Babies born to older fathers 'tend to have more medical issues' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/31/babies-born-to-older-fathers-tend-to-have-more-medical-issues <comment><USER2> They didn't isolate possible confounding variables, father's health and mother's health, which I guess are more important than age, and probably also heavily correlated. Also, as I understand it a lot of studies show that epigenetics has a larger effect than we previously thought. That means those two variables are even more likely to effect infant health.

edit: removed "mother's age", since they do account for that

> ""Studies have shown that advanced paternal age is associated with negative > health behaviours such as smoking and frequent alcohol consumption, obesity, > chronic disease, mental illness, and sub-fertility,"."

> But Eisenberg stressed that the increased risks for individuals were small. > After adjusting for the mother's age and other factors such as education and > whether she smoked, he found that children born to men aged 45 and over were > born less than a day earlier on average, and weighed only 20g lighter (just > over half an ounce) than those with younger fathers.

It seems like there's a lot more data there that could be interesting showing how education, smoking, and age interact, but all we're not getting that out of this article.

So that leads me to wonder, what agenda does this website have by publishing this clickbait title?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not exactly true AFAICT, though a valid criticism.

"After adjustment for maternal age, infants born to fathers aged 45 years or older had 14% higher odds of premature birth (odds ratio 1.14, 95% confidence interval 1.13 to 1.15), independent of gestational age, and 18% higher odds of seizures (1.18, 0.97 to 1.44) compared with infants of fathers aged 25 to 34 years. "

<comment><USER3> I should preface this by saying that I spend a lot of time reviewing scientific papers for private sector firms searching for red flags. So certain issues in scientific papers become common enough that they, sort of, jump out at you right away.

That's why, in fairness to HN user wufufufu, we should point out that they do _NOT_ control for the age of the female. They only say that the _male_ in the reproductive couple was aged X. (No indication as to the health of the female either.)

In general, when a wholly biological effect is observed in human study populations, without reference to a preceding controlled study on, say, mice, your antennae go up. Now in the private sector, that means that the people I worked for would adjust or shuffle resources to account for the likelihood of partners or customers bringing successful legal actions. (Or, perhaps, cancel projects altogether.) But here all it means is that you probably can go ahead and have kids if you are thinking about it and are already over 35.

Humans, (and several other animals), have been doing this for millennia. It's very likely not older people having kids that will eradicate us. (Or even lead to our decline, to be perfectly frank.)

<comment><USER4> > That's why, in fairness to HN user wufufufu, we should point out that they > do NOT control for the age of the female

The article is so poorly written that one can't tell whether they controlled for it or not.

The first, second and third paragraphs all list increased health problems or indicators of health problems without mentioning whether they control for the mother's age. The fifth paragraph gives some more figures (born a day earlier, weigh 20g less) which don't contradict the other paragraphs, and explicitly mentions controlling for the mother's age.

If they didn't control for the mother's age (a huge effect and hugely correlated with the father's age) the study should never have been published or reported on. If they did control for it and found such insignificant differences, it should have been published, but not reported on. For my faith in research, I'm left hoping they did find some large effects after controlling for the mother's age but the Guardian has failed to communicate that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> open-source-ux Here is a well-written summary and review of the study from the NHS website (which also reviews coverage of this story in the UK press):

[https://www.nhs.uk/news/pregnancy-and-child/health- problems-...](https://www.nhs.uk/news/pregnancy-and-child/health-problems- more-common-babies-older-fathers/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Clearly they are reporting the findings, but what would interest me is exploring the benefits to children of older fathers and establishing at which point the competing forces balance.

The obvious factor is increased wealth - this tends to be backloaded, thus there is a benefit from greater available income to spend on a child, whether this is in the form of better nutrition, better education, greater parental availability (not universally going to increase with age, but the option is more easily there for a well off father vs a father just making ends meet)

Other factors may be less clear, less universal and probably not so widely agreed: things such as an older father potentially having a child with fewer siblings or being more settled (in a maturity sense).

And finally, it would be interesting to look at this in a two generation scale: what of children born to young fathers but where those fathers themselves had older fathers? Is the effect passed on or does it get reset?

<comment><USER6> I can offer a personal anecdote here. When I was born, my father was a very healthy 50 who didn't drink or smoke and who got regular aerobic and resistance exercise. He took an early retirement buyout when he was in his mid 50s, so as a toddler I had a ton of time with him and it was, from my perspective at least, absolutely wonderful. He also had children and grandchildren already, and that experience was likewise quite beneficial.

So I can confirm that in at least some cases there are benefits to having an older father. I have no doubt that there are drawbacks also. One of the obvious ones is that on average you will have your father in your life for much less time.

If you're going to have children later in life, man or woman, make sure you've been looking after your health and continue to do so. Young persons can take much more abuse and remain healthy, older ones can't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "Studies have shown that advanced paternal age is associated with negative > health behaviours such as smoking and frequent alcohol consumption, obesity, > chronic disease, mental illness, and sub-fertility," she writes, adding that > all are linked to health problems in newborns."

These are key details, and weren't mentioned until the end. In other words, age could be too general in that it's acting as a proxy for other known negatives.

</comment><comment><USER8> The current state of things is not conducive to the continuation of our species. We should change some things.

</comment><comment><USER9> xczbzbdhdtryhb/dhbdbxnrfbgdv7gggghnnhjhggffcvcbvxbcqwerytuoouipasdfghjkklzxcvbnmmf|bvvccvvvvbbvv||////

</comment><comment><USER10> (EDIT: LPT, TLDR removed) If you're approaching 35 as a male and haven't had kids yet (or have had kids and might consider more), put some reproductive tissue in cryo. There's also a paper floating around that chronic stress from fathers can be passed genetically to children (which you might be able to avoid using tissue banking) [1]. Cost is ~$1k for collection and 5 years of storage, $2k for 10 years of storage (prices are for the US based on my research).

[1] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-dads- stresses...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-dads-stresses-get- passed-along-to-offspring/)

<comment><USER11> That isn't something this article discusses so that isn't actually a "TL;DR."

Additionally cryopreservation itself can cause sperm damage (during initial freezing), which while often inconsequential for people e.g. undergoing cancer treatment or who would otherwise find themselves infertile before finding a partner, should be weighed if you're opting to forgo kids and view cryopreservation as a mitigation for age-based sperm damage.

If you have the opportunity and ability to have kids before 45 then it is safest just to do so. Freezing and waiting because it is inconvenient isn't a risk free venture.

<comment><USER10> The data shows people are putting off having kids longer, both men and women [1]. Damage to reproductive tissue from rapid freezing used in cryopreservation is inconsequential; here is a report of an embryo frozen for 25 years that was successfully used to bring a fetus to term [2]. $1k-2k is cheap insurance against the future, versus rushing to have children. It's not perfect, but as I said, it's insurance. If the thawed tissue can't be used for IUI procedures, there will be ample supply to use with IVF. Very similar to being cryogenically frozen, having any percentage of success is better than 0.

This will all be moot in 5-10 years when technology is commercially available to generate reproductive tissue from adult cells [3].

[1] [https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2016/01/14/4628164...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2016/01/14/462816458/average-age-of-first-time-moms-keeps-climbing-in- the-u-s)

[2] [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us- canada-42420864](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42420864)

[3] [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/14/scientists-c...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/14/scientists- create-sperm-eggs-using-skin-cells-fertility-ethical-questions)

<comment><USER11> > Damage to reproductive tissue from rapid freezing used in cryopreservation > is inconsequential

Relative to what?

> here is a report of an embryo frozen for 25 years that was successfully used > to bring a fetus to term

Loss of viability is only one metric by which damage can be measured. Something can be viable but the damage causes a less healthy child, just like age based DNA damage.

Plus the embryo's age is a mislead showcase. Correctly stored embryos can last almost indefinitely (atmospheric radiation damage being the only limiter). The risks from cryopreservation is primary during the freezing process.

<comment><USER10> > Relative to what?

Relative to not having the ability to reproduce at all in the future, or at an unknown diminished capacity. I'm not sure where your fearmongering is coming from, the science is proven that banking male reproductive tissue is safe for the donor and effective for bringing a fetus to term in the future when paired with a healthy egg.

Ten years ago studies were done on young adults with cancer banking semen for future fertility use [1], and the success rate was 30% with IUI and 50% with IVF. Those odds are even better today with improved clinical cryopreservation methods (vitrification has shown success rates upwards of 90-98%).

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17647219](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17647219)

<comment><USER11> > Relative to not having the ability to reproduce at all in the future, or at > an unknown diminished capacity.

That isn't what we're discussing. We're discussing opting to delay reproduction and using an imperfect means to do so. You're trying to conflate it with e.g. cancer victims or those who are losing their fertility, which wasn't your original proposition at all.

When there is no alternative it is a huge improvement, when you're opting into it for no great reason, you have to examine the costs more closely. You've stumbled into contrasting age based DNA damage with Cryopreservation's damage.

