Profiling CPython at Instagram (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://instagram-engineering.com/profiling-cpython-at-instagram-89d4cbeeb898 <comment><USER2> this is a very interesting talk around the same topic - [https://lwn.net/Articles/754163/](https://lwn.net/Articles/754163/)

> _But Shapiro may not be aware that the Python core developers have often > preferred simpler, more understandable code that is easier to read and > follow, over more complex algorithms and data structures in the interpreter. > Some performance may well have been sacrificed for readability._

> _Mark Shannon said that Python 3.7 has added a feature that should provide a > similar boost as the method-lookup caching used in the experiment. Shapiro > said he had looked at those changes but still believed his proposed > mechanism would provide more benefit. Attribute lookup still requires five > lookups in CPython, while it is only one lookup in the experimental version. > Shannon did not sound entirely convinced of that, however._

</comment><comment><USER3> _> Roughly 85% of LOAD_ATTRs occured at monomorphic sites;_

This observation and the accompanying graph are, I think, the "generational hypothesis" equivalent to static types.

The generational hypothesis says most objects are either very short-lived or long-lived and modern generation GCs very effectively optimize for that fact.

A particularly pragmatic way to look at static types is that they optimize for monomorphic calls at the expense of polymorphic calls. For the latter, they require you to manually define interfaces, virtual methods, or some other explicit dynamism. In return, monomorphic calls are much faster.

The 85% number is an indication that that's a good optimization, as long as the other 15% aren't too hard to handle in your statically-typed language.

<comment><USER4> Or you can just do what Python 3.7 implemented (and Instagram seems to have separately implemented) -- cache attribute lookups and invalidate the cache if necessary. [0]

The GC optimization, well, that'll probably be left up to other interpreters.

[0] "Mark Shannon said that Python 3.7 has added a feature that should provide a similar boost as the method-lookup caching used in the experiment. Shapiro said he had looked at those changes but still believed his proposed mechanism would provide more benefit. Attribute lookup still requires five lookups in CPython, while it is only one lookup in the experimental version. Shannon did not sound entirely convinced of that, however." [https://lwn.net/Articles/754163/](https://lwn.net/Articles/754163/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > This suggested techniques to eliminate loads and stores (e.g. switching to a > register based bytecode) would be an effective optimization.

Did anybody try anything in these line of work?

<comment><USER6> The Perl6 VMs (Parrot, MoarVM) are register based.

<comment><USER7> I believe Lua is as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This gives instagram ideas for how to improve the python interpreter for their workload. If instead you're interested in profiling to look for ways to improve your python code, check out [https://github.com/uber/pyflame](https://github.com/uber/pyflame) or [https://github.com/benfred/py-spy](https://github.com/benfred/py-spy)

<comment><USER9> To repeat [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17929621](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17929621), there is Python support in several comprehensive performance tools with better visualization/analysis functions than flame graphs. I don't know how well the Python-specific instrumentation compares with the above, but it would be worth working on, if necessary, for what the tools provide generally..

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there any Python library for profiling or optimizing regex? E.g. for a given set of fixture data, see which order things inside each group should be in to get the fastest test suite times while everything still passes.

<comment><USER11> Optimal layout of a NFA-Regex is (I assume) an Hard academic Problem. Which means a library likely won't just be able to "do it for you".

The CS-Fundamentals that underscore (Python, Perl, PRCE, and Java regexes) are the same. So this longer article may help: [https://www.javaworld.com/article/2077757/core- java/optimizi...](https://www.javaworld.com/article/2077757/core- java/optimizing-regular-expressions-in-java.html) as while the syntax of the regex may change, the side effects and performance implications of the individual operators will not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So stop using functions...got it.

<comment><USER13> The Python Performance Tips [1] basically says this, along with many other helpful hints when trying to squeeze performance. They all boil down to: In a tight loop, don't do anything that triggers a lookup or function call.

[1] [https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSpeed/PerformanceTips#Dat...](https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSpeed/PerformanceTips#Data_Aggregation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> published at November 2017

<comment><USER15> Thought-bleach for yesterday's post?

<comment><AUTHOR> What's a thought-bleach?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why not just use Java/C++?

<comment><USER4> "Our most common success story starts with a Java or C++ project slated to take a team of 3-5 developers somewhere between 2-6 months, and ends with a single motivated developer completing the project in 2-6 weeks (or hours, for that matter)."

[https://www.paypal-engineering.com/2014/12/10/10-myths-of- en...](https://www.paypal-engineering.com/2014/12/10/10-myths-of-enterprise- python/)</comment></comment>


Google Chrome 4.0: Fastest OS X browser by 34 per cent - <AUTHOR> http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/0,39029471,49303325,00.htm

<comment><USER2> The author compares the JavaScript performance of a Chromium nightly build with Safari 4.0 based solely on the SunSpider benchmark.

Lousy article behind a sensationalist title.

</comment><comment><USER3> I love Chrome. I now use it exclusively on Windows at work because Firefox is just so much slower compared to it. At home on Ubuntu, I use the Chromium daily builds which are now very stable and using --enable-plugins for Flash is becoming more stable every week.

This is just so great for browsers in general. As we all know, competition just makes everything better. I'm glad how Chromium has grown and I look forward to see how the other browsers begin innovating.

<comment><USER4> I love chrome, but it just can't manage tabs the way the Tree Style Tabs extension can.

<comment><USER5> I've used the Tree Style Tabs on Firefox, and I can say that I actually prefer the way Chrome does it. With Chrome, it looks like a standard list of tabs, but behind the scenes, it's a tree.

To each their own...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If it's ok with you, I'm going to go ahead and mentally refer to it as Google Chrome 0.4.

</comment><comment><USER7> After using Firefox 3 on Linux since the alpha, Chromium has reminded me what it is like to use a browser where all local operations are instantaneous. I just wonder how low the hardware requirements for Chrome OS will be.

</comment><comment><USER8> Scrolling on Chrome is still really slow compared to Safari (uses 100% cpu!) Guess this test doesn't do any of that.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Because I've used Firefox and various add-ons at work for so frequently and for so long I think Chrome is going to take some getting used to, but from what I've seen so far it's well worth the effort.

Firefox has served me well over the last few years but seems to grow ever- slower on my Macbook while playing with Chromium is like a breath of fresh air.

Next week I'm going to try using the built-in Developer Tools to see how they stack up against Firebug, but what I've seen thus far has been pretty encouraging.

<comment><USER9> Safari's Web Inspector (used verbatim in Chrome) is still missing a few features vs. Firebug (mostly with editing, and integration with webapp frameworks), but it's _STABLE_ , and fully integrated.

Firebug crashes constantly, is unusable with many sites, and is never quite in sync with Mozilla's development plans. Mozilla blew it big time promoting their completely useless "Web Developer" extension for years (even shipping it in the installer), and completely ignoring Firebug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I did a sunspider benchmark of safari and firefox (forgot which version, but I did it recently with the latest versions of both) and their speeds were almost identical.

<comment><USER11> So?

<comment><USER10> Well safari kept saying how it was the fastest browser around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Faster than Opera too?

Edit: Yes, at least the Javascript engine is significantly faster on this benchmark.

On Chrome 126.96.36.199 on Windows I scored 1051.2 ms, on Firefox I scored 4633.8 ms, and on Opera I scored 6230.2 ms.

</comment><comment><USER10> Safari should just take the V8 engine.

<comment><USER13> Why? The two projects have been swapping the performance lead back and forth since the start of this current period of insane browser development, and it would be an enormous undertaking to make the switch.

<comment><USER10> Ok, then understandably they shouldn't. But I wandered off and argued another point: why open source should take the best and incorporate it.

<comment><USER14> The problem with this approach is that there are large switching costs involved (due to the previously mentioned tight coupling between javascript engine and rendering engine) and the "whose JS engine is the fastest" crown gets passed back and forth between Mountain View and Cupertino so frequently they should just plant it somewhere around southwest Los Altos and be done with it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Read the Update: at the bottom, and you'll get a feel for the technical / journalistic aptitude of the writer.

It really smacks of Mike Angelo's noisemaking at the early part of the decade: <http://everything2.com/title/MozillaQuest>

Edit: I really miss the tech-meets-timecube aspect of that site.</comment>


Facebook Bans Fake News Sites from Using Its Advertising Network - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-bans-fake-news-sites-from-using-its-advertising-network-1479175778 <comment><USER2> Facebook apparently already had a fix ready for fake news, but didn't implement it because it disproportionately affected right-wing news sites, and they were afraid of backlash:

[http://www.gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news- was...](http://www.gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was-undercut- by-fear-1788808204)

This got me thinking. I'm center-leftish, but I'd like to think open minded. To me, the results FB saw are correct - from Birtherism, Obama being a Muslim, Sandy Hook trutherism, all the way to Democrats using the voting records of dead people to swing the election, the false conspiracy pedalling news stories I've seen have been overwhelmingly on the right. (note that I am not saying all right-wing people believe these things, just that most of the people who do are right-wing)

But am I wrong? I'm constantly aware that Facebook puts me in a filter bubble. Does anyone have any good examples of left-leaning fake, conspiratorial news stories in the last few years?

<comment><USER3> > Does anyone have any good examples of left-leaning fake, conspiratorial news > stories in the last few years?

The theory that Putin hacked the Democrats to get Donald Trump elected.

There's zero proof that Russia is behind the leaks, but Dems still peddle this myth. Hillary Clinton even went as far as threatening Russia with military intervention over the emails. And there's still zero proof Russia had anything to do with it.

