Avoiding the Adjective Fallacy - <AUTHOR> http://betterexplained.com/articles/adjective-fallacy/ <comment><USER2> This same effect occurs in computer science with "big-O notation"

Every time I'm asked about big-O in a job interview, I'm asked to recite the formal rules of the notation, rather than demonstrate how to use the resulting insight to make the code better. Just because I don't know the formal rules of how to calculate Big-O they assume I can't write any code that scales.

Its like a teacher assuming a student can't speak english because he can't recite the adjective order chart from memory.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's necessary to know the formal definition of big O (or big Theta or big Omega) but there's a spectrum there. If all you can say is "nested for loops are bad" and you can't explain why hash tables provide fast lookups then I'm not going to be very impressed.

On the other hand plenty of people can memorize that a lookup in a BST is O(log n) without understanding what that actually means. If you can explain that a balanced BST grows in height by powers of two without actually using the phrase "log n" then that's more impressive than the person who does rote memorization without understanding what it actually means.

<comment><USER4> I'm going to render myself permanently unemployable in the industry by admitting this, but one thing I'm still not really sure about is why every text on CS assumes array have O(1) access? I mean, in the real world it surely takes more time to reach elements further in memory, if only because electrons travel at finite speeds and also you can't magically write any number into a register, there has to be a piece of electronics that will count up to it somehow. Is it only because all those hardware operations are so stupidly fast we don't care about them day-to-day usage, or is there another reason for assuming arrays have O(1) access?

<comment><USER5> First, no, in the real world it does not take more time to reach elements further in memory. Even if the memory is physically further on a chip (and some memory has to be), the memory transfer happens on a clock edge, not just "as soon as possible", so the elements actually transfer at the same time.

On to the larger point: O(1) does _not_ mean "twice as fast as O(2)". It means "does not take longer depending on how many elements there are". That is, if I have an algorithm that takes twice as long as an O(1) algorithm, the slower algorithm is still O(1). We do not care about constant factors when dealing with big-O notation.

Accessing an array is O(1). What do you have to do to access an array element? You have to take the size of an array element, and multiply it by the index of the element, and add the starting address of the array, and access the memory at that address. That's O(1), _because it does not depend on the number of elements in the array._

In contrast, accessing an element in a linked list is O(N). You have to start at the beginning of the list, and keep getting the next element until you get to the one you want. On average, that takes N/2 operations for a list of N elements. But we don't care about constant factors like 1/2 in big-O notation, so accessing an element of a list is O(N).

But if I want to insert an element into the middle of a linked list, and I already have a pointer to the place where I want to insert it, that insertion is only O(1). I have to change swap some pointers around (2 or 4, depending on whether it's a singly- or doubly-linked list). But that doesn't depend on the size of the list. Whereas if I want to insert an element into the middle of an array, I have to move all the elements after the inserted item, which is an average of N/2 items, which means that operation is O(N).

This is a completely inadequate explanation of big-O, but I hope it's enough to clear things up at least a bit for you...

[Edit: fixed italics.]

<comment><USER4> > _Even if the memory is physically further on a chip (and some memory has to > be), the memory transfer happens on a clock edge, not just "as soon as > possible", so the elements actually transfer at the same time._

Here is the key insight I was missing. Thank you very much!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I attempted to use only intuitive explanations in my programming class once, and a student rebelled and asked for some more definite rules. She wasn't asking for a dictionary, just SOME structure to help her out. The conclusion I reached is that you need a mix - ground students in rules while supplying them with high-level concepts. You shouldn't rely on only one approach, but give them multiple entry points into the idea. Moderation, as in all things.

<comment><USER7> This is everything I hate about language learning through pure immersion (Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, most language schools). For example, I struggled for an absurdly long time with genders in German when I started because I assumed it was like French (male, female, plural). Turns out there's 4 genders, and often the female article is the same as a the plural. Once English sentence could have solved that.

<comment><USER8> I think that learning the rules is an absolute necessity, even if your goal is to develop your intuition well enough that you don't need them. (Edit: I think this implies a little more than I meant to say. Being exposed to the rules is a necessity, but you don't necessarily have to go out and memorize them from beginning to end or anything.) They're important scaffolding. Even native speakers of a language need to be taught the formal rules if they're to speak well.

I'm going to make a lame attempt to coin a term and call this the Arch Fallacy, which is when you look at your goal and assume anything not present in it is unnecessary to achieve it. A completed arch contains no supports within it, but you'll have a tough time building one without any.

<comment><USER9> "contains _no_ supports" (was "contains to supports")

Funny thing is on first reading, I didn't notice that at all and read it the way you meant. I only saw the typo on a second reading. Interesting autocorrect the brain does.

In any case I like your Arch Fallacy! I think I will use it.

<comment><USER4> > _In any case I like your Arch Fallacy! I think I will use it._

I'll use it too, it's great and I don't recall any term for that particular error in thinking. I've already started spreading it (the name, not the error) among friends, hoping it will catch on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Old little lady" is correct in context.

 _" Which little lady are you referring to? The old little lady, or the young "little lady" that is her five-year-old great granddaughter?"_

Though order is a syntactic feature, the restrictions on adjective order are derived from semantics, which depend on context. They are not ruled out by the grammar, _per se_.

Therefore the rule which says it must be "little old lady" is plain wrong.

The fallacy consists of regarding incorrect or incomplete rules as the unvarnished truth which to learn from and imitate.

<comment><USER11> > Therefore the rule which says it must be "little old lady" is plain wrong.

This is _natural language_. One contrived corner-case counter-example doesn't invalidate the general rule.

<comment><USER10> Right; rather it invalidates the purported generality of the rule (which no serious linguist would assert in the first place).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In my experience, getting good at math requires first that you accept that your intuitions suck. Your natural intuition will constantly lead you astray mathematically. People who struggle with algebra are often people who are trusting their intuitions about what is correct. Eventually, you internalize the rules and they become your intuition. But to suggest that we should skip the rules and instead try to build up intuition seems rather wrong-headed to me.

<comment><USER13> >But to suggest that we should skip the rules and instead try to build up intuition seems rather wrong-headed to me.

The problem with natural languages, and especially english, is that there aren't really any formal rules as there are in well-defined maths like algebras.

If there are no rules, how can you skip them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm a native English speaker, and I never came across such a thing. Often, such adjective mistakes are simply corrected because 'it sounds funny'. I took advanced courses in English and school, and as a weird result, missed out on much of the sentence labeling and other such things. I'm also learning a language. I moved to Norway a couple years ago and am in the second year of classes. Rules, even when they are loose, help a lot as an adult learner because the rules give me something to lean on to make guesses. I'm just now starting to get a feel for what 'sounds' right, but thanks to the rules, I can bypass that for now and use the language skills I have and make do.

</comment><comment><USER15> I teach music lessons professionally and spend hours every day playing with this exact concept. To me it's really about building off of what a student already 1) knows conceptually (rules) and 2) has experienced (intuition).

What I've learned is that you can't teach any type of rule until all it's "prerequisite phenomena" has been _experienced_. Music education has a bias of more "doing" and experiencing and less "talking" about (or it should at least). So it has a keen way of turning ideas and concepts into action rather quickly. I think many other disciplines in school can learn a bit from how music is taught frankly: there is a very quick turnaround from concept to application/experience and therefore to emotional context of some sort, which really is the end goal to all learning. _Why do you care about X?_

So if a rule simply is an equation of some sort, or a statement of relationships, then the prerequisite phenomena is making sure every variable is defined within it; so that one can focus solely on the relationships within the objects instead of the undefined variables. This covers many different grounds depending on the style of the learner and the material at hand. Sometimes (rarely) words are enough (if you're building familiar rules into new rules and the experiential phenomena is all done in the mind "ah-ha!") and usually, a student needs to hear the sound of a major scale vs a minor scale and try to describe it with words before telling them what actually makes it sound different theoretically. And even then, there are different ways to explain it. If the student picked up major scales really well (prerequisite phenomena), I will use the modal approach to learning minor scales (it's the major scale but starting from a different note), if the student picks up the scale tones and is better with spacial relationships, they usually already talk about the differences between what they just played as a sharp/flat 6th or 7th scale tone. And there you have it, they've just instructed YOU how they think about a concept.

Music is a great example of how there is no single correct way to explain the theory. First off, music practice and artistic decisions _always_ came first, the theory came later as people tried to understand and teach it. And it is the bias of educators to find a single correct way to understand it within themselves that leads to them only prescribing one way to do something (memorize this!). Teaching really is listening more than it is speaking.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is actually sort of called out in the comments on the post, but I think it bears saying again in my own way.

It's deeply disingenuous to compare effortless biologically-determined learning to effortful general learning and think you can apply lessons from one to the other. _Even in the example the OP picked_ , there's a reason that the learners drill the adjective order table, and it's because without the drill _they will never learn it at all_. Learning a language as a small child is a different process than learning the same language as a late teen or adult, and the results are very different. (Even so, I wouldn't bother instructing people in adjective order... if they do never learn it, it's no big loss.)

