MySQL 8.0 is now generally available - <AUTHOR> https://mysqlserverteam.com/whats-new-in-mysql-8-0-generally-available/ <comment><USER3> I had hoped that the SQL improvements would fix this annoyance, but according to the documentation they did not:

      create table fib ( a integer, b integer );
      insert into fib (a, b) values (1, 0);
      update fib set a=a+b, b=a;
      update fib set a=a+b, b=a;
      update fib set a=a+b, b=a;
      update fib set a=a+b, b=a;
      update fib set a=a+b, b=a;
      select a, b from fib;

The correct result according to the SQL standard is a == 8 and b == 5. In MySQL the result is a == 16 and b == 16. They do document this in the manual, saying UPDATE evaluates the assignments left to write, and note that this deviates from the standard.

MariaDB is the same prior to 10.3.5. Starting with 10.3.5 it defaults to left to write evaluation, but you can set the SIMULTANEOUS_ASSIGNMENT mode flag to make UPDATE evaluate the assignments simultaneously instead of left to right.

I believe that all other common SQL databases (Sqlite, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server) follow the standard.

<comment><USER4> I have to say, I wouldn't get your hopes up. If I were MySQL, I wouldn't touch this with a 10 ft pole because it's not likely to really affect somebody's opinion of MySQL enough to switch, but there's going to be at least one person whose code you'll break. Before you can consider SQL compatibility, you have to keep most-popular-version-of-mysql compatibility.

<comment><USER5> I agree. If it's desired, use a config setting to make it the default. It was already standard practice in any MySQL database I rolled out to set InnoDB as the default storage engine in the config until it became the shipped default. Like transaction isolation levels, this is something you either set as an administrator for your need, or you let the application setup guide steer you, or you let the application queries specifically set it, if the application needs it. Otherwise,you risk causing real data corruption and loss to existing customers purely for the benefit of being more compliant in your _default configuration_.

A global and per-session setting is sufficient and more beneficial, IMO, so I think MariaDB took the right approach. If MySQL still doesn't have that setting, well, that's troubling, but I can't say I'm entirely surprised.

<comment><USER6> MariaDB and MySQL have different goals here - MariaDB wants to offer drop-in compatibility for Oracle. MySQL has a core-audience of OLTP apps, that are mostly developed for it specifically.

When designing features, I think it's important to make sure they can benefit the highest number of users possible. For this one, I don't think it can ever be the default because of the burden of backward compatibility. So it is difficult to justify developing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's disappointing that MySQL is developed in private and then only pushed to GitHub when released.

I had noticed that it had not been updated in 3 months:

MySQL in the Cloud Native Interactive Landscape [https://landscape.cncf.io/grouping=landscape&landscape=datab...](https://landscape.cncf.io/grouping=landscape&landscape=database- and-data-warehouse&selected=my-sql)

Diff showing last commit [https://github.com/cncf/landscape/commit/65f79c653e0fceac9f3...](https://github.com/cncf/landscape/commit/65f79c653e0fceac9f3b2e26aa4337a12eceebb3#diff- ea4f83e4d8108e8fdb17ec90794f9bdf)

<comment><USER8> At least it's released at all, but yeah, not a community collab :|

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of the most interesting new features to me is full support of MySQL 8.0 as a JSON based document store using the new DevAPI[1].

There is a separate blog post highlighting it: [https://mysqlserverteam.com/mysql-8-0-announcing-ga-of- the-m...](https://mysqlserverteam.com/mysql-8-0-announcing-ga-of-the-mysql- document-store/)

1\. [https://dev.mysql.com/doc/x-devapi-userguide/en/devapi- users...](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/x-devapi-userguide/en/devapi-users- introduction.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> There are some very useful features there, but I can't help but think that MySQL should have had them a long time ago.

Is there something MariaDB doesn't have? I'm genuinely curious as I've only really followed PostgreSQL development.

<comment><USER11> I feel the same way. I've been using and tracking both since the mid to late 90s.

I've always wondering why, in a world where PostgreSQL exists, would anyone use MySQL. New releases seems to only slightly close the gap between it and better RDBMSs while retaining quite a few kludges and ambiguities.

In the meantime PostgreSQL gets better at the same pace.

<comment><USER12> MySQL is still a perfectly reasonable choice for massive-scale OLTP workloads. In my mind, a few things MySQL excels at:

* Threaded connection model. Postgres still uses process-per-conn right? This is very painful in situations with high connection churn / fire-and-forget db conns, which are required in some circumstances (heavily sharded environments where keeping persistent connection pools between all app servers and db servers is not practical)

* Ecosystem and experienced talent pool. Among companies with the largest database fleets, a plurality (maybe even a majority) use MySQL, or at least started out on MySQL. This translates to a greater availability of engineers worldwide with experience using and automating giant sharded MySQL fleets, more exposure to MySQL's edge cases, more familiarity with very specific performance characteristics and tuning, etc.

* MySQL's pluggable storage engine API allows flexibility for interesting future possibilities. Facebook migrated part of their MySQL fleet's storage engine from InnoDB (btree-based) to MyRocks (LSM-based) and achieved incredible compression benefits as a result, which translates to huge cost savings, while still being much easier than moving to another DBMS altogether. And AFAIK Postgres does not have comparable compression levels to MyRocks at this time.

* Replication options. I'm sure Postgres will catch up here, but its logical replication support is still relatively new, whereas MySQL has always used logical replication and supports a lot of different topologies and configurations. (Although, I won't cite master-master support as many folks do... it is not a good setup in MySQL and has long been discouraged in the community.)

* InnoDB's use of a clustered index for primary key means that it performs better than a non-clustered storage solution for some (many?) workloads.

Don't get me wrong, Postgres is a wonderful database and absolutely has many qualities and features that MySQL lacks. But it's not the black-and-white situation that some make it out to be.

<comment><USER13> And don't forget the TokuDB storage engine. It has some very interesting and different scaling/performance characteristics which can provide dramatic improvements for some workloads.

(Even though TokuDB is probably not the "best" choice for my workload, I love it for my text-heavy tables because its performance is still great and its on- disk compression ratios are superb.)

<comment><USER12> Fair enough, but personally I would be very hesitant to adopt TokuDB for a new use-case in 2018. Its rate of development and adoption have both slowed considerably in recent years, and MyRocks covers similar use-cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Reliability: DDL statements have become atomic and crash safe, meta-data is > stored in a single, transactional data dictionary. Powered by InnoDB!

To clarify, does this mean that DDL is now fully transactional the way it is in postgres?

<comment><USER15> This would be great if so, but it doesn't look like it:

[https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/atomic- ddl.html](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/atomic-ddl.html)

> DDL statements, atomic or otherwise, implicitly end any transaction that is > active in the current session, as if you had done a COMMIT before executing > the statement. This means that DDL statements cannot be performed within > another transaction, within transaction control statements such as START > TRANSACTION ... COMMIT, or combined with other statements within the same > transaction.

Sounds like it just means that single ALTER/ADD/REMOVE statements now cannot fail in an intermediate state, but a sequence cannot be run in a transaction, so there's still a manual process to unpick a migration that failed half-way through. (That's always fun in production...)

Perhaps the groundwork has been laid though, and it'll be possible in 9.0.

<comment><USER16> > _DDL statements, atomic or otherwise, implicitly end any transaction that is > active in the current session, as if you had done a COMMIT before executing > the statement._

That sounds horrifying. Implicitly committing transactions could very well leave the database in an undefined / inconsistent state, no? That is, from the applications view, if I do:

       BEGIN;
         STATEMENT A;
         STATEMENT B;
       END;

I would expect either both or neither to succeed, but that paragraph would suggest that A could succeed, and the transaction be committed. (And who knows after that?)

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER17> > That sounds horrifying.

That means any previous version could fail during DDL execution and leave your _metadata_ in an inconsistent state that you couldn't recover.

Now MySQL is about as good as any commercial database.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Side question, but why the jump from 5.7 to 8.0?

What happened to 6.0 and 7.0?

Edit: found a kind of answer, though I never heard of 6 and 7 being "used" before. [1]

> _Why did MySQL version numbering skip versions 6 and 7 and go straight to > 8.0?_

> _Due to the many new and important features we were introducing in this > MySQL version, we decided to start a fresh new series. As the series numbers > 6 and 7 had actually been used before by MySQL, we went to 8.0._

[1] [https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/faqs- general.html#fa...](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/faqs- general.html#faq-mysql-why-8.0)

<comment><USER19> MySQL 6 was used some 10+ years ago and has seen some alphas. Over time most things in there have been backported into the 5 series and some ideas for 6.0 didn't work out (i.e. Falcon storage engine) and were stopped. When/how 7 was used I'm not sure, but jumping from 5.7 to 8 simply drops the first digit, which was meaningless for a while already. (jumps from 5.5 to 5.6 and 5.6 to 5.7 were huge as well)

<comment><USER20> 7 is used for MySQL Cluster, see also [https://mysqlrelease.com/2018/03/mysql-8-0-it-goes- to-11/](https://mysqlrelease.com/2018/03/mysql-8-0-it-goes-to-11/) Geir

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > MySQL 8.0 delivers SQL window functions.

Great to see these in a MySQL release. Something so worth having I once had a script which would automate MySQL -> Postgres for data analytics purposes.

</comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone have any idea when this will be available on Amazon RDS?

<comment><USER23> Default comment in such topics )

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Woohoo I've been eagerly awaiting this. I use redshift postgres and SQL server at work and looking to migrate from postgres to MySQL for my personal ML projects.

