Choosing Between Rust or Go? - <AUTHOR> https://dmv.myhatchpad.com/insight/choosing-between-rust-or-go/ <comment><USER3> This whole site reads like blogspam. The copy has that uncanny "SEO-optimized" _je ne sas quoi_ to it, with a writing style halfway between "high-school newspaper" and "coding interview cheat-sheet written by an Indian ex-pat", using parts of the English language without understanding the underlying meaning or where they fit in - like a script kiddie, but with natural language. Does anyone else get the heebie-jeebies when they read "uncanny" text like this?

<comment><USER4> I just experienced this googling when particular 2021 car models come out, hoping to find out what upgrades might be coming. There's a website for each car with near-gibberish write-ups full of keywords that tell you absolutely nothing.

And they're on the first page of google!

[https://www.2020lexus.com/car- reviews-2019-2020/](https://www.2020lexus.com/car-reviews-2019-2020/)

First paragraph:

"Honda Civic is actually 1 of the most recent car that are designed by Honda. This car is a sedan car hybrid of which are developed to be used for metropolis car used."

<comment><USER5> Who needs actually translators when Google works enough well general used?

<comment><USER6> Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So when I wrote my piece complaining about how people should not try to compare Go and Rust as they were created for very different purposes, people kept commenting that I was attacking a problem that I had came up with myself, and yet here's one more comparison of that kind reaching the front page of hn.

To me the question in the title is as ill posed as would be "Choosing Between C or JavaScript?".

<comment><USER8> Your problem is that you're not a Thought Leader whose Insights are being brokered by a Community Engagement Specialist.

And let me explain. This guy has been "at a startup" and "at a Golang Meetup." If that isn't thought leadership, I don't know what is.

<comment><USER9> _Your problem is that you 're not a Thought Leader whose Insights are being brokered by a Community Engagement Specialist._

Good point.

It's a very light article, written for people who listen to Thot Leaders. It misses most of the important points.

Go is designed for web back ends. It has all the stuff you need for that, and the libraries have been thoroughly pounded on and debugged, because Google uses them internally. The language is stable and doesn't change much. It's a good fit to that job.

For other applications, Go may or may not be a good fit. Desktop apps? Probably not. Games? Probably not. Real-time control? No.

Rust now seems to be trying to use every cool idea around, all at once. The borrow checker was brilliant. The added cruft, not so much. We have generics! We have type theory! We have lambdas! We have functional programming! We have threads! We have futures! We have async! We have a whole bunch of different HTTP libraries! We've changed the error handling system how many times now? It's all very cleverly done. But it's overdone. I'm out of that world, and not clear on whether there are signs of it settling down yet.

<comment><USER10> The issue with Rust is that people actually like using it. So there's a bunch of development happening purely for enjoyment: why is that an issue? Nobody's forcing you to keep up with the trends - just stick to the older versions of the libraries and it'll simply work.

<comment><USER9> Is there a winner in the HTTP Rust library wars yet? The last time I used Rust, Hyper was on top, but I hear it's no longer cool. "reqwest" is being talked up. You can also get several versions of the same library in the same program through dependency problems.[1]

This is a process problem. The development process for Rust does not seem to force convergence.

[1] [https://hackernoon.com/programming-in-rust-the-good-the- bad-...](https://hackernoon.com/programming-in-rust-the-good-the-bad-the- ugly-d06f8d8b7738)

<comment><USER11> It's... been hyper for years and is still hyper. Reqwest is an ergonomic wrapper on top of hyper if you want a higher-level API with less control.

Among the Rust ecosystem things to gripe about, this is a odd one.

async_std vs. tokio is the real split-investment battleground these days, effectively undermining the async/await momentum right as it gets out of the gate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Note that the section "Fuschia: Google's Successor to Android" is incorrect. The [Fuchsia Programming Language Policy]([https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/refs/heads/master...](https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/refs/heads/master/docs/project/policy/programming_languages.md)) states neither Rust nor Go is not supported for end-developers.

<comment><USER13> > states neither Rust nor Go is not supported for end-developers

Just for clarification, neither are supported according to the linked document. (the double negative was confusing for me)

<comment><USER12> Oops you're right - too late to edit it. It should say "neither Rust nor Go are supported for end-developers"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Initially my take was Javascript is for quick-and-dirty code, Rust is for beautiful thought-out architectures, and Go is somewhere in the middle. Nowadays I tend to do even quick hacks in Rust.

<comment><USER15> I've written well engineered code in JS, I think it just requires a lot of discipline because the runtime doesn't help you.

<comment><USER16> It's not that it's impossible, it's just that expectations are generally low when it comes to JS code quality.

<comment><USER15> Who sets their expectations low? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My general file card on Rust's appropriateness:

It's for anywhere you want an iron grip on memory and correctness and the cost of screwing up is very large and don't need a quick minimum viable product. You'd expect to be writing a database or a high availability proxying server or any kind of driver or a game engine

</comment><comment><USER18> Go is more like a faster python or lighter java, rust is more like C/C++, they aren't comparable

<comment><USER19> > Go aims to combine the safety and performance of a statically typed compiled > language with the expressiveness and convenience of a dynamically typed > interpreted language. It also aims to be suitable for modern systems > programming.

\- Rob Pike

[https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/100428-pike-s...](https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/100428-pike- stanford.pdf)

edit: To provide greater context from the slides I linked. Go was designed to replace C++ and Java in Google.

<comment><USER20> > To provide greater context from the slides I linked. Go was designed to > replace C++ and Java in Google.

Was it successful in this task?

<comment><USER21> Far from it in fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I like both, why not both? They are created for different purposes.

</comment><comment><USER21> > Go probably is a better successor to Java since it's useful for building > distributed systems.

Far from it. golang, both the language and the ecosystem offer nothing close to what Java (and the JVM) offer in terms of building reliable systems, monitoring, profiling, performance, etc. Sorry to say, the fact that this comparison was made in the first place shows lack of experience.

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't know Rust but Go:

* Go is an extremely productive language * It doesn't have all the fancy cool features other languages have * The community is huge and it is easy to find libraries * It has gained popularity faster than any other language I can think of. They must have done something right.

<comment><USER20> I would agree for all of them. But, from personal experience - <USER2> dives down really badly the moment code base have grown in size considerably. Adding more people makes it even worse, since most of these people start to come in with a very fresh language knowledge ("oh, Go is simple, you can pick it up in no time --management"), and you have to babysit each merge request carefully. Which makes your productivity worse, mgmt adds more people, you miss things here and there, and code quality goes down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> My only complaint about go is the lack of a Go supported IDE. There are lots of paid ones out there, but I've spent the morning looking for a good one that runs in a web browser that are easy to install.

<comment><USER25> > _My only complaint about go is the lack of a Go supported IDE. There are > lots of paid ones out there, but I 've spent the morning looking for a good > one that runs in a web browser that are easy to install._

I am not sure why would you want to run your IDE in a web browser, but Visual Studio Code [1] is regarded by the Go community as one of the best code editors (with plugins) [2] to develop Go projects, and in case you do not know already, Visual Studio Code is technically a web browser [3]. That being said, Goland [4] is probably one of the best integrated development environments for Go programming out there.

[1] [https://code.visualstudio.com/](https://code.visualstudio.com/)

[2] [https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/go](https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/go)

[3] [https://github.com/microsoft/vscode](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode)

[4] [https://www.jetbrains.com/go/](https://www.jetbrains.com/go/)

<comment><USER26> Plus if you want VS Code in the browser there's Coder.com (both hosted and open source varieties)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> tl;dr Go, of course. rust it just too fugly and has no worthy support on windows and in IDEs. sure, you may love it but if you check out jobs, it's like 100:1 for Go. rust is and will be an exotic language for very niche use cases.

let the downvotes begin :)

<comment><USER28> What kind of problems with IDEs are you running into with Rust? I've used Intellij and Clion with the Rust plugin and they seem to have all the standard IDE bells and whistles - inferred type annotations, autocomplete, autoimport, interactive debugging, refactoring, etc. I haven't tried VSCode but from what I understand that's even more popular than the Jetbrains tools so I would guess that it works pretty well too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've abandoned Go in the middle of The Go Programming Language. There is really no reason to use it - there are much better languages for systems (both - as in services as well as in low-level systems) development. Desktop development experience is quite a mess as well.

<comment><USER4> I've been starting up using Go as "fast Python" for web services / REST APIs. The patterns encouraged by Go development are actually how I preferred to write Python in the first place, which is to say

1\. largely avoiding huge tightly-coupled frameworks like Django

2\. writing a little more boilerplate with the payoff of making code a lot clearer to reason about without having to step through tons of layers of overly-dynamic libraries

I think Go will really start to eat up the backend web services space in the coming years.

<comment><USER30> In this vein, I've been focused on finding/creating tooling at the same level of abstraction as Go (net/http, database/sql + sqlx, etc) but in Haskell. So it ends up being a bit more ergonomic for a variety of reasons.

scotty (-> net/http), aeson (-> encoding/json), and postgresql-simple (-> database/sql) are pretty close, although aeson & postgresql-simple need some tooling on top to get them on par w/Go struct tag reflection imo.

I still love to use more advanced Haskell libraries, but there's something to be said for stitching together functions in IO with simple types.

<comment><USER31> I think you're right that the level of abstraction is the same but the language ergonomics are drastically different. Go was designed so that anyone coming out of school could read/understand/write it very quickly. I'm not a Go expert and I can reason about code pretty well and even write some stuff.

