Goodbye Sweden - <AUTHOR> http://swedenreport.org/2015/06/02/goodbye-sweden/ <comment><USER2> Nationalism, xenophobia, and even fascism seems to be on the rise in Sweden - as it is in the rest of Europe. (I'm basing this solely on media coverage and personal observation.)

Posts like this show a poor attempt, with entirely subjective observations, to justify some of these attitudes. What's particularly scary is how the poster tries to disguise his views with a belief in socialist politics.

<comment><USER3> "The once homogenous population has been forever altered by a rapid and massive addition of people from vastly different cultures and value-systems. 26,8% of the population is now foreign-born or with at least one foreign-born parent, and the national census bureau estimates that some 150 000 per year will arrive to the country of just 9,8 million residents.

There simply is no possible way to absorb and assimilate such volumes of people, period. Then you are merely creating ethnic enclaves, which due to incompatible language, culture and job skills become ghettos, which in turns brews crime, misery and extremism. Once the inflow has exceeded the capacity for absorbtion, further immigration only makes the problem worse. "

I don't know the author, but this sounds like it belongs in a Pegida handbook.

<comment><USER4> People here in Scandinavia are very worried because their cozy little village of a region is being infused with massively different cultures.

Can't really blame them, and to be sure crime and social costs are higher as a result of immigration. That said, there is every reason to believe that these effects will diminish over time as immigrants start to integrate, even some beneficial effects are already showing.

The problem is that 'integration' takes generations, and a very large influx jeopardizes this process. So the adverse effects remain very visible and most people are too short-sighted to take the long view. At the same time Europeans are so hypersensitive about 'racism' that the topic can't even be discussed in polite company (which leaves it to actual racists to even talk about the issues).

<comment><USER5> Here in Denmark, in my opinion much of the worry is not based on first-hand experience with actual immigrants who have moved to your town and are not integrating well, but rather with a more generalized worry that the culture in some sense is threatened. That's harder to solve with practical measures like integration assistance, because it's not based on specific daily problems but more general ideological worldviews.

If anything it seems anti-correlated with presence of real live immigrants. The largest group of immigrants to Denmark go to Copenhagen. But Copenhagen isn't where you find the strongest anti-immigrant sentiment, as you'd expect if anti-immigrant sentiment were caused by contact with immigrants. Such sentiment isn't absent, but Copenhageners are comparatively okay with immigration and the majority take moderate views, focused on practical issues like programs to improve integration. The strongest worries and the more "militant" style of anti-immigrant politics comes from rural and small-town areas which do not really see large-scale immigration.

I believe this is also the case in a number of other European countries, for example in Austria and Switzerland, where immigrants go mainly to the cities, but anti-immigrant sentiment is concentrated in the rural areas and small towns. Some of this probably has nothing to do with immigration _per se_ but is a result of preexisting cultural splits between cosmopolitan, liberally oriented cities, and more conservative countrysides (a 19th-century sort of romantic nationalism is very strong in rural Scandinavia).

<comment><USER6> That is absolutely correct. But Switzerland has a different kind of immigration - its mostly highly skilled workers, working in IT or as doctors, and some lower skilled labour in the hospitality industry. The total amount is very high though (20%+), which makes people uncomfortable - and understandably so.

The situation in Sweden is a bit different though. Many of them are people that have no chance of finding a job in the Swedish market, which leads to crime, ghettos and separated societies. Its essentially mis-managed on a political level. This will only lead to resentment, the rise of right-wing parties and social problems. I don't think this is a desirable outcome for either the immigrants nor for Sweden as a society.

<comment><USER7> [http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/immigration-policy_-in- switzerla...](http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/immigration-policy_-in-switzerland- immigration-doesn-t-only-create-winners-/37635550) :

> At the end of 2012 there were 1.87 million foreigners in Switzerland, the > equivalent of nearly 23.3% of a total population that has passed the > 8-million mark. In addition, more than 270,000 cross-border workers hold a > job in Switzerland.

I bet that most of the permanent residents and virtually all of the seasonal workers are in the low-skill category.

<comment><USER6> No need to guess. Quote [0]: "The admission of people from non-EU/EFTA countries is regulated by the Foreign Nationals Act, and is limited to skilled workers who are urgently required and are likely to integrate successfully in the long term."

And the previously non-regulated EU residents are from a more similar cultural background, so there is a qualitative difference from the situation in Sweden.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Switzerland](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Switzerland)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Swede here – I don't agree with this post. He does bring up some very good point about the real estate situation though.

I do, however, think that it's wrong to say that Stefan Löfven is a 'corrupt yokel'. He's been in a very hard situation politically, where he's been forced to rule as a minority. The opposition is doing everything they can to make sure that he looks incompetent as a leader, as it's basically ensuring their next election victory. He's only been in office since september, so it's not actually that weird that not too much has been done.

The whole post is filled with overstatements like this – and I'm kind of amused about the idea of escaping sweden because it left some of it's socialist ideals in the 60's to go to a country who despises socialism.

<comment><USER9> They don't really have to try very hard. He comes across as deeply incompetent most chances he gets imho, he's been especially embarrassing in international circumstances. He should have gone the way of Juholt, if not for timing and a lack of decent alternatives.

I left Sweden 5 years ago and I more or less agree with the post. It seems to have some undertones i don't entirely appreciate but on the whole it should serve as a necessary reality check if taken with a pinch of salt. It brings up many points that are worth discussing at length but which are essentially verboten in Swedish society. Even if it does overstate or sensationalize somewhat.

I doubt he is leaving specifically because it has abandoned some socialist ideals. For me it has more to do with not wanting to be part of the mass delusion, not wanting to constantly fit your opinions to an ever narrowing hallway of acceptable ideas and speech (not because they couldn't but because they shouldn't have to). At least when you don't live there you don't have to see and live it day in and day out. If anything I have grown more fond of Sweden and the ideals it represents since moving, because I am not forced to come to terms with its realities on a daily basis.

<comment><USER10> Another Swede, I agree with a lot of the points, especially how the current government can't help but make themselves look foolish.

But, free health care, free education, almost no religious zealots what so ever, zero religious impact on lawmaking, a relatively inclusive society, etc, makes Sweden one of the better places to live in the world, imho. Obviously, I'm biased.

I too find it rather weird that someone who yearns for more socialism would move from Sweden to the US. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The same old xenophobe right-wing populist rhetoric we hear in Norway as well (though Sweden has admittedly met with larger issues than us).

        "Yes, there was a heavy blanket of socialism and collectivist values covering everything, but there was a core of pragmatism beneath the redness."

Redness? Come on.

</comment><comment><USER12> Dane here... we look at Sweden and sigh. The once prosperous and sensible country seems to have lost it. It's all about being "good" for other peoples money and it seems like there's a sort of self-hatred amongst ethnic Swedes. If you want to see the pinnacle of multiculturalism, feast your eyes on Sweden. I'll give it 10-20 years and then I think we will have a thorough breakdown in Swedish.

<comment><USER13> Swede here. You nailed it.

<comment><USER14> LOL. Did you sign up here just to say that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There are valid points in this post, eg [http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-diverse- cities-...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-diverse-cities-are- often-the-most-segregated/)

I thought he could almost be talking about London. Diversity is not integration. Lack of integration creates polarisation. A single example: different nationalities have different levels of education, therefore different incomes, therefore different social status, and different accommodation budgets, therefore geographic limitations, and common solutions. In my area, watching east africans try to steal phones off tables in coffee shops is so run of the mill it's boring. Same nationalities, same activities - community effects. Some places in London try to resolve such a situation by mixing up affordable housing with higher-income housing. The situation is then exacerbated, as the higher income people then have to live with what is in their culture unpleasant behaviour. Of course, everything just gets dismissed as racism, when it's in fact about culture, not race, and not applicable to all cultures. The dismissal resolves nothing. If we were talking about moving into the amazon, people would be outraged at the displacement of the locals, but somehow western cultures don't matter, or some sort of penance has to be paid for sins of some previous generations. Until the liberals learn to have a discussion instead of flippant dismissals and name calling, nothing will be resolved, and europe's moving to the right shows that their is something that needs to be resolved.

<comment><USER16> I have to agree. I am very concerned by both what's happening in Europe and by concerns being dismissed as racism or xenophobia. I am glad there are others who have a level headed view of this. It's really hard to talk about this topic, because so much of the associated vocabulary has been taken over by actual racists in the past and sets off all kinds of alarm bells.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As a Singaporean, I laugh at these low immigration numbers. 150K per year out of 9.8 million residents, that's a drop in the ocean.

According to the government, the total population of Singapore is 5.26M. Out of this, 3.27M are citizens, with 540K Permanent Residents and 1.46M non- residents. In other words, about 2M or 38% of the population were not born in Singapore.[1] Note that this is a conservative estimate since an immigrant can become a Singapore Citizen after 2 years as a Permanent Resident.

And yes, obviously there is great concern because a lot of foreigners do not assimilate well either.[2]

[1] [http://population.sg/resources/population- composition/](http://population.sg/resources/population-composition/) [2] [http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/rapid-growth- singapor...](http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/rapid-growth-singapores- immigrant-population-brings-policy-challenges/)

<comment><USER18> So that we are talking about the same thing, from where is the immigration coming from? Is it primarily neighboring countries with similar language, culture, and religion, or is it like Sweden where commonality in culture is the exception rather than the norm?

