Declassified Report Shows Doubts About Value of NSA's Warrantless Spying - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/25/us/politics/value-of-nsa-warrantless-spying-is-doubted-in-declassified-reports.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> Does anyone seriously think the program is actually to stop terror? It is here to control the population in the country. Oh you want to run for president with ideas we don't like? It would be sad if someone publishes all this data we are sitting on.

<comment><USER3> For that to be true, that would mean that the existing president would have been campaigning to curb the powers of the NSA before he became president and then afterwards flip flopped, changed his mind and backed off to the point of supporting more surveillance.

No way! That actually happened! [1] my god, why aren't the American public and press even asking these questions?

However, he must have changed his mind for some other reason, because otherwise that would mean the NSA blackmailed the president of the USA. Which of course is completely unrealistic!

[1] [http://www.propublica.org/article/the-surveillance- reforms-o...](http://www.propublica.org/article/the-surveillance-reforms- obama-supported-before-he-was-president)

<comment><USER2> There is also a long history of doing this, just one example: [https://www.google.com/search?q=fbi%20mlk](https://www.google.com/search?q=fbi%20mlk)

Another (not so clear) example is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer_prostitution_scan...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer_prostitution_scandal) He was called "Wall Streets worst nightmare", and suddenly he has to resign because he spent time with a prostitute.

<comment><USER4> Spitzer was also evading financial regulations.

Or do you mean to imply that it was a fabricated hit job? Because to me it seems to be a real problem when a law enforcement official is giving himself special treatment.

<comment><USER5> > Or do you mean to imply that it was a fabricated hit job?

Suspected parallel construction. They used illegal collected records in order to find the dirt, and then dug it out using other means that were quasi-legal.

That having been said, an anti-prostitution _crusader_ who is using prostitutes deserves exactly what he got. If he hadn't been a crusader, I would have been sympathetic.

It just like Republican congressmen. I really don't care how or with whom they're having sex, as long as they aren't crusading against what they, themselves, are doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As welcome as this is, I don't want to rely on the standard of effectiveness in my opposition to such programs.

<comment><USER7> It is unfortunate, but most people will trade their rights and freedom for perceived security.

Providing evidence to the contrary might be the practical way to sway the majority's opinion.

It does legitimize the means to the end though, which is never good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The worst thing that all of this spying and whatnot did is that every crazy conspiracy theory written in sibling posts...

...doesn't really seem all that crazy or outlandish at all, and I suspect much of the speculation is at least partially within the bounds of exactly what happened/is happening/will continue to happen.

</comment><comment><USER9> Its irrelevant, whatever the 'value' of spying. Utilitarian ethics is a horrifying foundation for a nation.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's unfortunate but in a world where rationality on subjects like these (forget about ethics) is hard to find pointing out that the thing the world seems to revolve around (money) is being wasted can be used to some effect.

I agree that this is not the way the world should work but when you all you have is eggs omelette is on the menu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Secrecy of a program undermined it's effectiveness. It seems clear from this document that they completely failed to learn what the 9/11 commission blamed the attacks on: not that we didn't have the intelligence, that the intelligence was managed and communicated poorly.

I can't imagine as an FBI agent to investigate random phone numbers and told they were relevant without any context, especially when most of them are nothing. And if nobody can use this intelligence, why collect it? It sounds like big data buzzwords gone mad.

Even worse is the secret legal memos. If judges aren't allowed access to the legal documents about the program, how can they be expected to protect our democratic institutions and freedoms? Even most of the Bush and Obama administration's counsel were kept in the dark about the legal memos.

A power grab? If so, a pretty ineffective one, it seems nobody has benefited from the stellar wind program or even has access to information from it.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's kind of like security checks at airports, I am not aware that in the long history of terrorism, a single attack has been stopped at one of these security checks.

<comment><USER12> That doesn't really say anything about whether the checkpoints are effective or not.

If they are ineffective, I'd not expect any attacks to be stopped at the checkpoint due to its ineffectiveness.

If they are effective, I'd not expect any attacks to be stopped _at_ the checkpoint because the attackers know about the checkpoint. If they don't know how to get past it, they will not start the attack.

We do know that before checkpoints where introduced in the early '70s there were a lot more hijackings. In 1969 there were over two dozen hijackings to Cuba, for example. Airline hijackings went way down after checkpoints were introduced and made it so you had to have a more sophisticated plan to get a gun onto a plane than simply tossing it into your carryon bag.

<comment><USER11> Then you can justify any vexation to passengers with this logic. If I am forcing all passengers to strip naked, and for 20 years I do not catch any terrorist like that, it means I am doing a good job!

<comment><USER12> Using the lack of terrorists caught at a checkpoint to justify the checkpoint would be invalid, just as using that lack to say the checkpoint is not stopping attacks is invalid.

My point is that "attacks stopped at checkpoint" is not a useful measure, because it has little if any connection to the effectiveness or lack thereof of the checkpoint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I had the exact opposite reaction to Snowden's revelations about the NSA that everyone else did. Prior to that, I had thought it is a ridiculous infringement on people's privacy. I thought it was terrible what the NSA was doing. I advocated heavily for anyone thinking about heading in that direction to rethink their life, and work on something constructive.

Snowden revealed so much more data collection than anyone could have imagined was going on. People's thoughts as they were evolving, the NSA could watch someone and know what they were doing before they did! But compared to this level of surveillance, which was WAAAAAY beyond anything the Stasi or Gestapo ever did. And did people think that they were living under a police state? Did people have to watch what they said and wrote? No.

Because the NSA treated that data with an _incredible_ amount of responsibility. They were, quite literally, a black box: [https://www.google.com/search?q=nsa+building](https://www.google.com/search?q=nsa+building)

And you were hard-pressed to find irresponsibility there. They actively denied their capabilities, hid from the public, remained completely hidden. This is great: it's the opposite of living under a dictatorship. It's great that they hid so well. I gained enormous respect for them. In addition, I thought that that data would have the most amazing historical significance of anything humanity has _ever_ recorded.

One of the greatest insights into the past that we have is at Pompeii, where Vesuvius erupted and covered a city in ash, freezing everything just as it was, in the middle of conversations. Blackboards were filled with crude insults to the teacher. People left graffiti everywhere. It gave us an incredible amount of information.

Can you imagine in the year 3,000, when the NSA's documents are ancient history, what kind of insight into the human condition, machinations, good guys, bad guys, plans, history, humanity can gain by seeing every single person's complete activity down to the second, down to when they were composing their thoughts?

I believe that history can be a huge lesson, and not only "those who do not learn from history are doomed to report it", but that it's better to learn from somebody else's mistakes. In the year three thousand, humanity can learn so much from a complete black-box recording of everything that has ever happened today.

Compared to this level of access - which is illegal, which they denied, which they still do not acknowledge - about the only abuses someone can name is that a general had a sexual affair (which most people would consider immoral) and they manufactured a back story for how they learned this. That's the worst thing I've ever heard about them.

Why do they have to exist at all?

Some people suck. A free society means people are free to do and think whatever they want. Some of them will choose to pursue great ideas and ideals, set up huge disruptive businesses where they generate billions of dollars in true value for society, that never existed before. The easiest way to be a millionaire is to make something great, and let people buy it.

Other people will look at a millionaire, and make an elaborate scheme to blackmail and extort them. They think that the easiest way to make money is through theft, scamming, blackmail, extortion. What should happen if Larry Ellison's wife is kidnapped? What if a virus writer encrypts your files and illegally blackmails you to decrypt them?

In the latter case, the person should be brought to justice. And this should happen: [https://noransom.kaspersky.com/](https://noransom.kaspersky.com/)

Everybody knows what happens under an anarchy, or a complete lack of rule of law: people spend their energies arming up personally, as opposed to building relationships, products, ideas, or being productive. People don't trust each other. Might makes right.

How much better than that is the fact that if you concoct an elaborate kidnapping or terrorist plan, the appropriate agency can get the black box to spit some facts out about this?

Since learning the extent of the information the NSA has siphoned up, and the incredible responsibility that they've treated this with, I would not have a problem if they had a a multi-petabyte database with every thought, action, keystroke, of everyone on the planet. If anything it is too bad humanity is not quite in a position to be united into a single world government that this is a part of.

I support the NSA in siphoning off all the data, treating it responsibly, hiding, cowering from oversight, denying what they are doing (even from other agencies), withholding data, and being the black box that they are. I don't mind if readers here work for them.

This is just about the opposite of what I thought about the NSA before the Snowden revelations!

Their very existence keeps people honest. When people online happen to be talking about how to do something destructive, they joke about being added to some list. But by the same token, they wouldn't even think about actually concocting such a plan.

EDIT: I want to reiterate that they should not admit any of this and vehemently deny it. That is the difference between living under a dictatorship, or living under complete freedom from surveillance and government oversight, while enjoying protection from kidnapping and ransom.

<comment><USER14> I'm sitting in front of my keyboard for like 10 minutes trying to find where to start from... Honestly, I cannot.

> Can you imagine in the year 3,000, when the NSA's documents are ancient > history, what kind of insight into the human condition, machinations, good > guys, bad guys, plans, history, humanity can gain by seeing every single > person's complete activity down to the second, down to when they were > composing their thoughts?

Yes, it will be very pleasant - and exciting at the same time - to be able to view - and perhaps enjoy the same - activities of a person that searches for tentacle/eel porn.

<comment><USER15> Ditto. My first thought was to rage at the rationale behind that post, but I'm glad I stepped back to let it percolate. Scares the shit out of me that presumably normal and respectable and intelligent people see the situation that way...