On a different, more technical note, OP doesn't quite understand what's going on in the example either. "Vietnamese spicy food" is perfectly standard English; the ordering there is determined by context. "Vietnamese spicy food" is a subset of spicy food, and will be used whenever it's being contrasted with other spicy food, whereas spicy Vietnamese food is a subset of Vietnamese food, and will be used whenever a contrast is drawn between spicy Vietnamese food and other Vietnamese food. (It's correct, however, that in the zero- context case, "spicy Vietnamese food" is preferred. In my analysis, that's more because people are likely to reify the concept of "Vietnamese food", which makes the phrase structure ("spicy" [adj] "Vietnamese food" [noun]) rather than ("spicy" [adj] "Vietnamese" [adj] "food" [noun]).)

</comment><comment><USER17> In my third semester of Calculus class, I had a Physics professor. True to his background, he would sometimes take the entire class elaborately explaining the geometric interpretation of complex 3D operations, something I greatly appreciated. The formal notation and theory was always there, but he made sure the intuition was there also (if possible). Best math teacher I've ever had.

<comment><USER4> In high school our physics professor (and an actual physics PhD) decided that he can't teach us "real physics" without derivatives and integrals (the latter not being in high school curriculum at all), so by the end of the first year, he taught as both. Our maths teacher started tearing her hair out over this, complaining about lack of rigour; eventually she gave up and taught us integrals with full mathematical formality. Having those two takes on the topic helped us understand it really well.

Another science class anecdote - first year electronic engineering, the professor is showing us the derivation of transistor gain formula. He started from pretty much first principles, written out a _huge_ formula, and then started to cross things out - "this in practice is close to 1 so we can ignore it", "in standard operating conditions this is pretty much zero" (and poof, half of the equation gone, multiplied by zero) - and kept going until he arrived at the standard I_c = βI_b. It gave me a new appreciation of just how much engineering is basically handwaving parts of reality away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> You won't be able to complete a single formal, rigorous proof without clear, formal unambiguous rules. Yes, first principle reasoning is straining, requires hard work and causes headaches, but the understanding will be deeper and complete. The English language is shaped by use and constantly changing. Mathematics is not supposed to change unless we have a mistake in our axioms.

<comment><USER19> Consider imaginary numbers, which don't invalidate anything as such and have to be tidied away after you're done playing with them, but make an entire class of calculations much easier by providing a consistent way to deal with otherwise awkward problems.

<comment><USER18> They don't change the existing parts of the language, they just enlarge its body. Imaginary numbers don't invalidate the other rules. In natural languages, if you learn the rules down to the last nit-picky detail, you will soon realize that it is no longer valid, sometimes within years, other times within decades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The first class that touched upon the formal theory of limits for me was called 'Analysis'. The calculus courses I took before that were informal and leaned mostly on intuition and algebra.

</comment><comment><USER21> It bugs me that he doesn't actually give a reason for why these orderings are "right", beyond his having an intuition for them (which might be just pattern learning, as others here mention).

It's been said (citation needed) that phrases like "tick tock" and "see saw" are in those orders because it's a high or hard vowel before the low or soft (e.g. "tock tick" sounds weird). Maybe _that_ is why "little old" lady sounds more correct to us? I don't know. But the article goes off to draw a parallel to mathematical intuition, and leaves the original grammar problem unresolved, in my opinion.

Incidentally, I usually _really_ like the Better Explained articles.

<comment><USER22> Thanks for the feedback! Glad you've enjoyed the articles thus far :).

The adjective order rules are interesting in that we have to reverse-engineer them from our brains, but aren't consciously aware of them. It's apparently an area of ongoing research why certain orderings are correct. (Maybe there's something about the specificity of the adjective, where the more-specific items are closest to the subject.)

I think the higher-level concern is we can get tricked by thinking we need to consciously master the structure in order to be fluent, vs. letting our brain's pattern-matching skills do some of the heavy lifting.

<comment><USER21> Hey, appreciate your reply to my comment! And fair response, I'm glad to hear from scientists that are able to talk about open research, as opposed to trying to make a dogmatic point or conjecture without evidence.

I like the view that this is an open problem and an area of active research, much more than the more conventional, lay-person settling of the issue as "developed an ear for the language" and that's the end of it.

The impressive work of people like Steven Pinker and Chomsky (in his actual academic field) is to look very carefully at different ethnographic groups, and the larger cultures those groups are embedded in. By doing so, finding groups isolated enough or with a materially different context, such that they _don 't_ exhibit the same patterns.

The title of the article felt like a bait-and-switch, I guess. When I realized it was on betterexplained, it did make more sense that it was ultimately about mathematical reasoning. No worries!

<comment><USER22> Thanks for the reply. I struggled with the title a bit, in my head I think of the "XYZ Fallacy" as a trap we are likely fall into. For me, the trap was overemphasizing a set of implicit rules and trying to explicitly teach those rules to newcomers. (I.e., the newbies are required to use a structured approach that proficient practitioners never needed or even know about.) This is my personal lingo though, and might not make sense to others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Terrific article. And it turns out the complex adjective chart isn't even sufficient to capture the rules. Apparently there are exceptions and it's an area of continuing research:

[http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is- the-...](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-the-rule-for- adjective-order)

<comment><USER24> There shouldn't even be formal rules. The meaning of linguistic constructs are determined by how the appropriateness of phrasing is captured by usage in context. Whether "old little lady" or "little old lady" is correct is largely a matter of what you are more comfortable with, which is a matter of how people around you spoke when you learned the language.

Formalizing it would be about as silly as formalizing which music sounds good.

<comment><USER19> Sorry, I think that's complete bullshit. And there is indeed a great deal of theory that formalizes what makes music sound good; most of it is maintaining patterns of whole-number ratios to derive scalar and rhythmic intervals, and there are certain algorithms and formal rule systems that reliably produce pleasing results within particular genres. Even music that deliberately breaks these rules (like 'noise music' involving extreme distortions or recordings of 'unmusical' sounds) can be thought as a meta-development of those rules; the equipment or source material employed to make such 'unmusical' sounds acts as constraints, and lead to emergent structures of their own.

<comment><USER24> I would disagree with you, but the problem here is that we are communicating different concepts using the same words.

<comment><USER19> Well, I don't wish to get in a fight and I'm sorry if my blunt response came across as a personal attack. I'll try to keep a more open mind and work harder at understanding your perspective rather than just restating my own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Interesting article, and it does describe things that we should strive for--- an intuitive sense is a key sign of mastery of a subject. However, the idea that we should learn math the way we learn languages has a flawed premise. Human beings have been equipped by evolution with the capacity to acquire language by exposure. Cognitively normal children aquire language, including the complexities of grammar, through simple exposure to people speaking that language during a particular period in their development. It's unfortunate that this ability doesn't persist through life, or apply to more than one language for most people. But for children, language acquisition is completely effortless.

This is not the case for other cognitive skills, such as reading and (to our point) mathematics. My son cannot learn calculus simply by hanging out in my office. While our end goal may be the sort of effortless intuition in mathematics that we experience in parsing complicated sentences, the process of acquiring those two skills is of necessity widely divergent.

</comment><comment><USER4> Focusing only, or mostly, on formal structure always[0] seemed to me to be just a failure of teacher at introspection. For instance when using your native language, if you stop and look at your own thought process, you'll quickly realize that you _don 't_ consciously invoke _any_ grammar rules. In fact, the brain doesn't have enough computing power to explicitly build sentences by applying grammar rules, not if you want to have a conversation. It should be obvious, on introspection, that formal structure can be only a scaffolding for building your cache.

[0] - For things you learn to use all the time, or to leverage your cognitive process. The obvious exceptions are things you want to do with mindless precision, where the risk of guessing wrong is unacceptable. Compare public speaking to memorizing a poem, or guesstimating to doing explicit pen and paper arithmetics.

</comment><comment><USER26> ROA: this is the first time I've ever heard of such a thing. I'm not surprised such a thing exists, but as a native speaker who has done a whole lot of writing I find it amusing I've made it for so long without ever encountering the attempts to formalize it.

</comment><comment><USER27> This reminds me of Lockhart's Lament regarding math education:

[http://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/mnewman/LockhartsLament.pdf](http://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/mnewman/LockhartsLament.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER28> Maybe I was incredibly lucky, but whenever someone rails against how awful the "standard" math education is, and recommends a "better way", I note that the "better way" was how I was taught.

I suspect what happens is that students _forget_ some of the good basic ideas (or is that "basic good ideas" ;-) ) they were taught, and teachers fail to re-emphasize them to keep students on track, and so all they remember is the formal/abstract techniques they spent a login time struggling with. Painful experiences stick in our memort more than smooth easy experiences.

</comment><comment><USER29> Why does the phrase "old lady" or "little old lady" pop into your head when you go to speak about an old lady? Because you have heard the phrase many times before.

It's just memory, we recite timeworn phrases because that's what we hear over and over.

Non-native speakers use phrases that "sound wrong" only because they are synthesizing from principle or from their own language, and haven't heard the usual phrases over and over.

This is where rule-based language analysis runs aground.

<comment><USER30> Okay, but let's assume you encounter a goat. It is purple. It is from Mexico. It is tiny. It seems to also be a robot. I'm guessing you've never come across someone describing such a thing to you before, such that you can identify from memory the correct way to describe that goat.