That's absolutely NOT true of Haskell. It's a much more nuanced language and while I'm sure it's great once you learn it, the learning curve is steep. Because of that I think it's much easier to hire Go developers than Haskell developers too

<comment><USER30> Optimizing for the beginner isn't necessarily a good thing though. While that is true of Go, the trade-off is for even somewhat complex systems, Go starts to falter compared to Haskell. Local reasoning of Haskell scales nicely with complexity, at the cost of learning it.

There are economics at play here too. If your turnover rate is high (1-2 years even), the company can get the short end of the stick, while the employees get to pay the fixed cost of learning Haskell on company time.

My experience though is FP novices can get to doing new-hire-level tasks in Haskell within a couple weeks of mentorship. I've seen 0-FP-experience interns dive into applicative functor code in _Scala_ and have no trouble so long as we sat down and explained things from first principles (and motivated the value of the abstractions we use.)

I have actually found the opposite to be true for hiring. Every place I've worked has had more Haskell applicants than they knew what to do with. Largely because Haskell can make your company uniquely desirable in a sea of options.

The only time a Haskell company I worked at "had trouble hiring" was when we turned away countless Haskell-experienced developers due to the sole veto of a VPE over and over again. After months of observation, it was clear that he was actually starving the team of Haskell resources so he could build momentum to move away from it (despite the team being fine with the language)

<comment><USER21> > Go starts to falter compared to Haskell.

Not just Haskell, but any mature OO language/runtime as well (JVM, .NET). The fact remains that golang is popular because of Google's name behind it. While its concurrency model is somewhat decent, its warts get in the way very quickly for any non-trivial project.

<comment><USER32> what do you define as non-trivial? I'm aware of a number of companies and projects that are definitely more than non-trivial.

I think Java/C# are verbose and ineffectual languages and people are seeking alternatives that make a lot more sense and deliver more power and speed.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask: How do you apply "programmer's" efficiency in everyday life things? - <AUTHOR> I notice myself towards fellow human beings that I try to optimize simple everyday tasks. "They" mainly try to optimize certain events, by using Google Maps for the shortest route.
But I try to do this with numerous things, from filling up the dishwasher, to taking out the thrash, to (quite often to irritation to my SO), postponing things: to add things up and then to everything in one-efficient go.
Some of these moundaine tasks are "repeated" items with a reminder of a todo-app. Or by paying all bills every 2 weeks, instead of when they come in.
My wife (2 kids) cleans the house basically constantly. While when I'm alone, I just do it at the end of the day, cause it doesn't matter to clean up multiple times the toys.
I buy things that don't expire (like toothpaste) in bulk. While she buys them by one.
Do you guys/girls have similar instincts and events happening? It's really not about non-chalance, but rather the strive to do things as efficiently as possible with as little effort as possible, while having the same good outcome. <comment><USER2> I store physical items in my home in an LRU cache. Items I use all the the time are close to the places where I use them. Less frequently used items are stored further from the place they are used, for example in a closet or the garage.

This clashes badly with my roommate, also a programmer, who strongly prefers to store items by category. He will put all the kitchen gadgets on a shelf by the kitchen even if those gadgets go months without being used.

The advantage of his method is that you always know where something is, because it's in the right place. The advantage of my method is that most of the time I get things done faster, though sometimes I end up spending some time looking for a thing I use only infrequently.

It turns out he also has much more stuff than I do. Since caches are more efficient with a smaller working set, it makes sense that we would each prefer our own strategy. Who knows which direction the causation goes.

<comment><USER3> This reminds me a lot of Marie Kondo's book, _The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up_ , which had a huge impact on how I organize things.

<comment><USER4> Also reminds me of Sandra Felton's book _The Messies Manual: The Procrastinator 's Guide to Good Housekeeping_ which had a huge impact on my approach to most things in life requiring organization. I'll one-up the idea of an LRU cache: you can own several pairs of scissors. And the right place for them can be the workshop, the sewing room, the art studio room, the kitchen, and your home office. That one tip has saved me loads of time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You are task oriented, while your wife is goal oriented. If there are twenty dishes to wash and you only have time to wash seven, the goal oriented person washes the seven. Goal oriented people actually tend to be better organized and get more things done. All of the time you spend planning doesn't add up to enough savings for it to pay off. Try timing a few things and see for yourself. Loading the dishwasher in a different way might save you one or two seconds total. But you spent more time thinking about it. Just get things done. You'll find you are faster, and you spend less time thinking. Thinking requires effort and energy. Save that for the stuff that really matters.

<comment><USER5> Such claims are very major and significant, but rarely have strong evidence behind them, and as such I would recommend that they are not made, and that the OP continues to do whatever it is that they find efficient.

<comment><USER6> Opinion does not require evidence. He was commenting based on experience.

<comment><USER7> GP wasn't asserting that the original comment wasn't an opinion, GP was asserting that the lack of evidence makes the opinion unnecessary (the question was not "Why ..." it was "How ..." and the question did not ask for any tips).

To better demonstrate why this opinion isn't worth a lot without strong evidence, one can imagine almost the same words, but arguing for the exact opposite side and notice how neither argument is more helpful than the other. For example, consider if the original comment read:

Task oriented people actually tend to be better organized and get more things done. The tunnel vision that goal oriented people have prevents them from performing efficiently enough to meet their goals. Try timing a few things and see for yourself. Not thinking about things might save you one or two seconds total. But you spent more time proceeding with an inefficient plan. Just think a little more. You'll find you are faster, and you spend less time repeating the same motions. Actions require effort and energy. Save that for the stuff that really matters.

<comment><USER8> > The tunnel vision that goal oriented people have prevents them from > performing efficiently enough to meet their goals.

Interesting. You basically just described various situations in which I was flabbergasted because some colleagues of mine regularly try to slog manually through very boring, repetitive tasks (with much sighing and moaning, of course). I find it rather strange to have to point out possible automation (even for one-off tasks) in an IT firm.

That said, being the procrastinating type, some tasks just have to get done. The dishes don't do themselves, no matter how much you organize them :-)

<comment><USER4> I'm glad you mentioned procrastination. That's a key characteristic of task oriented people. The biggest benefit I got from observing goal oriented vs. task oriented people was to stop procrastinating (in the name of efficiency) and to just get things done. Things like the dishes. And once I understood there's not going to be a breakthrough in efficiency in picking up socks around the house, I also started moving faster at those things so I could get back to the fun stuff like thinking about how to make stuff efficient. Stuff that really can be made more efficient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've gone down the path of minimising my choices to a small good set for a lot of things. I do this for everything from clothes and shoes to managing my money.

Clothes are simple. 10 shirts that are either black or grey. Three shirts that are work branded. close to ten pairs of chinos and jeans (all work appropriate, some kevlar lined for motorbikes) Bulk undies and socks, all patterned so they are easy to pair up. Two pairs of shorts for summer and a pair of sports shorts for sport and the beach. A couple of suits for the odd time I need them (weddings and interviews)

For getting stuff done like cooking or making stuff, I operate with the minimum number of "tools". For actual tools, this means a cordless drill and screwdriver, couple of power tools, a good screwdriver set, a spanner set and a socket set. For the kitchen it means three good knives, the minimum set of kitchen utensils I need to make everything I make regularly, one good pan and two good big tiered pots that I can steam stuff in.

Financially I assign resources as they come in. I split my paycheck into fun money (pub and lunches/dinners out), food money (going to the shops and making stuff myself), savings and bills. All my bills are direct debited and the amount I put in to paying bills is higher than I worked out it would cost me over the course of the year. This means i only ever have to think about how much of the fun money and food money I have when making decisions.

By minimising my options when it comes to making decisions, I minimise my time working through all the options to make them.

<comment><USER2> What you are describing has been touched on by a few other commenters here, and it really works for me too. Psychology even has fancy terms for why this works: devision fatigue and the paradox of choice.

<comment><USER9> I've taking minimizing my decisions to an extreme in some areas. My meals normally consist of food from a small group and when I'm travelling, the local food I go out to try or when I'm meeting people is normally burgers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A literal one that I probably picked up from another comment section here:

Treat your closet as an LRU cache—always put clothes away on one side, and start looking for items from the same side. As an added benefit when you run out of capacity, anything that has ended up on the far side is a likely candidate to be evicted to a higher latency storage layer (bins in the attic), or simply deleted and recomputed if ever needed again (just drop it off at Goodwill, you can always buy another).

<comment><USER11> You also have to add a recompute expense to that calculation. The $500 3-piece suit that you only wear to special work events, weddings, etc. shouldn't get deleted just because you haven't used it in a year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Don't have much to say about how to do things, but I'd say try to _reduce_ the number of things to do, so the little you still have to do won't be a big deal.

For example, I only communicate with companies/suppliers via email/phone (and change suppliers if they can't accommodate that). This means any physical mail that arrives must be spam, and goes in the trash without even being opened - anything I care about would instead come through phone or email. This means I haven't needed to fiddle with papers for ages, while my flatmate still wastes a good 10 minutes almost every day reading incoming mail (and then putting it into a huge pile she'll eventually have to sort out - akin to technical debt).

Bills are paid out automatically (via "Direct Debit") so I don't have to worry about that either.

Shopping is taken care by Amazon subscriptions, which means new stuff arrives soon before the old boxes run out. Haven't been grocery shopping in ages.

Food is handled by Deliveroo/Uber Eats, so no cooking necessary. I use throwaway forks & plates so no dish washing necessary either.

Cleaning/housekeeping is handled by a company that does it every week in the flat while I'm away, so no worries about that either.