<comment><USER2> There isn't conclusive evidence, but from what I've read, the hack to Podesta's email used a Bitly account known to be associated with Russian intelligence:

[http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-hackers-broke-into- john...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-hackers-broke-into-john-podesta- and-colin-powells-gmail-accounts)

Like I said, not conclusive, but I wonder what definite evidence you're likely to have with intelligence agencies. Point taken, though.

<comment><USER4> I agree, this is definitely not conclusive proof that the source used by Wikileaks is the same source. It's probably important to note that his password was something like "p@ssword".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find it odd that a lot people think discerning between real and fake news is hard, or has some sort of insurmountable "gray area" filled with slippery slopes.

We've done it for pornography, and it has worked really well. I don't get bombarded with pornography on the internet anymore. Why can't we apply the same logic to fake news?

And no one thinks banning certain type of advertising from pornography sites as censorship. It still exists, it's still growing, and you can find it easily. Same applies here I think.

<comment><USER6> Pornography is socially unacceptable.

Fake news is socially acceptable, if it agrees with your (and many of you friends') viewpoint.

I have had a numerous friends and family of all levels of education genuinely share things that is clearly misleading, if not fake, to my eyes at first glance. There could be multiple reasons: some people simply _want_ the story to be true, others simply trust a place that has a website and a mostly-shady look.

We need major change and guidance to help people separate lies from the truth... as long as people still want the truth, which is not entirely clear to me right now.

<comment><USER7> Fake news is absolutely not socially acceptable if it agrees with your own viewpoint.

Google does a pretty good job of detecting scam website these days by looking at site reputation and detecting link farms. Hopefully Facebook will do the same.

<comment><USER6> Fake news absolutely is acceptable. For the posts involving fake news on your Facebook, have you seen more people agreeing with the story - or at least liking it - or more people fact-checking it and getting a like on the fact- check link?

I have always seen more likes on the story itself than on any fact-checking correction follow-up comment.

<comment><USER7> We are agreeeing. I meant "socially, as in what a proper member of Society should do". Don't steal things from others and don't spread fake news, among other morals we should hold dear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> All of you are complaining about fake news, but what about omitted news?

What's the point in having a news source which presents only/mostly true news, the same time ignoring huge amount of those ones which do not fit their political line?

This will result in people having a false image of an overall situation, exactly the same as fake news will.

Moreover, I think news omitting is the root cause of fake news problem. People see certain events happen around them. They know these events are true because they see them with their own eyes. But they do not see reports on these events in mass media. The same time alternative and partisan media report these events, people see them on their FB timelines. So they redirect their trust towards these media and FB. If this schema repeats for years, they can trust these media so much that they can accept fake and unbelievable stories (which are also naturally more likely to appear in partisan media). And refuting these stories by mass media makes them even more sound in their eyes, especially if they once saw these media refuting stories which were real.

And this applies to both sides.

<comment><USER9> OTOH the media also loves to report non-newsworthy events, making them appear to be more common than they are. We now return you to our developing "missing white woman" story...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The problem is that so-called "real" news is itself full of subjectivity, bias and hyperbole. So continues the hand-wringing and pearl-clutching from last week.

<comment><USER7> How is that _the_ problem? Can you cite some examples?

<comment><USER4> There are multiple reporters who colluded with the Clinton campaign to push a specific narrative during the election. In one example, Glenn Thrush went so far as to call himself a hack in one of the emails to her campaign chairman, which he ended with "Please don't tell anyone I did this".

Granted there's a difference between bias and a completely fabricated article about something that did not happen, but presenting half the story is also problematic, as is coordinating with the people who the story is being written about.

Unfortunately, if one were to entertain the idea of banning Politico, it would be considered an affront to the idea of freedom of the press.

By agreeing to allow biased coverage to profit from advertising, Facebook is essentially saying that you can do this as long as you don't get caught. By the same yardstick, several right leaning media companies are guilty of the same sin, but the fact that we have proof in this case suggests that this is a standard practice in the industry, which reveals that honest reporting may only exist upto a particular point.

Source: [https://wikileaks.org/podesta- emails/emailid/12681](https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/12681)

<comment><USER7> Hack language aside, wasn't he asking if the article had an falsehoods in it?

How do you expect reporters to have access to "sources inside the X campaign" without making an effort to build relationships and trust?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> would that be the end of the onion [http://www.theonion.com/](http://www.theonion.com/) ?

And what is defined as fake news ? These developments will prove really interesting.

<comment><USER12> I love the onion, but it's deeply disturbing how many people believe their articles are real. There is a small niche online of screenshots of people falling for them: [http://literallyunbelievable.org/](http://literallyunbelievable.org/)

<comment><USER13> I admit that I once fell for an article from the German-based equivalent of the Onion.

I had a good laugh when I checked the domain though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Please ban the Huffington Post while you are at it.

<comment><USER15> before salon?

<comment><USER14> You are right. Some samples from the Salon webpage:

"The racist, fascist extreme right is represented footsteps from the Oval Office": Republicans warn of Trump presidency

Donald Trump has killed American Exceptionalism: Why his election was the deathblow for our great national myth

White flight from reality: Inside the racist panic that fueled Donald Trump's victory

Has the American "experiment" run its course? The empire of chaos has overtaken America.

Please Google/Facebook add this to the list to remove as well.

<comment><USER15> The misogyny apocalypse: Turns out being white and male counts for more than intelligence, grace or decency

[http://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-misogyny-apocalypse- turn...](http://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-misogyny-apocalypse-turns-out- being-white-and-male-counts-for-more-than-intelligence-grace-or-decency/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't think it would be so hard for FB to partner up with snipes.com and provide some kind of check which flags news stories as potentially fake and offer the user the chance to click through to snopes in order to read more about it. With simple text matching and maybe extracting text from some of the images this shouldn't be too difficult. I know FB already have a tool, but I am not sure how it's implemented.

<comment><USER17> snipes.com -> snopes.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> While debating what is a "fake news" site. _Maybe it 's also time to revisit the debate what is a "news" site..._

Organizations that do original journalism and news reporting seem to be struggling financially. Meanwhile, many popular sites now considered legitimate "news sites" don't do much original journalism of their own and instead they are mainly just curating or aggregating news from those original news sites.

(I'm not talking about sites like HN or reddit, I'm referring to large popular sites with "articles" where they're rewriting/spinning/summarizing news stories found elsewhere, then linking somewhere in their "article" to the original news site, lastly they add the most sensationalist clickbait headline they can come up with!)

News curation/aggregation sites offer a service people want, they are usually free to read, and copyright law cases have determined what they are doing is legal.

Facebook and Google clearly have a huge amount of power here. I support them taking action against fake news sites (I do look forward reading details what that means and how they do this).

But it's not just FBerg and Googy at fault here, part of the reason things have gotten this bad is the slippery slope where "real" newspapers, news- agencies and other organizations that have trained journalists doing original news reporting have let themselves be overrun by sites using their work without appropriate compensation or recognition. They have also fallen behind on the tech skills needed to deliver news on the noisy interwebs, and they have not pushed to revisit copyright laws that aren't working for anyone as intended.

</comment><comment><USER19> who is going to rubber stamp 'news' as 'real'?

<comment><USER20> The Ministry of Truth

<comment><USER21> Exactly this. Worst possible outcome. It is solving the problem with more of the same the problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What's considered 'fake news' though.. I mean you could argue breitbart/huffington post which are both very biased are fake... yet they do have some honest articles in there- - but many REAL news services were calling it w/ major odds for Hillary even if they had data that pointed otherwise... MSM also did not report pro-Bernie news that might have led to him beating Clinton, and Trump in the end...

Since we've removed the rule that requires news to show the opposing view point on every piece of news -- it's pretty much all op-ed anymore...

</comment><comment><USER23> Fake news is a natural extension of sticking to news sources that reaffirm our beliefs.

We tend to live in our own information universes. Broadening our views is uncomfortable.

</comment><comment><USER24> Interesting development and a move in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER25> The next step is to ban them from the platform. Any Facebook Page that continually posts fake news should be given a warning, and then booted if the practice continues. Just as Google has quality guidelines for websites, there should also be quality guidelines for Facebook Pages. To do otherwise is to open up Facebook's users to abuse.

</comment><comment><USER26> When fb starts getting into the business of censorship, it's time there monopoly is investigated.

<comment><USER9> That's why if they're smart they won't block "fake news" but will add some kind of disclaimer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The cure is worse than the illness. The left went out of its way to take every word Trump said literally. In the most damning way, to produce outrage.

Are the 3000 thousand opinion pieces assuming that that Megyn blood was coming from her vagina and not her eyes, because it suited them more also fake news?

You cannot abstract talking to the other side. You cannot abstract discussion - and I mean real discussion, not demonstrating intellectual superiority</comment>


Apple goes to war with video game streaming platforms in App Store rules update - <AUTHOR> https://mashable.com/article/apple-app-store-game-streaming-services/ <comment><USER2> Apple's avarice knows no bounds. They have alerted the world +dog and they will inexorably get regulated. Parallels to Apple via Android have emerged and matured. The time is coming when these streaming platforms will shake Apple off their boots - with a little help from their friends.</comment>


Kubernetes the Hard Way on Azure - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ankursoni/kubernetes-the-hard-way-on-azure <comment><AUTHOR> Happy to announce the first release of this tutorial project: [https://github.com/ankursoni/kubernetes-the-hard-way-on- azur...](https://github.com/ankursoni/kubernetes-the-hard-way-on- azure/releases/tag/v1.18.1)

This release was tested and found to be working on: \- Windows command prompt \- Ubuntu 20.04

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Kubernetes The Hard Way on Azure is optimized for learning, which means taking a not so long route to ensure you understand each task required to bootstrap a Kubernetes cluster. The original long route is shortened with the help of Terraform and Bash shell scripts for semi automated deployment steps (fun for learning) and also fully automated end to end deployment along with scaling of Kubernetes cluster on Azure.</comment>


Ask HN: How to pivot from app development to embedded systems - <AUTHOR> I have prior experience in C/C++ from HPC and JVM experience at a big tech company building out backend services and want to get into more lower level stuff.  Have some mechanical engineering academic experience.<p>What side projects could I work on to move away from app development into a more IoT/embedded systems role? <comment><USER2> Something with threads and mutexes might be relevant, even if it was in the JVM.

