A broken algorithm that affected American transportation - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v7gxy9/the-broken-algorithm-that-poisoned-american-transportation-v27n3 <comment><USER3> I met another faulty transport planning algorithm 30 years ago.

Background: my first job in the UK Civil Service was as an admin assistant (I did the filing) in the Highways Contracts division, Dept of Transport. My team's job was to let the contracts for developing plans for new/improved national roads across England.

The Algorithm: roads cost a lot of money to build; every proposed route had to demonstrate significant value for money through a cost-benefit analysis for each project, considering a number of different detailed options for the new or improved road. One of the main costs was how much money needed to be spent on buying and securing the land, and compensating the owners for loss of business, etc. In cities and towns, this favoured putting bypasses through the poorer parts of the (sub)urban environment. In more rural areas it favoured routing roads through less productive farmland. The least productive land was land that wasn't being farmed or mined. Routes put through these areas would be given an acquisition cost of £0/meter[1]

... Which is why in 1993 the Government settled on developing an improvement scheme for the A303 which put a new double-lane carriageway straight through the middle of Stonehenge.

The proposal didn't go down too well. 30 years - and several administrations - later, the Government is still trying to get the proposal through planning[2]

[1] - Though in fact highway lengths were still measured in 'chains' and 'links' back in the early 1990s: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_(unit)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_\(unit\))

[2] - Current proposal for the project: [https://assets.highwaysengland.co.uk/roads/road- projects/A30...](https://assets.highwaysengland.co.uk/roads/road- projects/A303+Stonehenge/Environmental+Non+Technical+Summary.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> As some others have mentioned, I don't think that induced demand or the failure to prevent congestion are failings of the model itself. A congested 5 lane road still has a higher throughput than a congested 2 lane road.

However, the largest problem I see which the article briefly touches on is the failure to even consider building something besides a freeway. A `correct` model should be screaming to build public transport.

However, consider the following circumstances:

1\. As it is many people are forced to have a car even if public transport can serve their main commute but often public transport is more expensive than the marginal cost of driving a vehicle (i.e gas + upkeep) so they choose to drive unless the congestion is extreme (i.e one of the worst commutes in the US).

2\. Even if public transport is pretty decent (commute + groceries), they just happen to already have a car because their previous location did not have public transport. So we are back at #1. Or I don't know if I'll move in a year or two so might as well keep the car.

3\. OR now that I have a car , I would probably not want to have to pay for expensive parking (& housing) in an area with public transport plus now I'll have to pay a mechanic a premium to even change the oil. So instead I live further away thus reinforcing the need to keep the car.

4 & etc. I need to travel >50 miles (skiing, hiking), renting is a pain and long trip ride sharing is expensive. Groceries are easier to do with a car especially when buying in bulk (Although, if/when I can get Costco delivered same or 2-day with perishables at <=10% premium, then this is a moot point).

Cars are pretty (at least marginally or per mile) cheap in America and we do a very poor job making the alternatives attractive if not impossible. Anyone who has a car seems to drive it even if public transport could be used (again outside of super specific commutes in a few cities). Until we can either make car ownership/use more expensive or greatly increase the practicality of not having a car at all, anticipate having a car and being stuck in traffic at least part of the time.

<comment><USER5> So I have a weird opinion - cars are cheap, and give us time.

If your time is worth little, public transportation will work. But if you want to get from home to work and back, the car will be quickest. And if you want to go to the grocery store on the way home, no public transportation helps with that.

There are a few modifications of that.

If you have to get to work and you're not in a rush and you have something to do along the way like listen to a podcast or read a book, then that might be slightly different, because you're living a bit. (although podcasts work in the car if you are not against driving + listening - some people are)

Public transportation works really well when the roads are full full full. Getting from one side of Mexico City to the other quickly during rush hour is possible with the metro, not possible in a car.

<comment><USER6> That's true of your personal car (if you're lucky), but cars in general are expensive and don't give us time. They just increase the distances people are willing to travel, and as a city-planning and economic side effect, increase the distances people _have_ to travel. All while having terrible side effects on the climate and our health.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I broadly agree with the article, but one point where it falls short is that it doesn't mention that the 4 stages of the model can be (and sometimes even are!) iterated in various ways to account for the way real people actually behave: modellers in the 21st century aren't quite as naive as all that (and probably the ones in the 50s weren't either but they had less data/computer power).

For reference, the four stages go like this: you start with "trip supply and demand" by zone, then inter-zone trips are generated by matching those up, then mode choice is computed per trip based on cost and travel time priors, then assignment to the network which results in actual trips and computed travel times based on route selection and congestion.

The travel times can then be fed back into mode-choice and iterated on: people will make the transit-vs-car choice differently based on the relative costs (in time and money and inconvenience) so iterating the last two steps can go a ways towards modelling that equilibrium.

Folks can exert some amount of choice around which trips they make (as mentioned in the article) and where they work, based on how easy it is to get there, so feeding the travel costs back into trip-generation can account for some of that, and over a longer horizon, both workers and employers can exert some control over where they live/site their facilities, so all 4 stages can be iterated as well.

None of this is perfect, and it's not always done, and the rest of the article's points stand, but I just wanted to say the modelling is not all that primitive :)

Edit: I studied this stuff in university 15 years ago with Professor Eric Miller, who wrote this book on how to integrate all this stuff in an iterative way... [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11067-005-2630-5](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11067-005-2630-5)

</comment><comment><USER8> Ironically this article exposes the fallacy of "induced demand." Proponents of this mindset, such as the author of this article, claim that more lanes inevitably lead to more traffic. But the article leads off with an example of a massive highway expansion project that is a "boondoggle" because traffic fell and the lanes are empty. I thought that lanes automatically fill up, because induced demand.

<comment><USER9> Surely, unless the claim was that in all cases, everywhere a new road means new levels of traffic to fill it, a single counterexample does nothing to expose a fallacy? I feel like your "inevitably" here is a bit strawman-y

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > population and land-use patterns... are two of the most important variables > in any TDM [Travel Demand Model]

All models are based on assumptions. Revisiting those assumptions should be a continuous process that forms a tight feedback loop, especially given the long timelines and large capital costs involved with civil infrastructure projects.

If population and land-use assumptions are the key factors then the important questions should be how these assumptions will be validated and how often. These questions seem to be missing from the article.

</comment><comment><USER11> Some more reading: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand)

> City planner Jeff Speck has called induced demand "the great intellectual > black hole in city planning, the one professional certainty that everyone > thoughtful seems to acknowledge, yet almost no one is willing to act upon."

<comment><USER12> That's bizarre, because I see it as the most overused argument over the past 25 years! People oppose any lane additions with induced demand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Public transportation should really just be bus-based. Every city that has a large public transit system — worldwide - spends an absolute fortune on trains, track maintenance, overhead lines, operators, and so on. Even shiny European systems are hugely hugely expensive. They often use a wide variety of approaches — Boston for example has about a half dozen completely incompatible rolling stock. Buses can be deployed and scaled cheaply, routes can adapt quickly, dedicated bus lanes can be built with paint and not tunnels. Choke points can use dedicated right-of-way and electric infrastructure can go into tunnels with far less ventilation need. Buses can handle a fallen tree by driving around it. Buses don't need special tracks to take them to depots. A down bus doesn't back up the buses behind it. The list goes on and on.

<comment><USER14> do you have any thoughts on what causes these systems to stick to trains?

to me, as a user of public transit, they just seem somehow more pleasant, in a way I can't really make sense of. I strongly dislike riding in buses and try to avoid it, whether part of transit systems, Greyhound/Peter Pan, or even high-end charter buses.

maybe if you had electric (no exhaust, quiet) buses with frequent reliable service, dedicated lanes almost everywhere, nice bus stops without hostile architecture, I wouldn't feel such a strong preference, but I'm not sure.

I'm wondering whether it's not just that I subconsciously dislike getting jostled around and feeling slightly carsick.

<comment><USER15> > do you have any thoughts on what causes these systems to stick to trains?

