Reliably measuring IQ through commercial puzzle games - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961500104X <comment><USER2> Well, reading the PDF was anticlimactic. Why? Because page 2 of the PDF describes the 12 games that were used. They were games that test memorization, puzzle completion, and pattern matching.

In other words, the "commercial video games" used in their research were "brain games" and not Pac-Man, Mario Bros, and Call of Duty, etc.

If you've ever taken a _real_ IQ test where the proxy shows you cards to match or pictures with "missing" data, the 12 video games they used are very similar in spirit. It's not surprising that there is high correlation between the scores of those particular types of video games and real IQ tests.

However, that's not to say there is zero correlation between blockbuster video games like Call of Duty and IQ. Maybe another study will pursue that.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the warning. I was really hoping to see Halo or Quake or something, because in my experience practicing these games in a casual-competitive way, I hit a performance ceiling. In high school I played Halo nearly every day, and a bright friend of mine, who didn't even own the game, was a surprisingly good player for his limited experience.

On a similar note, I once read that reaction time and IQ are correlated (not sure how strongly), which is interesting because you might expect motor functions like that to be orthogonal to higher-order cognitive abilities.

<comment><USER4> _On a similar note, I once read that reaction time and IQ are correlated (not sure how strongly), which is interesting because you might expect motor functions like that to be orthogonal to higher-order cognitive abilities._

Speed is good, in many contexts. Say you've two people, and person A has overall cognitive speed 25% greater than the other.

That doesn't just help with Jeopardy!, it gives you 25% more time to think in normal conversations, on SAT tests, while playing video games, at work, etc.

Even a 10% slower speed differential from a baseline human is a big, big disadvantage.

<comment><USER5> > _Even a 10% slower speed differential from a baseline human is a big, big > disadvantage._

This would make sense if all thinking is equal and only the _rate of thinking_ varies. In practice, the quality of thought processes seems much more important than the the rate at which such processes are carried out.

For example, attempting to assess "cognitive speed" can be very dangerous in interviews. It seems like such a promising metric. A candidate who answers questions 10% faster than average will generally be much more impressive than a candidate who answers questions 10% slower than average, and it's tempting to think person A will be 22% more productive. Of course, over time, it may turn out that he occasionally provides more _bad_ solutions to problems, or can only solve superficial problems, or solves the wrong problems. And you realize the person who consistently solves problems correctly (albeit at a slower pace) is a better choice than the person who introduces new problems as quickly as he solves existing problems.

It could always be argued that person B is actually thinking faster, but thinking through the problem much more carefully, causing him to verbalize his answer later. Or perhaps both people are thinking at the same speed, but person B has simply thought _more_. Maybe person B is actually thinking slower but more effectively. From an outsider's perspective, we can't know what's happening under the hood, which makes "cognitive speed" a weak metric for judging effectiveness in practice.

<comment><USER6> This. You want some easy proof? Watch a video of Steve Jobs answering questions, like the WWDC 1997 Q&A video. Time how long it takes him before he starts speaking after the questions are asked, and note the quality of the answer.

<comment><USER7> Yes, but presumably in those long pauses, a faster thinker would have time to consider more possible replies, make predictions on how the audience would receive them, and generally make more adjustments and improvements than a slower thinker.

In other words, faster cognition would probably help you formulate a slow, considered reply just as much as it would help you answer more quickly. That might be especially helpful in a public speech to a group asking unplanned questions.

I agree with freyr, though, that quality of cognition/ideation matters more than speed, and doubt that 'thinking speed' is necessarily correlated to better thought output.

Like IQ itself, faster basic cognition probably means _something_ , but I don't think anybody knows _what_ it means or how (or even if) it relates to "intelligence" (whatever that means).

In my personal experience, I have seen more great ideas and solutions come from "weird thinkers" than "fast thinkers". I realize that sentence does reduce to the cliche, "Think outside the box, bro," but it seems true over the course of all that I have observed in my own life.

<comment><USER8> In that example, it may also simply have been that Jobs had been prepped (or prepped himself) thoroughly with answers to a lot of likely questions.

I don't put a lot of credence to the speed thing here. I know one senior executive who made a point of writing down question on cards when he was asked them live at an event. Which I always thought was a rather clever approach to 1.) Make sure he understood the question correctly and 2.) To give himself some time to formulate the best response.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> These academic pay walls really are a cancer to learning and human knowledge.

<comment> semi-extrinsic In proper scientific fields, authors post preprint PDFs on freely available sites like arXiv.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A year and a half back, when I was in the 10th grade, I did some similar research on the effects of video games on the cognitive skills of students. I specifically designed games for this research. I wanted to further this study to test commercially available video games, but due to lack of support and finance, I could not (I'm still in high school).

You can go through the paper here if you want: [http://www.emerginginvestigators.org/2015/01/gaming- cognitiv...](http://www.emerginginvestigators.org/2015/01/gaming-cognitive- skills/) OR [http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.01665](http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.01665)

TL;DR; of the paper: I divided the class into two groups, one that played the video games and one that did not. Two tests were taken - one before the children were allowed to play games and another at the completion of one week. Children were made to play games for an hour daily. The results showed that gaming does improve cognitive skills. I was particularly surprised by the substantial improvement that it led to in scores.

PS: Anyone who wants to take this further or maybe has ideas for implementing this, please feel free contact me. I would love to help you out on this.

<comment><USER11> I am the founder of [http://brainturk.com](http://brainturk.com) . I would like to talk to you on this . What's your email ?

<comment><USER10> You can send me a connection request on Linkedin ([https://in.linkedin.com/in/mohnish7](https://in.linkedin.com/in/mohnish7)) and once I accept it, you can check out my email address. I'm a bit skeptical about sharing personal data on public forums.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe a better summary of this paper would be "IQ tests presented on a computer screen produce scores highly correlated to IQ tests presented on paper," since they didn't use what you would normally call "video games."

</comment><comment><USER13> Was thinking this knowledge could be used as a recruiting tool, then immediately this came to mind...

"Greetings, Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada..."

<comment><USER14> I don't know if this is what you're referring to, but this is exactly what patio11 is working on now [http://www.starfighters.io/](http://www.starfighters.io/)

<comment><USER15> He's referring to the (1984) movie "The Last Starfighter", in which an arcade game is used to recruit a fighter pilot.

It's also where patio11 + ptacek got the name for that project.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They are already used for that purpose:

"The largest human cognitive performance dataset reveals insights into the effects of lifestyle factors and aging" Daniel A. Sternberg, Kacey Ballard, Joseph L. Hardy, Benjamin Katz, P. Murali Doraiswamy and Michael Scanlon, Front. Hum. Neurosci., 20 June 2013 [http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00292](http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00292)

</comment><comment><USER17> One addendum here is that you can use them to measure g, but as soon as you start trying to use them to _improve_ g any value of g you measure using them will be incorrect due to learning effects and there is no reliable evidence that playing such games can improve g. Source: wrote my prelims on this.

</comment><comment><USER18> reliably <> accurately

Wow, some psychology professor who read Ender's Game (Probably watched it since, come on, psychology is science at its laziest and the timeframes match) decided to make a quick buck by publishing an online paywalled paper on the "discovery" "for the first time" that people give up signs of their intelligence when observed performing an activity that requires them to use it (which matches the description of an infinite number of activities...).

Hey, I can reliably measure your intelligence by reading your comments on Hacker News. May I have your cash-money bucks, please? $_$ I have been working hard with hundreds of my students to prove it! For the first time ever! $_$

The fact is that you need specifically designed games for an accurate test. Most video games just won't make the cut. Even a combination of them: take the top 10 from steam. I dare anyone to accurately measure the IQ of their players just by looking at them them play in whatever lab environment they want. An those would be pretty boring. They would be in fact, tests.

<comment><USER19> Publish or perish mentality ... or ... good science hindered by a hyperbolic, misleading title. The former is cancerous but the latter can be easily rectified. I myself can't call it because I didn't click the link hoping I would get a TLDR in the comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there a link to the paper?

<comment><USER21> Fuck academic paywalls, here's a pdf.

[https://mega.nz/#!510ngJYY!S2_PGUIrprdnc5Byf5y1MNIbonm9-v3Y2...](https://mega.nz/#!510ngJYY!S2_PGUIrprdnc5Byf5y1MNIbonm9-v3Y2zCmdsSMJ4k)

<comment><USER22> I haven't a credit card, i am a penniless person studying on a public university that does not teach (almost) anything good, and wants to become a game dev based on free software philosophy, currently researching about edutainment and... zomg... you pwn, thanks! really thanks!

every article i want to read about this, is via payment only, so it is becoming really hard to research about this subject :( but today, you saved the day!!

<comment><USER23> I don't know what specific university you're going to, but many university libraries have free access to journals for students.

You should do some research on your school's library's website.

<comment><USER24> Sad that we need to research how to get access to research.

How much impediment to the progress of the arts and sciences should we allow copyright to impose?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> We can estimate a metric of intelligence by observing people performing tasks that require thought and problem solving?

O.O

</comment><comment><USER26> > Here we show, for the very first time, that commercial video games can be > used to reliably measure individual differences in general intelligence (g). > One hundred and eighty eight university undergraduates took part in the > study.

Is this a joke? _reliably measure_ ? _188 students_? So are you trying to tell me that if I could play Call of Duty with A. Einstein I would be humiliated despite him never having played a video game in his entire life?