<comment><USER17> As of 2014, about 55% are from other South-East Asian countries. But the government has a policy of maintaining a stable "ethnic mix" which means that there are now a lot of mainland Chinese. And while I'm also Chinese by ethnicity, you can ask other ethnic Chinese from Hong Kong, Taiwan or Malaysia what they think about the nouveau riche from China. :)

Source: [http://www.nptd.gov.sg/portals/0/homepage/highlights/populat...](http://www.nptd.gov.sg/portals/0/homepage/highlights/population- in-brief-2014.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think some personality types are just prone to the attitude that everything's turning to shit. The same people that feel that the world is less safe today while statistics show the opposite. That doesn't mean he doesn't have some good points. Personally I'm particularly worried about the schooling system. The strain of immigration may be real, I don't know if it will be a net positive or negative in the end. To be safe I would prefer a more modest immigration policy.

I think Sweden is following a larger trend in the west of a more polarizing society with higher income inequality and the slashing of the social safety net. I think globalization and new technology is to blame for this, not naive politicians.

</comment><comment><USER20> Hyperbole. Some of the concerns are quite real but please don't mistake this for an accurate or balanced statement.

<comment><USER21> Totally agree. This is essentially a political rant about the politics of Sweden and as such pretty exaggarating. I don't quite understand why it's trending on HN.

<comment><USER22> (meta) Anything that gets more comments than votes is known to be penalised by the HN ranking algo. Any highly political post like this tends to get more comments than votes, so most of the time it sinks. But, this article is about Sweden, which is outside of most readers' personal experience, so while people still upvote it from agreement with its politics, they don't jump in and start debating it quite so much.

Eventually enough people will flag it or start commenting that it'll drop anyway (a mistake in the algorithm if you ask me, as it makes flags 'super- downvotes') but in the mean time...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _Now, to be clear, it is my opinion that modest immigration is healthy for society and beneficial for trade, cultural development and so forth. Protectionism as a concept is counter-productive, while free trade and the ability for skilled labor to go where they're in demand is beneficial for everyone._

 _Having said that, what Sweden is doing is something completely different. The once homogenous population has been forever altered by a rapid and massive addition of people from vastly different cultures and value-systems._

tl;dr: Protectionism is bad. Sweden should be protectionist and homogenous.

... if the rest of the article is like this I'm not sure of the value of it.

</comment><comment><USER24> The EU asylum system [0] is currently debated and fairness will be improved. It is not an easy task, considering the UK threatening to leave, but Sweden and Italy are treated unfairly by their partners here.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Regulation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Regulation)

<comment><USER25> This is an issue for Italy but not for Sweden. Sweden is not a border state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Funny how, as a Finn, the more international vibe of Sweden is one of the main reasons why I'm planning on immigrating there after graduation.

</comment><comment><USER27> Sweden is the best example of what happens when you have a completely liberal society. And, of course, it's bleeding to lots of places. And if you call them out, you are called racist.

<comment><USER28> Completely liberal?? Drinking is extremely expensive and regulated, drugs are strictly forbidden.

It's full of subsidies and welfare in many aspects of life and society, not sure what you're talking about.

It's very liberal in some senses, but calling it a completely liberal society is silly.

<comment><USER29> He's talking right-wing American English, where "liberal" strongly overlaps with "communist/socialist".

Americans are fond of reverting long-standing European political conventions "just because". Historical Liberalism was all about free trade and low taxes? Let's use the term for the party that supports higher taxes and regulations. Red is for socialists, blue for conservatives? Let's swap them! How fun!

(Not that it matters anyway, the entire European discourse is a million miles to the left of anything being discussed in the Land of the Free. The world is so weird.)

<comment><USER16> The use of the word "liberal" in the US drove me nuts the first few months I lived in the US. I used to be identify myself as a "Liberal" in Germany and constantly felt misrepresented when people were talking about "liberals" in the US. Weird enough the term that comes closest to what I understand as European liberalism is libertarianism. So we had to throw in a syllable to make up for the word that's being used everywhere else having been hijacked. I wonder if some of this is fallout from the insane two party system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I don't agree with the author on almost anything but I wholeheartedly agree that voting with your feet is the only type of voting that brings immediate results.

Voting with your feet > voting with your wallet > voting though a ballot box every 5 years (you should still do that though as it costs you nothing!)

</comment><comment><USER31> I blame aftonbladet.se for 80% of the crap going on in Sweden at the moment. They really have made a huge difference to the worse of the mental health of the nation.

<comment><USER32> 80% seems a bit on the heavy side, but I'll agree that them and Expressen are just cannons of useless vitriol.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> you had me at _" Jihadist Trojan horses are flowing through the porous border"_

what a pile of crap

</comment><comment><USER34> I didn't knew that ycombinator allowed such xenophobic views on their site. This is an example of some guy that thinks that only the pure swedish people is to be trusted.

I'm horrified at what Hacker News can become...

<comment><USER33> While I agree the article is trash I also think having it posted on HN provides value as the comments and reaction show clearly how unwelcome xenophobia is.

<comment><USER35> All it's shown me is how politically biased the readership here is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Looks like a case of "never meet your heroes".

</comment><comment><USER37> This reads exactly like Atlas Shrugged, complete with politicians bankrupting the system, unwarranted charity, non-objective scholars and a collapsing railroad system.

I don't know of the situation in Sweden, but I kept wondering if the post was satire. It seemed too one-sided to be totally honest.

And then things like "most of the west had a housing crash" don't increase your confidence in the writing.

</comment><comment><USER38> Everyone has their own view and cling to their reality with confirmation bias and cherry picking. The optimists say we'll work out any problems, this is a transition period, the complainers are exaggerating and "everything's fine where I live" The pessimists will say things are only getting worse and that the optimists are ignoring real problems.

I live in Stockholm and try very hard to have a nuanced view. Unfortunately, more and more, I see the pessimists view. It isn't as bad as the worst pessimists are saying, but it's also far from as good as the optimists are claiming. Sweden is a 2/3 parts tenderizing frog that's ignoring that the temperature is rising and 1/3 that's boiling.

If we see past the actual issues, which are complex and multifaceted, there's a number of trends in Sweden that's deeply disturbing

1) The level of discourse is only getting worse and more polarized. Populism, emotions and who can make most noise wins over any rational nuanced debate.

2) The quality of politicians are becoming more corrupt and separated from their voters, while resorting to pandering to whatever gives them votes, money and power. It's frightening to see the lack of competence in any party right now.

3) A naive sense of security and refusal of many Swedes to believe things are getting worse and that we are facing real problems. We don't seem to value what we always had and can't conceive we'll ever lose it. Even though education, pensions and care is going down the drain and crime rates rapidly rising.

Someone will twist or focus on some minor facet to state that's not the case at all. Everyone will like and tweet that article clinging to the feeling that we're still great.

4) Inability to treat root causes rather than symptoms.

5) A toxic media climate dominated by "feel good" articles and vicious attacks on any dissidents.

6) Exaggerating and focusing on the wrong topics. We can have a turbulent feminist debate in all the newspapers about manspreading in the subway, while ignoring issues like cultural violence against women, because it isn't "political correct" to even discuss that topic.

Sweden's problems are not only Sweden's... but symptomatic of the problems we're facing in general in Europe and the world: Inability to deal with rampant complexity and globalization, a financial system predicated on unsustainable expansion, booming population and third-world poverty meeting first world abundance.

We just want to feel like good people in a world where it's more and more everyone for themselves... Just saying all this makes me depressed, think I'll go back to believing we're awesome.

</comment><comment><USER39> "crumbling rail system"? Going to Sweden on vacation. Please tell me it's BS :)

<comment><USER28> Seriously, Sweden is an amazing country, so beautiful. People are so welcoming there, it's incredibly safe and easy to go around.

Everybody speaks English and is willing to help.

Some swedes that were mingling with some of this horrible immigrants the blogger was talking about where kind enough, to invite me to their place to sleep.

Don't guide yourself by anything on this article, I'm surprised it got so far.

Go to Sweden and enjoy that amazing country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Surreptitiously racist and full of prejudice. Thank you for leaving our country.

</comment><comment><USER41> the xenophobia in this rant basically amounts to "sweden for swedes", but it's more striking when you read this on the About page:

 _Please note that I enforce a zero-tolerance policy towards racism, violence and extremist comments.

Judging other people by the color of their skin is manifestly absurd. So please don't submit such comments here_

Edit: removed some sarcasm

<comment><USER42> Where is he "judging people by the color of their skin"? Exactly what is xenophobic in this post?

<comment><USER43> Did you miss these lines?

"Jihadist Trojan horses are flowing through the porous border along with the tens of thousands ID-less refugees. But what makes me the most pessimistic about Sweden's future is how the social fabric itself has been undermined."

If the "social fabric" of a country amounts to it's prior ethnic homogeneity, then decrying it's unraveling amounts to being scared of people coming from the outside. People which, in the case of Sweden, also tend to have a darker skin tone than the average citizen 50 years ago. This, in conjunction with the suggestion that Muslim immigrants tend to be "Jihadist Trojan horses" makes it a very thinly veiled Islamophobic piece.

<comment><USER44> > "Jihadist Trojan horses are flowing through the porous border along with the > tens of thousands ID-less refugees.

It is true that 9 out of 10 that applies for Asylum in Sweden have no ID.

Source: [http://www.svd.se/nio-av-tio-saknar-id- handling](http://www.svd.se/nio-av-tio-saknar-id-handling)

<comment><USER43> Nope, that's a willful misreading:

"Statistik från årsredovisningen som släpps i dag visar att endast tio procent initialt har godkända id-handlingar som godkänds av verket."

Only 10% had ID which were approved _on the first go around_. It's not clear what portion of the 90% had "no ID" and what portion merely had insufficient ID on their first attempt. Your reading would make it seem like ALL of these immigrants are shady characters out of a cartoon, trying to fake their way into the country.