Trains are excellent for dense urban environments and better yet when integrated with another modes. I take Berlin as an example: You have fare zones and S/U-Bahn everywhere in the city center extending for to Potsdam, etc., trams in the former east, buses on the less dense parts of the city. Also trivial access to regional and long-distance trains. And it also disproves the typical excuse "You can't do that in an old city": some U-Bahn lines exists since 1902, the city got devastated by war and then there was the DDR. The reunification needed a lot of work and yet the system survived. Took me a long time to notice there was no Ubers, maybe because it was not that advantageous for people to use it and Uber Inc. just gave up instead of fighting city regulations, as they did everywhere).

I compare with the systems from my native Brazil, where public transportation ranges from pathetic inefficient on big cities to non-existent in small towns. Hell, I really miss Berlin.

<comment><USER13> My point is that most cities are not Berlin, which is one of the wealthiest cities in one of the wealthiest countries on Earth. What does Cleveland have to learn from Berlin?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> These big projects aren't about actually solving problems. They're a combination of public works projects and returning money to your political investors. So you choose the project then construct the justification. Because the true confidence interval is really large, you can go either way.

If you're good about it, you can drag the project out with delays but with milestones you can talk about politically.

Then by the time the project has been discovered to have been unnecessary you're out of power and it's no longer a problem.

And your investors have a good return to invest in the next guy to give them the next project.

<comment><USER17> I think a lot of Americans are still in the world war 2 generation mindset about the US being corruption-free. The truth is that corruption at every level has gotten steadily worse throughout the last century, but the culture hasn't yet changed to be vigilant of it, probably because most Americans are very honest themselves.

<comment><USER16> I think that's it, honestly. I think this relatively high-trust culture that Americans have actually makes the society pretty efficient and it's much more pleasant to live in.

But it has none of the anti-bodies to the kind of cynical corruption that many other countries find endemic. And so when it came here, America had no defence. Because the host is still so healthy, it still doesn't realize it is carrying this parasite.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when the host becomes unhealthy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This kind of complex-system-optimization problem seems ripe for improvement via machine-learning. Cases where 1) precisely modeling the outcome is totally intractable, and 2) you really just need to get "close enough" to get good results. It also helps that this case is predictive in nature (so it's easy to go back and measure accuracy) and has an enormous set of available training data (all traffic happening everywhere across the country).

It feels very similar in spirit to that story about Google reducing data center energy use by 40% via ML optimization: [https://deepmind.com/blog/article/deepmind-ai-reduces- google...](https://deepmind.com/blog/article/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data- centre-cooling-bill-40)

More broadly I've started wondering if there's a huge opportunity to apply software to civil improvement. Everything from detecting patterns of corruption, to aggregating data that can inform voters, to identifying sources of inefficient spending. I don't put much stock in things like digital voting/governance, but in the area of "data crunching and presentation" I think there's a lot that could be done.

<comment><USER7> > an enormous set of available training data (all traffic happening everywhere > across the country).

I'm not sure this is very helpful to predict traffic patterns over the next 20-30 years in a policy-sensitive way... All the historical data in the world wouldn't have predicted the rise of Uber, the pandemic, the maybe-eventual rise of self-driving cars etc.

<comment><USER18> True, but it doesn't sound like the approach described in the article factors in extraordinary circumstances like that either

<comment><USER7> The model won't tell you how likely these scenarios are, but one advantage of this class of model over black-box ML function-fitting is that you can do scenario planning. You can do models runs like "what happens if the price of oil shoots way up?" or "what happens if 50% of the cars are taxis?" (e.g. Uber-driven future) or "what happens if transit all of a sudden gains a huge perceived cost?" (e.g. respiratory-virus pandemic) in the third and fourth stages of the model. In the early stages of the model you can look at stuff like "what happens if firms abandon city centers?" or "what happens if 50% of white-collar work is done from home?" etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Pre 2000s transport planning is a textbook study of optimizing for the wrong thing. Although it failed to reduce congestion you could argue the extra trips contributed to GDP... but that's subject to the same problem...

Ultimately what is the correct metric though? Well being? [https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/8/3180/htm#](https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/8/3180/htm#)

</comment><comment><USER20> The interstate system dates to 1956.[1] So it is part of the set of mental models that haunt the US and continue to poison our built environment. The post-WWII era is the same era that gave birth to the modern suburb and the Baby Boom, giving us the Baby Boomers.

Americans have been basically brainwashed into thinking that patterns of development from that era are right and good and so forth and then we put those models on steroids and do more of that same.

Our suburbs began as houses of around 1200 sq. ft. Last I saw stats, the average new home in the US was over 2400 sq. ft. (though a recent private conversation with a professional urban planner suggests those figures may finally be dropping).

We need an entirely new set of mental models, something I think of as "the butterfly economy" based on a comment I made on HN once.[2]

There is a potential path forward, but we aren't going to take it because that would involve listening to a woman and this will not happen. This is a hill our current world is eager to die upon, so we will remain haunted by the ghosts of Christmas past -- prisoners of mental models that served our parents and grandparents extremely well, so they got burned into our collective psyche as the only good way to do anything and never mind that the world has changed and all of that is very much out of date.

I'm short of sleep, tired of getting zero respect, underfed (as is the norm late in the month), in a generally bad mood over how my crappy existence remains crappy largely due to sexist BS and no amount of pointing out the sexist BS causes it to really budge. So I think that's all I'm going to say here since I fully expect to get kicked in the teeth for saying anything and I've had quite enough abuse for one life.

[1] [https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/interstatemyths.cfm](https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/interstatemyths.cfm)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028732](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028732)

</comment><comment><USER21> Not shocking at all that Vice would frame an algorithm designed to create construction jobs via federal funding as "broken" and "poisonous".

</comment><comment><USER22> The article actually begrudgingly admits the model works fine. It's nice they are honest for a change, normally they just factoid it away.

And concludes it's politics.

Not sure if I read the same article as everyone else?

</comment><comment><USER23> Hub and spoke public transport is dead. It relies on huge infrastructure investment and open access.

The future is autonomous minibusses with algorithmically-derived live routes, served on a subscription basis by private companies to private individuals. This way people of similar socioeconomic status can rub shoulders with eachother and feel more comfortable, and receive a greater standard of service.

It might very well be necessary to modify roads and road rules to facilitate autonomous vehicles - that's the kind of public investment we should be making.

<comment><USER24> The issue with private services is that they will handle most profitable routes and ignore less profitable ones.

You end up with a system where there is even more socioeconomic exclusion (poorer people living in areas where they need to use cars, but cars are more expensive and won't get into the future cities).

Or - at worst - it won't work at all, because you will need a car anyway for those 5-10% long tail destinations that private transport won't cover.

I think this is the reason European countries have public transportation - which is forced to tackle less profitable routes, but can earn back money on the profitable ones. (Similarly post office)

<comment><USER25> Hope does that compare with the reality of jitneys both in India and the similar phaenoma around NYC providing timely transportation for the working class? (In NYC often persecuted by the government as well)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This article repeats a common flaw, which is citing the theory of "induced demand". This is merely rhetorical framing. Demand isn't induced, but fulfilled. And it is a good thing, because that's what those drivers want - <USER2> make their trips easily, which is what road infrastructure enables.

The notion that increased road infrastructure will magically hold congestion steady or worsen it is laughable. It just means demand hasn't been satisfied yet. Clearly a 1000 lane highway would not be congested, so there is some finite and lower number where demand balances out with supply. This is no different than supply and demand in any other situation, which is why the label of "induced demand" is without meaning and simply a rhetorical device.

<comment><USER19> This isn't physics and it isn't an exact equilibrium, but within the range of highway sizes we actually have (not your 1000 lane hypothetical) it seems to hold. Not only do people drive more, but more origins and destinations get _built_ to take advantage of new transport links.

<comment><USER27> A 1000 line highway would take tens of minutes, maybe upto an hour, to drive to the outside lane, it would have its own interesting traffic problems.

<comment><USER28> I can imagine you'd want to split it e.g. into 250 4-lane tracks, with the leftmost track being reserved for people going all the way to the end of the highway, rightmost track for people who're about to exit the highway, and the middle tracks for people traveling to various points along the highway path, sorted left-to-right by distance, descending.

