Gun Trouble - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/gun-trouble/383508/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Just to keep things in perspective: the Iraq war and occupation, taking eight years, cost 4500 US military lives. The Battle of Antietam, a single day, saw 2100 Union and 1500 Confederate lives lost. The Meuse-Argonne Offensive was about six weeks, and saw 26000 US military lives lost. The Battle of the Bulge was six weeks long and saw 20000 US soldiers die. The entire Vietnam war, a similar timeframe to the Iraq war, saw 53000 US soldiers die.

Somewhere along the way, the US public seemed to decide that it was okay to go to war, but not okay to lose soldiers doing so. 2.5 million US military have served in Iraq, and 4500 is 0.18% of those. Painting a picture of soldiers dropping like flies is misleading - and yet the US still meets its military goals (though failing at the corresponding political ones).

In any case, against that backdrop of success, you're not going to shift the embedded graft keeping the current top dog in place.

<comment><USER3> While I'd tend to agree with your larger point, when looking at decades- or centuries-old wars it's worth keeping in perspective that the falling death rates have much more to do with improvements in evacuation time and trauma care. Even beyond the obvious improvements in things like antibiotics, soldiers are now living through wounds that would have been fatal to them as recently as twenty years ago.

The cynic in me says that the way that this continues to be reported--as military dead instead of military casualties--is meant to deliberately obscure this fact. How many people returning from these modern wars will need full- time medical care for the rest of their lives?

<comment><USER2> It's not that distorted. Antietam had a wounded:killed ratio of 4:1, Meuse- Argonne was 4:1, Vietnam had 6:1, Iraq had 8:1. Bulge was a particularly deadly sample at 2.5:1 (If you include all allied forces and not just US military, Iraq drops back down to ~5:1). Basically you could convert 4500 US casualties in Iraq into deaths as a pseudocontrol for 'ye olde medicine' to bring the ratio back into line, and it wouldn't particularly change the numbers above.

I also think that total casualties needs to be taken with more care than total deaths, as a casualty is anything from a nicked ear that takes you out for only a day, right on up to an amputation. Death is unambiguous. Casualties are far more mutable - witness the presidential candidate who had a successful smear campaign run against him because he supposedly 'wasn't wounded enough' to merit a Purple Heart...

 _How many people returning from these modern wars will need full-time medical care for the rest of their lives?_

Probably much less as a proportion than previous wars, though it's really anyone's guess. 'Full-time' medical care is a big thing; it basically means hospitalisation for the rest of your life. Remember also that while some soldiers would survive who previously wouldn't, treatment overall is superior - someone who previously would have been left with a lifelong crippling disability may have a much reduced effect in the modern day. It's not like modern medicine improves the lot of only those patients who are at death's door.

<comment><USER4> " _witness the presidential candidate who had a successful smear campaign run against him because he supposedly 'wasn't wounded enough' to merit a Purple Heart..._"

You misstate that part of the case against Kerry: in short, he transferred to the riverine force not knowing it would soon be sent into serious combat, and thanks to the three Purple Hearts was able to leave that duty Real Soon after the third, see e.g. [http://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/service.asp](http://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/service.asp) for confirmation of the basic latter facts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> USMC OIF vet here. A lot of great comments here but most appear to be missing one key idea: the primary purpose of the infantry rifle is not to kill, it is to suppress. When infantry tactics are properly executed, irrespective of clime and place, most of the actual killing will be done by belt-fed weapons (machine guns such as the M249, M240, MK48) and high explosives (hand grenades, mortars, artillery).

If you were to make an analogy to boxing, the M4/M16 is the infantry squad's jab, and machine guns and grenades are its power punches. The point of suppression is to keep the enemy's head down so that you can both close with him and force him into geometries that make it easier to kill him with more powerful weapons. It is true that a 5.56mm round does not have a lot of stopping power, but it is designed for point-target accuracy up to 600 meters, and a well-maintained M4 with good optics can put rounds through a window (eg, suppress the enemy) at 800 meters. It is also important to note that a 5.56mm NATO round weighs about a third as much as a 7.62mm NATO round; my kit in OIF was about 100 lbs including body armor and would have been around 120 had I been carrying a rifle chambered for 7.62 and the same number of rounds. Also, another important thing to note about stopping power is that anything worth shooting once is worth shooting many times. Stopping power definitely matters when we're talking about sniper rifles, less so for an infantryman's primary weapons system.

With all that said, the M4 is not a great weapon for reasons others have enumerated in these comments. I agree that the HK416 is a beautiful rifle and barring the development of something better should be the primary weapons system for the infantry rifleman, but the procurement / acquisition system is completely screwed up so I'm not holding my breath waiting for that one to happen.

<comment><USER4> " _the primary purpose of the infantry rifle is not to kill, it is to suppress_ "

Isn't this a chicken and egg issue? After WWII, where the snide might note that the only country employing such infantry rifles _lost_ ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StG_44](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StG_44) and I know it was not for that reason, and that the StG 44 was not evolved for the mission, e.g. no straight line recoil), first the Soviets adopted this concept (I gather after experience with a submachine gun and such tactics), and then _a purely political decision_ forced the AR-15 and 5.56x45 on our Army and Marines (the Air Force loved it for guarding their planes, very much not the same mission).

 _IF_ we had a better cartridge (but certainly not 7.62 NATO, including for the reasons you cite), and more emphasis on individual marksmanship, might tactics shift a bit? Not a lot, I understand the concept (to the extent someone who's eyesight kept him out of the military might), I just think we went too far with it. Especially since a fair amount of this was motivated by fraudulent research (SLA Marshall).

Let me also bring up the issue of our past, current and no doubt future "dirty" wars: rifles are potentially more discriminating than those more powerful weapons, so potentially less "collateral damage" and harm to our own.

Then there's the morale issue: how many of our men trust their rifle to save their lives when they're depending entirely on it? I've heard way too many accounts, including forca's on this page, about 5.56x45's lack of stopping power, and seem my comments on Martin Fackler's elucidation of how it works, or doesn't.

Then again, and echoing all of our comments on the completely screwed up procurement system, the failures to stop he cited would be less common with 20 inch barrel M16s instead of "Made By Colt" 14.5 inch barrel M4s. And because of that screwed up system, and $$$, this discussion is academic at this time, we should have done the right thing in the '50s :-(.

<comment><USER5> It's not really a chicken / egg issue, and the tactical logic of fire and maneuver long predates WWII. Yes, the StG 44 was a revolutionary weapon and certainly influenced the AK and Stoner designs, but I'm not sure I buy the argument that it influenced tactics per se.

FWIW, the story I've heard behind the introduction of the 5.56 round is that it was designed to wound, not kill. Supposedly the generals in charge of doctrine in the 50's surmised that wounding Soviet soldiers would be a better way of slowing their advance across the Fulda Gap than would killing a similar number.

With regard to SLAM being a fraud -- there is indeed debate as to whether his stats about what % of men in WWII fired their weapons are accurate. However, to the extent that any of SLAM's writings influenced the rollout of the M16, it was Soldier's Load, the TLDR version of which is, "our gear is too heavy". He had a point there, and we shouldn't ignore the significance of the 5.56mm round's light weight, and not just for the M16. Being able to carry 5 drums of SAW ammo on patrol can come in handy.

<comment><USER4> " _the story I 've heard behind the introduction of the 5.56 round is that it was designed to wound, not kill. Supposedly the generals in charge of doctrine in the 50's surmised...._"

The story you've heard is dead wrong on many particulars:

The '50s "generals" were fixated on creating 7.62 NATO and the M14 upgrade of the M1 Garand (and BTW it was another TFX/JSF one long arm to do everything semi-debacle). The AR-10 (the parent of the AR-15 that used 7.62 NATO) was part of the "competition" that somehow ended up selecting the Army's very own M14, through expedients like replacing screws and/or pins with coil springs while the rifles where in the custody of the Army.

An early limited use of the AR-15 in Vietnam produced outsized reports of _extreme_ stopping power and lethality, explained by the very high velocity of the the 55 grain bullets of the time (3,250 fps in something I just looked up, which matches my memory). From my research, before the civilians in the DoD forced it on the Army and Marines, mere wounding was never a selling point, that sounds more like excuses after real experiences showed how bad it really was.

SLAM was a fraud, his schedule could not have produced the data he claimed to have collected then, a scholar reviewed his appointments calendar and noticed the discrepancy. It appears he did a limited number of bullshitting sessions and pulled his results out of his ass. Read e.g. the completely unrelated Hackworth _About Face_ for a bit more on his feet of clay, in Vietnam.

My counterpoint to the soldier's load argument is that the tradeoff went too far, e.g. I've read some accounts of SAW operators who _really_ wished the round was more effective. I submit there's a case to be made for fewer but more effective rounds, but not battle rifle level. E.g. would 3-4 more effective drums do as well or better?

Have to run, maybe more later.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for setting me straight, do you have any sources for the account of what happened in the 50's? I'm a history nerd and would love to read up on it.

<comment><USER4> You're very welcome.

For the '50s, nothing off the top of my head, although it's really just a synthesis of a bunch of things I've observed and learned over decades:

First is the obvious, that the M14 is a Garand with a detachable box magazine and a much better gas system in the front end, but it still has an op rod and the same exposed bolt on top. Compare to the other major designs of the 50s:

The AR-10 wasn't exactly, except it inspired the AR-15, then there's the FNH FAL and the H&K G3/91: the only exposure the action gets is the necessary ejection port.

And of course the M14 officially won the US competition. The corruption in that should be searchable both directly (e.g. search for "sabotage" of the alternatives, but you'll also find hits alleging sabotage of the M16), and indirectly in the much studied history of the adoption of The Black Rifle, as one of the major books on it is titled. Some of those accounts should detail why the civilians in the DoD took this out of the Army's hands (and I gather terminating with extreme prejudice that unit of the Army, and of course closing down Springfield Armory in 1968; the M60 debacle probably also played a role).