<comment><USER27> You would do well to learn about effect size and p values. Your common sense guess at what might be reliable is incorrect, which means your doing a disservice to your own understanding of the world.</comment></comment>


Alchian–Allen effect - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchian%E2%80%93Allen_effect <comment><USER2> The reverse effect works too. When an overhead cost drops, people consume crappier versions. Free online news is a striking example. If you walked down to the news stand and paid $0.75 for a physical newspaper and the content was all Clickhole listicles you'd never buy it again. But people consume plenty for free.

<comment><USER3> There was and still is plenty of Clickhole-level crap on newsstands next to the newspapers. People buy it.

<comment><USER4> In fact IIRC people buy printbait considerably more than they buy actual newspapers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thought this was just common sense. Suppose you're buying necklaces.

Today: Gold $10; Silver $0.10

Tomorrow: Gold $1010; Silver $1000.10

By adding a constant to both prices, the price ratio no longer remains aligned with the underlying value ratio. Assuming you have to get one necklace each day, there is less of a decision tomorrow than there is today, because silver is overpriced relative to gold. The correct prices for tomorrow should have been "Gold: $1010, Silver: $10.10", so you're effectively getting _more_ scammed by going with silver.

<comment><USER6> I'd agree that once presented with as stark an example as yours, it is common sense, but it takes some insight to create such a thought experiment in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > when the prices of two substitute goods, such as high and low grades of the > same product, are both increased by a fixed per-unit amount such as a > transportation cost or a lump-sum tax, consumption will shift toward the > higher-grade product. This is true because the added per-unit amount > decreases the relative price of the higher-grade product.

> Another example is that Australians drink higher-quality Californian wine > than Californians, and vice versa, because it is only worth the > transportation costs for the most expensive wine.

<comment><USER8> My unscientific observation has been that the opposite holds for French wine. They seem to ship the US their worst, but it hits our shelves marked up 4x what it'd be in France.

Maybe it's a branding thing, and French wine's got enough power in that department that they don't need to send us good stuff to move product, at least at the lower end. Maybe with some French writing on the label low-price- shopping consumers are equally likely to buy it whether or not it tastes good, so there's no reason to send anything but the worst they have. Other European countries seem to have no trouble shipping us nice wine in the lower price tiers, but then they're not France.

<comment><USER9> In reality there's a lot more in a product than just good and bad.

Especially with wine, where it is not actually so clear that a true quality ordering exists, all sorts of other effects are at play. For example, we know how the signaling value of price overrides some true quality variables.

In economics, its important to know these simple models and their outcomes, but it is equally important to know when other effects are at play, or when assumptions do not hold

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So that's why I go broke on vacations... I want to eat somewhere cheap and the wife says, "No, let's go to the expensive joint... we've already spent $x getting here, so an extra $50 won't make a difference!" Now I have a name for the phenomena.

<comment><USER11> I would call what you're experiencing the sunk cost fallacy [1].

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Loss_aversion_and_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Loss_aversion_and_the_sunk_cost_fallacy)

<comment><USER10> No. The sunk cost comes into play in explaining why we've gone to Disney World three time too many simply because we bought some multi-day package years ago. I hate Disney. She hates Dianey. But, we gotta use up the stinking tickets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > the Alchian–Allen theorem

Uhm, I'm not an economist but how is this a "theorem"? What is the theory, what are the axioms, where is the proof? This seems like an empirically observed trend.

<comment><USER13> there is some basic arithmetic in the article. imagine the cost was raised by $100, then prices of beans would be $101.5 and $103, i.e. pretty much everyone would go for higher quality. gradually decrease the premium, and you will gradually decrease the number of people who prefer the higher grade product in favor of lower price. this is pretty much it. quite simple and neat observation, actually.

"the harder the punishment, the harder the drug" is another very important non-trivial observation, missed by most people.

<comment><USER12> > quite simple and neat observation, actually.

Did you read my comment? That's exactly what I wrote. This is not a "theorem". Theorems live inside theories, they're logically implied by axioms of the theories. That basic arithmetic proves nothing of the sort.

<comment><USER9> Then it is a theorem, as it is tautologically implied by certain axioms imposed on preference relations or choice correspondences, such as completeness, transitivity and a notion of continuity.

Since the whole theory won't fit in one wikipedia article, I suggest you read the first chapters or either a) Mas-Collel, Whinston and Green or b) Kreps, Microeconomic Foundations I (not the old undergrad book from him)

This would provide you with the theory to understand this result in a more mathematical correct way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Another example is that Australians drink higher-quality Californian wine > than Californians, and vice versa, because it is only worth the > transportation costs for the most expensive wine.

As a person who loves Belgian beer, I came to this realization when I was on a bit of a beercation there. For the most part, the good Belgian beer makes it here. When I'd try beer from breweries I hadn't heard of while I was there, it was mostly worse than the Belgian beer I had tried at home.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't see anything in the article about the extent to which this effect has been observed in the real world. Is it another example of economists assuming that people are idealised rational actors (who would prefer a 1.6x coffee bean premium to a 2x, to take the example in the article), or is there some hard evidence that it explains the real behaviour of real people?

<comment><USER16> They give 3 examples at the end:

"The effect has been studied as it applies to illegal drugs and it has been shown that the potency of marijuana increased in response to higher enforcement budgets,[2] and there was a similar effect for alcohol in the U.S. during Prohibition.[3] This effect is called Iron law of prohibition or Cardinal rule of prohibition.

Another example is that Australians drink higher-quality Californian wine than Californians, and vice versa, because it is only worth the transportation costs for the most expensive wine.[4]"

<comment><USER15> Thanks. I did read the article and noticed the examples that you referred to.

To clarify: I just don't see where the _evidence_ for any of these claims is accessible. Four of the six references don't appear to be available on-line. Of the two that are, one is a brief summary that leads to a paywalled FT article that I can't read, and the other is a ~200 pdf economics textbook.

I'm happy to accept that a price differential changes when a constant is added to both prices. But I do question whether people in the real world will switch to a different type of coffee bean because the differential goes from x2 to x1.6. And I wanted to know more about the _real-world_ circumstances in which it had been observed.

I might be pursuaded that the market for illegal drugs/alcohol could exhibit this effect, but it would be interesting to know how how, given that illegal products are probably going to be subject to other effects not shared by legal products, biases and selectivities were compensated for.

Edit: Made first paragraph clearer.

<comment><USER17> The fact that the sources are not easily accessible to you for free does not negate the fact that there are cited sources explicitly disproving your assumption (that this is just economists making things up).

> _Thanks, I also read the article._

I'm not sure the extent to which you considered this, but in this context it's hard to read that sentence without making you sound like a jerk.

<comment><USER15> > > Thanks, I also read the article.

> I'm not sure the extent to which you considered this, but in this context > it's hard to read that sentence without making you sound like a jerk.

Did you consider the possibility that I was simply thanking dyeje for their reply, and confirming that I had noticed the examples that they referred to? Assumption of good faith, etc? Nevertheless I've edited my reply to hopefully make my intended meaning clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _The effect has been studied as it applies to illegal drugs and it has been > shown that the potency of marijuana increased in response to higher > enforcement budgets..._

If the price of all marijuana goes up, then I bet overall usage of it goes down even if the individual potency goes up.

<comment><USER19> Depends... if quality goes up, sometimes that grows the demand for a product. Kraft Parmesan convinced me I didn't like Parmesan for the longest time...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Similar to an even exchange in chess. If you're behind it's a good deal, if you're ahead it's bad. Of course evaluating value taking into account positions (and thus determining whether an exchange is really "even") is not straightforward.

<comment><USER21> I don't consider myself a good chess player at all, but I always thought the opposite way: When I'm ahead, I'm willing to whittle down both sides with even trades until they are left with no options and can be checkmated. When I'm behind, an even trade feels scary - I'm looking for a way to catch up.

Am I missing some reason why it would be the opposite?

<comment><USER20> Yes you're right, I meant the exact opposite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I didn't realize they had a name for it... it seems so obvious.

<comment><USER22> > it seems so obvious.

I'm not sure the effect is logically sound -- before the price hikes you weren't willing to pay a dollar more for name brand (or premium drugs etc), but after the price hike you are? I'm not sure if the authors have a mathematical model supporting the decision, or are just observing illegal drug markets and generalizing.

<comment><USER23> > before the price hikes you weren't willing to pay a dollar more for name > brand (or premium drugs etc), but after the price hike you are?

Imagine that 10 normal people and Bill Gates want to buy bottles of wine. Bill goes for a bottle of $6000 Richebourg Grand Cru, and the 10 normal people always go for Shitscreek Red, sold for $4. So about 9% of the buyers are willing to pay extra for the name brand.

After the Great Wine Tax Bill of 2021, the prices are both increased by a fixed per-bottle amount of $6000. So now the Richebourg costs $12000, and the Shitscreek costs $6004. The 10 normal people migrate to beer, and Bill Gates still buys Richebourg. So about 100% of the buyers are willing to pay extra for the name brand.

<comment><USER24> That's not what the effect is about. The effect is about normal people becoming more likely to choose the expensive one because it appears to be "less 'more expensive'", because they judge ratios instead of absolute values.

A similar irrationality is when people will do an extra hour's work to save $50 off a $100 purchase, but not to save $50 off a $10000 purchase.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


US Birth Rate Hits New Low – A Nation of Singles - <AUTHOR> http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/12/us-birth-rate-hits-new-low-a-nation-of-singles/ <comment><USER2> > To get a sense of how powerful the marriage effect is, not just for women > but for men, too, look at the exit polls by marital status. Among non- > married voters – people who are single and have never married, are living > with a partner, or are divorced – Obama beat Romney 62-35. Among married > voters Romney won the vote handily, 56-42.

