Ask HN: log on, drop out? - <AUTHOR> Like a lot of HN hackers, I've been living and working in a big metropolitan area for a while (S.F. in my case). This certainly has its upsides, but also some serious downsides. It's expensive so being unemployed for even a short time can be risky. It's also crowded and noisy and distracting.
So, I've been considering selling everything, quitting the 9-5 and moving somewhere cheap, where I can live for $1,500 a month or less total. I've got savings to tide me over for a couple of years and I think this might give me the time and quiet I'd need to do some more serious hacking on my own projects and also to just disengage from all the urban energy for a while. I think I could do enough freelance work to at least break even and probably do better and I could charge less than people that need to pay S.F. or New York rents.
There are a lot of places in the West, for instance, where you can rent a big apartment or even a house for ~ $500 a month and live next to some really beautiful national parks, forests etc.
Anybody else had similar thoughts? Are there pitfalls I'm overlooking? Anybody else had dreams of a hacker Walden Pond? <comment><USER3> Funnily enough, I'm in maybe the opposite boat as you.

I currently live in a quiet suburb of OKC, maybe 20 minutes drive from downtown. Rent is cheap, around $0.75/SF/month. Bandwidth isn't terrible, but it's not like SF or NYC.

I'm a freelancer. If I wanted to, I could probably cover all my "necessary" expenses working one or two days a week. Instead, I work 6 days a week, and save almost all my money. I want to move to SF or NYC once I have some serious savings.

To be honest, I just don't like the culture here. Although I've grown up here and have friends, gf, etc. here, "professionally" I feel alone. I'm one of only very few tech-minded entrepreneurs. I hack alone. It's not uncommon for me to go 48 hours without leaving my apartment.

I was in SF on business last week and it struck me at just how easy it was to get contacts and network in a place where there are other hackers. There's no awkward "So, what do you do for a living?" conversations where you have to start at "what is a web application". Even for a hacker, I am really, really independently-minded. That said, it would be great to have a partner on a couple of things. But I won't find one here.

tl;dr If it's a short-term thing and you're tight on cash--go for it! But you'll get lonely after awhile.

<comment><USER4> As someone who moved from Indiana to NYC, I applaud you. You don't realize how many opportunities you're missing until you move to a big city.

The fact that a week ago, I decided to randomly google 'tech meetups' and find one that was meeting the next morning with 20+ high quality entrepreneurs was ridiculous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What about moving to China? (I'm serious.)

I moved to China a few weeks ago and was amazed how this place is an ideal place for startups/freelancers. First, the cost of living is extremely low AND you get a similar (if not better) quality of life than what you can get in the US. I live in Shenzhen, a very young city with a booming economy and the world's capital of electronics manufacturing. The population density here is much higher than even the largest US cities, which means: a lot of 24/7 restaurants, night clubs full everyday of the week / hour of the night, convenience stores around every corner, cheap taxis (3$US can get you far), etc. There are very few foreigners but it can be a nice thing at the same time because when you see a fellow westerner, you are tempted to socialize very quickly and most of them have interesting stories to tell. Ah, I was about to forget: Chinese girls love westerners.

China is also ideal for startups. The economy here is growing very fast and the domestic market is huge. The software industry here seems to be lagging behind the US by a couple years. This means that people knowledgeable about the western market have a significant edge because they are able to foresee the trends that are likely to take place in China. That's why there are so many Chinese clones of popular western websites.

I could go on and on... Get in touch with me if you'd like to ask some questions.

EDIT: Some pictures from my apartment <http://www.flickr.com/photos/50425387@N06/>

<comment> matthew-wegner What is your immigration status? How difficult was the process? How long did it take?

<comment><USER5> It's pretty straightforward: you buy a 3 months, 6 months or 1 year visa - <USER2> questions asked. The 1 year visa costs about 700$ but I believe you can get it much cheaper if you get it from the US. It took a few hours and I bought it at the border of Hong Kong (no visa needed to go to Hong Kong for less than 3 months).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "I could charge less than people that need to pay S.F. or New York rents."

Charging less is attractive for commodities. When you are buying toothpaste or cola, there is not that much difference from one brand to the next, so having the lower price can help make the sale.

For tech work, the difference in skill among programmers can be an order of magnitude. Also, there is some information asymmetry--it is hard to know which programmers are good. So your rate is one indicator that people use to evaluate your skill level. If you are a highly skilled programmer but charge low, you may be sending a signal that you are a novice programmer.

Furthermore, if you charge too low you may attract clients from hell. These are clients that don't know much about programming and think that it's easier than it is (which is why they are looking for below market rates).

So don't charge less in order to attract clients. Rather, demonstrate (show specific evidence of) your superior skill and then charge a competitive market rate.

Also note that it might be harder to find clients if you move away from a large urban area.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm trying to do the same thing eventually.

However, have you lived in a semi rural area before? It's not necessarily Walden Pond. Half of my childhood was spent growing up in a semi rural area and most people who live there are into snowmobiles, hockey and going to church. You most likely need a car. The quaint rural villages that you really want to live in can be as expensive as living in a city. "Real" rural america is usually more like a truck stop than it is a french farming village. I'd be interested to hear where you are considering. Personally, I would like to move to Maine or Vermont, but also enjoy the city... it just gets exhausting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah that's a very good point. I've wondered about this. For example, the Southern Utah desert is my favorite place in the world and there are some very inexpensive towns to live in down there but the culture is _very_ conservative.

Main or Vermont are definitely possibilities. The winter sounds horrific but I was in Vermont in the fall a while ago and it was totally stunning. From what I understand Vermont and Maine both lean much more to the left politically so it would probably be less of a culture shock.

<comment><USER8> Let me give you four words of advice here: Stay away from winter. At least do that. Really.

<comment><USER9> ...unless you like winter. I moved to New England a few years ago, and we have three excellent seasons here: summer, fall, and winter. There is no spring, at least by any reasonable definition of spring by anybody who has lived anywhere where there is spring. But "sea and ski" is what it's about here, and, it turns out, I'm ok with that.

<comment><USER10> There is usually about 1-2 weeks of nice spring weather in May/June. I like spring in New England more than spring anywhere else, because you know that if you blink, it'll be gone. So it's time to have classes outside and enjoy the nice weather and go for a bikeride or something.

Here in California, it's spring all year round, and so we sit at our computers and ignore it most of the time.

<comment><USER9> _because you know that if you blink, it'll be gone_

Indeed, it goes away if the sun goes behind a cloud. Even better when you have kids, and have to make sure the baseball field is dry and safe for them. You'll be shoveling mud into wheelbarrows, transporting it to a mound of dirt, and coming back with wheelbarrows-full of dry dirt. Heavy work. More rain. So you do it again. You. Well, and the mosquitoes.

I agree that there are glorious days in the spring here, but in my view they don't a season make. But all-around it's still a fabulous place to live for the climate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm going to pitch for my adopted home town here: come to Grass Valley! We have a solid technological history (and, I think, future), an energetic Economic Resource Council that's trying to attract new talent, and some really beautiful spaces. Traffic flows easily, locals spend their weekends at one of several nearby rivers in the Summer, we're not far from Tahoe, etc. etc.

I visit the Bay Area often for friends and business, and I don't mind it there, much, but I'm always happy to get home again -- despite being a wanderer from 18 to 27 or so. I wholeheartedly recommend living in a beautiful natural environment.

It's not super super cheap here, but close enough: my girlfriend and I live in a great modest home with a shop and small yard, and awesome neighbors, for $795/month.

We do get snow, though.

EDIT: And if you're interested, I'd be happy to take a day out to show you around and introduce you to people.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had something a little smaller in mind but Grass Valley looks pretty nice. I should visit that part of CA sometime.

<comment><USER11> One of the things I like best about this area -- and stop me if I start to get annoying -- is that it's just about as small or big as you want.

There are plenty of places 10 or 15 minutes from town that are really isolated: little dirt roads in and out, and neighbors that you might meet but never actually see. You can pick your climate too; beautiful, chilly Tahoe forest a short drive up highway 20, or rolling grassy hills without snow in "south County". (Both of those have a lot of trouble getting broadband though.)

If you feel like you need a more social night out, Auburn is 30 minutes away, Roseville is an hour, and Sac'to is just a bit beyond that. If you get to missing the Bay Area, it's just 2.5 hours away.

Or, if you want to really get away from everyone for a bit, just drive up highway 20 to the Grouse Ridge area, or highway 49 to Downieville (another beautiful small town) or Sierra City, with some gorgeous 8,000 foot crags and lakes.

So yeah, come check it out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think that you will have less success than you think you will trying to underbid projects because of your lower cost structure. For work that is truly local (some law practices work this way), there may be an established regional price point that may indeed be lower than the wider market. But you aren't going to get lucky trying to sell iPhone dev or Django projects on the cheap; people don't buy projects that way.

The most important rule of freelancing/consulting/selling-to-companies: your customers aren't paying with their own money. There are plenty of things that are more important to them than an abstract dollar number.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an interesting observation. I have no experience in the current freelance dev market so this is definitely useful information. I guess I could at least take advantage of a cheap location in that I could live off the revenue from handful of smaller personal projects (apps, facebook games, etc), but this is definitely the big unknown in this plan.

