Ask HN: What country would you lend money to? - <AUTHOR>

Many nations besides the United States are seeking to borrow funds by issuing bonds.
While in the past the U.S. has always been a "preferred" borrower because of a world "dollar standard" and a presumption of good governance there are many indications that this perception is changing.
With so much of our exploding debt being short-term any fall off in a willingness of others to finance it could be disastrous for our future.
If you were one of those bond buyers (and being broke I'm definitely not a bond buyer, but very interested in our future)...
What country would YOU lend to?
Are we still the best "bet" on the planet? Are other nations "tied" to us in ways that prevent them for NOT lending to us?
Or should we all start hoarding stocks of non-perishable foods? <comment><USER3> The uncomfortability with the dollar right now seems to be a combination of a short memory and political sentiment.

The Euro has been strong over the majority of the past decade. Yes, less than 10 years time. Remember that from 1999 to 2002, the Euro was falling with decent consistency.

The US Dollar has been a stable currency for a lot longer and the US economy has done well for a long time.

People are worried about debt, but it might not be that much of a risk. If the banks pay back the money that was lent to them, the treasury can take that money and destroy it and there's no expansion of the money supply beyond a short stop-gap. Likewise, if they pay back the money with interest (and there's little chance this won't be the case), the US government can gain funds as well as not expanding the money supply.

The perception has changed a little, but not drastically with those devoid of political intent. Sure, part of it is that the Bush administration played loose with the currency and, in fact, sometimes argued for a weaker dollar and the current wars make the US look less of a good investment, but part of it is definitely political. I mean, if you're China you sure want to create the perception that the US won't be the continuing standard. If nothing else, it's like having two parts suppliers even if you don't consider one of them to be a serious option - you can always use them as a negotiating chip with the supplier you do consider a serious option even if it's a hollow threat. Likewise, many European politicians would like to consider their power rising; Iranian officials love to blast the US; people opposed to the wars want to play the debt card; etc. And some of it is legitimate, but some of it is FUD. I mean, if I came on here and said, "Linux just doesn't do graphics" there's a bit of truth there in that graphics card drivers might not come out as quickly or be as optimized, but it's not like you can't have a nice GUI or use the GIMP or whatnot, but I can say "truthful" things that are completely misleading because I want to advance an anti-Linux agenda. And the same is true here, one can say that the treasury (doubled|tripled|whatnot) the debt and not talk about how most of that is being repaid and it doesn't look like there's much of a chance it won't be repaid. It's the "truth", but it's still misleading. And if you have an agenda, those truths are your friend. Again, not to say that there aren't problems, just to say that some people might be pushing those problems out of proportion to advance an untrue agenda.

Oh, and one thing is important to note: government debt doesn't need to be financed. It does in the long-run, but not in the short term. A government with its own currency has the option to print money. When a government just prints money, it can cause inflation since if each dollar is a fraction of the economy as a whole and there are now more dollars, each dollar is a smaller fraction of the economy. Now, I say "can" there, because there isn't some automatic mechanism - it's based on people's perceptions. In fact, inflation can happen even without an expansion of the money supply simply based on people's fear that inflation should be happening.

And it looks like the "exploding debt" will only be short term as many of the banks have already repaid their loans.

You can try betting on hoarding food or whatnot, but you're most likely going to turn out wrong. It's not that other nations are "tied" to us so much as the US is still a very good economy. Plus, US debt isn't so bad. As of 2008, it was at ~38% of GDP. Compare that with Japan at ~172% of GDP and you can see that many countries do live with a lot more debt (Italy 105%; Greece 97%; Egypt 86%; Israel 76%; Canada 63%; France 68%; Germany 66%. . .). And as long as all the TARP money comes back to the government, there hasn't been any real expansion of the debt - it was a short term loan that looks like it'll be repaid quickly if it hasn't been repaid already.

Now, there are challenges. Rising healthcare and third level education costs in the US don't look good for long-term competitiveness, but one of those looks to be on the docket at present and it's easy to forget many of the problems that European countries have when one isn't resident there. But the US economy is far from a tale of doom. Challenges will be ever present - <USER2> matters is whether you address them or not and whether you do so consistently. And the US has faced up to challenges over a long period of time.

//That said, bonds are a terrible investment as you can usually get better rates in a CD from a bank.

<comment><USER4> The US does not just have 38% of GDP in debt. That is just the PUBLIC debt. Or as the CIA puts it "...the cumulative total of all government borrowings less repayments that are denominated in a country's home currency".

[https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world- factbook/...](https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world- factbook/geos/us.html)

USA

Public Debt: 37.5% of 14 Trillion Dollars (GDP)

External Debt: $13.75 Trillion

Total Debt: 138% of GDP

Canada

Public Debt: 63.8% of 1.303 Trillion (GDP)

External Debt: $0.7811 Trillion

Total Debt: 123% of GDP

ALSO, it is very important to clarify that Canada does Net Present Value accounting for our retiree programs (our version of Social Security actually has a FUND where we save money for our retires, its not a cash in cash out program). If the USA did account like Canada did you guys would be at roughly double our debt level. Check out IOUSA for a better explanation.

<comment><USER5> Interesting stuff. Where would Canada be if we accounted for things the way the U.S. does? Would we be at half our present debt level?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Honestly, if I had enough money, I'd invest - in return for citizenship (some countries do this) - in a country that meets (as close as possible) the following criteria:

1\. Isn't in the EU

2\. Isn't the US or too closely tied to the US

3\. Isn't too closely tied to the UK

4\. Isn't terribly unstable, unpredictable or currently at war

That doesn't leave me with much, I guess... though then again, I'm doing this for the citizenship, not the investment, so maybe my criteria isn't the most useful ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a very interesting aspect regarding the citizenship angle... hadn't thought of that... certainly could be influential on a decision...

I heard an idea once that high mobility could lead to countries having to 'compete' for citizens!

<comment><USER6> The way I see it, if theres another world war or other major global event and I need to relocate for whatever reason, having a citizenship in a country that meets my criteria would be extremely beneficial. If I were to actually invest, then obviously theres more to be considered - like actual value of the investment, difficulty of traveling to/from country (especially under extreme circumstances), relations with other countries and so on.

My criteria is based around the fact that the one EU country is as good as the rest, really (and I already have an EU passport), same goes for commonwealth countries. Finally, theres no point in "hiding away" in a country that will give in to US pressure without a fight either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would not lend USD to the US. I would lend euros to the US but they don't want any. If my income stream was US based I might lend money to the US in the form of TIPS (Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities).

The US is not going to formally default on its debt. What they are going to try is to inflate the debt away and TIPS protect you against that if your income is in USD.

<comment><USER8> The formulas used to adjust TIPS principal and interest are based on official US Gov't. statistics, which means they are slightly more trustworthy than a politician's promise.

Still, if inflation is your concern then better a halfhearted adjustment than none at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not unbiased enough to decide if some other country would be a better bet than the U.S. Still, I suspect the top outside choices would be India and Japan, in that order. Japan is miles ahead of the rest of the world in robotics, which means that if the price of Chinese labor ever increases, they own manufacturing. They still have a piece of the pie, even with rock-bottom labor prices, which says something.

India is even more interesting because there are a lot of educated people, but still very low living costs. Early America is the last time there's been a combination like that.

<comment><USER10> Here are the yields on Japanese Bonds

<http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates/japan.html>

2.2 percent on a 30 year bond, which means that the maximum upside on the principal is roughly 20 percent. So, a 10K investment could theoretically rise to 12K if the 30 year yield drops to 0, which it won't. If it rises to something sensible, like 6 or 8 percent, you take a bath.

People seem to think of bonds like they do savings accounts, but they aren't. There's a huge principal risk. And government debt always seems "off" to me. For instance, Japanese debt is largely held by the Japanese themselves, for patriotic reasons sometimes. This distorts the market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yes there are countries that are tied to the US in the sense that they are forced to keep lending. In fact this is the most striking aspect of the current crisis.

The deal is this: China lends money to the US and US consumers buy chinese exports for that money. I'm not quite sure what will happen when this scheme ends. It may be ending right now so we will see.

</comment><comment><USER11> As the US has recently demonstrated all of the industrialized nations are so interconnected that a major failure in one is a major failure in all of them. If there is any country I would consider loaning money to it would be the ones that did the best in this past mess. From there I would have to look at the countries fundamentals.

</comment><comment><USER12> I would invest in a sovereign not tied to a physical piece of land, because it would be an interesting sociopolitial experiment. Like Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong in Snow Crash.

</comment><comment><USER13> Norway.

<comment><USER14> I voted you up, but that's kind of like saying you'd lend money to Bill Gates. There's no point in it. The question in lending, apparently, is who can you lend money to that is at the intersection of really needing it and really likely to repay it.

