It can make more sense to build new renewable capacity than run old coal plants - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-07/wind-and-solar-power-have-become-amazingly-affordable <comment><USER2> "[Wind and solar are] even close to being competitive with the marginal costs of running the coal and nuclear plants we already have."

Is that still true without incentives, green grants, rebates, and tax credits? Because without all of that and with mountains of red tape nuclear still produces energy at the lowest cost, and without emitting any CO2.

<comment><USER3> Are you sure about that? You should look at the fortunes of the engineering groups McDermott, CB&I, and Shaw and how the cost overruns associated with the Westinghouse contributed to so much trouble for those EPC companies and Toshiba. Nuclear has two big problems: difficulty with costs of constructing new plants and currently completely externalized storage of spent fuel. The latter is poorly defined and understood, even though some people would like to give the appearance otherwise.

<comment><USER4> is there any reason why we can't conceivably jettison nuclear waste out of orbit?

<comment><USER5> Because there is no need to. The radioactive material wasn't a problem before it was dug out of the soil. It's not a problem if it returns to where it came from. The problem is that most government try to find an idiotic central storage location instead of simply distributing the spent fuel over many locations.

<comment><USER6> Oh yeah sounds easy until someone digs it out again and puts it in a bomb.

Or it leaks and reaches our water...

No risk there never has been.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't understand the hype around wind and solar. Or rather I don't see how these technologies can ever be anything more than a minor player in the energy market:

These technologies are extremely sensitive to weather conditions which means that other, more stable sources must exist and have "stand by" production cap to produce all the energy these tech won't under bad conditions. If so, what's the point? (I mean in the grand, climate crisis, scheme of things) what am I missing?

Even in "green" countries, most of the green energy comes from bio fuel which is just burning young "soon to be coal".

<comment><USER8> Energy storage will enable us to use only clean renewables. While the costs for energy storage aren't falling nearly as fast, they are still decreasing. I anticipate that rate to accelerate

<comment><USER4> Why does everyone turn from Nuclear though? It seems like the most viable option in my opinion. I'd rather have a network of nuke power where energy reliability is weather-independent than forests of wind and farms of solar. I feel like its a much greener approach overall. What's the manufacturing breakeven in carbon costs for a windmill or a solar panel?

<comment><USER9> In my case geopolitical reasons, mostly. I prefer nuclear plants not be in what the US president lovingly calls shithole countries. Those tend to not yet have nuclear, but a drastically increasing need for energy. Many of them are also a lot closer to the equator than western countries with existing nuclear, making solar much more viable than e.g. in the UK.

> What's the manufacturing breakeven in carbon costs for a windmill or a solar > panel?

This questions feels like you mostly try to justify your otherwise preexisting preference. A proper system would have external costs factored into the price, by the way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I learned from Professor Vaclav Smil that while Wind and Solar are practical energy solutions in the United States population ~340mil. It is not practical in all regions in more populous countries such as China (population ~1.4 Billion).

There are large regions in the country where Solar is not a good solution due to fog. And Wind is not a good solution due to lack of wind.

We have a global climate system. As is such if the goal is to reduce carbon emissions in some areas Nuclear power is the most effective method to achieve this goal. Furthermore, moving China to non-carbon energy sources would have the largest impact globally. They use ~ 22 GigaWatts of electricity per year. Which is 3.6 times as much as the US which is the 2ed largest consumer of energy by country.

[http://vaclavsmil.com/](http://vaclavsmil.com/)

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

<comment><USER11> This is surprising to hear. Here's some back of the napkin math that seems to contradict the assertion that there's not enough sunlight to power humanity: [https://ag.tennessee.edu/solar/Pages/What%20Is%20Solar%20Ene...](https://ag.tennessee.edu/solar/Pages/What%20Is%20Solar%20Energy/Sun's%20Energy.aspx)

They claim texas recieves >300x the amount of power consumed in the form of sunlight.

Another source claims that the Sun delivers enough power in a single hour to power the earth for a year: [https://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-the- potential-of-sol...](https://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-the-potential-of- solar-power-2015-9)

I can respect the fact that we cannot capture 100% of that power, but even a fraction should power the earth, no?

<comment><USER12> it's not even that surprising when you consider that basically _all_ of earth's energy through its lifetime derives from the sun in some form.

the main exceptions--radiative exchange with the rest of the universe and energy from earth's core--are relatively insignificant sources compared to the solar influx of energy.

fossil fuels are just solar energy captured and (inefficiently) transformed over hundreds of millions of years through plant and animal intermediaries. wind and hydro (weather-based energy) are also intermediated forms of solar energy.

the sun is effectively unlimited energy for billions of years, mostly being radiated away right now, so the closer we get to transforming it directly into useful forms, the better off we are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Oh, can I not wait to ditch Ontario's Power for my own Renewables. The costs are reaching extremes now. We have some of the most expensive power in the world.

<comment><USER14> Ontario power is mostly from renewable sources already, but yes it is highly mismanaged.

You can see the hourly Ontario energy use by source here:

[http://www.ieso.ca/power-data](http://www.ieso.ca/power-data)

One of the worst inefficiencies of the Ontario grid is that we run an abundance of energy during parts of the day, during which we dump electricity to the US at extremely cheap rates. If that electricity were offered at the same rate to Ontario residents (who are paying for it!) you would see residents retrofit homes with dual-fire gas/electric heating and other utilities. Or if we had a means to store that electricity it would cover the highest-use parts of the day (approximately 3 hours later) where we still fire natural gas to cover demand.

<comment><USER15> Is there a minimum rate at which they produce hydro power? That seems like a great option to spin down hydro power during those parts of the day, store the water, and then spin the hydro plants back up at peak load.

<comment><USER16> About a quarter of it is from Niagara Falls, ie: run of the river.

The amount that they divert varies by time: they want to keep the falls nice during the day, but divert more at night.

And a lot of dams are dual use: controlling water levels while generating electricity, so it really depends on weather. When it's dry they can maybe do this, but when it's wet, they gotta be careful. Or vice versa depending on which side it's raining more on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Love reading this kind of news. As an aside, this is the exact type of content that is super welcome on the platform we launched in a Show HN on the front page today ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21472817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21472817)). The url is [https://collective.energy](https://collective.energy) if you're interested in growing your impact further!

</comment><comment><USER18> I wish small scale solar was falling as fast, especially very small scale. It would be nice to be able to purchase a blanket-sized solar panel for twenty bucks.

</comment><comment><USER19> My experience with utility solar is it's getting competitive but not reliably so yet: [https://twitter.com/ctdonath/status/1184138472988315648?s=20](https://twitter.com/ctdonath/status/1184138472988315648?s=20)

</comment><comment><USER20> Sounds great until you read the caveats, I think the general agreement is that choosing the best of the dirtiest sources is going to be the important decision facing my kids' generation.</comment>


Trashing Chromebooks - <AUTHOR> http://www.systemcall.org/blog/2014/06/trashing-chromebooks/ <comment><USER2> Those swollen batteries are rather worrying - unless these laptops are being subjected to temperatures far outside of their design spec or the charging circuitry is (very slightly) overcharging them, they should not be swelling at all. Although in more gentle conditions they'd probably last long enough for the few years design life these have.

<comment><USER3> I've had several (three or four) MacBook batteries swell up like that from normal/slightly heavy use after only a couple of years. This was in the 2007-2008 era or so, though, when you could actually remove and replace them.

I think it might happen more than people think.

<comment><USER4> My father's 2010 MBP did this a couple of weeks ago. He opened it to stick an SSD in it and saw that the thing had bulged inside the chassis. Might have been like it for a year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Samsung Chromebook is a fanless machine, relying on cooling from the ambient air around it. Having to remove the lid switch to allow the machine to power on with the lid closed should have been a pretty strong signal of this.

Since they are far, far into voided-warranty land already, I would say just remove the lid completely and thus get better airflow and cooling for the board.

</comment><comment><USER6> As a curiosity -- why not use QEMU to test ARM? Or is that risking incompatibility with real ARM hardware?

<comment><USER7> In practice, both (qemu and hw) buildbots are useful. qemu is a bit faster and easier to scale, hw is the ground truth.

Google Native Client buildbots are exactly like that:

qemu: [http://build.chromium.org/p/client.nacl/builders/precise_64-...](http://build.chromium.org/p/client.nacl/builders/precise_64-newlib- arm_qemu-pnacl-opt)

pandaboard: [http://build.chromium.org/p/client.nacl/builders/oneiric_32-...](http://build.chromium.org/p/client.nacl/builders/oneiric_32-newlib- arm_hw-pnacl-panda-opt)

And yes, Panda is very unstable under heavy load. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Needlessly provocative title/link bait.

The Chromebooks are not trashed, they are simply re-installed with Linux and have their batteries removed so they can rest in racks for long-term testing.

tl,dr; There aren't enough reliable ARM servers yet, so for developing Linaro (optimized release of gcc), they use Chromebooks.

<comment><USER9> I like how any interesting article I've seen about Chromebooks in the last year or two starts with removing Chrome OS from the machines.

<comment><USER10> Agreed. I use an HP Chromebook 14 with an Ubuntu chroot as my main machine, and I love the Chromebook, but I have no love for Chrome OS.

It's just too damn limited to be appreciable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you put the devboards in an enclosure with vents on opposite sides and a small exhaust fan on one vent, you will get much better longevity, as that keeps air moving across the hot parts. I don't know if it's a better solution than the chromebooks though.

<comment><USER12> A fan seems a much simpler solution.

Then again, I am playing with Odroids now and don't like to hear that they will fail if I max them out for days on end.

<comment><USER13> Even a small refrigerator seems simpler than hacking up a chromebook.