Also, look for things where you're dealing with sequencing and using internal state to track events in the external world.

</comment><comment><USER3> One angle is there is a fair amount of need for back end stuff for IoT.

That said embedded covers a wide range of things, from tiny bare metal projects to single app full up computers.</comment>


Show HN: I made a song for your landing page video - <AUTHOR>

Some of you may know me as a freelance developer and the founder of BugMuncher, but my primary passion in life is actually music.
I've recently decided to have a go at making some money from my music by submitting songs to Audio Jungle. So far I've only submitted 2 songs, but both were approved for sale first time, so I guess I'm doing something right :)
My second submission is a song I wrote specifically with tech start-ups' landing page videos in mind:
http://audiojungle.net/item/introducing-success/3581039
Hopefully it can find a home on someone's landing page :) <comment><USER2> Awesome, I always wondered where I could find nice soundtracks like this for demos. Good stuff.

</comment><comment><USER3> I love it. Plus this is a smart way to market your work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you kind sir :) I've got another couple of start-up focused tracks like this which I'll be publishing soon.</comment></comment>


GitHub survives massive DDoS attack relatively unscathed - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/01/github-survives-massive-ddos-attack-relatively-unscathed/ <comment><USER2> Check out this full analysis of the DDoS attack: [https://blog.thousandeyes.com/how-github-successfully- mitiga...](https://blog.thousandeyes.com/how-github-successfully-mitigated- ddos-attack/)</comment>


Ask HN: What industry or technology needs democratization? - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone,
I've been combing through the S&P 500 lately as a mental exercise to find which large, old corporations have a younger startup competitor that immediately springs to mind.
I think it would be fun to see what technologies we can think of that are very complex, expensive, and operaionally intensive, but could somehow be brought into an individual user's household.
Examples to get your brain thinking:
-Mainframe -> PC
-Iron foundries -> 3d printing
-Stock trading/charting went from the few to the many
-Internet/telecom went from household to mobile
Some ideas of mine that are probably being worked on already anyway:
-FPGAs and ASICs are still extremely capital intensive to fabricate but offer legitimate performance boosts, not easy to get hands on these like x86 cpus
-3d printing for all feasible materials
-Manned aircraft of any kind are still very expensive to obtain and permit despite the massive demand I imagine to avoid traffic and go to places with no roads. Drone hoverboards already exist!
-Wireless/radio networks are extremely expensive to build and operate, hence why in the US it is cartelized. Plans for balloons in space exist to deliver service to rural areas- what about local players operating their own ham networks?
-Robotic chefs, robotic farms
-RasPis are making beowulf cluters and super computing more economically feasible for the masses. Soon some of the largest information businesses built around search (google, expedia) and data (financial exchanges) may become services a person can do themselves in private.
-Diamond mining/sales. Heavily cartelized for little reason. Massive demand, world could use more ethical suppliers of alternatives <comment><USER2> Financial data suppliers. (Cheaper alternatives to Bloomberg/MS/Lipper ...)

</comment><comment><USER3> Software development

<comment><USER4> ba dum tiss</comment></comment>


Slack backtracks on new text editor - <AUTHOR> Just received this email from Slack as a reply from my feedback:
<comment></comment><comment>---- Hi Emile,
We really appreciate your feedback, and we hear your frustration. We're sorry for the impact this is having on your ability to communicate with your team and on your overall productivity. We made a mistake by forcing everyone into this feature without providing an opt-out for customers like you: people for whom the existing behavior was working just fine.
We've started working on a preference that will let you return to the previous message composer. We don't have a specific release date to share right now — it's this team's top and only priority, however, and we expect to have it available on the desktop within a couple of weeks, with Android following shortly thereafter.
We will follow up with another note when this option is available to you, and we'll include instructions on how to enable it.
Again, we're sorry for the disruption and we're grateful for the feedback. We missed the mark on this feature! We will do our best to learn from this and avoid similar mistakes in the future.
Best,
Pamela </comment><comment></comment><comment>---- </comment><comment><USER2> I got the same response: happy to know they're at least adding an "advanced input" mode or similar. To their credit Slack's support has always had good communication in my experience. Glad the feedback made it to the right team, and that they seem to be listening.

</comment><comment><USER3> I suspect the big HN thread yesterday had something to do with this - when I sent feedback to Slack about 24 hours ago, I got the cookie cutter "turning off the new formatting tool isn't an option we're offering" response.

<comment><USER4> Got the same boilerplate yesterday.</comment></comment>


The High-Stakes Race to Rid the World of Human Drivers - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/driverless-cars-are-this-centurys-space-race/417672/?single_page=true <comment><USER3> One thing I haven't heard much about is how humans and AI drivers will interact.

If we all assume that AI cars are going to be very conservative and very competent drivers, will people take advantage of that? Will human drivers become even bigger assholes that cut off AI drivers at every possibility, knowing that an AI will not hit them? Why wait in a big line for an exit, when you know an AI car will always let you in. The AI driver won't even mind, as it has no emotional state, so why not?

Pedestrians and cyclists may also learn that they can freely cut off an AI car at anytime they please. Why wait for a walk signal? Why walk all the way to the intersection? Just saunter across anywhere you like, so long as you cross in front of an AI car.

<comment><USER4> For me the bigger question is WRT the ongoing quest to marginalize human beings.

Once we automate everything, then what?

<comment><USER5> I imagine the same argument was made about the industrial revolution.

There is still a lot to work for once we remove the more mundane parts of our existence.

<comment><USER4> > _the same argument was made about the industrial revolution._

A bit of a specious comparison which assumes that the degree and quality of the technology are irrelevant.

There was no Deep Mind during the Industrial Revolution.

<comment><USER4> Edit: there was no Deep Blue, that is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well if this is a "race" as the headline says, it sure is gonna be a long race, folks. These cars haven't yet been programmed to handle things like snow-covered roads where you can't see the lines, or construction zones that have you driving on the opposite side of the road at the direction of flaggers, etc... there's just a ton of work remaining to be done if your goal is truly to "rid the world of human drivers".

<comment><USER7> If those high targets are the only things remaining then I'd say the race is pretty close to finishing. I'd be more pessimistic if features on the todo list still included 'identifying stop signs', 'recognizing people', 'not killing people', and 'driving more smoothly than a teenager'.

<comment><USER8> What's more, people are forgetting that normal traffic does not go through wilderness, and roads are not just slabs of concrete in a line. We draw markings on the road. We put signs next to them. It stands to reason that as self-driving cars will be slowly deployed (I don't see them rolling out simultaneously in sunny California and in snowy Switzerland), we'll be updating road infrastructure with signs and other objects designed for AI drivers - ones that could help them determine road conditions better.

<comment><USER9> Considering how poorly current roads are maintained I don't hold out hope for anything that requires _more_ maintenance. Many roads I drive on are not properly marked for human drivers as it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I just bought a 2016 Volkswagen that has laser cruise control and lane assist. I ordered the fully loaded package because the incremental cost was not large, and I figured I might as well have all the toys if I was going to the expense of buying a brand-new car.

I consider myself an enthusiast; I have a fair bit of time on the racetrack in lapping days and amateur races, sometimes I volunteer at car control clinics and teen instruction days. All of my cars have manual transmissions and I ride a motorcycle. I definitely did not expect to become dependent on any driving nannies.

What I've found is that it's absolutely astounding how fast you come to trust the automated systems. In my car, the laser cruise control will drive the car for you at virtually any speed. It does a great job of keeping up in traffic, has no issues with hills or going around bends, it's always able to track the car in front of me perfectly. It uses the brakes to slow the car. I've got the manual transmission so it only slows the car down to about 15mph and then prompts me to take over and press the brake; if I had the automatic, it would come to a full stop in traffic and only require a tap of the accelerator to resume once traffic ahead started moving.

Even though I only have 700 miles on the car and have only used the laser cruise for perhaps 20 or 30 miles in total (mostly just playing with it), I find I still expect the system to brake the car once disengaged. For example, I'll be coming up to a red light, lift off the throttle, start braking, and then think to myself "huh, I wonder why the car didn't start slowing down for me."

The lane assist feature will correct the steering once or twice if you start to come too close to the lane marker (within maybe 2 feet) but it's very subtle and you barely feel it while your hands are on the wheel. After a correction or two (and maybe 10 seconds, I'm not sure exactly how it decides), the system tells you "hey, idiot, you're supposed to be steering". I have, on multiple occasions, been surprised that it "allowed" me to get as close as I was to adjacent cars, before realizing that it only is meant to keep me within my lane, it knows nothing about the vehicles around me. But something about the fact that it has lane assist (and, incidentally, ultrasonic parking sensors) fools me into thinking it knows more than it does. I'm not saying I was letting the car drive for me, I was fully in control, I was simply surprised that it didn't override my judgement of how close is too close.

It's a brave new world out there. It's surprising how quickly you cede mental control, if not physical control, even to systems that have clearly defined limits and features that you don't even intend on using, let alone relying on. I imagine things will get worse before they'll get better. That said, humans are bad enough drivers that it might not get MUCH worse!