Norway would just pay you back immediately, thus making your lending pointless. And if we're actually talking about lending them an amount that they'd need, like, say, a trillion dollars, I'm not sure that I'd bet long term on the Norwegian economy at that scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> You have money?</comment>


Do I dare call bullshit aloud? Do you? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.asmartbear.com/call-bullshit.html <comment><USER2> There's a correct way to call bullshit outloud. Usually it fits the format of:

"Here is why what you're doing is wrong, here is why, and here is how to fix it."

Most things that don't fit this format are self-serving for the person doing the calling.

<comment><USER3> Just because you can see something is wrong doesn't mean you have a solution, and not having a solution doesn't mean you shouldn't say that something is wrong.

I would agree that "here is what you are doing is wrong, and here is why" is always appropriate. But pointing out problems doesn't come with an obligation to figure out how to fix it.

Criticism is a valuable role, whether or not you can fix the thing you find broken.

<comment><USER4> I think this is fair, but it would be good form to admit when you don't have a good alternative solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yawn. Not sure how daring it is to call-out a spammer.

Overall message is fine, but the preface story...

<comment><USER6> Yeah I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like what if the spammer was Calacanis and immediately put the kabosh on all the OA's fundraising efforts and speaking engagements? Now _that_ would have been a story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought it was the Scythians, not the Macedonians, and that they decided once sober and once drunk. But the Macedonians certainly were known as hard drinkers.

</comment><comment><USER8> Calling bullshit aloud is usually risky for the person doing the calling. Even when the message is well-taken, the messenger is always surrounded with a halo of negativity. Yet, calling bullshit aloud is probably the most effective way to get rid of bullshit, so it must be done!

To call bullshit aloud without worrying about Godin, Fried, or Spolsky, we created "Blackspots". Blackspots are bullshits called aloud. They are anonymous, they are what you think, and we (the spottiness.com team) use our brains to moderate them.

There are also Goldspots and they are exactly the opposite, because excellence should also be appreciated anonymously. Nothing to gain, nothing to lose, just seeing the real perception emerge.

</comment><comment><USER9> Perhaps next Mr. Cohen would care to refute the likelihood of the FBI sending me a pdf to discuss the disposition of my "US$1.5 Million United State Dollars", or whether the mentioned herbal remedy will indeed make me a "MOVING SEX MACHINE".

<comment><USER10> 'Thanks so much for extending me the privilege to let me purchase this one of a kind herbal remedy, but I'm compelled to pass on your offer because sadly, I am single and 'MOVING SEX MACHINE' is not, in fact, directly relevant to my audience.' sounds reasonable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you skipped right to the comments, a good summary of this is: The author "finally grew the stones" to send a strongly worded email to a spammer.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's not always useful to call bullshit. Specifically, when confronted to that kind of emails, the best policy is not answering.

Calling bullshit out loud is useful so that others can know it is bullshit. Otherwise, the energy is best spent elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've found how loudly I call it is in direct proportion to how bad it smells.

</comment><comment><USER14> Not if my karma is at risk...

</comment><comment><USER15> Definitely the two martinis talking. Entertaining, though :-)</comment>


Show HN: Cycle-accurate Nintendo NES emulator in ~1000 lines of code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/AndreaOrru/LaiNES.git <comment><USER3> This is one example of how powerful and expressive C++ can be in the hands of the right person. I love (plain) C for its openness and the apparent ease of use but keep being amazed at how much more powerful as a language C++ is - <USER2> the point that C starts looking like a children's toy tool that should be abandoned as soon as the hand is strong enough to hold the real one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks (for calling me the right person). There is a price to pay for power in C++ though. Keeping the code beautiful and readable is often a challenge, as the syntax gets convoluted very quickly. I'm not the biggest fan of the Standard Template Library either.

Lately I've been experimenting with D ([https://dlang.org](https://dlang.org)), created by Walter Bright and Andrei Alexandrescu, both well known expert C++ programmers. D feels a lot like C++ should have been had it dropped some C compatibility in exchange for clarity. Its meta-programming capabilities are also far more powerful. I can think of features (like template mixins) that would make this project even more compact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure if this can be technically defined as cycle accurate, since cpu instructions are still executed atomically, instead of executing each instruction cycle independently... I guess the end result is what matters and not the actual implementation?

EDIT: I suck at c++

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not atomical. Note that the PPU is constantly updated in the middle of the CPU instructions in a way that respects the timing of the original hardware. The relative order of operations between CPU and PPU is respected.

<comment><USER4> You're right, sorry ^^ Too many meta-programming tricks for me

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is _insanely_ good. I remember studying the code of other NES emulators and all of them easily passed the 10k lines mark. Makes you wonder how much repeated code is there.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be fair I don't implement all the mappers, but I'm pretty confident the core parts of the emulator (CPU and PPU) are as small as it gets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Such pregunta. Very clever. Many condense. Such switch. WOW. So emulator.</comment>


Stop LexisNexis from Selling Your Personal Info - <AUTHOR> https://www.lexisnexis.com/opt-out-public-facing-products/Default.aspx

<comment><USER2> It requires supporting documentation?</comment>


Etsy users irked after buyers, purchases exposed to the world - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2011/03/etsy-users-irked-after-buyers-purchases-exposed-to-the-world.ars

<comment><USER2> Interesting bit from the linked comments via "egoodman85":

Hey, just want to clarify something as an Etsy employee. It's not your _purchases_ that are public - it's your feedback on those purchases. I know it's a small distinction, but it's not like we have some sort of desire to publicize our members' purchases. Feedback is public by default just like it is on eBay - to increase accountability and transparency. It's also worth noting that feedback has been public since the site's launch (in fact, the option to make it private was only added recently). The new People Search feature does not change this at all.

<comment><USER3> FWIW, it's not just "your" feedback, it's also any feedback left by sellers on purchases you've made, which identify your purchase whether you left any feedback or not.

(search etsy for my username for an example)

I see this as a _major_ privacy screwup by Etsy. I don't mind people being able to see the earrings I bought my girlfriend a few years back, but I can _easily_ see people having purchases exposed that they really didn't ever expect to be made public. (and I'll guess there's a whole category of items that stop being bought on Etsy, and a category of purchases that won't be made there any more (who's gonna buy their mistress jewelery on Etsy any more?))

<comment><USER4> For the record, this is how it's always been on Etsy. However, we pushed a change earlier tonight that removes seller feedback from public view. This seemed like the right thing to do and is appropriate now that we are using the newest PayPal API to ensure payment before an item is sold on the site -- this removed a lot of the reasons for the public visibility of the specifics of seller feedback. Note that your feedback score as a whole is still visible, so we haven't removed seller feedback altogether.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We take this stuff very seriously, and I just worked with Rob (CEO), and we implemented this solution: [http://www.etsy.com/teams/7716/announcements/discuss/6818578...](http://www.etsy.com/teams/7716/announcements/discuss/6818578/page/1/)

Being able to react to issues like this quickly is one of the great things about the Continuous Deployment process we have set up at Etsy. You can read more about that here:

[http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/05/20/quantum-of- deployment...](http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/05/20/quantum-of-deployment/)

<comment><USER5> Don't you think it's kind of inappropriate to respond to a serious accusation with a marketing statement about the technical architecture of your site?

I mean, sure, before reading this I thought Etsy was cool because of the continuous deployment thing, but now I think two things:

1\. perhaps continuous deployment leads to launching features without thinking about their consequences for long enough; 2\. Etsy's team is more interested in thumping its chest about continuous deployment than owning up to a serious mistake.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps you're right. My comment was primarily intended to link to the explanation of the change we made to address some of the concerns people had. Plugging CI was probably not necessary, though this is hacker news and so I thought it was relevant to the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Your purchase history should never be up for grabs in a public manner. That is a breach of trust in my book. I liked etsy but I don't think I will purchase anything from them in the future because of this. Not that I am buying anything incriminating but I don't want to support this type of marginalizing of customer privacy.

This is the type of thing that should most certainly be either not implemented at all or an opt-in type of thing if etsy still decided to go through with creating the feature.

</comment><comment><USER7> I had high opinions of Etsy after reading about their work environment and ethics, but that is just a terrible move.

The only way to minimize the damages would be to roll back the feature completely and apologize. Or turn it off for everyone and leave the option to turn it back on. But that's a major PR blow.

<comment><USER8> It's also an example of how it can be a liability to depend on another self- interested corporate entity for your entire business platform. I've been reading some of the comments on the forums from sellers talking about a significant drop in sales.

But Etsy is in part successful due to the success of its sellers and their unique offerings, making it a more symbiotic relationship. Merchants aren't helpless and can put pressure on Etsy to be more open about changes, and ensure that the privacy of their customers is always a first consideration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yep. That's pretty horrific. Never buying on Etsy again.

<comment><USER10> Based on your other comments on this site, I assume that was sarcasm, but I know that a lot of other people would think you were being completely serious.

