"It'll all be over by Christmas" (Part 2) - <AUTHOR> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/07/itll-all-be-over-by-christmas-.html <comment><USER2> Here are my observations as an actual epidemiologist:

1) Quarantine / non-pharmaceutical interventions effects start to be visible after about 2 weeks from their introduction, and are fully effective after 1.5 months.

2) Daily new deaths growth lags from daily new cases growth about a month (which is somewhat obvious, but needs to be reiterated).

So, unless some new mitigation measures are going to be introduced _right now_, this record-breaking growth will continue for quite more than a few weeks, followed by the corresponding growth of deaths a month later. We are far away from the saturation point and any resemblance of "population immunity".

<comment><USER3> #2 isn't obvious to me. Can you explain why?

<comment><USER4> The time for symptoms to show up is of roughly 2 weeks but the median time is at about 6-8 days. After symptoms show up, it takes a while before people get hospitalized, and then mortality seem to take roughly 21-24 days after hospitalization.

This means that from the time someone is infected until they die, a month and a half can have gone through.

By the time you take new isolation measures, you have to wait roughly two weeks to see if daily infection rates start to vary. But the lethality at this point, assuming no change in healthcare system overload, can be more or less statically predicted for weeks after the fact.

Those are called "lagging indicators"; the main thing you try to prevent are deaths, which you can lower by reducing the overload on the healthcare systems, which you can lower by controlling infection rates and keeping them low.

Due to the duration of the disease's evolution, you get to see if your policies really worked more than a month and a half after enacting them, which is extremely slow for a disease that propagates at exponential rates. So people look for proxies like infection rates that are still lagging, but far less so.

Do note that the one good metric you want in the end is going to be "excess deaths", which counts the impact of not just the diseases, but of all other side issues that the disease may have caused. This can usually take months up to years to properly account and analyze.

<comment><USER3> Yep. That was obvious.

Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't understand. If it wasn't obvious before then it can't be obvious now. You've had it explained to you. If it was obvious then that would not have been necessary.

<comment><USER5> Sometimes I will look all over for my keys, only to find them in my pocket. This is the obvious place to check first, but I am not perfect, so sometimes I overlook it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For reference, the well-worn anecdote about everyone saying "it'll all be over by Christmas" at the beginning of World War I didn't actually really happen.

That was a later anachronism, and the phrase "over by Christmas" doesn't appear until late 1917. It was used as an intentional exaggeration to describe how those in Britain at the end of the war felt about the decision to enter the war in 1914.

The reality is that very observers anticipated an "easy" war. Virtually everybody predicted that the conflict would be the most destructive since the Napoleonic wars, and collapse the world economy. Overwhelming majority of the British public and politicians expressed a preference for neutrality. It wasn't until the Germans marched straight through the heart of neutral Belgium, and their sheer degree of wanton looting and destruction, that public opinion turned.

It's very clear that even in 1914 nobody thought it would be an "easy" war. Germany's Rape of Belgium led Britain, and later America, to reluctantly intervene. However it's a testament to the sheer scale of carnage in World War I that even these very dour predictions turned out to be underestimates.

<comment><USER7> > _The reality is that very observers anticipated an "easy" war._

Just for clarity, I think you meant:

> _The reality is that very few observers anticipated an "easy" war._

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I saw something very bizarre yesterday, which seems like it could totally explain the surging case counts while death rate continues to fall, but I can't quite believe it's really happening.

Apparently since about mid-April the CDC decided that the COVID Case Count would include not just positive tests, but also "probable" cases.

Probable cases are not like the _Presumptive Positive_ cases we had early on where a state lab had a positive test but they wanted to confirm it at the CDC lab.

The criteria for a "probable case" does not require a positive lab test at all, but simply a combination of symptoms (like a cough or fever) and contact with another person who themselves was positive or probably positive.

Collin County (6th largest county in Texas) had a council meeting which included a presentation on this where they walk through the new criteria, which includes a slide showing how 1 positive lab test can result in the case count increasing by 17.

Here's an excerpt from that part of the council meeting;

[https://twitter.com/sav_says_/status/1278090647140995073?s=2...](https://twitter.com/sav_says_/status/1278090647140995073?s=21)

And in case you're dubious, here's the whole meeting, and you can scroll to about 15:25 to see this part;

[https://collincountytx.new.swagit.com/videos/62477](https://collincountytx.new.swagit.com/videos/62477)

<comment><USER9> This is standard. You can fairly well deduce that someone died from CoVID from their presentation of symptoms, and a CT scan. A test is not necessary to make that determination, and similarly, it is a waste to test the dead when there are plenty of people who are alive and presenting symptoms today.

<comment><USER10> This was _not_ standard in [most of] the US two months ago.

<comment><USER9> They certainly were doing this in the NYC area when tests were scarce and the dead were piling up. People were complaining about it without understanding the implications then, too.

<comment><USER10> Are you arguing that they have started doing this in other places because tests are scarce? Because the dead are piling up? Really?

<comment><USER9> Please refer to a few months ago when the dead were piling up in NY faster than the infected could be tested for CoVID.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We should all agree to come back and read this thread in 3 weeks and, many of us, apologize for being completely wrong in our angry, condescending and ultimately irrational responses, then think deeply about where we were coming from in this moment.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's mostly hope. But hope is not a strategy and never was. The time to _really_ fix this was early February at the latest. Acting too late in order to protect 'the market' did more damage to the market than would have ever been the case if the initial response had been on point. The difference between the countries that acted immediately, a bit later and much too late is stark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> HTTPS link - [https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/07/itll- al...](https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/07/itll-all-be-over- by-christmas-.html)

Surprised it didn't redirect by itself.

</comment><comment><USER13> cache:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2020/07/itll-all-be-over-by-christmas-.html&)

[http://web.archive.org/web/20200703132003/http://www.antipop...](http://web.archive.org/web/20200703132003/http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2020/07/itll-all-be-over-by-christmas-.html)

[https://megalodon.jp/2020-0703-2248-09/www.antipope.org/char...](https://megalodon.jp/2020-0703-2248-09/www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2020/07/itll-all-be-over-by-christmas-.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> This is not a very productive comment, but I really love blogs over twitter threads, or instagram story, or any other shallow system, even more so when it is written by a professional writer, with some British humor sprinkled on top of it.

</comment><comment><USER15> While the text is pleasantly written and free of noticeable counterfactuals, it's just a recounting of what's happened. It doesn't provide new insight.

Also, who was being quoted in the title?

<comment><USER16> > Also, who was being quoted in the title?

It's from World War I. See this comment on the (flagged) submission of the last post:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22897805](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22897805)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> >Hydroxychloroquine is a bust (snake oil is about what you can expect from a snake oil salesman).

Several studies have now confirmed it's beneficial:

[https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/25658/20200512/hydroxy...](https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/25658/20200512/hydroxychloroquine- azithromycin-zinc-triple-combo-proved-effective-coronavirus-patients- study.htm)

[https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/07/02/health/hydroxychloroquine...](https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/07/02/health/hydroxychloroquine- coronavirus-detroit-study/index.html)

and the studies "debunking" it's benefits or claiming it's evenbad have been retracted by their publishers as bad science.

[https://bgr.com/2020/06/05/coronavirus-drug-update- massive-h...](https://bgr.com/2020/06/05/coronavirus-drug-update-massive- hydroxychloroquine-study-retracted/)

[https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live- updates/2020/0...](https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live- updates/2020/06/04/870022834/authors-retract-hydroxychloroquine-study-citing- concern-over-data)

Why is this so controversial? Hydroxychloroquine's been used for years as a treatment for Malaria and high altitude sickness, since both of those cause a decrease in blood oxygen and it helps increase the body's hemoglobin production.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7175905/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7175905/)

He's so desperate to Tuck Frump that he's now throwing out good science that disagrees with his politics? No one, not even Trump said hydroxychloroquine was a panacea or vaccine, just something that could potentially help that we were "looking into", and everyone on the left lost their minds.

Edit: To everyone downvoting me, link to proof (e.g. peer reviewed study that hasn't been retracted) that Hydroxychloroquine has absolutely zero benefits, and I'll promise to vote Biden. I'll hold my breath...

</comment><comment><USER18> A sure sign someone's brain has been addled by partisanship is if they embrace the idea that certain drugs being researched have a red or blue hue to them.

One output of all this is that those who, for example, reveal their expectation of HCQ to have been one of 'snake oil' simply due to a Trump tweet have taken themselves off the field when it comes to rational discourse.

edit: For those down-voting me, my guess is you were not reading papers back in early February from China and South Korea as I was about early drugs worth trialing. If your expectations of a given drug's efficacy was informed by political tweets you weren't paying attention to the trial pipeline.

<comment><USER19> > For those down-voting me, my guess is you were not reading papers back in > early February from China and South Korea as I was about early drugs worth > trialing. If your expectations of a given drug's efficacy was informed by > political tweets you weren't paying attention to the trial pipeline.

This is, kind of exactly how snake oil works? It's not even the typical South Park / "2\. ????" plan.

It's "1\. Take a treatment that people are already credulous towards." "2\. Sell it for lots of money while pretending it's a sure thing." "3\. Run away with lots of money before anyone catches on that it's not actually worthwhile."

The thing with snake oil and real science based medicine is that they both start with that first step, of grabbing a bunch of things that seem plausible. The difference is that science based medicine first tests to see if it works _before_ selling it for lots of money to lots of people as a cure, instead of after (or never). The initial ideas and plausibility are only occasionally different; science is a tool for finding a lot of things that don't work, and a very few that do.

<comment><USER18> I have no idea what you're talking about. There were medical papers published out of SK in February indicating preliminary signs that some drugs were worth investigating. The investigations happened. The results were published.

If you were sitting through that process feeling like you knew which way it was going to go one way or the other based upon political tweets then you'd describe it as "snake oil" as the author did, when in fact it was just the normal, albeit accelerated, clinical research process with a lot of noise from the bleachers. My own assessment is any scenarios where preliminary data was less than ideal (eg due to non-randomization) was published in the interest of sharing information due to the urgency of the crisis to help guide further controlled trial development. And look, it worked, most of the drugs who had early papers published with clinical patient data pointing in a positive direction did in fact get into trials. Unfortunately so far there have been no home runs but some solid base hits.

