comment><USER53> As the acronym implies, a "social justice warrior" is someone who fights for social justice.

Hiring journalists with a strong homogenous political agenda is a poor way to produce neutral, fact-based reporting.

<comment><USER54> > Hiring journalists with a strong homogenous political agenda is a poor way > to produce neutral, fact-based reporting.

Have you considered the possibility that these SJW's are actually representative of today's youth? If they are, shouldn't NYT be hiring even more of them?

I really don't care about what the backgrounds of Journalists are, as long as they adhere to the principles of journalism (honesty, a desire to question authority and find the truth at all costs etc.).

<comment><USER19> Have you considered that if you are fighting for anything other than truth, you have a serious conflict of interest as a journalist?

<comment><USER52> The problem being that most everyone thinks they're fighting for the truth.

Person A will complain that "SJW types" are being hired, the complaint being that they are biased against the truth.

Person B will complain that "SJW types" AREN'T being hired, the complaint being that people biased against the truth are being hired instead.

I don't know the answers, but I do think the "let's present both sides" of journalism has left journalism doing a terrible job of effectively presenting the truth. Finding a path that embraces objective reporting AND denies efforts to exploit the weaknesses of systems designed to promote objectivity is something we've not figured out yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> The NYT also deliberately blurs the lines between any kind of non-leftist thinking (traditional conservative views, non-left liberal thinking, criticism of Islam or illegal immigration) and 'alt right' \- a term created by Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who wants to create a white ethnostate which (at least according to Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt- right](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right)) describes far right hate groups.

I know people who work at the NYT. They're absolutely smart enough to know the difference.

<comment><USER56> Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. It's boring, nasty, and just what we don't need here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER55> I understand the ideological flame war rule, as I've been here since it's introduction, but we're discussing the Times being misleading, and I'm not attacking or promoting any particular ideology in this post.

<comment><USER56> That may be true and yet you can still be taking the thread further into flamewar. At the dog park, when dogs get into a fight, I notice that there are sometimes other dogs who get in the middle of it, barking and racing around. They're not fighting at all, but they sure make the thing more intense.

<comment><USER55> Point taken. I'll be more careful in future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Google spreads way more misniformation than nyt, they aren't worth defending.

<comment><USER43> It's not a dichotomy, we can and must hold both accountable. This race-to-the- bottom thinking is ruinous.</comment></comment>


Relay system is helping the Indian truck-driving industry - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/news/business/21729811-its-pit-stops-and-relay-system-could-elevate-low-status-truck-drivers-rivigo-helping <comment><USER2> > _for a country where most people own guns and can legally shoot you to death > and claim castle doctrine, the IPO of a kickass search engine like Google > was but another feather in SV 's cap_

See how irrelevant the caste system reference was, The Economist?

</comment><comment><USER3> Yup, the caste system was so relevant to the discussion and so beautifully explained.

</comment><comment><USER4> Help with the paywall?

<comment><USER5> [https://archive.fo/RuksZ](https://archive.fo/RuksZ)</comment></comment>


James Burke on the "Technology Trap" - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPcZ_5uCldg <comment><USER2> Terrifying. Off to buy a bow and arrow, smear my face with rabbit droppings and crawl into a bush for two weeks.</comment>


The Return of the Cray files (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.modularcircuits.com/blog/articles/the-return-of-the-cray-files/ <comment><USER2> It's a shame the disk images are not freely available.

<comment><USER3> It would be interesting why this is the case.

I suspect it is mainly because there is no one around who would be in a position to allow redistribution of images.

Which would be the saddest possible reason, in a way - if some company or person sat on the copyright and flat out refused to allow redistribution, there would at least be hope for that person or organization to change their mind. But if there is no one left who could consent, that day will never come.

Of course, if there was no one left who could give permission, that would mean there was no one left who could complain or sue; but ethical issues aside, I would not like taking that risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's interesting digging around in UNICOS.

They supported virtualization pretty early in the 90s it looks like, reading the interface for UNICOS on UNICOS

<comment><USER5> That's not so remarkable, considering that IBM's VM/370 operating system supported virtualization in the early 1970s (you could run various IBM operating systems in a VM/370 virtual machine, including VM/370 itself):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_(operating_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_\(operating_system\))

<comment><USER4> I'm very familiar, but it is noteworthy for a Unix-derivative/vendor.