<comment><USER14> In high school I tried building a PC into a refrigerator, and the results weren't pretty. The fridge could not keep up with the heat being generated by the CPU and over time it got too hot and shut down. The electric bill was also quite expensive, keeping a fridge running full blast 24/7.

Maybe hacking up the fridge to have the Freon running right over top of the CPU, but I'd rather take my chances tearing apart a Chromebook than tearing apart a fridge.

<comment><USER15> [http://www.overclockers.com/extreme-water-cooling-using- refr...](http://www.overclockers.com/extreme-water-cooling-using- refrigeration/)

Yeah it's super old.

There's also the guy who using his pool water to water cool a few machines.

[http://www.thebuehls.com/pool_cooling/](http://www.thebuehls.com/pool_cooling/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My current ARM build machine of choice is the 2G quad core Utilite [http://utilite-computer.com/web/utilite-models](http://utilite- computer.com/web/utilite-models) with internal SATA SSD.

Only annoyance is stupid power connector, which really needs fixing as it comes out too easily.

Its fast, and I run it fairly heavily although builds are not continuous, but it is on 24x7.

</comment><comment><USER17> I feel like the NVIDIA Jetson TK1 would be a better alternative to the odroid products.

[https://developer.nvidia.com/jetson-tk1](https://developer.nvidia.com/jetson- tk1)

<comment><USER18> jetsons are not inexpensive.

<comment><USER5> Neither are any of the alternatives, really. The Jetson TK1 is a great little board, and it's significantly faster than the original ARM Chromebook (4x2.3GHz Cortex-A15 vs 2x1.7GHz). It also has a fan, so it should stay cool under prolonged load.

<comment><USER19> The TK1 is probably worth testing out and looks at least marginally faster in most tests, but it's worth pointing out that it seems nowhere near as much faster as its specs might suggest, and stability running under constant load is still an open question. Here's a couple benchmark comparisons courtesy of Phoronix: [http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1405010-KH- NVIDIATEG94,13...](http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1405010-KH- NVIDIATEG94,1309037-SO-SAMSUNGCH72&compare)

(Still, if it were stable it seems like it's much preferable to having to individually mangle Chromebooks and the TK1 comes w/ Ubuntu preinstalled on it's eMMC. The bootloader can also be flashed to boot from SATA)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So what about cross compiling on x86? My company make SW for switching hardware which is mostly PPC (P2020) and we compile everything on large x86 systems.

<comment><USER21> I don't understand your question... the article is about automated software build testing on ARM, not the build step itself.

<comment><USER22> isn't it? their complaint about the beagles is that they don't have enough ram to be compiling anything without refactoring the build system.

<comment><USER23> Being able to cross compile tells you exactly nothing about the state of your native build environment on the target platform. I mean, just because I can successfully cross compile C code for an attiny doesn't prove that gcc has been successfully ported to run on an attiny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Huh? Why not buy these? [http://www.amazon.com/RK3188-Quad-core-Bluetooth- headphone-s...](http://www.amazon.com/RK3188-Quad-core-Bluetooth-headphone- standard/dp/B00AZR1TG2/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1402465502&sr=8-8&keywords=chromebox)

<comment><USER25> In my experience (and the experience of other users; Google for some blogs), the RockChip devices are pretty low quality. Often it's tricky to get Linux on them and if you do, it won't be with a mainline kernel and hardware support may be patchy.

<comment><USER26> well, maybe Linaro could do something about this, if only author had known somebody working for Linaro ....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why not use Android sticks instead? For $60 you can get a quad-core with 2GB RAM, USB + HDMI + WiFi + BT and passively cooled. You can place dozens of them on a single rack. What would be Chromebook advantage here?

<comment><USER28> These sticks definitely do not have the cooling capacity to run at full rated heat output 24/7\. As you note, they're passively cooled. They don't produce any less heat than a Chromebook on the same SoC, they just throttle and downclock faster.

<comment><USER27> I meant "passively cooled" as their advantage. You can always place some Noctua on top of them if needed, you just don't have to. I have one of RK3188-based sticks which is enclosed in a passive case. I also run the latest Bay Trail NUC in passive mode 24/7 and its temperature is higher on heavy load than of that Android stick. Performance wise BT is about 2x as fast, though it depends on a task. 9W vs 14W at full load including OpenGL, 1W vs 4W at idle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Are there not ARM Chromeboxes around?

<comment><USER21> There's the Samsung Chromebox Series 3,

[http://www.samsung.com/uk/consumer/pc-peripherals/chrome- dev...](http://www.samsung.com/uk/consumer/pc-peripherals/chrome- devices/chrome-devices/XE300M22-B01UK)

Edit: Nevermind, seems unavailable now. And not ARM. Derp.

<comment><USER30> Unfortunately the Samsung Chromebox Series 3 uses an Intel processor, not an ARM processor.

A slightly less "friendly" alternative to an ARM-based Chromebox would be the NVIDIA Jetson TK1. It's a developer board with an actively-cooled Tegra K1 SoC. We've been experimenting with these boards over the last two weeks and haven't encountered any stability problems. We're not pushing them as hard as Linaro does but we're certainly putting them through their paces.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It seems 'cheap ARM linux platform more powerful than a Raspberry Pi' is the chromebook's primary use these days.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm surprised they didn't go for the various rk3188-based tv-player android devices. There's got to be one hackable enough for Ubuntu.

<comment><AUTHOR> The name of the game with ARM devices is often support and stability. There are plenty of ARM boards out there with just barely enough driver support to get Ubuntu running, let alone hacking it on yourself. Like the post said, Chromebooks already come with good hardware and software support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> What about a chromebox?

[http://www.asus.com/au/ASUS_Chromebox/](http://www.asus.com/au/ASUS_Chromebox/)

<comment><USER34> That isn't an ARM box.

[http://www.asus.com/au/ASUS_Chromebox/Chromebox/specificatio...](http://www.asus.com/au/ASUS_Chromebox/Chromebox/specifications/)

Intel® Core™ i7-4600U Processor or Intel® Core™ i3-4010U Processor or Intel® Celeron 2955U Processor

<comment><USER33> doh. Sorry, got lost in the excitement ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Was this written in the 2000s? "The only problem is, there aren't any ARM rack-servers or workstations." There have been commercial rack mountable ARM servers for years now. Even the simplest Google search shows a wide range of ARM rack mountable servers. You can even special order them from Dell. What are don't seem to be is great value. I am sure a few netbooks would be better value. (ps re-installing the operating system is not what anyone except maybe ma and pa, would call trashing one).

<comment><USER36> Googling "Dell ARM Server" shows me a bunch of articles from 2010 about a proof-of-concept.

What do you recommend that people order from Dell, for less than $2000? (Note that the Chromebook in the article retails for ~$200, and IIRC the other ARM boards mentioned are also like ~$100-$300.)

<comment><USER32> Maybe there's a way to hack Ubuntu onto a cloud-connect stick?</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Simple tool to make a habit of exercising - <AUTHOR> https://workoutbff.com/ <comment><USER4> No app will work.

You just have to reprogram yourself to do it.

Nothing else but ACTION will suffice for exercising.

A very fit friend of mine said to me many years ago "I just don't give myself any choice about whether I'm going to the gym."

You can talk and use apps and make plans and get trainers and coaches and excuses etc etc etc but in the end the ONLY thing that works is ACTION - <USER2> and exercise. Find an exercise that suits you. I like running because it's so easy - just pull on shoes and go - and you can listen to podcasts as you do it. Also CrossFit because I find exercise boring so it's really great to do a group class where the instructor tells you what to do - all I need to do is turn up for an hour and hand over all the thinking about it to someone else and leave fitter and hour later.

<comment><USER5> It's 102. All the CrossFit gyms in Texas don't have ac. I'm miserable. Also I don't have a death wish.. no choice no option.

I'm about to force myself to spend 180 a month for a crowded upscale 24 fitness. But the Olympic gym that wanted 320 a month takes the Cake.

When I wasn't living in a literal oven I would go as far as the drive 30 minutes to do CrossFit or Oly. I have a metal block on not group classes. Only CrossFit works for me. I never get results at a vanilla gym. But you are right its a no choice situation. But for me it works to have a chart with weekly cells.. hard to break that chain when you need a new poster board...

<comment><USER6> > I never get results at a vanilla gym.

How are you defining results?

If you watch yt videos by Arnold or Jay Cutler and just go to the gym, you'll be the strongest guy there in about a year.

If you mean lose weight, that's 99% an intake problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Streaks are often self-defeating. A few samples from the duolingo forums where this comes up frequently:

[https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/17598950/The- demotivation...](https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/17598950/The-demotivation- of-a-STREAK)

[https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/3705144/Streak-Breaker- Wh...](https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/3705144/Streak-Breaker-Why-Streaks- aren-t-so-important-after-all)

[https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/7927344/Lost-streak- and-m...](https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/7927344/Lost-streak-and- motivation)

<comment><USER8> I had a several hundred day streak on duolingo, lost it and haven't opened the app since. Why would I, all my hard work is lost? I didn't actively think about it until I saw this.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps something like a "moving average" would be better to motivate people to keep things going without creating an expectations bubble.

"You did great for the past 4 weeks - perfect streak" or "you are doing really well - only missed one day in the past 4 weeks". You know, something a human might say.

Start off with a x Days, then switch to x Weeks and then moving average.

<comment><USER10> A moving average is an amazing idea. I'm gonna mess with that idea today for my work tasks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's a great open source android app[0] which has most of the functionality here in a really polished package.

[0] [https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits](https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits)

<comment><USER12> Is there an equivalent of this on iOS?

