Sick whale found to have 30 plastic bags blocking its stomach - happy-go-lucky
http://news.sky.com/story/sick-whale-found-to-have-30-plastic-bags-blocking-its-stomach-10754077
======
evolve2k
My home state introduced a plastic bag ban a couple of years back. It was
acccompanied by a simple campaign that encouraged families to bring re-usable
bags to the checkout counter when shopping for groceries. If you forget to
bring bags, you can buy these re-usable canvas bags from the supermarket for
around $1. Initially we all bought a bunch while our habits switched over, but
this worked as the bags are useful anyway and most of us now keep some in the
car and some in the pantry.

Thin supermarket bags were the focus of the ban. Surprisingly after the ban a
number of venues that sort of need plastic bags, eg for vegetables or takeout
started sourcing 100% compostable bags that are allowed. I didn't even know
this solution existed before the ban.

There is a culture locally now to have reusable bags in the boot of your car
and for a few items to just load up your arms.

It's been pretty successful and no-where near as interrupting as you'd
imagine.

Ref: [http://www.zerowaste.sa.gov.au/plastic-
bags](http://www.zerowaste.sa.gov.au/plastic-bags)

~~~
abawany
In Austin, TX (USA), one of the few progressive cities in Texas, a plastic bag
ban was passed four years ago to much grumbling. AFAICT, the residents have
adapted to it and the prices for reusable bags are quite reasonable.

Unfortunately, the TX state legislature has other ideas and will likely attack
this ban this year: [http://www.mystatesman.com/news/texas-lawmakers-look-
courts-...](http://www.mystatesman.com/news/texas-lawmakers-look-courts-they-
make-new-run-bag-bans/rag2OQD3Fi3QmVtb6t5GMP/) .


Facebook XSS Exploit [CODE][GIST] - pokoleo
http://shalecraig.posterous.com/57983906

======
spcmnspff
I get this error message when I try to post it as a status:

Message Failed This message contains blocked content that has previously been
flagged as abusive or spammy. Let us know if you think this is an error.

------
joshmlewis
I've seen this used before this past week.


Why I use Object Pascal - samuell
https://dubst3pp4.github.io/post/2017-10-03-why-i-use-object-pascal/
======
StillBored
As I get older, I'm strongly swinging into the camp that thinks languages
should have strongly restrictive syntax. Object pascal is one of those
languages which is both low level enough to cleanly map to efficient code, as
well as high level enough not to feel really restrictive. Its a language that
is completely misunderstood because far to many people read a couple critical
essays, and believed everything they read, even though the strongest argument
frequently was that its harder to type "begin/end" than "{/}". Which is a
pretty lame thing, given code completion in editors as old as emacs.

Put another way, the thought patterns programmers fall into when using it seem
to result in code which is easier to understand than most other languages
which seem to encourage "perlism" (creating a single unreadable line),
"forthism" (creating a billion two line words that combine to solve all the
problems in one word), or a few other things which become completely
unmaintainable when the project grows beyond what can be written by a over-
energetic student in a semester at school.

~~~
chubot
I don't think anyone really disagrees with you -- most people have problems
with the syntax of Perl, C, and C++. Sure, they can get used to it,
particularly with C because it's small, but the syntax isn't why they use the
language.

Somewhat surprisingly, I think Perl's syntax is one of the reasons that Python
became popular. Perl can do pretty much everything Python can, and it came
significantly earlier. Yet people gravitated toward Python.

I wouldn't call Python "strongly restrictive", but I would call it "just
right". It's terse without being unreadable.

JavaScript syntax is also pretty sane (but there are many horrible parts to
the semantics.)

Ruby seems to be pretty nice in the common cases, but there are apparently
gremlins lurking in corner cases. Python has only 1 or 2 syntactic gremlins I
can think of (trailing comma, etc.)

~~~
kibwen
_> Perl can do pretty much everything Python can, and it came significantly
earlier. Yet people gravitated toward Python._

I don't think syntax is the main culprit here, and Perl is only four years
older than Python. For about 15 years Python tried, unsuccessfully, to compete
with Perl as the premier language for shell scripting and sysadmin tasks. It
wasn't until around 2005 that Python finally caught on, its rise coinciding
with Ruby. While I do personally find Python more readable than Perl, I
attribute its ascent more to the combination of the Web 2.0 gold rush
demanding dynamically-typed languages for quick prototyping, Perl's apparent
mid-2000s limbo due to Perl 5 vs Perl 6, the then-declining reputation of PHP
and the shared hosting services which first popularized it, and the quality of
Python's standard library (which made up for CPAN).

~~~
wainstead
I have long thought Perl can do _anything_ Python can, and then some. I still
use Perl one-liners to find/change strings in code bases:

perl -pi -e 's/somestring/newstring/g' $(ag -l --python Foo)

Does Python have an equivalent?

I think the fabulous Python libraries for data science have really propelled
the language to the top of the list, in terms of users.

~~~
richardwhiuk
You could have just used sed for that?

~~~
throwaway7645
So Perl was built because Sed/Awk had "whipupitude", but fell short of being a
real application language like C which was great and fast to run, but slow to
develop in. Perl was the middle ground which took the power of Sed/Awk/Bash
and made it faster and more respectable and added a huge module repository. Of
course take this with a grain of salt.

------
krylon
I feel kind of sheepish to admit that "Why Pascal is not my favorite
programming language" had a huge impact on me and caused me to avoid Pascal
until I was forced to deal with it because a coworker quit and dropped
maintenance of an in-house application in my lap.

I was happy to realize that most of the criticism in that essay no longer
applies to relatively recent versions of the language/IDE (Delphi 7 in my
case).

One huge advantage if Pascal is that it is very easy to read; the code does
not look or feel pretty, but it is so easy to read I could get an idea of what
was going on without any prior knowledge of Pascal within a few hours.

Keywords not being case-sensitive felt weird at first, but one gets used to it
very quickly.

~~~
jandrese
My High School programming class was taught in Pascal (Turbo Pascal version 3
IIRC). I remember liking it just fine, but when I went to the university I
switched to C because everything interesting was written in C. Also, there
were no Pascal compilers in the FreeBSD (2.0) ports tree back then.

I had a notion that Pascal was a "toy teaching language" too, but for what I
was doing that didn't really matter.

~~~
whatyoucantsay
You must be 50... and you're still on HN! Are you still an engineer? If so,
what stack are you using now?

~~~
jandrese
You are off by about a decade. FreeBSD 2.0 was released in the mid 90s.

I still skim Slashdot too.

Most of the time I'm working on ancient versions of RHEL that are never
connected to the internet so I don't exactly get to use "stacks" or anything
that wants to pull code from Github. If it doesn't come on the RHEL 5.5 disk
it's not available. You might be surprised how much you can do with a modest
CGI script, a touch of JS, and some basic styling CSS.

~~~
whatyoucantsay
I clearly misjudged the time of Pascal's popularity and have never heard of
RHEL but thanks for the response!