It's also self-evident that something major happened to establish 7.62 NATO. E.g. I just read in Wikipedia that the British were going forward with their own rifle design using their own intermediate .280 British (which looks to be noticeably better than 7.62x39, a bit hotter than 6.8 SPC but probably wouldn't travel as far), then Labour lost the 1951 election...: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FN_FAL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FN_FAL)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Its interesting that its completely absent factual data, all persuasive arguments. Fairly obviously, someone hoping to sell a new rifle is paying him to write, but who?

(Oh and edited to add a computing analogy, his argument is basically Microsoft Bob both sucked and needed debugging a couple decades ago, and there are only minor geeky technical changes between Bob and today's Windows, therefore we need a new OS, because new things never need debugging)

</comment><comment><USER7> There are a number of excellent gas piston rifles that are much more reliable and not far from the cost of ARs (especially with mass production) - the SCAR, ACR, HK416.

One of these was supposed to become the new system, but it ended in a bureaucratic mire: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Carbine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Carbine)

</comment><comment><USER8> There is nothing wrong with a Gas Operated AR15. It has _less_ moving parts than an ak47 in that regard. While you do get some chamber fowling, it's inconsequential since the bolt carrier rides with minimal contact with the chamber walls. Contrary to popular belief, an AR15 does _not_ require careful maintenance, but this seems to be beaten into deployed personnel.

The real problem is the 5.56mm cartridge. It's under powered, especially in sub-sonic applications, and it can't do crap for penetrating barriers. It should be replaced with the .300 AAC blackout which offers better terminal ballistics and offers an effective sub-sonic option for silenced applications. The coolest part about this cartridge is that ALL M4s and M16s could be upgraded with just a barrel change. The mags, bolt, bolt carrier, lower, and upper chambers are all 100% compatible. That could reduce the cost of the upgrade significantly.

<comment><USER4> What do you think of the 6.8mm SPC, which at first glance looks like it'll be better at long range (splitting the difference between 6.5 and 7mm was a compromise between range and damage)?

From the Wikipedia article the " _[300 AAC] purpose is to achieve ballistics similar to the 7.62×39mm Soviet cartridge in an AR-15 platform while using standard AR-15 magazines at their normal capacity._ " Surely we can do better than that, 7.62×39mm is not a terrifically great round either.

<comment><USER8> 6.8mm SPC is an incredible cartridge. It's far superior to .300 AAC in range and terminal effects. It offers a wide variety of loads including an effective subsonic load. There are a few quibbles about efficiencies (powder and materials): The standard infantrymen doesn't really need long range cartridge.

However, the big reason I wouldn't suggest 6.8mm as an upgrade to the 5.56mm is the upgrade path is more expensive. While the 6.8mm _can_ work with the standard buffer tube spring, it's best those get upgraded for accuracy and shooter comfort. The 6.8mm requires a new bolt and barrel in the upper receiver. The 6.8mm also requires new magazines (to be used at full capacity). The 6.8mm requires new brass and new loading dies, so your ammo production lines have to change significantly. Finally, the chamber pressure increase in the 6.8mm may introduce reliability issues in certain models of the AR15, especially in the gas impingement system. And personally, I the recoil from the 6.8mm kinda sucks.

The .300 AAC requires _merely_ a barrel swap. Everything else in the upper is compatible. The brass from 5.56mm can be cut down to make .300 AAC brass (yay for recycling) and existing loading dies can be used to load .300 AAC. The existing magazines can be used at full capacity.

While the 6.8mm may be a superior round, I think the .300 AAC wins in terms of practicality. Just my opinion :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Something that we don't mention enough - the m16 lower might be the best ergonomic piece ever made. All controls accessible without breaking cheek- stock weld. The boing-boing-boing of the buffer spring is a bit annoying. I left the service before the A3 saw wide deployment so not sure about the 3 round burst mech.

Change the upper receiver to a piston-type which for civvies is about 1000 USD and you essentially have a Galil. Israel got religion about the AK after the '73 war. They have a good record of learning from their military mistakes.

What I'm not sure about is a new cartridge. A heavier projectile will maintain momentum for longer distances, but to have the same muzzle velocity, you will need to add more propellant. My hand loading experience with .223 says it's possible, but maybe not desirable. And I think to move beyond the 62 grain projectile you will have to increase bore size. Once you move out of the .223 / 5.56 envelope, you're looking at new magazines, ammo pouches, etc.

I like the idea of adding reflex sights, as no iron sight really allows for quick target acquisition. But not sure how long anything with glass will last in combat.

As for the article's timing? Ask FN.

<comment><USER4> I've read, but never had adequately confirmed, that the 3 round burst mechanism absolutely destroys the semi-auto ergonomics. Specifically, each pull has increasing weight until the 3rd resets it back to the first pull's weight.

As I understand it, 6.8 SPC requires new magazines but the rest of the form factor is the same, so no new pouches etc. I've just read that .300 AAC can use the same magazines, although it was claimed in Wikipedia it was designed to essentially be a 7.62x33mm clone, with of course subsonic provisions.

I gather that if you really want to do it right, you want something in-between a full power battle rifle cartridge and an assault rifle one, like the interwar .276 Pedersen or post-WWII .280_British ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.280_British](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.280_British)). But that would require replacing too much stuff today, we really should have done it in the '50s when we had the money, everyone else needed to change their service rifles, and everyone but the Germans needed to procure General Purpose Machine Guns. But we just went with a nearly pointless shorted .30-06 with a beefed up rim for better semi- and full auto reliability, got everyone else in the West to adopt it, then screwed them over with the M16/5.56x45 debacle.

<comment><USER10> 6mm rounds seemed to be common in pre-War II era: Swedish Mauser, Arisaka, Carcano (aka "JFK assassination rifle"). Interestingly enough, the Fedorov Avtomat -- the first select fire rifle -- used the 6.5 mm Arisaka round (from the captured Japanese stockpiles after war of 1905).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are a number of factual errors in this article. It may be presented as fact, but it is mostly an opinion piece with facts wrapped in. I'm speaking as a veteran; my MOS was 13F (forward observer), and I was regularly attached to infantry units.

First, in training up for Iraq, soldiers were trained on house-to-house clearing operations and urban warfare operations -- not in the long distance 'open field' operations the author seems to indicate.

While the Army does have large scale operational training (at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, CA), soldiers also went through a Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) at Fort Polk, which emphasized urban operations. These operations take place in much, much smaller distances than needed for a long rifle; and any soldier carrying an M16 wished for an M4.

As far as not having the same amount of accuracy -- the author is correct, but at 300+ meters, most line soldiers (including infantryman) can't hit the target but 2 times out of 10 anyway. We simply do not train to try to hit a target at 300+ meters. The silhouettes we would shoot at even depict an enemy soldier _standing up_ at 300 meters, which tells you how ludicrous such a thing is. "Someone's firing at me, let me stand up!"

That's the first factual error the author makes; claiming 'most' engagements take place at long distances (read: "an especially serious disadvantage in modern combat, which is increasingly taking place over long ranges."). Even with an M16, a soldier does not want to engage something that far away and waste their ammunition -- at best they'll lay suppressing fire and try to get in closer and flank the enemy.

The author then goes on to blame the weapon's issues on its construction -- he's right. It does need to be cleaned and maintained. We were always told, if you have five minutes, clean your weapon. Clean it. Clean it. Clean it.

The author then states that an AK47 can fire at twice the rate an M4/M16 an. He's right. That would be a problem if the American soldier were trained to fire indiscriminately; but they are not. They're trained in firing precisely; and only to fire extraneous rounds when needed (like to lay covering or suppressive fire).

The author points out that "today's soldier" wants a modular weapon. Rails systems are really cool; and they're really useful -- but not every soldier needs such a thing, and even infantry soldiers don't need One Weapon To Rule Them All. That's what got the JSF in trouble -- it tried to be everything to everyone.

Soldiers need different weapons for different purposes; yes it's "Cool" to be able to swap out parts between weapons (and in battle, probably a requirement) but it's folly to think that one soldier would even be issued parts that weren't directly necessary for _their_ MOS and position in their unit.

A soldier isn't saying, "Man, I wish I had a 7.62 because I'd love to fire 400+ meters", they're saying, "Man, I wish I had a 7.62 because I want to make sure when I hit something, it's dead." The author again plays the distance card -- that's not on the minds of your average soldier (if it were, more soldiers would use telescopic scopes).

There are good reasons why soldiers don't use computerized sights -- they break. Invariably they break at the wrong moment, like when you just fell into a hole you didn't see at 3am on a moonless night, when you were issued single sight Night vision goggles because the binocular NVGs are only given to squad leaders.

The author is correct about the problem: We need a new weapon that is durable and able to be modularized. The author just gets the details wrong.

<comment><USER4> " _First, in training up for Iraq..._ " is about training, not what happened or _could_ happen on the ground. Which leads to the observation that the US Army _gave up on marksmanship_ in the '60s or thereabouts (in part based on SLA Marshall's fraudulent WWII "research"). _Of course_ you aren't trained to take advantage of weapons capabilities available to mid-19th Century soldiers when your issue weapons are _very_ weak in them.

That you make the best of a bad weapon system and round does not say anything about what could be achieved with better ones, and more emphasis on personal marksmanship, something I'm told the Marines never gave up on. And aren't rifle rounds a little more discriminating than the alternatives?

