I Quit Hacker News (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://mattmaroon.com/2010/11/23/i-quit-hacker-news/ <comment><USER2> Hm, this post is almost 3 years old, but Matt has been active recently ([https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattmaroon](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattmaroon)). Did he get a little account recovery help or was the password change not as random as he said?

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish you all the best. I've contemplated quitting HN quite a few times as well, I might do it myself, but the community with all its flaws I still enjoy at times. There are a few people who think they're better than most, but that's not just a HN problem, it's a problem everywhere, people on HN are just better at articulating their point and getting upvotes.

This part I couldn't agree more with:

 _Fluff posts from John Gruber, who rarely says anything at all of value (and I say this as someone who spends most of my time working on iOS projects) are extraordinarily popular because it fits within the community's ideology_

John Gruber could literally publish a blog post with no content and just a title and it would hit the front-page of Hacker News and people would be commenting about how they get his metaphor and try connecting it to a new Apple gadget or sales report... Very overrated.

You missed one other point: the constant homepage submissions about Google Go. I've used it a couple of times myself and I think it's a great language, but the amount of posts about it you see on this site hitting the homepage are ridiculous. How much praise can you sing for something without repeating yourself? The same thing seems to be happening with Google's AngularJS.

I recently saw a submission for a Sublime Text editor clone someone wrote and open sourced. The author had disabled the ability to post an issue on the Github repo and people took the author to school and back in the comments section about it. The author clearly stated if you want to contribute, send me a pull request because I don't have time to fix issues. This guy open sourced some amazing code (written in Go of all languages) and instead of saying thank you, a few decided to laud the author with negativity.

Hacker News has flaws, I think over time they will work themselves out and the community will tame itself down (I hope), for the moment I'll hold on and enjoy the ride. I love nothing more than to take top commenters oozing negativity to town. Being able to tag and filter submissions would be amazing, I would immediately remove all Go and AngularJS posts if I could. Maybe someone should create a Chrome extension that does it? Take it one step further and add in some basic sentiment analysis to hide any negative comments on submissions.

<comment><USER4> Re Chrome extension, I was thinking the same thing. There's a lot of rubbish posted here but also some gems - ESP from the older members I think, who have been sys admins or used Unix since the '90s or earlier. I keep a notebook of the most useful comments and bookmark others.

So a Chrome extension to filter again (eg tag comment as "technical", "ideology" and see what others do) could be v interesting.

Unfortunately the most thoughtful, most civil comment threads, seem to disappear the fastest off the home page - and attract the fewest participants. This could be a community issue or a chicken and egg situation...

<comment><USER3> There is a similar plugin for Reddit called the Reddit Enhancement Suite, it's a pretty well made plugin, so maybe a plugin along the lines of HN Enhancement Suite where it kind of tidies and fixes things up would be somewhat cool.

Definitely agree about the disappearing gems in the comments section. Being able to follow users would be cool as well, their comments would be moved and highlighted with a particular follow colour.

I am liking the sound of this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> EDIT: I wrote my post before I realised how old the submitted article is! Disappointing that the problems listed are probably worse today than they were three years ago.

> 1\. Lack of a down-vote means vocal minorities are disproportionately > represented. How many Hacker News users really want to see 5 stories about > the TSA body scanners every time they log in? It doesn't matter, because as > long as 10% of them up-vote every story on the topic it's going to flood the > top page with them until they move on to something else.

FLAG. You only get limited flags, but FLAG THESE FUCKING SUBMISSIONS.

> Some people will say "they have flags" but flags are not down-votes, and > even most people like myself who wish there were down-votes don't use them > as such. Flagging is for spam, trolling, etc. I may not like what you have > to say, but I'll fight for your right to not be flagged for saying it.

Flags act like down votes for submissions. In the absence of down votes flags are the only tool available for Submissions that do not belong here.

I'd agree that flags should not be used that way for comments.

> The community is full of ideologues to the point where the comments are most > often just predictable talking points being regurgitated ad nauseum.

People need to downvote empty idealogagy. People need to down vote a lot more than they do. Perhaps it's a problem that only ten % of the site can downvote. I sometimes wonder what would happen if HN reversed the down / up vote privs - anyone can downvote, but you need 500 karma before you can upvote.

Anyway, sorry to see you go. Have fun, and good luck!

<comment><USER6> I think the reasoning is that people will actually join the argument instead of clicking an arrow facing downwards when they disagree with a comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> >Lack of a down-vote means vocal minorities are disproportionately represented. How many Hacker News users really want to see 5 stories about the TSA body scanners every time they log in?

Clearly some do, if these stories get upvoted. I think a better answer than downvoting would be a ways to organize and filter content besides the single- channel model which currently seems to assume either a homogenous community or content or both. Clearly useless and repetitive content should be flagged, but judging by the number of "this doesn't belong on HN / yes it does " comments i've seen, a lot of people have differing ideas of what Hacker News "should" be showing them.

> Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather than > value, perhaps because many people simply cannot see the difference between > the two.

I believe upvotes and downvotes should only apply to threads themselves, and comments should be left alone. I'm sure i'm in the minority on this among HN users, but I think when you can downvote comments, then specious downvoting becomes inevitable because it's less work than coming up with a cogent or relevant comment.

<comment><USER8> Glad to hear someone else think the same. I believe that it won't change in here though. Someone said: "If you don't like it, fork it" and this is probably true in this case. Maybe even a business opportunity.

However, I somehow lost the hope that bringing this topic would do any change. I even emailed pg, asking to delete my account including all my posts, but got no response ever. idk..

<comment><USER7> I think I may have heard kogir mention they don't let people delete accounts and they don't delete posts because it would interfere with the structure of the existing threads. That does kind of make sense but people can still delete individual posts even after they've been replied to so I don't know.

And "forking it" would be the (relatively) easy part. The hard part is getting people to show up and stick around.

<comment><USER8> Other social networks solve that "problem", by just filling the old posts with "deleted content" and replace the username with "Deleted user".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been on internet forums for over 14 years now, the complaints the OP has are the same complaints I've heard everywhere else. I've heard people say the same stuff (maybe slightly different topics, but the same content) numerous times. I have no intention of sounding like a dick here, but who cares? He is going to find the same thing everywhere he goes. People are the driving force behind his problems...can't fix that unless we end up being owned by skynet.

</comment><comment><USER10> I haven't really been a longtime user myself, but as far as I can tell (and yes, this falls under point 2) he is pretty much right on all points made.

Except 4 seems a tad too general, and going from snobbish to looking down on people is not always a one-to-one realtionship. I consider looking down on someone one of the worst evils and I am pretty sure I am not alone here (nor anywhere). At least I hope.

</comment><comment><USER11> Semantics of an up-(or down)-vote is an issue (see here [http://www.debiki.com/forum/-5rjf6-semantics-of-an- upvote](http://www.debiki.com/forum/-5rjf6-semantics-of-an-upvote) for a short discussion on that). In short, I would love to have a place where I can easily filter things containing intellectual value, instead of popularity bar.

<comment><USER8> I have the same issue, but I think PG swears that up/down voting is the thing, just because reddit does it too. Thank you for the link!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have been less active since I lost my up voting (my fault,I had a few days when I up voted everything that hit the frontpage) and flag (no idea here) capabilities but there's no way I'm leaving hacker news. I find more interesting content here than on any other site.You can probably configure reddit to get a similar output but it's not the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER13> Like those fuckers on forums: "Farewell fellow users, I know you'll all miss me a lot, /requestsban"

<comment><USER5> SuicideGirls (NSFW) forums had a ban called "The Zot"; the user would go grey. But they also had something called "The Uber Zot", where all the user's posts would be deleted.

Thus, some people would go on a spree of horrific posting in order to earn an uberzot and "go out in style".

Gently counter productive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Weird that you should need to say goodbye. Shame you did not leave a forwarding address for where the nerd is supposed to go for the news that matters these days. Oh well.

</comment><comment><USER8> @Qom How do you quit?

EDIT: ok, he just changed the password to something random.. :/ Dumb question, asking someone who left for how he left...oh man.. Sometimes I don't know where my mind is

@pg Please add a "disable account and delete my posts" button. Almost every site has that feature. It's disrespectful to assume somebody should not be ever able to leave. There is no way to disable your account, or delete all your posts. (I agree that submissions don't need to be deletable btw.)

</comment><comment><USER15> Why was this removed from the front page? That's how I reached it.

<comment><USER16> Probably people flagging it as it's 3 years old.

<comment><USER15> Oh, I thought flagging was for spam and offtopic submissions.

<comment><USER17> It is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One person decides popular internet site isn't for him. News at 11.</comment>


Electrolyzed water called a 'miracle liquid' - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-magicwater23-2009feb23,0,821096,full.story

<comment><USER2> This thread pretty much debunks the "miracle liquid":

[http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/23/electrolyzed- water-a.ht...](http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/23/electrolyzed- water-a.html#comments)</comment>


UTC with Smoothed Leap Seconds (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/time/utc-sls/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is much more recent than [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017761) ( TC, TAI, and Unix time (1997) by djb ) and more convenient for most of common use cases.

In short, UTC with leap seconds is no problem at all, as long as exactly 86400 seconds exist in every day (1) for the common calendar calculations and the leap second is "smoothed" by the computer time synchronization code. Google already used this approach (and blogged about it while not crediting Kuhn, as far as I understood).