What is Slashdot's strength from your POV?

~~~
khedoros1
> have never heard of RHEL

But surely you've heard of Red Hat itself? In the early 2000s, Red Hat Linux
broke into a couple directions: "Fedora Linux" as the community version of the
OS, and "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" as the supported, enterprise-level version
of the OS (and CentOS as the community-supported version of RHEL).

------
pulse7
Ultibo - the barebone unikernel OS for Raspberry Pi - is written completelly
in Object Pascal... it's source code is >>much<< easier to read than C
counterparts (see [https://ultibo.org](https://ultibo.org)).

~~~
justin66
This is strange and wonderful. Thanks for sharing. Somehow I wasn't aware of
this, and I follow Raspberry Pi stuff.

~~~
leledumbo
Too wonderful. I was shocked when I see common filesystem drivers (including
NTFS!), completely written in Pascal. The author must be a programming God.

------
mdhughes
I've lately been trying out FreePascal for building my indie games (which have
in the past been in C, Python, Java, Objective-C, and finally JavaScript), and
it's going well enough. There's certainly room for improvement, and the
Lazarus IDE is not at all to my taste, but it's likely to be my next-ten-years
language.

[https://mdhughes.tech/2017/09/02/pascal/](https://mdhughes.tech/2017/09/02/pascal/)

and a couple of followup posts

[https://mdhughes.tech/category/pascal/](https://mdhughes.tech/category/pascal/)

~~~
j_s
Any early feedback on mobile?

~~~
leledumbo
Lazarus and/or Free Pascal? Android is looking good, though maybe not really a
pleasing experience for those with less experience. It even has multiple
approaches. iOS is still dark, no one seems interested in making it work, even
Arduino gets its place before iOS.

Delphi? Some big mobile apps are written in it already. WPS Office for Android
and/iOS, if you ever heard, was written in Delphi. At least the last time I
decompile their APK it confirms a Delphi runtime existence. Disadvantage would
be the framework that's not native, thus you may end up in jumbo size APK even
for a form + label containing hello world.

------
s_kilk
How do users of languages like Pascal get by without any/many libraries? Do
they need to use the FFI to call out to C functions constantly?

I mean, I certainly buy that $VINTAGE_LANGUAGE could still be great to develop
in, but I'm curious the practicalities of working on modern systems without
re-inventing every single wheel.

~~~
samuell
In my experience (talking FreePascal/Lazarus here, as I'm on Linux most of the
time), the library situation is not _that_ bad, actually. The standard lib has
most of the mundane stuff, and a little github-searching can often find a
working version of more specific stuff (like SSH2 which I needed recently).

To the contrary, in some areas (like GUI tooling) it is far far beyond newer
alternatives like Go.

Also, I think the higher level of the language than C/C++ etc can make it
easier to develop your own solution, should you have to.

~~~
oneweekwonder
We needed a app for branding. That login to a website. So it needed to do a
POST request. I struggled with fp and google for 30 min, and dropped to the
`RunCommand('curl',['[https://ifconfig.co'](https://ifconfig.co')],s, opt)`
clutch with curl.exe(with licence file) bundled into my innosetup file...
magic?!

~~~
conductor
libcurl (with examples) is bundled in the FreePascal distribution, as well as
simpler alternatives like fphttp, fphttpclient, fphttpwebclient, etc.

~~~
oneweekwonder
Thanks will look into it.

It is hard to get the boss to allow you to write a mvp in non mainstream
language.

So I had a quick swing at the libs and wondered about so/dll dependancies
compiled against my exe; and just went for a bundled exe, yum and apt curl
install script... under a day native win and ubuntu support?!:D I'm sure there
is a TODO tag above my command for the junior that is going to hate me because
he now needs to code in lazarus... ;)

------
baldfat
Turbo Pascal and Forth were my first languages past Assembly on C64. They were
so much better then Basic and Assembly for a young teenagers.

Delphi is now $1,200 to $4,400 a user!!! WOW more then the $75 in 1983

[https://www.embarcadero.com/app-development-tools-
store/delp...](https://www.embarcadero.com/app-development-tools-store/delphi)

~~~
dubst3pp4
Currently I'm learning Forth and I really like that language! It's a brain
twist and that's reason enough to have a look at :-)

~~~
stevekemp
I've never done anything serious in Forth, but I was first exposed to it in
the late 80s, and keep coming back to it.

Over the past couple of years I've written, and thrown away, several
implementations of Forth in C, C++, and Perl. I've even had it running,
embedded, on ESP8266 devices.

It continues to be something I enjoy toying with, but equally something I
can't find a _perfect_ use for.

~~~
baldfat
Give it a try in Racket. Racket's macros is a dream to create another language
in.

------
V-2
_" You can also define your own types"_, _" classes can also inherit other
classes"_, _" Pascal is modular"_...

Not to say these are not valid reasons, or expectations one may have from a
language, but - what exactly is Pascal being compared to? I mean, it's 2017.

~~~
mdhughes
C has no classes, and everything's in one global namespace.

Scheme & LISP have no built-in classes, and one can argue that CLOS isn't what
we normally describe as OOP. Both normally have a global namespace.

Inheritance in JavaScript is possible but very hard to implement correctly
before ES6. Node has namespaces (sort of) but client-side JavaScript generally
doesn't.

PHP in theory has namespaces, but the standard libraries are just dumped in
global.

~~~
CiPHPerCoder
> PHP in theory has namespaces, but the standard libraries are just dumped in
> global.

Modern PHP development almost exclusively uses Composer libraries rather than
the standard libraries, which overwhelmingly use namespaces in Vendor\Project
format.

There's going to be a push to clean up the standard library in the coming
years. The plan is to introduce a namespaced alternative to the standard
library in the global namespace which also cleans up a lot of nits (e.g.
phpsadness.com posts). Maybe in PHP 8? Then when the ecosystem catches up, we
can discuss deprecating/removing the "just dumped in global" way of doing
things in PHP 9.

Source: I'm very likely going to be the main person driving this push.

~~~
mdhughes
Namespaces by 2020? That'd be nice. The \ syntax still makes my eyes bleed a
bit, when most others use . or :

~~~
CiPHPerCoder
You might want to go see a doctor and get that checked out then.

Just because "most others use . or :" doesn't mean it's the only correct
syntax in the realm of possibility.

------
_pdp_
My dad still runs his business on a software I wrote in 1998 in Delphi. I
haven't touched it since then but it is the only code I have that still works
19 years later.

~~~
slig
Does it runs on modern Windows or is it running on a VM?

~~~
narag
It could very well work without VM. Current Windows is binary compatible with
old programs.

There are a few reasons that programs stop working and most of them are
related to hardcoded directories that got perm. restrictions over the years.

------
idlewan
The Nim language [0] feels very inspired by Pascal while looking like Python.
If you're interested in fast, compiled & typed languages, I suggest you also
take a look at it. I personally love its readability.