Window functions have been a long time coming and I personally can't wait!

<comment><USER25> There are a lot of postgres fans on HN, would you mind giving some more info on why you want to go from PG to MySQL?

<comment><USER26> There are some nice features that MySQL lacks. Personally, the thing I like best in Postgres is transactional DDL. In MySQL, if halfway through a database transformation your migration script fails, you are in a broken state and you are on your own. Postgres rolls the whole transaction back. Ofcourse there are some other features MySQL lacks, such as variable length character columns (varchar) where you don't need to specify a maximum length.

The transactional DDL seems to be introduced in MySQL per 8.0 though

<comment><USER27> The advantages of Postgres (and MariaDB) over MySQL are pretty well traveled on HN. OP wants to move from Redshift Postgres & SQL Server to MySQL - <USER2> isn't something you see very often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Release looks great. I can't wait for MyRocks to arrive to make it even better.

</comment><comment><USER29> I demand satiation.</comment>


How does Uber pose against ridesharing competitors in terms of market valuation? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Craftdotco/status/1016816122425819137 <comment><USER2> It'd be interesting to see how many monthly active users each of these companies have

</comment><comment><USER3> interesting that Uber has almost as high of a valuation as Didi

<comment><USER4> probably because Didi bought out all of Uber's operations in China and thus effectively monopolizes Chinese rideshare. it would be interesting to see rideshare market share broken down geographically</comment></comment>


How Pixar's Toy Story 2 was deleted twice once by tech & again for its own good - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/05/21/how-pixars-toy-story-2-was-deleted-twice-once-by-technology-and-again-for-its-own-good/?utm_source=HackerNews&utm_medium=share%2Bbutton&utm_content=How%20Pixar%E2%80%99s%20Toy%20Story%202%20was%20deleted%20twice%2C%20once%20by%20technology%20and%20again%20for%20its%20own%20good&utm_campaign=social%2Bmedia <comment><USER2> That slow motion `rm -rf` is a little doubtful. Sounds more like an ftp-style recursive delete.</comment>


Ask HN: Feedback on a couple of startup ideas - <AUTHOR>

For the past few weeks, I have been researching into a couple of ideas:
1) Online gift certificates for restaurants:
Currently, very few restaurants sell online gift certificates. Many sell gift cards at the restaurants but if you need to order one online, they need you to fill a payment form, fax the form to them, after which they mail out the gift card. In todays world of instant gratification, this is missing out on potential revenue. The way this idea will work is to have a link on the restaurant's website to the site which will handle the payment and fulfillment of the gift certificates. Being an aggregator is not the goal in this idea.
I have talked to several restaurant owners and most seemed very excited and interested in the concept
2) Build an iphone app that will become a visual menu for restaurants: Currently, restaurant menus are boring. They hardly include any  visual images of the menu dishes. Visual aesthetics / plating are a major component of the high end restaurant dishes. They way this idea will work is to have an iphone app and then build a catalog of restaurants and the photos of their menu dishes. When a diner visits a restaurant, they can fire up the app and see the photos of the various dishes.
The biggest hurdle that I see with the above ideas is selling to restaurants. Restaurant owners are a busy bunch - and simply getting in touch with them can be a challenge. Selling to them is a totally different beast.
I'd like to get the feedback of the HN community on these ideas. What do you think ? If you want to get in touch to discuss any of these ideas further, my contact email is in my profile. <comment><USER2> Restaurant websites are abysmal, all of them. I've long wanted there to be a service that provides the following information in a non-flash, easy to consume format (in order of importance):

\- Hours of Operation

\- Menu with Prices and Pictures of the main dishes (if not every), in HTML, not a freaking PDF

\- Phone number and address with easy way to find and print directions from my location

\- Pictures of the restaurant in an easy to use, standardized slideshow (lightbox or other similar solution)

optional:

\- Reviews from yelp and other services

\- Ability to make a reservation online

\- Backstory of the restaurant

I think there's huge startup potential in this space, but I imagine the difficult part is getting the restaurant owners on board. I'm surprised a CMS hasn't been popularized that allows restaurant owners to create sites that meet these specifications easily and uniformly. I suppose you wouldn't even need the restaurant's approval, though, because you could just set it up _for_ them like Yelp and other services do and have users upload the pics, menu details, etc (like a wiki).

Anybody know if this has been attempted before?

<comment><USER3> I'm working on this right now. I'm starting with Orange County, CA at the moment and then I plan to roll it out to other places later. I am focusing on simple, informative restaurant pages with aggregated reviews and comments from other sites.

I plan to post the site on HN when it is ready. It is called Orange Dish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Number 2: I don't think high-end restaurants want to show images of their dishes. For some reason it does not seem classy. Perhaps that's not an issue for the low/medium range.

<comment><USER5> I also don't think they would want to encourage their patrons to take their phones out during meals. Think this is still considered poor form, could be wrong though.

Think idea number one is the better one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wouldn't waste your time on idea #1. Idea #2 could fold out into a bunch of different paths, at least one of which has to be worthwhile.

Idea #1: You need to ask yourself why people buy gift cards in the first place. They buy them as gifts for other people, gifts to be given at a later date. Instant gratification is far less of a factor when it comes to gift- giving, which is inherently non-instant. The only reason anyone would ever need to print off a gift card would be if they totally forgot the need for it, with like 15 minutes to spare. While that may _seem_ like a niche you can fill, it probably isn't. There are formal-ish standards for gift-giving, and the appearance of forgetting till the last minute is always, always, always avoided; the implication being that you didn't care enough about the recipient to remember to get the gift ahead of time.

Go for #2, and play around with the idea some more.

</comment><comment><USER7> Number 1. <http://www.cardpool.com> has started doing similar. (but not competing with your ideas) When you buy one of their cards they will instantly email you the card's details so that you can use it online while they send you the physical card in case you want to use it in a brick and mortar.

Number 2. I would take a look at <http://www.foodspotting.com> for a potential source for an initial image database. Providing a professional photographer would also help.

They both will require quite a bit of footwork to get enough restaurants to buy in on the idea. Good luck if you decide to do either of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Cardpool started offering something similar, but their focus is completely different currently. Also, the thought of using foodspotting to kickstart things occurred to me as well :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Based on how you described it, I believe that idea 1 will have better traction with restaurant. You offer them a low cost / low risk new customer acquisition channel.

Idea number two discribes a problem that customers might have, but you are trying to sell it to the restaurant owners.

If you go with option 2, you must think how the fact that the menues are boring and lack visuals affect the business. Maybe customers ask the waiter too many questions, maybe they spend too much time thinking what to order, maybe they return the dish or they simply leave unhappy because they didn't get what they wanted. In short, if you want to sell your solution to the owner - describe the owner's problem.

</comment><comment><USER9> I like the first idea as specifically targeted towards the restaurant industry. we use to get snail mail discounts coupons from restaurants for your birthdays. those restaurants could be your initial target customers as well.

On a side note, I am looking for feedback on some of my ideas. would you mind recommending me something at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1773435> ?

</comment><comment><USER10> I like number 2. Maybe you could entice the restaurant owners by providing a professional photographer.

There is potential to do cool stuff with the data you would collect like A/B testing different plating styles of the same dish.

On the other hand, my wife says she is grossed out by restaurants that have pictures of their dishes (maybe this speaks to the need for better presentation).

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree - some of the things I envisioned - to collect metrics data on which dishes people are clicking on / engaging with the maximum. This can be fed back to the restaurant as well as the users can be presented with a 'most popular dishes' option as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reading your ideas, I was thinking about number 2, and those demos of the Microsoft Surface awhile back, and I had this idea. What if insead of an "app" you had a web app where where resteraunts can upload photos/prices/descriptions of menu items, and get a QR code they can paste up in their resteraunt. Might be slighly less of an enterance barrier for customers.

</comment><comment><USER12> Number 2 sounds good, but photographing food is insanely difficult. See:

<http://photocritic.org/food-photo-tricks/>

I think hiring an artist to make a drawing of the food may be cheaper :-)

</comment><comment><USER13> It's funny but some of my friends and I have been looking at the second idea and have made some progress there. I'll takl to my friends and contact you if they seem interested.

</comment><comment><USER14> I like (1) quite a bit for the following reasons:

a) Restaurants are responsive to the idea.

b) You can bundle your fees into transactions, rolling the product out at zero cost to the restaurants.

c) Once you build the core platform, integrating new clients is dirt cheap, eg add a logo / description, it's live.

d) You can build an overarching brand HUB as a connector to all the different clients.

e) Build in a viral component - instead of building for specific restaurants give restaurants a directory on "dinnerdiscounts.com/restaurantname/" and give restaurant a stack of cards to include in their diner's checks, or charge $10 - 15 to do a custom card.

f) Build a model around breakage where you require $100 in account accrual before you issue a check to the restaurant. This makes for incredible cash flow and margins.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for all the valuable points you listed out. The one thing I didnt quite understand from your comment was the following: 'give restaurant a stack of cards to include in your diner's checks or charge $10-$15 to do a custom card' -- could you clarify if you get a chance. thanks.

<comment><USER14> Sure - I'm suggesting that you get the restaurants to do your marketing for you.

For instance you could print ~5,000 GENERIC, but tastefully designed business cards for $50 - 100.

EG - "Thank you for dining with us - we'd like to thank you with 10% off a gift certificate for your next visit. Just visit RestaurantDeals.com and search for us right away."

Once you run out of the 5,000 cards, reprint with updated messaging based on what you learn.

