Larry Harvey, co-founder of Burning Man, has died - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/28/obituaries/larry-harvey-burning-man-festival-dead-at-70.html <comment><USER3> As an electrical engineer with a traditional work-ethic, I always felt cursed that my only brother was a Bohemian/artist. Then my brother asked me to join him on a trip to Burning Man and I reluctantly agreed.

Not knowing what to expect, my brother privately took care of everything. He created several costumes so we could wear something different every day. He decorated our bicycles and designed elaborate canopies. He made drug laced snacks for barter and created games we could play in darkness of the desert night. Upon my arrival, he made me feel welcome despite my immediate realization that I was not worthy of attending this event. For I had contributed nothing. I had, for the first time in my life, felt like _dead- weight to society_. But instead of judging me, my brother made me feel loved.

Going to Burning Man is truly a humbling experience. The unimaginable massive spectacles of creativity are beyond my ability to describe. As much as we would like to return we both agreed we wouldn't unless we had an installation to exhibit. A fitting mission a for sibling artist-engineering team who feel obliged to give back to an event that gave them so much.

RIP Larry. I hope somehow in death you feel all the love and beauty that Burning Man inspired.

<comment><USER4> While the Burning Man experience had been one of the unforgettable for me, I'd spent at least a day there forced to think about economics of it all. The ticket to BM cost big money for most people ($450 + $80 vehicle pass). For example, right now the tickets are priced at $1200 per person at the official website. This is a significant revenues for the organizers with 50,000 attendees. I couldn't wonder but thinking why cost is so high? There is virtually no services provided by the organizers except for portable potties (which BTW stinks all over and is perhaps _the_ biggest factor in ruining the whole experience). Almost all of the labor and even lot of material is provided by largely unpaid volunteers. I understand there is grants made to many artists, but still I'm not sure if some organizers have probably created this whole scheme to make a living out of this. There is not much of an explanation on why tickets are so pricey while number of attendees have kept increasing every year while the costs should have almost remained more or less same because of lack of services.

I was also surprised that while folks are encouraged to give and take gifts and keep the whole thing free of cash, there is _indeed_ commercial establishment to serve coffee. Why can't it be made free? A cup of coffee costs less than $1 to make (especially when you have volunteer labor). Even if a person drinks 5 cups a day, 5 times a week - it's still $25. For a ticket that costs $400+ isn't that doable that would allow to make the event truly cashless and keep the spirit of the event?

<comment><USER5> Most tickets are priced at $425. The $1200 tickets are for people who can afford them but couldn't get them at $425. Some of the $$ from the $1200 ones goes to support the low-income ticket program fwiw.

I will say, if using a portapotty "ruins" the experience for you, you're going to be better off going to an event where you can stay in a hotel, vs a big camping trip to the desert.

<comment><USER6>
      > I will say, if using a portapotty "ruins" the experience for you, you're going to be better off going to an event where you can stay in a hotel, vs a big camping trip to the desert.

Or better: if using a portapotty ruins it for you, contribute a better toilet. I bet lots of people will be very thankful for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had many enlightenments from burning man and I hope to have many more; the participants are worthy successors once they pick up the dance, and so I think the event will go on.

One of my favorite memories is an early night at my first burn, there was a man on a stool with a walkie-talkie checking ID to enter the base of The Man.

I didn't have my ID on me, but I patiently lined up with everyone else, planning on explaining that I only wanted to see the inside with my friends and wasn't planning on drinking tonight at all.

Before reaching the man on the stool, someone in front of us made a break for it past him. He barked angrily at the guy, grabbing at him and shouting into his handset.

When it came to me, at this point I thought my chances were slim and I would have to sit this attraction out without an ID. I explained my situation to him anyways.

I will never forgot his reply: "I am just fucking with you all" he said, a twinkle in his eye. Indeed, there was only an air of official-ness around his outfit and stool, he had no real authority. We all just accepted a queue for ID checks voluntarily.

I walked past and learned more about society from that one prank than I had from any textbook or class since. And that is just one experience.

I hope to carry that on that tradition. There is a real magic in culture, and I am thankful that Larry stumbled upon it and decided to share. Thank you, and thanks to everyone who keeps it going!

<comment><USER8> The opening chapter of Cormac McCarthy's _Blood Meridian_ has a story like that except a bit more intense.

Indeed, when you realize how much of human experience runs on autopilot and you try to consciously evolve past that, you can feel manic and begin to feel like anything is possible.

<comment><USER9> > begin to feel like anything is possible

You can do whatever you want. As long as you can bear the consequences.

<comment><USER10> The consequences are usually an illusion.

<comment><USER11> But if you make a habit of testing them you'll find the ones that aren't pretty quick.

<comment><USER10> Such is the peril of living a full life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Burning Man has been one of the 3 most important events in my life ! I never met Larry Harvey but he seemed like an amazing man. I learned so much about myself, life and everything in between going to it. I've gone almost 7 times, but havent gone in the last 5 years.

I really loved some of the snippets from this article about Larry. The bit about someone waking him up at 4am with a chainsaw to work on an ice sculpture made me laugh outloud. Definitely par for course at Burning Man, and his reaction says alot about him. RIP

[http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/larry-harvey-founder-and- le...](http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/larry-harvey-founder-and-leader-of- burning-man-dies-in-san-francisco/ar-AAwtwQx?li=BBnbfcL&ocid=iehp)

</comment><comment><USER13> Larry's realized vision of community has inspired so much creativity that it's impossible to do justice to his impact on our world in a short comment.

Personally, I met my wife and many friends through his indirect action, and I've become much more creative and understanding of those around me in the process. There must be many more here with similar stories.

<comment><USER14> Could you go into this more? I've never been to BM but have always been curious what people have gotten out of it.

<comment><USER15> One of my favorite quotes from Blood Meridian (which was published before Burning Man was a thing; I have no reason to believe it influenced Burning Man but the two are linked in my mind because of the setting and because this quote always makes me think of it)

 _The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning._

I would note that there is a difference between experiential knowledge and propositional or factual knowledge - you can read as many books about dance as you want, but none of them will tell you what it feels like to dance. In the same way, everyone sort of knows, on some level, that essentially everything about society is arbitrary. Your clothes, your food, your house, your job, everything is the result of path-dependent evolution that didn't _have_ to end up how it did.

Ok, great, so you can know that just from using logic, but how can you _feel_ it? Burning Man is one answer to that question. It lets you experience the "fevered dream" that is reality.

<comment><USER16> Basically everything almost didn't happen.

<comment><USER17> A better way to look at it is, in a million different places, the odds were a million to one. We happen to be observing from the one of those place where it _did_ happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Back in the day (around 1995) I used to go to parties that Larry Harvey and Marion (who called herself Maid Marion at the time) used to also go to.

I was told that the original burning man was an effigy of Larry's ex- girlfriend's new boyfriend.

At the time you could even find this story online in a number of places. Mysteriously, it seems to have been purged from the web. But I still believe it to be true, based on who told me and when.

</comment><comment><USER19> RIP. He leaves ripples bouncing around and amongst countless peoples' minds, reverberating with the realization that there are no limits on what is possible.

</comment><comment><USER20> Thank you Larry.

Burning Man photos that are favorites of mine by many photographers:

[http://www.joelparkerhenderson.com/burningman/](http://www.joelparkerhenderson.com/burningman/)

Photos are by many people during many years.

</comment><comment><USER21> Burning Man has changed my life. It will continue to for as long as I live.

</comment><comment><USER22> I went in 2007 and keep saying I will go again.

Last year I watched all the videos here [https://burners.me/shadow- history/](https://burners.me/shadow-history/) and found it very interesting and intriguing. An insider's perspective on the BM organization. Downloading the slide decks gives an overview of the materials.

</comment><comment><USER23> > anti-establishment, anti-consumerist

Can't help but feel there is something insincere in that statement, I mean somehow it seems like exactly the product of consumerist society to me (I mean the attendance cost, cost of setting up you "booth" (?) there), so I wonder if somebody feels the same/gave it more thought.

</comment><comment><USER24> A beautiful article of a beautiful man. So it goes. I will remain forever* transformed due to him.

* Until I die, I suppose :)

</comment><comment><USER25> Is it ever brought up whether Burning Man is based on the Zozobra?

</comment><comment><USER26> more on Larry : [https://larry.burningman.org/](https://larry.burningman.org/)

</comment><comment><USER27> But will he be cremated?

</comment><comment><USER28> You must pay to read about a great man who's vision went beyond money and to the core of humanity. Paywalls suck.

<comment><USER28> I realize there are other ways to read about him. I've received the email, posts, messages. I don't like that there is a paywall for an obituary. For an article like "Top 10 most popular puppies" I understand the paywall, who doesn't want to look at puppies? But the death of a person that has affected so many people's lives, like mine, why is there a paywall?

<comment><USER29> Quality journalism costs money.

Someone had to be paid to write the obit, someone was paid to edit it, someone was paid to put it online, the servers cost money, so does the power, so does the connectivity and other infrastructure to put it online - none of this is free - heck, 30 years ago, you would have needed to buy a paper to read it.

Do I like the rates the NYT charges? no, I'd be happy to pay 5 dollars a month so I can access the top 5 newspapers of record though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "I don't think black folks like to camp as much as white folks". - <USER2> Harvey on why there are so few black people at Burning Man[0]

[0][https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/sep/04/burning- man-...](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/sep/04/burning-man-founder- larry-harvey-race-diversity-silicon-valley)

<comment><USER31> As a person of South Asian decent, I can validate how few people

I attribute it to a first and second generation community - if you already have a community to call your own, you are less likely to search for others. I'm alternative enough to be interested; and don't identify with that cultural background much.