<comment><USER11> He's not being sarcastic. It's a non-obvious disclosure of people's information they consider to be private. It's a very good example, actually, of how Etsy is not respecting peoples privacy, regardless of the language in their privacy policy.

So no, Thomas is serious -- as am I. I hate shit like this because these kinds of security and privacy violations are not things the average consumer knows how to protect themselves against. It's non-trivially solved. You and I might be able to do it, but most folks can't, and they shouldn't be punished because of it.

<comment><USER10> Heh, I fail at the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I just logged in and set feedback to private, now it says:

+Private Thank You! Enjoy! Check back with us. We are always adding new items. 420Chopshop .com

I bought a gift for my cousin and now my profile is tagged with 420chopshop (they also sell things that aren't related to marijuana). It seems like you can write anything you want in feedback and there is no way to hide or remove it.

While I don't find it to be a huge issue, it will make me think twice before buying something from Etsy in the future.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Found an XXL glass dildo..."

Next para: "Critics of Etsy's new policy seem to have a thing for searching for artisan dildos, but the point is pretty clear."

That is one spectacular double pun at the end...

</comment><comment><USER14> There had to be at least one person at Etsy that thought this was a bad idea. As far as most people are concerned, a purchase is a private transaction between two parities that is not to be disclosed (unless explicitly agreed upon by both parties). Whoever made this 'feature' a reality really ought to get fired.

<comment><USER15> And those people were probably steam-rolled over by a group of 'experts' who decided that 'very few' people would care about this, because, y'know, it's social? And everyone likes social?

<comment><USER16> I don't know anything about how they run their operation but my guess is that this was a big initiative and most people didn't see this reaction coming because so much information on the site is public already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why is etsy trying to do social? Are they going to roll out a daily deals service next? What's their search strategy? Come on, etsy has a nice little niche going, why ruin it by chasing the latest trend?

</comment><comment><USER18> As an example: [http://www.etsy.com/people/vanessakaleidoscope/feedback?type...](http://www.etsy.com/people/vanessakaleidoscope/feedback?type=for_others) I don't mean to pick on this person, but I'm using this page as an example (and it is from the P-A forums, I didn't dig it up).

Some users think that "feedback" is like an email to the seller; it won't be public.

Given that people are upset, why doesn't Etsy just disable this "feedback is public on your profile" feature?

<comment><USER16> Because that would defeat the purpose. For a site like etsy feedback is very important and if a buyer or seller is untrustworthy you need to know.

<comment><USER18> I agree. But psuedo-anonymize it! Just like Amazon gives you an option to pick a name to go with your feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Etsy's team should be willing to publish a highly visible feed of their staffers purchases since they obviously shouldn't have anything to hide.

<comment><USER16> Most of their team that I've met over the years (my wife used to be a pretty big seller on that site) have shops and actively sell or have sold things so you could see what they bought already through the feedback system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It is great that someone from Etsy has stepped up to respond. Thank you!

But, does _feedback_ expose purchases? If so, there needs to be an explicit explanation (or policy) that identifies this will occur on Etsy.

</comment><comment><USER21> Etsy is trying really hard to be 'social' lately. Some members like it, others don't. It seems like they swung harder down this path after the recent investment by Index Ventures.

</comment><comment><USER22> This article seems really misleading, or I'm confused. If it's really just your feedback, then it's just like every other ecommerce site, where reviews are public, and ars should correct themselves.

Otoh, the screenshot in the article makes it look like it's all purchases. So which is it?

</comment><comment><USER23> Our CEO just posted a comment on the article for clarification:

[http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2011/03/etsy-users-irked- aft...](http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2011/03/etsy-users-irked-after-buyers- purchases-exposed-to-the-world.ars?comments=1#comment-21429759)

<comment><USER24> "We do have plans to give buyers on Etsy the ability to hide feedback for certain purchases". "Certain purchases", really? Why not all purchases. I see a train wreck coming.

<comment><USER23> EDIT: I was mistaken on a few things - see gfodor's comment above

<comment><USER25> As was clearly pointed out, seller feedback -- over which you have no control -- is also public. And from your CEO's statement: "We do have plans to give buyers on Etsy the ability to hide feedback for certain purchases. We certainly appreciate privacy, and we spend a lot of time on these issues."

Now, I barely use etsy but my gf is a heavy user. I admire your company, but if this is true -- that any purchase I or my gf make can receive public feedback from the seller -- that's really not very cool. Plus your ceo has a "plan" to allow people to disable it. It's hard to believe that your current answer to "I bought a custom dildo and the seller said I was a good buyer" is "tough shit -- email our customer service to hide your name and wait for this change to be deindexed from G/Y/B".

I hope that I've misinterpreted the above article / response, because based on my limited purchasing history at etsy, it's not at all what I would have expected.

<comment><USER4> Yes, see my comment above. We pushed a change this evening that removes seller feedback from your public profile. Since Etsy was founded you've always been able to see this information. However, upon considering the fact that we no longer have issues wrt buyers not paying due to our new checkout system, combined with the fact that it inadvertently reveals a buyer's purchase information based upon the action of a seller, we decided it made sense to remove this view from your public profile.

As far as the visibility of other feedback goes, such as the feedback you make on a seller, you can mark the feedback as 'private' when you make it to hide the item involved.

<comment><USER21> Yes, you've been always able to see this information. But did it appear in Google with your full name, or did your account show up when people uploaded their address books? No. It seems Etsy hasn't figured out that dealing with people's real-life identities is a serious matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This issue has been addressed: [http://www.etsy.com/teams/7716/announcements/discuss/6818578...](http://www.etsy.com/teams/7716/announcements/discuss/6818578/page/1/)

+10 for continuous deployment, too.

</comment><comment><USER27> Hi, Adam Brown from Etsy here.

Just wanted to let you know that we have resolved this issue. As of right now, all your purchases and feedback on Etsy are now automatically set to private.

You can read more about it in our blog: [http://www.etsy.com/storque/handmade- life/rethinking-feedbac...](http://www.etsy.com/storque/handmade- life/rethinking-feedback-12472/)

</comment><comment><USER28> When are companies going to figure out that whenever 'social' gets bolted on to an app there's a backlash? Why do we all keep trying this over & over? Do we actually see this increasing sales? Or is it just a general feeling that since Facebook is worth XX billion, we'll be worth more if our experience is more social?

<comment><USER29> I don't think it's about the money, as you propose, but more about Etsy craving to be more than just a place where people buy and sell stuff. They probably consider that uncool. Perhaps success has gone to their head a bit.

Be that as it may, I can imagine it's not easy to resist the urge to 'swing for the fences' and 'make a platform play' or 'build a social-commerce ecosystem' when you're killing it in a space you pretty much invented like Etsy is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Some additional clarifications here -- I also work for Etsy:

[http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2011/03/etsy-users-irked- aft...](http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2011/03/etsy-users-irked-after-buyers- purchases-exposed-to-the-world.ars?comments=1&start=80#comment-21430678)

</comment><comment><USER31> The responses to this give me such little faith in this community and the internet in general.

This is a pain, sure, but for everyone to suddenly be saying "if they don't fix this today I'm never using them again" -- don't you think that's a bit rash?

Why can't we raise our concerns about this policy with pointless threats that so little will ever carry through with. This is a relatively small issue, but one that a lot care about, so make it clear it matters to you but to say "if you don't fix it I will never use you again" is lame. Explain _why_ this is bad instead of just saying you'll never use it again. It seems so childish.

<comment><USER32> It seems like a reasonable response to say "if they don't fix this today I'm never using them again", etsy took information which people had assumed was private and made it public. If they respond quickly and take steps to ensure something like this doesn't happen again then I might consider using them again. One of the fastest ways to influence a profit driven enterprise is to make it clear that there actions mean you will no longer give them money (either by no longer shopping on etsy or listing on etsy).

I also take issue with your statement that "this is a relatively small issue", while the items I personally bought on etsy are fairly mundane I don't want my shopping history to be easily googleable. How would you feel if the local XXX store started posting pictures of all of the customers in the news paper (or even just putting them up on the web)?

<comment><USER31> Yeah, so they can explain _why_ it's a problem for them. If Etsy know why users are concerned they can work out a suitable solution. For example, how does "Yep. That's pretty horrific. Never buying on Etsy again." help at all?

<comment><USER32> I could see that possible being a concern where the reason why people are upset isn't obvious, but this is not one of those cases.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Trouble With Bright Girls - <AUTHOR> http://psychologytoday.com/blog/the-science-success/201101/the-trouble-bright-girls

<comment><USER2> I don't think this is limited to girls. I have read in some parenting books about the number of boys being diagnosed with ADHD might be related to this feeling, that they try something and can't get it, then just get frustrated and move on.

We have tried to be particularly encouraging with our 18-month old son. From what we have read, often saying "you are so smart" as led to many children giving up when they face a tough task as they feel they must not be smart enough to figure it out. Instead, we say "you worked hard", "good work", "you put time into it", etc. Anything to encourage the act of working rather than how smart he must be.