Then that messaging works for ALL the clients you sign up, and you give restaurants a stack of 100 cards that they can include in the receipts or checks they hand out to patrons.

Direct respons rates on cards targeted properly can drive up to say 3 - 5% which more than covers the cost of you handing out the cards, and helps you go viral since customers will also realize they can get discounts on other restaurants :)

Make sense?

Then offer as a premium service to restaurants cards printed with their own specific URL / messaging if they don't like the generic model.

To sell this vision work closely with a half-dozen restaurants, get them extraordinary results, and use their testimonials as your sales pitch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 1 is really good, 2 is a solution looking for a problem and i doubt it will scale. Idea 1 could be huge, because right now, there is no central gift certificate web site. It's a really good idea, but absolutely requires a good quality domain name, one you'd probably have to pay for.</comment>


How bosses are (literally) like dictators - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/7/17/15973478/bosses-dictators-workplace-rights-free-markets-unions <comment><USER2> Surely employers compete for employees, so employees can simply vote with their feet</comment>


Visualizing timelines of music mashups - <AUTHOR> http://mashupbreakdown.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> From the about page [0]:

"Mashup Breakdown is an attempt to visually describe the musical wizardry that goes into a mashup. For each track, you'll see the timeline of samples used, and with the currently active samples highlighted in real time as the track plays. I (@brahn) created the site when the spectacular mega-mashup artist Girl Talk released his 5th album, All Day, composed from an astounding 372 songs by other artists."

[0] - <http://blog.mashupbreakdown.com/pages/about></comment>


The Impending NY Tech Apocalypse: Here's What Is About To Happen - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/future-new-york-tech-2011-9

<comment><USER2> >> instead of joining high-potential startups, engineers are founding mediocre companies. ... There are a lot of small teams building small ideas. ... Their deaths will be great for New York tech. [Freeing up money and talent for more substantive companies.]

It sounds like lots of VCs are are lemmings trying to do the YC thing without the requisite talent and judgement.

I don't think I necessarily buy the conclusion that a lot of failures in the web space will free up money and talent for (say) the enterprise space. It could also be that the talent pool in NYC is too shallow to support hundreds of startups. (You are free to consider the last to be SV hubris.)</comment>


Ask HN: Where do you buy static website templates? - <AUTHOR> Although I'm a full-stack developer, I often find myself bogged down by the intense and drawn-out work of building something from scratch.
Themeforest is filled with Wordpress templates and Google is surprisingly bogged down by "Top 30" blog posts that all have overlapping suggestions.
So, HN, where do you go to find light-weight, responsive templates for your side projects?
Edit: I ended up finding kind of what I was looking for: https://uicookies.com/ & https://themehunt.com/ are nice resources. However, I think I'll probably stick with building things from scratch for now. <comment><USER2> I love the ones from HTML5UP, they are free, open source and really beautiful [https://html5up.net/](https://html5up.net/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll dig through Themeforest HTML section for one pagers costing no more than $7-15. Surprisingly great..

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://creativemarket.com](http://creativemarket.com)

</comment><comment><USER5> I've had luck with themehunt in the past (as you mentioned coming across already).

</comment><comment><USER6> if you want to create coming soon website with no coding and no hosting check out [http://startmydomain.com](http://startmydomain.com)

</comment><comment><USER7> Envato Elements</comment>


Douglas Crockford, for JavaScript: The Good Parts - <AUTHOR> http://sayyouresorryforwhatyouvedone.blogspot.com/2011/04/douglas-crockford-for-javascript-good.html

<comment><USER2> This article isn't put across in a very balanced way. In fact I cut short my response when you said "Fuck you Douglas" because my hopes of receiving a civil reply evaporated. Anyway;

> I say we have a reasonable expectation that people writing code that does > financial calculations have a fucking clue as to how their math will work on > a computer.

No we don't.

> He goes on to suggest that the right way to handle this is by scaling your > values to be in cents (or whatever quanta you happen to care about). It's > interesting to see DSP-world fixed point evangelism suddenly materialize in > JavaScript. Be warned: unless you heavily wrap this scaled approach in > objects, you will make a mistake somewhere.

What? It's more likely you'll make a mistake dealing in whole cents than doing floating point math? Really?</comment>


The pros are moving from Mac to Z - <AUTHOR> http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/workstations/mac-to-z.html

<comment><USER2> I don't get the sense that the "Pros" are moving from Macs to Z, these pros that wanted all the power were already on PCs in the first place. And what HP really meant are the creative media pros (whose industry is still heavily on Macs), not really the same market IMO as the general pros including IT, data analysis, science and so on. I get the feeling HP is trying hard to grab the creative media pros and not really understanding them.

Mac Pro wasn't really about the specs because you always could get more powerful PCs for identical or cheaper prices. So focusing on the pure spec is not going to win you anyone. These creatives are willing to pay the higher costs and HP is missing the point IMO.

Creative media folks like Mac Pros because of the stronger ecosystem of Apple software and hardware. HP, if you want these folks, you need to work on building a stronger ecosystem and explain how it beats Apple on all endpoints.

HP did the right thing of pointing out the stronger connection to the software like Adobe and Avid stuff but it's like in a smaller print all the way down of the page.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think HP should really show a picture of expanding a PC workstation versus the new Mac Pro which would result in a spaghetti junction of external cables, boxes and power adapters.

Also, I actually don't know any developers who are using the new Mac Pro, whereas before they would be excited and talk about the old Mac Pros. Are the new models selling well? Any start-ups using them? After the poorly received release of Final Cut Pro X, I imagine most video production folk went back to their PCs... and since Apple gave up on the server, enterprise and scientific computing markets, who is actually buying and using the new Mac Pros?

<comment><USER3> People who bought old Mac Pros (that really need the parallel performance and didn't just switch to iMacs during the long redesign lull). Developers might care about things like internal expandibility & detailed cost/performance ratio, but generally the overhead of switching OS in the pro space is heavy and in my (research IT) experience people are wedded to a particular platform regardless of individual gripes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting, but my perceptions of HP are still colored by the junk they were shipping during the Fiorina era. Also, MS-Windows isn't happening for me. I could see maybe going back to Linux.

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like Linux is a first class citizen:

> _All HP Workstations can support a variety of operating systems. HP > engineers work extensively with Windows® and Linux® operating system > providers to verify top performance, flexibility, reliability, and > compatibility with HP Workstations. We conduct joint engineering > collaboration with industry partners long before systems are introduced._

[http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/workstations/products.htm...](http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/workstations/products.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Obviously they've never tried to install Linux on a >2Tb drive in a z640 using legacy boot...

</comment><comment><USER6> Too bad these don't run OS X...</comment>


Programming Best Practices to Name Variables, Methods, and Classes - <AUTHOR> http://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2014/10/10-java-best-practices-to-name-variables-methods-classes-packages.html <comment><USER2> I wouldn't call myself proficient in Java, but I understand the basics. I'm a C and C++ programmer at heart, so the few times that I had to write new Java code back in the day I always would prefer snake_case class names and snake_case variable names. Although I'm sure it irked the Java guy we had working for us, at least it was very easy to determine who wrote a particular block of code.</comment>


Show HN: JSON pretty print with modern user interface and ssl - <AUTHOR> https://jsonprettyprint.org? <comment><USER2> So this is basically `python -m json.tool` via a browser right?

Still not sure I understand the purpose of all these single use sites that replicate functionality already present on most developer machines.

Like I said earlier, the next thing will be "println" as a web service. It just echoes back the input with "\n" appended.</comment>


'Facebook profile may expose mental illness' - <AUTHOR> http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-01-27/news/36577123_1_social-media-activity-facebook-profile-facebook-activity

<comment><USER2> This is seriously academic research? "People who are less social use facebook less to interact with others" -- are you kidding me?? No freaking way!</comment>


French Three-Strikes Law Ruled Unconstitutional - <AUTHOR> http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/06/10/1732211/French-Three-Strikes-Law-Ruled-Unconstitutional?from=rss <comment><USER2> See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=601951> for a related discussion.</comment>


Google Profiles updated again: now add photos to your Google profile - <AUTHOR> http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2011/03/more-picturesque-google-profile.html

<comment><AUTHOR> It looks like if you're signed into a Google account, you can access profiles with this link:

<http://profiles.google.com/me></comment>


Scientists create antibody that defeats coronavirus in lab - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-04/scientists-create-antibody-that-defeats-coronavirus-in-lab <comment><USER2> [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16256-y.pdf](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16256-y.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Is it standard to report antibody concentration in μg/ml? How likely is it to deliver the reported IC50 to the lung? Also do antibody typically not have cytotoxic concentration because of their specificity?

<comment><USER4> Protein concentration is essentially always presented as mass/volume in every scientific paper I've ever read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem is to find an antibody that defeats just corona and not other cells, like nerves and other stuff you need

<comment><USER6> > The antibody known as 47D11 targets the spike protein that gives the new > coronavirus a crown-like shape and lets it enter human cells. In the Utrecht > experiments, it didn't just defeat the virus responsible for Covid-19 but > also a cousin equipped with similar spike proteins, which causes Severe > Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.

> Monoclonal antibodies are lab-created proteins that resemble naturally > occurring versions the body raises to fight off bacteria and viruses. Highly > potent, they target exactly one site on a virus. In this case, the > scientists used genetically modified mice to produce different antibodies to > the spike proteins of coronaviruses. After a subsequent screening process, > 47D11 emerged as showing neutralizing activity. Researchers then reformatted > that antibody to create a fully human version, according to the paper.