The common operating systems should just use UTC-SLS for the calendar-related time. Who needs the "real honest atomic seconds" already uses TAI.

More details also here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9018367](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9018367)

\--

1) POSIX already specifies that every day has exactly 86400 seconds for "Seconds Since the Epoch" and the current code relies on that:

[http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_...](http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap04.html#tag_04_15)

<comment><USER2> And still no really good justification why general society should have to pay the price of the needs of some specialist systems and astronomers. I'm disappointed that civil time decided that UTC instead of TAI made sense. The least we can do is fix UTC and let specialists deal with it.

And yes, while repeating a second at the end of the day is a terrible approach, it's not a worse sin than leap seconds in the first place. I do hope that slowing down the clock is generally picked up and accepted.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, the leap second is not the problem at all. UTC has sense since the calendar _day_ is more important for everybody than some ideas of some confused programmers. Who needs "just pure atomic seconds" already has TAI.

All the computer clocks are inaccurate and synchronize sometimes, often more than one second, and nobody worries about that or maintains any tables when his computer adjusted (try yourself, you'd soon see why you shouldn't care about the leap second). Likewise nobody would worry about the leap second were there not too much confusion among the programmers, enough to have the NTP implementation as it was and the people who used djb's or the code from Olsen tz to "account" for the leap second all the time for the calculations that didn't need that.

For some examples of confusion see:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7552104/is-a-day- always-8...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7552104/is-a-day- always-86-400-epoch-seconds-long)

The least voted comment is right: "in POSIX, a day is exactly 86400 seconds by definition" (when we ignore the daylight saving time changes of the wall clocks and computers of _the whole hour_ , of course).

Linus agrees it's a good decision:

[http://www.wired.com/2015/01/torvalds_leapsecond/](http://www.wired.com/2015/01/torvalds_leapsecond/)

"the POSIX approach puts the pain where it belongs, and hides it from the vast majority of cases that really don't care. I think it was the right decision."

"The people and computers who really care about "atomic" time tend to be astronomers. For the rest of us – both people and computers – we're probably better off taking the POSIX approach to it, and just say "who cares", with a few unlucky people worrying about bugs happening because of the perversities of timekeeping."</comment></comment></comment>


A DIY diabetes kit - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36711994 <comment><USER2> My son was just recently diagnosed type 1 about 4 months ago (exactly on his 1st birthday, shitty birthday).

Unfortunately, we live in Vietnam where access to even basics like pumps, let alone CGM, is non-existant, or incredibly hard. We had to fly to Singapore to get a pump, and then fly back every three months to get new supplies. CGM is a pipe dream.

One thing this article doesn't touch on, which is unfortunate, is how much of a nightmare modern medical systems make diabetes. In the US, insurers decide what pumps you get, what CGM device you might be able to get, even what insulin you are using. I see it everyday on the support groups I'm on. And the costs are astronomical. In Vietnam, we get our son's insulin for $12 a vial. The same vial in the US is about $400 or more (insured price). Test strips in the US can cost $1-2 per strip; we spend about 20-30 cents per.

I am very hopeful about the bionic pancreas though, a device that does what these DIY systems do; but also delivers glucagon as well as insulin. There are also some stem cell trials that are very interesting too. I'm hoping that by the time this kid hits college, his care is automated as possible, if not outright cured.

<comment><USER3> I still don't understand why insulin is so regulated and expensive in US. I feel sorry for people with Type 1, Type 2 who many a times have to skip their insulin dose. I think it should be freely available over the counter and there should be some cheap availability for such a common drug.

<comment><USER4> It seems relatively defendable - it is far, far more dangerous than many prescription only drugs (eg: birth control), and most people will not be able to work out how much they need without seeing a doctor first.

<comment><USER5> My understanding is that Dana Lewis developed the pre-cursors to OpenAPS because she had to perform dosage calculations several times a day. Often this was in the middle of the night. And getting it wrong could be fatal.

Going further, the calculations are rule of thumb and generic and each person has to make adjustments based on intuitions about their metabolism, what they ate, what they plan to eat, what activity they anticipate, and when they last dosed. It's every day, for the rest of their life.

[Source]

Scott Hanselman interviews OpenAPS hacker Dana Lewis:

[http://www.hanselminutes.com/514/the-open-artificial- pancrea...](http://www.hanselminutes.com/514/the-open-artificial-pancreas- system-openaps-project-with-dana-m-lewis)

<comment><USER4> Yes, I have lived with relatives with diabetes and understand that it's quite complex. I don't think anyone with diabetes would suggest that it should be ok to just start taking insulin without a doctor involved, which is (to my understanding) the basic argument for whether a drug should require a prescription or not. You can make a separate argument about whether it should be a longer prescription, or about the failings of a system where seeing a doctor at all is prohibitive for some people, or the fact that the medication is outrageously expensive (which is not directly related to the need for a prescription at all).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hello all,

There are many areas the article does not cover, but this is expected when writing space is limited. Main areas that I feel need more coverage...

1) The community itself, it is overwhelming to see how much work has been done by people in their spare time. Many of these developers go unnamed and provide some amazing work - I would not be able to complete my app without this community, I'm just putting the puzzle of community work together and filling in the blanks where needed.

2) Access to tech, it is almost insulting to see how may Diabetics cannot access Pumps and CGMs, or can access one and not the other. The cost for such systems and limited access is not justified.

3) Why, when we do own the required tech purchased from our own money do we then have to "hack" such devices to access the data that they have about MY body!?

4) The dangers of the community work, this is no riskier I say than commercial systems but this subject must be openly discussed in the community to be sure we understand and limit possible risks

5) I agree with the comments about glucagon, this should ideally be a worse case treatment. Why do we need a system that can provide glucagon when early alerts from an APS can notify the patient that a carb treatment is needed. Let's stop trying to find a 100% solution and produce something that covers 60% of our needs now

</comment><comment><USER7> Good to see this here. I'm one of the developers (though more on the radio comms side, rather than on the glucose control side. See [http://github.com/oskarpearson/mmeowlink/wiki](http://github.com/oskarpearson/mmeowlink/wiki) for info).

My wife's been on the software since last September, and it's made a huge difference to us.

If you've any questions, ask here or grab me on twitter at @oskarpearson

<comment><USER8> If I wanted to get something like this setup for a homeless person... what would I need to do?

<comment><USER7> The biggest problem is going to be expense, followed by reliability and power when out-and-about.

I'm not sure where you are, but in the USA compatible pumps probably start at around $1,000. That doesn't include the monthly cost of the CGMS sensors, which is also significant.

If you're in a country with universal healthcare, and the healthcare provider is willing to cover the CGMS sensors you might have success. (Some govt healthcare services will cover CGMS sensors for people that can't tell when they are hypoglycemic.)

If the person with diabetes (PWD) is very mobile, reduced size and weight will have to be at the forefront of your thinking. However, that requires the most expensive OpenAPS hardware (the Intel Edison - see the mmeowlink wiki).

If the PWD is ok with a larger device due to a bigger battery, you could use cheaper hardware (Pi zero and a 20,000mah battery). It'll still need daily charging, though.

One idea: you might find running things overnight only might have an advantage, depending on whether they have a stable relationship with a shelter. The system would then cover them for a reasonable amount of time every day without the challenge of waterproofing, batteries, etc.

If this is feasible, the best place to start is with the simplest config, as documented at [https://github.com/openaps/docs/blob/master/docs/docs/walkth...](https://github.com/openaps/docs/blob/master/docs/docs/walkthrough/phase-0/hardware.md)

Let me know if I can be of any support. My details are in my profile. Alternatively, you can find us on the intend-to-bolus channel on gitter.

<comment><USER8> I am in Arizona, and I will be in touch. I have some ideas (they could be shit, or they could be really good). My details are in my profile as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Open Artificial Pancreas home: [https://openaps.org/](https://openaps.org/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Type 1 diabetic here: diagnosed at age 14, almost 22 now.

I use xdrip with a CGM and I have to say, it's been the best thing for my care (after insulin, lol). The main challenge of diabetes is keeping your blood sugar in range, not too high, and not too low, and getting it back in range if it deviates too far. Blood sugars dropping too low during exercise is a major concern as it can result in seizures and worse.

Thanks to the combination of my dexcom G4 + Android + Xdrip + smartwatch, I can always get a pretty good estimate of where my glucose is, and thus minimize the risks and harm from my (chronic, uncurable) condition. Definitely a great case for open source development for propreitary hardware. The CGM has helped me even more than my $10,000 insulin pump :X

</comment><comment><USER10> Open question - What is the actual cost of living with Diabetes type 1 in the US with a good health insurance? The reason I am asking is I have a 10-year old son with type 1 and we are thinking of moving to US (from Sweden) and would like to estimate the actual cost of living with diabetes in the US in order to make a real life calculation of what it would actually cost us per month. Any tips would be appreciated - if you wanna take it privately - message me on Twitter (@hising) or send me an email - mattias at ridgestreet dot se

<comment><USER11> Would an insurance ever cover something that is already known? That at least doesn't sound like an insurance in the usual sense of the word.

