Twitter Acquires Gnip - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gnip.com/

<comment><USER2> Interesting: It seems twitter now does see distributing their data as a valid businessmodel (before they 'outsourced' this to DataSift and Gnip). Wonder what it will mean for the other sources Gnip has, and for the customers of Datasift.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've often wondered if there's any hidden terminology in some of these press release, eg: "[http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/15/twitter-buys-gnip- taking-o...](http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/15/twitter-buys-gnip-taking- ownership-of-the-top-source-of-twitter-data/")

"To that end, we have agreed to acquire Gnip" \- I'm wondering for example if the "agreed to acquire Gnip" means that Twitter doesn't see this as a high- value acquisition on the same level as Crashlytics or Mopub.

<comment><USER4> I found that phrasing weird in the blog as well: "Today I'm pleased to announce that Twitter has agreed to acquire Gnip".

Makes it sound like they almost forced the acquisition on Twitter.

I'm not sure that Gnip is a 'high value acquisition' for Twitter though - AFAIK they're basically just re-streaming Twitter fire hose data which Twitter could do themselves. This is probably just a way for Twitter to lock down/get even more control over their ecosystem.

<comment><USER5> The wording is generally used because the transaction has been agreed t though it may not have been completed officially / legally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I guess that makes Twitter data cheaper than before? Last time when I contacted them for one week of worth tweets (with some filters on top) they wanted me to pay tens of thousands dollars. I ended up crawling the data myself.

<comment><USER7> were you able to get firehose access for that? or were you just spidering the public tweet stream?

<comment><USER8> Most likely spidering; its difficult/expensive to get firehose access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> does this mean that they will no longer sell non-twitter data like Foursquare?

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder what this will mean for Gnip's biggest competitor, DataSift.

<comment><USER10> [http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/15/datasift-there-is-no- change...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/15/datasift-there-is-no-change-to- our-relationship-with-twitter-after-gnip-acquisition/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Best of luck to the Gnip guys -- they're a great group of people.

</comment><comment><USER12> Congrats to those guys. I worked with their service for about a year and they had a great product.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting, I had gotten the impression Twitter was aligning itself more with DataSift in recent years. I used Gnip a few years ago and thought it was a great service, although the high price point drove us to ultimately roll our own.

<comment><USER14> By "roll our own" do you mean you just used the twitter streaming API? Did that have enough data?

<comment><USER13> Yes, Twitter streaming API plus several other data sources (Facebook, Reddit, forums, etc.). It's enough for us since we're always filtering by keywords or users. We were also granted elevated access.

<comment><USER15> What was the process like for elevated access? I'm deciding between using Gnip or Twitter's streaming API today actually.

<comment><USER13> It was pretty straightforward in our case. We had to show them that we had use cases that weren't feasible with the default access level and also demonstrate that we weren't competing with their user experience at all. Not sure how much it mattered but we had been using their streaming API for almost as long as it existed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not surprising to see Twitter finally acquire Gnip after working with them for four years. A great achievement for the team at Gnip, and will be interesting to watch the data model they intend on developing with Gnip as time goes on.

</comment><comment><USER17> Sorry, off topic, but:

Question: is Twitter's free "garden hose" sampled data stream still available?

I used to use the small garden hose sample of near real time tweets. I just tried running an old script to fetch the garden hose and it didn't work.

On topic: I thought that the Gnip business model was interesting, and I can't help but think that the other data sources that Gnip processes and resells may not like this aquisition.

<comment><USER18> Yes it is.

The API changed and now requires authentication, so that might be why your script wasn't working.

<comment><USER19> Are you sure the Garden Hose has free access? I can't find any public access to it in the docs, everything directs me to their "data partners", which charge for this information.

<comment><USER18> I'm assuming you and the OP are referring to the Streaming API? More info here: [https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/streaming](https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/streaming)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Mazal Tov, but this isn't the game changer I was hopping for (:

</comment><comment><USER21> Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER22> So Twitter basically acquired their own data? Hmm.. more proof I dun know how Silicon Valley works.

<comment><USER23> I'm a customer of Gnip's - they provider several enrichments and data normalizations on top of Twitter's stream. Could Twitter have hired X engineers and duplicated what Gnip does? Perhaps - but Gnip also has an existing customer base, existing revenue flow, infrastructure setup to handle customers creating their own matching rules etc.

There's more to Gnip than just re-selling the Twitter firehose.

<comment><USER24> Gnip also integrates with a number of other services as well

<comment><USER25> Will these sites want Twitter to have firehose access to their data? For example Tumblr, Foursquare, Wordpress? They also offer Facebook data, but it is a managed public API connection.

<comment><USER24> It's a very good question. I really have no idea what the implications are and probably depend on each company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Either Ghostery or AdBlock prevent the actual content of the blog post from loading. Please don't rely on Javascript to load content like that.

<comment><USER27> Not sure why you're being downvoted but I logged in to same the same thing. This blog is blank to me.

<comment><USER28> He is being downvoted because it is crazy to expect websites to work around the bugs in various 3rd party plugins. This is an issue for the plugins to fix.

<comment><USER26> I would argue that relying on Javascript to display what ought to be a simple static site is the problem here, but I also agree that perhaps the plugins ought to recognize what's going on and allow that JS to run.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Which webserver is better? - <AUTHOR>

During past few days I have been reading about webservers available 1. Apache 2. Mongrel 3. Unicorn 4. Tornado 5. Nginx<p>While I have read the both Tornado, Nginx are written adressing C10K problem. Tornado being used at facebook. Twitter laying its hands on Mongrel and Unicorn and while apache serving the major percentage of Domain. My question is if I have to use one for my startup which one should it be ? Or is it completely dependent on the type of startup being founded. <comment><USER2> There is no "better."

You simply look at your needs and match. E.g.,:

Apache: Does it all. Uses lots of ram doing it. Nginx: Does some of it. Uses little ram doing it.

I used to use apache, but I didn't need it's bulk. Nginx suits me just fine.

You just need to pick something and move on to coding. In the end a webserver is only a means to an end: your startup. If you need to change later to scale, do it then. You just need to launch right now.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd say, whichever you're most comfortable with, but it also depends a lot on your startup.

Apache is a good general purpose web server, the others are a bit more specialized.

Personally, I use nginx, because I do not need the extra stuff apache would provide, and my resources are fairly limited, so nginx fits my use-case better.</comment>


Mint.com: Nurtured by Super-Angel VCs - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2009/tc20090915_065038.htm

<comment><USER2> I think VCs are trying to turn their reputation on its head:

"Nurtured By Super Angels" is pretty much the opposite of "Raised By Wolves".

<comment><USER3> Some VCs are good, some maybe not so much.

Let's be honest: Kopelman is one of the good guys, and First Round as a whole is one of the great firms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is with people in their twenties trying to peg themselves as man- children?</comment>


Microsoft wants to use AI and data to take on climate change - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90334623/microsoft-wants-to-unleash-its-ai-expertise-on-climate-change <comment><USER2> Blue Sky of Death?</comment>


Chrysler shuts down all production - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2008/12/17/autos/chrysler_shutdown/?postversion=2008121720 <comment><USER2> Remember, they always shut down for two weeks this time of year. There are just extending it by two more weeks. This really isn't surprising or shocking.

<comment><USER3> It will be a bit more shocking (but not surprising) in '09 when the title is, "Chrysler shuts down production - forever"

<comment><USER4> Chrysler has a history of being on the brink of bankruptcy...current situation is nothing new for them

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So this is part lack of capital and part political posture.

</comment><comment><USER6> "continued lack of consumer credit for the American car buyer" says the company. My message to them it should honestly read "lack of easy credit means people who are sensible won't buy our sub standard product".</comment>


Show HN: Chalkscore – Glassdoor for Education - <AUTHOR> https://www.chalkscore.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, my wife and I are both teachers and we've both worked in schools that looked really good on paper - good attainment, great inspection reports etc - but were not very nice places to work in. Speaking to friends, this is a common problem because almost all the publicly available information about schools is for parents, students and sometimes inspectors.

The things teachers care about you can only discover by talking to other teachers, but without a personal connection that's almost impossible. When applying for a new job, schools know a lot about the candidates but the opposite is rarely true. We're trying to redress the balance a bit with Chalkscore. We hope it will let teachers make a more informed decision about where to work, and in doing so, that it will exert a gentle pressure on schools to pay more attention to working conditions and environments for teachers.

Happy to answer any questions!

<comment><USER2> 1) As someone who is committed to improving schools, what is your reaction to the current praise for schools in Finland? This video in particular makes Finland look almost incredible:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHHFGo161Os](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHHFGo161Os)

2) In some places, the environment at the school is determined more by the district than the individual school, since there is mobility within the district. Have you thought about tracking reviews of districts?

<comment><AUTHOR> Finland's reputation is well deserved! My wife took part in an exchange visit there and spent a week in a Finnish classroom. They are more selective for teacher trainees than the US and UK, and their training program is more rigorous than the UK, but once completed, teachers are trusted as professionals and left to do their jobs without being micro managed. There was also a lot more focus on subjects outside reading, writing and maths and a lot less focus on testing.

District reviews are on the road map!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great idea! My wife is a teacher and this was a big question for her.

The difficulty will be getting teachers to do this. Maybe start promoting in one geographic region?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's definitely a pain point for many teachers. So far, the response from teachers has been overwhelmingly positive. The response from school leaders has been cautious at best.