<comment><USER11> > _it 's always able to track the car in front of me perfectly_

I've always wondered how this would really work. What happens when the car ahead changes lanes or exits the freeway? Have you run into any issues with weather (rain, snow) interfering with the sensor?

<comment><USER12> That depends on the sensors which are used. Most current ACC systems use radar, which should not be affected by weather but has other problems like high cost, narrow field of view and you only get speed and distance as data points which are not always easy to interpret correctly. Ideally it's combined with a camera to get more information about the environment like land markings, so that you know if the car in front of you is actually in your lane or just going around the corner in the lane next to you. The camera is obviously prone to glare, raindrops, etc.. When the car ahead changes lanes or exits the freeway, the system will try to find another car as a target vehicle and adapt the speed accordingly to keep a certain timegap, if it can't find a target it will behave like normal cruise control.

<comment><USER9> A more sophisticated (but expensive) radar sensor could do the job without the camera. A sensor capable of Doppler processing, sweeping, and tied to some sort of platform telemetry (GPS, INS, etc.) could maintain a large and fairly comprehensive situational picture. Add moving target indication to the signal processing and it could form tracks on all other vehicles on the road, which would provide the motion vectors for them without the need for another sensor. You could even use track behavior to detect anomalies in the road, assuming you have multiple tracks.

I could go on all day about this (having actually worked on MTI radar for several years), but I have actual work to do. :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The comments on here are funny. People lose their mind when it comes to autonomous anything. ZOMG everyone's going to shoot down autonomous delivery drones! People will walk out into traffic! People will hack their cars and do crimes!

Come on. All this is illegal now. It will still be illegal, and easily enforceable. Which is what keeps crimes from happening. That and human decency which most people have.

<comment><USER14> I think it's the other way, people on here are funny and lose their minds if you try to pose a problem that we can find a solution for. They're all "omg it's not a problem Google are already perfecting it!" There are a lot of issues that remain unresolved (snow does cover parts of N.America and Europe for months at a time). What's wrong with raising these issues and discussing them without resorting to "you so dumb, it gonna be fine, doomsayer!"?

<comment><USER15> Didn't you hear? You won't be permitted to purchase an autonomous vehicle unless you can provide documentary evidence of your having been in favour of the technology even before it was proven.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> anyone work on artificial intelligence technologies here? i have some lay questions - is anyone testing driverless cars in an environment where most cars are driverless? does that make a difference?

are there any weird effects / properties that can emerge?

does it have the potential to solve the persistent traffic jam issue?

<comment><USER17> I believe so.

As driverless cars take over more and more, the weird (aka dangerous) behaviors should become less common. Many forms of distracted driving will simply vanish, not even considering the obvious issues like drunk driving.

Once you start automating dispatch, I think it simplifies and improves things further. For one, you're going to be less likely to be late.. which means less stress/anxiety and less distractions which should mean less accidents and near-accidents that cause traffic issues.

 _IF_ you can eliminate many - but unlikely all - of the little issues, problems, etc that compound to cause big problems, why would there be traffic jams?

(And that's not considering traffic updates to re-route around existing problems.)

My post on the topic: [http://caseysoftware.com/blog/future-transportation- today](http://caseysoftware.com/blog/future-transportation-today)

<comment><USER18> My offhand anecdata suggests that the bulk of traffic jams are caused by people driving older cars. There is a little-understood cosmic force that causes cars to stop running in proportion to how critical the section of roadway is to regional transportation and in proportion to the age of the car. 1985 Nissan Sentra in a tunnel? Guaranteed to burst into flames.

More seriously, there are obvious reasons why older cars are more likely to just stop running, or to be involved in a fatal accident that snarls traffic. I think the tipping point is not going to come from the deployment of self- driving cars, but will arrive instead when the fleet of junkers nears eradication.

<comment><USER19> It's not obvious to me why older cars are more likely to be in fatal accidents. Even though my '66 Mustang is wildly less safe in many ways, it also gets driven with much more care than what I see around me.

<comment><USER18> There's probably a bathtub-shapes curve of driver care. I'm sure that drivers of classic American sports cars, at this distance from their dates of manufacture, are taking due caution. People with new cars all have ABS, stability control, and the other bells and whistles. But people who are driving the 1994 Dodge Colt were probably forced into it by financial circumstances. They don't have an investment to protect, they don't have any safety features, and they probably don't even have working shock absorbers or roadworthy tires.

I don't know if I am alone in this perception, but it has been built up over many years of being stuck in traffic on the Bay Bridge. What kinds of cars to you see on fire, on the shoulder, or being pushed off the bridge by those Caltrans wreckers? Old ones. Second-hand cop cars bought at auction. Old Japanese compact pickups with 2 tons of concrete in the beds. Cars that were going 75 MPH on emergency spare tires. Cars with no outside mirrors? WTF?

I ride the bus, so I'm biased. I think if your car breaks down or you get into an accident on the Bay Bridge you should pay a million-dollar fine and have your car and license seized permanently.

<comment><USER20> Do you mean they push wrecked cars down the length of the bridge to get them off? Or are they literally in such a rush that they just chuck it off the side of the bridge? Because that would be awesome.

<comment><USER21> If it can roll and brake, a CALTRANS vehicle with a strong push bumper will push it somewhere out of the way. If not, they have to tow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> In the city of Nuremburg, Germany in the year 2006 Siemens started to introduce automated trains. Until this day, they have to be operated under supervision. So how exactly do all these tech companies want to get the fact out of the way, that there is an actual AI needed before they can dive into autonomous cars driving the streets? The wet dream of big biz for sure, if only it could meet up with reality. Sorry for not thinking big enough, im just confused how those companies, that not even manage to get their own available products to be working flawless want to step into a market where things will cost lives.

<comment><USER23> There are dozens and dozens of fully automated train lines in fully automated operation: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_subway_systems)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> For people looking for an investment opportunity, once self-driving cars are a reality, buy shares in British Pub chains. Being able to have a drink and not worry about how to get home will make them a lot more accessible.

</comment><comment><USER25> well, first auto-car, then auto-truck, then auto-truck-train. (3-10 trailers with one tractor, and possibly hub motors suitable for long hauls with no turns) Then electric cars pas gas based cars. Then electric trucks with droppable battery packs - full charged in 2 minutes by changing it. Then they will get into local driving and delivery, into large mechanical drop boxes at houses and businesses. Deliveries 24-7. The box can be a wall port with a live floor = lots of space. The beginning of the robot age. The last thing they will invent, before people are gone, will be the robot consumer...

<comment><USER26> The robot consumer might be the most underrated threat to humanity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Perhaps a better solution would be something totally void of automobiles?

In terms of efficiency, is using the same technology (cars) in a different way - removing the driver - really going to have long term affects?

My guess is that cars themselves will be out of production before we reach 100% adoption of driverless cars.

<comment><USER8> Electric cars seem to be a pretty good solution, though the cars of the future will probably be much smaller - right now we pad them a lot with extra metal and plastic so that the passengers can survive a collision. With self-driving cars you won't need that anymore. I imagine the future of cars is a PRT[0] system - it's a perfect thing for a city. As for travel between cities, that's what trains are for.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> For a sense of how this is going, you can read the California DMV's collection of autonomous vehicle accident reports.[1] 9 from Google, one from Delphi. Almost all the Google ones are a Google vehicle being rear-ended by another car at slow speed. Typical situation: Google AV turning right on red after a full stop. AV advances enough to get a good sensor view of cross traffic, detects cross traffic, and stops. Following vehicle rear-ends Google AV. Not AV's fault.

If manually driven cars had radar-controlled braking (now a common option, and one which may become as standard as ABS in a few years), that's enough to stop most rear-end collisions. That may be all that's necessary for AVs and human- driven cars to play well together.

[1] [https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/auton...](https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/autonomousveh_ol316)

<comment><USER14> Driving behavior and patterns are important for safety too, when you assume that it's not the google AV's fault that it gets rear-ended you may be wrong. If a human driver sees more than the AV (has a bigger brain, more experience) and is able to better asses a situation, the human might not see _why_ the AV is stopping, having assessed correctly that the way is clear. It is the AV's fault for not being smart enough, and thus acting erratically _by normal driving standards and patterns_.

I knew several people in the UK when we were learning to drive who failed their test because the tester thought them too cautious and therefore not confident enough to avoid an accident.

Reading on the subject of self driving cars, one gets the impression that there is a auto-assumption that human drivers must all be idiots who should never, ever have been allowed behind the wheel, but that probably isn't the case. I'm not saying the roads will be any less safe with AVs, but let's not believe all the Utopian propaganda of the businesses selling us this product.

<comment><USER28> No, if you rear-end someone driving safely, you are at fault and reckless. This _I can control the situation_ thinking are the famous last words of every idiot ever wrecking his car, or, sadly, killing others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's a crazy claim / instance of the Chinese Soda Fallacy in the middle of the article. Why would the first-mover developer of automatic driving software be able to reap 10 cents per mile driven?

<comment><USER29> >Chinese Soda Fallcy

I've never heard of this particular logical fallacy and search engines are no help. Can you explain?

<comment><USER18> Hrmm, I did find exactly one instance of the phrase on Google. I'm surprised, too.

As it was explained to me, a Chinese Soda Fallacy is a business plan wherein you stand to make a dollar selling a Coke to everybody in China. You will make a billion dollars! Except that the market-clearing price for Coke in China isn't a dollar, and not everybody wants one, and so on and so forth.

The idea that you will make a dime every time anyone drives a mile strikes me as perfectly congruent with that fallacy.

Edit: This article seems to address the topic without using the phrase.