I'd be interested in seeing these numbers adjusted for age, various SES indicators, etc.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Young people and single mothers are both very unlikely to be married and already known to hugely favor Democrats.

<comment><USER4> Interesting, my guess is this is the demographic the Obama campaign was courting with the Life of Julia [1] slide-show a while back-

<http://www.barackobama.com/life-of-julia/>

<comment><USER5> But if everybody lives like Julia, who the hell will do the hard work anymore?

<comment><USER6> Are you saying that web design and starting your own small business (as did Julia in the ad) isn't hard work?

<comment><USER7> I think his comment was more along the lines of, "Who will dig the ditches?" I'm sure HN's response is, "Robots, if all goes as planned."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Everyone said, "Bail out the banks and you risk turning into Japan."

You bailed out the banks. Now you're turning into Japan.

Mazal tov, America! You're committing national suicide!

<comment><USER9> Assumption here being that US needs more younger people.

Let's see a couple trends here though:

1) US life expectancy is on the rise, I guess one of the most expensive healthcare systems in the world is good for something.

2) Average retirement age is moving farther ahead - Reuters recently ran an article about startup founders who are 60+ y.o. [http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/27/us-valley- ageism-i...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/27/us-valley-ageism- idUSBRE8AQ0JK20121127)

3) Rise of robotics outsourced a good portion of typical physical jobs to machines - iRobot, Kiva Systems, Tesla's car-manufacturing robot arms

4) Youth unemployment is on the rise

5) Youth STEM skills, the only applicable skills that matter in current economic climate, are declining

Why does the country need large amounts of young people again? A bunch of the assumptions - you need younger people to slave off to contribute taxes towards the retirement of the elderly - are a bit shaky to say the least. Most of the youth employed at various menial jobs are earning low enough income to qualify them for tax credits, so they're not a huge revenue source.

<comment><USER10> > 3) Rise of robotics outsourced a good portion of typical physical jobs to > machines - iRobot, Kiva Systems, Tesla's car-manufacturing robot arms

This is really of no consequence. Do you know any janitor who lost a job to roomba?

CNC have been there en mass since 1970s, and robotics since 1980s. A robotic assembly line is featured in final scene of Terminator (1984), and it was very much state of the art then.

However, contrary to doomsday prophecies of the time, what replaced American jobs were not the soulless machines in Japan, but penniless workers in China. The future never seems to play out in the coolest sci-fi way.

<comment><USER9> It's just the matter of cost. Soulless machines are just more expensive to design and slower to roll to market. Some of the technologies (like self- checkout registers at supermarkets) make no economic sense until a certain price point is reached.

<comment><USER11> Interesting question: is it cheaper to use a low-skill, uneducated workforce for low-skilled work, or a smaller but somewhat higher-skilled and educated workforce to maintain the mechanized workforce replacement machines, as well as the smaller set of workers to design and program the machines? It's usually easier to point a guy to a corner and tell him to sweep, than it is to program a machine to do it and to get politely out of the way when a customer walks by.

Who pays for those higher skilled workers?

Can you get enough of them?

<comment><USER12> There's a lot of overhead (liability, benefits, dealing with people) that's removed when using machines.

<comment><USER11> Benefits are easy: don't offer them, or make sure you structure the work week so the employee doesn't get enough hours to qualify.

People deal with unplanned for interactions with people better than a machine, they're much more flexible.

Liability, you can go either way on that.

I think it's an open question still, when you get down to low enough skill and pay.

Edit: People are the ultimate low skilled contingent worker. A pre-programmed AI-equivalent in every box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow that might be a little premature. The US do not have anything close to the problems the European countries are facing.

<comment><USER14> Indeed, the latest figures (2012, CIA World Factbook) show the United States' 13.68 births per theousand persons is still higher than most of Western Europe.

The demographic-economic paradox [1] is fascinating.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> One interesting thing is that this seems a bit self-correcting.

Assuming there is any genetic component to the desire for having children and religiosity (and I believe there is), that means that non-religious people, and people who are not interested in having children are breeding themself out of existence.

It'll probably be many generations before the results are large, but it should cause a dramatic shift eventually. (Which will probably eventually get too large, causing yet another shift in the other direction.)

<comment><USER16> "Assuming there is any genetic component to the desire for having children and religiosity (and I believe there is)"

The genetic argument should cancel itself it out. After all, if genetic factors should eventually cause people to have more children, then how is it possible for us to have a 55 year trend toward less children (as the article says, since 1957)? If genetics can eventually correct this trend, then why hasn't it already done so? For you to make this argument solidly, you'd have to establish at least 1 of 2 dependent arguments:

1.) there is some critical number that triggers a reaction

2.) there was, in the past, some force that allowed people to defy the genetic impulse to have children, but whatever that force was, it will no longer have as much power in the future

Here on Hacker News I have, several times, seen people invoke the idea that child-raising is a genetic impulse and that therefore the trend toward less children should be self-correcting. The people who advance this idea don't seem to get the irony of the suggestion.

Here is a bit of personal history: my great grandmother had 16 children. My mother had 4 children. Of the 4 of us, we are mostly past the age where we would consider having children. The 4 of us have so far had a total of 3 children, and I don't think there will be any more children, so my mom has less grand-children then she had children. This surprises her.

There are some powerful forces pushing the trend towards less children. My feeling is that some people are glib in their dismissals of the trend. A poorly thought out genetic argument would fall into my category of glib.

<comment><USER17> Agreed. You could easily argue that in an agrarian society children are an economic benefit (because your wealth is based on working the land), whereas in an urban society having children is an economic burden.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Assuming we can handle the "421" problems, a world population in the 1-2 billion range, purely through low fertility rate, would solve a lot of environmental problems. You could have first-world quality of life for everyone, with reasonable technology advances, and still have a much lower impact on the environment than we have now.

Under 2b seems like the right number unless space colonization is seriously in force.

<comment><USER19> Unless we see huge advances, I think we are doomed with space colonisation, since we put more energy in than we can take out, i.e., it produces non-self- sustaining space colonies reliant on Earth.

<comment><USER11> We may _wish_ we're doomed to space colonization.j

"The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand." \- Carl Sagan, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot>

What he's saying is that anything viable is too far away. Forget about the Moon or Mars, we cannot protect a population against radiation, and if we could we may as well build that same habitat here on our then presumably inhabitable planet that we're already on.

Don't just use the planet up and walk away from it, because there's nowhere to go.

<comment><USER19> Mostly OT:

I used this fact to consider a plausible simulation hypothesis. I had assumed you would need a universe larger than ours to simulate ours. However, assuming that since all the other places are far away, and we have found no other intelligent life, then it may be possible that we live in a simulated world in a Universe that is the same size or smaller than ours, since they would only need enough space to simulate the complexities of Earth at a low level, and the rest of the entire Universe could either be simulated at a very high level, or simply filled in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The marriage rate is lower than ever because we are in a transition from a patriarchy to a matriarchy. See my blog post about it:

<http://blog.couder.net/post/2012/06/30/Sex-and-Power>

<comment><USER21> Marriage is also lower because feminism made all women paranoid, made them want to be victims. Man can't approach woman as easily these days - will be accused of rape, harrasement, day rape if he tries. Example - suggest cup of coffe to woman in elevator - instant rapist (I hope everyone still remembers that incident) . By the way, was't there some statistics that it's men don't want to marry thesedays (for obvious reasons - women start most of divorces and takes almost everything. And men that stars divorce are famous for getting their pen1s cut off and thrown in garbage disposer.) Why it's hard to approach feminism indoctrinated wiman (victim syndrome) kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling- schrodinger%E2%80%99s-rapist-or-a-guy%E2%80%99s-guide-to-approaching-strange- women-without-being-maced/

<comment><USER22> When I lived in the US I had no problem to call girls for a beer, even one that called herself a feminist and studied feminist literature in her MSc... maybe this is just a moral panic where you live, rape is not that common in New England and people are not paranoid about it, at least this was true in the cities I lived.

But I never approached strange women on the street, only people that I knew or was introduced before.

<comment><USER21> "But I never approached strange women on the street, only people that I knew or was introduced before." Good for you to have broad circle of friends.

Also rape is not common in any first word country, but feminists claim 1 in 4 women will be raped... (had nice link about that claim but can't post it now).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> very interesting, but the part about singles being less concerned with the future is more than slightly ridiculous. IMHE, parenthood brings on a set of priorities that override longer term, less tangible issues in favour of supporting children.

<comment><USER24> Thank god someone else picked up on this. I'm willing to take the article at face value in its description of the results of the research; but the analysis is all nut job territory.

The singles not caring about the future is one perfect example. If it were true, and it were only the regions with high concentrations of parents caring about the future, then you would see much stronger support for actions to prevent climate change in areas where there are higher birth rates. The thing is, you don't - it's the cities - the places that the author is bemoaning for the lack of kids (he even calls cities "pleasure centers") that are at the forefront of trying to fix the big problems. The areas with the high birth rates are the ones that seemingly don't care about the future.

So yeah, take every last bit of his analysis with a grain of salt. He strikes me as a "America has been going backwards since the 1950s" type and he's trying to back the data in to fit his preconceived notions of how the world should work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why do we need to continue to increase or maintain the population?

<comment><USER26> To pay and care for the current population.