<comment> saiya-jin I wouldn't be surprised if many of them threw IDs away, so they can claim they are coming from war regions and seek asylum, instead of being just another part of economic migration (like many people from north Africa/middle east actively try).

I don't blame them, if I would be so desperate, this would be a logical step. The big moral question that opinions differ so much on is: should we in Europe try to help all of them at all costs, even if millions will come?

Personally, I wouldn't mind sharing my resources, if the person I share it with will respect rules I set and learn to speak the language I speak. If not, goodbye.

<comment><USER43> To be trite and cliche: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Your claims make a superficially plausible story, but if you are going to base your moral decisions on something, basing them on these unsubstantiated claims is circular reasoning.

Why do you personally get to set the rules? Vote for people that support the rules that you believe in, but thinking that you can play cultural imperialist, dictating how people should act and what language they should speak, is frankly egotistical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Where is he emigrating to?

<comment><USER19> A country without any problems or immigrants: the USA!

<comment><USER46> Yeah, wait until he finds out there are 12 million undocumented immigrants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article is not relevant for HN. Flagged.

<comment><USER47> As evidenced by the 100 comments by interested HNers?

<comment><USER14> As per the guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Did this article really gratify your intellectual curiosity?

<comment><USER47> First criterion, front and center on that page:

       "Anything that good hackers would find interesting"

<comment><USER14> Being a HN user for over seven years, I'm very aware of that criterion. IMO most political discussions is a detriment to this site. But obviously there hasn't been enough user flags to kill this submission. Too bad!

Edit:

BTW, you didn't answer my question :-/

<comment><USER47> Doesn't matter what I like; if we flagged every article somebody didn't like, there'd be no HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I couldn't manage to find one single positive article in this _report_ [1]. So it's good for they that they got the opportunity to move (apparently they moved back for family reasons).

[1] Really? Not even an article about a particularly delicious meal of köttbullar?</comment>


CVE-2019-11510: Pre-Authentication Arbitrary File Read Vulnerability (Exploit) - <AUTHOR> https://know.bishopfox.com/blog/breaching-the-trusted-perimeter <comment><USER2> In Pulse SSL VPN, since submission didn't mention what.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely - thanks for that. The title was already running long though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> On the plus side, your VPN server now doubles as a file server!

<comment><USER4> And cloud service with arbitrary execution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like there are still a few thousand of them out there that are vulnerable: [https://www.shodan.io/report/SsFDWdzh](https://www.shodan.io/report/SsFDWdzh)</comment>


The New York Times's pricing is too high - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/back-of-the-napkin/the-new-york-times-is-shutting-down-7713515b525e

<comment><USER2> the suggested pricing seems awful low to me. I think the NYT is worth more than that.</comment>


How big is the Python Family - <AUTHOR> https://py.checkio.org/blog/how-big-is-the-python-family/ <comment><USER2> From the (at least somewhat) active projects Nuitka, a Python to C compiler seems missing here.

[1] [http://nuitka.net/](http://nuitka.net/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is missing PyonR, which is Python as a Racket #lang.

On the flip side, I'm not sure that PythonNet should count, as it "uses a standard CPython runtime".</comment>


Americans are drinking bleach and dunking food in it to prevent Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/americans-are-drinking-bleach-and-dunking-food-in-it-to-prevent-covid-19/ <comment><USER2> When we've created mass hysteria around this pandemic, this is the results. What did people think would happen? That all of a sudden people would start being free thinking, reasonable people who can separate the hype from the science.

When you put the fear of God in people, they will do anything, no matter how crazy, to not go to hell. This is the exact same thing. People know bleach is bad, but what does it matter because bleach might kill me but covid19 will for sure!

<comment><USER3> If only we had sane leaders who didn't voice similar idiotic thoughts in public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At least one person is bathing in it: [https://www.latimes.com/entertainment- arts/story/2020-04-24/...](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment- arts/story/2020-04-24/coronavirus-cristina-cuomo-chris-cuomo-clorox-instagram)

Pretty crazy.

<comment><USER5> "Why?" she added. "To combat the radiation and metals in my system and oxygenate it."

An _80 gallon_ bathtub? That's double a typical bathtub. They fit right in with the CNN crowd.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the advantage of listing your site as "Creative Commons"? - <AUTHOR>

From a purely selfish standpoint, beyond the issue of the public good, can this bring extra traffic, give you additional credibility, make you any money? <comment><USER2> CC Attribution is a well-recognized way to quickly give permission to people to redistribute and remix your work, publicizing it and increasing its value in the process. Bloggers looking for more color for their posts might grab a relevant CC'd photo.

CC Attribution-Share Alike may lead to someone creating something that you can reintegrate with your original work, improving it. If you provide a dataset of 2D time-based points and someone makes a neat visualization of that, everyone is better for it.

This depends on your content. Things like photos or datasets will probably be reused and remixed more than, say, written content (which will probably be quoted and linked to regardless of license).

<comment><AUTHOR> "2D time based points." Not sure I follow. Was that just an example?

Regarding the type of content on the site, I think you make a good point.

<comment><USER2> Just an example. I was imaging something like <http://➡.ws/詫> when I said it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It answers the question of "how can I re-use the content of this site legally"

The upside is that it means the site creator has put some thought into it, and allows the user to understand their rights clearly.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think that it really matters. It tarnishes the concept of cc : do you consider your site as a work of art ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Creative Commons is more about copyright than "art". Not sure why you would talk about tarnishing CC. In what way?</comment></comment>


Exolon game clone in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://newagebegins.github.io/exolon/exolon.html <comment><USER2> Brilliant. Loved this game and the Cybernoid series after it by the author Raffaele Cecco. This version is made all the harder for the fact there's no slowdown when there are lots of sprites on the screen as well. Well done.</comment>


The rise in popularity of boys' names that end in 'n' - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/america-why-are-you-all-naming-all-your-boys-like-this-1561328070 <comment><USER2> Of the seven boys I know under the age of 3, six have names ending in N: Mason, Lawson, Hudson, Colin, Callen and Quinn. And while the last one doesn't quote match the pattern as the others, that's a pretty stunning percentage.

<comment><USER3> That is fascinating. Please don't take this the wrong way because I'm genuinely curious, but are they all white kids? I'm curious to see if this is a way for some white parents to give their children distinctively white names.

<comment><USER4> I named my son Quinn - it's a celtic name, even though neither my wife or myself can claim any such ancestry. And no, we didn't really give whether a name sounded like a particular ethnicity even the slightest thought when we named any of our kids.

We generated large lists of names and would read them off to each other. Both of us just liked the sound of Quinn - felt modern yet traditional, masculine, and so we though, unique. Unfortunately it has become the "Sean / Shawn" of this generation - gender neutral and all too common. I feel a bit like Johnny Cash and the "Boy Named Sue" where I hope he doesn't hate me as he gets older. Honestly though, in our small town there's only one other Quinn (a little girl about his same age) and everybody in town knows him because of his unique name and even more special personality. So, guess it's alright in the end.

<comment><USER3> I see. I certainly wouldn't think most parents would make conscious decision to pick more 'white' sounding name. I'm more curious about the catalyst that makes certain names take-off in popularity, and hence making them sound more attractive to parents. In your case, I wonder what caused you and your wife to feel that Quinn sounded 'modern yet traditional'.

Quinn as boy's name is uncommon, but its popularity got a nice boost in 1985 and has been on a nice uptrend.

www.babycenter.com/baby-names-quinn-462915.htm

Quinn as girl's name is a different story.

www.babycenter.com/baby-names-quinn-6865.htm

It surged in popularity some time in 2009.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This strikes me as the same sort of statistical non-information that people strive to come up with during sports games (at least in the US). "Mr. X is the first person in 17 years to bat Y% during years modulo Z while facing right- handed pitchers with only four fingers on their left hands!"

<comment><USER6> Why is that? It's not just some sampling error, it's the entire social security database, and there is a definite trend over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Note this graph measures the % of total names, not the % of total boys with names ending with 'n' (which would be much more meaningful).

<comment><USER6> It says "distribution of last letter in newborn boys' names".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you want insanity, try to name _any_ female russian first name that does not end with a 'uh' or 'ah' sound.

<comment><USER3> Lubov.

 _does sanity dance_

<comment><USER8> "sonseh" is another one

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Certainly seems to checkout. It's an interesting trend, kind of similar to how the majority of girls' name ends in a vowel (including 'y').

Relevant Data: [http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/top5names.html](http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/top5names.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Father of an Ethan here. Before we named him (12 years ago) it was a relatively uncommon name, and then suddenly it was the #1 boys name. Kind of creepy, to be plugged into the cultural pulse and not be aware of it.

One thing that drew me to the name was that there was no obvious "cute" nickname form of it. Unlike my other favorite name, Lawrence, which gets turned into the distasteful (to me) Larry.

<comment><USER11> Mission Impossible?

<comment><USER10> That's my best guess. That and/or moms with their secret crushes on Ethan Hawke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hello new mods, just wondering why this story is only 2 hours old, has 43 votes but has already fallen to the third page, whereas [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7560756](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7560756) has the same number of votes, is 11 hours old, and is ranked slightly higher? Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER12> My two sons are named Carlo Gibson Septimius and Leo Balthazar Septimius. So is that one out of four?

Besides that the boys we know on their age is a Marius, Leon, Loui, Anthon, Emil, Emil, Ethan, Austin.

All the boys that end with n have english speaking parents (besides my oldest who is Gibson as a middle name)

<comment><USER4> If this is true, I applaud you - those are fantastic names.

Emil was somewhere on our list as well.

<comment><USER12> It's true :) What you see is a struggle between my wife and me.