Often I'm alone in alternative subcultures - gaming, the burn, the poly scene, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is a cute story, but for folks considering attending bartering of any kind at the burn is not a thing.

<comment><USER3> You are right about this and we were both surprised at how sober Burning Man was. The media literally used the phrase "drug-fueled orgy" to describe Burning Man that year. Given all the nudity and psychedelic nature of the event I can see how one could come to this conclusion. Well, that and the fact that someone probably re-gifted our drug-laced snack for a masturbation session. Seriously there was an actual tent where you could trade snacks, pancakes, whatever, for a hand-job.

Jeez, why did you have to derail an intentionally sentimental comment by mocking it as "cute".

<comment><USER32> Intentionally sentimental, indeed. The first thing you do here is elevate your 'engineer work ethic' above your brother who is _merely an artist_.

You go on to describe how your brother did all this nice stuff for you and didn't judge you despite you doing nothing to prepare and coming to the event as a spectator.

You mention how for the first time ever you realize maybe you aren't that important to society. How surprising it is to find out maybe you aren't the most well-rounded person ever.

Like a 30 minute sitcom you wrap up your story saying your relationship with your brother is now a team of equals due to the experience. What was _your brother 's_ growth in this little story? That his big important _engineer_ brother might not look down on him now?

Are you really a changed person due to this one week experience? Someone who doesn't measure their life value by their engineering contributions, who respects artists and their lifestyle? Is that the story you are telling?

On top of that, being top comment means this will undoubtedly influence HN readers to ask themselves, _" What a nice story. Maybe I should go to Burning Man this year. Maybe people will accept me as a spectator and I will be fine going in with no preparation and have some major philosophical realization about myself."_

So I'm reading this episode of Friends comment, hoping you at least do some justice to these potential attendees. But, no. After a successful sparkle pony ride down your memory lane you make a point to acknowledge drug use and bartering. Which shows you really don't know how to represent the event and that this is a weak intro to what it is for HN readers considering attendance for the first time. Doubling down by invoking a description by "the media" is fitting.

Your story reads as possibly accurate yet wildly incomplete portrayal of your relationship with your brother. To quote another commenter, this was a "great comment" to someone who has never gone to Burning Man and does not have a sibling. Hence, my summary of it as "cute."

For folks considering attending Burning Man for the first time here are some things OP missed:

1\. Don't show up unprepared.

2\. Don't go expecting some kind of breakthrough. Don't go with expectations of any kind.

3\. Read the 10 Principals that Larry Harvey wrote in 2004.[1]

[1] [https://burningman.org/culture/philosophical- center/10-princ...](https://burningman.org/culture/philosophical- center/10-principles/)

<comment><USER33> Now you've crossed into personal attack and are breaking the site guidelines badly. Please stop.

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


JS 2D physics engines benchmark - <AUTHOR> http://olegkikin.com/js-physics-engines-benchmark/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for this, it went under my radar.

I would also like to see [https://github.com/schteppe/p2.js/](https://github.com/schteppe/p2.js/)

Anyway I imagine this tool a little effort so thanks for sharing.</comment>


Google: We're One Of The World's Largest Hardware Makers - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/google_makes_servers/ <comment><USER2> This, along with rising popularity of Chromebooks, makes Google's future seem like a cenrtralized data store/processor. Kind of an eerie thought.

<comment><USER3> Eerie indeed given their existing vast bulk of personal data from emails to browsing habits. Now they want to be the portal to the entire web for people via Chromebooks and hold _all_ their data. That makes the cynical part of me glad that Google+ hasn't been overly successful.

<comment><USER4> Search, Analytics, Plus, Mail, Android. Search & Analytics & Plus have allowed them to track you around the web. Mail & Plus have provided them with your real name, your relations/contacts and other personal details. Android gives them your phone number and location.

I believe part of the reason they are so steadfast in having real names for Plus is because Mail wasn't 100% successful in getting the actual names of users.

Everyone of their services is designed to gather a specific kind of information about the user. (Play a game and predict their next service based on the kind of information you'd expect them to want of you. I'm going with world wide payment systems.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find it fascinating that Google is more than a decade old already and yet nobody has been able to completely copy all of their major innovations.

<comment><USER6> What "major innovation" did Google have 10 years ago that hasn't been copied?

<comment><USER5> OK, so, if you look at what has set google apart you see three different things. Hardcore CS savvy is one of them, which led to pagerank. Then you have solid software engineering talent which led to the implementation of pagerank through map reduce and sharding. And combined with that you have revolutionarily different data centers. To google a data center is a single unit at many levels (application level, servicing level, manufacturing).

Google manufactures what are arguably single data center sized computers, and makes the software to run on it. This sort of vertical integration is a huge advantage to google, because it gives them a huge quality/price/performance benefit, allowing them to leverage CPU cycle more effectively, more efficiently, and more inexpensively than their competition. Can you come up with an example of a company that scales the same way that google does to the same degree?

<comment><USER6> Of course there are lots of other search engines that use pagerank. Sharding is of course nothing new. Map-reduce is a smart way to increase throughput of a cluster, but it's not unique (after all there is a popular open-source Hadoop project). I'll give you the data center advances though :)

<comment><USER5> Exactly, there are a lot of bits and pieces duplicating things that google did in the late 90s but there's nobody out there who's doing all those things at once. Which is surprising because there are huge business advantages to doing so. But it requires a level of execution that only google has been able to pull off so far.

Edit: on the one hand it's an impressive achievement on google's part and a testament to their exceptional competence. On the other hand it's a bit disappointing because it means that google is that much harder to compete with and diversity in the marketplace is always a good thing (no matter how benevolent the rule of the monopolist of the moment might be).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why actual rockstar programmers do not say anything? - <AUTHOR> Programming and computers are huuuuuuuge area, if we look at from bottom to the top,<p>- hardware level - they sit and work, they do not call themselves rockstars<p>- low level, fpga - they sit and work, no rockstars<p>- os level - sit and work, no rockstars<p>- algorithm developers - sit and work, no rockstars<p>- application/db developers - sit and work, no rockstars<p>- web devs, js - THEY ARE ROCKSTARS,<p>if we look at above areas, probably easiest one maybe web devs, who knows maybe they have smaller salary than other areas too, but when it comes to PR, they are always rockstars, they are cool, why the heck this is always the case, who works hard don't get attention, attention will be given who uses that product or sales. <comment><USER2> As a full-stack-but-primarily-back-end web developer, I somewhat resent the OP's implication that web developers are lesser than other developers. Why are we distinct from "algorithm developers" and "application/db developers" when what we develop are applications that interact with databases and often require fairly sophisticated algorithms? Can't we just agree that different types of developers work with different technologies and skillsets and one isn't inherently better or worse than another based solely on which technologies they work with?

All that aside… the "rockstar" attitude rankles, though really, it's something you'll mostly see in job listings and such than from web developers themselves. I can't recall meeting any developers in this industry who would refer to themselves as a rockstar with a straight face, but I've met a couple bosses who said things like "we only hire rockstars" and such. So to the extent that a skilled web developer seriously says they're a rockstar, they probably only do so to angle for a job, I'd imagine.

<comment><USER3> Call me an a __hole, but I really think that web dev does not require nearly as much deep knowledge of computers as an engineer working on lower levels of the stack. Each web app usually solves the same tired problems again: interface with a db, present data, cache stuff, handle user accounts etc.. There is some meaty stuff - perhaps caching and serious performance optimization, but most of a web app is either front-end CSS stuff, or interfacing with a DB to fetch data.

Yes, there is definitely work to be done in making a web-app, and i don't think its easy at all to get a website to be really fast or get the styling right across 100s of devices, but its not always technically challenging work IMO. I am NOT saying that web devs are worse, but yes, I am saying that the job generally requires less deep technical knowledge, and perhaps more of other skills i know nothing about :p This is the rationale for why I choose not to go into webdev, because i love solving meaty problems. I would love to hear your perspective and be proven wrong though.

<comment><USER4> This entire comment is just nonsense. Web development is equivalent to any other level of the computing stack. That is, there are good developers working on solving complex problems, and bad developers churning out mediocre software that doesn't really do anything "meaty".

I see absolutely no evidence that web development is any less technically challenging than any other field – the fact that there are loads of developers churning out cookie-cutter CRUD apps doesn't mean that's the whole field.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Absolute nonsense.

\- Developing for the web is not 'probably easiest one' – it's equivalent in complexity to any other part of the software stack. The fact that there are lots of generic CRUD apps that are being developed does nothing to change that – the majority of applications are boring LOB apps, the majority of hardware drivers are barely functional repackaging of reference implementations, and so on.

\- There aren't really any 'rockstars' in development. I'm sure there are some knobs out there who call themselves that; I've never met or heard from one, despite a decade in the web development industry.

You've clearly got a stick up your arse about something; I suggest you'd be better served spending your time learning more about how the industry actually works, and less time writing this sort of dreck.

</comment><comment><USER5> Competition. Because all startups need a frontend to get users, there are many independent firms hiring in that market, and because demand is high, there are many developers as well. Because the market is both liquid and very competitive, devs need to SCREAM VERY LOUDLY to be heard (minus a few folks who get snapped up early by highly desirable employers like Google, Facebook, AirBnB, or Uber and then quietly sit and work, often moving more toward backend as their careers progress).