Not all of this is possible for everyone (things might be different depending on your location, whether you have a family, your financial situation) but personally it works great for now and I have plenty of time when I get home. Basically for anything that you're doing, try to see if there's a way to _not_ do it at all or to outsource it to someone else (who might be an expert at it and thus do it more efficiently than you can).

<comment><USER13> Disposable forks and plates seems wasteful

<comment><USER12> Plates are paper so the environmental impact should be relatively low. I agree that the plastic forks are still a problem but haven't really found a solution. I do wonder though, would never having to wash dishes offset the impact of disposable cutlery?

Edit: never mind, see below. Apparently paper still has a ton of impact as far as manufacturing it goes (it's not just renewable trees, there are chemicals involved).

<comment><USER14> The creation of paper is chemically intensive, from processing to dyes to color it. It is not environmentally friendly.

<comment><USER15> So, no toilet paper and paper towels then?

Just a washcloth and bidet?

<comment><USER14> Certainly more environmentally friendly, although transitioning to those for public settings requires more maintenance and procedure than simply having a waste basket in the bathroom.

My girlfriend did exchange in Brazil and fell in love with bidets there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I dont. If I applied what I did at work all day to what I do at home, both would become very monotonous. Sometimes I like to do things slowly just to take enjoyment in the act of doing, or I like to keep a routine so I can do chores on autopilot and not have to really think about it

</comment><comment><USER17> I have a hybrid system with my closet and Evernote:

The closet was something of a mess—assorted things used with varying frequency. After purging what obviously could go, I bought identical boxes that would fit in the shelves of the closets and labelled them with letters.

I then created an index. Each box got a new note in a dedicated Evernote notebook named according to its label, and in the body of the note I listed its contents.

My closet now had full text search. This made it ridiculously easy to find any random item I might need. I just had to type the name of the thing, and the matching note's name would tell me what box to look in.

Also, when I needed to find something, I always added an "x" on a newline under the thing when I retrieved it. This updated the last modified time of the note. After awhile, the boxes with the oldest last modified times became prime targets for future purging. It also made it very obvious when frequently used items should get dedicated space with quick access.

</comment><comment><USER18> I use the "sort first" optimization more than non-programmers in my household.

For example, my technique for putting away groceries is to take the contents out and set them next to the grocery bags, then sort them by where they're going (kitchen fridge, pantry closet, etc.). This is faster than repeatedly taking one or two items out of a bag and bringing them where they go.

<comment><USER19> Amusingly, my family has an additional habit: Our shopping list is organized according to the aisles of our preferred supermarket. It really speeds up shopping.

<comment><USER18> Is it a paper or electronic shopping list? I've thought about that, but we're still using a pad of paper stuck to the fridge with a magnet, so it seems hard to implement. I generally do the shopping, and as I move to a new section of the store I run through the list placing dots left of items in that section. Then when I get each item I draw a vertical line through it. I find it easier to spot breaks in a vertical line than to spot missing check marks.

<comment><USER19> Paper. We print it out and cross off the stuff we don't need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Also see the book _Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions_ :

[https://smile.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-Science- De...](https://smile.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-Science-Decisions- ebook/dp/B015CKNWJI)

</comment><comment><USER21> I have very similar instincts, and it weirds me out sometimes. I have an in- depth understanding of the efficiency difference of the direction I mow my lawn (NW/SE is the best for the shape of the yard, but you can't do that every time. N/S is second most efficient. E/W is third and I can't stand it), and am constantly wondering if there is a better way to snowblow my driveway.

Past that, I feel myself optimizing paths through the office and hand movements for juggling things and the door, stuff like that. And then when I see people use less than optimal routes and techniques I wonder why that's the case.

<comment><USER22> Just be mindful of what you're optimizing for. Like, minimum energy exerted or minimum distance traveled might not be the best choice for a sedentary office worker.

I, too, spend an unreasonable amount of thought on mowing optimization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Classifying tasks into priorities. 1.Urgent and required. Sorted by urgency. 2.Required. Waits until all #1 completes. 3.Optional. Waits until all #2 completes. 4.Leisure/Misc. Waits until all #3 completes.

Reducing wasted space by putting items with lower usage into storage space category that is in proportion to usage: 0.Items with daily use priority 0. 1.Items which aren't used daily get priority -1. 2.Items which aren't used weekly get priority -2. 3.Items which aren't used monthly get priority -3. etc, the less used items occupy their own category(e.g. yearly use "yearly storage space") .

Reducing decision space iteratively: 1.Enumerating all possible choices/options. 2.Discarding all low-quality choices. 3.Discarding all mediocre choices. 4.Selecting a set of top choices. 5.Writing down a comparison table for #4. 6.Filling the table in #5 7.Eliminating choices that sound worse than average. 8.Repeat #7 until you're left with one choice.

Solving complex problems by breaking them into sub-problems. 1.Formulating on paper the scope of the problem as separate sub-problems. 2.Sorting the sub- problems in order of difficulty. 3.Connecting the sub-problems to their potential solutions. Like a graph from sub-problems -> solutions 4.Selecting the most connected solution. 5.Improving the solution to include more connections(so a single solution solves all or most sub-problems in #2) 6.If a solution can't be improved, try next most connected solution. Focus on the solutions that can be improved. 7.The best-performing solution is implemented. 8.Repeat with next best solution.

</comment><comment><USER24> Whenever I'm trying to look for something in a (mostly) sorted list, I always do a binary search. I can't recall the exact circumstances this has come up in real life but it has.

<comment><USER25> Dictionaries and other sorted books is what comes to mind for me. Always open from the middle and pick the next stack of paper to split from either the left hand or right hand until we get to the page we want.

In school, we'd need to open a specific chapter of our textbooks, and I'd search by the same method.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I try to parallelize as many tasks as possible. My SO absolutely hates this a lot of times because it means you have to work for longer period of times instead of breaking up tasks. But stuff does get done in less absolute time.

Example: We're baking something. Say cornbread. My usual thing is to immediately wash the dishes after putting the stuff into the oven. This means two things happen at once: dishes and cooking. Then when while we're eating, the dishes are drying. So then someone can put away the dishes and then the other can start putting any other dishes we used into the sink.

Basically, I just try to parallelize tasks as much as possible. Grouping them is good too but sometimes mentally it's too much to wait for the grouping to occur. I do cost benefit analysis on things like multiple trips vs one heavy and awkward trip. Sometimes multiple trips is faster and less stressful. Try to factor things in like: well if I have less stuff in my arms I can /run/. I can't do that when I have a bunch of stuff in my hands.

Other things I do are like: try to step up 2 steps at a time at the pace of doing 1 at a time. Basically 2x up stair climbing performance. Run/jog to various parts of the home or between the car and getting inside. Just trying things to speed things up and get little bits of exercise in.

Unfortunately, I live in very small spaces so I frequently optimize for time over space (cost of being a newer resident in the Bay area). Very small cache here so no option to buy in bulk. :)

Oh and other unusual things: try to do stuff with your non dominate hand. I only brush my teeth with my non dominant hand. Incredibly difficult at first with a manual brush (small circles are hard!). But after 10+ years, much better. I try this with various tasks just to try to up my dexterity and keep life interesting.

</comment><comment> bad-joke I tend to "think" in Logo. Often this comes down to shouting "forward" at slow pedestrians but thankfully my family has learned to keep me away from the reptile exhibit at the local zoo (I have been ejected several times).

It's really quite stunning how many people have difficulty thinking of things in terms of birds and turtles.

</comment><comment><USER27> Loving the LRU cache IRL posts :)

I'm constantly tweaking my laundry sort algorithms to try and find the fastest. My latest is to have bins for the two youngest, two oldest and myself and my wife. I grab and chuck dry clothes into each. Then I take those to the appropriate place in the house and sort.

I also have toy cleanup bins stashed in each room so I can pile stuff away quickly for easier tidying.

And I have a dustpan just for toy tidying, scooping things off the floor.

And I try to keep the vacuum in the centre of the house where it has the least distance to travel to any room.

And I try to quietly take the messiest toys (small parts) out of circulation.

And all our devices use the same charging cable, and there are charge points with those cables in the most strategic places in the house.

And I try to tidy as a background "garbage collection" task, never leaving a room without removing something that's not supposed to be there

</comment><comment><USER28> Hard to measure but I believe I think more about how things might fail than other family members.

<comment><USER29> I've seen similar - Them: "You're too pessimistic" vs. Me: "You haven't thought this all the way through".

There's a balance to be struck though, because often worrying too much about things that don't happen or saying "I told you so" when they do only really serves to annoy people.

<comment><USER25> There is indeed a balance, because opportunities tend to have time limits. Thinking things through for too long to arrive at a sure and optimal way of doing something might mean failing to take the opportunity you had to do it at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> When someone's walking towards me head-on, I don't do an awkward side-step in sync with them. That usually ensures a collision. I stop still, and close my eyes. They then avoid me.

Taking a bus in a foreign country (e.g. China) without reading the timetable is challenging. So I would get on the first bus going the right direction, and stay on until it deviated from my desired path. Then I'd get off, walk to the next stop, and repeat.

</comment><comment><USER31> I plot my routes in the car based on the total score of a route composed of points for left turn, right turns, lights, etc. Avoiding left turns at a light is a big goal. I know others do this too (notably UPS's supposed optimization of only making right turns).

</comment><comment><USER32> Moving is pretty easy. Everything is staged in a priority queue, all boxes are "databased" by room -> type. Also since I'm lazy, it's pretty good easy to classify things that are wasting time, though a good distraction is definitely sometimes worth it.

</comment><comment><USER33> Perhaps you should be optimizing for overall happiness of your household rather than your own. Perhaps you should try communicating in a collaborative manner with your family.