> I'm not sure where your fearmongering is coming from

Science. The scientific literature has been clear on the DNA damage sustained during the freezing process for tens of years:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryopreservation#Risks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryopreservation#Risks)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New cloud phone service for startups and small businesses - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ivrbuddy.com/ivr-buddy-is-here/

<comment><USER2> Interesting. I've been looking for such a solution. Just signed up.

</comment><comment><USER3> Really awesome work on the call flow designer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that works very well! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this using Plivo ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's based on Plivo :)

<comment><USER4> Very cool!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What does April 1 cost the tech industry? - <AUTHOR> Between the amount of time people spend online talking about it, and interacting with the "jokes", and the development time (hello Google), is there any way we can put an estimate on the cost to the industry?<p>I know that even when I was at reddit April 1 took at least a few days of planning and coding, and now they start planning well in advance. <comment><USER2> What does going to the bathroom cost the tech industry? Why don't tech workers wear diapers so that roughly 15-20 mins per day is saved, translating to millions of dollars saved per year?

What does eating meals cost the tech industry? What if Google instead spent money investing in Soylent, would the ROI be higher if they simply fed their workers intravenously so that they could save 90 mins?

Not everything is measured in time and dollars and cents. That's the whole reason why the prevailing attitude in Silicon Valley isn't how much time you spend at the office, but that you get your work done. Asking stupid questions like this propagate that same old mentality that spending time on fun tasks "costs" the company.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Asking stupid questions like this propagate that same old mentality that > spending time on fun tasks "costs" the company.

Your own bias is showing here. I didn't say cost was a bad thing -- you just assumed it is.

Lots of good things cost money -- server time, employees, marketing, etc.

I was just interesting in figuring out the cost, not trying to say it is bad. If I wanted to say it was bad I would have used a word like "waste". I did not use that word.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Last year it cost the tech industry $456,345,234.23

</comment><comment><USER4> What did 2048 cost to the tech industry?

<comment><USER5> Now this is a question we don't want an answer to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What does social life cost to Tech industry?

<comment><USER7> What does social life have to do with anything?

<comment><USER8> I think it's just pointing out that focusing on any one thing and proclaiming it wastes enormous amounts of resources when viewed at large scale can be a bit silly most of the time. I mean, why stop at April Fool's?

As another person mentioned, what do bathroom breaks cost the industry? How much does people working 40 hour weeks rather than 80 hour weeks cost the industry? How much does a 5 day instead of a 7 day work week cost the industry?

<comment><AUTHOR> > proclaiming it wastes enormous amounts of resources

I never said that. It's interesting however that at least two people assumed I did (the person you mention talking about bathroom breaks also assumed I meant it was wasteful).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I couldn't find any numbers for April Fools stuff, other than an off-hand estimate of "a few hundred million", which seems about right.

But here's a list of a few other things which cost the U.S. in lost productivity ([http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/06/h...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/06/here- are-all-the-things-that-supposedly-cost-the-u-s-billions-in-lost- productivity/)):

\- Heavy drinking, 220 billion/year;

\- Smoking, 92 billion/year;

\- Commuting, 90 billion/year;

\- Changing passwords, 16 billion/year;

\- Spam, 21 billion/year;

and my personal favorite,

\- Screwing around on the internet when you should be getting work done, of which Reddit is a significant contributor, 134 billion/year.

If I were witty I could have a lot of fun with that last point.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Cost" is a bad way to put it since time expenditure on the internet is not a zero-sum game.

For companies with good jokes (Google, Blizzard), April Fool's jokes can be an effective marketing tool. Of course, very, very few internet brands/personalities actually put effort behind jokes.

I'd imagine more productivity was lost on days with absurd news (e.g. Facebook's WhatsApp acquisition)

<comment><AUTHOR> > "Cost" is a bad way to put it since time expenditure on the internet is not > a zero-sum game.

That's fair. However development time doesn't feel like it would be zero sum.

<comment><USER10> Zero sum implies that the sum is zero. It's entirely possible for the benefits of marketing publicity to outweigh the opportunity cost of development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I always thought it was an opportunity for cheap marketing..

</comment><comment><USER12> What does javascript cost the tech industry?

<comment><USER13> Let's keep this thing lighthearted, I don't want to read about Lovecraftian horrors at 5 o'clock.

<comment><USER12> I have this strange recurring dream: I'm reading hacker news, and between the headlines about 2048 I see a very disturbing headline that fills me with dread. My heart races as I click, but before the browser can load the page I wake up screaming. The awful headline that disturbs me beyond the worst cyclopean nightmare is "Show HN: cthulhu_fhtagn.js" I can't imagine what horrors it may conceal.

<comment><USER13> [https://github.com/MrJoy/cthulhu](https://github.com/MrJoy/cthulhu)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Always write a spec - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2009/11/19/always-write-a-spec-part-one.aspx <comment><USER2> It's this type of thinking though that has lead to some of the most over- engineered pieces of crap ever built.

Point being: The person writing the spec isn't the one - 99% of the time - that will be using the software. At the very best - if you are the main user - you're not exactly sure _how_ you will use the software, since it doesn't exist yet; ergo, the spec is always going to be wrong.

That's okay if you can keep the spec small and nimble. At that point thought it's just a recording of a thought process. Of course such small iterations are better realized by just writing the code outright, testing for intended functionality and releasing into to wilderness to test whether your assertions about the use of the code are correct. (i.e. testing the spec itself)

The faster you can get to that last point, the better you can use your time. In many cases (not all) the act of writing the spec only lengthens the entire process.

<comment><AUTHOR> Spot on. User Stories (Agile) are a much better tool for managing requirements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> s/spec/unit-tests/g</comment>


Where Vim Came From - <AUTHOR> https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/05/where-vim-came-from.html <comment><USER2> > While Emacs certainly still has a following, some people think that the > Editor Wars are over and that Vim won.16 The 2018 Stack Overflow Developer > Survey suggests that this is true; only 4.1% of respondents used Emacs.

I'm an Emacs user for years now and love the editor. But I'm curious about this claim of its poor popularity. The article refers to a piece from [http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat- Bruc...](http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat-Bruce- Byfield-s-Blog/The-End-of-the-Editor-Wars) which bases its arguments on two surveys from 2013 and 2014.

Does anyone know of a credible way to measure the popularity of Emacs and what the usage trends are in 2018 other than SO?

<comment> cup-of-tea Very difficult to do with free software and completely irrelevant really. At some point in your life it's OK to accept that you're the weird one. We're the weird ones. Donald Knuth, Richard Stallman, Guido van Rossum, Rich Hickey et al are the weird ones. I don't know why emacs is such a barrier to everyone else or why vim is so attractive. But I don't understand most other humans about most things.

<comment><USER3> Ok let me be very honest here, let's look at both editors learning curves

\- vi/vim

You need to learn to open a file, edit it, move around and exit and the edit/view mode. Everybody learns how to do it. At first it sucks but you can learn this in 5 min.

Nothing too hard, and yes, do use the direction keys, it's not the 70s anymore.

From there you can learn other things

\- Emacs

You try reading anything about it, there's something about Meta key (and apparently nobody can say what the actual _meta_ key is without some wrangling from them because who knows if you're not coding on a Sun Sparc from the 90s so they don't want to compromise).

Then something about a "prefix command" C-x (what is C? Control? Which other program uses C as an abbreviation for that?) Buffers. What's a buffer?

I tried opening the help of both programs, VIM shows exactly what I mentioned there. Move around, close this window, etc

Emacs? I'll copy-paste here (key bindings help)

> C-x Prefix Command

> \200 .. ÿ encoded-kbd-self-insert-ccl

> C-x 8 iso-transl-ctl-x-8-map

Why the F is this relevant or useful?

Then I try to quit and it's a bit of a wrangle until it gets Ctrl-C Ctrl-X right (or the other way)

Everything seems like it's actively fighting the user, and making it more difficult or convoluted than it should.

Usability problems are _never_ the fault of the user.

<comment><USER4> Have you tried exiting vim? :D

<comment><USER5> I know this was intended as a joke, but exiting vim is now much easier than exiting emacs (IMO), assuming that the user has some experience with UNIX and uses `Ctrl+C` to exit most programs.

If I start vim and press `Ctrl+C` I get an helpful message saying "Type :qa and press <Enter> to abandon all changes and exit Vim".

If I do the same on emacs, first the help screen disappears (which was the one telling me to use `C-x C-c` to exit emacs and then I just get stuck with an unhelpful message about creating new files.

<comment><USER6> You could try opening the _File_ menu and selecting _Quit_ :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >As far as I can gather, Intel HEX files are meant to make binary images less opaque

I know this is getting away from the main point of the article, but they're purpose is more to have a standard format that compilers can generate and eprom/device programmers could read without being concerned with the machine's endianness. Pretty much any embedded compiler can produce a .hex file, and pretty much any programmer will read one.