Focusing on one region is a good idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like a great start! Would be nice to be able to search by location only to know if any schools near me have been reviewed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Added search by location and search by district today. I hope you find it useful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Two tips for a Show HN like this:

(1) You should add a comment to the thread giving the backstory of how you came to work on this, and explaining what's different about it. That tends to seed discussion in a good direction.

(2) On HN it's a bit of an antipattern to have your username be the name of your company or project. It creates a feeling of using the site for promotion and of not really participating as yourself. Better to have a username that represents you as a human being, which of course need not be your real name. (If you want to change your username, email us at email@example.com and we'll help.)

Good luck!

<comment><USER6> Dang,how in the world do you read so many comments and also maintain HN? Any tips/your workflow will be appreciated.

<comment><USER5> I'm not the only person who does it. sctb is the other public moderator.

We write software to try to keep on top of things.</comment></comment></comment>


DynamicFusion: Reconstruction and Tracking of Non-Rigid Scenes in Real-Time - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1eZekcc_lM

<comment><AUTHOR> via: [https://code.facebook.com/posts/521270584688278/oculus- scien...](https://code.facebook.com/posts/521270584688278/oculus-scientist- wins-computer-vision-award/)

Paper behind this is here: [http://rse-lab.cs.washington.edu/papers/dynamic- fusion-cvpr-...](http://rse-lab.cs.washington.edu/papers/dynamic-fusion- cvpr-2015.pdf)</comment>


Why use credit when you have cash? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.investy.com/why-use-credit-when-you-have-cash

<comment><USER2> The most important reason is left off the list - Cash Flow.

$10,000 in hand and $10,000 in debt with monthly service of $500 is infinitely better than zero debt and zero cash when a customer delays payment by 30 days because of their cash flow issues and your employees walk because their checks bounce.

Run out of cash and your business can and usually will die if it really is a business.

</comment><comment><USER3> >Assuming the investment works out, it will pay for the cost of borrowing over time.

In other words, because the company is deciding to take on more risk, hoping for better rewards.

I'm recently debt free (I don't own a house), with car, credit cards, loans, everything paid off. It's how I could afford to quit my job and bootstrap my own company last month. Not just financially, but mentally, with buy in from my wife even though we have a four month old baby. Companies don't have four month old babies, and CEOs usually get rewarded nicely when the risks they take with other people's money work out, so the calculations are different for companies than for individuals.

<comment><USER4> I agree that it's not the same for people as it is for companies. And it's ironic that the rash decisions (read high risk) taken by companies often affects individuals.

Being debt-free is a good financially and mentally, as you say. It's interesting that I am also in a similar situation as you -- I paid off all loans and then could afford to quit my job to bootstrap my company. We're in the same boat, and I'm enjoying every bit of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are good debts and bad debts. If you use loans to pay a property which earns you $10,000/month whereas your monthly payment to the bank is only $8,000/month, why bother using cash to pay for the property?

You can leverage your cash well and scale the business to many properties and the total down payments you pay might be even less than the price of ONE property.

Good debts are those debts with higher returns elsewhere than the interest of the debts themselves. Using credit instead of cash here is simply free cash- flow.

<comment><USER6> When that property stops earning you $10,000/month, you'll be in a heap of trouble pretty fast if you can't keep making those $8,000/month payments.

<comment><USER5> When this really happens, selling the property is a wise choice, and you can make a lot more at this point.

Even if the property market crashes, you can always choose to default. - Nothing lose, this is not your own house.

<comment><USER4> "Even if the property market crashes, you can always choose to default." There is always someone who loses here (investors who have put money in mortgage backed securities?). Intentionally defaulting is not the most ethical thing one could do, and this kind of thinking has partly helped bring the recession upon us, which no-one could escape. No?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe the number one reason is that debt forms a tax shield: Interest payments are an expense which reduces your tax base while dividend payments don't. (see the trade-off theory)

Asymmetric information is another possible reason to prefer debt: If somebody wants to sell something, it often means that he's not happy with it. So what does it tell a potential investor if management wants to sell equity? Thus, management will often prefer to issue debt as to not send a negative signal to the market. (see the pecking order theory)

It's interesting to note that Modigliani & Miller have proven that the financial structure (ratio of equity to debt) wouldn't matter in a frictionless market. There are many theories concerning many different market frictions, e.g. bankruptcy cost, agency problems, etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> A good example of opportunity cost borrowing is Microsoft. They have borrowed money by issuing bonds, even though they have plenty of cash. In the recession they didn't have to offer high yields on the bonds in order to find people begging to buy them, and they can invest the money they raised at higher rates than they are paying. It's basically free money for them.

Of course, it does open them up to FUD. The Boycott Novell folks were all over it, proclaiming that Microsoft is in debt, and that SEC filings showing Microsoft doing well were the result of cooking the books to hide the truth, and the press is not reporting it because Microsoft bought them all off.

</comment><comment><USER9> As an individual (not a company), I see my credit card as an interest-free loan until the end of the month. I pay my CC bill in full every month but were something to come up in an emergency I could allocate money as needed and pay the minimum whereas if I had already paid for everything in cash I might be out of luck.

If you feel comfortable and are fairly sure you know what you're spending is going to be like in the next year, it's also possible to take advantage of those "No interest for a full year!!" deals but carrying a high balance (a high percentage of your available credit) can negatively effect your credit score.

Be careful out there :)</comment>


The Ecommerce Scam - <AUTHOR> http://alex.posterous.com/the-ecommerce-scam

<comment><USER2> I don't think it is a scam to sell products with different features and specifications and allow the customer to choose the product that is right for them. Could search technology improve this process? Sure, but it isn't a scam.

Furthermore, cameras used in the example are quite different -- the more expensive camera shoots 720p video, has optical image stabilization, and a larger display.

<comment><USER3> I just went looking to see if the $114 camera did HD video, since I'm planning to upgrade my Canon five megapixel camera explicitly to get HD video and big enough storage to make it worth having. So, for me, that's a huge feature difference. I don't know if I'm an average digital camera consumer, but I'm definitely not a serious photographer or videographer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a couple of concerns with this article, however, I do generally agree with most of the author's thoughts.

1\. Title is deceptive, it should have been labeled 'Deceptive Pricing Scam' or 'A need for better product reviews' and not 'E-commerce Scam'. It's a blank statement with no meaning. Almost every website in the electronic shopping sphere offers orders of magnitude better than the brick & mortar alternative, which is zero, with regard to reviews. Additionally, this sort of price problem exists in both traditional retail and online shopping. How is the problem specific to online shopping?

2\. Saying that Amazon returns 24,000 hits for Canon Digital Camera as a problem is like saying Google returns 12,400,000 for the same search (which it does). Search is evolving in all areas, not just e-commerce.

3\. I'm going to assume that the statement 'no innovation has been made since the 90s' was in specific reference to product review/consumer option entitlement. Leaps and bounds of improvement have been made to user interface, credit card security, guided navigation, payment options, search (believe it or not), scalability, advanced marketing, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> I agree with Alex. We can say that e-commerce is still in the "pre-google" phase, by analogy to search.

E-commerce sites could be much more than electronic mail-order catalogs. Amazon has tapped one dimension with customer reviews, but there's enormous room for improvement.

As Alex points out, the burden is still on the consumer to perform labor- intensive research. We need to change this.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think jordanf's startup Kallow has been doing a great job hitting this market, at least for me. Even as a technical consumer, I don't want to do in- depth review searches, I simply want to optimize for ( value / price ) / time. I've made four purchases based on Kallow and have been very happy.

Kallow certainly isn't the ultimate answer, but it's a step in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER7> Be careful what you wish for: generating a diversity of ever-better options for the savvy consumers is at least partially subsidized with the margins extracted from inattentive 'casual' consumers.

Reduce those margins, and it's possible that the prices paid by savvy shoppers could go up, and the pace of innovation -- exploring the technology/marketing solution space -- go down.

<comment><USER8> But the direction/efficiency of innovation would improve.

Better to spend money that encourages companies to research more genuinely useful products rather than products that simply may be more marketable because they have a useless extra 2 megapixels.

<comment><USER7> You can't be sure of that. The market is a giant ever-changing multi-party game with lots of nonlinear and counterintuitive effects.

I would be more confident of your prediction if there were some suppliers/retailers that _only_ sold the high-margin items with "overpriced" bells and whistles. But there aren't: the exact same companies that produce and retail the "good" "valuable" products also make money from related high- margin products for naive and price-to-value-oblivious consumers. And these high-margin products help pay for some of the same shared research/design/marketing costs as support high-value/low-margin products for savvy buyers.

If the article author's goals are met -- the casual consumers now "overpaying" are directed to cheaper products they'll be just as happy with -- the thing you can be sure of is that industry margins will go down. Lower-margin industries have fewer upstarts and slower product cycles, so the idea that "the direction/efficiency of innovation would improve" is dubious at best.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: We've Launched a VR Video Camera – Spherical, 4K, 60FPS, Global Shutter - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN, Three of us have conceived, designed, and launched Sphericam 2 on Kickstarter. We're now halfway through the campaign and have raised over $220K with backers paying $1299 and up for a camera that will be shipping in December.
Our Pitch: VR is awesome but there's no content. Shooting 360 video currently is a total nightmare. We want to make it easy and fun. Our camera makes "native resolution" in Gear VR or Google Cardboard.
This project follows Sphericam 1 which I launched on Kickstarter in late 2012 - we did ok, sold 100 of them, but the tech wasn't there and the market wasn't nearly there (Oculus hadn't happened yet).
As a hardware startup we are working with lots of constraints, bottlenecks, and pain points around going from prototype to production, but we all have some experience with that.
Our next tasks are to ship in December, while scaling our sales model and manufacturing, and of course, keeping the product refreshed as the resolution of VR goes up year after year ;-)
Our Kickstarter is here: http://kickstarter.com/projects/1996234044/sphericam-2-the-4k-360o-video-camera-for-virtual-r
cheers, Jeffrey Martin <comment><USER2> I saw this on /r/oculus - very cool.