So why, when someone shouts out "Look out for that robot purple tiny Mexican goat!" you would immediately peg them as not a native English speaker, but if they had said "Look out for that tiny purple Mexican robot goat!" you would not?

This is not a 'fixed phrase' thing. There are rules, you're just not consciously aware of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > Similarly, getting good at math doesn't mean marching through a gauntlet of > rules on every problem

No, it does to a degree. The rules are inferred from observation and internalized, but not precisely. "little" before "old" is a rule, almost motoric. As a foreign speaker I agree that isn't a logical rule :)

edit: I guess, the author is looking for the term heuristic (a general rule that is right often enough, but not precise nor complete).

</comment><comment><USER32> Interestingly enough in the example he gave 303 x 13 I actually didn't look at the last digit to see that 5074 is wrong, I did an instant mental calculation of 300x13=3900 and saw that 5074 can't possibly be right before reading on.

So everyone has a different spidey sense.

</comment><comment><USER33> >> we developed an ear for the language and know how it should sound. And "old little lady" sounds off

Until you get into regional dialects and slang.

It only sounds off if you are accustomed to reading correct English. I do a lot of reading, and I think that is what developed my ear for phrases which are 'incorrect'.

I can't tell you what a participle or things like that are because I haven't been formally trained, but I can tell you which sentence from a list is the correct one.

I hear some people talk and I'll shake my head as I hear them slaughter the English language, but then I realize they probably don't do a lot of reading and didn't get far and school and that's just how their peers talk, as incorrect as it may be.

<comment><USER34> there is no correct or incorrect way of talking. slaughtering the English language? as long as both people understand, it does not really matter.

language is not something that's set in stone - it constantly changes. I would encourage you to be curios and try to learn something from others ways of speaking.

Something not matching your expectations / what is commonly seen as the 'right' way does not make it wrong.

IMHO judging people that don't read or didn't get far in school is plain wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Is "Adjective Fallacy" actually a thing or just something invented by this article?

Such a poor headline.

</comment><comment><USER36> I think I was taught the adjective order as in generic to specific.

</comment><comment><USER19> _We didn't become good at English by studying a chart: we developed an ear for the language and know how it should sound._

Unless we grew up speaking a different language, or were born to people who didn't have English as their first language. My wife has been in the US since the age of 2 and speaks perfectly but she still has a few minor linguistic tics that a second-generation native speaker wouldn't, and is she shy if she comes across a word she's not sure how to pronounce or whose meaning is unclear.

Having taught English as a second language to people from a wide variety of backgrounds, I don't expect anyone to memorize the royal order of adjectives, but it's incredibly useful for them to know that there _is_ an underlying system and to match patterns of adjectives from their reading material against it, or play games with it (like thinking deliberately wrong phrases such as 'old little lady' for comic value), or be able to refer to it if they're nervous about writing something. The same is true for people who miss out on a proper education because of domestic or socioeconomic problems and maybe come to literacy as adults, but never develop the total confidence of someone surrounded by language since birth. Incidentally, those of you who live in California may have noticed the public information campaign encouraging parents to talk and sing to children, especially babies and toddlers. Research indicates that this has a massive influence on brain development and subsequent success or failure in life. See [http://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/2159692...](http://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/21596923-how-babbling-babies-can-boost-their-brains-beginning-was- word) for an overview.

So yeah, of course the _best_ way to acquire language is to be in a linguistically rich environment, and just soak it up to develop an intuitive understanding that promotes linguistic creativity and wordplay, as opposed to studying it through formal methods and turning it into a philological exercise. But that does not mean that formalism is bad, or that we should conceal the existence of systematic structures from kids in case it will wreck their creativity or something - if for no other reason, than to spare them the waste of reinventing the wheel should they be inclined to adopt a formalist approach on their own initiative. It's very easy to handwave away such rigid- seeming pedagogical tools if you already enjoy the benefits of total fluency, but for those who do not enjoy the same advantages this is the equivalent of pulling up the ladder behind oneself and then critique the confused for poor listening skills.

I don't have a comment on the math part - I agree with the author that we ought to be open to using multiple learning techniques so that each student can find the best one, but I think he seriously underestimates the utility of formality. When I was 5 I thought chanting multiplication tables every day at school was a bit silly, but 40 years later I greatly appreciate the fact that I can handle everyday trivial math problems reflexively rather than needing to reach for a calculator, pencil and paper, or a mental script of how to perform the calculation. Repetitive drills and formal methods are not the best way to _explain_ new concepts, but they are incredibly useful exercises to _retain_ them and make the basic knowledge feel instinctive in later years.

</comment><comment><USER37> I went to school here in the UK, getting good marks in English and I have never heard of the Royal Order of Adjectives. It sounds like some official lackey the Queen might call on when she just can't find the right word.

I remember our English teacher giving us one single lesson on conjugation, and that was only because we were so confused by all the stuff about conjugating verbs in French class. Other than that I cannot remember us going near any kind of formal grammar.

edit - I just thought, it is also not that hard to construct a context in English where 'old little lady' can work.

 _I looked again at the little lady sitting across from me. At first, from her height, I had assumed her to be young. However now, looking closer, I could see she was a very old little lady indeed._

<comment><USER30> Precisely - you're not arguing against the article at all here. The point of this piece is that it is possible to learn how to do something without ever being exposed to the underlying rules. Or even to the fact that such rules exist.

Calculus, by comparison, is built on firm rules about what you are allowed to do and what you can't, when cutting a shape up into pieces and rearranging them. The piece is arguing that it might be possible to make headway in calculus by just being exposed to usage, and the formal rules can be kept to later. That seems quite compelling.

<comment><USER37> _Precisely - you 're not arguing against the article at all here._

Yep, I should have probably made that clear. Was more side commenting through the metaphor. In general, learning English like that works quite well, but then it throws you when you are then asked to conjugate the verb 'to be' in French class and nobody has ever asked you to ever conjugate a verb in English. You end up knowing how to use English, but do not learn the technical terminology required to dissect it.</comment></comment></comment>


Thinscript: language that compiles to both WebAssembly and JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/evanw/thinscript <comment><USER2> Oh wow I did not expect this to be up here this soon. Warning: two-week-old project. I've got a lot of plans for this but it'll take at least a few months for this to be anywhere near useful. Right now it's just an experiment!

<comment><USER3> Please don't add type inference. Coming from Scala it seems such a beautiful concept and a productivity booster when you are writing code but then you come back a few months later / see someone else's code and quickly figure out what a time waste and a productivity drain it really is.

<comment><USER4> If I may, that just means that either 1) your tooling is bad 2) Scala's type system is too complex.

I don't know scala much, but it's not a problem in other languages with full inference (particularly OCaml, but it's not a huge problem in Haskell either).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks a lot like typescript. Is there any particular reason for not either 1) adding a wasm backend to tsc (which tsc may or may not allow), or 2) implementing a strict subset of typescript? It just seems like piggybacking off of a larger language would help this sort of idea gain traction.

<comment><USER2> Yes. TypeScript doesn't have a sound type system and it comes with a lot of baggage:

* Using hashtables in TypeScript relies on the representation of JavaScript objects with strings as properties. Emulating JavaScript's in-memory representation in an ahead-of-time compiled language isn't a good idea for performance reasons.

* TypeScript only has a single number type (double) which is pretty slow if you actually need to work with integers. JavaScript VMs do a lot of work to figure out which numbers are integers using information that's only available at runtime. Using explicit integer types means the generated code is a lot tighter.

* A lot of existing TypeScript code uses structural typing to model dynamic type contracts present in today's JavaScript code, but this is usually a loosely-typed approximation and not something that a compiler can rely on. It's more just to improve tooling for developers.

* TypeScript uses exceptions which are hard to emulate efficiently in native code.

* I want to be able to add certain things and extend the language, so I don't want to limit myself to TypeScript. For example, I'm considering a preprocessor for conditional compilation and something similar to C#'s unsafe syntax for pointer manipulation.

<comment><USER3> All these reasons in Typescript are intentionally designed so that it's easy to work with the rest of the JS ecosystem. Good tooling + rapid prototyping is a strength not a weakness.

<comment><USER2> I don't consider the design of TypeScript a weakness at all. TypeScript is really well designed and is great at what it does. The type system they came up with is pretty optimal for modeling real-world JavaScript code. But the tuning they did around the JavaScript ecosystem means it's not a great language to use for generating efficient native code. I started ThinScript in part for exactly that reason. I want good tooling and rapid prototyping, just for native development instead of web development. That requires a different set of trade-offs and design decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thinscript looks interesting, aside from coding in it directly it could prove to be a useful transpiler target, allowing non-web-languages to make better use of WebAssembly as both WebAssembly and Thinscript mature.

<comment><USER2> Yes! I considered this and it's an interesting idea. ThinScript may end up being pretty opinionated about memory allocation though (I'm not sure yet if I'm doing pure reference counting, pure garbage collection, or some combination of both) so it could be a useful higher-level target language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if there's a plan for generics support?