</comment><comment><USER34> I have a glass walled shower, and I experimented with different patterns of squeeging it until I got one that looked like the best. I would have solved it analytically if my math was better.

</comment><comment><USER35> i'm meticulous about checklists, mostly due to programming.

I have extensive records, self-kept for a few hours a week, regarding any and all finances, home maintenance, car maintenance, etc.

It mostly serves as a form of self-flagellation in the form of financial guilt associated with over-spending, but it's a useful trait to have once-in-a- while.

I was a prodigious note-taker in school, too. I think that may be related.

<comment><USER36> I was hoping someone else would mention checklists. It's the closest I've come to "automating" a lot of chores. These are kept in org-mode with habits associated with them, so they're both reoccurring and have a nice chart to show how frequently they're being done.

As an example, "kitchen - daily". My partner and I have determined that I'm totally blind to things, so I have a checklist that looks like:

\- clean dishes from dishwasher to cupboard

\- inspect counters, clockwise starting at dishwasher

\- dirty dishes from sink to dishwasher

\- if dirty, wash and oil cast iron pans

There's a bunch of these, one for each living area, and a daily/weekly one for each. They pop up in my schedule with the rest of my consulting tasks, and since I work from home I can just grab one from the day's master todo list when I need a break.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I structure things , whenever possible, around a simple rule: Faster, better, more efficient .

</comment><comment><USER38> I can't help trying to ruthlessly optimize repetitive tasks. It's sort of like the rule of three in real life. Quick example:

Yesterday, I was building a set of shelves in my garage. These are pretty beefy to hold hardware and tools and stuff, so I was building them with a 2x4 frame and plywood on top. Three levels, and I wanted them to be 10 feet by 2 feet, so I had ten foot front and back rails, with shorter stringers every two feet. So I had six rails, and six stringers per level, total of 18.

For the rails, I measured one, marking center lines for each stringer. Then I lined up all six, and drew the lines across all of them with my square. Probably saved fifteen minutes compared to marking and measuring each one individually.

For the stringers, each one needed to be 21 inches, and you really want them to all be as close to exactly the same as you can get, or else your the frame gets all out of true. If you try to measure each one and cut them one at a time, you never get them just right, and it takes forever. So I figured the first one, and screwed down a stop block to my miter saw bench, to make a jig. Now I don't have to measure, I just slide the 2x4 down to the stop, hold it against the fence, and zip zip zip, I cut the whole batch in a couple minutes, all just the same length.

Going onto the assembly, I've got my rails all marked out, and my stringers all cut, so I can start screwing things together. The hard part is lining things up, holding it all together, and trying to get the screws started and driven without anything shifting. So I went down my rails and started all 24 screws on each rail where I had the center lines started. Works best if you drive them just through, so there's like a sixteenth of the point sticking out. Now I've just got to line up the stringer square and hit the already started screw with my driver. It also helps keep everything square and reduce walking around if you do them in a snake pattern, so start on one end, screw to one rail, go to the other rail and screw the other end, stay on that rail and start the next stringer, then go to the other side.

Last, getting to the installation, the really fiddly part is trying to get everything lined up and level, while you're trying to hold the assembled shelf up and then screw it all in. Real PITA if you're working alone. I was screwing them into the wall studs against the back wall of the garage, with a few posts on the unsupported front. So I cut some cheater blocks out of scrap 2x4, that would span two studs, and that the shelf could sit on as I'm installing it. Measure where the shelf should fall on one stud, and screw one side of the cheater there. Then take a small level to level it up before screwing the other side. Then use a four foot level to mark where the other cheater should go, and level that up. Even better, I was in a corner on one side, so I had another stud I put a third cheater on, leveled up kitty-corner with the others. Now when I pick up the whole heavy shelf, I just set it on my blocks, and I've only got to worry about supporting one corner as I'm getting it leveled and attached to my outside post. When that corner is level, everything else is level. Repeat three times for the three shelves.

I do this kind of decomposition and optimization in everything, and always have, way before I even saw a computer...</comment>


Does Amazon Web Services Pricing Follow Moore's Law? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.atomicinc.com/2015/03/03/does-amazon-web-services-pricing-follow-moores-law-2350/ <comment><USER2> It's difficult to top AWS just based on an apples-to-apples comparison of buying servers versus turning up EC2 instances. EC2 is pretty price aggressive if you know what your needs are, identify an instance type that fits well, and reserve it for 3 years. A lot of people don't actually achieve all three, but it's often possible.

Most comparisons overlook the crucial price differentiator between AWS and a datacenter build: bandwidth costs. AWS bills based on bytes transferred, every IP transit provider bills by 95th percentile or similar.

A 1 gig commit on a 10 gig circuit is $1-2/meg in a well served on-net building, so let's say $2000/mo. The switch is $5000 or so, something that can't do full table BGP but is layer 3 capable, and support is $1000/yr. The cross connect is $300/mo. Plus a little bit more for optics and fiber. Over three years the cost is $91,000 (plus power to run the switch), if you never go above the 1 gig commit. Seems like a lot of money right?

Compare this to transferring 500mbit/s constantly to the Internet over 3 years at AWS pricing. That amounts to 156 TB / month transferred. Per month that will cost $11,878.40. Over 3 years the cost is $427,622.40.

There are some other key differences between AWS and datacenters: \- it puts all of your spending into opex, eliminating capex (this matters for some businesses); \- it limits the ways you can solve problems, there's no VRRP support for example, which is very limiting for a lot of service types; \- there is no ability to peer or receive settlement free transit if you deploy in AWS

However, in terms of raw dollars, the method that AWS uses to bill bandwidth consumption is always the major cost differentiator.

<comment><USER3> The bandwidth between AWS regions and Cloudfront is free so you can save a lot here as well while improving performance for your end users. And on the Cloudfront side, you can negotiate pricing to further reduce the cost.

Edit with Source: Cloudfront pricing page: [http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/](http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/)

"If you are using an AWS origin, effective December 1, 2014, data transferred from origin to edge locations (Amazon CloudFront "origin fetches") will be free of charge."

<comment><USER2> Cloudfront is cheaper, that is true. The same 500mbit/s outbound via Cloudfront is $381,173 for 3 years at list prices. I think that this has given Cloudfront an enormous pricing advantage in the CDN market, considering that using any other CDN means paying EC2/S3-outbound plus the third-party CDN's prices.

If your content is highly cacheable, you can still use a third-party CDN and come out ahead. Since your EC2/S3 outbound will be 1/100th or 1/1000th of the total outbound, it starts to not really matter. For dynamic content, you're essentially being double billed, which is undesirable.

Either way, you're not going to get content out of AWS for an order of magnitude less money, which is what you can get in a conventional datacenter build. AWS is billing CDN-style: per byte transferred. When combined with the hit rate, this makes some amount of sense for a CDN service (like Cloudfront): every byte transferred has an impact on the edge caches.

I don't think that it makes much sense to bill EC2 bandwidth this way, but since people are obviously willing to pay it, Amazon has no real incentive to restructure their pricing.

This practice is probably the single largest source of lock-in for AWS, even above all of their hosted services like ELB and SQS. It's also why startups that run out of money sometimes can't let people take their data (photos or whatever): they simply can't afford the outbound bandwidth fees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't quite agree with all the calculations of AWS vs DIY.

m3.medium instance - 1 core, 3.75GB RAM, 4GB SSD

Typical server this days: 2*10 physical cores, 256GB RAM, 2 TB SSD For around ~$10k

So you can run AT LEAST 20 m3.medium instances on a physical box (without overbooking). If you use overbooking a single server can handle probably 40 m3.medium class machines. So instead of 100 servers, you need 30, or more probably 20.

Bottom line is: People locked in the cloud mindset do not understand how fast physical hardware is this days compared to "cloud" offerings.

<comment><USER5> People locked in the physical mindset do not understand how flexible cloud infrastructure is these days compared to "metal" offerings.

By the way, your rack is on fire.

<comment><USER6> [http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/01/09/fire-...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/01/09/fire- amazon-data-center-construction-site-ashburn-contained/)

<comment><USER7> The point of his comment was that if Amazon have a fire that they'll deal with the issue, you won't have to do anything.

<comment><USER6> if your instances go down you're going to have to deal with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, absolutely. Which means you need to architect and run expecting failure, which is so much different than traditional apps. (I am calling architectures 10 years old, "traditional"; that is funny.)

<comment><USER6> you're supposed to architect assuming failure no matter what. it's been like this for years. most engineers just choose to ignore best practices.

aws is just the first provider to explicitly tell their users "we don't care if your servers go down. tough cookies." which is what they all should have been doing in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't agree with the methodology for calculating AWS -vs- Moore's Law as mentioned in blog articles such as this one.[1]

A more accurate cost model would require _multiple components_ in addition to number of transistors that amazon buys.

For example, to fully build an AWS service:

++You need a plot of land for the data center. Do real estate prices follow Moore's Law?

++Concrete and steel to erect the data center building. Do raw building materials follow Moore's Law?

++Energy costs. Does the price of terawatts follow Moore's Law?

++Bandwidth costs. Does the price of network transfers from Tier 1 backbones follow Moore's Law?

++Staffing costs. Do the programmers, system admins, and other techies' salaries paid by amazon follow Moore's Law?

++etc, etc.

If transistor count was the _overwhelming_ cost item for supplying an "AWS" offering, we could then ignore all other component costs as an insignificant rounding error. Is this the case?