People live longer; diseases of old age are not cured yet and are considerably expensive and labour intensive. You need lots of people earning money and paying taxes to provide for that older generation. You also need lots of people to do the physical care of that population.

<comment><USER24> You are promoting the economic equivalent of a Ponzi scheme that by its very definition is not sustainable.

<comment><USER26> People pay small amounts of money into their pension (401k?) schemes throughout their life.

The growth of those schemes requires people to continue to pay money into them.

This ponzi scheme is either my poor communicating, or is a feature of many pension systems around the world.

([http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/a-look- at-p...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/a-look-at-pensions- plans-worldwide-517579.html))

I agree it's not sustainable. What do you suggest? How should people fund their old age?

Prisoners are already being used to care for other old age prisoners. This moving NY Times article is fascinating. ([http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with- dement...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dementia- among-aging-criminals.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0))

Fun sci-fi noodling would have criminals being sub-contracted into institutions that care for poverty stricken old people. The prison / elderly care industrial complex grows to a huge evil empire. (Throw in a bit about making and selling coffins and it's complete.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Birth rates are low but population continues to grow. The US is still a nation of immigrants, once we accept that with our Immigration laws we'll be fine.

</comment><comment><USER28> I was pretty good then got all ideologue at the end with unfounded assertions.

</comment><comment><USER29> The problem is health-related - physical, mental, and emotional - along with not getting the proper support of the community that it takes to raise a healthy child, not just for the child, but for the parents.

</comment><comment><USER30> I have a question. How does one solve negative birth rate effectively? What are possible cases in which the trend was reversed?

</comment><comment><USER31> Personally, anecdotally, I would find it exhausting to try to catalog all the ways in which child-rearing has been disincentivised in my own life.

I find this all another instance of the outsized hypocrisy in the U.S. Bemoaning something, while simultaneously taking seemingly every action to reinforce it.

(There are a lot of secondary effects, that I won't go into here, that seem to trigger... "outrage" in some of the very people contributing most strongly to the primary condition. Deceit, or stupidity. Seems to be some of each.)

</comment><comment><USER32> So? It's not like we're running out of people.

</comment><comment><USER33> Less stupid people being brought into the world? I see nothing wrong with that. It's about time.

EDIT: And seriously: "The US birth rate has continued to decline to a record low since the recession of 2007-2009. This is alarming."

This is not alarming. The depression never ended. It'll be 2013 soon and we're still in a depression. This is supposed to be a serious educated article? Fail!

<comment><USER34> >This is not alarming.

It's certainly alarming if you have pay-go pension schemes like Social Security and Medicare. The way things are going either the young will live under a crushing tax burden or people who paid into social welfare programs for fifty years won't see any benefit. That's not a recipe for a stable society.

<comment><USER5> The pay-go pension system is a huge ponzi scheme because it needs more and more people into the game with each generation. It lasted less than a century and it's on the edge of collapse now. Why should we postpone the inevitable?

<comment><USER34> >The pay-go pension system is a huge ponzi scheme because it needs more and more people into the game with each generation.

Depends on the ratio of the people paying in to the payout. Social Security would be pretty easy to fix by reducing the payout a bit and raising the tax a bit. The big problem, of course, is Medicare, and I expect that's why a single payer plan is inevitable in the US.

These programs have problems as currently constituted, but they're fixable even if the population isn't growing. However, whatever problems we have will be exacerbated if the number of people working is actually falling.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Edwin Land and Polaroid Photography - <AUTHOR> https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/land-instant-photography.html <comment><USER2> His biography, The Instant Image _, is terrific. Edwin Land is one of my inventor heros.

_ The title comes from how the Polaroid was conceived, all in one instant. (I won't spoil the story.) After seeing the whole working invention in his head, the rest was just a long process of execution. I'm sure many of us can relate.</comment>


W – A simple programming language - <AUTHOR> https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/projects/49-w-a-simple-programming-language <comment><USER2> I particularly like the keywordlessness of W's syntax. Virtually every other language divides identifiers into 2 arbitrarily defined classes: the somewhere from 20 to 100 special identifiers that mustn't be used, and all the others that can be used by the programmer. Because W's syntax uses punctuation and symbols for all its functionality, the programmer doesn't need to either remember which 50-ish identifiers not to ever use, or have a special IDE-like task running in the background to gives prompts whenever it detects an illegal identifier use. Very clean syntax!

<comment><USER3> ..sorry but this is a non-problem. If you insist on not using an IDE, then the compiler will still catch any keyword clashes as errors. Also most languages use contextual keywords so it's even less of a problem.

<comment><USER4> Right. I think I've never wanted to name a variable "if".

<comment><USER5> But what about old, current, and new?

Or int?

Or class?

There is more then one project out there with klass.

<comment><USER6> I name variables 'old', 'current', and 'new' all the time. Just not in C++/Java.

And why would you want to name a variable 'int'?

<comment><USER5> Or in JS. Or in C#. That covers a lot of the big ones.

Perhaps you should name your language, so I can provide better examples.

<comment><USER6> Examples of what? Ways to name variables so they look like keywords? I don't need your help with that. Even if I used a language that used keywords like 'ssalc' and 'wen', you could contrive some reason to be upset that you can't use those words in your code. The advantage offered by keywords is readability, and it comes at the expense of your ability to use those words for other purposes. If that's unacceptable, then your priorities are probably misplaced.

Plus, you can always use a grammar that distinguishes between keyword rules and variable rules, and you'll never have any unambiguity. Even if popular languages don't do this, that's not a general problem for computer languages.

<comment><USER5> > Ways to name variables so they look like keywords? I don't need your help > with that.

Oh good. My comment was in response to someone who doubt keywords would ever make good variable names (e.g. class).

> you can always use a grammar that distinguishes between keyword rules and > variable rules, and you'll never have any unambiguity.

Yes, that is nice. And that's what W does. As an ancestor comment said, kudos for a "clean syntax"!

(NOTE: there are alternatives, e.g. Scala's backticks. But W's choice is a good one.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think he needs to update his grammar.[0] The definition of _program_ does not allow for anything but _definition_ s (i.e. declarations), except in blocks (see _compound-expression_ ).

So his examples in his tutorials[1] do not conform to the grammar described, e.g. conditional expressions.

[0] [https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/index.php/projects/14-w-compiler/...](https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/index.php/projects/14-w-compiler/51-w-syntax- specifications) [1] [https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/index.php/projects/14-w-compiler/...](https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/index.php/projects/14-w-compiler/50-w-a- brief-tutorial)

</comment><comment><USER8> According to [http://gtello.pagesperso- orange.fr/hp200lx_f.htm](http://gtello.pagesperso-orange.fr/hp200lx_f.htm) turbo pascal works very well on HP 200LX.

<comment><USER9> Everything works on HP200LX. Except Emacs, but there was some C-script-based Emacs, which was OK. I think had Smalltalk and serial mouse at one time, as an extreme example.

HP200LX was my only computer 1993-1995, if I wanted to see some color pictures I went to see library computer. It was my travelling companion for 20 years upto 2010, mostly as an E-book reader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> We've almost run out of single letter programming language names!

<comment><USER11> Assuming Wikipedia is up to date, we still have: A (there is however a A+ langugae),H,I,L,N,O,P,U,V,X,Y and Z left

<comment><USER12> I know of a tiny language called Z: [http://chrisdone.com/z/](http://chrisdone.com/z/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting that he's making things to run on his HP200LX. I (still) have a Zeos Pocket PC that I used daily for about 2 years. MSDOS and MS-Works was my world. Ahh, good times...

[http://www.oldcomputers.net/zeos-ppc.html](http://www.oldcomputers.net/zeos- ppc.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Vaguely related (due to the similar naming): [https://github.com/catseye/Specs-on- Spec/blob/master/star-w/...](https://github.com/catseye/Specs-on- Spec/blob/master/star-w/star-w.markdown)

</comment><comment><USER15> >So why would anyone in his right mind would create a whole new programming language? Isn't BASIC or C++ good enough already?

Ha ha ha!</comment>


A material found to carry current in a way never before observed - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2018-08-material-unique-behavior-current.html <comment><USER2> > Scientists at the Florida State University-headquartered National High > Magnetic Field Laboratory have discovered a behavior in materials called > cuprates that suggests they carry current in a way entirely different from > conventional metals such as copper.

> The research, published today in the journal _Science_ , adds new meaning to > the materials' moniker, "strange metals."

> Although scientists understand the physics of LTS, they haven't yet cracked > the nut of HTS materials. Exactly how the electrons travel through these > materials remains the biggest mystery in the field.

The biggest mystery in the field... of science?

<comment><USER3> > The biggest mystery in the field... of science?

The biggest mystery in the magnetic field at their laboratory. /s

They probably meant something like the field of HTS material physics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For reasons of my own, I think this will turn out to be a pretty important clue as to the nature of super conductivity. Something I wonder is if resistivity would go down in response to a high electric field.

<comment><USER5> If you already know what's going on, then please let us know already. For reasons of my own I think the nature of super conductivity is going to be an important part of future technological developments!

<comment><USER4> Heh, if _knew_ what was going on I would be building some Tony Stark level gadgets already :-), but what I have been observing are the number of papers being produced around new observations or interpretations of the interaction between the electromagnetic forces and quantum effects.

I have also observed over the years that, like debugging complex problems, once experimental physicists can repeat an effect that is not well understood, the underlying physics is more likely to be revealed.

I wrote Dr. Shekhter and he said an updated paper would be available on Arxiv shortly.(arxiv:1705.05806) so I'm looking for that.