Another book suggested having just 3-5 toys in a room, rather than the 50 we have now, so the amount of concentration is focused instead of moving from one to the next. Now if we can just get the 4 grandparents with just this 1 grandchild to stop buying him things! Probably going to hide everything when they are not here instead.

</comment><comment><USER3> > She found that bright girls, when given something to learn that was > particularly foreign or complex, were quick to give up - and the higher the > girls' IQ, the more likely they were to throw in the towel. In fact, the > straight-A girls showed the most helpless responses. Bright boys, on the > other hand, saw the difficult material as a challenge, and found it > energizing. They were more likely to redouble their efforts, rather than > giving up.

A prestigious English school for girls recognised this problem, and ran "failure week". Trying and failing is much better than not trying.

([http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16879336](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16879336))

([http://www.wimbledonhigh.gdst.net/failure- week.html](http://www.wimbledonhigh.gdst.net/failure-week.html))

Other techniques that some schools use are to stop asking students to put their hands up to answer a question - the teacher will pick a student who then has to try to answer. Being wrong is fine. The wrongness is where people learn.

<comment><USER2> Really good idea. As a 33 year old, I still feel some of the anxiety when I remember being wrong in college or high school. Hopefully, more schools can adopt this idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> FWIM: The linked article is from 2011.</comment>


DNA Data Storage: The Entirety of YouTube Could Fit on a Teaspoon - <AUTHOR> https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a29008852/dna-storage-future/ <comment><USER2> The first write-only (to a first approximation) memory storage. Reading back petabytes of DNA is going to be a challenge.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, one could only imagine the cost of sequencing the dna to retrieve the data (not to mention the current lack of random access). Illumina's highest capacity sequencer will do 6Tb (terabases). The machine costs about half a million dollars and each run is tens of thousands of dollars, not to mention the lab costs of preparing/storing the dna. Additionally, the depth at which one would have to sequence to get _all_ of the data back reliably would be >1 meaning that every base would have to be sequence more than once (to avoid sequencing errors).

<comment><AUTHOR> "each run is tens of thousands of dollars"

I'm not familiar with sequencing economics, would you mind explaining the cost of a "run"?

<comment><USER3> A sequencing run (at least in the context of Illumina's technology) requires a few very expensive consumable reagents: First being the flowcell (microscope slide that the dna sticks to while being read by a laser), the reagents (containing enzymes with fluorophores and other reagents for amplifying and manipulating DNA), and the actual power consumed by such machinery. This does not factor in prep/lab costs (which can be kept at a minimum with automation, but that also is a high startup cost endeavor). Each sequencing run can take ~1-3 days depending on the format.

Edit: this video may be able to explain a little better how this process works: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCd6B5HRaZ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCd6B5HRaZ8)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the explanation. I've seen research on graphene-based nanopore sequencing, but my knowledge and understanding are shallow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> rather than just talking about the density of storage it would have been interesting to get some figures on the read and write speed. I figure that writing things to DNA and/or reading it is incredibly complicated and slow. What's the use case for something like this, putting information into DNA and then freezing it somewhere?

<comment><USER5> I work for a commercial synthetic DNA producer in R&D. At the moment writing DNA is the slow part. There has been an almost Moore's law like reduction in price/increase in speed for sequencing, but so far synthesis has lagged. The state-of-the-art is phosphoramidite synthesis which has been around since the 80's. We have optimized and streamlined the process, but a single base addition (writing one 'bit') is still in the range of 100's of seconds. Also the length of DNA produced by phosphoramidite synth is limited to a couple hundred bases in most cases (although it's possible to extend that out to hundreds of bases at increased cost/reduced efficiency). So long DNA has to be stitched together from shorter strands. The other issue with synthetic DNA is quality so methods like microarrays are not necessarily the best (quality cannot be objectively measured on a per strand basis).

There are some interesting developments out there, like using enzymatic methods to synthesize long strands, but a lot of that technology is still in it's infancy.

I would be happy to discuss the field if anyone is working in it (or has interest)

<comment><USER6> I'd like to discuss! Email in my profile

<comment><USER5> Hi Dan, I've actually been meaning to reach out to you, your company is doing some really exciting things. I don't see your email in your profile, so I will send a quick email to your company info email. Otherwise feel free to send a quick message to sbearden at idtdna dot com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(Star_Trek:_The_Next...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_\(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation\))

</comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of ST:Voyager's bio gel packs

<comment><USER9> But ST:Voyager never had the DMCA.

Imagine the copyright strikes of storing (and replicating) all of YouTube in a teaspoon.</comment></comment>


Intel's Xpoint is broken - <AUTHOR> http://semiaccurate.com/2016/09/12/intels-xpoint-pretty-much-broken/ <comment><AUTHOR> From the article -

> They claimed 10x the density of DRAM, it is now 4x

> Latency missed by 100x, yes one hundred times, on their claim of 1000x > faster, 10x is now promised

> More troubling is endurance, probably the main selling point of this > technology over NAND. Again the claim was a 1000x improvement, Intel > delivered 1/333rd of that with 3x the endurance.

From this seminar few months back - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXurTRtmfWc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXurTRtmfWc) ,

I think density can be increased, this is only the initial product,

and latency is contributed more by PCIe/OS/application rather than the underlying 3d-xpoint material. The slides from the article are for the PCIe SSDs, I wonder whether the earlier claimed latency, still holds well with NVRAM.

I wonder why the endurance is so lower than the earlier claims.

<comment><USER2> Ouch!

10x latency and 3x endurance might normally satisfy the "must be 10x better" criteria to break into an existing market, but with the maturity of flash, and how memory hierarchies can ameliorate useful sets of latency requirements, this could end up being a damp squib instead of the revolution promised. 1000x endurance would have been great, 3x, who will notice?

Not the first time Intel has grossly mismanaged its technology....

<comment><USER3> "memory hierarchies can ameliorate useful sets of latency requirement"

Not the latency for commits to stable non-volatile storage, unless battery backed RAM is an option.

<comment><USER2> Or just a big enough capacitor to finish the necessary writes to flash memory. Which as I understand it is one of the things that distinguishes enterprise from consumer flash drives, and one of the reasons I use the slowest, smallest Intel enterprise flash drive for system and /home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One should not confuse 3D XPoint that is a sort a memory and Optane that is a product, a SDD. Octane uses all the traditional protocols to work like other devices in a computer and that slow down the operations a lot. We saw the same drawbacks with SDD when they used the SATA interface and the protocols of hard drives, before special drivers improved their speed.

</comment><comment><USER5> How is it "broken"? I thought they meant that there's a fundamental flaw with the tech, but instead it seems he just means that they didn't meet their original goals of the tech with their first actual product.

<comment><USER6> SemiAccurate - the website this article is posted on - is a bit like the Daily Mail of technology. It probably had clickbait titles before the word was coined.

<comment><USER7> perfectly named though—truth in advertising FTW!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The new numbers Intel is claiming, can be met by floating gate transistors that are randomly accessible (versus those arranged in bit lines and word lines like in NAND). Especially for a single level cell. No need for another materials science/physics like "x point", unless"x point" actually is just a PR spin without any new physics.

<comment><USER9> Can you please explain this in layman's terms?

<comment><USER10> Floating gate = the switching element on a transistor acts as a capacitor and can hold charge. the basic primitive for building flash memory.

NAND SSDs which are common today are essentially rows of similar structures. Each row is a string of floating gate transistors, and to read a single bit, you gotta run the whole operation of reading the entire row.

Random access means that you can read anything anywhere without any sort of similar caveats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Intel will probably end of spinning this as the first (more impressive) set of numbers being estimates of the potential limits of the new technology.

Almost certainly those nice round numbers came from some engineers (or more likely, engineering manager) being pressured for 'long term performance estimates of the technology', coming up with something that seemed plausible, and then wrapped up nicely into a marketing presentation.

Or, it might be that intel actually did have something approaching each of those three claims - in three separate embodiments of the product, and is running into problems combining the traits together.

In all cases, I feel for the Intel engineers working on this project right now. Probably all cursing that original reveal.

</comment><comment><USER12> So disappointing... I'm wondering if they did it intentionally to make room for an upgrade(i.e like the TV industry did with 8K)</comment>


Ask HN: What's the most unexpected social convention you've discovered? - <AUTHOR> In the context of running a startup in the Bay Area.
For example, a post I read eons ago described how, when talking to an investor, and they ask you if you're talking to other investors, you always say yes. The reason being is that you always want to appear to be able to give them competition, and moreover, if you say no you look inexperienced.
Any other catches like that you can think of? <comment><USER2> When you meet someone you often say things like: "Hey how are you doing? or "How is it going?" These phrases are not intended to be literal questions but are actually used to gauge the other person's feelings towards you. From their tone and the length of their response you can determine whether they want to expand the relationship or are indifferent. These meaningless phrases are actually an important part of social interactions, despite having no apparent meaning.