There are relatively few hardware-level companies and hardware-level software engineers. There are relatively few FPGA companies and FPGA engineers. There are relatively few OSes, and relatively few OS-level software engineers. Within these fields, everyone knows who the good developers are based on their work.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's an accessibility effect.

Because "front end web development" is the most easily started of the items you list, anyone with a browser even most mobile phone browsers are sufficient these days, there is a larger pool of "interested" people who recognise the topic. Since the larger pool is more diverse it starts to exhibit behaviour we consider more typical of "the general population" instead of "us programmers".

The modern trend of ninja and rockstar developers is nothing more than normal group psychology. Your options are "run away into a more specialist niche" where the population is more to your liking, "ignore it" like reality tv, or "go native" and learn how this new aspect of technical culture can be useful to you.

</comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps you simply hear more about Web devs because most Web gigs are relatively small - compared with many of the lower-level jobs. As a result, Web folks are constantly advertising themselves to find the next gig. Also based on this small-job phenomenon, these people may have better skills at marketing themselves.

The other thought that comes to mind is that the results of Web skills are usually apparent in a very short time after the person begins working. The user-interface is the "face" of a long path of other systems that make the whole thing possible. Hence, those persons closest to the UI get associated with the results of all the systems working in tandem. It's as if they themselves made it all happen.

</comment><comment><USER8> I would say there are people in all of these categories with egos. Quality work should speak for itself really.

Maybe we get the impression that people who work with web facing technologies are the loudest because they will have very popular repos on GitHub. Remember though, there are plenty of people who have solved equally complex problems who cannot share their work for various reasons.

Those people probably have a right to say they are a rock star, but not a lot of people will ever know outside their job / company.

</comment><comment><USER9> What makes a rockstar? Their audience.

There are more web devs or web devs wannabes in the world ready to consume content from more experienced ones, making them "rockstars" as you call.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is true, but I'm not sure it's only limited to IT or programming, I'd say it's present in more or less any human activity.

</comment><comment><USER11> You mean bill gates is not a rockstar?

</comment><comment><USER12> All the rest are NINJAS!!!!!

<comment><USER13> I get put of applying for jobs when they request a "Ninja". Sounds like a bollocks startup full of kiddies who think they know way more than they do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> algorithm developer?

<comment><USER10> I'm guessing this is OP's title for software architects.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very close to this definition, but probably in the middle, think about Map/Reduce, think about parallel computing models, think about indexing, searching and many other things which are related to architecting, designing and optimizing how things work

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Perhaps: web devs are so ashamed of their privacy-violating, resource-hogging websites that they need something about themselves to feel proud of so they give themselves a dramatic job title and say "I'm good".</comment>


Last.fm no longer offers radio internationally - <AUTHOR> http://www.last.fm/announcements/radio2013

<comment><USER2> Never bothered with it. I listen to dubstep on <http://listen.di.fm/public5/clubdubstep.asx></comment>


Boeing communications boss resigns over sexist article he wrote in 1987 - <AUTHOR> https://nypost.com/2020/07/03/boeing-communications-boss-niel-golightly-resigns-over-article/ <comment><USER3> Core to any sort of social progress is the belief that people can change, and people changing.

I sure as heck wouldn't want anyone judged for views they held 30 years ago. I don't want to be judged for the views I hold today in 30 years either.

That goes for most actions too: Even if you murdered someone 30 years ago, if you served your time and reformed, you ought to be able to have a normal life now.

I'm a different person now than I was in college, and I'll be a different person in another 30 years. I may be a better person or a worse person -- I don't know yet -- but I definitely will not the same person I am today. I can think of few things a person might have done in 1987 which ought to affect their lives now.

This does not reflect well upon Boeing at all.

There is also an element of ageism here. Virtually anyone beyond some age will have held currently-unacceptable views at some point in their lives.

<comment><USER4> The problem is there isn't a culturally agreeable calculus to know when someone is trustworthy, and that the "punishment" here is one of withdrawing from relations through the free exercise of association. The main intervention you can do is to tell people to stop exercising their freedom of association.

> That goes for most actions too: Even if you murdered someone 30 years ago, > if you served your time and reformed, you ought to be able to have a normal > life now.

If a person molested one child 30 years, should a label of "sex offender" follow them as they attempt to regain their life as a youth educator? Should they never ever be allowed near children again?

If someone wrote in their youth on the violent nature of the negro and their intellectual inferiority, should they be entrusted with a leadership position over black Americans?

<comment><USER3> I think key in my post was "and reformed."

There were plenty of, for example, KKK members who then became anti-KKK activists. If you were born in 1915, and your parents were a member of the KKK, odds are pretty good you might have written something like that in the 1930's. It's how you were brought up. We don't have permanent digital records of everything that happened, but I'd say it's almost guaranteed you would have expressed such views.

If by the 1950s and 1960's, you had renounced those views, and wanted to be a civil rights activist, it's important you can do that. If anything, familiarity with the opposition would make you more effective.

Without the ability to do that, the civil rights movement would have needed to wait for a lot of people to die (or at least retire). It happened when it did in part because people could and did change their minds.

So to answer your question: In all of the cases you listed, it's possible for people to grow and reform. It's a question of what evidence is available that they have, in fact, reformed. To go with the KKK example, sharing KKK secrets with the FBI, taking the large personal risk of publicly denouncing the organization, and joining the civil rights movement would be pretty darned good evidence.

<comment><USER5> > I think key in my post was "and reformed."

Is there good reason to expect that they reformed?

Is it as or more reasonable to expect they've simply learnt to hold their more objectionable views close to the vest?

If the answer to the former is "no," and to the latter is "yes," then I don't really know how you'd expect anyone to work with a leadership that openly views them as a hindrance to the workplace.

If he'd made a public anti-semitic article 20 years ago, and didn't undertake very significant acts of reformation, certainly _I_ would take for granted that he's still an anti-semite. There's no reason to imagine otherwise. And I'd feel very uncomfortable working for a company where the leadership includes and accepts a publicly professed anti-semite.

<comment><USER3> I'm not close enough to this situation, but the evidence I have is:

(1) He said so. (2) There weren't any allegations of improprieties in the past decade or two in the articles I've read. (3) 30 years ago, likely a majority (and certainly a near-majority) of people had at least some level of discomfort with women serving equally in the military. Today, it's an extremist view held by a tiny minority. Most people who held those views 30 years ago did, in fact, change views, not closet them up.

What you're describing is a symptom of exactly this cancel culture. People DO learn to hold their more objectionable views close to the vest, and that's a problem. People can't actually change views without open and critical conversations.

I live in an extremely progressive city with a lot of racism and bigotry simmering just below the surface. It's bad -- many people in positions of power hold extremely bigoted views. That never plays out in the open, but those people act on those views, either without articulating them, or articulating them as abstractions.

I see no way to address any of that without honest and open conversations, which we can't have. Saying the wrong thing leads to career death, so everyone says the PC thing.

And when racism happens, in most cases, people depart quietly, and move into a similar position at another company / school / police department / etc. It's pretty rare that anything goes public. But if it did -- someone was closed out of the economy because of a perception that they were racist -- what do you think the result of that on racial tensions would be?

It's important to have systems to address and resolve problems. If you have a racist, the desired outcome should be that in a few years, they're not racist anymore. Start there, and work backwards to how to build out systems to do that.

There's also a longer post about the value of due process, and of innocent- until-proven-guilty (which is not the same as NO process, which is what we often have right now).

As a footnote, your discomfort is not the paramount issue here. We have laws to protect former felons, people with bad credit records, etc. from employment discrimination. Even if I might rather not hire a former felon, or someone who can't manage their finances well, I'm not allowed to ask those questions in a job interview. That allows people who've made mistakes -- often much bigger than this one -- to return as contributing members of society. That's a good thing. Otherwise, we end up with revolving doors to jails. Indeed, I'd argue those are the laws which ought to be expanded -- they're not nearly strong enough, and that disproportionately impacts vulnerable populations. We want paths to remediation for everyone, rather than for no one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the boss's article:

> _They may become inhibited and stilted, self-consciously muting the more > overt expressions of their comraderie because they feel that frank vulgarity > is inappropriate in the presence of females, even if that vulgarity is a > male social lubricant and if women profess not to object._

 _They may openly rebuff her presence because they are unable to relate to her on masculine emotional terms._

 _They may treat her with patronizing tolerance, as the unit 's mascot._

 _They may being to compete with each other for her attention, breaking up group loyalties and shared destiny for individual sexual or romantic gratification._

Although his conclusion may have been wrong, it sounds like he was ahead of his time in predicting some consequences of sexisim that many feminists point out exist today.

To balance out your opinion of how right he was, he also said this:

> _In contrast, women do not naturally band together ritual comradeship._

Clearly, he didn't provide any sources or reason to believe that. His article was armchair speculation. Repeating cultural beliefs without support, as if they were scientific facts, served as the mainstay of "polite" racism and sexism for decades, and although polite society has moved on from those cultural beliefs, it's a lesson to all of us that the practice of writing these unscientific articles never went out of fashion.

<comment><USER7> > Although his conclusion may have been wrong, it sounds like he was ahead of > his time in predicting some consequences of sexisim that many feminists > point out exist today.

ISTM that he's predicting some very real social frictions, but that calling them "consequences of sexism" may be a bit silly-- unless you posit that literally any institutional dynamic that might disadvantage women in some way is per se structural/institutional sexism, which is really just a matter of semantics. They're consequences of forcing people presenting with very different gender roles (male vs. female) to interact in a newly diverse environment. This will always involve some compromising of values.