The global shutter is particularly impressive.

What's the sensor(s) that you're using in the camera? I'm guessing that you've not developed it yourselves, although I could be wrong!</comment>


SpaceX satellites could blight the night sky, warn astronomers - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/28/spacex-satellites-could-blight-the-night-sky-warn-astronomers <comment><USER2> Obviously high-bandwidth satellite internet is important. Speaking from a place in the USA where we only have one option for pretty crappy DSL internet (at $60 a month), I would probably even be among the first to try and get it! Before you criticize scientists as having tunnel vision for attempting to stymie global world progress, consider that astronomers are not and have never been in a position to have any regulatory power on this issue. At most they can inform the public of the side effects.

There was a similar situation when a Russian private company sent up a satellite that would deploy reflectors to purposefully make it one of the brightest objects in the night sky[1]. I image some astronomers breathed a sigh of relief when the reflectors didn't properly deploy.

In radio astronomy, there are a few small protected bands to keep some portions of the spectrum quiet for scientific purposes. There is no such "spectrum allocation" for optical astronomy. Like chopping down the rain forest or putting plastic in the ocean, we may improve our quality of life through external costs. Governmental regulation permits us to partially control for these externalities. Perhaps if we find ourselves in a big mess like with CFC's and destroying the ozone layer, we will have a public call-to- action to create regulations.

So, what's the rub? Ground based telescopes are vastly cheaper than space- based alternatives for optical and radio astronomy. The difference in cost is often more than two orders of magnitude. If ground based telescopes become less efficient or less productive, there will simply be fewer scientific discoveries made within a flat budget. If the public is required to increase the budgets of NASA, NSF, ESO, and ESA to maintain their desired level of scientific output, then that in itself is an external cost that SpaceX and other companies are passing on.

[1] [http://spaceflight101.com/soyuz-kanopus-v- ik/mayak/](http://spaceflight101.com/soyuz-kanopus-v-ik/mayak/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wondering if these satellites follow a fixed path. If so, and there are few enough of them, the nextgen land-based optical telescopes will just have to factor this into scheduling.

Has SpaceX said anything about the paths they will follow? Can they change mid-deployment?

<comment><USER4> They all have Xenon thrusters and can move, however will do so only when needed to dodge other satellites or debris. Changing their orbit significantly is prohibitively expensive.

You can see the general pattern in a really cool webgl animation on the main site: [https://www.starlink.com/](https://www.starlink.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> From a minute of googling, there's roughly 5k satellites in orbit right now. Most of those are in a slightly higher orbit than Starlink's (LEO) so they're incrementally farther away, but would be in a better position to catch sunlight in the night sky.

And yet I, probably like everyone else who isn't an astronomy enthusiast, haven't ever looked at a light in the sky and known it was a satellite. They're subtle, not dominating the night sky by any means, at least insofar as an untrained modern human can tell. Starlink would up the number of satellites by ~2x, perhaps, but would that be enough to change the basic equation?

<comment><USER6> > at least insofar as an untrained modern human can tell

Perhaps, but that's irrelevant to this discussion which was initiated by competent experts in their field. Not like protests against 5G which are based on dodgy YouTube videos.

Starlink will have a significant impact on the global night sky based solely on the approval of one agency of one country of 8% of the World's population. Even if you as a layman don't perceive it to be a problem in your daily life, doesn't that just seem... wrong? If North Korea had taken such a step there would be sanctions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is it worth protecting ground based astronomy here though? Obviously the science is immensely important, but so is the internet, I dont buy this idea about the lack of consensus being an issue. Certainly the scientists should have had their say, and perhaps this should have been put up for a more public debate before the project was initiated, but I don't think that the go ahead to the project should be contingent on consensus from the scientific community. It should be contingent on approval from a regulatory body that is appointed/controlled in some democratic way and reflects the will of the population, and if the benefits to society outweigh the risks, then it should get the go ahead regardless of consensus by astronomers.

<comment><USER8> Possibly unpopular opinion: no, I don't think it's worth protecting ground- based astronomy. I could be wrong, but the majority of the important visual/IR astronomical observations from the last decade seem have come from space-based instruments, not ground-based ones. We need to put more instruments in orbit, not worry about fundamentally limited ones on the ground.

Additionally, this seems to me like an overall positive effect for the public at large. Being able to see satellites zooming across the sky is pretty cool, provides educational opportunities beyond what normal stargazing offers, and reminds people that there's something to aspire to (and look forward to) beyond what's on the ground.

<comment><USER9> While obviously we're making more advanced measurements with space-based instruments, the value of the night sky for the average human cannot be overblown. Many people don't know what they're missing, having never lived outside of broad scale light pollution. While I don't think we necessarily need to worry about all ground-based telescopes, I do think that the average person being able to look at the sky and see the stars is something we should never give up on.

<comment><USER10> I agree with this sentiment 100%. Looking up at the sky and seeing a massive chains of satellites would be a lot like finding piles of trash along a hiking trail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a landowner in a dark sky zone, I can't decide if the trade-off is worth it.

It'd be nice to have Internet way out there. But at the cost of my (and everyone else's) pure night sky?

</comment><comment><USER12> Someone ought to do a simulation of what this would look like with the full constellation. I love stargazing, I take days long trips to go to dark sites just so I can enjoy the sky. I imagine it would be quite beautiful to see that the implied lattice around the earth as sun glints off the solar panels.

I'm personally so excited to see these, I think it will be a breathtaking, tangible emblem of one of the first planet-scale systems that humans have built.

</comment><comment><USER13> > His estimates suggest that once the first 1,584 satellites are launched, for > which the trajectories have already been made public, there will be about 15 > satellites clearly visible above the horizon for three to four hours after > sunset and before sunrise.

Oh no, 15 tiny lights in the sky. Not really a blight.

<comment><USER14> Actually, this is a good point.

I care about light pollution a lot and think most people are missing what I had when I grew up (Canadian/American border in the 90's). I wish cities had strict codes and <1% of the waste light they do now.

But dark skies are not dark at all - there are about 10000 visible stars. A few moving dots is not going to ruin the experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wouldn't be a problem if we didn't let telecomms fuck us in the ass so badly that we need this.

</comment><comment><USER16> Has anyone yet built an AR simulator app of what SpaceX informs us will be their satellites' visibility with correctly-aimed panels at various times of day, dusk, and night?

</comment><comment><USER17> Not too worried about it. They have a shelf life and I imagine their design will improve over time.

I'd rather see some regulations against all the lights in the Walmart/shopping mall/grocery store parking lots which have completely ruined the night sky in my area.

<comment><USER18> The shelf life isn't the problem. The problem is quantity in the sky (this will continuously be relaunched) and how bright they are. This will ruin many long exposures for many existing telescopes, but you can do some amount of image subtraction if you do many short exposures. That's might be a problem for some instruments depending on their readout electronics.

It's also a global problem.

<comment><USER4> The video in the article is not representative. Solar sails were not in the final position and the satellites were not in their final (higher) orbit. It was also taken during the short time-window that the sun was still illuminating the satellites.

Regardless, we should be moving our telescopes to space. Much less interference of all kinds.

<comment><USER18> The amount of light will still be appreciable and will affect many kinds of observatories around the world, even at magnitudes less brightness.

You also can't slew a telescope in space like you can on ground, it would be extremely cost prohibitive in terms of fuel.

"moving telescopes to space" is the equivalent of "let them eat cake" comment in this funding environment. It sounds like a wonderful proposition until you realize how many observatories we have on the ground and their utilization and how expensive it would be to replicate half that utilization. It's already not easy getting time on a telescope, if everybody had to be crammed on 15 space observatories costing $1B/each, there would be no observational time for grad students or post docs let alone funding for research. You also kill follow up observations on temporal events.

Of course, maybe the government could reach an agreement with SpaceX to send up the observatories for free and send some money the way of the astronomers for seriously messing up the sky, but there's no reason to expect SpaceX to be a good citizen of the night sky.

<comment><USER19> >You also can't slew a telescope in space like you can on ground, it would be extremely cost prohibitive in terms of fuel.

You can use reaction wheels instead for zero fuel use.

<comment><USER18> not quickly

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One more reason to utilize the far side of the moon for some seriuos astronomy! Am I rite?

</comment><comment><USER21> Billboards from LEO. I'm not a fan but it could monetize key tech for space travel.

<comment><USER22> As a defender of space travel and Starlink: Nobody in their right mind wants that. Public reaction would rightly be swift and negative. Starlink provides a useful, widely available service and the fact you can see them is a side effect (they're not very bright operationally, so it's not really a negative). But a billboard is effectively legal graffiti.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is such an incredibly short-sighted view from astronomers. The same tech that is going to enable SpaceX to launch thousands of satellites is exactly what will enable (and fund) the expansion of humans into space — which will be more of a boon to astronomy in the long term than any number of large ground- based telescopes.

I'm perfectly happy to permanently screw over ground-based astronomy if that's what it take to get us into space.

