Working at Microsoft (2004) - <AUTHOR> http://www.qbrundage.com/michaelb/pubs/essays/working_at_microsoft.html <comment><USER2> Since this blog is a bit dated, here are some things that have changed in the last 10 years from the perspective of someone who works here now. First some background to fill in the time between when he wrote this and now:

When Vista dropped, public opinion of Microsoft started to go out the door. That was right around the same time that Apple released its first iphone (2007), and with a failed OS and a hugely successful device release by Apple, Microsoft fell by the wayside. Public opinion tanked a bit, and it seemed like the only "positive" energy was Steve Ballmer. Whether or not you can call his energy "positive" is debatable, but he was certainly energetic. Few employees actually liked Ballmer though, so when Satya came on it was a breath of fresh air. Satya came in at an absolutely perfect time - hololens and windows 10 were just about to be announced, meaning he'd get immense credit despite only being here for a short period. With a new CEO, Hololens, and Win10 on the horizon, public opinion (and our stock price) of MS has started to go up. The corporate culture in the last year has changed drastically, and support for open source internally has shot up (which as someone with a linux/unix background has really made me happy).

Four or Five years ago, if you'd asked me what tech company I worked for, my answer would have probably been, "Microsoft, I know, it's a bummer. I'm trying to move to google". Now though people actually think MS is cool again. The stuff we're working on is exciting and the corporate culture is starting to get healthy.

<comment><USER3> I'm happy to hear the culture at your company has improved but I don't know if Microsoft is considered "cool" \- or whatever that means.

Anyone who has been around long enough (and not really that long all things considered) knows better than to ever trust Microsoft. Their whole model has been, and always will be: "Embrace, extend, extinguish".

So Microsoft is opening some things up? They've had no choice as they are being left behind more and more. They know the modern developer is not as interested in an expensive IDE and MSDN account when there are many alternatives. We are creating so much more software than before and the top down model Microsoft sold has become niche after many years of dominance.

Any open project Microsoft gets involved in and any open standard they get involved in should come with a warning label. Why? Because this is in their DNA.

<comment><USER4> Anyone who has been around long enough knows not to trust Google, Apple, Facebook, Oracle, ... Microsoft is not uniquely untrustworthy when it comes to big multi-faceted companies. As for DNA, I haven't seen any dodgy behavior in the OSS area for 5+ years, and nothing like EEE since I started working here in 2007.

<comment><USER5> No, Microsoft is a special case because they have always been at best amoral; they have been a cutthroat, even malicious company. Recently they've softened their behavior and image, but it's really a very recent shift and given their past treachery it's hard to trust them.

These other companies may not always work together in harmony, but at least they aren't preoccupied with extinguishing their competitors and dominating ("owning") their users.

<comment><USER6> Microsoft is a special case, but not for that reason.

Microsoft is a special case because they had a zero-sum game/scorched Earth mindset, and the ability to lose billions of dollars per year, indefinitely, achieving it.

Microsoft was not content at allowing potential new ideas/technologies develop which might grow the market and improve things because they saw everything as a potential threat to their position. So they would do everything from trying to poison the market, to pouring (losing) tons of money into competing products, and sometimes just buying up companies and let it rot.

The very special part is as long as Windows and Office were cash cows, stock holders weren't willing to lead a revolt for Microsoft losing billions on everything else.

Not all companies are not scorched earth (SGI gave away serious resources to Nvidia, Valve recently gave away their VR tech in the highly publicized layoffs a few years ago).

Other companies might like to play scorched earth, but they don't have the ability to piss away money like Microsoft. This is why Microsoft is a special case.

Microsoft still has tons of cash and Windows/Office is still a cash cow. And it is generally accepted that company culture is hard to change once established (especially here on HN). This is why people with historical context do not trust Microsoft, with good reason.

<comment><USER4> So how was MSR part of a scorched earth strategy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My 2 cents working here.

Focus: Yes, this place still is 100% about making software. Yes, sometimes the company still pushes hard for really stupid things. That's getting better.

Unreality: I have no idea what he's talking about. Maybe upper management but everyone I work with is a real person with real financial concerns and life goals. I've had many conversations about poverty and its effects on people. Most people I talk to wonder how people making median salaries get by in the area.

Personal Freedom: Yeah right. It's not like anyone's got you at the point of a gun but most of the time you're being payed to work on some project that has a pretty obvious route forward. The tyranny of the immediate rules here.

Company Leadership: A wash but better now.

Source Code: Plenty of that. And open source is being embraced more and more every day.

Benefits: Nice salary. The yearly company performance raise has been beating inflation. The health insurance is good but it's now a capitalist ploy. There's a bunch of stuff they pay for that I'd rather have money for instead. The retirement is kind of hilariously weak but that's the trend everywhere I think.

Free Soft Drinks: I'm a curmudgeon. I don't like my "overhead" subsidizing others' pathway to diabetes but whatever.

Work Life Balance: You have to fight for this. And I mean really fight. You basically have to be willing to lose your job. But if you stick to your guns and find the right place, you can achieve this.

Microsoft is Not Evil: Oh, they probably are. But so are most the places you all work for too.

Influence: I integrate tools into games, which really overall isn't that important. That's also how I maintain my "Work Life Balance."

<comment><USER8> I quit earlier this year and the unreality is huge. I cringed every time minimum wage came up for the last year or more because of the libertarian "they should just get better jobs!" crap that followed, or explanations of how people on low incomes are really making a ton of money off welfare payments. More work-specifically, I was constantly arguing over design decisions that treated bandwidth and connectivity as unlimited. I was in a meeting where someone suggested that since everyone in the room knew how x worked, we could assume it was general knowledge. Some of these people walked out of college 5 or 20 years ago straight into a job making six figures in Redmond, and that's not just all they know, its all they care about.

Also, I agree with his whole section on managers. In my six years there, I officially had maybe 15 managers? Four of them were great and if I went back, it would probably be under one of them. It wouldn't be worth the risk to go back and work for a new manager unless they came highly recommended by a friend. The personality cult effect is still real - I'm even doing it myslef above, but for a high level example look at the people who have followed Terry Myerson for years. I'm not sure I see this as negatively as he does - a good manager is hugely important in making the job worth having, so once you find one, you try and stay with them if it works for you.

<comment><USER7> That's fair. I guess I'm just lucky in the people I've found to work with. Most seem pretty socially conscious and well aware of how lucky they are to be where they are.

I accidentally skipped the "managers" section. And I completely agree. Of the 5 teams I've worked on there, I've only had one truly great manager and he was a recent hire from outside.

This is especially frustrating for me as a junior engineer. Microsoft has utterly failed to help develop not just myself as a young engineer but most the young people hired with me. What is more, most teams barely take experience into account at all. I've always felt as though I'm expected to operate at the same level as people with 20 years of industry experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > At Microsoft, I've had access to the source code for Halo 1 & 2, Internet > Explorer, MDAC, MSXML, the .NET Frameworks and CLR, SQL Server, SQLXML, > Virtual PC, Visual Studio, Windows, the Xbox and Xbox Live, and probably > several other projects that I've forgotten about. Does it get better than > this?

This is horrible! Sure you get to see the internal stuff, but in 2004 you were also forbidden from looking at any open source software. So sure you could see a handful of software titles that you can list on your fingers, but the millions of other programs you couldn't. How can someone that says "I love source code. I love reading it, writing it, thinking about it." possibly have been happy about being walled off from the rest of the software world?

The last section on influence was wrong in hindsight. Sure Microsoft had influence in the 90's, but if you joined them in 2004 I can hardly think of them as influential in the last decade. Incremental improvement with a lot of churn for churn sake.

<comment><USER10> >you were also forbidden from looking at any open source software

For work/internal use, but I'm pretty sure he kept using it in his free time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well, it looks like he's back on Microsoft. [https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelb](https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelb)

</comment><comment><USER12> His page [http://michaelbrundage.com/note/2005/05/15/xbox-360-emulator...](http://michaelbrundage.com/note/2005/05/15/xbox-360-emulator/) gives a taste of the xbox emulator project.

Now I want to learn so much more.

</comment><comment><USER13> Any comments related to the situation in the branches of Microsoft around the world? (like Microsoft Uk, Ge, Fr, Br, It, etc... you understood)

I have some friends in Microsoft Uk and they all talk really bad about the company, both in how it is managed and in the support they get from other members of the team. Just to say one of my friends got his access card only after two weeks and a usable laptop after 7 and only after receiving two or three that got infinite BSODs.