<comment><USER13> Working on something similar for iOS and watchOS for some time, planning to ship it this year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I see a lot of people here having success with goal-setting and gamification, but sometimes it's a struggle to come up with concrete goals. This is especially true if there's no obvious problem to solve at the moment (OK weight, good body image, stress managed, just not exercising). What's a good goal, then, for someone who simply wants to increase useful lifespan? "Run at least X miles every Y days" feels like "write X lines of code every Y days", which feels arbitrary unless you're training for a distance-running event. How much is enough? Where are the diminishing returns? What do you even measure?

Gamification is basically a way to substitute fake goals for real ones, which works for some people but not all.

<comment><USER15> If your goal is "increase useful lifespan" the list of of fitness goals is nearly inexhaustible. You're optimizing too early, and your target goal is too abstract. Consider grabbing some more near-term goals (ones that will also contribute to "increase useful lifespan") and pursue those.

To share a personal example: signing up for a long race gave me concrete goals with a deadline, I could measure my progress in distance and time, and by the time I completed the race I began to enjoy running for the sake of running. Now I have an enjoyable hobby that also contributes to "increased useful lifespan".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What I would like is a paid plan where you pay for each day where you don't exercise. See "loss aversion" on Wikipedia for why.

<comment><USER17> That's kind of what you're doing if you get an expensive gym subscription and don't go.

<comment><USER18> I pay the same amount for my gym membership whether I go or not. What GP is asking for would only cost money on the days they don't go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I drank the Samsung kool-aid, with the Galaxy Sx phone, Gear Active watch, and the Level headphones.

The Health App has been a win. Tracking meals and what have you is straightforward.

But the real win is the gamification of the Global Challenge. While completely meaningless in any real-world sense, somehow keeping the step score and all of the silly achievements and missions help to quantify and motivate.

Recently, via the headphones, I've taken in some outstanding podcasts while out walking. (No specifics, lest I violate the HN orthodoxy.)

Overall, any app that gets us up and moving is a positive thing.

<comment><USER20> This is exactly why duolingo owl has so much power over me. Can't lose my 235 day streak and can't drop out of to a lower league after working so hard to get to that league.

<comment><AUTHOR> > duolingo owl has so much power over me.

I use duolingo as well - and one of the saddest days was when I lost a 100+ day streak. It's funny how a meaningless number can have so much power.

<comment><USER21> I don't remember perfectly, but the creator of Lodash (javascript library) had something like a 365 day streak of coding everyday. But it was broken because he committed late a night and the cutoff was on a different timezone. He was so bothered by it, he contacted GitHub to fix it for him.

<comment><USER22> Couldn't he have simply back dated a commit (or edited the time of an existing commit)? Ex. [https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti](https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My challenge with working out is not how to continue once I start which tools like the X.effect and streaks help with. It is how to go from 0 to 1. How to start? That's a mindset challenge which is probably insurmountable for any app to solve for an individual. I've watched myself bottom out through eating junk and lazing around before something clicks and I start exercising. I want to figure out how to shorten the distance between two exercise peaks.

<comment><USER24> The only thing that works for me in that situation is to decide to do it and then do it, no matter what. It'll suck for a couple of weeks, but by tracking weight, body fat, and just looking in the mirror for changes, it sucks a little less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> My current trick for aerobic exercises is... Beat Saber. It's a rhythm game for VR headsets, in which you use your controllers as light sabers and have to cut apart cubes and avoid obstacles, all to the beat of music. At higher difficulty levels it gets pretty intense, so it works great as an exercise, and it's also _fun_. You don't even notice when you start sweating from exertion.

My wife and I talked a lot about getting a dancing mat, which was my college friend's go-to exercise technique (he ended up going semi-pro and winning some awards in StepMania competitions), but dancing mats - especially hard ones - make a lot of noise, making them unsuitable for use in an apartment in a block of flats. Dancing games have similar benefits - exercising becomes _fun_ , and there's built-in progression to guide you. But after Oculus Quest - <USER3> standalone, untethered VR headset - came out, we decided to go the Beat Saber route. Waving hands doesn't make the noise stepping does, and untethered headset is even more portable than the dancing mat.

</comment><comment><USER26> The thing that helps me exercise is not habit, it's goals. I used to work out 5x a week, but other things fill my time now, so I need a reason to work out. Lately it's indulging in food/drink, going on a long trip, a weekend at the beach, etc. If it weren't for the goals I'd probably never go.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, thinking about the long term goal, the result, is what keeps you going. Imagining how good you'll look if you lost 20 lbs makes you want to exercise or eat healthy today.

Maintaining a streak has more of a negative feeling, where you are committed to it but don't really want to do it. Also, what happens if you lose the streak. If you missed 1 day, now the streak and motivation is gone. 1 day turns into 2, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I started regularly excercising every day, after I realized I could use it as a means of procrastination.

I can seriously recommend it. Go for a run, if you're finding yourself putting off something with the intention of working when you get back.

<comment><USER28> Huh. Reading this made me realize I also use it to procrastinate. But I also find myself way more ready to be productive afterwards and some of my best thinking is done at the gym.

</comment></comment><comment> 97-109-107 I have had some success with [https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits](https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits)

</comment><comment><USER29> For me it's the opposite issue - I am paid to motivate me to sit at a desk and stare at a screen. At all other awake times I cannot resist cooking, eating, running, cycling and rowing as much as possible. Occasionally I enter challenging endurance events. I prefer trail running because its the most challenging for me. I am not great at any of it but I just love doing it.

</comment><comment><USER30> One critique I have is that it seems like it's binary whether you complete a task on any given day which doesn't work well if you only partially complete something.

For example, lets say I set a goal to walk for 1 hour per day. But then I only walk for 30 minutes, how would the app handle that situation?

<comment><USER31> See, this is where technology can't help. Weaseling around with half-done tasks won't cut it.

Why did you want to track the goal in the first place? This is probably the most important question.

Why didn't you set the goal to 30 minutes, if there are days where it's likely that you miss your more ambitious goal?

If you set the goal to walk an hour per day and you just walk 30 minutes, you obviously failed to reach the goal. Depending on the first two questions, you can be hard on yourself for this or not.

<comment><USER32> > Why didn't you set the goal to 30 minutes, if there are days where it's > likely that you miss your more ambitious goal?

Because the goal is still an hour, but there are different levels of failing. A simple binary "pass/fail" means the record shows the same difference between lying in bed all day Vs running a marathon and walking 59 minutes Vs 61. If I'm 2 grams above my goal weight at Christmas is that a simple "fail"?

You are right that setting a goal aligned with what you want to change is the important question, but you want you achieve may not well fit into a clear pass/fail.

<comment><USER31> But walking for 15 minutes is also better than lying in bed. Or for 5 minutes. Where do you draw the line?

You could make this percentage-based. Track the progress, show green or some kind of achievement only when you have 100%.

I'd argue that this system is okay too, but more complicated than a simple binary yes/no choice.

Walking 59 minutes or 2 grams above goal weight: If you are serious about the goal, this could serve as a great reminder that you should push through the last minute of walking or get down on Christmas and burn an extra 150 kcal.

Again, depends on how serious you are about your goals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I love this and hope to see it succeed. I've always found I work out dramatically more reliably with a little bit of social accountability.

Unfortunately not hopping on as a user because I have a workout partner at the moment, but I've been wishing someone would build this for ages.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your review.

> I work out dramatically more with a little bit of social accountability.

I have experienced the same myself, and suspect that it is true for most people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> (sincere) Thank you for making the product that I had as just an idea. I thought about a workout BFF in terms of a good commitment device. My other angle on this kind of commitment device was someone to call me to wake me up in the morning. :) Great stuff!

</comment><comment><USER35> The front page has a clear design explaining the idea. Working on a product myself the one liner and short explanations are harder to create than most people imagine. Good job.

</comment><comment><USER36> I've had a simple tool (or set of tools) for decades that've made a habit of exercising. Mountain bikes. They truly are the killer app.

</comment><comment><USER37> I like it a lot, thank you.

Quick notes: i couldn't find a way to delete a task, and the task directory table doesn't fit on an iPhone 8 held vertically.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm a fan of [http://dontbreakthechain.com](http://dontbreakthechain.com)

</comment><comment><USER39> It might be a stupid question, but how do I sign up? I can't find it anywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> You click on the "Try it out" button to create a demo dashboard, add tasks and then click on register to sign up.

Sorry about the convoluted route.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Oh goodness thank you. I was looking for something just like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you find it useful

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Another thing to get in the way of working out.

</comment><comment><USER42> Can you add "laps" to the target counter?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have added laps now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Why cant you just go excercise?

<comment><USER44> Some humans have problems with motivation and focus. Clearly you don't but that doesn't mean other people don't need tricks and tools to help them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No app. Apps are all now.

</comment><comment><USER45> internal service error :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the bug.

I think you logged-in before "trying out". I have fixed the bug now.

<comment><USER46> I'm getting an error 500 and I did not log in. Just hit try. And the error trace back is visible w/paths etc.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why don't US oil companies just buy oil from Saudi Arabia? - <AUTHOR> The situation today seems to be largely equivalent to the situation that Herbert Dow (Dow Chemical) faced when he was producing bromine over 100 years ago: A cartel engaged in predatory price cutting to drive unwanted competition out of the market.
The response of Dow was to just buy up all the cheap bromine from the cartel and re-sell it and with this strategy he was able to break the cartel price cutting and greatly expand his business. [1][2]
I'm wondering why US oil companies who suffer from SA price cutting still pump oil themselves at a loss rather than use the same strategy as Dow and buy Saudi's oil instead. The situation seems to be largely the same and that would be the "textbook response" to it.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-shrewdest-smartest-maneuver-youve-ever-seen-in-business/answer/David-Fry [2] http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=31 <comment><USER2> Oil is really complicated. It is deeply tied to US foreign policy and all recent military conflicts. Lower foreign oil prices harm US oil producers, but they're awesome for almost every other industry (unless they bought oil futures!) Lower fuel prices also make it easier for people and goods to move more cheaply/freely around in an economy, which is also incredibly good for everyone!