<comment><USER12> In the US, "health insurance" mostly isn't about actual insurance, it's just part of the evolved process of obtaining care with a degree of oversight and (semi-)centralized records. You _can_ pay out-of-pocket, in much the same way that you _can_ represent yourself in court: nobody can deny you the option, but the system isn't really set up to operate that way and something will probably go wrong when you try it.

<comment><USER13> That's not entirely true. When I was uninsured, I was able to negotiate significant cash discounts with many out-patient providers. They had a very good idea what the overhead of billing an insurance provider was and were willing to lop that off their charge.

Where it gets tricky is with in-patient care. There I would agree that it's more like representing yourself in court.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting how they discuss risks in open source. If one can make a guess from other software it is very likely that open source at least in the future will outperform proprietary solutions. Standardization organizations should start to think about how to make their certification processes attractive for FOSS projects, imo.

</comment><comment><USER15> My girlfriend has type 1 diabetes and uses this. It's been a huge improvement in her life - as others have mentioned, it's really like the best thing since insulin.

One thing that's been really awesome to see is how T1D patients and parents with little or no experience with FOSS have taken this stuff: "You mean you guys just made this amazing thing 100% for free?!?!?!". It's like watching the birth of open source all over again :-)

The T1D hacking movement is huge - for example, my GF and I recently replaced the batteries in her CGM transmitter (you're not supposed to be able to do this, so it involved a dremel and solder and playing the tiny fingers game). The older transmitters last about 6 months, and then you have to order them through a horrible medical supply company that knows you're not their real customer (your insurance company and device manufacturers are) so this is a big deal.

An even bigger deal: the newer Dexcom transmitters turn off after 3 months. Dexcom claims that new features mean they need more juice, but T1D hackers reversing the new protocol discovered that the app they come with _turns them off_. Fortunately, it seems possible to turn them back on without dremels and the tiny finger game.

A closed loop APS is the next step for us :-)

</comment><comment><USER16> I had the chance to meet and interview the author of the open source tool (Tim Omer). Super smart, motivated and clearly capable.

I hope his work can help many people who are in need of this type of tool.

</comment><comment><USER17> Any investor here with an interested in diabetes/medical devices?

</comment><comment><USER18> It's about type 1 diabetes</comment>


Facebook to acquire CTRL-Labs, a startup for controlling computers with the mind - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-23/facebook-to-buy-startup-for-controlling-computers-with-your-mind <comment><USER3> Interesting that this is a tech I've wanted for ages, yet with these days of privacy issues where mere mouse behavior can lead to identifying signatures... I'm not letting anyone near my brain patterns.

I'll wear a tinfoil hat on this one.. but not knowing what possible behavioral/emotional/matchable patterns might exist in my waves is a bit terrifying. Thanks no thanks Facebook. If there even was a company I'd trust with my brain signature, it's sure as hell not you.

 _edit: I should note, it sounds like this is not specifically brain waves.. but still. My opinion in this arena doesn 't change hah._

<comment><USER4> Also note that this might not be a one way street. They might use brain machine interfaces to stimulate your brain according to the ads you are watching. E.g. you watch ads for beer and you get the feeling of beer taste on your mouth or you watch ads for bread and you get the smell of freshly baked bread, etc. Or when you are in a store, the implant will give you a serotonin kick when you foveate on a specific product (whose manufacturer paid for that kick). etc.

It's creepy af. But 20 years ago when you told someone about the privacy intrusions of smartphones, people would've been creeped out as well so I'm pessimist and saying it will come.

<comment><USER5> This tech has the potential to distort market forces to a significant degree. Somewhat similar to how cigarettes are harmful to the user, but the user wants to smoke them anyway due to the products impact on the brain.

New products may not get investment because the user is hopelessly attached to the old product through some a reward signal hardwired into their brain.

On the other hand, learning and studying could feel awesome with such tech. And mind altering substances might not be a requirement.

As we get more powerful tech, I think we should work towards ways of bending the tech toward positive outcomes.

<comment><USER6> Hopefully folks like yourself have a seat at the table when it comes time to define "positive outcomes."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As someone who works with EMG, the hype CTRL-Labs has been pushing regarding their tech is over-the-top ridiculous.

In short, it's a wearable band that uses electrodes to measure your forearm muscles' activity (electromyography, or EMG), coupled with accelerometers to capture motion. It's awesome technology, but contrary to all the "neuro" buzzword bingo, you can't "control computers with your mind" – you have to physically contract the muscles in your forearm, just like if you were using a mouse or keyboard. This video gives you an idea of what the device is actually capable of: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD4efk8T2X4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD4efk8T2X4)

Either way, it's exciting to see this kind of tech make it into the consumer space. Even if it doesn't catch on with AR/VR, it will have a lot of positive effects for researchers as well as for users with accessibility and mobility challenges.

<comment><USER8> Whether you have to move your muscles isn't so important, the goal here is to create a control surface that is usable in VR/AR, which this technology can totally still do.

Walking down the street with AR glasses right now sucks because you can't actually _do_ anything without disruptive gestures (holding your hand to your face, talking out loud to nobody, etc). If you could tell the glasses what to do simply by making small imperceptible movements in your hand, that's a huge leap forward towards making AR actually something usable

<comment><USER9> the question is if this device is more expressive than , say, wearing a glove.

<comment><USER8> Even if it was equally expressive, it's probably far less obtrusive to wear a bracelet than wear a glove (though that depends on the design of the bracelet I guess)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have still never owned an Oculus Rift simply because it is owned by Facebook and while I can't know for sure what they are doing with data collected, I can try my best to not walk straight into the fire. Maybe it would actually be better for Facebook to spin off an acquisitions/ventures arm associated with the main company as loosely as possible, and leave out data and privacy concerns by not using any data from their ventures until they are wholly incorporated into the Facebook business, but I'm no legal expert and Facebook is definitely not the type of company that would stay it's hand at an opportunity of collecting even more data

<comment><USER11> Agreed. If they were smart, they would break themselves up as Alphabet did in preparation for future investigations etc.

They could then acquire companies more "quietly".

Mark should also take a page from Larry's book and transition to the background more while lettings someone else run Facebook.

<comment><USER12> I don't think Facebook is able to get away with that, at least not as easily.

With Google my #1 concern is they'll shut it down. With Facebook I know it's going to sniff up all my data it can get its grubby hands on (which is also the #2 concern with Google if the product survives)

In any case on the subject I don't want anything but my own hardware processing anything thought related. That is not something the cloud should be involved in

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > uses a bracelet to measure neuron activity in a subject's arm to determine > movement that person is thinking about, even if they aren't physically > moving

I don't understand how this could possibly work with an armband. They presumably are reading electrical signals from motor neurons, but why do they fire if there's no movement? Is it possible that they are detecting incredibly small movements that are involuntarily caused by thinking about moving your hand?

<comment><USER14> This sounds straight like future-future-tech. My Fitbit can't even measure my heartbeat or steps with sufficient precision and they want to measure electric signals from neurons? Sounds (yet) impossible.

<comment><USER15> It's not even that new. A professor was using a much earlier version of this same tech to steer his boat in the 90's. It was very easy to read left and right signals to control a rudder as a prototype.

There have been commercialized versions of this tech already. The Myo was Kickstarted in 2015 and then acquired by CTRL-Labs. I have one and that generation of the tech was still tricky to use effectively.

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/312488939/myowaretm- har...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/312488939/myowaretm-harness-the- power-of-your-muscle-signals)

Here's a pretty decent paper on the quite long history of Brain-Machine Interfaces: [https://www.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/physrev.00027.20...](https://www.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/physrev.00027.2016?view=long&pmid=28275048&)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Relevant post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21039955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21039955)

What I think FB is probably going to use it for:

* Some sort of peripheral to "unlock" advanced features in FB, which will basically give them a never-ending stream of neural-data to train models on.

* Ad impressions, no need to track clicks anymore, if user reacted to it in a "positive" manner they will be getting a cut.

* Bundle with Oculus (Something like: [https://youtu.be/D8pB8sNBGlE?t=638](https://youtu.be/D8pB8sNBGlE?t=638))

<comment><USER17> agreed - this is all about improving ad engagement metrics. If they can demonstrate that the user was engaged even if they didn't click the ad, then the acquisition is worth the $500m-$1b they reportedly paid for it. I also see the wrist band as becoming linked to payment / libra functionality -- that way it's always on the user and it opens fb to greater awareness in the physical world as well. It's funny how the tech future is finally materializing just the point where we are realizing that instead of utopia, it is turning out to be an utterly repulsive sci-fi nightmare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There is a presentation about tech in question: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8pB8sNBGlE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8pB8sNBGlE)

Looks very interesting, but I would prefer it not to be owned by facebook.

<comment><USER19> This doesn't seem like a neural interface at all. Yes, _technically_ the device is measuring neural activity, but it's measuring neural activity in your arm, not in your brain. In effect, this seems to be _way_ closer to gesture control than it is to a neural interface.

If that's all they're doing, the title of this post is very misleading (and consequently, most of the comments in this thread are irrelevant).

<comment><USER9> yep. it's totally a surface electromyography device that feeds into a neural network to recognize the gesture you are making from your wrist. There are alternatives of course, such as gesture recognition from a camera. This is interesting regardless, but wonder how useful it is. Gesture recognition is not new , it's just has not surpassed other input devices yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Sounds like a very interesting tech. I'm curious if the Facebook brand is the right place for it though. Facing public scrutiny I don't think many people trust Facebook anymore to share the intricate info of their lives.

