So very sad. Ben Fry is one of my heroes. He's done an amazing job with Processing, over a very long time. I can't think of any other open-source project with the same consistency of vision and quality of execution, plus the level of design and usability.
I read a lot of Ben's code while I was working on the IDE for Arduino. It was always extremely clear, robust, and well-commented. And occasionally hilarious. My favorite part was the prompt to take a walk that showed up when you had created a new sketch for each letter of the alphabet on a particular day (sketch names defaulted to something like 20231003a, 20231003b, etc). But there were also some good digs at the failings of Processing's various dependencies, like Java and Mac OS.
The world of computational design and open-source software is much better for having Ben Fry and Processing in it.
Agreed. Ben, although he doesn't know it, is one of my biggest inspirations for what I do. Back in 2005 or so he did a presentation to my class at the GSD on his genome visualizations. I was blown away, but even more so when I asked him what language he works in and he said Processing. I said I was unfamiliar with Processing and he said, "Oh, I wrote it." Mind. Blown.
On days I'm looking for inspiration I revisit that day in mind or visit benfry.com to see what other cool projects he's been working on. Thank you Ben for your amazing contributions to data visualization programming and for being an inspiration to an aspirational hacker.
One common query on HN is "what's the equivalent of the Conmodore 64 in this day and age? how will the next generation of hackers learn?" For me, it was largely Processing and Arduino.
I learned to program in Python but at the time (around 2005 say) it wasn't easy to create python gui apps that didn't involve a fair bit of boilerplate. When I first downloaded Processing I was immediately hooked. It was amazingly interactive, with top notch documentation and examples. It contributed a lot to me becoming a programmer.
Also shout outs to Fluxus which is pretty sweet too,
One thing that I think is lost in a lot of the comments here is that, to a large extent, privacy is experienced, not factual. That is, in many cases, the breach of privacy is the act of mentioning something that should be private, not whether or not the system (or the person) knows that thing. This is something we tend to intuitively understand in our human relationships, but one that somehow seems to be forgotten in the design of these systems (or, at least, the conversations about them). We need good ways to tell the Google Assistant that something is private (or for it to figure it out for itself) -- even if it still possesses the underlying data.
(There are, of course, situations in which the actual existence or not of specific data is what matters, but I think those are less relevant to the success of something like Google Assistant than the perception of privacy -- and that perception is important, regardless of the underlying data.)
There are use cases for things like Arduino (a microcontroller development board). We'd like to allow uploading to Arduino boards from an online IDE. We'd also like to allow for interaction between sensors and actuators on an Arduino board and websites (e.g. programs written in the Scratch visual programming language). Yes, we can do much of this by having the user install a local application that communicates via web sockets, but that has its own security implications and adds an additional step for the user.
Unfortunately the obvious way of doing this with WebUSB is, from a security perspective, equivalent to giving the online IDE the ability to install arbitrary code. The Arduinos with sophisticated enough USB stacks to support WebUSB can also be reprogrammed by sketches to emulate a keyboard and inject keystrokes, including a series of keystrokes that downloads and executes a malicious executable.
> Yes, we can do much of this by having the user install a local application that communicates via web sockets, but that has its own security implications and adds an additional step for the user.
You're target audience is arduino hackers, and you're worried about them installing an app? You need to seriously reassess your assumptions.
It still doesn't make any sense. Who that's not intimidated with soldering irons and wiring circuits up that can literally burst into flames if you do it wrong, is going to say, "Heavens to Betsy! I have to click an installer! My word, I'm comin' down with the vapors!"?
For hand-soldering, it might be nice to include 1206 packages in addition to 0603 ones, although I realize that would make the list much longer.
Another good reference for this kind of thing is the Fab Lab inventory: http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/fab/inv.html and it might be worth looking that over to see if there's anything that seems worth adding.
My former advisor, Leah Buechley, and other friends created this introduction to programming and electronics via e-textiles and the LilyPad Arduino: http://sewelectric.org/
As someone who's tried to get from San Francisco to Silicon Valley without a car, I'd love to see companies like Google advocating and supporting better public transportation as well as just providing a private solution.