I wanted Gibson and Balthazar to be first names, my wife wanted Carlo and Leo. She won first round I will win the next one :)

Emil is my nephew and a great name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is the graph measuring the number of distinct names that end with 'n', or the number of recently born boys who have names that begin with 'n'?

If it's the former, then unpopular names with many distinct spellings may be vastly overrepresented in the graph.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wolfram Alpha has name data, although I couldn't get it to return this sort of statistic.

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10+most+popular+boys+na...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10+most+popular+boys+names)

<comment><USER15> [http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/limits.html](http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/limits.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's funny I was just joking on twitter that, as a rule, every t-ball team in my son's league has to have a Jaden and an Aiden on it.

My son's name also ends in n (Boston) but I've yet to encounter it amongst other kids

</comment><comment><USER17> Well, there's a Kishan on my block and a Nathan around the corner, both under three. But John and its variants--Ian, Ivan--have never really gone away, have they?

</comment><comment><USER18> I would like to see socioeconomic status factored into the name trends.

</comment><comment><USER19> Maybe n is a popular letter to end nouns with the same way g is a popular way to end verbs with? (ing)

<comment><USER20> My half-baked theory is names ending with "n" are generally all clearly masculine. Many names are being gradually feminized, or at least androgenized, such as Taylor and Kacey. I bet many parents naming boys would try to avoid ambiguous or potentially ambiguous names.

All of the boy names that pop into my head right now that end with "n" are pretty unassailably male.

John. Shawn. Allen. Ben. Brandon. Trenton. Colin. Ethan. Jason.

Of course, the day is coming that some little girl is named Johnathan.

<comment><USER21> Counter to your point, Vivian used to be a common mans name but underwent a feminisation so that now it's almost exclusively used by women

<comment><USER22> To me, Leslie seems another good example.

<comment><AUTHOR> Beverly was the one that shocked me. It's partly since I grew up with an Aunt Beverly, and partly because I'm used to names ending in -ly being feminine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hurray I'm popular.

<comment><USER5> No, but your name might be. ;)</comment></comment>


How to learn D3.js - <AUTHOR> https://wattenberger.com/blog/d3 <comment><USER2> D3.js is great, DC.js is amazing. [https://github.com/dc- js/dc.js](https://github.com/dc-js/dc.js)

DC combines D3 and crossfilter for multidimensional filtering so you easily do things like click an element to use it as a filter for your other elements.

<comment><USER3> Shameful plug here - and yes dc.js is great! An alternative web-component based approach to dc.js is available here: [https://github.com/PolymerEl/multi-verse](https://github.com/PolymerEl/multi- verse). It is still based on Polymer 2.0, migration to lit-element in the way.

<comment><USER4> I recall seeing your project almost 2 years ago. A bit of unsolicited advice - It would _really_ help if your Github and docs page linked to a few actual interactive examples showcasing the different chart types supported, and the general capabilities of your library. Screenshots really don't do justice to projects like dc.js and your lib that hinge on interactions between users and charts/data.

It also appears that your demo for multi-chart is:

1\. Broken

2\. Blocked by most browsers and requires manual override of security suggestions (probably related to https and some sort of cross-domain things going on).

I'd be curious to see any working examples like the one dc.js has on it's main doc page. Cheers

<comment><USER3> Thanks a lot for your advice! Live demo used to be working on webcomponents.org - one service powering them has stopped working...

I launched this approx 2 years ago - using it in prod, but not had proper time to devote on better doc/demo/presentation. Looking forward to it during current migration to lit-element.

<comment><USER4> Awesome. Sounds good. Best of luck! I know that it's hard to find time for any of this stuff when it's all a labor of love in your free time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone involved in computational geoscientific research, finding new ways to visualize and present data is a persistent challenge. We don't use Javascript much (read: ever) in day-to-day work, but I think there is enormous potential there for viz of post-processed data.

This article gives a great intro to D3.js, and I'll be looking into it more. A colleague also recently showed me Dash by Plotly [0] which may be of interest to folks in a similar situation.

[0]: [https://dash-gallery.plotly.host/Portal/](https://dash- gallery.plotly.host/Portal/)

<comment><USER6> My issue with D3 and other DOM-oriented systems is that it's rare I have a small enough amount data that it would work for them. There's a certain amount preparation and filtering that can be done, but particularly with time-series or geographic data, if you're in exploratory mode, you want to be able to slice and dice as part of the interactive browser presentation.

<comment><USER7> As far as I know, D3 can also render into a canvas, which should eliminate the DOM/SVG nodes overhead.

<comment><USER8> Yes, in my experience this can get to considerable scale (hundreds of thousands and beyond) but at a price. You need to do all your own management for things DOM/SVG were doing (e.g. hit detection, styling). You still need to send the data to the client and probably store it locally (customers will enjoy learning how to start Chrome from the command line with flags like --args --js-flags="\--max_old_space_size=8192"). The client environment still doesn't have much support for data management or processing unless you bring in some other JS libraries. I'm a big fan of JS development but the criticism is on target.

<comment><USER7> True story.

There is no endless RAM, even for browsers :)

DOM-nodes are rather heavy compared to simple JS objects, so getting rid of them can bring some visualizations that are too heavy for the browser back into the realm of doable.

After that you have to optimize your other data-structures. If you have objects with many boolean fields or strings that are essentially used as enums, you can try to replace them with bit-fields, I read some library creators (BlueBird promise) got much performance gains with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just fyi

I used d3.js back in 2016 and it was already at that time very nice, but I always had problems to keep control of it (a lot of code and the end-results sometimes didn't work 100% as intended as my code did not cover all possible constellations of potential input data).

If I remember correctly after a while I then tried Cytoscape ( [https://cytoscape.org](https://cytoscape.org) ) and coding was a lot simpler and the results were more stable. I then dropped the project but I left with a positive impression of Cytoscape. There was maybe as well some other good candidate, but I just cannot remember anymore... (something that was doing at that time initial experiments with WebGL as optional/secondary output-engine - was it Cytoscape or something else?) .

Of course if you need max flexibility and very special results then D3 is #1.

<comment><USER10> For anyone confused by the link - Cytoscape confusingly exists as both a javascript library and a Java desktop application. Cytoscape the desktop application is a very biology-focused network visualization/analysis platform, whereas Cytoscape.js is a pretty general purpose network/graph library. You can find Cytoscape.js at [[https://js.cytoscape.org/](https://js.cytoscape.org/)].

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> D3.js was surprisingly pleasant for me to work with. It made it pretty easy to implement x-splines.

[https://jordi.platinum.edu.pl/xsplines/splines.html](https://jordi.platinum.edu.pl/xsplines/splines.html)

Some day, I should try to work and get x-splines into more drawing programs; I really do find them a lot easier to work with than other kinds of splines.

<comment><USER12> this is really great, thanks for sharing! I like the linked Papers We Love slides - wish I could have seen the presentation!

<comment><USER11> Yeah, for better or for worse, talks are intentionally not recorded. The idea is that this way people will be less afraid of asking questions and it's more of a guided discussion than a one-way presentation.

<comment><USER12> that makes total sense, and I love the concept. (even though I also want the recording of the presentation!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great intro. I got the book and it was really good. I don't know or have any association with them, just a satisfied user.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good to know. I got the free 1st Chapter and am considering the entire book. D3.js is awesome. You buy the std or the deluxe version?

<comment><USER14> I've gotten the React and RN books from FullStack. I reference them regularly because they're both great workbooks and reference books. I'm sure Wattenberger's D3.js book is similarly exceptional.

<comment><USER15> What kind of experience level would you recommend the React book too?

I've done small frontends in Angular 1, pure JS, jQuery, and fiddled around with newer Angular and Vue. While I found Vue pretty intuitive, I kind of got stuck jumping from the little tutorial components to a full page - how to organzie components, the code modules themselves, etc.

It seems React is eating the frontend world, so I've always kind of kept it on my to-to list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can someone familiar with d3 describe why you'd use it instead of the many libraries that use it under the hood? For example, I think either bokeh or plotly uses it, but you don't have to learn any of the d3 details, and also have more capabilities like webgl.

<comment><USER17> One of the frustrating things w this whole ecosystem is you basically have two choices:

* Use one of those higher-level libraries (bokeh, plotly) to create a chart that looks exactly like every other chart made by that library

* If you need to do _anything_ custom, at all, you end up having to build from the ground up w d3.

In other words, those libraries are super cool and I use them on the reg, but they offer little to no customization, so people very often end up back at the bare-metal build-it-yourself-w-d3.

<comment><USER18> I can't speak for other libraries, but Plotly is extremely customizable: you can change pretty much color, font, dimension etc. There are thousands of attributes which can be tweaked, from the length of the tick markers to the exact positioning of the titles, the shapes of the markers, etc.

Here's the full Javascript reference for all of these attributes: [https://plot.ly/javascript/reference/](https://plot.ly/javascript/reference/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> OK so I have been dreading doing some graphing work for too long now and am curious if anyone can help point me in the right direction.

How would you go about creating a live stock chart graph with D3.js?

All of the tutorials I have read assumed that the graph data was set in stone. Take this data, produce this graph.

I have created a few mathematical indicators for equity price predictions based on live data feeds, and I want to visualize them in real time in a graph.

Do you just keep rebuilding the graph every time a new datapoint comes in?

<comment><USER20> Mike Bostock's got some examples of charts that update without redrawing the whole thing (for example [1]) - you update the bound data and the bars/points/whatever to be removed/added fall out "magically". The term you're looking for is the "data join" [2].

1: [https://bost.ocks.org/mike/path/](https://bost.ocks.org/mike/path/)

2: [https://www.tutorialspoint.com/d3js/d3js_data_join.htm](https://www.tutorialspoint.com/d3js/d3js_data_join.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Super detailed and interactive exploration of the whole D3.js API. Beautiful to click through, insightful to read!