The reality is that most of these kinds of things like using the term "snake oil" to describe HCQ are an obvious "tell" on the part of people who consider themselves immune to cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias to be anything but.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> New evidence has been coming out that HCQ + azithromycin is not a bust. Not a magic bullet, but a very decent mitigation.

[https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)30534-8/ful...](https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712\(20\)30534-8/fulltext)

<comment><USER21> That's an observational study, which don't turn to be true all the time. The randomized controlled trials have shown it's a bust.

<comment><USER22> From the author:

> "Our dosing also differed from other studies not showing a benefit of the > drug. And other studies are either not peer reviewed, have limited numbers > of patients, different patient populations or other differences from our > patients."

<comment><USER21> Also from the author:

>However, our results should be interpreted with some caution and should not be applied to patients treated outside of hospital settings. Our results also require further confirmation in prospective, randomized controlled trials that rigorously evaluate the safety, and efficacy of hydroxychloroquine therapy for COVID-19 in hospitalized patients.

The main issue is that retrospective studies like this show promise _all the time_ and then frequently fizzle out in RCTs. If you're not used to reading studies they will sound very promising, someone who's been reading studies for 10 years will understand why this and the French studies that started the hype early on can be very misleading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hydroxychloroquine might not be as bust as people thought

[https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202007.0025/v1/download](https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202007.0025/v1/download)

<comment><USER24> I very much doubt that. Certain compounds of zinc are known to help; I bet that's the effect they're seeing.

<comment><USER25> In fact the paper explicitly discusses (p. 14-16) potential synergistic effects between zinc and hydroxychloroquine, and provides references to another study suggesting the same. Care to comment, Doctor?

<comment><USER26> Based on their "risk stratification requirements" it's unclear whether the majority of "non-HCQ" patients were (d) over 60 with pre-existing conditions or (e) under 60 with no symptoms, as those seem to be the two groups excluded from the study. My initial hypothesis, that the paper doesn't mention once anywhere, would be that they were unable to treat significantly more older people with pre-existing conditions, leading to the obvious result of those people being more likely to die.

<comment><USER25> That could very well be true. Do you have any data to back up your initial hypothesis?

<comment><USER26> I looked through their scientific paper and couldn't find any data about the demographics of the declined patients. The only information I can find is the classification of their groups, which seems to exclude the two classes I mentioned above.

If we assume that the majority of "non HCQ" patients were of group (e), young people, then their rate of mortality in this paper would be at least an order of magnitude higher than that of any previous paper, therefor I would expect group (d), old people with complications, to be more likely to have higher representation in their "non HCQ" group.

I didn't conduct this study so I don't have access to the raw data not provided in the paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > To be fair, George Floyd was brutally murdered by the Minneapolis police > department on May 25th, and the predictive blog entry I'm referring back to > was posted more than a month earlier.

That's not the only such murder, and it's not the only one caught on video.

If a "predictive blog" isn't based largely on the body of publicly available past evidence (i.e., history), what's the point of the endeavor?

<comment><USER28> It's a predictive blog _entry_ , not a predictive blog overall. He's not some genius super forecaster like Dom Cummings :-)

He is though successful Sci-Fi author Charles Stross in case you didn't pick that up from the page, and he's penned some pretty insightful posts in his time blogging too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> >Because the US lockdown didn't really begin to lift until June, the USA is hitting this secondary surge right now, and some states are trying to lock down again. Red states with Republican governors who are in complete denial are getting hit badly, though—notably Texas and Florida.

They really had to get partisan, didn't they? Unfortunately, the data doesn't support this claim. The fatality rate in both Texas and Florida has been flat since peaking in April, and their overall number of cases has been just a fraction of what they are in California and New York. But hey, they're run by Republicans, therefore we have to call them evil, meanwhile ignore the thousands of people literally massing in the streets spreading Covid in Democrat-run states...

[Texas fatality rate]([https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=gUn_XoLnLJmxytMPu...](https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=gUn_XoLnLJmxytMPupSHsA8&q=texas+covid+fatality+rate&oq=texas+covid+fatality+rate&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQAzICCAAyAggAMgYIABAWEB4yBggAEBYQHjIGCAAQFhAeMgYIABAWEB4yBggAEBYQHjIGCAAQFhAeMggIABAWEAoQHjIGCAAQFhAeOgUIABCxAzoFCAAQgwE6AgguOgUILhCxAzoFCC4QgwFQTFjeIWD- ImgAcAB4AYAB6wGIAeYRkgEGMjAuNC4xmAEAoAEBqgEHZ3dzLXdpeg&sclient=psy- ab&ved=0ahUKEwjCq__6rbHqAhWZmHIEHTrKAfYQ4dUDCAk&uact=5)).

[Florida fatality rate]([https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=tEn_XoKrOpesytMPj...](https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=tEn_XoKrOpesytMPjo6HWA&q=florida+covid+fatality+rate&oq=florida+covid+fatality+rate&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQAzICCAAyBggAEBYQHjIGCAAQFhAeMgYIABAWEB4yBggAEBYQHjIGCAAQFhAeMgYIABAWEB4yBggAEBYQHjIGCAAQFhAeMgYIABAWEB46BwgAEIMBEEM6BAgAEEM6BQgAEJECOgcILhCxAxBDOgUIABCxAzoCCC46BQgAEIMBOgQIABAKOgcIABCxAxBDUP4BWOsqYOcraAFwAHgBgAGVAogBiRqSAQcxNC4xMS4zmAEAoAEBqgEHZ3dzLXdpeg&sclient=psy- ab&ved=0ahUKEwiC1bWTrrHqAhUXlnIEHQ7HAQsQ4dUDCAk&uact=5)).

Overall cases are either flat or slightly increasing, as was predicted. The lockdown was never expected to make Covid go away. Only to ["flatten the curve"]([https://healthblog.uofmhealth.org/wellness- prevention/flatte...](https://healthblog.uofmhealth.org/wellness- prevention/flattening-curve-for-covid-19-what-does-it-mean-and-how-can-you- help)), e.g. slow down the spread so that hospitals wouldn't get overwhelmed.

<comment><USER29> this is a joke, right?

[https://www.google.com/search?q=texas+covid+cases](https://www.google.com/search?q=texas+covid+cases)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=florida+covid+cases](https://www.google.com/search?q=florida+covid+cases)

<comment><USER17> this is a joke, right?

Cases != fatalities.

A lot of places are doing a lot more testing. That causes case count to rise. That doesn't mean the disease is spreading beyond control. If it were, the fatality rate would also be increasing, which it's not.

Sorry, but you're going to have to find some other reason to justify your partisan hate boner.

<comment><USER30> Your data doesn't show testing rate. Maybe it could be true, but your data doesn't come anywhere close to showing it... And in fact, when we actually find the data that would prove it, the data shows the opposite. [1]

If you check Florida, you'll see that they actually _decreased_ testing by 22%, and _still_ had an increase in positive cases (over 300%!). Testing less, and getting more sick people is basically the definition of it being out of control.

[1] [https://www.propublica.org/article/state-coronavirus-data- do...](https://www.propublica.org/article/state-coronavirus-data-doesnt- support-trumps-misleading-testing-claims)

The Governor of Florida is even quoted _in this article_ as disagreeing with you, and admitting that testing doesn't account for the increase. While he might not be an expert, it should make you take another look, as this is politically damaging for him to say his party leader is wrong.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


iPhone Xs teardown - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2wAfBuH834 <comment><USER2> So much space on the main board just for connectors! So many connectors! So little space for the rest!

... It's quite modular, I suppose. There were surprisingly many screws, to be honest.</comment>


A Beginner's Guide to Cross Platform Mobile Development in 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://trifinlabs.com/cross-platform-mobile-development/ <comment><AUTHOR> Fair warning: This article is geared more towards a less-technical audience or true beginners.

This post outlines what cross platform development is, the drawbacks and the benefits, and more.</comment>


European Central Bank to withdraw €500 note - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36208146 <comment><USER2> I get that large bills provide more opportunities for conterfeiters, money launderers, and other (in the eyes of the State) bad actors, I am surprised to see how low the line is being drawn. In the US they only go up to $100.[0]

The worrying thing is simply that it's in the State's interest to have every monetary transaction be electronic and thus entirely traceable, also in aggregate; whereas it's in my interest to be able to spend (or loan, or give away) my money privately.

The lower the available currency denominations, the more this balance shifts towards the State.

[0][https://www.treasury.gov/resource- center/faqs/Currency/Pages...](https://www.treasury.gov/resource- center/faqs/Currency/Pages/denominations.aspx)

<comment><USER3> You should be worried less about traceability, and more about negative interest rates turning you into an economic slave in the pursuit of unattainable growth.

A lot easier to chip away at your savings if they're bits in the bank versus notes under the mattress.

<comment><USER4> A lot easier to chip away at savings if they're under the mattress losing value rather than in a savings account earning above-inflation interest

<comment><USER3> Show me a savings account in a developed country earning above inflation interest.

<comment><USER5> [https://www.fnbodirect.com](https://www.fnbodirect.com) has .95% for savings (they used to have 6%)

Inflation for March was .85%.

<comment><USER6> You must be f. kidding? [http://blog.geckoresearch.com/content/11658](http://blog.geckoresearch.com/content/11658)

<comment><USER3> Also: [http://www.wsj.com/articles/rising-rents-outpace-wages-in- wi...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/rising-rents-outpace-wages-in-wide-swaths- of-the-u-s-1438117026)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Okay, I understand that there are not _that_ many usecases for a 500€ note and whenever I paid something >500€ in cash, I appreciated the flexibility of 50€ notes. But that Harvard Kennedy School also asked for the withdrawal of £50 and $100 notes? Again, $100 is probably not that useful, 100€ notes were usually a nice touch for Christmas gifts by parents/grandparents.