I don't have any biology background - are you saying this targeting might not work?

<comment><USER7> The reason we carefully test things that work in a petri dish is that some of them harm people, and many others don't work in people.

<comment><USER8> I once saw a good talk that mentioned that -any- drug has a chance to be adversial. Drugs that work on most people might make another sick. This is indeed why there is so much testing and careful indexing side effects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Relevant: [https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/27/mo...](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/27/monoclonal- antibodies-for-the-coronavirus)

</comment><comment><USER10> How much do monoclonal antibody treatments cost, per patient, usually?

For example: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4570079/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4570079/)

Also, how much of the high cost is research cost, and how much of that is per- unit production cost?

<comment><USER11> My most recent treatment of ocrelizumab was ~$64k, which I have to get twice a year. It's not much more expensive than a lot of the other disease-modifying therapies for my condition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> [https://xkcd.com/1217/](https://xkcd.com/1217/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Yes, a vaccine MAY be possible, but the news reports I'm hearing are wildly optimistic at best. It will also take an enormous amount of energy/willpower to quarantine until then.

It might be more economically efficient (and convenient) for the strong and healthy to purposefully self-infect, and build up anti-bodies naturally. Herd immunity will eventually be built and corona will no longer be a problem.

<comment><USER14> >It might be more economically efficient (and convenient) for the strong and healthy to purposefully self-infect

If someone told me I should deliberately catch a cold I'd say no. What about Ebola? I'd say no! A germ that I don't know? I'd say no!

If a police patrol arrived somewhere and someone ran away, that person would be suspicious. If I'm asked to get any germ I'd suspect that it's very dangerous, even if it was just a cold.

So telling people to infect themselves deliberately won't work.

<comment><USER15> I'd do it. Everyone is going to catch this. I think I already had it (doesn't everyone?) but in the event I didn't, if I could volunteer to get infected I would do it.

<comment><USER16> I'm assuming because you are sure having it once will give you some immunity? It's really unclear if that is true and I respectfully disagree with those who same it is more likely than not.

<comment><USER17> We don't "know" that infection confers any sort of lasting immunity, but there's zero reason to believe it doesn't give you immunity at least for a few years.

This is all rooted in the media narrative trying to scare people to stay at home "you could catch it over and over again". It's not science, and it's counter productive.

<comment><USER18> Well, it's not science, but it may be productive. A lot of people will hear "it's not so bad" and "healthy people should get it and get over it", and go out and make others sick (including people that could die or be hospitalized).

It's not science, it's crowd control. People don't exercise good judgement reliably, so that might be counterproductive.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple and AT&T sued for false advertising, lack of MMS - <AUTHOR> http://trueslant.com/marcflores/2009/08/14/apple-and-att-sued-for-false-advertising-lack-of-mms/ <comment><USER2> "You can't sue McDonald's if its coffee burns your lap because the cup says the contents are hot."

The beauty of living in this country is that you can sue anyone you please. The writer clearly doesn't remember the 1994 lawsuit of Liebeck v. McDonald's. In which Liebeck sued McDonals because she burned herself with hot coffee. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaur...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants)

<comment><USER3> The "contents are hot" label was added as a result of that lawsuit, AFAIK.

<comment><USER4> Wouldn't have changed the outcome of the lawsuit if it had been on there beforehand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I knew the older iPhones couldn't send MMS, but I had thought that the new one could because they keep saying "Send and receive pictures and videos" in relation to the iphone up here in Canada.

<comment><USER6> As I understand it, the iPhone is capable of sending MMS, but AT&T is afraid that a few million iPhone users suddenly having that ability will burn their infrastructure to the ground in a day[1]. So, they are presumably doing their best to strengthen their infrastructure before making the feature available.

I believe several non-U.S. carriers with iPhone users have it enabled already (on the iPhone), but I do not have first hand knowledge that this is true.

[1] I'm exaggerating for effect, of course.

<comment><USER7> It's certainly true here in Europe, but we've had MMS for at least 5 years, so the previous iPhone model was a bit of an odd duck out for not having that feature.</comment></comment></comment>


Judge orders child porn suspect to decrypt hard drives - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/05/in-reversal-judge-orders-child-porn-suspect-to-decrypt-hard-drives/

<comment><USER2> > the Milwaukee-area man now must either ... or must provide an unencrypted > copy of the data

How will they know if he provided an unencrypted copy of the data or some other data? Also, what if he forgot the password?

I have at least one pendrive with an encrypted partition that I wouldn't be able to decrypt. It's empty but that is supposedly unprovable. I should probably reformat it.

On the political side, the government is cleverly eroding the right to privacy. Virtually no one will stand up for a paedophile (whether the charge is true doesn't matter) so they get to set a precedence here and use it against whomever they want later.

<comment><USER3> I don't see an erosion here. Has the right to privacy ever allowed people to prevent access to something where there is probable cause to think there's evidence of a crime?

<comment><USER4> I think it's a wholly new situation. Previously, you couldn't be compelled to e.g. hand over the combination to a safe, but the police are free to just break into it, once they have a warrant. There's no "breaking into" cryptography, which sets it apart.

In any case, I don't see how the Fifth Amendment wouldn't apply here. Maybe we'd prefer that people not be able to take refuge in it for this stuff, but that means amending the Constitution, not ignoring inconvenient parts of it.

<comment><USER5> Based on previous rulings, the 5th Amendment doesn't apply because the State already has specific knowledge that this guy has child porn on an encrypted drive, through other means. That being the case, the act of decrypting the drive is no longer _testimonial_ , as, by itself, it does not implicate him.

If they merely believed _really, really strongly_ that he has CP on an encrypted drive, then compelling its decryption _would_ be testimonial, because the State would have knowledge (namely, that he possesses child porn) after the act of decryption that they did not have before it. That makes the act of decryption, itself, testimonial, and subject to 5th Amendment protection.

EDIT: as has been noted else-thread, however, Wisconsin is in a different Federal Circuit than the aforementioned previous rulings, and so isn't bound by them.

<comment><USER6> My understanding is not that they have good evidence that there is CP on the encrypted drive, but rather that they have good evidence that the drive belongs to the guy and that he can decrypt it/has access to/knowledge of its contents.

The idea about not having to give up a combination/password is that by doing so you would essentially be admitting ownership/access/knowledge about the contents that were protected by that combination/password.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My attitude is simple.

If they have enough information to incriminate him, then they don't need the password. If they don't, then the 5th applies.

After he's been duly convicted by a jury (and NOT by the judge!) and being incriminated is no longer an issue, then they can compel him to decrypt the rest.

Or, alternately, they can compel him to decrypt it, but then all of that data is inadmissible in court.

</comment><comment><USER8> _"...after devoting "substantial resources" in the case, FBI agents apparently have been able to decrypt one of the drives. The government argued that because it had found "numerous files which constitute child pornography..."_

So if they've found the evidence they're looking for, why keep pressing? Because they don't want to spend the extra effort to decrypt the rest and are looking for a plea bargain?

<comment><USER9> >The government argued that because it had found "numerous files which constitute child pornography," "detailed personal financial records and documents belonging to Feldman," and "dozens of personal photographs of Feldman," Feldman therefore has "access to and control over" the set of drives.

So if the FBI puts my bank statements (PDF) and my photos in a drive along with "some files that constitute child pornography", am I guilty as well? "We found three safes. We opened one of them and found some illegal things in it. We swear we didn't put them there. We also found some financial records and photos belonging to this guy. We didn't put those there either. Pinky swear!"

<comment><USER10> I'm assuming they would have taken forensic images of the drives, rather than the drives themselves.

Tampering with evidence would be stupid. They'd go to jail, they'd risk all previous cases they've been involved in, etc. I guess it happens, but you need a lot more than "I bet they did it".

<comment><USER11> Yeah, so I'm convinced that the FBI would not have done the tampering. Now show that no other person has had access to the drives' contents prior to their collection as evidence.

He would certainly strengthen the case for that (his ownership and control of the data) if he was able to decrypt the drives himself.

<comment><USER12> They don't need to do that. The drives went from the defendant's house straight to the FBI evidence bag when they were picked up by the FBI evidence tech while searching his home.

If the defendant wants to argue that someone hacked his computers and put the CP on his drive before the FBI took them, that is for him to argue. If he can't provide any proof of such (note that he is not required to provide proof), it is unlikely that the jury will believe such a defense.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, you're right. I would like to know how they decrypted the drive though. "Substantial resources" does not say much. It could mean a lot of computing power, or just a lot of brute-force sleuthing to find the backdoor. What exactly should a third-party frame-up look like?

In my mind, at least, how they came to be able to decrypt the drive could possibly lend some credibility to their claim that he owned it and was in control of it, and the remaining drives as well.

<comment><USER5> Totally guessing, but the password is probably the weak point.

<comment><USER11> I would have guessed otherwise, if this guy is an IT pro, he probably knows to use a long and secure passphrase. I'll be surprised if someone who knows can say the password was the weak point. Maybe you're right, but...

I'd think the most likely way to get in would be to find the passphrase had been cached somewhere, or the unencrypted key was accidentally copied somewhere onto a swap file from some shoddily built backup process that used up most of the RAM compressing files, resulting in that or some similar leak.

Same as you though, I don't really have the slightest idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Now, is this "possession" of child pronography crap images that ended up in a Content.IE5 directory, or in Mozilla's cache? Or perhaps, even deleted from those locations? Or are these images that were in C:/windows/fonts/child_porn hidden folder?