</comment><comment><USER22> Minor bug report in case the author's reading: in the "maps-and-globes" section it says "Change the projection in the dropdown below to see how they differ" but starts out with that dropdown populated with geoAzimuthalEqualArea while showing the projected map for geoMercator.

<comment><USER12> ah! thanks for flagging that, just fixed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Anyone know articles on how to integrate d3 with virtual-dom libraries like ReactJs ?

<comment><USER24> No article, but I've done it. You basically have to take on a lot of the creation of the SVG element tags yourself, since having both D3 and React manage the DOM is a bit awkward. However, a lot of D3 functions already give back most of the properties that you need to construct the DOM anyways. For example, the classic sunburst chart (example here: [https://observablehq.com/@d3/zoomable- sunburst](https://observablehq.com/@d3/zoomable-sunburst)) can be constructed from the section of code that contructs and partitions the hierarchy:

        partition = data => {
          const root = d3.hierarchy(data)
             .sum(d => d.value)
              .sort((a, b) => b.value - a.value);
          return d3.partition()
              .size([2 * Math.PI, root.height + 1])
            (root);
        }

Some downsides to this:

* Zooming is non-trivial, you have to recreate it in React proper

* React has to re-render entire hierarchies or massive lists depending on the traversal method that you choose to use for hierarchical datasets (topological or depth first) and React chokes on these pretty easily since they tend to be wide and flat

* Quickly changing data sets can't really benefit from memoization or React.memo, since the layouts themselves will constantly change. It makes things a bit awkward when mixing with memoizable data.

However, once we got the groundwork down, we never really had to touch it again. It was much easier to maintain than the pure d3 implementation using useEffect or componentDidMount, since we didn't have to deal with any sort of DOM state ourselves any more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've been meaning to spend some time with D3.js for a side project. Bookmarking this, casually scanning this it looks like it's exactly what I needed. How's the book different from the web intro?

<comment><USER12> Good question! This is meant more as an overview, whereas the book dives right into practical examples, while gradually weaving the basic concepts in. The book is a lot more extensive and detailed, and gets into data visualization fundamentals and more advanced concepts.

If you're curious, the first chapter is free to download and gives a good sense of the flow:

[https://www.newline.co/fullstack-d3](https://www.newline.co/fullstack-d3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I love using d3 to make visualizations, the only bad thing about it is that so many demos and tutorials seem to have been made on v3 which requires some minor adjustments to get the same code working on v4+.

<comment><USER27> The breaking changes from V3 to V4 was a real problem, imo. A lot of it was the same functionality just reorganized.

A better approach would have been to leave the old code running with stubs to the new method signatures. As it is, if you want to migrate code from V3 to V4, it takes a lot of mostly annoying and tedious work that could have been done once by a little bit of code that calls the new code from the old method signature. Have a d3V3toV4.js translator library in there if you want, but don't make people update years of code to get on the latest versions of the API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This looks beautiful but it doesn't seem to directly attack the main conceptual barriers that I find people run into with D3. These are: how its API is driven in a declarative functional style rather than imperative, and properly understanding the mapping from data space into the domain/range of the plot. Without getting these concepts right up front it can be really confusing. I would introduce those ideas first right up front before talking about the other parts.

<comment> marble-drink Yep. There is no point at all knowing anything that is presented here without understanding how the API actually works from a high level. For me it was an "aha" moment when suddenly everything made sense (and I realised how nice d3 actually is).

The other big problem with d3 is that you don't get much for free with it. Many people are surprised that you have to draw a bar chart using rectangles. But d3 doesn't "draw graphs", it just maps values from your data into attributes in the DOM. You have to know HTML, SVG, CSS, and, of course, Javascript very well already to have any success with d3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Back in the day I learned d3 by reading a tutorial by Scott Murray [1]. It was perfect for me as it also covered the basics of javascript itself, which I hadn't used prior. It's written for v3 of d3.js, so a bit out of date now, I still wanted to give it a shout out - thanks Scott!

[1] [https://alignedleft.com/tutorials/d3](https://alignedleft.com/tutorials/d3)

</comment><comment><USER30> Nicely paced intro to D3.js except for the part where it matters the most. The `d3-selection` section where this guide introduces "the pattern", things begin to go downhill as the author loses the audience they claim to be targeting.

`.enter()` and `.exit()` is not covered at all, simply outsourced to the guide/demo by Mike Bostock, which is actually a really nice demo however it also omits explaining the mechanism.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the feedback! There were so many rabbit holes that I had to prevent myself going down - I scope creeped this article enough as it is!

I also specifically didn't want to go into the data join patterns for two main reasons:

1\. there are lots of other articles that talk about it in depth, and 2\. these days, I largely don't use it at all.

This is partially why I wanted to write this up, because the DOM manipulation parts can seem like an integral part of D3, but there are really only 2 modules devoted to it. I mostly use D3 for its utility methods, and a JS framework like React to handle all of the rendering, and I really want other people to be able to discover those functions without first "learning d3".

<comment><USER31> Your article is very impressive, really good work!

These days I also tend not to use d3 for DOM manipulation, but only for its powerful helper functions (d3-scale, d3-array, d3-shape, d3-geo etc.)

I even try not to import d3-selection except for very specific cases.

I'm using Vue for DOM manipulation, and computed properties play very well with d3 helper functions (i.e. a scale which auto-updates itself reactively). In a way it's very similar to ObservableHQ's reactivity. Most examples from Observable can be relatively easily converted to Vue with computed properties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Awesome. Wattenberger's blog is also really good (from a cursory glance). Really impressive stuff, can't wait to read it all.

<comment><USER12> thanks! I'm always open to requests for new posts as well, if there's anything you want to read about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's nice to find a good D3 resource.

I've had a couple projects where I wanted to dive into D3.j but I found it to be a huge topic and most of the time I end up with a D3 related framework where I don't have to dive in to the depths of D3.... but still wishing I could learn D3.js directly.

</comment><comment> kube-system If anyone is having issues loading this site like me -- it looks like DNSSEC for this site isn't validating properly.

[https://dnssec-analyzer.verisignlabs.com/wattenberger.com](https://dnssec- analyzer.verisignlabs.com/wattenberger.com)

<comment><USER34> What makes you think that? Like almost all sites on the Internet, I don't see DNSSEC set up for Netlify (or this content domain) at all.

<comment> kube-system You're right, I must have totally misread that page I linked. My resolver was returning a bogus result, I toggled DNSSEC validation, and didn't dig much further. Looks like it's an issue with my resolver on this domain. Odd, because I haven't touched my configuration in ages and I haven't seen this problem before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> How is D3.js these days? I last tried to use it 4 years ago for a side project, and ended up using C3.js instead (its a D3 wrapper). Since then, I haven't followed either library's development.

<comment><USER36> We used c3. But switched to Vega-lite. It is another wrapper on D3 but it's well thought out and the defaults are really good. It has university backing. We vega lite for our web based software (it reminds me of R's ggplot2)

[https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/](https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/)

They have a python graphing lib too based on the same "grammar of graphics"

[https://altair-viz.github.io/](https://altair-viz.github.io/)

<comment><USER37> +1 vega-lite and altair

The interactive crossfilter part in particular

[https://altair-viz.github.io/user_guide/interactions.html](https://altair- viz.github.io/user_guide/interactions.html)

[https://vega.github.io/vega- lite/examples/interactive_seattl...](https://vega.github.io/vega- lite/examples/interactive_seattle_weather.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Such a well paced tutorial, bookmarked!

</comment><comment><USER39> As someone who wrote a lot of charts in d3.js I must say that just using React instead of d3.js is a lot less overhead. But that's my opinion.

<comment><USER12> I share your opinion! And that's actually partially why I wrote this post - it's really great to know the different utility methods of d3.js to help render a data viz (using React, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Great site op ! Great intro for d3

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Looking forward to learning it myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Really nicely put together page.

</comment><comment><USER42> This looks interesting, I am looking for a new way to plot my fitbit data exports (right now using Python with Pandas and Matplotlib), but I still need to find a good way to store all that data before plotting it!

<comment><USER43> Do you know SQL? Storing it in a local PostgreSQL database and using PostgREST for D3 to access it would let you slice and dice in addition to graphing.

<comment><USER42> Yes thank you for the tip! PostgreSQL does sound like a great idea and it would be easy to add new data points since I can check against the timestamp before adding new data.</comment></comment></comment>


Browse websites from search engine results page - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/url-render/flhclpkhoiajoikkabbfbinnjapaflog?hl=en <comment><USER2> Can't get Twitter to work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Weird, it works on my computeur. Maybe a network security settings ?</comment></comment>


Stop Being an Idiot - <AUTHOR> http://orderedlist.com/our-writing/blog/articles/stop-being-an-idiot/ <comment><USER2> I agree with the author's point, but I really wish there were some examples. It's one thing to say that you're against stupid, boring interface design. I think we could all agree on that. But I bet we'd have a slightly harder time agreeing on just which interface designs are stupid/boring and which are simple/elegant.

<comment><USER3> I'll throw out an example: The Drupal admin interface is an example of stupid/boring, while the Wordpress admin interface is an example of simple and elegant.

Anyone agree?

<comment><USER4> I can't agree at all about the WordPress admin interface, which I use to run the website of my nonprofit (because that is what was set up by someone else). It's a very annoying interface and one I hope to replace as soon as possible-- although I acknowledge I am still shopping for what to replace it with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Edward Tufte's advice is to visualize your audience (i.e., "users") as "smart but busy".

</comment><comment><USER6> Stop reinvinting the wheel. Don't be an asshole and replace the browser's scrollbar with one of your own.