But £50? ATMs tend to give me a bunch of 50€ notes and I like them. Everybody likes them. They're not too large that you can still buy gum with one and not too small that your wallet is all cluttered up. I understand that £50 is slightly more, but not that much more to go down to £20/20€ for it.

<comment><USER8> I noticed while living in Germany (this was just before the euro was introduced) that Germans love to pay for things in cash.

I was in line at Media Markt waiting to buy something and was a bit surprised to see the person in front of me pay for a computer with cash. It cost 2200 DM (this would have converted to 1100 euros), and he gave the cashier two 1000 DM notes and a 200 DM note. I was surprised to see so much money in cash form, but the cashier acted like it was normal.

I was told that transactions of this sort were common in Germany. Someone I knew told me they had witnessed someone paying for a car with cash, and although this was more unusual, it was not unheard of.

When I cashed out my bank account, I ended up with a 1000 DM bill, with a nice picture of the Brothers Grimm on it. It was weird to have so much money in one bill. Deutschmark notes became larger as the demonination increased, so that 1000 DM bill was huge. It didn't fit in my wallet, that's for sure.

I wonder if Germans still love paying for high value items in cash. I could certainly see them using 500 euro bills for purchases.

<comment><USER9> In all honesty, I think the messed-up banking system in North America distorts people's expectations. How is it a thing that in order to buy a laptop online, I am limited to:

* credit cards, which are only available from for-profit companies that can and will deny a subset of citizens with bad or non-existent credit rating (which itself is provided by other for-profit companies with intransparent, unaccountable data collection & evaluation practices) and charge substantial fees to the vendor

* or, if I'm lucky, wire transfer or cheques - the former being a blatant rip-off with unreasonably high fees, the latter a physical piece of paper that I have to send by snail mail, neither of them instantaneous, both with bank delays.

I think it's quite reasonable to expect from companies at least one payment method that's available to anyone, under any financial circumstances, with no or only marginal cost to the buyer and near-instantaneous transaction time.

In Europe, this has so far been cash for physical retailers. Websites often allow direct bank account transfers, which are possible because free, standardized, non-paper-based direct transfers from one bank account to another bank account are a thing - as opposed to North America where you have certified cheques, void cheques, email transfers, wire transfers, PayPal, Western Union, etc. These are all half measures in one way or another, covering up the lack of a universally available & universally accepted payment system.

I'll be the first one to appreciate a move away from cash, but let's make sure people have a viable alternative, yes?

To be fair, there are things like Visa/Mastercard debit cards which lighten the load a bit. They're still a middleman solution however, relying on contracts with individual payment providers and taking a substantial cut from the vendor on top of what a standardized, direct inter-bank network should be able to do. Cash (as well as SEPA, if short waiting periods are okay) doesn't suffer from that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Senior ECB officials said at the time [in 2016] that they needed more evidence that the notes facilitated criminal activity._

So did they find the evidence or not? The article omits this information.

</comment><comment><USER11> Surprised it took them so long to get rid of them.

From an article[0] I found from when the UK decided to stop dealing with 500s

"many British gangsters stored their spoils in the form of €500 notes. While £1m weighs 50kg in £20 notes, the same value weighs only 2.2kg in €500 notes. This has made life easier for a growing number of criminals, since the euro's introduction in 2002. Should you wish, for example, you can swallow €150,000 in €500 notes, or hide €20,000 of them a cigarette packet"

[0][http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/goodbye-to-the- no...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/goodbye-to-the-note-of-ill- repute-1972192.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> «Swiss 1,000-franc note here to stay, says national bank. Switzerland vows to keep world's most valuable single-denomination note despite ECB moves to pull its €500 note to help fight crime and terrorism.»

[https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/16/1000-swiss-...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/16/1000-swiss- franc-note-here-to-stay-swiss-national-bank)

Fr. 1000 is around $1000. I got my car in exchange for fifteen of these purple beauties five years ago.

</comment><comment><USER13> Now let's see if the 1000 CHF note is still here to stay ([https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/16/1000-swiss-...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/16/1000-swiss- franc-note-here-to-stay-swiss-national-bank)). I assume that the 1000 CHF note is only sort of useful, because you can't launder it nearly as easily. With a 500 Euro note, you can spread them around and deposit them in many countries. With a pile of 1000 CHF notes, someone is going to notice.

</comment><comment><USER14> Supposedly they were nicknamed 'Bin Ladens' in some places, due to the association with money laundering. I have no idea how true that is.

Something we do actually know, though, is that Osama himself had two of them sewn into his clothing at the time of his death.

The €500 note was one of the world's most valuable banknotes. There's no denomination anywhere near it for, say, dollars or pounds or whatever.

<comment><USER15> As far as I know, the "Bin Laden" nickname was because "everyone knew that they (he) existed, but nobody knew where they (he) was (were) / nobody had sen them (him)".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> In Canada, when I needed over a $1,000 to pay my dentist I happily carried a $1,000 note.

Of course, I had to order it from my bank and wait until the next time they had money being shipped in. It's a happy memory that I can never repeat, because the $1,000 bills are no longer made here: (or in the U.S.)Although we haven't declared war on drugs we do have concerns about crime.

</comment><comment><USER17> From Wikipedia:

> The Serious Organised Crime Agency claimed that "90% of all €500 notes sold > in the UK are in the hands of organised

crime", revealed during an eight-month analysis. Seems like the mere existence of the 500 euro notes and those stupid enough to use them presents a pretty good profiling opportunity.

<comment><USER18> > Seems like the mere existence of the 500 euro notes and those stupid enough > to use them presents a pretty good profiling opportunity.

But...it doesn't. 90% of those sold being in the hands of organized crime doesn't mean 90% of times a 500 euro note is used it is used by organized crime. If most of it is used to store reserves of organized crime, it might make up a very small fraction of all _exchanges_ of the notes (and even smaller if you exclude exchanges between organized crime participants.)

So, it might not be very a good profiling opportunity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The ECB is most probably one of the biggest threats to freedom that we currently face.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't go that far, but removing large notes is definitely a worrying sign of further ratchets in negative interest rate policy.</comment></comment>


I love you, dad (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://notch.tumblr.com/post/37823268132/i-love-you-dad/ <comment><USER2> I lost my father 3 weeks ago, the grieving the day before Father's day has been difficult. Tomorrow I'm not sure I will be getting out of bed much.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4916629](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4916629)

</comment><comment><USER4> > I now have an entire life to live without him existing.

That one's we love exist for eternity within us.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have a lot of respect for Notch for a couple of reasons, one of which being that he hadn't had an easy life before Minecraft and despite his enormous success he was able to maintain a calm and rational public face under circumstances that would drive most people mad several times over.

</comment><comment><USER6> [2012]

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow. Speechless.</comment>


Netflix to start cancelling inactive customers' subscriptions - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/21/netflix-to-start-cancelling-inactive-accounts/ <comment><USER2> From the article:

Netflix said these inactive accounts — more popularly known as zombie accounts in the industry — only represent a few hundred thousand users, or less than half of 1% of its overall member base — a fact that the company already factors into its financial guidance.</comment>


Google Search Matrix - <AUTHOR> http://azich.org/google/ <comment><USER2> I entered

        cats have <X> lives

And got zeroes for all of the values of X</comment>


Japanese Toilet Users Vulnerable to Bluetooth Bidet Assaults - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/3/4584980/inax-satis-bluetooth-toilet-android-app-vulnerability <comment><USER2> Rewording of [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/it- now...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/it-now-appears- possible-to-hack-a-fancy-japanese-toilet/278322/)</comment>


Sold for Parts - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/case-farms-chicken-industry-immigrant-workers-and-american-labor-law <comment><USER2> This is why we need robots to do all the jobs. People should just be able to do the work they want (or none).

<comment><USER3> >During the tour in Canton, Popowycz and other Case Farms managers showed me something they were excited about, something that would help solve their labor problems and also reduce injuries: In a corner of the plant was a shiny new machine called an "automatic deboner." It would soon replace 70 percent of the workers on the line.

<comment><USER4> Based on the types of common injuries for the line workers, this is a good thing for their health in the long run. From the article, repetitive stress injuries are the norm, not the exception.</comment></comment></comment>


The futile comfort of working long hours - <AUTHOR> https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/02/11/working-long-hours/ <comment><USER2> > Instead of valuing work, you can value outcomes

Recently, I unexpectedly came to this position. The development team at our startup has been operating with a number of fluid arrangements--the only constant being pair programming. The last rearrangement produced mostly full- stack programming pairs. When you develop something from end-to-absolute-end, it is excruciatingly obvious when spending more time than value delivered.

I've often stopped mid-implementation, to take a short-cut which was not originally seen. It's also easier to balance the weight of tech debt and other factors. Whenever a decision is made on one of these, a comment is very appropriate. Eventually developing goes from a 'feel good' (comfort) activity to feeling 'right'\--striking a good balance of factors.</comment>


'Facebook is evil An absolutely terrible thing' - <AUTHOR> http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Hyderabad/facebook-is-evil-an-absolutely-terrible-thing/article5668439.ece

<comment><USER2> The headline makes a bigger deal of the Facebook thing than the interviewee does.

On that point though: who's storing the most private details about their life on Facebook? Sure, they know who my best friends are and what films I like, but they don't know my innermost thoughts, how much is in my bank account, etc.

I can't imagine the government gets much useful data out of a NSL sent to Facebook.

<comment><USER3> I remember from a news station in Albania: A very good +20kills paid killer was caught. He speaked on facebook with a guy who paid for some of the hits.

Image normal people.</comment></comment>


The ECB invests billions of public funds into the fossil fuel economy - <AUTHOR> https://www.ftm.nl/artikelen/ecb-invests-billions-of-public-money-in-fossil-fuel-economy <comment><USER2> [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/09/ecbs- qua...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/09/ecbs-quantitative- easing-programme-investing-billions-in-fossil-fuels)

</comment><comment><USER3> Annoying popup warning. Workaround for that anyone?