And that, why is child porn illegal? It is only a picture of a CRIME THAT HAD TAKEN PLACE. Yet, snuff films and other films and pictures that show active murder are completely legal. And considering there is no mens rea for this possession, I believe that it should not be a crime.

For the people whom nodded me down, please answer this: why is child porn illegal but videos/pictures of murder NOT illegal?

<comment><USER14> _why is child porn illegal? It is only a picture of a CRIME THAT HAD TAKEN PLACE._

An important question is: Does criminalizing the possesion of child porn reduce the chance of those original crimes from happening? I think it does, and I think that's a good reason to ban it.

It's also a good way to discourage people who like child porn, to tell them that there is something wrong with them, and that they should not do it.

<comment><USER15> That's his point. Would criminalizing violent movies reduce chances of violence? Many think it would; so ban those movies? Video Games? Guns? Knives? Rice cookers?

<comment><USER16> You're totally missing it. A CP image _is_ a record of a crime, a violent movie is just a depiction of something that would be a crime except that it isn't real. So criminalizing child porn is of a different degree than criminalizing violent movies, the one is somewhat reasonable the other is ridiculous.

<comment><USER17> In many countries, virtual CP is also illegal. US law specifically includes a clause regarding material that "is, or _appears to be_ , of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct" -- <http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2252A> section (a)(6) .

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The difference here seems to be that they successfully decrypted one of his drives and were able to prove that there was child pornography and that the drive belonged to him. At that point, as I understand it legally, he can be compelled to decrypt the drives because they already know he was possessing child pornography on at least one of his drives. It would be different if they did not actually know he had child pornography on his stuff.

<comment><USER19> So they can only force you to violate your 5th amendment rights if they "really _really_ know" that you're guilty anyways?

<comment><USER20> You are begging the question of whether decrypting a hard drive is a violation of your Fifth Amendment rights.

<comment><USER5> Your 5th Amendment rights are completely and utterly irrelevant to their decrypting your drive.

<comment><USER11> Unless you are the one who is being compelled to decrypt the drive. Producing the key is an act of testimony. You could not state for the record, the passphrase for the key, if you did not know it.

Breaking his crypto in some way, to access his files without cooperation, on the other hand... that is no fifth-amendment violation, to be sure. It also doesn't prove that he's been in control or owns the data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder what happens in a case like this if the person is simply unable to remember the password.

<comment><USER22> Just click the forgot password link :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder what the punishment will be for not providing the passwords or decrypting the drives.

<comment><USER24> Contempt of court probably, but raynier can say in details.

Interesting thing will be what will happen if you are really unable to decrypt the stuff. If you store the keys away from the drives (lest say ram only server somewhere) that expires if it does not receive confirmation code every 24 hours. And the keys are lost forever this way.

<comment><USER25> Would that still be contempt of court? Or destruction of evidence, or whatever. Couldn't it be argued that it's a purposeful destruction of evidence if once they know they are going to court they stop putting in the code to keep the data from being destroyed?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> From the article: He can't be compelled to provide a password if the court can't prove that he is the owner of the drive.

The work to decrypt one of the drives was done to prove that the drives were his property. If the court is convinced the drives are his property, they can compel him to release the contents of the property.

I imagine that:

1) If he doesn't know the password, he would have the first admit ownership of the drive -- this would allow the court to use evidence from the other drive against him.

2) If he doesn't own the drives, or maintains that he does not own them, the court has to rely on forensic evidence they can gather. Their case would be much stronger with more evidence and proof that the drives belong to him.

</comment><comment><USER27> Can somebody (in the US) be ordered to aid their own prosecution? In the EU it would be against the European convention on human rights as far as I know. So I'm guessing the US constitution protects suspects in the same way?

<comment><USER11> Yes, it's called the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution here.

      No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or
      indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual
      service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in
      jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be
      deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for
      public use, without just compensation.

<comment><USER27> Ok, but not being a witness against oneself is not the same as not being forced to aid in prosecution? Because I think not to aid in your own prosecution is broader, allowing the suspect to refuse this court order. Or was this court order unconstitutional?

<comment><USER11> I'm not arguing anymore whether it's constitutional or not. I think the argument is that he's already proven to be in possession of Child Porn, so there's no harm to his case in providing the rest of the evidence on the remaining drives.

I think that's a despicable argument, as I thought "what would a frame-up look like" and if I was doing that to someone, I would have left the keys hidden conspicuously in an accessible place to one drive that I 0wned while in the process of setting this guy up. Now the remaining drives are automatically suspect.

The difference now is that they claim they are not asking for his testimony implicating him, since he's already implicated. I just don't see how things are much different now than they were before. You might be right, about the difference between aiding and being a witness. I'm not even sure, though, how to go about proving that a person is in control of a hard drive, encrypted or not.

Unless of course you found a thumb drive on their person with the keys, unprotected by a passphrase, and they can immediately be used to decrypt the drives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> AFAIK it is physically possible to construct drives that cannot be backed up and that self destruct if you decrypt with the wrong key (using quantum magic).</comment>


Fuck Your 90 Day Exercise Window (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://zachholman.com/posts/fuck-your-90-day-exercise-window/ <comment><USER3> Equity is monopoly money. So many ways for it to fall thought so few for it to actually pay out.

As someone whos spent ~12 years in the startup space... when you take a job expect only the money guarnteed to you. If your not happy with that move on... Equity? That is a windfall.

<comment><USER4> But do I buy the options when I leave the startup? That's a hard choice.

<comment><USER5> Not to mention the savings account on the side you have to start building to buy your options when you resign! I never factored that in until I realized I had to come up with $15k on the spot to quit if I wanted to take my options with me. Now I know and am prepared, but for 24 year old me fresh out of college leaving my first startup job, that was a tough realization.

<comment><USER6> If the options are worth something, shouldn't getting 15k in credit feom a bank be pretty easy?

<comment><USER7> That's often a big "if".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for writing this. I quit my "startup employer" last year. I was leaving at a critical juncture and the company begged for me to stay at least for 3 months to complete an important project. I said "fuck you" and left. I had $300K worth of ISOs and 90 days exercise window which I let expire.

In fact the 90 days window is what made me quit before completely 1 year. Quiting sooner is better than wasting 5 years.

<comment><USER9> I'd strongly advise against saying "fuck you" to anyone. Leaving on good terms is important, and pays off. Make it a habit early on.

<comment><USER10> You know, there are times when it's entirely appropriate. Perhaps we could treat each other as adults and simply ask if there was a particular reason they didn't think parting amicably was an option? They may have had one.

<comment><USER11> > Perhaps we could treat each other as adults

A good adult like thing to start with is not literally say "fuck you" when leaving.

<comment><USER12> Depends a lot on the context behind that leaving. There are absolutely situations where it can be warranted - abuse (including verbal), for example. Politeness is the default state of affairs, but depending on how you behave, you might lose that privilege.

<comment><USER13> In any case where a 'fuck you' is warranted deadpan silence works better.

<comment><USER14> Sometimes the company deserves it.

you usually don't want to burn bridges, true. However don't ever let anyone treat you like shit. Walk away. Burn that bridge to the ground.

Like the time where one of the seniors was clearly an asshole and was right on the border of racism. My manager wouldn't do anything to jeopardize his promotion. He was clearly a bully.

Fuck that bullshit. I walked away as soon as I got my green card.

<comment><USER13> My point is that losing your composure is undignified, let them be the angry ones, they should understand that you have lost nothing and it should eat away at them. Giving a 'fuck you' is in a way providing closure for them.

<comment><USER12> So, basically, don't do it to hurt them more?

What if you want to provide a closure for _yourself_ , and don't care about them?

<comment><USER13> Exactly. You should be good enough at what you do that you are never the one in need of closure.

<comment><USER12> Closure is an emotional thing that is not necessarily (in fact, I'd say not usually) connected to "being good enough" in any meaningful sense. If anything, it can be the opposite - when you realize that you have been treated in a way that is far beneath the value that you were providing, the realization of that fact can very well lead to a "fuck you".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Maybe I am alone in this but goood ol fashioned profit sharing has again and again been a better long term value for me

I have found employees & employers tend to do more favorable in a number of ways:

* All levels of employees get to participate in compensation

* do in part to that, participants (in my albeit subjective look at things) tend to work equally as hard

* there seems to be a natural tendency to reduce waste of resources everyone gets some of the revenue slice

The only real down side I can think of is the same ones stock options have (except for the vesting period, to be frank): the longer you have been with the company and or the higher you climb the ranks usually the more you get.

Also it is true that in profit sharing a lot of times a buyout may not always be spread around, unlike with options (though it happens with options too)

To me at least with straightforward profit sharing the gains are realizable In a consistent and judicious manner

<comment><USER16> Startups generally have no profit to share.

<comment><USER17> They can share only future profit which is in the form of stock.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It is strange that the typical window is so short, or that employees accept _the ability to buy_ something as compensation in the first place.

<comment><USER19> > the ability to buy something as compensation

While that is indeed the mechanics, really what you get is exposure to upside without exposure to downside. The fact that it's options is a (probably outdated) structure that is beneficial from a tax perspective.

<comment><USER4> Only if the company IPOs. More commonly you buy the options, pay taxes on them, then the company goes under before you make your money back.

<comment><USER19> While that is common, that is unrelated to my point.

Being given an option grant does not expose you to downside. Exercising the grant can result in a loss, sure, but exercising is not necessary to have exposure to upside.