<comment><USER8> It amused me that the hex file was described as esoteric given how prolific they are in the embeded world.

<comment><USER9> That brought back memories.

When I was a kid I liked to poke around executables in the MS-DOS world. Hex editors were limited in the sense that they wouldn't let me insert bytes into the file, just edit existing ones. Because I didn't have access to an disassembler or an assembler (they were sold at stores but they were too expensive for me), I wrote a simple program that would convert a binary file into a text file full of hex codes, then I could edit that, change jumps to different addresses, change strings, and then I would reassemble the executable with another program to see the effect. I used this to translate programs and games to Spanish by changing the strings in the executable. Messages in Spanish are in average longer than English ones, so I couldn't just use a hex editor.

It's funny to me that the hex file format is a real thing.

<comment><USER8> it's a bit more involved than just hex.... it specifies address ranges and data that goes into those address ranges + more

see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_HEX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_HEX)

<comment><USER10> And, unfortunately, it is a destructive process going from elf to hex, as I've discovered a few times. Intel HEX is just the data at what addresses so one looses the section info and metadata from an elf.

I'm always happen to see when a uC vendor IDE keeps the elfs and the programmer takes elfs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I see MS-DOS is mentioned near the bottom, but the part I was most curious about was not.

When I got my dad's old Windows 3.1 laptop somewhere around 1999, I discovered DOS and started fiddling with it, eventually discovering the "edlin" editor. Everyone else though it was bizarre and hard to use, but I really liked it because I could look at different parts of a file at the same time.

The commands were similar to the example given here for ed, but the output much much easier to read. Does anyone know if it was another clone or just coincidence?

<comment><USER12> > Does anyone know if it was another clone or just coincidence?

EDLIN was a clone of CP/M ED. Was CP/M ED influenced by Unix ed? I don't know, but I somewhat doubt it. Gary Kildall's primary background was in IBM mainframe and DEC minicomputer systems (in particular VM/CMS and TOPS-10), and so it seems to me more likely that CP/M ED was influenced by DEC or IBM line editors, than by Unix.

That said, Unix and IBM mainframe operating systems share some common heritage. Both were influenced by CTSS. So, it may be that any observed similarities between CP/M and Unix line editors could be due to that shared ancestry, rather than any direct influence of Unix on CP/M.

<comment><USER13> CP/M ED is more in the TECO tradition than anything else, through the DEC influence. It is oriented around characters rather than around lines as the ed family is.

<comment><USER14> And if you keep going back, TECO (like QED) can be traced back (via ports, rewrites, shared authors, etc) to the PDP 1 and Colossal Typewriter. All those histories are intertwingled back then.

<comment><USER15> Heh, I'd forgotten that EMACS started out as "editor macros" that were eventually ported from TECO's command language to MacLisp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wouldn't be surprised if a large part of Vim's current popularity stems from EDITOR=vim by default on many distros, despite often having emacs and always including nano. Even over a decade ago when I was in my early teens this seemed pretty common.

<comment><USER17> To be honest I've seen very few linux machines with emacs preinstalled, nano seems to be part of the ubuntu default install (maybe debian too?) but isn't on any fedora box I have immediate access too (it is available in the repos). This might be because I mainly deal in servers with smaller installs than most desktops.

I would entirely agree that a lot of vims popularity lies in it being part of the default install on pretty much every unix box ever though. That and it actually being a decent editor once you get over that initial insert mode/command mode learning curve.

<comment><USER18> Because, of course ...

* [http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/vi...](http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/vi.html)

There is a whole history of why emacs is not likewise in the SUS, already related long since by other people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I pressed j on the blog page and was upset that it didn't scroll down.

<comment><USER20> There's a way to fix that. ;-)

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogbaibhgnhhndojpepiihcmeb?hl=en)

[http://vimperator.org/](http://vimperator.org/)

<comment><USER21> and [http://qutebrowser.org/](http://qutebrowser.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Though e-lisp is great and I appreciate the power and regularity of Emacs, Vi(m)'s mode-full, default cmd-mode editing that doesn't require ctrl + meta + esc left_foot_pedal + wink-wink-nudge-nudge... seems so much nicer to me than insert-by-default editing - thank goodness there are vim plugins everywhere.

The TRS-80 Level II line editor was very much in the spirit of "em", along with other BASICs of the day.

And perhaps a nod to the even more cryptic Teco.

<comment><USER23> I'm always kind of curious about comments like this -- it seems everybody knows you have to play games of Twister and hit twelve control keys simultaneously to do even the most basic things in Emacs.

But... I use Emacs. I've been using it for almost twenty years. And I'm struggling to think of anything I use regularly the involves hitting more than two total keys simultaneously (keys pressed in sequence obviously don't work as an argument, since that's also how you edit in Vim). I think the only one is query-replace, because it involves hitting Shift to compose the M-% combination.

And I don't use a ton of custom keybindings, either. The only custom binding I use that's simpler than the default is goto-line, which I have bound to just M-g.

Do people genuinely run into cases where they frequently have to be hitting 3+ keys simultaneously to use Emacs? Or is this just one of those "everybody knows" things that's actually completely false?

<comment><USER24> > Do people genuinely run into cases where they frequently have to be hitting > 3+ keys simultaneously to use Emacs?

Paredit mode has several useful ones for writing elisp.

\- C-M-f, C-M-b, and C-M-u (forward-sexp, back-sexp, and up-sexp)

\- C-( and C-) (barf and slurp commands)

\- C-M-k (kill-sexp)

M-: (eval-expression in the minibuffer) is also a frequent command for me.

I've overlaid several keys in the number row with Control and Alt, so they are nice to press with my middle and ring fingers (as opposed to pinkies). I've been meaning to write a blog post about this.

<comment><USER25> Only barf and slurp are paredit commands, the others you mentioned (the sexp motion and killing commands) are stock Emacs!

(Well, by default C-M-u is bound to backward-up-list, either that's what you meant or paredit really defines a slightly different up-sexp commands. I don't remember right now.)

The worst command I regularly use, in terms of number of modifiers, is definitely C-M-% for query-replace-regexp.

<comment><USER26> Yep, I use those movement commands for getting to the beginning or end of brackets when I edit JavaScript.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I still fondly remember lynx it was like the vi version of the web browser. There is an O'Reilly book called "spidering hacks" which goes into some of the advanced stuff. Lynx was the Swiss Army knife which could host, execute, parse, and script web pages in a single command (lynxcgi). It was also decentralized and could run through telnet or raw sockets inside a VMS system. Vi keys and Emac keys were options either of them could be set as the html editor making it seamless.

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't think I could write an editor with regular expressions from scratch in a week. Especially if you took away the internet and 99% of my CPU and RAM. Fail.

<comment><USER29> Yet Antirez wrote a cute curses-based editor over a weekend:

[http://antirez.com/news/108](http://antirez.com/news/108)

True it is missing regular expression-support, but it does have find, and many people (including myself) have forked it to added regexps, lua-scripting, and other advanced features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > Fred Fish was an American programmer that mailed out a floppy disk every > month with a curated selection of the best open-source software available > for the Amiga platform.

Fish disks contained mostly freeware/public domain as far as I remember. Not open-source software.

<comment><USER18> The name "open source" had not even been coined at the time. "PD" was a popular contemporary prefix for things, although their actual public domain status was legally questionable, irrespective of the FSF's objections to the idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's amazing we have Bill Joy to thank for not only C shell and much of BSD, but also VI.

<comment><USER32> It's time to give a spotlight to NeoVim that puts efforts into getting rid of legacy craft while maintaining compatibility to move vi past 50 years of usage.

Last time I checked, there's no clear advantage from users' perspective for now but some plugins have started targeting it as the primary platform and also a few GUI are being developed too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Fred Fish! That name brings bad memories of the good old Amiga days.

<comment><USER34> Fred Fish was a great programmer I was quite delighted to work with. We happened to stop by his house on our honeymoon, (although that was because our car broke down in Phoenix, but my wife liked him too). I was sorry when he passed away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> When you are learning programming, its important to be able to isolate the problem you are working on and focus on that. The fact is that vim has a steep learning curve, and no matter how fast you are at typing things, your rate of productivity is still limited by how fast you can make decisions and how fast you can think and solve problems. I strongly believe that mastering hotkeys and tools like vim is the final stage of achieving the highest levels of programming skill. This is because once you have learned so much and trained yourself hard to think and move really fast, only then does your productivity bottleneck become things like using the mouse too much, not knowing certain hotkeys, not using things like regex replace, multi-line edit, and so on. The problem is mastering a single tool requires a tremendous amount of investment of time and energy, and once you are at the point in your development as a programmer where you need to start improving on hotkeys, well you are already deeply invested in whatever tool you are using and making the switch to vim has a major cost associated with it, because now you have to learn everything you already know how to do all over again. Is this cost worth it? Sometimes, depending on how advanced a person is, other times, depending on the situation, it's not. I think this phenomenon explains a lot about why vim is not as popular as perhaps it deserves to be.