<comment><USER7> You don't actually need to freelance. A lot of big companies these days will let you work remotely. Especially if you've got a niche set of skills that they need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm surprised the possibility of moving to the third world doesn't come up more often here. For the price of rent in SF (say 1000$ pr month) you could eat out (and eat well) everyday, party with westerners for next to nothing and hire a programmer to help you out with your work in countries like Malaysia or the Philippines. Links to blogs, posts, twitterfeeds etc. of people who have done this would, btw, be appreciated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I've considered this too actually. I was kicking around the idea of relocating to Vietnam for a while this way. I wonder how much more difficult working remotely from that far away would be. I imagine there are programmers already living in places like that that would be happy to get contracts at first-world salaries, so hopefully being a native speaker and understanding first-world cultural conventions would be enough to justify asking first-world salaries.

<comment><USER13> Professionally I think you can leverage your knowledge and first world status better if you move to a place with people who speak better english (the Philippines/India/Malaysia) and with a larger outsourcing industry (the Philippines/India/Malaysia). Unless you by native speaker mean native Vietnamese speaker, that could be an awesome advantage -- wages are for workers in the outsourcing industry is, among other things, determined by english speaking ability. When it comes to getting first world salaries where you do contracting work is probably often irrelevant -- and could also be hard to tell (depending on need for communication making time differences or unstable internet connections problematic etc.). I have been wondering about the possibility of being a sort of salesman/manager/quality controller for contracting work with Filipinos doing the grunt work. (The Philippines and Malaysia does not tax foreign sourced income, wich could go a long way to offset a decrease in pre tax income.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As an alternative to moving to a low-cost rural location, have you considered moving to a lower-cost, creative cultural city? I'm thinking specifically of Montreal, QC.

There is an incredible creative scene in the city covering, music, the arts and an amazingly supportive technology community. There are also a couple of very active seed-stage funds (though nothing compared with Silicon Valley and not much of an angel network, I'm afraid)

The best part is that cost of living in Montreal is among the lowest in North America, yet you still have access to amazing infrastructure, stunningly beautiful architecture, and beautiful friendly ladies - seriously.

I am actually looking to trade places with you and am planning to leave this wonderful city to go check out San Francisco for a bit (I have my reasons), but I cannot recommend Montreal enough. Oh, and I'll be back!

<comment><USER15> How easy is it for programmer from the U.S. to move to Montreal? Are there a fair amount of companies in the startup scene able and willing to support a visa?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I live in a rural college town--Pullman, WA.

Monthly living expenses for me can top off around $1000/mo comfortably. I have a car but don't pay for the insurance (though I do pay for repairs, gas, etc.) so $1500 is definitely doable. Rent for a single person can be had for $300-$400 with some looking, and not necessarily in bad conditions. $500 will get you plenty of space. You will likely need the car, though the town bus system is very good (supposedly one of the best small-town public transit systems in the country). It's a college town so you have a younger population than some rural communities--it's not quite "truck stop", in other words, but having a large student population has its own problems. There are quiet parts of town, where families and grad students tend to live, but the "student ghettos" have loud parties, crappy apartments, and predatory lending practices aplenty.

The next town over, Moscow, ID, is about 8 miles east. It's also a college town, plus it has a nicer downtown (complete with hippie food co-op). Haven't lived there, though.

If you like variable weather, where the temperature goes from -10 to 110 over the course of the year and you see wind, rain, snow, hail, and sunshine in the course of about the same week, you'll like the area. Speaking of seasons, summers are a lot nicer and quieter than the school year, at least in Pullman.

Not sure I'd recommend living here to anyone, to be honest, but if you want to feel isolated from the real world for awhile it'll do the job.

<comment><USER17> this general idea is good.

there are a lot of rural colleges where living is cheap and parks are close. i went to school at clemson, and the situation is quite similar.

plus, if you're working on a project and want to hire people, there are lots of students who would jump at the chance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hey, we just did exactly this!

My wife, my 2yo and I moved last month away from Paris/France to a rural location in S/W of France (1h away from Bordeaux the city).

We gathered savings before doing this, and we're doing remote consulting and working on new ideas to generate income.

We're living "low-profile" money-wise, and we're pretty happy with it.

A lot more time to give to ourselves and our kid, too :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Personally, I think that's a great thing to do, especially when your line of work uses a computer. Even if you're not working, you can still build your skills (hacking on open source, iPhone apps, web pages, whatever) while living almost anywhere. Enjoy life, avoid the stress, it's always worth it.

The main risks I can see are that it may be harder to connect with people in your industry, and you may find few jobs willing to let you work remotely (this tends to be available only to very experienced people, e.g. CTO can live in the mountains if he wants, and the company says OK). Then again, if you're trying to avoid 9-5, not even having a job for a few months is still good stress relief.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been trying to get an idea of how hard it would be to make a living entirely through remote contract work. I see a lot of job postings along these lines but I have no idea how well they pay or how competitive the contracts are. I've been salaried for 10 years now so I have no first-hand experience.

On the flip side though, I'm beginning to see the opportunity costs of a 9-5. It's hard to find the energy to spend another 3 hours hacking on my own ideas after working in front of a computer all day and the company I work for puts a lot of roadblocks in front of open-sourcing any of my work so I'm increasingly cut off from the open-source community and all the job networking that comes with it.

My ideal would be to find a way to spend no more than 6 months of the year working to pay the bills and to have the other 6 months free to work on my own ideas. I'd happily trade a lot of material comforts for the freedom and time to follow my own muse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just keep in mind that the transition will consume some time, energy, and $$ -- and don't underestimate that you'll be trading friends as well as surroundings.

</comment><comment><USER21> Anywhere in central California (the central valley to be more specific) is cheap to live compared to SF. For example Madera, Fresno, or even Clovis you can rent a decent looking 3 bedroom house with yard for about $1000/month. However, these cities are mostly agricultural and do lack the "techy" feeling you'll find in bigger cities like SF or even LA. The summers are quite humid and hot, but it's nice that it only takes about 1.5 hours to drive up to Yosemite National Park.

Clovis, CA has a population of about 100k. Recently it has been trying to bring the technology atmosphere, for example a couple of days of go we had 59daysofcode conference (<http://59daysofcode.com/>). Quite exciting!

<comment><USER22> I as well like central California, but I would be wary of the central valley unless you can deal with heat well. I live on the coast, which I love, but it is no where near as cheap as the valley, it at least has weather I can survive in. The other issue is that most large/modern cities are four to five hours away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have two recommendations for places to look into if you plan on only working for yourself, and not looking for work (unless it is remote contract work).

1\. Oaxaca, Mexico - I lived there for a year while working on a startup and loved every minute. It's really cheap (my wife and I spent about $1100 a month in total, and had a great lifestyle). It's a beautiful city, with lots to do, and is close to some great hiking and only about 5 hours from gorgeous beaches. It's also very safe these days. The drawback is being completely isolated from the tech community.

2\. Missoula, Montana - This is a great little college town about 3 hours away from where I grew up. I stayed a couple of nights there in 2008 and was blown away by how much it had changed in the time I had been gone. It's super cheap, gorgeous (great hiking, skiing, biking is all around you), the people are genuinely friendly and laid back, and there are great micro-breweries and pubs everywhere. Again, the drawback is being isolated from the tech community.

I hope you find what you're looking for.

</comment><comment><USER24> I live on <800 a month in Pittsburgh, soon to be <700\. It's actually becoming a pretty big tech city, all the major companies (Microsoft, Google, etc) have stuff going on here, and there's a lot of opportunities to make connections to help with whatever project you've got going. It's right near some great parks, and the city itself is packed with trees and grass...

<comment><AUTHOR> I hear good things about Pittsburgh but for some reason I picture it as a cold, dangerous, post-industrial city. Is this just CA bias?

<comment><USER24> It is cold in the winter, but it's also hot in the spring/summer.

It is post industrial in the sense that the economy has moved on from industrial type stuff like steel manufacturing -- the economy is very tech/service oriented, with lots of computer/tech/robotics startups and so on, as well as a large health care sector (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center runs their own health insurance which covers a significant portion of the entire state of PA). It was one of the cities least hit by the housing crisis and the economic backlash from that.

As for dangerous -- there are some bad areas, like in every city, but for the most part it's very safe. Safer than any big city in CA for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I love the idea of working from anywhere, spending time at a mountain cabin with just a cell connection. Fresh air and silence.

<comment><USER26> Start a Hacker Cabin. Seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I live about an hour north of San Francisco in Sonoma county. It's quiet, beautiful and in Sebastopol, there are only 7,700 people. You could find a place on craigslist for not a decent price... you're 10 miles from the beach and 20 minutes from several parks and beautiful areas. It's at least worth a look.

<comment><USER22> Sebastopol is pretty awesome, And it has a decent tech scene thanks to O'Reilly Media being based there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> One pitfall: why charge less? There's really no reason, and it tends to bite you back. Just charge the same.

<comment><USER29> On the other hand, why would anyone want to hire someone who works out in the boondocks? You wouldn't be able ot meet with them in person very easily.

<comment><USER16> Unless all your potential clients live in the _same_ city, you have this same problem, don't you? Or do some people only work for Bay Area-based clients or whatnot?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I hear Boulder, CO is nice. It certainly ticks a number of your checkboxes: rural, cheap, and next to a lot of beautiful parks and forests. I've never been, but it's on my short list.

<comment><USER31> Boulder is nice. I live by Horsetooth Reservoir up north in Fort Collins and love it. It's cheap and I'm surrounded by Horsetooth Mountain, Lory State Park, and Roosevelt National Forest/Rocky Mountain National Park.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Yes, but I'd have to sell this huge house first :-(

I have lived in places at the extremes of size. From NYC to where I am now: a small farm in Minnesota. It's easy to live on $1.5k in a nice part of Minneapolis. Even with a mortgage and car payment my monthly burn wasn't much more than that when I lived there.