Just build the damn telescopes in space. And stop thinking single-mirror scopes like Hubble — you could build huge multiple-segment mirrors in space — much bigger than anything on earth.</comment>


Automating testing with node.js, mocha and WebStorm - <AUTHOR> http://hadihariri.com/2012/02/26/automating-testing-with-mocha-and-webstorm/

<comment><USER2> Slightly tangential to the post, but Mocha produces really awesome test coverage report too:

[http://tjholowaychuk.com/post/18175682663/mocha-test- coverag...](http://tjholowaychuk.com/post/18175682663/mocha-test-coverage)

</comment><comment><USER3> I usually just use guard to run my mocha tests continuously. I have it check for .js files that have changed and run the test suite again.

As an emacs user, this is just running in a terminal window inside emacs so I have continuous feedback as I code. Makes TDD a lot of fun.</comment>


SIMD / GPU Friendly Branchless Binary Search - <AUTHOR> https://blog.demofox.org/2017/06/20/simd-gpu-friendly-branchless-binary-search/ <comment><USER2> I was stumped as to how this was possible, until I saw that it relied on memory access relative to a computed offset, for which as far as I know there are no SIMD instructions. I guess it could be argued that a texture in a shader would provide similar functionality.

Also of interest are sorting networks [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorting_network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorting_network) which can be used to perform branchless sort on parallel hardware.

<comment><USER3> Since the title mentioned GPU-friendliness: GPUs are built all around scatter/gather memory accesses. The actual performance of memory accesses of course still depends on locality. The first load in a parallel binary search will be fast, since all threads will load the same element, later loads can get progressively worse.

That said, the code in the article doesn't actually improve anything specifically for GPUs, because standard binary searches are already "branchless" for practical purposes. Really, the only difference between the article and a standard binary search is that the code in the article has manually unrolled the search loop. That, plus some (not all) binary search implementations can do an early-out if the comparison happens to hit equality.

None of these changes make a SIMD- or GPU-specific difference, because loop unrolling doesn't make a difference in terms of control-flow divergence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think in order to really reap the benefits of this you'll want to actually reorganize the in-memory layout of the trees in order to make sure all elements needed for the comparison end up in the same cache line.

I haven't been following this closely, but the last time I checked scatter- gather loads were really really slow.

Chapter 3.3 from page 27 (PDF page 43) on of this be interesting: [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Florian_Gross/publicati...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Florian_Gross/publication/275971053_Index_Search_Algorithms_for_Databases_and_Modern_CPUs/links/554cffca0cf29f836c9cd539.pdf)

Also contains a survey of some other related data structures and algorithms.

<comment><USER2> Thank you, scatter-gather was the google term I was looking for, though I couldn't immediately find any architectures that implement a vector scatter- gather. Are you aware of any?

<comment><USER5> Not sure what could be a scalar scatter/gather, but NV and AMD GPUs do the vector one (you can read write n values from n offsets with a single instruction).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it reasonable to estimate that the performance of this code will be bounded by log2(n) memory round-trips per lookup?

If so then could you double performance to log2(n)/2 lookups by issuing parallel memory requests for location n and also both candidates for location n+1?

<comment><USER7> Have a look at [https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05053](https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05053) from pkhuong. They discuss this issue and other variants that paper. So e.g. branchless binary search, the branchy binary search + speculative execution as a form of prefetching, branchless binary search with explicit prefetching.

<comment><USER6> Seriously awesome paper!

The answer seems to be "yes" judging by their dramatic conclusion:

> Our conclusion is contrary to our expectations and to previous findings and > goes against conventional wisdom, which states that accesses to RAM are > slow, and should be minimized. A more accurate statement, that accounts for > our findings, is that accesses to RAM have high latency and this latency > needs to be mitigated.

In other words: to optimize memory access you should think like a network engineer - treat RAM as a "long fat pipe" and do the usual optimizations like pipelining that you would in TCP or HTTP or ....

Related: "Computer architecture for network engineers." [https://github.com/lukego/blog/issues/18](https://github.com/lukego/blog/issues/18).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone know of any comprehensive resources that cover various techniques to do things branchless or otherwise optimize for gpu? I learned about masking the other day, but it seems this sort of stuff is only covered in dispersed blog posts and institutional knowledge.

<comment><USER9> Professional CUDA C Programming by Cheng, Grossman and McKercher would be my recommendation. They show you how to do many optimization, motivating them using real-world examples like: matrix addition, reduction of n elements, and matrix transpose among others. They give the code, then show you what the code looks like after optimization 1, 2, 3, etc. along with what kind of speed-up they were able to obtain over the naive implementation using each optimization.

<comment><USER8> Oh that's great - I actually have it laying here next to me, but I haven't opened it yet because I went with OpenCL and I haven't even tried all options in OpenCL yet, but then I guess I need to reprioritize. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is not branchless.

It's if-less. But the ternary operator (?:) is a branching instruction.

<comment><USER11> Not necessarily. A compiler can optimize ?x:0 into a multiply. For example,

      f(x) ? y : 0

can also be written as

      (int)(bool)f(x) * y

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a godbolt to play with as well, showing how it does actually compile down to being branchless in clang (you can switch it to use other compilers too) [https://goo.gl/bywp8b](https://goo.gl/bywp8b)

<comment><USER12> In case anybody was wondering, the x86 assembly is doing the multiply trick. The rather confusing "lea" instruction -- Load Effective Address -- is used as a space-efficient way of saying "take one register, multiply by 1, 2, 4, or 8, add another register, and put it in a third register". The thing in the register that gets multiplied by that constant is either a 1 or a 0.

If the constants had been less convenient numbers, like 42, the compiler could have instead used a conditional move instruction -- more general-purpose, but I believe slightly larger and often ever-so-slightly slower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Huh, neat. This is really similar to the underlying mechanism used in the compiler that only used x86 mov instructions.

[https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator](https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator)

<comment><USER14> Not really:

1) Doesn't obfuscate

2) Comparisons operators compile very similarly to a conditional statement (e.g: if, ternary operator, etc)

[https://godbolt.org/g/xXecW2](https://godbolt.org/g/xXecW2)

I rewrote the OP code using ifs, and it compiles to exactly the same instructions. You can then add -O3 -msse -msse2 as compiler flags, code will be optimized about the same way.

<comment><USER13> Yes really.

movfuscator doesn't really obfuscate all that much, other than just being weird.

It's whole shitck is to compute offsets into it's memory space differently based on the input data, but not change the instruction stream based on the data. That way computations that shouldn't contribute to the final result are simply given a scratch offset that isn't read back, but the instruction stream never deviates.

This SIMD code is also ultimately computing different offsets into memory space (contributing 0 to that lane's offset on each iteration if that SIMD lane has already found the node it's looking for), but keeping the instruction stream consistent across the 'separate' lanes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If I'm doing my mental compilation correctly, these can't actually be parallelized, due to 'ret' being referenced and set by each line. I'm curious if this is actually the case, and if an actual parallel implementation is possible (and how fast).

<comment><USER16> Yeah, the data dependencies means this will never be fast.

Additionally, "(haystack[4] <= needle) ? 4 : 0" is basically a branch. I mean, a smart compiler _could_ make it a conditional move, but that is in no way guaranteed.

<comment><USER17> I think the branching could be avoided by using a cast from boolean to integer, "(haystack[4] <= needle)*4", instead of a ternary operator. It doesn't help at all with the data lookups, though, which is the bigger problem.

<comment><USER18> It depends on the optimization level. Using no optimization, gcc 5.4 will use branches for this case, but using -O2, it avoids the branches (on x86_64). Verified by using gcc -S to show the assembly generated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Reminds me a little of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorting_network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorting_network)

</comment><comment><USER20> Try GCC vector intrinsics which allows comparing scalar to vector.

</comment><comment><USER14> Technically a comparison operator would be a form of branching, because you have comparisons and jumps based off flags, same as what happens when you compile an if statement.

It becomes more evident when you see the generated code. [https://godbolt.org/g/Mu9KBY](https://godbolt.org/g/Mu9KBY)

e.g:

        cmp     rax, QWORD PTR [rbp-24] ; compare a and b
        ja      .L2                     ; is a above b?, if so jump to .L2, otherwise proceed

In fact this statement:

        size_t ret = (haystack[4] <= needle) * 4;

...is 100% equivalent to this once compiled:

        register size_t ret;
        if (haystack[4] <= needle) {
            ret = 4;
        } else {
            ret = 0;
        }

So the code is not really branchless, just if-less.

<comment><USER14> To the trolls that downvoted my post without explaining why, here is the proof: [https://godbolt.org/g/xXecW2](https://godbolt.org/g/xXecW2)

I rewrote the function using if statements making it compile to exactly the same instructions.

If you optimize the code with compiler flags (e.g: -msse, -msse2 for SSE/SSE2, -O3 for optimization) the generated instructions are exactly the same.

My point being: the code in the blog post is not branchless. The absence of if statements doesn't mean it's branchless.

If you care to disagree here by downvoting I dare you to reply explaining why you think this is wrong.

<comment><USER21> You didn't read the post properly. There is a subsection for a version without ternary operators.

<comment><USER14> The version I compared against was the one using numeric comparison ( <= ) not ternary operators. It's in the link I shared.

So I hope you revert your downvote or provide proof of what I am saying is incorrect.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are completely right, I'll mention this in the post (In that case do a branchless comparison based on subtraction or similar?). Fwiw when doing simd, you'd use intrinsics which wouldn't have this issue, but it is a valid point and completely true. Thanks!