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240529702048303045741335...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204830304574133501980701202)

A COKE FOR EVERY KID IN CHINA This gambit rests its case on a plethora of secondary data to show how large and fast-growing a market is. The plan then makes a heroic leap and assumes that the new venture will grab X percent of that market it could be 1%, 10%, 30% or whatever. "Surely," the plan argues, "with the large number of customers in our market, we'll easily get enough. We only need a small fraction to have a very nice business."

<comment><USER30> Sounds like the more generalized equivalent of the typical software fallacy that goes like, "There are umpty million iPhone users, if just 1% of them buys our app...."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't have a commute. I just recently downsized from a VW gross polluter TDI (jetta sportwagen) to a Toyota off-road tacoma. 1/2 the gas milage. This will probably be the last vehicle I personally buy for years. It will be mostly road trips and off road camping.

The wife plans on a Tesla Model 3 as her car.

For my uses, even my 2016 Tacoma TRD OR screams over technical for a lot of back country camping / jeep trail stuff.

<comment><USER32> > _gross polluter TDI_

> _Toyota Tacoma for road trips_

The cognitive dissonance is impressive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm going to miss shifting gears and double clutching.

<comment><USER34> Double clutching, seriously? That is some niche hardware you are driving - <USER2> manual transmissions are synchromeshed nowadays, unless you're driving a racecar maybe.

<comment><USER33> Double clutching makes downshifting at high revs much smoother, and reduces wear&tear on the clutch & transmission. (I have a pretty grabby clutch, yes, it's aftermarket.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> When my grandfather died back in the '80s my grandmother had to learn to drive because she'd been a passenger her whole life.

</comment><comment><USER36> Sorry for typos, eating fried chicken...

I cant wait to see what happens once the modders and criminals get a hold of self driving cars. My awesome car would pretend to be an emergency vehicle. Pretend to be a truck and that it can't stop easily, pretend emergencies so people move, claim that it's chaging lanes to mess with people. Without a centralized authority it's just negotiation. With a CA then humans and remote locations will have issues.

It's going to be a great dystopian future.

<comment><USER37> All of these things are already possible. Hell I see an example of most of these behaviors pretty frequently. It's not like normal people are going to suddenly become psychopaths when they get self driving cars.</comment></comment>


Docker operations slowing down on AWS - <AUTHOR> https://jeremyeder.com/2017/07/25/docker-operations-slowing-down-on-aws-this-time-its-not-dns/ <comment><USER2> And then people consider me a dinosaur when I say, no cloud, just rent a server or two (not colo! just dedicated servers). Your average web service does not need to scale near infinitely; for the same amount of money you pay to Amazon you can overprovision 3-5-10 times and that'll handle your spikes. No surprises. Same amount of work: EC2 and bare metal both gives you a root prompt, go from there. These days you can get things provisioned with 24 hours -- some providers will do it in minutes. Of course, Amazon provides a lot of services beyond basic EC2 instances but if you use them you have a very ugly vendor lock and heaven forbid you want to do something else in the future...

This is like a double trap many try to sell to startups: a) you need to scale across many machines and b) the way to scale is the cloud. My take: a single machine (or two for HA) will be enough, if you really want to go big separate the web server from the database but that's it. And yes, I am in the website performance business, I worked on the video purchase platform of one of the largest British television stations and even that didn't require more than a single database server and a single Redis server for caching layer. Harken to [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5131266/increase- postgre...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5131266/increase-postgresql- write-speed-at-the-cost-of-likely-data-loss) this question from 2011 discussing speeding up from like a thousand inserts per second at the cost of data loss -- today you will write on an SSD and don't need to risk data loss. Does your web site / app really get a thousand writes _every second_? I thought not. Does it even get a thousand _reads_? If not, then why are you building a complex database cluster...?

The other day I saw quad E7-4870 (yeah won't win any single thread contest but has 40 cores and 80 threads) 512GB RAM servers for $299 a month, with 1TB RAM for $499. Had a low end 2TB SSD for boot and you could add 8x1TB HDD w/ HW RAID for $40...

<comment><USER3> Yes. Look at [https://www.packet.net/bare-metal/](https://www.packet.net/bare- metal/) for bare metal boxes provisioned in less time than an ec2 instance.

Or if you want to go old school, cheaper, and less sexy/api driven: [https://www.delimiter.com/](https://www.delimiter.com/)

If you shop, for around 30-40 a month you can get 16 cores, 32gb ram, and a 120GB ssd or 1-2TB spinny disk.

<comment><USER4> also scaleway.com (they have API, but no user-data).

IMO, docker and container orchestration spells a bright future for bare-metal boxes like these, as you won't need cloudformation, etc..

But I still see few alternatives to S3, many vendors offers block devices, but only the big clouds offer blob storage. Backup and restore from blob storage makes recovery from crash pretty easy.

<comment><USER5> How does docker replace cloudformation? Don't you still need something that says "hey you are running out of capacity soon, time to add more hardware for your software to run on"

There has to be something that adds more bare-metal for your docker containers to run on when the existing bare-metal reaches capacity, right?

<comment><USER6> A fully containerized setup allows one to use something like Kubernetes to do such orchestration.

K8s is getting pretty easy to setup these days.

<comment><USER5> I was asking about once your bare metal capacity reaches its limit. At some point you need to provision more bare metal and expand the total resources kubernetes can consume with docker.

Cloudformation, to me at least, is the power to expand resources for large traffic events. Most of the time you can get by with a small amount of instances but its nice when it scales up to hundreds of instances in minutes.

The bare metal equivalent would be to buy something that can handle the peak load from the start, right?

<comment><USER7> >Cloudformation, to me at least, is the power to expand resources for large traffic events. Most of the time you can get by with a small amount of instances but its nice when it scales up to hundreds of instances in minutes.

This is not what CloudFormation does. CloudFormation allows a declarative way to express a group of AWS resources to be created and coupled together. There's nothing that's quite exactly the same as CloudFormation, but stock Kubernetes is quite close, since you effectively describe what resources you want in individual declarative YAML/JSON files. However, there's nothing standard in Kubernetes for coupling them together into one thing equivalent to a Stack in CloudFormation.

<comment><USER5> Maybe we are talking about different things, but I use CloudFormation to autoscale ec2 instances based on avg CPU load over a period of time

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuid...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws- properties-as-group.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While the article is factually correct, the tone strikes me as being disingenuous. The problem seems to be that the servers were running on gp2 disks, which offer a performance baseline with free short term bursts based on credits collected. The author has just realised that for consistent throughput, they would have to choose provisioned throughput and pay accordingly.

This isn't some conspiracy by AWS, though. It's all in the documentation and isn't even hard to find. If you want X ops per second baseline with occasional bursts you pick option A, or if you want consistent Y ops per second you provision and pay for Y. Read the manual - not having read the docs or explored the console is not an excuse to say that a service provider is being shady or rent seeking.

<comment><USER9> Exactly. I'd go further and say the burst capacity is actually a super useful and powerful feature that is very hard to get on your own hardware. Definitely can catch you unaware if you aren't on top of it and can get expensive for some needs, but as you say not hidden at all.

I have a hacky shell script I sometimes use for moderately sized environments that don't have better monitoring setup, it reports the minimum percent of burst balance remaining over the past day, requires the aws cli and parallel:

      #!/bin/bash
      while getopts "p:" opt; do
        case $opt in
          p)
            export AWS_PROFILE=$OPTARG
            ;;
          \?)
            echo "Invalid option: -$OPTARG" >&2
            ;;
        esac
      done

      if [ ! "$AWS_PROFILE" ]
      then
        echo "-p <aws profile> or AWS_PROFILE env var required"
        exit 1
      fi

      start=$(date -v-1d +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S)
      end=$(date +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S)

      aws ec2 describe-volumes --output text --query 'join(`"\n"`, Volumes[*].VolumeId)' | parallel -j 20 "echo -ne {}\\\t && echo \$(aws cloudwatch get-metric-statistics --start-time $start --end-time $end --period 86400 --namespace AWS/EBS --statistics Minimum --metric-name BurstBalance --dimensions Name=VolumeId,Value={} --output text --query 'Datapoints[*].Minimum')" | sort -n -k 2

<comment><USER10> thanks for this script, pretty helpful!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The author's takeaways include moving disks to io1. This is a bad bargain in most cases, and particularly bad in the ~500 IOPS range (which is what I'm seeing in the Grafana screenshot there).

gp2 disks get 3 iops per gig "free", bursting up to 3k. (They don't burst after 1 tb, because your baseline performance is higher than the burst rate.) io1 is 25% more expensive per-gb, and you pay by the IOPS on top of that.

A 175gb gp2 disk will give you 525 IOPS baseline, at $17.50 a month. I'm guessing his volume is about 40gb, doing math backwards from his bottlenecked IOPS; a 40gb io1 with 500 IOPS will cost you $83.75 a month! And on top of that, AWS will cap you _hard_ at that 500 IOPS; the gp2 can still burst if needed.

I know of two general cases where io1 disks are worthwhile: if you need more than 10k IOPS, or if you have very high IO requirements but very stable disk space usage (e.g. high-performance RRDs). Crack open Excel and do the math; it's worth the five minutes to check.

(Also, your burst balance is available as a Cloudwatch metric, as I recall! Set alarms on that shit!)

<comment><USER12> Agreed. After a lot of struggles trying to find a good average IOPS on AWS for our database, we just increased disk to 1tb with gp2 and got rid of the problem. It gets 3000 iops/sec all the time and you never have these problems. It's still much cheaper than io1.

It's a trade you must account for when choosing cloud providers, nothing is free. For now it's still cheaper to pay for servers than spend time setting things up ourselves, but we're always measuring cost x benefits and thinking if we need to leave aws. The time is coming, but for now it's still working for us.