</comment><comment><USER21> Letting something owned by Facebook anywhere near my mind is the last thing I'd want to do.

<comment><USER22> It's going on your arm not brain

<comment><USER21> The mind might be largely collocated with the brain, but I did specifically say mind :D Where the device goes is irrelevant to my concern; what it might be reading, and what I'd trust them to do with it, is not.

To be fair this concern is not only about Facebook, I'd have similar concerns now about anyone, but Facebook have already shown themselves to be bad actors. Fool me once, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ok, this is the kind of tech I would like to see come up and mature in the coming ten-twenty years.

Having dozens of employees and four years of development period with VC money suggests that they have something more than just a POC.

With any great technology/innovation, the next obvious question always is, how can it be used at a mass scale, so that it gets accepted as just another part of a person's life. To put it another way, how can it be assimilated into the common services/products that we consume in our daily lives. Only then it will produce the value that it's makers were hoping for.

So what kind of void could this technology fill?

That depends on the vision of the creators and those who own it. I guess, if it was Apple that was buying this startup, we would see very different end usage of it.

If it was Google, we would see something absolutely different. If it was Amazon, who knows what they might use it for?

But since it is Facebook, we have to feel a bit apprehensive.

Because what is it that Facebook intends to do in long term? What is it's vision? Being one of the biggest tech companies in the World right now, it is of paramount importance that we know what do they intend to do with the tech they acquire?

And this tech could be revolutionary! It is the kind of stuff that we read in Sci-Fi. Hope they make something good/useful out of it.

<comment><USER24> Oculus connect 6 is tomorrow and Thursday. You should watch the keynotes to get an idea about what they will do with this

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Has Black Mirror taught us nothing? ;)

</comment><comment><USER26> Seems fitting. They're already controling minds with their computers, why not close the loop :-)

</comment><comment><USER27> After cambridge analytica and Libra, I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg is the right person to own a this kind of technology

<comment><USER28> He just wants to make the world more connected. /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can we learn from our mistakes (Instagram, WhatsApp) and just block this.

<comment><USER30> Why was Whatsapp a mistake?

<comment><USER31> For it to work fully it demands full access to ALL your contacts.

Facebook now knows the name, location and details of your bank, doctor, where you work, your family, your accountant, your psychotherapist etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> David Brin's (sci-fi) version sits in your mouth and detects minute muscle movements to determine which words you are thinking of saying.

</comment><comment><USER33> Nice addition to their current technology controlling minds with computers!

</comment><comment><USER34> So it'll be like voice control where I have to speak slowly and clearly, hide my accent, control my pronunciation... just to get Siri to tell me the weather... but _with my thoughts_? I don't even know how to think slowly and clearly.

<comment><USER35> What's funny is with Siri and Google Assistant I can mumble barely- intelligibly and they understand exactly what I'm saying. I guess I should thank my lack of an accent?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> As a D&D fan I enjoy associating companies with creatures. This acquisition fits the picture well. Let's see if you can associate each FAANG with its creature. Dragon, Lich, Illithid, Beholder, Djinn

<comment><USER37> Facebook - Beholder (Obvious)

Apple - Dragon (Pile of gold. Ancient. Has good variants.)

Amazon - Lich (Seeks to conquer everything)

Netflix - Djinn (Not actually as scary as the rest.)

Google - <USER2>

<comment><USER36> Almost :) I swap F&G.

With the article hint about mind reading, mind flayers (or Illithid) connect their minds together in huge cities. They are also famous for manipulating minds with their psionic abilities.

Beholders have plenty of (non-googly) eyes and look everywhere, gather ancient knowledge, gather various artifacts, but usually don't care about you except for when they zap you for coming too close.

Djinn are masters of illusions rocking you with dreams while they drain you.

The lich (or maybe semi-lich soon) is in the business of dealing time. He has a special relationship with time, which allows him to trade advantageously to fill its boundless ambitions.

The cash hoarding behavior and love of beautiful shiny things is indeed a characteristic of dragons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I love fancy/zany new HCI stuff, and I have been waiting for the CTRL-Labs product to come out for a LONG time.

In my head, the compromises CTRL-Labs are making is brilliant and I believe it can create a compelling product.

This could FINALLY be the keyboard killer. I would love something I can walk and use easily, use from a reclining position, and avoid having to use my hands for typing while programming.

I have bad wrist pain from typing all day, so I am sure to use only ergonomic keyboards and mice and take frequent brakes. Not having to deal with that would be great.

</comment><comment><USER39> After acquisition: "You know how you created a system to control a computer with a mind? Well we want you to keep doing that, just the other way around."

</comment><comment><USER40> The best part is it is totally free.

In order to activate the band, you simply imagine yourself buying a product from one of the advertising partners.

</comment><comment><USER41> For a moment, I read that as controlling minds with the computer, and thought: Wait, Facebook does that already!

</comment><comment><USER42> Source, BSidesLV presentation on Brain-Machine Interfaces: \- for those in the know (basically, a bunch of PhD labs and a few private companies, small network of people), FB's efforts with this have achieved `read` capabilities, and the thought is they have have achieved `write`.

<comment><USER43> Hey - off topic but what do you think of BSides? There is one soon in my area and have been on the fence about attending. Is it hit or miss on location?

<comment><USER42> yeah def location dependent. BSidesLV is the mothership, few other cities do big ones as well.

Conversely, an underdeveloped BSides local to you is a good opportunity for you to get involved and make a name for yourself in the local sec scene.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This app requires new permissions: Will you grant Facebook permission to access your thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER45> I built a Smart House system "mind" controlled by EEG made specifically for ALS patients 8 years ago. [https://youtu.be/mQrytBbSbsA](https://youtu.be/mQrytBbSbsA)

I'd like to be bought please.

</comment><comment><USER46> Makes sense, with their main business being the inverse.

<comment> the-dude Eco 101 : [https://www.gwern.net/Complement](https://www.gwern.net/Complement)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems fit to complete the loop, however it s redundant. FB already knows what you want to do with your computer

</comment><comment><USER47> [https://outline.com/tnfGyL](https://outline.com/tnfGyL)

</comment><comment><USER48> "Facebook to acquire CTRL-Labs, a startup for controlling computers with the ~~mind~~ brain"

<comment><USER9> technically all personal computers are controlled with the brain

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'd have called it CTRL ALT Labs, but other than that this is pretty terrifying.

</comment><comment><USER50> Definitely one of the top 10 most terrifying headlines I've ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER51> Help, facebook was reading the old joke headlines again.

</comment><comment><USER52> New frontiers for how to commodify and sell you

</comment><comment><USER53> In a way, they are already on our minds with all the weird techniques they have to make people addicted to their stuff. But that is definitely going way too far.

</comment><comment><USER54> The technology they produce itself is pretty decent, but in the hands of facebook this is one step away from being a dystopian nightmare.

</comment><comment><USER55> Of all companies Facebook should be kept as far as possible from any kind of Neuralink type interface.

We are literally going to lobotomize our species in a quest to get people to click ads.

<comment><USER56> Could it not be said that people who are so in to Facebook that they would like and want this are already (self-)lobotomized to a degree, by whatever factors make people revel in boring social stuff/ignorance and not wish to pursue higher knowledge or goals?

I mean most of Facebook seems to be:

20% of

\- saying "I was at this location"

\- pictures of food

\- pictures of people's kids

\- pictures of people at events like concerts, family gatherings, etc.

\- complaining about traffic/weather/money

and 80% of

\- reports of memes

People whose Facebook interaction is pretty much just the above, which is probably the majority, aren't really going to achieve much more in life without Facebook, whether it's reading your brain or not.

<comment><USER55> Pictures of kids for viewing by grandparents and relatives is literally the only legitimate use of Facebook as far as I'm concerned. It's basically an over-engineered photo sharing service.</comment></comment></comment>


How Equity Dilution Works - <AUTHOR> http://www.gaebler.com/How-Equity-Dilution-Works.htm

<comment><USER2> This seems like a pretty-long winded explanation of a relatively simple concept, and doesn't even mention option pools, a nearly ubiquitous feature of most funding rounds.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe the calculations should also take into account that the chances of the equity becoming worth anything at all is probably higher in a company that is able to bring in one or two rounds of financing. And that the exit value hopefully is higher. All the owners are in most cases diluted equally, including the ones making the decision. The total worth of your shares should be higher even counting the dilution, or you are working at the wrong company to begin with.

<comment><USER4> Who has the power to decide over dilution? Can you decide that you don't want your part diluted, and the rest can't do anything about that?

<comment><USER3> No, it is probably a majority vote among the share holders. Minority share holders have no say in the decision.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Ultralancer – An exclusive network for the world's top freelancers - <AUTHOR> http://www.ultralancer.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> We use a wide array of indicators and rank freelancers according to their Behance, Dribbble, Github, and other portfolios. Then we will admit those with the highest scores. Although we understand that those are not the only top freelancers, but those are the ones with verifiable track records.

</comment><comment><USER2> What is your strategy to acquire the "world's top" freelancers and how do you filter out the average or worse ones?