Otherwise it would be just one huge mess.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


My wife is my co-founder, is that going to be a problem? - <AUTHOR> Hello, I applied in the S17 batch with my co-founder/wife and I was wondering if it will hurt or help us because we are married? We do have a very strong connection - having hitchhiked Asia and the Middle east together(including war zones) and we literally saved each other's lives, so perhaps if there is any bias against married people, this will prevent it? <comment><USER2> In business you're going to have to make some decisions were you will disagree with each other. Unfortunately this will carry over to your personal relationship. Personal to business disagreements will also happen. If you can, avoid putting extra stress on your marriage. It's hard enough to stay married in general. You can say the same thing for the business. Also, it's nice to remove yourself from the stress of work. It's going to be so much harder when your wife is going thru the same stress.

In short, don't do it. It's not worth the extra stress.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well the issue with us is that our business was born out of our abilities, alone the business would fall apart. For now, we have no choice to be co- founders. But thank you for your input.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It depends. Your past experiences certainly suggest that you work together well on an adventure and facing crisis - both of which are common with startups. I did read somewhere that the husband and wife co-founders of VmWare maintained a professional separation of responsibilities and decision making. They upheld this when facing staff, investors and other outsiders. They only did "couple things" at home and with friends. In business they were like any other co-founders.

My take is that when you travel and have adventures, you strive to be similar and match your interests and abilities. In business you need to focus on your specific competencies. You will need to assign responsibilities and stick to them. Otherwise you end up constantly debating every decision and that slows things down. But these are generalisations. Your specific abilities might suggest novel ways of working together.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the input, it is inspiring and rather useful for us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They say co-founder relationships are like a marriage, so since you're already in a marriage with your co-founder, and assuming you guys have a good relationship where you can openly communicate and understand each other, you should be good.

</comment><comment><USER5> Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston (husband/wife) co-founded YC... a company you might have heard of.

So the answer is No.

</comment><comment><USER6> Two of the co-founders of YC are now husband and wife, although I have no idea if they were together at the start. It appears they have also accepted a husband and wife team before . Not sure whether they factor for this one way or the other.

Personally I couldn't do it with my wife, that's just the nature of our relationship. Last thing I want to waste time doing while starting up is have to give out constant hugs because I was too harsh in my criticism or disagreement about something. However everyone's relationship is different good luck to you if yours is one of those.

Also aside, is it wise to be hitch hiking through middle east war zones? The last thing I'm sure anyone here wants to see is you and your wife on the news cowering while someone threatens to cut your heads off.

</comment><comment><USER7> I co-founded a company with my boyfriend of 1.5 years, who later became my husband. Our company has been bootstrapped and profitable for the last 8 years. Initially, we were both slightly embarrassed to be both co-founders and in a relationship, but as time went on (and especially in moving to SV) we realized this is incredibly common. Its also very common to co-found with a sibling, cousin or other family member. The reality is that running a company is incredibly hard, and you need to be able to trust your co-founding team members. Family members (by blood or marriage), if you are lucky, are often the people you trust the most.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have seen many couples break up after co-founding a failed startup. Granted, this is at the college/university level, and it sounds like you have a bit more experience under your belt.

But do make sure that you both accept the risk that the startup could result in your divorce _and_ in business failure.

</comment><comment><USER9> YC is started by a married couple.

</comment><comment><USER10> Presumably all married couples have a strong connection ... I'd also presume most investors would see it as a net negative, so your overall pitch will have to be that much stronger.

</comment><comment><USER11> No. I see it as an asset as trust levels are incredibly higher. It will also help in decoupling the highs and lows of business from the individuals.

Godspeed to you and your wife!

</comment><comment><USER12> Cisco and VMware were also started by married couples.

(Now I'm wondering how many YCers haven't heard of either company.)

</comment><comment><USER13> Please tell me this is satire.</comment>


"eBay-style online courts could resolve smaller claims" - <AUTHOR> http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31483099

<comment><USER2> Buy justice now, free P&P.

If watching Judge Judy is anything to go by (which I doubt!) demeanor is used in arbitration as much as incisive questioning.

You have a new email.

Judge: Do you think you're smarter than me?</comment>


Review of _Bullshit Jobs_ - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/25/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-by-david-graeber-review <comment><USER2> I heard a radio interview by the author a few days ago. An interesting bullshit job he described is the 'duct taper' in software engineering. Basically those who take existing software and tape it all together as something new. I see the same behaviour everyday in the hardware industry and passed off as innovation.

Edit: you can read more about the idea here.

[https://books.google.ie/books?id=Lsc8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT75&lpg=PT...](https://books.google.ie/books?id=Lsc8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT75&lpg=PT75&dq=bull+shit+jobs+"duct+tape"&source=bl&ots=xL4O7mlGMW&sig=5d3WPf8btLridL9RopkQiqGCmno&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjHiczZiaTbAhWksKQKHacYCz8Q6AEwAHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=bull%20shit%20jobs%20"duct%20tape"&f=false)

My recollection was off. It's more about duct taping being about paid work doing maintenance on making innovative code interoperable while many programmers spend their personal time actually building the really interesting stuff.

My gripes about my observations was related to colleagues (trained in heat transfer) responding to calls by clueless managers for _disruption_ by buying a bunch of consumer electronics taping it all together can pretending they redesigned the computer.

Incredibly frustrating when you're actually trying to do novel research.

<comment><USER3> Other 'bullshit jobs' including making trains and toasters and ladders by taking existing components like nuts and bolts and simply welding them together.

I've always wanted to like David Graeber. Superficially, he seems like a smart, rigorous, heterodox left-wing thinker. But his work is intellectually bankrupt more often than not. Brad DeLong has been doing the hard work of breaking down Graeber's facile arguments and incorrect information for years. Here's one blog post to look at if you're curious. [http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/11/monday-smackdown-in- th...](http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/11/monday-smackdown-in-the-absence- of-high-quality-delong-smackdowns-back-to-david-graeber.html)

<comment><USER4> Why are people such suckers?

Brad DeLong is a self-proclaimed troll and a proven serial liar. He for some unfathomable reason decided to go gunning for me despite my never having met him or interacted with him in my life; he started by spewing outright personal slander that had nothing to do with my work (or anything else I could figure out) until I pointed out false personal aspersions were actionable; so then he appears to have decided to go after the book instead. The first time I tried to correct one of the obviously false statements about my work that appeared on his blog, providing irrefutable evidence (he claimed Giovanni Arrighi had never said something I'd attributed to him, I produced a quote from Arrighi saying exactly what I'd claimed), he simply cut the part with the evidence out of my response (he carefully edits the comment section). After that I blocked him on twitter and stopped even looking at his blog. I thought eventually he'd get bored and go away, but bizarrely, he kept it up for literally years. He stalked me online, showing up to attack me whenever my name was mentioned prominently in a public debate, on twitter, he made up dummy eggshell accounts to try to trick me into engaging with him, he'd pretend I was arguing with him, knowing I couldn't see his tweets (people showed them to me later), he'd take tweets I'd made in arguments with others and putting them on his blog pretending they were addressed to him, and otherwise behaved in a totally and frankly rather unhinged fashion. Finally, again, knowing I'd blocked him and had refused to interact with him for years at that point, he created a twitter bot to attack me every day for a month, each tweet ending with "stay away!" \- i.e., pretending he wasn't the one stalking me but the other way around.

So the man is irrefutably a liar. You can believe his other claims about my scholarly work if you like.

In fact, most of the "factual errors" he claims to have found are either differences of interpretation, downright misrepresentations of my position, or points so trivial it's somewhat flattering that's the best he managed to find. Example: he once posted an entire blog post just to say my interpretation of the Sumerian principles called "me" was incorrect. When I showed this to one of my best friends, who is a Mesopotamianist, the friend started laughing out loud. Nobody, he said, really knows what the "me"s are. There are a half dozen interpretations. The one I adopted was the most widely accepted one but sure, he said, lots of people have other ones. I think the biggest actual mistake DeLong managed to detect in the 544-odd pages of Debt, despite years of obsessively flailing away, was (iirc) that I got the number of Presidential appointees on the Federal Open Market Committee board wrong. I thought it was one, actually it's three. Yup. Guilty as charged. I got the number wrong. The difference between 1 and 3 had absolutely no bearing on the point I was making in the sentence in question. But DeLong has triumphantly trumpeted this again and again as proof that I'm an ignoramus. In other words, he's still not managed to find anything really substantial wrong with the book.