<comment><USER2> I plan to do it eventually. I've implemented generics before so that's not the issue. It's just hard to get the design of generics right when the compiler has multiple targets. You want to emit compact JavaScript code and at the same time support the generation of efficient machine code. C++ does generic code through template expansion but that ends up generating a ton of code, which is bad for code delivered in a network environment. It may make sense to make different tradeoffs given the context of this project. I'm planning on putting off generics for a while though until more pieces fall into place.</comment></comment>


Multi-User Dungeon – British Legends - <AUTHOR> http://british-legends.com/CMS/

<comment><USER2> Here's some notes I wrote down on how to connect to Essex University via an ARPANET gateway, log in to Essex University, and run MUD! I must have been about 15 at the time. I wrote it on one page of a Zork map, as you can see.

[http://www.donhopkins.com/home/images/EssexMUDLogin.jpg](http://www.donhopkins.com/home/images/EssexMUDLogin.jpg)

Thanks a lot to Richard A. Bartle and Michael Lawrie for sharing!

Here are the instructions and some notes to explain what the commands mean:

MUD: Multi User Dungeon

@O 42 -- This was the old TIP command to open a connection to an NCP host id #42 (NCP host IDs were 8 bits. The TIP command to connect to a host was later changed to @L. See "User's Guide to the Terminal IMP" at [http://www.dtic.mil/cgi- bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDo...](http://www.dtic.mil/cgi- bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA014398) . IMP 42 was in London -- see [http://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien42.txt](http://www.rfc- editor.org/ien/ien42.txt) )

%CON ESX TORUS EPSS 52200300 -- That's a command to the gateway to connect to Essex University in the UK.

LOG 1776,1776 -- That logs you into the guest account for Americans to play MUD.

Password BUZBY

TY GUID.TXT -- That types out the intro guide to MUD.

RU DSKB:MUD[2011,2653] -- That runs MUD.

K/P or K/B Logs off

<comment><USER3> That's so great. Who was Eliot? :)

<comment><USER2> Eliot lived in Northern Virginia, had the user name ELIOT@AI (an MIT AI lab tourist account), and I think his dad worked for the FBI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I miss MUDs. I remember writing a sophisticated bot to farm mobs (mobiles; monsters) for me and my friends so I could watch TV whilst it was grinding away at the game. Great times.

</comment><comment><USER5> Aaaaaand, my personal favorite long-running virtual world, Federation is still around: [http://ibgames.net/](http://ibgames.net/)</comment>


Tree of 40 Fruit - <AUTHOR> http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/chefsexperts/interviews/sam-van-aken-interview

<comment><USER2> You would think the single most important aspect of that article would be a nice picture showing the actual trees, either in bloom or fruiting but all I see is what looks like a photoshopped image at the top of that article.

Surprisingly the "artist" uses the same fake picture on their site as well. There are a few minor pictures of multi fruit grafted trees which you could find if you went to any garden center as they are quite common.

This seems like something destined to impress people who don't know any better. I'd love to see the actual 40 grafts tree in action but it seems to be agricultural vaporware.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why you think its photoshoped? perhaps its too good to believe? He did TED talk with more photos of the tree. It would be very unlikely for him to not disclosed in venues like TED that these were photoshopped.

[http://new.livestream.com/tedx/manhattan2014/videos/43864399](http://new.livestream.com/tedx/manhattan2014/videos/43864399)

<comment><USER3> That image is clearly photoshopped. The image quality of the tree pixels vs the background, the strange lighting discrepancies and the shadow on bottom left of the planter box that is somehow towards the light.

Look at the transition at 29 seconds in that talk [1]. The clouds are in the same place.

[1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9EuJ9QlikY#t=29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9EuJ9QlikY#t=29)

I don't hold anything against the artist though, the article just picked a terrible image to use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I graft apple and pear trees in my back yard. One of my apple trees has 10+ varieties. The good thing is that once you have different varieties of apples on the same trees, the yield increases, because you have cross-pollinating varieties so proximately to each other. I learned how to do different grafts from various youtube videos.

There is also a group in SF that grafts edible grafts on decorative urban trees, such as on Japanese cherries: [http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/04/07/150142001/guerri...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/04/07/150142001/guerrilla- grafters-bring-forbidden-fruit-back-to-city-trees)

<comment><USER5> Have you done any pear/apple combinations? Surprisingly (at least to me), there are some varieties of apple that are compatible with both pear and apple rootstock. Winter Banana (an apple, not a banana) and Bartlett Pear is one of combinations known to work. You can then use the Winter Banana graft as an interstem, to which you can graft apple varieties which are not directly compatible. Or you can go the other way, graft the Winter Banana on your apple tree, and then graft pears on to that. I've got a Winter Banana started in the back yard, but it's not yet large enough to start playing around with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nifty use of grafting, a surprisingly ancient agricultural technique: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafting](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafting)

</comment><comment><USER7> So it turns out that plants swap genetic material when grafted. It would be really interesting to plant the seeds and see what the next generation looks like from each of the 40 branches. Could be a very intriguing genetics experiment. [http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/05/01/unintent...](http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/05/01/unintentional- genetic-engineering-grafted-plants-trade-gen/)

<comment><USER5> I don't think that you are interpreting the linked article correctly. The normal belief is that there is no gene transfer with grafting. The article claims that there can be limited gene transfer at the graft point, and that if you cut slices at this point and grow them out by tissue culture, you can propagate a true "graft hybrid", unlike the slightly more common "graft chimera". While the seeds resulting from the plant that grows from this in- vitro propagation might be interesting to study, the seeds from the fruit grafted on to the original tree are well understood to be remain true to the fruit (scion) and not the rootstock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would love to have one of these in my backyard. I find that a single fruit tree produces too many fruit and only lasts a short time of fruit-giving per year. But a free that gives 40 fruits spaced out is ideal.

</comment><comment><USER9> So, can we call this a fruit salad tree?

<comment><USER10> It's kind of a fruit tree salad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Isn't this putting all your eggs in one basket?

<comment><USER12> I think for a yard tree that is also serving an ornamental purpose, you are often doing that no matter what.

40 varieties of fruit sounds a lot nicer than 40 pounds of black walnuts (which have a thick, tough, stinking skin if you even think you want to harvest the nuts).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Blog spam: [http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/chefsexperts/interv...](http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/chefsexperts/interviews/sam- van-aken-interview)

<comment><USER13> Thanks, changed.</comment></comment>


Mt Gox acquisition? - <AUTHOR>

Loading their page this morning yielded:
 	 		<title>MtGox.com</title>
Is this comment new? <comment><USER2> They were just preparing for this announcement: [https://www.mtgox.com/](https://www.mtgox.com/)</comment>


Show HN: TechCrunch Adv Filter and News Alerts (feedback Welcome) - <AUTHOR> http://crunchtech.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> TechCrunch has an interesting array of articles, but can be pretty noisy when you just want to know about interesting startup activity. This scrapes TechCrunch every hour, going back a few years, and aggregates articles mentioning startups, scraping their funding amount, investors, relevant categories, and founded year. You can search these articles by category, funding amount, and/or founded year.

Would love to hear peoples' thoughts!</comment>


A Fervent Defense of Frequentist Statistics - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/jne/a_fervent_defense_of_frequentist_statistics/ <comment><USER2> I find this discussion (Bayesian vs Frequentist) somewhat baffling - it's as if physicists spent time arguing whether Lagrangian, Hamiltonian or Newtonian mechanics was "correct". In reality all three are equivalent, but different problems might be more naturally expressed (and easily solved) in one or the other form.

Similarly Bayesian and Frequentist descriptions are mathematically equivalent, the only question is which is the more natural description for a given problem.

Having multiple models like this is incredibly useful - some things that are intractable in one might be trivial in another - but trying to anoint one model as "the truth" seems perverse.

<comment><USER3> My impression was that frequentists and bayesians do actually disagree in some cases.

The example I remember is, suppose you have a coin with a uniformly random bias, except that the bias will not be zero. What is the probability that you will see heads if you flip it once?

\- Bayesian: 50%

\- Frequentist: Anything except 50%

Although you'd probably find they agreed on all the "what do I expect to see" stuff, so I guess that kind of is like interpretations of QM.

<comment><USER4> That's almost a straw-man argument. When you're making statements about pure probabilities, _everyone_ is a bayesian. Most toy examples make "frequentists" look like morons, because essentially all of the judgement and discretion is removed from the problem, so you'd have to be an idiot not to apply Bayes's rule.

The difference shows up when you actually have an interesting data set to analyze. Bayesian statistics can disagree with frequentist stats in small samples because they're (often) using different normalization strategies; and they can disagree in large samples where the CLT fails. There may be other settings where they diverge too that I'm not aware of. But neither of those scenarios is one where insisting "I'm a Bayesian, so the answer is blah" or "I'm a frequentist, so... blah blah" is likely to be a good strategy. Those are the settings where it's hard.

<comment><USER5> If an example can illustrate a difference between two formal methodologies, the example should be as simple as possible, right? It doesn't paint one as superior to the other, but simply highlights the different methods by which they assign probabilities to events. If you make the example more complicated, the difference becomes less clear.