[0]: [https://nim-lang.org/](https://nim-lang.org/)

~~~
justin66
I'm curious what's similar to pascal about it? It's garbage collected, it
compiles to C or JavaScript, and its syntax is inspired by Python, so I just
wonder what is left.

~~~
dmux
From [https://nim-lang.org/features.html](https://nim-lang.org/features.html):

> Oberon-inspired visibility markers

> Pascal-inspired type sections for leaner definitions

While Oberon isn't Pascal, they're both Wirth languages that share many
commonalities.

------
hvs
I used Delphi (1) to Delphi 5 in the 90's and used Delphi at a company for
production software from 1998-2001. I loved it. It was (?) a great language
and was always a pleasure to work in. I'm not a language fundamentalist (I use
whatever it takes to get the job done and whatever my employer prefers), but I
can say that at least 16 years ago it was a joy to work in.

------
SmallDeadGuy
Some fun I had with free pascal in college was that you can $DEFINE almost
anything to almost anything else:

      {$DEFINE (:=ab}
      {$DEFINE ):=ba}
      ...etc...

Code becomes pretty ridiculous:

      WriteLn ab ab a + b ba * c ba

If you define WriteLn, +, and * as other things too you can get horrific
looking code. All keywords like program, if, then, and end can be redefined. I
wrote a script that would take a regular source file and output a functionally
identical file which looked like:

      {$DEFINE program:=a}
      ... many more defines ...
      {$DEFINE [:=zd}
      {$DEFINE ]:=ze}
      a b c d e f g h (* ... the entire program on one obfuscated line *)

~~~
boznz
Wow, using pascal for 30 years and diddnt know this..

I am actually thankful its not that well known. Pascal is still readable where
as #defines in C libraries give me terrible headaches decoding.

------
ckok
Yeah I've written compilers for Swift, C#, Java, JavaScript and Pascal and
agree Pascal is the cleanest and nicest language, both on the parsing side and
writing in.

~~~
frik
Pascal language has a LL(1) grammar, typical for Wirth and other 1980s work.

LL(1) grammars are of great practical interest, as parsers for these grammars
are easy to construct, and many computer languages are designed to be LL(1)
for this reason.

~~~
ckok
I always hand write them but yeah. LL(1) is always nice

------
j_s
I believe the toolchain offers the best cross-platform GUI option right now.
In the best case this can serve as a wake-up call to other languages: get your
GUI house in order!

~~~
jdhawk
Everyone is (sadly) switching to Electron for this purpose.

------
oneweekwonder
While the author mentions castle-engine at the end I also want to mention
glscene[0]. Don't think it is actively maintained like castle. But boy was it
amazing to read through the code to learn OOP principles and GL.

[0]:
[http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/GLScene](http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/GLScene)

------
_pdp_
Apollo Computer used Pascal as the systems programming language for its
operating systems beginning in 1980. Variants of Pascal have also frequently
been used for everything from research projects to PC games and embedded
systems.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_\(programming_language\))

------
tekacs
Folks interested in Object Pascal might also be interested in
[http://www.elementscompiler.com/elements/oxygene/](http://www.elementscompiler.com/elements/oxygene/)
(no affiliation, but as an observer it seems relevant and interesting).

~~~
ckok
I am obviously biased, thanks for mentioning it :)

------
aswanson
What caused pascal to lose out to C? Seems like it was a good language that
had developer uptake.

~~~
jhbadger
1) The popularity of UNIX where C was the standard language 2) The fact that,
much like BASIC, most implementations of the language didn't follow the
standard. In practice, Turbo Pascal was more of a standard than the official
one.

~~~
rpeden
It was more than just the popularity of Unix.

A while back, I ended up following a link on HN and reading a bunch of old
computer magazines. I came across an article by Peter Norton (in PC Magazine)
from around 1986 or 87. In it, he discussed why C was rapidly displacing
Pascal among DOS programmers.

Not that Unix didn't have an effect, but as DOS and then windows exploded in
popularity in the 80s, C displacing Pascal there played a big role in Pascal's
overall decline vs C.

edit: I think this is the article I'm thinking of:

[https://books.google.ca/books?id=NZrPkWywRXgC&pg=PA75&lpg=PA...](https://books.google.ca/books?id=NZrPkWywRXgC&pg=PA75&lpg=PA75#v=onepage&q&f=false)

~~~
pjmlp
In those days without Internet and expensive dial-up access to BBS limited to
5 simultaneous users, it depended very much where in the globe we are talking
about.

On my area in Portugal, using C was mostly for university projects.

For anything else we were using Turbo Pascal and Assembly, with Clipper for
business applications.

Actually many MS-DOS systems programming books had code listings in C, Pascal
and Assembly.

~~~
rpeden
A BBS with 5 simultaneous users? Sounds amazing. Most of the BBSes here in the
Toronto area only had a single phone line. :)

~~~
pjmlp
Yep, at least they had 5 different numbers, but given the price of regional
phone calls, I only used it a couple of times during a Summer job.

------
pjmlp
I loved Turbo Pascal and Delphi, which is why I having Java and .NET compile
into bytecode always felt a bit of deception.

~~~
ckok
What makes bytecode a deception though?

~~~
pjmlp
If Java and .NET produced executables like C and C++, there would be less need
for them.

Instead, one is forced to deliver the VM with the application or buy a third
party AOT compiler like Excelsior JET, while depending on another language for
implementation.

This made everyone that cared about writing native executables focus on C and
C++, with the respective increase in unsafe code.

This is finally changing thanks to D, Go, Swift, Rust, but slowly.

So we have .NET Native on UWP, Xamarin on iOS and Android and IL2CPP on Unity.

Java now started a long road that will take several years until Project
Metropolis will finally deliver some kind of results.

~~~
s_kilk
> This is finally changing thanks to D, Go, Swift, Rust, but slowly.

This whole thread has me imagining what it would be like if all the energy
that went into Go/D/etc had gone into Free Pascal instead.

Imagine if Free Pascal had a swanky website, and an army of people blogging
about this hip, powerful language, all the kids are getting on board, I heard
Netflix are re-writing their routing layer in Object Pascal, have you seen the
benchmarks for this awesome new non-blocking Pascal web server...

~~~
pjmlp
I did enjoy Pascal a lot, but right now it lost the PR battle.

Its spirit leaves on in languages like Rust, Swift, Kotlin and similar.

It is easier to drive adoption to those languages, than try to convince
younger devs to use Pascal, even with a swanky site.

I like your idea, though.

------
dmix
How are the available packages? Is there a package management system ala
`bundler` or `npm`?

This to me is a critical piece of adopting a language, especially a non-
mainstream one. Pascal has the benefit of being older but access to clean
modern libraries is critical.