</comment><comment><USER36> I still use the original, AT&T vi since I grew up on UNIX and Solaris 2.5.1 was my first UNIX OS after using my Amiga.

Even when I'm on a GNU/Linux variant, I run vim by calling vi, primarily because syntax highlighting enrages me to no end.

vi won because it came with every UNIX by default, and when one is in a cold server room connected to /dev/console via serial port at 3 o'clock in the morning, one quickly learns to appreciate vi's ready availability and ubiquity.

Emacs on the other hand was always a huge program, was never bundled with UNIX by default, and compiling it on one's own always ended in failure somewhere around Emacs wanting to compile itself as an Xwindows application. Add to that that Emacs had completely different key bindings and users would have to adapt to it rather than it letting them use their prior knowledge, it was a death knell to Emacs. Later versions added vi key bindings ("evil mode"), but since the pre-built versions continued to insist on Xwindows, it was wholly unsuitable for servers; for example, an SGI Origin 200 or Origin 3000 didn't even have a frame buffer nor did they need Xwindows, and neither did the hp K-, N-, or L-class servers. Meanwhile, vi continued to be the UNIX system administrator's trusty friend: always there, with no additional software requirements.

Ironically, when I'm on the Amiga I use vim, but there it doesn't have syntax highlighting which I hate, and so is usable out of the box (I use it as I would vi on UNIX, without any extra vim fluff).

<comment><USER37> FWIW, you can compile emacs without support for X11, and you can run it in the terminal my adding the "-nw" parameter.

Not that I want to interfere with your choice of editor. ;-)

<comment><USER36> I probably could, but vi(1) is muscle memory for me, and I use it in some very advanced ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm an Emacs user but I'm really surprised at the number of (presumably, as HN skews young) younger people here using vi or derivatives. Most younger people I know use neither vi nor emacs, using Sublime Text or an IDE or something, but vi seems much more alien to the modern worldview than Emacs, as it a modal editor, which has died out in all but vi-clones these days.

<comment><USER39> 26yo astrophysicist / datascientist here. Using neovim since two years now and before vim for 3 years as main editor.

I don't know anyone below 40 using emacs. (Neo)Vim using (lots of) plugins has a pretty solid user base around here. Most is Atom / VS Code / Jetbrains IDE but vim has a solid standing especially along the more enthusiast programmers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> That's a great read. I'm not a hardcore vim user, but like most devs I bump in to it often enough to get somewhat familiar with its wacky interface. I always had this feeling I'm using a legacy tool (in a nerdy positive way) even though it's relatively young. This article shows that my feeling was quite accurate.

</comment><comment><USER41> Wonderful read, there was a lot of history there I didn't know

</comment><comment><USER42> It's also neat how TextMate syntax files came to be the de facto syntax format that Sublime Text and VS Code use.

</comment><comment><USER43> I've tried emacs a couple of times over the years, but it never really stuck for me. Not sure why. I use vim as my main editor on the job and at home. The more basic commands have become second-nature and every now and then I go read about something I haven't played with yet and make it part of my workflow.

I can't stand IDEs. I understand their benefits, but the amount of resources they take up appall me at some deep level. I'll use them and grumble if I need to. I haven't really liked an IDE since the Turbo Pascal 4.0 days. I also have a thing about not liking software that tries to second-guess me. I'll take a vim session loaded with files and another terminal window to build the project in and I'm golden. Of course, I'm not working on huge projects for the most part. Maybe it's an old-person thing.

</comment><comment><USER44> Since the article is explicitly about vim (over the original vi) by name, `:x` is a shortcut for `:wq`.

<comment><USER45> Don't forget shift+zz

Definitely saves me whole seconds per year...

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> "dismissed it, saying that he had no need to see the state of a file while editing it"

</comment><comment><USER47> > How did Vim become so successful?

They didn't answer this question. The most obvious to me is that Linux distros have had it as the default for decades. If FreeBSD caught on instead maybe we'd have people writing the same article about the amazing history of nvi.

This is a weird thing to me. When I was getting started with this stuff, everyone out there acknowledged that vim was a vi clone in the first breath. There are now lots of folks that think vim is the primary thing. Kind of similar to how they call shell scripting "bash". I guess it's rather like asking what brand of Kleenex, or a Coke in the southeastern US.

</comment><comment><USER34> From the article:

> ...Emacs could cost hundreds of dollars (this was before GNU Emacs)

Emacs clones (of various levels of compatibility) for unix and other systems could be purchased back around the time this sentence is set, but to be fair, the original Emacs (or EMACS -- the ITS filesystem only had upper case) evolved by RMS et al from Gene Ciccarelli's TECO init file was naturally free. And Bernie Greenbergs Emacs clone for Multics (called emacs because Multics was case sensitive) was also free (and the first one, as far as I remember, to be written in Lisp).

<comment><USER48> [http://multicians.org/mepap.html](http://multicians.org/mepap.html) \- Greenberg's "Multics Emacs: The History, Design and Implementation" is the canonical Multics Emacs paper.

While "emacs" is the command to invoke emacs, it was always referred to as Emacs in the documentation and the program itself.

You can use it at [https://ban.ai](https://ban.ai)

<comment><USER34> > While "emacs" is the command to invoke emacs, it was always referred to as > Emacs in the documentation...

Multics's use of mixed case used to weird me out. (It was my problem...I eventually got over it)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> You know x does the same as wq? No need to complain vi made it too long :)

<comment><USER50> Well, there are people who warn about :x

See the _comment_ with the most upvotes:

[https://stackoverflow.com/a/510333/1149404](https://stackoverflow.com/a/510333/1149404)

<comment><USER51> brb, editing my .vimrc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> For some reason i'm not the biggest fan of vim on a computer. But, vim on android with termux is the best editor i've found for android and I don't know why but as weird as it may seem using vim with the right touchscreen keyboard isn't actually that bad. It's the only realy solution i've found for doing small amounts of programming on my phone. Nothing big, but for small hundred line or so, scripts and such vim is definitely the best thing i've found to use on android.

</comment><comment><USER53> > Thompson paid a visit to Queen Mary's, saw the program Coulouris had built, > and dismissed it, saying that he had no need to see the state of a file > while editing it.

Classic Thompson

</comment><comment><USER54> How old are regular expressions, when the predecessor of `ed` already got it?

Edit: Found it[0]

Regular expressions originated in 1951, when mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene described regular languages using his mathematical notation called regular sets.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression#History)

</comment><comment><USER55> Great article, although the biggest takeaway for me was learning how to use and exit ed. +1 point to my Unix street cred stat.

[https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html](https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed- msg.html)

</comment><comment><USER56> > How did Vim become so successful?

I recall the early days of RoR crowd were pushing for Vim too. It was hipster in term of adopting new and awesome things and RoR crowd really push some new things. This was when the editors war was still a thing.

<comment><USER57> One reason I switched from Emacs was because it took longer to launch

<comment><USER32> I don't see this gets mentioned much but this is one of the larger reason I never use emacs. When quick editing files on remote servers, snappiness is really nice, even with bunch of plugins activated.

<comment> cup-of-tea You use it wrong. You're supposed to keep your local emacs running and use tramp to login to the remote server. That way you still have your emacs config with you and don't have to load it again.

What vim users don't seem to understand is: I never restart emacs. Mine stays running for weeks, even months at a time. When I change my emacs config I just run the code. I don't restart emacs.

<comment><USER58> You understate how great tramp is. It is what allows me to simply not care whether a file system is local or remote. They all behave like local file systems under tramp.

<comment> cup-of-tea Describing Emacs using English is necessarily an understatement. It can only be properly described using Lisp.

<comment><USER32> If a program cannot be described by a human language then the logic is flawed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I've been using vim for a long time now. Mainly because I haven't figured out how to quit yet.

</comment><comment><USER60> This is a great historical trace / origin story. And now it all makes sense. But I'm a little disappointed. As someone who came to vim from the world of Notepad / Wordpad / WordPerfect / Word, vim, when I finally learned how to be productive in it, seemed so revolutionary and amazing. I sort of was hoping for a story that justified this feeling, like "Bram had a dream one night where alien greys appeared to him and told him he had a mission for humankind. They then showed him source code for a perfect text editor used in the Aldebaran system for millennia. It's name, they said, would be vim. Bram created it in a non-stop 3 day sprint before expiring for 1 month."

<comment><USER61> This is, in fact, the story behind Lisp Machines. Unfortunately, humans quickly forgot the lessons from the aliens, and made computing the mess it is today.

The history is documented here: [http://landoflisp.com/](http://landoflisp.com/) (scroll down and follow the arrows).