<comment><AUTHOR> It's the little helpers that are the problem, _not_ the NSA per se, all those presumably normal, respectable and intelligent people that see nothing wrong with this are the heart of the matter.

Here in nl with some regularity the 'if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear' bull-shit gets trotted out and it is really aggravating but at the same time it helps to have a window into the minds of those that would be happy to live in a world like that.

Me, I'd rather see whole generations of criminals walk free than to see the world lose all those things that were hard-won not all that long ago.

Every thread like this eventually converges on comparisons with the former Third Reich and we tend to shy away from that comparison because obviously the differences are legion but at the same time you have to really worry what a future political powershift could do with the data they would have at their disposal. At a guess any resistance would be dead before they even got to first base.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I've Never Played Fortnite; Was Forced to Attend Travis Scott's Fortnite Concert - <AUTHOR> https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/travis-scott-fortnite-concert-989209/ <comment><USER2> I understand exactly how the author felt, it's the same way I feel everytime there is a news story about an event(many times paid for by my tax dollars) being put on by government subsidized organizations that I can not attend/view unless I sign up for a third party privacy mine like Instagram, Twiiter or Facebook.(or Fortnight)

Recently this had real world consequences in Canada when the police decided to warn residents of an on going mass shooter event only for people with Twitter, worse only for people with Twitter notifications turned on.

I think it's great that government organizations use social media to connect to citizens but when that is the ONLY method used, it forces citizens to agree to corporate and private EULAs in order to access publicly funded services, which is not great at all.

It's time to legislate against any exclusive services being government funded. If it's available through a government web site thats fine put it on social media too but don't subject me to the whims of for profit corporations to obtian publicly funded services.</comment>


San Francisco Tech Boom Brings Concerns - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/us/san-francisco-tech-boom-brings-jobs-and-worries.html?_r=1&hp&pagewanted=all <comment><USER4> Very real concerns indeed. San Francisco is the most puzzling and frustrating city to try to comprehend. It's equal parts optimistic futurism and steadfast abhorrence to change.

Walk down the streets, look inside City Hall - look at the extreme effort applied to make sure even the streetcars hail from the early 20th century, and that the sanctified Victorians are never touched, and you'd never guess this was a city looking to be at the forefront of massive economic and population growth.

Depending on where you are looking, rents in the city are up from 30% all the way to 130% since this time last year. And the city added a net total of a whopping 269 new housing units in 2011. Everyone has heard stories - entrepreneurs cashing out with Fuck You money, and can't buy a condo - <USER2> none are on sale, at any price. We've also heard the stories, of the hated dotcom yuppies going to view an apartment and bidding substantially above the already outrageous asking price. It's getting a little crazy out there.

All the while the city has placed firm caps on the amount of new commercial space that may be developed per year. Worse yet, the city has placed restrictions even on _where_ residential and commercial development can happen - pretty much exclusively in SoMa, which accounts for 0.8 square miles of the total 49 square miles of land in SF.

Meanwhile the other 45 square miles (minus the Presidio and Golden Gate Park) are full of low-density housing that is completely barred from building upwards to accommodate the massive influx of population. The 3-story Victorian House is holy, and must not be sullied by... well, more people living there, rents be damned.

And what's with using Twitter to recolonize crack row? Of all the businesses you can try to import to bring more "desirable" traffic to the area, you had to pick the one that caters all meals internally and has every imaginable perk already in-house? This is supposed to bring new businesses to the area? Not to mention the area's massive homelessness and drug abuse problem is not due to _lack_ of legitimate business traffic, but rather the presence of numerous humanitarian aid organizations, none of whom are going to be moving any time soon (nor should they, nor would it be politically feasible to force them to). The only thing this half-assed plan will ensure is Twitter employees scrambling to make sure they have secured parking at the new office.

<comment><USER5> Not to disparage your entirely valid argument, but:

> Everyone has heard stories - entrepreneurs cashing out with Fuck You money, > and can't buy a condo - because none are on sale, at any price.

That's not what "Fuck You money" means.

"Fuck you money" is buying the entire block and tearing down all the other condos and then buying the real estate company and firing the realtor who showed it just for giggles.

It's an entirely different order of magnitude from "wealthy" or even "filthy rich".

It's the ability to say "fuck you" to literally anyone— with impunity.

Very few people in the tech community have reached this level. Indeed, very few _humans_ have, from any sector.

<comment><USER6> _buying the entire block_

You can only buy what is for sale. If it's not for sale, at any price, you can't buy it no matter how much money you have.

<comment><USER7> Not to mention that even if you could buy the block, San Francisco almost certainly wouldn't let you tear it down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm an engineer who just moved here to the Mission where I'm paying this exorbitant amount of money in rent mentioned in the article. The people in my building (of which 4 of 7 units are Googlers, I'm not one) battle a group of locals who congregate in the park drinking and doing drugs over noise, parking, trash, and various other complaints almost daily. We just want a safe living environment close to our workplace. I don't feel sorry for these low budget semi homeless drunks but hope the gentrification raises property value substantially for the home-owning locals who've been here for years. Its sad other long time locals who rent are also being forced out, but still can't help but think the process is cleaning up the city. Gentrification just never had a bad connotation to me and still doesn't now that I"m seeing it on the front lines.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure why you're being voted down. SF is a crazy place where "gentrification" is a bad word.

<comment><USER9> Presumably they're objecting to "hope the gentrification raises property value substantially for the home-owning locals who've been here for years". Which presumably was the opposite of what the poster meant to write.

<comment><USER10> is the opposite what he meant to write? It was always my assumption that he was correct; gentrification raises property values, so "home-owning locals" make money off of their real estate value going up, while renters will be potentially pushed out (or stay and pay more in rent). Am I missing something?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In which San Francisco makes markets illegal and then is surprised when they fail to clear.

There's a good discussion to be had, somewhere, about the implications of rapid productivity growth in the tech sector versus the rest of the country, what this will do to relative equality of outcomes as measured by income ("destroy it utterly"), and the social consequences of that. But I find myself incapable of discussing that vis-a-vis San Fran real estate because that is, fundamentally, a political problem.

<comment><USER12> The discussion has in fact been had by Matthew Yglesias in his Monexbox column on Slate.com, and by Ryan Avent in his book The Gated City: [http://www.amazon.com/Gated-City-Kindle-Single- ebook/dp/B005...](http://www.amazon.com/Gated-City-Kindle-Single- ebook/dp/B005KGATLO/)

Basically, development restrictions in economically productive areas raise prices and drive out productive workers to less productive areas, improving standard of living for those who move but lowering overall wages and productivity for the country as a whole.

It is an entirely political problem and the only reason it's such an issue in SF is the economic productivity there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't care much for reporting that tries to heat up a conflict where none must exist. There are a lot of underlying assumptions and hidden prejudices in that piece, the most visible was equating black people and poor people. Then there was a cry for maintaining diversity -- it seems that having smart people from all over the world working together to change the planet isn't diverse enough for the NYT. It looks to me like they need appropriate ratios of commonly-recognized political groups. Very poor reasoning.

I've long since given up trying to understand San Francisco politics. It's an extremely dynamic city, but at the same time there's a lot of folks there who consider themselves progressive that are hanging on to 50-year-old ideas from the 1960s. A lot of things are "untouchable." In fact, I'd go so far as to say the city has a huge conservative bent, it's just not expressed by what we would consider conservatives. Don't change things!

I know the neighborhood that's mentioned, and I wish Twitter the best of luck. Hopefully a new administration doesn't take over in a year or two and start undoing all the special perks that lured them there.

California desperately needs Silicon Valley and the spillover into SF. I sincerely hope they keep advancing policies that continue the growth and not go down the road of trying to pick apart each little thing that starts going right.

<comment><USER14> I'm in favor of the Twitter perks; that neighborhood has needed help for a long time. But I think you dismiss too lightly the displacement of people and the substantial rich/poor divide in this city.

The problem isn't the NYT's reasoning. They just have different values than you do. To some extent I agree with them; San Francisco has definitely gotten less diverse. We don't get smart people from "all over the planet". We get them mainly from whitebread America, Europe, and certain parts of East and South Asia. They're generally well-educated and well off. A lot of people who have been in SF for generations are getting priced out of the city, and that is disproportionately affecting black and Latino residents.

One can legitimately say, "so what?" But it's not irrational to dislike that.

<comment><USER15> _We get them mainly from whitebread America, Europe, and certain parts of East and South Asia._

I.e., they come from half the planet (Europe + USA + China + India == about 3.5 billion people) rather than the whole planet.

You are correct that the NYT has different values, and it's important to recognize what those values are: they view certain privileged [1] groups as deserving of being statistically represented in SF. Their underlying value system is basically corporatism.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism>

(The term "corporatism" is only peripherally related to modern LLCs. While a modern LLC may be a corporation, so are "black people", "poor people" and "long time residents" in the sense that the NYT is using them.)

<comment><USER14> Well, most of them come from the well-off portions of those places, so it's a lot less than half the planet. But yes, you seem to get my point, which is that the population in SF is not representative of the globe at large.

I guess if you wave your hands some you could call it a flavor or corporatism. But I think your description of those groups as privileged is pretty rich. From a certain angle it's technically correct, but in a way that aggressively misses the point. You might as well call them lucky duckies.

<comment><USER15> There are about 2^(6 billion) subgroups of humanity. The NYT consistently chooses a small subset of those subgroups to focus on, and to give moral consideration to.

The particular grouping chosen by the NYT is just an arbitrary moral choice to privilege the {race == black} subgroup over (for example) the {SSN % 7 == 2} subgroup.