</comment><comment><USER14> It really depends on what product you land on, and what your career goals are. And you'd better have career goals, because if you don't you are looked down upon. Doesn't everyone want the CEO's jobs? It's still as hyper-competitive as ever, and to a certain degree, even more so since M$FT has invested in creating job centers around the world. Microsoft still employees more "temps" than FTEs, just saying.

</comment><comment><USER15> When was this written?

<comment><USER16> It appears to be 2004. He indicates that he was hired in 1999, and elsewhere he talks about the number of managers he's had in five years.

<comment><USER15> Well. I may not have any inside info but I'd wager that 2004 MS and 2015 MS are very different workplaces indeed.

<comment><USER17> They are/were. I worked there from Feb 2000 until Dec 2014. The company changed a great deal over that time. Without commenting directly on Ballmer I will say Satya Nadella is a great CEO and he is doing a great job transforming the company.

<comment><USER18> Hopefully he will take responsibility for cleaning up the app store and stop focusing on app count. I wrote Satya, the GM of the Windows Store, and various PMs on that team, but nothing.

Countless tons of crap on the store. MS _paying_ for shovelware. CSRs defending fake versions of Dropbox. Fake Windows Updates on the store. Publishers pretending to be Microsoft or other big vendors. Smaller ISVs unable to get scam versions of their software removed. Hell, even Netflix had s tough time getting rid of fake Netflix apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> All blogs should be required to have datestamps! :)</comment>


Samsung Galaxy J5 phone reported to have caught fire, exploded - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/business/samsung-smartphone-fire-1.3839753 <comment><USER2> Since the phone has been on the market for a while, it's probably a one-off. Most such incidents are due to damage either during manufacturing or in use. Worrying for Samsung though.</comment>


Ask HN: best/most popular hosted server monitoring services? - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to hear your suggestions for reputable, fairly large server monitoring services. The kind where they'll send you an alert if/when a service or server goes down, for a fee in the range of $20-100 per month. If you know an approximate number of customers your suggestion has, that would be great, since the major thing for me with these kinds of services is that most are too anonymous and hard to trust, since these kinds of businesses are relatively cheap and easy to set up in your parents' basement. I'm not interested in installed software, since I'm not at the scale needed to set up my own independent monitoring infrastructure.<p>I appreciate any ideas or suggestions. Thanks! <comment><USER2> We've been very happy with pingdom.com. Plans range from $10-$35, they have a lot of options to verify your machines are actually up (APIs, ping, string matching, https, etc).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, Pingdom is nice, I've actually used their free alternative GIGRIB for personal use and worked at a company who used their Business account. I'd like some more alternatives though. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This was the first result in google for "uptime monitoring": www.uptimesoftware.com

Given that they have a free plan, why don't you just sign up and see how reliable they are for your self prior to buying?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the thing with monitoring software is that I'd really like to have a reasonable level of comfort with my choice before starting to use something, since the only time you need the service to be rock solid is when the faeces hits the rotating blades, so to speak.

edit: also, after looking at the site, that's downloaded software, which requires me to set up trustworthy infrastructure myself.

<comment><USER3> Is it really? yuck. When I saw this post, I thought this would be reasonably simple... After all, all you need is something to ping/hit the webserver and report when it can't.

To be honest, you can't account for every possible situation. Sometimes murphy's law applies. But if you can find a service that at least lets you know when it's hitting your server historically in some way, you should purchase it and get on to worrying about other things. If the company doesn't perform, you can deal with that issue at that time.</comment></comment></comment>


History Professor banned from YouTube because he had clips of Nazi Propaganda - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/MrAllsopHistory/status/1136326031290376193 <comment><USER2> Those who forget/erase history are doomed to repeat it!

<comment><USER3> You mean censoring speech in the abstract or the failure to limit Nazi propaganda in the 1930s?

Also, in which historical era was voluntary and deliberate censorship _solely_ by private, commercial entities a dominate factor in how things unfolded?

<comment><USER4> Fun Fact: The Weimar government had very brutal suppression of Nazi Propaganda and jailed Nazi publishers. This just won them more popular support as the public wanted to know why Nazis were being suppressed. The court trials of Nazi publishers received wide attention and gave them a platform to air their views. It turned out that Weimar censorship was counterproductive then as it is now.

Another fun fact. The communists in Weimar Germany went for the whole "punch a Nazi" thing in a big way, violently attacking Nazi political groups, which directly lead to the formation of the SS (actually a precursor group) as a self-defense group meant to protect the Nazis from communist street violence. That turned out really well for the communists, too!

So indeed, those who fail to learn history really _are_ doomed to repeat it.

<comment><USER5> Fun fact: Germany today has arguably even stricter laws banning Nazi propaganda, and hasn't renazified in 75 years.

<comment><USER4> This is false. German anti-Nazi laws are weaker today than under Weimar and the society is generally much more liberal.

Of course the reason why no nation has renazified is because Fascism exists as a boogeyman of the left rather than a reality. It is a completely discredited ideology. If you look at every public opinion survey, there are many more communists than there are nazis, even though morally both sides are equally odious.

If you could find a Nazi lurking about somewhere, rather than in the nightmares of radicals, they would never say "Real Nazism has never been tried". Whereas there are actually people claiming to be communists and insisting that communism deserves a tenth or eleventh chance. Nazism is a completely defeated ideology even as communism continues to try to come back from the grave.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This happens to people on the left all the time too. They get mass reported if they have any nazi symbols in their videos - even educationally.

<comment><USER7> I have some trans friends. They all say 'community guidelines' is just another tool to be wielded against them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Could this be some kind of automoderation perhaps related to this recent announcement?

> "First, the ban on supremacists will remove Nazis and other extremists who > advocate..."

[https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/5/18652576/youtube- supremaci...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/5/18652576/youtube-supremacist- content-ban-borderline-extremist-terms-of-service)

</comment><comment><USER9> The Left tries to sanitize history...

Probably because history clearly shows that their cult is apt to turn into mega-murder. Like National Socialists' did.

<comment><USER10> We've banned this account for using HN for ideological battle—not what this site is for, regardless of which flavor—and ignoring our request to stop.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> They were too offensive!</comment>


ARKit + CoreLocation [video] - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/AndrewProjDent/status/886916872683343872 <comment><USER2> The _really_ interesting stuff is in Part 2 of his demo:

[https://twitter.com/AndrewProjDent/status/888380207962443777](https://twitter.com/AndrewProjDent/status/888380207962443777)

<comment><USER3> If you could somehow project that as a HUD in a car, then you'll have a great solution to a big problem in the navigation space. Many people have trouble reading maps because they have difficulty in translating the pictographic display from some other screen into the roads and signage they see in front of them. If they no longer have to do this translation, then following directions becomes significantly easier for a large class of people that struggle with current navigation systems.

<comment><USER4> It could have some negative side effects, as in: "But the arrow pointed straight off of the edge of the cliff!"

<comment><USER5> If they drive off a cliff when using the system, would they not be more eligible for a Darwin Award?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't get me wrong this is pretty cool, but one thing that makes me a bit annoyed is the way the author frame the video. With the current version of ARkit and most AR libraries these days, there's no occlusion of the virtual geometry, meaning that you can actually see the blue line and arrows overlay the real world at all time (So some far away virtual arrow will be on top of a real wall right in front of you). That's a bit less sexy and it's clearly hidden here. It's also possible that some directions look confusing with the lack of occlusion and too numerous virtual objects on the screen.

I'm looking forward to when AR libraries use their point cloud technology to also do object reconstruction and virtual occluders using real world objects!

<comment><USER7> We're planning to bring occlusion to ARKit with Forge. The accuracy can't match a depth camera, but still plenty of use cases. Here's an example on a Pixel:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9CpT- sy7HE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9CpT-sy7HE)

<comment><USER8> This is awesome! Is the sdk available?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I haven't upgraded anything to an iOS 11 beta so I haven't been able to try this myself - but how effective is ARKit if the camera loses a view for a little bit?

<comment><USER8> [https://twitter.com/AndrewMendez19/status/888765856225923072](https://twitter.com/AndrewMendez19/status/888765856225923072)

Here is a video upload from a July 4th ARKit experience I made. If you have small movements and have occlusion, ARKit does well. You see in the video that after movement and occulusion it loses its bearings.

But whats crazy is when you return the view and ARKit fixes itself

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can see Apple dropping some Glass reinvention swiftly.

<comment><USER11> They have to go back in the line. Google is already using google glass in some manufacturing environments. Microsoft already released hololens, although for now mainly for devs. magic leap hopefully is coming next year and accordingly to the rumours should be quite a big leap.