(My background, BTW: only JROTC in the late '70s due to eyesight, but my Senior Army Instructor was an Infantry officer who mentioned he fired around 10,000 rounds as part of the effort in fixing the original issue M16s and their ammo, and was a _great_ rifle team instructor. The rest is based on growing up with guns and hunting, and studying this issue immediately after the Vietnam War when I wondered how things had gone to hell in the previous decade and a half while I was too young to really follow or study them, and preparing for a stint as an infantry officer that was not to be.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a subject that is endlessly debated in gun and military circles. This is one position on one end of the spectrum. There are good points on all sides, much of which is complicated and ambiguous. HN is no place to get into such an involved subject. Suffice it to say, whole books have been written about military weapon choices by experienced soldiers.

<comment><USER13> yes the debate between 5.56mm and 7.62mm crowds is hot enough to rival a .Net/Java debate LOL. Still I am glad to see it. How many soldiers lost their lives because of faulty M-16's in Vietnam? How many lives were lost because of faulty equipment in WW2? I have two friends who are active duty military and if they come under fire I want to make sure that their equipment does what it needs to do when they need it. So a little spot light on these issues doesn't hurt.

<comment><USER4> The basic service rifles and carbines of WWII _were reliable_. So was the BAR light machine gun by then.

We're talking about the reliability and effectiveness of the very most basic weapons issued to our troops.

Heck, when counting effectiveness, the current Europellet (9mm) pistol, which has to use FMJ ammo, is much less effective in stopping than the old M1911 (the latter of which just happens to be the design I carry every time I exit my dwelling).

<comment><USER14> I agree. As a veteran myself, I often wondered about the decisions to move from the proven 7.62 to the not-so-effective 5.56. Back in WWII, if a German soldier took at .30-06 in the chest from an M1, he wasn't getting up from it. Even the British Enfield and Vickers guns using the venerable old .303 (7mm) would put a man down reliably with a solid hit.

I personally know troops who have shot insurgents several times with M4s at lethal ranges (less than 200') and they took the hits and kept fighting long enough to return fire. Those same insurgents hit with a 7.62 slug would be DRT. Full stop. There is a reason quite a few Marines and soldiers carried .357 revolvers in Vietnam. The reason was the stopping power. The 125 grain .357 traveling at 1400 FPS boasts 96% one shot stops on human torsos that are not armoured. The .357 is still the gold standard for handgun stopping power. Like you with your 1911, I'm a .357 guy. If I cannot do it with six, I need something belt fed. Plus, like a lot of guys I know, I favour a New York reload anyway.

Stay safe.

<comment><USER4> Thanks!

Although I quibble that I'm a Facklerite instead of a Marshall and Evans type, so I don't trust their .357 results, I'm specifically and convincingly told their data is just not of high enough quality to support their conclusions (I haven't investigated for real because since I was a teen the M1911 has fit my hand like a glove, so it's weapon choice/shot placement first, followed by the natural choice of .45 ACP over .38 Super, which I'll note is not the equal of .357).

The Martin Fackler camp believes that at service pistol velocities killing scales with the number of holes poked in a person, stopping scales with the area of the bullet. And all things being equal, .45 is a lot bigger than .357.

However I note that that famous .357 load has a nominal velocity that's twice as high as .45 ACP, so _maybe_ it really is disproportionately effective (note that only the 10mm has really duplicated or rather substantially exceeded its ballistics, even .357 SIG doesn't quite reach the .357 Magnum).

One thing that got me to wondering in this direction is the "unreasonable effectiveness" of ~.30 caliber ball (FMJ) ammo (e.g. including the .303, German 7×57mm and Russian 7.62×54mmR). Absent construction like the relatively fragile West German 7.62 NATO round, like e.g. AK-47 rounds it's going flip, at least partly, before exiting without fragmentation, and without dumping much of its energy unless it hits solid bone or the like.

Fackler's general thesis about wounding is that permanent crush cavity counts, "hydrostatic shock" and the like don't much or at all, soft tissue by and large gets pushed out of the way and snaps back. Note that he got his start in this in Vietnam field surgery....

But when I look at the temporary effects of a high power 7.62 or thereabouts slug, I note that in most any torso hit their radius is going to encompass the spine. So I've been wondering if their proven effectiveness on the battlefield is a combination of a potentially temporary shock effect on the CNS via the spine (plus of course the direct effects), followed by bleeding out etc. before sufficient medical care can be rendered. The first being the "put down", the second being the "stay down", or at least weak enough not to get back up and be effective.

<comment><USER10> For what it's worth, I believe the original specifications for 9mm NATO involve a higher pressure than standard commercial 9mm (effectively +P, i.e., probably not something to fire a C&R WWI Luger, but again not quite a .357 magnum).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let's me echo just about everything the author is saying:

In theory and practice, the Stoner direct impingement system where gas is vented directly into the receiver requires _vastly_ more maintenance than piston based designs. To my knowledge, _no one_ who isn't accepting large numbers of donated M16s uses this design in their service rifle, with Canada an obvious exception to the rule. _Absolutely no one_.

It has two advantages that I'm aware of: the front of the rifle is lighter in weight, and has better inherent accuracy since nothing in the front is moving. However the Swiss, who care _infinitely_ more than the US _Army_ about marksmanship, didn't find the latter to be an issue when they developed their own 5.56 NATO rifle. (The Marines still care about marksmanship, but don't have any choice in their service rifle, except in rejecting the M4 and sticking to the 20 inch barreled M16).

5.56 NATO is a lousy round for stopping people, although the exact details were not elucidated until Martin Fackler did the research in the '80s. At low velocity, all things being equal the round just travels straight through, doing one flip to exit backwards (what happens when a bullet changes media like this). If the velocity is high enough, the round breaks at its cannelure (a crimped indentation that mates with the end of the cartridges brass to keep the bullet in place during rough handling and firing of other rounds), creating two pieces. At higher velocities, the back end will fragment. As a rule of thumb, for every inch chopped off the barrel, you loose ~50 yards of effective range due to this mechanism. Which causes one to wonder why the Army switched to the M4, sacrificing ~275.

The answer I see to that is the total, and I mean total, corruption of this part of US Army procurement in the post-WWII era. The Army did OK with the 1903/6 Springfield bolt action rifle (a copy of the 1898 Mauser), and superbly with the M1 Garand semi-auto rifle for WWII and Korea. But after that the procurement process was totally corrupt, as in samples of other designs were physically sabotaged so the M14 could be adopted. It's a Garand with a better gas system and a detachable box magazine, both good improvements, but outside of a good trigger pull it's probably the worst design adopted in that era because it leaves so much of the action unprotected from the elements.

The situation was so bad the Robert Strange McNamara's DoD of Vietnam infamy forced the AR-15 onto the Army, which as mentioned in the article totally screwed up the procurement of it (and one is allowed to suspect sabotaged it by e.g. not properly supporting the cleaning of the rifle). As the author mentioned, a lot of good men died in Vietnam due to unreliable M16s, which, I'll agree with the others, has been kludged to a barely acceptable state. But again, I'd say it's the worst of the currently issued rifles, except perhaps for the Heckler & Koch G36, a rifle that's infamously issued to armies that don't actually it in war.

Continuing with the procurement corruption, what prompted the move to the M4? Uncharitable people like me believe it's likely the fact that Colt lost the M16 contract to Fabrique Nationale d'Herstal (National Factory of Herstal, Belgium), which despite its name and origin has had a tight relationship with Americans and America since at least the '30s. So Colt came up with the propitiatory M4 and lo and behold, the Army switched to it.

Except now Colt has also lost that contract to FNH, and their factory in South Carolina is even more busy (they also at last count provided all the barrels for our machine guns, plus manufacture Winchester and Browning guns; in history, John Moses Browning (PBUH) first worked with Winchester before moving mostly to working with FNH).

<comment><USER15> > corruption of this part of US Army procurement in the post-WWII era.

Supporting allegations regarding the current sidearm, the Beretta M9, which replaced the m1911: [http://archive.gao.gov/d4t4/130439.pdf](http://archive.gao.gov/d4t4/130439.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Interesting. Although IMHO deciding on an Europellet dispenser caused it to be fatally flawed from inception. (IMHO it ought to also be single action, but realistically a smooth DAO would be the best that would also be acceptable to our ridiculously risk adverse officer corps).

I should also mention that the M60 was the worst General Purpose Machine Gun (GPMG) ever adopted by a major military. Details as reported by a M60 operator in Vietnam on request, but it was vastly inferior to the FNH, German and Soviet designs, witness our almost complete later adoption of the FNH design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> one of the best articles with interesting commentary on the subject:

[http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2013/01/robert- farago/marin...](http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2013/01/robert- farago/marine-223-may-not-be-lethal-enough-for-civilians/)</comment>


Ask HN: I feel like im getting close to hitting a wall. - <AUTHOR>

Some back story,
5 years ago I was in a slump, I had stopped school for personal reasons and I became borderline depressed. My whole family suffers from bipolar disorder so its something I am used to. I digress..
I was never a good student in school, high school I barely attended and I really had no business being in college when I did go. Luckily I have always had a passion for computers.
About 4 years ago I got sick of wasting my life, started going to the gym and being motivated. I had my father who works in the finance industry see if he could get me an internship somewhere in tech. I was offered a job about 6months in because they were happy with my work and how fast I picked everything up.
I have been working with perl and mysql for nearly 3 years now. Perl was the first language I learned, I dabbled in others (C++/Java/Lua/JS). I am 100% self taught and very motivated. I have some modules out, nothing too crazy.
Perl is a very awesome language to those who use it. Unfortunately all the places that look like a blast to work at are mostly python/ruby. I currently support my girlfriend who is a full time student, rent, misc bills. I cant afford to just quit and learn a new language. I also have two start ups one a mobile app with another developer and another whom gave me an equity stake to keep me. I work close to 85hrs some weeks. I cant even afford a vacation.
I really don't know what to do, am I to just accept this as my life and be a Perl developer? I know I can do other projects in other languages, but when all you do is get projects in a single language how can I become anything better than proficient.
Do any of you have similar situations or any advice you can offer me? I just feel like i'm losing my passion that used to keep me up 24hrs a day writing code. I'm only 26 so this is scaring me. What will happen when i'm 30? <comment><USER2> _What will happen when i'm 30?_

You will be on top of the world again. Seriously you are in the beginning stages of a burn out, which I am convinced is a form of depression brought on by the software development industry. We see it so many times, I wish a professional in the mental health field would study it specifically.