<comment><USER14> "You are right!" \+ no upvote = bad

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not the one who downvoted you, but I am the one who wrote the article :P</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ajit Pai's Big Lie - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20171127/01044438683/ajit-pais-big-lie.shtml <comment><USER2> Ajit Pai is the worst kind of person. Greedy liar bought off by the people he's supposed to regulate.

<comment><USER3> So like 99% of politicians?</comment></comment>


Can Nintendo Wii Tackle Child Obesity? - <AUTHOR> http://www.physorg.com/news145204190.html

<comment><AUTHOR> There's hope for Linus! (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=355659>)

</comment><comment><USER2> Not many calories burned, no fat loss. Simple.</comment>


I made progress bars using only CSS3. You can use them for free. - <AUTHOR> http://dipperstove.com/design/css3-progress-bars.html

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure how these are innovative at all as it's just three Div's and some CSS. Yes it does use CSS gradients and box shadows to look a little nicer but this is realy something that can be whipped up in a few lines of CSS. Does it realy warrant a GitHub project? It would be better as a tutorial showing others how to make it from scratch.

<comment><USER3> Oh come on. Since when are there rules for what warrants a GitHub project? I store a collection of icons on GitHub. It's not really something you'd expect to see on GiHub but it's useful to me and if some else stumbles on it and likes it then it's a bonus. No one claimed these were innovative. You'd be surprised how many people, experienced or not, would find this useful to build on. Don't be a know it all, now. The post is exactly what it says it is and there's really nothing wrong with it. Don't be negative for no reason please.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I wasn't trying to suggest it was not useful at all. I just feel that for something so simple it would be better to show people how to create the same effect as it is using a few simple techniques that are core to web design. I understand that there are a lot of people that find it hard to visually design things and having an example that can be copied is helpfull.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also note that there exists a <progress> HTML5 element: [http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#the- progr...](http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#the-progress- element)

<comment><USER5> The same thought occured to me. Is it possible to style the new <progress> elements?

<comment><USER6> Mozilla provides a psuedo-element for this. See: <https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/%3A%3A-moz-progress-bar>

I think Webkit has a similar approach, although I don't know if it provides as much freedom in styling as the -moz-version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A long time ago I thought it would be cool to use CSS as a light-weight drawing framework for things like this. But my local web standards expert told me that CSS is only supposed to be presentation, not content. Is this a legitimate concern, and a reason to avoid this approach?

<comment><USER8> A progress bar is more presentation than content though?

I guess for usability there should be text inside or underneath saying the % progress? (In which case it'd still be XHTML for content and CSS for presentation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9>
         <div class="progress" style="width: 40%;"></progress>

What? That should be </div> (From the README.md).

Also seconding the simplicity of the project (i guess new years eve is a low- volume time of the year for submissions, but i wouldn't have expected this to be #5 on the front page.. must have hit all the right buzzwords.)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is useful. They look great. I recently used SWFUpload to allow customers to upload large files directly to S3 and it works great. However, it provides no UI for keeping users informed about the status of their uploads out of the box. Twitter Bootstrap also doesn't provide anything like this. In that instance I ended up putting something together myself, but I'd have way rather have had something like this to use off the shelf. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER11> The CSS code isn't confined to a namespace, which could be a problem. For example, I might want to use .rounded for a global CSS style rather than it refering to only progress bars.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good point. I'll put them in a proper namespace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For people using bootstrap, someone's been working on some nice looking progress bars there: <https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/pull/699>

</comment><comment><USER13> Somewhat similar to the progress bars built by Lea Verou: <http://lea.verou.me/polyfills/progress/>

<comment> Apple-Guy That version is very basic. Dipperstove's version is much better in terms of design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not sure how you'd make the progress bars move without some Javascript.

<comment><USER15> I think in the guy's original usage of the progress bars being able to dynamically update is not required. If you can provide the percentage through server-side code then javascript is not required.

If it needed to be a progress bar to show progress of something happening on the page, then javascript would be needed.

</comment></comment><comment> jack-r-abbit I use progress bars from time to time on quizzes. this is a nice and simple implementation I'll be adding to my bag-o-tricks bookmarks. thanks.

<comment><USER16> Could you share an example of the quizzes you are doing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I took Tufte's one day class up in New Haven a couple of months ago. So now you know...

edit: anything you particularly like about him?

<comment><AUTHOR> I took his one day class a few years ago in Portland. It was great. I like the obsessive level of detail he applies to his craft, down to personally choosing the paper stock for his books.

Also, sparklines. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks sweet!

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd love to see more things like this contributed to a reusable SASS library that could be "included" in CSS/SASS sheets that could be processed/cached server side for speed. Reusable components has always been the hardest part of clean CSS (at least for me).</comment>


Security things in Linux v4.8 - <AUTHOR> https://outflux.net/blog/archives/2016/10/04/security-things-in-linux-v4-8/ <comment><USER2> Now only if more of the RT patch landed in mainline I couldn't be happier.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious. What do you need/are you using in the RT patch that isn't mainline ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      Now there is no (expected) way to bypass seccomp filters, and
      containers with seccomp filters can allow ptrace again.

<comment><USER2> *until proven otherwise

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm curious what "PaX Team" thinks of this.

<comment><USER6> With the accessibility of these patches in the few distros that support them falling further and further behind-- they're becoming increasingly theoretical, and less interesting to hear commentary from.

E.g. [https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/sys-kernel/hardened- sou...](https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/sys-kernel/hardened-sources)

<comment><USER7> What does their inability to fund continued development have to do with their security competence?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no relationship between the two.

<comment><USER6> Sadly, it isn't so-- the further from the vulgarities of production the patches are the less realistic the experience gained from working with them.

I can tell you how to make a perfectly secure computer, grind it down and launch it into the sun.

Part of the rest of the kernel communities complaints about many of these changes is that they aren't sufficiently pragmatic for widescale use or long term maintenance.

<comment><USER8> PaX is a patch-set, that's fine. People who care enough about low level security can apply it. The market for 'we care about security' is very large. Unfortunately, it still doesn't intersect with 'popular', and at that level one kernel team may be deploying to millions of machines. The mainline kernel (as well as other OS kernels) have drawn features explored through PaX and its predecessors slowly over time, and will likely continue to do so. Writing off PaX as increasingly irrelevant because you personally can't configure it with a button-click on your distro-of-choice simply reflects a profound ignorance of the longer term technical and social environment in which it is developed.

<comment><USER9> It's becoming irrelevant possibly because you have to pay for stable patches now:

"Grsecurity stable patch downloads are available to customers only."

edit: that's for grsec only, not PaX + grsec.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bill and Melinda Gates: Changing the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/talktojazeera/2012/08/2012830123030716320.html <comment><USER2> Bill & Melinda Gates played an important role in eradicating polio from India. Now they are working on sanitation solutions and helping AIDS patients.

-Ex-Volunteer for Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation</comment>


China Is Paying for Most of Trump's Trade War, Research Says - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-19/china-is-paying-for-most-of-trump-s-trade-war-research-says <comment><USER2> The actual study is here: [http://www.econpol.eu/sites/default/files/2018-11/EconPol_Po...](http://www.econpol.eu/sites/default/files/2018-11/EconPol_Policy_Brief_11_Zoller_Felbermayr_Tariffs.pdf)

It seems that they completely omitted analyzing the impact of the retaliatory tariff's; which is odd - as that can often be a major reason not to impose a tariff in the first place.

<comment><USER3> Imports from China are rising

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IMPCH](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IMPCH)

but the prices of those imports are falling.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CHNTOT](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CHNTOT)

This can mean two things: either the Chinese are cutting prices to cope with tariffs (a benefit to the US), or Americans are displacing expensive Chinese goods for cheaper Chinese goods -- which means the demand elasticity is high and most of the burden goes to the Chinese producer, as explained by the diagrams in your study.

<comment><USER4> Imports from China are rising because importers expect prices to rise. If you want to know if tariffs are harming China you should look at FDI.

<comment><USER5> This is what the Maersk CEO said recently. Everyone is importing more now in case prices and tariffs rise. He also mentioned that US exports to China has slowed presumably because the Chinese government force the hand of Chinese companies more easily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article seems to assume that only seeing a 5% price increase on items tarrifed at 25% must mean the foreign manufacturer taking a 20% hit. However, if domestic producers become profitable at the 5% higher level then we could just buy all our goods domestically and the foreign producer can stop manufacturing. In that scenario they aren't 'paying' anything except the lost profits on goods they no longer make. If their profit margin is under 20% then they aren't paying "the other 20%". Nobody is. Consumers are just paying 5% more for goods produced domestically. If we impose a tarrif of one thousand percent and prices go up 10%, nobody is paying for the other 990%.

<comment><USER7> > In that scenario they aren't 'paying' anything except the lost profits on > goods they no longer make.

But they are paying a high price by losing market share. Profits are one thing, but revenues are a whole other. Revenues support jobs, higher revenues typically offer all sorts of "economy of scale" benefits, etc. If Chinese manufacturers lose access to their American consumers, they have a high price to pay

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> China already has had an effective tariff on digital imports so China was sort of asking for a trade fight. They got it.

<comment><USER9> Not just a tariff. They have essentially an embargo on web companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seeing how they had an $800 billion trading surplus with US, I'd expect that.

<comment><USER11> I always thought that for a country with the World's reserve currency, the USA ought to maximize its trade deficit instead of worrying about reducing it. It gets scarce, useful stuff (iPhones, raw materials, food) in exchange for green bits of paper that the USA can print an unlimited supply of. The green bits of paper are usually invested back into the USA creating jobs and other economic opportunities (no point in hoarding it if it gets inflated).