I absolutely _love_ it out here and never want to live in a city again. But have you ever lived outside a city or suburb before? There are drawbacks that aren't immediately obvious: no or very few good restaurants if there are any at all; everything is spaced farther apart; if you have an emergency help may not be close at hand; trivial things like making sure your car has enough gas become important when there isn't a gas station on every other block.

There is a campaign running now in the Duluth area called "Offshore to the North Shore" or something like that which plays up that the North shore of Lake Superior (most beautiful area of the state, BTW) has a low cost of living and well trained people and can be cost-competitive with offshoring. Maybe they can offer some relocation literature?

Not to be a booster for my state, but Duluth, MN is the gateway to enormous tracts of unspoiled wilderness and has plenty of affordable rental housing, culture, an international seaport and a few colleges. Might be worth a look.

<comment><USER33> I currently live in Minnesota and am hoping to get better plugged into the tech scene? Do you know of any specific groups or places where I can find entrepreneurs?

<comment><USER34> Check out TECHdotMN. They have a Google calendar that is full of events. RubyMN, MinneBar, MinneDemo and CodeCamp are all good events.

<comment><USER33> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Dallas and Austin are decent choices. If you want something a little smaller and less urban, there are plenty of towns of various sizes in East Texas.

If you're looking for something _really_ out of the way, West Texas is a really good choice. For instance, Alpine, Texas is right next to Big Bend National Park. If you want something a bit more arid, try Fort Davis.

</comment><comment><USER35> Consider New Orleans. It's a bikeable, walkable city where one can get by for very little. Not the biggest tech city in the US but loads of culture and if you're considering moving to the wilderness that's probably not a big deal for you. As long as you don't mind heat or living near minorities you'll be fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure New Orleans is fascinating but I'm leaning towards something way less busy and urban. For whatever reason being close to nature limbers up my thinking and inspires my creative side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> If you go too far out in the sticks, you lose the benefits you get from interacting with other entrepreneurs in person. Try some 2nd-tier tech cities like Austin or Denver. More affordable, but you still have access to local people.

</comment><comment><USER37> There are plenty of opportunities in small towns with < 100, 000 people. These towns usually have one moderately funded community college at best. This means you have this perfect imbalance of skilled professionals and untapped small town business startups in order to conquer the landscape quite painlessly.

If things go sour in my part of the world I will definitely find some small but rapidly growing desert town to monopolize. Hope this didn't come off too cynical but it's really not that bad of an idea.

</comment><comment><USER38> $1500 a month or less is possible even in NY or SF. I'm doing it with a small shared apartment in Manhattan. (Roughly. If I ate out less I could push it down well below.)

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm going to suggest Washington state. There is no income tax, the sales tax is reasonable, and you may find the rain helps you stay focused on coding. I would suggest somewhere around Bellingham, WA - you would be 90 mins north of Seattle and 90 mins south of Vancouver, BC.

</comment><comment><USER8> Just wanted to add this, so you have another option:

Do-It-Yourself Downsize: How To Build A Tiny House [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1281092...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128109273)

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm Russian and have immigrated to Canada along with the parents 8 years ago. Woudl love to hear how viable Moscow is as far as tech entrepreneurs go.

<comment><USER41> Moscow is one of the most expensive cities in the world. It's in the state of semi-permanent traffic jam, so you'll have to live close to subway. Corruption level is high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Texas is awesome. Cheap living, fast internet, sxsw, and plenty of places to explore.

</comment><comment><USER43> please make a blog post once you figure this out AND make it work

</comment><comment><USER44> Move to Philadelphia.

Or Berlin.

Vienna's pretty great on a budget, too - that's where I live. But Berlin is cheaper and more "happening" (though Vienna is in every way nicer itself).</comment>


Ask HN: Web typography app - <AUTHOR>

Is there a web app out there that helps with web typography? Something similar to identifont, which would ask a few questions and return me a snippet of css? <comment><USER2> While it's not an app, here's a really in depth article about best practices for typography that helped me out a lot:

[http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/08/20/typographic- desig...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/08/20/typographic-design- survey-best-practices-from-the-best-blogs/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Are you looking for a snippet of CSS for the @font-face declaration like this <http://kernest.com/fontconf-com.css> ?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, not really. What I had in mind was questions like:

 _what's your average length of headers?_ what's your average number of lines per paragraph? _How many paragraphs do you have per page?_ How many columns do you have per page?

And then the app would offer me combinations of fonts, line spacing, etc for h1, h2 and p tags.

Snipppets like on here: [http://www.3point7designs.com/blog/2008/06/10-examples-of- be...](http://www.3point7designs.com/blog/2008/06/10-examples-of-beautiful- css-typography-and-how-they-did-it/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think you'll find <http://www.typetester.org> helpful</comment>


Dual EC DRBG, The Saga Continues - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/0xabad1dea/8165378

<comment><USER2> his (daniel brown's) position seems consistent to me - it may have had a backdoor, but it wasn't obvious that it did, it was documented how to avoid the risk, and it's the only prng with a proof (apparently - i wouldn't know...). why are we so angry with him? is he the nsa? did he get the money? he seems to work for certicom, not rsa.</comment>


Firefox Will Use Memory Allocator From FreeBSD  - <AUTHOR> http://ventnorsblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/beta-3.html

<comment><USER2> I'm tempted to compile other applications with jemalloc</comment>


Bitbucket is down - <AUTHOR> http://status.bitbucket.org

<comment><USER2> This is the second outage I've seen them suffer in less than a week. Does anyone know if it's being attacked?

</comment><comment><USER3> And up again. The mouse fell out of the wheel.

<comment><USER4> Not fully the website and API are still down which effect tools like tower

<comment><USER3> The website was accessible again when I posted that, but you're right, it's gone again.

I was foolishly optimistic.

<comment><USER4> Haha well it's up again now touch wood

<comment><USER5> Up and down... Like wood.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to think on the spot and persuade? - <AUTHOR>

One of the biggest flaws I have is not being able to think and argue on the spot. I suspect it has to do with how grown I've become to Internet forums, which gave me the freedom to go back and edit what I wrote.
Often times when I get into a heated debate, I get flustered from being in the moment. But then I'll usually think of a really good counter-argument like thirty minutes later. Is there any sort of training or maybe any books that I could look into to help me get over this?
I feel this is a very fundamental skill to have anywhere. Thanks! <comment><USER2> I have no idea what I'm talking about, but if you get lost, you can frame your argument in an analogy and build your way up from there. As long as your argument is rational, you can find parallel examples in almost any topic (especially topics you're deeply familiar with!). This kind of arguing doesn't rely on fact, but broad general concepts, which should give you a lot of leeway for where you want to take your discussion.

</comment><comment><USER3> Practice should help; there are debate clubs for that. Or try debating politics - it's mostly useless, but you'll never lack willing opponents. Knowing your subject very well helps, too. Staying calm is always useful; I have no recommendation on how to achieve that, though (I never really had to work for that.)

</comment><comment><USER4> I have seen many people have this issue. Being very smart and not being able to construct and argument on the feet. I always advise them to join Toastmasters. I'm a member and it has greatly improved my persuasive abilities.

</comment><comment><USER5> The trick to speaking well is practice. Talk through your arguments in a safe calm environment, speak freeform without stopping, record and watch your practice sessions. If that sounds like too much work, try Toastmasters.

<comment><USER5> Better yet, have long conversations with people who speak well and with whom you resonate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Expect to be challenged when conversing. When speaking, prepare your next point. Appear calmer and more confident than the other person. Relax.</comment>


Why isn't anyone building order fulfillment app/tool for Kickstarter campaigns - <AUTHOR>

After looking at a bunch of kickstarter campaigns that got funded, the same trends seem to occur. Order fulfillment is really bad. Doing a quick google search, the only 'competition' I see is:
http://www.fulfillrite.com/Kickstarter-Order-Fulfillment.htm
and even then, I mean... Examples of backers who would like their product
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/trygger/trygger-camera-case-iphone-4-4s-polarizing-filter/comments http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/limemouse/scanbox-turn-your-smartphone-into-a-portable-scann/comments http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hand/hand-stylus/comments food for thought <comment><USER2> At Fulfillrite we are dedicated to working with Kickstarter projects to make them successful post Kickstarter & beyond. The challenges projects face are very unique. Such as: The usually don't know what to anticipate, some projects have been been successful way beyond what the project directors imagined. The next challenge is that usually at that beyond besides order fulfillment they need advice/assistance in many other areas. From signing up to a fulfillment center to the point of shipping in most cases takes weeks/months due to manufacturing delays or otherwise. At fulfillrite we are fully devoted to helping these projects succeed in all areas we can help even if it takes weeks or months. Our team will help you with anything you need. Most order fulfillment centers will just tell you to call them back when you have the products. We look at it as teamwork - to help you succeed.

We also offer all Kickstarter projects a generous discount on all the projects order fulfillment costs since we know they are working on low margins & already share a chunk of their profits with Kickstarter.

In response dangrossman: Kickstarter doesn't offer any functionality/ features (excluding some basic help pages) to Kickstarter projects other than providing the platform to raise money. Once you're done your it's all up to you to figure out the manufacturing & logistics of running a successful business in the real world. The only option they offer for exporting your orders is a csv file export. It would be great if they would allow third party solutions such as ours to offer direct integrations, etc...