<comment><USER62> Relevant XKCD [https://xkcd.com/224/](https://xkcd.com/224/)

<comment><USER60> Hahaha, perl.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Vi?

<comment><USER64> QED, ed, ex, vi, elvis, stevie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> People think seeing more lines at once - biggers displays, multiple monitors - makes them more productive.

Let's compare what the people in this article accomplished and how many lines they could edit at once:

      C, unix - 1 line
      BSD unix - 24 lines

(Not really fair, as a hardcopy has many lines).

> Vim is the most popular text-mode (i.e. terminal emulator) editor

I'm pretty sure the vast majority of programming is done in an IDD, not a terminal.

> good ideas accumulated gradually over time. ... enjoyed contributions from > some of the greatest minds in the computing world.

A bigger factor is preseving investment in muscle memory. e.g. The choice of hjkl was not genius (any more than qwerty). But why change once fluent?</comment>


Ask HN: $4,100 worth it for traffic surge to non-profit website? - <AUTHOR> A close friend of mine runs a non-profit and they are going to be on national news in a day or two.
The problem is that the website won't be able to handle the traffic.
The host, WP Engine, gave some quotes to upgrade, but really the only option they said would work is $4,100/month. The other options they admitted wouldn't guarantee that the website could handle it (and probably would crash).
It's super critical that the website be able to handle the donations when the news story airs.
Is $4,100 a fair price? My friend doesn't mind paying for it if:
1) It works and the website doesn't crash.
2) It's a normal rate for this type of issue.
The website is:
http://www.kaylacares4kids.org/ <comment><USER2> If it is a static website or can be converted to one for a short period. You could just have AWS Cloudfront [1] sitting in front of your website acting as a cache. You then redirect all requests to Cloudfront. It'll at most cost a small small faction of that. I probably wouldn't go the route of setting up your own dedicated boxes since you have a time crunch and you might not configure things correctly (as you'd need to load test, etc). The Cloudfront option will take a few hours to setup and test if you've never done it before (about 25 minutes if you have). Cost wise, it is pay as you go. But, you can use the AWS calculator [2] to get a ball park figure. A big traffic spike would probably only cost you $100-200 bucks or something (many millions of hits over a couple days). It all depends on how much data you are pushing, so if you have tons of large files, or binary objects, you need to think about that.

www.kaylacares4kids.org -> AWS Cloudfront Cache -> Wordpress

AWS will take the pounding and your site will be fine. You can do the same thing with CloudFlare but I've only used Cloudfront (as the other comment mentions).

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/](https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/)

[2] [https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html](https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Just put it behind CloudFlare free tier, and apply some load testing and see how it goes.

</comment><comment><USER4> Absolutely not. If you can, run it on your own machines, or GCE/AWS, where you can commission a large server or build a scale-able infrastructure (wp frontends, EFS, aurora on AWS or wp frontends, gluster, cloud sql on GCE).

For $4k, you can pick up a couple of used servers off of ebay, 4 ssd drives, and probably colocate them for a year.

Hell, if you want to, you could probably even go with just one larger server from hetzner or scaleway or aws and you should probably be fine, depending on how much traffic you anticipate.

</comment><comment><USER5> It looks like a semi-static website. $4100 is an outrageous quote. If it's just for a day or two and the content will remain the same - then I suggest using a static cache and something like Cloudflare.</comment>


Pondering the why you should work somewhere - compiler-guy https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/03/02/reasons/ <comment><AUTHOR> I took my manual labor job because it provides a horrendous workout. Ideally I would also find a mentally challenging job that sets equally impossible goals but I cant think of anything besides the gaming industry.

</comment><comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this. This person seems to have a lot of interesting things to share!</comment>


Is your email address one of 711M found on a cybercrime site? - <AUTHOR> http://metro.co.uk/2017/08/30/is-your-email-address-one-of-711000000-found-on-a-spambot-server-6888834/ <comment><USER2> Judging by the number of phishing emails I get on my older email addresses I would have to think so.</comment>


Cloud brightening experiment tests tool to slow climate change - <AUTHOR> http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_28470305/climate-change-controversial-cloud-brightening-project-proposed-moss <comment><USER3> The Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand is worth reading if this subject interests you. [1]. Brand created the Whole Earth Catalogue, which inspired the first wave of Silicon Valley PC pioneers (Steve Jobs most famously). It's the catalogue that ends with the phrase "Stay hungry, stay foolish."

Brand was a founding member of the "Green" movement, which was formed to combat the predicted "Population Bomb" (something Brand addresses in the book).

In later years, Brand has sought more pragmatic viewpoints on the environment. The book specifically address geo-engineering, nuclear power, genetically engineered crops, and other 'hot topics'.

I've mentioned it here before, but worth mentioning again because it's a long, enjoyable read -- thought provoking, conversation starter.

1: [http://www.amazon.com/Whole-Earth-Discipline- RestoredWildlan...](http://www.amazon.com/Whole-Earth-Discipline- RestoredWildlands-Geoengineering/dp/0143118285)

</comment><comment><USER4> Climate is a big system and we know only some parts of it. Trying to cure symptoms may have grave consequences. (Think about medicine - there are many tests before it can be used; many early drugs had horrible side-effect. But in the case of Earth we have only one run.)

<comment><USER5> Actually with many medicines you only have one run - it does not matter if a lethal side effect is rare if it happens to affect you.

We are already running a massive experiment on the earth; we are pumping huge amounts of green house gases into the atmosphere and we are not really sure what will happen. If things go bad really quickly I would like to have some options (even if high risk) rather than be left with nothing.

<comment><USER4> Sure, a medicine may be lethal (but after many trials, errors, cases etc - people developed efficient drugs and medical procedures). But there are many people; it's a big difference if one dies or everyone dies.

"Even more experimenting" is a bad idea. The current situation is bad and we should change its causes. (Otherwise it's like healing tooth with painkillers.) Here I would guess that the average value of risk is highly negative (as in any case with dealing with complex systems).

And there are many imaginable consequences, which are far worse than the current pace of global worming. E.g. poisoning biosphere, accelerating global warming, etc.

And, no, global warming is not an asteroid impact (i.e. killing everyone and everything), so "all or nothing" is a poor mentality (and deadly dangerous!).

<comment><USER5> The people involved in this research are not suggesting we try this - they are suggesting we work on alternatives in case we really need them.

I agree 100% that we need to do far more to reduce our emissions, but right now not enough is being done. If we don't get our act together in time, or things on the warming front move faster than everyone hopes, then we need alternatives. We only have one world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" Personally, I doubt that the world is ready for this," said Stephen Gardiner, a University of Washington philosophy professor who studies the ethics of environmental policies. "Geoengineering raises huge ethical and political questions, nationally and internationally."_

Am I the only one sick of self-appointed ethicists opposing everything. I have yet to read a quote where one said something is good and should be done - <USER2> can see them saying "Clean drinking water: Personally, I doubt that the world is ready for this".

Edit. These guys are trying to develop an insurance policy for us if it turns out climate change is worse than expected.

 _The scientists say there will be deep satisfaction if their project succeeds, but far better would be a future without global warming._

 _" We would be perfectly happy," Cooper said, "if our method works beautifully -- and it never needs to be used."_

Rather than support this the ethicists have to oppose even having an alternative option. Much better to just do nothing and let the planet burn down - at least the world will be ready for that.

<comment><USER6> There's an underlying element here. Some people have developed a sort of belief system around the idea of carbon emissions being intrinsically amoral. For them, man-made CO2 emissions are dirty, gross, and fundamentally sinful. Ameliorating the impact of CO2 on the climate is thus something like purchasing a religious indulgence in that worldview. Anything that enables continued carbon emissions without humanity suffering the consequences is thus seen as extremely morally suspect.

<comment><USER5> Yes there is a bit of this (the beaver's dam is good and part of nature while the human dam is bad), but the previous thinking was more if we as scientists provide alternatives then the politicians will decide they don't need to do anything about emissions. There has been a bit of an epiphany within the scientific community of late that we might have left it too late to solve just by reducing emissions and that we also need to work on alternatives just in case.

<comment><USER7> I think there is something intuitively different between the engineering of non-human animals in nature[1] that has gone on for millions of years and which the rest of nature has evolved along side of, and the human engineering[2] that has drastically changed the face of the planet in less than 200 years, rendering much of nature extinct in the meantime.

1\. [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/American...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/AmericanBeaver.JPG)

2\. [http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2010-07/20/13406...](http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2010-07/20/13406959_11n.jpg)

<comment><USER5> The difference is we (humans) are better at engineering than beavers (not a put down of beavers as they are amazing).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apparently these guys have never watched the movie Snowpiercer...</comment>


More Bad News for ObamaCare - <AUTHOR> http://stream.wsj.com/story/campaign-2012-continuous-coverage/SS-2-9156/SS-2-413181/ <comment><USER2> Bizarrely, this article is cut off both in the stream version of WSJ and in the direct article link. But, if you go from the Google link, you can see the whole article. Shady behavior on the WSJ's part.