"High" temperature superconductors have been interesting for a while. My thought is that if there is a way to understand this current conductivity using quantum electrodynamics it could open a way to understanding how to create super conductors that operate at room temperature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Excerpt:

"The fact that the linear-in-field resistivity mirrored so elegantly the previously known linear-in-temperature resistivity of LSCO is highly significant, Shekhter said.

"Usually when you see such things, that means that it's a very simple principle behind it," he said.

</comment><comment><USER7> So what applications this will have ?

<comment> m-p-3 It this leads to room temperature superconductivity, it could allow MRI scanners to operate without the need of expensive helium-based coolant system. And this could also mean that if they can use it in PCB, you could have a CPU that doesn't release heat.

The implication of heatless CPUs and less need for cooling would have a tremendous impact in datacenters.

<comment><USER8> As far as I can tell room temp SC would be more beneficial to power transmission than anything. The energy could be zipped along from wherever it is generated most efficiently with little loss.

Successful room temp SC wouldn't be able to produce _heatless_ CPUs because the transistor mechanism has to work by essentially a changing resistance level. So the billions of transistors themselves would still give off heat, but not the wires connecting them. I'm not sure what percentage heat comes from the transistors vs conduits between those transistors. Significant boost in efficiency / reduction in heat, but not _heatless_.

<comment><USER9> In general the power consumption is in the transistors, and related more directly to junction capacitance, voltage, and frequency than to resistance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> No observations here, still ;-)

</comment><comment><USER11> > discovered a behavior in materials called cuprates that suggests they carry > current in a way entirely different from conventional metals such as copper.

Well, cuprates are copper-based molecules, so a better wording would be "they carry current in a way entirely different from metallic copper or other metals."

<comment><USER12> No, that would be as if I said Water is less flammable than Hydrogen and you had replied: "But Water is just Oxygenated Hydrogen!!"

<comment><USER11> No, you're missing a level of subtlety. The author made it sound like there was no relationship between cuprates and copper, but in fact cuprate molecules include copper atoms. In fact, cuprates are a new family of superconductors because of their copper content.

Your metaphor doesn't add any information, since water is less flammable than hydrogen.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: TabDown – Markdown from new tabs in your favourite web browsers - <AUTHOR> http://wangfenjin.com/markdown-editor/ <comment><USER2> I really didn't understand what this project is, then I clicked the link to the Firefox addon page and read this single line

> Open new empty tab with Markdown Editor

Now I understand.

Having to install something anyway, what are the advantages over Typora, which is an open source cross platform desktop application?

<comment><AUTHOR> We spend lots of time in web browser, this extension makes it easy for us to write down temporarily or remind of us to do something.

This extension will automatically save what write down and access it everytime new tabs opened. And the text also shareable with others.

Make it an extension also enable us to access the content offline.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Whats the Right Word for This Product? \_("n")_/ - <AUTHOR>

The Idea {brighterme.org} is to send a weekly digest of the 10 funniest photos on the Internet to our kind subscribers.
The problem is that I don't know the right wording to use in getting people interested.
Anyone skilled in positioning or language pls help!!!! <comment><AUTHOR> thanks @creyes123

I was actually thinking of what to say in the body of the copy. Any help with that? The present one doesn't seem to be converting much

<comment><USER2> Oh. That is a very different question.

By the way, the word is spelled happiness.

I did not see anything particularly funny in any of the photos in the home page, for starters. The quote on the right was cut-off for me. Don't expect more than 1280 pixel wide.

I agree that the wording appears to be lacking. It looks like a perfect case for A/B testing, too.

Here's an idea: show them one funny photo with a "Next" button. After they hit next three times or so, put up the email sign-up. All the text you need is "Funny Photos via email."

How do you sign up for the emails!? Did I miss something? If I did, almost all other folks will, too. Also, lose the link to classroom.ng - too confusing. Move it to the bottom of the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> funnybones.com

funnyweek.com

funweek.com

weeklygiggles.com

weeklychortles.com

chortleme.com

theweekinlaughs.com</comment>


Dear Apple: Deleting your users' apps without notification is rude and arrogant - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/03/dear-apple-deleting-your-users-apps-without-notification-is-rude-and-arrogant/#zZXkhmFBJ8IMZzE2.99

<comment><USER2> About the removal of YouTube app from iOS 6

1\. This is already reported during the beta days. NDA being only a 3 capital letters and all.

2\. Google submitted YouTube app to iTunes App Store, and it was released on September 11th, 2012.

3\. John Koetsier, a writer for VentureBeat that also consulted on technology, social media, and marketing for many years; apparently was either living under a rock since September 11th, 2012 or just whoring for page hit.

4\. Did I mention page hit whoring?

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand any of this diatribe. Various Apple vs Google business issues have been evident for months, and most people accept the fact that changes must be made. So Apple removes the YouTube App and you now download its replacement from the App Store. What's outrageous about that?

Isn't everyone a little tired of these articles using words like "disaster", "outrageous" etc etc. It's just a phone that runs little apps, folks!

<comment><USER4> It is removing features from a phone people have already bought. Sure, we know to just go to the App store and get the new one, but my parents definitely wouldn't.

I sure am glad I don't work in telco any more and don't have to deal with customers complaining about it. It was bad enough when the Android Market switched to Google Play, even with a pop-up information screen when launching before the switch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Came here to see the usual PR reps frantically posting their same old defenses of everything Apple. Wasn't disappointed!

Deleting installed software without permission, notification, or explanation? Definitely not OK! Would never know that on any forum for discussion though where even the most obviously problematic Apple practice must be defended at any cost, and those who disagree silenced.

<comment><USER6> If you understood what this article was whining about, you wouldn't have posted this pointless tirade against anyone who likes Apple products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Imagine that this was your Mac (or your PC). And, in an upgrade to a new version of the operating system, Apple or Microsoft deleted applications on your device. Instead of PhotoShop, you now get NewAwesomeImageEditor, and instead of Skype, you get … nothing.

This is outrageous."

Yes, imagine.

"Previously obvious applications like Windows Calendar and Windows Contacts are now gone for good. You can get back much of the functionality from these apps, as it turns out, but via a download-only application called Windows Live Mail. What?" - [http://www.winsupersite.com/article/windows-7/windows-7-revi...](http://www.winsupersite.com/article/windows-7/windows-7-review- part-10-bundled-applications)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is being angry at nothing. It was publicized. The google version of the youtube app is better for everyone including the user.

</comment><comment><USER9> Don't you have to agree with some EULA and ToS with Apple when connecting your iPhone?

And doesn't these agreements more or less state that Apple can do whatever they please and you have to like it?

</comment><comment><USER10> Dear Venturebeat, John Koetsier:

I'm sorry I gave you clicks. Please accept this story flagging as an apology towards the greater discourse.</comment>


The iOS App Store Brings Users Only Because It's the Only Choice - <AUTHOR> https://inessential.com/2020/06/20/the_ios_app_store_brings_users_only_beca <comment><USER2> Ok - but what is Brent and DHH going to do about all the bad actors who will also distribute their software outside the store.

Have they not considered that?

Do they not care about anyone impacted by that?

At this point, who can deny the problems with the App Store?

But denying the problems with the alternatives just because you personally stand to benefit seems like just as much of a problem.</comment>


The Management Myth - <AUTHOR>

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-management-myth/ <comment><USER2> 404

<comment><USER3> Probably this: [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2006/06/the- manage...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2006/06/the-management- myth/4883/)

The submitter left off a trailing "4883/".</comment></comment>


How to use car2go for free - <AUTHOR> http://davidolesch.github.io/2013/04/15/how-to-use-car2go-for-free/ <comment><USER2> Sounds like a win-win to me in that the cars get refueled for the cost of a twenty-minute ride. My guess would be that this is by design.

<comment><USER3> Some people hate filling up at the gas station so I don't think this is a scam at all.</comment></comment>


Power outage in Linode Fremont Datacenter - <AUTHOR> http://status.linode.com/2010/11/possible-power-outage-in-fremont.html <comment><USER2> My linode has been down for over an hour and still counting. They just went under three nines in one day...

</comment><comment><USER3> I noticed this an hour later because my monitor script was set up in the same datacenter. Lesson learned.

<comment><USER4> I have zero affiliation with the group, apart from being a casual user but <http://wasitup.com/> has come in handy for me quite often. Even for free, it'll do a check 20 times an hour.

<comment><USER5> Pingdom also has a very good free plan. It's limited to one url, but for that URL, it's just as good as their paid plans. So you get checks from a ton of DC's, and it tracks response time as well as uptime.

<comment><USER6> It hasn't been well publicized after the original announcement (and isn't prominently placed on their plans page, either) but I've had great success with Cloudkick's free developer plan on my personal virt (which is still down..):

<https://www.cloudkick.com/accounts/signup/developer/>

CK sent me a text message as soon as my host went down earlier, which gave me time to file the ticket against Linode.

Only caveat - they don't provide a signed RPM, which can cause some administrative hardship for linux users using rpm-based distributions (most of the yum operations require you to add an extra cli option to allow working with unsigned rpm's), but it's a minor complaint given that their agent isn't mandatory and doesn't need a lot of updates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So... they ever heard of redundant power generators? Does anyone know what happened exactly?

<comment><USER8> I've had power transfer switches fail more than once. Just because you have a redundancy available doesn't mean you are reducing failure points in the system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I live right down the street from the datacenter (~ 0.5 miles). The whole area's power was out for a bit, but know more than an hour. My site is having errors.