</comment><comment><USER3> There's Amazon Fulfillment. You ship them your stock and they'll pick & ship all the orders. The orders don't have to come from Amazon.com, there's a web interface and API for sending the customers to ship to. What I don't know is if you can do that without listing the product in their marketplace at all.

<comment><USER4> You certainly can use FBA without listing on the Amazon market place, it's actually covered in their FAQ:

"Can I use Fulfilment by Amazon if I don t sell on the Amazon.co.uk website? Yes. You can ship your product units to us, and we will pick, pack and deliver the items to your customers when you tell us to. This allows you to sell your products on other platforms but still take advantage of Amazon's fulfilment centres and our experience in shipping products."

Source [1]; [http://services.amazon.co.uk/services/fulfilment-by- amazon/f...](http://services.amazon.co.uk/services/fulfilment-by- amazon/faq.html)</comment></comment>


License Haiku - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000360

<comment><USER2> Cute. But if you're looking for something accurate, informative _and_ brief, try <http://www.tldrlegal.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted this because I remembered hearing it during his memorial service last week. I also thought it was cute then, and it was one of funnier moments in the service. But thinking about it again, I wonder if there's something a haiku can more memorably convey than the more useful format of tldrlegal cannot? The latter can obviously drill down to more detail. But the haiku version, while not only being more memorable, can provide the distilled context of the law in a way that a point by point summary doesn't.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of Aaron's particular haikus since I don't know the law that well. And I expect the haikus are flawed, since he wrote them when 16. Still, a pretty interesting idea of communicating complex terms, even if much of the value is in cuteness.

<comment><USER2> Yeah true. I'm no haiku aficionado, but it seems that the beauty of it partially comes from its rigid format, forcing the writer to distill something down to its essence.

On a side note, I kind of wish I knew Japanese, so I could read some authentic original haikus. Apparently they're much nicer in Japanese...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A strange thing legalese. The more words in the document, the less clear its intent.

Its like approaching a theoretical limit. A lawyer's dream contract. A document that contains all words, in all combinations, and means absolutely nothing.

</comment><comment><USER4> Reminded me of [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/04/pick-a-license- any-...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/04/pick-a-license-any- license.html)

<comment><USER2> Not sure I agree with his description of the GPL license:

 _The archetypal bearded, sandal-clad free software license. Your code can never be used in any proprietary program, ever! Take that, capitalism!_

You can totally use it in any proprietary program, you just have to provide the source as well.

<comment><USER5> I think sometimes people confuse "proprietary" with "this is mine and you can't touch and I'm going to smack you if you try."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really like these, even though the standard English interpretation of the haiku form bugs me to no end.

<comment><USER7> i find it's a lot less annoying if you simply call them "senryu"

<comment><USER6> Definitely better, although there's no obvious way to map _on_ to English. Using morae works OK, but most non-linguists don't even know what that means, much less how to count the morae in English phrases.

<comment><USER7> i'm not entirely convinced basing english poetic constraints on morae makes sense. for faux-senryu in particular, i've found that simply sticking to 5/7/5 syllables, coupled with a good feel for the rhythms of english speech, produces very pleasing results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> See also Gervase Markham's "Poetic Licence" <http://www.gerv.net/writings/poetic-licence/bsd.html>

</comment><comment><USER9> This is glorious. The haiku error methods from BeOS come to mind.</comment>


Reclassify waste to shift the nuclear landscape - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/reclassify-waste-to-shift-the-nuclear-landscape-1.22880 <comment><USER2> I'd be really happy if we could handle radioactive waste with the same level of concern we assign to things like arsenic, cadmium, mercury, or any of the other poisons we dump into open pits that'll kill you horribly and won't go away _ever_.

<comment><USER3> The LD50 for arsenic in rats is 15 mg/kg: [http://whs.rocklinusd.org/documents/Science/Lethal_Dose_Tabl...](http://whs.rocklinusd.org/documents/Science/Lethal_Dose_Table.pdf)

The LD50 for strontium 90 in hamsters (90 day survival) is 2 millicuries per kilogram: [http://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.2307/3573895?code=rrs- si...](http://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.2307/3573895?code=rrs-site)

Given strontium 90's specific activity of 142 curies/gram ([https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/196800...](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19680020487.pdf)), in mass terms that's 14 micrograms/kg for the LD50. Gram for gram, strontium 90 is about 1000 times as acutely deadly as arsenic, or 40 times as acutely deadly as the chemical warfare agent sarin. If you look at plants built to dispose of sarin, they take something a lot closer to "spent nuclear fuel" levels of precaution than "dump it in a pit" precaution.

I agree with you that safety precautions should be by the numbers instead of by psychological reaction, but in a numbers-based regulatory scheme I'd say that we are in much more dire need of increased caution for "mundane" poisons than in need of decreased caution for exotic ones like chemical warfare agents or nuclear fission products.

<comment><USER2> I believe that nerve agent disposal sites you can find pictures of are all on- site setups at the depots where the weapons were manufactured and stored. In many cases they were disposing of stockpiles of deployment-ready munitions. Care there was not a matter of safety and surety, it was a matter of arms control and international treaty. Field-expedient disposal in an ongoing military situation, on the other hand:

        It can be, though not without some problems. Mauroni describes a
        process used in Iraq in 1991. "We'd come across a bunch of
        rockets, and you suspect there might be some chemicals in them,"
        he says. "The field expedient way, if you're in a hurry, is to
        blow it up in place." Army Explosive Ordinance Demolition teams
        would use a 10-to-1 ratio of explosives to suspected chemical
        weapons.

[https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-09/fyi- chemic...](https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-09/fyi-chemical- weapons-and-disposal#page-2)

And yes, there _are_ radiologicals that need to be dealt with more carefully than others. I'm not denying that. 90Sr is about the worst I can think of - its half-life is _just_ short enough for it to be immediately dangerous but also just long enough that you can't stuff it in a box and come back in a year. And I agree that you'd have to treat it with the same immediate care that you would dimethylmercury or VX.

The thing is, 90Sr is the worst radiological I can think of. US regulations partition radioactive waste into either low-level or high-level, low-level being things like the gloves the doctor wears when handling the radiotherapy drugs and everything else being high-level. And guess how you have to handle high-level waste? That's right, you have to treat every single kilogram of marginally neutron-activated steel like it's made of 90Sr. That's _insane_.

(that and, well, if you had a lump of 90Sr, burying it in a hole for a million years is a stupid way to deal with it. 30-year half-life; throw it in a shed on a military base, if the US government collapses mail it to another government to stick on their military base. repeat for 300 years and done. if there're no stable governments to mail it to, you have bigger problems.)

<comment><USER3> Per US NRC definitions,

 _High-level radioactive waste or HLW means: (1) Irradiated reactor fuel, (2) liquid wastes resulting from the operation of the first cycle solvent extraction system, or equivalent, and the concentrated wastes from subsequent extraction cycles, or equivalent, in a facility for reprocessing irradiated reactor fuel, and (3) solids into which such liquid wastes have been converted._

[https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc- collections/cfr/part060/p...](https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc- collections/cfr/part060/part060-0002.html)

Given that all American irradiated reactor fuel is still young enough to retain substantial portions of its original strontium 90 (and other medium- lived fission product) content, it doesn't seem like an overly broad definition to me. Maybe in practice things like slightly radioactive steel ends up lumped in with spent fuel? If so, yes, that's bad.

I agree that we don't need to bury spent nuclear fuel in permanent geological repositories. Don't try to chemically reprocess the waste, bury it beyond observation, or otherwise convert a simple, compact, inexpensive problem into a more diffuse, complicated, expensive one. Monitored/guarded sheds is fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it possible to transform this stuff into something not more dangerous than the original uranium ore that was mined. And then put it back in the ground where we found it? Surely it was radio-active before humans got to it in the first place...

</comment><comment><USER5> Another solution would be to invest in research on how to make the really nasty stuff with half-life times > 100 years be less dangerous.

The less we leave to our children, the better.

<comment><USER6> A fast breeder reactor can do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just wish people would realize how much waste producing solar cells causes. At least nuclear waste is largely stored on site and uranium isn't mostly supplied by child slavery. It really was our only chance at clean energy.

<comment><USER5> > uranium isn't mostly supplied by child slavery.

Well, it's not child slavery, but lots of mining happens in regions with indigenous people, it's not exactly healthy for surrounding people and e.g. in Niger there have been scandals about worker treatment ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_debate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_debate)).</comment></comment>


GATES: Official Movie Trailer [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgSqbwIExGQ

<comment><AUTHOR> Forget about Jobs...It's all about Gates!</comment>


It's Time to stop using the word 'Retard' - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-cauldron/its-time-to-stop-using-the-word-retard-7389f4fbaeed

<comment><USER2> It is hard to argue against this article, but I feel a lot of social capital to accomplish these things was burned up on freaking out about terms like flipbook, chink in armor, niggardly, master-slave IDE interface, black hole, etc. It has now become a regular occurrence among my friends to say "that's racist" when something even refers to race, _or sounds like it does_ for instance.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a boy, the word "retard" was part of my vocabulary. I used it to describe concepts that were dumb or irrational. I continued to use it into adulthood without thinking. I did not realize how offensive it was until my girlfriend called me out on it. So now I just use the word "dumb." I hope I am not offending any groups now.