<comment><USER8> "Gender roles" seems obviously institutional. Who exactly assigns them, and why would it be silly to say that the portions that aren't clearly biological are likely sexist?

<comment><USER9> Are you saying it's not clearly biological for men to behave differently around women?

That it's not clearly biological for a man to place a high priority on seeking a woman for "individual sexual or romantic gratification" in a way that can cause him to view other men as competitors at the expense of "group loyalties and shared destiny"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> this cancel culture thing is getting out of control.

First you cannot judge how people would talk or act in the past based in present values.

Why are people able to consider cultural subjectivity when talking about other cultures, but not our own? We are not the same society that we where 40 years ago. Things changed, opnions to

And event if the guy was sexist, this attitute dosent consider if his opnion changed over the years. People learn new things, get new experiences that change theirs perspectives.

Letting go a worker because of a opnion he held 35 years ago should be met with a lawsuit.

<comment><USER8> He was canceled by Boeing. If they thought he was worth keeping, it would have been very easy to defend him against this ancient article, especially since his classy exit shows him to be willing to contritely say the right things now.

If you're saying that Boeing is out of control, I agree, although firing some exec for being passionately sexist at one time in his life doesn't rank on the list of their sins imo.

<comment><USER11> _it would have been very easy to defend him against this ancient article_

Would it? Or would anyone who tried to defend him also have their own 30+ years ago opinions dredged up? It's not safe for anyone until there is "herd immunity" against being cancelled and we're a long way from there yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."

</comment><comment><USER13> If a United States Naval Officer goes to the trouble to get his passionate views into the annals of the USNI, you better go to the trouble to retract them if you've evolved.

This wasn't some tweet. And context matters in retrospect given what happened in the Tailhook era.

<comment><USER14> The article says he apologized:

"Golightly stepped down Thursday as Boeing's senior vice president of communications following an employee complaint about the 1987 article, which he called "embarrassingly wrong and offensive.""

<comment><USER13> A former Naval Officer and C-Level aplogizing when he gets caught 30 years later is not honorable. The time to do it was decades ago. It's a wonder who vetted him.

He's not some kid on the internet.

<comment><USER14> The guy is in his 60s. Asking people to remember everything they have ever written over their entire life, and then publicly retract it as soon as they change their minds about any given portion, is not reasonable. Heck, I had an article published in a student newspaper twelve years ago (in 2008), and even now I barely remember what it says.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cancel culture strikes again.

</comment><comment><USER15> Maybe he was asked to quit, perhaps rather forcefully. But he is going out in a classy way by saying his prior position was wrong.

The people on this thread calling this "cancel culture" could learn something from the frankness of the statement.

Keep in mind his company has military contracts. If the PR guy is on record opposing women in the military, even a long time ago... Not good.

<comment><USER14> This culture of "never forget, no excuses, no forgiveness" is part of why the US has so many people in prison. Suppose someone commits an armed robbery. They should be arrested, certainly, for many reasons. But after they have been tried, punished, and served their sentence, should they be permanently exiled from society? Should they never be able to find employment for the rest of their life? No, because that doesn't help anyone and just creates more crime. This person is probably rich enough to retire, but most people are not - <USER2> _need_ a job, or else they'll get evicted and wind up homeless. "You can never work again" isn't that much better than America's history of insanely vindictive prison sentences.

<comment><USER15> I totally believe in forgiveness.

But I think you miss the point. This guy's entire job was promote the public image when, among other things, selling to the military. And he wasn't rank and file. He was near the top.

He won't have trouble finding a job that doesn't involve giving a bad image to a military contractor.

<comment><USER14> He wasn't re-assigned, transferred, or demoted, even though Boeing is a big company with plenty of positions - he was fired. And many people are willing to fire even blue-collar workers and random small business managers:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop- firin...](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing- innocent/613615/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> He claims this is why, but if you're the chief spokesperson for a company that can't get past a safety and reliability scandal, I think it's just he was asked to resign.

<comment><USER9> He's only been there 6 months. Seems unlikely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I see people complaining that he was canceled, but if it takes three and a half decades to get canceled, then I'm not sure I see the problem. If I were to write an article about how I think that women ought not to serve in the military, or any such similar drivel, then I would probably perish naturally before any punishment arrived.

Are folks here anticipating that they themselves will get canceled for their old sexist writings, or is there something else here?

<comment><USER14> This sort of retroactive vindictiveness is bad for everyone. In 1987, almost no one supported gay marriage, and many people wrote articles saying so. (DOMA was enacted in 1996 under Bill Clinton.) A lot of people, perhaps a majority of Americans, have changed their minds in the light of new arguments and evidence. How willing will anyone be to change their minds, if the response is "that doesn't matter, you're fired and exiled from polite society for the rest of your life"?

"An army officer in the Qin dynasty was supposed to lead his troops somewhere but got delayed.

He asked a friend of his "What is the penalty for being late?"

"Death." Says his friend.

He then asks "What is the penalty for rebellion?"

"Death." Says his friend.

He replies "Well then..." And thus began the Dazexiang Uprising."

<comment><USER17> Well, this executive voluntarily resigned. He could have just as easily issued a statement condemning his younger self for their sexist and puerile remarks, disavowing his older views and committing himself to doing better. Plenty of folks have done just that, and found themselves growing and improving as people.

There are plenty of loud politicians that, since the 1970s, have supported gay rights; Bernie comes to mind [0]. (He also opposed DOMA [1].) Indeed, a majority of Americans, some 70%, have had to change their minds about this, but that does not mean that there were not folks back then who had reasonable moral stances about ensuring that all of us have the right to volunteer to go die for this country.

I'm not seeing what's actually bad here. Indeed I'm not even seeing what's vindictive. The wages of free speech is people reading and thinking about what you say.

[0] [https://www.vox.com/2015/7/7/8905905/sanders-drugs-gay- right...](https://www.vox.com/2015/7/7/8905905/sanders-drugs-gay-rights)

[1] [https://www.vox.com/2015/9/9/9295867/bernie-sanders-gay- sold...](https://www.vox.com/2015/9/9/9295867/bernie-sanders-gay-soldiers)

<comment><USER14> "Well, this executive voluntarily resigned."

In this context, "voluntarily resignation" usually means "resign now, or you're fired":

[https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/23/business/23family.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/23/business/23family.html)

"He could have just as easily issued a statement condemning his younger self for their sexist and puerile remarks, disavowing his older views and committing himself to doing better."

He did do all of these things. It didn't matter, he was still fired. No forgiveness allowed.

"Plenty of folks have done just that, and found themselves growing and improving as people."

In my experience, making someone apologize and then firing them anyway rarely leads them to personal growth.

"There are plenty of loud politicians that, since the 1970s, have supported gay rights; Bernie comes to mind [0]."

I don't think even Sanders supported gay marriage in the 80s. The linked clip just says that being gay shouldn't be illegal.

"Indeed I'm not even seeing what's vindictive. The wages of free speech is people reading and thinking about what you say."

Reading, thinking, and responding to speech is good and healthy. "You are never allowed to earn a living, participate in commerce, or support your family for the rest of your life, regardless of what you do or how many times you apologize" is vindictiveness.

<comment><USER17> It sounds like you're speculating; do you have _evidence_ that he did not voluntarily resign?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: New Way to Discover More Music - <AUTHOR> https://thefifthprint.com/pages/discovermorejams <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone! I'm Zach, I'm 16 years old and I created The Fifth Print which is a t-shirt shop based on music. I've always thought that music plays a crazy important role in our lives and has the power to make us more productive and happy among other things. It has the power to change lives and unite communities.

So, I decided to create a weekly email digest where each edition has a couple of songs representing a different genre (example: one from rock, rap, alternative/indie, and pop). And also a reader submitted one. Lastly it'd also include a profile of an artist so you can find out why their sound is their sound and a music video since I believe that music videos have the power to greatly enhance a song.

I'd love for this little project of mine to become a great way for everyone to discover new music and explore different genres and find new artists. I'd love to get your feedback on it! Tweet at me @zach_cmiel for suggestions or questions or if you just want to talk music. I'd love to chat! Hope you guys enjoy it and discover more jams!</comment>


DuckDuckGo was down - <AUTHOR> https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hacker+news <comment><USER2> Hey folks - we're back in business. Clearly Dax the Duck had a case of the Mondays!

<comment><USER3> I'd love to read a post-mortem.

<comment><USER4> Sometimes ducks just have a bad day.

<comment><USER5> Some days you're the jet engine; some days you're the duck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And it's back, after 10 minutes. Nice job to the response team, that was fast !

</comment><comment><USER7> All I know is that I would not want to be the one who had last committed to production.

<comment><USER8> Good teams don't blame individuals. You can praise individuals, but you take blame as a team.

Hopefully at least two people reviewed the commit before it was put into production. Someone set up the post-launch smoke-tests/api-test-suits. Someone built the CI/CD-system. Etc etc.

My point is, it is rarely a single individuals fault when something at this scale goes down.

<comment><USER9> I also think a lot of praise should generally be a team thing too (but I also love this: "You can praise individuals, but you take blame as a team.")

When discussing success to an outside group (giving a presentation or something) or higher up (especially here!) you always use "we". Even if it is a section that only you worked on or you did most of the work. You can often pick out good managers by just seeing if they talk like this, if their focus is around what they individually did or what their team accomplished.

My point is, it is rarely a single individual's success when things work.