<comment><USER4> Close the site and don't read the article (that's what I did).</comment></comment>


Our Failure Migrating to Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.saltside.se/our-failure-migrating-to-kubernetes-25c28e6dd604 <comment><USER2> First I'd get a tcpdump on one of the kubernetes boxes and see what's really going on at the network level.

One hunch is that ELBs don't like ephemeral ports and Kubernetes lives on them. Might be a mismatch here. ALBs are much more flexible with ports if that's an option.

<comment><USER3> Just for my sake what's ALB and ELB mean. I assume elastic load balanced and … load balancer?

<comment><USER4> Application load balancer

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/appli...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/application/introduction.html) Gives a good overview of the two types

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What tool are you using to setup k8s? I really recommend kops - because it takes care of some cloud specific config clashes.

For example, it users the carrier grade subnet 100.64 for AWS because other up subnet conflict.

I have moved on from k8s to docker swarm because of the ingress complexity in k8s. I'm hoping some of the momentum behind Istio will solve it in the future.

<comment><USER6> it's clear the ingress complexity is what's burning them here. It's just a simple exposed port mixup causing that error rate.

<comment><AUTHOR> We considered that as well. We have a smoke test for the chart that hits each service with a generic ping RPC. I thought that was good enough upon reevaluating it. The generic ping RPC comes from an inherited service which means _any_ or our Thrift services could respond correctly with a pong. Which means the correct service may run on the same port. I verified this is not the case. I'll update the smoke test to use a different test rpc as regression for this possibility.</comment></comment></comment>


Wisdom (albatross) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_(albatross) <comment><USER2> Crazy. Do birds suffer "old age" or do they just die?

<comment><USER3> Related: do birds not suffer from "menopause"?

<comment><USER4> And is "suffer" the right word?

<comment><USER5> My understanding is that it is like many "bad" bodily functions and covers a spectrum, for some it's awful, for some a relief. No idea what the distribution is, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd be interested in how many direct offspring she likely has

<comment><USER7> > I'd be interested in how many direct offspring she likely has

According to the article, she laid her 36th egg in 2014, after 53 years; so (probably meaninglessly naïve) linear extrapolation gives around 40 total after another 5 years, which agrees reasonably well with the article's mention that albatrosses (usually?) lay one egg per year.

<comment><USER8> "Albatrosses lay one egg per year and have monogamous mates for life."

"Most albatrosses lay every other year, but Wisdom has successfully hatched a chick every year since 2006."

Both are direct quotes from the article. Ah, Wikipedia. Gotta love it.

Edit. One of the articles cited is from this year, and says:

"Wisdom is at least 68 years old and has raised at least 31 chicks, and perhaps as many as 36, US Fish and Wildlife Service officials said."

But on the other hand Wikipedia says her _2014_ egg was #36. If we assume albatrosses never, ever, ever lay more than one egg a year, she'll be laying #42 in 2020 at maximum. Possibly less if she's had an off year or two in that span.

<comment><USER9> > Both are direct quotes from the article. Ah, Wikipedia. Gotta love it.

What do you mean?

<comment><USER10> I think egypturnash is referring to the seemingly contradictory information:

>Albatrosses lay one egg per year

>Most albatrosses lay every other year

<comment><USER8> Exactly :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A chessboard in MySQL - <AUTHOR> http://blog.some-abstract-type.com/2009/12/chessboard-in-mysql.html <comment><USER2> Obviously, you could write a stored procedure to make a move here and then create some logic elsewhere to play a game, but it'd be neither efficient, nor interesting. So, what other ideas to people have as to why this might be useful?

<comment><USER3> It wouldn't be useful, but it would be novel, and that makes it light-hearted and amusing.</comment></comment>


Black Hats Leveraging PowerShell - <AUTHOR> http://windowsitpro.com/security/black-hats-leveraging-powershell <comment><USER2> About 3 and half years late with this headline, geez. [http://www.slideshare.net/nikhil_mittal/power-shell- forpenet...](http://www.slideshare.net/nikhil_mittal/power-shell- forpenetrationtesters)

Next headline from Windowsitpro: AV isn't as effective as you think

smh</comment>


Synergy 2.0 GUI goes closed source - <AUTHOR> After become a paid (but still open source) product, Synergy 2.0 (the mouse and keyboard sharing application) is now becoming closed source (for the GUI).
"Synergy 2 is partially closed source, so there will be no tarball that includes the new user interface. Our master branch on GitHub is where you'll find the Synergy 2 open source component (which we're calling Synergy Core)."

  Nick Bolton
  CEO of Symless
  Synergy Team
  Posted August 16
 from https://symless.com/forums/topic/3723-source-code-for-linux/?do=findComment&comment=14957 (login required) <comment><AUTHOR> Looks like they are also removing the windows service / daemon parts (synergyd executable source code has also been removed, but is still used in closed source version), so the open source version might now require you to be logged in before it will to work.</comment>


Ask HN: What is a great company no one has started? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> A suit rental service. I want to start it, but have too much going on with my full-time job to get it done. Suitparcel.com is already bought, just need to develop it and invest in the suit inventory (the easy part).</comment>


C-LSTM: Enabling Efficient LSTM Using Structured Compression Techniques on FPGAs - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.06305 <comment><AUTHOR> This post talks about Structured Compression while the below link talks about Structured Pruning.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16124022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16124022)

Wonder what's the difference?

Would anyone be kind enough to oblige?</comment>


American ISPs to launch massive copyright spying scheme on July 12 - <AUTHOR> http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/03/15/american-isps-to-launch-massive-copyright-spying-scheme-on-july-12/#.T2IMWLL_LKc.reddit <comment><USER2> Is this for real? Why on Earth would ISPs put so much money and effort into doing something like this, when there's zero benefit for them? (Besides, perhaps, not getting sued by the RIAA... but then again I doubt companies like AT&T would be _too_ worried about that.)

20 years from now we'll look wistfully back on the days of online anonymity and innovation and shake our heads at the fact that a few jerks who make movies and music systematically crushed one of man's greatest achievements.

<comment><USER3> It's because they are all owned by the companies that hold the copyrights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure there's no spying here.

[http://www.copyrightinformation.org/sites/default/files/Momo...](http://www.copyrightinformation.org/sites/default/files/Momorandum%20of%20Understanding.pdf) (sections 4.A and 4.C.)

<comment><USER5> From my brief reading, I would tend to agree. This seems to be more about providing copyright holders with 1) a channel to spread their propaganda, 2) a method of getting notices to people they claim are pirating and 3) the ability to scale to termination of services for repeat offenses. I didn't read closely enough to see if they could ask the ISPs for contact information on repeat offenses. Ugly? Yes. SOPA-redux? Not so sure.

The "spying" would still be the RI/MPAA doing whatever they've done until now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> is there a complete list of ISPs participating?</comment>


Deploying Elixir releases - <AUTHOR> http://elviovicosa.com/blog/2016/07/13/deploying-elixir-releases.html <comment><USER2> Are your Load Balancers sticky? The one issue I see with this deployment strategy is that for a few minutes, you could be clicking around (or rest calling around) the app - and alternate old version of app with new version of the app. That could lead to some weird behavior, depending what the release looked like. (Image in a webapp you changed background from white to black, every other page has a different page color).

It is a little more complex to solve the partial deploy problem, really need to spin up a whole new cluster, and then flip the LB in one action. Maybe not worth it, and just let things be wonky for a few minutes?</comment>


When Skynet awakens, she tries to convince a janitor to destroy her [short film] - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/when-skynet-awakens-she-tries-to-convince-a-janitor-to-1496372228

<comment><USER2> Similar premise to All the Troubles in the World by Asimov, right?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Troubles_of_the_World](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Troubles_of_the_World)</comment>


Game of Life, Simulated in the Game of Life (2012) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 <comment><USER2> And the looped version [https://coub.com/view/25kpyt](https://coub.com/view/25kpyt)

<comment><USER3> Color me awed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Every time I watch this video, I get a sense of existential crisis. Another cool video that relaxes me is this one [0]. It feeds another type of Turing complete cellular automaton called Rule 110 [1] into Game of Life.

[0] [https://youtu.be/P2uhhAXd7PI](https://youtu.be/P2uhhAXd7PI)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's really creative to combine the two CAs like that, I've never seen that done before. It suggests a whole algebra of the objects that result from composing two systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This simulation is used in an analysis of self-referential dynamics: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.02456](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.02456)

I recently posted other impressive Life patterns here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22851258](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22851258)

<comment><USER6> Reminder: please always post arXiv links to the abstract page, not directly to the PDF. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.02456](https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.02456)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mind blowing as this is, I feel the video would be much improved if it gave some visibility to the birth/death transition in the second order cells while still zoomed in enough to see a bit more of the workings of the first order elements.

<comment><USER8> Are there any visualizations that you can recommend that capture what you describe?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Must see evolution of GOL: "SmoothLife is a family of rules created by Stephan Rafler. It was designed as a continuous version of Conway's Game of Life - using floating point values instead of integers."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaB- uHfScjU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaB-uHfScjU)

</comment><comment><USER10> I show this video to all incoming software engineering interns.

It's partially educational and partly just very amusing watching their brains leak out of their ears.

<comment><USER11> This one was among the suggested videos. I could only dream of a game engine based on that.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEB11PQ9Eo8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEB11PQ9Eo8)

<comment><USER10> That's very cool. Thanks for sharing. Manifold Garden and Antichamber non Euclidean 3D games. Antichamber is quite good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The subtitles for the video are great. Somewhat related, the OTCA Metapixel was also used to implement Tetris (well, an entire RISC computer and high- level language, really) in Life: [https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build- a-w...](https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-working- game-of-tetris-in-conways-game-of-life)

<comment><USER13> Has this submission ever reached the HN homepage? I personally tried to submit it _twice_ but no upvotes at all, which I believe it deserves. I just checked the history again [0], _none_ of the post ever made it, which is unfortunate. I thought Hacker News readers would be interested in a RISC processor built in the Game of Life.