</comment><comment><USER3> Accounts created just to promote a story usually get banned here.</comment>


Lean Startup 101 - <AUTHOR> http://swombat.com/2011/2/7/lean-startup-101

<comment><USER2> Please can you kill your Chrome IE plugin popup (on IE7), if I had an alternative way of browsing your site on a corporate machine I already would do, dropping a massive popup covering the content that I can't get past doesn't help.

<comment><USER3> Sorry man, I'm doing my little bit to help encourage the death of IE7 by applying the Chrome Frame plugin. I _am_ being ideological about it, yes.

Look at it this way: if everyone did this, IE would die a quick death.</comment></comment>


Mozilla Launches Experimental Tool for Cross-Browser Debugging - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/campd/fxdt-adapters

<comment><AUTHOR> From TechCrunch:

"When you are building Web apps — and especially when you are debugging them — all the subtle differences between the different browsers start coming into play. Testing on every single browser is a hassle and there are no good tools available that help you easily automate these tests, partly because the different browsers' developer tools can't talk to each other. Mozilla, however, has now built an adapter that allows it to connect the Firefox developer tools with Chrome and iOS to help developers test their web apps there right from Firefox."</comment>


Show HN: Speck, a WebGL molecule renderer for attractive and practical figures - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/wwwtyro/speck

<comment><USER2> Wow, the coolest thing about this tool is how wide of an array of visualizations you can create from a handful of sliders. I dunno much about the molecule aspect of it, but it certainly produces some super cool looking sci-fi type renders.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice! Just curious whether the project uses any ChemInformatics toolkit for molecule processing?

<comment><USER4> I'm not the author, but I have looked over the source code. The project only supports XYZ format files, which are super easy to parse. The colors and atomic radii are all given in one large dictionary. So the amount of chemistry and physics present in the code is minimal</comment></comment>


OCaml Language Sucks - b-man http://sds.podval.org/ocaml-sucks.html <comment><USER2> When I was in the Film Club at St. Andrew's College in 1977... (yeah, yeah, walked to school barefeet in a blizzard, only Aurora, Ontario really _did_ have winter blizzards!) Anyhow, Dr. Rupert Ray, the "Master" running the club gave us a piece of advice: When reviewing a film, review the film you saw and not the film you would wish you saw.

So for example I think criticism like _The conspicuous absence of macros cannot be obscured by the presence of preprocessors_ is witty, but it is really reviewing a language that is a dialect of Lisp with a glaring defect rather than reviewing a language that may or may not provide a different solution to the problems that macros solve.

</comment><comment><USER3> A very thorough argument, albeit with a trollish/link-bait title. Also, please note that the author maintains a Lisp implementation (CLISP) and might have an axe to grind; generally, never take a Lisper's opinion on an ML dialect, or an MLer's on Lisp; the two groups are mutually hostile and philosophically incompatible (kinda like Skinheads vs Trekkies)

<comment><USER4> For what it's worth - I'm a professional lisp dev who greatly admires the ML family and its ilk (Haskell, Miranda, etc).

I'm not very good with them (yet), but I can appreciate the safety guarantees of a good type system (as long as it has decent inference and can avoid the ridiculous verbosity of Java).

As a rule of thumb, if I want to hack something up quickly, and I use Lisp (or python/perl). If I want something safer, easier to maintain (not necessarily extend though ...), etc I like languages with stronger typing and more powerful static analysis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> argument #1 : "OCaml sucks because it is not LISP". argument #2 : "OCaml sucks because it is not LISP". ...

Oh, and seriously? This one is good for a chuckle. I am convinced that it's an instance of the pattern above. I don't know what version of LISP that does this the author has in mind, but it's not the 50s any more -- we no longer leave batch jobs on punchcards at the computer in the morning to obtain the results in the evening. I would hate if my compiler spat so many errors that the initial, and only pertinent one, scrolled out of the screen:

"Compiler stops after the first error:

Compiler should process the whole compilation unit (normally, a file) unless a total disaster strikes. E.g., if an expression has the wrong type, just assume the type is right and proceed to the next expression. You do not have to generate the executable, just report as many errors as possible!"

<comment><USER6> To be fair, most compilers do continue on in an attempt to fund further errors, and this is useful. The key is doing so in a way that keeps the errors pertinent. See the first few chapters of Programming Language Pragmatics for some discussion of this.

<comment><USER7> I second that reference!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ouch, pretty harsh. Any OCaml fans around want to counter some of those complaints? Are these things that don't bother most programmers, or can be avoided by proper idiomatic code?

I've heard good things about OCaml elsewhere, but my experience with functional languages is limited to a bit of Scheme and Haskell. I've thought about trying out OCaml but this makes me possibly want to reconsider...

<comment><USER9> Ergh! Sure, some of these things are true, but some just _reek_ of a stubborn refusal to do things the way the language intends for them to be done.

Note how instead of saying, "Ocaml doesn't have with-open-file or unwind- protect", he says, "Here's how you have to do with-open-file and unwind- protect in Ocaml". No! You do not go around trying to turn other languages into Lisp if you want to code in Lisp. If you want to code in Lisp, you code in Lisp.

Similarly, he just dismisses the syntax as "pretty much unreadable". Bollocks. The language syntax is fine. Sure, it's different from what most people are used to, unless said people have used SML or Haskell. But it's a decent synatx - yes, with it's own quirks and problems - which is most certainly not "unreadable".

"No Polymorphism; Cannot add an int to a float - need an explicit cast" - <AUTHOR> he means to say is that it's a very strong-typed language. If you use the "O" part of "Ocaml" (Objective Caml", polymorphism exists and works.

Now, a lot of his points are valid, like the one about the standard library. But in general, I feel that he really discredits himself by his persistence in writing Lisp code in Ocaml. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

(Disclaimer: I've used Ocaml, but not to any grand extend. Maybe 10,000 lines of code written in it. Paradigm-wise, I'd have to say I might prefer Lisp, although I find that CL is slightly annoying often times.)

<comment><USER10> "Note how instead of saying, "Ocaml doesn't have with-open-file or unwind- protect", he says, "Here's how you have to do with-open-file and unwind- protect in Ocaml". No! You do not go around trying to turn other languages into Lisp if you want to code in Lisp. If you want to code in Lisp, you code in Lisp."

What would be the OCaml solution for the problem that unwind-protect solves? In Haskell, I would use bracket, and appropriately the API documentation of bracket gives the definition of withFile as an example:

      withFile name mode = bracket (openFile name mode) hClose

(see [http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/Contr...](http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/Control- Exception.html#v:bracket))

<comment><USER11> You can implement your own unwind-protect:

[http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml- list/2003/07/5ff66...](http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml- list/2003/07/5ff669a9d2be35ec585b536e2e0fc7ca.en.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article makes me very happy that I'm currently learning F# instead of plain vanilla OCaml.

Having said that, some of the code to me just doesn't look right. Like the file open nonsense. Why not just write a generic function and use that whenever you need it? Do you really have to repeat all that nonsense every time? Because if you're basically copying and pasting, maybe you're doing something wrong?

I don't know, since I'm a newbie and I'm on F#, not straight OCaml. I know in F# I can get an open file (with error catching) in just a line or so of code.

<comment><USER5> You shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet.

1/ if you're a newbie at F#, it is not completely unlikely that all the F# you have ever written was valid OCaml. The languages are that close to each other.

2/ the author's criticism is that OCaml is not LISP, not that OCaml is not F#, so all the complaints he has against OCaml very likely apply just the same (note that I am not saying they are _valid_ complaints) to F#.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I didn't read the article and really don't care to, but I want to know: which of the following languages would HN suggest - OCaml, F# or Scala?

I took a brief look at OCaml a few years ago and have been meaning to try and learn it properly for a long time now, but never got around to actually doing it. From my very very brief look at F#, it looked really nice. Finally, I don't know much about Scala, but since I'm mostly using Clojure for my own coding (and Java + C++ + JNI in work), maybe staying with a JVM language would ultimately more beneficial?

Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm an ocaml fan, and I agree with some of the complaints, but mostly the last section. The article should've started with that.</comment>


List of Resources on SwiftUI - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vhanagwal/swift-ui-everything <comment><AUTHOR> Everything you need to know about SwiftUI; collected from all around the internet.</comment>


Show HN: VectorStyler for Mac Public Beta - <AUTHOR> https://www.vectorstyler.com <comment><AUTHOR> I'm working on VectorStyler ([https://www.vectorstyler.com](https://www.vectorstyler.com)), a vector graphics and illustration software for the Mac. VectorStyler was started with the goal of providing not just a different, but also a better solution in the vector graphics and illustration software space. I believe that many requests for tools and features from designers and illustrators, have been left unanswered for long. Due to the peculiar situation the vector graphics software market is. And I hope that VectorStyler answers some of these requests.

The detailed list of features can be found at: [https://www.vectorstyler.com/detailed/](https://www.vectorstyler.com/detailed/)

If you use a Mac (post 2014 models recommended, MacOS 10.11 or newer), and would like to try a new vector graphics software, please download the public beta and let me know how it works for you.

I would love to hear your feedback on this.

<comment><USER2> This is great, I think that vector tools need much more competition. I have used most of them through the years, obviously, Illustrator has been the main package for most of it, though recently I have switched more to Affinity Designer, Inkscape and Krita, which has basic vector tools these days. Though I have to say I'm a bit disappointed that VectorStyler is Mac exclusive which rules it out for me sadly. I have nothing against proprietary and paid software, but I do try to at least get one that is multi-platform since I use Windows and Linux.