<comment><USER10> I also really like it when managers mention significant individuals (as suggested by the phrasing that started this thread), as long as everyone on the team is getting mention-worthy projects. Both group and individual recognition, as long as it's fairly used.

<comment><USER9> Yes, exactly. I don't want to downplay the importance of praising individuals, but at the same time I don't want it to shadow praising teams.

There's a balance and I do think we tend to focus on the individual as a society. We can only climb mountains by standing on the shoulders of giants. One person gets to the peak and we should praise them for that, but we shouldn't ignore their foundation either (which I think currently happens). E.G. Kepler was an essential part of science and needs to be recognized, but if it wasn't for the work that Tycho Brahe did, Kepler's achievements couldn't exist. The "single person" mentality ignores the importance of the foundational work that needed to be done and frequently causes many to feel that they are not achieving simply because they are working in these roles, which are essential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Image and video search works. Regular text search, maps and news are down. Did they forget to bay their Bing bill?

EDIT: scratch that. DDG is back in business again. I would love to read a post-mortem.

<comment><USER12> Do they still use Bing ? I thought DDG had in-house search db.

<comment><USER11> The Duck Duck Bot crawls the web in some fashion but it is my understanding most of what's in their search result comes from their Bing indices. Correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER13> Afaik, it's still mostly from Bing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Came here to see if I was crazy. Should be an interesting post-mortem, I wonder if someone dropped the production database...

<comment><USER15> Autocomplete in the search bar still works, so there's some data out there.

<comment> matt-attack I would have thought that the type of person compelled to use DDG, would disable autocomplete.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h It really depends. On the continuum of "I don't care about privacy" to "borderline paranoid", there's certainly a middle ground of "I don't trust Google but do trust DDG to not record every keystroke I send and add it to my profile forever" that would be happy to enable autocomplete if it was going to a search engine with a meaningful privacy stance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Probably an operational issue, like an expired internal certificate I'd imagine. Very curious to see the post morten and root cause analysis.

</comment><comment><USER17> Image search still works for me. Odd.

Edit: strike that, only for some entries. Must be some cache?

</comment><comment><USER18> It still works if you're hungry: [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=food&ia=recipes](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=food&ia=recipes)

<comment><USER19> Haha, I was also searching "food" to see no results and just started seeing recipe results returned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Changing the time range to "Past Month" yields results

<comment><USER21> Can confirm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It looks ok to me:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nothing&t=hk&ia=web](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nothing&t=hk&ia=web)

</comment><comment><USER23> Can confirm, from Switzerland.

I was quite confused why my query for a well-known brand name was returning nothing. Bang queries still work.

</comment><comment><USER24> Even the conversion magic doesn't work (eg "1cm in inches") which one would assume is a separate system

<comment><USER25> As well as bangs, which give a different error saying to email firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Oops, not fun. I think they must have been having problems for a while, I recently switched to try qwant because DDG was frequently slow to respond, but it was still working...

</comment><comment><USER27> I know I was freaking out and had to use Google directly. :)

</comment><comment><USER28> It's back up now. Should know soon why it was down

</comment><comment><USER29> Seems like other type of searches (images) still work.

</comment><comment><USER30> It is just the "All" and maps tabs that are not returning anything as of now. News/images/videos are still working.

</comment><comment><USER31> Possible issues:

\- It could be an issue with DNS servers \- Certificates that got expired \- Latest push to production that got wrong \- DDoS attack

</comment><comment><USER32> Wow, they must be having a pretty bad morning

</comment><comment><USER33> Recipe results are still coming through

</comment><comment><USER34> What a tough time for the devs. Troubleshooting at such a scale must be a nightmare

</comment><comment><USER35> Came here to say this. Still broken for me. "NPR" was last query.

</comment><comment><USER36> It's working again! But wow, that was quite an interesting 9 minutes!

</comment><comment><USER37> I had this issue one time, and it got fixed when I reloaded the page.

</comment><comment><USER38> Interestingly it looks like image search is still working though

</comment><comment><USER39> Works again. I wonder if the fix was just rebooting a server

<comment><USER31> Normally that does the trick, but it doesn't tell what went wrong so it could repeat again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> wow, they are third in search engine usage, not sure whats going on!

[EDIT] removed the metrics due to downvotes! check below for traffic information and how much is lost..

<comment><USER41> where did you get this number from?

<comment><USER40> [https://duckduckgo.com/traffic](https://duckduckgo.com/traffic) June 2020 Daily Average 62,489,472

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Has this ever happened with another large search engine?

<comment><USER43> Yes. : [https://www.cnet.com/news/google-goes-down-for-5-minutes- int...](https://www.cnet.com/news/google-goes-down-for-5-minutes-internet- traffic-drops-40/)

"Google suffered an outage late on Friday night, though you might not have noticed -- it only went down for five minutes. During that brief window, Internet traffic around the world dropped by a massive 40 per cent, according to Web analytics firm GoSquared, Sky News Online reports. "

Bing also: [https://www.pcworld.com/article/183770/bings_30_minute_outag...](https://www.pcworld.com/article/183770/bings_30_minute_outage_a_sally_field_moment.html)

"Microsoft's Bing search engine was offline for about 30 minutes on Thursday evening."

Qwant also: [https://blog.qwant.com/qwants-unprecedented-service- failure-...](https://blog.qwant.com/qwants-unprecedented-service-failure-our- apologies-and-thanks/)

"Qwant's infrastructure broke down around 12.00 UTC, and the service could only be restablished hours later, around midnight"

<comment><USER44> also a case in 2009 when google flagged all search results as malware for 55 minutes: [https://techcrunch.com/2009/01/31/google-flags-whole- interne...](https://techcrunch.com/2009/01/31/google-flags-whole-internet-as- malware/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Fixed now it seems

</comment><comment><USER46> I wonder if they have a status page?

<comment><USER47> I tried to find one. The closest I came is their Traffic dashboard [1], which is updated daily. I also checked their Twitter account [2] but no mention of problems yet.

[1]: [https://duckduckgo.com/traffic](https://duckduckgo.com/traffic) [2]: [https://twitter.com/duckduckgo](https://twitter.com/duckduckgo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Looks like it's back up now!

</comment><comment><USER49> fixed

</comment><comment><USER50> now it's good. It's searching.

</comment><comment><USER51> They're back. So that lasted about 4 minutes..

<comment><USER52> Still broken for me.

<comment><USER41> same, still broken.</comment></comment></comment>


The QNX Neutrino Microkernel (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.3.2/neutrino/sys_arch/kernel.html <comment><USER2> My biggest dream is for some version of QNX along with the Photon GUI to be fully open sourced. Even if it was QNX 4.

It would be a game changer.

<comment><USER3> It seems to me to be ideal for automation, yet most seem to be using Linux.

This is probably due to the Open Source status I suspect.

<comment><USER2> Photon GUI alone to replace X windows would be amazing.

<comment><USER4> I used it as my main desktop system for three years while working on a self- driving vehicle, in 2003-2005. There were versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, and Open Office, so you had all the essentials.

It's OK, but would feel dated to most users. The really great feature is that there is _no lag_. The consistency of QNX is impressive. This is a real-time system, not a warmed-over time sharing system. No swapping or paging. Proper CPU scheduling. So little "why did it do that?"

<comment><USER5> You must have been throwing a lot of CPU power at it, or perhaps I've just been extremely unlucky:

I've used multiple QNX based user interfaces and the one thing they all had in common was their lagginess and unresponsiveness.

<comment><USER2> What version did you try? When I tried QNX 4.24 on my desktop computer, I think it might've been on a 125 mhz pentium? Or a 486. The Photon GUI was snappy.

<comment><USER4> 6.71, on a Pentium III.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Essentially the same trick as in L4. Minimal messaging with MMU protection, all syscalls (messages) are blocking, no mailbox per receiver, unlike Mach/Hurd. Their biggest problem.

QNX has much better POSIX support than L4 though. But L4 is open source.</comment>


The iPhone 4G Predictions - <AUTHOR> http://martin.drashkov.com/2009/12/iphone-4g-predictions.html

<comment><USER2> Does the author have an iPhone? There already is an App Store Genius. It doesn't work with your ratings AFAIK, nor the number of times you use an app, but it is definitely there.

Not trying to bash the guy for writing his thoughts but even he says it is conservative. Extrapolating what the next iPhone will be based on the last 3 is easy to get 90% right, as the author does here. It's that last 10%, the interesting bits, that is difficult to predict.

</comment><comment><USER3> > _It is based not on sources, but extrapolation of current trends and an > attempt at reading the market (...)_

Clearly the author is unfamiliar with how Apple operates.

Also, the "3G" in the current iPhone models represents the cell network generation, not the phone generation.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, reasonable. And not very daring. Maybe even a bit too much on the safe side: the current iPod touch already runs at about 800 MHZ. I don't think the next iPhone will be any slower than that.

(But the idea about the screen resolution is great: I think they could actually do that.)

</comment><comment><USER5> The article suggests incremental changes. The 3GS had incremental improvements _and_ some real additions like the compass and video.

What will the real changes in the iPhone V4 be? Voice control? FM Transmitter? Seems too tame. Microprojector or 3D screen seems too far-fetched.

<comment><USER2> 3GS has voice control already. However, I always forget to use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> that was a pointless article. In summary, everything will be bigger,better, faster.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure I've seen reports of 64GB NAND chips being built for Apple. And, when you consider that there already is an app store genius, this becomes a pretty worthless article.