<comment><USER12> > The green bits of paper are usually invested back into the USA creating jobs > and other economic opportunities (no point in hoarding it if it gets > inflated).

The "green bits" are pumped into real estate across the US (not to mention Canada, the UK, and Auckland), inflating housing prices and making it harder for housing consumers to acquire property (kudos Vancouver for your foreign buyer tax!). Jobs are not created with these investment dollars.

Warren Buffet warned us of this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGo_NL- eclw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGo_NL-eclw) (trade imbalances lead to serfdom)

<comment><USER13> While increased demand for real estate had definitely played a substantial role, housing costs could be flat or even decrease if we simply increased supply dramatically. There are a limited number of people but there is a cubic amount of space if we build up. If we had policies that encouraged always building then housing prices would collapse and we wouldn't have an affordable housing problem at all, even with foreign investors buying speculative property.

<comment><USER14> > housing costs could be flat or even decrease if we simply increased supply > dramatically

I have a feeling places like SF and NY have already tried this. Considering most of these foreign investors are most interested in these two cities over lets say Nebraska, it's hard to see how NY just needs to "build more supply" is a solution.

> If we had policies that encouraged always building

We have those in Australia, it's called negative gearing. We also have the most expensive houses when compared to average income and our cities have taken your advice and started to build up at rapid paces. Still hasn't worked.

The Aus government is now suggesting we lower our immigration cap from 1% of total pop yearly so maybe that will help.

<comment><USER15> Not sure negative gearing is actually intended to increase house building?

Isn't it just a strange (legal) tax loophole which enough people take advantage of that it's difficult to get rid of politically?

<comment><USER16> Well, it likely increases housing prices by reducing the effective cost of leverage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how much it matters who is paying more? A more important factor might be who can last longer. A president with a fickle base used to the many comforts of a highly developed country? Who will vote again in two short years? Or the Chinese people already used to the government deciding what's best for them?

<comment><USER18> Whoever simply makes more money from the goods they export. In this case, China has more to lose.

You forget that in China, you have a dictator who uses violence and fear to keep people in check. They are stuck with his foreign policy abilities, which many analysts will conclude, Xi fucking sucks, including those around him who aren't happy about him being a dictator and praising Mao (has anything ever good come out of ppl who idolize Mao?)

The US is on it's way to prosecuting a Russian KGB asset who has been compromised and being blackmailed to willfully corrupt in order to launder the billions that Putin and his buddies stole from his own fucking country. Thankfully, the US president doesn't have absolute power, cannot stay in power indefinitely, is not immune from the institutions that the American forefathers have created to keep the President in check, a continuity in all the core national security organs such as the CIA and NSA which prevents somebody like Xi from ever pulling the same shit, and cannot just roll over people with tanks and then make a stupid song about how much people love the Tianmen square.

In China, the trade war is having a far more profound impact on society and economy but you will never hear this and neither will the vast majority of citizens in China because information cannot flow freely and it's censored.

If China seems invulnerable and powerful, it's only because they specifically crafted their image in that manner. The fact is China is dysfunctional by and large and anyone who had exposure to their political system knows it can't continue no matter how many _active measures_ they take.

<comment><USER17> You seem to agree with me that a dictatorship can last longer in a trade war? Your gripe seems to be with what a horrible place China is. That might be true. Having lived there and done business there I think it's more nuanced than you're making it out to be. But let's say it really is that bad. Does that win a trade war before the next US elections in 2 years when US consumers might already be frustrated with higher prices?

<comment><USER19> Dictatorships are not very efficient economically, it seems.

China has become an industrial powerhouse when some modicum of economic liberty was admitted by Deng Xiaoping. Dictatorship stifles internal economic competition, and makes the economy less and less efficient.

If Mao times look too drastic a comparison, you can compare to the USSR, which was also, well, nuanced, and had leaders stat stayed at power for decades. How well did it fare against the US?

<comment><USER17> China isn't the USSR. China is increasingly capitalist, has had years of excellent economic growth, and has a quickly growing middle class. So my question remains: who gets unelected first when the middle class suffers? I don't think it's the dictator.

<comment><USER19> With more heavy-handed government involvement, I'd suppose that China is decreasingly liberal-capitalist and increasingly state/crony-capitalist. Government-controlled huge semi-monopolies are known for comparatively lower efficiency.

<comment><USER17> Then what's confusing is why China's economy grew at something like 10% for many years. When was the last time the US saw that kind of growth? Why aren't corporations democracies? I'm not convinced you have a strong persuasive case, but data is always welcome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Isn't the GFW the biggest tariff of all?

</comment><comment><USER21> The highest annual imbalance was $375 billion in 2017.

[https://www.census.gov/foreign- trade/balance/c5700.html](https://www.census.gov/foreign- trade/balance/c5700.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> It seems from a few comments that some people would rather US suffer than Trump be proven right.

<comment><USER23> I've heard this phenomenon is called Trump Derangement Syndrome. It's not nearly as bad here as it is on Reddit, thankfully.

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

<comment><USER24> It's still pretty bad here, as you can see with many discussions the CNN-type opinion tends to be prevalent. What is nice is that discussions here often involve intelligent, analytical discussion around such talking points; a degree less hivemind regurgitation here perhaps.

I'm sure there is a heck of a lot less reputation management and astroturfing here. That is probably down to the size of this forum though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Fake news... doesn't confirm my bias.

this is how it works, right Trump?

</comment><comment> dis-sys Typical strawman. Trump started the trade war because the _deficit_ is huge, not because China's exporters have higher profit margins. The mentioned "research" concluded that the trade war is going to "lower the bilateral trade deficit by 17 percent" after imposing tariff on $250 billion worth of imports from China. As the deficit is increasing every month, reduce it by 17% is like moving back to say one year ago.

<comment><USER14> Source? I know ive heard trump say they are profiting off the US unfairly many times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> China's swine flu is caused by trying to substitute soybeans from pigs meal and has caused a big problem. China is certainly paying a high price for boycotting US soybean. Chinese buyers are too afraid to buy US Soybean.. not because the Chinese tariff makes it too expensive but because of the feared repercussions from the government.

<comment><USER27> I don't understand the link from soybeans to swine flu. Is this because you feel swill feeding increases the disease risk?

I read a few articles... this seems the best. None seemed to make the same connection.

[https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/african-...](https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/african- swine-fever-scientists-should-track/amp)

<comment><USER26> I was reading an article that some Russian feed was the cause and it was substituting soybeans. It wasn't the normal feed the farmers buy.</comment></comment></comment>


The Backbone of the Internet: What Is a P2P Network? - <AUTHOR> https://utopia.fans/networks/the-backbone-of-the-internet-what-is-a-p2p-network/ <comment><AUTHOR> Is it more safe or it doesn't matter?</comment>


Ask HN: neoliberal policies as compared to socialist policies? - <AUTHOR>

Ask HN: What has been the influence of neoliberal policies as compared to socialist policies in various parts of the world? <comment><USER2> That they are both horrible and imbalanced.

It's "who cares about poor people" vs. "who cares about rich people"

I would hope for the coming 30 years that we elect moderate politicians instead of radicals, like in the last 30 years, but probably my hope is idle.</comment>


Conntrack tales – one thousand and one flows - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/conntrack-tales-one-thousand-and-one-flows/ <comment><USER2> Author here. There are more conntrack stories to tell...

In this one I tried to do a quick "what happens when table is full", and ended up with a rather rich and complex blog post. In it I discuss:

\- EPERM

\- implicitly dropped packets

\- weird kernel behaviour on loose=0 and ACK being dropped

\- iptable policy counters having their gotchas

\- problem of syn floods and conntrac

and more.

It's not that this is super breathtaking, but modern deployments depend on conntrack (I'm looking at you k8s). Even though conntrack is notoriously under-documented and misunderstood. I hope that the linked scripts would allow folks to try to reproduce the weird conntrack behaviour and spread the knowledge of underdocumented corner cases.

<comment><USER3> The conntrack(1) utility also has some fun brokenness. For example, there's a TOCTTOU issue when you flush connection state, as Calico and other k8s CNIs do regularly. The utility queries the kernel state, builds a list in user space, and then iteratively deletes each session. But if a session expires between when its reported and when the utility tries to delete it (for example, hitting the standard UDP session timeout, or a TCP FIN, which happens all the time), the delete fails with ENOENT and the utility immediately exits without flushing the rest of the state.

Calico and other controllers resolve this by calling conntrack(1) in a loop until success or a limit (e.g. 3, 5, or w'ever magic number) is reached. But even then you regularly get one more error than the limit, triggering alarms.

I submitted a patch last year that added a command-line switch for suppressing certain errors, but the netdev mailing-list is high traffic and I never got any feedback. I never expected my patch to be accepted on the first round; not even the _approach_. I can think of several other alternative ways to address the issue, such as not exiting on error until working through the queue, utilizing exit status codes for reporting the reason, etc. But it's unfortunate I got no feedback whatsoever considering it's a substantial pain point in the wild and a clear (IMO) defect in the implementation--because the error is _inevitable_ and to be expected given the TOCTTOU race.

Of course, if _I_ were writing a controller like Calico I probably wouldn't be shelling out to conntrack(1), but instead making the netlink calls in-process. But I'm not most people, especially in this particular case where everybody else manifestly treats conntrack(1) as the de facto programmatic interface.