Especially when the scrollbar you invent doesn't work in Chrome.

<comment><USER7> I find "Don't reinvent the wheel" to be a terrible idiom. Think about the wheel for a moment. Is the wheel on your bike the same as the wheel on your car, or on a train, or an an airplane? Of course they're all different! The wheel has been reinvented thousands of times, and we're better off for it!

Yes, it can be worthwhile to borrow successful concepts from other disciplines. But in many cases, the concrete implementation NEEDS to be reinvented in order to apply the abstract concept to a new purpose.

<comment><USER8> OK. How about "Don't build hexagonal wheels, unless you have a _very_ unusual use case."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I always yell at people who blame themselves for not being able to figure out a technology, whether it be the UI of a program or the physical interface of a device. People tend to assume stupidity on their own part; instead, I tell them to blame the designers. After all, most people would blame the manufacturer if confronted with a car that was hard to use. Interesting how simple interfaces (a wheel and two peddles) are expected in some areas and not in others.

</comment><comment><USER10> FYI your site doesn't work too good in Safari or Chrome. Very slow scrolling. Something about the background image I suspect. Works fine in Firefox though.

</comment><comment><USER11> _Nobody likes the unfamiliar._

Then why is your blog dim white letters on a black background?

The first thing my reptilian brain thought was that this was some kind of left-brained new-age artistic fluff. But it's not. You have important points to make.

So do your readers (and back button pushers) a favor and practice what you preach. Combine your artistic tendencies with a more familiar, more functional white background and reach more of us. You _can_ do both.

<comment><USER12> I'm teaching you that different interactions are ok. Unfamiliarity isn't wrong, it's just different. People get used to it, and often times prefer it. Consider my site your education on different contrast ratios. You did, after all, read the post.

<comment><USER13> I didn't read more than a few lines. White on black gives me a full-blown migraine. Many other people also seem to find it literally painful to read, not merely unfamiliar or jarring.

Consider me your education on different contrast ratios. ;-)

<comment><USER12> Dark text on a light background (on screen) gives some people migraines too. This scheme is my preference, has always been, therefore it's what I make for my own site. Feel free to use your preference for your own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the author makes a great point. I pursue this concept in what I call "elegant design". What this means to me is taking as much functionality as possible and putting it into a simple to understand package. There is a huge difference between "intuitive" and "Dumbed down". Want some exapmles? Think Apple products or, online, facebook. Both have a lot of features available, but you aren't overburdened by them. You take what you need and you leave the rest. On top of that, both offer an intuitive GUI that is easy to comprehend. A lot of times this comes down to interconnecting all of the aspects of your system to be accessible where your users need them to be.

I feel this is an area Microsoft has struggled with in the past and they are finally catching up with their more recent Office program. A good case study here? Compare Microsoft Outlook to Gmail. Gmail is an elegant solution, Outlook is incomprehensible to the point that there are companies whose business is making it easy to understand (ie. Xobni).

There are many other examples, but I'm interested in what everyone else thinks too...

</comment><comment><USER15> And this goes double for language designers!

<comment><USER16> I suppose so (hey, Lisp is The One True Way), but also don't expect your users to be super-human (i.e. garbage collection is best for many of not most problem domains).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Isn't "Dumbing it down" exactly what apple is doing with the iPad, which will almost certainly be a runaway success?

<comment><USER18> There's a fine line, and I suspect the iPad is on the right side of it.

What you probably want to shoot for is offering features that will leave 90% of your customers 99% satisfied. If you only offer the stuff that the bottom 50% needs, too many people will feel crippled (and that's what a dumbed down product will look like), whereas if you try to please that top 10%, you're going to have to make the UI far too complex. If you please 90% of the target audience, you'll likely end up with a clean interface without pissing off too many people.

I'm all but certain the iPad will fully satisfy 90% of the people that buy it, especially since it's not being positioned as a desktop replacement.

<comment><USER17> Interesting. Thanks for your thoughts

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I agree with Tracy's comment on this post. What specifically are we talking about, other than generalities?

</comment><comment><USER20> Tufte rehashed

<comment><USER20> Why would this be flagged/downvoted? Tufte says it better, says more about it, and gives awesome examples.

<comment><USER21> Probably because your comment lacks information. "Tufte rehashed" tells me nothing. Who is Tufte? Is that a company? A person? A blog? What's their link? Is it just an inside joke I don't get?

Just adding context and links to your comments would make them more useful.

<comment><USER22> Just in case you actually haven't run across him before -

<http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The simplest way that you can measure & tweak usability to your site is to do some basic field testing.

Nielsen has an excellent outline for actually testing and applying basic user interface design here

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/anybody-usability.html>

If you have a budget, do it up right.

If you don't, rely on family and friends that fit your demographic.</comment>


Men not marrying? How deep does the problem go? - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlvMAS_20K4

<comment><USER2> From the guidelines:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Go back to Tumblr.</comment>


Bill Gates is backing a revolutionary waterless toilet - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com.au/bill-gates-waterless-toilet-2016-11 <comment><USER2> This still requires the use of a battery. I've seen some pretty badly maintained toilets in different parts of the world.

I forsee many of these toilets not being used or maintained because it's much more complicated than your standard toilet and needs more maintenance.

The toilet hasn't changed much over the years because it's so simple.</comment>


Five ways to work 35 hours (or less) a week as a programmer - <AUTHOR> https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/07/03/35-hour-workweek/ <comment><USER2> In Sweden this is already normal at big companies, and I'm getting so used to it that I may go down to 7 hours at my next job also (they are not as big).

It really is super nice to go home at 4 pm.</comment>


Cliq - <AUTHOR> http://www.justcliq.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Saw these guys present last night. The press release gives a good overview: [http://www.justcliq.com/press/#general-press- release](http://www.justcliq.com/press/#general-press-release)

"Cliq is a touch sensitive smartphone case... It's completely wireless, you'll never need to charge it..."</comment>


Jobs in 2020: the importance of emotional intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://www.thinkautomation.com/future-of-work/jobs-in-2020-the-importance-of-emotional-intelligence/ <comment><USER2> I'm an outsider who attended Cogx in London and spoke to some of the brightest minds there:

"Social/communication skills" were sorely lacking.

I'm not naming names and I don't like what I'm writing but it really worries me that they were architecting the future.

I do apologise as I'm not a cruel person but there you go.</comment>


The Alternative History of Public-Key Cryptography (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://cryptome.org/ukpk-alt.htm

<comment><USER2> It was Singh's book got me interested in crypto when I read it in 9th grade, but it really made me smile to revisit this!

Since leaving GCHQ, the NSA, and a hedge fund, Nick works as a genetic anthropologist at the Broad Institute. Last year I had the distinct pleasure of haranguing Nick Patterson with all manner of technical questions, mostly with regards to Hidden Markov Models. He never did mention his role in public- key cryptography. The NYTimes did a bio on him a few years back, it's a great read about an amazing person and intellectual giant.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/science/12prof.html> [http://www.broadinstitute.org/blog/five-questions-nick- patte...](http://www.broadinstitute.org/blog/five-questions-nick-patterson)

<comment><USER3> <http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/mf_qa_singh/> Wired article about how the British Chiropractic Association went after Singh.

      Simon Singh: It would have meant that whenever somebody
      typed "Simon Singh" into a Web search, it would say,
      "science journalist found guilty of libel." People could
      dismiss anything I'd ever written about alternative
      medicine. But more important, it would have implied that
      there is some validity to these claims that chiropractic
      can help with things like asthma and colic. And that
      would have an impact on parents and their children. Faced
      with that, I couldn't apologize. If you've written
      something that you believe is true, and if you can afford
      to defend it, then you've got to defend it.

<comment><USER2> The UK really needs to backport the Zenger Trial.

<comment><USER3> This <http://www.relfe.com/media_can_legally_lie.html> I think turns it on its head. Its trajectory was quite the opposite of Singh's libel lawsuit. Zenger side of Atlantic isn't any rosier.

It was established that, deliberate falsification of the news (by Fox) is the agency's legal right, and so is firing reporters not willing to lie on purpose (about health effects).

Law totally beats me. Thankfully I am not a lawyer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wrote about this in Wired some time ago. Here's the link. It's also the subject of the last part--a sort of epilog--to my book Crypto.

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.04/crypto_pr.html>

I was at Cocks' talk, which was held, appropriately enough, at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and others cracked Nazi Enigma codes. It is really worth a visit if you are in London and have a day to travel. Whit Diffie also shared with me some fascinating stories about his strange relationship with James Ellis, his counterpart in the classifed shadow world.

</comment><comment><USER5> Clifford Cocks, meet David Huffman...

\-- Exhibit A --

 _Cocks did not fully appreciate the significance of his discovery. He was unaware of the fact that GCHQ's brightest minds had been struggling with the problem for three years, and had no idea that he had made one of the most important cryptographic breakthroughs of the century. Cocks's naivety may have been part of the reason for his success, allowing him to attack the problem with confidence, rather than timidly prodding at it._

\-- Exhibit B --

 _In 1951, David A. Huffman [...] hit upon the idea of using a frequency- sorted binary tree and quickly proved this method the most efficient. In doing so, the student outdid his professor, who had worked with information theory inventor Claude Shannon to develop a similar code._

\--

In other words, as we can clearly see here, it pays to be ignorant :-)

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if Clifford Cocks was the inspiration for the passage in Neal Stephenson's book Cryptonomicon, where the rookie NSA employee finds the (zeta?) function that is seeded with the word "COMSTOCK"? Either way, the real history of cryptography is often just as interesting as the fiction written about it.