<comment><USER13> > we just increased disk to 1tb with gp2 and got rid of the problem. It gets > 3000 iops/sec all the time and you never have these problems. It's still > much cheaper than io1.

shockingly, tons of people don't know about this. Sure, there are use cases where it probably isn't cost effective to do this, but my default policy towards using gp2 is "will this server write to disk even a moderate amount? if so, its get a 1TB volume." Especially for something like a node in a k8s cluster where your workload is non-deterministic, this should be the default.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Performance management 101 on AWS volumes:

1) The IO of a disks is proportional to the size of the volume. You need to get bigger volumes to get more performances. 3 io/GB

2) The high performance volumes (io1/PIOPS) are extortion. It's cheaper to pay for a bigger regular volume (gp2) that comes with a higher IO quota than to pay for the special high performance volume.

3) Each instances type has a disk performance cap. They are lower than you think.

4) Don't use t2 instances for anything that requires non negligible sustained IO.

P.S. Clearly the author is just discovering AWS.

</comment><comment><USER15> tldr: AWS EC2 has the concept of I/O credits for storage. If your instance runs out of credits, bad things, which may seem completely unrelated, will happen.

I was having similar issues last week and did not consider I/O credits. I think AWS could do better at notifying you if your EC2 instance gets into this state (without having to set up a cloud watch alarm).

<comment><USER16> Rather EBS performance is non-deterministic. This is definitely not new, but is an informative deep dive.

The other big gotcha is that EBS volumes are lazy loaded. Not necessarily something that's going to bite you in a production environment regularly, but it's something that could very easily throw off your benchmarks and performance testing.

<comment><USER17> Should you ever assume IO to be deterministic? Hard drives can crash, they can be slow(especially magnetic). Networks can disconnect, become congested or have random interference.

This is amplified on the cloud, but it should also be well known by anyone that works with the cloud. These things are well documented, although I could see why you don't really look for it until you have issues with it.

<comment><USER18> I think the problem is that from your average application developer's point view - there's nothing that they can really do that they aren't already doing (unless they're blocking the main thread on disk IO, in which case they can do a _little_ bit more).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> We hit the IOPS limit on AWS many times, both on VMs and SQL instances. The solution was always to artificially inflate the size of the underlying storage, as you get 3 IOPS per GB on persistent disks (the other option was to buy IOPS, but this somehow always turned out to be way more expensive).

This issue was on a "pros" section when we decided to move our operations to GCP, when you get 30 IOPS per GB on persistent storage, so 10x more than on AWS. One way or another, if you really need _a lot_ of IOPS, you better stick with a local (ephemeral) SDD storage – just bear in mind it will vanish along with your VMs.

</comment><comment><USER20> In other words, if you do not rate limit yourself then others will rate limit you.

<comment><USER21> It's called out in the post: most applications are not written to deal with reads / writes suddenly dropping in throughput. How are you supposed to rate limit the IOPS of a program you don't control? Can you make `docker' do exponential backoff if it notices some operations are taking too long?

In a network scenario, the remote service could say something like Quota exceeded, please try again later. read and write syscalls don't really work like that. They instead remain in uninterruptible sleep, which means they can't wake up, or be killed or stop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The debugging story was interesting, but what really sticks out for me is that Amazon has pretty tight QoS working for distributed storage. That's actually a really hard problem - much harder than its better known networking equivalent. As much as I might curse the Amazon business folks for using it to screw customers, I also have to give kudos to the engineers for implementing it.

</comment><comment><USER23> Why not use an ephemeral volumes for the docker data. This is a CI system, so the docker images are all transient anyways. Seems like an easy way to avoid the I/O credits.

<comment><USER24> The most recent "general purpose" instance families (C4, G3, M4, P2, R4) don't offer ephemeral storage anymore. My guess is that AWS will only offer ephemeral storage for a few selected instance families in future.

So you have to decide: older instance types (which will become more expensive as they usually don't benefit from new price reductions) or no ephemeral storage

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A 1TB gp2 volume is cheaper than an 1TB, 3000 iops io2 volume, and provides nearly-identical characters.

Only use io2 if you have a _latency_ sensitive application or need more than 10,000 iops. Even then you can RAID10 some gp2 volumes together and with enhanced networking get I believe 30k iops out of one instance.

<comment><USER26> even thenm if you really are worried about latency, AWS isn't the place to be...

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think after a decade of "Cloud" hype that many customers are finally realizing that the costs/benefits of using a provider are just more complicated and more expensive for most of their needs.

</comment><comment><USER28> For me, this style of writing really detracts from whatever the article might actually say.

<comment><USER29> I actually found it enjoyable and refreshing. Technical, but fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> EBS optimized VMs looks nice on paper, you can choose the size and pay for your needs only. But the once you start to use the disk in production you see the problems.

In short, if you want to use the disk a lot, you need to pay a lot. If your app is slow on aws and uses EBS as storage, increase the disk size, not the VM instance type. This is true mostly for database performance, which once the RAM is filled, relies on IO a lot to get new pages from disk.

<comment><USER30> This is the kind of advice I wish was easier to get. The AWS docs are very lacking in my opinion for "If you're exhibiting this specific performance problem the cheapest option is to increase [x]" where [x] is increase instance size, disk size, performance, add a read replica, etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> if you don't need to deal with HIPAA PCI DSS etc. going with DO, Vultr and the like would save many startups considerable $ compared to AWS.

</comment><comment><USER32> If you're interested in IO performance, maybe don't run Docker - whose main advantage over VMs is fast IO - on top of VMs unnecessarily?

Triton and OpenShift add proper isolation to Docker and hence provide fast IO since you're not adding a layer of Xen.

<comment><USER33> I love native containers, but none of the major cloud providers support them so that isn't really actionable advice for most people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> +100 points to the excellent debugging skill demonstrated by the author.

It's great to see someone in top form.

</comment><comment><USER35> How do you flip a volume on the fly? I thought you had to do the "snapshot > make new volume > reattach" route

edit: thanks for the info, znep (hit my comment limit, hence the edit... )

<comment><USER9> Not any more, as of some number of months ago you can grow and change volume type on the fly especially if it isn't a boot volume.

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs- expan...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-expand- volume.html)

Read the limitations very carefully, [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/considera...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/considerations.html) In particular if it was attached before Nov. 1, 2016 you need to do a one time stop and start of the instance or detach/reattach the volume and there are limits on instance types supported (but the definition of "current generation" is broader than you might assume at first).

This is quite an awesome enhancement, we were able to transparently convert a bunch of 15TB volumes from gp2 to st1 without downtime or impact to the app, and save a bunch of money.</comment></comment>


Trump says Iranian ships 'will be shot' - <AUTHOR> http://daily-sun.com/post/166561/Trump-says-Iranian-ships-will-be-shot <comment><USER2> Fake news. It quotes a speech "here" without giving any location. Actual quote is from over 2 months ago.</comment>


The Benefits of a NOLS Education - <AUTHOR> http://findthepulse.com/blog/2008/09/16/the-benefits-of-a-nols-education/#more-51

<comment><USER2> Sounds a bit like the army without taking crap and doing idiot chores all day long.

On a more serious note I genuinly believe that if not made obligatory, everyone should be strongly encouraged to spend an extended time in the outdoors. It's a great way to get to know other people on a profound level, while also getting to know yourself.

In addition to the skills you learn there, the wild has a way of putting things in perspective and instill a sense of belonging. As counter intuitive as it may sound, you're never more in touch with mankind as when you leave it all behind for a moment.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't recommend NOLS enough. I did a month-long course after undergrad in Australia. Take a semester off from school and do a course for credit instead. Or, if you're out of school, find time to do a course that's as long as you can afford. The skills you learn are innumerable - both practical and psychological - and the views you earn are majestic.

</comment><comment><USER4> Another alternative is Outward Bound. I went on a 21 day mountaineering course in the Sierra Nevadas that was life-changing.

Having met with people who have done both, Outward Bound offers courses where the most demanding are about the same as a NOLS course.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you avoid cherry-picking data? - <AUTHOR> With all the data-powered hot takes on Covid, racism, police violence, government spending, etc., how does someone avoid cherry-picking data in order to support their own or their in-group's bias?<p>Is this possible? <comment><USER2> 1\. Read the sources outside of your view point.

2\. Play devil's advocate with the information you get.

Personally, i think it's important to remember that the world is very complex and 2 views can be different and at the same time true.

Nickel and Dimed[0] is a book on low-wage jobs and how it is difficult to get by without support from some kind of social program.

Scratch beginnings[1] is the story of a guy that tried to live in a shelter and get by. In ten months he had moved into an apartment, bought a pickup truck, and had saved around $5,300.

Both these stories are opposing, in the logical sense. But they also real. Exploring different perspective helps dispel the notions that there is one "truth".

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_Beginnings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_Beginnings)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is useful. I tend to look for a universal rule I can abide by but reality requires alternative solutions. My hope is to find solutions that benefit collective society while not creating new inequities in the process. I believe conflicting realities need to be held in tension rather than allowing them to cancel each other out.

<comment><USER2> > I tend to look for a universal rule I can abide by but reality requires > alternative solutions.

I do the same. For me it's result of applying "scientific thinking" to everything, and searching a "grand unifying theory".

I agree that conflicting realities should be displayed, as long at there is no effort to try any reconcile them and force some homogeneity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think the real answers are unsatisfying but unfortunately true:

1\. Time. In the moment it's very hard to understand what's going on. Time gives perspective. The down-side to this is that raw data sometimes gets lost with time, and then the fights begin about how to interpret what data there are.