<comment><USER4> Try resubmitting to netfilter mailing list:

[http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html#netfilter- devel](http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html#netfilter-devel)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wish iptables had an option to use full-cone NAT (endpoint independent mapping + filtering per rfc5128) instead of always doing full cone (endpoint- dependent). It would dramatically cut down on the number of table entries needed, possibly down to 1 if you use source port binding.

</comment><comment><USER6> Conntrack table can become full pretty quickly on Kubernetes if you don't cache DNS...</comment>


Forbidden Haskell Types - <AUTHOR> https://semantic.org/post/forbidden-haskell-types/ <comment><USER2> If anyone is confused by how the author uses "proof" in this article, they are referring to the Curry-Howard isomorphism that types represent propositions in a constructive logic and well-typed terms inhabiting those types can be considered as proofs. a :~: b is the type that a and b are "equal", i.e. they are the same type. the functions convert1 and convert2 witness the isomorphism between a and b.

The core reason why GHC didn't allow the naïve recursive definition in the first place is because the definition failed the occurs check[0], so using type families and explicitly labeling the types circumvents the problem.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> For another approach to making this work in Haskell, see this thread of mine from 2010: [https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell- cafe/2010-October...](https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell- cafe/2010-October/085307.html)

The relevant keyword if you want to learn more here is "equirecursive types".

<comment><USER4> Zomg it's max!

(For those who don't know, the parent poster wrote and maintained a lot of nice Haskell Libs at one point)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for remembering :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thank you for the article, it is great read. I'm trying to follow haskell- oriented blogs, some of them are cool to read, while more deeper ones are harder to follow (probably it is about me, not about author!).

Anyway, I often struggle to understand "what problem is author solving exactly", in terms "what is the benefit if we create such recursive type (or whatever else is the theme)" ? Somehow, there are lot of articles making some magic and showing "how can this be done in haskell", but at the end it is hard to understand "what is the benefit here, which real-life problem can I solve by using this technique, how to relate this with real world".

Please do not get me wrong, this not only about this post, but somehow very often in haskell - related posts. Or is it only me ?

<comment><USER6> Jon Harrop, who is a troll, but on occasion quite funny, once wrote:

 _Haskell is best at solving problems that Haskell invented and other languages do not have._

<comment><USER7> This is very true, but I think there's a good reason for it - using Haskell forces you to first address many fundamental issues that most languages just let you paper over. The issues still exist in other languages, but you can ignore them, and then years later wonder why so much software is ad-hoc and full of complicated, but preventable, bugs.

E.g. haskell's laziness forced early haskellers to think about denotational ways of managing effects, and ended up forcing them to invent modern monadic effect systems. Now, there are a lot of people who actually prefer explicit effect management over freely mixing effects and logic, and not just because they have stockholm syndrome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Now do 'T = T -> Bool'!

<comment><USER9> Curry's Paradox [0], for anyone wondering why this suggestion is entertaining and deserves its exclamation point.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%27s_paradox)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There was a part of me hoping that this would be "forbidden" in the sense of "forbidden knowledge".

I was, surprisingly, not disappointed.

<comment><USER6> Ah, you wish to learn of the category which is not a category, H̦̻̺̮̝̹̲a̶̶̳͉͚̕ͅs̷̷̻͙͚̥͚̟̣ͅk̼̭͞ͅͅ.</comment></comment>


Which browser do you use? - <AUTHOR> Which browser do you use and why?<p>https://twitter.com/NFNLabs/status/1304447542919229441?s=20 <comment><USER2> Firefox. I have no reason to switch yet, and there are certain creature comforts (userChrome.css and a ton of under the hood changes in about:config) that make me want to stay.

</comment><comment> non-entity As of right now, Firefox, but I might switch back to Chrome on mobile thanks to the last Firefox Android update.</comment>


IP over Burrito Carriers - <AUTHOR> http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-lohsen-ip-burrito-00

<comment><USER2> We already have IO ([http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/io-13.html](http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/io-13.html)) in a burrito ([http://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction- intuitio...](http://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuition- and-the-monad-tutorial-fallacy) ); now we're putting IP there, too?

</comment><comment><USER3> "One must be wary of disreputable IP over Burrito service providers as packet corruption and bad data handling can result in damage to the receiving unit and may result in an extremely messy packet rejection."

Ain't that the truth.</comment>


Floating-Point Perils - <AUTHOR> http://www.entertainingcode.com/archives/floating-point-perils/

<comment><USER2> If you dont know this much, you will shoot yourself in the foot, getting hard to track down errors. There a several other important things to know not mentioned in the article.

\- Don't test for equality. Use "abs(a/b - 1) < epsilon", where epsilon is close to zero but larger than your accumulated rounding error. The least significant bits in the mantissa wiggle around quite a bit even when the values are supposed to be the same.

\- Dont use binary floating point for money. Use a decimal representation. Python decimal is pretty good, but Java BigDecimal will bit you if you dont learn its peculiarities.

\- Learn about NaN and Infinity. They are like Ice 9 (Vonnegut) and change everything they touch into themselves. You cant even test for them unless you know what you are doing.

Fore more read <http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp0114/> or links in the article.</comment>


Mining cryptocurrency by physical activity - <AUTHOR> https://cardium.world <comment><USER2> Just to be clear, they are not using the physical activity to mine the tokens. The plan is to assign you token when the app think you are doing physical activity.

It's not clear, but it's probably just another ETH ERC20 token, so the real mining is done by the ETH miners. (Why do they need to allocate 15% of the ICO to "blockchain development"?)

<comment><AUTHOR> "app think you are doing physical activity."

App and fitness-tracker they write.

"Why do they need to allocate 15% of the ICO to "blockchain development""

I think not only for blockchain development. Manufacture of bracelet and software is not free too.</comment></comment>


Chinese Scientists Have Developed a Revolutionary Paste That Transforms Desert - <AUTHOR> https://www.brightvibes.com/686/en/chinese-scientists-have-developed-a-revolutionary-paste-that-transforms-desert-into-fertile-farmland <comment><AUTHOR> Excerpt:

"The revolutionary technology behind the latest Chinese innovation was developed by researchers at Chongqing Jiaotong University. Scientists there have developed a paste made of a substance found in plant cell walls that, when mixed with sand, is able to _retain water_ , nutrients, and air: all the necessary characteristics of a fertile growing medium. In other words, soil."

Basically this water retention enables growing crops, and thus farming, in places that were previously deserts...

Related: Chinese Desert Farming Miracle:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQQzDrPCEK4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQQzDrPCEK4)</comment>


How bathroom posture affects your health. - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2264657/ <comment><USER2> >sitting on toilets—a recent phenomenon, stemming from the invention of the flush toilet in 1591—might be unhealthy

There's a Roman museum near here that has a model barracks toilet which is basically like a modern compost loo - it's like an enclosed bench with holes to defecate through. I guess you might be supposed to stand on it but it's certainly not presented that way.

I've seen toilets in medieval château and castles with wooden seats on a knee height enclosure too. Doesn't appear to be an invention that followed the flush toilet. Nor can I see how a flush toilet would need a change in posture.

<comment><USER3> >Nor can I see how a flush toilet would need a change in posture.

You're definitely correct. South East Asia (at the minimum) has millions of flushable porcelain squat toilets. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article speaks the truth. I was traveling in China last year and was averse to pooping in the squat toilets there (they're generally quite filthy). In any case, eventually push came to shove and I had to bite the bullet.

It was like an awakening, I had not realized how uncomfortable are our western toilets until this experience.

<comment><USER5> Here in Asia, you most always find both western and squat toilet in houses, hotels and public toilets.

In public toilets squat toilets are still more hygienic to use than sitting on the western toilet seats.

Moreover if the flush doesn't work, which usually would be the case, you can always pour a bucket of water.

<comment><USER6> Pouring a bucket of water also works with western toilets. Try it one day. You'll probably have to do a few buckets but it works.

<comment><USER7> You would only need to use a few buckets on an American toilet. European ones use a lot less water.

<comment><USER6> The bucket size is a small one, about 1L

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sorry, but I don't know a polite way to ask this. How do you urinate while on a squat toilet without peeing all over your pants?

<comment><USER8> Found the answer to my own question: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilets_in_Japan#Squat_toilet>

Turns out, you only pull your pants down to your knees, so the area between your feet is unobstructed for peeing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "My 10-minute routine dropped to a minute ..."

Jesus, what the hell is wrong with this guy? Or maybe I'm the freak, but I don't spend ten minutes on the toilet. Usually it takes 30s-2m to do my business.

Maybe he should consider a change in diet?

<comment><USER10> Yeah, it sounds like this guy has some kind of specific problem, which maybe squatting can relieve.

I looked him up, assuming he might be an old guy, but he appears to be early- to-mid 20s, meaning that spending ten minutes just to take a crap on a regular basis is not normal.

<comment><USER11> What if he has a good book on hand? I've been known to spend hours in there due to good books. It gets very uncomfortable, but you just can't put the book down!

<comment><USER12> If you think it's uncomfortable now, wait until you get hemorrhoid surgery to undo the damage you're doing with this.

<comment><USER11> I was a little kid at the time. I haven't had enough fixating books since then.

Thankfully, I don't think children are especially susceptible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _six subjects had their rectums filled with a contrast solution and then released the fluid from a squatting or a sitting position while being filmed with X-ray video._

yikes.

<comment><USER14> Science!

<comment><USER15> Only if they were wearing lab coats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Kudos to those who participated in the studies (particularly the Japanese study). They sounded extraodinarily uncomfortable. As odd as it sounds, I'm thankful for the lengths some will go for science (I'm going to pretend this was the motivation).