Frankly, this is a transparent and rather pathetic game. Anyone who goes through a long book on diverse topics will be able to find some things they can hold out and say are "errors." Just to show how easy the game is to play, just in the course of his trolling me, DeLong managed to himself make more glaring errors than he managed to come up with in 544 pages of text. Some were genuinely embarrassing. Let me recall a few offhand:

1\. he claimed that Switzerland doesn't have an air force (it does)

2\. he claimed that Jeremy Bentham's body is preserved in London School of Economics (everyone who knows anything about Bentham knows his body is in University College London, LSE didn't even exist when he died - and this guy is an economic historian?)

3\. he was completely unaware that the bubonic plague struck Medieval Europe more than once - which, again, for a professional economic historian, is incredibly embarrassing. I mean this is very very basic Medieval History 101 stuff. And he was just totally clueless.

I hate to be seeming to blow my own horn, but when there's a crazy person out there using dishonest methods to try to destroy your intellectual reputation, and where there are honest people like you apparently taking the bait, some things have to be pointed out. The best measure of the accuracy and relevance of scholar's work is what other scholars in the field think of it. If you want to measure my standing as a scholar in anthropology, you might want to consider the fact that the most eminent scholar in the field, Marshall Sahlins, co-wrote a book with me. If you want to assess the merit of Debt, you might wish to consider the fact that there have now been two different scholarly conferences specifically dedicated to engaging with the book, attended by Classicists, Assyriologists, Medievalists, Economic Historians, Anthropologists, and other specialists in the fields addressed in the book. Do you think that would have happened if it was a "intellectually bankrupt" work full of obvious mistakes? For instance, Brad DeLong has been an economic historian for decades now. Has anyone even thought to hold conference to discuss the implications of any of DeLong's writings or ideas? Finally, if the argument is that I'm clueless when it comes to economics, I might ask why you think it is that on Tuesday I will be presenting a macroeconomic seminar at the Bank of England.

Sorry, but you've been suckered by a liar and a con man. I've honestly tried to just ignore the guy, hoping he'll eventually go away, but since he won't, I guess I have to explain what's really going on.

<comment><USER3> > Sorry, but you've been suckered by a liar and a con man. I've honestly tried > to just ignore the guy, hoping he'll eventually go away, but since he won't, > I guess I have to explain what's really going on.

After reading your response and digging into this a bit further, I retract my previous comment and no longer put any stock in Brad DeLong's intellectual honestly. I apologize for spreading it further.

<comment><USER4> Thanks much for saying. I mean it's understandable. It wouldn't normally occur to anyone that someone that reputable - professor at Berkeley, former Treasury official - would also be an internet troll. In fact he might be the only person I know of in a position that reputable who behaves the way he does. But he does.

<comment><USER5> "Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages..."

<comment><USER4> Yes, DeLong, we all know there was a garbled sentence in the first edition that was instantly removed the moment anyone noticed it. The only reason anyone has heard of it since is because you have reproduced it probably 457 times in a your endless attempts at defamation.

Look, I don't know you, DeLong, and I don't know or particularly care why you have decided to go on a five-year mission to use whatever dishonest means you can think of to destroy another scholar's intellectual reputation (a mission at which you seem to have failed pretty miserably, considering some of the honours I've noted above), but I'm starting to get tired of this. Your first effort at outright personal libel constituted an obvious potential legal case. The endless dishonesty about the book is less clear ground from a civil law perspective, but from the point of view of professional ethics, it's a very clear case of a violation, in fact, short of actual plagiarism, it's about the clearest case of a violation of professional ethics I can imagine. Universities have ethics codes, Berkeley does too, and using calculated dishonesty to try to defame another scholar, with clear and even admitted malicious intent - let alone, doing it perhaps a hundred times - isjust the kind of violation over which it is possible to make a formal complaint. Do you really want me to have you hauled up before your university's ethics board? Because I'm seriously considering it.

(Oh and there's no point in taking down the tweets and blogs containing the most obvious, demonstrable lies because I have screen-shots.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here are the first 3 paragraphs of the section on Duct-tapers from Chapter 2.

[https://monosnap.com/file/L41lTePrEn3wAJxD4sMZxeIYacxDqK](https://monosnap.com/file/L41lTePrEn3wAJxD4sMZxeIYacxDqK)

This was striking for me because I immediately thought that all the stuff I've authored for salt, ansible, grunt, etc. is duct tape. And I hated doing that work. I always did.

It's necessary and necessarily complex but a lot of the complexity is because fitting all this stuff together is going to be a mess no matter what. We can argue about better and worse approaches to managing the complexities (micro- services, whatever) but it's still complex and I resent that.

</comment><comment><USER7> Link to the original essay: [https://strikemag.org/bullshit- jobs/](https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Review of _Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber_; review by Eliane Glaser

> As well as documenting personal misery, this book is a portrait of a society > that has forgotten what it is for. Our economies have become "vast engines > for producing nonsense". Utopian ideals have been abandoned on all sides, > replaced by praise for "hardworking families". The rightwing injunction to > "get a job!" is mirrored by the leftwing demand for "more jobs!"

</comment><comment><USER8> Off topic

<comment><USER9> From the HN guidelines:

 _Please don 't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it._

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > people are not inherently lazy: we work not just to pay the bills but > because we want to contribute something meaningful to society.

That is a pretty extraordinary claim!</comment>


Bill Gates: I agree with Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking about artificial intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/03/bill-gates-on-reddit-i-agree-with-elon-musk-and-stephen-hawking-about-ai <comment><AUTHOR> And I agree with Bill Gates:

"I think it is worth discussing because I share the view of Musk and Hawking that when a few people control a platform with extreme intelligence, it creates dangers in terms of power and eventually control."</comment>


Show HN: Codeanywhere - <AUTHOR> https://codeanywhere.com <comment><USER2> "The only multi-platform cloud editor" except for all of the other ones.

[https://www.nitrous.io/](https://www.nitrous.io/) [http://codev.it/](http://codev.it/) [https://codio.com/](https://codio.com/) etc, etc

<comment><USER3> None of those are made for mobile/table. Not a single one.

<comment><USER4> Neither is this. Page says it works on all platforms but when I try the code editor on my Windows Phone 8, it's clear that it does not. Page scrolls to weird locations when I just type. I typed Hello and some second later text was scrolled out of visibility. Spent a few minutes just trying to type, but it really does not work. (This was typed on same phone without weird scrolling...)

<comment><USER5> Duh - when people say something is mobile/tablet compatible, obviously what they mean is compatible with the latest version of Android or iOS.

/s

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I realise that it's become common to trust cloud services with your IP, but as expensive and onerous (and often impossible) it would be to prove that someone ripped off your code, it seems foolish to develop anything proprietary or patentable on a platform like this one, regardless of what legalese they put in their TOS.

It would be far more sensible for Codeanywhere to offer / license a VM or Docker appliance that you could host on your own server, that you could monitor its network traffic, and so on. This way you could have some sense of security.

When a chunk of source code can ultimately be licensed for millions of dollars, you probably want to have a bit more protection for your IP. Not being so much paranoid as practical.

<comment><USER7> Your argument applies just as much to email, but it appears not to be a problem. Two reasons:

1\. The legal protections and auditing are actually enough. 2\. The companies hosting mail and code successfully have better security than most customers that would otherwise run those services in-house.

<comment><USER8> on your second point, I'd be careful before making that assumption. Without evidence there's no reason to believe that a supplier company will have better security than your own and it's entirely possible they don't.

Also should a supplier suffer a breach they have powerful incentives not to disclose that breach to you, and where intellectual property is involved (e.g. code) the theft may well not become immediately apparent.

<comment><USER9> The provider has a specific set expertise that's probably better aligned with hosting this service. Since it's a revenue center for them, versus a cost center, they're better equipped to make the case to hire specialists.