2\. Judgment. In the moment, you have to use a combination of historical track record of the data source and your own judgment. New York Governor Cuomo did a good job of explaining the subtleties of this at his daily briefing yesterday (Saturday), which I recommend watching. In summary, there are certain things doctors and the WHO thought were true and recommended several months ago that turned out not to be true, and new information and policy recommendations get disseminated as we learn more.

<comment><AUTHOR> These are very true and so difficult to adhere to when I'm emotionally connected to an issue. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Follow the scientific hypothesis-driven approach.

You try to prove that your hypothesis is wrong. If you can't find evidence that your hypothesis is wrong, you can "accept" that your hypothesis is right.

This forces you to try to find holes in your logic. If you can't find any, probably it is solid.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! This is so easily forgotten.</comment></comment>


The Plan to Feed the World by Hacking Photosynthesis - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/the-plan-to-feed-the-world-by-hacking-photosynthesis-1715525456 <comment><USER3> "Problems cannot be solved with the same mind set that created them."

― Albert Einstein

There are more natural ways to achieve the same results. Perennial Polycultures use natural flora & fauna in a closed loop ecosystem. They also have higher overall yields than monocultures.

These solutions are available to us right now. In fact there's a growing movement of farmers who are utilizing & learning more about Perrenial Polycultures.

Here is some literature:

[http://www.amazon.com/The-One-Straw-Revolution- Introduction-...](http://www.amazon.com/The-One-Straw-Revolution-Introduction- Classics/dp/1590173139)

[http://www.edibleforestgardens.com/about_book](http://www.edibleforestgardens.com/about_book)

[http://www.afforestt.com/index.html](http://www.afforestt.com/index.html)

Here are some farms that I'm familiar with (either I know the farmers or they are well known):

[http://www.newforestfarm.net/](http://www.newforestfarm.net/)

[http://www.polyfacefarms.com/](http://www.polyfacefarms.com/)

[http://www.fieldswithoutfences.org/](http://www.fieldswithoutfences.org/)

[http://www.thevitalfarm.com/](http://www.thevitalfarm.com/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm working on one of these projects, trying to make C4 photosynthesis an installable module.

Happy to answer questions.

<comment><USER4> I was under the impression that nitrogen fixation was still the limiting factor in plant growth. If that's the case, will improving photosynthesis really improve yields?

<comment><USER5> I'm a vast gaping maw of ignorance here, but I thought we had solved nitrogen fixation with the fritz-Haber process at the cost of using fossil fuels. Am I wrong, or are we just trying to keep farmers from having to buy ammonium nitrate?

<comment><AUTHOR> Supplementing nitrogen comes with a whole host of environmental trade-offs. In particular there are problems with pollution, where nitrogen added to fields gets washed off in the rain and ends up in waterways. There it can totally destabilise ecosystems by introducing a flood of nitrogen which is usually a scarce resource, leading to massive population explosions of some kinds of organisms, which in turn can leave huge buildups of toxic byproducts. This is called eutrophication.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Producing enough food is basically a solved problem, distribution and hindering people to eat an everincreasing amount of meat is the problem

<comment><USER3> Monoculture, petrol, chemical agriculture is often produced in a centralized manner, which introduces inefficiencies (with environmental issues) in transport, fertilization, pest control, etc. The current paradigm also requires large amounts of capital to purchase machinery, mined fertilizer, poisonous pesticides, GMOs where seeds can't be saved, etc. This cycle of dependence has caused many small farms to be in financial crisis. Also, don't forget that large scale factory farming is subsidized by the government. Without these subsidizations, large scale factory farming is not viable.

Factory meat production follows the same pattern of monoculture, with disgusting & unhealthy results.

The alternative is to decentralize food production. Small, organic, polyculture farms reduce or eliminate the need to transport food over long distances, import fertilizer, use pesticides. Decentralized food production also enables the farmer to be independent of having to purchase expensive inputs from large multinational corporations.

Small farms are more humane and, similar to startups, freer to innovate.

<comment><USER7> Large scale monoculture is a necessity to feed the world. What are you going to do with a tiny farm that cannot benefit from the economy of scale and agricultural tech?

<comment><USER3> Large scale monoculture is not necessary. It's not one tiny farm, it's many tiny farms owned by the people who live in that region.

Many of the problems that are "solved" with technology don't exist in natural perennial polycultures. For example, pests. In a natural perennial polyculture, you have an ecosystem that naturally manages the pests (via predators). These organisms evolve with the pests.

Tiny farms grow more food per acre than large monoculture farms.

Agricultural tech creates problems of it's own & does not match the prowess of nature. Natural processes grow the food, not technology. Technology can help, however, it can also hinder, and it does in our current petrolchemical centralized paradigm. Look at the pollution, soil degregation, erosion, desertification, poverty, etc. Large scale monoculture ruined just about every ecosystem that it has been used on. For example, the American Plains used to have 10s of feet of rich topsoil built by natural processes over the years. It's now eroded due to runoff & mismanagement propagated by large scale monoculture.

I can provide many other examples & problems, but I'll keep this post short.

Large scale monoculture is a failed experiment & a blight on the planet. It's also only viable because of government subsidization. Our monoculture paradigm benefitted from, wasted, & toxified our natural inheritance in less than 100 years. So yes, monoculture is extremely efficient at creating a mess.

<comment><USER8> "Large scale monoculture is a failed experiment"

That is simply not true. Crop yields continue to increase. By a lot.

[http://crops.missouri.edu/audit/images/CornYields_MO.jpg](http://crops.missouri.edu/audit/images/CornYields_MO.jpg)

We no longer need to have 90% of the population working as stoop-labor agricultural peasants. Famine is essentially a thing of the past (it only happens in areas where the government is severely fucked up for one reason or another). Mechanized agriculture is the greatest success story in the history of the human race.

If you really want to go back to the age of peasants and serfs, why don't you lead by example? Start by producing all of your own food using intensive hand cultivation. Then produce all of the food for 150 other people using intensive hand cultivation.

<comment><USER3> > Crop yields continue to increase

This is like judging someone's wealth by their ability to rapidly use a credit card. Monoculture has destroyed our ecosystems, caused rampant desertification, caused soil runoff, stip mined the less fortunate countries, polluted our water, increased pests overpopulation, increased disease, etc.

> If you really want to go back to the age of peasants and serfs, why don't > you lead by example?

Dualistic solution-centric thinking is an issue with our times. It's time to think systemically. How can we improve existing systems? Which paradigms are appropriate to our entire context? Can we move toward an ethics driven paradigm, instead of a solution centric paradigm? There are many solutions to a problem, but some have maladaptive implications in a broader context not considered by myopic vision.

Can we start to view the world with a broader context; beyond money & a certain strain of technological progress?

Can we move beyond reductionistic metrics & take the entire situation into account?

Also, is it so bad to have more farmers? Many natural farmers don't seem to think so. Is the hustle & bustle of city life with it's stress & unemployment a good life?

Will the Pharmaceutical industry cure our Nature Deficit Disorder? What's left when you worked hard all of your life & it's your time to die?

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

While I don't own land (it's quite expensive in the current economic system), I do support local farmers & participate in local economies to a certain extend. I'd love to increase my participation because it's the responsible thing to do.

<comment><USER9> That's a stretch. Iowa grows more every year; our soil is in the best shape its ever been; erosion is at a low; water pollution is at a low. We can certainly make it work.

<comment><USER3> The best shape ever? Like before western civilization came when it was the grand prairie?

Also, there are issues with runoff:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/us/conflict-over-soil- and-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/us/conflict-over-soil-and-water- quality-puts-iowa-nice-to-a-test.html)

There's also a concern about water management. Natural ecosystems tend to get the most out of their water usage. I seem to recall that the midwest water aquifers are a limited resource.

That aside, I can buy that soil is improving. I also agree that we can make it work. I do applaud regenerative efforts in Iowa.

However, I'm looking at a global scale, where desertification, pollution, runoff, lowering productivity, etc. are big problems. As an analogy, many climate change deniers will claim that it's still winter in their local area, but that perception is not fully representative of what is happening on a global scale.

Re: the industrial paradigm on improving local soil systems; is importing nutrition on a massive scale, robbing that nutrition from other ecosystems, a responsible thing to do in a global context? I'm realistic in the sense that some importation may be necessary, in fact nature moves nutrients via animals, wind, etc. However, nature works in a cooperative & systemic way.

<comment><USER9> Our soil is about perfect for growing what we grow. Topsoil used to be the big thing, before ammonia fertilizer. Now the best crops grow on clay hillsides. Which we have plenty of, since Iowa used to be largely timber.

Confused about the 'importing nutrients' thing - ammonia fertilizer is fixed from the air (since WWII); no more shipping bat guano around the country.

<comment><USER3> I can't criticize your approach, since I'm not a farmer. I respect what you do & the work that it takes to run a farm. I can only point out what I've seen & what inspires me.

re: Amonia

> A typical modern ammonia-producing plant first converts natural gas (i.e., > methane) or LPG (liquefied petroleum gases such as propane and butane) or > petroleum naphtha into gaseous hydrogen.

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

This requires the importation or local extraction of fossil fuels. Given that the United States is now utilizing fracking to extract natural gas, this causes pollution within the aquifers as well as reducing the integrity of the surface strata.

A natural approach of fertilization is animal poop from grazing & polycultures (nitrogen fixing perennial plants, like Black Locust), similar to how the ancient prairies were fertilized.

Mark Shepard, who's farm is in Wisconsin, has a large scale example of "Restoration Agriculture". He has a silvopasture that feeds his livestock. The livestock fertilize the fields. He also grows nuts. He also saves money by not having to buy fertilizer or pesticides. He also uses keyline design, swales, & ponds to efficiently use water & reduce runoff.