<comment><USER14> Gosh, you've figured it out. That choice is entirely arbitrary and random, and has absolutely nothing to do with history or morality.

<comment><USER15> I didn't claim their grouping choices had nothing to do with history or morality, nor did I claim randomness. I specifically said that the NYT's choice of which groups deserve privilege is based on an "arbitrary _moral_ choice".

<comment><USER14> Yes, the choices are moral choices. But by calling it arbitrary, I presume you mean: "Based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system."

If they are without reason or system, then the can hardly be derived from existing moral systems (that, is morality), or the application of those moral systems to (and lessons learned from) historical circumstance (history).

But by all means carry on with your aggressive point-missing. Would you care to pick this particular nit? Or perhaps a different one?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> /rant

Excuse me if I don't cry for SF. Come to NYC and we'll chat over a slice of Lombardi's. Joking aside, this is the kind of garbage divisive reporting that plays both ends against the middle. But actually against each other. Take a look at Detroit. Perhaps these people might consider authorizing new commercial and residential building permits to add supply to the market. But noooooo. Don't touch the historical architecture!

When did it become a crime to be successful in this country? Since when is it a bad thing to make enterprise, move the ball forward and create? You want equality? Build more mixed income housing with all that tax revenue you will receive from all those six figure employees living in your city. Don't ghetto your city like certain parts of NYC by concentrating low income housing. Spread it around. But hey, who am I kidding, rich people won't let that happen.

Everyone needs to give a bit.

Sickening.

</comment><comment><USER17> Anecdotally speaking, at my last job I was positively priced out of all decent San Francisco neighborhoods while making $80k per year - it's simply not possible to compete with the Googlers and Apple folks making three times what you are. One showing I went to near Alamo Square had about 30 people viewing, and over 12 applied - it was a dingy one-bedroom, but you'd never know from the crowd or from the asking price.

I shudder to think of the non-techies who aren't in rent-controlled apartments; this boom will be exceedingly unjust to them.

<comment><USER18> Rent control is screwing things up in the first place.

For example, without the option to end leases landlord's can't empty a building, demolish it and rebuild with more units. This imposes an artificial constraint on supply. Demand isn't particularly elastic so prices rise.

Meanwhile, the price ceiling encourages overconsumption amongst the rent control population. Kids are off to college -- why downgrade from a 3-bedroom? There's simply no incentive to do so. This further limits supply.

If you want to see rents fall, repeal rent control, repeal Prop 13 and allow construction.

<comment><USER19> Do you really think the main constraint on supply comes from rent control and not zoning limitations? In SF there is a strong desire to preserve the historical character of the neighborhoods (agree or disagree as you like, but the political will is there) and I think that's the root reason why it's difficult to demolish buildings and rebuild them with more units, not the mechanics of rent control.

In any event, even in a rent controlled building, you absolutely can terminate all of your tenant's leases and kick them out, upgrade the property, condoize it, and sell the condos (Ellis Act.) The only restriction is that you must sell the units, not rent them.

(speaking as someone who, as a side project, is in fact building high density residential units in SF)

<comment><USER20> Zoning is primary, but without rent control, the Tenderloin would be a lot better (convert the SROs into reasonable rentals). Of course, getting rid of the enablers of homelessness would also be necessary.

<comment><USER19> It's not rent control that keeps SROs around - there are separate SRO controls. You're not allowed to eliminate SRO beds without building replacement beds in another part of the city (or paying into a fund to cover the cost of someone else doing it, and it's a significant fee.)

Many of the people in SROs have substance abuse or mental health problems or other disabilities, and most (?) SRO tenants are paying their rent in federal housing assistance vouchers (which is why SROs can be so profitable - <USER3> government pays you a high price to house people that otherwise wouldn't be welcomed on the rental market, housing discrimination laws notwithstanding.)

Any zoning plan has to make space for this population somewhere in the city. If you let people demolish SRO beds, you're just going to discover that you have to build new ones at public expense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This article repeatedly expresses concerns that "blacks" may be pushed out of the City.

This struck me as kind of odd. Why the repeated mention of just blacks? Is that a racist statement? If not, would it be racist to otherwise imply that blacks (and apparently just blacks) cannot compete with skilled, high-wage workers?

At the bottom of the article, credit is given to what sounds like a black woman for being a contributing reporter. The article is written by what looks like a Japanese person to me. Now I am tempted to think that it's not negative racism on display here so much as self-interest on behalf of the contributing reporter (and I'm puzzled as to why the lede author turned this piece in as- is).

Basically, I'm not sure what (if anything) to make of this, and am interested in people's thoughts.

<comment><USER22> Here's what I make of it:

I have a big problem with equating blacks to poor people, mostly because it makes blacks monolithic, as if all blacks are poor. This isn't the case, even if you limit your analysis to the SF area.

Consider how ridiculous it is to equate an entire ethnic group with poverty, or wealth for that matter--there are wealthy and poor people across all demographics. Far better for the NYT to have said poorer residents, or some such like.

It does seem the mayor specifically mentioned blacks (could be a political calculus or real concern), but the reporters also referenced them separately, vaguely. Either way, the characterization of blacks in this article was done poorly.

You asked if this is racism; probably something like implicit bias - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aversive_racism>.

Also: it seems you thought that the contributor's name (Malia) somehow indicates that she is black. A google search shows otherwise.

<comment><USER20> In San Francisco city itself, black and poor are highly correlated, for a variety of historical reasons. Most of the long term middle and upper middle class black residents in the Bay Area are in the East Bay. There are fairly concentrated areas of SF which are low income, low development, and primarily black (HP, Bayview) and some areas which became more developed (Fillmore). Mid market and tenderloin have gotten a bit more developed and more diverse (mainly in that poor Arabs and SE Asians moved in 10-15y ago).

Economics and race in SF is really complex.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't know where this guy has been. Unless you make $150k plus or are already in a rent-controlled apartment, you were priced out of San Francisco a decade ago. Between restrictions on development and rent control, there's almost no new rental stock to satisfy demand.

<comment><USER24> I lived in SF on 60K and knew a ton of people that did the same (or made less). We all lived with roommates.

<comment><USER23> Well, okay. But then what was your household income?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Maybe the city planning commission that decides how many apartments can be built, shouldn't be stocked with current property owners whose wealth is tied to the artificially low supply of apartments in SF? Just a thought.

</comment><comment><USER24> I lived in San Francisco for two years, in the Dogpatch, close to the 22nd Street Caltrain.

For one, construction was a regular sight in my neighborhood. (e.g. north of 17th Street) But I think it would be an ideal location for much further construction. There were a bunch of abandoned industrial buildings in my neighborhood. Either rehab them, or tear them down and build six-story apartment buildings. You can leave the existing Victorians intact while still adding a lot of housing stock.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm looking at the last cheap parts of the Peninsula and trying to figure out how to gentrify -- East Palo Alto and parts of Menlo Park and unincorporated San Mateo County.

This basically happened a decade or two ago with Foster City.

It seems quite an arbitrage opportunity that a house which goes for $2-2.5mm in Palo Alto goes for $300k in EPA just a mile or two away.

</comment><comment><USER26> The tech community needs to become a lot more politically engaged.

Particularly where it counts: campaign contributions.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'd like to see what Twitter would do with the expected 2,600 employees. Hard to see that happening unless they dramatically change the product.

Then again, I am one of the few who still strongly suspects that company will leave a large hole in the ground in a few years.

</comment><comment><USER28> Forgive me if I don't feel sympathetic to the plight of the poor programmers in SF. Everybody flocks to SF because that's where all the venture money is at. Which is just fine; you want to hit it big with yet another social startup? That's great for you, but I'm not going to feel sorry for you if you don't win the lottery. There are plenty of other places in this country that are vibrant, fun places to live that are also affordable and offer lots of opportunity. I'll enjoy SF as a tourist, thank you.

<comment><USER29> Sigh. This just REEKS of jealousy while genuinely making no sense. The article is about the non programmers of SF getting pushed out of affordable living by the programmers. Having the response, "well boo hoo, how could I feel bad for these programmers" feels like you either didn't read the article or just wanted to feel better about yourself. Don't get comments like this at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is the New York Times which on a near daily basis features articles with titles like "What you can get for 2 million dollars" (a nice closet in a bad neighborhood) as if thats a bargain.

Expecting sanity in either the SF or NYC market is a waste of emotion. If you can't afford it (and you can't) dont live there. Your a programmer not a rock star.

<comment><USER11> The not-so-subtle subtext of this conversation is that the last line will be "You are a New York Times reporter, not a programmer, so you should not expect to be able to live in New York."

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is why I've decided to not participate in San Francisco.</comment>


What's Worked in Computer Science - <AUTHOR> http://danluu.com/butler-lampson-1999/ <comment><USER2> The claim about RISC being a No is bizarre. RISC has definitely won, for 2 big reasons: 1\. Intel redesigned their x86 processors to execute using a RISC model internally. AMD is using the same idea. A processor architecture is defined by its execution model (not it's external encoding). 2\. ARM is more ubiquitous than Intel, and ARM is a RISC architecture. In fact, ARM may be the dominant processor architecture in the next 10 years.

RISC is resoundingly a Yes.

<comment><USER3> The author addresses this:

> _It's possible to nitpick RISC being a no by saying that modern processors > translate x86 ops into RISC micro-ops internally, but if you listened to > talk at the time, people thought that having a external RISC ISA would be so > much lower overhead that RISC would win, which has clearly not happened. > Moreover, modern chips also do micro-op fusion in order to fuse operations > into decidedly un-RISC-y operations._

<comment><USER4> The success criteria is not mentioned at all, so there is no clear way of settling this.

yes the brand "risc" failed, but does that mean the idea behind risc presented by the computer science community failed?