</comment><comment><USER17> Can't you just lean forward on the toilet to achieve the same result?

<comment><USER18> If you're removing your rear from the seat while leaning forward, then maybe. The point of squatting, besides the angle of the innards involved, is the pressure on your bum. Leaning forward, or raising your feet of the ground, as is mentioned, won't decrease the pressure. That motion is more likely to increase the pressure. There are a number of articles regarding this rectal pressure as it contributes to hemorrhoids. IANAD...just my 2 cents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've been perching for 2 years and subjectively recommend it.

<comment><USER20> The logistics of this baffle me. Do you have the seat up? Any problems with splashing? Do you do this in public restrooms? Friends' houses?

<comment><USER19> Seat down; no splashing problems really, you are only 2 or 3 inches higher; only at home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There is something else to through into the argument- flexibility.

The use of western toilets reduces our ability to reach the full squat position and some reckon this is why pulled hamstrings and achilles injuries are more common.

When western people squat, we tend to go up on our toes to reach full depth due to our inflexibility gained from using toilets.

This inflexibility changes the way we do things- when a western adult wants to pick up something from the floor they bend over at the hip. Watch a young child that has recently started to walk do it- they do a full squat with their heals on the ground!

</comment><comment><USER22> My grandfather, a physicist, had many odd friends. One of them was a Brit who in the 1950's invented a toilet that permitted squatting. He said of the work, "I believe the savages had it right all along."

The toilet was never produced.

<comment><USER23> _One of them was a Brit who in the 1950's invented a toilet that permitted squatting_

I do believe I have seen somewhere a flyer by the British National Health Service advocating putting one's feet on a (step)stool in order to achieve a more optimal position when using a traditional toilet. So perhaps his legacy lives on.

(I am too scared to try and google for proof).

<comment><USER24> > advocating putting one's feet on a (step)stool in order to achieve a more > optimal position when using a traditional toilet

I haven't seen the NHS flyer but I have seen a photo of a sign from Japan indicating that this is a good idea (also that you should rest your elbows on your knees and bulge your stomach out). I think it certainly helps things (this has got to be the oddest thread I've seen on HN in a while).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> News the laxative industry doesn't want you to hear!

</comment><comment><USER26> The study claims squatting is better than sitting for hemorrhoids, but what is the effect of squatting on the knees?

<comment><USER27> Deep squatting is good for the knees.

I do it as a weight lifting exercise three times a week. Please squat below parallel (i.e. hip below knees, the bone in your leg should be below parallel to the ground). High squatting above parallel can wreck your knees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm still holding out for the Three Seashells toilet.

<comment><USER29> Technically and nerdily, I believe that was a form of toilet paper and not a toilet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Squat toilets are also more sanitary. I'd much prefer public toilets in the US be of the squat variety.

<comment><USER31> The public squat toilets I've seen have been more of a mess than public sit toilets, and the standing area can be as bad as the porcelain rim of a sit toilet -- a place I would not choose to step. So while more sanitary under ideal proper use, in public places they appear to me less sanitary, at least in their effect on all floors nearby.

I wonder if this contributes to the higher rates of hepatitis and related illnesses in Asia -- and that in turn to the custom of removing shoes before entering households.

<comment><USER32> > I wonder if this contributes to the higher rates of hepatitis and related > illnesses in Asia -- and that in turn to the custom of removing shoes before > entering households.

Removing shoes before entering households is standard practice in quite a few (most?) European countries as well, so I imagine it is not related to higher rates of hepatitis and subsequent fear of infection.

(Frankly, from a subjective viewpoint, I consider this custom to be related mostly to common sense. It seems mind-boggling to me not to remove shoes before entering your home. Not only does it keep your home cleaner, but it is more comfortable to boot.

The only valid exception would be not asking guests to remove shoes, since they may not be comfortable with that.)

<comment><USER27> It's customary to remove your shoes in at least Germany, Sweden and Switzerland. British people are strange. They keep their shoes on.

<comment><USER33> Until they move to Canada - then they remove them again. I always got looks for removing my shoes at work, it's much more comfortable to wear socks.

<comment><USER27> I often remove the socks, too. Depends on the temperature.

<comment><USER33> It's very good if you are handling static sensitive electronics. Sweaty feet and a concrete floor is much better than nylon carpets and plastic shoes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> For what it's worth, I've been squatting since preadolescence. As a counterpoint to the experience of the sitters in the study who rated their experiences squatting "more comfortable" than sitting, I've tried going back to sitting from time to time to no avail; I find it unnatural and difficult.

I always figured it was because I was used to doing it my way, not because it was easier. I didn't switch for comfort reasons, and certainly I never dreamed it might prevent hemorrhoids later in life!

</comment><comment><USER35> Besides sitting vs Squatting, the other (and more important) issue with the western style toilet is the use of "papers" instead of bidet (water hose) for cleaning after oneself.

At home we always install a home-made bidet: usually a water hose connected to the shower somehow with a mechanism to turn it on/off.

When I'm in a public place, I try to avoid using public bathrooms. Sometimes I can't avoid it, like when I'm at work.

</comment><comment><USER36> I was told once that in China, people squat a lot more than in the West. Both for toilet use, but also just for "sitting down" somewhere.

Example: I was told that upon seeing a bench, whereas westerners would normally sit on it, a Chinese person will squat _on_ it. This supposedly also makes their legs much stronger.

Can anyone confirm this?

<comment><USER37> Squatting trivia: South Asians do squat in repose, but notice that the heel of the foot is in full contact with the ground.

I read somewhere that the typical Westerner, or someone not used to squatting for extended periods, will squat on the balls of their feet. Apparently this can tire you out quickly.

I'm embarrassed that I can't quite manage to squat on my heels either, despite being South Asian.

<comment><USER11> IMHO it's because they are two different kinds of squats. On the balls of your feet, you a ready to spring into action at any second- it is more like a quick breather than a resting position. It comes much more naturally. On your heels, you can't exactly break into an instant run.

<comment><USER37> That was just my point - it comes naturally to Westerners because they are not used to squatting. South Asians can execute either stance equally naturally.

I've seen people go from standing to squatting position (not in a toilet) and they don't go through an intermediate ball-of-foot-squatting phase.

<comment><USER27> Yes. But sliverstorm wasn't saying that they go through an intermediate ball- of-foot-squatting.

By the way, practice makes perfect in squatting as in every thing else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If your interested in outfitting your own house with something else,

<http://www.naturesplatform.com/index.html>

I've tried myself to squat while hiking outdoors and I keep falling over.

<comment><USER39> And how can you argue with those endorsements!

 _I've been balancing on toilet seats for twenty years. I've broken a few, and dislodged my share of toilets from their anchors to considerable expense. The stability, comfort and ease of Nature's Platform is a great relief._

Charlie Walters, M.B.A. Boone, North Carolina

<http://www.naturesplatform.com/testimonials.html#Walters>

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I lived in Turkey for a while and almost every house has one normal toilet and one old school toilets (hole in the floor) which hasn't got a place to sit so you have to squat.

AFAIK also muslims prefer squating over sitting as it's the suggested practice, also they don't pee standing up (I think this is due to health reasons as well but can be about being clean,not sure).

I always prefer squating over sitting however when you get old generally you need to sit as squatting is literally requires effort, many elderly people sits due to this.

I can't imagine squating in a normal sit toilet, that's just dangerous.

<comment><USER41> > _I can't imagine squating in a normal sit toilet, that's just dangerous._

Only if you have trouble supporting your bulk, be it due to obesity or lack of muscle conditioning. Or balance issues, obviously.

<comment><USER42> Are you imaginining standing on the seat, standing on the rim, or standing on the ground in a martial arts horse stance? Because I can see significant possible problems with all of these. (technically, problems with the last would be due to "lack of muscle conditioning," but not many people are conditioned well enough to stay in a horse stance for long).

<comment><USER41> The rim. The seat, provided it is solidly built and attached. Anecdotally I feel quite stable either way.

 _Edit: the trick to perching on various narrow surfaces, for me, is to have the heel on one side an the ball of the foot on the other. "Gripping" as it were._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Let's just say that this squatting thing really does have all the benefits that the article says it does.

Does is occur to anyone else that instead of squatting precariously on a sit toilet, risking a fall and backsplash on the feet, one could simply put a stack of phonebooks or a kiddie stool in front of the toilet, and then put your feet on it while you take a dump? Same angle for the core/legs, but less danger.

<comment><USER44> One of the commentators on the original article suggested using a stool. It's a good idea, but what a choice of words!

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I haven't sat on a toilet in years. I spend less time in the rest room and I've also got some good quad muscles to show for it.

</comment><comment><USER46> The article probably should have mentioned that squatting is still common in Muslim dominated countries.

We squat because that's the cleanest way to release waste. We also squat when we urinate, that way no urine is splashed back to your pants, which happens when you stand and urinate.

</comment><comment><USER47> I believe I saw a diagram once of one's internals in both postures. The squatted one looked more "natural" or at least less... _"tangled"_. I had no luck finding that picture to share though. Can anyone assist?</comment>


Mother App - <AUTHOR> http://motherapp.com

<comment><USER2> How will Apple cracking down on "cookie cutter" apps affect your business (assuming that this was even posted by someone from this company).

<comment><AUTHOR> _not from this company_

You still have Windows Phone, Android and BlackBerry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The 'app' frenzy has long since reached 'bubble' proportion. You've been warned.</comment>