<comment><USER12> If there's one lesson to be drawn from Apple's history, it's that first to market is not a good metric for blockbuster success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nokia had something similar years ago : [https://youtu.be/55Qdem9pJxY](https://youtu.be/55Qdem9pJxY)

<comment><USER14> I swear I had an app installed on my iPhone 3G (I guess 2008/2009) that did something similar. Was it Sam Altman's Loopt that had a 3D view that used geomarkers and displayed them as you rotated the phone with the camera view leaking through it? I believe it was L*something.

<comment><USER15> I believe you're thinking about Layar. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b64_16K2e08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b64_16K2e08)

<comment><USER14> That was it. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> eventually we are going to fall back to a google glass style device when people realize how stupid it is to have to walk around with a phone up

</comment><comment><USER17> Hasn't Yelp's app implemented this feature (called Monocle) for half a decade now? Could anyone explain the difference?

<comment> k-mcgrady I remember that (haven't used it in years though). I remember when it launched it was a big deal. I think the big deal here is that any reasonably skilled iOS dev could write this in a few hours. Yelp certainly spent more time and money doing it. So the big deal is the tools have finally reached a point that doing useful AR work isn't difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> is this a trick or is geolocation on iPhones better than the 5m typically quoted.

<comment><USER19> I generally saw 1-3m accuracy when I was trying out ARKit and some GIS data, YMMV

[https://twitter.com/bFlood/status/888485889248157697](https://twitter.com/bFlood/status/888485889248157697)

that said, when using worldalignment gravityAndHeading, any location inaccuracy when the ARSCNView starts up will throw off the AR illusion, sometimes considerably. I hope apps will be able to correct during an ARSession when better location data is detected

<comment><USER18> >relative to a nearby iBeacon

where is the iBeacon in the parking lot?

<comment><USER19> there is no iBeacon (not sure where you're quoting that from?), its just spatial data (lat/lons) projected into the SCNScene coordinate space (which is relative to the location and heading of the device when the ARSession starts)

<comment><USER18> >Core Location provides services for determining a device's geographic location, altitude, orientation, or position relative to a nearby iBeacon.

[https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corelocation](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corelocation)

<comment><USER20> As the quote states, it can (determine the geographic location, altitude, orientation) OR (determine position relative to a nearby iBeacon)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Music Copyright Lawsuits Are Scaring Away New Hits - <AUTHOR> https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/music-copyright-lawsuits-chilling-effect-935310/ <comment><USER2> This would seem to be making the case that copyright is not serving its explicit purpose: to increase the size of the public domain. That public domain's value is even acknowledged in the article: there's no "virgin birth" for music or some such pithy aphorism.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unintended consequences of excessively long copyright periods.

Couldn't happen to a nicer industry.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is the exact scenario black musicians have been agitating for for decades. Funk and R&B artists in particular have found themselves frustrated that their grooves -- the bits that actually _make_ the song -- can be lifted wholesale by other artists because historically copyright law only concerned itself with melody.

The Blurred Lines ruling makes it clear that grooves are, in fact, copyrightable. Maybe we'll see the benefits as musicians are forced to innovate.

<comment><USER5> The Blurred Lines case was not about rhythmic grooves, it was basically about instrumentation/orchestration and to a lesser extent about basic harmonic elements. There are very good reasons to enable "lifting" of these things, namely because they're basically functional elements - there's only so many instrumentation choices you can make in any given song, and often it's even forced by e.g. your genre choice (rock'n'roll, jazz, funk, R&B, what have you). If you want genres to evolve freely, that's not going to happen if everyone who writes in a genre has to pay copyright to whoever happened to be first in experimenting with that one weird choice in instrumentation.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Manifesto Matcher – 'Tinder' for the UK Election Policies - <AUTHOR> http://manifestomat.ch/get-app <comment><USER2> This is a very well done app, and i like the idea of the face made up of your answers.</comment>


Show HN: Simple monitoring of websites (with posts to slack) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/k2xl/downtime_monitor <comment><USER2> SMS option will be welcome</comment>


Hacker News now uses Google Captcha - <AUTHOR> Just got hit with one.
1. Since when?
2. What for?
3. Bye and thank you for the fish. <comment><USER2> Hacker News uses CloudFlare, which uses ReCAPTCHA if it thinks malicious or excessive traffic might be coming from your IP address.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was pretty sure they have stopped using CF ..

<comment><USER2> You're right (my bad), they now use AWS. I imagine they're either using some other DDoS product or spun up something simple that does basic prevention, likely via CAPTCHA for suspect traffic.

ReCAPTCHA is basically the industry standard when it comes to CAPTCHAs, so whomever likely just went with that instinctively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Last HN post from auslander, bitches :) It was a good run!

Changed password to the blindly typed one.

Google must die, lol

<comment><USER3> What's the purpose of that? You can still reset it</comment></comment>


Simplified bookmarking - <AUTHOR> http://saved.io/ <comment><USER2> Great timing! I was looking for a bookmark service last week.

I love the UI here, but the service does not provide much functionality.

1\. How do I re-order the list? 2\. How do I re-name the bookmark? 3\. Does Saved.IO provide any list functionality or do I browse down a long list of 300 bookmarks? 4\. This service needs 'tags' (i.e. shopping, banking, school, etc.) 5\. The delete button is too close to the bookmark (especially considering it lacks a 'Are You Sure?' prompt). I've accidentally deleted three links already on mobile. 6\. The 'added [x length of time] ago' provides no function and adds clutter. 7\. I've already have a few issues with it saving numerous bookmarks for a single page.

I want to love this service. Convince me! :)

<comment><USER3> Grapesoda, I don't want to hijack this thread, but I want to give you another bookmarking alternative. Take a look at my submissions!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like that they're making use of URLs in an interesting way. IMHO these Web services (reminds me of [http://deturl.com](http://deturl.com)) are quite neat in general.

But: it's still far easier to click a bookmarklet. I'm not sure this has enough utility to get someone to switch bookmark providers.

If someone's looking for a good "power user" bookmarking service, [http://pinboard.in](http://pinboard.in) is excellent and their business model is refreshingly transparent -- a one time fee of about $10 for an account.

<comment><USER5> What about Google Bookmarks? [http://www.google.com/bookmarks/](http://www.google.com/bookmarks/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is pretty great. Nice idea and good, simple execution.</comment>


All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/matter/all-dressed-up-for-mars-and-nowhere-to-go-7e76df527ca0 <comment><USER3> This piece is quite an interesting read, as well as being well structured and well phrased. This makes it all the more unfortunate that the writer is obviously unfamiliar with the technologies which would be used, and the realities of aerospace projects; leading to a slew of errors.

Some of the errors include:

1) Separating oxygen from nitrogen is quite commonly done, and there are at least three distinct methods for doing it. The reference is to an amateurish analysis done by others who had not done any research. Source: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_swing_adsorption](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_swing_adsorption)

2) It is quite well known that NASA distributes its contracts around the country, so as to increase political buy-in from governors, congressmen, and senators. In fact, the space shuttle was green-lit because Nixon had cancelled the national aerospace plane, and his administration had a meeting about how that would affect votes in key swing-states, and they decided that the shuttle would benefit his re-election effort. Sources are numerous including [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo8v7juSgRw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo8v7juSgRw) .

3) Vitamin D would be a problem from lack of sunlight, not vitamin A, and even then supplements and artificial lamps both provide viable long-term alternatives to sun-exposure.

4) Building a vehicle to carry sufficient fuel and supplies for the trip to Mars is not especially technically challenging, when compared to the design of an earth-entry vehicle. Earth orbit rendezvous allows for the assembly of massive (though expensive) space vehicles such as the ISS.

<comment><USER4> To your point (3), perhaps it is reasonable to bring a lifetime's supply of vitamin supplements for four people. But with an artificial lamp you would have to worry about bulbs burning out (how many would you need?), and the lamps would consume a significant part of what would have to be a limited power supply in the colony.

To your point (4), that there may exist an even more difficult problem does not mean that building a Mars vehicle is "not especially technically challenging." The author explicitly cites the three recent malfunctions with rocket launches, and the older Apollo, Soyuz, and Shuttle programs all had their difficulties too. Building a Mars vehicle is surely challenging.

<comment><USER5> You wouldn't build such a lamp like on Earth. An oxygen plasma with a spectrum filtered glass case, microwave excited to avoid the need for electrodes, would last pretty much forever and be repairable using only in with materials.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Aside from all the serious problems, their puny budget being probably the biggest, what always bugged me was the reality show aspect... What an ugly way to even think about achieving such a great feat. Are they picking their candidates like Big Brother does, with the egos and sex appeal? Will there be fighting? Sex? I mean, if the viewers get bored, and this will be a pretty long show with a pretty small cast, what happens then? And how will people even react to watching someone die in a "show" like this? Wouldn't this actually be the most perverse form of human exploitation ever conceived?..