<comment><USER4> Right, but my point is that "as simple as possible" in this case is still "very complicated." It's sort of like trying to use "Hello world" to explain the difference between static and dynamic typing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure why the author picks Myth #5 as the big pro-frequentist point. The "online learning" problem he's describing is a simple multi-armed bandit problem. The magical frequentist algorithm that he's touting is UCB-1. It's a great algorithm, it has finite-time optimality guarantees like he mentions. However, it still has a tuning parameter that can matter quite a bit in practice. Also, the Bayesian approach to MABs is Thompson sampling, which is also finite-time optimal. I guess I don't get the big deal on this point.

From a machine learning perspective, frequentist methods are great because they scale. All of these fancy nonparametric Bayes methods coming out these days take weeks to run and include so many approximations that you've got no idea whether what you're actually inferring is truly similar to the original model.

The biggest problem with frequentist methods is that they are conceptually odd in their approach. Bayesians take the view that you should fix the data and integrate over the possible parameters. Frequentists take the view that you should fix the parameters and integrate over the data. That is kind of weird to me.

So you either start out conceptually pure as a Bayesian and compromise to the point of meaninglessness or you abandon your morals at the start as a frequentist and things go smoothly from there.

 __Edit __: As noted below, it 's actually Exp3 rather than UCB-1. I glossed over the part about potentially adversarial bandits.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually it's not UCB-1. UCB-1 solves the stochastic bandit problem, where you assume the arms have fixed but unknown expected reward. He's talking about the adversarial setting, where you make _no assumptions_ about the distribution of the rewards of the arms. They can even be set by an adversary that is trying to make you perform badly. Remarkably you can derive results here, though the "catch" is you are measuring performance against choosing a fixed arm for every play. (It's actually a bit more complex than that, but that's a reasonable simplification for direct comparison to the stochastic bandit.) The standard algorithm in the adversarial setting is Exp3: [http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~yfreund/papers/bandits.pdf](http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~yfreund/papers/bandits.pdf)

Otherwise I agree for the most part with what you've said.

Edit: In response to the parent edit, I should note that I know of no Bayesian algorithm for the adversarial setting. Thompson sampling is assuming a stochastic problem. I think a Bayesian algorithm would be possible, but the details elude me.

<comment><USER6> Same here. I was thinking after my edit that I don't know of such an algorithm either, but I don't think in principle that there is anything stopping someone from coming up with one.

So... who wants a NIPS paper? Noel and I are happy to just be 2nd authors, since you know... it was our idea and everything. ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hell yeah. First author gets to do the poster session. I'll do the skiing. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do people really argue against frequentist statistics? I was under the impression that in bayesian statistics you basically are just weighting your distribution by a prior, usually because there is not enough data yet to use robust frequentist methods. Put another way, I was under the impression that bayesian statistics are a way of solving the cold start problem[1]. Effectively you are using frequentist statistics in bayesian inference anyways. Please correct me if I am wrong.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_start](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_start)

</comment><comment><USER8> Michael Jordan's talk "Are You a Bayesian or a Frequentist?" is one of the better treatments of this topic IMO.

(talk): [http://videolectures.net/mlss09uk_jordan_bfway/](http://videolectures.net/mlss09uk_jordan_bfway/)

(slides): [http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/mlss09/mlss_slides/Jordan_1.pdf](http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/mlss09/mlss_slides/Jordan_1.pdf)

<comment><USER9> I've always been partial to Brad Efron's explanations, see [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.179....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.179.2128)

IMO he nails the key distinction here: "One definition says that a frequentist is a Bayesian trying to do well, or at least not too badly, against any possible prior distribution."

And there's some nice humor also: "The 250-year debate between Bayesians and frequentists is unusual among philosophical arguments in actually having important practical consequences."

<comment><USER8> Yes - Efron's paper (also available at [1]) is excellent.

[1]: [http://statweb.stanford.edu/~ckirby/brad/papers/2005BayesFre...](http://statweb.stanford.edu/~ckirby/brad/papers/2005BayesFreqSci.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not a statistician, but I'm afraid I don't get his Myth 5:

" _For some reason it's assumed that frequentist methods need to make strong assumptions (such as Gaussianity), whereas Bayesian methods are somehow immune to this._ "

What I'd thought I'd heard before, from the Bayesian camp, was that both methods required strong assumptions, but the assumptions had to be explicit in the Bayesian model.

</comment><comment><USER11> _> claim that frequentist methods need to make strong modeling assumptions._

 _> Assumption that horse race winners are not completely random and that there is a strategy_

This is kind of the assumption that people tend to blame frequentist statistics for doing (well, any statistician I guess). There are nearly always assumptions made about what the random variables are or aren't. If the horse race was completely random, your guarantees fall apart as it's a simple dice roll with no strategy beyond chance. Yet you've used your assumption to dump money on the table, and now you've probably lost it.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's been a while since I was into this, but I think the problem of the bounds discussed in Myth 5 is that while the theory is fine, in practice the bounds are big, and Bayesian methods converge faster. The discussion also doesn't seem to discuss incremental decision making where posterior(t-1) -> prior(t).

I note that the discussion avoids the crazy stuff with frequentist stopping rules which is much more elegantly handled using Bayesian & decision theoretic methods.

I agree that there are quite a few myths around frequentist methods as described in the article.

</comment><comment><USER13> My attempt to summarise the difference in language familiar to computer scientists, is that you can look at the frequentist vs Bayesian debate as being about when a worst-case analysis is preferable to average-case analysis for unknown parameters of a statistical model.

There's something you don't know (the parameters). Are you looking to make statements which bound how bad things could be under the worst-case setting of those parameters? Or do you have some idea upfront about how likely different parameter settings are, and want to make statements about them in the "average" case?

Rather like with worst-case vs average-case analysis of algorithms, which is more appropriate depends what you're trying to do, and sometimes both are interesting.

</comment><comment><USER14> Blah blah blah

I don't care about the method, I care about a correct prediction.

If one group can't do that, well, tough for them.

But in the end it's the structure of the solution and the "guesses" that had to be done that contribute to the success more than the method.</comment>


Building the Next-Gen Travel Agency Using AWS, Clojure and a Comically Small Team - <AUTHOR> http://www.colinsteele.org/post/23103789647/against-the-grain-aws-clojure-startup <comment><USER2> Article is from 2012.</comment>


TSA Admits Bungling of Airport Body-Scanner Radiation Tests - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/tsa-radiation-test-bungling/

<comment><USER2> This article is confusingly written to obscure the fact that there's no story.

Some field tests showed radiation levels 10 times higher than expected, but the TSA has determined it's because some field testers, who were conducting 10 tests at a time, reported the sum of the individual radiation levels instead of the average.

Apparently this is due to a confusing field test form. So the TSA has fixed the form.

I mean, I hate the TSA too, but come on...

<comment><USER3> That doesn't even make sense. If they forgot to divide by 10, the results are actually 10 times _too large_ , meaning the actual radiation is 1/10 of the previously reported result.

<comment><USER2> Correct. These new tests produced abnormally large results. If these results were true, then this would be front-page news. But the results are faulty. So the actual radiation is ... the same as what we thought before these new tests were conducted.

It's confusing because, once you understand it, you ask _why they wrote a story about it_.

<comment><USER3> Oh now I see. I thought they forgot to divide by 10 in the _old_ results. But the story is that they did _new_ measurements which were too large because they screwed up. So the story is that nothing's changed. Yeah, I agree with you...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The real issue is that these scanners violate the 4th Amendment and impose health risk for no gain in security.

<comment><USER5> I am not a legal expert, but I do not believe you are forced to use the airport and thus the 4th amendment does not apply.

<comment><USER6> If your job requires a lot of travel, then short of a radical career change (itself, a pretty unreasonable demand)airplanes are your only viable choice.

But are you "forced" at gunpoint? Obviously not, but this is a ridiculously high standard to use when establishing whether someone is being compelled to do something.

If your boss says "you need to be in Dallas on Monday morning", you need to be in Dallas on Monday morning.

<comment><USER7> This is not a good argument. You have no legal right to drive an automobile or to fly a plane, both are heavily regulated. The "if you have a job that requires X" argument is fundamentally weak, there is no intrinsically superior right to any activity due to it being job related or not (this is a good thing, I believe).

The problem of course is the extent of intrusion on daily lives.

The better legal approach is the 10th amendment route, or coming up with new legislation.

<comment><USER8> "You have no legal right to drive an automobile "

Actually, under Common Law you have a legal right to _travel_ (I'm not saying driving) in a car if you're a Sovereign.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jUxupkD57g>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWRO_jQxDjY>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfbfpz4iYDU>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is so last year's question for the TSA.

The new question is why the mainstream press isn't repeatedly asking the TSA why they are suddenly appearing in train and bus stations as well as randomly shutting down bridges for car searches? It's happened often yet few know about it.

<comment><USER7> Because the only thing separating the vast majority of the mainstream media from tabloid journalism is mere perception and production value?

<comment><USER9> I would only add the qualifier "currently" to your question.

Because a decade ago NY Times and CNN were actually paying for real reporters to go into the field and research things.

Now they've become popculture pushers, anything just to get eyeballs on their websites, though the NY Times still has some good pieces. CNN is long past gone however.