<comment><USER3> This is culture-specific. As somebody who moved from Scotland where "How are you doing" has only one socially-acceptable answer "Good/Great/Fine" I'm now in Finland.

If you ask a Finnish person how they are, they will tell you.

I regard this as refreshing, honest, and interesting.

<comment><USER4> I want to move to Finland just for this, haha.

People here (southeast USA) like to ask this question as they are walking by. There is absolutely no way to answer in an honest way, you just have to say "Good, good." or something like that. Furthermore, since you're walking by it's still awkward even to say "Good, you?" I've always found it really weird. If you just want to say hey, say hey! Hello. Greetings. Salutations. Don't ask me a question as you're walking away. :v

<comment><USER5> Also in the southeast. I've started answering honestly (to a point). And when I ask it I stop first and face the person. It's actually a very difficult habit to get out of once you've started. Similar to removing verbal tics such as "like". The hardest part is the mindfulness required to acknowledge it's even happening.

<comment><USER4> Personally I only ask it if I'm already stopped and facing someone. At work, so many people are walking by me at a very fast pace and just quickly shoot this question at me. I answer, "Good, you?" and hear a "good" in the distance as they are already 10 feet away, and it's always felt super awkward.

Totally fine in the breakroom as we are in line to get coffee/water though.

But yeah, people probably just don't think about it much. I understand it's just a greeting to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In parts of Mexico it's considered embarrassing to admit not knowing how far away someplace is. The conventional solution is to use the code phrase: "Quatro kilometers, señor.

</comment><comment><USER7> Whether it's investors/bosses/clients, if you're invited to share your weakness/inexperience on premise that doing so is a sort of strength through honesty; it's a trap, and the right answer is expected to be the opposite.

<comment><USER4> "I had a weakness once. I overcame it. _beats chest_ "

Agreed. General advice I've heard is, "Well THIS, but this is what I've been doing to get past it."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Technically if you talk to anyone with a share portfolio about the weather, you are talking to other investors.

</comment><comment><USER9> Using self deprecating humour in the Anglosphere may signal confidence. In Germanic countries it will get you pitiful nervous stares.

I don't know about the Bay Area but I've heard uptalk is prevalent there specially on tech.</comment>


Ask HN: Are there jobs that let me code without top-heavy management? - <AUTHOR> I'm growing weary of the "culture fit"-obsessed non-technical leadership calling the shots, the headhunters placing you in mismatched positions, the creeping boot camp Taylorism, the endless turf wars disguised as academic discussions about tech strategies that ultimately get resolved by pulling rank based on arbitrary titles, being forced to use someone else's incomplete implementation of a tech stack selected exclusively from how many Github follows it has, the endless competition, and fad-driven Agile flavors where all the wrong people are held accountable for lost productivity, assuming accountability is even being held at all.
Is there any job that isn't exclusively attracting programmers, but a programmer can have a high impact on business performance and pays about as much as one would expect from a programming gig?  Like some small business that needs a "architect hacker" to streamline parts of the company for growth?
Just anything to get me out of the bland, sterile, high-school-esque contemporary programming culture. It's absolutely disgusting. I want to be a hero in a small pond, not an interchangable cog who writes code based on a top-heavy spec that didn't consult me or QA or any tech people at all until the deliverable date was already established. <comment><USER2> Look at the books "Have Fun at Work" and "Friends in High Places" by Livingston.

The confusion you describe reflects the difficulty of getting everyone to pull in the same direction when you are trying to do something that is too complex for one person to do.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are psychically dead on as to the cause behind this. Thanks for the confirmation! :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> been unemployed for about a year now. it's tough. everyone wants a fucking unicorn with photographic memory.

</comment><comment><USER4> Amen!</comment>


Should Education Focus on Connections/Understanding Rather Than Pure Knowledge? - <AUTHOR>

I am furthering my education in psychology, political theory, and philosophy, and I would like to know what HN thinks.<p>Do you think a problem with education lies in how, or what we teach?
What would you like to see?<p>(I apologize if this is against protocol for HN, but I think it is a thought provoking question.) <comment><USER2> I think education should be centered around what a child wants to learn and explore instead of a fixed set of things that should learned.

Who decided that memorizing multiplication tables is more important that learning how to make music?

Personally, I agree with Murray Rothbard that education would be a lot better off without all of the coercion.

Human beings are natural learners. Is being made to sit at a desk for hours listening to what someone else thinks you should learn really the ideal way to learn?

Far more people come out of our schools unwilling to learn than go in that way.

<comment><USER2> The brain is primed to learn when you really want to know something or to solve a problem.

Excitement about learning is far more important than learning A, then B, then C and then being finished. The truly accomplished are excited.</comment></comment>


Web-dev nirvana, and why I needed to let go of React to reach it - <AUTHOR> https://www.bryanbraun.com/2019/09/11/web-dev-nirvana-and-why-I-needed-to-let-go-of-reactjs-to-reach-it/ <comment><USER2> Recreating the wheel with many less features. React is an abstraction of the view layer that's able render to multiple platforms (DOM, iOS, Android, Windows).

These "anti-React" and "web is too complex" articles are common.

It takes 1 command to generate a React project, all the configuration is done for you. This includes code-splitting where it generates a small runtime. The other chunks in the bundle are pretty small. Most of the dependencies are just for development.

React components themselves are easy to write and they don't lock you in to just the web.

<comment><USER3> The phrase using a shotgun to swat flies comes to mind. These modern frameworks and tool chains solve very well understood problems. They enable large teams of software engineers to collaborate and release complicated interrelated software on predictable schedules. Not every project has this requirement. For smaller projects the overhead and the included complexity that comes as a result of using these frameworks and tool chains vastly overshadows the benefits.

<comment><USER2> You should develop every project like it's an enterprise level app. Why would you rewrite it in a different tech when it's ready to grow? It's easier to use, why shoot yourself in the foot.

It's a myth you need a large team to create a React app.

<comment><USER3> [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.01715.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.01715.pdf)

From the bottom of page 11: Most software at Google gets rewritten every few years... (continues with another paragraph).

In most of the companies Ive worked at for more than a few years some major piece of the architecture changes in ways unforeseen by the original designers. This usually incurs massive changes on the frontend, since it's often the glue that wires everything together. Migrating to react from a simpler framework is a minuscule amount of the effort. Large structural changes for growing software products are the norm, not the exception. If your project never gets past the initial stages its pointless to plan for the future when there might be none. Which is what this guy's project was, an initial project on a weekend retreat.

<comment><USER2> The skeleton I use to create weekend projects is the same as what I use to create enterprise projects. I don't see the need to juggle "simpler" frameworks for no reason, especially when those "simpler" frameworks are harder to use (because you have to remake everything yourself)

There are many small things I don't want to recreate that are always needed in every web app. Translations, authorization, accessibility, bug tracking, and more.

Another person said it best. You aren't going to use your own C++ compiler just because it's simpler and you don't need all the features, why do the same to the toolchains for the web?

<comment><USER3> Following this logic Spring never would have been invented in the Java world because Java EE does everything you need it to even though you don't need all of those features. Frameworks and tool chains become bloated and convoluted over time. I'm not super well versed in react/js/etc web development, but given the regularity that you see and hear about these sorts of posts, a not insignificant minority feels like the toolchain is overly complex for lots of use cases. If it wasn't then the post wouldn't have made it to the front page. It wouldn't have been upvoted just like our comments in this discussion :) Just because _you_ find the toolchain an easy to understand time saver that's pretty DRY doesn't mean everyone else does. Who knows? Maybe complexity in React will continue to increase and someone somewhere will invent the Spring equivalent for React. Why would they? Because they didn't need all of those features. (Also thought of Vue.js spinoff from AngularJS)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Honestly, I love articles like these. I feel like so much of the time we think in terms of frameworks as opposed to the problems they're there to solve.

I've been in situations where, for reasons I won't get into, I wasn't able to use large tool chains or have tons of dependencies. I had to distill things to the basic problem(s) that I needed to solve and come up with maintainable ways to solve them.

<comment><USER5> "Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler." AE

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just for fun, here is what I would currently call nirvana when it comes to writing React components (12 lines compared to 35~38 from the article)

      (ns demos.core
        (:require [reagent.core :as reagent]))

      (defn DarkMode []
        (let [dark? (reagent/atom false)]
          (fn []
            (.setAttribute js/document.body "data-theme" (if @dark? "dark" "light"))
            [:label
              [:span "Dark Mode"]
              [:input {:type "checkbox"
                      :onChange #(reset! dark? (not @dark?))
                      :checked (when @dark? "checked")}]])))

Done with ClojureScript + Reagent

</comment><comment><USER7> That is way I really think Svelte3 can shake webdev a bit. It generates small, plenty fast builds by default with easy syntax. Currently it is missing a bit in terms of tooling, but the results just bring you back to almost pure HTML and JS with much less to be worried about.