I don't think this nasty idea even deserves this much work to write about it. I'm sorry for Josh, but I hope they do not succeed. I do not want to see the horror that this could turn into. Let's not mar space and Mars with this bullshit.

<comment><USER7> This is an excellent point; reality-show-manufactured drama would rob this achievement of the gravitas it deserves. Humans are given to pettiness on occasion, it would be a tragedy to elevate and preserve those petty moments when memorializing a new human epoch.

<comment><USER8> _" reality-show-manufactured drama would rob this achievement of the gravitas it deserves"_

Worse, it risks completely ruining the idea of human space exploration and planetary colonisation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> First: I thought this was a well-written article.

Second: although it is definitely not something I would seriously consider, I can appreciate that there _are_ some people out there who are in fine mental health and would eagerly go on a one-way trip to Mars.

But third, when I read this:

 _Before he'd applied for Mars One, Josh had met a girl at the Redhead Days festival in the Netherlands. Eli did not have red hair, but was brunette; Josh was drawn to her easygoing demeanor, her effortless good moods, and they fell very much in love. But a shot at Mars would be a serious, life-changing turn of events, and Josh knew that he would have to fully commit if he was ever going to make it to the final selection. He didn't even wait for the application deadline to break it off._

...I concluded that Josh was an idiot. Not for wanting to go on a one-way trip to Mars, not because of any career or lifestyle decisions he had made, but simply because he sabotaged his potential happiness based upon a _promise_ of something exciting happening, made by people a world away that he had never met and who seemed to have a dubious command of the critical technical details of such an undertaking.

Ten years from now, when Josh is still on Earth, Mars One is considered to be another Biosphere 2 and Bas Landsorp and his pals have long since moved on to other commercial ventures, I suspect Josh will wonder about that brunette.

<comment><USER10> I strongly suspect Josh knows exactly what he's doing, even if it's not exactly what he's saying he's doing.

<comment><USER11> Yep. He sounds like a really fascinating character, but it seems to me like Mars is not really the key motivation in his life. He sounds like he's running away from something. I hope everything works out for him in the end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When they explain to me how ISRU (in-situ resource utilization) can fabricate a replacement for a blown microchip or a refrigerator's compressor - <USER2> only on the equipment you can bring to Mars in a couple of space capsules - I'll be ready to begin seeing Mars One as something other than an insane pipe dream.

This article nails it: these people would be living an 18th-century lifestyle. But it would be one utterly dependent on 21st-century technology for something as basic as breathable air. If their 18th-century lifestyle can't keep their 21st-century technology working, and the organizing company can't drum up enough money to send regular resupply flights for decades to come, they die. Simple as that.

<comment><USER13> It's like a time machine that kills everyone as soon as the time machine breaks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> To send actual humans to the surface of Mars requires several robotic missions first to prepare.

If we expect to make fuel for the return journey there, that needs to be happening before the people leave Earth orbit.

Ditto for digging the hole and putting in an underground habitat.

Building a greenhouse from glass made on Mars.

Growing actual food on the surface.

Each of these steps are critical and need testing before we send people. Otherwise it's a pointless test to find out which failure gets them first.

<comment><USER15> How about, before all that, we try and inhabit, say, deserts on Earth first? Make that psychologically and economically feasible first. To my knowledge, we are yet to successfully demonstrate that we can maintain a viable, materially- closed ecosystem, without having to worry about extra things we'd encounter on Mars like pressure and temperature differentials and excess radiation.

I am all for Mars, 100%. The sooner the better. But it's not like Earth doesn't have its own inhospitable climates that are vastly easier to conquer than Mars, and we haven't even managed that (but then, perhaps there's just not enough motivation?).

<comment><USER16> We already comfortably inhabit a desert, we call it Los Angleles :-) Perhaps a better example is the underground city of Australia, Coober Pedy. Non self- sustaining examples exist in the Antarctic as well.

The point being, Earth has hard to live in places, but not a lot of motivation for living in those places. Mars as a sort of sex appeal to it "Mars!" but its a valid question what happens once people figure out that its just a place that is really really far away from Walmart.

<comment><USER17> I think the point is not that it is technologically infeasible to live in deserts, but that doing it _years_ with only what you can fit in a capsule the size of a U-Haul or dig out of the ground (with a drill you brought with you in the U-Haul) is _extremely_ difficult.

And, that no one has demonstrated how that can be turned into a positive, long-term revenue stream, even in principle.

<comment><USER16> Camping in the Sierras as I have done over the years has lead to seeing a lot of mining towns. And a mining town in the 19th century was a modest analog of a Mars colony in that they made most of their own tools out of locally available material, lived off food that could be sourced locally, and had few support structures outside of their own ingenuity.

The argument that presumably robotic missions would pre-supply a landing site with materials that could not be locally sourced, tools for processing locally sourced materials into useful form (including but not limited to air/water). Puts what is left being there for the hell of it.

Failed earth experiments like the Biosphere ones depended primarily on self containment (good for when you are surrounded by vacuum), successful experiments like the Russian 'mobile home from hell' [1], and some things in the middle like 'earth ships'[2] actually point to feasibility.

What is lacking is the certainty that you _will die_ if this doesn't work. And that, is pretty hard to simulate on Earth because there is always an "option" of some sort for rescue.

[1] [http://www.space.com/13500-mock-mars-mission- mars-500-ends.h...](http://www.space.com/13500-mock-mars-mission- mars-500-ends.html)

[2] [http://earthship.com/](http://earthship.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The point about the overabundance of oxygen (from the plants) that would require venting, but limited nitrogen, which would ultimately result in suffocation is one of those great little details that you don't normally think about when you think about living on other planets. There is so much we take for granted living day to day on a planet that we've evolved in concert with, that it's easy to overlook the little (and big) details that are so important for life to exist.

<comment><USER3> This problem has been solved, and machines capable of separating gasses exist all over the world; they are commonly used in hospitals to provide oxygen to patients, and for various other purposes.[1]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_separation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_separation)

<comment><USER4> How often do these machines need spare parts? And how much power do they consume to operate?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This article is like a laundry list of what's wrong with my generation. Whiny, cynical, woefully uninformed but happy to share technical reasons why something won't work.

</comment><comment><USER20> > How the colonists might cope with a deficiency in vitamin A from a lack of > sunlight, however, is.

Don't they mean vitamin D?

<comment><USER21> I believe so.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> We are no where near ready to go to Mars.

What would the impact on the public's psyche be if this mission failed by means of a torturously slow death of the crew? I think it'd be a huge setback for any sort of space exploration to witness fellow humans triumphantly land on Mars and then watch it all fall apart and the crew perishes tragically (being optimistic enough to say they actually land safely).

I bet the Apollo program would have ended much sooner if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin never made it off of the Moon.

I have always thought as Cmd. Hadfield stated, that we have to go to the Moon and get it right there first. Go to the Moon, get this space colonization thing figured out and then the conversation on heading to Mars can begin.

</comment><comment><USER23> Well written article!

As much as I would like to but I think it will probably never happen in the near future. Not because of technical reasons as some people state in the article. In my opinion the technical difficulties are not the most difficult things to solve in order to travel to Mars. Humanity went basically from 0 to space and on the Moon but this was only possible because of the political pressure where everything was dedicated to reach this goal. This included a lot of money and ten thousands of people. But most important it was the society who supported this goal no matter what. Today nobody really cares if people go to space and this makes it impossible for a hand full of people who do.

<comment><USER17> I agree. Barring some economic windfall that hasn't yet been discovered, it will require a national (world?) crisis and a Manhattan/Apollo project for a project on this scale.

And the $6B pricetag is ludicrous. To put this in context, the state of California estimates the cost of high-speed rail from SF to LA at ~$50B.

<comment><USER24> Yeah fine, and everyone at SpaceX DEVELOPED the rockets that take people to SPACE for the same as what Facebook paid for Snapchat. Valuations are WEIRD.

Further the $50B price tag has a lot to do with paying a LOT of union folks, legalized "corruption" in many forms and the like. Finding huge cost savings in the construction industry is possible if you're motivated but nobody is because big infrastructure projects like that get handed out more based on politics than merit.

<comment><USER17> SpaceX benefited from a great many years of experience, technology, knowledge, and lessons learned in blood from NASA, which is priceless. Comparing SpaceX outlays to a corporate acquisition pricetag is a weak analogy, at best. NASA (federal taxes) provided roughly half of SpaceX's initial funding. Large fractions of their current contracts come from NASA. And of course plenty of SpaceX's engineers are ex-NASA employees.