But I have a lot of co-workers who use Mac and as a fellow Finn I'm absolutely going to ping them to this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Moi, Having a Windows port is on the roadmap. The base framework and UI has been compiled, the main roadblock is a boatload of Apple Metal compute code (for GPU). But there is also OpenCL (available in the Preferences) already so that might help (never tried OpenCL on Windows), or just going DirectCompute, but that is a much bigger effort. NVidia CUDA support could also be a way to go, but that limits GPU support to NVidia only.

As for Linux, well lets keep an open mind.

But let your Mac co-workers try VectorStyler out, and let me know how it works for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why target largely unsupported technologies like Metal Compute over say OpenCL with a _much_ larger market share? You mentioned the complaint about Nvidia CUDA limiting GPU support to Nvidia only, but Metal Compute limits you to a subset of AMD cards to a subset of Mac versions in the wild.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right with the OpenCL vs Metal thing. OpenCL is supported in VectorStyler (see Preferences - Performance section). But running on a Mac (for now), requires Metal, as Apple deprecated OpenCL. OpenCL is still there, but performance on Macs is way better with Metal (this might be intentional from Apple).

OpenCL also had some Mac driver issues with some 2014 NVidia iMacs, which actually caused problems. So for now I have Metal support, and OpenCL is still there but not as good as Metal on Macs.

As for CUDA, most iMacs are with AMD at this time, and Metal still serves good both NVidia and AMD on Macs of course. Of course Metal is far from perfect, but as a small dev, Apple kind of puts you into a corner with that one.

Thinking outside of Macs (Windows and Linux), I would like OpenCL to be the choice, as it is already implemented in VectorStyler, but as I said, I don't know how much extra steps would require from the user (installing drivers, etc). CUDA is a great choice, outside of Macs, and it might be part of a Windows port.</comment></comment>


SQL injection attack on Uber's website - <AUTHOR> http://petition.uber.org/sf/

<comment><USER2> This is pretty funny. "Swimming in the ocean - APPROVED Swimming in private pools - APPROVED Slip-&-sliding on Market Street - DENIED"

<comment><USER3> Loved the "Mistery Button" link poiting to an input validation and sanitization information page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In response, Uber took down all of their petition pages.

See full details here: www.thisshouldbefixed.com

</comment><comment><USER5> Way to pick a good cause guys...</comment>


Ask HN: Why Learn Functional Programming - <AUTHOR> What are some reasons to learn functional programming. I have tried learning it but it gets  complicated understand few concepts. <comment><USER2> Why I think FP is getting popular:

* It's old as hell which means is battle proven * Before it was hard to understand since everything pointed to look at it with a "mathematical view" which not every developer has. Now there are more tutorials and "Blog posts" * New technologies emerged which follow the pattern with familiar syntax and great tooling.

Right now why should you? I'd say why not? If you already know OOP, FP can give you more ways on think about problems and solutions. Plus, it can give you a competitive advantage over other developers.

It is definitely not a hammer which can nail down everything, but it's a good tool to have around.

</comment><comment><USER3> actually, this IS the point of learning FP. it's a different way of thinking about programming and it offers you a new way (often a more elegant) of doing things.

it's usually worth the effort. writing code in a functional way (even without a functional programming language) simplifies testing, often improves program stability and robustness. the more side-effect-free or pure blocks you have in your code, the easier you can build a composable or a concurrent program. basically, most of the principles of good software development (SOLID, DRY, KISS, ...) are native to FP.

<comment><USER4> I started watching the SICP video series on YouTube last year. Just the substitution model exemplified in the Scheme programs in the first few lectures has had a big effect on how I write Python for the $DAYJOB.

Probably the most fascinating thing to me about programming is being able to learn a new approach and apply it in different languages or contexts.

Note to OP -- watch the SICP video series on YouTube here [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB63C06FAF154F047](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB63C06FAF154F047). Get the book and work at it. It's great.

<comment><USER3> it's a great book and the video series is also very good. definitely a good start for FP and also for software engineering in general.

coming from a C/Java background, my earlier Python code looks absolutely like a typical imperative/OOP mixture and now every time I look at it I see parts that can be rewritten in a much cleaner, simpler, FP-like style. it's really one of the paradigms that changes the mind in some way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> functional programming is a catch-all term for a way of writing code that is focused on composing pure functions, actually using the innovations in type systems made in the last few decades, and overall being awesome. This one also gives such advantages: the ability to manage complexity with abstractions, more safe, reliable, composable code, better maintainability I would advise you to read this article - [https://serokell.io/blog/introduction-to- functional-programm...](https://serokell.io/blog/introduction-to-functional- programming), this article also has links to other useful topics that relate to this topic.</comment>


$1800 Unique shared office space for a startup (Fidi, San Francisco) - <AUTHOR> http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/off/4977685069.html

<comment><USER2> • Few phone calls

please pay rent, don't try to do business...</comment>


Software eats software development - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2014/04/13/software-eats-software-development/ <comment><USER2> _> In the pre-Internet era, tools like Hypercard and Visual Basic allowed hundreds of millions of semi-technical people to become software developers. Since then, there hasn't been much work in these areas, but from what I've seen that might change soon._

I doubt that there will be much progress on this in the foreseeable future. Not for general purpose programming anyway. It's not true that there hasn't been a lot of work in these areas since Visual Basic. Not a week goes by without news about some tool that finally allows everyone to create UIs easily, wire up some logic and one-click-deploy everything on the web and mobile devices all at the same time.

But the bottleneck is somewhere else entirely. It's thinking in terms of models. Formalizing and abstracting what we know intuitively about the world and about the things we want to automate.

In my opinion, there have only been two inventions that really "democratized" access to thinking in models: Spreadsheets and SQL. Both are from the 1970s. There has been no progress since then, perhaps with the exception of some of the visual things you can do with modern game engines. Maybe R and Matlab deserve mentioning but they are for people who know exactly what they're doing.

I think the next step has to be abstracting away some of the intelligence required to analyse data and make all the tedious micro decisions about how to transform it into something fit for the task. What we need to make progress is some kind of AI enhanced version of Excel.

<comment><USER3> * Not a week goes by without news about some tool that finally allows everyone to create UIs easily *

That's because they start at the easy part (the UI) and move down until they hit that this is a hard problem. But there's reason for hope: there are breakthroughs happening in this space (reactive like spreadsheets, declarative like SQL). The results are really exciting.

<comment><USER4> > there are breakthroughs happening in this space

could you elaborate on this one. Any links?

<comment><USER3> I don't have any public links but send me an email, it's in my profile.

<comment><USER5> I am curious too...I'll send you an email.

I am the developer of HiveMind (crudzilla.com), it is a web app platform that aims to tackle web app development in a way that moderately skilled developers could do a lot with.

So I am definitely curious!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I was something like 13, I went to my first computer trade show, where on vendor was touting tools that would let non-programmers write software for the minicomputers of the day, eliminating the need for those expensive programmer guys.

Ever since, I've seen people selling similar notions. Whether or not they work, I expect we'll see a number of similar tools on the market. As things like magnetic healing bracelets demonstrate, not actually working is no barrier to selling a product.

<comment><USER7> Programming for non-programmers is an oxymoron to begin with. Even using Excel is programming.

I've become convinced that one of the reasons this field has failed so spectacularly in the past is because people are trying to achieve something that is literally impossible.

In order to communicate with computers you have to become computer literate. Or at least, it's far easier (and will remain so for a while yet) for a flexible human to become computer literate than for an inflexible machine to become human literate.

Finding better ways to make humans computer literate is and will for a long time be a much better path to make computers more accessible, and it's largely what's worked to get us to the point we're at now.

<comment><USER8> Let's operationalize it then:

We need tools that bring the learning curve down and allow people to develop their own basic tools to make their lives easier, while storing the data on a central location.

Amazing things have been done in Excel, but have you ever seen a department have locking issues? "Can you close the spreadsheet so I can get in?"

Yeah, we need multiuser excel, or perhaps a google docs equivalent that can be hosted internally.

<comment><USER9> >We need tools that bring the learning curve down and allow people to develop their own basic tools to make their lives easier

This won't achieve much because the issue is that most people can't think about the problems they face in a structured way.

Modern programming isn't hard, all you need to learn is a handful of control structures and how to do I/O, and there are a multitude of tools to take away the tedious bits.

But if you can't describe the problem you are trying to solve in a structured way than no non-AI tool will help.

P.S. I remember being considered a Wizard in a non-technical university course because I looked up some Excel tutorials and built a spreadsheet with some basic calculations and graphing. This wasn't technically hard, but most of my classmates lacked the ability to comprehend the relationships between different cells and tables in Excel.

<comment><USER10> Currently, programming requires critical thinking and coding.

Enabling people to become critical thinkers is a much bigger problem than just programming: programming will always require critical thinking.

Making programming a computer easier is a difficult problem to solve but very solvable as long as we assume that programmers are critical thinkers.

<comment><USER9> See I don't think coding can get any easier for the level of problem we are talking about here. The kind of small problems we seem to be talking about are the kind of thing that is within the realm of "scripting". You don't need a deep understanding of Computer Science or advanced data structures to write good enough code for those problems.