</comment><comment><USER8> I like the gist of this article, but how would these components be nested? (Or how could you add this?) That's something I really need. I checked the source repo, there is no nesting.

Also, wouldn't using innerhtml cause scroll positions etc to be lost?

<comment><USER9> Original author here.

I don't think nesting is possible in the examples in that post. I'm sure there's some way to get it working that I just haven't figured out yet. Maybe you could replace the default template strings with something using tagged template literals (like [https://github.com/developit/htm](https://github.com/developit/htm)).

You can work around nesting by spinning up new components after the innerHTML assignment, and assigning them with IDs. Here's an example where I've done that:

[https://github.com/bryanbraun/music-box- fun/blob/dc899c14adc...](https://github.com/bryanbraun/music-box- fun/blob/dc899c14adcd4b228b243cee1e88a394e204f805/js/components/note- lines.js#L22-L25)

Edit: typos

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > You can't just create a React app.

Only you can. React on a CDN works and create-react-app is but a one line CLI invocation to... create a React app.

> we'd need to get rid of Webpack, since it's difficult to comprehend and > customize

Is it? You don't really need to customise create-react-app and even if you did, Webpack has good docs.

> We'd drop Babel too, since transpiling creates a workflow burden (especially > for debugging).

Bit slow to start up the dev server, I grant you, but we're talking seconds here and how often do you do it? Hot reloading is instant. Source maps work. This feels fairly false. Importantly, the tool chain will check my code for issues, making my work flow much better. Especially if we throw in typescript. It also lets me use things like lambdas, again making me more productive, not less.

> we can end up with a codebase that's shockingly React-like, without the > workflow and maintenance overhead

Except for maintaining your own custom router, event handling, wrapper around some popular CSS framework so that you don't have to style everything explicitly, and all the rest of it, of course.

> It's hard to overstate how much easier it is to develop once all the extra > tooling and abstractions are gone.

It's hard, because it isn't really easier, is it? What specifically is easier? Having to make and debug all your own custom everything, including your own leaky abstraction? Having to figure out how to optimise the site's performance because you've thrown away the virtual DOM and all the benefits that brings? Having to write your tests against a real browser's DOM engine?

> You save a file, you refresh the page, and you see your changes.

That works just fine with create-react-app, etc.

> You can read your stack traces.

I already can, thank you.

> You can pause execution and not be lost.

Have you heard of breakpoints, or run to cursor? I'm not sure what this even means - does the author mean hitting the pause button in the debugger randomly while rendering the page?

> You can spend all of your time working on your app, instead of chasing down > obscure build issues.

I already do, thank you. I suspect chasing down obscure build issues is comfortably less than 1% of the problem. I suspect it will be more than that if I follow the author's advice by "creating a production-only build", which will make my prod and dev environments wildly diverge. No thank you. I already have a production-ready build backed by battle-tested tools maintained by someone else.

This looks strongly like a toy solution in search of a problem.

No one would advocate building your own custom C++ compiler just because you don't use all the features of the language. This is basically the same.</comment>


Show HN: Htop 2.0 released, now cross-platform - <AUTHOR> http://hisham.hm/htop/ <comment><USER3> 128 Cores - nice: [http://hisham.hm/htop/128.png](http://hisham.hm/htop/128.png)

<comment><USER4> That version of Ubuntu looks very, very old.

<comment><USER5> Looks like 8.04 hardy heron, no ?

<comment><USER4> Yes, seems like it's 8.04!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://drunken-security.at/is-it-a-good-idea-to-show- everybo...](http://drunken-security.at/is-it-a-good-idea-to-show-everybody- what-your-server-is-doing/?q=/archives/41) has a live htop background :-)

<comment><USER7> We are pleased that you "stole" our idea :)

Is it ok to steal back the gif? Because i think the server load is a bit to much with so many background reloads.

<comment><AUTHOR> sure! that's the spirit of free software :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was just installing an older version the other day on FreeBSD, and having to mount (unmaintained) procfs was quite annoying. So after seeing this link I specifically went to their site to check what they mean by "cross platform". They say procfs won't be needed anymore.

Speaking of which, does anyone know why OpenJDK wants procfs on FreeBSD? Is this a Java thing or a problem with libraries people write using Java?

<comment><USER9> I think it is OpenJDK that want's procfs and fdescfs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think htop and lua are probably the two main Brazilian contributions to the open source community.

<comment><USER11> Apropos of nothing: does country of origin (or is it residence; or residence of the main contributors) tell us anything that is at all useful?

It seems like information - the sort people go 'oh really, how fascinating' to - but I can't really see how it's relevant.

Anyone want to chip in and make a stand for national identity or anything?

To me it's kinda like you said 'find and grep are the two main contributions to OSS from the flan-eating community'.

Yes, I should probably just keep such thoughts to myself ...

Oh and htop is awesome! Only used Lua on a Minecraft mod (and an not a programmer/CS) so can't really comment on it.

<comment><USER12> It's just a little point of interest. I don't often think about my life intersecting with the nation off of Brazil, yet I use htop every day. Now I'll probably cast my mind to a Brazilian rainforest when I do. Just makes the world a slightly more interesting place.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Always nice when we help to make people's perceptions of places less unidimensional. Brazil is not only a place with rainforests, we also have coders! :)

(Though, even though I'm a (Southern) Brazilian myself, I used to think the whole "monkeys in the streets" here was a hoax until I moved to Rio de Janeiro and I realized they have tiny squirrel-sized monkeys running atop the power lines there!)

<comment><USER12> I feel the unidimensional thing. Australians don't actually ride kangaroos to work! There is, if I'm honest, a wallaby living in the bush that abuts my property, though.

You'll excuse me, however, for continuing to cast my mind to a tranquil rainforest rather than a Brazilian coder at a keyboard. I understand they both exist, but one is far more relaxing to contemplate than the other! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really enjoyed this talk[1] by Bryan Cantrill, part of which is about what it took to emulate Linux's syscalls from within SmartOS. It's lengthy, but enjoyable.

One of the applications that they tried to port directly to before the emulation layer was htop, and he has a good rant about what that took because of its use of /proc and how that made porting it very difficult.

Given that, I'm sure this wasn't easy. Kudos!

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrfD3pC0VSs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrfD3pC0VSs)

<comment><USER14> Cantrill loves to rant, don't he?

<comment><USER15> He does and he's good at it. It's usually pretty entertaining.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I used to use htop, but switched to glances at some point, because of a quicker-to-find-the-info-you-want interface.

<comment><USER17> I use htop. I tried glances as I heard good things about it. It is nice, I like how it has more stuff -- disk, network. However it installed matplotlib, fonts-lyx, tk8.6, libjs-jquery-ui, python3-bottle, and a slew of other dependencies, not a big deal but something to watch for.

<comment><USER16> Were you adding it through apt-get or pip? With apt-get it's fairly painless.

        apt-cache depends glances

      Depends: python-psutil
      Depends: <python:any>
        python:i386
        python
      Depends: <python:any>
        python:i386
        python
      Depends: python
      Depends: python-pkg-resources
      Depends: adduser
      Depends: lsb-base
      Recommends: python-jinja2

<comment><USER17> apt-get. It was painless, and I have the diskspace so not a big deal. Looking at package properties I see it recommends a bunch of packages, so it installed those and their deps (this is Ubuntu 15.10):

        hddtemp, lm-sensors, python3-docker,
        python3-bottle, python3-pysnmp4,
        python3-influxdb ...

<comment><USER18> optional dependencies are optional for a reason, no real reason to bring it up as a con.

<comment><USER17> I just described by experience of installing it. It wasn't a huge issue, I installed them anyway after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Awesome! Installing htop is the first thing I do on my *nix systems. The update is still not up on Homebrew, shouldn't take long though.

<comment><USER20> Perhaps you're referring to Linuxbrew - "a fork of Homebrew, the Mac OS package manager, for Linux."

It exposes the same repository as its OSX counterpart, with linux-flavoured customisations where necessary.

From feature list at [http://linuxbrew.sh/](http://linuxbrew.sh/)

\- Can install software to a home directory and so does not require sudo

\- Install software not packaged by the native distribution

\- Install up-to-date versions of software when the native distribution is old

\- Use the same package manager to manage both your Mac and Linux machines

<comment><USER19> Nope, I am talking about Homebrew, it provides the best way to install htop on OSX.

<comment><USER21> The htop package on Homebrew is a fork of the original for OS X called htop- osx.

[https://github.com/AndyA/htop-osx](https://github.com/AndyA/htop-osx)

<comment><USER19> Didn't know that! Thanks for sharing.

I hope the fork will be deprecated now for the official one. There's already a related issue on the repo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if this can get into Ubuntu 16.04 before feature freeze in a week or so..