I don't know the answer to your question, but I did some research and will also speculate. I could be totally wrong.

I don't believe there's a tariff on oil imports in the US. So why don't US oil companies buy foreign oil? Probably because the infrastructure required to move and store oil is incredibly expensive, and because the oil buyers could just go straight to the source.

The amount of oil that would have to be purchased in order to increase prices again is totally astronomical. I imagine most oil companies prefer to have low storage costs and therefore try to avoid overproducing, which means they probably don't have massive amounts of unused storage space.

</comment><comment><USER3> OPEC produces 33 million barrels of oil a day. You know how big an oil barrel is. I'm not sure how much American companies would have to buy and store to significantly affect the price, but lakes full, at vast storage costs.

According to your article Dow bought "hundreds of thousands of pounds" of bromine and based on a quick Google search a pound of bromine is about the size of a pill bottle. So one warehouse full.

<comment><USER4> I dont think OP is suggesting buying their oil to somehow impact the price, and is instead saying that the cost US oil companies are paying to extract oil themselves is more than it would cost them to just buy it from Saudi companies

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One would store a commodity if one thought it could be sold at a higher price in the future.

Companies across the globe are storing oil including on parked tankers. Here is some data for US storage: [https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/supply/weekly/](https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/supply/weekly/)

However, crude and distillate storage capacity is much smaller than consumption and production.

</comment><comment><USER6> To be refined... _where_?

Oil refineries have to be configured for a given class of crude. Prudhoe Bay differs from shale-derived, etc.

Arabian "light sweet crude" is the easiest to refine, but it still means differing processes.

</comment><comment><USER7> Their operations have costs: loans, operating costs, and they have to at least get a return.

If they stop pumping oil tey are down to zero. What funds do they use to buy up the world's oil? Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia will just keep dumping oil while still taking in profits

DOW was able to buy up all the bromine - today the oil will just keep flowing</comment>


Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality - <AUTHOR> http://news.stanford.edu/2017/01/24/stanford-historian-uncovers-grim-correlation-violence-inequality-millennia/ <comment><USER3> Louis Chauvel, a french sociology professor, made a similar argument using a Prey-Predatory model with trade union membership and income inequality over the last 100 years :

"This article shows empirically how trade union membership and income inequality are mutually related in twelve countries over more than 100 years. While past research has shown that high income inequality occurs alongside low trade union membership, we show that past income inequality actually increases trade union membership with a time lag, as trade unions recruit more members after inequality has been high. But we also show that strengthened trade unions then fight inequality, thereby destroying what helped them to recruit new members in the past. As trade union density decreases, inequality increases and eventually re-incentivises workers to join unions again. By showing this empirically, we reconceptualise the relationship between inequality and union density as a prey and predator model, where predators eat prey – unions destroy inequality, but thereby also destroy their own basis for survival. By empirically showing that trade union density and social inequality influence each other in this way over long periods, this article contributes to a dynamic approach on how social problems and social movements interact."

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/kykl.12128/full](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/kykl.12128/full)

<comment><USER4> I think this is really interesting, especially as how it has played out in recent years - right up to the last few months - in the UK.

I used to know a guy who worked for a trade union who was bemoaning its demise. In 1997 when Labour came to power in the UK for the first time in nearly 20 years, they strengthened employment laws so well, the need for trade union was perceived as lesser by much of the membership. This meant the trade union struggled to survive.

It's interesting to me that the campaigns they fought on and won around employment rights, was perhaps at the detriment at overall income inequality.

We now have zero-hour contracts (utterly horrific for those at the lower end of the skills spectrum), and CEOs earning many hundreds of times the lowest paid in their workforces.

Brexit was caused by income inequality for the most part. The perception by many is that immigration was causing a drag down on wages, but all the data suggests in fact immigration is net benefit to a population, and its the top rising away faster at the top and under-investment in public services that's actually the cause of the country's ills. Fixing this is a big thing, and whoever does it is likely to be long remembered.

In recent weeks, the leader of the Labour Party who is being roundly criticised for ineffectiveness (amongst other things) by those both inside and outside the party had his first bit of good press in some time: he suggested a wage cap inside companies linked to the lowest paid member of staff.

If you set this to say 50x gearing a company that is only paying its cleaners £10,000/year can only pay it's CEO £500,000. If the CEO feels he deserves £4m/year, he'd have to raise cleaners' salaries to £80,000/year - about 4 times the national average wage.

The hope is this will push down CEO wages reducing the race at the top of the pile, but also raise the lower wages a little, thereby improving quality of life for lower-skilled workers. Cleaners get £15,000, CEO gets £750,000. And so on. Net result: income inequality is reduced.

But how do you do that in a free market economy? His answer is surprisingly simple: government contracts that go out to tender should have this as a stipulation in order for the contract to be awarded.

If you are a train operator, eduction or health care provider, etc. and you're only paying your staff minimum wage (£6.70/hour for those aged 25 and over), you don't get the contract if your Chief Exec is earning more than the equivalent of £335/hour (a little shy of £700k/year).

There are a lot of firms who do nothing but government contracts whose CEOs are paid a considerable amount more than this.

Some will argue that this will lead to a situation where these firms can't hire "the best", or that they'll game it by making remuneration more geared to shares/dividends instead of salary/bonuses, but I think that's unlikely to bear out in reality: there is a steady queue of capable people more than willing to work for £335/hour running service companies.

Brilliantly, it even defeats one of the big scares going on at the moment around Brexit reactions and the touted UK/US trade deal being discussed: there is worry that US healthcare companies might start bidding and getting contracts for parts of the NHS.

Critics are worried that these companies are outright profiteering enterprises, evidenced, they say, by the state of US healthcare. This would either stall them from bidding/winning, or promote this policy across the Atlantic into those companies.

And if the remuneration balance _does_ move to shares and dividends, I think that the Left will have won a major goal: they can promise low income taxes and raise taxes on dividends, knowing that this will be popular with very, very large parts of the population. Meanwhile, it'll redistribute wealth and normalise income distribution, all without having to scare the middle classes who mostly end up net winners.

Will it ever happen? Probably not with Mr Corbyn at the helm (his poll ratings are very poor and stagnating even long after last Summer's dramas), however he had party support from all factions, and across the benches. I can see it gaining traction before the next General Election.

Will it happen in the US? Well, if you elect a billionaire who appoints billionaires to his cabinet to perpetuate a system that made them billionaires, it's unlikely they'll nix it. But who knows - it could work.

<comment><USER5> Asserting that Brexit voting is based on immigration dismisses a whole swathe of arguments in favour of an exit from the EU. I certainly didn't consider immigration policy as a reason for my exit vote.

<comment><USER6> Honest question, what did you consider then? Because beside the immigration thing the Brexit camp seemed to be a cluster fuck of contradictory claims.

<comment><USER5> Daniel Hannan explains it better than I could

This has a partial transcript of his presentation at Oxford Uni

[http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-17/daniel-hannan- right...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-17/daniel-hannan-right- approach-brexit)

<comment><USER7> Daniel Hannan is an imbecile, and you were swayed by his "arguments". Unbelievable. He talks about UK regaining "independence", when UK's citizens are the least independent in the EU (mass surveillance wasn't introduced by some European directive). He talks about how Switzerland is thriving, when the brits and swiss have absolutely nothing in common. And people fall for this crap. But hey, it's your vote, let's see how well you fare post-Brexit, with businesses moving to mainland Europe. Make UK great again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love reading the comments on stories like this and consider these comments to be a bellwether as to the current state of inequality in our society. Unfortunately I tend to consider myself one who exists on the lower part of the wealth distribution logarithm within the western world, globally it's a different story. Just as anyone tweeting on their smart phone or tablet claiming to be part of the 99% might want to rethink that in a global context, most of us in the west are global 1% ers. Could it be that the rise in terror incedents recently may in fact be caused by this inequality and not just radical religious zealots? Even if this is not the case we may want to make sure that our empathy does not diminish to the point where we suggest that the starving people of the world eat cake if there is no bread.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Islamic-inspired terrorism draws a direct lineage from the writings of Sayyid Qutb ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Qutb](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Qutb)), an Egyptian civil servant who studied in America and was aghast at how consumerism subversed communal and religious virtues, and even more shocked to see the same transformation occurring in the Arab world. He eventually drew the conclusion that consumerism sequestered people away from reality, and so he came to advocate for terrorist attacks on civilians specifically to force people to look at and confront what he perceived as poisonous Western values.

To say that all those poor misguided young men just need jobs and money misses the point entirely. The problem is with society itself. They yearn for an alternative, but we in the West are too much a part of the system to imagine life outside of it.

<comment><USER9> Note that his thinking didn't turn militant until he was jailed and tortured by the Egyptian government. That at the time had backing of USA, and thus trained by the CIA.

<comment><USER10> His Wikipedia article disagrees with this, saying "Upset that Nasser would not enforce a government based on Islamic ideology, Qutb and other Brotherhood members orchestrated a plot to assassinate the Egyptian president in 1954. The attempt was foiled and Qutb was jailed soon afterwards;"

<comment><USER9> I guess someone will have to take that up with Adam Curtis...