<comment><USER4> Surely you will be upsetting people who, for whatever reason, are unable to speak?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I sometimes wonder whether Americans realise that "retard" is pretty much hate-speech in England.

If you're the kind of person who doesn't say things like "I was Jewed on that deal" you should probably avoid using the word "retard" unless you're talking about watch mechanisms.

</comment><comment><USER6> Pretty soon all descriptive words are going to be deemed bad and banned.

Whatever happened to "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me"?

<comment><USER7> Other than it being untrue? Words have definitely hurt me. Words have made me cry. Words have made me yell out in frustration and anger. Words have also made me smile, and laugh, and cheered me up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> And the euphemism treadmill continues...

<comment><USER3> idiot -> moron -> retard -> special -> mentally challenged -> person with learning difficulties</comment></comment>


Jim Coplien: DCI Architecture, OOP, Agile and User Interface - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/interviews/coplien-dci-architecture

<comment><USER2> Additional DCI links:

<http://www.artima.com/articles/dci_vision.html>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data,_Context,_and_Interaction>

</comment><comment><USER3> More links on this page:

[http://www.leansoftwarearchitecture.com/home/more-online- res...](http://www.leansoftwarearchitecture.com/home/more-online-resources)</comment>


Google Begins Charging for the Embedding of the Maps API - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/apis/maps/faq.html#tos_pricing

<comment><USER2> Just judging from the table it seems like your usage would have to be pretty excessive to get charged. 25,000 map loads per day == someone loading an embedded map on your site every 3.4 seconds. The site also says they aren't going to stop your maps loading or display a warning automatically or if it's a one-day thing (i.e. your site gets slashdotted) but only if it's continuously excessive. Very few folks need to worry about this and those who are getting 25,000+ hits per day on an embedded map alone can probably afford the $4 per 1,000 additional loads. I just don't see too many folks this will actually hurt, and I can't imagine it costs Google $0 for your 25,000 loads per day they're giving you for free either.</comment>


Show HN: Sourcetrail – Visual Source Explorer Now Supports Python - <AUTHOR> https://www.sourcetrail.com/ <comment><USER2> Looks very interesting, but seems to be excruciatingly slow at indexing Python projects. Ran it on [https://github.com/fonttools/fonttools/tree/master/Lib/fontT...](https://github.com/fonttools/fonttools/tree/master/Lib/fontTools) (~230 files) and it took 45 minutes while keeping all 16 cores of my Ryzen 1700 at full load, sometimes using ~16 GB of RAM. Exiting the application ends in a SEGV, but seemingly without consequences? Also, after moving the database files to a different folder and renaming the "source group", it now asks me run re-index everything. AAAARRRGHHH.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sourcetrail dev here. Thanks for the feedback!

Yes, Python indexing speed is still slow, mostly due to the underlying framework that needs a lot of time to resolve symbol names. We hope we can improve this.

The crash on closing was already reported: [https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/SourcetrailBugTracker/issue...](https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/SourcetrailBugTracker/issues/698) I opened another issue to not inform about indexing when only renaming source groups: [https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/SourcetrailBugTracker/issue...](https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/SourcetrailBugTracker/issues/700)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Absolutely amazing product! wish it supported more languages though.

Other than being a great and useful product, their Global Pricing is based on big-mac index is fantastic. To put this in perspective, the "standard" price of 744.47$ is twice the median wage in Afghanistan.

<comment><USER4> Took me a while to find out that you refer to the AUD amount. Where did you get the global pricing? I selected different countries, but the amounts still show as equivalent to the USD one?

Edit: They are using paypal rate (or close to it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Never knew a product like this existed. This is a godsend for me as I navigate lot of old codebases.

</comment><comment><USER6> I usually use PyCharm in a very similar manner, to browse others code locally. This is much more efficient compared to e.g. browsing/reading the code on GitHub. Whenever I spend more than a few minutes browsing some code on GitHub, I just clone the repo instead and open it in PyCharm. Finding some usages of some function, or simple searching for some string or so is much faster and more comfortable (also because the search on GitHub is so limited). I can only recommend this workflow to anyone who reads others source code. And reading others source code is anyway also something I would recommend everyone.

About Sourcetrail, I see from the homepage that it also has some additional graphical representation. Is this more helpful over what PyCharm already offers?

If so, maybe this also can be a feature request to PyCharm.

<comment><USER7> Another vote for the git clone / pycharm workflow. If I'm thinking I might end up tweaking the code I might fork instead of clone to make generating a pull request a simple click in the browser. But I'm definitely in love with Pycharm. Even to the point of using it to evaluate code on remote servers locally on my laptop. Just perfect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There exists one for Javascript as well:

[https://github.com/Bogdan-Lyashenko/js-code-to-svg- flowchart](https://github.com/Bogdan-Lyashenko/js-code-to-svg-flowchart)

Including a VSCode extension (but it seems unmaintained):

[https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=lucasbad...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=lucasbadico.code- flowchart)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this looks really nice! It doesn't seem to resolve symbol names however, so you can't see how different functions/definitions are related to each other and navigate between them. But the same author is working on another project that seems to go in that direction: [https://github.com/Bogdan-Lyashenko/codecrumbs](https://github.com/Bogdan- Lyashenko/codecrumbs)

<comment><USER8> That looks really awesome! Thanks for sharing or I'd miss it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here is the release post that describes the Python integration a bit more detailed: [https://www.sourcetrail.com/blog/sourcetrail_supports_python...](https://www.sourcetrail.com/blog/sourcetrail_supports_python/)

</comment><comment><USER10> How does this compare to Code Maps in Visual Studio? Can anyone who has used both comment?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sourcetrail dev here. To my knowledge, without going into too much detail:

* Sourcetrail has a tighter integration between source code and graph visualization, because it offers less features than a full blown IDE like Visual Studio and can keep the UI more simple. Users of Sourcetrail can use either code or graph to navigate and both update simultaneously. In Code Maps the visualization stays the static until explicitly updated by the user.

* Sourcetrail's visualization is centered around one currently active symbol. Then other nodes are positioned up/below/left/right of it to encode additional meaning into the layout. Nodes are bundled together to de-clutter. In Code Maps the user starts with a certain symbol and then adds more and more symbols to the visualization, building a map. Filters can be applied to de-clutter.

* Sourcetrail needs to index all source code upfront, but afterwards querying and visualization generation is fast. I'm not certain, but to my knowledge Code Maps indexes only on demand/only partly upfront, so queries are not as instant.

If you are interested in Software Visualization, you can watch my recent talk at ACCU 2019, where I go through some design decisions of our visualization: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvmp3Gzhv8o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvmp3Gzhv8o)

<comment><USER10> Thanks a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Oh my god, I've been looking for something like this for like a full year. This is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER12> What frameworks did you use to create the UI?

</comment><comment><USER13> Awesome! Will try without a doubt.

</comment><comment><USER14> I tried the demo back when this was still called Coati. Very impressive, but not quite suitable for my current job. I didn't have time to fully evaluate it at the time, but these are my impressions from trying to use it on our codebase (I can't say exactly who we are due to NDAs).

My first criticism would be that the UI wastes a lot of space with all the curves and thick borders. Might be due to me using Vim most of the time, but I'm used to a higher text density. It also felt sluggish, but this might have been improved in the meantime, and also I used it on Linux which is notoriously bad for graphical responsiveness.

Second, the indexing was kind of slow. Our codebase is very far from the size of Chrome's, but it is a big commercial C++ project - something like 2M sloc (with comments). This was compounded by the fact that switching branches often led to nearly rebuilding a lot of files due to changes in often-used headers.

Third, it can only index one build configuration. Our single source tree is used to build several products and indexing only one build configuration is helpful, but often I need to know if changes necessary for product A will impact product B. It would be really nice if the indexing was split off into its own daemon and I could e.g. have three daemons looking over three build configurations on Linux, an additional remote daemon indexing the MacOS source, and further two running on a Windows host (possibly a VM). This might sound extreme and convoluted, but the kind of large C++ project where Sourcetrail would shine is the kind that has its own very opinionated idiosyncrasies.

Finally, it doesn't actually solve my most frequent use-case. Sourcetrail is great for browsing and understanding OOP structure of code. However, I am most often interested in exploring dataflow. I really want to know where a particular member of a struct is set, where the values in the expression come from, where those values are set, where the values in those expressions are from, etc. This can be accomplished with pretty much the same hierarchical interface that Sourcetrail currently has, but instead of classes and methods, the basic units should be expressions and values. Another useful feature would be "where is this value used" \- say you have a member of a struct, or a method returning a constant value, and you want to know where the value of the member is used. Not where the member is used, because the value of the member is often copied around, but without being modified. I would really like something that can track through assignments to tell me where this value ends up. Right now Sourcetrail doesn't really cover this usecase better than Vim+ctags+rtags+ripgrep. Yes, this sounds a bit like "Dropbox is just sftp+rsync", but I couldn't make Coati work better for my usecase than my current setup.

I can't demand that dataflow analysis be implemented, because I can't promise that I'll use Sourcetrail even if it is, but a data-oriented view of code might be a worthwhile development to consider.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sourcetrail dev here. Thanks for your extensive feedback!

A lot of things have changed since Sourcetrail was called Coati (about 2 years ago). We put a lot of work into improving indexing speed, handling multiple configurations/different languages within one project and reducing "sluggishness" in the UI. Sourcetrail runs now smoothly on code bases with multiple MLoC.