<comment><USER7> Comstock is a recurring name throughout Stephenson's works. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle> in particular comes to mind.

<comment><USER6> Definitely. And the "rookie solves a seemingly impossible math problem without knowing it's supposed to be difficult" is a pretty common archetype, but it seemed like enough details matched that maybe there was a connection.

<comment><USER8> One nice instance of the archetype is George Danzig: <http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's the problem with government research - same problem with the air forces' 1968 moon landing.

</comment><comment><USER10> this is gonna sound silly, but is anyone else scared to visit cryptome? same with wikileaks.

<comment><USER11> No. Why would I be scared?</comment></comment>


Germany refuses to sign ACTA (for now) - <AUTHOR> http://www.panarmenian.net/eng/news/92920/ highler quality sources in German Language: http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article13861529/Berlin-verweigert-Unterzeichnung-von-Acta-Abkommen.html <comment><USER2> Don't let yourselves be fooled - not only in Germany is it a common method by the government to undermine protests, to call them successful, sit out the fallout, then try again when public attention is focused on other events (like, a football cup or olympic games). I hope noone will withdraw their call for protest tomorrow.

As Germany is one of the most infuencial countries in the EU, we should also show solidarity to the people in other countries and help overturn this treaty entirely.

<comment><USER3> Its not a common method in Germany. No idea where you come from but if you would know a bit about Germany then you would understand that there democracy still kind of works (unlike in the US for example).

<comment><USER4> _Its not a common method in Germany._

Where are you getting that from? It's standard practice, try reading some alternative media (fefe!) sometime. I have no matching links handy, but you can read about it pretty frequently if you look in the right places (e.g. during the Fukushima event).

<comment><USER5> What do you mean with alternative media?

The "alternative media" is what conspiracy theorists use to convince themselves that 9/11 was an inside job.

If by alternative you mean a place like HN where stories are being commented on then I agree but you will hardly find one sided support for that kind of claims here.

Which is why HN for all the bad trends we see here is still one of the best places to get our apriori views invalidated.

<comment><USER6> HN does not invalidate your views, it presents you with the views of a certain group of (mostly U.S. based) people.

You can observe strong tendencies in viewpoints for both web/startup/tech related things as well as political issues, and especially for the latter you won't find the full "political spectrum" covered around here (not confining its meaning to notions like left/right wing here).

That's why you should use several different sources/media.

<comment><USER5> Oh I do use several different sources. The point is that HN attracts different sources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Go Germany! So it seems there is hope yet. The noise about ACTA in Poland is still growing and politicians are beginning to notice this is a much bigger deal than they thought. Especially as the leading party just went down several percent in polls.

This can now be stopped at the EU level, which will not be easy, but is doable.

</comment><comment><USER8> As a German, I consider this a desperate attempt to dilute the efforts of the opposition to organize nationwide rallies on saturday. The move just seems too perfectly timed... (Edit: the keyword here is 'for now')

</comment><comment><USER9> Its still not to late to sign the petition against ACTA: <http://www.avaaz.org/en/eu_save_the_internet/>

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm afraid it's only postponed until the EURO 2012 in summer :-/

</comment><comment><USER11> [https://www.amnesty.org/en/news/eu-urged-reject- internationa...](https://www.amnesty.org/en/news/eu-urged-reject- international-anti-counterfeiting-pact-2012-02-10)

Amnesty international asks EU not to sign ACTA.

</comment><comment><USER12> Good for you Germany!

I wish British politicians weren't useless, spineless, back stabbing, lying arseholes. They signed without blinking an eye.

<comment><USER13> Concur. Would the movement to save the NHS eclipse any ACTA movement too?

<comment><USER12> What movement to save the NHS? I think it's a movement to fuck it up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This seems like big news. Can this article be trusted? I don't see this being reported anywhere else.

<comment><USER15> Yes, it can be trusted: [http://www.zeit.de/digital/internet/2012-02/acta- deutschland...](http://www.zeit.de/digital/internet/2012-02/acta-deutschland- ablehnung)

<comment><USER16> BTW great article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> GG Deutschland! Anti ACTA protest planned tomorrow in Romania. Please attend the rally in your city.</comment>


Can I ask a potential employer for code samples and/or employee contacts? - <AUTHOR> https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/113051/is-it-reasonable-to-ask-a-potential-employer-for-samples-of-their-code-and-or-em/113056#113056 <comment><USER2> This feels like something you can usually only get away with if you're the mythical 10x rockstar developer. The employer has lots of options. You are merely one of them. They already rule out tons of applicants on arbitrary criteria. The power imbalance is why wasting the applicant's time is perfectly fine, but if you want the interviewing party to show you proprietary code or give you employee contacts, that means you're making additional work for them, and you're not 100% on board with this place yet, so why are they wasting time on someone who seems skeptical (maybe not a "team player") and might not even accept their offer?</comment>


Apple Reportedly Cuts iPhone Production By 20% To Meet Falling Demand - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/07/09/links-9-july-apple-reportedly-cuts-iphone-production-by-20-percent-to-meet-falling-demand/ <comment><USER2> Everyone knows Apple's iPhone release schedule so wouldn't that make sense?

</comment><comment><USER3> It sort of makes sense for demand to be low right now. They just released a new operating system. Typically, new hardware will follow a few months later.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is not unusual at this point in the product cycle.</comment>


Verbal Abuse on the Linux Mailing Lists - <AUTHOR> https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/15/329

<comment><AUTHOR> Sarah Sharp linked to this on her blog [1], but the discussion itself is more interesting.

[1] [http://sarah.thesharps.us/2013/07/15/no-more-verbal- abuse/](http://sarah.thesharps.us/2013/07/15/no-more-verbal-abuse/)

</comment><comment><USER2> .... her response to perceived verbal intimidation and abuse is threats of verbal intimidation and abuse?

</comment><comment><USER3> Same old culture clash again.

Linux kernel list has this old school male hacker culture where being nice and politically correct when you disagree is not required. If you make mistakes, it should hurt and you should take it personally and cry at night.

Then there is this new politically correct enterprise framework hacker culture where people want to connect and to be accepted as human beings.

It's like merging between motorcycle gang and golf club.

People should understand that calling names and getting insulted is not always bad thing. If you assume that all mailing lists should end up being bland and polite, you'll be disappointed.

<comment><USER4> _It 's like merging between motorcycle gang and golf club._

That's priceless :).

In many ways this is the norm for mailing lists and IRC channels. I'm not condoning this kind of behavior but it's been that way for a long time. It also starts at the top and many projects do not tolerate that kind of behavior and encourage everyone to be part of the community--there is hope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems like Linus is still a douchebag.</comment>


Demonstrating responsive design to clients.   - <AUTHOR> http://jamus.co.uk/demos/rwd-demonstrations/

<comment><USER2> Does not really work. Because it just renders stuff in an iframe. But actual devices behave quite differently. For example an ipad fools the website about its pixel size. So it renders very different from how its displayed here.

For example meteor.com fits nicely into my ipad and even into my android phone. But this page makes it look like it does not fit at all.

Also tried other sites and had the same effect. Sites that have no magic css/js to cope with different screen sizes or devices. They work on the devices and not on this website.

<comment><USER3> Maybe I understood it wrong, but, wasn't the point of this showcase to show how it should look rather than how to make it look like that in all of the devices?

I think it wasn't meant to be the kind of thing you open in your different devices and look how it looks rather, this is how content should adapt, does it make any sense?

<comment><USER4> exactly :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just couldn't help myself.

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/216352/drdception.png>

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice.

I also like <http://mattkersley.com/responsive/> which shows different resolutions side by side, I find it easier to compare.

</comment><comment><USER7> Some time ago there was <http://responsive.is/> posted on hn, which is awesome!

this looks quite cool too, but changing between "devices" makes the iframe jump. anyway, cool stuff! martin

<comment><USER8> I think the jump is more realistic, it means the resize event will only be fired once. Which is what the orientation change on a mobile device would do.

<http://responsive.is/> animates the iframe resize meaning the event will be repeatedly fired.

<comment><USER9> yeah, but resizing a browser window fires the resize event multiple times. responsive design isn't mobile specific, practically by definition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Scroll bars are frustrating given the amount of effort put into this, plus the sites I tested aren't rendered the way they actually appear on an iPhone meaning I wouldn't be confident showing this to clients.

</comment><comment><USER11> Similar: <http://www.responsinator.com/>

<comment><USER12> I think this is the best one I've seen so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This doesn't work with sites that return 'X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN' or 'DENY', which is probably the simplest and best click-jacking countermeasure. It's used by some big sites (e.g. Google), and increasingly used by modern frameworks (e.g. in Django 1.4 it is not yet on by default, but extremely easy to enable - just uncomment one line in the default settings file).

Something to be aware of!

</comment><comment><USER14> Nice idea, would be even better executed if the "embedded webpage" would be clipped to the device frames during resize.

Clicking on the landscape iphone while in portrait iphone mode shows the full landscape embedded webpage on top of the frame while the frame resizes, which is kinda jarring.

</comment><comment><USER15> Nice idea, well executed. Would be nice if the URL can be exposed as a GET parameter so it can be linked to.

<comment><USER16> Yeah - that was exactly what I was hoping for.

I'd love to be able to send an email to some potential clients along the lines of 'Have you thought about responsive design? Here's why it matters in the context of your current site.'

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As has already been noted, this doesn't take into account media queries and viewport scaling.

But i tell you what does? Testing on actual devices with an amazing tool called adobe shadow.