I'm no processor expert, but it sounds like to me the paradigm behind risc is both theoretical and practically sound and is a key component in most modern CPU's.

<comment><USER5> I would disagree. Intel adds more and more special instructions for niche uses (crypto,HPC,virtualization,etc) for the sake of efficiency. This becomes increasingly necessary for performance improvements, because frequency scaling hit its boundary for now and manycore is about to (see Dark Silicon).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We write web services in Haskell every day and it's much, much easier to refactor, and runs much faster than, the PHP that came before it. This is at large scale for a mature tech company, too.

We've also had good success with Erlang for messaging, although its standard libraries have annoying bugs.

Based on this, I'd say: Functional programming: yes. Fancy type systems: maybe.

The reason for "maybe" is that we use ByteString a little too happily and don't new type enough to prevent all bugs ahead of time...

Then again, C++ templates are definitely fancy type systems, and we ship lots of important code on that every day, too!

<comment><USER7> If you don't mind me asking, what company is this that uses Haskell everyday?

<comment><USER8> I have a video in my watch queue that shows Facebook is:

[https://youtu.be/sl2zo7tzrO8](https://youtu.be/sl2zo7tzrO8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article discusses "today", yet it has no publication date. Well, it mentions "2015" in the conclusion, but that's it.

This trend to publish without a date is ill-conceived.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Author is slyly redefining "what's worked" to "what's widely used".

<comment><USER10> What are some examples of things that "worked" but are not "widely used"? Erlang?

<comment><USER11> Functional programming, even when not in, strictly speaking, functional programming languages (MLs, Haskell, lisps, Erlang), has worked. It's moving more and more into mainstream languages. Either as a sublanguage (Linq) or by piecemeal incorporation of its concepts (pattern matching, anonymous functions, TCO so recursion can be used penalty-free, etc.).

<comment><USER12> > Functional programming, even when not in, strictly speaking, functional > programming languages (MLs, Haskell, lisps, Erlang), has worked

How do you know? By "worked" the author means "has unambiguously turned out to be a good idea with very significant benefits". That some people really like something and are able to write good, working programs with it doesn't mean it's "worked" in the sense discussed.

First, each of these languages is "functional" in a very different way, so much so that even their inclusion in the same category is tenuous. Second, none of these (except maybe Erlang) has been used extensively enough in large- scale projects to give us a definitive answer regarding the actual benefits.

That functional concepts are finding their way into the mainstream is very true, but some of these have also been associated with OO for a very long time now (in fact, they've been a part of OO longer than three of the four FP languages you list have existed). Smalltalk, the most OO of OO languages, had anonymous functions from the beginning, and would tell you that anonymous functions are just as much OO as functional. TCO is not very mainstream, and as Guy Steele demonstrated, is just as relevant for OO as it is for functional. Also, adoption of some concepts doesn't mean FP as a paradigm has worked (the bigger problem is that FP doesn't even have a definition; it is continuously redefined to mean whatever it is people associate with languages that call themselves FP).

In short, we're not sure quite yet, hence "maybe".

<comment><USER13> I agree with you that from the perspective of the article Functional Programming is still a "maybe" as it doesn't have the same sort of following or use in large-scale projects as OO, but I suppose it might be the perspective of the article that is incorrect.

Whatsapp has demonstrated the power of FP with Erlang, and other programming languages like Elixir are starting to gain traction as they improve on the older Frameworks and make development more "comfortable".

Whether they will get enough traction and garner enough of a following to become a "Yes" from this articles perspective is difficult to say but I am confident people will see the light of FP sooner than they think, and I feel like it won't be long till FP is the new cool kid on the block, I'm just not sure who will be responsible for leading that.

<comment><USER12> > Whatsapp has demonstrated the power of FP with Erlang

Whatsapp demonstrated the power of actors and lightweight threads with Erlang. FP had little to do with that.

<comment><USER13> Good point... I suppose that is also what Elixir is bringing to the party.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Speaking as someone currently in the "enamored with capabilities" phase, I'd like to know more about how people get disillusioned with them and whether it can be prevented. Is it something we just need to keep trying until we get out right, or are they somehow fundamentally unworkable despite their elegance?

Also, does the increasing importance of power consumption affect the RISC vs CISC issue? Naïvely I would expect that to work in favor of RISC.

<comment><USER15> I would put the author in the "doesn't know what he's talking about camp" in regard to capabilities. The same could probably be said regarding the claim that distributed computing works and that maybe we're ok at security now. All of these feel like fields in their infancy.

Capabilities are among the few systems that can solve authorization decisions involving three or more principals. Ambient authority systems e.g. systems based on ACLs are inherently broken when dealing with 3 or more principals (see [http://waterken.sourceforge.net/aclsdont/](http://waterken.sourceforge.net/aclsdont/)):

"The ACL model is unable to make correct access decisions for interactions involving more than two principals, since required information is not retained across message sends. Though this deficiency has long been documented in the published literature, it is not widely understood."

If you're looking for a place this arises in practice, look no further than the same-origin policy in web browsers, and the complexity of three principal interactions where one principal is a user, another is a web site, and the third is a malicious web site.

That's not to say we should abandon the same-origin policy, but we need authorization primitives that seamlessly span multiple principals.

Projects like Capsicum are adding capabilities to OSes like Linux and FreeBSD.

Cap'n Proto is demonstrating what's possible with a modern implementation of CapTP.

I think the need for authorization-centric (as opposed to identity-centric) access control systems is becoming increasingly clear. Capabilities (particularly in the CapTP sense) are one realization of this idea but there are others.

<comment><USER12> I would put your comment in the "doesn't understand what the author is saying" camp. When he says something has "worked" he doesn't mean it has promising working prototypes or has the potential to improve things. He means that the benefits have been very, very clearly demonstrated to be very significant and widely applicable. And "clearly demonstrated" means their impact has been shown in numerous production settings.

As this is the case for distributed systems but not for capabilities, the author's categorization seems spot on, even if current work on distributed systems is "broken", when "broken" has its common modern connotation of "has (possibly much) room for improvement".

<comment><USER15> To reiterate, because you missed my original point: The author thinks we're doing okay at security, and capabilities failed. We aren't doing okay at security, and capabilities are still a promising solution.

The solutions where capabilities are truly most promising have no embedded competitors. I'm looking at things like SELinux here. Few other solutions (except e.g. Macaroons) are actually capable of making correct authorization decisions in scenarios involving 3+ principals: the competition is broken, and vicariously, so are most authorization systems which try to solve 3+ principal authorization problem correctly.

You may as well be arguing that memory safe / garbage collected languages lost to C circa 1995. C is broken and programs written in C will always be full of holes as compared to equivalent programs in memory safe languages just in the same way as authorization systems not built to handle 3+ principals will make wrong decisions. This is why it's 2015 and we're still dealing with CSRF.

If you implement SELinux at your job like I do, and have some informed criticism about how Capsicum is unneeded because SELinux is great, I'd love to hear it! But I'm guessing that isn't the case... I am also guessing it's an area the OP is not particularly informed about.

<comment><USER12> > you missed my original point

I think you have simply misunderstood what the author is actually saying. He is not saying what you think he is, and I don't think you disagree with him at all.

> The author thinks we're doing okay at security

Where does he say that? He says, "security still isn't a first class concern for most programmers", and puts it in the "No" column.

> capabilities are still a promising solution.

The author doesn't dispute that. In fact, he says nothing about the promise certain technologies hold. In fact, he says: "I'm much more optimistic about research areas that haven't yielded much real-world impact (yet), like capability based computing and fancy type systems. It seems basically impossible to predict what areas will become valuable over the next thirty years."

The article, however, is not concerned with possible solutions, even those that show great promise. It is only and solely concerned with solutions that have been conclusively shown to work well in the field by having a wide applicability and usage in numerous production projects. As capabilities -- so he says and you don't seem to dispute -- aren't there _yet_ (he emphasizes the "yet"), they belong in the "no" column. That they show great promise -- or even maybe contain the only solution to problems we haven't been able to tackle -- bears absolutely no relevance to the issue of whether they "have worked" or not. It is a statement of fact that they haven't yet, and you don't seem to dispute that.

Similarly, putting something in the "no" column doesn't mean that something has lost. The author makes that abundantly clear. A no may well turn out to be a yes in time. A no simply means "not yet" (while "maybe" means that it may in fact be "working" now, we just don't have enough information to conclusively say).

The article therefore voices no criticism on the validity of certain technologies at all. That, too, the author makes abundantly clear. It is nothing more than a list of those technologies that to this day have (or haven't yet) been conclusively proven to provide significant benefits and wide applicability in the field. Those that only show promise belong in the "no" category. It is an inventory, not a critique.

You have no argument (so it seems) either with me or the author. In fact, I have no knowledge on this subject at all: I have no idea what capabilities are, I have never heard of Capsicum (or SELinux for that matter) and have never even worked on security related issue. it was just clear to me that you are responding to criticism that is simply not there, and responding with great force by dismissing the author (who is very well versed in technology), which is rarely a good idea, especially if you don't carefully read what he has to say.

<comment><USER15> > Where does he say that? He says, "security still isn't a first class concern > for most programmers", and puts it in the "No" column.

He put it in the "Maybe" column for 2015. Try searching for "Security"

So Capsicum patches landed in the Linux kernel mainline, Kenton Varda is shipping Cap'n Proto and Sandstorm.io, and capabilities get a "no" but security gets a "maybe"? K.