As far as unions go, I will grant that wages are higher as a result of their existence. That's a feature, not a bug. I'm curious: just how much of that $50B pricetag do you imagine is due to unions and "corruption"? A ballpark figure from the website of your choice will be fine.

<comment><USER24> Yes, that's all fine. But here's the thing: even if the billion dollars dropped magically out of the air, it still only took a billion dollars to develop a new rocket. Doesn't matter where the money came from if that's how much money it was.

I don't care if it's public or private money that made SpaceX possible, and it doesn't much matter to me if the tech to go to Mars is all designed from scratch or bought from people who already know how to do it. It's that it is possible to do big things for a lot less than $50B.

If you have to design everything from scratch because it's $10k/lb and every pound counts, well, then yes it's going to cost a huge pile of money.

But what if it's $1k/lb to get to space? Suddenly COTS stuff doesn't look as stupid.

<comment><USER17> No, it took much more than a billion dollars to develop a rocket. You are just ignoring huge swathes of the cost to support your claim. If you estimate the aggregate cost of SpaceX launches, including 50 years of work by NASA, it will be orders of magnitude greater than $1B. I mean, tell yourself whatever you want, but R&D isn't free, and they didn't have to do most of it.

In the context of the present thread, since many of the problems associated with a manned Mars mission are unsolved, forgive me if I'm skeptical that Adam Smith's invisible hand will somehow bring the cost down to manageable levels. With or without COTS.

<comment><USER24> There's a big difference from developing the FIRST rocket and developing A rocket. The first one is now built. We now have the people with the experience. It can (and is!) being done.

I'm not arguing the price of the first rockets that NASA built at all. I'm arguing that SpaceX didn't have an extra hundred billion of secret NSA black money that they used in addition to the publicly known about billion that we can be sure was spent.

You can't argue that because NASA spent $20B or whatever in 1960's dollars to get us to the moon that somehow SpaceX's $1B rocket is ACTUALLY a $21B rocket. You could argue that if SpaceX had to develop everything from scratch it would cost a lot more than $1B, but they didn't.

Similarly not everything that it would take to go to Mars is going to have to be engineered from scratch. Especially as launch prices keep coming down. If you could get to orbit for $100/lb it's only 10x as expensive as overnight air freight and at that point weight wouldn't even be a real issue anymore.

Is it kind-of crazy to talk about $100/lb launches right now? Yeah sure. But Musk has said that it's $200k worth of fuel to launch a Falcon 9, which has a 30klb payload to LEO. That's $6/lb in marginal cost plus whatever overhead on the rocket. Suddenly $100/lb doesn't look quite so batshit insane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Gravity on Mars is only 38% that of Earth's. What this would mean for the long-term health of colonists on Mars is not known"

I think this fact is often overlooked. The problem of gravity (and radiation) are probably harder to overcome than food and oxygen.

<comment><USER3> This kind of argument was made early and often in the late 1950s, with respect to zero gravity, and it proved to be fear-mongering. Without evidence for this sort of proposition, it is simply pessimistic speculation.

This piece was not well researched, please do not invest too much credence in it.

<comment><USER26> To this day astronauts need to spend good amounts of time exercising during long stints in zero-g aboard ISS to avoid significant bone loss. Of course, maybe if you never leave Mars, you would be just fine with the bone density/strength you have.

<comment><USER3> Citing specific problems can be instructive, and I would agree that bone and muscle mass loss could prove very bad. My issue is with nebulous claims that 'anything could happen'.

I would add that the bone and muscle problems are very well known to just about everyone who has done as much as read a science fiction book. Heinlein went into the subject in detail in his 1966 novel "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", and more recent writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson have written about it too.

<comment><USER8> It is worth remembering that Heinlein and KSR are writers of _fiction_ , which tends to gloss-over difficult problems in favour of pleasing stories. Neither were/are scientists, although Heinlein had an engineering degree, and it would be inadvisable to rely on their work.

In 1966 the space endurance record was just under 14 days (Gemini 7) and very little was known about the long-term effects of low gravity environments at that time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> For anyone interested in a good, intense read about surviving alone on Mars, I highly recommend Andy Weir's "The Martian". Fiction (for awhile, anyway) based on science & engineering & human behavior. Don't start it on an evening when you can't stay up all night!

<comment><USER28> Seconded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If that is the intellectual level of the applicants, they have far worse problems than radiation and food.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is one exceptionally well-written article.

<comment><USER31> The illustrations and structure added a lot as well!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> A well written article, interspersed with great art. Makes me wonder why he published it on Medium of all places.

This article deserved better. The author deserves recognition.</comment>


Kaspersky Sues Trump Administration for Banning Its Software - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/18/571710070/russia-based-kaspersky-lab-sues-trump-administration-for-banning-its-software <comment><USER2> It's going to be another one of those trials where the evidence is visible only to the judge and not to the prosecution lawyers...

They'll lose, and not even know why they lost.</comment>


Hold It In: Why Are Most Bathrooms in the NYC Subway Locked? - <AUTHOR> http://untappedcities.com/2014/02/24/hold-it-in-why-are-most-bathrooms-in-the-nyc-subway-locked/ <comment><USER2> Giant article-obscuring pop-up.</comment>


Where Ruby/Sinatra falls short - <AUTHOR> https://www.pc-kombo.com/blog/68/Where%20Ruby/Sinatra%20falls%20short <comment><USER2> I find it really interesting that the Ruby language led to two such wildly different, yet equally valid approaches to web apps - Sinatra and Rails.

Sinatra is the most minimal web framework I've ever used. It's fantastic for doing quick mockups and small apps. Yes, you will hit limitations. Bicycles are not good dump trucks. And even before you hit hard limits, you're going to find yourself inventing a lot of structure/convention to keep it from devolving into pretty PHP.

Rails, on the other hand, is fantastically complete. It does _everything_ for you. Convention over configuration is a brilliant concept, and the self- discovery nature of the ActiveRecord ORM is something that is totally natural in Ruby and quite awkward in other languages. For writing basic CRUD apps (which is much of the software world), it's really hard to beat the efficiency of Rails.

And when people whinge about performance... well, so what? Horizontal scaling, friends. Developer performance is _much_ more important than software performance in most cases (especially since networks and databases form the bulk of your performance cost out in the real world). But efficient developers, that's magical.

<comment><USER3> Sinatra is not an "approach to web apps" \-- it's a single purpose tool that maps HTTP requests to Ruby. Like Flask or Web.py (Python) and Express (JS).

You are comparing apples to oranges.

<comment><USER4> And you're saying oranges aren't fruit because they aren't like apples.

It's actually a not-insignificant amount of code that creates an approach so cleverly transparent that you are able to interpret it as no approach at all.

<comment><USER5> "oranges" is a very narrow range of colours between 585 and 620 nm wavelength. I'm not surprised wikipedia has a page on that [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_orange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_orange)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This post would be more appropriately named "Where my knowledge of building web applications falls short" \- the title is kinda inflammatory and a lot of the commenters here likely haven't bothered to read it and are just throwing in their two cents on the technologies mentioned in the title.

None of the complaints here are the fault of Ruby or Sinatra. One exception could be the trailing slashes complaint. The issue exists in really any web framework, though. Flask, for example, will give you the same hiccup.

I tend to defeat it in Flask with `app.url_map.strict_slashes = False`

> There are too many ways to access parameters

This is a bad thing? The framework gives you flexibility to build your program the way you want, and the way your specific problems might require.

> You will need much more than included

Well... yeah. This is not a batteries included tool for building websites end- to-end ... it's a simple way to map an HTTP request to Ruby.

> Rewriting www.yourpage.com to yourpage.com, or the other way around

> Serving your site over https

> Redirecting all [http://](http://) pages to [https://](https://)

> Running tasks in the background

> Saving data in a database, and reading from it

These are definitely not responsibilities for an HTTP -> Ruby library and the first 3 are certainly responsibilities for your public-facing HTTP server (Nginx, etc...)

<comment><USER6> It's supposed to be more than that. Sinatra is described as "a DSL for quickly creating web applications in Ruby with minimal effort".

Entire web applications, with minimal effort. I have not found this to be the case with Sinatra.

<comment><USER7> The application is not the server.

<comment><USER6> Of course, I agree. But though in practice Sinatra may be just a library for routing HTTP requests to a Ruby application, it is marketed as a relatively complete environment for building web applications, making a bunch of these criticisms valid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >And besides: If Sinatra starts a server listening for incoming traffic, why does it still seem common to run a regular webserver like nginx in front of that server?

This is a common technique used for tls-termination and management of 'virtual hosts', among other things.