"Coding" will never go away before AI because at some point you need to formally express the design you have thought up. It doesn't really matter if you do that with arcane syntax, symbols, or "natural" language.

<comment><USER10> > "Coding" will never go away before AI because at some point you need to > formally express the design you have thought up. It doesn't really matter if > you do that with arcane syntax, symbols, or "natural" language.

It sounds like you are saying, and I'm not disagreeing with you, that the act of speaking required coding.

That is, speaking is taking input from the senses and memory, converting that input into a natural language (coding/encoding) through thought and saying the final thought out loud.

How does this help in understanding the differences between typing out syntax, manipulating symbols, expression using natural language or AI using it's own coding approaches?

<comment><USER9> No, I am saying that coding will always require some kind of formal expression, and that the difficulty of the grammar used is not the major barrier (as these issues can be dealt with by compilers and IDEs).

Attempts to create "natural" language programming haven't worked because actual natural languages are too informal and imprecise for simple algorithmic comprehension.

A system that can comprehend natural language and turn imprecise specifications into a program should be an AI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> And enterprise software development has been going in the opposite direction. I work for a $100 billion company. Some days, I want to stab myself and throw myself out the window.

<comment><USER12> In these situations, I believe there are two types people:

A: "Wow, things are really messed up. I'm out of here." B: "Wow, things are really messed up. There's opportunity _everywhere_."

Either can be right, depending on the person and situation.

<comment><USER13> I'm a B, for sure. I'm trying to create new tools to deal with the "things are really messed up" problem... in part because I can create a working business and get myself out of the enterprise, and in part because I genuinely want to make this industry better. What I like about what I'm building is that it changes the human/computer ratio in debugging and problem-solving for complex systems.

Have computers do what computers do well, so people can do what people do well. That's the core of my approach to building software. A big part of the reason enterprise development sucks is because debugging is so _manual_. Automate parts vulnerable to automation, and engineers won't just be more efficient - they'll be happier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> All those tools you talk about still need to be maintained.

Anything built for "non-programmers" as you say, is also many orders of magnitude more complex, and at some point that complexity will grow to a point where it is cheaper to replace the whole system entirely rather than upgrade.

API's and stuff are easier on some level, but distributed systems are also much more complex. Upstream API's change, or get EOL'd or change license.

actually, instead of listing all the reasons : every point you made is just going to end up with more software being developed. it all feeds into itself. endlessly.

</comment><comment><USER15> This also means that design is playing a proportionally larger role in startups.

A lot of the engineering work needed to build the next Instagram/WhatsApp/etc has become commoditized. Design is what's left.

<comment><USER16> Wow. That's actually something that hadn't really struck me until reading this comment. While there is development to be done in ever project still, the upfront amount is growing smaller and smaller with the (P|I|S)aaS techs available to companies. A lot of it does really come down to making the front end of a product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's why this is, at least on a certain level, wrong...

 _Software complexity expands to exceed available tools._

This is a Big Truth. No matter how fast hardware gets, we'll beat on it until it's burning up. Give us better tools, and we'll just write more and more complex software until the tools break down under the complexity. Give us better processes, and we'll make bigger projects.

Better tools don't make it any easier to write software, never have, never will. They just change the kind of software we can write. You don't buy a Porsche to drive 55 more effectively, and you don't use better software development tools in order to work less.

<comment><USER17> Why aren't developers responsible for managing the complexity of their project?

<comment><USER18> They do - if they have ownership too. But project managers won't like to give up the ownership, they just push for more features in less time. There goes your hope for responsible complexity management...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> You know every time we create some innovation that unloads the burden from programmers we invent some other crap to waste their resources on.

Circa 2010 enterprise java managed to take all benefits from freeing memory management and waste them on absurd abstractions and xml permutations (you throw some settings in xml and see what happens)

The universe is conspiring against us shipping real code.

<comment><USER20> LOL, so true! I'd say the opposite is true: software isn't eating programming in any significant way. As much, it's eating the overhead you describe.

Breakthroughs? Show me!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Competitive market forces will keep programmers busy for quite a while. As soon as it becomes easy to do things like make basic online stores with Shopify, stores will want more fancy functionality to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

</comment><comment><USER22> Economically these are not different from technology in general. We can do more with less. There are two side to that statement.

We can do with less. The first two points are especially relevant to this side of things. The most "talented" can be extremely productive. What if Google search & Gmail could be built and run by 14 talented individuals? Duckduckgo seems(ed) like an experiment in this direction. Doing with less is not necessarily painful or revolutionary though. Often, it's smooth. The answer to a lot of "how did people do ___ before computers" questions is "secretaries."

We can do more. That has been the overwhelming result of technological change up to now. Better tools -> More stuff gets made. Most of the resources freed by "doing with less" go into doing more. Agricultural machinery frees peasants to work in factories. Industrial robots free laborers to work as social marketing content creators. Progress.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's not hard to imagine rote programming becoming a universal skill among high school graduates. I could even see this happening within our life-times; it's really only a matter of societal will and available teaching staff. The basics are... basic.

If this happens, then APIs and libraries that make development easy and intuitive for end-users could easily become as in-demand as well-designed websites and mobile apps are today.

<comment><USER24> I can see general programming being added to a school curriculum as most people think it's a guarantee at a good career (for some reason).

I don't mind this mindset, and would enjoy teaching such a course.

I look at it this way though, we theoretically teach every single American student how to write, has that caused an increase in high quality literature being produced? Theoretically, every high schooler can read, I'm curious what percentage of adults actually read literature for fun?

Most long form writing (which I'd consider to be analogous in complexity to large scale programming) is not very common. The average adult's writing is quick and "dirty". I'd expect to see an increase in programming similar in size, scope, and usefulness to email, text, lists, and meeting notes. It would be personal, private, and not meant to last. Tents, not marble palaces.

I think a much more valuable tool would be to teach everyone git (or something easier but still with good branching). For quick and dirty, excel is fine, and some improvement on it likely will come in our lifetimes. What I think is far more valuable is a way to version all text a person produces, with branching and history.

<comment><USER25> The problem with quick and dirty excel, is that the temporary gaps that it fills become permanent solutions. The a couple of years down the line, too many parts of the system are hinged around an unreliable error prone excel sheet, when something better should have been written.

<comment><USER24> Well that's just it, what is "better"? Currently, the software to replace a typical excel spreadsheet is prohibitively expensive. (As someone who currently makes a "spreadsheet replacer", I've heard our BA regularly comment that it takes us tens of thousands of dollars to add in features he was able to add to his spreadsheet in a few minutes.)

I recognize that we are building a cathedral meant to last, and he was building a tent that was error-prone and easy to break. The thing that gets me is how fast he was able to turn data into the answers he needed. Why don't my tools let me put something that fast together?

I've become lately interested in the idea of a "better excel" that could solve the issues excel has: easy to "forget" a new row or cell, hard to version, hard to share, stuck behind a complex gui, hard to add bigger data, etc. I think such a tool could greatly increase the "general programming" of the world far better than just teaching high schoolers to program. Most people who would program either do so for someone else (trying to automate something) or for work because they need to get an answer out of some data. I think excel IS a programming language, it just has a gui instead of text. I think if that was improved upon, it would meet a big need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Software eats software development is nothing new. Everyone who writes libraries is doing just that for past 30+ years. In fact good software developers take pride in writing software that require less code. Its in the inherent nature of software development itself. Come to think of it, software field could be the most egalitarian of all. You won't see lawyers lobbying for less complicated laws!

</comment><comment><USER27> "Developers have steadily marched upwards from Assembly to C to Java to, today, scripting languages like Ruby and Python."

Downwards in terms of language design though, you can add JavaScript to the end of that sequence to make it even more obvious. Otherwise we would've been using a some sort of sane syntax version of Haskell by now. If software is "eating" 'whatever' then computers should be doing more for you not less, hence even more pre-runtime checking, not less.

"... allowed hundreds of millions of semi-technical people to become software developers. ... these tools act as a force multiplier for the software industry."

Multiplying the code mess professional developers will then have to maintain? Example: converting Excel and Access spaghetti into sane programming models in finance.

<comment><USER28> Who moved to Java? Write once - debug everywhere.

<comment><USER29> Guess you don't code in Java. As that's bullshit. But maybe you refer to GUI != HTML applications. And even there it's not true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's interesting that there is no mention of the so called "citizen developer". According to some Gartner reports very soon a fairly large amount (approx. 25%) of all business applications will be "written" by so called "citizen developers". These are mostly business people with minimal or no programming knowledge but are able to use software tools to create other "software tools". A good, VERY BASIC example is building an Excel "app" with some VB scripts...

</comment><comment><USER31> Programming for non-programming works best when they don't know they're programming. It's easy if you don't know you're doing it.

</comment><comment><USER32> > _General purpose tools for non-programmers: Since then, there hasn't been > much work in these areas, but from what I've seen that might change soon._

Really? Loads of examples. One just off the top of my head is Scratch: [http://scratch.mit.edu/](http://scratch.mit.edu/)

<comment><USER33> I love Scratch and teach it in my gen ed class, but I'm not sure I'd quite call it a "general purpose tool" in the same way that Hypercard was. I could certainly see it evolving (or rather, forking) into such a thing, but as it stands it's a little too kid-education-animation-game-oriented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > _Developers have steadily marched upwards from Assembly to C to Java to, > today, scripting languages like Ruby and Python._

Since when does being a dynamic language and not having to have a main() function make you a "scripting language?" I didn't know people still said those words.