Pascal looks like an excellent option for building cross-platform desktop
apps, given the excellent GUI libraries. But I doubt I'm sold enough on it for
any web stuff, given the great other options. I'd likely use OCaml if I was
going to gamble on a non-mainstream language.

~~~
rufusroflpunch
This is a pretty critical piece for me as well. I've done some googling and I
can't find anything definitive.

~~~
dubst3pp4
Lazarus has a concept of packages for years. There is a newly created package
manager to handle updates and dependencies as well:
[http://wiki.freepascal.org/Online_Package_Manager](http://wiki.freepascal.org/Online_Package_Manager)

But I don’t think that it is comparable to gem/npm or whatever yet...

------
seabrookmx
All of the arguments given for Object Pascal in this article could apply to
other languages.

A better question might be "why use Object Pascal over Language X"?

I could see a niche in cross-platform desktop development, assuming you didn't
want to go the Electron route (and there's valid reasons for doing so). I've
worked in Qt quite a bit in my desktop days and Qt/C++ is quite complex.

Object Pascal still has manual memory management though, IIRC, which is a
large portion of that complexity.

~~~
emodendroket
Yeah, I don't have the sense from reading this that I have any idea why I'd
prefer Pascal over, say, Java, or C#, unless I liked begin and end blocks more
than braces and felt really strongly about it.

------
PaulHoule
I loved Turbo Pascal back in the day, thought it was better than C when I was
working with DOS. I switched to C when I started working on Unix workstations.

------
a76
I just what to thank the author of the article. I am from the camp of those
who had this misunderstanding of thinking that Pascal is only a "toy language"
to be studied at school or university and the articles gave clear proofs it's
not. I'm not going to switch to Pascal now or explore the question more
deeply; it was just an important thing for me to learn.

~~~
dubst3pp4
Thank you, this really encourages me after all that discussion! :-)

------
pcunite
I wrote the first version of Outlook Profiler in Delphi 6, then in Delphi 7.
Wonderful introductory language for making products (although Perl was my
first exposure). The VCL GUI library and IDE work so well together that things
today are second rate. Strange that we've not improved this basic need.

Today, I write most things in C++ (or C# if I can).

~~~
ido
I always felt it’s really strange that making a quick and dirty GUI
application is still easier with Visual Basic 4.0 (circa 1995) than with most
any modern tool.

~~~
meredydd
I'd like to see what you think of [https://anvil.works](https://anvil.works)

It's deliberately built in the Delphi/Visual Basic tradition, and trying to
carry those virtues onto the modern web.

~~~
ido
interesting, thanks for the tip!

------
jetti
I've tried picking up Free Pascal and, for me, the documentation is lacking. I
come from C# where Microsoft has amazing documentation and small examples on
how to use just about every single class in the .NET framework. I guess I'm
just spoiled with the documentation I have had and need to get used to it.

~~~
dubst3pp4
Did you have a look at
[https://www.freepascal.org/docs.var](https://www.freepascal.org/docs.var) and
especially at the RTL [https://www.freepascal.org/docs-
html/current/rtl/index.html](https://www.freepascal.org/docs-
html/current/rtl/index.html) and FCL [https://www.freepascal.org/docs-
html/current/fcl/index.html](https://www.freepascal.org/docs-
html/current/fcl/index.html) documentation? I think the Free Pascal team has
done a good job documenting nearly everything!

~~~
jetti
Wow, not sure how I missed that. I was just looking at their Wiki and then
there was a page where they had the language spec. This changes a lot. Thanks
for bringing this to my attention.

~~~
pjmlp
The old Borland manuals are on bitkeepers.

They are quite good.

------
noonespecial
The default setup for the industrial control systems I've had to work on is
Windows2000 with Delphi applications.

There are a shocking number of these systems still in use today.

I've come to have a grudging admiration for these clunky old things and a
special respect for pascal in its many forms.

------
dehef
In my university (in Paris) we used to learn programming that way for the
licence degree

1st year -> pascal only

2nd year -> c only

3d year -> java only

That was a very nice learning curve for the core course of programming.

~~~
ksec
For absolute beginners, I still think Pascal, or Turbo Pascal is best to
start. It has a syntax that doesn't scare people away, and very readable.
Deploying is also 1 trillion times easier then what ever we have today, ( C ,
Python , Ruby , Node.js ... )

I would have picked Ruby if it could compiled into a single executable file,
and if the Dev environment actually work on Windows.

P.S: It does work on Windows, but not as simple and easy as it should be.
Compared to every other alternative on the market.

~~~
thethirdone
> Deploying is also 1 trillion times easier then what ever we have today, ( C
> , Python , Ruby , Node.js ... )

What makes it easier?

Distributing an executable from C seems easy. And using package managers from
others also seems easy.

~~~
boznz
Press F9 and you get a self contained exe which was not dependent on any
libraries in about a second.. I think that was what the poster was getting at.

------
partycoder
Pascal and C are very close to each other as they implement the same
programming paradigms. Haven't tried Object Pascal but I assume it extends
Pascal with OOP and some other stuff... while still being the same
imperative/structured/object oriented combination we all know.

If you are coming from C, it should be like moving from Python to Ruby, or
Java to C# or viceversa... same paradigms for the most part.

------
i_feel_great
Anyone here used PascalScript[0], specifically with compiled Pascal itself? I
am planning an application that is compiled and delivered with PascalScript to
allow the end user to extend and customise the application without access to
the source code. Preferrably using FreePascal.

[0][http://www.remobjects.com/ps.aspx](http://www.remobjects.com/ps.aspx)

------
Mikeb85
Anyone who likes Pascal should check out Nim. Inspired by Pascal, with some
Python-like syntax (and significant whitespace), as well as some really cool
features from other languages. Also compiles to blazing fast binaries via C or
C++ (JavaScript too but not sure about the performance there).

------
Lewton
Most of the points are all well and good (albeit underwhelming) but

>This is maybe the fact, that most developers are annoyed about: the absence
of braces and the very verbose syntax of the language. As an example, instead
of opening and closing braces, Pascal uses the begin and end keywords for
blocks. The if keyword is complemented by the word then. As you can see, the
whole syntax is readable like plain English. If you start to cry now, you
should consider one important question by yourself: What is more important?
The ability to have a short syntax to write code fast or the possibility to
read and understand code that was written by other developers or even by you a
year ago? I’m in favour of the second fact and I really enjoy that
verboseness.

You don't make code more readable by adding more noise.

BEGIN and END is just plain noise

BEGIN And how exactly does this make code "readable like plain English?" END

~~~
astrodust
English is great but for all the "noise". Why is "the" a three letter word and
not something more concise like "le" or "a"? Why is it "and" and not a single-
letter "y" like any sensible language?

You get used to the syntax, and after a while it becomes invisible.

------
gwbas1c
I know C# borrowed heavily from Pascal. (So much that a lot of its
improvements over Java were overlooked.)