As the OP points out though, 90 day windows force you to exercise (and be exposed to downside) or forfeit your upside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> xkcd-sucks Has anyone successfully negotiated their way out of a 90 day exercise period or is it the kind of thing that can only be negotiated at a new job?

<comment><USER20> (Not A Lawyer disclaimer)

There's a tax law reason why this isn't a trivial change. Best reference I could find is here:

[https://thestartuplawblog.com/incentive-stock-options- post-t...](https://thestartuplawblog.com/incentive-stock-options-post- termination-service-exercise-periods/)

In short, to be treated as an Incentive Stock Option - which comes with benefits for you (taxed as capital gains, not as income, if you hold 1 year from exercise and 2 years from grant) and for the company (different accounting treatment and they don't have to withhold taxes at exercise time) - the option must expire within 90 days after your employment.

Some companies are now moving toward treating options as NSOs if you keep them after your employment, and ISOs if you exercise them during this period - <USER2> this kind of change comes with lawyers and accountants (and maybe even a change to the stock option plan approved by the board of directors) attached, so it's not easily negotiated for a single employee.

<comment> xkcd-sucks So, in your (uninformed, nonlawyerly) opinion, is a NSO grant with 90 day expiration just taking the piss?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For someone who was an uninformed early stage employee who has seen the company grow but far from being public, I find AMT to be a much bigger problem than the 90 day window. Although I suppose if I had a longer window, I could potentially avoid AMT by waiting.

</comment><comment><USER22> I feel obligated to repost a recent comment of mine (full thread at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19020085](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19020085)):

One of the former companies I worked at never allowed early exercise and issued standard ISO with 90 day expiration upon leaving, which is unfortunately essentially the analogue of "standard and clean" when it comes to employee compensation. By the time I was ready to leave (4+ years, I was very early) all my equity was vested, and buying it required spending ~250k (USD!) between cost of exercising and AMT taxes, all while the company shares were illiquid as ever. The company had no interest in helping me, despite me asking for an extension to the option expiration, they were too bitter that I was leaving and creating significant "damage" to the business.

It was incredibly painful and I felt very cheated and stupid for agreeing to those terms in the first place (actually faced some deep depression and anger against the world for a few months because of this, and thought about going to therapy), but what did I do in the end? I paid out the money. Yes, I wrote a check to my employer for 60k, and another check to the IRS for 190k, depleting my non-emergency savings (and this is from a very frugal person, who never even spent more than 8k on a car, car being my biggest expense ever). There were funds who would lend me the money, but wanted 50%+ of the proceeds, and if the company goes under you're still on the hook for a taxable event when the loan is forgiven.

Luckily AMT for ISO exercise can be slowly (very slowly) recouped in future tax years (and the new tax law made it a bit easier by increasing the deduction and the phaseout limits), but I still had to waste so much of my after tax money just to leave with what I matured over the years. And that money is now sitting in the government pockets for years, producing me no interest and losing value with inflation until I recoup all of it.

Fortunately, a year after I bought those shares one of the investors contacted me and bought some of my equity, so I was able to recoup all what I originally put in (and then some). But it's simply insane, and I am still in the hole for all that AMT that I will recoup in ~10 years, no less.

Other coworkers who left and didn't have the money to come up with the exercise and tax liability, simply lost them, justifying to themselves "well, they're probably not going to be worth anything anyway" (which could be totally true even after paying thousands to exercise them!).

It's a plain insult to startup employees. I wish all startup employees would rebel against this and refused to accept any startup offer unless there was early exercise paid by the company upon joining, or option expiration window of 10+ years.

I, for one, know that will never __ever__ join another startup again for this reason.

<comment><USER23> Very few people have $250K in liquid assets lying around, especially for such a risky venture.

I'll tell you a worse story: your company _does_ allow early vesting so people exercise their options at grant time, long before the vest. This way you avoid the whole taxation problem were the exercising to be happening later.

But guess what? The company does a _down round_ and lays off people, effectively 'buying back' the stock that laid off employees had paid for by 'early exercising' (i.e. the unvested remainder). Since the company buys back the shares at the same price employees bought it at, you think, hey - 'even stevens'? No! Because it's a down round, you're selling something 'above fair market value' (even though it's the price you paid) - and you have to pay taxes!

So consider that: you have to pay taxes on stock that you never properly owned, and never made a dime on!

Ex: you have 10K shares with strike price of 50 cents, vest over 4 years. You exercise them all right away (before vesting) at 50 cents. After 2 years, you get laid off, the company buys back 5K shares at 50 cents. Same price. But since there's a 'down round' the shares are only worth 20 cents each. You now owe taxes for selling 5K of something you bought at 50 cents, sold at 50 cents, but are only worth 20 cents, ergo 30 cents a share 'profit' \- that you never realized on shares you never actually owned!

The company in the meantime, bought something at 50 cents only worth 20 cents and gets a tax write off.

The IRS is ballpark neutral, so it's really like the company taking money from employees they just laid off.

Now, the company can issue a ton more shares and wipe out the value of laid off employees equity, and issue _new_ equity to the staff that stayed on to keep the current staff happy.

In terms of % ownership, this has the effect of simply transferring ownership from laid off staff to the current staff + owners.

This happened to me, I'm not sure how common it is, but surely it's not that rare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> 83(b) with pre-vesting exercise if you can, probably only works at early early stage. I did that twice with different outcomes, overall positive.

<comment><USER25> "If you can"... I've never quite figured this out. Is this something the company has to offer or can anyone do it with the financial means and acccess to a good tax lawyer / accountant?

<comment><USER26> You mention financial means, but keep in mind that depending on the stage the company is at, "financial means" ratchets upwards. The last "real" pre-IPO company I joined would have required a ~$300K check from me to early exercise.

<comment><USER27> You don't necessarily need to early exercise all of your options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone actually understand the consequences of turning ISO's into NSO's?

It's easy for someone to say "oh yeah, just convert the ISOs to non-quals and give me my 10 year exercise window". What does it actually mean for the companies (and yourself on the other side) to support this?

<comment><USER29> We went through a giant hassle to provide this for our employees. Oddly enough, they don't appear to give a shit. At all. My cofounder and I thought this would be a big selling point.

The downside to an employer is: first, you know that in a 90-day exercise or lose them world, lots of ex-employees don't exercise. That's great for your options pool. Second, our employees seem not to care. Third, anything nonstandard raises questions in future rounds. Fourth, there's apparently some more complex tax accounting according to our cfo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have had to walk away from several hundred thousand like this. Sickening

</comment><comment><USER31> Seems like an obvious opportunity for a specialized financing firm...</comment>


Google: We're not killing ad blockers. Translation: We made them too powerful - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/06/13/google_chrome_ad_blockers/ <comment><USER2> If Firefox would add a smooth zoom for pinch for Windows touchscreens, then I would never look back to Chrome. Its a feature that has been promised for many years, but has never been implemented properly.</comment>


Object injection vulnerability enables remote code execution in WordPress 3.6 - <AUTHOR> http://vagosec.org/2013/09/wordpress-php-object-injection/index.html <comment><USER2> An old (2.x) version of WordPress I worked on included an eval() statement that amounted to basically just doing variable assignment. I am sure there was some reason for this (probably not a good one), but it turned me off to the WordPress core. The fact that every WP release is quickly followed up with a patch for some critical remote code execution vulnerability tells me that there is something systematically wrong with its handling of user input and security.

Because of that, I moved off WordPress for personal blogging and onto Pelican [1]. You can't compromise static content.

[1] [http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.2/](http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.2/)

<comment><USER3> Pelican isn't exactly client-friendly and has far fewer features than WordPress. Pelican and the rest of the static-site generators might be great for developers or tech-savvy folks, but you'd be hard-pressed to sell the system to the average web client.

<comment><USER2> Exactly, but it's perfect for me. I guess having a WYSIWYG editor and a web UI would make it more user friendly.

I also like that I can have my content under version control.

<comment><USER4> Statamic tries to blend the best of both worlds (client-friendly UI + no database): [http://statamic.com/](http://statamic.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool research. I like how you "connect-the-dots" from the benign-looking MySQL's behaviour to the bad code in Wordpress. This reminds me of [http://www.suspekt.org/2008/08/18/mysql-and-sql-column- trunc...](http://www.suspekt.org/2008/08/18/mysql-and-sql-column-truncation- vulnerabilities/).

I'm surprised that the fix in Wordpress wasn't explicitly marking fields that need to be serialized/unserialized, instead of second-guessing based on the broken promise by MySQL.

> MySQL replaces characters it doesn't recognize (for the given character > set), with a placeholder. MySQL will sometimes replace byte sequences with > "?" or "�" (U+FFFD). Such replacements would not be harmful.

This is so wrong. A database must never change any data that it's asked to stored. Wordpress, and other applications, always make that assumption, and when it isn't true anymore all hell breaks loose.

PS: it blows my mind that it looks like strpos in PHP could return either boolean or integer [1].

[1] [http://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tags/3.6.1/wp- include...](http://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tags/3.6.1/wp- includes/functions.php#L0)

<comment><USER6> I'm always sort of flabbergasted when I see PHP programmers doing this "maybe_xyz" stuff. I recall there's a PHP api for escaping stuff that has weird options for either allowing "double escaping" or ignoring successive invocations. It screams amateur hour to say "uh, i have a string, and I don't know if it's escaped yet, so I'll just call this API that escapes it because it magically avoids 'double escaping' for me." There's no such thing as "double escaping" \-- it's just "escaping". The fact that you might be escaping something that appears to be an already-escaped string is irrelevant. If you are dealing with user input strings and you don't know for sure whether a string is escaped or not (or how many times), you are probably writing a security hole somewhere.