<comment><USER7> Even a decade ago, or 4 decades ago, I think there was a lot wrong with mainstream media. The disruption the internet is causing is revealing a lot of these problems more than actually causing them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's strange that these aren't required to undergo some sort of more standard and professional safety testing. I get that they don't need quite the same level of reliability as medical scanners, but the level of radiation safety should be similar, or perhaps actually higher, since many more people are routinely exposed to them. Could you get a device with the amount of ad-hoc testing that's been done here even into your local doctor's office? My guess is no.

I'm not particularly confident in what I've found of the failure analysis and testing, either. For example, the devices appear to work by scanning a beam rapidly across one's body. If the beam got stuck in one place, it would have to shut off extremely rapidly to avoid an unhealthy dose of radiation being concentrated in one place. Is it possible for the beam to get stuck? Are there fail-safes that would cut off the beam, and how fast do they operate, and how reliable are they? As far as I can tell, miscellaneous doctors and medical- device folks have been asking these sorts of questions, but there aren't very professional looking tests and analyses available to answer them.

</comment><comment><USER11> "The Therac-25 was a radiation therapy machine produced by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited .. It was involved in at least six accidents between 1985 and 1987, in which patients were given massive overdoses of radiation, approximately 100 times the intended dose"

<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Therac-25>

</comment><comment><USER12> Clarification, not bungling the actual scans, but bungling tests _of_ the scanners, and by bungling tests of the scanners; not testing incorrectly, but omitting a single critical step.

Standard procedure is to take ten consecutive measures and then average the results (sum and divide). Their test staff have simply missed the final step on that list.

Raises competence questions, yes, but nothing to get bent out of shape about in terms of real world effects in isolation.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm not worried. According to the scanned test log, the radiation level was 0.0. Everyone knows that 10 times that is still zero, so we're safe.

</comment><comment><USER14> I bet you get more radiation during your flight. Still, if this fuels irrational public fear of scanners such that it outweighs irrational public fear of terrorism, I'll consider it a good thing.

<comment><USER15> We will let you test that theory out. Certainly you don't have a problem with someone else, perhaps more cancer prone and risk averse than you, opting out. Right?

<comment><USER14> Opting out is absolutely fine. I am in no way supporting these stupid backscatter machines. The only thing that will get rid of them is public outrage, and that is never, in my experience, rational.</comment></comment></comment>


IPhone market share doubles to more than 10% - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/external/venturebeat/2009/05/20/20venturebeat-iphone-market-share-doubles-to-more-than-10-12208.html

<comment><USER2> Somewhat wrong title, it is the iPhone market share of smartphones that have increased to 10%. Smartphone sales represented only 13.5 per cent of all mobile device sales in the first quarter of 2009. So apple's share of the overall market is still less than 1.5%.

Data from the original report <http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=985912>

<comment><USER3> The whole article is very confusing regarding this, mixing the total market and smartphone market without giving any hint as to what it means with the particular numbers. Very badly written.</comment></comment>


OpenShift offers five free 512 MB app/MongoDB instances - <AUTHOR> https://www.redhat.com/openshift/blogs/its-big-its-free-its-easy-mongodb-on-openshift-keeps-getting-better <comment><USER2> I work at OpenShift. On pricing: There are two models, the one quoted above where you use your own EC2 account and get 30 free hours, and one where you're running multi-tenant in our EC2 account entirely for free. On the second one (called Express), the intention is to keep these free instances and have people pay for additional capacity. It's a git interaction, languages are Java, Python, PHP, Perl & Ruby, and we're giving away the largest free quota of MongoDB so we can get your feedback.

<comment><USER3> This is the first I've heard of OpenShift, from the sounds of it there are a set list of applications/languages you can use on the platform? Are there any plans for node.js support?

<comment><USER2> node.js and others coming. And the architecture is pluggable, so once we enable 3rd-party plug-ins, they will come faster. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I still dont understand what GeoSpatial support and Map Reduce means. Anyhow, i'm excited to learn that companies are offering solutions for MongoDB, it gives me more confidence in putting together something in MongoDB.

I see they're also offering RockMongo GUI. Does anyone know how to get the interactive shell working as per the example on the main MongoDB website?

<comment><USER2> Interactive shell (known as Mongo Shell) coming in one week. Also will have ssh port forwarding so you can run things locally and connect to remote Mongo.

<comment><USER4> woo hoo. cant wait!! ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You've got a little typo: "the ability TO tail" under log tailing

Looks neat though. I was looking for a place to work on some Mongo DB stuff so I will probably try this out.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand how OpenShift is priced. The website does not seem to have any information on it.

<comment><USER5> I think this is your answer: <https://openshift.redhat.com/app/flex>

Provide your EC2 info or -

Take advantage of Red Hat's free trial offer. The free trial includes 30 days or 30 hours (whichever comes first) of free cloud resources from Amazon EC2.

The free trial is governed by the terms and conditions agreed to during the registration process for OpenShift.

Please Remember:

OpenShift is in developer preview with no service level agreements.

* OpenShift should not be used for production purposes.

* At Red Hat's discretion, it may decommission the resources it granted as part of the free trial without notification, explanation, or backup.

* Users of OpenShift Flex are responsible for making backups of all their data

* After the expiration of the free trial, the resources and data on them will be deleted

* To maximize the time of your free trial we recommend that you stop your cluster when not utilizing it

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How long before we see a how to on "using OpenShift's free MongoDB instance with Heroku?"</comment>


Czech PM resigns over illegal spying - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e4e8da5e-d6d9-11e2-9214-00144feab7de.html

<comment><AUTHOR> _" Mr Necas resigned days after prosecutors charged the head of his office, Jana Nagyova, with bribing members of parliament and ordering intelligence agents to spy on people. The scandal has a personal element for the prime minister: one of the surveillance targets, according to lawyers involved in the case, was his own wife, Radka. The two are filing for divorce."_</comment>


Japan's Entry in Flying-Car Race Takes to the Air - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/japans-entry-in-flying-car-race-takes-to-the-air-11598691548 <comment><USER2> Aren't flying cars called, "helicopters"?

Perhaps a bit too snide, but helicopters can take off and land vertically and can carry roughly as many people as most passenger vehicles. And they're mature technology that has been around for over half a century at this point. The problem of moving people through the air without a runway for takeoff and landing has been solved for 60+ years.

What advantage does this flying car have over a helicopter? It's a quad rotor craft so presumably is mechanically simpler (no swashplate) but at the expense of lower speed and reduced ability to operate in the wind. Also it means a crash if any of the four rotors fail (no autorotation). It can also drive in the road like a car. But on the other hand it looks like it seats just one person, and in an open top vehicle so it'll be uncomfortable in the rain.

Helicopters are already supplemented by cars in most use cases. I don't really see the advantage of a flying car over flying a helicopter to the nearest heliport and driving in a car the rest of the way. The only real advantage is the fact that there is no vehicle change. But that comes at the expense of using a vehicle that makes major sacrifices to both fly and drive on roads.

<comment><USER3> This is true, but also not true. Helicopters are stuck as a concept: large main rotor and tailrotor and also expensive parts and traditional aerospace practices. There are other physical paths, e.g. Osprey, Cheyenne.

But the big thing now is batteries and electronics and brushless motors. It allows flight at a whole new level of cost/safety.

Compare with toy-drones - your point here to me reads like "there's nothing new with these quad-rotor drones, we've had gas rc helicopters since forever". And that is similarly wrong as saying these new vtol concepts are just helicopters. Fundamental tech enables the concept of flight to be reinvented using first principles. We know a bit of where this is going in small quads. For manned flight it is still unknown.

<comment><USER2> Helicopters are "stuck" because they've largely settled into an optimal configuration over the 70 years if experience designing helicopters. Some of the first helicopters had multiple rotors [1], but those were abandoned for good reasons They have a large main rotor because larger rotors provider greater efficiency. The single large rotor also provides the ability to perform autorotation in the event of power failure. Batteries are also bad choices for aircraft since they have very low energy density by unit of mass [2] combined with the fact they don't get lighter as energy is expended like thermochemical fuel.

These are the main reasons why quadro copters largely remain in the realm of drones and toys. These are the use cases where mechanical simplicity of four fixed pitch electric motors shine, and the shortcomings of reduced safety and lifting power aren't big issues (cameras weigh less than people and their families don't sue when they get smashed in a crash). You point out helicopters aerospace practices as a drawback, but in reality those practices emerged to deal with the responsibility and demands of human air transport. What is it going to cost to insure one if these flying cars? How many people's life insurance policies is going to cover rides in these things?

Definitely quadrocopters have made their mark in consumer electronics and even some commercial applications. But I am very dubious that people will be flying in electric multirotor craft.

1\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focke- Wulf_Fw_61](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focke-Wulf_Fw_61)

2\. [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/En...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Energy_density.svg/1920px- Energy_density.svg.png)

<comment><USER4> > The single large rotor also provides the ability to perform autorotation in > the event of power failure.

That's a nice fantasy but when the SHTF nobody ever seems to be able to pull off an autorotation landing without fatalities. You need enough forward speed and control authority to make it work. An incident when you're at or near hover is unrecoverable.

<comment><USER2> An incident at or near hover is close to the ground, and so has much better chances of survival.