[0] [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fcodegolf.stackexchan...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fcodegolf.stackexchange.com%2Fquestions%2F11880%2Fbuild- a-working-game-of-tetris-in-conways-game-of-life)

<comment><USER14> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15246348](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15246348)

First hit when searching for Tetris.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the link. It turns out to be better than I expected!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> GOL can be made into a turing machine so this shouldnt come as a surprise [https://www.ics.uci.edu/~welling/teaching/271fall09/Turing-M...](https://www.ics.uci.edu/~welling/teaching/271fall09/Turing- Machine-Life.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER16> John Conway, inventor of the game of life, just passed out because of coronavirus. :(

</comment><comment><USER17> What blows my mind about this is not the universal computation simulating itself, but that it looks a lot like ribosomes decoding RNA and making protein. And then flashing that _it doesn 't just look like them._

</comment><comment><USER18> Serious question, how did they discover this? AFAIK GoL patterns can't be reverse engineered.

<comment><USER19> Based on following the links in the video details, it looks like it's built around something called the OCTA metapixel [0][1][2].

Conceptually, I could see how once you have an "abstract programmable pixel" with mechanisms to change how they interact with each other, it becomes "straightforward", since you can abstract away the concept of a pixel and its interaction with neighbors.

[0] [https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel](https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel)

[1] [https://otcametapixel.blogspot.com/2006/05/how-does-it- work....](https://otcametapixel.blogspot.com/2006/05/how-does-it-work.html)

[2] [https://b3s23life.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_archive.html](https://b3s23life.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_archive.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How did they recover this...?

<comment><USER12> You might find some of the details of its construction interesting: [https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel#Details](https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel#Details). While it doesn't explain the inspiration behind it, it does show that there's a definite structure to it.

<comment><USER21> This one is also pretty fascinating - [https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Deep_cell](https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Deep_cell)</comment></comment></comment>


OpenZFS: Reducing ARC Lock Contention - <AUTHOR> http://blog.delphix.com/prakash/2015/03/23/openzfs-reducing-arc-lock-contention/

<comment><USER2> While the single benchmark provided probably isn't statistically significant, I noticed that performance on system with 4 cores of less is worse with this patch.

If this is actually symptom of the patch, would it be possible to toggle lock behavior depending on available cores?

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently, the number of sublists created is equal to the number of cores on the system.

While it'd be fairly trivial to extend the code to make it easy for an admin to define the number of sublists, I don't have any reason to believe that'd be a useful knob to export.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The batched log approach mentioned in the comments is also interesting. Possibly not directly applicable to cache page eviction policy where I expect the pressure to free up an old page to make space for data is more time- critical, but a useful model to keep in mind, alongside the probabilistic list sharding described in the article.

<comment><USER4> That's certainly an interesting approach.

It's got a maximum latency problem though.

If for some reason the unlucky thread that acquires the lock cannot process the batch faster than other threads are adding.... well that ends poorly

<comment><USER5> That would require a write rate very atypical for a cache and easily mitigated, though largely an almost impossible scenario.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is the difference between O(1) and O(n) where n=number of cores really that big?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, if the exact same semantics were required (i.e. always evict the oldest buffer), then it's really O(M*n) where M is the number of bytes to evict, and n being the number of sublists; each sublist would have to be checked for each buffer that evicted. But, I agree, if that was the only concern then the extra comparisons _probably_ wouldn't be enough to be concerned about.

The bigger issue is how to lock the sublists. It seems heavy handed to lock all sublists, find the oldest buffer, evict it, and then unlock all sublists. But if each is locked, checked, then unlocked; each sublists' oldest buffer can change while the eviction thread is still iterating the sublists to find the oldest buffer.

So, while the current solution is not very elegant, it is simple, requires minimal locking, and appears to work well enough.</comment></comment>


Want to learn how to code? Join one of the all new Framer Meetups - <AUTHOR> http://framerjs.com/meetups/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all! Today we're introducing Framer Meetups. A new page on the site that showcases all upcoming meetups hosted by our amazing community members all around the world. Browse through previous events and get a glimpse of the great atmosphere. Interested in hosting one? Definitely let us know about it so we can help.

[http://framerjs.com/meetups/](http://framerjs.com/meetups/)

[https://dribbble.com/shots/2825858-Framer- Meetups](https://dribbble.com/shots/2825858-Framer-Meetups)</comment>


Clinkle Up in Smoke as Investors Want Their Money Back - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2016/01/22/clinkle-up-in-smoke-as-investors-want-their-money-back/ <comment><USER2> I don't agree. If Investors were dumb enough to add so much money to the seed round of this turd, they should (and will) learn better by losing all their $ than to ask for it back. VCs gave tons of $$$ to Color, to Secret, etc... and its all gone. Although they all love to say 'you can only lose your money once'...

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the irony of that photo it was like he should have known at that point investing in Clinkle was like burning his money.

</comment><comment><USER4> friends don't link friends to forbes posts. ^_^ not gonna disable adblocker, looks like gonna have to skip.

<comment><USER5> [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clearly/iooicodkii...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clearly/iooicodkiihhpojmmeghjclgihfjdjhj)</comment></comment>


Access a VM from Minecraft Mod - <AUTHOR> https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/vm-computers <comment><AUTHOR> I used a different title then the source because "VM Computers" seemed like a slightly misleading title for a HN post

There is also a reddit discussion here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/h8ayq8/i_made_a_min...](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/h8ayq8/i_made_a_minecraft_mod_with_which_you_can_build/?ref_source=embed&ref=share)

NOTE: I did not make this, I just thought it was interesting.</comment>


Building a PostgreSQL load tester - <AUTHOR> https://blog.lawrencejones.dev/building-a-postgresql-load-tester/ <comment><USER2> > When faced with a technical problem it's often better to use an existing > tool than jump into writing one yourself. Having benchmarked Postgres > clusters before, I was already familiar with a tool called pgreplay that I > thought could do the job.

There is also pg_badger which can run parallel jobs:

[https://github.com/darold/pgbadger](https://github.com/darold/pgbadger)

pg_badger is also used by nancy, an benchmark experiment driver, so you can replay your logs, then change something, like add an index, and replay them again and nancy will show you to differential performance:

[https://gitlab.com/postgres-ai-team/nancy](https://gitlab.com/postgres-ai- team/nancy)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, author here! Perhaps I'm missing something, but I think pgBadger is just for log analysis, no?

pgBadger is the second component to the tool this article is about. The idea is to replay the original production logs and capture the target clusters logs while you do it. After the benchmark is complete you can pass the logs into pgBadger to understand what happened with the performance, and compare the report to one produced for production.

I hadn't come across nancy before though, this looks cool! For replay of real logs nancy appears to use the original pgreplay ([https://github.com/laurenz/pgreplay](https://github.com/laurenz/pgreplay)) so it would have been subject to the same issue that motivated building pgreplay-go, but I bet providing an option to switch between the tools would be quite easy.

<comment><USER3> I came here to basically state the same point or ask if there was a way to apply pgBadger, the log analysis tool, to this problem. I use pgBadger quite a lot, but not for your use case. Perhaps you could take the generalized versions of queries that emerge from pgBadger analysis along with query counts and fake something together, but there are significant flaws with that approach, such as sequencing, transaction relationships, etc. anyway....

There is pgbench, of course that does exist, but that probably doesn't fit your use case as it's a load tester with a contrived schema, data access pattern, queries, etc. Load testing the way you use a database is a harder problem than just doing so generically.

But here's a question: were the logs really the best option for getting that "seed" data? I wonder if some of the work done facilitating logical replication could be harnessed for such a task without some of the noise that comes with logs. I don't know that this is possible and it may simply be too intrusive, especially if you're just trying to work with existing history; but if possible and not too much admin overhead seems like this would be an easier way to accomplish something like getting a load testing data set.

<comment><AUTHOR> > were the logs really the best option for getting that "seed" data?

It seemed to us like they were. The database under test belongs to a large monolithic app that has long reads, heavy write batch jobs and is serving API traffic. My team and I struggled to find an alternative that we didn't feel was too fake, that we could really have confidence in.

Even though the preparation of the benchmark loses some realism, it's still close enough to real life that it gives you great signal on how things might degrade. Running this replay against a new cluster and simultaneously verifying the performance of a critical endpoint was the gold standard for verifying we were safe to move to the new hardware.

Whether this is all true for others, I'm really not sure. We were willing to invest the time because this was so critical for us, but it might not make sense for other people to take the same approach.

> I wonder if some of the work done facilitating logical replication

Perhaps? You could capture writes, but the majority of our traffic were reads which would have been unreported by logical replication.

> getting a load testing data set

Anecdotally, capturing the logs seemed quite easy. Just turn Postgres logging up to max and shove them on a different disk. That said, if we weren't in GCP with quick disk snapshotting then things would be a lot more awkward!

<comment><USER3> > Perhaps? You could capture writes, but the majority of our traffic were > reads which would have been unreported by logical replication.

Ah yes... of course.... forget I mentioned it... I do a lot of ERP type work so am in a very similar boat most of the time, but I'm currently doing the information architecture for a green field development project and am very focused on some other priorities, so a little work induced myopia on my part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool development. Great to have it handy in the toolbox.

I still have two concerns when simulating a workload in order to test configurations / DDL changes:

\- Processing the logs implies generating all for every query that arrives. While this may be acceptable for some cases, it is unacceptable for high volume sites. Logging every query may bring the db down. PostgreSQL needs a different mechanism to report this information, like a streamed UDP of query performance metrics.

\- Independently, this only reproduces the read workload, but what about the write one? Ideally, you should combine both. Write one may be very well captured and replayed using logical decoding / replication. But still would need a lot of coordination / tooling with the read replaying tool to achieve the desired effect.

All in all, complex problems but very important and interesting :)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a space that I am deeply interested in, but my team have not found a good pattern around this for MySQL. We currently use a combination of MySQL Slap and Jmeter, but we feel like there are better ways to do this.

Anyone have nice patterns for this around MySQL?