[1][https://gigaom.com/2014/04/19/moores-law-gives-way-to- bezoss...](https://gigaom.com/2014/04/19/moores-law-gives-way-to-bezoss-law/)

<comment><USER9> _" Do real estate prices follow Moore's Law?"_

It doesn't have to. If prices are constant and computers halve in size/power use every x months, real estate prices per bogomips halve every x months, too.

 _" Do the programmers, system admins, and other techies' salaries paid by amazon follow Moore's Law?"_

Again, they don't have to. It also is possible to make efficiency gains. Here, I would guess Amazon has outsprinted Moore's law.

Similarly, I would guess network costs and speed have gone down faster than Moore's law.

Of the things you mention, my _guess_ would be that only energy prices are a significant factor stopping AWS pricing from following Moore's law.

But yes, it is more complicated than "pricing should follow Moore's law"

<comment><USER10> >Of the things you mention, my _guess_ would be that only energy prices are a significant factor stopping AWS pricing from following Moore's law.

Ah, but this is subject to Moore's Law too: As transistor density increases, performance per watt goes up (well, this requires Dennard Scaling also). Hence, as Moore's Law advances, the power costs go down (at constant performance).

Your guess about network costs are correct, their prices have a half-life of 9 months: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Other_formulatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Other_formulations_and_similar_observations)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No, but Google Compute Engine does a bit. For instance, Azure is at least twice as expensive than Google for cloud compute. (In addition to having their weirdass PaaS design leaking into their IaaS. Nice service otherwise.)

I was super hesitant to use Google for anything (A: because I dislike them now, B: I couldn't be sure they'd be committed to it, C: I recall they screwed people on Google App Engine?). But their offering is so much more straightforward and much cheaper. No commits, just use VMs and get discounts.

GCE is also way faster to start up. And single-core performance blows away Azure.

Azure and AWS make a big deal about storage and transfer, while ignoring they're way overpricing the CPU.

Edit: Here's Google's pricing "philosophy": [https://cloud.google.com/pricing/philosophy/](https://cloud.google.com/pricing/philosophy/) where they explicitly say they're committed to Moore's Law and others aren't.

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice story, but the numbers don't add up at all. If you order managed colo at a provider like Rackspace (which is a much higher level of support and guarantees than AWS, basically 24x7 and 100% on network and cooling etc) and get dual or quad CPU machines (really standard, I think they don't even have single CPU as an option anymore) with 256 or 512 GB ram you can run 64 or even much more "AWS medium" nodes on 1 piece of hardware. Because the AWS "core" is based on a very old type of Xeon.

So in reality you could run this setup with fully managed network and a 100% SLA on 9 or 10 dedicated machines at Rackspace (or even a cheaper competitor of theirs). The price for that would be around 9x 800 and the cost of two dedicated firewalls for a redundant high performance setup. So I would guess 7 to 8k USD per month or 288.000 USD in three years. Which is over 60% cheaper than the proposed AWS setup.

So maybe if you buy way too much hardware and combine it with a lot of manual work that could be done cheaper by a good provider, then yes... AWS looks cheaper. But if you look at a realistic setup on that scale, hardware is much more cost effective.

The sweat spot for AWS is a small setup or very flexible load. If you're big with a steady load, a smart setup with a managed provider is much more effective.

(And as a last remark: both AWS and Google have huge discounts for long commitments, Google even does it without upfront commitment. So if you use those prices the two options end up much closer again)

</comment><comment><USER13> Quick comment on the comparison of AWS cost to DIY cost - for AWS costs you're using the on demand pricing for 3 years and comparing it to the cost of buying hardware over 3 years. If you're going to be running instances for 3 years you're probably going to be using reserved instances - in the case of m3.medium instances the rate drops from $0.070 / hour to $0.0261 / hour.

So, with the 3 year reserved pricing your total cost ends up being something like $411,544 - less than half the cost of the referenced $880,000 hardware purchase price.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are 100% correct. That is why the article explicitly listed it as an assumption, and that the advantage for public cloud over private hardware is even better once you account for that.

<comment><USER13> Whoops - totally missed that assumption!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Fascinating topic - yes AWS pricing falls slower than Moore's Law, this reflects the degree of market power shared by few large public cloud providers given the scale needed to compete at the top level. The profit maximizing strategy for each is enjoy rising margins while costs fall and reset prices to a lower level as a pack once costs have fallen so low that it is most profitable to lower the price to serve a larger market (google 'oligopoly' or 'kinked demand' for further clarity).

There was actually a slide addressing this very question used in a Urs Hölzle keynote at Google Cloud Live 3/25/14\. It was titled 'but prices are not falling fast enough' and showed 2006-2014 cloud prices falling 6-8% vs. 20-30% improvement in hardware pricing. I included a screenshot in my deep-ish dive I'm developing on the economics of cloud market pricing [http://www.stackalpha.com/blog/2015/2/25/cloud-price-wars- th...](http://www.stackalpha.com/blog/2015/2/25/cloud-price-wars-the-joke-is- on-us)

<comment><USER15> > It was titled 'but prices are not falling fast enough' and showed 2006-2014 > cloud prices falling 6-8% vs. 20-30% improvement in hardware pricing.

Did power, land, maintenance, staffing, R&D, etc. costs fall 20-30% during that time period too?

<comment><USER16> For Google's purposes, this is immaterial. They already have core competencies in power, land, maintenance, staffing, R&D, etc that are sunk costs. Their point is that Amazon is enjoying 80-90% profit margins, and so this is a lucrative business for them to enter. Moreover, they're pointing out that they can offer you large cost savings sustainably to entice you to switch.

For a small business's perspective, the cost of overhead is absolutely material - but then, most of them probably wouldn't switch to bare metal anyway, but rather Dockerize their app and shop it around to whoever the lowest-cost IaaS provider is.

<comment><USER15> > They already have core competencies in power, land, maintenance, staffing, > R&D, etc that are sunk costs.

Their cloud offerings expanding mean more power use, more land use, more maintenance, more staffing, more R&D. It's not all sunk cost.

<comment><USER16> But the point of the graph is that these together << the price they can charge for the service. That's what profit is.

<comment><USER15> Of course they're making money off it.

Claiming that a 20-30% reduction in raw hardware costs means you should see the entire service's cost go down 20-30% ignores those non-hardware costs, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Price drop speed has already been examined: [https://gigaom.com/2014/04/19/moores-law-gives-way-to- bezoss...](https://gigaom.com/2014/04/19/moores-law-gives-way-to-bezoss-law/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent. I like the numbers - it took a long time to hunt down numbers, the GigaOM article would have helped - but it is the underlying costs beyond the hardware that make it so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The increasing energy cost in computing these days should change our thinking on Moore's law. We shouldn't be worried as much about doubling the power of a cpu, especially in a cloud setting, because you can always do that by using 2 cpus. We should instead create an equation based on the computing power, energy consumption, and energy prices.

</comment><comment><USER19> remember, price != cost. pricing has many other influences.

Interesting conundrum however that the author discusses, that the gigaom link does not. At first glance this may appear that big consumers would be better off with their own hardware long term since they could theoretically follow the moore curve, but the missing piece is the cost of ownership AND cost of staying on the curve(since the curve keeps falling, you're continuously upgrading)

Next up is to build such that you can treat all cloud hosts as a commodity. Continuously monitoring pricing and loads and moving large amounts of instances from one provider to the next to optimize your costs.

</comment><comment><USER20> I hope to have time to build a google spreadsheet to compare your numbers more closely.

Mose people don't realize that an AWS "core" is a threaded core. So the example quoted below of 2 processors with 10 cores is not 20 equivalents to amazon cores, but 40 cores.

Additionally, you're not depreciating your costs over several years as near as I can tell.

Whatever these numbers come out to, it's clear that if you're small and need unpredictable agility, AWS is cheaper. If you're larger and have enough foresight into your usage pattern, AWS is never cheaper at the right economy of scale.

<comment><USER21> > Whatever these numbers come out to, it's clear that if you're small and need > unpredictable agility, AWS is cheaper. If you're larger and have enough > foresight into your usage pattern, AWS is never cheaper at the right economy > of scale.

Isn't that pretty much just a rule of the economy? Something like "It will always be cheaper to do it yourself, at a sufficient scale"?

<comment><USER20> Probably true. But, I think, and hope to prove, that that inflection point is much lower than represented in the OP's writings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm always amazed that anyone can accurately calculate any cost of a set of Amazon web service elements, must less do it sufficiently accurately to measure over time.

<comment><USER23> There's an old joke that AT&T was really a billing company that happened to offer phone service. You could say the same thing about AWS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Moore's Law refers only to the number of transistors in a component, and while transistors _generally_ translates to computing power, this is not a 1:1 thing.

Lately the shift has been from CPU power to GPU power, so while there's more compute capability than ever, you need a hybrid system to take full advantage of Moore's Law.

</comment><comment><USER25> The hp server prices had no discount. Made me think the guy was being dishonest or uninformed about the rest

</comment><comment><USER26> It probably doesn't if the article's headline has to phrase it as a question instead of just stating outright "Amazon Web Services Pricing Follows Moore's Law".

</comment><comment><USER27> GPU instances still seem overpriced. Reserved gets you $0.30 an hour, which would run you ~$8000 over 3 years. Hard to imagine the specs are much better than a $1500 computer.

<comment><USER2> The GPU instances use Nvidia GRID K2 cards, which cost $3000 in qty 1. AWS only runs two GPU instances per card, so they need to recoup the cost from fewer instances than typically share components. Nvidia's high end cards (GRID, Tesla) also have significantly disproportionate per-gflop costs.