The issue with multiple rotors is that if one rotor fails the craft immediately pitches over and crashes. The Chinook solves this because the two rotors have a linked shaft. Definitely a quadrocopter becomes unstable with only 3/4 rotors. Maybe the octocopter posted elsewhere in this thread can sustain one failure and still land.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Flying cars are interesting because they have the potential to partially make obsolete the natural monopoly of roads. Governments are heavily involved in natural monopolies (possibly for good reason) but I worry that that involvement may crowd out innovative private organizations that would otherwise have the incentive to bypass the natural monopoly. I wonder what other innovations are being stifled in the same way.

As far as flying cars go, they sure are loud. But cars are fairly noisy as well -- in cities the roads are often very close to apartment buildings.

<comment><USER6> You run into the natural monopoly of airspace instead.

There's more room up there, but owners of the land beneath and users of other aircraft alike have a vested interest in the skies not being a free-for-all, and sure enough it's government agencies stepping into the air traffic control and regulation breach.

<comment><USER7> That's pretty hard if traffic is not confined to roads and journeys don't need to start at an airport.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The comments here are why we don't have flying cars.

Everyone thinks of every possible negative. Instead of asking why not we should we asking what if. Maybe think of solutions along with the problems you find.

<comment><USER9> What if we could decrease the force of gravity? That would be a great solution.

<comment><USER10> Yes reducing mass would be a good general approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So, what is the attraction, exactly? It doesn't look as fast as a car or any more convenient, at least until cities are redesigned to accommodate these vehicles. I also assume that it is more energy-hungry than a car and I imagine that accidents are bound to be worse than cars for the foreseeable future.

Is it safer to pilot than an helicopter?

</comment><comment><USER12> eHang is further along. [1] 16 rotors.

Battery energy density seems to be the big remaining problem. Flight times are too short.

[1] [https://youtu.be/T_mezyLhvlA](https://youtu.be/T_mezyLhvlA)

<comment><USER13> A question I've always had is, how is the decision on how many propellers made? Why 16, and not 4? Or why 1?

<comment><USER12> The drone-type designs cannot autorotate like a helicopter. They don't have the variable-pitch blade controls a helicopter does. If you lose an engine or prop, you crash uncontrollably unless you have some spare props.

<comment><USER13> Ah, I see -- so the 4 prop one in the OP article... that is basically a death trap at some point?

<comment><USER14> It's 8 (two stacked along the same axis in each corner), so there will be some kind of redundancy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> [https://archive.is/lg4yx](https://archive.is/lg4yx)

</comment><comment><USER16> Is it physically/technically possible to have quiet or silent rotors on drones? I can't imagine flying cars as depicted in the article becomg a thing in cities if they sound like the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

<comment><USER17> Not really; an airfoil that's generating lift makes noise. The bigger the airfoil and the slower its moving (relative to the air stream), the less noise it creates. However, you can't have those characteristics with this kind of aircraft.

Multi-rotor copters like this rely on light and fast props, so that the speed of the prop can be changed quickly. This changing of the prop's speed creates the tilting and rotational movements shown in the video.

<comment><USER18> There are means: [https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180305004A1/en?oq=2018...](https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180305004A1/en?oq=20180305004)

Blade design can also contribute or reduce noise. Fully silent while providing sufficient lift seems impossible...but how long did it take to innovate to the bladeless electric fan?

<comment><USER19> Isn't the bladeless electric fan just a ducted bladed fan?

<comment><USER20> No, because "ducted fan" has a very specific meaning in aerodynamics. But yes, a bladeless electric fan isn't actually bladeless, the blades are just hidden inside the fan body.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't see how this could ever be feasible for consumers. People still struggle to drive when there are roads, what's going to happen when you add a third dimension to control?

<comment><USER22> I suspect self-driving is much, much easier when you get up above ground clutter.

<comment><USER23> I agree.

In two dimensions, a vehicle moving North-South and a vehicle moving East-West have to cross into each other's path at some point, and 2.5D solutions (bridges and flyovers) help but require significant investment in resources that simply isn't possible at every junction.

In three dimensions, this simply isn't the case; we can separate different directions of traffic by height, and provision of dedicated corridors for changing route is merely a matter of making regulation rather than infrastructure.

There's a reason why we've had autopilot on planes for significantly longer than on cars.

<comment><USER17> The flip side is twofold - to take advantage of said autopilot, you need a pilot's license, which is significantly harder and more expensive to get than a car license.

Aircraft are also expensive (and come with expensive operating costs like airframe examinations), since their failure mode is a more-or-less controlled "falling out of the sky" - so you want the most resilient parts you can have to skew more towards the "more controlled" end of the spectrum.

There's also a whole network of human traffic controllers who work 24x7 to accommodate our existing air traffic; more would be required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> People are going to be dreaming of flying cars until some other technology comes along that completely obsoletes them.

<comment><USER25> Or until they hear how loud they are. People underestimate how loud these flying cars are and how much noise pollution can ruin their quality of life. I can't imagine a suburban neighborhood full of these loud flying cars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can just see the kids running to the car after soccer practice and mum yelling "BLADES!!"

</comment><comment><USER27> If multi rotor cars become standard, we will all be wearing ear protection.

</comment><comment><USER28> What we need is propulsion systems like the Tic Tac spotted by the Nimitz.

</comment><comment><USER29> Imagine if every one of your neighbours had one or two...

<comment><USER30> It's the ultimate wonderful if you own one. Terrible when everyone else does. It's like automobiles X 100.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Looks like a worthy competitor of Moller Skycar /s

</comment><comment><USER32> why is the headline talking about flying car yet I don't see any wheels?

</comment><comment><USER33> I can't read the article, but if it leads to widespread adoption like the automobile was, I can see this being much worse for society than the car was. Some examples of the sort of things we can see:

\- Suburbs times 100. Now, the suburbs would be even less accessible as they wouldn't even be connected by roads. Coincidentally, they could be anywhere, which would spread out utilities and make them even more inefficient as they are now due to sprawl.

\- Much, much more expensive, both due to the complexity but due to insurance. Already cars are deadly and destructive, flying cars would lead to all sorts of accidents and property destruction given the difficulty of driving them especially by non-professionals. This too would probably be normalized like automobile destruction is but the actual cost will still exist and need to be subsidized by sky high insurance premiums

\- Further destruction of cities. Now, like wide streets and highways that demolished neighborhoods (often black and immigrant communities), we'd see calls for destruction of tall buildings for "the sake of safety" due to the common place destruction discussed earlier. Streets and walkways like sidewalks today would fall into disrepair, trees and monuments would be cut down or removed for safety, and so on.

Then again, I don't think we'd get that far due to climate change, but this is just based on a historical understanding of what happened to the US since the 30's. I can see a much more atomized and disconnected society.

<comment><USER34> Other problems:

1) Terrorism. I know you mentioned property destruction, but intentional terrorism targeting humans is a real risk. Cars are already lethal weapons. Terrorists have used them to mow down dozens or hundreds of people at a time. Flying cars could become kamikaze weapons, or could be hacked into becoming them, with far more lethal potential. 9/11 was just a bigger version of this, so the precedent exists. Yet, there would be no TSA to protect you. Would we need civilian air defense turrets?

2) Noise. This would be huge, because rich neighborhoods that have frequent helicopter traffic are already flooded with complaints. If flying cars became commonplace, the noise issue would be dramatically worse than that.

3) Light pollution. We already have an issue of light pollution that makes stargazing and enjoying the night sky difficult. More importantly, it disrupts sleep patterns, which has all kinds of knock-on effects for society in terms of mental health, childhood development, accidents, and so on. Constant lights in the sky at night would be a nuisance that even high fences wouldn't block.

4) Inequality. Those who can afford the new vehicles, which will surely start out pricey, get to perform geo-arbitrage. They can buy cheaper land that hasn't yet factored in the new commuting realities, and yet make the same wages. Would be one extra hurdle for those trying to become upwardly mobile. One more huge debt burden to take on, while striving in the rat race.

<comment><USER35> These are all already car issues. Terrorism seems to be over sold anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why not focus on building better and cheaper helicopters?

<comment><USER37> If my experiences with Satisfactory have taught me anything, it's that the answer is usually more conveyor belts.</comment></comment>


Holy Cow How I Got Over 2000 Hits on this Blog in a Few Hours - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupceo.co.za/2010/01/14/holy-cow-how-i-got-over-2000-hits-on-this-blog-in-a-few-hours/ <comment><AUTHOR> Excellent post. Especially like the pic on how to create quality blog content. Very readable.</comment>


Why I Use Emacs - <AUTHOR> http://shayelk.in/why-i-use-emacs/ <comment><USER2> I don't like Emacs. Emacs key-bindings are neither ergonomic nor do they make any sense in any way. They are barely consitent across modes, only if you are lucky. They are the way they are because they are old. And old people don't like change. Emacs has also several other problems. It lacks multi threading, the cursor can not be moved off screen. Autocomplete for C-like languages is a mess and really inferior to everything else I used. Compared to all other Lisp dialects, Elisp is the worst. It is not only by far the slowest, it also lacks essential features like namespaces. And then there is complete clusterfuck of conflicting "modes" and the lack of disposition to cooperate and unify within the community.

The reason why I'm so upset is, if you are a newcomer and look at Emacs what you see at first glance on the outside is basically total crap. But then people tell you that the learning curve is high and everything is awesome if you just learn.