Anyways, back to you specifically, you need to get away on a vacation first and foremost that won't in and of itself fix it but it will help to arrest it's progression to a full blown burn out. When I say vacation, you don't have to jet set off to Aruba or something like that, going camping or to some semi- local retreat will do. Just get somewhere away from any and all computers.

Now that will make you feel better but if you go back and just jump back into your old routine it will only have bought you a weeks worth of motivation at most. Old habits will creep in, and you will be back to square one.

You are burnt out because of something in your work life, most likely the use of the same technologies to do the same things over and over. You need to change the technology and you need to change what you are doing with it. Our interest change over life and it sounds like you are hitting one of those age brackets where some things that where very important in the early 20 start to become irrelevant as you head for 30.

The point being, reevaluate your interests and start to isolate problems in that interest that you can solve or that you can help others solve. Take a look at the popular technologies, pick one you like and start to solve that problem in a new language. Getting started is tough while in burnout especially when you are not getting the successful feedback because you have adopted a new language and technology. But you will have to trust me here, it only takes grinding through it for a little while, and then you implement something (a small routing in a new language, a cool screen for an app) and then all the sudden you are back. It's like waking from a slumber.

Those of us that are prone to burn out do so because we become bored, you have to stop doing what you are doing now and start doing something that you are interested in. You probably feel like you have done everything you want to do in your current role and therefore there are no challenges left. Unfortunately when you are in it, it seems so difficult but when you look back on it, it truly is as simple as do something else.

The thing to remember is that burn out does fade, even if you stay put and don't change anything generally ones role will change enough over time that it will remedy the burn out but there is no guarantee that it will happen quickly. If you take active efforts to change it, you can get yourself out of it in short order.

I am sorry that you are going through it and I wish you the best, just remember that it is temporary, and that you can help to make its duration shorter. There may be other burn out periods in the future but once you have the tools to deal with them, they become easier and easier to manage. Good luck to you, and if you ever need advice on the subject my contact details are in my profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, this makes me feel better.</comment></comment>


Airbnb guests accuse it of deleting negative reviews and boosting bad hosts - br-g https://qz.com/1333242/airbnb-reviews/ <comment> br-g Posting because I recently had this happen to me with a rental we booked through Airbnb. Our negative review was scrubbed after two weeks and the entire reservation history has been removed from our account.</comment>


Cyber Crime Fighters vs. Cyber Freedom Fighters - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127575960

<comment><AUTHOR> Doesn't this end up as the same argument "then only criminals will have guns?"</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best qualtiy office chair for long stretches of coding? - <AUTHOR> I am setting up new office space for my new company and want opinions on chairs for coding. Our budget is up to $800 per chair.  Are the Aeron chairs worth it?<p>I am <comment><USER3> I love my Aeron. Even more so when I was able to pick it up for a great price second hand. There seems to be a tremendous abundance of them available from second hand office furniture companies.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sitting on one of these right now:

Bungie LoBack Office Chair: <http://amzn.com/B0002XQJQ4>

It may not be quite as good as an Aeron, but I had an Aeron chair for two years at a former job, and this holds its own, especially for $129. I've had it for something like 7 or 8 months, and both the chair and its comfort have held up well. I can sit in this thing all day. The cheap task chair it replaced, I would get tired of sitting in after 45 minutes.

YMMV. I also supplement the lumbar support:

<http://amzn.com/B000AP0HY4>

The combination may not be stylish enough for some. I would recommend trying it to a student.

(I do not sell chairs, nor am I affiliated with Amazon. I'm just a programmer who needs a comfortable chair.)

</comment><comment><USER5> I noticed my neck and back problems started going away when I went to the gym. No chair will make your neck and back muscles get stronger.

<comment><USER6> Agree. Even by jogging for about 30 minutes to an hour a few days a week solved my lower back pains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Aeron.

My wife and I have both spent our own money on Aerons, and if we lost them, we'd get Aerons again.

They also last forever. My older Herman Miller chair from 1993 is still in good condition too, in spite of having logged something like 40,000 butt- hours.

BTW, Aerons come in three sizes, so get the right size for your people. At 6'2" and 240 lb. (187 cm, 110 kg) I need the large size. My wife is on the cusp between small and medium.

<comment><USER8> I wouldn't say they last forever. My aeron is about 15 years old, and it's starting to get some wobble in the main stem. (There might be a bearing that i can replace, but I haven't looked into it.) Also I never did understand the +/- dial on the side. It increases the stiffness of the chair, but I have to crank it about 5-8 times every few days. It feels like the mechanics are wearing out.

(And my back is bugging me more recently, but that may just be me getting old.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I recently purchased a chair for my home. I looked at Aeron chairs. They were nice but I didn't get the WOW factor I thought I would. I also realised that I would be paying for the 10+ years guarantee. Since I would be the only one using the chair, I thought it was not necessary for me. It makes sense for businesses though as they will be subject to more wear and tear from moving and different use plus don't need to worry about your chairs for the next decade at least.

The best way to help coders keep their health is to encourage them to take a 5-10 minute stretch break every 45 minutes or so. You may also want to look into getting standing desks that can be easily adjusted so people can stand while they work if they so choose.

</comment><comment><USER10> When you have a seat in the Aeron, you won't think, "Wow, this is incredibly comfortable." It's fine, definitely comfortable, but not mindblowing. Where it earns its price is after you've been sitting for, say, six hours and realize that you're still comfortable. In most chairs, you'll get sweaty and crampy long before that.

The mesh in the Aeron is important, by the way. I find the limiting factor for chair comfort is usually sweatiness/stuffiness.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have an Aeron at work and I love it. It's absolutely worth the cost over time. There's no 'wow' factor when you first sit, but you'll still feel comfortable in it after many hours, which is not the case with most chairs. I also have had some lower back issues recently and sitting in the chair actually makes me feel much better.

At home, I have a Steelcase Think plus lumbar support. I wanted something a bit less expensive and nicer looking for my bedroom. It's also great - I don't spend as many hours on it as I do on the Aeron and it's done a wonderful job so far - no back pain at all.

Before that, I used a $10 Ikea chair for two years, and I felt serious back pain after a few months. It's absolutely worth it to invest in a quality chair. Even though the price tag is depressing, make the purchase once. Your chair / back pain will become a solved problem for at least a decade.

<comment><USER12> I have an Aeron and I just don't like it. I don't think it's comfortable at all. I've adjusted pretty much everything on that chair and nothing works for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not a joke, whatever chair you buy, budget $20 or $25 for a professional grade stability ball for "sitting breaks". It's good for posture, core, etc. and helps one to stretch out a bit. I thought it was weird until I tried it, and now I always keep one next to my desk.

</comment><comment><USER14> Am I the only one that doesn't sit on a hard chair? :) I tried them out and I much prefer the "sofa chair"

<http://ioj.com/v/h6qxu> <\- photo of my aging chair

</comment><comment><USER15> I've had one of these since 2002. It's a little over your budget but it is worth every penny (Get the gel seat-pan).

I've survived shipping pushes that had 14-16 hr./day coding with this chair

[http://www.mcergo.com/humanscale-freedom-chair-with- headrest...](http://www.mcergo.com/humanscale-freedom-chair-with- headrest.html)

<http://www.humanscale.com/products/freedom_index.cfm>

</comment><comment><USER16> Steelcase 454 Concentrix

Old, make sure you get the one with steel 5-way legs & hard casters, and without arm rests (unless you really want them). These have not been made new for ~20 years, but you find them occasionally on craigslist, or stuffed way in the back of used office furniture warehouses.

My first one lasted 15 years, I found two more last year ( @ $25/ea ).

</comment><comment><USER17> Go sit in everything before you make up your mind. You may have to drive to several office furniture stores to do this -- one store may not carry all the major brands.

In the end, I purchased a Steelcase Leap, and I've been very pleased with it. Unlike cheaper chairs I've used, it doesn't leave me feeling fatigued after hours of use.

</comment><comment><USER18> Recently got an Aeron for about $600.

[http://www.madisonseating.com/aeron-highly-adjustable-by- her...](http://www.madisonseating.com/aeron-highly-adjustable-by-herman- miller.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> I like my Mirra at home better than the Aeron I have at work. I'd check them out. Also been meaning to try out some sort of balance ball part time.

</comment><comment><USER20> humanscale = amazing.

<http://www.humanscale.com/products/liberty.cfm>

i have that one at work and it's definitely added to my productivity. it adjusts in everyway i could want and definitely beats aerons that ive tried. the back support is perfect.

</comment><comment><USER21> I got a used Steelcase Leap on craigslist and I am really happy with it.

</comment><comment><USER22> Eight hundred dollars per chair? That's a crazy high budget.

<comment><USER23> Not if the $800 chairs are substantially more comfortable. Keep in mind that the $800 chair will last several years, so the cost of giving a programmer such an expensive chair is miniscule relative to their salary. Joel Spolsky (a big fan of the Aeron) has written about this subject at length:

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDevelopers.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I honestly don't know why people rave about the Aeron. I went to a store and sat in a few and wasn't impressed, maybe it's because I'm skinnier than most people, may (as some suggested) you need to sit in them for a long time to appreciate them.

What I do know is that for a period of time I was on a mad chair hunt. I went from store to store trying to find that perfect million dollar chair that would stop my legs and feet from hurting due to lack of circulation because of how long I'd sit for.

In the end, after sitting in Aeron after Aeron and others, I gave up, realized every one of them was a waste of money.