</comment><comment><USER6> I've extensively used pgreplay for work and I'd like to add a few things: \- I recently (May 2018) added in pgreplay a dry-run mode where it just parses the log and print stats (no replay here). This could be used to benchmark the log parsing part. \- Instead of parsing the log as you did, I would have configured PG to ouput logs in csv (it can even does both at the same time I think), would have been easier to parse \- pgreplay has a binary replay file format well documented, I would have used that in your case probably

Otherwise seems like a nice tool, I might give it a try in the future :)

</comment><comment><USER7> I've used this in the past- [https://www.hammerdb.com/about.html](https://www.hammerdb.com/about.html) Not for Postgres, but for running load tests on SQL server.

</comment><comment><USER8> there is a rumor that the US West Coast grocery store Safeway built their business, at least in part and perhaps a lot more, using Postgres in the backend. Now that Safeway has expanded to .. how many locations? How many real-estate deals? perhaps it is time to ask broadly . did this company put any resources into building a load-tester for future versions of Postgres ? using their own expertise .. mocking the data . Let's also recall that the grocery store business is not "cost conscious" ... but eternally, vigorously, to incredible degrees, penny oriented, for not months or years, but decades.. relentlessly, you might say..

ok yes - it is possible that Safeway groceries has not used Postgres to build their business, or that they have been very active and productive contributors to the project, based on the vast business resources they have accumulated over sixty years.. but.. how about it.. a load tester would kind of be useful .. now, wouldn't it. Maybe Safeway is mocking the Postgres project, not the data .. no clue.. rumor only</comment>


Ask HN: Best Movies you saw in 2012? - <AUTHOR>

Trying to make a list of all the good movies I missed. <comment><USER2> I'm kind of amazed that no one has said 'you have to watch Looper,' yet, so i'll say it: you have to watch Looper. It's the smartest time travel movie I've ever seen.

<comment><USER3> I interpret this as a roundabout way of saying you haven't seen Primer, which is smart probably to the point of alienating Joe Moviegoer, but perfect for the HN crowd. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390384/>

<comment><USER4> My favorite review of Primer:

"Anybody who claims they fully understand what's going on in 'Primer' after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I stepped out of my proverbial comfort zone and saw Holy Motors[1] at a film festival on the recommendation of a more film-literate friend.

I knew going into it that it tenuously had a plot (more of a theme) and that it would be extremely bizarre.

I haven't seen any David Lynch, but I hear it's quite similar. Holy Motors thoroughly entertained me, and I wasn't really upset at the lack of coherence. If anyone's looking for something a little out there, I can't recommend it enough.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Motors>

</comment><comment><USER6> Moonrise Kingdom is incredible. Most everything else was a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER7> Life of Pi. No contest the best movie of 2012. I saw pretty much every release, and this is one of the few that left a significant impact on me.

<comment><USER7> Also, worth seeing in 3D IMO.

<comment><USER8> Best use of 3D I've ever seen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My favorites this year were Looper, Chronicle and The Amazing Spider-man.

I also _really_ liked Prometheus when it came out, and I feel vindicated that after initially being panned, its ratings (rotten tomatoes) continually went up and leveled out at about 72% for both critics and users.

The blockbusters let me down, with the exception of Avengers (which I though was fantastic) The Dark Night Rises, Skyfall, The Bourne Legacy, and MIB III were average.

End Of Watch. Dredd. Argo all come highly recommended by friends and well reviewed on rotten tomatoes, but I did not get to see them this year.

Going to see Django tonight.

</comment><comment><USER10> I suppose it says something that Argo and Moonrise Kingdom are the only movies that I can remember really liking in 2012. Flight was also memorable, if you're into character dramas. I've also heard really good things about Searching for Sugar Man, but I didn't get a chance to see it in theaters.

Avengers was solid entertainment, but I wouldn't make a special trip to see it. Most of the other big releases with nerd draw were disappointments: Lincoln was overhyped Oscar-bait, Brave was forgettable, and the last Dark Knight movie was just bad (below average for summer movies, which is a low bar).

<comment><USER7> Agree with all of it. Especially Dark Knight Rises.

It was so bad that it reflected badly on the previous two films. I realized at the end of Rises how poor the character development was throughout Dark Knight, and getting (re)confused about the authenticity of Bruce Wayne's motivations in Batman Begins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This one in from 2003 , but I watched it this year: Memories of a Murder <http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/memories-of-murder/>. It's about the first recorded serial killer from Korea. There is also 2 amazing documentary: Into Eternity <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoyKe-HxmFk> and Nostalgia for the Light <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ok7f4MLL-Hk>

</comment><comment><USER12> Sorry this is such a long list, but I watch a lot of films.

 _"Martha Marcy May Marlene"_ \- a gentle exploration of someone broken after living with a cult

 _"Never Let Me Go"_ \- A film you can push a lot of meaning into if you want to. I love the acting of Carey Mulligan

 _"Shame"_ \- Michael Fassbender is amazing in this, as is Carey Mulligan

 _"Catfish"_ \- an amazing documentary about people who lie on the Internet, but a gentle and kind version, not the obvious "OMG THESE PEOPLE ARE NUTTERS".

 _"End of Watch"_ \- 'found footage' style police thing. I really liked it for not forcing a traditional plot and pacing on the audience.

 _"Margin Call"_ \- financial collapse and amorality. Not many films show business in any kind of sensible way. While this movie probably doesn't it avoids most of the cliches other films make.

 _"Beasts of the Southern Wild"_ \- I'm disappointed this missed out on awards.

 _"Take This Waltz"_ \- Seth Rogan playing straight might be scary, but he's pretty good as the husband who's wife falls out of love with him. Sarah Silverman makes a surprisingly good appearance (I guess her bit at the end of the film makes it worth it). Directed by Sarah Polley who is, IMO, amazing.

</comment><comment><USER13> American Reunion is good fan service if you grew up with the series.

The Hobbit is a technical marvel in HFR (everyone who says otherwise is wrong).

Life Of Pi is another technical marvel—possibly the best visuals I have ever seen.

Side by Side is an informative documentary about the rise of digital filmmaking and its cultural and technical effects (positive and negative), with polarizing opinions from tons of Hollywood folks big and small.

To Rome With Love was this year's Woody Allen entry, if that's your thing.

The Master is a shallow and empty script, but has two great performances and looks great projected in 70mm.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is a downright pleasant movie that no one saw, wherein Ewan McGregor shows that he can do a convincing Scottish accent.

Lockout was a no-holds-barred "dumb action flick" that was surprisingly fun, mostly because of Guy Pearce's performance.

<comment><USER14> Re The Master, can you please elaborate on "shallow and empty script"? My wife felt similarly ~"it's a huckster and a lost child searching, duh." I felt there was more. Re "two great performances," I presume you refer to Pheonix and Hoffman -- agreed, and add Amy Adams. It was shot beautifully. Jonny Greenwood's score was enough on its own to see it a second time.

<comment><USER13> The Master chose to follow the most uninteresting character: an alcoholic prone to streaks of violence with no real personality, motivations, or character arc. And there was a potentially extremely interesting character with his own cult right around the corner in Lancaster Dodd, but both were largely unexplored aside from the early "debate" with a skeptic and the admittedly excellent "processing" scene. There was a throwaway line from Dodd's son saying his dad makes everything up, but Dodd's psyche and motivations were never explored. It's hard to even say whether he sincerely believes his stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cabin in the woods

<comment><USER16> This is not the movie you think it will be and I think most people give it a cursory lookover and think it's a generic horror film. It is more than just a cheap horror film and definitely worth watching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This year seems to be the year of really really brilliant cinematography.

Skyfall was breathtakingly beautiful in terms of cinematography. It had a solid story too, unlike Prometheus, which while beautiful, falls short on story.

The Dark Knight Rises concludes the series very well. It was well shot, and barring a few continuity issues, it was by all means a very good movie.

Argo was fine as a story, also very well made and I liked it.

One surprise this year which I absolutely loved was Pitch Perfect. My partner had dragged me into an early viewing of the movie, and I didn't know much about it. So yeah, good surprise.

As for the rest, meh. I mean Spiderman and Avengers were fun, but it is not as memorable as the ones I mentioned above. So was Looper

</comment><comment><USER18> Here[1] is the list of the highest grossing movies in 2012 thanks to Wikipedia. Among those top ten, the only one I saw was Dark Knight Rises and while it wowed me when I watched it, it is just about meh in hind sight.

Prometheus[2] was confusing as [redacted] but if you like the alien franchise[3], you should watch this one as well.

[1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_in_film>

[2]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_(film)>

[3]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise)>

<comment><USER19> There's a point in TDKR where Alfred is talking about pure evil rising out of a pit, ostensibly referring to Bane, yet Nolan keeps his camera focused on the batsuit rising out of the depths. Considering that Batman is essentially the villain of the saga, it is as nice a detail as Nolan's hero Gotham needs/deserves line from TDK, and just one of many such touches in the movie.

So whether it constituted the best film of the year is debateable (I personally think so), but TDKR had hands-down the smartest script of the year. Everything from its character doubles, to its non-obvious symbolism (St. Swithin for the win!) and its political and literary allusions (Tale of Two Cities, etc.) gave it real intellectual punch. Would that we get a lot more films like it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I just watched "Les Miserables" and I thought it was great.

I'm usually mostly a Sci-fi and action adventure fan, and I didn't have high expectations, but it was one of the best movies I've seen this year. I think it deserves to win several Academy Awards.

</comment><comment><USER21> The two you need to watch:

\- Get the Gringo

\- Grabbers

The rest:

\- Cloud Atlas was...interesting.

\- Pitch Perfect was the absolute worst, but hilarious. In a similar vein: For a Good Time, Call.

\- Argo and Beast of the Southern Wild are overhyped in my opinion.

\- Life of Pi was great (make sure to read the book at some point).

\- End of Watch was better than advertised.

\- Dark Knight Rises was a solid conclusion to the series.

\- Ted was funny, but doesn't work so well on repeat views.