<comment><USER7> While I totaly agree, this is in no way specific to PHP.

Ruby on Rails has such ugliness too, a view helper called "escape_once": [http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/TagHel...](http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/TagHelper.html#method- i-escape_once)

What's crazy is that I can't even find an "escape" helper. Ho it's called html_escape. Ho and there is a html_escape_once too!

Python Django too: [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/utils/#django.util...](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/utils/#django.utils.html.conditional_escape)

<comment><USER6> Fair enough. It's funny how angry I get when I think of someone needing an "escape_once" function or "is_serialized". I think this discussion might have to become part of my interview process, because if someone doesn't understand the absolute undeniable terribleness of trying to determine if a string has been escaped or serialized by inspecting its contents, then I really don't want them in my code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> WordPress is the PHP of web frameworks....

I'll be in the corner.</comment>


TaiChi: Open-source computer graphics library - <AUTHOR> http://taichi.graphics/ <comment><USER2> For anyone interested - since its not immediately clear from the website (though the graphics are stunning) – TaiChi is a cross platform combined physically based animation and physically based rendering toolkit/ library. It wraps a lot of current state of art research algorithms and significantly simplifies doing graphics R&D. It is also a lot of fun to play with.

<comment><USER3> So it's not doing physics?

<comment><USER4> I believe it is doing physics. See [http://taichi.graphics/gallery/](http://taichi.graphics/gallery/) for some examples.

<comment><USER5> It is both not doing and doing physics. That is the TaiChi way.

<comment><USER6> Actually, the TaiChi way would be "not-doing" (Wei Wu) physics. See: [http://www.the-taoism-for-modern-world.com/wei-wu-wei-not- do...](http://www.the-taoism-for-modern-world.com/wei-wu-wei-not-doing- taoism/)

<comment><USER7> It's the other way around, wu wei--the absence of effort. The extra wei in the front is the "doing" of "not doing" (wu wei) which seems to be something particular to this author. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_wei](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_wei)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can the submitter explain this better? What sort of computer graphics? Real- time simulated? Path traced? I explored the website and the github and neither really made clear. "Computer graphics" is so broad as to be useless as a descriptor.

<comment><USER9> [http://taichi.graphics/about/](http://taichi.graphics/about/)

<comment><USER10> That about page doesn't help at all.

> Taichi is an open-source computer graphics library with implementations of > 40+ graphics papers. It has a hybrid design: a C++14 kernel part, and a > user-friendly Python 3 wrapper.

That's the extent of the information on that page.

<comment><USER11> The gallery of rendered images and videos is probably the quickest way of getting an idea of what this software project can achieve:

[http://taichi.graphics/gallery/](http://taichi.graphics/gallery/)

<comment><USER8> Doesn't answer the questions I had. Is this real-time or batch rendered? Also, the site advertises it as a "computer graphics library" but many of these demos are more about physics simulation, which only adds more confusion...

<comment><USER12> Physics simulation is a very active computer graphics research topic (see e.g. the SIGGRAPH conference). The goal in computer graphics research will not be to have an exact result, but to have a visually plausible (and pleasing) result as fast as possible.

<comment><USER8> Yes, I know. But such libraries often call themselves "physics simulation libraries." The term "computer graphics" is typically reserved for rendering. So what is this library doing? The scene setup and rendering? The offline rasterization? The frame-to-frame physical simulations? More than one of the above?

<comment><USER13> It's a library of complete physically-based simulation and rendering algorithm implementations.

You seem to be assuming that "library" must mean a layer or an API providing certain runtime abstractions or functionality. That's not really what this is. It's more about code reuse and a rationalized core of tools for implementing the various techniques.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The Github README has some good examples too: [https://github.com/yuanming- hu/taichi](https://github.com/yuanming-hu/taichi)

</comment><comment><USER15> So this is mostly for non-realtime, non-interactive stuff, right?

<comment><USER16> There's a number of interactive simulations. My impression is that it's for writing research code, which often requires scaling things down to iterate on the simulation behaviours at interactive rates, then scaling up and going offline to make a cool video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> How does this compare to magnum.graphics?

<comment><USER18> Excellent question.

You are clearly familiar with the latter. Perhaps take a couple of minutes to read through the linked project and answer the question here, for everyone's reference?

<comment><USER17> I'm actually not very familiar with it, other than it's meant for more real- time stuff and it supports a lot of different platforms. I'd love someone comparing that is actually educated on the topic (computer graphics) :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It was stunning and I can see use of that in corporate presentation, science study, school IT..just wow

</comment><comment><USER20> What's the difference to say something like Unity?

<comment><USER21> Unity is a full blown game editing and creation suite with a complete engine (physics, rendering, assets, sound, so on). This is a graphics library using some very fancy, very modern research.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm realizing that the github link would have been better

[https://github.com/yuanming-hu/taichi](https://github.com/yuanming-hu/taichi)

mods can you change it to the github link pls?

<comment><USER22> That animation of a knife slicing a bananaesque object is going to give me nightmares. I never knew there was an uncanny valley for fruit before now.

<comment><USER23> Yup, true uncanny valley - it's clear that this is something similar to banana but significantly different, it doesn't behave like a banana at all but like dough or modeling clay in the shape of a banana.

I'd never considered how a banana would look like when cut, and I'm not certain how it should look but I'm certain that it's not like this.

<comment><USER16> The banana example comes from the MLS-MPM paper[1]. MPM is basically a way of simulating deformable solids using particles. The big thing that the MLS-MPM paper achieved was that the particles wouldn't magically interact with their neighbours on the other side of a thin solid.

The example is kind of ugly, but it's really only trying to illustrate one specific property of their simulation: that the knife can properly separate neighbouring particles from each other without any spooky interactions between the banana on one side of the knife and the banana on the other side.

[1]: [https://youtu.be/8iyvhGF9f7o](https://youtu.be/8iyvhGF9f7o) | [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3201293](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3201293)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> uuhhhh bad name ?</comment>


Celebrate Your Freedom to Read: Banned books on Google - <AUTHOR> http://books.google.com/googlebooks/banned/ <comment><USER2> I remember reading 1984 during my lunch breaks in high school and when I turned that final page, I was a changed person. It's unfathomable to me that some young adults today, in the same country, are purposely sheltered by their community and government from having that same experience.

<comment><USER3> 1984 was perhaps the best book I read while in high school.

<comment><USER4> The important thing about 1984 is that it's message is even more relevant today.

We _need_ the next generation to read it so they remember not to go there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I might have jumped the gun here; a lot of these books aren't really available from Google Books - they're mostly limited previews. (dang copyright!)

Good on them for maintaining the spotlight, I suppose?

</comment><comment><USER5> Banned _in the USA_.

Are all those out of copyright already?

</comment><comment><USER6> Hyperbole.

"Banned" means that someone is stopping you from buying it. However, most of the instances of "book banning" in the US consist of a public entity not buying a given book.

Yes, there are instances of actual book banning, but they almost all involve pornography. Does Google Books/video carry those books/movies? For example, how much Max Hardcore does Google carry?

</comment><comment><USER7> More detail on why and where classic novels were banned here:

[http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychall...](http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengedclassics/reasonsbanned/index.cfm)

Hailing from the Emerald Isle, I find it embarrassing how many of these books were banned in Ireland.

</comment><comment><USER8> Sorry for the stupid question, but could anybody tell me how to actually read a book on Google books? I never seem to find a link to the actual text of the book. (For example I just tried Catch-22 from the list of banned books).</comment>


Ask HN: Tips to Reduce Docker Image Sizes - <AUTHOR> What are some of the most common and advanced tips to reduce docker image sizes? For Rails app, for python app. For docker images in general? <comment><USER2> [https://hackernoon.com/tips-to-reduce-docker-image- sizes-876...](https://hackernoon.com/tips-to-reduce-docker-image- sizes-876095da3b34)

[https://rollout.io/blog/reduce-docker-image- size/](https://rollout.io/blog/reduce-docker-image-size/)

[https://phoenixnap.com/kb/docker-image- size](https://phoenixnap.com/kb/docker-image-size)

[https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1133826/tips-to- reduce-...](https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1133826/tips-to-reduce- Docker-image-size)

</comment><comment><USER3> For docker images in general: the best way is to do multi-stage builds [0][1]. You will need to (re)write your Docker files to use this.

A quick-and-dirty way that doesn't require rewriting is just to use the experimental --squash flag[1] (i.e. add: --experimental --squash) when running docker (you can also turn on --experimental permanently by putting { "experimental": true } into docker's /etc/docker/daemon.json file. And, on a Mac, you can open the Docker app and there's a checkbox to turn on experimental features and then you can just use --squash in the terminal).

Anecdotally, I had a 4.67GB docker file that --squash reduced to a little over 1GB. However, a rewrite of the docker file to do a multi-stage build took that 4.67GB file down to just under 0.5GB.

P.S. Pro-tip: if you want to speed up your docker builds, if you're using 18.06 or higher, you can use use buildkit [2]. Again, anecdotally, on a 6-core Macbook from 2019 I think I got a 30% speedup or so -- your mileage may vary (a colleague with an 8-core machine I think got a 50% speedup -- it's been a while, so these percentages may be a bit off, but you get the idea).

It was also an experimental feature early on, so you needed to have experimental features turned on (as described above with --squash). With later versions you don't need to do that -- check your version's documentation.