The your second point - legalese is very beneficial for that. In the US at least, as long as it's not a protected (by FISA, etc..) organization breaking into your provider's systems, contract law covering compromises is a fairly well developed area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Being cloud based is this "Code Anywhere", or "Code anywhere where you have Internet access"? The latter, in my case, would be "Code in less places than you could with your laptop and standard offline dev tools".

<comment><USER11> When was the last time you did any development without internet access though? For me at least, I've found it to be pretty much a necessity.

<comment><USER12> I travel a lot by train, which means a broken internet connection most of the time. Or when I stay in hotels or on a customer's site without wifi (3G doesn't always work well enough).

<comment><USER13> I gave a personal instance of the Cloud 9 ([https://c9.io/](https://c9.io/)) IDE a go a year or so back. Using git locally and enabling git on the server gave me collaborative and offline options.

I think some form of VCS access to these services determines their ultimate usability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very nitpicky, but part of the landing page copy says:

> _NOW AVAILABLE ON ALL PLATFORMS_

Now, I guess readers are willing to forgive Symbian and AmigaOS not being in the list the follows, but if you say "all platforms" you have to _at least_ include Windows Phone.

My issue isn't really with OS support however, and it's perfectly OK to skip not-very-popular platforms. But if you put at least one blatant lie on the front page, you don't give me confidence that it's the only one.

<comment><USER15> Not sure if I am missing something but this works in Chrome, which works on windows...

edit: Sorry, the word "phone" was a widow and I missed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> All these cloud IDEs seem to be popping up everywhere, but I just don't see the value in them. I use Vim as my editor so I can use everything over SSH anyways, so I just use Vagrant or SSH back home if I'm working on my Chromebook.

</comment><comment><USER17> The colors look really nice, but I suspect my vim(1) can do it cheaper. What's it with the obsession to use the slow and heavyweight Browser+JS when you can do it lightweight & efficiently?

</comment><comment><USER18> First, congrat at releasing your project/product.

But I want to be a critic, like always. There are at least a dozen of "code anywhere" solution out there and most don't solve the core problem which is that we can either write code or run code with very very limited privilege.

As both a Github and a Bitbucket user, I can code anywhere I want as long as there is an Internet access. I can edit my files right on the page, or just fire up a new gist on gist.github.com to write a short snippet. I use jsbeautifier.com to make my JS code "prettier" if my code is getting messy. If I have a modern version of Firefox I can even write my Javascript in a scratch pad.

The issue is again I don't have an environment to run code and use the tools I want to use. I don't mean that this is an easy problem to solve as everyone has their own special setup (e.g. different dot files, tab vs space, etc) and minus security handling and hardening. But that is the hard problem, and the real problem worth digging.

<comment><USER19> Thank you very much :)

I honestly appreciate the criticism, and I agree on the problem that exists and we are trying our best to solve it and we believe that we are on our way there, especially with the new DevBoxes. Feel free to try Codeanywhere out and send me/us more (constructive) criticism. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm a long time cloud9 user and we actually use ace editor in a couple of our own projects. I logged on to check out your diff feature as I thought it was quite neat, but all I got was a bunch of broken menus and misaligned panels.

When I say logged in, I mean that this was the first thing I saw after doing the one-click signup via my google account. I'd advise you to fix your product before advertising it, and let us know so I can have another look.

[http://i.imgur.com/ZX9w3rD.png](http://i.imgur.com/ZX9w3rD.png)

Google Chrome for Linux 36.0.1985.125

EDIT: Works fine after a couple of refreshes. I didn't know codemirror had that diff mode. Nice.

<comment><USER19> Have not seen that yet, as I just tried it and got this:

[http://i.imgur.com/uLvQqic.png](http://i.imgur.com/uLvQqic.png)

But will look into it. Appologise

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> You advertise bitbucket support, but as far as I can find, that's only as a generic git provider using a DevBox only via your web interface. You set the expectation that it would be possible to get the iOS app, set up an account, attach to a repo, write code, and commit.

This does not deliver.

If this is possible, it isn't clear at all and I couldn't find documentation on it. If this is some sort of premium feature, that's not clear either. Please get your marketing copy in line with the platform's actual capabilities.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not affiliated with this but the product seems to work as advertised. Lets me work on my sites during my lunch hour at work on any office browser.

<comment><USER19> I am the Cofounder, thanks for the post!

<comment><USER22> Are you planning on windows store support (universal)? Says you support all major platforms but one is apparently missing :)

Great contribution!

<comment><USER19> We do have a lot in the pipeline, and Windows will be coming along :)

Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This looks pretty damn good!

Couple of things:

* Have you tried making the tour/tutorial a small toast notification, rather than a modal? (I'm allergic to modals)

* Could I have a button to "Create from github project" which would check my project out into a new workspace/sandbox/devbox?

</comment><comment><USER24> I just tried this last week while evaluating ide's with ipad support, but the bluetooth keyboard support in the app is not very good (e.g. the arrow keys don't allow for moving the caret). Any chance you're fixing this soon?

<comment><USER19> This is a problem with a private API of Apple. But we are working on a workaround.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Excellent Product. Easy to sign-up and from London it feels and looks as the machine is next to my feet. One suggestion though is may be to include a live chat support to bring some human feel and love :) and differentiate from the competition.

Congrats.

</comment><comment><USER26> Digital Ocean has web-based terminal access to your droplet (in case you have one). Why not use that to code from anywhere?

</comment><comment><USER27> If two files are opened and named the same (ex: index.html), you should show the directory they are in as well in the tab.

</comment><comment><USER28> how is this different from cloud9?

</comment><comment><USER27> I'd love an OSX-based 'devbox' so I can write in Swift or Objective-C

<comment><USER19> Very cool idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I should be able to use the browse functionality if my filesystem is FTP.

</comment><comment><USER29> Why would I trust you with my codebase?

<comment><USER19> Why would you not? Is it any different than any other online tool that your code passes through?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Brilliant webapp

</comment><comment><USER31> seems cool, but what are devboxes?

<comment><USER19> Thanks, well DevBoxes are in essence your own virtual private servers that run in the background of Codeanywhere. They give users the ability to provision any Development Environment they prefer ( PHP, HTML5, Java, NodeJS, python, ruby, c/c++).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a quite great produce, the best for coding on the go.

<comment><USER19> Thank you!</comment></comment>


How to start a startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.squidoo.com/startup

<comment><USER2> In the linked article, the first two sentences of "Step 1" are: "Before you can solicit interest in your product, there are two things that you need to do. The first step is to obtain a provisional patent for your invention..." This step comes _before_ "design your product" and "build your product". After I saw that, I stopped reading.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, that article is kinda crap.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=175185>

</comment><comment><USER4> That is so wrong in so ,so many ways...This is one of the misguiding articles I have ever seen and I'm beeing easy on the article now...

sell , design and then make the product? come on...

<comment><USER5> This approach isn't as stupid as you might think. A lot, if not all, of the successful entrepreneurs I know would never make a product before they've sold it to somebody. This is a great approach because if you can actually sell the product before you've made it you know there is a market.

</comment></comment><comment> meat-eater I think the article isn't serious. It's obviously meant as a joke. So lighten up guys :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow, that's a lot of Amazon links.</comment>


Farewell to America - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/01/gary-younge-farewell-to-america?CMP=edit_2221 <comment><USER2> The specific criticisms that 'paulhauggis' makes may be true, but I disagree with his assertion that "These sorts of articles do nothing to help the situation and further contribute to the violence against the police and a racial divide in this country." Instead, this is the sort of article we need more of.

Despite the criticisms, this is still one of the least polemic, most accurate, heartfelt, unbiased, personal, and effective articles on race in America that I've ever read. I disagreed with some of the article's specific conclusions, but these are dwarfed by the impact of the article as a whole. Read this article.