The mentioned "issues" don't seem to be Sinatra-specific, but rather about the authors shallow understanding of the topic as a whole

<comment><USER9> One of these "other things" is buffering of slow HTTP requests. Application servers are usually not designed to deal with that and are meant to be run behind a proper load balancer/reverse proxy. This is usually very explicitly mentioned in their documentation, for example in [https://bogomips.org/unicorn/PHILOSOPHY.html](https://bogomips.org/unicorn/PHILOSOPHY.html)

<comment><USER10> puma does pretty good at buffering slow HTTP requests though.

I honestly _don't know_ why we usually put apache or nginx in front of our ruby 'web servers'. But I keep doing it anyway, cause 'everyone else' does, and I don't want to take the time to be sure I don't need to, it works.

However, I believe rails deployments to Heroku generally _don't_ put another web server in front. Which, per your point, slow clients is quite exactly why they explained the switch from unicorn to puma as a default web server. [https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog- items/594](https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-items/594)

It is true that in 2018 web dev has gotten complicated (in a variety of different axes), and if there's a framework/platform that will allow you to not know it is, I don't know what it is! It would probably be one that made a lot more choices for you though (like, say, ruby web server, so you don't need to think about 'oh, unicorn can't handle slow clients but puma can') -- which is the opposite of Sinatra's philosophy -- but then again Rails approach to try to do that has not resulted in something people find easy either. shrug.

<comment><USER11> I've stopped using Nginx in my Docker containers, and I just run puma directly. It's still behind a load balancer that also handles TLS termination. I also serve all the assets from the Rails server, but they're cached with a CDN, so it only needs to serve each file once.

If you're using Docker with Kubernetes, Convox, Docker Swarm, Rancher, etc., then I don't think you need to run Nginx or Apache. I ran some load tests on my staging environment with and without Nginx, and it didn't make any difference.

This was a really good article that helped me understand request routing a bit better: [https://www.speedshop.co/2015/07/29/scaling-ruby-apps- to-100...](https://www.speedshop.co/2015/07/29/scaling-ruby-apps- to-1000-rpm.html#how-requests-get-routed-to-app-servers)

<comment><USER10> If you weren't caching with CDN, would serving those static assets as efficiently as possible be a good reason to keep using (eg) nginx, do you think?

Oh, I guess load balancing (with a multiple-host scale) is another good reason, if you don't have heroku doing it for you, nginx is a convenient way to do it just fine.

<comment><USER11> I don't know if there's any middle ground where you'd want to use Nginx instead of a CDN. If it's an internal app then it doesn't really matter. But if you have any reason to worry about the performance of serving static assets, then you should always be using a CDN like CloudFront or CloudFlare, etc.

But yeah, Nginx can be a great solution for load balancing and TLS termination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If people are looking for a lightweight Ruby webserver, I'd highly recommend checking out Roda [https://github.com/jeremyevans/roda](https://github.com/jeremyevans/roda)

More related to the article, the author mentions that routing order is a problem with Sinatra. Is this not common to all route matchers?

What different behaviour would make sense? Obviously once a route is matched it should be executed, so is the issue here the way route ordering is done? What order would make more sense than ordering in the way the routes are defined?

<comment><USER13> The author is claiming that the order ends up NOT being the order they're defined, but without examples it's hard to tell if the problem is that or that the regular expressions being defined are not working as intended

<comment><USER14> "Now imagine not having a classical style Sinatra app, but a modular one."

I think the author ran into an issue where files were loaded differently in development mode than in production mode. Likely in development mode only the required files were loaded and the file with the more important routes wasn't. I wonder why that didn't show up in their tests.

But I also wonder if they aren't using Sinatra for too large projects. If you have routes defined over several files, it's likely to get problematic. Maybe they should be using a more complete web framework like Padrino or go all the way with Rails.

<comment><AUTHOR> It wasn't that setup related. pc-kombo does not need that many routes that I did spread it over multiple files. I generally do avoid that. I wanted to give the specific example at first, but did not find the related commits anymore when writing the article, and in the end if it was really related to some behavior change linked to a version change (or x86 vs ARM) it would not be too useful now. It's meant as an example for the rough edges one can encounter.

But the essence is that I had some routes defined using regexpressions, probably like the URL definition for a page in the blog (not saying it was exactly this one):

        get  %r{/([0-9]+)/([\w]+)} do |id, title|

And I ran into a situation where on my local dev platform this did not trigger when calling a similar looking route, but on the production server it did. I just remember being surprised that the specificity of the regex-evaluation seemed to change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> With micro web frameworks you're doomed to implement a subset of Rails, or have to dig around to find and configure one of the gems usually associated to it.

For those that are ok with this, or already have an understanding of the limited scope of your app, I strongly recommend Roda [0], it's a much more straightforward routing system with better memory/cpu usage.

I can't find a single instance for which Sinatra can be used where Roda is not a better choice.

[0] - [http://github.com/jeremyevans/roda](http://github.com/jeremyevans/roda)

<comment><USER16> Agreed. Until I wrote Modern[0] - and that was in many ways more of an exercise in OpenAPI/Swagger than anything else - there were few reasons I could find to not use Roda over Sinatra.

Grape's also pretty good, but I prefer Roda over it too. Something about writing it feels better.

[0] - [https://github.com/modern-project/modern- ruby](https://github.com/modern-project/modern-ruby)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For me Sinatra is great. It's the minimum you can get away with in a lot of situations. The whole thing is like 1-2000 lines of code (so totally feasible to actually read all of the code). The limits the author has run into are not necessarily Sinatra limits. The author also wants to do 120mph on a bike which most people will recognize it's a bad idea. Use the right tool for the job.

</comment><comment><USER18> My company runs its entire backend on Sinatra, and has since 2011. We do ~200K requests/min on AWS c5.4xlarges and r5.2xlarges, so we are a fairly significant deployment of Sinatra/ruby.

As the sole and still primary maintainer of our production infrastructure, I've been very happy with this choice of tech. I think our problem was made much simpler because, as a mobile app, we basically were building an API. We did integrate ActiveRecord/Support, and today have a massive suite of tests we run in rspec (it's pretty cool, Jenkins will spin up ~50 concurrent EC2 instances running docker, run the tests, and report back in about 15 min).

To this authors complaints, I suppose I feel that every framework has idiosyncrasies that you just accept and figure out, and many of the issues cited are felt only once and then not again. Today, running at scale, the main challenges have to do with building and supporting new tests, which rspec is amazing for, and handling application complexity, which we have been addressing using Service Objects.

</comment><comment><USER19> Part of the issues are with the separation of responsibilities between rack, sinatra, and whatever you use to run rack (e.g. puma is just one of many options here). We had similar issues a few years ago when we still used sinatra (on top of jruby).

One of the assumptions baked into rack is that parameters can only occur once. It returns a dictionary of values instead of a dictionary of lists of values (like e.g. the servlet API does in java). So we had some issues with request parameters that could occur more than once because of that. Ultimately we had to grab the raw request and do our own parsing to get that working. Likewise headers are treated the same way.

Another issue that was annoying was that rack, sinatra, AND the rack server we used (something on top of jetty that I forgot the name of) each had their own wonky logging primitives and configuration that interfered with each other. So we were getting duplicate log messages with very inconsistent formatting from different frameworks that each assumed to be in control of stdout. In the end some monkey patching (mainly to make rack log calls do nothing) allowed us to log via jruby/java via a proper logging framework on Java so that we could send properly formatted json messages to our logging cluster instead of dealing with unparsable garbage emitted via puts. We even managed to use the MDC, which is a good reason to use Java logging frameworks if you are running on top of jruby anyway. I don't think MDC is a thing in the ruby world.

Then there were loads of fun issues with cross site scripting protection in sinatra breaking stuff in subtle ways, double session initialization (i.e. two frameworks trying to set the session cookie), and a few more such issues.

I'm assuming some of these things may have improved over the years.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _So we had some issues with request parameters that could occur more than > once because of that. Ultimately we had to grab the raw request and do our > own parsing to get that working._

I had to do the same multiple times. Not for this project, but for different ones. Thanks for mentioning it. I should've mentioned it in the article!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Someone on HN previously mentioned that every project they've started with Sinatra, they've regretted down the road that they didn't use Rails.

I think the complaints about Sinatra are vaild, in that it needs to limit how params are accessed, better startup documentation, etc... But ultimately Sinatra is for building super simple crud apps. I don't even use it for anything that accesses something more than a SQLlite DB. I often use it for serving up basic front end assets and running single page applications that have some small server side component to them.

It's footprint is lighter than rails, but so is it's intended functionality.

<comment><USER21> I suppose it's a selection bias. You likely heard about projects that achieved some significance, which requires some sophistication which Rails provides.