But I agree with your suggestion regarding data-flow analysis. That is what understanding unfamiliar source code often really comes down to. We also had some user requests to go that direction. We never really looked into this area so far, because it is a lot harder to collect the data (dynamic analysis) and it needs a whole new user interface.

While the data collection is solvable (Visual Studio debugger can do it, I think), I'm not sure whether it is really possible to come up with an effective user interface that shows which paths the different values take.

To explain why this is hard, let me use a metaphor: With data-flow you need to deal with a new dimension: time. Sourcetrail can handle dependencies between definitions really well, before the code is executed: space. What you want is a tool that combines the two into a space-time exploration tool of source code. Not sure if possible at all, but very interesting to think about. :)

<comment><USER15> I just watched your talk, and found it very interesting, thanks for sharing it!

I hope you can do the data flow analysis. That would be so cool and SO useful.

Python certainly has the ability to collect the data. A couple existing tools make use of this.

For example, MonkeyType and Birdseye observe the values that are passed around by tracing execution during test runs (or even during a production run, but the performance impact can be substantial). [https://github.com/Instagram/MonkeyType](https://github.com/Instagram/MonkeyType) [https://github.com/alexmojaki/birdseye](https://github.com/alexmojaki/birdseye)

Even more information can be gleaned from the gc module (see [https://mg.pov.lt/objgraph/](https://mg.pov.lt/objgraph/) for a tool using it).

These tools make good progress, but I'd be _very_ interested to see what a software-visualization expert would come up with.

I'd also love to see how a concurrent execution tree can be visualized. For example, the wonderful Trio concurrency library is built on a tree of concurrent tasks. It would be so cool to see which events are happening at the same time. I've never seen a visualization of how it'd work. (The Trio team is also extremely friendly on their Gitter chat.) [https://github.com/python- trio/trio](https://github.com/python-trio/trio)

Structured logging is yet another exciting area. Can we generate visualizations from logs in OpenTracing/OpenCensus format? Some existing work is [https://github.com/jonathanj/eliottree](https://github.com/jonathanj/eliottree)

Gary Bernhardt's "A whole new world" talk [https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new- world](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world) proposes extracting data from logs and highlighting important lines from tracebacks and and slow lines from trace timings in the editor.

I haven't used Structurizr, but it seems interesting. Do you have thoughts on it? [https://structurizr.com/](https://structurizr.com/) has a python port at [https://github.com/sixty-north/structurizr-python](https://github.com/sixty- north/structurizr-python)</comment></comment></comment>


Don't Ban "Bossy" - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/03/dont-ban-bossy.html?mbid=gnep&google_editors_picks=true <comment><USER2> That's funny, I actually heard the word used when I was a military cadet in high school. It was used to teach the difference between being a a leader, or just, well bossy. Don't be a boss, don't act bossy, and so on.

Bossy people, we were taught, boss people around by using their rank. No one wants to follow them, they just have to. That's the worst kind of leader, we were taught. don't be bossy was good feedback. A good leader inspires, sets the example, is firm but fair, and through their behavior and actions people will want to follow them.

Not sure what all this implied sexism stuff is, I only heard it used around men, and it was and still is a damn fine term for the bad ones. What term would they prefer be used for someone that's acting bossy?

<comment><USER3> In Sandberg-style liberal feminism (which preserves inequality except for the more well-off white women and therefore doesn't help all women), I can imagine they want to improve subordination to female bosses. So you should be ready to follow her imperatives like you would Zuckerberg's.

In corporations, boss subordination is so complete that "bossy" only applies to someone who isn't actually literally a boss. So I can imagine "bossy" is used to question the legitimacy of female bosses. However, more serious kinds of feminism directly attack the existence of bosses, since many more women are at the bottom of hierarchies than the top.

<comment><USER4> In alignment with your observation, this campaign is thought by some to be battlespace preparation for Hillary's 2016 presidential campaign.

<comment><USER5> Oh my. That is brilliant submarine marketing.

<comment><USER4> I prefer "cover influence operation".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> (I didn't even know the "Ban Bossy" campaign existed, so I guess my comment is more about that and goes along with what the article is saying.)

Looking at the videos - to an outsider like myself, they look massively ridiculous. So there is a societal problem where girls are either not empowered to lead or are discouraged from leading by others. To stop that practice, we will get rid of calling them a specific word.

Words only have the meaning that we put into them. "Bossy" can be applied correctly or incorrectly. How is the word at fault?

I think "only in America" applies here. Instead of understanding that this is a complex, complicated issue in society, let's find a catchy campaign title and rail against intangible things. Oh aren't we all happy we have dealt with the problem in a format that we can easily post to our facebook wall instead of, you know, doing the hard work of actually figuring out and dealing with people on a deeper, personal level.

And yes, I get it, the campaign uses a reductive catchphrase to get a foot in the door and then deliver a more nuanced message. But I think a campaign set on a weird, possibly destructive premise may do more harm than good. It may lead people to think they're doing something when they're actually doing nothing apart from perpetuating a meme.

How about we all just stop and check ourselves before reducing others to adjectives in general? Grown-ups and children, women and men alike?

Maybe this tendency to grasp for the simple answer, the quick phrase at all times is the root of the problem and should thus not be utilized as a solution.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's funny but "bully" is more associated with males and "bossy" with females. Both have negative connotations of forcing someone to do something against their own will. It seems that the reason behind not banning "bossy" is that females require this opportunity for leadership development. It seems sexist that females should be allowed to impose their will on others but males shouldn't in similar situations. I would argue that females already have a leg up on their male counterparts with the fact that they mature earlier during adolescence and perhaps use this to their advantage. As the article mentions, other ways exist to exhibit leadership. Being bossy though is the worst alignment of incentives: power & peer acceptance thru fear vs respect.

<comment><USER8> Oh yes, this must be why leadership positions in business, government, and all areas of life are dominated by women. Oh wait...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Ban Bossy" Spokesperson: Beyoncé

Beyoncé Lyrics:

Bow down bitches, bow bow down bitches

Bow down bitches, bow bow down bitches

H-town vicious, h-h-town vicious

I'm so crown, bow bow down bitches

Beyoncé's husband Jay-Z Lyrics Excerpt:

My nigga, please - you ain't signing no checks like these

My nigga, please - you pushing no wheels like these

My nigga, please - you ain't holding no tecks like these

My nigga, please - you don't pop in vest like these

<comment><USER10> Firstly, I fail to see how the lyrics from a Jay-Z song from 2002 are anything other than completely irrelevant to the Ban Bossy campaign. But if you're going to bring it up, we might as well do it right.

1) Pharrell says those lines not Jay-Z. This is the same person who wrote/sings/produced the Academy-Award nominated "Happy" song from Despicable Me.

2) The context of lyrics within a song, the intended meaning of the song itself, and intended audience of a song should obviously be taken into consideration. On a site like HN, that so often seems to point out the ridiculous nature of arguments against video games causing violence, citing lyrics of someone's husband as somehow a statement about.... well I have to be honest, I can't follow the logic of the point you're trying to make... is disappointing.

And finally 3) Here are some lyrics from Jay-Z that seem pretty relevant to your comment:

"...Rap critics that say he's Money, Cash, Hoes I'm from the hood stupid, what type of facts are those If you grew up with holes in your zapatos You'd celebrate the minute you was having dough I'm like f-ck critics, you can kiss my whole a--hole If you don't like my lyrics, you can press fast forward...

...I don't know what you take me as Or understand the intelligence that Jay-Z has I'm from rags to riches, ni--as I ain't dumb I got 99 problems, but a b-tch ain't one, hit me"

<comment><USER9> Why'd you censor the lyrics?

"I fail to see how the lyrics from a Jay-Z song from 2002 are anything other than completely irrelevant to the Ban Bossy campaign."

We're talking about banning words. If I had to guess, I'd bet more people would support banning "nigga" than they would "bossy". Personally, I don't think any words should be "banned" because it's simply not possible. Society may evolve to not use a word, or shun those that do use a word - but a campaign to "ban" a word does an injustice to the literal meaning of the word "ban" because it's just not realistic, or possible.

<comment><USER10> To your question: I censor myself on HN because I don't believe Hacker News, which is often used by children and is a place that seems to wish to be more welcoming to women and racial minorities, is the right place to have an environment where swearing or using racially inflammatory language is okay.

Especially when readers don't know my relationship to the subject matter, or my relationship to the individual I'm addressing.

To your point about relevance, I'm going to point out to you that zero people are actually advocating banning a word. They're saying "hey let's stop calling girls who express leadership skills "bossy" because that has negative consequences". To which I think the average person would probably be open to. They are advocating not using a word in the wrong context. Call kids bossy when they're being brats, sure, but when someone, particularly girls are being leaders and doing the same things that boys are complimented for, don't call them bossy.

#WhenSomeonesBeingALeaderDontCallThemBossy is a pretty long hashtag and a terrible way to quickly market your campaign. #banbossy is memorable, gets to the point, and can encourage a conversation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I understand that this is a touchy subject, especially on HN, but come on: "Avoid editing what you want to say in your head, and try not to worry about being wrong." This is straight from their Leadership Tips for Girls pdf. They are encouraging girls to just say whatever comes to mind. What's next - calling everyone who disagrees "sexist"?

<comment><USER12> >What's next - calling everyone who disagrees "sexist"?

If you disagree then you are automatically labeled as one of the obvious sexist rapist rape apologist pedophile neckbeard supremacist spermjacked nerd sperglord virgin libertarian losers. They can't possibly be wrong, so if you disagree you must be one of the hell bound sinners of the most dire nightmare.