<comment><USER6> When you count IBM mainframe Unix vendors like Amdahl UTS, Interactive Systems (ISC) VM/IX, Locus Computing AIX/370, etc, Unix virtualisation (under VM) actually dates back to the 1980s, with the earliest iterations of it reaching back into 1970s (early versions of Amdahl UTS c. 1979 and earlier work done at Princeton to port Unix to VM/370 c. 1975-1976). So Cray doing Unix virtualisation in the 1990s wasn't from that perspective particularly novel. Pretty much continuously from the late 1970s through to today, there has been some variant of Unix running under VM somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Side note: I'm struggling to read these articles with the very thin font used (on MacOS). Using font-weight: 300 with Helvetica Neue is a strange choice that I'm seeing in more and more blogs. Maybe it looks more readable with other OS fonts and is just an oversight.

Bumping it up to 400 in dev tools makes is far more readable.

<comment><USER8> It seems to be something that does originate from the MacOS world, where apparently that choice does not produce such thin strokes that are so hard to read.

While Dev Tools certianly can fix the brokenness, here is a bookmarklet that will do the same:

javascript:(function(){var all=document.getElementsByTagName("*");for (var i=0,max=all.length;i<max;i++){all[i].style.fontWeight='400';};void(0);})();

That is all one line. Put it into a bookmark, then hit the bookmark when you encounter one of these thin font sites. The thin fonts go away.

<comment><USER9> Mac user here. I also see thin strokes that are hard to read. I've started just putting my browser into readability mode for everything, which accomplishes a similar result.

Or closing the tab without bothering, if readability mode can't handle it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Arghh. The series ended before he succeeded. So close!

It was a fascinating read however and an inspiring display of persistence.

</comment><comment><USER11> The login did not work for me :/

<comment><USER12> Blog is from 2011</comment></comment>


Visualizing Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration - <AUTHOR> http://www.visualcapitalist.com/two-centuries-of-immigration/ <comment><USER2> I built a company and sold it to Dropbox. Building another company to cure Cancer using AI. Leadership positions at various big companies. Wrote a book about Entrepreneurship which is part of an Executive MBA program. Built the biggest social network to come out of India.

Because I am from India, I would never get a Green Card through EB-2 (though I have two approved EB-2 petitions). Yesterday, USCIS denied my EB-1 petition using argument which are against the law. Now I have to leave US :(

I have an approved O-1 (extraordinary ability), but apparently, once you have filed for a Green Card Adjustment of Status, you can't get a visa stamp for anything other than H-1. Not sure if I can come back!

<comment><USER3> Sorry for your misfortune.

But at this point, wouldn't it just make sense for you to just go to a country which is more welcoming?

<comment><USER4> Yes, this is a good strategy. Move the capital and jobs to some other country. Singapore or Canada are a good options that have been used by my other Indian friends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One point I find they are missing here is how conditions in origin countries greatly affect immigration. German emigration dropped abruptly due to Bismarck's creation of the social welfare state [1]. Recent improvements in the Mexican economy are a large factor in the decline of Mexican immigration [2].

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck#Early_legisl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck#Early_legislation) 2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigration_from_Mexico#Recent_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigration_from_Mexico#Recent_trend_reversal_in_migration_Mexico-U.S).

<comment><USER6> I hope CIA doesnt decide Mexico needs a different ruler and doesnt overthrow the government just because some asshole in DC decided thats a good idea.

<comment><USER7> The CIA mostly doesn't decide that kind of thing, they just implement decisions made in the White House.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting to see the graphics on this.

Being from the UK and having spent time working in the US, I feel like in the last ~10 years it has become harder for Europeans to immigrate to the US.

Does this ring true for anyone?

<comment><USER9> Apart from working in tech. Is there a reason to move to US for an average bloke?

<comment><USER8> If you are in highly educated, able to work, and are in the right field (i.e. software), life for the majority of individuals who fall into this category is better in the US than many other countries. On the other hand if you're dirt poor, have no education, bad health.... you may be better off in Scandinavia or Western Europe.