Public sector unions and corrupt/incompetent government workers in SF Bay Area is the root cause of the atrocious public transportation in this area, money is not. There are plenty of cities around the world that spends less per capita on infrastructure but still has a way more effective system.
There's enough blame to go around- city councils and affluent voters in communities in the peninsula and points beyond who can't break out of NIMBY enough to allow BART to expand from the East Bay are a big cause for why the transportation system is so badly Balkanized.
So what kills me in every one of these conversations about shitty old rules and regulations and nimbyism, is that to this day I've never seen one comment by one person on HN explaining exactly what we can do to advocate against the current rules and regulations to allow more housing to be built.
There must be some way for us all to be able to get involved in the right places in the right way to get these arcane regulations changed. Would hosting a daytime bike party during city council meetings with an obligatory stop at city hall help? Are there specific people to write to write to to voice our opinion?
Most people haven't the foggiest clue on how to engage effectively with local city politics.
The very fact that such a a place like SF has such a high cost of living is the problem.
I recently just came back from Tokyo, truly a world class city with multiple times the population density of SF and the highest city GDP in the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_GDP
You know what? Cost of living there is actually CHEAPER than here, food, transportation, hell, even housing is cheaper than the joke that is SF.
Arguably, but that doesn't mean you can ignore it, or that the increase in cost of projects due to a higher cost of labor is a sign if mismanagement of those projects.
If you would like to propose an intervention targeted at reducing the cost of living in SF, I'll certainly listen though I won't promise I'll agree.
A large part of cost of living is driven up by cost of housing. That has historical reasons in the case of California.
After the 70s California voters voted against raising property tax, the government had to get most of their revenue from income-tax, thus the highest state income tax in the country. Due to this, California government income fluctuates a lot with the economy (as we saw from 2008-2009), but that's a different topic.
One thing about property tax law in California is that it's calculated based on how much one paid for property, not its current worth.
The problem with low property tax is that when combined with federal tax incentive for housing mortgage and a cheap rate, it makes sense to invest in housing, and having the value going up does not punish the home owners like places with higher property taxes or places that calculate property tax based on the current values of the properties.
The end result is that existing homeowners in California are very much against new development since they've got a "I've gotten mine, so fuck you" mentality since they want to keep their existing properties valuable, and this is ESPECIALLY true for owners that own multiple properties that can use it for rental.
Imagine you bought a few apartment complexes in SF right after the recession back in the 90s, the places would be worth multiple times as much now but your property tax has not gone up, but you can charge $3k for a small one bedroom apartment, then you'd vote with all your power to make sure new development and new supply for housing is stalled.
This is one of the reasons why direct democracy doesn't work, since people are very short sighted when voting for important issues that could have long lasting effects. A suggested solution would be lower income tax, but make property tax to be calculated off existing values of properties, thus thwart artificial inflation of property values. Of course things like this will NEVER get passed since no politicians dare to piss off existing homeowners.
To be honest, I am personally pessimistic about this state's ability to change for the better, a big reason being the state's obsession with direct democracy that resulted in many bad policies in the past.
While I think in many cases the counterarguments are stronger than you present them, I don't think I disagree with either taxing current value of homes, or reducing the impact of direct democracy in CA (at the very least, we should require something stronger than simple majority of votes cast).
between Nimbys and public sector unions and the fact that the Bay Area is essentially under one-party rule...no. It's just not going to happen. Private initiatives are the only hope.
I've tried to source the components using as few vendors as possible (currently DigiKey, SparkFun, and Arduino, plus ordering the PCB) but it's definitely more work than just buying a kit. I'm working on a better solution but it's probably a ways off.
I read a lot of Ben's code while I was working on the IDE for Arduino. It was always extremely clear, robust, and well-commented. And occasionally hilarious. My favorite part was the prompt to take a walk that showed up when you had created a new sketch for each letter of the alphabet on a particular day (sketch names defaulted to something like 20231003a, 20231003b, etc). But there were also some good digs at the failings of Processing's various dependencies, like Java and Mac OS.
The world of computational design and open-source software is much better for having Ben Fry and Processing in it.