<comment><USER23> It's not a default package, right? If so it can be updated in the repos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> htop is an amazing upgrade to plain old top. Thank you for your work on this!

<comment><USER25> Agreed. And it's fun running it on a box with 32+ cores.

<comment><USER26> Is there a quick way to avoid having all those cores take up the top 32 lines of the screen?

Checking my 40 core machine in a typical terminal window, I can't see any of the processes, just 40 lines of CPU! Thanks.

<comment><USER27> If you press F2 you can change the setup for the top meters and switch it out with CPU average or other combinations of cores.

<comment><USER28> ...or if you're not the interactive type (or deploy untold millions of images), edit .htoprc .

Hm. Given the opacity of that config file, I went the way "configure interactively, then roll out the new .htoprc"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I love htop! I hope homebrew gets it soon. Mine only says version 0.8.2.8? I donated $5 to the developer. Thanks for htop

<comment><USER30> For others interested in donating: [http://hisham.hm/htop/index.php?page=donate](http://hisham.hm/htop/index.php?page=donate)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Huge htop fan. Honestly probably my favorite unix utility.

Just did `brew update && brew upgrade` but not seeing an htop update. I am still running htop 0.8.2.8 via brew.

Also tried on an AWS server running Ubuntu, same thing `apt-get update && apt- get upgrade` no new htop version available. Running htop 1.0.2.

<comment><USER32> I hit the same thing, so I figured I would try compiling from source.

I built ncurses 6.0 from source (installed to $HOME/local) and then htop 2.0 (also to $HOME/local) and it worked a charm. This was on a clean (took it out of the box today) 10.11 system.

<comment><USER31> Ehhhhhhhhhhhh, really want to stick with using native package managers (brew, apt). Did you just add htop to the apt exclude?

<comment><USER33> I too would like to know how to install via brew.

<comment><USER34> I quickly and hackily did `brew edit htop` and made these changes to install htop 2.0: [https://gist.github.com/bmorton/231bc3d6b3aa6fbefd48](https://gist.github.com/bmorton/231bc3d6b3aa6fbefd48)

I've got it on my list to fully fix it up and submit a PR, but feel free to flesh out my changes and submit instead :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> woohoo! ProTip: Even older versions of htop have mouse support. You can click on columns the change sorting for example.

</comment><comment><USER36> My favorite top replacement. Keep up the good work!

</comment><comment><USER37> Has anyone got mouse wheel support working on a PuTTy terminal? I've compiled htop from source against ncurses 6 on Ubuntu, but no luck.

I know it sounds like I'm asking a lot for a PuTTy window... but mouse clicks have (amazingly) worked even on a very old version of htop. Just wondering if anyone has done it before pursuing it further.

</comment><comment><USER38> I don't suppose this finally allows sorting in tree view, does it? That's been a feature I've been wanting forever.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tree view is sorted by pid only, sorry. I'm afraid moving entire subtrees based on other criteria (such as CPU%) would make the screen unbearably jumpy.

<comment><USER39> Is there a way to combine all the processes with the same command name?

I have a ton of mariadb processes (I don't even know if this is normal, but it seems to be working just fine) and it gets tiring having to scroll them just to glance the numbers on other processes.

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/ghwsh6ye1gt32k1/Screenshot%202016-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/ghwsh6ye1gt32k1/Screenshot%202016-02-11%2011.06.44.PNG?dl=0)

<comment><USER40> Those might be threads. It's best to disable showing threads (F2 - <USER2> options - Hide kernel/userland threads) because they give little information over just the process.

<comment><USER39> Thank you so much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Wouldn't braille characters also make nicer progress bars? I think they look more dense then a bunch of ||||

<comment><USER42> Braille characters, or just colons and full stops?

      [::::::::....        ]
      [::::::::::......    ]

Could you give an example of the braille characters being used in this way?

<comment><USER41> I was just thinking that using braille characters would fill more area on the screen. In particular, | characters look very thin. A bunch of widely spaced green bars |||| is functional but not very appealing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Yep! Perfect! Now I don't need to do some kind of magic :) when installing on my FreeBSD servers. Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER44> That slide design is really great.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Ok so I know of and have tried top, atop, htop, ntop. What else is out there??

<comment><USER45> Glances: [https://nicolargo.github.io/glances/](https://nicolargo.github.io/glances/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is really timely... I just got my new MBP today, so I've been installing all of my standard tools. Luckily I saw this before I used Homebrew to install htop!

</comment><comment><USER46> Oh the vtop inspired bar is def cool!

regular top has been catching up though and while htop is different and perhaps still better, regular top does the job for me in most cases.

<comment><USER47> It might depend on which top (BSD,GNU,?)

<comment><USER46> gnu of course ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Were they able to improve the conf file and color selection? I remember that was one area that needed work. 256 colors would be nice also ;)

</comment><comment><USER49> When I gave up to get it working properly on FreeBSD, I see this news. Great news.

<comment><USER50> Just now downloaded and compiled it on FreeBSD. Works as expected. Haven't used htop 1.x on FBSD so can't offer a comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is one of the first things I install on any new Linux system. Amazing tool.

</comment><comment><USER52> My biggest feature request is better search workflow (perhaps like Vim, instead of having to press F3) and ability to filtering/grep the list of processes when searching.

I am installing version 2.0 on my laptop to see if search has changed.

</comment><comment><USER53> Does that mean that it now works on OSX without root?

<comment><USER54> Works for me. Had to build from source (couldn't find an OSX binary), but it compiled without a single warning, which is probably a record for something not OSX-specific. make install still requires root, of course, but it runs fine from the build directory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> htop has always been in my list of tools to install on server. Thanks for this great upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER56> Woohoo! This is great.

</comment><comment><USER57> <3 happy top

</comment><comment><USER58> still no vi keybindings?

</comment><comment><USER59> Still no Windows though.

<comment><USER60> Haha everyone used to mock MS because cross platform to them meant Win16 AND Win32. Now we use it to mean various flavours of Linux. Progress?

<comment><USER61> > Now we use it to mean various flavours of Linux.

?

"Portable" htop 2.0 works on FreeBSD[0], OpenBSD[1] and OSX[2], not just "various flavours of linux".

[0] [https://github.com/hishamhm/htop/tree/master/freebsd](https://github.com/hishamhm/htop/tree/master/freebsd)

[1] [https://github.com/hishamhm/htop/tree/master/openbsd](https://github.com/hishamhm/htop/tree/master/openbsd)

[2] [https://github.com/hishamhm/htop/tree/master/darwin](https://github.com/hishamhm/htop/tree/master/darwin)

<comment><USER60> Back in the day it wasn't unusual for something to support 30-odd variations on Unix, plus VMS and Windows. ./configure && make && make install. Those were the days!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> To be fair, it is still only for POSIX-y systems. Not cross platform in the conventional sense.

<comment><USER61> Working on different unix-like OS is cross-platform in a completely conventional sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Great !! hisam_hm

you help me drop one of my alias function now :D

̶e̶n̶v̶o̶f̶ ̶(̶)̶ ̶{̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶'̶s̶/̶\̶x̶0̶/̶\̶n̶/̶g̶'̶ ̶/̶p̶r̶o̶c̶/̶$̶{̶1̶}̶/̶e̶n̶v̶i̶r̶o̶n̶ ̶}̶

</comment><comment><USER64> If it did not try so hard to emulate nmon poorly, I'd use it more.

</comment><comment><USER65> Wait, where are the Windows binaries?

Oh, I see. They trying to be smart and say "cross-platform" because now it runs on more Linux distros. That's not smart, that's faulty marketing. And AFAIK it already was running on 90% of Linux and also on MacOS.

<comment><USER66> No, it's accurate marketing. Asking for htop to be available on windows is kinda silly if you recall that htop is "top++" and depends on having a unix filesystem.

"Cross-platform" is a contextual term.

<comment><USER61> > depends on having a unix filesystem.

It doesn't do that. Before the multiplatform changes it did depend on having procfs (linux's I assume since BSDs had a non-identical procfs yet weren't supported), aside from the OSX fork which ripped out all the /proc access and replaced them with OSX API calls.

What it does depend on is ncurses.