This includes tech, engineering and other professions. For instance you can get a graduate mechanical engineering job and start earning ~$70k and live in an area where housing costs ~$150k-$200k for a small, detached, ~2-3 bedroom house with garage and garden (2.85x ratio). You can also get amazing weather :)

Mechanical engineers in the UK start on ~£25k in areas where a small house will cost £300k-£400k. That's a ratio of pay to house price of 16x versus 2.9x in the US. Anecdotal I know but powerful.

<comment><USER10> Scandinavia is, somewhat contrary to popular belief, great if you are upper- middle class. A similar life in the US would be prohibitively expensive. The problem is if you are middle class and paying for many system that you might not in effect be able to use.

<comment><USER11> From what I've seen, the truth is the exact opposite (living in Sweden, visiting the US). Sweden is only good if you live on welfare or have a "bad" job (where the salary is inflated due to unions, plus you might get welfare).

Upper middle class people in the US are _so much_ better off - there is really no comparison. If average Swedes only knew how poor they really are...

<comment><USER10> The average Swede isn't upper-middle class, at least not by Swedish standards. If you are upper-middle class in Sweden you have a lot of freedom that upper- middle class people in the US don't necessarily have.

In Sweden you can study cost-free. You can get a second, or third, degree from reputable school, even online. That makes it easy to change careers or to stay competitive.

If you are established in Sweden you are going to have very high financial security and low living costs. Almost anyone that is upper-middle class in Sweden can take a year off to, say, start a business without any major consequences.

Just in general upper-middle class people in Sweden have a lot more quality of life and time. 40 hour weeks, employment protection, flat hierarchies, short commute, long vacations, summer homes etc.

I personally have nothing against people moving to the US. Especially if you are middle-class and in your twenties it can be a good idea. But as soon as you have kids your costs are going to rise significantly, your opportunities are going to decrease or both.

I would be interesting to hear what you think is better in the US for someone upper-middle class.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here is the source of the animation (looks much nicer, and interactive)

[http://metrocosm.com/animated-immigration- map/](http://metrocosm.com/animated-immigration-map/)

</comment><comment> temp-dude-87844 Can anyone point me to low bias, nonpartisan analyses about the US immigrant population by practically meaningful cohorts? These sites that rehash aggregate numbers are the most widespread, and the subtext on sites like this is that they provide insightful portrait into who immigrants are -- but this is an incomplete picture that speaks nothing of their admission category and conditions, their fates in the States, their position on socioeconomic metrics by year since their entry.

A while back, I was looking for data to quantify the distinction of "Ellis Island"-style open application immigration, vs. the precondition-gated system we have today. I was also trying to understand the socioeconomic differences between employment/skill-based immigrants (of various admission categories) and family-based immigrants. But official government sources are spread across multiple agencies, and the cohorts are set in a way that isn't helpful in disaggregating superficially similar people with very different outcomes.

In my observations, pro-immigration groups tend to publish data that is difficult to disaggregate (example: this data sheet on 'Profile of the Unauthorized Population: California' [1] by the Migration Policy Institute), while groups that want to restrict immigration (Center for Immigration Studies, The Heritage Foundation) have better cohorts with more practical relevance, but the less flattering data is used by them to justify their various restrictive policies, and their bias raises concerns about their veracity. It's a challenge to find a source that hits the middle ground.

[1] [https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/unauthorized- immigrant-...](https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/unauthorized-immigrant- population/state/CA)

<comment><USER13> Are you looking for recent data? USCIS publishes data about admission to the US by visa category (family, skilled, unskilled, refuge, etc) in quite a lot of detail.

<comment> temp-dude-87844 This is a good primary source -- relevant example: 'Yearbook of Immigration Statistics 2016', Table 9 [1].

[1] [https://www.dhs.gov/immigration- statistics/yearbook/2016/tab...](https://www.dhs.gov/immigration- statistics/yearbook/2016/table9)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _Stamen_ studio once did a similiar, arguably more elaborated one, once for Richmond's "American Panorama": [https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/foreignborn](https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/foreignborn)

</comment><comment><USER15> Watching this made me realize how different things were in 2010 than 1980.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a great graph. I love videos like this.

One thing missing is migration out of the United States. For much of the video, the largest source of immigrants is Canada. Surely the US Canadian border is a two way street. I'd expect migrations between the US and Canada to roughly balance out.