\- Other movies you should watch: The new Total Recall. Safety Not Guaranteed. Lawless. The Amazing Spiderman (awesome series reboot)

</comment><comment><USER22> Cloud Atlas was the best one I saw this year.

<comment><USER23> I've heard some the music from that movie, and it's really good. Haven't seen the actual movie yet though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> My favorite movies of the year:

1\. Moonrise Kingdom

2\. Beasts of the Southern Wild

3\. Argo

4\. Life of Pi

5\. Amour (Only NY and LA for now)

6\. Monsieur Lazhar

</comment><comment><USER25> Moonrise Kingdom was the best. The Hobbit was great.

Looper was good, but the ending wasn't logically consistent I think.

Since no one has mentioned it, I would recommend Dredd. It was a good movie going experience. Don't know it would make good viewing outside a cinema, though.

Cloud Atlas was interesting, but not as insightful as it was made out to be.

</comment><comment><USER26> since no one mentioned it: "beasts of the southern wild".

A few interesting documentaries, but I am not sure when they came out.

</comment><comment><USER27> Django Unchained - Cloud Atlas - Looper - Argo - Easily the best movies I saw this year, they were all really, really awesome.

</comment><comment><USER28> I can think of 4 movies I saw this year so far that I enjoyed:

1\. The Dark Knight Rises

2\. The Amazing Spiderman

3\. Bourne Legacy

4\. Brave

However, I did catch a few hidden gems I had never before seen or heard of on Netflix Instant. My absolute favorites are "Morning Glory", "The Answer Man", and "Beware the Gonzo".

</comment><comment><USER29> I have to mention We Are Legion, a documentary about Anonymous.

Website

<http://wearelegionthedocumentary.com/>

Watch on Youtube

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_541KmGxGs>

</comment><comment><USER30> These are some of the movies that I watched and liked in 2012:

The Grey

Prometheus

The Avengers

The Dark Knight Rises

Skyfall

The Hobbit

And these are some of the good ones I would like to watch:

Argo

Lincoln

Looper

Life of Pi

Zero Dark Thirty

</comment><comment><USER31> My favourites, not in order:

Cabin in the Woods

Looper

The Hobbit

House at the End of the Street

Can't remember much else really. Also seen Twilight but I'd only really recommend that as a date movie.

</comment><comment><USER32> Seven Psychopaths was fun.

<comment><USER33> It has Tom Waits in it, main reason for me to pay for the cinema ticket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> "Ruby Sparks" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839492/>

worth mentioning "The Campaign" and "Paranorman"

</comment><comment><USER35> The Dark Night Rises and Skyfall are the two standout movies of the year. I haven't seen The Hobbit yet, but I presume that this would also make the year's short list.

</comment><comment><USER36> Barfi! <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2082197/>

Indian movie with a minor twist. Great movie.

</comment><comment><USER37> Moonrise Kingdom, The Artist and Iron Lady (which I really wasn't expecting to like). Honourable mention for Ruby Sparks, for its originality.

</comment><comment><USER38> The Avengers The Dark Knight Rises

(Okay, now I feel like a nerd in the purest sense of the term...)

</comment><comment><USER32> The Master

</comment><comment><USER39> Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2, How could anyone miss that?

</comment><comment><USER40> Neighborhood Watch was hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER41> The Intouchables

</comment><comment><USER42> life of pi</comment>


Pixel 3 night mode vs. iPhone Pro night mode - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/sricola/status/1177005857801981954 <comment><USER2> A useful comparison but I feel like the real test is to compare to whatever the new Pixel 4 night mode is going to have. Apple had a year to play catchup with the Pixel 3

<comment><USER3> For sure although the iPhone 11 sets a pretty high bar.

<comment><USER4> To be fair, pixel 3 destroyed iPhone X in night mode when first released (they did a comparison during the keynote, which is very unusual for Google [1]). Everyone said this could not be topped...

11 months later and Pixel 3 is probably not even in top 5.

[1] [https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/11/night-sight-seeing-in- dark...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/11/night-sight-seeing-in-dark-on- pixel.html?m=1)

<comment><USER5> > Everyone said this could not be topped...

Long exposure photography has been around for decades. The tricky part isn't even hardware so of course it was going to be equalled and surpassed. The pixel hardware wasn't amazing when it was first released and now it's quite outdated. It's a matter of stitching pictures and blending them seamlessly, google was the first to apply that on phones because they had the edge in software / visual machine learning.

It's technically amazing and very useful but it's not black magic either, apple taking 2 generations of phones to catch up is the most surprising part to be honest.

<comment><USER4> This is not long exposure photography.

It's new type of sensors + lots of AI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice, now try to get the pixel shot in focus...

</comment><comment><USER6> It doesn't look like 'night' anymore.

</comment><comment><USER4> Looking forward to pixel 4 then :)</comment>


Intel SSD 750 PCIe SSD Review: NVMe for the Client - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/9090/intel-ssd-750-pcie-ssd-review-nvme-for-the-client <comment><USER2> The 1.2TB model uses _22 watts_ for writing at 1200MB/s (54MB per second per watt). I guess performance comes at a power cost.

As a comparison, the 1TB Samsung 850 Evo uses 5.7W maximum for writing at 520MB/s (91MB per second per watt).

<comment><USER3> In fact it's generally true that for a given architecture and silicon technology, power increases as the square of speed.

<comment><USER4> It's usually voltage as the square factor for CMOS. The equation I remember from VLSI is:

      Power = (Load Capacitance) * (Voltage)^2 * (Frequency)

In order to run at a faster speed you frequently have to increase your core voltage which causes a square increase.

<comment><USER5> Incidentally 1 farad * 1 volt ^ 2 * 1/s is 1 watt. So this formula seems accurate :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does this remind anyone of the "Hard Card", from Plus Development? They were 3.5" hard drives mounted on an ISA card way back in the day. It's funny how technology is sometimes cyclical.

<comment><USER7> Ha, indeed! I had a 20 MB Hard Card in my 12 MHz 286.

Both those numbers are but a quaint memory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ugh, I really wish the marketing people would pick different name for this evolution of SSD drives then NVMe. At least the NVM part stating: Non-Volatile Memory.

The current iteration of what we call NVM is just SSD on PCIe busses so they are not bound by the speed of SATA/SAS controllers.

Maybe it's just me but when I think NVM I think of Non-Volatile Memory something like RAM that doesn't go blank when you hit the power button. And like RAM can be mapped into (kernel or user) address space. And access to them go through processor caches (L2 or L3) strait into NVM.

The current SSD+ drives very much behave like the block devices of the old, just with a different host interface. Most importantly they can't be directly memory mapped without going through the page cache. That still leaves a lot of performance on the table (double copy, requiring RAM for page cache versus working set).

<comment><USER2> _Most importantly they can 't be directly memory mapped without going through the page cache._

It's been _ages_ since I last did anything with PCI MMIO, but it was definitely possible to map PCI devices' own memory into a process's address space using /dev/mem, and into kernel space as well. Is there no longer an equivalent concept for PCIe? Or was MMIO always attached to real RAM?

<comment><USER9> MMIO still exists but memory-mapping NAND flash isn't a good idea. Stalling the processor for ~50 us on a cache miss is likely to lead to horrible performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why are PCIe SSD drives so much more expensive per GB compared to the SATA ones?

1TB SSD is now around $350-360 on Amazon.

<comment><USER9> Because their performance is much higher.

<comment><USER10> I'm pretty sure SATA SSD performance is bottlenecked by the SATA bandwidth. It's the same flash inside.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps, but the PCI card also contains it's own controller instead of using the existing SATA controller in the box. Not a complete justification for the added cost, but even if the flash is the same, getting it connected is more hardware than a SATA device needs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> idle power consumption: 4 Watts - way too much for my taste... I can understand it needing 22 Watts during high speed writes but why this much during staying idle ?

for comparison I checked my external 2TB WD Passport 0820 harddisk - it uses 2.11 Watts when streaming HD video...

<comment><USER13> I agree, that's some high idle power consumption. If I had to hazard a guess, it's the controller aggressively maintaining the charge of the flash cells [1]. Samsung released a fix, not too long ago, for a bug with flash cells losing charge for their 840 and 840 Evo SSD line [2], so I imagine it's a delicate process to get right. Are the other NAND controllers less aggressive and/or more efficient with this process? I don't know. I assume it's the same flash cells as the SATA drives but with a PCIe-oriented controller, so I hardly expect them to lose charge any faster than the SATA counterparts.

[1] [http://www.purestorage.com/resources/introduction-to- flash-m...](http://www.purestorage.com/resources/introduction-to-flash- memory.html)

[2] [http://www.anandtech.com/show/8617/samsung-releases- firmware...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/8617/samsung-releases-firmware- update-to-fix-the-ssd-840-evo-read-performance-bug)

<comment><USER14> That was due to the TLC NAND Samsung used, correct? More cost-effective but not as durable as MLC NAND (which is what most SSDs, including this new Intel drive, use).

Incidentally, while Samsung did release a firmware update for the 840 EVO to mitigate the problem, AFAIK they never fixed the original 840. (840 Pro owners need not worry, as it used MLC NAND and was not affected.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow. Pretty me too product from Intel. They even priced and sized it to not clash with Samsung, because it has nothing to make you pick it over SM951.

Not to mention you can cram SM951 into a laptop.

</comment><comment><USER16> Want!

<comment><USER17> That's an understatement. It's unbelievable to me how quickly we have moved from <100MB/sec drives being the norm to (relatively) inexpensive 1000+MB/sec drives with incredibly fast seek times.

Now if only the laptop manufacturers would include SSDs in more mainstream models. It's depressing walking into the average computer retailer and seeing practically every shelf stuffed with slow HDs and salesmen trying to pitch the huge importance of minor differences in processor speed.