The g2 instance costs have also come down a bit in the last 6 months, so they used to be even more overpriced.

For $8.4mm you can run 592 g2 instances reserved for 3 years and get 1,355,680 gflops. In a datacenter environment (including power, network equipment, installation, redundancy, etc.) you could achieve that level of performance for $3mm (not using GRID or Tesla cards). And then bandwidth prices really blow EC2 out of the water.</comment></comment>


Alterations in glutamate and the experience of ego dissolution with psilocybin - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-020-0718-8 <comment><USER2> I'm kind of hoping this puts the nail in the coffin with researchers trying to separate the psychedelic effects from the anti-depressant effects so that they can turn it into some kinda pill people have to take every day.

<comment><USER3> > they can turn it into some kinda pill people have to take every day.

I feel like this model is a perfect example of how the incentive structure of the pharmaceutical industry runs counter to pursuit of the best outcomes.

From what I understand anecdotally, psilocybin taken in moderate doses can have beneficial effects on depression and anxiety which last for weeks or months after the dose. This would be an amazing result by all accounts. A treatment which can be done every 6 weeks and still be effective would mitigate a lot of risks, like possible dependency and any toxicity which might be related to prolonged exposure. It seems to me that gets much closer to what we would refer to as a cure than a treatment.

But it seems like most of the clinical research is going into micro-dosing: i.e. how to make this something you would take every day to alleviate symptoms. I just don't understand the benefit of this approach other than the fact that it might be a better business model.

<comment><USER4> Moderate does trips aren't for everyone. The HN crew is full of novelty- seeking, curious, open-minded explorers, already drawn to this sort of experience. Your average, vanilla soccer mom who is largely okay with life but struggles with panic attacks because her brain isn't great at damping the amygdala-cortical loop, may not necessarily be ready/interested in a trip through psychedelic space.

<comment><USER5> I think the answer to that is to slowly increase the dose over a number of sessions. Starting out with microdosing to get used to the body feeling, then getting used to visual disturbances and the altered mental state, and then graduating to a level that can unlock new perspectives on self and the world. This absolutely has to be done by a trained professional with personal experience with the substance and who has assisted with other guided sessions. It's not going to be a prescription that a doctor can throw at the patient and then check up on in a few weeks time.

<comment><USER6> Ketamine is being used to good effect these days in major depression. I wonder if they ramp up the doses like that when using it?

<comment><USER7> They don't.

Fwiw, the psychedelic effect of ketamine is separate from its antidepressant effect.

<comment><USER8> Hm, could you elaborate on that please? Do you mean the separate as in stereoisomer-wise? Or do you mean that ketamin has multiple effects on the brain or central nervous system, and one is the antidepressant effect and the other is the tripping balls effect? (And obviously pharma would like to find out what's going on exactly in the first case or ... how to block the second case while still having the first effect happen?)

<comment><USER7> * the stereo-isomers have differing effects: s-ketamine being more inebriating and less anti-depressant, while r-ketamine is less inebriating and has a stronger anti-depressant effect.

* The inebriant effect can be modulated without altering the anti-depressant effect, at least in lab rats. Cannabis is one drug that does this.

* The pharmaceutical company that ran the clinical trials for esketamine likely did so because it is actually the least effective anti-depressant of the two entanomers, and less effective than regular ketamine. By trialing and patenting the less effective one first, they can then patent the more effective one later, and make money longer, by dragging their feet. Esketamine is currently a few hundred dollars a dose (every three days). My ketamine is $70 for ~6 week supply. Capitalism is wonderful.

* fwiw, ketamine triggers other pathways in the brain, including ones that are involved in attention deficit and wakefulness. It has the same effect as amantadine - an ADHD medication. I can't take it after 10 am or so, if I am going to get a decent night's sleep.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Totally anecdotal but LSD made my depression significantly worse than improving it in any way. I had two proper trips and had a seizure kind of thing at the start of the second one due to the overwhelming visuals (not experienced anything like that before or since).

EDIT: to expand, it made me very questioning of my own consciousness and gave me severe and persistent existential dread and fear of death to the point where I felt quite suicidal (which I've _never_ experienced before). I restarted my old anti-depressants which have helped quite a lot but I don't think these feelings will ever truly disappear. Quite honestly it is the one drug I truly regret taking. If you aren't ready to accept what these drugs will show you then it can be a long-lasting and damaging experience, certainly it was for me

<comment><USER10> That's rough. I'm sorry you're struggling with the aftermath.

My own story may be relevant to you. FWIW:

I was really into zen as a kid. Part of my rebellion against Christianity and leaving my church. Once while meditating, I accidentally had a pretty bad trip. (I can describe the actual trip separately.) I was completely unprepared, didn't even know such a thing was possible.

It's kicked my ass ever since.

From what I read (afterwards), others have called that kind of trip ego death, death-rebirth, religious experience.

In buddhist terms, if that was the 2nd stage, I had _ZERO_ interest in experiencing the 3rd stage, much less the 4th stage (aka "enlightenment").

A few months later, I was diagnosed with an acute life threatening disease. I was hospitalized for months, spent a few years recovering.

So the upside to having the living shit scared out of me while meditating was that actual near death real experiences were emotional cake walks. My care providers were like "Who is this kid?!" My family was less amused by my apparent blasé attitude.

Any way. To wrap this up.

We're all going get "there" one way or another. You're gonna die. It's all pointless. Yadda, yadda.

But you can choose to resume your normal life. You cope. You adapt. Fake it, if you have to, like I did. And eventually the habit of day to day living, striving, struggling, smelling the roses will become your new normal. Most of the time.

Just one caveat. Your pharmacology can absolutely change your brain, personality, outlook. Mental well being isn't just happy self-talk. Mind and body are inseparable. So figure out that other stuff too, if needed.

<comment><USER11> Wait, you accidentally experienced ego death while meditating as a kid!? That's fascinating

If you're willing to share, I would love to hear more. How did you get so deeply into meditation? What was your practice like? What were you doing that got you to such a "bad trip"

<comment><USER12> I don't know if this is the same thing, but in my early teens, I terrified myself during meditation because I got to a point where I felt I could "think myself out of existence" if I had continued along the (mental) path I was on.

Not sure if that's the same thing as ego death but it was terrifying.

<comment><USER10> Sounds the same. The Void is terrifying. Whenever my distractions stop working -- Hello Hacker News! -- my mind wanders back and everything seems a lot less real.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Personally, I think that the effective ban on psychedelic research is a crime against science and mental healthcare - given its immense potential. Sure, there are risks, but we routinely use drugs (as in: medications) of far worse side effects! For some reason, reading Grof felt like reading "Solaris" by Lem - on forsaken, unreal research. I am happy to we are slowly starting research into that.

I recommend "Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research" by Stanislav Grof ([https://www.amazon.com/Realms-Human-Unconscious- Observations...](https://www.amazon.com/Realms-Human-Unconscious-Observations- Research/dp/0285648829)) - he was one of the pioneers into psychedelic research, while it was easy and possible. For many aspects, it is... humbling. It seems that visions/senses/experiences of cosmic unity, or unspoken dread, or going beyond the physical world is more of a common theme of LSD.

However, I am torn, when it comes to its lack of skepticism. On one hand side, he hints that some aspects of extrasensory perception (e.g. clear visions of spermatozoid entering an ovum, visions of one's ancestors, etc) can be real, without noting some typical biases (e.g. people reporting coincidences only when they happen). Same, he seems to accept a lot of Freudian stuff uncritically. On the other, I am really happy he didn't censor the stories (or himself!) and share both processed and raw experiences. The overall narration is in the tone of a curious researcher knowing that he may get answers he is not looking for.

Overall, I recommend it a lot, keeping in mind that you don't take too religiously his mentions of Freud, Jung, birth matrices and extrasensory perception too literally. But... as a lens/perspective, that (though flawed/simplified) can yet be fertile.

<comment><USER14> > Personally, I think that the effective ban on psychedelic research is a > crime against science and mental healthcare - given its immense > potential...I am happy to we are slowly starting research into that.

Have you thought about supporting the people who have been laying the groundwork for the current wave of research (e.g. [https://www.heffter.org/](https://www.heffter.org/))? This new crop of research owes a lot to this group's decades long mission to bring psychedelic research back to acceptability.

[no affiliation other than knowing some of the founding board members]

<comment><USER15> also MAPS,

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Whereas higher levels of medial prefrontal cortical glutamate were > associated with negatively experienced ego dissolution, lower levels in > hippocampal glutamate were associated with positively experienced ego > dissolution.

This is interesting. Is there any practical techniques on how to induce the latter form of ego dissolution?

<comment><USER17> Eat mushrooms, apparently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> For me, psilocybin removed data filters and allowed my mind to receive data without mental heuristics prejudging my senses. I saw light and not objects, I saw more color where I knew there should be less, and I viewed bugs and plants as other beings occupying the same space as me.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Set and Setting" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_and_setting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_and_setting)

"Of course, the drug dose does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key..." — Timothy Leary (who ought to know.)

</comment><comment><USER20> So narcissism and egomania could possibly be a result of a bad diet?