The solution was cheap and simple:

1) I kept my cheapo $70 chair from Office Max

2) I put a $90 cushion on it (one of those you can carry with you and put in your car).

3) I put a wooden tangerine crate inside of a cardboard box, taped it up, and used it as a foot support to elevate my legs, thus relieving pressure on them from the chair's cushion.

That's it. I was able to code much longer now without taking breaks, for a fraction of the price. Then again, if you're buying for other people, this sort of setup might cause them to roll their eyes, this is mainly just advice for people looking to buy chairs for themselves.

Of course, don't forget to take periodic breaks and exercise. No matter how expensive or ingeniously setup your chair is, unless it's levitating you in the air with force perfectly distributed on every square inch of your body, you'll need to take breaks to allow your blood to circulate properly.

<comment><USER25> _I honestly don't know why people rave about the Aeron. I went to a store and sat in a few and wasn't impressed_

I hear that from people from time to time. I'm sure it's body-specific - <USER2> Aeron probably works really well for some people and not for others.

I tried out a few chairs before settling on an Aeron, and it was my favorite of the bunch. Two years later, I still absolutely love it.

Best of all, I've now purchased 4 Aeron chairs (for myself and for my employees), and I've found all four in the $300-$500 range on Craigslist.</comment></comment>


H-1B visa: imminent threat to innovation - <AUTHOR> https://blog.hackerrank.com/h1-b-visa-cap-the-imminent-threat-to-us-tech-innovation/

<comment><USER2> There is no shortage of technical talent. This is a tale used by tech companies to increase the H1B CAP and get access to more "supply" to keep tech wages under control.</comment>


Web3 JavaScript Functions for Ethereum DApps - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/better-programming/the-top-5-web3-javascript-functions-for-ethereum-dapps-7bc108bfd37 <comment><USER2> Important to note that libraries to integrate with Ethereum exist in many popular languages:

Ruby - [https://github.com/izetex/web3-eth](https://github.com/izetex/web3-eth) and [https://github.com/DigixGlobal/ethereum- ruby](https://github.com/DigixGlobal/ethereum-ruby)

Python - [https://github.com/ethereum/web3.py](https://github.com/ethereum/web3.py)

TypeScript/JS - [https://github.com/ethers- io/ethers.js/](https://github.com/ethers-io/ethers.js/)

Java - [https://github.com/web3j/web3j](https://github.com/web3j/web3j)

Go - [https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum](https://github.com/ethereum/go- ethereum)

PHP - [https://github.com/sc0Vu/web3.php](https://github.com/sc0Vu/web3.php)

& more.

Also - lots of tools to get started:

QuikNode.io - boot nodes or JSON RPC access

Infura - JSON RPC access

Ganache - Fork live network for local dev

OpenZeppelin - library for building smart contracts

Remix - IDE for ethereum.

The article above left a bit to be desired TBH

</comment><comment><USER3> How are people using this in practice?

<comment><USER2> You often need an account to do something meaningful (getAccounts())

You often want to get an idea of how much it will cost to send your transaction (estimateGas())

If you want to interact with smart contracts like crypto kitties, lossless lotto, compound lending protocol you need to load it up into your web3 lib (Contract())

If you want to send a write transaction or interact with any way that changes the state of the chain, you want to send a transaction (sendTransaction() although sendRawTransaction() is one I like better)

If you want to think in ETH but operate in the smaller units of ETH called Wei - transaction cost is calculated in GigaWei IIRC - you would use (toWei())</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to crowdfund open source algorithmic trading platform and datasets - <AUTHOR> Hello all,
I was tired of chasing down datasets to test investing ideas, so I built https://github.com/AlgoTraders/stock-analysis-engine and was wondering how + if a kickstarter or patreon (or something else) is worth the time to try to get traction? I'm currently running this all from my house, and I would like these funds to pay for hosting fees on AWS S3 so anyone can get started quickly with ready-to-go AI datasets and pricing data without paying for something like quandl (https://www.quandl.com/).
I am very new to growth engineering and crowdfunding, so am I interested to hear what HN thinks about these options to raise money without a VC or angel.
Thanks for your time! Jay <comment><USER2> Have you priced out S3? I've been scraping stock data for a few years and my monthly cost is still under $20 (on Google Cloud).

Another thought / question that's in my mind... Shouldn't the algos provide some profit that could support costs? If not, red flag

BTW, if you want that data & code, I'm happy to share. Cannot attest to the data quality. Haven't checked it in over a year, but it's still running!

</comment><comment><USER3> Since algorithmic trading is about being a better trader than the other guy, why would somebody give anything away if it were valuable?</comment>


If only Turing was alive to see this - <AUTHOR> https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/20/if-only-turing-was-alive-to-see-this/ <comment><AUTHOR> Scott Alexander: _Now r /SubSimulatorGPT2 has gotten to r/totallynotrobots, which means we get to see a robot pretending to be a human pretending to be a robot pretending to be a human._</comment>


Update on Ribbon and Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ribbon.co/an-update-on-ribbon-and-twitter/

<comment><USER2> It's good the guys were able to come up with a compromise. Sucks they couldn't get in-stream payments working, but being able to use the product cards is still a good thing. In the greater scheme of things, Facebook is probably a better investment than Twitter anyway.</comment>


Factor implementation in 150 lines of Python - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/731475

<comment><USER2> The title is misleading. It's an implementation of _a_ concatenative language. It's not Factor.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, I should have introduced it as a subset of Factor. Factor is much more full-featured, but the syntax of the language is in line with Factor's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> By implementing a variant of Joy concatenative language in Haskell I learnt monads:

<http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/concatenative/message/471>

I checked it up, it also counts at 150 lines of code, including comments and headers. A strange coincidence, I say.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am aware of the role of the stack in concatenative languages, but what about the _retain_ parameter in the primitive functions? In most of them it is unused...

<comment><AUTHOR> The retain parameter is a secondary stack for temporarily storing things from the data stack. It can be manipulated through the `r>` and `>r` words. The former puts the top of the data stack at the top of the retain, and one does the opposite. The `dip` word isn't a primitive in this implementation, but instead is defined as `swap >r call r>`, which saves the value underneath the top value of the stack (which is expected to be a quotation), calls the quotation, and then restores the retained value to the top of the data stack.

<comment><USER3> Two stacks are halves of Turing machine tapes: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_machine#Stacks_in_automat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_machine#Stacks_in_automata_theory)

<comment><USER4> Does this mean that the language would not be Turing-complete without the second stack?

What is the retain stack typically used for?

<comment><USER3> This precisely mean that language without second stack (more or less) is not Turing complete.

But, if your language can store lists on a stack, you're Turing complete again! One example if a Joy language, where you can have quotation on stack, assemble them and decompose back.

Most of the time you store there various intermediate values. It depends on the nature of language. For example, Forth variants often store loop counters on retain stack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just as an FYI, one of the properties of Factor and stack-based languages is that they are extremely simple -- almost trivial -- to implement an interpreter for. The main benefit of this interpreter would probably be to simply describe the syntax and evaluation structure of a stack-based language to one unfamiliar with the concept and not, instead, as a technical case study.</comment>


Emulators written in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/BigEd/jsemu <comment><USER2> Nice list. I do wonder how useful they are though, given that the actual ROMs for many games are illegal to distribute and the emulators require them to work. Are they for people running a personal server on their computer? For websites that want to let people play homebrew games through the browser?

Seems like the list of uses for a Javascript emulator isn't particularly high.

But they're pretty cool on a technical level.

<comment><USER3> The ROMs may be copyrighted of course, but there is an argument to be said for there being a fair use case here, namely archiving of historical content that is no longer accessible otherwise. That's what the Internet Archive nonprofit is doing, and it's very important,

[https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games](https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games)

<comment><USER4> Also, is it legal to posses a ROM that you own physically? I would think legal precedents for archiving or ripping (format conversion) might apply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> n-gauge Brings back some memories!

I added sound (via web audio) and touch / joystick controls to Ben Firshmans excellent NES emulator. Needs more mappers though.

Don't know if this counts as well - there's also phosphorus, a Scratch emulator:

[http://phosphorus.github.io/](http://phosphorus.github.io/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Cool list. I need to finish up my Apple I emulator.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is awesome. I'm looking at the 8080 emulator.

</comment><comment><USER7> Commodore section, vice.js:

\- website down/broken/abandoned

\- github repo alive</comment>


What is it like to write a technical book? - <AUTHOR> http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2008/06/15/what-is-it-like-to-write-a-technical-book/

<comment><USER2> It is sad that projects like this aren't really profitable to the author directly.

I'm sure he'll make plenty of money consulting, but to see so much sweat for minimum wage, ouch.

<comment><USER3> It's very sad for the publishing industry. If they cannot find a system that allows authors to make a reasonable amount of money, they're not going to last long considering that it's much more convenient and less stressful to just publish your book online, if you're gonna do it for free (and is just as good for your reputation if you do it right).

<comment><USER4> I've made a reasonable amount of money from my book, and it's not all that popular. It wouldn't qualify as full-time work for me, but since I've written it I've had a steady stream of additional income. No complaints.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow! The refresher on writing style (with "warning" RegEx's) is worth the read alone.</comment>


Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/man-wins-french-scrabble-championship-without-speaking-a-word-of-french-1.3161884 <comment><USER3> I was at the World Scrabble Championships in Prague a few years ago (with Nigel Richards). The amazing thing was how many of the highest-level Scrabble players were Thai and spoke barely any English. There are about 200,000 words in the Scrabble dictionary and and an average English speaker only knows 40,000. So knowing the language doesn't give a huge advantage, and all competitors end up spending years memorising word lists with no definitions - at a high level it's basically just a combinatorics game.

The majority of the English-speaking competitors were mathematicians / scientists, rather than linguists for similar reasons.