</comment><comment><USER10> I had just brought up a new instance. Why not choose Fremont? It's right down the .... oh dammit.

<comment><USER11> That's a good case in point. In general you're better off choosing locations further away from where you live/work to prevent issues like this where your office/home and datacenter could be affected at the same time.

<comment><USER10> It was _especially_ dumb of me because my other instance was ... in Fremont.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We had just launched a test server about 40 minutes ago and had been waiting for it to boot for ages when I finally thought to check the status page. Talk about bad timing.

</comment><comment><USER13> Still wait for the reboot jobs. maybe I should move to EC2.

<comment><USER14> Yeah .... our iPhone app downloads content from our server - so far we've got 3 1-star reviews saying 'Your app sucks - it can't download any content'

Damn .........

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The Fremont datacenter, if I remember correctly, is at Hurricane Electric. They had power issues in 2009 as well.

[http://blog.feedly.com/2009/11/03/24-minutes-of- unscheduled-...](http://blog.feedly.com/2009/11/03/24-minutes-of-unscheduled- downtime-resolved/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Latest News:

3:30am (EST): Some hosts were damaged by the power outage and we are working on moving these Linodes to hot standby equipment.

Please tell me that doesn't mean potential data loss!

<comment><USER17> >> Please tell me that does mean potential data loss!

Looks like it's not. Our server just went up - after the damage notication. Data seems to be intact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Going on 4 hours of downtime here, this is a disaster. Linode used to be really honest about the status of things, this time, they claim "most linodes should be booted" which seems not to be true.

<comment><USER19> 3:30am (EST): Some hosts were damaged by the power outage and we are working on moving these Linodes to hot standby equipment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> When it went down, I quickly realized my addiction to Twitter via irssi.

<comment><USER20> What are you using?

<comment> mike-cardwell I get access to Twitter via IRC by using Bitlbee.

<comment><USER20> I don't use Bitlbee, but I had no idea that it supported micro-blogging. I thought that it was just IM protocols.

<comment> mike-cardwell Bitlbee currently supports Jabber, MSN, OSCAR (AIM/ICQ), Yahoo and Twitter

There is also a Twitter/Jabber gateway for those not using Bitlbee: <https://www.tweet.im/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if this was related to the crappy weather in the south bay? My power was out for from 8 until 8:45ish (PST). Of course, I would hope their datacenter has a UPS and generators...

</comment><comment><USER22> Grrr... my one remaining down Linode has been down for a bit over 3 hours now (extrapolating from the Dashboard graphs). Sort of ... quite bad.

</comment><comment><USER23> there was a brief outage at the hurricane electric datacenter in fremont, probably due to the storm that came through the bay area this evening. our servers (not part of linode) went down, too, but were back up a couple minutes later. i can't confirm the cause, though, b/c i can't reach anyone at he.net on the phone. =(

</comment><comment><USER24> They are saying that linodes are on their way back up. Not mine though... alas. Anyone else have any more luck?

<comment><USER17> Still waiting. There is a queued task to restart the server about "36 years 10 months ago".

<comment><USER25> The just queued the restart at some very low value of a unix timestamp, which translates to 36 years ago. Strangely, not the unix epoch at midnight Jan 1 1970.

<comment><USER26> Old post, but...

FYI, it uses the epoch of caker -- i.e. the birthday of caker, Linode's founder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Suggest also hanging out in #linode on irc.oftc.net. Perihelion is being very patient and answering questions.

<comment><USER16> I would, if I could ssh to my linode.

<comment><USER27> That is an IRC channel. You shouldn't need your linode to use IRC?

<comment><USER28> I access irc via screen + irssi on my linode box. I'm in the same boat as him right now. Revering to prgmr for irc for the time being.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> And certificate errors on <https://linode.com>.

<comment><USER30> Go to <https://www.linode.com> instead. They've got a wildcard SSL certificate for *.linode.com, which will not work (and has never worked) without a subdomain like "www".

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I still have 2/3 servers down, one of them is still "Powered off" in the console.

<comment><USER16> Same here.

<comment><USER32> And here as well. Am I justified in being pissed about this outage, or am I failing in my responsibilities by relying on a company like linode to keep my site up?

<comment> mike-cardwell If you get a single server/vps from anyone, you should assume that it might go down for a few hours at any point. If that's a problem for you, you should create your own redundancy. No matter how much redundancy your provider claims.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Glad my linode is in the New Jersey data center.

</comment><comment><USER34> Might this be related to current prgmr outages?</comment>


The Internet of Unprofitable Things - <AUTHOR> http://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/2018/12/24/the-internet-of-unprofitable-things/ <comment><USER2> Device fleets are incredibly hard to get right, and if you have no updateability, you have to nail them the first time. For someone coming from a cloud background, it's a jungle out there, where all sorts of "easy" or "solved" problems are nothing of the sort.

As a sort of PSA, I want to plug the work that we have done at balena.io (formerly known as resin.io) to solve problems like these for everyone deploying Linux IoT devices, including open source / non-paying users.

We've built the open source balenaOS[1] and the (newly) open sourced openBalena[2][3] management server that anyone can use without paying us a penny. If you're about to manufacture a fleet of linux devices, and are about to put them out there, and don't want to pay for a service (so you're not using balenaCloud) but also don't want to solve problems we've spent years already finetuning, (such as ntp, dns, cellular modem support, read-only filesystem, host updates, etc etc) use the above projects and save yourself a mountain of pain in the ensuing years.

I hate being alarmist, but working with device fleets over the last 7 years, I've seen things you wouldn't believe. I've seen devices catch on fire, drown in storms, launch DDoS attacks, and everything in between. It's incredibly hard to underestimate how bad things can get when you put your devices out there with no ability to find them and update them if push comes to shove.

[1] balenaOS: [https://www.balena.io/os/](https://www.balena.io/os/) [2] openBalena: [https://www.balena.io/open/](https://www.balena.io/open/) [3] openBalena github: [https://github.com/balena-io/open- balena](https://github.com/balena-io/open-balena)

<comment><USER3> This looks really cool. I may be deploying a fleet of Raspberry Pi or similar servers in the near future and this might save us a ton of headaches.

The target context is a medical facility in a remote location without Internet (or extremely limited Internet), though. Is there a way to distribute updates by USB stick?

What's the best place to read stories of people who have tried deploying with Balena on RasPi-type servers and/or contexts without Internet access, and learn about their successes and difficulties?

Thanks!

<comment><USER4> _please_ do yourself a favor and don't remotely deploy rpi or anything that uses microsd cards for OS image and boot. The write lifetime of those, even using "industrial" cards, will mean a huge failure rate even with very light usage. Only use some sort of real sata3 or nvme bus SSD.

<comment><USER5> There are ways to reduce the risk, though, depending on your workload. It is possible to use the sd card just to boot, with all actual file systems in a USB attached device. You can also use some of the (very limited) memory as a ram disk for things with lots of writes...

<comment><USER4> Yes, but even so, the write wear leveling algorithm in a $50 consumer class SSD and dwpd (drive writes per day) are vastly better than microsd media.

<comment><USER6> Will second this. A friend of mine had to write his own wear leveling software to make use of SD cards in his hardware, sadly bom made anything better way too expensive to be commercially viable.

<comment><USER7> If your friend has written about this anywhere or is able to share any code, I would love to learn more!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The way they burned the NTP addresses reminded me of Douglas Adams quotes "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair".

<comment><USER9> I think that a pretty neat idea to solve all these time-related issues would be more digital wristwatches.

<comment><USER8> But making sure that there is a wrist besides each clock is yet another problem.

<comment><USER9> That's what the towels are for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good a place as any to mention my short story

[https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7132077&cid=49308245](https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7132077&cid=49308245)

possibly the only work of fiction ever inspired by NTP, IoT and cryptographic protocols.

This struggle with embedded ip address seems to echo this part of my story, "These hastily made things flooded the market and soon replaced other well- documented things. At times something failed and its inventors could not say why, they just assembled a new one or went bankrupt."

<comment><USER11> I absolutely loved this, thanks for posting it.

Do you have a list of your stories avalible?

<comment><USER10> NSA and the Desolation of Smaug [https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3863455&cid=44005849](https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3863455&cid=44005849)

Paced by the Animals [https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4352911&cid=45171567](https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4352911&cid=45171567)

The Trix Rabbit of Thorium [https://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11375261&cid=5...](https://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11375261&cid=55580891)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I got butterflies reading this because it's something I can see myself having done early in my career.

A relative newbie finding himself responsible for nontrivial design and implementation decisions for fleets of robots. Luckily they were always updatable. But if you asked me to set up the NTP story for them (which they had but people smarter than me worried about it) I would have Googled it for a while and just hoped that I didn't miss any fundamental understanding of how to use NTP.

p.s. this article felt like it was the _perfect_ length. It shares the perfect amount of detail succinctly.

</comment><comment><USER13> I like that story.

The author responded to the initial problem in the old-fashioned internet "we're all here to make things work" kind of way, without letting himself get taken advantage of.

And then when the problem decided not to play nicely, he increased the pressure in a civilized way.

These days most companies would have just said, "Sucks to me you" and cut off the dummy IoT company.

This also illustrates why big companies like Apple maintain their own NTP services.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm trying to coin "Postel decentralisation" for things like this: people assume NTP is a distributed robust system, but in practice it turns out to be run by one very overwhelmed guy in a basement somewhere.