What's the advantage of using Pascal over C# or Java? Is it that Pascal
outputs true compiled programs instead of requiring a VM?

~~~
mmargerum
Makes sense since Anders H. architected c#, turbo pascal, and Delphi. As soon
as he left Borland, Delphi began to atrophy. Too bad because it was a ground
breaking product when it came out.

------
oneweekwonder
Something I wonder how will one get object pascal work? The worst part is I
would like to be picky and only to fpc/lazarus dev, no delphi. Otherwise I
need to stick to selling my python/flask, html5 fizz buzz.

------
coldcode
Weird anyone still uses this, I first saw Object Pascal on a Apple Lisa in
1983.

~~~
badsectoracula
FWIW Apple's Object Pascal and modern Object Pascal have little common.

Although i think Free Pascal does have a Mac Pascal mode so that it can
understand Apple's Object Pascal dialect.

~~~
jetti
From what I've read Object Pascal is just another name for Delphi but without
the trademark hassle.

~~~
oneweekwonder
No need to speculate[0]. The name "object pascal" was firstly used by apple
for their dialect of pascal. Then Borland came and evolved Turbo Pascal into
Object Pascal(and brand it Delphi) and then fpc came and branded them a open
source object pascal implementation.

As for Pascal vs Object Pascal, Procedural vs OOP, Think C vs C++(not that I'm
saying c++ is better).

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Pascal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Pascal)

~~~
jetti
From the wikipedia article:

"Borland used the name Object Pascal for the programming language in the first
versions of Delphi, but later renamed it to the Delphi programming language.
However, compilers that claim to be compatible with Object Pascal are often
trying to be compatible with Delphi source code.[citation needed] Because
Delphi is trademarked, compatible compilers continued using the name Object
Pascal"

You're still right that Object Pascal can encompass more than just Delphi.

------
_dcwr
My first language in high school was actually Pascal (as in - Delphi) but now
I love C, C++, Lua and Python and barely can write Pascal at all, especially
since it's so separate from the C inspired syntaxes and semantics. For job
reasons I'll also probably learn something 'proper', mainstream, industrial,
etc., but not relearn Pascal. But for trolling, having fun or some private GUI
work (especially that, thanks to Lazarus) it's just great.

When I got to university they (the university, not the high school, no idea
about them) dropped it from the curriculum so my Pascal skill makes me quite
unique in that sense.

I only used it once or so during university to troll one doctor leading a
class, an old homework grading system still had Pascal available in it in
addition to C and C++ so I submitted a Pascal program. In a twist of irony the
next class after that assignment was led by another person, a really smart
professor who usually teaches in Warsaw who also happened to be quite a good
sport about jokes and such, who quickly sarcastically remarked to my Pascal
program: we've got a _connaisseur_ in here.

And this whole joke was actually in response to story the person usually
leading that class told, about how once during a competitive coding
competition (allowing C, C++ and Pascal) where everyone was using C or C++ he
was first to submit a correct program and it was in Pascal to which the live
judges commented that Pascal is making a grand return, since even back then it
was on its way out.

Recently I picked it up again when I needed to do something quite graphical
for statistics class on a short notice that would be dealing with graphs and I
didn't want to fight Qt, GTK+, HTML5 or whatever into submission and having
recently discovered Lazarus I knew it can do it. I quickly whipped up the
program, the graphing components were great with API and all but were poorly
documented (or not at all). Sadly there were no funny comments from the doctor
on that one.

Part of using Pascal for anything at all or even knowing it is actually the
funny comments and reactions of others. Some people seem to think Pascal is
properly dead, as in - no longer usable, no longer worked on, no longer coded
in, at all. Like COBOL or something but with no 'old bank software' and such
to save it. When looking for a job I actually even forgot to put Pascal on my
CV as being one of my 'very weak' skills but I imagine it didn't hurt my
chances... I even share the first name with Blaise Pascal (the French
mathematician the language was named for) so that makes my use of Pascal even
more appropriate and allows for even more jokes.

After that I also did few UVA[0] tasks but sadly Pascal seems to be broken for
many tasks so I gave up (I get an error saying 'mv failed: program.pas and
program.pas are the same file').

Later, to not waste and forget what I relearned for the graph program homework
and since GUI in Lazarus is so easy to do, I also (shameless plug) wrote a
notes program[1] for myself and it was a breeze thanks to Lazarus and the LCL
components. Now I use that program daily for my various notes, todos, etc.

[0] [http://uva.onlinejudge.org/](http://uva.onlinejudge.org/)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15436840](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15436840)

------
nikolay
A huge chunk of my career has been programming in Turbo Pascal and Borland
Pascal for Windows. I miss those days!

------
st3fan
THINK Pascal

------
luizb
Re: Because I can't learn any other language

------
thriftwy
To my limited experience, everything Pascal had of its own is unusable.
Everything usable in the language comes imported from C.

However I can see how one would prefer Object Pascal over C++.

------
sizzzzlerz
Hopefully, it has changed but, when I was learning Pascal many years ago, an
entire program had to be contained within a single file. No separate
compilation files and no linker. For all but toy programs, this made for some
very long files which, given the state of editors then, made maintenance a
real problem.

~~~
psykotic
UCSD Pascal had separate compilation units (late 1970s). A lot of people from
my generation got started with Turbo Pascal and it had units based on UCSD
Pascal starting in TP 4.

~~~
howard941
OMFG this brings back memories, like the promise of a processor that executed
p-code. Good times.


Pinax 0.9a2 Released - jtauber
http://pinaxproject.com/blog/2011/11/29/pinax-09a2-released/

======
mixmastamyk
Looking forward to a strong Pinax. I'm tired of reinventing the wheel.

------
jezdez
w00t!


Tell HN: App idea that should become reality - stasy

I would pay for an app that allowed me to take a picture of a reading/pages of a book and get a summary for it. This would be incredibly useful for schoolwork.
Basically like summly, but the summarized text isn't from some news site, but from the place you want it from (preferably a picture).
If you make this and have it as an iPhone app, please tell me about it, and I will definitely buy it: aeip@live.com
======
nklas
I would like an OCR app that, when launched, just OCR's the latest photo i've
taken and put the resulting text in the clipboard.

Example use case: You're in a hotel and want to connect to the WiFi so instead
of looking at their sign and typing in the password by hand, you just take a
photo and launch the app and then paste the password where needed.

Would also be good for power users with apps like Launch Center and
pythonista.

------
buss
Or go one level down - I'd pay for a good OCR library and a good summarization
library. The current OCR offerings are too difficult to get working well, and
summarization tech is way too specialized at the moment.