This sometimes has amusing repercussions - the world no 2 at the time, who was Thai, played the word "hetairas" and then challenged the word "twigs"...

<comment><USER4> To make it more interesting, they could give out new official fantasy word lists every year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of my proudest foreign-language speaking moments was playing, and winning, a game of Codenames in France, against native french speakers.

It was an amazing way to learn new vocabulary. If you haven't played, it's a 4x4 grid of words with 2 teams guessing which words belong to which team, giving additional words as clues.

After the board setup, the French players would explain the single, double, sometimes triple meanings of the words and I'd write them down into a notebook. Then, using a English-French dictionary I'd come up with clues that could fit. It worked surprisingly well, I think perhaps given the similarities between many English and French words. I wonder how it would work with a much more different language.

<comment><USER6> Many years ago, I was at a party in grad school and I wound up playing Scrabble with some classmates and some Chinese guy who could barely speak English.

The Chinese guy destroyed us. He nickel-and-dimed us with esoteric 2 letter words that we had never heard of and he strategically blocked us from the double and triple-word score squares.

On the way home from the party, my classmates and I were complaining about how the point of Scrabble was to show off your vocabulary and it was weird that we would lose to someone who could barely speak the language.

My girlfriend/now-wife interrupted our kvetching with, "You're all upset because someone else out-strategized you by understanding the rules better than you did. Get over yourselves."

She was correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The disconnect between "Scrabble the word game" and "Scrabble the area game with a semi-arbitrary set of rules for tile placement that is somewhat related to words" has been discussed here before.

But honestly, it isn't that exceptional a disconnect. Most board games have a "theme" that increases our enjoyment. But many of them are actually math games that could be played without thinking about the theme at all.

Chess is like that. Our knowledge of horses and bishops won't help us play chess. Same with Acquire. Hotel chains don't behave anything like contiguous tiles on a grid.

I'm about to order a copy of "Thunderbirds." The review I read said that it's quite enjoyable, but if you aren't a fan of the show, the theme actually gets in the way of enjoying the underlying game.

I feel like it may be more obvious when a Scrabble player wins a world championship despite not speaking the language, but the disconnect between a game as an abstract contest and a game's theme is very common.

<comment><USER8> Is the point that any (board) game can be boiled down to the mathematical backbone? Seems quite trivial.

<comment><USER7> All board games have something math-y underneath them. There is a thing called Game Theory, after all.

But for some board games, the theme around the game aids our intuition about how to play the game. In others, it serves only as window-dressing.

Take, for example, Settlers of Catan. We could change the theme somewhat, but fundamentally a theme around resources helps players figure out what to do with the cards. Saying that "ore helps you build buildings" also helps new players understand and recall the rules.

It might be the exact same game if we got rid of the metaphor and just said it's a game where you can exchange three grey cards, two yellow cards, and an S token, for a C token, but that would make the game much harder to learn and play.

At high levels of play perhaps you might spend all your time thinking about card draw percentages and see the board as an abstract graph, but the theme won't get in your way.

I'd say similar things about Agricola. Or the 18xx series of games. Those themes really help most players learn and play the games.

Other games, not so much. Ticket to Ride would likely be just as easy to learn and play if it was an abstract game of network connections. Go and Chess are clearly long past their original themes. And so forth.

So getting back to your question, I'm trying to say something beyond "All games have an abstract game underneath the theme." I'm trying to say that "A large disconnect between a game's theme and its underlying abstract game is not rare." I don't claim it's universal, but I suggest it's not so rare that Scrabble stands alone as an oddity.

JM2C.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Scrabble isn't a word game. It's an area-control game with 150,000 definitions of legal placement for your resources."

</comment><comment><USER10> Elite Scrabble players look at the language differently than speakers. For example you need to know words with 'Q' but no 'U'. Not something that comes up in everyday speech. [https://scrabblewordfinder.org/scrabble-words- with/q/and-no/...](https://scrabblewordfinder.org/scrabble-words-with/q/and- no/u)

<comment><USER11> I learned the word 'qanat' from Frank Herbert's Dune.

And I thought 'faqir' was written with a K.

<comment><USER12> The middle consonant is a ق, which is the same consonant at the end of "Iraq", or Qur'an. There's been a tendency to write this with <q> in English more recently -- consider "Qur'an" vs. "Koran". The <k> version produces transliterations that may look more natural for English spelling, but there is another Arabic letter, ك, which is transliterated as <k>, so the <q> version helps distinguish the two.

<comment><USER13> The borrowing of _fakir_ into English is largely the result of British colonialism in India. While Persian (and the heavily Persianified variety Urdu) was an important court language in NW India, and the word would have been spelled with ق in the native script, the word had passed from Persian via Urdu to Hindustani in general, which lacks a phoneme /q/, and so its unvoiced velar stop is reflected as k in English spelling regardless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find this amusingly reminiscent of the Chinese Room: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room)

</comment><comment><USER15> If you are interested in Scrabble, you'll like reading this (Feb 2019) review of Scrabble covering it as a area-control-wargame: [https://meeplelikeus.co.uk/scrabble-1948/](https://meeplelikeus.co.uk/scrabble-1948/) . My favorite quote:

>'This isn't the game as you have been told it is played', said Keel. 'If you play Scrabble this way, no-one else will ever want to play it with you. It's exhausting to look at a board in terms of positional vulnerability. Nobody thinks you're smart for exploiting the small, agile words in the Scrabble dictionary. They think you're a dick. This is not fun. We get something different out of this. This is tactical. This is satisfying. Your letters aren't parts of words. They're weapons and you need to employ them when you can do the most damage.

</comment><comment><USER16> Speculation: if you want to be a Scrabble master, you need to know N words, where N is much bigger than the vocabulary of a native speaker. So you're not at a big disadvantage compared to a native speaker.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, but the native speaker already has k words.

This article [1] puts the number of distinct French root words (i.e., ignoring conjugation and other modifications) at around 65,000. This long-running online test [2] pegs the average English native speaker vocabulary size as maybe 25,000. So k might be at least N/3\. That's not nothing!

Disclaimer: I know nothing about linguistics.

[1] [https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/08/international- scrab...](https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/08/international-scrabble-the- size-of-the-dictionary-depends-on-how-words-get-inflected.html)

[2] [http://testyourvocab.com/](http://testyourvocab.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> That's not uncommon. Highly competitive Scrabble is all about memorization.

</comment><comment><USER19> Learned this in the book Ultra learning. In short, the game does not have much to do with the language understanding anyway. They only overlap in that you do need to memorize certain words. But the brain behavior process are then largely different between understanding the language and playing the scramble game.

</comment><comment><USER20> The embodiment of Machine Learning.

<comment><USER21> I would say it takes similar qualities to master chess and scrabble. I've been to a scrabble tournament recently and it looks very similar to chess or go kids tournaments. It all starts with memorizing an opening in chess or specific sets of words like vowel words: [https://word.tips/vowel- words/](https://word.tips/vowel-words/)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> More discussion on HN, 4 years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9927760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9927760)

</comment><comment><USER22> I think we have to give it to the human brain. It's not just about memorizing but also finding patterns and then putting the right word there.

</comment><comment><USER23> Are letter frequencies and scoring adjusted for Scrabble in different languages?

<comment><USER24> yes (sample of two)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is perfect on so many levels.

</comment><comment><USER26> > Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French

> Nigel Richards of Christchurch, New Zealand, memorized French dictionary in > nine weeks

It would appear that he speaks _all_ the words of French. He may not speak the syntactically correct language but knowing all the words should take you a long way to winning this competition.

Reading the title I assumed he only used neologisms and other words common with foreign languages or something along those lines.

<comment><USER27> He knows what the words are and their spelling, but has no idea about their meaning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> IMO this is because Scrabble is a terrible game. Knowledge of the breadth of your language will only get you so far in the game: the winner will be the person who can put the greatest amount of short words with 'X' and 'Z' in triple-word panels.

If I were to re-invent the game I would remove the triple tiles and half the point value from most letters. This way you can give advantage to people who put longer and nicer words instead of that guy who knows that "qi" and "hext" are words in modern English dictionaries.

<comment><USER29> Does the game in other languages assign the same point values to letters? Is the distribution of letters the same?

It seems like a different language would have more or less frequencies of any particular letter which should influence the amount of available tiles and what they are worth.

<comment><USER30> Yes, the Polish version of scrabble doesn't have the letter X at all(since there are no Polish words which use it), and it has all of the Polish-specific letters added, with the rarity based score recalculated for Polish - <USER2> example Z is worth 1, since it's an extremely common letter in Polish:

[https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble#/media/Plik:Polskie_s...](https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble#/media/Plik:Polskie_scrabble_- _paths_-_ready.svg)</comment></comment></comment>


Earn money by curating your favourite music for businesses - <AUTHOR> http://getatmosphere.com <comment><AUTHOR> Amsterdam-based startup kollekt.fm launches a new music service for businesses called 'Atmosphere'. The service delivers a music selection that is handpicked by an artist or music expert who is exclusively connected to a business. Atmosphere not only creates a better in-store experience for customers, but it's also a new opportunity for artists and music experts to make money.

Do you want to become a curator or want to have atmosphere in your venues? Learn more on getatmosphere.com

<comment><USER2> Love this idea and also the execution looks well done. Kudo's on the launching customers (how did you land all of those?).

Could this also work as a music curation for in our office? Would save the SONOS battles that can turn ugly pretty quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool! Have been collecting music for ever!

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting!</comment>


Ask HN: Best resources to learn how to do integration testing in Go? - <AUTHOR> Is there a good book or resource that I can use to understand how to test microservices? Does mocking make sense, how to test external services, how much to test them?<p>Also, any recommendations for libraries to use for Go? <comment><USER2> We have two layers of tests in the repo (unit and integration) and one in our staging environment that tests the whole API from the he customer (black box) perspective.