> I have no knowledge on this subject at all: I have no idea what capabilities > are, I have never heard of Capsicum (or SELinux for that matter) and have > never even worked on security related issue.

Well that explains a lot...

<comment><USER12> You still fail to say where you disagree with what the article says as opposed to disagreeing with what you think the article says. It's not a matter of knowing the subject matter but of text comprehension. Sorry, I missed the "maybe" on security, but he explains that "a handful of projects with very high real world impact get a lot of mileage out of security research". With all due respect to Cap'n Proto and Sandstorm.io, neither have "very high real world impact". If you think capabilities are widely used in production, in multiple domains, and have had a significant and conclusive contribution to the industry, then you'd be in disagreement with the author, and I'm sure he'd gladly change his description in light of the new information. Like I said, it's an inventory, not a critique.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am not sure I would categorize a type system as a maybe. Dynamically typed languages succeeded only because they are simple and popular with beginers (python, php, javascript) and hence are popular by number of programmers, or because they are the only way to be cross platform (javascript). But I am not convinced that dynamic languages "work". It is great for simple things but completely breaks on large projects.

</comment><comment><USER17> First of all, this isn't so much about CS as about Computer Engineering. Next, as pointed out already, this selection is quite random and subjective

</comment><comment><USER18> What a strange random list of things big and small loosely related to computers.

So "bitmaps" work? "Software engineering" does not.

Sure things change in this industry. But you really need a bit more focus to capture what is going on and what drives it.

<comment><USER19> In 1995, "Software Engineering" would usually have implied CASE tools and heavy weight UML. It's current "success" is largely based on a bit of redefinition toward testing and team interactions and common values. They are rather different notions.

<comment><USER18> Yes. Where are as bitmaps here probably refer to pixel-level raster graphics. Where as "software engineering" is an entire field of its own.

If anything we are moving away from raster graphics to vector graphics, declarative approaches and display schemes that are adaptive to the device and its resolution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> RPC has won indeed, in many different ways. Classic RISC made its way into the embedded, low power devices and clearly won, at least by the sheer numbers of chips produced. Formal methods settled strongly in the hardware design [1]. Distributed computing made a very strong comeback (map-reduce, clouds, all that). So, in general, it's very outdated. It was already outdated even in 1999.

[1] [https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jrh13/slides/nasa-14apr10/slides.p...](https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jrh13/slides/nasa-14apr10/slides.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER21> What about Objects/Subtypes ?: a 'Yes' in 1999 but these days, we've learned the hard way that there are at least 2 contexts were objects don't quite work:

      - relational databases
        (objects & classes are organized in trees,
         and a tree is a sin in RDB land)
      - concurrency & parallelism

so a No? (although some people keep on trying)

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra I won't say RPC won.

We don't use Remote Procedure Calls much, we do Remote Endpoint Calls. Every endpoint still have to be considered, specified, secured, protected against DoS. None of that is automated - for example, endpoint specification systems famously didn't work. It's not that we fire random procedures on remote machines. We use protocols in the end, not procedures.

</comment><comment><USER22> > _" DEC started a project to do dynamic translation from x86 to Alpha; at the > time the project started, the projected performance of x86 basically running > in emulation on Alpha was substantially better than native x86 on Intel > chips."_

I've heard this several times, but would love to read more about it. Anyone know where to find more information?

<comment><USER23> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32)

(page 7) [http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs343/resources/fx32.pdf](http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs343/resources/fx32.pdf)

note that it was 500 MHz DEC Alpha vs 200 Mhz Pentium

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > In retrospect, the reason RISC chips looked so good in the 80s was that you > could fit a complete RISC microprocessor onto a single chip, which wasn't > true of x86 chips at the time.

This is simply not true. In fact, the first RISC I saw, the 88000, would not fit on one chip.

</comment><comment><USER25> Software Engineering is a loaded question. It covers the range from formal planning bureaucracies to seat-of-pants extreme programming. Any software company that makes it into its second decade has probably hacked together something that works.

</comment><comment><USER26> As usual, read this as "what's popular in Computer Science" more than "what's worked". Lots of things listed in the Maybe and No category (both the original table and in the article) _do_ work but aren't super-popular and some things listed as "Yes" like bitmaps and subtypes are bad but ubiquitous.

Apart from my usual spiel on how popularity is not particularly meaningful[1], this is also an example of a fascinating idea from poker: "results oriented thinking"[2]. It's a terrible name, but a crucial concept: you can do everything right and still fail or you can do things wrong and still succeed. In Poker it means you can bet correctly and still lose to the luck of the draw and vice-versa; you can't generalize from a single example or even a handful of examples. Of course, this is exactly what so many people in industry do. _Results oriented thinking is endemic in practical software engineering._

We even have our own name for it, or at least part of it: the IBM effect. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."[3] If you do the same old thing and fail, well, things happen. If you try something new and fail, well that thing you tried has to be terrible! Never do it again! Of course, in reality, those "things that happen" still dominate, but that's not how people make decisions. Then it's all magnified through institutional memory and "common wisdom".

It's also magnified because there's a certain kind of personality that values pragmatism above all else and categorically opposes anything new, idealistic or academic. (To be fair, pretty much the opposite of me :P.) The tricky thing is that they have a point... some of the time. But they'll use any sort of failure to rationalize their view, and because decision makers tend to be so results-oriented this sort of rationalization has an outsized influence.

Putting this all together both this article and Butler Lampson's original argument tell us a lot more about _the social dynamics of software engineering_ than they do about _computer science_. There are still interesting insights to be had, but _certainly not the ones the article is arguing for_.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10567962](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10567962)

[2]: Unfortunately, I haven't found a single good description of "results oriented thinking" as the phrase is used here. This blog post is okay, but the first part plays dubious semantic games with words that you may as well ignore: [http://randomdirections.com/why-being-results-oriented-is- ac...](http://randomdirections.com/why-being-results-oriented-is-actually- bad/)

[3]: Hilariously, this was the first Google result for the phrase: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt)

<comment><USER12> > As usual, read this as "what's popular in Computer Science" more than > "what's worked"

I don't think so. By "worked" he means that the benefits have been very, very clearly demonstrated to be very significant and widely applicable. And "clearly demonstrated" means their impact has been shown in numerous production settings.

> Lots of things listed in the Maybe and No category (both the original table > and in the article) do work but aren't super-popular

Not in the sense he means, which doesn't mean popular, but rather "clearly demonstrated to provide great benefits in the field with wide applicability".

> and some things listed as "Yes" like bitmaps and subtypes are bad but > ubiquitous.

I don't know what you mean by "bad". If by _bad_ you mean "have some serious drawbacks" or "can be possibly replaced by something better", then sure, but that doesn't mean they haven't worked. If by "bad" you mean that their benefits haven't been clearly demonstrated, then I'd disagree about your conclusion on bitmaps and subtypes.

> It's also magnified because there's a certain kind of personality that > values pragmatism above all else and categorically opposes anything new, > idealistic or academic.

Or is simply wary of incorporating ideas that haven't been sufficiently proven into products with billions of dollars on the line. OTOH, there is another kind of personality that confuses pure research with battle-tested ideas, and think that something that is shown to have benefits in research settings will surely have those benefits in the field without worse side-effects.

> decision makers tend to be so results-oriented

Shouldn't they be? Would you rather the people making the decisions on the software used to run your power stations, airports, banks and government be embrace "new" and be "idealistic or academic"?

Research is research, and the industry is the industry, and ideas have a very, very long maturation process of going from the research stage to the "demonstrably works at a large scale in the industry" phase. That's a good thing, and that's what it's like in all disciplines. Software is rather unique in that it has people who think this shouldn't be the case. Thank God they're not the decision makers.

> We even have our own name for it, or at least part of it: the IBM effect

And now, ironically, you're "spreading FUD" against an approach that is simply skeptical of things touted to be "the next big thing". Some of us have been in this industry long enough to know that most great ideas turn out not to be. That's not "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", but "let's not bet billions of dollars and possibly people's lives on the flavor of the week just yet until we gather more evidence".

<comment><USER26> > Shouldn't they be?

No. And the people who make nuclear powerplants and planes certainly _don 't_ engage in results-oriented thinking: you could easily take out half the safety features they build and not run into any catastrophes, but that's not an acceptable risk. Software companies, on the other hand, are perfectly happy taking on long-term and long-tail risk if it's more or less worked in the past, in large part because failure is far more forgivable. (Which, to be clear, is a good thing and and of itself, but does incentivize some unfortunate kinds of behavior.)

The whole point is that good decisions lead to bad outcomes and bad decisions lead to good outcomes all the time, but politics pushes people to react _strongly_ to results, ignoring this fact. This is quite different from other fields in engineering which by necessity, tradition, culture or even regulation operate differently.

As I said, "results oriented thinking" is a terrible name which leads to confusion, but it's what we have. Unfortunately I can't think of a better one and if I did it probably wouldn't catch on. (Which, amusingly, is an example of [2] above :).)

<comment><USER12> > And the people who make nuclear powerplants and planes certainly don't > engage in results-oriented thinking: you could easily take out half the > safety features they build and not run into any catastrophes

As someone who's once been there (not power plants but ensuring the safety of systems whose failure may endanger the lives of many people), it's much more complicated than that. If by "results oriented" you mean "look at nothing but the bottom line", I think you're disrespecting a lot of people by assuming (with little evidence) that this is indeed the process. I can tell you that it isn't, and not just in safety-critical software. Of course, there may be some bad people as in every field, but I've seen no evidence to suggest that "decision makers" are on average any worse at their job than anyone else. We _were_ result-oriented in the sense that we preferred not to let anything that didn't have _industry-proven_ benefits into our system.