>"Avoid editing what you want to say in your head, and try not to worry about being wrong."

This is very sexist of them. Their implication is that males are stupid and don't ever censor themselves when they work to be good leaders - that they are only gain leader status because they say every dumb idea they have, and that saying stupid things shouldn't have any consequences.

<comment><USER13> You forgot "creepy stalker", you closed-minded male chauvinist ape.

<comment><USER12> That's female chauvinist ape, shitlord!

<comment><USER13> Well played, Tohhou, well played.

Now if you'll please excuse me, I've just stepped in some of my own doggy doo, and I need scrape off my shoe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love the delicious lack of self-awareness with which these things are delivered. Like people who pay $50,000/year for college to study a subject of no practical use telling me to "check your privilege".

<comment><USER10> This is a kind of long response. But I hope maybe you'll read through it. Just saying "check your privilege" is probably not the best starting point for the conversation, so I'll try to do a better job of explaining. I don't know if you are misunderstanding what is meant by "privilege" or not, but the privilege being talked about when someone says "check your privilege" in my experience are the privileges that come from being part of the, for lack of a better term, more socially accepted or socially powerful group. Things like white privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege, you get the idea.

So regardless of your level of income or education, you can be, and probably are, still privileged in the way society sees and treats you.

For example, as a man, I pretty much never have to worry about being told I got a promotion because I was having sex with the boss, or that I'm only being angry or "emotional" about something because it's my "time of the month". Things that women have to deal with all the time.

Another example would be that I'm never worried wanting to have children is going to be seen as bad for business, and result in me being denied promotions or other advancement because of it.(Not to mention I'm statistically going to be getting paid more than women for doing equal work.)

Hopefully you can see how these are the type of privileges men, or another group of people in a similar situation, may never notice unless it is pointed out to them. Or they "check their privilege".

In relation to Ban Bossy, an important example seems to be that I've been conditioned my entire life to aspire to be a leader: team captain, salesman of the year, best on the basketball court, you get the idea. And not once was I ever, or will I ever, be discouraged from asserting my leadership skills as essentially "not knowing my place" because I'm a man, which can be the outcome when we tell girls and young women to not be bossy or other similar things.

Maybe a good exercise for you, and for all of us, is to listen to what people are saying when they describe the privileges we have, or to ask them to explain better because we would like to understand. Depending on our situation, maybe we'll gain a better understanding of our heterosexual privilege and being able to love who we want without having to worry that their gender will result in violence against us or them. Or maybe we'll learn about our religious privilege, and that we are able to practice a religion without inciting fear, being called names, profiled, assaulted, or killed because of the head covering we wear or for being "different".

<comment><USER14> _Things like white privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege, you get the idea._

What you are talking about, if it even exists, is a _rounding error_ compared to the massive good fortune relative to the entire rest of the human race that has ever lived, of being born in the West in the late 20th/21st century.

Perhaps _you_ can see that dropping a few hundred grand on a _hobby_ makes the speaker incredibly more privileged even within this already privileged group, and gender is absolutely nothing to do with (as the majority of homeless, etc, happen to be men, where's the white male heterosexual privilege there? Oops your whole model of the world just imploded, sorry 'bout that).

<comment><USER10> I can't tell if you're trolling or not. I tried to respond to you in what I believe was a mature and respectful way.

You've responded with a breathtaking amount of immaturity. And completely ignored any of the points I made. Perhaps one day you'll be more open to hearing and responding to what I wrote to you. Maybe that day won't come. Either way I wish you well.

<comment><USER14> _You 've responded with a breathtaking amount of immaturity_

To a post displaying a breathtaking amount of naivety. I didn't ignore your points, they are, paraphrasing Feynmann, "not even wrong". And I am not sure what "troll" even means these days, it seems to be a catch-all term for "someone on the Internet who isn't a part of my echo chamber".

Likewise, I wish you well, and I hope that one day _you_ will come around to what I wrote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm immediately extraordinarily skeptical about anything that suggests solving a cultural problem by changing language.

That's like trying to solve a math problem by changing the value of pi.

<comment><USER16> There is at least a theoretical logic to banning words like this: if being called bossy is causing girls to lose leadership skills then maybe stopping this artificially (even if people still think it without saying it) could lead to less girls being affected, and therefore in the next generation the stigma has disappeared. Obviously it's not that simple, and I have no idea to what extent, if any, this actually works, other than in theory.

<comment><USER17> > _" if being called bossy is causing girls to lose leadership skills..."_

I don't think that this particular word is the root cause. More important is the reason why people are using it. If you ban that particular word without addressing why people are using it, then those people will adopt a new word to mean the exact same thing. Creating euphemism treadmills doesn't fix anything.

<comment><USER18> Yep. Some people are taking this too literally. (Nerds parsing? No!) The heightened awareness of how word choice subtly undermines behavior we presumably want to encourage, is the point. This article suggests that instead of banning, women embrace the word as a badge they're doing something right (a la 'nerd'), and undermining the undermining would work too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> From BanBossy.org:

 _When a little boy asserts himself, he 's called a "leader." Yet when a little girl does the same, she risks being branded "bossy." Words like bossy send a message: don't raise your hand or speak up. By middle school, girls are less interested in leading than boys—a trend that continues into adulthood. Together we can encourage girls to lead._

So yes, as others have said here, the goal is not necessarily (or only) to get rid of the usage of the word. But as is very evident from other responses, that is not immediately obvious to everyone, in no small part because of the arguably poor catch phrase being used.

I'm also not thrilled with some of the 'motivational' phrases being thrown around. "I'm not bossy; I'm _the boss_ " (Beyonce) is not constructive. It's puerile and is more likely to encourage actual bossy behavior (the negative kind, as defined well elsewhere in this thread) than to help introduce equality in the way we encourage leadership attributes in all children.

Not, of course, that equality seems to be emphasized here. Which is a typical problem and one that's unlikely to help this campaign make a real difference, as it's immediately exclusive to some degree rather than encouraging _everyone_ to be confident.

</comment><comment><USER20> While feminists were busy telling the world about the dire need to ban the word "bossy," the Iraqi parliament was considering the implementation of a new law that would legalize rape, prohibit women leaving home without the permission of their husband, and legalize marriage for 9-year-olds.

"If passed, the law will apply to Iraq's Shia Muslims, the majority of the population. Provisions include prohibiting Muslim men from marrying non-Muslim women, legalising rape inside marriage by declaring that a husband has a right to sex regardless of consent, and prohibiting women from leaving the house without their husband's permission," reports Breitbart.com. The law, which has been denounced by Human Rights Watch as a violation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), would also lower the age of marriage to nine years old for girls and 15 for boys. Despite the fact that the law represents an egregious assault on women's rights and wouldn't look out of place in the stone age, you probably didn't hear about it because self-proclaimed feminists were too busy concentrating on more pressing atrocities being inflicted upon women – such as people using the word "bossy". [http://www.infowars.com/new-iraqi-law-legalizes-rape- feminis...](http://www.infowars.com/new-iraqi-law-legalizes-rape-feminists- too-busy-banning-words-to-care/)

<comment><USER21> I agree with the article, but "There are Starving Kids in Africa" is a stock bad argument

<comment><USER22> Yep, it's a fallacy too:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I saw the video a couple of days ago and it was flabbergasting that someone thought that this whole thing is going to achieve anything.

<comment><USER24> It's just feminists. Western version of the Taliban, if you ask me.

<comment><USER25> yes obviously feminists were the real ones behind 9/11

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Bossy is extremely specific and a terrible style of leadership. I've known bossy women as well as women who were great leaders. The overlap has between the two is the empty set.

How about you teach real leadership skills to girls who like to lead? Such as understanding, empathy, reward, etc. Of course the same goes for men, and bossy men are just as big a problem.

</comment><comment><USER27> You can see how this campaign of proclaiming "bossy" to no longer be gender neutral has caused me (a heterosexual white male) some serious gender identity issues, as I was frequently called "bossy" as a child.

Does this mean I'm actually a woman?

</comment><comment><USER28> "The number one reason that why girls are not turning into leaders is because they are occupied with posting selfies on your fucking Facebook, Sandberg!"

-Adam Curry

</comment><comment><USER29> "Bossy" doesn't refer to a person (male or female) who embodies _good_ qualities of leadership.

Instead, it is used to describe someone who takes charge in a rude and disrespectful way. Examples include: giving others orders, shouting, emotional manipulation, tantrums, and so forth. Anybody who behaves this way may be "leading", in some sense, but they are not being a very good leader.

Conversely, a girl who leads her friends and peers in a kind and empowering way is _not_ being bossy.

It would make just as much sense have a campaign to "ban douchebag" or "ban asshole", as these terms are disproportionately applied to men. And those terms don't apply to _being a leader_ , they apply to _being a rude, disrespectful leader_.

</comment><comment><USER30> My brothers used it on me all the time, but that might not be the typical experience.

</comment><comment><USER31> Wow, the "discussion" here validates every negative stereotype about the tech community, you troglodytes who I'm embarrassed to call my peers. I wonder if it's it too late, at 31, for me to change careers?

<comment><USER32> Are there no online communities that you can't complain about?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm impressed by how much people are missing the point. It's just about raising awareness of how young girls are treated, no one is actually banning any words.

<comment><USER34> Then maybe they shouldn't have led with the name "Ban Bossy?"