<comment><USER35> >scripting language

It's just a categorization. Not an insult.

<comment><USER36> It's a categorization with no meaningful difference. There's no honest reason to create something like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> For those in machine learning and programming languages, what would be the major hurdles in achieving voice programming (or at least scripting). A way to interact with a computer so that one could ask things like:

"Computer, search google's rss news for arduino articles. Sort them by lenght, in the top 100 results search for the world circuit. Copy paste the paragraphs containing those results into a text file. Send it to Jane".

Is it really that far? Wouldn't such a program enable some kind of _programming for non-coders_ (of course assuming one would need to learn some rules, and have a clear idea of what one was looking for).

<comment><USER38> The problem is it's already hard to be very precise about what you're saying when talking to a computer just with text, so we'd need functions specific for each of those voice requests, more reliable voice recognition, and also some AI intelligence to understand the English you're using, so even that simple request would be difficult unless we pre-scripted the functionality for that whole phrase.

It's not impossible, the technology just isn't there yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Question, does this follow the same trend as other Relationships..for example Mathematics can be said to be the 'software' of high-level physics..do we see the same trends in that there is a high-level in Mathematics where new theories are being created but a lower level where a large amount of people use tools to apply these new theories?

If so, than are we facing the same exact problem just in a different field?

My take on it, is that we never fully mastered teaching how to come up with abstractions and new models..tangential proof is the large number of religions created to come up with new models of explaining how the =universe works.

<comment><USER23> > do we see the same trends in that there is a high-level in Mathematics where > new theories are being created but a lower level where a large amount of > people use tools to apply these new theories?

Definitely.

If you allow more longer-running examples, this is exactly the situation of calculus. The Calc I-III that many use regularly is the application; Real Analysis is the theory. Ditto for any "applied" sort of math you can think of (stats, crypto, machine learning, etc. -- all basically just use theorems which are the "abstract interfaces" to pure mathematics.)

> we never fully mastered teaching how to come up with abstractions and new > models

And we never will, as long as the human race continues progressing :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> > Software is eating the world, and doing so using smaller and smaller teams. > WhatsApp was able to disrupt the global SMS industry with only a few dozen > engineers. Small teams can have a big impact because software development > (and deployment) has improved dramatically over the past decade.

While this is true, I'm coming to realize more and more that a _lot_ of would- be highly needed disruption is just not feasible because laws and monopolies are standing in the way, much of it due to lobbying and sometimes patents. It's sad.

</comment><comment><USER41> Halide makes me think we can give a bunch of that power that Moore's law gave us back to actual problem domains without making programmers any less effective.

</comment><comment><USER42> Pretty much his entire list is wrong.

"Deploying a commercial website ten years ago required significant upfront capital"

Actually... you could get a very large website up 10 years ago on almost nothing. $30/month dedicated servers were available that could do 10,000 connections at once. Which means you could serve millions of people cheaply. You could also get lots of virtual shared hosts for $5/month or less.

Heck, even 15 years ago you could do that. Maybe not everyone realised it till later, but it's not a new thing at all.

"Startups created simple APIs that abstract away complex back ends. Examples: Stripe (payments), Twilio (communications), Firebase (databases), Sift Science (fraud)."

There were plenty of services around on the internet 15 years ago with APIs too. Including payments, communications, databases, and fraud. I know because I developed some of them.

"Open Source. Open source dominates every level of the software stack, including operating systems (Linux), databases (MySql), web servers (Apache), and programming languages (Python, Ruby). These are not only free but generally also far higher quality than their commercial counterparts."

Guess what? Open source was around 10 years ago.

"Programming languages. Developers have steadily marched upwards from Assembly to C to Java to, today, scripting languages like Ruby and Python. Moore's Law gave us excess computing resources. We spent it making developers more effective."

Ruby and Python were both around ten years ago. The same as perl, php, and haskell amongst others.

"Special-purpose tools for non-programmers. These tools let non-programmers create software in certain pre-defined categories, thereby lowering costs and reducing the demand for developers. Examples: Shopify (e-commerce), WordPress (blogging), and Weebly (small business websites)."

um... blogging, e-commerce, and lots of other non-programmer tools were around in the 90s.

"General-purpose tools for non-programmers. In the pre-Internet era, tools like Hypercard and Visual Basic allowed hundreds of millions of semi-technical people to become software developers. Since then, there hasn't been much work in these areas, but from what I've seen that might change soon. By allowing more people to program, these tools act as a force multiplier for the software industry."

Have you heard of the internet? Seen the reams of cut and paste code out there from semi-technical people? Whole industries are centered around letting less skilled people make software. This hasn't decreased, but increased. There's a whole "everyone should code" movement hitting us.

Is this the quality of article we want on this website? Please delete my account!? I'm done.

<comment><USER43> Is this the quality of comment on this website... please delete your account!

What were the "plenty of API services" 15 years ago. I don't remember that many, you are talking pre google days... Like flashing "Under construction" websites... If there were APIs i think they were probably an accident ;)

Ruby and Python were both around ten years ago, and No body cared.. Python was primarily used as a CGI layer, and then later in Zope... Ruby just wasn't used (as far as I recall). After Rails, and Django, people started paying attention, and then google gobbling up the python community worldwide changed that.

What were the Blogging/E-commerce tools around in the 90s? Do they compare at all with the ease of use/scale of those quoted?

<comment><USER42> The e-commerce shop sold to yahoo in 1998 by pg. The guy who made this website. [0] Ebay was also doing _lots_ of business in the 90s.

Paypal was founded in 1998, and it wasn't the first e-commerce company by far. [1]

Perl, php, TCL via AOL and yes python were definitely used for much of the web. Google founded in 1998 used a little old language called... python. [2]

mod_python was released in 2000, which came after the non-cgi version of python the Netscape Enterprise server... which also used JavaScript as a server language. [3] However, _lots_ of people were using perl for web services.

SOAP designed in 1998 was one of the libraries or protocols where people published APIs, along with Corba, and xmlrpc amongst others. [4]

[0] [http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html)

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER43> ... You still didn't mention a single API.

And yes, python was in complete disuse that only obscure academics used it (Which is what google was founded by). I mentioned in my comment it only gained traction after google and django before then it was niche Zope and CGI. All your citations don't actually refute it, they in fact strengthen it...

So show me an API that existed in 1998... all you showed me was that SOAP was 'designed' in 1998...

Are you really citing "Netscape Enterprise Server" as proof python was in wide usage?

Paul Graham sold a business to yahoo, wasn't it in lisp? Did it have an API? does it actually prove any of the points you made, or is it just a statement about "There was business on the internet" which I never refuted.

You were really scrounging to come up with pretty much nothing, so thanks for further illustrating my point :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> _> Since the pre-Internet era, there hasn't been much work in general-purpose tools for non-programmers, but from what I've seen that might change soon._

What startups might he be referring to?

</comment><comment><USER45> Developers keep pushing the envelope to make tools easier to use and people keep coming up with increasingly complex requirements.

Neither side is ever content.

<comment><USER38> This. This is the reason why I never say "We can build X". We can never know because the requirements always get pushed an order of magnitude higher whenever we can actually build X.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> "Software is eating software" is true, but not good. It's not good at all.

Take a look at the manner in which so many companies use project management software like Jira: to create a Big Brother system. Developer's velocity drops below 15 "story points" per week? There's your bad guy! Some companies use time-tracking software (designed to help an individual manage her own time better, and certainly not to abuse workers) to take micromanagement to a new level. Then there's LinkedIn, which may have been started with good intent but makes it astronomically more difficult for people to reinvent themselves (giving even more power to corporate management, which is thus empowered to fuck with peoples' careers long after they leave).

The real bad guys have been using us (programmers) for decades to wage their war on the workers. That's most of what they want us to do. Our effective purpose is not build flying cars or cure cancer, but to vaporize jobs for the poor and deliver the proceeds, efficiently, to the rich. Since we are also workers (we're the upper-working class) it's not surprising that we'd see our own weapons used on us.

<comment><USER47> > Then there's LinkedIn, which may have been started with good intent but > makes it astronomically more difficult for people to reinvent themselves > (giving even more power to corporate management, which is thus empowered to > fuck with peoples' careers long after they leave

Just curious, how do you mean?</comment></comment>


Metrize Icons - <AUTHOR> http://www.alessioatzeni.com/metrize-icons/

<comment><USER2> Boy, no explanation anywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> What explanation is needed? Just scroll through the page!! Boy!</comment></comment>


Piku: Git push deployments to your own servers - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/embed/ec-GoDukHWk <comment><USER2> The non-embedded version: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec- GoDukHWk&feature=emb_titl...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec- GoDukHWk&feature=emb_title)

And the github repo of piku: [https://github.com/piku/piku](https://github.com/piku/piku)</comment>


China's 'Pearl Bro' making millions from live streaming - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170623-chinas-pearl-bro-making-millions-from-live-streaming <comment><USER2> Take-away: Not just about the product, that is a commodity, but about the process of interaction and providing an identity. And as stated in the video, 'killing time'.</comment>