<comment><USER21> Would IF help?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: The best formula for profit sharing in a small ISV? - <AUTHOR> Good morning HNers,
I'm creating a plan to implement profit sharing in my bespoke software business Atlas -
 https://www.atlascode.com.
Each year I'd like to take 10% - 30% of the annual profit we make, and redistribute it amongst the entire team. This amount will be prorated according to salaries and percentage of the year that people worked, so every employee will receive a part of the profits amounting to an equal percentage of their salary.
However...
I fear that sooner or later, my team will conclude they have no real power to affect the size of their own bonus.
To avoid this I want to design a specific profit share programme for each department. For the sales and marketing department this is quite easy, I simply hook their profit share in to meeting inbound lead and target customer numbers. I'm struggling to find similar levers to pull on the following departments:
* Software development
* Testing and 2nd line support
* Customer service and support
For each of these departments I need to identify what it is that that they do which most contributes to Atlas' bottom line. Any ideas on how to motivate these particular departments is greatly appreciated.
Alternatively, if I can't I'll still implement the profit share but it's very much "just" another benefit of working for Atlas, like the private health care and pensions rather than a true motivator for people to help grow the business. <comment><USER2> The way some larger companies do this is by salary * target bonus * bonus multiplier. Where the bonus multiplier is a function of growth ranging from 0-2. There's no competition between departments and the increase is meaningful to everyone.

I think this is healthier than a separate plan for each department as then you'll get people questioning the plan and their roles, value, etc.

<comment><USER3> Strong ties from salary to bonus can tend to misalign economic interests when it comes to the dirty work that makes a company successful. When the value of the manager's bonus is substantially more than the line worker's the manager has an incentive to push harder than the value of the line worker's bonus to a rational economic agent. The money might be better to put to the company's interest by incentivizing the line worker or improving the efficiency of the line work...by 'better' I mean relative to incentivizing the manager's economic self interests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Random remarks from the internet:

\+ Prorating bonuses based on salaries means that the lowest compensated people will tend to get, "better than nothing" bonuses and the best compensated people will get "buy a boat" bonuses. Essentially, this means that no matter what you do, there are likely to be a swath of workers for whom working hard to improve their bonus makes little or no rational economic sense...both at the high end and the low end.

\+ Different bonus structures for different departments means that the company explicitly values some functions over others. That's good for moral in the operations that are highly valuable. It's bad for moral in the operations that are at the bottom...because those employees cannot have much effect on their bonus.

\+ Sales is always a separate animal. Sales incentives are hard to get right because there is often misalignment between bonus metrics and what is good for the company. Closing a bad deal may be good for a salesperson's bonus. Sales people whose primary compensation is bonuses are more likely to be mercenary and leave when sales slump due to outside factors (the very time when developing leads, qualifying prospects and closing sales is _most_ critical to the business).

\+ The description of your problem does not describe the business purpose of profit sharing. Is it for retention? Is it to reduce salary burden? Is it for recruitment? To increase uncompensated overtime? Without a clear business purpose, there are no metrics by which to determine the program's success and to fine to the details.

\+ It's ok if the program is simply out of goodwill toward employees. It's ok if the program is to build a shared sense of mission. Those are also good business goals. Structuring it to further those goals means thinking about the effects that a profit sharing bonus is likely to have on individuals. It requires thinking about how they perceive the bonus structure in terms of fairness; the impact financial impact it has on their life; and how it fits into a rational economic actor model. None of it is easy.

\+ Equity is probably a better way to align incentives over the long term. Bonuses align interests only for people who are there in the last month of the year.

\+ In cases of tightly controlled entities such as Limited Partnerships in the real estate industry, shadow equity is sometimes used to compensate non- partner employees (those who do not have capital at risk) based on performance. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_stock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_stock)

\+ The simplest profit sharing plan is each employee receiving the same amount.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent remarks from the Internet, thank you.

Addressing your points in order:

\+ So you're suggesting everyone gets an equal split regardless of salary? I get it, that's probably fairer.

\+ Again, you're saying the same profit share regardless of role or salary, right?

\+ Sales easy to manage but they "get" numbers more than most people. Pay them money when they earn it. Agreeing how they earn it is the trick. My plan is to compensate sales people in addition to profit sharing on an OTE basis.

\+ The primary business purpose was originally for motivation but to be fair I think all my team are sufficiently motivated to do a good job. They're all diligent and thoughtful about their work, and passionate about getting shit done. Because of that, there's no need for the profit share to motivate them further.

Instead I suspect it's just a way of rewarding them for their work, and have them partake in our success meaningfully.

In other words, yes it's a good will program. On that basis if it's an equal split of profit at say 20% regardless of salary that's fair, and somewhat easy, to implement.

\+ Equity is a nice idea, and something that comes next when we've solidified certain key people's roles.

\+ Shadow equity eh? I had not heard of that. I'll give that some consideration.

\+ Here's the profit sharing scheme I think I'm going to run with, it's as simple as you suggest: _20% of all profits for the financial year will be paid out to all staff, split equally across individuals regardless of their salary, seniority or, length of service. We all ultimately partake in our jobs equally, and should therefore reap equal benefits._</comment></comment>


What happened to the HN article on Ethereum? - <AUTHOR> This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7492731
It was the second or third article on the frontpage when I commented on it an hour back, but now it is gone: from the front page, the first couple of pages, and from the "newest" pages.
I can see the article by clicking on the link, but otherwise it is as if it doesn't exist anymore. It has 63 points and is 2 hours old, so it "should" be somewhere on the frontpage ... . What happened? <comment><USER2> Hi, Stephan from the Ethereum project here.

I must say that seeing that link taken down was surprising, since Ethereum is at its core a programming paradigm for decentralized applications + a distribution mechanism.

In fact, the only 'thing' Ethereum borrows from bitcoin/altcoins is the implementation of decentralized consensus at scale, which we believe is applicable not just to currencies, but also the law, entrepreneurship, governance and many other fields.

If people here would like to help us improving our messaging, feel free to post here!! We're really appreciative for any advice, straight from the horse's mouth :)

</comment><comment><USER3> It has been posted several times in the last year, so I buried it as a dupe. In such cases we don't kill the item, so discussion can continue.

Normally, we'd kill this post, though, because you're supposed to ask questions like this by emailing us rather than posting it on HN itself. Since the sudden appearance of a new moderator in the threads is a novelty, we'll leave this one open for now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the answer.

Sorry for the post; I had quickly checked the guidelines before I posted, but I (think I) missed

"Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to email@example.com."

(I thought this missing post was some kind of bug in HN but, for some reason, I didn't think of it then as "a thing I would want to tell you".)

<comment><USER3> I have written software that shows me the prior submissions from a given domain. I use it to decide whether to bury or kill stories as dupes. (You can't rely on URLs alone for this.) Looking at this list makes it easy to determine whether a story has already had a significant discussion within the last year.

Perhaps one day we can add it to the server and give people a way to check this for themselves. (Edit: we eventually did this. Click on the site name after a title.) It'd also be a neat way for users to find old threads. HN's archives are rich.

By the way, duplicate detection, which on HN is porous and largely an honour system, has been much misunderstood. In my opinion, it's one of several design master-strokes that PG came up with when he made this site. I should write about that sometime.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Perhaps one day we can add it to the server and give people a way to check > this for themselves. It'd also be a neat way for users to find old threads. > HN's archives are rich.

In the meanwhile: I find the new algolia hnsearch _very_ useful and pleasant for this purpose. Typing in a few keywords from a story (and very often: from just the title) which I would like to submit, _immediately_ tells me whether it has been submitted (and discussed!) in the recent past. This is great for "personal" use, and perhaps algolia hnsearch has an API which you can leverage for moderation?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's currently at position 119.

My guess is it got flagged enough to drop.

It's annoying that an interesting new tech is flagged down off the front page, but HN has an anti-cryptocurrency contingent.

Doesn't speak well for this community that this happens.

<comment><USER5> HN has an anti-cryptocurrency contingent? Besides me and Patrick? From my vantage point, HN not only encourages cryptocurrencies, but also (through YC) has a profound financial stake in them.

It is weird that anyone would have flagged the Etherium story. The Moderator should pull up the list of people that did that.

What's more likely, though, is that the story was promoted by a voting ring. HN has what I perceive to be a bit of a hair-trigger voting ring detector, which is understandable, because it's pretty intensely targeted by rings. There are some pretty simple things you can do to get your story penalized this way. The best advice for avoiding the problem is to try and make sure your story rises to the front page naturally; think of HN like a pinball machine, and the detector as a "tilt" sensor.

<comment><USER4> Patrick is the loudest, but yes, there is a fairly sizable (but shrinking) anti-cryptocurrency contingent here. It's not unusual for cryptocurrency stories to get flagged down, though it's not as common as it used to be.

A voting ring is possible, I suppose. Certainly possible that the detector thought there was one, though the story had dozens of votes and comments before it dropped off.

It actually went from #2 to nowhere that I could find it and then showed back up in slot 119. I've seen stuff temporarily vanish like that before (all kinds of topics), not really sure what causes it.

I've recently seen things that behaved like comment voting rings, but that's probably a lot harder to detect, and I can't say for sure it's happening from the available data.

<comment><USER5> Sharp drops off the front page are usually either (1) the ring detector, (2) the flame-war detector (not here, though) or (3) aggressive flagging. But as I understand it, (3) really only works with stories in their infancy; by the time a story gets as many upvotes as the Etherium story got, it's hard for flags to make a dent. Believe me, I've tried, many times. :)

I'd be willing to bet on (1), the ring detector.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fascinating stuff, I'm glad I saw your post, because I had missed that.

Probably it just scrolled off the top few pages... things move pretty quickly on HN sometimes.</comment>


Show HN: Shia.guru, a toy for procrastinators like me - <AUTHOR> http://shia.guru <comment><AUTHOR> I have a lot of things I want to do. I also suffer from 'decision paralysis' \-- rather than starting any one thing from my list, I avoid them all at once. During one of these "avoidance sessions" I stumbled on a reddit thread where someone else had the exact same problem.

shia.guru is the very beginning of a tool to help myself and others push themselves to spend more time on the things that they want to do rather than the things that are easy.