It's a poignant, personal account of a English black reporter who has spent a decade of reporting on race in America pondering whether as a responsible parent he has a duty to return to England now that he has a school age son. He's not claiming it's the reason he's leaving, but explaining why one might feel that way:

      But while the events of the last few years did not prompt
      the decision to come back, they do make me relieved that
      the decision had already been made. It is why I have not
      once had second thoughts. If I had to pick a summer to
      leave, this would be the one. Another season of black
      parents grieving, police chiefs explaining and clueless
      anchors opining. Another season when America has to be
      reminded that black lives matter because black deaths at
      the hands of the state have been accepted as routine for so
      long. A summer ripe for rage.

This is someone who has thought long about the issues from an outside perspective, but has moved from analyzing race as a reporter to someone concerned about how the realities of race in America will affect his child's future.

      While I have been in America, I have not been shot at,
      arrested, imprisoned or otherwise seriously inconvenienced
      by the state. I do not live in the hollowed out, jobless
      zones of urban economic despair to which many African
      Americans have been abandoned. I have been shouted at in a
      park, taken different routes to school, and occasionally
      dealt with bigoted officials. (While driving through
      Mississippi to cover Katrina I approached a roadblock that
      all the other journalists had easily passed through, only
      to have a policeman pat the gun in his holster and turn me
      around). These experiences are aggravating. They are not
      life-threatening.

Like 'paulhauggis', you should feel free to disagree with it, and to debate the author's logic, but first you should read it.

      The altercations in the park, the rerouted walks to school,
      the aggravations of daily life are the lower end of a
      continuum – a dull drumbeat that occasionally crescendos
      into violent confrontation and even social conflagration.
      As spring turns to summer the volume keeps ratcheting up.

      "Terror," the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai writes in his
      book Fear of Small Numbers, "is first of all the terror of
      the next attack." The terrorism resides not just in the
      fact that it happens, but that one is braced for the
      possibility that it could happen to you at any moment.
      Seven children and teenagers are shot on an average day in
      the US. I have just finished writing a book in which I take
      a random day and interview the families and friends of
      those who perished. Ten young people died the day I chose.
      Eight were black. All of the black parents said they had
      assumed this could happen to their son.

      As one bereaved dad told me: "You wouldn't be doing your
      job as a father if you didn't.

Read it.

</comment><comment><USER3> These sorts of articles do nothing to help the situation and further contribute to the violence against the police and a racial divide in this country.

"When the authorities fail to heed community outrage, or substantively investigate, let alone discipline, the police, the situation can become explosive"

Sorry, but mob rule is not the answer. I also don't know how the police aren't disciplined. So many are being fired, even for just doing their job, that the crime rates are skyrocketing in major cities as we speak because the police are now afraid of losing their job and criminals are getting away with murder (literally).

"Trayvon Martin was walking through a gated community when George Zimmerman pegged him for a thug and shot him dead."

So why not mention the other side of the story? That Martin beat the hell out of George Zimmerman and almost killed him. Is this not relevant to the story?

"Clementa Pinckney, a South Carolina state senator, was in one of Charleston's most impressive churches when Dylann Roof murdered him and eight others."

This isn't the same as the other. Dylan Roof was a sick racist that murdered innocent people in a church.

"I have not only never met an African American who thought they could buy themselves the advantages of a white American"

African Americans have plenty of advantages in the US: free points on SAT/ACT, bank loans that cater to minorities, etc, quotas in many different industries (Police and Fireman to name a few).

"All you can do is limit the odds. And when one in three black boys born in 2001 is destined for the prison system, those odds are pretty bad. Having a black man in the White House has not changed that."

Let's get to the root of the problem: Why are black boys born in 2001 destined for prison? I believe it has to do with a culture of broken families where 70%+ of black families have only one parent, making it that much more difficult to survive.

[http://newsone.com/1195075/children-single-parents-u-s- ameri...](http://newsone.com/1195075/children-single-parents-u-s-american/)

"When George Zimmerman saw Trayvon Martin, he didn't see a 17-year-old boy walking home from the store. He saw someone "real suspicious", "up to no good", whom he assumed bore some responsibility for recent burglaries."

Just because he thought Martin was 'suspicious' or 'up to no good', doesn't mean it was because he was black.

"Even after Wilson shot Brown he continued to depict him as both physically superhuman and emotionally subhuman"

Brown was a criminal that before attacking Wilson, robbed a convenient store. "Hands up, don't shoot" never happened. Forensic evidence proved it. Why do we need to continue to defend criminals,criminal behavior, and re-write history?

"Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent."

The children involved in many of the mass shootings in the past few years weren't treated as innocent children..and most were white. As soon as a 'child' decides to attack, kill, and hurt someone, they are responsible for their actions.

"white adults felt entitled to shout at black children – be it in the street, or on school trips"

It's not racial. I think many (including me) are sick of parents not disciplining their kids. It takes a village, right?

"Eric Garner was just a man trying to sell cigarettes in the street before he was choked to death in Staten Island"

He was arrested 30 times before this point and was not complying with police. You left this part out. They used what normally is non-lethal force, but because of his size and health conditions, he died. I'm not sure what you would like the police to do.

If a person is resisting arrest (which is a crime btw), the police need to be able to use some sort of force to arrest them.

"Tamir Rice was just a boisterous kid acting out in a park before a policeman leaped out of his squad car and shot him within seconds"

My god this article is biased. The police had many other reports of kids with guns in the area. When they arrived, he refused to put the gun down and also ripped the orange tip off the end of the gun, making it look like it was real. A tragic situation, but not as much of an example of racism as this article would like you to believe.

"Nigger, I can find something to lock you up on," the officer told him.

You can't just say this as fact without actual proof of the encounter.</comment>


Cartoon Laws of Physics - <AUTHOR> http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~karan/courses/csc2529/cartoonlaw.htm <comment><USER2> > familiar principle of 32 feet per second per second takes over.

I took high school and college physics courses (in the US) and have spent 15+ years developing physics-related software and I don't recall ever hearing gravity expressed in ft/sec^2. I can't gauge whether this "familiar" principle is itself a joke or if there are places where gravity is taught as 32 ft/sec^2 rather than 9.8 m/sec^2...

<comment><USER3> Where did you get taught? I've heard it as 32 ft/sec^2 since I was a kid...

<comment><USER4> Strange. Since high school, I've always heard m/s^2. United States, mid Atlantic region.

<comment><USER5> US, high school in the south, 9.81 m/s^2 for life! I have never heard any physics in feet...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is also always this gem of a paper on applying cartoon physics to user interfaces:

[http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2009/cs4470_fall/readings...](http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2009/cs4470_fall/readings/animation.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Great article! Makes me wonder if there are any cases of user interfaces having animation smears [1] as motion blurs.

[1] [http://animationsmears.tumblr.com](http://animationsmears.tumblr.com)

<comment><USER8> Old Macs weren't powerful enough to draw fancy zoom effects. Instead, classic Mac OS, at least through System 7, would draw a series of rectangles[1] (third and fourth pictures) from the icon you double-clicked to the location of the window to show it opening.

[1]: [http://toastytech.com/guis/macos1.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/macos1.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The link states "Authorship Unknown," however the author is Mark O'Donnell, this was originally published in a 1980 issue of Esquire magazine.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yet another classic example of Internet humor at work. In this case, the classic formula of describing something decidedly non-intellectual in an intellectual manner. Never gets old.

<comment><USER10> Old-school internet humor. Writing-based (as opposed to visual), and with a lot of in-depth thought and time going into it. That you used to find on BBS and the like. Where can you find it today?

<comment><USER3> Through miscellanious old sites and The GNU Humor collection. It's hard to _find_ new material: it's out there, but the signal:noise on the internet sucks, so you have to be really lucky.

Oh, and BOFH is still going strong. So go read that if you haven't yet. The official archives are down, but there are mirrors, of you want to read '95-'99.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Even as a kid I always wondered why the heck Acme Inc. seemed to offer lines of credit to just about anyone, including homeless coyotes living in the desert.

Their sheer range of product offerings was also astounding, as was their apparent complete lack of after sales support and user training for said products.

They also seemed to have an incredible logistics team able to get huge and complex items out to the middle of nowhere in record time. Never once did the coyote have to wait a long time for delivery, or have to converse with shipping support reps to see why his package was never delivered.