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > It is almost universally true that violence has been necessary to ensure the > redistribution of wealth at any point in time

Strictly speaking, you don't need to redistribute wealth to lower inequality. Destroying wealth is sufficient. Violence and war is pretty good at that.

<comment> gm-conspiracy War does not seem to destroy wealth, but redistribute it?

<comment><USER12> When a bomb destroys a building, to whom is the value of the building redistributed to?

<comment><USER13> To the building company that will rebuild it.

<comment><USER12> Oh, so the rebuilding is done for free, funded by the value of the original building?

No. The rebuilding requires additional work/money inputs to create the new building. The value of the original building is lost forever.

<comment><USER14> "The value of the original building is lost forever."

Of course, but if you are a building company, why would you care about that?.

There is this idea, that, in a society with very little scarcity, would be almost impossible to make a profit. Your only chance would be to burn everything and start again.

I really hope that theory is false.

<comment><USER15> Why? What is so great about profit? I would be very glad to give up profit for no scarcity.

<comment><USER16> The ferengi is weak in this one.

<comment> gm-conspiracy Sorry, I cannot resist adding a reference to gold-pressed latinum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Inequality is not inherently a bad thing. People should be compensated for the value they produce. Profits are a signal of how much people value what is produced. For example, people love iPhones, it no surprise that Apple is the most valuable company in the world.

What causes resentment between classes is lack of mobility. This, IMO, is caused by government regulations and a banking system that hurts the middle class and below and benefits the people at the top.

We have a banking system where the federal reserve can make money out of thin air and inject it into banks. This shifts purchasing power to people in finance.

Regulations like minimum wage and higher taxes on larger income make it hard to hire the next marginal employee. Minimum wage prices out low skilled workers, who would like to work and obtain on the job experience needed to climb the ladder. High taxes makes it more expensive for business owners to hire someone. I'm not talking about large businesses like Walmart (they actually support minimum wage). Small businesses are going out of business, or are just not able to start with increased costs of doing business.

This is a vicious cycle where government intervention leads to rich getting richer, and the poor being more dependent on government programs and finding it harder to move up the ladder. So to fix this people beg for more government intervention, which worsens the problem...and on and on it goes.

<comment><USER18> >"People should be compensated for the value they produce. Profits are a signal of how much people value what is produced."

I'm hoping you might expand on this a little. I've never quite understood this line of reasoning mostly because it seems like there is a lot of money to be made in finance and yet I'm not sure how hedge funds "produce" anything. I really do mean this earnestly, I don't know a whole lot about economics so from my laymen's perspective it is unclear how fund managers are compensated for the value they produce if they are just buying a selling stocks.

<comment><USER19> From an economist's perspective, bankers can create value. If you want to lend money and I want to borrow, but we don't know/trust each other, a banker can "produce" a big help to match us together and price the risk. Those are two examples; there are tons of other services bankers provide their customers.

I believe bankers add value this way. To my eyes "bankers don't produce" is just as unfair as "coaches don't score any goals."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't really think that their conclusions are very honest. They provide only extraordinary situations, which are not usual by any measure. Masses during (and some time after, for like ~1 generation) such events are much less demanding, and they unite to survive (I can think that a lot of damaged countries after WWII built very successful industries, sometimes from scratch).

What I think can really affect violence, is a level of income for lower-class people. For example, in a lot of ex-USSR countries it is quite a problem – people are pretty violent just in everyday life, and we don't see positive trend in Russia, for instance. So, while super big difference between income of top and low classes contributes to the violence, the ability to have decent life, I think, will decrease violence drastically. Of course, it is oversimplification, there are tons of other factors, but I feel it this way, because violence is mostly done by people with the lowest income (and I don't think it is mandatory to be low relative to the highest, it is relative to the good level of life).

<comment><USER21> I don't know if you are correct about the violence being done mostly by the poorest. The most violent person I have ever met was the "cousin?" of a Kyrgyzstani diplomat. Hardly a poor person. He had a gang of fellow Kyrgystaners who beat a lot of people up at a school I went to, and they never got punished due to his political relations. They even ruptured the testicle of one man, which meant serious time in the hospital and potential infertility! My feeling is that this was not caused by poverty, but rather by a macho culture which saw violence as being something to be proud of. I think that there is a similar thing in the US, with gun toting "pro-rancher" types being very violent people, despite them not being poor. I do however, think that there is a correlation between poverty and risky violence. Poor people are more likely to commit a crime that could get them sent to jail. So the gun toting pro-rancher type might torture an animal, or spray it with bullets from a machine gun, they won't kill humans as often, because they don't want to lose their wealth. A black guy from the hood, however, who is no more violent and probably much less evil than the gun toting rancher, might commit a crime with a gun that could get him sent to prison for life because he has so much less to lose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> In the past few weeks the idea of 'legitimatizing violence' has been circulating heavily. On my Facebook feed most of it has centered on the idea that it is "okay" to punch neo-nazis now. The people saying this are people I'd never expect to. Twitter is similar. I wish I had stats on whether the legitimatization meme is really rising. To me, it looks like the fake news meme. Suddenly it's everywhere.

<comment><USER23> Culturally, Americans have chosen "Nazis" and zombies as default groups on which we can assert violence without questioning our moral values or their expression. While Richard Spencer is even saying in that clip that he isn't a Neo Nazi (before getting punched) - a great deal of the American population don't draw the lines as finely as he might. He's certainly said some things that put him in that world of thought.

I share your discomfort with this in so far as we shouldn't normalize violence in daily life.

<comment><USER24> I'm also uncomfortable with violence but I don't have an answer to the inevitable "well what else should we do". Facts, reasonable logic, and ridicule do not seem to work. Do you have any suggestions?

<comment><USER23> Turn off the media and talk to your neighbors?

Interpersonally, I think we need to keep pushing the belief that there is more than unites us than divides us. At the core of it, we all really want the same sort of stuff (safety, purpose, love, fun, etc.) The more we allow ourselves to be divided (by media, by political rhetoric, by rumor and gossip, by hate) the less likely we will be able to hold those with real power and influence to task - the less we will be able to shape policy and investment in such a way that everyone in our communities benefit.

Big picture, we need to create communities in which all people - <USER2> disaffected bigots - can feel that they are thriving (rather than merely surviving). If we do that then these groups, and this repressible rhetoric, will find less support and fewer fertile minds to pollute.

That's my belief anyway.

<comment><USER24> I agree that at the core most people want the same thing but there are bigoted beliefs that are inherently difficult to be a minority around and it's harder to handle. For example, the guy whose face has been punched often recently, he desires an ethnic cleansing in order to accomplish safety, purpose, etc. Should we expect the people who are targets of his rhetoric(the people he wishes to ethnically cleanse) to feel safe talking to him or interacting with him? I don't know, and I don't know if he'll even listen to those people. Has it worked for you with people you've met?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sounds like the other half of the thesis presented in "Forged Through Fire" [1][2], in that case arguing that wars are directly responsible for democracy, by virtue of reducing inequality. (Note, I've not read that text yet, just the WSJ book review, so please correct me if I'm off-target with that summary).

The obvious follow-on question is whether inequality is actually bad in itself, and is what produces the war. Or is inequality usually associated with societies where the upper classes keep the lion's share of the growth, and that is what triggers these wars?

[1]: [https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B016APOCZM/ref=kinw_myk_...](https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B016APOCZM/ref=kinw_myk_ro_title) [2]: [http://www.wsj.com/articles/democracy-is-dependent-on- war-14...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/democracy-is-dependent-on- war-1483741787)

</comment><comment><USER26> He seems to be talking about rapid changes to inequality. But inequality has been in steady decline for centuries (the last few decades in the US are a blip in comparison to the overall downward trend). These general downward trends that occur at the pace of decades or centuries can't be directly attributed to warfare, can it?

<comment><USER27> We have certainly had no shortage of wars in the past couple of centuries. Just in the past two hundred years, in order of largest death tolls[1], I see:

        * World War II
        * Taiping Rebellion
        * Second Sino-Japanese War
        * World War I/Great War
        * Dungan Revolt
        * Chinese Civil War
        * Russian Civil War and Foreign Intervention
        * Napoleonic Wars
        * Second Congo War/Great War of Africa
        * Shaka's conquests
        * Vietnam War/Second Indochina War
        * Biafra War
        * Mexican Revolution
        * Soviet war in Afghanistan
        * Korean War
        * Iran–Iraq War/First Persian Gulf War
        * American Civil War
        * Spanish American Wars of Independence
        * Angolan Civil War
        * Ethiopian Civil War
        * Spanish Civil War

All told, those are something like a couple hundred million dead. Them for each of those human bodies, consider how many living are profoundly affected by their death.

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

<comment><USER26> But the trend is generally downward, not a bunch of sharp decreases that would indicate being caused by a specific short-term event. Also many of these wars were pretty localized, so we should see the drops and inequality in the immediate area and a reduced effect elsewhere.

<comment><USER27> > But the trend is generally downward, not a bunch of sharp decreases that > would indicate being caused by a specific short-term event.

Many of these are not short term events. You have a several years-long war, with a rise in conflict before it and a gradual repair and rebuild afterwards.

There are enough of them that I wouldn't be surprised if the overall graph was smooth.

> Also many of these wars were pretty localized, so we should see the drops > and inequality in the immediate area and a reduced effect elsewhere.

In the modern world, few things are truly localized.

<comment><USER26> That's a valid explanation for how wars could cause the trends in inequality, but without further evidence this is a specious argument. It also doesn't explain regional variations in income inequality. Look at the list of countries by income inequality: there isn't really a correlation between income inequality and "war-iness".

I think wars can increase equality, but they are far from the only cause.