It works by trimming your TODO list to just ONE item for you to focus on -- with a promise to call you in an hour and check in on your progress.</comment>


Peloton Files Publicly for IPO - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/peloton-files-publicly-for-ipo/ <comment><USER2> Anyone here know enough about markets to comment on what happens with the glut of IPOs? Peloton seems like a relatively strong one but it seems like everyone is trying to cash out before the next recession and I worry that it's going to lead to some funky market behavior at some point.</comment>


Vela Incident - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident <comment><USER2> From the introduction:

> Today, most independent researchers believe that the 1979 [Vela Incident] > flash was caused by a nuclear explosion — perhaps an undeclared nuclear test > carried out by South Africa and Israel.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I think this is the best clue of how the sputh africans tested their nukes.

A weird nuclear policy that one: build and test in secrecy, never tell anyone you have them unless things are really dire, and only then do a public reveal. Explain that one with deterrance theory

<comment><USER4> That sounds a bit like Israel's policy — Although officially Israel's policy is one of deliberate ambiguity, if they have nukes then they are doing exactly what you just said; and if they don't, then presumably the scientist that they imprisoned for revealing the existence of the nuclear program was a stooge designed to make them look scary without any of the cost and complexity of actually bothering to make any nukes of their own.

<comment><USER5> He wasn't a scientist he was a low level technician.

He didn't even finish high school completely (no diploma), and dropped out of his engineering course at uni.

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

While he did revealed some information a lot of the technical details he talked about during his early interviews made absolutely no sense.

He was imprisoned on the basis of revealing classified information and taking photographs of a sensitive site.

Whether Israel has actual assembled weapons or not, they are a breakout state they have 2 reactors one at Dimona one at Soreq and even if in the 60's and 70's they didn't had the knowledge to build nukes considering they took in nearly 2M Russian Jews and their family members they probably could've gained that capability from that immigration since the late 80's to early 90's.

Israel can also potentially posses a nuclear Triad however for Israel nukes are only really useful as a deterrent against a conventional threat as due to their size MAD will not work for them against any of their possible opponents in the region.

MAD also requires that everyone in the equation will be sane and held accountable, if there is an Islamist coup in say Pakistan or if a regional theocratic regime gets nukes it's not clear how MAD would work even if the geographical and population sizes weren't that different.

<comment><USER6> MAD still applies to Israel if they can field a sufficient submarine force to retaliate against a first-strike, unless their opposition can also field enough hunter-killer submarines to perform a full decapitation with surety.

Also worth pointing out, while a theocratic takeover of a state like Pakistan would be infinitely problematic, (probably) particularly for non- proliferation, MAD still applies unless the takeover is a flat-out doomsday cult. Problematic as I may find an Islamist theocracy as a Westerner, they're not insane, but simply of very different cultural belief. Should anyone want to live to see tomorrow, and or allow their offspring to do so then MAD applies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh, wow. Didn't realise that GPS satellites were equipped with Bhangmeters, used to detect flashes caused by nuclear detonations. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhangmeter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhangmeter)

</comment><comment><USER8> I am South African but only born in '82 so was unaware of this incident.

However, I recall an incident of a South African Airways crash in '87 [1] which unsubstantiated theories stated were carrying nuclear materials or something.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Airways_Flight_2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Airways_Flight_295)

<comment><USER9> I was in RSA in the early 80s. There were a lot of RSA ships doing research in the area at the time. As was the custom the issued commemorating envelopes with special postmarks at the time [https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/323741168155_/Antarc...](https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/323741168155_/Antarctica- RSA-South-Africa-cover-79-IV-24.jpg) they were all postmarked "Neutron Research". At the time the rumour was that they were developing "a neutron bomb". This and the red mercury incidents[https://mg.co.za/article/1995-01-20-sadf-linked-to-red- mercu...](https://mg.co.za/article/1995-01-20-sadf-linked-to-red-mercury) left no doubt in my mind that the tests took place.

<comment> Tuna-Fish Red mercury is not a thing. Or rather, it's a very pervasive repeated hoax that plenty of people have fallen for.

<comment><USER9> Agreed, however the murders were real.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How did South Africa and Israel end up as bedfellows here? From a common love of apartheid? Apart from that, they seemed to be in quite different geopolitical positions.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps ironically, Israel condemned apartheid South Africa in the UN as part of a motion on the topic in the 60s.

With that said, they had early, good relations as SA recognized Israel very early on, with a Prime Minister in support of Zionism, and this remained so for decades.

[0] - [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel–South_Africa_relation...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel–South_Africa_relations#Early_Israeli_relations_with_apartheid_South_Africa)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ehm why is this newsworthy? It was repeatedly shown to be nothing..

<comment><USER12> Can you give pointers to the external information showing where it's repeatedly shown to be nothing? The wikipedia description sound very plausible.

<comment><USER13> Did we read the same article in wikipedia? It quotes many many sources saying it was not a nuclear test.

The quotes that it was a test were from journalists, and from people who "heard" about it. None from actual scientists who studied it.

<comment><USER14> Very good question. The article I'm reading says "Today, most independent researchers believe that the 1979 flash was caused by a nuclear explosion" What does yours say?

<comment><USER13> Read the details that discuss the available evidence. Not just the summary at the top which is not supported by the rest of the article.

<comment><USER15> It sounds like early on the US government said it was inconclusive in order to not offend South Africa and Israel. But more recently, people have been saying it was a nuclear test.

> A December 2016 report by William Burr and Avner Cohen of George Washington > University's National Security Archive and Nuclear Proliferation > International History Project noted that the debate over the South Atlantic > flash has shifted over the last few years, on the side of a man-made weapon > test.[1] The National Security Archive briefing concluded:

>> A Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored panel of well-respected scientists concluded that a mysterious flash detected by a U.S. Vela satellite over the South Atlantic on the night of 22 September 1979 was likely a nuclear test.

> The newly released research and subsequent report was largely based upon > recently declassified documents in files at the National Archives of Gerard > C. Smith, a former Ambassador and special envoy on nuclear nonproliferation > during Jimmy Carter's presidency.[1][60][5] Smith had once said: "I was > never able to break free from the thought that the event was a joint > operation between Israel and South Africa." The documents cited a June 1980 > U.S. State Department report where Defense Intelligence Agency Vice Director > Jack Varona had said the ensuing U.S. investigation was a "white wash, due > to political considerations" based on "flimsy evidence". He added that the > "weight of the evidence pointed towards a nuclear event" and cited > hydroacoustic data analyzed by the Naval Research Laboratory. The data, he > suggested, involved "signals ... unique to nuclear shots in a maritime > environment" and emanating from the area of "shallow waters between Prince > Edward and Marion Islands, south-east of South Africa".[1][5][60]

> In 2018, a new study made the case for the double flash being a nuclear > test.[6][7][61][62]</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How To Use the "Seven Deadly Sins" to Turn Visitors into Customers - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/11/18/how-to-use-the-seven-deadly-sins-to-turn-visitors-into-customers/ <comment><USER2> Good article - with regards the first point - Sin #1: Pride - "Showing off your customers. People want to use tools that big brands use." - Would you need to get permission off of the big brands to use their brand on your site ? Or the fact they use your site - could that be enough to publicise it ?

<comment><USER3> We put it in our terms of service (and many companies that do signups over the web do, too). For big companies with strict privacy, they'll get in touch or let you know if they don't want you using it.

That said, my strong preference is to highlight customers where we personally know someone there or have received very positive feedback (just in case someone wants a specific reference).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are there good examples of sites that use virtue rather than vice to be sticky / viral? There's something depressing about it being a successful strategy.

<comment><USER5> I'm surprised to find a comment like this here. These are sins only from a worshiper's standpoint.

For everyone else, these are great rational evolutionary strategies.

eg wanting to be number 1 so you can ensure good genes for your children, sloth to conserve energy, gluttony to store up excess for a rainy day, etc.

<comment><USER6> Well, the title used "Seven Deadly Sins". I'm not sure that using "The Seven Great Rational Evolutionary Strategies" has the same ring to it - although, the more I think about it, the more I like it.</comment></comment></comment>


Vegan-mayo startup Hampton Creek plans to sell lab-grown meat - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1015757/vegan-mayo-startup-hampton-creek-is-producing-lab-made-meat-and-it-wants-to-sell-in-walmart-wmt-and-whole-foods-wfm/ <comment><USER2> These are the same people who got in trouble for having their employees buy up all of their mayonnaise from grocery stores to inflate sales numbers, and whose products were just dropped from Target stores due to contamination concerns.

Between their track record and the chemical production methods described in this article... I'd be highly skeptical of this product.

<comment><USER3> That kind of behavior is particularly annoying because their vegan mayo is apparently really good. There's this terrible Silicon Valley disease where you can never just have a small profitable company with a great semi-niche product, it has to be huge and it has to get there by any means necessary.</comment></comment>


Founder Mentality - <AUTHOR> https://avthar.substack.com/p/founder-mentality <comment><AUTHOR> Wanted to share this reflection on the importance of "Founder Mentality", and how to apply it both as a founder and an employee</comment>


Call of Duty Modern Warfare aims to be most realistic war game on the market - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/video-games/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-behind-the-scenes/ <comment><USER2> call of duty realistic? that's comedic really, what does that make arma3?!

</comment><comment><USER3> As long as you cant get hurt, it doesnt come close.

<comment><USER4> Which "war [video] games" that are "on the market" are you playing exactly?</comment></comment>