[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CC8QqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702304020704579278472445817540.html&ei=SOi5UoGWFenE2gX9vIGADA&usg=AFQjCNGDZDXFfbNAVMFqT1pbqd- gClsNiQ&bvm=bv.58187178,d.b2I)

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a personal policy of upvoting an article before reading it, and after careful consideration I'm going to change that (at least for wsj.com links).

</comment><comment><USER4> Paywalled articles should be banned.

</comment><comment><USER5> what is with the paywall?</comment>


The Art of Unpacking (2007) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-07/Yason/Whitepaper/bh-usa-07-yason-WP.pdf

<comment><USER2> Peter Ferrie has written an encyclopedic book (released in 2011) on Windows anti-debugging:

[http://pferrie.host22.com/papers/antidebug.pdf](http://pferrie.host22.com/papers/antidebug.pdf)

Pretty cool stuff...

</comment><comment><USER3> packing techniques change rapidly, however you gotta start somewhere I suppose.</comment>


Firefox dev claims "everybody hates Firefox updates" - <AUTHOR> http://www.neowin.net/news/firefox-dev-claims-everybody-hates-firefox-updates

<comment><USER2> Firefox was a transitional product. Early versions of Firefox looked a lot like Internet Explorer. Outside of some small differences in naming (e.g., favorites versus bookmarks), users could transition without re-learning much. There were even Firefox skins (yeah, they used to call them that) that made Firefox look like IE.

At the time, Firefox was also a much better product. It was faster, it was more secure, and some of its seemingly obscure features (by the mainstream metric) made it wildly popular with geeks. It became "cool" to use Firefox.

Firefox taught regular users was a "browser" was. I bought a Firefox t-shirt early on. At first, no one knew what it was; no one knew what a browser was. But over time, people started speaking up: "Hey, I use Firefox."

Fast forward three or four years, and users already know that switching browser isn't all that painful. They've already done it once, and Firefox isn't the fastest kid on the block any more. Everything Firefox taught users -- to the undoing of IE -- is now being done to them.

<comment><USER3> So true. Firefox is now as annoying as IE ever was.

<comment><USER4> Except for the fact that it supports modern standards and isn't riddled with security holes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lots of discussion when this was posted a few days ago <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4209384></comment>


Mansa Musa: The richest man who ever lived - m-i-l https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-47379458 <comment><AUTHOR> "But he is by no means the richest man of all time. That title belongs to Mansa Musa, the 14th Century West African ruler who was so rich his generous handouts wrecked an entire country's economy."

How can anyone, let alone the BBC, make this claim? There aren't any records or any legitimate evidence to seriously compare wealth between eras. But even without records, we can safely say that mansa musa wasn't anywhere near the richest man in the 14th century where the khanates of the mongol empire, the holy roman empire, ottoman empire, etc reigned supreme.

Why make a claim as if it was a statement of fact when it is a conjecture at best?

And is a website called "Celebrity Net Worth" really anything that the BBC should be sourcing? What's the point of this article? It's not news. It's not history. Why did I spend a few minutes reading this article?

The first time I heard of mansa musa was years ago on reddit's TIL, but even there, it was ridiculed as being clickbait nonsense. Now the BBC is at it?

</comment><comment><USER2> Fun list, but it is pretty impossible to compare riches across history. Augustus personally owned Egypt, the breadbasket of the Mediterranean at that time. How to you even assign a dollar amount on that? How do you compare the purchasing power over time, when some valuables like gold or salt have become much more abundant, and other things like slaves cannot legally be traded anymore?

<comment><USER3> This brings up a question: does Trump own the American Treasury? I see the PM of my country at Starbucks sometimes and he looks like any other office drone but he makes billion euro decisions every day.

<comment><USER4> > does Trump own the American Treasury

No, Congress controls that, and they're elected by the American people, who ultimately own it.

Here's a more interesting example: [https://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/en- gb/resources/faqs/](https://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/en-gb/resources/faqs/)

> The Crown Estate belongs to the reigning monarch 'in right of The Crown', > that is, it is owned by the monarch for the duration of their reign, by > virtue of their accession to the throne. But it is not the private property > of the monarch - it cannot be sold by the monarch, nor do revenues from it > belong to the monarch.

<comment><USER5> > No, Congress controls that, and they're elected by the American people, who > ultimately own it.

Trump is also elected by the American people, though, right?

<comment><USER6> Trick question: he's elected by the Electoral College. Which is why he's president despite recieving fewer votes than the other candidate, because it's not a direct election but a delegate system.

<comment><USER7> For those haven't heard, there are plans underway to change that, too. Check out the National Popular Vote movement:

[https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/](https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/)

They're more than halfway there. I'm all in favor of the movement, and am holding out hope we'll see it click into place in the next decade or so.

<comment><USER7> FWIW, I am happily planning to expend my 3500 magic internet points promoting unions, worker's rights, and democracy in the strongly antidemocratic USA. In fact, I am looking forward to it.

<comment><USER8> You can't use HN primarily for political and ideological battle. This is in the site guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). The reason is that it destroys intellectual curiosity, which is what this site exists for.

We've warned you about this numerous times already. I don't want to ban you, but if you keep doing this we're going to have to.

<comment><USER7> I sincerely wish the site admins were as fastidious at minimizing ideology when it's pro-capitalist, but I also understand that this site functions largely as a promotional vehicle for a venture capital fund; it's never wise to bite the hand that feeds one.

<comment><USER8> Those are cheap and easy shots to take, with no burden of proof. But you actually don't know how hard we work for those things _not_ to be true. Nor does it change the rules or the request that you abide by them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _" Mansa Abu-Bakr, ruled the empire until 1312, when he abdicated to go on an expedition. Abu-Bakr was obsessed with the Atlantic Ocean and what lay beyond it. He reportedly embarked on an expedition with a fleet of 2000 ships and thousands of men, women and slaves. They sailed off, never to return."_

I wonder how America would have looked like if an African power could manage to establish colonies almost 200 years before Europeans. The technological superiority probably wasn't there but the presumed pandemics caused by the contact may still have provided the invaders an advantage. If nothing else, that would have provided the American natives some additional experience before facing the Europeans.

<comment><USER10> Well if Mali has 2000 ships, that would have been "technologically superior" to what the native Americans would have had, since they had boats, not ships.

But Mali also had guns so I'm not sure how Mali couldn't have been seen as more technologically advanced. I'm asking out of actual curiosity.

<comment><USER11> "Reportedly" had 2000 ships. The whole article is full of "reportedly" whenever it comes to hard numbers. She appears to be cherry picking outlandish accounts that are not corroborated with other sources.

For comparison, the Spanish armada, in 1588, posing a major challenge to British rule of the seas, had 130 ships. From what I can tell, the distance from Dakkar, the Atlantic port that appears in the map from the article to Lisbon [Atlantic port in Iberic peninsula] is ~1700 miles, while the distance from Lisbon to London is ~1000 miles. A force more than 10 times larger than the Spanish Armada only twice as far should have been a sight to behold, and reckon by European nations. Heck, if Abu-Bakr had cross-Atlantic ambitions, his navy should have long reached Europe. Yet, the mighty Mali navy is mysteriously a footnote in [or absent from] contemporary European maritime accounts.

This belongs to click-bait sites [copiously cited in the article] like money.com, celebritynetworth.com or smartasset.com, and not on the BBC. How the mighty have fallen...

<comment><USER12> Not to argue with your arguments but it wouldn't had been so easy to sail from Dakar to Lisboa due to prevailing winds. Sailing to America would be much easier.

<comment><USER11> Fair enough, I'm not a maritime buff. Here's a bit more info to confirm your point [0]. I was thinking more of intermediate stops, specifically Canary islands and Morocco coast, which could have made the voyage easier, and allow the gradual development of navigational prowess in the first place.

Speaking of intermediate stops, you'd expect a fleet of 2000 ships sailing to Americas to be borne out of a maritime culture with a significant footprint. You'd expect said culture to leave some archeological traces in the Cape Verde islands, which are only 400 miles straight to the west of Dakkar. I have never heard of any hard evidence of massive Mali empire / West African fleets traveling to Cape Verde islands on a regular basis. According to Wikipedia:

> Before the arrival of Europeans, the Cape Verde Islands were > uninhabited.[12] The islands of the Cape Verde archipelago were discovered > by Genoese and Portuguese navigators around 1456.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevailing_winds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevailing_winds)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Verde#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Verde#History)

<comment><USER12> Sailing west is easy with passat wind. Sailing North to Europe would require sailing far into the ocean in NW direction and turning East when you catch westerlies at 30 deg North. That would require lots of courage or prior navigational knowledge.