<comment><USER12> So Amazon is just Acme with good customer support and less credit?

<comment><USER11> LOL - I was looking for a corollary between Acme Inc. and Amazon but couldn't find one. You nailed it! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Those who enjoyed this may also enjoy Chuck Jones' 9 (or 11) Rules for Writing Road Runner cartoons:

[http://mentalfloss.com/article/62035/chuck-jones-rules- writi...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/62035/chuck-jones-rules-writing-road- runner-cartoons)

Excerpt:

1\. The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going "meep, meep."

2\. No outside force can harm the Coyote -- only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products.

</comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of the Steve Jackson RPG _Toon_

[http://www.sjgames.com/toon/](http://www.sjgames.com/toon/)

<comment><USER15> Dynamix's computer game Sid and Al's Incredible Toons [1] [2] is a wonderful cartoon-physics based game, the sequel to The Incredible Machine [3] [4], a Rube-Goldbergesque game like Mouse Trap [3].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_%26_Al%27s_Incredible_Toon...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_%26_Al%27s_Incredible_Toons)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-7LgrEUOL4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-7LgrEUOL4)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Machine_(series...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Machine_\(series\))

[4] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl1LvFDgCio](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl1LvFDgCio)

[5] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Trap_(game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Trap_\(game\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> WARNING: This product warps space and time in its vicinity.

WARNING: This product attracts every other piece of matter in the universe, including the products of other manufacturers, with a force proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them.

CAUTION: The mass of this product contains the energy equivalent of 85 million tons of TNT per net ounce of weight.

HANDLE WITH EXTREME CARE: This product contains minute electrically charged particles moving at velocities in excess of five hundred million miles per hour.

CONSUMER NOTICE: Because of the "uncertainty principle," it is impossible for the consumer to find out at the same time both precisely where this product is and how fast it is moving.

ADVISORY: There is an extremely small but nonzero chance that, through a process known as "tunneling," this product may spontaneously disappear from its present location and reappear at any random place in the universe, including your neighbor's domicile. The manufacturer will not be responsible for any damages or inconveniences that may result.

READ THIS BEFORE OPENING PACKAGE: According to certain suggested versions of the Grand Unified Theory, the primary particles constituting this product may decay to nothingness within the next four hundred million years.

THIS IS A 100% MATTER PRODUCT: In the unlikely event that this merchandise should contact antimatter in any form, a catastrophic explosion will result.

PUBLIC NOTICE AS REQUIRED BY LAW: Any use of this product, in any manner whatsoever, will increase the amount of disorder in the universe. Although no liability is implied herein, the consumer is warned that this process will ultimately lead to the heat death of the universe.

NOTE: The most fundamental particles in this product are held together by a "gluing" force about which little is currently known and whose adhesive power can therefore not be permanently guaranteed.

ATTENTION: Despite any other listing of product contents found hereon, the consumer is advised that, in actuality, this product consists of 99.9999999999% empty space.

NEW GRAND UNIFIED THEORY DISCLAIMER: The manufacturer may technically be entitled to claim that this product is ten-dimensional. However, the consumer is reminded that this confers no legal rights above and beyond those applicable to three-dimensional objects, since the seven new dimensions are "rolled up" into such a small "area" that they cannot be detected.

PLEASE NOTE: Some quantum physics theories suggest that when the consumer is not directly observing this product, it may cease to exist or will exist only in a vague and undetermined state.

COMPONENT EQUIVALENCY NOTICE: The subatomic particles (electrons, protons, etc.) comprising this product are exactly the same in every measurable respect as those used in the products of other manufacturers, and no claim to the contrary may legitimately be expressed or implied.

HEALTH WARNING: Care should be taken when lifting this product, since its mass, and thus its weight, is dependent on its velocity relative to the user.

IMPORTANT NOTICE TO PURCHASERS: The entire physical universe, including this product, may one day collapse back into an infinitesimally small space. Should another universe subsequently re-emerge, the existence of this product in that universe cannot be guaranteed.

</comment><comment><USER16> I always attributed VI to be that the movement during the fight exceeded the speed of sight.

<comment><USER17> For some reason this reminded me of Discworld's Ambiguous Puzuma:

 _A big cat with a unique black and white check coat, the ambiguous puzuma is the Disc 's fastest animal. Due to the Disc's standing magical field, which slows down light to approximately the speed of sound, the puzuma can actually achieve near-light-speed. Therefore, seeing a puzuma in motion means it isn't there. Puzumas commonly die from complications caused by Sangrit Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle; they lose concentration because they cannot simultaneously know who they are and where they are, frequently causing them to crash into an obstacle. Many males also die from ankle failure caused by excessively running after females who aren't present._

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flora_and_fauna_of_the_Discwor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flora_and_fauna_of_the_Discworld#Ambiguous_Puzuma)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "As speed increases, objects can be in several places at once."

Neatly explains why ninjas in anime are able to create shadow copies of themselves by moving really fast.

All of these are the sort of thing traded frequently in email and USENET in the 90s.

</comment><comment><USER19> This article should have a warning sign. I almost fell out of my chair with laughter. Insta-add to my Instapaper.

</comment><comment><USER20> Loved it — just wished there were links to YouTube clips with examples from classic cartoons.

</comment><comment><USER21> > The threat of skunks or _matrimony_ often catalyzes this reaction.

Gave me a good laugh.

</comment><comment><USER22> Duh. So unfunny and uninsightful, at least for anybody who did watch the old cartoons.

I'm sorry I've attempted to read it. Now I need a dose of Loony Tunes to wash the feeling away.

<comment><USER23> i wish i could express just how much i disagree with your sentiment. i think it's a rather elegant attempt at conveying the humorous laws of reality in a classic cartoon existence. But hey, I guess not everyone can find it funny.

<comment><USER22> As I've first read Murphy's law and some other humorous "laws", there was an impression of the author making an insight and then formulating it in a minimalistic way typical for the real scientific laws, which is what makes the laws interesting and funny on two levels at once: there's an "a-ha" moment and the "similarity" to the "real" laws.

As I've seen enough cartoons, for me this list appears just to be a clumsy description of some gags. It fails on the appearance of insight and it fails on the appearance of the real-law minimalism. That's why it's not funny. YMMV, I see there are people who like it.</comment></comment></comment>


Even Color doesn't know what's happening at Color - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/17/color-internal-chaos/

<comment><USER2> Haven't there been a handful of startups that are aquihired after announcing they're closing up shop?

</comment><comment><USER3> This makes me think venturebeat are scummy. Why are they being so obnoxious about this? Its sad.

<comment><USER4> TechCrunch once said, "it's expensive to be right, it's cheap to be first."

Being first gets you a ton of page views for little work, you don't have to be right. Even being wrong is beneficial these days, since they get to make a big story about the correction too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would say that the point is that there is a seed of tech which apple could acquire and put their army of eng on to make something along the same line of what color originally sought to do; Apple-instagram+facetime...

I would think that this is an exceptional acquisition that apple could make: no more color; a battle on instagram, facetime emulation and build upon the social image cloud idea that color started with...

and they wont be bogged down with colors staff - they will own all that color was, not what egos color is.</comment>


Where Do Nerds Hang Out? Find Out Here - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/where-do-nerds-hang-out-find-out-here-2009-11

<comment><AUTHOR> Pulling data from Graffitigeo, FourSquare, and Brightkite. You can now determine which places are hot where and when. For example, using the drop downs on the right you can find "The most popular places in New York, over all time, at 9 PM, on friday."</comment>


For Europe's start-ups, Silicon Valley Still Calls - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/Story/story/print?guid=7F641E66-8B93-11E0-8EEF-002128049AD6

<comment><USER2> Having lived in Helsinki and gotten some taste of the start-up culture there, I still believe that Silicon Valley is far far ahead of Europe in terms of the start-up scene. What I noticed was that culture in the Silicon Valley is very organic and feeds itself. However in Europe, it is mostly driven by the government grants/University initiatives/Business schools.

This is the prime reason why any serious entrepreneur should have at least some context of the silicon valley to get a holistic view of their business.</comment>


Game day exercises at Stripe - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/blog/game-day-exercises-at-stripe <comment><USER2> It is good that they are testing, but the mindset that this is a special occasion seems very weird to me.