<comment><USER27> Sure, I'm not arguing that all of the inequality changes are due to wars, just that there have been enough of them to potentially explain it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> So the last decade's decline in violence in the US indicates a decline in inequality?

<comment><USER29> Crime in general may be declining due to the reduction of lead in the environment:

[http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27067615](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27067615)

<comment><USER30> Yeah,that and demographic shifts out of the age group whose predominance seems to drive crime rates seem to more-than-explain the drop in crime, violent and otherwise, more than offsetting any effect from rising inequality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I would love to see Prof. Steven Pinker review this. He wrote "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature)

</comment><comment><USER32> I haven't read the book, but this seems like the classic case of a solution looking for a problem.

</comment><comment><USER33> cf. Peter Turchin [http://energyskeptic.com/2016/peter-turchin-violence-and- soc...](http://energyskeptic.com/2016/peter-turchin-violence-and-social- unrest-in-the-u-s-and-europe-likely-by-2020/)

</comment><comment><USER34> The title is a bit misleading. He uncovered a correlation between violence and equality.

</comment><comment><USER35> That was an interesting read, it definitely makes me want to read the book for a more detailed analysis.

I've increasingly been wondering about the links between violence/social unrest and inequality, particularly as we enter a period of time were globalization and automation have the potential to be hugely disruptive to the existing work force, even more so than they already have been.

This is only tangentially related, but I've been curious about the link between violent crime in the US and general societal health. Based on much of what I've read, and I could be mistaken here, I've seen a number of stats cited showing that factors like income inequality, purchasing power and very worryingly to me, social mobility, are all on a downward trend in the US. Even harder to quantify areas, like asking parents if they think their kids will be better off than they were, result in answers that skew unfavorably.

At the same time, it is both rather easy to own firearms or other forms of weapons and there are plenty already in circulation, and yet, unless I'm mistaken, violent crime has been on a steady downward trend in the US for the last 30+ years.

I would assume, perhaps niavely, that as social markers such as decreased mobility, inequality, pessimism about the future and distrust of the government and politicians grew, we would see a corresponding rise in violence. But it appears we aren't seeing that.

What could be behind this? Are we simply getting better at controlling people? Are we distracting them? Are we incarcerating them? Are they simply killing themselves? I know suicide rates for certain demographics have been increasing. Or are things not really as bad as they sometimes seem?

I'm definitely not advocating for violence, but I do feel that violence acts as a kind of societal last resort when a population believes they have exhausted all other options. Again, this could be a misguided interpretation of the situation on my part, but I would assume that violence in society would closely follow decreases in the kind of quality of life metrics we're seeing. I'd love to hear other posters' thoughts or if there are any good sources exploring the topic.

<comment><USER36> Probably an insane thought, but perhaps the 'us vs them' attitudes in current political parties and stances may be having an effect?

Maybe people are too distracted by the whole theism vs atheism/religion vs religion arguments, the complaints about sexism/racism/transphobia/etc or general debates about whether things like abortion should be legal or not.

Maybe people are being sidetracked too much by party politics and internet debates to actually do anything about income inequality.

Or maybe as said before, the various other changes have decreased crime rates so much that even an increase in it due to this inequality is barely noticeable. If exposure to lead was really tied to crime rates, perhaps the huge drop off there simply masked everything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've previously thought that wars OR the threat of wars, particularly of mass armies; meant you had to treat the 99% pretty well, or they wouldn't care to die for you. So this article makes me suspect that as drones do more of the fighting, and then finally all of the fighting, there will in future be no practical reason whatsoever to treat the 99% well. Drones stamping on the human face forever...

</comment><comment><USER38> "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure." \- Thomas Jefferson

</comment><comment><USER39> AKA [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority) AND [http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1118373109](http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1118373109)

</comment><comment><USER40> Peter Turchin has done similar work. This book is a great read!

[https://www.amazon.com/War-Peace-Rise-Fall- Empires/dp/045228...](https://www.amazon.com/War-Peace-Rise-Fall- Empires/dp/0452288193)

</comment><comment><USER41> "wars, pandemics, civil unrest; only violent shocks like these have substantially reduced inequality over the millennia."

No. The history of Anglo culture has been as violent as any other - but not in revolutionary terms.

Same thing for Scandinavian cultures.

UK/Australia/Canada/NZ have relatively reasonable rates of inequality and there has been no revolution.

Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland - have likely the highest degree of 'equality' and yet - there has been no revolution. Their Monarchies and State Churches remain intact to this day.

The American revolution - though important in terms of world history - was a pretty minor affair - the colonies were small and sparse at the time.

It's also very difficult to consider 'revolution' before recorded history as there were no 'social movements' as we understand them, granted, studying revolution before the common are would be worth an academic exercise.

</comment><comment><USER39> Any type of hegemony will have awkward repercussions and collateral damage;

</comment><comment><USER42> the pitchforks are coming!

</comment><comment><USER43> Singapore has one of the highest income inequalities in the world. It has one of the lowest violence rates in the world. You can say the same about China too and many other countries in Asia.

<comment><USER44> I don't know about Singapore, but China is known for its unofficial millionaire/billionaire corrupt bureaucrats and party members. Also, when government has a complete control over the media, crime statistics tends to get underreported.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Socialist nonsense. If he had some common sense instead of PhD, he would have "uncovered" the grim truth that the State is the source of most violence and inequality.

</comment><comment><USER46> How about we take away everything down to 10^6$ from the 0.0001% richest and redistribute it to everyone. We repeat this with the 0.0001% of the richest every year from there on. Every time someone is chosen for this honour they get a medal.

<comment><USER47> Imagine for a moment you are a driven, self-made .00001%er. If you KNEW your profits were taken at the top, would you work hard and innovate? Or would you commit fraud and squirrel away your wealth or not bother. Im sure a few would see it as a 'goal', but stakeholders would doubtlessly disagree. The spirit, I agree with, but not possible to cleanly implement.

<comment><USER48> There is no amount of work a human being could do that justifies the wealth that is in the hands of people like Zuckerberg and Warren Buffet. They seem like decent enough people, but they have an obscene amount of wealth and power.

<comment><USER49> Great wealth is rewarded for placing winning bets, not for hard work.

For example, gambling on investments, as with Buffet, or on a new idea, as with Zuckerberg. Sometimes just for gambling on Powerball.

The great rewards are balanced by great risks, and many of these gambles are valuable to society. Where would we be without new businesses and new ideas?

<comment><USER50> >The great rewards are balanced by great risks

Zuckerburgs wealth exceeds that of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of his countrymen. Do you honestly believe that the risk he incurred was greater than all of our nations oil rig workers, foresters, soldiers and police combined?

Am I missing something? If Facebook goes belly up do his shareholders get to cut off his hands?

<comment><USER49> Imagine investing $1000 in something with a 1 in a million chance of success (just for example). For that to be a rational bet, the payoff would need to be a billion dollars.

Oil rig workers, foresters, soldiers and police have guaranteed pay instead of a very small chance of very great rewards.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rosetta finds oxygen on comet 67P in 'most surprising discovery to date' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/oct/28/rosetta-finds-oxygen-on-comet-67p-in-most-surprising-discovery-to-date <comment><USER3> Very cool, planning and calculating a trajectory for a machine to land on a moving comet 10 years in the future and retrieve data is truly an astonishing feat.

<comment><USER4> And despite its 100kg mass, weighs 1g when landed. That's like using rockets to position a paperclip.

<comment><USER5> Philae's gas rocket was jammed, the wax seal had frozen or the sensor had broken. The pilots wanted an extra day to get it working but they were told the fanfare had begun and the various Presidents couldn't be disappointed so they had to launch.

Therefore they had to throw the Philae 'paperclip' exactly right using only Rosetta's thrusters to toss it toward the comet - no retrorocket to damp landing, only math.

Calculations were further complicated by 67P's dual lobed masses with Lagrange points inbetween the two lobes and an low escape velocity of 0.5 metres / second - practically a 3-body problem. Dr Matt Taylor is an awesome pilot.

Add to this the unexpected surface density (hard ice-crete shell rather than powdery floof) so the harpoon and leg screws would be worse than useless - <USER2> was an incredible piece of spaceship trajectory design and luck.

Thankfully the anchoring harpoon failed to fire, it would likely have ejected Philae from the comet.

The extreme reluctance of the OSIRIS team to share high resolution images of the surface may have complicated the search for Philae ( for which they were rightly but ineffectively chastised by the head of ESA ).

As the mission nears its close Rosetta will land on the comet and so post- perihelion close views across the surface will become available.

The 6 CIVAS photos returned from the surface of 67P by Philae IMHO rank alongside Armstrong's lunar footprint as humanity's greatest artworks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Were the power issues with Philae resolved? The last I heard, it was slowly dying due to insufficient sun exposure, but some people said it might come back to life when it got closer to the sun -- is this the case?

<comment><USER7> Just for a couple weeks in June/July.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philae_(spacecraft)#Reawakenin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philae_\(spacecraft\)#Reawakening)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Trying to find an old YC story about male accomplishment syndrome - <AUTHOR>

I can't remember the article well enough to remember keywords so that I can use searchyc.com, but I was hoping someone else knows what story I'm talking about and has a link to the blog/thread. The thread linked to a blog post, where the gist of it was a woman commenting about her male friends incessant drive to be successful, and how she likened that persistent worry to the same problem women face with constant worrying about body image. Here's to hoping someone else knows what I'm talking about :) <comment><USER2> This?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1601281>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the ticket! Thanks.</comment></comment>


Unblock Vimeo, Dailymotion, Rapidshare, Torrent links in India - <AUTHOR> http://ddl.io Hacked up this website for the people in India. At the moment it works for most video & file lockers including Vimeo & Dailymotion. <comment><USER2> I am in India right now. None of the sites you mention are blocked. Am I missing something here? It also looks no different than any other proxy site.