~~~
quahada
What sort of challenges have you had with OCR? I'm working on an easy to use
OCR sdk (iOS), we're going to start beta in a few weeks.

~~~
buss
Tesseract is really difficult to tune such that you get decent results from
camera images instead of cleanly scanned text.

Ocropus is really slow, but does seem to work better than tesseract out of the
box. It's still quite bad with camera-captured images and IIRC doesn't give
you any hooks to improve the results.

I couldn't find any other viable options when I was looking about six months
ago.

I want an SDK that gives me an easy way to train the OCR engine. That means
being able to view the images which performed badly, with text bounding boxes
and the OCRed text overlaid that allow me to manually correct the results
which it will then learn from. And, perhaps most importantly, good defaults
for the common cases of document scans & camera captures.

------
coffeecodecouch
This is an interesting idea, but what exactly do you mean by "summary"? Do you
want an app to detect the most important parts of the text, and give you just
those parts? Or are you interested in an app that detects what it is you would
like summarized, and then find summaries on external sites like SparkNotes?

------
krrishd
Not really a mobile developer myself, but Im guessing it would require parsing
the text from a book with something like OpenCV, and then passing it through
Summly's or clipped.me's API.

~~~
stasy
Where do you get Summly's API?

------
ajiang
Even better - auto summary of everything you see through Google Glass.

------
namenotrequired
I'd already be interested in one that just reads out the full text to me in a
way that sounds natural enough that it isn't distracting.

------
yaur
With an ISBN it wouldn't be that hard to pull it from amazon.

~~~
stasy
With printings from school, you often get short passages or short stories that
are not in books or very difficult to find within books. But just being able
to take a picture of it would make it so much easier.

~~~
yaur
Identifying the text isn't that hard, generally 10+ word excerpts pasted into
Google will give you a source. The reviews/summaries though... for books you
have amazon and good reads, for short stories though I don't know where you
would find them. The search: '"no advantages" review alice munro' for instance
only turns up material related to the collection that it is a part of, not for
the story.

btw, I'm kind of just brainstorming now.


Let Vim Do the Typing - tambourine_man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TX3kV3TICU
======
swah
Didn't know anything other than C-N/C-P concerning completion on Vim -
considering switching back now :P


Ask HN: What is the difference between cold emails and spam? - WolfOliver
======
Someone
A cold email is something that takes a human at least an hour to write.

Spam is something that takes a factory less than a second to spit out.

Somewhere in-between, there’s a gray area. ‘Spam’ is in the eye of the
beholder (nobody claims to produce spam) so where that is is a matter of
taste.

For me, a cold email _must_ have a human writer. That _hour_ isn’t a strong
boundary, but once you’re cold emailing ten different people an hour, I think
you’re reaching spam country.

I also think there’s computer-produced emails that aren’t spam, but I can’t
think of any I would call “cold email”.

------
andreicon
Spam is unsolicited correspondence. Cold emails are unsolicited, therefore are
spam.


America’s awful airports: A new ranking - iamchmod
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21599801-new-ranking

======
mbillie1
It would be nice to see a list of the airports in question (not that I have
any doubt about the awfulness of US airports, having been a twice-a-week-
traveling-consultant for 2+ years).

LaGuardia would be my personal nominee for US Airport Hell, but I'm sure there
are others...


Hadoop Platform as a Service in the Cloud - amitry
http://techblog.netflix.com/2013/01/hadoop-platform-as-service-in-cloud.html

======
nwenzel
Other than the architecture of their multi-cluster management system, which us
certainly fascinating, I found two interesting points.

1) Use of S3 as the data storage platform allows for Production, ad hoc,
analytic, and "personal" clusters to all work with not only a full-size data
set but the same data set. Brilliant.

2) The investigation of Amazon Redshift as a Teradata replacement. First, it
validates Amazon as a new competitor to on-premise relational data warehouse
implementations. Second, it would seemingly move substantially all their data
to the cloud. Third, what does that mean for their other apps such as
"traditional" BI? No sense having Cognos on a local server if all the data is
in the cloud.


Pray for the Souls of the People Sucked into This Dating Site Hell - rbanffy
https://gizmodo.com/pray-for-the-souls-of-the-people-sucked-into-this-datin-1825735565?rev=1526922420917&utm_source=gizmodo_twitter&utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow
======
cowboysauce
>they have hired “programmers with quantum computers to fight this stuff,”

Wow, either he's talking out his ass or he's been scammed hard. I'm leaning
heavily towards the former given the overall shady feel of the business.

I think it's obvious that they knowingly tolerate these fake profiles, if not
actively create them. To give the impression that their site has a lot of
users.

------
mnm1
Are these scammy tactics a surprise? They shouldn't be. Sites like match.com
and pof.com employ them effectively also, perhaps even more effectively
because the scams are hidden in a network with actual human actions as well.
They will cause a whole bunch of fake activity for new profiles that mimics
real interest. Only when one clicks on the messages or winks or whatever,
there are bugs and the profiles don't load or other such nonsense. I have a
hard time believing that just the profiles that recently interacted with me
are the only buggy ones that aren't loading on the whole site. As far as I can
tell, the entire dating site industry is mainly a scam that supports a small
amount of actual human interaction at the expense of millions of users, often
using shoddy programming as cover for the scam.


Interview With the Man Who Could Destroy Photography - nickb
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/06/exclusive-inter.html
======
ryanmahoski
I've never seen such hype. Does anyone actually think "the possibilities are
endless," that this device "is a prankster's dream" and "could destroy
photography"? I am skeptical of the physics described but since I'm not a
digicam expert I will just have to trust von Bismarck solved an apparent
latency problem. (When my digicam flashes, the fulgerator has to receive that
input and respond with its own flash, all before my shutter closes.) Ambient
and direct lighting would both have to be below normal daytime levels and the
subject needs to be dark enough to contrast the fulgerator's light. I wish
this guy all the luck due a man caught adulterating vacation photos but I
don't see how he has developed a viable tool. Maybe if I followed his über
optics hack, I'd understand the secret implications of his toy.

~~~
gaius
"(When my digicam flashes, the fulgerator has to receive that input and
respond with its own flash, all before my shutter closes"

This really isn't a problem. People have been using on-camera flashes to
trigger studio lighting for decades now. A flash is actually between 1/700 and
1/2500 seconds long, which is _plenty_ of time for the electronics to react.
You shutter is probably going to be open between 1/60 and 1/250 seconds (if
you're on P mode).

You can see this at nearly any wedding you go to, the pro photographer might
have some studio lights set up for the formals, unless he's using fancy radio
triggers, his lights can be set off by guests with cameras.

------
m0nty
"You couldn't take a photograph of a tourist attraction ever again without
worrying that some marketing crap would be pushed into your camera."

Ooooh! Look! Those guys from Coke f*cked up all my photos. Guess I'd better go
and buy lots of Coke then.

~~~
Hexstream
Sometimes it looks like marketers _actually_ think like that, judging by the
amount of IN YOUR FACE advertising that I can't in my right mind fantasize
that it might reflect well on a brand.

~~~
bayareaguy
Propagandists of all kinds come to mind.

------
bayareaguy
I can see this messing up current cameras but couldn't the added images just
be removed with embeddable postprocessing logic?