Ironically, it is sometimes the safety-critical systems (well, some classes of them) that can afford to take _more_ risk, because they have the resources to build a new system and then run it in production alongside the old one only it's outputs are not piped to real actuators (we called it a "shadow system"), and do that for a _long time_ (a year if not more) before flipping the switch. "Plain" software usually can't afford to be so patient.

> The whole point is that good decisions lead to bad outcomes and bad > decisions lead to good outcomes all the time

Of course. Our disagreement is on what constitutes a good decision.

> politics pushes people to react strongly to results, ignoring this fact.

I don't think so. I've been a decision maker (though not alone, and sometimes didn't have the final say) in both safety-critical settings and less risky ones, and it's not politics but often the lack of a better metric. I can assure you that we've extensively studied the reasons for each failure or success _to the best of our abilities_ and never looked _just_ at the bottom line if we had any more information. We took quite a few calculated risks (changed our numerical algorithms, chose the yet-unproven-at-the-time real- time Java over C++ for a safety-critical, hard-realtime system and more), but always opted for things that had been proven _in the industry_ (or tried to prove them ourselves). It's not politics that led us to that, but lots of experience. That's because things that work in the lab fail in the field more often than not. Ignoring _that_ fact is just stupid (or, rather, shows a lack of experience in the field), especially when the stakes are high (and they're always high to some degree in the industry).

Besides, _why_ risk anything on something that doesn't have strong evidence of significant benefits? We look at people like you to show us those benefits, and if you don't -- or you think you've found clear benefits, but those benefits simply aren't significant enough for us -- why take any risk? We gladly risk quite a bit when there's good reason to believe the payoff would be large enough. Even that (let alone battle-testing) is something some of the things you'd put in the "works" category have yet to demonstrate.

That is something we in the industry tell researchers all the time. If you're content doing pure research, do it and don't whine about us not adopting your work. If not, and you would like us to use your stuff, there's a lot more you need to do than your pure research, like extensive applied research with empirical results, and, most importantly, it requires understanding the industry's needs (e.g. in the industry something is not adopted because it is "better"; it will only be adopted if it is better enough to offset the adoption cost plus associated risk). But what you can't do is have it both ways -- do only the pure research _and_ whine about us not using it. Doing so shows a lack of understanding of what the industry is, and reflects badly on those researchers much more than on the industry (which, BTW, has made amazing achievements in software).

The industry adopts brand new stuff _all the time_ when the researchers do their job properly (well, to be fair, for some it's a lot easier). Suppose I'm a decision maker and someone says to me, my new sorting algorithm would be 20% faster for the data you're sorting. Well, the adoption cost is nearly zero, I can test they payoff rather easily, there is risk involved but it's mitigated by my ability to switch back, so I find the 20% payoff to be high enough and I go for it. This happens _all the time_. In fact, millions of people will soon switch to a brand new -- and rather ambitious -- GC algorithm (granted, one that's been tested for nearly a decade). But then some other guy shows up and says, my new programming language would make your development better. How much better? I ask. Much! he says. Talk to me in numbers, I say. By how much would my development cost be reduced? Hmm, he says. I'm not sure; 30%... maybe? So I look at the adoption cost (huge), risk (very high), and find that 30% to be rather low, but let's suppose it's borderline good-enough. Only he's not even sure about the 30% because he has no experience with large systems and he's never even tested his claim. Maybe it's 5%, maybe 70% and maybe -20%! So let me tell you that in that case, I will be _very_ results oriented, look around, see that practically no one else uses that language and those who do see payoffs nowhere near high enough, so I pass[1]... and that's when you say I'm motivated by politics, hostile to academia and afraid of new stuff.

[1]: True, it isn't fair. Technologies with high adoption costs incur a much higher testing burden _and_ are required to yield much higher payoffs than those with lower adoption costs. But that's no one's fault, and just the way it is. Researchers in those fields should keep on working, realizing that their payoffs would be high enough to be adopted by the industry every 20 years instead of every 5 as in low-adoption-cost cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Bad title. the list of topics is a very small fraction of the activity in computer science. The original Lampson title was fine. Why change it?

</comment><comment><USER28> Dependency injection.

\- No one ever</comment>


Ask HN: What is a good open source mail server for Linux? - <AUTHOR>

I have been looking around and want to setup my own email server for my domain.  I am running an ubuntu box for a server and want to install a mail service that is easy to install and allows for multiple users that can be created on the fly.  I have looked into dovecot and postfix but whenever I try and look up a good tutorial, people are using postfix and courier or some other program.<p>What would you recommend for a good open source mail server that uses IMAP and SMTP so I can setup a webmail client and use Thunderbird on? <comment><USER2> You'll probably hear this alot: Just dont do it. Seriously. Running a mail service is complicated and on your own it's barely worth the effort.

But if you're serious about it then start with learning Postfix as your MTA. This will only be good for inbound mail and delivering mail to local inboxes. If you want IMAP and POP3 then you'll need to dig into some other services. Courier is the most popular, but all the glue will still need to be written by you.

<comment><AUTHOR> So if it is not a good idea, what is another option to use my domain for an email address?

And you are saying Courier is better than Dovecot?

<comment><USER3> When Google Apps were free, my advice was typically just to let Google host email. Now that it's not free? Hard to say. You could just set up email forwarding, Postfix does that pretty easily.

<comment><USER4> FastMail always gets high marks from people who abstain from the Borg.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought about fast mail, just don't want to pay for something I could do on my own

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Postfix and Dovecot work fine together. It's a one-time effort to set it up and it will work for many years. Most of the work will go into setting up spam filtering (Spamassassin), some virus-scanner if you want to bother (Amavis) and perhaps the Anomy Mail Sanitizer, which has served us well over the years, as well as the task of setting up SSL/TLS for SMTP, unless Ubuntu has taken care of that already (Debian Squeeze hasn't ...).

Unfortunately, all Open Source webmail clients I know of (including Redcube, Horde) are cumbersome if you have used Gmail and Fastmail.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you like to learn a lot about the internals of SMTP and mailservers in general and need/want a super reliable, fast and (if the setup is carefully crafted) secure mailserver - I like qmail.

My setup is qmail (SMTP) + vmailmgr + Dovecot (IMAP) and it was pretty easy to set up.

To start with qmail, I would recommend <http://www.lifewithqmail.org/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just an update, I ended up using Citadel Easy Install, which honestly, was extremely easy. It did give me IMAP and SMTP mail access and was incredibly easy to use using the web admin that comes as part of the suite. Thanks everyone for their help!

PS. Citadel isn't very pretty looking so if you are just using it for webmail, I would suggest installing roundcube on top of it (you can setup the web admin to use a different port and still run apache/nginx for your site)

</comment><comment><USER7> Exim (SMTP) & Dovecot (IMAP/POP) work well together. Run them locally first to get comfortable since it sounds like you're a bit new to this. Read the docs and don't hesitate to search and post over at Serverfault ( <http://serverfault.com/> ).

</comment><comment><USER8> I use Debian's Exim package. It's not too much hassle, although I'd advise avoiding Debian's magic configuration stuff unless you're sure it suits your needs.

Edit: Oh, and courier-imap. It's so little hassle I haven't touched it in years and forgot how it's set up.

<comment><USER9> I'm running Debian (old[1]) stable with Exim for incoming and outgoing smtp with greylistd for limiting spam, and dovecot for imap4 access -- all with my own SSL certs from cacert.org. At some point I'll probably have to set up more spam filtering - but for now it works surprisingly well.

Unless you really know Exim _well_ I would recommend to _keep_ "Debian's magic configuration stuff". It makes it easy to set up SSL/TLS:

<http://wiki.debian.org/Exim#TLS_and_Authentication>

Setting up dovecot is pretty straight forward, too:

<https://www.debian-administration.org/article/275/>

Note: I see no reason to enable imap -- just go with imaps.

Greylisting for exim:

<http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/167>

Both Exim and dovecot can use a separate password file (among other options) for "virtual" users. I just use pam-auth for imap, and separate auth for smtp -- imap does give access to user files anyway (at least in principle, it could probably be locked more down).

If you're new to Exim, there's no big reason not to use postfix -- other than it's the default for Debian (Postfix being default on Ubuntu).

If you're going to host a lot of virtual users -- you might benefit from dbmail -- I haven't tried it myself, but been following the project from the sidelines for a few years -- it appears to be a good solution for virtual-user email (email users that are not also system users):

<http://www.dbmail.org/>

[1] I'll be dist-upgrading "soon" -- hopefully nothing will break ;-)

edit: formatting

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Use postfix for your MTA for raw smtp. If you want open source web mail and everything fancy checkout either round cube or zarafa. Bonus points for zarafa for having iPhone / android / blackberry compatible active sync and outlook compatibility

<comment><AUTHOR> Does roundcube handle receiving the messages?

<comment><USER11> Nope, it's just a web-based IMAP client.

<comment><AUTHOR> So what would handle the incoming emails

<comment><USER12> Postfix: <http://www.zarafa.com/wiki/index.php/MTA_integration>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> what trevoro has mentioned is 100% right. If you want just get things running without much efforts and still want to keep your mail server in-house, then go for zimbra opensource edition. Its worth using and will make mail server administration somewhat easier.

</comment><comment><USER14> proxmox.com has an open source mail server/gateway package.

</comment><comment><USER15> Buy a package at some web host where they have done the dirty work for you and you still own/control the data.