It is almost impossible to sail North along the coast of Africa even for ships that can go strong against the wind.

This is what most people misunderstand about Columbus. He did not discover America, he discovered the way to go there and back which required sailing first South looking for passat and returning by sailing North and then catching western winds.

Columbus knew that (from studying reports) before he left on his first voyage, he repeated this four times as all sailors who followed in his steps did for 300 years.

<comment><USER9> _" This is what most people misunderstand about Columbus. He did not discover America, he discovered the way to go there and back which required sailing first South looking for passat and returning by sailing North and then catching western winds."_

You seem to take for granted the presence of New World in the mind of Columbus and that the only problem to be solved was securing the access. That is wrong. Columbus was looking for India. He descended to India's latitude and went looking for it westward¹. I'm not aware of any initial plans to return back to Europe on a similar manner, i.e. (this is a mere speculation but I'm inclined to believe that) he could have returned back by some well-known route, to minimize risks if he could find an actual Indian trade post, or anything familiar, really. Given the "unknown part of India" he'd encounter, only later it became a safer bet to attempt sailing back north-eastward.

¹ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyages_of_Christopher_Columbu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyages_of_Christopher_Columbus#/media/File:Viajes_de_colon_en.svg)

<comment><USER12> I hear you. What I meant is that Columbus had enough pieces of a puzzle to make that journey there and back possible. Based on earlier journeys of Portuguese sailors, on reading different accounts both contemporary and historical.

And that after his discovery this circular route became the only way to America and back used by other sailors. This is more of an achievement then placing flag on some piece of land.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So he was 32 when his brother handed over the throne. His brother was presumably older, I'm guessing under 45 though. The brother is the king, has everything, probably realizes he is getting old, and purposely heads out on a final adventure to see for himself what lies on the other side of the ocean. That is pretty epic.

</comment><comment><USER14> >A hundred camels were in tow, each camel carrying hundreds of pounds of pure gold.

Or around $1bn in gold assuming 500 pounds per camel at current exchange rates. As a percent of the then global GDP, this was likely well above the modern super rich, but as a head of state, his pilgrimage would have been perhaps comparable to a mid-sized war for that time period given the number of troops and total expense.

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting article but _Jakob Fugger the Rich_ was estimated to be worth 400 billion Euro at the time of death and he's missing from the list. How accurate might the rest of the list be then?

<comment><USER16> Wait, the Fuggers were real? I thought that name and family were just an invention of Stephenson's in the Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.!

<comment><USER17> They are, indeed, real. And they make appearances in Stephenson's Baroque cycle as well, IIRC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Extra History did 5 episodes on the empire of Mali, where episode 3 is about Mansa Musa:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-Un2xx6Pzo&list=PLhyKYa0YJ_...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-Un2xx6Pzo&list=PLhyKYa0YJ_5DDhUWNT_5GWuCnXHh70Zz7&index=3)

</comment><comment><USER19> Based on their chart, "incomprehensible" is a bigger number than "incalculable" and both are larger than $4.6 trillion.

<comment><USER20> No. Incalculable is less than 4.6 TUSD.

<comment><USER21> If you mean literally, mentioning the result of the calculation or estimation ($4.6 trillion) certainly disqualifies it from being "incalculable".

Incomprehensible on the other hand is slightly more realistic as most humans can't really comprehend such high values. They understand them as a number but not the extent of it. Which is why when large numbers are involved you'll surely find some equivalences: "as heavy as 1000 747s", "1000 times taller than the Empire State Building", etc.

<comment><USER22> Did you read the article?

They literally put $4.6 Trillion on an entry between wealth entries lableed "incomprehensible" and "incalculable".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Am I the only one who primarily reacts to Gaddafi's inclusion? I knew the crazy geezer was rich, but richer than Bezos and Gates rich?

<comment><USER23> Here's a critical breakdown of where that number came from: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/edwindurgy/2011/10/25/did- moamm...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/edwindurgy/2011/10/25/did-moammar- gadhafi-die-the-richest-man-in-the-world/)

TLDR: The $200 Billion number comes from the value of property and assets owned by the Libyan government and sovereign wealth fund. And while Gaddafi had zero qualms about using tax money to directly fund his lavish lifestyle, treating government property as his own and using the sovereign wealth fund as his personal trust fund, he never made any moves towards actually seizing the assets or principal of the wealth fund for himself, so technically it shouldn't count towards his wealth.

<comment><USER24> > using tax money to directly fund his lavish lifestyle

I am trying to find references for this _lavish lifestyle_ claim. His Wikipedia entry says

"His home and office at Azizia was a bunker designed by West German engineers, while the rest of his family lived in a large two-story building. Within the compound were also two tennis courts, a soccer field, several gardens, camels, and a Bedouin tent in which he entertained guests. In the 1980s, his lifestyle was considered modest in comparison to those of many other Arab leaders."

I guess it's hard to say whether this amounts to a "lavish lifestyle" for a dictator.

<comment><USER23> _I am trying to find references for this lavish lifestyle claim_

First relevant looking link I found on Google:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-gaddafi- homes/aband...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-gaddafi- homes/abandoned-gaddafi-homes-reveal-champagne-lifestyle- idUSTRE77U5NL20110831)

<comment><USER24> Yes, there are several of those. I'm not very sure of their reliability though, as it is customary to paint in the worst possible light the people you've been waging war against.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If you liked this, you may also want to read about Howqua, a Chinese merchant who was the richest man in the world in the 19th century.

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

<comment><USER26> There is a character in the James Clavell book, Tai-Pan that bears some resemblance to Howqua. I wonder if he was based on him.

<comment><USER27> Quite likely. Clavell's novels are fiction but they were inspired by real people and real events.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Most of the story is ripped from the Wikipedia article. But then...

> Lucy Duran of the School of African and Oriental Studies in London

It's the School of Oriental and African Studies - SOAS. Not SAOS.

Yikes.

</comment><comment><USER29> This Wikipedia article is pretty good: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_figures)

</comment><comment><USER30> Jeez, the numbers thrown around in the article are insane!

Sample:

 _The king reportedly paid the poet 200 kg (440lb) in gold_

 _A hundred camels were in tow, each camel carrying hundreds of pounds of pure gold._

If this wasn't BBC, I'd have thought I was reading The Onion :P

 _The later arrival of Europeans in the region was the final nail in the empire 's coffin._

:( Of course

<comment><USER4> > The later arrival of Europeans in the region was the final nail in the > empire's coffin.

> :( Of course

We're talking here about an empire that tracked 12,000 slaves both ways across the Sahara. Most regions the Europeans colonized were plenty capable of inflicting the suffering on their people that the Europeans managed, the Europeans just industrialized the practices.

<comment><USER31> I think we can all agree that you don't have to go back very far in time for virtually everyone to appear like giant jerks (to put it mildly) when seen with modern eyes. Industrialization of exploitation has its own particular sinister aspect as opposed to just plain exploitation, though.

I do get sad sometimes that Europe bulldozered over virtually everything, not from a "better or worse" perspective, or "right or wrong" (because how am I to be a judge of that?), but from the perspective of curiosity as to where the Mali, or Inca, etc., would have been today if that hadn't happened.

<comment><USER27> There's some anthropological research that basically says that remote communities are generally more backwards than bigger communities. Some examples of this being the populations of the Americas, compared to the ones from the Old World; or the one in Tasmania, which managed to lose the use of tools their forebears in Australia were using.

Of course, extrapolating is super hard and risky, but the impression I get is that at least for the Americas, the local populations would be less competitive than the ones in the Old World.

<comment><USER32> Tenochtitlan had about 150,000-200,000 people at its height. That was larger than any city in Western Europe save Paris, and definitely far larger than any city that most of the conquistadors would have seen. The Spanish capital at Toledo was maybe 40,000-60,000 people.

<comment><USER27> I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying.

The same people that lived in Tenochtitlan hadn't yet discovered iron or had an alphabet.

By most objective measurements, their civilization was in an earlier stage than say, Ming China.

A part of this was due to lower competition levels in the New World (fewer people - and cultures - overall) and a part of it was environmental. For example they didn't have wheeled vehicles because they didn't have horses or oxen.

And regarding your city comparison, Ur had 100.000 people in 2100 BC (!), Carthage had 0.5M in 300 BC, Rome had 1.2M in 200 AD, Baghdad had 0.9M in 900 AD and Beijing had 1M in 1500 AD. So? :)

<comment><USER32> > By most objective measurements, their civilization was in an earlier stage > than say, Ming China.

Yeah, Tenochtitlan had a meritocratic system of governance, universal primary education, ...

History doesn't work according to a Civilization-style tech tree. A lot of the technological development is driven by the needs of the immediate area. Maize, the staple crop of the Mesoamerica, is actually a superior crop to rice in terms of caloric yield per acre (and the genetic engineering it took to turn teosinthe into maize is amazing--far more involved than the domestication of wheat or rice). Tenochtitlan didn't use wheeled vehicles because it was built on a large lake bed and you could use flat boats to move a large amount of goods.