~~~
jws
Automated post processing won't work well because it is an arbitrary
superimposed image, but the big key here is that it only works for flash
photographs. They say that in the article but then drop it. Tourist
attractions are generally the wrong scale for flashes to be required.
Overblown.

~~~
jfarmer
Right, well, people who have even a bit familiar with photography know that,
but most people with their point-and-click digital cameras don't.

They'll still get, er, fulgerated.

------
pmjordan
With digital cameras having preview screens, I suspect you'd notice pretty
quickly. Besides, this won't scale well to multiple flashes going off in
succession. As for monetisation, uh, I don't see the potential, but if people
are willing to pay for the tech then I can't argue with that.

------
russ
This would be pretty awesome for celebrities tired of the paparazzi, or for
Britney to revisit 2004.

~~~
noonespecial
It would not function in that environment as hundreds of flashes are going off
all at once.

This hack is one camera, one flash, one angle, close range, once every 30
seconds or so.

------
cheponis
I can think of half a dozen ways to defeat this, as any hacker could. Seems to
me to be much ado about nothing.

------
Angostura
It seems to me that this could easily be defeated by switching on 'red eye
reduction' to produce a smaller flash moments before the main flash.

~~~
ComputerGuru
Read the article. It claims he's using certain technology to detect fake red-
eye flash from real flashes when a photo is being taken.


News anchor Anthony Ponce quits to become a Lyft driver - curtis
http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/27/technology/anthony-ponce-lyft-backseat-driver/index.html
======
sheraz
So basically guy wants to quit and make a modern day version of this?

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


Bitcoin mining power reaches 1000 petahashes per second - no_gravity
https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=all
======
raducu
I really don't get why people are so hung up on these two issues -- "wasted"
electricity and wasted computer power without actual numbers to put things
into perspective.

Anybody has any real numbers on electricity used for bitcoin opperations vs.
electricity used by banks?

From what I know about hashing algorithms and hardware, I'm pretty sure that
the dedicated bitcoin hardware is not so capable for general computation
stuff.

I'm more concearned about the pissed brain cycles that go to waste inside the
big corporate oligarchies that we call banks.

------
JoeAltmaier
All that electricity pissed away because people can't (won't) trust a banking
authority.

~~~
RealityVoid
If you think about it, there is a lot of energy and time pissed away because
of trust issues. Reports, "cover your ass" emails and tasks, workflow
limitations because of lack of trust, locks on doors, security systems, LOADS
of bullshit jobs. Lack of trust shows in most aspects of our life. And,
ironically, I think(without any concrete data to back up, it's just my own
musing on the subject) that verification and "check systems" contribute
greatly at the trust individuals show to each other.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
But bitcoin miners have turned this into an energy-squandering engine with no
upper limit. They've automated pissing away energy for imaginary points.
That's not going to end well.

~~~
raducu
Don't you think there are market forces that will resolve this energy-
squandering thing?

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
It sounds like an externality to me, so "no".

------
tromp
It's simple economics.

If you have a lottery with a single 25BTC prize, that can only be played by
spending electricity to compute hashes, then expect 25BTC worth of cheap
electricity to be spent (every 10 minutes that the lottery is held).

The increase to 1 exahash/sec is simply due to the latest generation ASICs
having achieved 0.06 joules per gigahash.

At least this "waste" is reduced in half every 4 years.

------
webaholic
All that compute power could have been put to so much use only if the inventor
had thought of a better way to choose a nonce which works to create the hash.

~~~
throwaway7767
What useful work do you imagine being possible with
SHA256(SHA256(nonce+block)) by choosing the nonce differently?

~~~
webaholic
Instead of having an arbitrary number as a nonce... let's say you chose the
next prime number to create the hash. This itself will help us discover lots
of prime numbers :)

~~~
throwaway7767
It would also make bitcoin completely unusable, as the block time would be
tied to the time it takes to find a new prime. So transactions would only go
through every few years. So that would not work.

~~~
webaholic
That was just an example of useful work. I am sure we could find something
both useful and that is not time consuming.

~~~
throwaway7767
I agree that this would be great, but this is not a new idea, people have been
talking about these things since 2008-ish. Unless you have a firm proposal, I
think we're at exactly the same place as we've always been: everyone agrees
that it'd be nice, but noone has any idea how to make it happen[0].

The useful work also has to happen as a byproduct of the blockchain securing
calculations, because if it's seperate, the blockchain will offer worse
security properties than a competing blockchain with similar hashing power, so
there's a disincentive to use it.

[0] There was PrimeCoin, which computed some series purported to be
mathematically interesting. Math people I've talked to mostly shrugged their
shoulders when I asked them whether that work had any real applications.


Gloucestershire radio ham manages to contact International Space Station - colinprince
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/gloucestershire-radio-ham-manages-to-contact-international-space-station-10441887.html
======
jdietrich
ISS crew members make regular amateur radio contacts as part of the ARISS
scheme. A proportion of these contacts are pre-arranged for school and youth
groups, but many amateurs have made spontaneous contact.

Contacting the ISS doesn't require anything more sophisticated than a 2m/70cm
transceiver and a handheld Yagi-Uda - the difficulty comes from the very short
windows of opportunity and the substantial doppler shift.

[http://www.ariss.org/contact-the-iss.html](http://www.ariss.org/contact-the-
iss.html)

Similarly, many amateurs have made earth-moon-earth contacts, using the moon
as a reflector. UHF and VHF are most common, but some highly skilled amateurs
have made EME contacts using millimetre-wave bands.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93Moon%E2%80%93Ear...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93Moon%E2%80%93Earth_communication)

------
flashman
200 miles isn't all that far for a ham radio signal. I'm not trying to
diminish the achievement at all, however.

People interested in RTL-SDR (software defined radio on a USB TV dongle,
basically) might like to know that ISS transmissions can be heard on
148.500MHz. Requires a little bit more effort, and a licence, to chat back.


Ask HN: Accelerate or slow down? - glow

I have been tossing around a few ideas for a start-up, a couple of different angles on small-scale game development for download services, and getting good feedback from people around me.
So I'm faced with a dilemma: I have a family with small children. Not really the optimal situation for an time-consuming adventure like this. Is this the time to do this, or should I step down and postpone things, possibly losing the opportunities I see?
Try to put yourself in this situation and tell me how you'd reason. I won't really base my decision on answers here, but I'm hoping for a good discussion at least as I've been turning my head inside out thinking about this for a couple of months.
======
vaksel
start now.

Better to do a startup for 3 years @ 20 hours a week, than 2 years @ 80 hours
a week

Growth isn't instant, it'll take time to get new users. And if you are taking
the long view, you'll actually be more mentally prepared for when your startup
isn't an instant success

------
bprater
If you mean "step down" as in leaving your current employ, the critical
question is this: How many months savings do you have?

And if you have at least a year's saving, what is the revenue model and how
quickly can you get to the point where you can ship product?

Oh, and don't listen to what people around you say about your ideas. They'll
either think it's brilliant or say it's stupid, but rarely have anything
critical or useful to say.