And as much as we Americans like to think of ourselves as living in the promised land, there are a significant number of immigrants who arrived on US shores, decided after a few years that it didn't live up to expectations, and then went back to their country of origin.

<comment><USER17> "A significant number of immigrants who arrived on US shores, decided after a few years that it didn't live up to expectations, and then went back to their country of origin."

Often it wasn't that people were disappointed in the USA, it's that they only planned to be there temporarily. That is a pretty common story in the Balkans. Great-grandfather went to the USA, worked his ass off for a couple of decades max, and then came back to the old country and built a mighty house in his native village. And while in the USA, great-grandfather did some terribly isolated job like shepherding, or lived solely in an immigrant bubble, which meant that he never did learn English.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I imagined more of a discontinuity with the passage of the 1924 immigration restriction act to prevent all those "red" Italians from entering the US.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924)

</comment><comment><USER19> Its interesting to see the immigration from Canada.

Has there been any significant American emigration to e.g. Canada?

It would be good to show the slavery, and also somehow colourize the US itself by what origins make up the population.

<comment><USER20> > Has there been any significant American emigration to e.g. Canada?

In recent history, Vietnam War draft dodgers[0]. Estimates range between 20,000 to 30,000 men fled to Canada to avoid the draft.

[0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_and_the_Vietnam_War#Dra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_and_the_Vietnam_War#Draft_dodgers)

<comment><USER13> In 2015, 7,500 Americans were admitted to Canada as Permanent Residents.[1]

From 1986-2006, 445,000 Canadians immigrated to the US, or ~22,000 per year.[2]

So it would appear to be a net outflow from Canada.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Canada#Sources_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Canada#Sources_of_immigration) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_States#Origin)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> its nice to see the rest of the world light up in last 15-20 years. people from other countries finally have financial and legal means to leave their shitty and usually oppressed lives behind to join american dream. I wish the immigration policy was changed to give more equal chance of legal immigration rather than the shitshow we have right now.

<comment><USER21> I was actually wondering what the data considers "immigration". This shows no African countries light up until around the 90s but that's somewhat incorrectly categorizing influx of people into the US as it ignores "forced immigration" (kidnapping for slavery).

<comment><USER22> This visualization starts in 1820, so it misses out on the time period when most slaves were brought into the country. The US banned the importation of slaves in 1808 and made it a capital offense in 1820. Some were smuggled in illegally after that, but not in the enormous quantities that they previously had been.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> According to Wikipedia the vast majority of immigrants from Africa are not in fact coming from the Democratic Republic of the Congo:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_immigration_to_the_Uni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_immigration_to_the_United_States)

</comment><comment><USER24> U.S. expatriation numbers are down YoY, by the way:

[https://github.com/axibase/atsd-use- cases/tree/master/Expatr...](https://github.com/axibase/atsd-use- cases/tree/master/Expatriation#annual-data)

</comment><comment><USER25> It would be interesting to see on a % of US/global population basis.

The country colors get much brighter from the 70's on, making it tough to distinguish the effects of recent immigration trends from the global population growing from 4 to 7.5 billion over that time.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's interesting that Russian immigration to the U.S. drastically drops around 1920 which is half way through the Russian Civil War.

<comment><USER27> Soviet regime got to stop those 'enemies of the state fleeing wrath of the proletariat'.

Soviets introduced exit visa back in 1925, so probably that was a reason of that drop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's an interesting visualization but gives only one side of the picture. Emigration away from the US happens increasingly as well.

</comment><comment><USER29> "An important note. This data excludes forced migration (slavery) and illegal immigration."

So it doesn't give the full picture.

<comment><USER30> That's because it's much harder to track, and any estimates on illegal immigration are just that - estimates, based on how many people are actually caught.

<comment><USER31> I agree, but it would have been a better idea to include graphs with and without the estimates. Since the only note on it is just a text note, it will be all too easy for people to think this is a full picture.

Slavery and illegal immigration are both big parts of how the U.S. population came to be, like it or not, and they are such big parts that, although I sympathize with the difficulties of estimating them, not estimating them seems like a bigger problem.

But, it's a cool article nonetheless.</comment></comment></comment>