For our integration tests (we also call them acceptance tests), they are in an internal acceptance package. We have scripts that manage starting and stopping the docker containers of our dependant services and our service.

We developed a test harness atop "go test" that allows different suites of tests to have pre and post suite set ups, with separate pre and post test setups and built a framework atop that. However, that is overkill for many projects.

Just have test helpers to make requests into your running and containerized service and validate responses and output artifacts (logs, metrics, data sinks).

If this is a missing space for a blog post or tutorial, maybe I could write something up. It would have to be a month or two out before I could start it in earnest.

<comment><USER3> I'd definitely be interested in that blog post! I've been struggling with integration tests for a while. Here are a few issues I've ran into this week:

\- Where do I put integration tests? In their own package, or beside unit tests?

\- How do I automate the test environment? Should I use docker-compose? What if I'm already using docker-compose to launch the application - should I use Ansible instead?

\- Should I put the different testing commands in a Makefile, or just use the builtin go test function?

Basically, I want to know the neatest, easiest way to configure a testing environment, and the most idiomatic way to write/launch integration tests.

I'm not asking you to answer these, but I thought they could be useful for that blog post :)</comment></comment>


OVH Forum – Turnover on dedicated servers - <AUTHOR> http://forum.ovh.co.uk/showpost.php?p=54520&postcount=1 <comment><USER2> It's not a "failed pricing strategy" per se, the problem is that they want offers that are really attractive, they are able to provide them, but those offers are so good that too many people use them to upgrade. Which you can't blame them for, but it puts OVH in a position where it wants people to not upgrade too quickly, but still provide those good deals.

The obvious solution is to re-instate installation price, but Oles has never been a big fan of it as it increase the entry cost for new comers. Remember, they don't want to penalise new installs or growing stack in anyway, only (too) quick rent/upgrade cycle.

An alternate solution might be a "un-installation" price if you stop a server AND grab a new more/recent one to replace it after only a few month of renting, but that would be too impractical and hard to explain.

<comment><AUTHOR> The long term fix boils down to increasing prices, adding setup fees, or adjusting pricing of older equipment. Either way pricing needs to be adjusted (pricing failure or lack of pricing foresight). There's no way to successfully enforce retaliatory measures against those who cancel / re-order every few months. Because you can always use a different CC / account / payment method.

So I really think this hiatus was put in place so OVH can accumulate enough revenues over the next few months to be able to purchase new servers. They're just not able to get in the black or even amortize older equipment.

<comment><USER3> Reducing prices on used servers seems to be the best solution. That is what iweb does (they have a 'clearance' section with cheap, slightly older servers) and it allows them to clear out their old stock.

Generally you don't need the newest hardware unless you have huge amounts of traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I guess this "no installation fee" thing is killing their bottom line because for well-managed shops with automated software deployment there is hardly any disincentive to replace a rented server with a new one if prices or specs change.

<comment><USER5> These days, I ensure any personal servers that I rent can be scripted as much as possible with ansible so I can do this myself - not just work servers.

If a new provider comes up with a great offer, I can place an order, run ansible, rsync the remaining data, change IPs, proxy any remaining services I need for a little bit and off I go!

Show no loyalty, get the best deal you can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's experience has Hacker News had with OVH?

Personally I got a £4 a month ($6.30) dedicated sever from them not long ago when they came out (I think they sold out within a couple of days). I had to buy 3 months together as a minimum but it was still very cheap for a dedicated server (2GB RAM and 500GB harddrive). However my initial experience with OVH wasn't amazing. The website promised 24 hour delivery when I ordered it. However after 4 days no word from them so I sent a support ticket. I got a quick response saying that "As stated on our forums and website, the server will be delivered between 1 to 10 days". Kind of strange as the website had clearly said 24 hours when I placed the order (although it had since changed to 10 days) I'd covered this in my ticket but this wasn't mentioned. Anyhow I did get my server after 20 days (no word as to the hold up but at least they started the 3 months from when I actually got access to the server rather than when I'd ordered it). This is the only experience I've had with them and it wasn't terrible but not very promising. I've always had good experience with VPS on Digital Ocean so I think I'm likely to go with them instead when these 3 months run out. Alternatively I might keep the dedicated server just to backup files on to. The terms and conditions did not seem to forbid this. Has anyone else had experience doing this? Are they likely to destroy my server if I use it for my personal backups? Has anyone else used OVH? What experience did you have?

<comment><USER7> I've been with OVH for a few years now. Historical when they have advertised the server will be ready in 1 hour it is. The problem with the new range was that they were simply too popular. So much so that OVH's hardware partners could not deliver the hardware fast enough. They got something like 15,000 orders for just one type of server in about a day. That is 10% growth in their total server count in just one day! Sooo maybe you could cut the a little slack?

Actually the cheap servers are suppose to be for personal use. They lack hard disk raid, proper support, and have the lowest priority for hardware replacements.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I think there were even a bunch of non-technical people over at Hot UK Deals who ordered the new low-end server. Must've been a nasty shock for OVH all round.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> OVH Canada recently had a major price increase, no more cheap servers as of a month or so ago.

Well I take that back, they still have entry level but they are very weak.

They used to have a $60 server that was usable but now it is $80, so $240 more a year, not trivial.

OVH Europe has better pricing/configurations than Canada.

<comment><USER10> > OVH Europe has better pricing/configurations than Canada.

You could always rent an OVH server in Europe.

<comment><USER8> As I understand it, OVH Europe goes to quite a lot of effort to ensure non- Europeans don't order servers from them.

<comment><USER10> Oh, I assumed they would operate like a usual company. I guess in that case I wouldn't want to be their customer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if this explains why, when my current server failed and I decided to replace it with two more powerful ones for half the price, my order was mysteriously on hold for a week until the servers I ordered were out of stock, and then the payment was cancelled after it was too late to question it :(

(They did at least give me the old server back with the failing drives replaced...)

</comment><comment><USER12> They could make everything more expensive, and offer significant discount for "reserved" instance for 1 to 3 years, like Amazon does.

</comment><comment><USER13> I got the first dedicated server offering in their Canada DC. Since then, OVH offered better servers at lower prices. I ask OVH support if they can lower my monthly payment to match a similarly spec'd server. Keep in mind, they no longer offered the one I was using afaik. They said "No, cancel the server and order a new one". So that is exactly what I did, I was disappointed because it was more work. If they would just offer a price match , they could have lower turn over.

<comment><USER14> It sounds like they aren't able to offer discounts. I did the same with my provider after a few years. They halved the price.

</comment></comment><comment> SG- It's interesting to note that they've decided to go and upgraded all existing older SP servers which previously had 100Mbit ports to 200Mbit for free. They've been upgrading all the switches the last 3 weeks.

I think they could get less churn by doing some of these upgrades but also by lowering server prices after reaching a certain milestone.

Personally I know I was interested in moving to a newer SP server which had a faster CPU and more RAM combined with 200MBit port for only $20/more a month until I heard they were going to upgrade my port for free. But that wasn't advertised until I emailed them and it hasn't happened weeks later. If they were proactive in emailing an upgrade notice and also maybe even upgrading the ports first before the new servers came out they would prevent a lot of wasted 'upgrades'.

<comment><USER15> They most likely did not email you because they actually don't have the capacity to handle the extra load caused by everyone's cap being doubled.

<comment> SG- You can clearly see their capacity with the OVH Weather Map and it really doesn't show that being the case for at least North America (I know it's not peak time but I've been keeping tabs on it at peak almost every day for the last few months):

[http://weathermap.ovh.net/usa](http://weathermap.ovh.net/usa)

I don't know what the situation is in Europe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just got an email from them saying "We would like to remind you about the near expiry date of your services at OVH". Apparently my server will expire in "less than 60 days' time".

I wonder if this is part of there new strategy to keep people on their current plans. I only ordered my server for 3 months so they're very eager.

<comment><USER16> I think the real issue here is PayPal. I just opened an OVH account not that long ago and was surprised they only accept PayPal in Canada and USA.

So I opened a business PayPal account even though I have no intention of becoming a "paypal merchant". To my surprise, PayPal holds the money 8-10 days. Excellent.

It took about 20 days to get the payment through, so at least they started the billing cycle from that point.

Having heard so many PayPal horror stories I would not be surprised if they got screwed over somehow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think I'd have stuck around if their interfaces weren't so awful.

There were literally 5 different control panels I could use, it took me a support ticket to actually find where my server was residing (only in a single control panel version). Love that they're making a sixth control panel to fix that.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's really the first time a company that big halts all its commercial offerings! We are running a few OVH servers and they're clearly a great value for money.

<comment><USER19> Not true... Softlayer when they were servermatrix suspended sales in 2005. IIRC it lasted about 6 months (but that's from my foggy memory.. so I could be wrong).

Found this WHT thread:

[http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=453...](http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=453700)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The orquestration software like Ansible, Puppet, and Chef are killing them. You you scripted your server, the cost to move to another server is almost nil.

</comment><comment><USER7> A kickass cloud offering could be the solution.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Interesting problem and read (if you're able to get past the Frenglish).

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

Dear Customer,

The server deals that we offer are based on certain principles which make renting a server from us very appealing: \- no installation fees \- no commitment \- monthly payment \- regular release of new features

Up to 100, 000 servers in our DCs, we haven't had any particular problems with these principles. To manage growth, it was sometimes necessary to add a limit of 2 new servers per month. Sometimes we had added installation fees for a few months, but overall, the model functions very well.

Between 100,000 and 150,000 servers, we felt that these principles began to create problems in terms of turnover.