</comment><comment><USER16> If I am remembering correctly, Outlook should let you use a custom domain. However, I've never used it because I use Google Apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Prefer to work with Linux and stay away from Microsoft</comment></comment>


There's a rule in Russian grammar that every first-grader knows by heart - <AUTHOR> https://alexyar.tumblr.com/post/174622302172/theres-a-rule-in-russian-grammar-that-every <comment><USER2> There's a rule in English grammar that every English speaker knows, but likely doesn't know they know.

The rule was popularised by a Tweet [1], but I learned about it here on HN.

[1] [https://twitter.com/MattAndersonNYT/status/77200275722200268...](https://twitter.com/MattAndersonNYT/status/772002757222002688)

<comment><USER3> German has a very similar rule but as a native German speaker I can't talk about this rule. I just know that I know something but don't know what exactly I know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a difference between social rules, whose exceptions do not need to be interesting: шы might be an acceptable bigram in hip hop liner notes, while you don't have to feed your cat if you have household help who'll do it for you, etc, and formal system rules, whose exceptions should be interesting, which occurs _iff_ the broken rule also results in a consistent formal system: hyperbolic geometry, non-euclidean spaces, etc.

        Все в зале, посчитай с нами
        Чтоб сотрясались сами мы
        стены и пол!

</comment><comment><USER5> Actually, this particular rule is almost as same as math rules: и/ы after a consonant indicates "soft"/"hard" pronunciation of the consonant. Some consonants do not have this choice and are always "soft" so they are never followed by ы as it would make no sense. Of course, there are exceptions: a "soft" ц allows ы in a few special cases. Can't have a proper language where any rule would always make sense :)

<comment><USER6> Your direction of thoughts is right. But this particular rule is completely opposite to your conclusions. Ж and Ш are "hard" consonants so by ear И after them always sounds like Ы. But the rule tells us to write И instead of Ы. This rule of Russian spelling does not make any sense that's why every first-grader knows it.

<comment><USER5> What do you know, I looked up and you are right - they are really considered "hard". Though, as a native speaker I thought them to be "soft" all my life! I figure the rule making them "hard" is arbitrary, not the и/ы.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Doomerfood prepares emergency food kits and deliver to your door - <AUTHOR> http://doomerfood.com <comment><USER2> no toilet paper I'm out.

<comment><USER3> In times of doom and gloom, toilet paper should/would be the least of your concerns.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a post going around on twitter saying that Gilligan's Island and Lost are proof that you don't need toilet paper in a crisis.</comment></comment></comment>


Featuretools – An open source framework for automated feature engineering - <AUTHOR> https://www.featuretools.com/ <comment><USER2> I have also been a similar to tool for automatically extracting (informative) features. What I am trying to understand is whether it is possible to store the learned feature _definitions_ for later use. For example, I want to learn interesting features from a large data set and then I want to apply these feature to smaller data sets, say, for prediction.

<comment><USER3> one of the authors here. yes, that is definitely possible. it's explained in our doucmentation on deploying featuretools: [https://docs.featuretools.com/guides/deployment.html](https://docs.featuretools.com/guides/deployment.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does featuretools compare to tsfresh: [https://github.com/blue- yonder/tsfresh](https://github.com/blue-yonder/tsfresh) ?</comment>


Outsourcing your chores is a good thing - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/magazine/outsource-your-way-to-success.html?hp&_r=0 <comment><USER4> At one point I hired a personal assistant through oDesk. I took this idea from Timothy Ferriss's 4-Hour Workweek, but I hired someone in the US. I wanted to get a landscaping project done (that was required by the environmental regulators in Tahoe), but I didn't have time to track down the contractors, do background checks, make sure they showed up, and finally get the regulators to sign off on the project.

The contractors thought it was pretty strange to have to deal with someone in a different state, but it worked out pretty well. Our culture (at least here in the US) doesn't appreciate outsourcing day to day tasks (and I felt embarrassed telling people I had an assistant). Maybe this comes from our Protestant roots.

It reminds me of an episode of Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion. Some of his characters from Minnesota visit California and find out one of their relatives has a gardener, and they ask if the relative is having any health issues, because they couldn't imagine having someone do their gardening for them, unless they were severely ill.

Update: The poster above mentions getting what you pay for if you pay $2 per hour in the Philippines for instance. I agree with this. I payed significantly more, but I feel as though I got my money's worth. It isn't that expensive to hire in the US if you look to lower cost areas like the Mid-west.

For this project, I felt it was worth it to have someone who understood the problems of hiring and managing contractors in the US. The person I hired was a homeowner, understood what I wanted to accomplish, and did an awesome job. It turned out to be a fraction of the cost of the overall project, and was money well spent.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure it's related to work ethic or religious roots but it's certainly true that there was never a particular culture in the US of service whereby even people of fairly middle-class backgrounds had servants. And this has probably carried over to modern culture whereby people probably outsource fewer tasks like grass cutting, housecleaning, and so forth than they arguably should (whatever that word means in this context).

That said, a lot of people do outsource tasks like cooking--but they do so in different ways (like going to restaurants) rather than by explicitly hiring help.

<comment><USER6> It's a good point about eating at restauranta vs. hiring a chef; in my limited norcal experience, it cost less to have a come-and-cook chef weekdays than it did to routinely eat out, and it was _substantially_ more awesome in several ways.

Despite it costing less, though, several of my fellow Americans thought the chef was like, bourgeois, or pretentious, or _something_.

(I would still do it, except now I have a wife who cooks, and resists my lobbying to outsource this function...)

<comment><USER7> My college-age daughter LOVES to cook and finds it relaxing. I call her my "personal chef" and have basically turned over all household food stuff to her, freeing my time for other things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The best advantage I have found with our VA is having them listen to all the podcasts I want to listen to, summarize the articles and send me the transcript. Then I can skim in 30 seconds what use to take me 45-60 minutes to listen to.

Also, I have found Odesk very helpful when our sales people ask for custom demos for clients. Instead of distracting our team I hire someone on Odesk to reskin our demo app. The best part is I know exactly how much that demo costs and like to let sales know so they can decide for their self if a demo is warranted in each situation.

As for personal tasks, I love using the concierge service attached to my credit card. Just recently I had them research all the candidates up for local election for me, find out how to return a jacket I bought on a business trip across the country, and suggest some recipes for a halloween party.

I have a running list of my favorite things I have sent to my concierge on Quora: [https://www.quora.com/Concierge-Services/What-are-some- good-...](https://www.quora.com/Concierge-Services/What-are-some-good-uses- for-a-credit-cards-concierge-service)

I also have a running list on my blog: [http://delegnation.com/](http://delegnation.com/)

A presentation I did at a Product Camp recently about using outsourcing to support product management: [http://www.slideshare.net/russjhammond/product- camp-nashvill...](http://www.slideshare.net/russjhammond/product-camp- nashville-92813)

<comment><USER9> For the podcasts - have you tried listening to them at 1.5x or 2x speed? I started doing that & it's saved me _tons_ of time & I can get through way more content (doesn't sound that weird once you get used to it either).

On your credit card - is that the Amex Platinum? I have a friend that uses them as a personal assistant basically.

<comment><USER8> I do use the 1.5x feature but save that for the podcasts I actually listen to. By reading the transcripts I can "monitor" 3-5 weekly, hour long podcasts in 15 minutes.

As for the card, yes I use an AMEX Platinum but believe Visa Signature and MasterCard World Elite also offer a similar service.

<comment><USER10> Looks like AMEX Platinum is getting rid of their Concierge service

[http://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/1212590/bell-...](http://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/1212590/bell- tolls-amex-concierge-service)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I got a VA from the Philippines earlier this year & it's changed my business. I spend less time doing basic research, and repeatable tasks that I _can_ do - but is simply not a good use of my time.

I finally sat down, did a few of my tasks & documented each one, step by step, creating SOPs (standard operating procedures) for each one. It was a little tedious as first, but once my VA got after it - it freed up _tons_ of time for me (but almost more importantly - head space & energy).

Most people who have bad experiences with VAs either don't have a good idea how to manage them or don't have a budget to get someone competent for the tasks they're requesting (paying people $2/hour & you'll get what you pay for).

Go in with reasonable expectations, good systems & processes in place & you'll have a great experience.

<comment> martin-adams I keep wondering what my repeatable tasks are. I suspect I just don't recognise them because I don't have documented procedure.

I don't suppose you'd elaborate on some examples of tasks you give to your VA?

<comment><USER9> Data entry & research. Used to spend hours for lists, contact information, etc. Can be done automatically. Lead sourcing is another big use here.

Competitive research. Having your VA research these tasks & put together a database of information becomes a 1-day task that has immense value down the road.

Customer Service - haven't done this yet - but having them take messages, be my secretary, handle refunds & answer 80% of the support messages that come in (usually variants of the same problem with a fixed, simple solution).

Basic writing skills (non-native english is tough here, but if you want just a paragraph or so written, they can usually do a pretty good job here - <USER2> which I have an native-english editor / copywriter go back through & clean up any leftover artifacts).

<comment><USER11> True, we decided to outsource, at least partially, lead sourcing for [http://codedose.com](http://codedose.com), as it was just way too much time consuming and steering away from other more strategic tasks, like e.g. "processing" these leads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What about the social and psychological impacts of doing chores for all of those old-timey reasons like "learning the value of an honest day's work"?

I would say this kind of behavior has pretty big social implications that everyone seems to be glossing over.