<comment><USER66> Ah, thanks for the correction. I had no idea it wasn't using procfs anymore, or that darwin was using something very different. TIL :)

<comment><USER61> > I had no idea it wasn't using procfs anymore

It still uses procfs for Linux (since that's there by default), but not for the other ports. Consider Platform_getLoadAverage for instance:

* linux uses /proc/loadavg[0]

* freebsd and openbsd use sysctl({CTL_VM, VM_LOADAVG})[1][2]

* OSX uses getloadavg(3)[3]

[0] [https://github.com/hishamhm/htop/blob/master/linux/Platform....](https://github.com/hishamhm/htop/blob/master/linux/Platform.c#L143)

[1] [https://github.com/hishamhm/htop/blob/master/freebsd/Platfor...](https://github.com/hishamhm/htop/blob/master/freebsd/Platform.c#L123)

[2] [https://github.com/hishamhm/htop/blob/master/openbsd/Platfor...](https://github.com/hishamhm/htop/blob/master/openbsd/Platform.c#L181)

[3] [https://github.com/hishamhm/htop/blob/master/darwin/Platform...](https://github.com/hishamhm/htop/blob/master/darwin/Platform.c#L144)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


On This Day in 2003 - <AUTHOR> Hundreds of Albert Einstein's scientific papers, personal letters, and humanist essays made available on the Internet.<p>Einstein had given the papers to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in his will. <comment><AUTHOR> Link for the papers: [https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/](https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/)</comment>


The Dreams of a Man Asleep for Three Weeks - <AUTHOR> https://kotaku.com/the-dreams-of-a-man-asleep-for-three-weeks-1833572960 <comment><USER2> The article ends with:

> Only now I can wake up any time I want.

The author talks about dreams, but dreams are just one aspect of the ICU mental experience. The line between dreams, hallucinations, and memories can collapse.

Delirium in intensive care units is extremely common, affecting up to 80% of some patient populations. It is the result of a combination of highly vulnerable patients, extremely stressful situations, abnormal biochemistry, and powerful pharmaceuticals. It is poorly understood.

This delirium can pose danger to staff and patient in hospital, and can have lasting cognitive impact on patients once they leave. PTSD-like symptoms are not uncommon and are certainly under-treated. Given how common delirium in ICUs is, most facilities have limited or no psychiatric staffing for ICU mental health support.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2391269/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2391269/)

I spent three days in a coma as a result of hepatic encephalopathy, among other episodes related to end stage liver disease. Some day I'll write more about the experience. Incredibly vivid dreams are just one piece of it.

<comment><USER3> The first time they gave me a bunch of morphine post-op, a nurse kept wondering by. After a few checks, getting slightly more in explicit, I asked "why". She explained that there was a fair likelihood of hallucination with the drug, but _if they warn people in advance it is significantly more common_.

There is obviously more risk to unexpected hallucination, but always some risk if it happens. I still think it's a really interesting risk minimisation proposition.

<comment><USER4> I wonder if that phenomenon is explained by people being more willing to admit to hallucinations if they've been told it's an expected result of the drug, and not because they're crazy or weird.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This was a really enjoyable read - thank you for posting. I've always had difficulty remembering my dreams after waking, so I'm almost jealous of the amount of detail and realism he was able to retain, but then again, I guess 3 weeks of nothing but dreaming would do that

<comment><USER6> If you want to remember your dreams you can train yourself to do so. Keep a journal on your nightstand. The moment you wake up, write down all the details you can remember. After doing this for a while, you will remember more and more and the memories won't fade so easily.

You can also cheat a bit in my experience by waking up maybe 45-90 mins before you normally would, then going back to sleep. The dreams you have in this period should be more vivid and easier to remember.

<comment><USER7> How do you ever remember to write in it after waking?

I'm lucky if I remember deodorant first thing in the morning. I'm usually good 5-10 minutes after waking, but before then I rarely do things like shower and sometimes won't even make coffee. I guess I can talk to folks and be really mean at first - I don't remember these outbursts, though. It gets worse with bad sleep hygiene.

<comment><USER8> Have the notebook next to you in bed with a pen ready. If you need to get up to do it, you'll often forget all or most of your dream by the time you get to the notebook.

<comment><USER7> That's the thing: I do have a pen and paper by my bed - mostly for those "going to sleep" thoughts but also so I always know where one is.

I never remember until I've been awake and moving around for a bit. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I get it, I'm cynical. But am I the only one that wonders how much of this is true, and how much "poetic license"?

<comment><USER10> It might be hard to believe if you have fairly normal dreams. I can easily believe it. My dreams are much stranger than that. The last vivid dream I had was of Anubis looking men emerging from eggs laid out in a grid. They clapped their hands chanting 'wolf men, wolf men, wolf men' while I had to fight their normal looking wolf pets.

<comment><USER11> Any ideas what might be causing your.. imaginative dreams?

Cheese before bed? Art-house movies? Art-house substances?

<comment><USER12> I've had some great dreams with taking b12 right before bed. Or waking up then going back to sleep + b12.

<comment><USER13> You sure it was b12? b6 is known to increase dream 'weirdness'. I ran a not so scientific trial 15 or so years ago with around 30 individuals where we kept dream logs and took various dosages of b6. Small amounts do have varying effects on people.

I really do not recommend high dosages over 50mg, peripheral neuropathy is not fun to have.

<comment><USER12> Yes, it's the best b12 I could find.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I rarely read articles that long, but I found this one fascinating.

I can believe it, since I (both unfortunately and fortunately) have the most vivid, realistic, extremely detailed (and sometimes weird and frightening) dreams. Dreams that I can remember after years. Sometimes they change the course of days decisions, even life decisions.

I can remember almost every detail, except for one: every time that I wake up in the middle of the night after dreaming the solution to a big (mine or global) problem, or an idea for "the next big thing". I recall saying "Yes! Of course! How could I not think about it before?!". The answer is there, at the tip of my fingers, then I wake up and, frustrated, can't remember what it was. I can remember though that feeling of having the _click in my mind_ about the idea or solution being so rational and possible.</comment>


I'm Retiring from PHP - <AUTHOR> http://leftnode.com/entry/im-retiring-from-php

<comment><USER2> so this guy is retiring because other programmers suck at writing code?

I call it freedom. PHP gives you the freedom to put out crap our put out good code.</comment>


Better Than ROT13 (Video from RubyConf 2011) - <AUTHOR> http://confreaks.net/videos/670-rubyconf2011-better-than-rot13

<comment><AUTHOR> Notes available here: <http://listrophy.github.com/better_than_rot13/>

</comment><comment><USER2> I watched this over the weekend. A great overview of cryptography.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great timing, something I need to learn more about.</comment>


Credit Suisse Warns That U.S. Store Closings May Worsen in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-14/store-closures-may-be-even-worse-next-year-credit-suisse-says <comment><AUTHOR> Outline: [https://outline.com/eRjrp9](https://outline.com/eRjrp9)</comment>


Ask HN: Optimising very slow query - <AUTHOR> I have a very slow query that takes 10s+ time on my machine. I am using SQLite and SQLAlchemy. Here are some details that I posted yesterday on Code Review SE: https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/196034/slow-flask-sqlalchemy-query-using-association-tables<p>Any help is appreciated. <comment><USER2> How about you show the tables, indices, and the SQL query (queries) instead of relying on automagic of an ORM framework? Is it any faster if you create an appropriate SQL query yourself? How does it look like?</comment>


Ask HN: How does HN's downvotes work? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I realized a day ago that I've got downvoted on some of my comments, I'm not questioning their reasons, my comments was negative and I will just ignore if I dislike something in the future. But how does this work, is it admins or something like that that can downvote comments etc.?<p>Thanks. <comment><USER2> Anyone can downvote as long as they have 500 karma points. Exception is replies to their own comments. In that case only another person with required point can downvote.

</comment><comment><USER3> Everyone can, I do not remember but you might need a certain amount of karma before the down arrow appears. I do not know about posts, I don't think they can be downvote them.</comment>


Makers of 'Vaxxed' Threaten Lawsuit Over Valid Criticism - <AUTHOR> http://ascienceenthusiast.com/vaxxed-makers-threaten-lawsuit-for-valid-criticism/ <comment><AUTHOR> Here, a doctor reviews the "film":

[http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/anti-vaccine-doc- vaxxe...](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/anti-vaccine-doc- vaxxed-a-882651)</comment>


Will students fork over $60K for an online master's degree in data science? - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2013/07/16/uc-berkeley-now-offers-online-only-masters-in-data-science-for-60k/

<comment><USER2> If I am only paying for courses that I have passed and truly learned what goes into the degree--- perhapse. Only pay when the MS gets paid. This discourages "worthless degrees but might stop caligraphy courses and their unintended benefits.

(A similar model for medicine would be great. Pay to stay healthy charge back when you are sick. It becomes cost effective to produce cures and vaccine which prevent outbreaks. Distribute the care costs. ..)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you want to get an education, and you are a self-starter, then I recommend search engines and Wikipedia.

Universities were invented in the middle ages before the Internet existed.

</comment><comment><USER4> If the risk and time-adjusted reward is greater than $60,000, probably.

But in the long term, the cost structure of online courses is radically different than in-person. I would expect institutions that don't adopt to fail in the long term, as new providers with the lower cost structure enter and dominate; classic disruption. Their strategy right now would have been like if Apple released the iPad for $1,599 instead of $499 out of fear of cannibalization of their laptop market. If there is a way of offering a substitute at radically lower cost, somebody is going to cannibalize, it's just a question of who. If Universities don't do it to themselves, they should expect a slow and steady decline.</comment>