Moreover, your automatic video extraction part might actually break TOS of many sites you claim to support, specially if you play the extracted video from your own UI and/or host it on your servers, unless you are getting the video from a provisioned API and it allows such use.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think only Airtel users in Bangalore and Delhi are affected: [http://gadgets.ndtv.com/shownews.aspx?id=GADEN20120203409...](http://gadgets.ndtv.com/shownews.aspx?id=GADEN20120203409&Sec=NEWS&nid=212206)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It also currently works for novamov, movshare, filebox, dropbox, google drive, putlocker, videobb, rapidshare, tudou, videoweed, gorrilavid, mediafire, hotfile, and over 300+ sites..

</comment><comment><USER3> How exactly does that site "unblock" them?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just input the link into the box, or use the bookmark bar.

<comment><AUTHOR> So we have several datacentres around the world, and when users input a link. A server will take the task and try to download the content on the web, based on trial & error and user's response it learns how to download from a particular website.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple paid only 2% corporate tax outside US - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20197710 <comment><USER2> I call for a moratorium on journalists quoting taxes either only on a single year basis or singling out only a particular type of tax to focus on.

The proper way to understand the tax burden of a company is to look at the number analysts use: effective tax rate, averaged over some substantial period of time. This is not a complicated number. You basically take 100% - (income after all taxes) / (income before all taxes)

Apple's effective tax rate, according to their 10-K filings, has been 25-30% for the last 3 years: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/04/18/apples-9-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/04/18/apples-9-8-tax- rate-entirely-mind-gargling-nonsense/)

I should note that there is, somewhat ironically, a wild inaccuracy in this Forbes article which I don't want to seem like I'm endorsing: "We might ponder upon the way that federal taxation as a share of the entire economy has grown hugely over this period as well, meaning that what you can extract from corporations has fallen not because corporations are taxed any less but because others are taxed much more."

Total federal taxes as a %-age of GDP have fluctuated between 15-20% for the last 50 years. It was as high as 19% as early as 1952, and hasn't been as low as it is now (15%) since 1950. There is a mythology that the federal government keeps getting bigger, but almost all the growth in the federal government came in the 10 year period between 1934 and 1944. This growth can be explained almost entirely by just three things introduced in this era: social security, medicare/medicaid, and a huge peacetime military.

See: [http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...](http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=205)

</comment><comment><USER3> "All of the companies do pay considerable amounts of other taxes in the UK such as National Insurance and raise large sums of VAT."

<comment><USER4> It's fair to mention the other taxes like national insurance, but VAT shouldn't be mentioned here. VAT is simply "collected" from the customer, and then sent to the Government. No company ever includes VAT in their prices when they plan out the prices. They are simply added after the fact, and the consumer pays for it.

So disregarding other taxes, if say Apple wants $500 for the iPad, then they won't include the VAT in that price, they will simply add the fact to the $500 price, and make it $600, or whatever the VAT is in that country.

<comment><USER5> All taxes are collected from the customer, just not necessarily "simply". Arbitrarily dividing taxes into simple and complex and then reporting only on the complex seems even more misleading to me.</comment></comment></comment>


Reader/Reader blocking in reader/writer locks - <AUTHOR> https://blog.nelhage.com/post/rwlock-contention/ <comment><USER2> I encountered this issue a year or two ago on the Netflix CDN nodes when running with 100K TCP connections or more. We have metrics collectors that need to report how many TCP connections are open, and what state they are in (ESTABLISHED, TIME_WAIT, etc). Until recently, the only way to do this was to ask the FreeBSD kernel to copy out the entire TCP hash table to userspace, where an application can examine it & count connections. The problem with that is that the thread wanting a copy of the table had to take an rlock on the table while it was being copied. As the author points out, this blocks any writers, which in turn blocks more readers. So we'd see latency spikes when this script was running.

The problem has been fixed twice: by moving the top-level locking for that table to epoch (FreeBSD RCU equivalent), and also by using per-cpu counters to track the number of TCP connections in every state. So now the user-space collector just needs to fetch a small array of tcp states from the kernel.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a decent reminder blog post about something that is obvious on the surface, but subtle when you forget to think about it and make a mistake.

I've found that thinking of a lock as something you don't want to hold goes a long way. The point of locks is to release them.

Jeff Preshing has a good series on locks and concurrency. This[0] post (potentially with an extra dozen I read in the same sitting) is the one that really changed how I thought about locks: before I read it, I was very into lock freedom at every opportunity.

0: [https://preshing.com/20111118/locks-arent-slow-lock- contenti...](https://preshing.com/20111118/locks-arent-slow-lock-contention- is/)

</comment><comment><USER4> > So reader/writer locks tend to rely on the additional concurrency, and on > readers not blocking other readers.

> software has a constant tendency to get slower, absent deliberate and > careful efforts to hold the line, as developers add features and complexity. > And if slower processes don't immediately impact performance (because they > only hold read locks), they're more likely to go unnoticed. Thus, it's not > unlikely that over time read lock durations will creep upwards, mostly > without effect, until one happens to coincide with an attempt to grab a > write lock.

For me, the takeaway here is to maintain discipline in software regarding locking behavior. It's almost always a bad idea to hold a lock (rw or not) for an extended period of time.

Notably, this is how the Linux kernel developers responded to the case linked in the discussion of mmap_sem - the operation quadratic in number of threads was thrown out to avoid holding the rwsem for extended periods of time.

Also, re "and the lock is held by readers for a significant length of time": I would imagine that Rusty Russell would consider a few microseconds a "significant length of time" and wonder if you were insane if your software held a lock for 60 seconds.

<comment><AUTHOR> In a perfect world "maintaining discipline" is indeed the correct solution, but my experience tells me that humans cannot be relied upon to do that. Some individual humans can, but not the collective whole.

The discipline has to come from elsewhere. Either from the management (reducing the number of people you have to rely on from N to log(N)), or from tooling (reducing the number to log(1)).

As always, education is the silver bullet. Instill proper values, enable the skills to follow through, and in a mere 40-60 years the industry will be in a better place. As long as there is no incentive to mass-produce junior software developers on the cheap, we're golden.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _What to do about it?_

Design with RCU, if you can.

> _Time out writer acquisitions._

> _If potentially starving writers is acceptable, adding a timeout to write- > side acquisitions will bound how long readers can be forced to pause. > GoCardless' library for online Rails migrations implements this option for > Postgres, and also discusses the challenges and implications a bit._

This is nearly the same as simply not having writer priority. If "potentially starving writers is acceptable", that implies we can consider reader-priority locks, which do exactly that: potentially starve writers.

Under writer priority, we hold back new readers so that the old readers can leave and let the waiting writer in. If we balk when the new readers are blocked for too long, and bump the writer, then it's simply not writer priority any more.

</comment><comment><USER6> Please make the second "reader" in the title lowercase, otherwise it's very confusing to parse (looks like three things separated by slashes, instead of a single sentence with two words that have slashes in them).

</comment><comment><USER7> For the database example, could you change your isolation level for the reading queries?</comment>


The Tao of Programming - <AUTHOR> http://www.dekorte.com/blog/blog.cgi?do=item&id=4429

<comment><USER2> Taoism isn't really a religon, but more of a philosophy, and it's a really good one for a programmer. If you haven't read it then check it out. My favorite translation is here - [http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/taote...](http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interestingly, javascript fits the description very well: good balance between OO and functional :)

<comment><USER4> Hmm, I don't think I ever consciously recognized this about JavaScript before. Even when I focus on the functional sides by using functions for namespacing, constructors (I avoid 'new'), scoping, and limiting external access, objects still cooperate nicely and feel natural. This says a lot, because even in F#, which was designed to work well with OOP, mixing the two doesn't seem to produce a nice blend for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> obligatory: <http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html></comment>


Show HN: Auto Completion Module in Python. Usable for English or Programming IDE - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/chris-kuo/mind-reader.git <comment><AUTHOR> This is an update to the previously submitted Python Autocompletor class.

The updated implementation supports Primary and Secondary word table. It can be used as standard autocompletion for English words (repo comes with default word table). It can also be used as autocompletion suggestor for IDEs by loading the primary word table with keywords/built-in classes and functions, and use the secondary word table for user defined names.

Feel free to submit pull requests!</comment>


Meet the man who deactivated Trump's Twitter account - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/29/meet-the-man-who-deactivated-trumps-twitter-account/ <comment><USER2> Techmeme summary: _Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Interview with Bahtiyar Duysak, the Twitter contractor who deactivated Trump's account earlier this month, who calls the incident a "mistake"_</comment>


Show HN: Illumigami- Find a meeting room at a moment's notice - <AUTHOR> http://illumigami.io/

<comment><USER2> This is pretty neat and interesting. Though I found the voice over drowned out by the background music.</comment>


Focusing Illusion (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://edge.org/response-detail/11984 <comment><USER2> Good post.

I recently made a list of words/concepts that made me smarter:

Constructivism, incentive, meta-, inflation, half-life and root cause.

It's not complete, but the ones that came to mind somewhat easily.</comment>


MapReduce from the basics to the actually useful (in under 30 minutes) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudant.com/39351506

<comment><USER2> Am I crazy or was there not a single reduce query in the post? I've been working on map reduce queries for a little while now, aggregating statistics over feeds and stories posted, normalizing over item frequencies, and generally doing simple stuff.

I was very excited to see the second half of MapReduce. The reduce queries are always harder to write. If map is addition, reduce is division. I was hoping for examples on different reduce queries that are more advanced than the standard count tags in a list of lists. But no reduce period, so am I missing something?