<comment><USER13> Totally agree. As a kid of course I hated having to do all the work I was told to do. Now I much more appreciate it and have my own son mow the lawn, etc. I see my neighbors kid not wanting to mow the lawn (and they let him) and instead plays call of duty all day. Will it make any difference - I don't know, all I can continue to rely on is my own experiences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Outsourcing meals and cleaning is pretty common. Yet another economical article which discovers america.

BTW: when we had first baby, we hired doula for several weeks. Very good investment.

</comment><comment><USER15> sigh...If I could only outsource my HN reading I would be so much productive.

<comment><USER16> Why can't you?

<comment><USER17> I for one am reluctant to entrust somebody else with posting as angersock... I don't want to dilute the brand quality, the meticulous posting, the careful planning and forethought that goes into each bespoke communique.

For some things, if you want them done right, you have to do them yourself.

<comment><USER16> I doubt actually posting is the bulk of the time you spend on HN, though. Paying someone to filter a bit _could_ make sense. Possibly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I will say I would never hire anyone to do work I can accomplish myself - <USER3> don't care if it makes sense or not, I just couldn't do it. Why? Because I and I would say most people that hire people to take care of their lawns and clean their toilets aren't then using their time more wisely or getting that oh so amazing hour of family time they could never have. They just don't feel like doing the task.

<comment><USER18> This seems like a bit of a puritanical viewpoint. Taking a nap for an hour can be more productive than raking leaves, if rest is what you need most.

<comment><USER13> But there you use the word 'need'. If you have been working 48 hours straight and want to hire the neighbors kid to mow the lawn that's now a foot high, fine.

It's just my viewpoint, I know how much time I waste (heck I'm wasting it right now) and how much time I have to take care of the lawn, etc. I don't need to add to the waste because I don't feel like doing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Single page article here --> [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/magazine/outsource-your- wa...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/magazine/outsource-your-way-to- success.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=all)

</comment><comment><USER19> True story: I got my first industry job, out of college - at Apple - by hiring a VA to iterate through all open jobs that met a list of criteria I gave them (years experience, skills listed, etc), and submitting my resume to them.

</comment><comment><USER20> Talk about degrading family value.

Doing chores is beneficial and a nice way of taking a break.

<comment><USER9> I don't think you read the whole article or you would have caught this:

> (Oddly, it's perfectly fine if leisure time includes those inefficient > D.I.Y. household tasks that some people find rewarding and fun, like > pickling beets or knitting.)

If you find it fun - do it. If not, outsource it as fast as possible.

<comment><USER13> So if it's not fun, don't do it. Does that sound like a healthy philosophy to pass down?

<comment><USER9> How bout:

If you want to or have to do it - do it. If you don't want to do it & absolutely don't have to do it - then outsource it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: I'm building a startup, should I do LLC or C-corp? Why? - <AUTHOR>

I am building a startup and want to incorporate it, I was gonna do LLC but someone suggested C-corp. What's the benefit(s) of one over the other for startups specifically and why? <comment><USER2> Here's an answer from YC partner Gary Tan:

"If you ever want to take outside investment, you'll want to be a Delaware C corp. It's just standard and investors know how to deal with it. Even Facebook started as something else, but had to reincorporate.

It's not too difficult to fix, but might as well the avoid the problem in the first place." [1]

[1] [http://www.quora.com/Y-Combinator/Why-does-Y-Combinator- reco...](http://www.quora.com/Y-Combinator/Why-does-Y-Combinator-recommend- against-forming-an-LLC)

</comment><comment><USER3> Start it as an LLC. You'll make the Subchapter S adoption for the IRS. It used to be that VC's would not fund an LLC, but that is not the case anymore.

You can change your LLC into a C-Corp any time, or you can form an LLC and have it acquire the LLC for tracking purposes if your VC wants a c-corp.

LLC's pay taxes as an S-Corp, which means all the income and expenses pass through to you, the owner, and taxes get paid on the profit based on your personal tax rate.

<comment><USER4> What benefit does an LLC possess over a C corp? Bear in mind that a C Corp can also make an S Corp election.

<comment><USER5> Significantly less paperwork for one. You can form an LLC with a single sheet of paper in some states. No separate tax forms to file. Any losses pass down to the members, which is especially beneficial when you are starting since lots of startups(in fact any new business) will probably have losses. I am not an accountant, but I think you can also offset income from previous years if your losses exceed your total income.

Edit: I'm not too familiar with the S-corp election for C corps, so most likely most of the pass-through benefits apply there as well.

<comment><USER4> It took me about 20 minutes to form a C corp in NJ , using the state's website. I don't know how much easier it can get. BTW, if you have an LLC , you still have to file the S corp election form with the IRS. All I can say is that you should definitely speak with an accountant before deciding what is best for your situation</comment></comment></comment></comment>


bootstrapping becoming sexy again? - <AUTHOR> http://sramanamitra.com/articles/is-bootstrapping-becoming-sexy-again-by-sramana-mitra/ <comment><USER2> I'm a big fan of bootstrapping, and I highly recommend the following books:

<http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrapping-Your-Business-Successful- Company/dp/1593373872/>

<http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrap-Lessons-Learned-Building- Successful/dp/0971187304/>

And here's a good intro article to bootstrapping:

<http://www.inc.com/magazine/20020201/23855.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> I've come across Greg Gianforte before on ITConversations. Listen to the talk because his lessons are compelling and covers the bootstrapping article you supplied, "Bootstrapping Your Company", 2006 MySQL Conference, 19Mb, mp3 42m, 2006APR25 ~ <http://osc.gigavox.com/shows/detail1624.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Would YC have a problem with a startup "built to enjoy", with no exit strategy?

<comment><USER4> Yes. "Built to enjoy" startups provide no exit for the investor which makes it extremely difficult to recover an initial investment.

If you can bootstrap, do it. Venture capital is only a tool to be used in certain strategies where growth or momentum are prereqs to market profitability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bootstrapping is exhausting, not sexy.

</comment><comment><USER6> bootstrapping sounds much too kinky to be sexy

<comment><USER7> <http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=11086></comment></comment>


Here's to the Next 3 Years (Yehuda Katz Moves On) - <AUTHOR> http://yehudakatz.com/2010/09/14/heres-to-the-next-3-years/

<comment><USER2> I'm super excited by this -- I have been reluctant to use SproutCore, but I have a strong feeling that Yehuda's contributions will change that. I love JQuery, but what I really want is something that can do a bit more, like SproutCore or Cappuccino. Yehuda, when can we expect your contributions to become a public part of SproutCore?

<comment><USER3> Yehuda has already made some fantastic changes to the Abbot build tools that should be landing with the 1.4 release any day. It's in rc2 right now, just run gem install sproutcore --pre, the tools are super fast now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for all you've done, working with Rails has been (if possible) even easier and more fun because of you. Can't wait to see what new possibilities open up to someone with nothing more than an idea and a laptop.

</comment><comment><USER5> I feel a bit sad for Rails (yes, I know he will continue contributing, but I doubt it will be anything close to what he did in the last few years, when that was his main job).

But he seems a great guy and he deserves all the best. Good luck in your next endeavour.

</comment><comment><USER6> Anyone care to summarize why this is important news?

<comment><USER7> The output of this guy is amazing, any OSS projects he works on will move forward and benefit a lot of people.

<comment><USER8> And not just physical output of code, but he also seems extremely friendly & helpful and interested in fostering productive communities. Which is IMO just as important to the long-term health of open-source projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Props for the link to a great presentation of Avi Bryant (<http://twitter.com/avibryant>, <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=avibryant>, who is not only brilliant for his work on his startup that got bought by twitter, his seaside framework, which brought continuations to web, copied later by Scala Thrift framework, and also helped pg get on twitter).

<comment><USER10> _his seaside framework, which brought continuations to web_

Is this the case? I looked (briefly) for confirmation and did find at the very least papers discussing the use of Scheme's continuations for web session management, circa Seaside's first public announcement in 2002...

<comment><USER9> Well, seaside is also from 2002 (from their website: <http://seaside.st/>). But, If I am not mistaken, JBoss Seam, which is (unfortunately) far more mainstream than seaside/scheme/smalltalk, got its continuations idea from Seaside. And scalas' LIFT framework, which is also more mainstream, also got its inspiration from Seaside.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Because Yehuda will be working on SproutCore, I took another good look at it last night, playing with the Ruby (Sinatra) and the Clojure back end tutorial examples.

I met Yehuda at a Merb camp and listening to his talks about efficiency altered my view of using Ruby.

</comment><comment><USER12> 8</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=D<comment>

<comment><USER13> My gawd, HN is turning into Slashdot. :(

<comment><USER12> Sometimes a ding dong is the only valid response.

8</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=D<comment>~</comment></comment>


Otto and Budweiser: First Shipment by Self-Driving Truck - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb0Kzb3haK8 <comment><USER2> I don't understand why Budweiser who bill itself as semi working class beer is advertising that it helping to put hundreds of thousands of truck drivers out of work.

This is isn't a comment on driver less tech just on the optics which seem very problematic.</comment>


The future of ESL in China is here - <AUTHOR> https://ispikit.com/demo <comment><AUTHOR> This a project I have been working on looking for comments from the community and people who are generally interested in the idea of world based ESL speech games</comment>


Another big reveal on Theranos: Safeway execs questioned accuracy of blood tests - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/11/12/another-big-reveal-by-wsj-on-theranos-safeway-execs-questioned-accuracy-of-blood-tests/ <comment><USER2> Can't they use the full word and say revelation or use a synonym and say disclosure, development, finding, uncovering, etc... Why 'reveal'? Does it sound more faux sophisticated?</comment>