Anyway, you can either set an environment variable to use it i.e. export DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 or you can set this permanently by adding: {"features":{"buildkit": true}} to /etc/docker/daemon.json

[0] [https://blog.logrocket.com/reduce-docker-image-sizes- using-m...](https://blog.logrocket.com/reduce-docker-image-sizes-using-multi- stage-builds/)

[1] [https://docs.docker.com/develop/develop-images/multistage- bu...](https://docs.docker.com/develop/develop-images/multistage-build/)

[2] [https://www.giantswarm.io/blog/container-image-building- with...](https://www.giantswarm.io/blog/container-image-building-with- buildkit)</comment>


Keyword Strategy Tool That Comes with a Digital Marketing Strategy - <AUTHOR> https://emarketing-strategy.co.uk/keyword-strategy-tool-video-demo/ <comment><AUTHOR> The logic Digital Marketing Methodology - Book is on Amazon, "Lost in the Digital Noise" Gemma and James Pybus</comment>


Bullshit fighting - <AUTHOR> https://stactivist.com/2016/05/29/bullshit-fighting/ <comment><USER2> The bullshit asimmetry: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

<comment><USER3> Definitely. It takes hours to properly argue. It takes minutes to bullshit.

How many times do you give up on a social media argument just because you don't want to spend the next 30-60 minutes researching and building a solid case for your argument? I've given up completely. The bullshitters win.

<comment><USER4> And I think the more troubling problem is that bullshitters are generally indifferent to or hostile to the truth, to the very inclination to seek truth. The primary lens through which they evaluate statements is "personally useful to me", not "true".

So even if I carefully build a case for "true", it won't make much of a difference. At best, they decide their next personally useful statement is a non sequitur or a topic change or just going to some other context that is useful.

To me that's one of the really amazing things about Trump's rise. He really doesn't care about facts or logic or consistency. Even among politicians, he's a standout; none of his Republican opponents could come to grips with how totally irrelevant accuracy or orthodoxy are to his game. People keep trying to figure out what his true views are, but at this point I don't think that's a meaningful question.

And I should add that this isn't a left vs right issue; a recent example of a left-wing demagogue was Venezuela's Chavez. But Trump's rise is the first time I've gotten to see it happen up close.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.stoa.org.uk/topics/bullshit/pdf/on- bullshit.pdf](http://www.stoa.org.uk/topics/bullshit/pdf/on-bullshit.pdf)

> One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much > bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend > to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their > ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the > phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much > sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what > bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we > lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In > other words, we have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a > theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative > and exploratory philosophical analysis.

<comment><USER6> > we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is

Information asymmetry. Bullshit is applied game theory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hard to tell whether this is serious or not. What field is this describing? Scientific papers? Random idiots just posting on websites? If the idea is to challenge it everywhere you're setting yourself up to being that person who never sleeps because "someone is wrong on the internet".

<comment><USER8> > What field is this describing? Scientific papers?

Most likely yes. The author works in a scientific institute and has number of publications.

<comment><USER7> So...peer review, then? I suppose you could rebut comments from muppets if you were feeling a little bored but it's unclear what that would hope to achieve. Could you imagine stopping the industry which talks rubbish about the lunar landings and 9/11 with well written, carefully reasoned replies?

Don't wrestle with pigs; you both get muddy, and the pigs like it.

<comment><USER9> The problem with science is that it's findings get exaggerated by the media and by politicians. People latch onto one positive result, and ignore all the negative results. The media reports on findings that haven't been replicated yet, and significantly distort and exaggerate them.

Even within science, there are problems like publication bias and political bias.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I tend to agree with the intention but I think this subject is way more complex than this.

People form visions of the world based on their beliefs systems and they pull/push that vision in their behavior and the things they build.

To show what I mean about this: in a way, many good entrepreneurs are reality deniers. They need to refuse to believe that the current status quo is the best that the world can be. They need to believe a reality that does not exist (yet) in order to build it. For people with affinity they will be visionaries, for people that antagonise with them they will be bullshitters.

But that's how disruption happens, with cultural and market irreverence. That is pitched "selling smoke" (in the eyes of the cynic) or selling a new way to experience X in life (in the eyes of its believers and users/clients)

<comment><USER11> It may be useful to distinguish between things that are not true and never will be, and things that are not true but could eventually be true. If one were to try to present the former as though it were true, what they'd be presenting is bullshit, whereas I would say that the latter is merely (note the air quotes) "bullshit." To those who need everything to be true now, the latter will be seen as bullshit, but it is not actual bullshit, as it may yet become true.

<comment><USER10> Good point!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The greatest danger posed by bullshit is that powerful persons start believing their own. The neutral ends justify the means form is relatively benign.

</comment><comment><USER13> Trump is clearly on the cutting edge of this phenomenon.

<comment><USER14> I'm very sure he doesn't care one way or the other. He speaks with confidence then reframes conversations as necessary. This passes for leadership in modern society. Have you ever tried to listen to a US senator or a UK Lord or a Japanese Diet member argue?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I honestly thought this was about Trump for the first few paragraphs, and almost quit reading.

While we've found the the scientific meathod doesn't scale, I suspect that a Watson style application could seriously help one day. This is only compounded this with the "publish or perish" mentality. This encourages falsifying results, but also adds more noise to the pool of journals, decreasing your chance of being called out. I don't think the issue is with liars, but with the system.

What we really need now is Scienceology, (no not the religion) but a division of science that analyzes science. Finding better ways than what we have now.

edit: Cleaned up to make it slightly less nonsensical. I really shouldn't make a comment before having a coffee.

</comment><comment><USER16> What are good methods to fight bullshit at work? Conversely, what are the bad methods to fight bullshit at work?

EDIT: Let say it's not in the company DNA and that it's just some individuals behaviours.

<comment><USER17> Is the bullshit built into the company's DNA? Some places I have worked have certain varieties of bullshit that have basically become company truths. If this is the case, then you really aren't going to fight it.

<comment><USER16> Let say it's not and that it's just some individuals behaviours, in a relatively good company culture.

<comment><USER17> Its basically a rally the troops moment. One person can screw with a lot of people, so you probably need to work with others to stop any outbreak.

I assume we aren't talking a technical argument. If we are, then do a presentation and it will all come out in the Q&A.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > If something is not true, who cares? All the same. These attributes make > bullshitting worse than lying.

It makes bullshitting clearly BETTER. Being overly defensive about it, misses the point. BS is hard to combat, which is why it's a successful approach (not even a learned strategy because then it would be lying).

</comment><comment><USER18> Love of bullshit is the root of all evil.

</comment><comment><USER19> You've linked to the main page, which at this moment in time happens to have the bullshit blog post at the top. It's better to link to the actual blog post: [https://stactivist.com/2016/05/29/bullshit- fighting/](https://stactivist.com/2016/05/29/bullshit-fighting/)

<comment><USER20> Agreed, I'm quite sensitive to the scrollbar size when I land on a new article, and in this case I almost closed the window, thinking this would take the whole day to read :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a list of the top-10 websites (or news sources) on HN? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> Hello everyone. In no particular order, I have observed more articles submitted and up-voted for the following news sources. Whether unconscious bias or otherwise, due to their popularity on HN, I tend to trust these sources more than others: Bloomberg, TechCrunch, LWN, Github, WSJ, AVC, Atlas Obscura, CityLab, Stratechery.

Is there an official top-10 list? Do others have a list of top-10 news sites that you trust and follow regularly?</comment>


Ask HN: Has anyone used dual n-back and found an impact? - <AUTHOR> I've read through most of https://gwern.net/DNB-FAQ. Looked at most of the published papers. Reddit is pretty silent on the matter. I'm curious if anyone here has trained dual n-back and found an impact in their day-to-day.<p>I'm debating (probably) of trying a daily dual n-back routine. My biased experiment is multiple online IQ tests and then doing an assessment after a month of daily dual n-back. Love to know if anyone has suggestions or anecdotal results. <comment><USER2> I'm really bad at working with numbers (I get computers to do that for me).

I read that the new Japanese craze "Sudoku" would fix all that. They claim it is a good brain exercise.

Years later, I still suck at dealing with numbers (and still get computers to do it for me) but I'm really good at Sudoku.

Useful? Only if Sudoku was my end goal. The skill hasn't impacted any of the traditional targets you'd expect if you believe the mind games vendor claims. And the skill is definitely not connected to math/numbers/etc or any part of real life outside of personal entertainment. Replace the numbers with fruit or emojis or whatever, and you quickly notice its an advanced pattern matching game like they use to train parrots. A toddler's game re-jigged for adults.

Dual n-back is a hard game/puzzle/skill test, and I never used it because I expect it to be more of the same. You might get good at the game, so do it if you want to be good at that game. But we already know how focus works, so you just might develope a strategy for this one way the puzzle purposely distracts you. It doesn't translate to the real world. Try to come up with a real-world situation that mimics dual n-back's mental process. There are some, but the moment you change the objects and context, it all goes out the window.

I believe the "lab" results only prove people can answer questions better when in a really focused state of mind, and _nothing_ more. No new skills added outside a new strategy or two that don't affect your day-to-day.

tl;dr dual nback is the same as that audio jammer toy. You might master it, but the moment someone changes the context (eg: inserting wrong words) you'll be back to babbling like a buffoon.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you'll be wasting your time if you're looking for actual impact on your life. Try spaced repetition and/or incremental reading instead: they have much clearer and more substantive effects that you can experience directly.

You can't measure your IQ using online tests.</comment>