[http://www.newforestfarm.net/](http://www.newforestfarm.net/)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb_t- sVVzF0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb_t-sVVzF0)

Here's a great talk by Gabe Brown from Idaho using natural, regenerative methods to rebuild soil.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPjoh9YJMk&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPjoh9YJMk&feature=youtu.be)

My friends at [http://www.fieldswithoutfences.org/](http://www.fieldswithoutfences.org/) in New Jersey have a lush polyculture medicinal herb & food farm that started from rocky spent earth. There was no top soil when they started a few years ago. You can see how it looks right now.

[http://www.fieldswithoutfences.org/permaculture/](http://www.fieldswithoutfences.org/permaculture/)

<comment><USER9> Natural fertilizer is a pile of manure. There's no chance the supply will come close to serving the demand. Also, its already being used (you have to do something with it) and its only mildly useful. Unless you have some political point to make, its always supplemented (read: almost totally surpassed) by ammonia and other carefully calculated amendments. Vs whatever randomly came out of a cows back end.

<comment><USER3> Natural fertilizer is how our ecosystems were made to be so productive. Your land in Iowa is incredibly productive from a legacy of natural fertilization.

There are a growing number of examples of farmers using natural methods in the modern context. There is some supplementation, especially in the beginning to re-mediate lands that have been damaged by conventional agriculture; however nature has a way of making things work.

Natural polyculture systems produce more food than monocultures for a number of reasons, such as utilizing multiple layers, creating a functioning ecological systems, more efficient water usage, etc. This is done despite the lack of research that goes into creating natural food systems. Imagine how much better it will be when it's fully adopted.

Re demand: Much of our demand is artificial, narrow, globally structured, driven by subsidies, marketing, & supply. Corn based ethanol uses more energy than it creates. The only reason for corn based ethanol is to subsidize certain farmers. Our level of factory meat production is also destructive to the environment, resource intensive, & unhealthy. America pushes junk food creating an unhealthy, morbidly obese population.

I'm just pointing out how ecological & biological systems work, the consequences of the status quo, & how things can be improved.

I stand to be a good steward of our planet by considering the global systemic implications of our systems. That is the ethical thing to do. It's easy to hide behind rationalizations to shirk responsibility to explore viable options that have been proven to work.

If you see that as political, then you also being political.

<comment><USER9> This is an urban legend. Iowa is so incredibly productive because it get sun and rain in a good predictable quantity, and we apply man-made fertilizer to largely level fields in controlled quantities. The rest is wishful thinking. Topsoil became irrelevant to farming decades ago.

Returning to a Pollyanna view of a perfect agrarian society of cows fertilizing humble fields of vegetables, would result in widespread shortages.

Corn based ethanol no longer uses more energy than it creates; that threshold was reached years ago. Some more reading is in order, I suggest.

Just pointing out how agriculture economic systems work, and its absolutely nothing like described above.

<comment><USER3> > This is an urban legend.

It's an urban legend that Iowa has a legacy of good soil built up from generations of natural processes? I'm skeptical of your assessment. Can you dive more into it?

The ecologists I talked to seem to think that soil is very important to the health of the ecosystem & to grow healthy food.

> The rest is wishful thinking.

That is what I call an urban legend. It's certainly a made up story.

> Topsoil became irrelevant to farming decades ago.

Your perspective on topsoil is interesting, considering how nutrition in our food is on a downward trend. Also interesting how we are having drought, desertification, loss of habitat, pollution, etc. Most ecologists will disagree with your assessment that Topsoil is "irrelevant".

> Returning to a Pollyanna view of a perfect agrarian society of cows > fertilizing humble fields of vegetables, would result in widespread > shortages.

That's a myth & a failure of imagination; especially when you consider the pattern of decentralizing (localizing) agricultural production around the world. The UN endorses organic & distributed farming as the most viable options to feed the world. They can go even further & take a restorative approach to also heal the natural ecosystems that we are destroying.

There are studies that show that perennial polyculture systems grow more calories than monoculture systems. Third world countries are beginning to take the lead in growing their own food using many small scale, distributed, perennial polycultures ecosystems, with animals.

You can't write it off just like that. There's too much evidence that it will work...

The alternative is the status quo, destroying our ecosystems, polluting our water, decreasing food nutrition, making more crappy monotonous food, obesity, declining human health, desertification, etc. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for efficiency, however let's efficiently do healthy things, not efficiently do unhealthy things.

> Corn based ethanol no longer uses more energy than it creates; that > threshold was reached years ago. Some more reading is in order, I suggest.

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

It looks like there's a controversy over Ethanol's net output. You also need to consider the energy required to produce the fertilizer/pesticides, transport the ethanol, etc. It's certainly an order of magnitude less productive than fossil fuels.

I'm more interested in renewable energy, such as solar, wind, biogas, etc. Utilizing so much land, soil, water, etc. to grow energy seems wasteful & counterproductive to growing food that is nutritious, has variety, is restorative, & clean.

> Just pointing out how agriculture economic systems work, and its absolutely > nothing like described above.

I can see your point when taking a reductionistic lens to this system. When you look at the big picture, the agricultural sector is responsible for most of our CO2 pollution, soil runoff, loss of habitat, loss of health, etc. I'd venture to say that our agricultural practices are not restorative/responsible & leave much to be desired. In short, the product, it's costs, & it's consequences suck! This is also the planet I live on & I'm relying on you to be responsible with it's systems.

To write off improvements as "not able to work" is intellectually lazy. The improvements will work & require more attention if we (humanity) will prosper in the future...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Naive questions (largely because this is a whole area of science I'm ignorant to, but I am curious):

If plants could benefit from more efficient photosynthesis, over the span of the billions of years they've been doing it, wouldn't they have evolved to do so? Sure, it may benefit us in some way to assist, but how does the plant benefit?

The fact they're green and not other colors could be a significant evolutionary advantage... or wouldn't we expect to see other a large diversity of other colour plants? Why did green win out and not some other colour that absorbs different areas of the light spectrum?

If one of the laws of nature is survival of the fittest, what do we humans know that makes us think that our ability to tinker with evolution without negative consequences is a wise decision?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are two parts to the answer.

Firstly, some plants _have_ evolved to do photosynthesis more efficiently. One of the projects in the article (the one I work on) is to take a particularly efficient kind of naturally occurring photosynthesis - C4 photosynthesis - <USER2> copy it over to species that don't already have it. Sugarcane is an example of a plant with very efficient photosynthesis.

Secondly, there are relatively few evolutionary innovations in photosynthesis for several reasons. The main one is that the global environment is constantly changing - the atmosphere is very different now than it was 1.6 billion years ago when photosynthesis first evolved. The atmosphere started out with no oxygen, so photosynthesis first evolved to handle that scenario. But photosynthesis releases oxygen by breaking up water molecules, so it gradually oxygenated the atmosphere and depleted the carbon dioxide. Modern conditions with very high oxygen and low carbon break a lot of the assumptions that were fixed into the early photosynthetic system, so improvements tend to be workarounds because evolution mainly builds on what is already there.

The thing that humans have that evolution doesn't is the ability to reason about the system. Evolution is like an optimisation algorithm working within constraints, and humans are like software engineers that can change the constraints.

<comment><AUTHOR> I forgot to add a second reason why there are few innovations in photosynthesis. In most ecosystems, photosynthesis is not the limiting factor. Other things like water, space, mineral nutrients and predation are more important, so there is no evolutionary pressure for photosynthesis to improve.

But in agriculture we solve those problems - we provide space, water and nutrients, and we keep pests and competition away. Then photosynthesis becomes the limiting factor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I believe the answer is not in agriculture but in nanofoods. The ability to produce food from manipulating basic elements.

But for that we need to tame energy first, then water, then food.

<comment><USER12> There's also, I fear, a trap here where we believe we understand nutrition, only to discover there are nuances that we still don't have a great handle on.

As an example, there's the emerging posibility that one's gut flora can have a huge impact on overall health - and that certain types of foods can have a negative or positive impact on that gut flora.

Manipulating basic elements could easily lead to our skipping over critical parts of our health needs, with unintended consequences down the line.

Put another way: our dietary habits and nutritional systems developed over tens-to-hundreds of thousands of years. I'm very leery of any theory that we can easily replace that.

<comment><USER13> Right, gladly I believe we are some way beyond 'emerging' and into 'researching' , 'This year, the US National Institute of Mental Health spent more than US$1 million on a new research programme aimed at the microbiome–brain connection.' [http://www.nature.com/news/gut-brain-link- grabs-neuroscienti...](http://www.nature.com/news/gut-brain-link-grabs- neuroscientists-1.16316)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are some problems with plants, and one of them is that plants are, often misunderstood, live beings that are strategist by nature. If you put an improved photosyntesis in rice, this could lead to more grain of course, but also could boost the production of leaves and roots and the result could be less or none grain in the same time. Or atract predators. Have you consider this possibilities?

</comment><comment><USER15> I'll make a complaint on the way this article is written which I think is quite damaging: the sense that all of this work is being done by "scientists" and "experts" who will develop this technology in their ivory towers and make it available to the public at some point. Just wait around and you will be handed these gifts.

This style sucks because it separates the reader from "experts" (you are not one), and it implies that you cannot participate even by intent. Experts will decide what is best for you, and you must receive it and like it. The notion that the future is something produced by a few and the majority only receive it passively is an affront to a free society.

<comment><USER16> I'm pretty confused by your logic, I certainly don't think that it implies, for example, that the reader would be unable to go into education and go down a career path where they would become one of the few experts who are working in this field. It even links to papers and technical articles.</comment></comment>