The New World was probably more populated in 1492 than you think it was, and newer archaeological evidence is starting to show that what we thought were "empty" lands of people were actually fairly densely populated--say, the Amazon rainforest. Pre-Columbian Americas are usually now figured at about 100 million people, which would be more than contemporaneous Europe and North Africa in population.

<comment><USER27> > Yeah, Tenochtitlan had a meritocratic system of governance, universal > primary education, ...

So did various places in the Old World. Were those systems you mention for Tenochtitlan universal in the New World?

> History doesn't work according to a Civilization-style tech tree. A lot of > the technological development is driven by the needs of the immediate area. > Maize, the staple crop of the Mesoamerica, is actually a superior crop to > rice in terms of caloric yield per acre (and the genetic engineering it took > to turn teosinthe into maize is amazing--far more involved than the > domestication of wheat or rice). Tenochtitlan didn't use wheeled vehicles > because it was built on a large lake bed and you could use flat boats to > move a large amount of goods.

Yes, and I even mentioned that there were various factors involved in the whole thing. Still, at the end of the day, if I have 100 coins and you only have 20, you're poorer than I am. Some things we can measure objectively, and civilizations are rated on a scale. Otherwise the Stone Age would be considered as developed as the Bronze Age and the Bronze Age would be as developed as the Iron Age and... Yet things don't work like that.

> The New World was probably more populated in 1492 than you think it was, and > newer archaeological evidence is starting to show that what we thought were > "empty" lands of people were actually fairly densely populated--say, the > Amazon rainforest. Pre-Columbian Americas are usually now figured at about > 100 million people, which would be more than contemporaneous Europe and > North Africa in population.

Yes, but the Old World was much bigger in sheer size plus the main population centers were China and India, which you conveniently skip over :)

<comment><USER33> > Some things we can measure objectively, and civilizations are rated on a > scale.

No, they aren't.

But even if they were, the best objective measure might be: given the choice of living within either of two different civilizations, which would people prefer? And from that standpoint, the New World was actually _more_ advanced than Europe:

> I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would > rather have been a typical Indian or a typical European in 1491. None was > delighted by the question, because it required judging the past by the > standards of today—a fallacy disparaged as "presentism" by social > scientists. But every one chose to be an Indian. Some early colonists gave > the same answer. Horrifying the leaders of Jamestown and Plymouth, scores of > English ran off to live with the Indians.

Also:

> Back home in the Americas, Indian agriculture long sustained some of the > world's largest cities. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán dazzled Hernán > Cortés in 1519; it was bigger than Paris, Europe's greatest metropolis. The > Spaniards gawped like hayseeds at the wide streets, ornately carved > buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away. They > had never before seen a city with botanical gardens, for the excellent > reason that none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a > thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate. (Streets that weren't > ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors had never heard of such a thing.)

> Spaniards, who seldom if ever bathed, were amazed by the Aztec desire for > personal cleanliness.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/30...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/)

<comment><USER27> 1\. Why do you folks keep moving the goalposts? You're the second person that replies to me almost the same way, primarily not reading my comments. I didn't say the New World vs Europe, I said the New World vs the Old World.

There were Asian cities of 1 million people at the time, there's plenty of Asian civilizations where people bathed, etc.

Plus saying that the Spaniards hadn't seen such a thing is not saying that much in a time where the average person would travel, on average, at most 20km from their hometown, throughout their entire lives. Even for the average conquistador, this was the trip of their lives. They'd better be impressed by what they see, now that they get to see thing thousands of km away from their home village! :)

2.

> No, they aren't.

Yes they are, I don't adhere to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_relativism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_relativism). A civilization that has discovered antibiotics is better, all other things being equal, than one that hasn't.

<comment><USER32> > A civilization that has discovered antibiotics is better, all other things > being equal, than one that hasn't.

What metric do you mean to use? If you want to measure by health outcomes, the most technologically advanced societies did not surpass paleolithic societies until about the 1950s. For 10,000 years, the healthiest people on the planet would have been "backwards" hunter-gatherer, non-agricultural societies. Even if you want to limit to comparisons between agricultural societies, the Aztecs were probably healthier than the Spaniards they encountered.

Technological advancement does not necessarily mean superiority. Another fun fact to point out is that early iron weapons were actually inferior to contemporary bronze weapons. (And the Spaniards' reaction to the Aztec macuahuitl was "ha ha, funny looking weapons… holy crap, those things are deadly dangerous"). If you try to actually start defining objective criteria, the assumption that Western society is/was superior is actually very shaky.

<comment><USER33> Horseback archers in open grasslands also retained a massive advantage over firearms until the Colt revolver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Richest man in history and already unknown to most of the world, along with many others on the list. Just goes to show that legacy is not measured on a balance sheet.

<comment><USER35> Yes. Legacy is governed by controlling the narrative. That is the real lesson.

Another lesson - there is no one legacy, we each have our own context. Go overseas and they will know Mansa Musa better than our local legends. Sort of like you comparing your high school music playlist with a friend in college from another country and you're like...woah...never heard of these artists!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Gaddafi was worth $200bn?!! What an ignominious way to go. It must have sucked particularly hard to be that rich and die the way he did... money != power I suppose, not always anyway.

<comment><USER37> No, it should be clear that however they're calculating wealth is obviously wrong. Augustus Caesar has the wealth of $4.6 trillion? There is simply no way that is true.</comment></comment>


Ask PG: What prompted you to write "How to Do What You Love" - <AUTHOR> I discovered Paul Graham and Y Combinator in 2010 when I Googled "do what you love".  It prompted me to start a business called Do What You Love.  Three years later I revisited my blog post about finding PG's article.  I am just wondering what prompted PG to write it in the first place??? <comment><USER2> I don't know how old you are, ThinkADRIAN, but my sense is "young." Pretty much everyone faces questions like the ones addressed in "How To Do What You Love" when they're growing up; those questions don't go away as you age, but you get enough context for them that they're not so hard to answer.

At that point, you start to notice that pretty much everyone younger than you has the same set of life stage problems and questions that you did. This is doubly true if you have a lot of exposure to high school students, college students, or recent grads, or if you write popular essays.

Rather than trying to answer the questions, and the thought behind the questions, piecemeal, it's easier to write one comprehensive answer and both direct people to it and let people find it on their own.

I can't guarantee that that was pg's line of reasoning, but I suspect it's reasonably close.

<comment><AUTHOR> When I read that essay, I wondered why they don't teach this stuff in high school or college. Years beyond education, people are still not doing what they love. A lot people drag their feet going to jobs where they don't feel fulfilled until they finally retire.

I just wondered what inspired PG to write almost a manual on the subject. So I asked... "If you don't ask, you don't get."

<comment><USER2> >I wondered why they don't teach this stuff in high school or college

I actually have assigned it and some of Paul Graham's other essays; many students, however, appear to reject his advice, or are not ready to listen to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well, he is going to delete his HN account on of these days. Everybody seems to get off the commode and fire a question to PG.

BTW, @pg: is possible to delete a HN a/c (by the user I mean)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. I asked him a question about an essay he wrote... Is that not worthy of this forum?

"If you don't ask, you don't get."</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any risk in taking money from BigCo VC branches? - Kepler-295c Like Baido Ventures, Google Ventures etc.
I'm worried about ideas being stolen. I'm sure the VCs in these departments are trustworthy. However, it would not surprise me in the least if the VCs were being asked to share their notes in a location that just happens to be accessible to business development departments.
Are there any war stories that have made it to light in this area? <comment><AUTHOR> Most corporate vc's are far too inept to steal an idea and too far on the periphery of company operations to have any influence on corporate strategy.

Truth is high companies are usually incapable of stealing ideas at the base of the company (sure Zuck sees stories and he can make it happen, but otherwise - very rare.

<comment> Kepler-295c Right but I would never suspect VCs, in today's world of Google Drive et al it's entirely possible that their notes are readable by business dev.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> If they give you money and take your ideas then they aren't stealing.</comment>


Can I compute the mass of a coin based on the sound of its fall? - <AUTHOR> http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/121879/can-i-compute-the-mass-of-a-coin-based-on-the-sound-of-its-fall <comment><USER2> " Because it has attracted low-quality answers, posting an answer now requires 10 reputation on this site. "

I really don't get the stack exchange group of websites. Some of those answers are outstandingly amazing.</comment>


OpenAI GPT2 Speaks as a Londoner - <AUTHOR> https://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/ai-generated-quotes-overheard-wordonthestreet <comment><AUTHOR> I've trained the GPT2 117M model on 6 years worth of Time Out's #WordOnTheStreet feature, and this is the output of a generated sample.

I'm amazed that most of the quotes actually make sense, in a very weird way. Happy to take any questions about this one.</comment>