<comment><USER3> Plenty of reduce queries, you just didn't need to write the code ;) Good point, though, good material for the next round. I'm open to suggestions if you have an interesting data set or question.

<comment><USER4> Here's a great example of something that is most natural in mapreduce: <http://www.danvk.org/wp/2007-04-06/nebulabrot/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Terminology is so badly abused in this article that it almost reads like a parody.

Also, the tasks could have been accomplished in 3 or 4 lines of SQL.

<comment><USER6> In what way is terminology badly abused? There isn't a single use of the word "cloud" in the entire article and the only "buzzword" terminology used appears to be used accurately and sparingly. If that isn't your contention, why not explain otherwise? How does the abuse/misuse of terminology detract from the quality of the article or make it inaccurate?

Further, your argument that the same could be accomplished in "3 or 4 lines of SQL" is a straw man. The article never claimed the specific task was shorter/easier to do using MapReduce and Cloudant; the author made an example based on common use cases—one that didn't require architecting a full requirements specification for when one would find Cloudant/MapReduce/Non- relational databases superior to a few lines of SQL for various values of "superior".

Your comment is vague, largely irrelevant, and completely useless regardless of its accuracy since you provided absolutely no arguments to back up your claims. The fact that it has even two points is disheartening.

<comment><USER5> The phrases that irked me were:

"I have yet to meet a database that isn't a key/value store"

Dimensions that are "somewhat orthogonal"

"It suffices to say that MapReduce is all about giving programmers an efficient way to consume data without needing to know how or where it is actually stored."

I don't think that definition suffices, and it misses (or buries in 'efficient') the rather central point that MapReduce is a programming model for distributing computation.

I'm all for non-relational databases where they're appropriate, and Cloudant sounds like it is doing great things. But I think that there's a risk in presenting toy examples in a way that seems to sell them as the solution to common use cases that really could be solved more easily with old-school tools.

<comment><USER7> I suppose "somewhat orthogonal" is like being "almost pregnant", perhaps the author was just speaking loosely here.

I agree that the examples were toy ones, but it's precisely these simple things like projections that we see folks struggling with when coming from the relational world.

The answer to "can't you just do this in SQL" is always yes you can. Things change, non-relational dbs were around before relational ones and are now returning for a variety of reasons.

I'd like to see some follow on posts that delve into the subtleties of rereduce, another real pain point for new users.

One thing that is not emphasized enough in my mind is the flexibility that a schema-less database such as BigCouch gives you. Consider the trivial schema one would construct to support the 3 or 4 lines of SQL required for these toy examples and then consider how that schema might evolve as needs for different queries change, as the data grows, as different apps with different O-R mapping issues are brought into play and so on.

A schema-less approach does push more of the complexity into the app layer for sure, but it allows the schema to evolve more naturally. After all schema-less doesn't mean the schema really goes away conceptually.

I agree also that Cloudant is doing great things, that's why I joined the team, that and the free coffee :) Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for the article. It is like a continuation from the NoSQL tapes. When I saw the video, I wondered how to use the built-in reduce functions. Now it is clear.

I also like the use of json.tool to format the output at the command line.</comment>


The Difference Between Good and Great - <AUTHOR> http://joncanady.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=44

<comment><USER2> I'm prompted to log in???

<comment><USER3> so did I, and I was wondering if it was a statement to all the start-ups that give a sign-up before knowing anything about the site,

but it turns out that this is the link that should have been shared <http://joncanady.com/>

it's an article about github</comment></comment>


Airbnb is offering a sleepover at the last Blockbuster - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/lyapalater/last-blockbuster-sleepover <comment><USER2> This is one of the marketing stunts that really hit home for me. My memories of going to the video store as a kid are some of the most vibrant early memories. I wonder if kids today will have the Netflix or Dinsey+ UI burned into their memory the same way, or if they're exposed to so much content it will all be a blur

<comment><USER3> I never cared much about movie rentals as a kid, however growing up in the late 1980s one of my favorite things was renting NES games from local video rental stores on the weekends (they all got into NES rentals pretty quickly).

There was always a bit of a thrill looking for a new game to play through. Each game experience back then seemed remarkably original, like new gaming territory was being traversed for the first time. Going from Ninja Gaiden to Little Nemo to DuckTales to Mega Man and so on.

The only thing better was the massive wall of games at Toys R Us. Originally they displayed the boxes on the wall (they later switched to a lame slip of paper). I vividly remember Zelda's gold box leaping out from everything else.

<comment><USER4> What was particularly fun for me as a kid, regarding video game rentals, was that consoles like the N64 and SNES had saves on the cartridge and sometimes you'd pick a game with a save slot where someone already unlocked a huge chunk of the game. Hitting the "jackpot" with a cartridge that had everything unlocked made the game even more fun. Suddenly that one level I was stuck on in Donkey Kong Country has been passed and I'm on to checking out other levels..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What a waste of a killer brand. Would love to see them resurrected.

Edit: to clarify, I mean seeing the Dish Blockbuster logo on the .com. Feels like a wise entrepreneur could turn that business around for the nostalgia crowd (myself included).

</comment><comment><USER6> Funny, I was just searching for an Airbnb in Bend, OR a couple weeks ago, and they were all bizarrely expensive, like from $600 to thousands of dollars a night.

<comment><USER7> Tech/HNW crowd fleeing Bay Area/Seattle for space. I know of a few well-funded startups that have essentially relocated to Bend area (broken commercial leases in Bay Area and major employees/management moved to Bend).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What a weird promotion. I guess Airbnb approached Blockbuster about this, and is paying them? I can't imagine Blockbuster would have any desire for this kind of advertisement for their own sake.

<comment><USER9> > What a weird promotion. I guess Airbnb approached Blockbuster about this, > and is paying them? I can't imagine Blockbuster would have any desire for > this kind of advertisement for their own sake.

I don't think there's really such a thing as "Blockbuster" anymore. IIRC, this location is a franchisee that outlived the franchise itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I did see that a verified Blockbuster Twitter account briefly came out of retirement this month -- don't know who would be operating that anymore, as I doubt they have a social media manager...

[https://twitter.com/blockbuster/status/1293318870074302467](https://twitter.com/blockbuster/status/1293318870074302467)

</comment><comment><USER11> I drove past this BlockBuster last year while visiting Bend for a concert. I didn't go in because we were late for the show, but it tripped me out and had to double-take. Bend is a humble little town that's a bit touristy, but of all places to have a BlockBuster, this would be the place.

</comment><comment><USER12> The last Blockbuster is offering a sleepover on Airbnb, not the other way around.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's only 4 dollars a night! It's a no brainer if you are a nomad short on cash.

</comment><comment><USER14> This makes me think they should have pivoted Blockbuster to a hostel / low cost hotel experience. Could have small rooms / shared baths that center around a living room where you can do movie night with other guests. I would be a customer.

</comment><comment><USER15> I guess this is how they're preparing for the IPO?

</comment><comment><USER16> Airbnb is looking for cheap publicity and buzzfeed is looking for an easy article.

<comment><USER17> Sounds like a win-win to me. Actually, win-win-win, because I think this sounds like a pretty cool excursion.

<comment><USER16> Can't wait for a sleepover, which implies several people, in a closed room. Just them, me and covid. What a great idea.

<comment><USER17> Eh, it's limited to 4 people per night, and they are doing extra cleaning and sanitizing to keep things safe. What more can you ask? How is that any more dangerous than the same 4 people spending the night anywhere else? Or, even, those same 4 people hanging out at the store during the day for, say, 12 hours? As the listing itself says:

> Keeping our customers (and now our guests!) comfortable and feeling at home > is our priority. You'll have the store to yourself from check-in to check- > out, and it will be cleaned prior to your arrival in accordance to Airbnb's > Enhanced Cleaning Protocol which is informed by recommendations from the > U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Plus we'll provide > you with a pack of face coverings, disinfectant wipes, and endless hand > sanitizer!

See [https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/44577127?source_impression_id=p...](https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/44577127?source_impression_id=p3_1597448153_gVRYSqNAPezxlEn0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Over the last few days I've seen several front page articles on SEO pop up on HN.

It is almost too meta for my brain on Friday afternoon to see a !@$@! buzzfeed article on HN that is lightly chronicling AirBNB's amazing publicity stunt.

Which is, even as you read it now, generating untold fathoms of sweet, sweet SEO link juice and domain authority.

THAT is how you SEO!</comment>


US urged to recruit master hackers to wage cyber war on America's foes - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jul/10/us-master-hackers-al-qaida

<comment><USER2> Oh, so this whole "cyberthreats" fearmongering was never really about them getting funds to actually _defend_ the country with you know..."defensive" stuff, but to get funds and pass bills that allows them to _attack_ other countries.

I don't know what anyone would take their word for it anymore, after they've already built Stuxnet and Flame viruses to be themselves "cyberthreat" to others, and now they whine about others attacking them.

I'm starting to notice a trend here, where in the future they will want to have proxy wars through the Internet with as many countries as possible - basically whoever offends them in the slightest, or at least to use their offensive ability to threaten them into doing what they want (signing treaties, etc).</comment>


Windows 7, 8.1 moving to Windows 10's cumulative update model - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/08/windows-7-8-1-moving-to-windows-10s-cumulative-update-model/ <comment><USER2> More good news. Moving to Linux soon.</comment>


Target hacked - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/moblordTV/status/1062298914391502848 <comment><USER2> Someone sent me a screenshot of the same thing coming from @gsuite. It's far less likely that "Target and Google were hacked" than "Twitter has a bug that can be exploited for this".</comment>