</comment><comment><USER8> Can you have a 4G phone that doesn't get 4G broadband??? No. They will have to call it something else.

<comment><USER9> He's using 4G as two things: 4th generation, and link bait.</comment></comment>


Cassandra: Structured Storage System over a P2P Network - <AUTHOR> http://static.last.fm/johan/nosql-20090611/cassandra_nosql.pdf

<comment><USER2> I like how they choose to trade off consistency for speed.

It's not like Facebook is a mission-critical application that requires all data to be 100% consistent. If an update to a user's photo album isn't immediately viewable by all other users, it isn't that big of a deal -- most users won't even notice, and the speed increases over MySql were dramatic.</comment>


The difference between keyboard and screen reader navigation - <AUTHOR> https://tink.uk/the-difference-between-keyboard-and-screen-reader-navigation/ <comment><USER2> I was at a conference the other week, and one of the big takeaways for me is how many people actually have some sort of disability. In the US for people aged 18 - 65 it's 10%, but for those over 65 it jumps to 37%.

It's easy to dismiss these statistics as 'not applicable to our customers', especially when you are a healthy twenty-something, but the statistics say that as we get older, 1 in 3 of us will have some sort of disability.

The talk also mentioned temporary impairments which restrict the way users can interact, similar to disabilities. What happens if you have a climbing accident and your mouse hand is in a cast for three months? Or maybe you are just on a train, holding the rail with one hand while it's swaying backwards and forwards.

<comment><USER3> Temporary impairments are a massive thing to consider! One example I recall was that Facebook learned video engagement rose massively when subtitles were added because most people scrolling through Facebook on their phone don't have sound on due to the environment (work, commuting, etc.).

Another example that I'm always complaining to designers about is that low contrast text might look fine when you are designing something on your desktop machine indoors, but take it outside on a phone and a sunny day might make it all unreadable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To sum up: screen readers critically depend on a proper document structure for efficient navigation, So, build a correct logical structure, then style it. Do not make everything out of divs and rely on CSS to render it nicely.

<comment><USER5> Screen reader is not the only reason to do that, but it is one reason. There are also other reasons why you should define the proper document structure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am a big fan of the viumium extension, it add easy keyboard navigation to any webpage. I'm not touching this mouse this if I can avoid it.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogbaibhgnhhndojpepiihcmeb?hl=en)

<comment><USER7> I've gone the other way. I'm using mouse gestures so that I can control my browser with a minimum of mouse travel, making keyboard shortcuts obsolete. Rocker gestures (hold left then click right and vice-versa) control my history, scroll gestures (hold right then scroll) scroll through my tabs, and regular gestures (hold right then draw a small figure) do the rest.

It's a very convenient and quick way to browse one-handed, like when lied back in a desk chair.

But on my old laptop I used qutebrowser for a while, which is a lightweight browser which also is focussed on vim-like controls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Something we've been trying to figure out is how to get screen readers to play nice with a terminal emulator. We're building one as a webapp and had a pretty good solution in an old version of jQuery terminal, but the new one splits each character into its own span... So we're trying out xterm which builds out a whole aria tree, but simple concepts escape me like... How can a screen reader "scroll back and forth" between terminal output, without just redoing a terminal command and listening to the whole output all over again?

<comment><USER9> If you have a Windows machine handy, I suggest you grab the NVDA screen reader ([https://www.nvaccess.org/](https://www.nvaccess.org/)) and try it out with the Windows console to get a feel for what a good screen reader plus terminal experience is like. I understand that the Orca screen reader for GNOME also has good terminal support, and I think JAWS for Windows does as well, but I'm more familiar with how it works with NVDA.

Here's how you move around the terminal with NVDA. For all of these commands, you need a keyboard with a numeric keypad, and NumLock should be off. I believe there are alternatives for laptops without a keypad, but I'm only familiar with the desktop layout. To read the current line, press numpad 8. To move to the previous line, press numpad 7. Next line is numpad 9. The same pattern applies for words (numpad 4-6) and characters (numpad 1-3).

Incidentally, on Mac, VoiceOver's terminal support is crappy enough that my friend Tyler Spivey wrote his own screen reader for the terminal environment, called tdsr [1].

[1]: [https://github.com/tspivey/tdsr](https://github.com/tspivey/tdsr)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Google Chrome supports a set of rational kbd warrior controls across Gmail photos, and the like.

i sometimes wish they'd bullied website Devs the way they did with amp to enforce hjkl vi/Emacs motion support.</comment>


Erlang/OTP 18.2 has been released - <AUTHOR> http://www.erlang.org/news/97 <comment><USER2> ecdsa-sha2-nistp256: yeah, everybody loves those nist curves. Not marked as safe by djb according to his hardened standard here: [http://safecurves.cr.yp.to/](http://safecurves.cr.yp.to/)</comment>


Free ads.txt analysis tools – bulk validation for exchanges - <AUTHOR> https://www.adauth.com/validation/publishers <comment><AUTHOR> A free tool for exchanges to validate their publishers in bulk.

Step 1: Enter a list of publisher domains, and your exchange domain

Step 2: ...

Step 3: Profit

See which publishers should authorize your exchange but do not.

Feedback welcome!</comment>


3600-year-old Swedish Axes Were Made with Copper from Cyprus - <AUTHOR> http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/archaeology/1.719125 <comment><USER2> And nearly all of the tin used in Bronze Age tools came from a single mining area in what is now Afghanistan. Recommended: Eric Cline's "1177BC, The Year Civilization Collapsed", great read on the state of the economy of the time (and from the title, its rather spectacular collapse).

<comment><USER3> So there was global trade in the 1100's BC?

<comment><USER2> The Bronze Age was an amazing period in history. It's end has many parallels to the current state of international relations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ancient Irish mythology describes people settling the island who first set sail from the shores of the Black Sea...so why not axes from Cyprus?

<comment><USER5> Can you provide a reference - is it the "black sea" or the Black Sea, if the latter what name was used for it in the oldest sources?

<comment><USER6> Well, traditionally the Scots in their legends said that we came from Scythia which is in that part of the world:

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

From the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath:

" _They journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes, but nowhere could they be subdued by any race, however barbarous.

Thence they came, twelve hundred years after the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, to their home in the west where they still live today._"

[http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/the-text-of-the- declaratio...](http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/the-text-of-the-declaration- of-arbroath-1-465230)

NB One of the kingdoms that eventually became Scotland was the Irish/Scottish Dál Riata:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A1l_Riata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A1l_Riata)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I understand why Northern Europeans would have wanted copper, but why did Mediterraneans want amber? Was it just a luxury good?

<comment><USER8> Quite possibly. It's no stranger than using gold as a medium of exchange. Some things are valued just for being decorative.

Historically amber has also been used in perfume and folk remedies. I have no idea if the Mediterraneans were into that specificially.

<comment><USER9> >used in perfume

Are you confusing amber with ambergris?

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

<comment><USER8> Nope! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber#Scent_of_amber_and_amber...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber#Scent_of_amber_and_amber_perfumery)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's also been known for awhile that the metal products often went the other way. As early as 1200 BC a proto-Celtic people had some major copper/iron works set up along the Danube, and the trade went down the river and over Anatolia to the mideast. Jewelry with Celtic symbols were found in Sumeria.

<comment><USER11> Even further afield, there were extensive copper and gold mines, for export, in very early Ireland, also proto-Celtic times.

Per Wikipedia re: mines in Cork and Kerry: "mining and metalworking took place there between 2400 and 1800 BC. ... Mines in Cork and Kerry are believed to have produced as much as 370 tonnes of copper during the Bronze Age. As only about 0.2% of this can be accounted for in excavated bronze artefacts, it is surmised that Ireland was a major exporter of copper during this period."

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What if there's no supply chain, but rather the material are recycled from whatever axes or tools which travel during wars or conflicts?

<comment><USER13> Third paragraph in the article states that Nordic amber was heavily prized in Mycenaean Greece. Distances and climate in Europe are actually quite reasonable for overland journeys, especially considering that the ancient empires of the Middle East interacted in a substantial way for several millennia despite being much farther than a Greece-Sweden transit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Free trade!</comment>


Overview of Running an Online Game for 3 Years - def- https://hookrace.net/blog/ddnet-evolution-architecture-technology/ <comment><AUTHOR> €10/m/location is damn impressive. I've run servers for a turn-based asynchronous and real-time casual game for the past three years. With ~700k unique monthly players (about 200k/day) we do about 1500 request/s at peak and pay thousands a month for our AWS stack. I'm not mad at it, I think we get great utility for what we pay, but this is lean and mean for realz.

Kudos!

<comment> def- Thanks! Interesting to hear about your experience as well. By requests per seconds you mean packets? I was curious and with 330 players playing on DDNet right now[1] we get ~7400 packets/s incoming, ~8300 packets/s outgoing.

[1] [https://ddnet.tw/status/](https://ddnet.tw/status/)

<comment><USER2> My guess is that he's talking about HTTP requests.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I am talking about HTTP requests. We're just exploring moving over to web sockets, the original implementations were done before that was practical on mobile networks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This was really great to read, in-depth and interesting, thanks a lot for taking the time to write it. :)

</comment><comment><USER4> The author writes: "Reduce the number of syscalls by caching the value of gettimeofday() until a new tick happens or network packet comes in" But I'm pretty sure glibc on recent Linux handles gettimeofday in user-space, without context switch (kernel maps the data to userspace). I guess caching the value locally and updating it 1/sec or something would still help if there are thousands of calls/sec, but not as much as if it was really a syscall.