Well my experience was, the more I learned the more crap appeared. One layer of crap after the other. Luckily everything could somehow be fixed with a lot of configuration and scripts. But the points I mention above are the lowest layer which can not be fixed with just a bunch of lines of Lisp like in the previous layers. So even at the core Emacs is crap.

<comment><USER3> I do totally agree the key-bindings are neither ergonomic (they're actually inducing RSI issues) nor do they make any sense in any way, which is your first point.

However this is _trivially_ fixed because in Emacs everything is configurable. Keymappings are very easy to change (I'm using my own, completely custom ones, in my own keymapping minor-mode). There's also the "evil mode" reproducing the very superior (compared to Emacs) vim keybindings. So it's not true that they cannot be fixed. Not only can keybindings be fixed but a) they should and b) it's trivial to do so.

I'm using my own minor-mode which contains all my keymappings. Doing it that way you'll hardly ever have conflicting shortcuts.

evil-mode is an option too for people who want the (way better) vi(m) keybindings.

<comment><USER4> I am using evil-mode since i switch from Vim to Emacs and i am obsessed. Don't get me wrong , VIM is well VIM (awesome!), but some emacs plugins are more polished that VIM's ones and i can't stand vimscript.

<comment><USER5> But you like sucky elisp?

<comment><USER4> IMHO is better than sucky vimscript.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've tried just about every editor under the sun. I keep coming back to emacs. It Just Works, it's flexible, it's configurable, it doesn't impose any particular workflow on you, and it's basically everywhere that I need it -- terminals, GUIs, unix, linux, OSX.

I most recently tried sublime text, and it was okay, but it fell over in some pretty serious ways with basic stuff. Like indenting -- I'd have to go back and find the problem again, but there was a ridiculous indentation problem that was a deal-breaker, and the response from the ST community was, essentially: _" I don't know anyone who indents that way, so we're not going to support it."_

OK then. Back to emacs. It Just Works.

</comment><comment><USER7> "... its various Ctrl-Meta key-chords will seem not merely satisfyingly ergonomic for the typical arthropod, but also direct evidence for the universe's Intelligent Design by some six-legged, multi-jointed God."

It just feels good. Do it today!

<comment><USER8> [http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/its- cover.png](http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/its-cover.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Two links away that led me to [http://mph.puddingbowl.org/2010/02/org-mode-in- your-pocket-i...](http://mph.puddingbowl.org/2010/02/org-mode-in-your-pocket- is-a-gnu-shaped-devil/) which is hilarious and very true. Source committed emacs user, I've contributed to org-mode, and it is great. But still, true.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hello. The keybindings file I use in OS X for simulating some Emacs behaviour, was too long to be saved as a comment. Below are references for how to make Emacs like shortcuts that works through the whole OS X, at least through all programs that uses the Cocoa Text System. Xcode got its own system. BBEdit uses its own, and at least the Omnifocus programs I use, also use their own.

         *
         * References:
         * https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/EventOverview/TextDefaultsBindings/TextDefaultsBindings.html
         * Above is Apples Documentation on the subject which is Mandatory reading!
         *
         * Mandatory reading as well: http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/system-bindings.html
         * This page lists Apple's keybindings and standard keyboard functionaliaty to a further extent than Apple's documentation further above.
         *
         * A Must read concerning customizing the cocoa text system: http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html
         *
         * *Very Useful Page* when you want to make your own bindings: http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/KeyBindings/Windows%20Bindings.dict
         *
         *
         *
         * http://www.cocoawithlove.com/2009/12/multiple-copy-buffers-cursor-and-tab.html
         * Above mostly for how to utilize the kill-ring, which doesn't work well with the setup here,
         * and it is focused towards XCode, which has it separate keybindings file, but works after the
         * same principles. Beware: XCode uses a string list, instead of array. It is important to
         * keep the space after the comma!
         * "select:", "do someth:"
         *
         * http://wttools.sourceforge.net/emacs-stuff/emacs-keybindings.html
         * Above is a keybindings table, which is of use only to see the keyboard shortcuts.
         * The commands we use on OS X is not named equivalently to Emacs.

<comment><USER11> Why not Aquamacs?

<comment><USER10> I have my keybindings work everywhere, in Spotlight, I can captialize, or lower case words everywhere, and such, I have and extra yank/kill buffer apart from the paste board. It is not about the editor really, it is more about the whole user interface, and I use BBedit for editing, which doesn't use it. But sometimes, it feels very good to just use TextEdit, and have a multi-window environment for writing small texts, and to set a mark and such, when the text grows longer. All that kind of stuff that I feel making the work more fun. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Java guy here. I've never understood how retro types can criticize IDE's, relative to the "clean, simple elegance" of a text editor... and then reveal that their text editor is Emacs. In terms of learning curve and simplicity, IntelliJ might as well be "ed" in comparison to Emacs... or even Vim to a lesser extent.

I spent years using Eclipse, and even though I now concede that IntelliJ is superior, it still took quite awhile to get up the learning curve and let go of my Eclipse bias. If you write a lot of code in any language, then you invest a significant amount of time and energy into learning how to maximize productivity in your tool of choice. That tool is then the best tool, because you are invested and most productive with it.

<comment><USER13> I don't think cleanness, simplicity, elegance, or learning curve are ever the advantages touted by Emacs users. It's all about extensibility and customizability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Fair warning: I'm a sysadmin.

My basic attitude has been unchanged for fifteen or twenty years now: programmers need programmable editors because they can be more productive when they are comfortable; sysadmins need an editor which is installed on every system and works the same way by default.

emacs is pretty good, and was what once heavyweight is rendered small and fast by the march of technological progress. But if you, as a programmer, want to devote yourself to becoming an expert in something else, go right ahead.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've never tried Emacs, but tales of the unergonomic nature if its keybindings have steered me far far away. On a side note though the author wrote "I don't think I could learn another set this side of river Styx." and I just find myself really liking this expression. Cheers!

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm going to paint with a broad brush here, but usually it seems like emacs/vim (chosen here to represent broad categories of editors) evangalists haven't given a whole lot of time to try out the other side.

I'd say it took me only a few minutes to get the hang of vim, but several weeks of regular use to really appreciate it. I have never given emacs the same opportunity simply because I've never felt the need to leave vim. But I certainly would do so before I recommended vim over emacs to anyone else.

<comment><AUTHOR> I gave Sublime four months; and in those four months, I only used Emacs once on a remote machine.

I really did try, but the experience left me wanting, and made me realize I'm never going to try another editor ever again: I'm just not ready for another four months of hate directed at my main working tool before I'll revert to the One True Editor™.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why does stuff like this get so high on HN all the time? It isn't news, emacs has been around for approx forever and obviously is a good editor slash operating system for all the serious devotees. What do these pieces add? Literally never will the "vim vs. emacs" thing be resolved if it isn't now. Note to self, write a piece about how "I use <editor> because I know how to use <editor> well" if I ever want to be big on hn.

<comment><USER12> Bonus points if you can tie <editor> to the NSA or Bitcoin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like this post for many reasons. One of them is introducing me to the word retrogrouch

</comment><comment><USER19> Apparently emacs is excellent in defend-mode.

</comment><comment><USER20> tl;dr: Emacs is forever, because I got used to the key-bindings.

Seriously?

<comment><USER21> You'll hear similar things from vim users. And for those of us who use neither, we also like what is familiar, and it may keep some of us _away_ from both emacs and vim.

<comment><USER22> (As a vim user) I like to think that the keybindings actually make sense. There are tons of articles out there about the verbage of vim commands. Once you get used to the vocabulary vim makes a lot of sense. (But it could just be Stockholm syndrome for most of us)

<comment><USER23> As someone who spent about a year getting used to VIM, I can actually document the progress of Stockholm Syndrome in my own chat history.

The first few weeks are filled with things like "Why is (d)elete cut?! I want to delete it, not put it in the buffer! And why do I have to push 'd' twice? This is stupid." or "Who thinks (w)rite makes more sense than (s)ave?"

But then over time, I started internalizing the commands and whenever someone else would echo the same complaints back to me, I'd usually find myself responding "Well, vim is pretty old, so you have to forgive it for not being up on modern terminology. If you just remember the keywords, it usually helps a bit. Plus a good configuration makes it a lot easier to use!"

Now I'm at a point where I find myself hitting ":wq" more often than not regardless of whether I'm actually in vim... and I started looking up ways to use vim keybindings in Sublime Text.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Emacs is good, man!.</comment>


Trump Sics Lawyers on Teen for Making Silly Site Where Kittens Punch Him - <AUTHOR> http://observer.com/2017/03/trump-cease-and-desist-kitten-punch-site/ <comment><USER2> I'm sure sending lawyers after people putting up sites mocking him will end super super well for Trump. No way this could backfire. I'm sure the internet will respect his wishes.</comment>


Apple Replaces Lead Contractor on New 'Spaceship' Campus - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2015/06/16/apple-replaces-lead-contractor-on-new-spaceship-campus/

<comment><AUTHOR> Their spaceship look awfully similar to GCHQ's head office. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doughnut#/media/File:GCHQ-...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doughnut#/media/File:GCHQ- aerial.jpg)</comment>