I suppose there's a number of very small, non-public projects that have, say, 10-20 users doing a relatively trivial thing, and are just fine on Sinatra (or web.py, or maybe even a plain CGI script). But they never catch much attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How does Elixir's Phoenix framework compare for the shortcomings of Sinatra noted here?

Give Elixir's commitment to immutability and functional programming, I'm thinking it might be more explicit in some of the places Sinatra has implicit or inconsistent behavior.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've been a long-time user of Sinatra as well as Rails. About 8 years ago or so I decided to move all of my sites onto Sinatra and made a simple file- backed CMS that has scaled quite well over the years.

The drawbacks of the approach have been having to write a lot of methods and classes from scratch to handle certain processing data (there is no actual database) but the end result has been something quite bulletproof and scalable to a point, and the experience implementing those features (like TLS, sessions, helpers, etc) has been quite valuable.

However, my needs are starting to grow and I think soon we will have to move off of the old framework onto something new as our business requirements grow more complex.

</comment><comment><USER24> Sinatra is a great way to build test programs and demos. Once scaling up to a real application I have found that Rails is a better choice because it has a lot of the things built in that feel missing from Sinatra.

For example if you are trying to figure out how to add things like flexible initialization logic, security protections, clever MIME type handling, Cucumber testing, and better routing, you'll find that Rails has these things built in.

What you can't get from Rails is the "one file application" that's the killer feature of Sinatra. But all those files and directories in Rails are doing stuff that you'll eventually want.

</comment><comment><USER25> The answer to points 5 - 8 is basically to use Rails/ActiveSupport. If you're writing an API for a SPA, then Sinatra hardly falls short.

</comment><comment><USER26> Biggest thing is something else. Performance of Ruby/Sinatra plus gems needed to make it workable is worse than actual Rails. Might as well directy work with Rails. Better support and more features on top of better performance.

</comment><comment><USER27> Ruby/Sinatra is really nice. I wrote a little webapp 10 years ago using it. Faced with the alternative of doing everything in C++, it really made things easier.

</comment><comment><USER28> > And a small issue on top of that: If you define /route, /route/ will still > throw a 404. The right solution would be to serve the page on the two routes > but set one as canonical source. But you have to do that manually.

In most cases you can get away with wholesale removing and redirecting all trailing slashes in middleware.

<comment><USER29> Rack gets you out of a lot of jams if you know how to use it effectively.

<comment><USER30> That's the truth. I had a thing come up the other day where a client wasn't including a content type header and thus the body was being interpreted as application/x-www-form-urlencoded. Rack middleware to the rescue on that one.</comment></comment></comment>


75% of managers talk about growth in 1:1s - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/SoapBoxHQ/status/1176919612501450752 <comment><AUTHOR> Original article: [https://soapboxhq.com/blog/management-skills/growth-and- deve...](https://soapboxhq.com/blog/management-skills/growth-and- development?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=evergreen)</comment>


Complete and Voluntary Starvation of 50 days - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4982520/ <comment><USER2> I did this too myself in 2013 with roughly the same numbers (initial body weight ~92kg losing 20kg in 7 weeks most of it body mass). Also I didn't take supplements and cut down to tap water only (no food or soups or anything). Reintroducing my body to food was challenging to say the least.

I had prior experience doing such a diet once before (for 21 days a year earlier) knowing 8 weeks could be realistic for me to maintain at the time. I stopped a week early because even I boiled the tap water, the residual chlorine left over wasn't properly broken down by my body (food helps with that normally) and caused strong reactions every time I tried to drink (nausea even vomiting in final week). So not being able to hydrate myself I needed to stop very abruptly.

After I reintroduced my body to food I ended up in hospital a week later due to kidney stones (presumably a side effect of the starvation diet and flushing them out)

The hunger goes away after the 3rd/4th day and I was even able to go for a small run every other day until week 5. My motivation for it was neither religious nor to loose weight (although I had 10kg too much compared to my ideal shape 5 years before). People thought I was crazy for doing it (and I didn't tell anyone about it while it happened and also refused to discuss it with my doctor). I wanted to see how my body (and mind) reacts to extreme pressure like that. Also I felt experienced enough at the time to do this I would not recommend pushing too far into the extreme especially if it's your first time. Also worth noting that my weight never bounced back and I managed to maintain my ideal even after 5 years later (only gained 5kg mostly bodymass I lost not so much the fat).

My mental abilities (creativity, concentration, focus) were incredible especially until week 5. What I learned is as the body prepares for starvation it also releases huge amounts of energy that is stored up. Feels like having super powers. The body makes these reserves available so we can give it a final push for hunting or finding food (when homo sapiens is out in nature trying to survive I guess). It's probably why fasting is such a big thing in every religion.

<comment><USER3> > _My mental abilities (creativity, concentration, focus) were incredible > especially until week 5._

How long did it take from the onset of the fasting, for your mental abilities to show improvement?

<comment><USER2> Once I overcame the initial hunger feeling of the first days it became noticeable. It then increased peaking in week 3 to 5 but present even until the final days.

In the last days I became aware that every day I continued it was another day where my mind "won" against my body, and this scared me increasingly because I was no longer sure if I was still listening objectively to my body or if I was trying to prove something just for the sake of it. (e.g. "you came already that far now don't give up" -> this reasoning worked well for doing marathons sports but felt was dangerous to apply here). It was like my body telling me that it would no longer support my BS, ... but not via a hunger feeling as in initial days but I became so weak that walking more than few meters required a rest. Even speaking for more than 10 mins was tedious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Related: Results of a 382 day voluntary fast [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2495396/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2495396/) (1973)

This patient's initial weight was 207 kilograms, and over the course of a year he lost 125 kilograms. During this time he only consumed water, yeast, and multivitamins. After ending the fast, he successfully kept the weight off and only regained 7 kilograms over the next 5 years. He received a Guinness World Record for the longest recorded fast.

While a successful example of weight loss, the paper does cite five reports of fatalities occurring during total starvation weight loss treatment. It is probably not the safest way to lose weight.

<comment><USER5> It is amazing that we have so good knowledge over what the body needs that one can live on just water, yeast and multivitamins for a year. But why the yeast?

<comment><USER4> The paper does not say, however I did find a source speculating why:

 _The reason doctors administered yeast is simple – it was his only source of protein, and without it, the body starts eating its own muscle tissue. Without any form of protein at all, the man would not be able to "direct" his body to consume his vast amounts of body fat as fuel, and would die within weeks._

 _Just two tablespoons of nutritional yeast[1] provides a person with 60 calories, 5 grams of carbohydrates and 9 grams of protein – including all nine amino acids, which the human body cannot produce on its own._

Seems like nutritional yeast is a convenient source for essential amino acids.

[0] [https://coach.nine.com.au/2016/04/06/17/01/the-mystery- behin...](https://coach.nine.com.au/2016/04/06/17/01/the-mystery-behind- the-207kg-scotsman-who-fasted-for-over-a-year)

[1] [http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/custom/1323565/2](http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/custom/1323565/2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Last summer I fasted (intermittent) for 30 days. I had intended to do a pure fast (water only), but circumstances lead me to 1 meal a day.

I gained strength the longer I was in the fast. My running distance increased, and I lost on average .5 lbs a day. I weighed myself 4 times and day, logged all my meals and activity. I felt great. I gained back about 5 lbs on average, but this fluctuates some. (as is expected)

The key thing I learned from this, to maintain my weight loss, is to appreciate being hungry. It makes your next meal taste better, you have signal process to let you know you are burning fat, and it makes your stomach consistently smaller so you fill up easier. All wins...

<comment><USER7> What was your starting BMI? What was your finishing BMI? Did you experience any of the symptoms the guy in the case report got (stomach cramps, blackouts when standing up, belching, etc.)?

<comment><USER6> I am pretty healthy to start with (this guy seemed to have quite a few issues implied by his weight history). I didn't measure BMI beyond pinching my belly.

I had no negative symptoms at all. I suspect partly because it wasn't a long term complete fast, and also, I've fasted my entire life at least once a year, so I know what to expect. I stay well hydrated, and get plenty of sleep.

Sorry for the lack of BMI info, but my pants getting loose was my measure for that. :)

Edit: With what I know now, if I had negative symptoms, I'd start with multiple shorter fasts until I could handle longer ones. The minimum would be 24 hours.

<comment><USER8> > I didn't measure BMI beyond pinching my belly.

It sounds like you kept track of your starting weight and ending weight. If you know your starting and ending height or can safely assume your starting and ending height are very close to your current height, you can calculate change in BMI. There's no need for a skin caliper measurement, as you seem to be implying.

<comment><USER6> I will have to look up BMI calcuations at some point (currently working), and add this data to my spreadsheet. Thanks, I didn't know this was possible.