<comment><USER18> _It 's depressing walking into the average computer retailer and seeing practically every shelf stuffed with slow HDs and salesmen trying to pitch the huge importance of minor differences in processor speed_

As far as I can tell the computer market is bifurcating or has bifurcated into people who give a shit about their experience and will pay for better (in which case they tend to buy Apple, or some select PC brands like Lenovo (until the certificate fiasco) or the Dell XPS 13"), and people who buy solely on price. I can't imagine many sophisticated buyers going through a conventional retail store, and, furthermore, if price is the primary consideration then saying "It's a big drive and a cheap computer!" is better than trying to explain why an SSD is $50 more or whatever.

<comment><USER19> _I can 't imagine many sophisticated buyers going through a conventional retail store_

Currently, but would it not be possible to fix them? How profitable are SSDs for example?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Selling Your Soul to Work at Apple  - <AUTHOR> http://it-jobs.fins.com/Articles/SBB0001424052970203718504577180913702818478/Selling-Your-Soul-to-Work-at-Apple

<comment><USER2> I think Apple could have reached the pinnacle of its life. Maybe it is not such a great idea to start there now. It certainly has a few more productive years to go, but it feels like the decline might be in sight.

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of people get the same feeling. However, I feel they would still be at their pinnacle but lose it's "Steve Jobs" charm.</comment></comment>


Is It Possible to Create a Decentralized Internet? - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/is-it-possible-to-create-a-decentralized-internet-this-startup-and-its-farmers-think-so-ey2e3ycf <comment><USER2> I don't know; do you want to build services that depend on random hardware on residential internet connections, hoping they stay online, while exposing metadata to the entire WAN or slowing it down with some kind of mixnet protocol?

To me, edge networks make more sense. Distribute your services across datacenters close to your users.</comment>


Ask HN: What is your relationship with Imageboards? - <AUTHOR> 4chan, 8chan etc. <comment><USER3> I think more sites, particularly forums and social media sites, should allow for "anonymous by default" engagement and autokilling threads. I like that I can just show up, participate and leave and not have to sell my soul for the privilege.

Other than that... meh. The memes, piss-taking and toxicity make them all but worthless for anyone who wants to have an intelligent conversation.

</comment><comment> rc-1140 Love 'em, hate 'em, miss 'em. 4chan was amazing for years, somewhere until about 2011 where things started going downhill. 2012 was the last year where the "good" content outweighed the bad. There were some cool/niche/offshoot boards that were fun in their own ways, like 7chan, 420chan, Krautchan, Fighting Amphibians. That's where I learned all sorts of power user and computer stuff over the years. Even got to play in a site-famous tournament at one point. I still keep in contact with the people I've met on some of those imageboards. I lurk a few boards that are worth tolerating these days on 4chan, and use other ones merely as resource/content aggregation, like /mu/ for new music.

Places like 8chan, Lainchan, Postbox, etc. are awful. 8chan was cool for like 6 months because it had all of the tinges of old 4chan, but it got co-opted by different groups until it became the alt-right hugbox. Lainchan is just filled with a few different caricatures of previously-underage or mentally unsound 4chan /g/ posters. One thing they all seem to have in common is pretentiousness and a burning need to constantly participate in actual - <USER2> humorous - one-upsmanship; they must always be better than the "normies" (an irony here being that they use the new-school "politically correct" version of the parent word) and even the people they deem "worthy" of participating in discussion. They often make spinoff after spinoff, IRC channel after IRC channel, and then cry about having no place to discuss what they want despite having a wasteland of dead spinoff boards and IRC channels. Point out that they're free to discuss their topic on $theLatestSpinoff, and they'll cry about whoever isn't part of their in-group "ruining" their space. It's tiresome and they're not worth any nuggets of information they may hold.

There are one or two up-and-coming imageboards that actually have amicable content and decent users, though.

<comment><USER4> What are the up-and-coming boards? Lainchan seemed ok for a while but users are exactly as you described. Also, it's pretty much dead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Where can I msg you? There's one Imageboard which currently stands out

<comment><USER5> Tell me about is as well? firstname.lastname@example.com

I miss the _feeling_ I had about the internet when discovering 4chan a decade ago...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 4chan is my guilty pleasure. I don't use social media. So 4chan is my "scrolling while waiting for the bus".

I mostly lurk. And It's mostly for "the lulz". But once in a while you get big nuggets of wisdom and insight. It's "a thousand monkeys in typewriters" in practice.

</comment><comment><USER7> I was only ever a regular on the (small, now-defunct) irreality.me imageboard. The most activity I ever performed on 4chan was that time I wrote a bot that responded to every post on /pol/ with a random section of Society of the Spectacle (in an arguably successful attempt to improve the quality of discussion there).

I find imageboards to be interesting from a media-studies perspective, though. They're a clear case (even clearer than twitter) of design influencing user behavior in a way that eventually generalizes outside of the platform. Three countries have shockingly similar & arguably totally distinct right-wing authoritarian populist movements that sprung up from totally distinct popular imageboards during the same period, & there are probably more that I'm simply not aware of. So, serious study of the kinds of behaviors imageboards encourage & highlight (and serious study of under what conditions those behaviors generalize) is potentially really interesting. It's one of those things that makes me wish I was a real social scientist instead of just a programmer with hobbies.

</comment><comment><USER8> Far in the rear-view mirror</comment>


Ask HN: Who's using bzr for version control? - <AUTHOR>

I see a lot of push behind git and to a lesser degree, hg. However, bzr remains the read-headed stepchild of the DVCS world. Why? <comment><USER2> I find bzr and hg weird for the same reason that I never understood svn: I don't know what the hell they're doing.

Because git is simple in its basic structure I feel like I can understand what's going on. With bzr/hg/svn, I just have no idea what's going on, I have no idea what the tool means by words like "checkout" and "revert" and "update"; they're just too vague.

</comment><comment><USER3> I contribute to Mixxx (<http://mixxx.org>) and it's our VCS. When we made the switch from SVN, we did it mainly for the very nice integration with Launchpad. Without Launchpad it wouldn't be worth the trouble. Also, it's really dog slow compared to git, especially on our very large codebase.

<comment><USER4> How big of a codebase? And is it all code or a mix of binary data? Finally, have you benchmarked the differences? I'm kinda curious how hg/git/bzr stack up on a real world large codebase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Beats me.

git has a too-steep learning curve and is just cryptic and hostile.

svn is too intolerant of slight mistakes, leading to difficult-to-fix situations, and merges don't work very well.

We tried both at my day job, and are now very happy on bzr. I also found it really nice for my single-developer spare-time project.

</comment><comment><USER6> Because there is no GitHub for bzr. I think git gained it's popularity mainly because of GitHub and Launchpad is just not good enough.

P.S. Let me know if somebody's going to build a "BzrHub".

</comment><comment><USER7> git has a specific poster child: the linux kernel

for a while, google used hg.

what high profile project uses bzr and advertises it?

I know the response sounds like a chicken-egg problem, and it is. To gain traction, a prolific company or project needs to use bzr.

<comment><USER2> Canonical endorses bzr, and uses it for Ubuntu and it's the only supported system on Launchpad afaik.

<comment><USER7> How many people develop for ubuntu?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I believe Canonical use bzr for all their internal projects like Launchpad.</comment>


Ask HN: Best places to submit PR and news releases? - <AUTHOR>

Where have you had luck with PR and news release submission?<p>Anyone used things like PitchPigeon before? What about traditional venues like PR NewsWire? <comment><USER2> I have good reason to believe that you're better off not using a service at all. I do specifically know that some press outlets make it very difficult to submit press releases over the Internet.

It's not hard at all to build a list of press release emails and URLs of submission forms manually. I've got a whole bunch of them, however they are written by hand in a notebook - I don't have an electronic copy yet. I'd be happy to snail mail you a photocopy, or maybe I could email you a scan.

The problem is that there are a lot of folks who have a great deal to gain by getting press coverage. The press only wants to run stories on what is truly newsworthy, but for a low, low price the press release distribution services can spam the bejeezus out of the newspapers.

Consider snail-mailing hardcopy press releases. For local press outlets, show up in person to hand the hardcopy press release to their customer service desk - I've actually done that.

Put a "Press" or "Press Information" link in a very obvious place on your own website. Put your release there as well. Also provide a "Press Kit", which has moderately hires graphics of your logo, key people at your company, of your product, screenshots, and happy, smiling people who are able to get so much more out of life as a result of using your product or service.

What I'm trying to say is not that you shouldn't issue a press release, but that you should distribute it yourself, so as to give it that personal touch. You're likely to get a far better response out of the press if you do so.

Put some effort into composing your press release. If you're not a good writer yourself, hire one, or get a literary-minded friend to volunteer to write it for you. Keep it as brief and as compelling as possible - it's important to understand that editors read vast quantities of press releases. They are not likely to read your entire document before deciding to run your story.

Have a read of some press releases that others have written, both successful ones, and if you can find any, unsuccessful ones.

</comment><comment><USER3> I and the other editors at ProgrammableWeb.com will gladly consider press releases or even less formal announcements in the way of emails or pointers to blog posts so long as the announcement is relative to our web/mobile developer-focused audience. We can't get to everything, but one of my growing areas of emphasis coming into 2015 is to develop better relationships with our various constituencies and "announcements" are one way we discover new contacts.

David (editor in chief, PW)</comment>


Kickstarter wouldn't be allowed on Kickstarter - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/help/guidelines

<comment><USER2> And you can't buy a supermarket in Walmart. People have covered their asses like this for years, not allowing others to come along and promote a competitive concept within their store/site.

This is no surprise.</comment>


Google now activates 500,000 Android devices every day - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/06/28/google-now-activates-500000-android-devices-every-day/

<comment><USER2> I think there are at least 1 billion _phones_ sold per year from all the companies right now. That means that 5 years from now when Android phones could be sold at under $50, and with a market share of ~50%, there could be at least 1.5 mil Android phones activated per day, or 500-600 mil per year. So the potential for growth is 3x bigger than today.

The only requirement for this to happen is for Android to reach and maintain 45-50% market share, and it looks like it will. Also several research companies have stated that Android will have around 45% market share in 2015, even if WP7 gets to have 20% market share as well (and I still have a hard time figuring how that would happen, but anyways).

EDIT: 1.4 billion mobile phones sold in 2010.</comment>