VIDEO: [http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adobe-technology- sneaks-2012/adobe...](http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adobe-technology- sneaks-2012/adobe-shadow)

download: <http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/shadow/>

<comment><USER18> I'd just like to say, thank you very much for the heads up here. This looks SERIOUSLY cool and seems like it would solve all the niggling issues we've been having with mobile web development. Can't believe nobody else here has jumped on this

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow. Thanks for the all responses people. There are some really good suggestions here. I have added the project to GitHub for anyone interested in improving the tool.

<https://github.com/jamus/rwd-demonstration>

</comment><comment><USER20> Great idea. One improvement might be to make the mobile view look more like a mobile device; now it looks very much like the tablet. Perhaps the borders (sides in portrait, top and bottom in landscape) could be thinner.

<comment><USER20> Also, if this page itself was responsive would be nice: resizing the browser would select the appropriate view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If they don't like it when you're at this stage, you're in trouble! How are people presenting/explaining responsive designs at the concept stage? Designing in browser? Multiple mockups? Mood boards and style guides?

</comment><comment><USER22> One of the common "mistakes" I see with these tools is to base the iframe size on exactly 320 or 480, etc. The scroll bar should be outside of the width of the "device".

</comment><comment><USER23> It assumes I keep my browser window maximised. Bad assumption.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's actually a great tool for demonstrating to clients what you mean by responsive website design

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It shows 4 layouts for <https://trello.com> Nothing you couldn't get by resizing your browser though.

<comment><USER25> Yes. But clients will understand this one better, with different known devices right in front of their eyes. Some of our clients can't map a resized browser window to a smartphone <-> tablet switch.

<comment><USER24> I agree. Just pointing out that it's not doing anything to emulate any of the behaviour of any device. It's still rendering as whatever your browser will show for those sizes, same user-agent/css/javascript behaviour. Still, as a demonstration tool it will be very useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Already been done a few times...

<http://responsive.is/> for example.

</comment><comment><USER27> i like it, great idea. I almost missed the fact that you can check out any website - maybe emphasize the input box for the url more?</comment>


Yoga and entrepreneurship - <AUTHOR> http://learntoduck.net/yoga-is-fucking-judgemental

<comment><USER3> _"Yoga is fucking judgmental"_

Sorry it really isn't. Yoga is its true sense is an individual practice for improving one's mental, physical, spiritual state of being. Perhaps if you are a practitioner of Yoga, you might be interested in learning more about its origins and history [1].

Bikram Yoga which the author took classes for is a commercial take on yoga, much like Dance Yoga, Jillian Michaels Meltdown Yoga; or something I could copyright tomorrow called "Dance Dance Yoga Revolution". From my understanding Bikram Yoga is a fitness product to make money for its founder, which he has ensured by "copyrighting" his system of poses and by suing numerous studios and former students, etc. Maybe this is why the author's experience with yoga was of being judged and why he calls anyone with an opposing view a "hippie". The practice of saying "namaste" at the end of the session sounds like something you'd do to add a flavor of east meets west to make this practice cool/hip because in the context described in the article, it doesn't add much to the state of the individual aside from this cool "namaste moment."

 _"Choudhury holds a copyright for the 26 poses which constitute Bikram yoga under the same theory which allows choreographic sequences to be copyrighted. In September, 2011, Choudhury filed an infringement suit against his former student, Greg Gumucio, founder of a competing chain of hot yoga studios."_

Disclaimer: I haven't ever taken a Bikram Yoga class, but I've been practicing Yoga on and off since high school.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga>

[2] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikram_Yoga#Legal_issues>

<comment><USER4> Thanks for posting this. Yoga if done correctly should not make you tired. It should leave you in euphoric and blissful state devoid of almost all negative emotions. This then puts in the right state to do meditation. It took me years to get this right. And you can't commercialize something that takes that long and is slow and gradual.

Plain and simple: If X makes you tired or judgmental or angry ..., X is not yoga.

I am not making this up. Google Scholar this.

Also, yoga teachers are not supposed to do it for money. Read up on how Gurukuls worked.

Yoga removed from its spiritual context is just a kitschy low grade thing that may hurt you while taking your money.

<comment><USER5> yeah and swimming correctly doesn't make you tired either. but until you actually reach that point, you have to go through many many hours of painful practice.

Thinks don't magically happen. You have to work for them.

EDIT: That said, my girlfriend who was indian, disliked bikram yoga a lot, because of some of the aforementioned issues

<comment><USER6> Things have to be difficult only if you want them to be difficult. I had the bliss from yoga classes since probably second or this class. Physically tired, mentally relaxed.

<comment><USER5> ok, so given the fact that a lot of the difficulty results from being different levels of flexible, and coming from different fitness level backgrounds, and having different levels of experience when it comes to gathering your thoughts.

Are you sure you want to imply that everyone starting a sport has the same physical fitness, stretchiness and mental attributes when starting out any sport/yoga?

<comment><USER6> You start off by saying that only hard work can bring about bliss, and when confronted with a different experience you pigeonhole it into asserting that bliss must befall every single person regardless of their circumstances. Step aside from the false dichotomy - it's not the case that yoga can either bring about bliss quickly to everyone or no one. It may bring to some and not to others. Will it work for a particular person? The easiest way to find out is to try. There is no point in guessing. Sign up for 8-class introductory course, by the end of it you will have a pretty good idea whether it works for you. It worked for me, and it worked for other people I know, so it works for some people. It's not going to be a waste of time.

If you're worried about prerequisite fitness level, I can guarantee you that I had the worst stretching and the least endurance of the entire group - it's fairly obvious in class. One thing I had more that others is discipline - <USER2> think I was one of the few to attend all eight classes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> replace yoga by any other sport taken seriously(ie. competitively or almost competitively), any instrument or basically anything humans learn in general, and the only thing that changes is the temperature(although that also highly depends on where in the world you do it)

I've been doing martial arts for 18 years and i could say exactly the same.

What is more fascinating in my opinion is that what you're describing is a tiny bit of what is known as sports psychology, which in turn is very close to what is observed in military combat psychology, which in turn is very closely related to entrepreneurship in general.

my point is that while i think that it's good that you wrote down your experience, and the emotional connection to it, what you're describing is in no way specific to yoga.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why is Yoga Judgmental? Does Yoga have a voice or life of its own? Not sure I understand that comment. I like the parallelism to start-ups and agree that Yoga is practice. I do Pranayama every single day, and it is form of Yoga. And yes it is a practice. But judgmental - don't get that...

</comment><comment><USER8> Damn, I thought yoga was supposed to help you calm down and chill out.

I did really like the author's parallelisms to entrepreneurship, though.

<comment><USER9> Yes, it is. I'm a serial entrepreneur who became a Yoga professor last year I can say that the author is totally equivocated in some points. He is judging something that isn't Yoga.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are very different styles in Yoga. Bikram is probably one extreme where everything is regimented, and there is only way correct way. There are also Yoga styles that are more kin to jazz improvisation and anything in between. May be there is a startup analogy somewhere there as well :)

<comment><USER7> Bikram Yoga has its roots or inheritance in Yoga with respect to the "asanas" or poses but I would say that's about it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: When did the idea of an app store first come together? - <AUTHOR>

I was just reading this old profile: http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2007/09/02/introducing_the_google_phone/
And this passage stuck out:
Mark May, an equities analyst at Needham & Company who follows Google's stock, says he doesn't expect Google to manufacture the phone itself, but rather provide an operating system and a suite of applications that "would appeal to consumers and professionals," like the mail and word processing applications it already provides to PC users.
"That's a natural extension from their core business," May says. The operating system is expected to be open not just to Google's applications, but applications developed by all sorts of other players - a real problem with many cellphones.
September 2nd, 2007. Apple's store didn't come out until July of 2008.
Since I wasn't following along, anyone have insight into whether this was a general trend in thought then, if rumors of Apple spurred this analyst to think about Google along similar lines, or if some other company had already launched the concept? <comment><USER2> Valve comes to mind. Game makers were already doing this kind of centrailzed distribution long before it went mainstream but it was clear this would be the direction as broadband began to pick up around 2002-2003 as comcast and other cable providers started to gain real traction.</comment>


FTC to Examine Past Acquisitions by Large Technology Companies - <AUTHOR> https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/02/ftc-examine-past-acquisitions-large-technology-companies <comment><USER2> If we really want to look at anti-competetive mergers check out the telecom acquisitions. Seems like every single one leads to increased prices and the companies doing the exact things they promised not to do to get the merger approved.

<comment><USER3> The big change between 1980 and now is before that the FTC considered market concentration when deciding to allow a merger or not. Now they only consider whether the merger is likely to raise prices for consumers. Which just boils down to the company pinky swearing not to gouge the public 'too much'

<comment><USER2> The maddening part is every time there's one of these big mergers they pinky swear prices won't go up and surprise surprise they almost immediately do. I realize judges and the courts aren't really meant to have a memory about past technically unrelated cases but it drives me crazy.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Metrace – easy Python CPU/memory tracing - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sloev/metrace <comment><AUTHOR> author here

I spend some time looking for a tool (2 hours on github/google) and simply couldn't find a tool that:

* tracked cpu/memory usage for a process AND its children

* let me annotate scopes (using a context manager) in code to know later how much was used (cpu/memory) in that scope

* provided a nice HTML output with interactive charts and downloadable images

* low amount of dependencies

.

so i made Metrace. It does those things and ONLY those things.

it

* appends all info to a json lines file for easy interpretation (slow i know, but simple ;-)

* uses plotly to generate nice cpu and memory charts where individual processes have their own line charts (within the figure) and the traces (reported using the context manager) are correctly associated to the processes

It is brutally implemented, I needed the tool asap, but i will invest some time in increasing code quality soon (20 percent time).

.

similar things that didnt feel they met my demands:

* memory-profiler

* netdata

* name your tool, i probably tried it :-)</comment>