<comment><USER8> BMI is body mass in kg divided by the square of height in meters. The typically cited normal range is 18.5 kg/m^2 to 25 kg/m^2.

Technically, you can use whatever units you want, but almost every chart uses units of kg/m^2, and if the units aren't explicit, they're quite probably using kg/m^2.

<comment><USER6> I used an online conversion tool [0], and got these numbers.

Starting BMI: 28.6 Ending BMI: 25.9

It says I am still overweight, even at my lowest weight. lol

I am curious what these numbers mean to you? (I know I need to lose more weight, cause I can see it in the mirror...)

[0] [https://bmicalculator.mes.fm/](https://bmicalculator.mes.fm/)

<comment><USER8> A very lean bodybuilder could still have a high BMI.

I don't have a reference offhand, but the US Army has a lot of data on military-service-aged men and their cardiovascular health risks. They found BMI isn't a great predictor of cardiovascular health. Some formula involving height and the circumference of the belly was a much better predictor of cardiovascular risks.

A thin but tall westerner colleague in Japan told me that doctors in Japan are required to counsel anyone with a waist circumference over a certain limit about weight loss. There's no correction for height (or race), only sex. His doctor realized that my colleague isn't overweight, but still had to lecture him. BMI at least accounts for height, but can be similarly misleading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Clear ethical barriers preclude structured research into the physiology of > such stimuli.

I wonder why that is. The key point is "voluntary" starvation, read fasting. Why not make a study with consenting participants to fast for a specific time? Which "clear ethical barrier" is broken here?

<comment><USER10> I have done lots of alternative stuff to deal with a serious medical condition. I have done so very successfully. I also did it without external pressure to stay a particular course, etc.

People when watched behave different. People under contract behave different.

It is one thing to take notes when someone does this voluntarily. It is quite another to put people under contract for something like this.

<comment><USER9> Fair point. I thought more on the lines of "we search people who want to fast. We will provide medical supervision and a controlled environment where you can do that, while we take notes. If you want to quit, you can at any time." (I assume with contract you mean something like "you have to fast for x days, if not you are in breach of contract" \- is that correct?)

<comment><USER10> I just mean a contract agreeing to a study at all. "What gets measured gets done." Etc.

I am under the close supervision of my 30 old son and have been since he was 13. It's a completely different dynamic than reporting results to a doctor or lab for a study.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Also see:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/fasting/](https://www.reddit.com/r/fasting/)

</comment><comment><USER12> I started eating once a day about 2 months ago. Lost about 20kg. After a while you just stop getting as hungry as you usually would. Sometimes when I'm busy I actually forget to eat.

</comment><comment><USER13> As somebody who is not familiar with medical research, can anyone tell me why the authors mention the BMI here at all? As far as I understand, the BMI is an indispensable metric for statistics on large populations. However, in a case study involving only a single individual, it seems to me that other markers such as body fat percentage for example, would be a better choice making the BMI more or less meaningless.

<comment><USER14> The individual used an electrocapactive conductance device to measure his body fat. It was listed as 29.9%. Maybe try reading the content next time..

<comment><USER13> It still doesn't explain to me why the authors still mention the BMI. It seems like a meaningless piece of information given that they have much better markers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Of related interested, and possibly the only paper that has reached the NEJM with a magician as an author, is this paper that describes David Blane's physiology having spent 44 days fasting in a box: [http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200511243532124](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200511243532124)

</comment><comment><USER16> The unit of the BMI should be kg/m^2

Will read the rest now but I'm not sure what to think of a paper with such an error in the first line of the abstract.

<comment><USER17> I don't see that as an error. Although there's a popular simplified model that expresses an ideal weight as a function of kg/m^2, the weight/height ratio is indeed expressed as kg/m.

Furthermore, if that detail was relevant I'm sure that the paper wouldn't have passed through a peer review process.

<comment><USER15> If the authors were using kg/m^-1 instead of kg/m^-2 with the given information (96.8 kg; BMI, 30.2 kg m−1; height not provided), the patient would need to be over 3m (nearly 10 ft) tall. This seems unlikely. If it were true, it would probably make for an even more interesting case report.

Peer review for less well known pay-to-publish ($1800) journals like this one is by no means a guarantee of quality: [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full)

<comment><USER13> kg/m^-1 -> kg/m (or kg * m^-1)

kg/m^-2 -> kg/m^2 (or kg * m^-2)

;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In the jain community, i see a lot of fasting around me. Everything from whitelist-of-foods, to total and complete fasts.

Some momore info: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting_in_Jainism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting_in_Jainism)

Enterprising researchers should collect data from above.

</comment><comment><USER19> I lost over 40lbs doing this, not as extreme.

As everyone else reports, I felt more energy and focus, massive rapid weight loss.

Fasting is a miracle cure, I tried nearly everything else. More people need to know about how effective it is.

</comment><comment><USER20> So, at the end they found out it's bad?</comment>


U.S. Press Freedom Tracker - <AUTHOR> https://pressfreedomtracker.us/ <comment><USER2> I think people should have protests targeted toward (lack of) freedom of press _itself_. I mean freedom of press is the big story here.

Because bad things unreported are even worse than bad things reported. Its all about building trust for society. What do you think?

</comment><comment><USER3> This site appears extremely more credible, due to more reliable sources, than the one with a 1000 upvotes here yesterday. Looking at this site's about page they appear to source their information from industry related organizations where the one from yesterday sourced its data from one person aggregating data off Twitter.

The numbers are dramatically different though.

<comment><USER4> Are the numbers really that different? This site only shows incidents up through Saturday. The more recent coverage in the github thing yesterday just isn't there yet. But I'm happy you think this one is trustworthy and hope you stick around to watch them add incidents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/fox-news- crew-c...](https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/fox-news-crew-chased- park-while-documenting-dc-protests/)

Wow, this is scary to think about. I'm glad the reporters didn't die.

<comment><USER6> Wow, I wonder where people got the idea to target the media from!

<comment><USER7> [https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/06/well-try-to-help-you- follo...](https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/06/well-try-to-help-you-follow-the- police-attacks-on-journalists-across-the-country/)

The police?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The second item under "journalists attacked" is a cameraman who said he was attacked (and then rescued) by protesters. Is the goal here to count _both_ attacks by authorities and civilians?

<comment><USER3> Why is that distinction significant?

<comment><USER9> Also not OP, but in that one article the violence was indiscriminate, not targeting journalists.

James Taranto in his Best of the Web column had a running gag poking fun at articles where lots of people were affected by a problem, but the author dwells on one particular group, under a heading of "World Ends, X hardest hit." Yes, journalists are being affected by recent violence, but so are a lot of other people.

<comment><USER3> I just think it would be productive to focus on reducing any violence. I suspect focus on particular groups exists to qualify some artificial _us versus them_ dichotomy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


SolveSpace – Parametric 2d/3d CAD - <AUTHOR> http://solvespace.com/index.pl <comment><USER2> just FYI, 2.0 is pretty outdated. most active development happens in a fork [1] with regular dev builds.

[1] [https://github.com/whitequark/solvespace](https://github.com/whitequark/solvespace)

</comment><comment><USER3> I really wish someone would come up with a really nice web-based parametric modeler, that has javascript as its primary language.

Imagine being able to use npm to share and install parametric parts as easy as:

var Bracket = require('some-bracket');

var L = new Bracket({ ... });

<comment><USER4> I've been using OpenJSCAD (demo at [http://openjscad.org/](http://openjscad.org/)) for small parts and really like it. With some work it could probably do what you describe but as far as I can tell no one is using it that way.

It would be cool if there was an ecosystem of OpenJSCAD parts that you could import as javascript modules.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, one should be able to import a part through a URL, and parametrize it ones own system.

<comment><USER6> I built the URL part out into a little side project. It uses OpenJSCAD but only the OpenSCAD interpreter so it can render the STL for you on the server.

[https://hipcad.com](https://hipcad.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How does this compare to OpenSCAD?

<comment><USER8> If you are referring to SolveSpace, OpenSCAD is text-based, and you build your geometry programmatically.

SolveSpace has a CAD viewer interface, and you draw and constrain your geometry. I use FreeCAD as an alternative to AutoCAD (Inventor, Fusion360), but I have used SolveSpace for a small project where I wanted to animate the linkage for a client. The same could have been done in Fusion360 too. It was for fun.

The latest FreeCAD has greatly improved animation capabilities for renderings.

You can use SolveSpace's constraint solver in your own project, since I believe, it is separate from the viewer code. It is a very nice piece of work by one individual. I follow it once or twice a year to see if people are going to add much more to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How does it compare to FreeCAD?</comment>