(It _could have been_ set up properly to be distributed here, but they didn't do it)

<comment><USER15> NTP itself is not decentralized, but the largest NTP provider is the NTP community pool, www.pool.ntp.org. The pool is operated by MANY PEOPLE IN BASEMENTS AROUND THE WORLD, using DNS to distribute the traffic. It's practically pretty robust for most purposes.

However, people just go to a list of NTP servers, then copy a few into the code, instead of using the distributed pool. Then it's not a surprise that the NTP in a product is going to stop working, meanwhile a one very overwhelmed guy who happened to run one of the server is going to have serious troubles, see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753835](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753835).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good on the author for playing nice with them. Hardcoding IPs for _any_ purpose is a bad idea, this is literally the reason DNS exists.

<comment><USER17> I don't think that was really the main problem in this case. Hardcoding any address (DNS or IP) _that you do not control_ is always a horrible idea.

<comment><USER18> Does anyone really control their IP addresses? I thought that ultimately those were controlled by ARIN, RIPE, et.al.

<comment><USER19> If you have your own dedicated IP range and you are advertising routes correctly, then you're as close to ownership of your IP addresses as Google or Facebook are of theirs.

ARIN and RIPE control allocations, but do not control routing to allocated ranges.

<comment><USER20> I think the point GP was making is that you don't "own" IP addresses, you effectively "lease" them. If you don't pay your ARIN (or others) dues, you'll lose them.

<comment><USER21> Sure but that is also true of a domain name.

<comment><USER20> Domains are much more vocal about expiration in my experience, but maybe that's just the registrars I've used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's so simple to setup your own Stratum-1 server, I don't get why more folks don't. The one I keep in my house is a 1U unit about the size of a 16 port switch and keeps time accurate to 15ns via a small Multi-GNSS antenna (yes, serious overkill for home needs, but I already owned it for a use case that used to need it).

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately, having more Stratum-1 servers does nothing to help clueless device manufacturers who hardcoding the IP address of an individual server, and damaging the community service. But yes, when we talk about the NTP community in general, we certainly needs more Stratum-1 servers. Nowadays, running a Stratum-1 is easy, the hardware is cheap, a single broad computer w/ time source from a shortwave radio or GPS. And if one loves electronics, one can build a precision oscillator (evem a Rubidium standard can be used for 300 USD), or go straight to make a GPSDO to achieve highly-reliable timekeeping.

Nevertheless, there are two practical difficulties.

1\. Static IP addresses are unavailable in most home connections. And many home broadbands throttle UDP traffic, dropping them when the pps rate is high. It makes one's home unsuitable for hosting a NTP server.

2\. Unlike Stradium-2, you cannot simply use a "cloud" service for your dedicated server. To run a NTP Stratum-1, you have to physically host your server with the customized hardware in a datacenter, which costs 100 dollars/month in my city, not including network transit and bandwidth. I really want to run one, but I cannot afford it.

3\. Shortwave / GPS reception is usually not available in a datacenter, and an antenna installation is usually not allowed. You can be creative, a good way is using the time provided by mobile basestations. But it needs experience.

<comment><USER22> > a good way is using the time provided by mobile basestations

That would definitely not be Stratum-1, so I wouldn't recommend it.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for reminding me. If a mobile basestation is not usable, it seems to me that the best way is trying a WWVB-disciplined oscillator. Shortwave is certainly not available indoor, but longwave reception is possible. Hopefully it won't be killed by NIST due to the funding issues...

<comment><USER20> I've never been successful getting long wave reception in a data center (didn't try running cable to an external antenna though, as then why not GNSS if that's doable).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's referenced in the article, but one of the earlier ntp abuse cases:

[http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear- sntp/](http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear-sntp/)

Makes for interesting reading.

</comment><comment><USER15> In short, if you are ever going to make an embedded device, or an operating system distribution, or anything with NTP default on, please make sure,

1\. NEVER, ever hardcode an individual NTP server (in form of a IP or domain). DO NOT just go to a list of NTP servers, then copy a few into your code. DON'T ping pool.ntp.org and get its IP address written down. DON'T DO ANY OF THESE! PLEASE!

2\. DO NOT use Stratum 0 and Stratum 1 servers. Please use Tier-2 and lower. Practically, if you follow Rule No.1, then you are always following this rule.

3\. If the scale of your system is small, in hundreds, or in a few thousands, PLEASE USE pool.ntp.org, this is the NTP community cluster backed by DNS load balancer. Always request the DNS, and make sure the IP is not cached locally for too long. If you need more than one servers, use 0.pool.ntp.org, 1.pool.ntp.org, 2.pool.ntp.org, etc (3 is often enough).

4\. If the scale of your system is large, such as tens of thousand, or you are making a new system, you SHOULD request a customized prefix from pool.ntp.org, such as debian.pool.ntp.org, it helps the community to manage the traffic. If your system is a large commercial one, you ARE REQUIRED to donate some servers to the NTP Pool to compensate the community. Another option is running your own private NTP cluster. The policy is here: [https://www.ntppool.org/en/vendors.html](https://www.ntppool.org/en/vendors.html)

5\. If possible run a standard NTP implementation, like NTPd, chrony, or something else as long as it's written professionally. Nowadays even lightbulbs run Linux, then why don't you run a standard NTPd?

But If you can't, then make sure...

(a) implement NTPv4, DO NOT use NTPv1.

(b) Read the new SNTP RFC if you are implementing an SNTP client. [http://www.faqs.org/rfc/rfc4330.txt](http://www.faqs.org/rfc/rfc4330.txt)

(c) DO NOT synchronize time on the beginning of an hour, or 00:00 UTC! Select a minute in a hour randomly for synchronization.

(d) Use an exponentially-increase retrial interval, DO NOT keep retrying when the server is unreachable, you are launching a DDoS attack!

(e) Support Kiss of Death packet, your client should immediately stop requesting a server, cease and desist, once a KoD packet is received.

(f) Make sure the client will stop requesting the builtin list of servers, once an alternative server is set by the user.

These should have been written in all textbooks related to practical networking lectures, but apparently, there aren't. People don't even realize that their actions are harmful, and we have all the problems...

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

The NTP community is a complete tragedy of the commons. Even many government institutions cannot keep up with the abusive traffic, and stopped providing public NTP servers.

Today, if we don't count Microsoft and Apple's NTP, almost all public NTP servers are provided by the volunteers from [https://www.pool.ntp.org](https://www.pool.ntp.org). By using DNS, it forms a NTP cluster to distribute the load. These people provide time for the entire Internet, and they are the people who withstand all the abuses day by day.

People just assume they are some random super servers that always work, without being responsible for their actions, such as hardcoding IP addresses, writing abusive retry code (without exponential increment of timeout), and making a cronjob that initialize a synchronization exactly at midnight (without randomization), effectively a DDoS.

Usually, if a device comes with hardcoded NTP addresses, it, in fact, usually indicates their program is poorly-written, and the manufacturers are irresponsible. Those devices have the worst homebrew NTP implementation on the planet,

1\. They send ancient NTPv1 packets, while the latest version is NTPv4.

2\. They synchronize their time on the beginning of an hour, effectively making a flooding attack. Another larger flooding attack starts at 00:00 UTC.

3\. They retry interval is around 3 minutes, if fails to reach the server, make even more traffic to the server, rather than an exponentially-increase interval.

4\. They still try to talk to the default hardcoded servers, even if an alternative server list is set.

5\. They don't support the Kiss of Death packet, nothing can stop them if they became wild.

Stratum 0/1 servers are the most vulnerable: they have highest accuracy, with reference clock. Despite the acceptable usage of ST-1 is only passing time to downstream, or for scientific purposes, since there's only a handful of them and often listed publicly, they are often spotted by those manufacturers, and put in their devices by default.

Stratum 0/1 are usually provided by universities, or unpaid volunteers for the public good of the Internet. If a single server got hardcoded in those mass- manufactured devices, serious consequences can happen, the volunteer may literally bankrupt: your whole institute/school will be kicked out from the Internet [0]; when you came to the manufacture asking to pay the damage they are responsible for, you are threatened by a lawyer from California. [1] The whole Internet community should honor the spirit of self-sacrifice of these NTP volunteers.

The NTP community pool is Stratum 2+, suitable for general use. It has similar issues of abuses - once you're in and became well-known on the net, there's no way out and you keep receiving bad-traffic, because some clueless people have hardcoded your IP address, or has put it in a cache that never expires. Fortunately given a reasonable bandwidth, it is often a negligible issue and safe to ignore. But there are exceptions. [2] One of my NTP server became DDoSed one day, because an ISP cached the IP address for pool.ntp.org with a large TTL, and the IP address happened to be mine! The traffic was 40 Mbps...

In contrast, NTPd has proper rate-limit mechanism built-in, such as KoD and good pooling interval, blocking NTP does NOT causes more user traffic. What increased is the abuser traffic. The damage caused by a standard NTPd and silly sysadmin is much less significant and is negligible compared to the Internet of Scary Things.

By the way, not only hardware devices can contains dangerous NTP code, but also software.

As long as manufactures still write broken code and unaware of the proper way to use NTP, nothing can be done to solve this issue. Many involved in these misuses and abuses are totally unaware what they are doing. The proper way to use NTP should have been written in all textbooks related to practical networking lectures.

[0]: Flawed Routers Flood University of Wisconsin Internet Time Server [http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear- sntp/](http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear-sntp/)

[1]: Open Letter to D-Link about their NTP vandalism [https://web.archive.org/web/20060423012837/http://people.fre...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060423012837/http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/dlink/)

[2]: Recent NTP pool traffic increase [https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2016-December/0895...](https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2016-December/089588.html)

<comment><USER23> On the one hand, I completely appreciate this. When I set up NTP, I'm careful to think through consequences and tread lightly. After all, I learned my sysadmin skills at a university before the September that Never Ended, so it really was a collegial place back then.