<comment> def- You're right. Unfortunately with virtual machines that doesn't always work. You can enable it manually but that's more inefficient because the Kernel can't use paravirtualization for clock then. I stumbled upon this a month ago: [https://ddnet.tw/irclogs/2016-05-17.log](https://ddnet.tw/irclogs/2016-05-17.log)

        21:37 <@deen> A third of the sys calls of a DDNet server are recfrom and
                      sendto each
        21:37 <@deen> they always occur in large chunks, so ideal for
                      sendmmsg/recvmmsg
        21:38 <@deen> the last third are mostly strange time and gettimeofday
                      calls, I thought I got rid of most of them
        21:40 <@deen> server with 30 players causes 3000 syscalls a second
        22:00 <@deen> PACKET_MMAP is very cool, reading packets with 0 syscalls,
                      too bad it's not for regular applications (requires root,
                      doesn't work with normal udp socket):
                      https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/packet_mmap.txt
        22:04 <@deen> and then the glibc version matters a lot for syscalls. new
                      versions of glibc don't syscall at all for gettimeofday
        22:05 <@deen> (or something else is causing that, not sure yet)
        22:13 <@deen> Reading the glibc implementation, that's done by vDSO,
                      interesting: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/vdso.7.html
        22:32 <@deen> totally confused why some of our servers use vdso
                      gettimeofday, others not even though they have more recent
                      kernel and glibc
        22:41 <@deen> ok, probably depends on the underlying clock that the vps
                      uses. pvclock is used with kvm and doesn't support vdso. but
                      looks like there's some progress being made:
                      https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/12/9/914

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome and inspiring to me, great work!

I am now looking at LFE (Lisp Flavored Erlang) and ELM to create a very small online game. It makes me want to maintain C/C++ chops.

It's sad Apple is so walled in that you need a VM to build for OS X, and iOS doesn't even make the list. I have an iPad, but I use an Android phone for that reason, and I only program mobile for Android. Apple is getting better at supporting iOS devs of late though...

</comment><comment><USER6> Hey great work!

Curious to hear what the client stack was? Did you use LibGDX by chance?

<comment> def- Thanks! You can see the client here: [https://github.com/ddnet/ddnet](https://github.com/ddnet/ddnet)

SDL2, OpenGL, FreeType, pnglite, zlib, curl, md5, wavpack, opus, json-parser

So pretty much low level, keeps the performance and flexibility high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just re-downloaded (vanilla) teeworlds the other day. After playing a lot of QW and Xonotic, it's nice to play something like HLDM or TeeWorlds that's a bit more wacky and less competitive. There is no bunnyhopping in teeworlds. Just cute fluffballs, hookshots, and heavy weaponry. Although, for whatever reason, all of the players are in the EU, or SA, and I'm USEast, so the ping's really high. One of many reasons I want to get a GPU that can handle UT4. Yes, mine is really that bad.

</comment><comment><USER8> What was the reason for the fork with Teeworlds?

<comment> def- Teeworlds is a shooter. People wanted to race in Teeworlds, so a modification was required. From there it developed into multiplayer racing and the last few years of DDNet adding features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would like to see this kind of post for slither.io

</comment><comment><USER10> Maidsafe will eliminate all this server problems!</comment>


How to Build a Reading Habit (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://nickwignall.com/reading-habit/ <comment><USER2> > Use Blinkist

Visited their website. Pricing: give us your credit card for the free trial, cancel within 7 days, or we'll charge you $90 for a one-year subscription. (Oh, sorry, I meant $89.99)

</comment><comment><USER3> tl;dr

IMO, if you need 19 steps to build a reading habit, reading is probably not your thing and you should concentrate on doing something else.

I am an avid reader, yet sometimes I stop doing my daily before-bed reading, which is a good indicator that the book I was in the middle of isn't that great, and I should just move onto something else.

So here's my recommendation for building a reading habit:

1\. Find a way to easily consume books. I absolutely adore my Kindle, not sure I'd read that much if I had to hold for multiple hours a 1000+ page book in my hands every night.

2\. Find a book that you like. Non-fiction isn't my thing, so I don't do non- fiction books, until the day I find one that holds my attention. Simple as that.

In October I've started the Wheel of Time series for the first time, I'm on book 5 now, and I can't wait till it's bed time to read what's next. I'll be thoroughly sad when it's over.</comment>


Phlock, My Hardware Startup That Disappeared - <AUTHOR> https://atila.ca/blog/tomiwa/phlock-my-hardware-startup-that-disappeared <comment><AUTHOR> A few years ago, prior to starting atila.ca, I created an electronic device that helped people unlock doors using their phone, share the keys with friends and started a company called Phlock. Long story short, the company quietly failed and slid into the abyss of apathy.

In the spirit of "you learn more from your failures than your successes", I decided to write about what I learnt from starting a company that failed, open source the code used to build Phlock, and advice for anyone thinking about or currently starting a company, hopefully you can learn from my experience so you don't make the same mistakes I did.

Would also love to hear your thoughts on the article as well :)</comment>


Assessing Sweden's 'Vision Zero' Plan for Suicide Prevention - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/06/vision-zero-suicide-sweden/394994/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> (I haven't read the article yet.)

I once volunteered for the Suicide Prevention Service of Santa Cruz Count, in California.

I never lost anybody.

All I ever required to convince someone to disarm the implement of their own destruction, get a good night's sleep then consult a mental health professional the very next day was an hour or so of "Active Listening".

I quickly came to the conclusion that most suicidal people get that way because they feel no one ever listens to them.

Active listening is very helpful in many other situations, for example when someone is violently angry active listening can lead them to be happy and friendly.

<comment><USER3> _" I quickly came to the conclusion that most suicidal people get that way because they feel no one ever listens to them."_

At least, most suicidal people who call a Suicide Prevention Service.

Thank you for your efforts volunteering, incidentally!

<comment><USER2> Thank you for your kind words.

Unfortunately it is quite common for people to commit suicide without mentioning their plans to anyone, without anyone even suspecting. For example during our training we were told of a college student who committed suicide in his dorm room. No one missed him until the smell of his decaying corpse disturbed the other students on his hall.

It's also commonly asserted that suicidal people attempt suicide to manipulate others, for example to win sympathy or to send a message. In my experience that is not the case. I've met lots of suicidal people; a former employer of mine, Chris Schefler - a cofounder of the world's first web hosting service - actually did commit suicide. In my whole life I've only met one person who attempted for reasons of sending a message.

"Self injury" is a different thing from suicide attempt. That's commonly practiced by people with Borderline Personality Disorder. A psychiatrist explained to our training class that people with BPD do not experience feelings, so they cut themselves in hopes of feeling something.

<comment><USER4> Just to chime in here on BPD as well (for source, see comment above - I spent a couple of years fairly immersed in BPD literature as my wife was studying it pretty intensely for school/work, and I also had a personal interest as a result of some family members who had been diagnosed):

fiatchamp's right: that description of people with BPD is waaaay off the mark, and for what it's worth is a prime example of the stigma against BPD sufferers within the psych community. The best research on BPD (see generally the work of Marsha Linehan and subsequent) indicates that far from being "without feelings", people with BPD suffer from an over-intensity of feeling.

It's often compared to being without emotional skin -- just as a person who just had their skin badly damaged will experience extreme sensitivity there, people with BPD are abnormally sensitive to emotional pain -- and end up engaging in self-harm __not __, generally, as a way to seek attention or manipulate others, but rather to distract themselves from the inner turmoil.

It's a rough disease, made worse by pervasive condemnation from most of society, including many in psych. Thanks again for your work on the suicide line -- and if still you're interested in the topic, please read up on the post-1990s research on BPD. It will be worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Problem: people are "unhappy" and cant/wont fulfill their needs by them self.

Solution: fulfill their needs.

\</comment><comment>--

Problem: Their needs are unsolvable with money.

Current solution: Put the problem to the side using medicine.

Solution: Create a society where the state has powers other than money.

\</comment><comment>--

Problem: That society would be what we call pure communism.

Solution: Cleans all "evil" from the communist state.

\</comment><comment>--

Problem: how to cleans all "evil".

Solution: ?????

\</comment><comment>--

I dont belive it is posible to stop all suicides if we want a society where free thoughts is allowed.

<comment><USER6> I'm probably in the minority who believe we should not be actively trying to prevent suicides. I hope I have the freedom to take my own life some day when I feel done with it

<comment><USER7> > I hope I have the freedom to take my own life some day

This is different to actively trying to prevent suicides.

What most people want is to stop bad irreversible decisions.

<comment><USER8> > What most people want is to stop bad irreversible decisions.

Not so sure about this one. Isn't it that, from the point of view of a healthy, well socialized human, it's quite a horrifying thought of someone killing themselves? Isn't it that, if you have the gift and the will to give someone something so substantial as "being listened to", and this would save them from killing themselves, that is a human deed that we should offer for free, willingly and with compassion?

In my belief system suicide prevention is (for the most part) an emotional issue rather than an intellectual one.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Debian bootstrap from source code - <AUTHOR> https://wiki.debian.org/DebianBootstrap <comment><USER2> Debian bootstrapping is awesome and surprisingly easy to use. I've used it in the past to bring up a Debian install in a chroot on various otherwise unsupported devices (mostly Android watches and phones).

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you were using debootstrap rather than Debian bootstrapping? They are two quite different things.

Also: [https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile](https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile)</comment></comment>


A love letter to jQuery - <AUTHOR> http://madebymike.com.au/writing/love-letter-to-jquery <comment><USER2> I may have turned into a little wimp, but this actually made me a little misty eyed.