What is turnover? Turnover is when our existing customers that rent servers decide to take new ones from us to replace the old. This if not a problem if the old server has been rented for 2-3 years, or if we can re-rent the old server as a Kimsufi for another 2-3 years. But with 150,000 servers, the number of customers renting a new server again after 3 to 6 months has become the majority. And the old servers are becoming comercially obsolete too quickly.

Today we have 170, 000 servers and since the range was updated at the beginning of August, the turnover has sped up even more to become too high. The majority of deliveries are basically just turnover. We are no longer delivering enough servers to keep up with new projects or new customers. The delivery time for everyone has become too long and we can say that the mechanics isn't working any more.

As for the 170K servers already leased out, there's no problem to report and no change to expect. Everything is running perfectly well and we're not changing anything. The problem only concerns new orders for new servers.

How do we fix this turnover issue?

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

We think we can find a better way of working which will enable us to deliver servers in 1hr, while managing 200,000 or even 300,000 servers. But such a way of working requires serious consideration.

We have started to make adjustments on certain elements such as IP Failover, but clearly it is necessary to go more in-depth. We have multiple avenues to follow, but if we start making changes every day, a piece here and a piece there, nobody will understand anything any more.

And so even if we have more than 10,000 servers ready to be delivered (all ranges and DCs mixed up), we have thus decided to "sell out" all dedicated server offers in France and the European subsidiaries, as well as in Canada and the USA. Orders already placed will be delivered, but we are not accepting any more new orders.

This "sold out" action will enable us to take time to analyze the sales of the last few months in greater depth, and understand the behavior of each customer contributing to the turnover.

We will then put the servers back on sale in limited quantities (batches of 100 servers) and new principles to then re-analyze what has happened, and so on and so forth until finding the principles which will allow us to:

\- deliver the servers to you quickly \- offer very competitive offers \- increase customer loyalty to their servers

At the same time, we're speeding up the rewriting of the API in v6 in terms of domain names, emails, web hosting and dedicated servers. The same goes for Manager V6 which will replace V3 and V5 before the end of the year. Our order system will be reviewed before the end of the year for all the services that we offer you. We will be able to offer bank card auto-renewal in Europe and Canada. In short, we are making the most of this " sold out" period to focus internal resources not on growth, but rather on consolidation of our backoffice and on careful consideration of the mechanics of our offers.

In the meantime, if you have new projects which oblige you to rent new servers, please don't hesitate to contact us so that you can place an order manually. We have the server stock but we don't want to deliver it and continue this high turnover cycle.

We're counting on your feedback to help us to refine the mechanics, which must be convenient for you and allow us to do our job without having to change the rules of play every 6 months because we have 200K or 300K servers in our DCs. This is basically a good time to discuss and exchange, and then to come up with the idea that nobody has yet come up with…

Best wishes,

Octave

<comment><USER21> "Interesting problem and read (if you're able to get past the Frenglish)."

His French is just as bad. It's kinda refreshing to read stuff that isn't passed through PR consultants for polishing. OVH brutal honesty is very rare.

<comment><USER22> It's true that some people just have two second languages, and some barely a single.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You never get fired for choosing AWS.

<comment><USER22> You'll get fired for making a devastatingly bad call, and AWS could be one of those. It's difficult to work with, can be expensive if not used effectively, and exposes you to completely different kinds of risk than your team might be used to.

<comment><USER24> We're a small company (30+ people) and been happily using AWS for several years now. We've found them price competitive for the same features - and they are really easy to use if you're looking for scale.

A few reasons for why I think they're now the 600-pound gorilla in that space. ;)

<comment><USER25> Just curious, do you just use EC2 and do you dynamically scale the number of machines you use frequently? All the math I've done for a constant number of servers/instances shows that unmanaged dedicated or colocated hardware comes out far ahead in price.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Top Logo Design Trends for 2017 with Examples - <AUTHOR> http://brandingbeard.com/branding/top-logo-design-trends-2017/ <comment><USER2> Wow! It's like an article on design, written by someone who knows fuck all about design.</comment>


NSA director modeled war room after Star Trek's Enterprise - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/09/nsa-director-modeled-war-room-after-star-treks-enterprise.html

<comment><USER2> Am I the only one to find this a bit sad?

<comment><USER3> no. Fire 'em all. Get a contractor in there, strip out all that fanboi crap, and rebuild it as a bog-standard C&C/Ops room. With taxpayer money, you get square rooms with beige paint, a kick in the ass, a dirty look, and a harsh word to shut up and get back to work. If you're going to spy on me, mothereffer, you'd better not effing enjoy it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Presumably, there is a visitors log. I suggest someone FOIA that, ASAP.

Then, perhaps someone will be so kind as to ask those "legislators", preferably under oath, _what the hell they were thinking._</comment>


AWS Step Functions – Build Distributed Applications Using Visual Workflows - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-step-functions-build-distributed-applications-using-visual-workflows/ <comment><USER2> Nice. So this is basically a replacement for SWF (Simple Workflow Service) that allows you to build the decision steps using a GUI/JSON and allows you to execute tasks using either Lambda or the traditional activity pollers. Building a multi-step workflow that handles branching, retries and failure just got a lot easier.

I was hoping they would do something like this, working with SWF has always felt unnecessarily complicated. The Java Flow Framework just felt like an awkward abstraction to me, but this makes a lot more sense.

Combine this with their new AWS Batch service and I think people are going to save countless man hours that would have otherwise been spent working on repetitive, undifferentiated code.

<comment><USER3> The Flow Framework is an abomination to engineering, and should die a pathetic death. Liberal annotations, codegen, aspect weaving and bytecode manip, requires a special JUnit test runner--it embodies all the aspects of the Java culture that I despise.

I rather like the idea of SWF, but its API is too low-level, it has poor tooling, and the workflow/activity versioning is awkward and makes the systems too rigid. I am glad that AWS is moving to data-driven workflow definitions, that means they can build much better operational tooling (like the GUI) to manage and understand workflow executions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Other than the examples, what kinds of interesting things could this be used for? What are the advantages over writing code for the coordination?

<comment><USER2> Well similar to SWF it looks like they provide the infrastructure for tracking the state changes and the input/output data at each step so you can:

      (1) Quickly get a visual overview of all your executions

      (2) See  how many workflows failed

      (3) Drill down and see which specific step failed and the data that might have triggered the failure

      (4) re-run specific workflows

It provides built in error handling, retries/backoff, and parallelization. These are all things you could code yourself, but at some point you would have built a workflow system. Not to mention that the infrastructure of the workflow system itself is managed for you, so you don't have to worry about that going down. You can write workflows that execute over days, weeks or months and not worry about what happens if your server goes down.

It would also come in handy for mutli-language workflows. If your were interacting with a variety of third party APIs that had SDKs in different languages, you could quickly string together a Python Lambda, Java Lambda and some .NET code that used the long polling API.

It would be nice if it integrated seamlessly with Cloudwatch and X-Ray to provide a unified view of logging and tracing right from the same interface.

I also expect a more seamless integration with AWS Batch at some point. Could be useful for chaining together multiple independently maintained batch processes (video conversion, resizing, publish to youtube).

I personally use SWF for a 10 step e-commerce workflow that calls multiple API. It works great, but I could have developed it much more quickly using Step Functions if it were available at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This sounds a lot like HP Operations Orchestration.

<comment><USER3> I didn't know what that was, and went to HP's website to look it up.

> "IT process automation and run book software that improves service quality > and customer satisfaction, and lowers costs by eliminating latency between > silos, increasing first time right rate, enforcing standards, and delivering > reports for ROI, audits and more."

Ugh, seriously HP? What a load of BS. What the hell does it do?

Compare that to the AWS description of Step Functions:

> "AWS Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of > distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows. Building > applications from individual components that each perform a discrete > function lets you scale and change applications quickly."

<comment><USER5> It's a wyswig way of doing integrations and orchestrating stuff. [was going to say operations like start this vm, or provision this vm based on the template, post cat meme to s3, etc]

This is what the studio client looks like: [http://www.www8-hp.com/us/en/images/auto_oo_studio_ss_tcm245...](http://www.www8-hp.com/us/en/images/auto_oo_studio_ss_tcm245_1626213_tcm245_1626234_tcm245-1626213.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not useful. Those graphical programming interface all end up miserably. Don't understand why people still trying to sell it.

<comment><USER7> > Those graphical programming interface all end up miserably.

This is factually not true. There are a number of fields where graphical programming interfaces have a long history of success.</comment></comment>


Hacker Dojo, finally a hangout where coders can go 24/7 - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2009/08/13/hacker-dojo-finally-a-hangout-where-coders-can-go-247/

<comment><USER2> Hmm. $100/month to ... sit in a room with other people and bang on my laptop?

It'll be interesting if this ends up taking off.

<comment><USER3> Sure beats paying $4 to work at a coffee shop. Plus, not every coffee shop lets you bring your soldering iron or desktop computer.

<comment><USER4> Especially when now cafes are now kicking out laptop owners even if they do buy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems like this would be most beneficial to coders who are working on a bootstrapped startup or those without full-time jobs; i.e., those that would find it harder to pay $100/mo.

</comment><comment><USER6> Places like this seem to be popping up here and there...how well do they do? Is this a truly viable (in the long-term) business?

<comment><USER7> _Hackerdojo is not a business._ What is _wrong_ with you people? This is like asking whether reading or sex is "a viable business".

<comment><USER8> Calm down. Breathe.

Hacker Dojo is a California Nonprofit Mutual Benefit Corporation. Fully tax- deductible federal 501(c)(3) status will hopefully happen when things settle down.

<comment><USER9> Technically a 501(c)(6), actually.

<comment><USER8> I didn't realize there were so many options: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)>

501(c)(3) would work for the Dojo under Education, [Technical] Literacy, and Prevention of Cruelty to Children or Animals.

Also, being as helpful as ever, google tells me 501(c)(3) = 450,588,064,374 m/s</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>