On the the other hand, the internet is a much bigger place. Things are orders of magnitude more complex. The feedback loops that made NTP work well in a 1990s university environment are mostly absent. When a problem happened then, I'd see something in the logs or in packet captures, figure out what was happening, and get the responsible person quickly on the phone. That's not even hazily possible these days.

As much as I'd love to think putting a stern warning in textbooks would fix this, I doubt that would matter at all. What we really need is a major increase in observability or traceability. And failing that, what we'll get is common resources getting sliced up so they fit within domains of accountability.

<comment><USER15> I do agree. A complete solution is designing a new generation/revision of time protocol with accountability and anti-misuse as parts of its design, just like how people are implementing ASLR and NX in C programs and starting to use memory-safe languages. Or just see how TLSv1.3 removed all unsafe algorithms, so it will be little damage even under the worse case scenario.

Also, I think NTP needs more publicity. We need people to be aware of it before we could get feedback. The community then can have a watchdog team that spots misuses and publishes alerts.

<comment><USER24> _designing a new generation /revision of time protocol with accountability and anti-misuse as parts of its design_

It would be "time.google.com" and you would need a Google account.

<comment><USER15> Or perhaps RoughTime when security is needed?

[https://roughtime.googlesource.com/roughtime](https://roughtime.googlesource.com/roughtime)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Immediately thought of Bruce Sterling's article on anticonventional objects. I guess this company goes in the buildable, but neither desirable or profitable section. - [https://www.wired.com/2013/10/design-fiction- anticonventiona...](https://www.wired.com/2013/10/design-fiction- anticonventional-objects/)

</comment><comment><USER26> What RTC drifts so much in a week (or even a year) as to throw off lighting or HVAC controls timing?

<comment><USER27> An RTC chip without temperature compensation in an extremely variable temperature environment.

<comment><USER26> How far would a lighting control or HVAC control have to drift before it became impractical to use? I could imagine 45 minutes could still be "eh, who cares?"

45 minutes in a year is under 1 part in 10000.

<comment><USER28> I can imagine _5_ minutes being well into _I care_ territory. Could be the difference, say, between pulling into a dark drive way or having light.

<comment><USER26> Program the lights to come on 30 minutes earlier then. An overcast day and a new moon vs a day with high cirrus overhead and clear skies to the west almost surely has more variability than 5 minutes' difference.

<comment><USER28> If it drifts at 5 minutes per week you still have to reprogram after 6 weeks.

<comment><USER26> Sure, but that's ~500ppm drift, which is fairly extreme.

<comment><USER29> HT1380 drifts 10 seconds every 20 hours under normal conditions. I don't think this is outside the realm of possibility if they chose a cheaper chip or had weird temperature fluctuations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> 1\. 70 GBP/hr seemed like a low rate for a consultant (what's an electrician or a plumber cost on a subscription contract?). I'm glad author doubled it.

What happened to NetThing's customers after they ceased trading? Who took over the lighting management of the car parks etc. ?

<comment><USER31> Author here. I'm sure you're right. I pretty certain I could have charged them much much more and they'd still have accepted it.

In conversation with the software eng it was implied that they intended to send someone on site to each of over 500 sites to reimage the devices. That must have cost them way more than £70/month and the way that after ~10 months the number of devices actually went up to over 1,000 suggests they were happy to just keep paying.

The thing is, it was essentially no work. All I did was remove a firewall rule. I had to run NTP anyway for my regular customers. Initially more time was spent just in email back and forth and honestly I was enjoying that.

Because of it being basically no work, I had a moral problem with trying to find the absolute highest amount of money they would bear.

I know that is wrong and it does me no good, but I couldn't get past it.

What did annoy me was their inability to pay bills on time, and time I spent chasing invoices and creating custom late payment paperwork that is never relevant for my usual customers.

That was the main impetus for doubling the rate, and despite me jokingly suggesting that their product was not good enough to be profitable (I have no real data on that either way) I suspect they had much bigger organisational problems to be consistently paying late and ending up insolvent.

<comment><USER32> I like your attitude. If you were stuck fixing the mess the software engineer had to fix, you'd appreciate a random stranger making your life easier when they didn't need to. Maybe they'll pay it forward. Think of the money you didn't charge as your donation to making the world an ever so slightly nicer place!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I should really put some time into writing this up, but my first script that went corporate-wide was an NTP catch up script.

Now that I think about it, I really don't know why an NTP catch up script was needed.

Basically VMWare time was not reliable. Windows will by default not catch up unless you get to around 5 minutes off. My script checked every day to see what the drift was and correct it if it was more than 5 seconds of drift.

The underlying reason for concern was logging - we wanted to make sure that our log times were comparable.

</comment><comment><USER34> > "their innovative reluctance to pay for anything on time"

Thanks great and educational writeup.

</comment><comment><USER35> It's pretty cheap to embed a tiny GPS receiver and crappy chip antenna these days. Probably enough for time sync in many situations.

<comment><USER36> Is it? The cheapest gps chips are still a couple bucks a pop (not counting the extra costs of more complex integration.) And from my experience these cheap gps and pcb antenna solutions are basically useless indoors. NTP is probably still the right solution for these devices, being essentially free to add to a device that already needs an internet connection. Care should just be taken to implement it correctly, obviously.

<comment><USER13> _And from my experience these cheap gps and pcb antenna solutions are basically useless indoors._

This is true. I know a TV station that has a tiny satellite antenna bolted to the outside wall to run its internal NTP for all of its wired and wireless devices because GPS simply doesn't work inside the building.

I'm not sure if that's a problem because of all the electronic equipment, or the construction of the building, or the fact that the building sits almost underneath a 500-foot-tall tower with several 10 to 20KW transmitting antennae on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> all too common. this happens for the simple reason that such devices are created by people that have never deployed anything to the field, and never worked under anyone who has. that and of course the pressure to get something to market quickly.

</comment><comment><USER38> Man I really enjoyed your writing style.

Got a huge kick out of that.

</comment><comment><USER39> Question for people who read the link-

Do you like the writing style and inclusion of gifs?

<comment><USER40> ... There were gifs??

I guess I'm so used to useless ads and graphics in blog posts, I honestly, scout's honour, did not notice and have no recollection whatsoever!

A damning statement on the Internet of today perhaps, but it neither enhanced nor detrimented my reading of the article

<comment><USER41> same! I had to go back and look because I would have sworn there were no images at all! Now I realize my brain had classified them as ads and simply edited them out of my conscious awareness all together.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> lesson: politely tell shitbag customers them to go f' themselves.

</comment><comment><USER43> BWAHAHAHAHA thanks both for the nice post and for politeness you prove to have.

That's not much IMO a problem of "modern IoT" but a problem of modern managerial-driven society that lead to a proliferation of Ford-model workers at ANY level, not only the lowest one.

People simply can't reason autonomously anymore, at any level, can't really understand "the big picture" of pretty anything: think only at periodic "cry" for $FamousFreeServices down and the relative cue of polemics that follow...

</comment><comment><USER44> Interesting subject - but I found myself pretty quickly lost in the technica terms. I do not even know what an NTP server is.

<comment><USER45> I don't really understand comments like this on HN. I've derived a lot of value through the years from thoughtful questions asked to dig further into an article but I've never understood why somebody would assert "I don't even know what X is." Search engines exist, yes?

<comment><USER46> His argument is likely that you shouldn't have to when a simple explanation could fit into the article.

<comment><USER45> But it's not an "article". It's a blog post. An informal post, written informally, for an obviously technical audience.

I very, very rarely explain what "AWS" is when I'm casually writing about cloud stuff. It's table stakes. You should know, or you aren't gonna appreciate reading it anyway.

<comment><USER47> Logged in just to upvote your comments. This is a place of intellectual curiosity, and I don't understand those who expect knowledge to be spoon fed to them. If you don't know a term, search engine it and work your way down the stack.

You might find yourself pleasantly surprised you're providing an NTP server in the NTP global DNS pool.

<comment><USER48> > search engine it...

That is, go to google.com or DuckDuckGo.com and search for it...

I mean, open the browser, click on location bar (on the top) and write...

That is, if you are on Windows, click Start menu (which is now 4 rectangles),...

Nevermind... /s

<comment><USER49> I use Safari on macOS.

When I need to google a term, I highlight it, and then press ⌘C, ⌘T, ⌘V, enter. (Copy the search term, open a new tab, paste into url/search bar, search term)

I've gotten quite fast at the keyboard sequence; it takes maybe one second total. I imagine I could make this process even faster with a plugin, But I see no need.

I would like to think that most Windows machines would let you be similarly performant by default. But if not, that's further evidence in my book that Windows just sucks...

I will note that some acronyms can be annoyingly un-googlable, as the same one stands for a wide variety of different terms. This problem does not apply to ntp, however, which comes up right away.

<comment><USER50> Can't you just right click and search from the context menu, since you just highlighted the term so the pointer ought to be in the vicinity.

<comment><USER49> ...y'know, I actually forgot that existed. IIRC, at one point, that opened a search in the current tab rather than a new one, so I got used to my little keyboard shortcut instead.

The behavior appears to have changed at some point, though, because it now opens searches in a new tab. I'll probably change my behavior now. Thanks for the reminder. ^_^</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>