Sometimes when I'm working with React or Ember on a large project, and have to do quite a bit of work for a small feature, I fondly remember the days of just banging out a two-liner with JQuery that would do the same thing.

<comment><USER3> Stupid question from a newbie: why don't you do that today?

<comment><USER2> Well, while frameworks require a bit of boilerplate, it makes large projects MUCH more maintainable. Back in the bad old days, yes, you could bang out a bunch of features very quickly in JQuery, but as the size of the site increased there were lots of opportunities for disparate sections of code to interfere with each other. Additionally, there are serious performance concerns using jquery for any significant number of DOM mutations, which most of the major frameworks solve. Finally, you can't just arbitrarily mutate the DOM in these frameworks, so you can't use jquery willy-nilly if you're using them.

<comment><USER4> Some frameworks reduce boilerplate by implementing features for you in their way so that tiny trivial tweaks require reverse engineering the framework and maintaining your own fork of the framework. Hopefully generators that scaffold boilerplate instead of hiding features in the framework stay to pick up more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice meditation on one of the defining frameworks of the modern web. I don't see robust front-end frameworks like React as ever really making jQuery redundant – for the non-app, document-paradigm web, these solutions make for over-engineering, while pure JS still leaves (ever fewer, granted) gaps. For certain purposes, jQuery will remain the best fit for some time to come.

</comment><comment><USER6> Heh. I still use jQuery for pretty much every project.

There is a server-side port of jQuery which is absolutely fantastic: [https://github.com/cheeriojs/cheerio](https://github.com/cheeriojs/cheerio) This allows you to render jQuery based views on the server or client with the same code.

All the latest JavaScript view libraries are a huge pain to work with. Sharp learning curves, punishing APIs, and extremely unexpected performance issues. jQuery just works.

<3 jQuery

</comment><comment><USER7> Whenever I hear "You don't need jQuery!" I immediately ask myself: is this guy/girl younger than 25?

<comment><USER8> I think even people that are older sometimes forget how terrible it was to develop with JavaScript before things like Prototype and jQuery came on the scene. Just moving from alert() to console.log() was a revelation.

<comment><USER7> You're right!

Forgetting to say "thank you" to people who helped us a lot is something that happens more than often in IT.

I still remember when I heard of jQuery. It was in 2007 and it was so amazing.

Yes, I admit, the 'alert()/console.log()' was amazing :)

<comment><USER8> I'd just like to go back and show 15-year-ago me Firebug or Chrome/Firefox's DevTools and inspector. It's pretty stunning how far the tooling has come and what you can do with it.

<comment><USER9> Heh, nearly that far back I was wishing I could install Venkman in IE.

JQuery and Firebug deserve a lot of credit for bringing some sanity to JS/web development. Sure things have moved on now, but they were ground breaking.

<comment><USER10> Man, it was 2006 (10 years ago!) when Firebug, Drosera [1] and Web Inspector [2] were all released. There were definitely a lot of people eager to have some tools to make front end web dev easier back then.

I never worked with Venkman but I recall all too well the hellish time I had debugging JS back around the turn of the millennium. IE was laughable, if there was an error in a script somewhere it would often just say error on line -1.

[1] [https://webkit.org/blog/61/introducing- drosera/](https://webkit.org/blog/61/introducing-drosera/) [2] [https://webkit.org/blog/41/introducing-the-web- inspector/](https://webkit.org/blog/41/introducing-the-web-inspector/)

<comment><USER9> That part about the line numbers in IE error messages was exactly the pain I was thinking of :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A lot of what is now called Native comes from Javascript — every time we use `querySelector(All)`, for instance, it's because of jQuery's influence. Which makes me a bit less nostalgic than this author: every time I use qsa I think "Thanks, jQuery", but I don't need to use jQuery itself anymore…

</comment><comment><USER12> I've always had a dissatisfied opinion about jQuery, I much preferred Mootools. When coffeescript turned up, it seemed to hop on the back of jQuery. Doing a lot of the things Mootools already did and leaving gaps where jQuery was king.

Now I use typescript and no libraries at all. It isn't too difficult to write a utility object that can handle whatever depreciations or abstractions are fluctuating.

If you are writing a library of any kind and expect your clients to install jQuery for the benefit I'd say you've added too much bloat.

<comment><USER13> Funny how ES6 looks a lot like MooTools, it was ahead of its time

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wish he would have said why he doesn't need it any more. Heck, I just paid $30 to code school last summer to take the jquery courses and now I use the heck out of it on everything...

<comment><USER15> The big front-end JavaScript frameworks like React and Angular are architected in a way that no longer require jQuery for DOM querying or manipulation.

They also smooth out browser quirks which is less of an issue now with Modern browsers than it was at the dawn of jQuery which was another USP it had that propelled it to popularity.

<comment><USER14> Well I figured that. I was more interested in how he moved away from jquery. I've looked into Angular many times over the years. But sadly, I find more people complaining about it than praising it. Looking into React now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> John Resig is one of the kindest, gentlest, most wonderful people I've ever met. I think this is heavily reflected in jQuery itself. Thanks for everything JR and jQ! <3

</comment><comment><USER17> Honestly, I miss developing with jQuery. It was fun, expressive, fast, and unopinionated.

I miss the web before the framework bro's came in and over-engineered the hell out of it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wonderful letter. I agree wholeheartedly. I learned web development 15 years ago and I stopped for a long time. When I came back about 3 years ago, jQuery for me was such a beautiful and pleasant reintroduction. I kept thinking to myself "I can't believe this! You mean I don't have to use those insanely long and unintuitive native js Dom calls anymore?!"

</comment><comment><USER19> I'll just offer another perspective. for me jQuery was a major stumbling block to me learning JavaScript. And without JavaScript, you can't write very much jQuery either.

I'm young enough that there's a generation of jQuery-loving developers above me, and the whole generation younger than me is enamoured with the newer frameworks. But for me it wasn't until I stopped looking at jQuery and focused on proper JavaScript that any of it made sense to me.

The thing I find remarkable the more I learn Js is that the 'level' of the language seems _perfect_ for the problems you're working with. jQuery makes things abstract and high-level enough you'll never figure it out - and any lower level and JS would be a lot harder to learn. The more I get into it the more perfectly suited to the task it seems to be.

</comment><comment><USER20> The best APIs are those that don't change because they work so well. jQuery has pretty much been that.

</comment><comment><USER21> Here's an alternate POV. jQuery is fading from the spotlight not just because there are better ways of handling the DOM, but because the mindshare and code ecosystem that grew up around it got completely blindsided by modern module- loading/packaging systems. The same is true of Angular I think but to a much lesser degree.

</comment><comment><USER22> Longevity and robustness of jQuery is hard to match. 10+ years for a software project is amazing. Hopefully, in next few years pure ES6 (and later ES7) will give us that joy that's been missing.

</comment><comment><USER23> This was thoughtful, touching, and very emotional making! Thank you for writing / sharing this. Very much share the feelings.

</comment><comment><USER24> I wish someone builds a jQuery-like API for Android. Will definitely back it on KickStarter. Is it going to be React-native?

<comment> wh-uws Seems to have stagnated but someone has

[https://github.com/phil-brown/droidQuery](https://github.com/phil- brown/droidQuery)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> jQuery was invaluable 5+ years ago, but luckily it's not needed for most modern web projects, unless you need to support old IE browsers. Even then, it's worth seeing how many calls you really need to make that are not supported across your target browsers.

<comment><AUTHOR> > but luckily it's not needed for most modern web projects, unless you need to > support old IE browsers.

I disagree. While I am building our actual app in Angular, our landing page and that still uses jQuery for things such as ajax requests. There's no need to pull in any major framework like Angular for such tasks.

jQuery still has a lot of relevancy in the web.

<comment><USER26> I would say the landing page is exactly the case where jQuery is _not needed_ anymore. Yes, it's convenient to use, yet for a mostly static page with a few XHR calls, some DOM interactions and whatnot - it's a bloat, actually. 12-16 months ago it would be a sabotage in most cases, but once it's all OK to forget about IE8 - you really can put the good ol' DOM-AJAX-animation JS libraries to rest.

From personal experience: just few days ago I've made a landing page. Focus was on mobile and performance so no jQuery, modernizr, lo-dash, and so on. We only grabbed some syntatic sugar from microjs.com so we could write _$(el).remove()_ instead of _el.parentNode.removeChild(el);_ , etc.

Turned out a nice, little page with all the usual bells and whistles only really needs a 12KB of JavaScript code (uncompressed). We actually missed lo- dash more than jQuery.

In age of "modern browsers'" ubiquity, and Angular/React/Ember/MV* libraries doing the heavier stuff, the support for older IEs is really the last selling point of jQuery. And that goes away soon.

P.S. Very handy: [http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/](http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/)

<comment><USER27> > it's a bloat, actually.

I mean, it's like less than 30kB minified+gzipped, and if you load it from a CDN, then there's a 95% your users already have it cached.

I guess it's technically a "bloat" but unless all your images are gzipped SVGs, it's almost certainly one of the smaller elements in your page.

<comment><USER25> Unless you're using the unversioned ("latest") jQuery version on your CDN, the browser cache hit rate will be way less than 95%. I've seen some estimates at less than 20% (can't find the link at the moment).

And for various reasons, it's not a terribly good reason to use the "latest" jQuery version with no version, unless you're prepared to deal with sudden code breakage.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>