The genius is in your passion for the idea.

~~~
glow
When I say "slow down" I don't mean quit my day job, but rather put it off for
a couple of years. Quitting my day-job feels like a bad move, but if things
start working out I might take a day off every week to work on my stuff.

------
lsc
If you are self-funded, or can self-fund, accelerate. I personally see this as
my only chance.

Nothing has changed for me, in terms of revenue. I still have more consulting
work than I can handle, at ridiculous rates. What is different now is that
none of my competitors can get loans or venture capital, and I can hire really
good people for quite a lot less than usual.

Marketing, too, seems easier than usual. Consumers care about price now, which
unlike the intangibles people usually compete on, is an area where I can
compete.

but then, I don't have kids.

------
glow
Thanks a lot for the comments.

As I read through some of the comments, I see that my arch-nemesis "time
management" probably is one the reasons I'm sweating over this. Using the
right amount of spare time effectively and letting it take it's time is
probably key, but oh so hard to do.

You've given me good food for thought, thanks!

------
apage43
Certainly not the time to quit your day job and then try a start-up, but i
don't see why you couldn't throw together your startup in your spare time. Is
there a reason you need the 'time-consuming adventure' to actually consume so
much time? It'll take longer to launch but on the whole, be less risky.

------
axod
Do it in spare time and see how it goes :)


Why I'm not laughing at C Plus Equality - xs_kid
http://blog.mollywhite.net/why-im-not-laughing-at-c-plus-equality/
======
vezzy-fnord
The comments section got absolutely slaughtered by Reddit and 4chan after this
made its way on a popular subreddit.

That said, I personally thought her entry only ended up (unintentionally?)
conforming to the very stereotypes the project served to satirize in the first
place.

~~~
skunkworks
I agree with you that her entry unintentionally ends up skewering itself by
running head-first into the joke. Really though, she skewered herself by
ranting about a really bad joke.

The C+= joke sucks. It's poorly executed. It's far too self-conscious and has
way too many "wink-wink" moments to be effective satire. You either need to be
clever and subtle, or absurd and outrageous. Instead, most of the jokes fell
flaccidly in the middle: too obvious about its subject matter, but not even
remotely clever. Making it a programming language doesn't make it clever joke,
it just means you tried really hard to tell a joke.

And she fell for it. Which ironically validates its existence, poor joke
execution be damned.

------
__pThrow
"Your document is a collection of sexist, trans*phobic jokes and negative
stereotypes, and I'm not laughing."

I think it's great the way Ms. White met their ugly speech with more speech of
her own.

That's the remedy to ugly speech, more speech.

I disagree with Ms. White almost entirely, but I do approve of the way she has
chosen to confront them.

In the past 36 hours, we've seen github censor this speech, and calls from
feminists to have bitbucket censor this repo at bitbucket as well. On twitter
there have been callouts where people who "star"ed the repo were listed and
implicitly threatened and people tweeting in support of the parody were named
and labeled.

That sort of behavior from github and from internet feminists trying to stifle
speech and police speech is wrong.

~~~
10098
The sad part is that this sort of behavior is _exactly_ the reason that repo
exists.

------
flyinglizard
Great promotion to that repository (some of which I found quite clever). I'm
not sure what the writer wanted to achieve by publishing this blog entry,
especially as it's pretty thin on commentary.

That being said, maybe the best way to change the tone of the open source
community - or any male-dominated community, for the matter - is to get
involved with it?

------
eliteraspberrie
Humour is subjective. What I find not funny, other people will find hilarious,
and vice versa. I am not humanity's arbiter of what is or isn't funny, and
neither is Molly White.

------
vinkelhake
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

------
anigbrowl
I didn't see the point of dignifying it with a comment when submitted earlier,
since it's obvious unfunny trolling, better ignored than acknowledged.

~~~
supergauntlet
Feminism discussions in tech circles never go anywhere good anyways, because a
huge number of people have a warped perception of feminism that they rally
against and it just ends up being one big shitshow where no meaningful
dialogue occurs.

------
thenerdfiles
Reminds me of the
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair).


InstantCab (YC W12): A Hybrid Alternative To Ride-Sharing and Taxi Apps - ajju
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/instantcab/

======
joshwa
A big problem I've seen with the proliferation of these apps is that I've seen
drivers with three or four devices, (which makes sense from the driver's
perspective--maximizing opportunity), but even though I'm in the car paying a
fare, they show up on the other apps as available! The result is that when you
put out a call for a ride, even though it shows tons of vehicles available,
most of them are actually currently occupied. As TFA points out, this leads to
distrust since as a rider you can't actually be sure you'll be able to get a
ride.

I think the app makers need to encourage riders to report to them when they
see drivers using other apps and misleadingly showing themselves as available.
I know I'm going to start doing it.

~~~
ajju
That's a good point Josh. We ask drivers to set themselves as unavailable if
they are on another ride, and we are measuring a lot of things that help us
figure out which drivers are more reliable so we can reward them accordingly
vs which drivers are unreliable so we can part ways with them.

Of course we'd definitely love feedback from you and other users when you see
a driver engaging in untrustworthy behavior. Email us ask at instantcab.com
(or leave a comment with your rating if you are using InstantCab)

------
ajju
HN Readers: there's a $5 off coupon at the end of TechCrunch article, but we
have a special coupon for π off your ride. Use "HNFriends" at or after signing
up.

Also happy to answer any questions you have :)

------
joseakle
Hi, i am one of the founders of Yaxi. We are doing very similar in Mexico if
you are interested in having a chat, pepe at yaxi dot com. We are also taking
the hybrid approach and have sent thousands of trips too.

~~~
ajju
Jose: sending you an email

------
ajaymehta
This is a totally awesome service -- once called an InstantCab in SF and a
limo came to pick us up. A goddamn LIMO.

~~~
ajju
Thanks Ajay. As the commenter on TechCrunch said, ballers get baller service
;)

------
ianferrel
>InstantCab drivers are more likely to actually use the app the way it’s
intended. Also, there’s really no way for drivers to cancel. Once they’ve
accepted a ride, there’s simply no button they can push to get out of it.

What if they hit the button accidentally?

~~~
ajju
Ian: We have worked hard to make the app easy to use for drivers to minimize
mistakes. For example: when we started the company, every one of us including
engineers drove cars for 10 hours shifts for 3 weekends in a row, giving rides
to friends to understand how to design well for drivers.

Mistakes still happen occasionally, and we have procedures to deal with them
but we took this approach to make it clear that bailing after accepting a ride
is not an option.

------
eeek
I worked with these guys for a couple days and I can say they are a really
amazing team: positive energy, healthy debate and mutually supportive. Way to
go InstantCab!

~~~
ajju
Thanks Eric! Appreciate your vote of confidence. Come by the office and let's
grab lunch on Monday if you have some time!

------
garfbargle
Love it, can't wait for it to make it's way down to SoCal