If you create a marketing campaign and it is misinterpreted by what is presumably largely your target group (men who don't realize their words are apparently harming girls during their formative years) the fault is yours, not your audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Is there any empirical evidence this word harms girls?

<comment><USER36> It's not about the word "bossy". "Ban Bossy" is just the name of the campaign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I bellyfeel banning words is doubleplusgood.

</comment><comment><USER38> I would rather "slut" gone, than bossy.</comment>


Tesla CEO says bought ventilators in China for U.S. - java-man https://news.yahoo.com/tesla-ceo-says-bought-ventilators-101355316.html <comment> java-man "China had an oversupply, so we bought 1255 FDA-approved ResMed, Philips & Medtronic ventilators on Friday night & airshipped them to LA," Musk said on Twitter.

What prevents our government from doing its job? Where is FEMA?</comment>


How NASA Kept the ISS Flying While Harvey Hit Mission Control - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/31/16228906/nasa-mission-control-center-tropical-storm-harvey-international-space-station <comment><USER3> In case anyone wonders how long ISS could survive completely unattended - <USER2> averaged 1 debris avoidance manouver per year before 2011 and 4 in 2012. Its orbit is around 400km which is low enough do decay slowly, but boost burns happen only every few years. Both of those events are planned months or years ahead.

NASA must have decided there was no real danger to the operators apart from some longer shifts and sleeping in the office. Otherwise, even without the backup ground control, ISS wouldn't be in any significant danger if disconnected for a few days.

<comment><USER4> Boost burns happen significantly more frequently than every few years. At 400km and a drag profile as large as the ISS, decay would take around a year or less, depending on attitude. A little bit more reading:

[https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9087/how-often- doe...](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9087/how-often-does-iss- require-re-boosting-to-higher-orbit)

<comment><USER3> Wow, the height chart there is excellent. I was looking at a 2013 post where someone mentioned the next burn is scheduled for 2015. Clearly it was inaccurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My favorite part of this is the mission patch they came up with for the team that had to stay at JSC: [http://imgur.com/a/9YiQZ](http://imgur.com/a/9YiQZ)

<comment><USER6> A pun in Latin! Thanks for the smile

<comment><USER7> For the more thick of us, what makes that a pun? Looks like they just modified the aphorism.

<comment><USER8> To the stars through/from water, it's a play on the phrase ad astra per aspera which means to the stars through (or in the context despite) hardship. The original phrase also is fitting but since the water in this case is their hardship I think is what makes it a pun.

<comment><USER9> I'd call it a play on words, but it's not a pun—only a single meaning is possible here.

<comment><USER10> I've talked myself into thinking it's actually a pun. _Ad astra per aspera_ is a set phrase in English, so any modification to it is punning the phrase. In this formulation, _aquam_ still carries the original meaning of _ardua_ , hardship. While this wouldn't be a pun to a native Latin speaker, I haven't met too many of them.

I kind of wish my work had mission patches like this, though "Deployed Client X" doesn't sound so dramatic.

<comment><USER11> Have you looked at this? [https://openbadges.org/](https://openbadges.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Noting that the plans they made were all as a result of having enough advanced warning of the storm to 'bring in big camping backups and setup cots (assume those were there already?'. I would think that the planning should or would include a case where there is no warning at all. In other words personnel would be required to keep items onsite like hospitals do with crash carts for emergencies maybe storage places or bomb shelter esq. After all if one thing this storm taught (the chemical plant with the generators on the ground) is that you can't really predict the unknown unknowns. It doesn't seem, relative to the cost of space missions, a big deal for each employee to keep onsite (at JSC cost) items that would be needed (including medicine; refreshed as needed) in the event of no ability to plan ahead.

My wife works as a doctor at a hospital. I am always amazed at how they make no plans at all in bad weather to have a system in place to make sure she gets to work. It was actually my idea to tell her to buy an SUV so she wouldn't have problems when it snowed. It's literally left to all employees. They don't even have a way to reach her in the case of a mass county wide emergency. For example we don't have a landline and they don't have my cell phone and so on. It's all very ad hoc.

<comment><USER13> It seems, from reading about the recent attacks in London and Manchester, that it's assumed for a major situation, that most of the staff will hear about the situation through other channels, and make their way to the hospital on their own accord.

There's also a very interesting article from Stanford about how they handled their response to the Asiana Airlines crash a few years ago: [http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2013/07/this-is- not-a-...](http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2013/07/this-is-not-a-test- in-caring-for-airplane-crash-victims-training-and-teamwork-prevailed.html)

Basically, they paged everyone to come in, and roped in everyone who was in the hospital to help out.

<comment><USER12> "Pagers" (if you mean that literally) aren't used anymore. The difference between pagers and cell phones is that pagers work practically everywhere and cell phones as you know are spotty.

That said I think it depends on the crisis and the community size. Not everyone is even watching the news during the day I remember I heard about 911 as a result of someone making a comment on a group that I followed that was almost quite accidental.

Part of the problem with any of this is that disasters aren't that frequent so not much thought is given to a host of 'what if's'.

<comment><USER14> No, pagers are very much still used by doctors. My wife is a doctor. In both hospital systems she's worked, she has carried an actual physical pager. Sometimes more than one!

<comment><USER12> Same here but my wife doesn't have one where she works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > But when it comes to sending commands to the orbiting lab, that has to be > done on site at JSC.

> There's the option of moving Mission Control temporarily to a hotel in Round > Rock, Texas, before transitioning control more permanently to NASA's > Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. This facility has a lot > of spaceflight infrastructure and could potentially support operations for > weeks.

This seems very surprising, as it sounds like there's not really a plan if something disastrous were to happen to JSC. I don't mean to say they couldn't figure it out -- I have no doubt of that -- I am just surprised that the best plan backup plan is migrating to another facility "for weeks" after a short transition in a hotel (is this a literal hotel, or something more akin to a 'carrier hotel'?).

<comment><USER16> There are also Russian and ESA mission controls. Normally it seems they do more science support missions than supporting the facility itself, though Russia of course runs support for Soyuz and Progress docking, but if something truly disastrous were to happen to JSC those mission supports could be transferred to another location. That comment is more 'this is how we have the security setup and for a temporary situation like Harvey it's not worth changing everything when we have an alternative plan' than 'there is absolutely no other way to control the station than physically logging in from JSC.' That's pretty clear given that their primary backup site is just a hotel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> tl;dr They were prepared to and did modify their operations as necessary to meet their SLA. They did their jobs.

Emergency preparedness isn't rocket science even if your organization's mission happens to be rocket science.

<comment><USER18> In fact most of the corporates have this part of their internal audit called BCP Business continuity Process, asking team members not to come to office but continue working.

What's inescapable I think is things like Malware attack and not these things

<comment><USER19> I worked at a small business that made working from home mandatory one day a month for all employees (whatever day was convenient for each employee, not all at the same time). On multiple occasions they'd tell people to just stay home. Bad snowstorms and power outages, mostly. It worked really well, because everyone know how to get stuff done when remote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Headline seems click-bait-y, doesn't it? "Kept the ISS Flying"? Last I checked the ISS doesn't fly. Even if we concede that as a term of trade, it isn't going to fall out of orbit because it gets no love from earth for a few days.

</comment><comment><USER21> "ISS, we have a problem."

<comment><USER22> "This is Houston, we have a problem"

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Inertia?

<comment><USER24> Stable orbit above the troposphere?

<comment><USER23> It's not really that stable, but it can hold for a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Space is so disappointing because everything humans do there is super complicated and fragile.

<comment><USER26> It's due to a lack of cheap, readily available energy. We have to constantly worry about fuel and debris because maneuvering isn't cheap, and any form of electromagnetic shielding that's could even theoretically be useful would have incredible energy usage.

<comment><USER27> ?? No. It's due to lack of mass (for shielding and fuel). We produce lots of energy in orbit.

<comment><USER26> Getting mass into orbit is also difficult due to a lack of cheap, readily available energy.

<comment><USER28> Energy costs are a tiny fraction of launch costs. If rocket fuel could be had for free, it wouldn't noticeably change overall costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> NASA? It's maintained by Russia.

<comment><USER27> No. The vast majority of Station is the USOS, the US side. Station overall control is handled by NASA.

<comment><USER30> Control in what sense? Paperwork? Only the Russian segment has any engines that could change ISS's orbital position.

<comment><USER27> Control as in day to day operations. Who organizes visiting vehicle ops, consumables, etc.

Those Russian engines are only used occasionally. Mostly, Station relies on US-side control moment gyros for attitude control. Also, the huge solar arrays (USOS, again) act as controllable aerosurfaces. In a pinch, you could actually use the solar arrays alone for desaturating the gyros. Until Shuttle retirement in 2012, Shuttle was also used for reboosting Station. It's possible for other visiting vehicles (ATV, HTV, Cygnus, Dragon, Proton, Soyuz, Starliner, Dream Chaser) to reboost as well. Mostly Proton does the reboosting, but that's just an operational decision.

Something like 75-80% of the mass of Station is USOS. Something like 80-90% of the power as well. Zarya, a Russian-built module that was the first part of ISS and which contains propulsion systems (Ukrainian-developed control systems), was actually bought and is owned by the US.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fox Rocked by $179M 'Bones' Ruling - <AUTHOR> https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/fox-rocked-by-179-million-bones-ruling-lying-cheating-reprehensible-studio-fraud-1190346 <comment><USER2> Kind of interesting. They force arbitration but don't accept the result if it doesn't go in their favor...</comment>