Rule #1 of programming is that if you didn't test it, it doesn't work. (It may still not work for real after you test it, but at least it's got something.)

You can't claim to anyone, or even yourself, that you have some kind of fault- tolerant system if you don't do this kind of test after every change.

<comment><USER3> We only started doing this about 3 years ago after I heard John Allspaw speak at Velocity. It has cut down dramatically the "Oh, that system that we thought was redundant was only redundant in the sense of an appendix, not in the sense of kidneys..." It was initially a hard sell to my ops team to implement it. (I promised them air cover for any losses we incurred as a result of game-day testing, of course.)

I agree with you that it should be common, but I'd suspect an honest survey of the field would show that it's far from standard practice. I'd guess fewer than 25% of companies do this in any meaningful way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me to Netflix chaos monkey [1].

They shut down servers and components of the system to make sure they are resilent to failures.

> The Simian Army is a suite of tools for keeping your cloud operating in top > form. Chaos Monkey, the first member, is a resiliency tool that helps ensure > that your applications can tolerate random instance failures

More interestingly is that it is opensource. [2]

[1] [http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released- in...](http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-into- wild.html?m=1)

[2] [https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy](https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy)

</comment><comment><USER5> I've heard this (or similar tests) also referred to as "fire drills".

The first one I like to do is to restore the entire infrastructure from the off-site backup. When I know this is good I can sleep soundly.

</comment><comment><USER6> So Stripe is the company that configured their master to no persistence, killed it, and blamed Redis for losing their data? Annoying they reported the "issue" to Aphyr, decided to withhold their name, and proceeded to spread a ton of FUD against Redis when the core issue was a mis-configuration on their part. Hand-holding can only go so far.

<comment><AUTHOR> The main point of the post is that if there's a configuration you expect to work, you need to test it, independent of whether or not it's supported by the author. I can think of a dozen other distributed system failures I've seen that happened despite using stock configuration — this particular failure was simply a recent example, and helps illustrate why game days are so valuable.

On the plus side, Antirez has said that this configuration will soon be supported: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8522630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8522630) (thanks Antirez!), so future users will be able to run in this configuration safely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like the part about three replicas of redis destroying all the data when the primary went down. If anyone out there is using Redis as more than a cache then you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER8> This is not what happened, a replica with persistence turned off restarted with an empty data set, and the slaves replicated that empty data set. Basically Redis replication currently must be used with some form of on-disk persistence turned on. However after the introduction of diskless replication ([http://antirez.com/news/81](http://antirez.com/news/81)) we now have a good reason to support replication with persistence turned down in a proper way, so there is already a feature work in progress in order to support the Stripe- alike use case: [https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/2087](https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/2087)

<comment><USER9> If the promotion logic is wrong how would persistence have helped? Say the primary disk fails. If it's still considered primary when it's brought back up with a fresh disk, wouldn't you get the same empty-replication problem? (I know nothing about redis, just wondering.)

<comment><USER10> In the case described, there is no promotion logic.

The replicas will try to reconnect to their original master forever unless something else (like Sentinel) redirects them in an actual failover/promotion setup.

So, the master had data, it died, it restart with no data, then the replicas immediately reconnect. If the master had persistence enabled, it would have reloaded the old dataset on startup and the replicas would have re-downloaded everything—since they are _replicas_ of the master, they will always prefer the master data over their own, even if the master is empty.

If you were in a strange case where the disk failed and you replaced it with an empty disk (is that what you mean by "fresh disk?") then it's the same as starting an empty dataset. Not entirely relevant since the server would be intentionally started empty after a maintenance action instead of just restarting the already-populated process that restarts as empty because there's no saved dataset to load on startup.

The "all replicas resync an empty dataset" is a logical consequence of the configuration they enabled, but one without obvious repercussions without either directly experiencing it or a longer multi-chain thought experiment. (but, fixes for such things are already on the way—soon!)

<comment><USER8> Just to add some more info:

Funny enough what triggers this problem when you have master persistence turned down is, the _lack_ of failover, if the reboot happens fast enough, in case you are using Sentinel, for it to failover to a replica. So no failure was sensed at all, just the master magically wiped its data set.

So from the point of view of distributed systems, if you want to analyze the sum of Redis replicated nodes + Sentinel, the problem is that the system is not designed to cope with nodes losing state on restarts.

However it is possible to improve it, and I'm doing it, but before diskless replication it was IMHO pretty useless to have support for persistence-less operations in conjunction with replication, since the slaves to synchronize required _anyway_ the master to save an RDB file on disk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> PagerDuty implemented a similar type of test called "Failure Fridays":

[https://blog.pagerduty.com/2013/11/failure-friday-at- pagerdu...](https://blog.pagerduty.com/2013/11/failure-friday-at-pagerduty/)

The learnings from forcing actual failure in production parts of your stack are incredible.

</comment><comment><USER12> How are they getting such low write times with Postgres relative to Redis with comparable datasets and throughput? It's been a while since I used Postgres, are they implying that they're using a particular add-on or that they've optimised their queries for it?

<comment><USER13> No, their tests don't imply that they are getting better write times with redis across the board, they are measuring the 99%-tile latency.

What they have found, in a worst case scenario Redis is worse than Postgres.

So for example, their Redis response times might look like ,{1ms, 1ms, 1ms, 9ms}, while their Postgres response times might look like {3ms, 4ms, 3ms, 4ms}. Looking at it this way you can expect redis to perform better, however that outlier is worrying. For stripe they value having consistent and predictable performance over varying performance.

<comment><USER12> That's really interesting, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> And still, every other day you hear people using cache as primary data store.

<comment><USER10> That's kinda an obtuse version of a middlebrow dismissal. You're positioning yourself as "of course— _I_ knew better all along! Bow before my foresight!"

In other anecdotal evidence, I've been using Redis as a persistent store since 2011 and haven't lost any data.

There's always the giant caveat: just because software says it does X doesn't mean it does X until you have seen it actually happen. In this case, restarting a zero-persistence master was bad because it goes run->die->restart[empty]. Then, the replicas immediately reconnect, resync[empty], and now they are completely up to date with the master (which is the only Redis contract asked for here: always be an exact copy of your master; since persistence was not requested, the replicas re-sync an empty dataset).

In better news: there are already fixes for _each_ of these issues showing up in Redis very quite Real Soon Now.

<comment><USER14> That wasn't my intention at all.

Anyway. Redis is considerably mature but still have edge cases that will literally void all you data. And that's definitely not okay when it's being used as your source of truth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is such a good idea. Thanks for the write-up / sharing.

</comment><comment><USER16> what software are you using to plot those graphs?

<comment><USER17> Looks like graphite:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=graphite+graphs&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=graphite+graphs&tbm=isch)

<comment><USER18> To be explicitly pedantic -- graphite-web plots the graph, whereas graphite manages time series data processing and storage.

<comment><USER19> To increase the pedantic-levels: these are not plotted by graphite-web. In this case graphite-web only spits out source data in csv or json, actual plotting is done by Grafana (see stereo typical Grafana legends on the screenshots).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Beautiful math in all browsers - <AUTHOR> http://www.mathjax.org

<comment><USER2> If your startup involves displaying mathematics on webpages, use this.</comment>


Spruce beer continues to have a following - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181219-canadas-christmas-tree-in-a-bottle <comment><USER2> This article is trying really hard to make spruce beer a health trend, like maple was (is?).

At the moment, it's just a different kind of soft drink. It tastes a bit like a Christmas tree stand smells. Sort of minty, earthy, and a bit medicinal. It's no weirder than root beer, or Asian soft drinks that have a grassy flavor profile.

For me it's mostly a Christmas season thing, like eggnog. It often appears in Quebec supermarkets around this time, although, alas, not so much out west. You can sometimes get it in restaurants that specialize in Quebec-style fast food.

Though, I think if some enterprising young people put their minds to it, they could make it a premium experience and sell it in the kombucha aisle. The First Nations/miraculous elixir angle is clever, albeit exploitative.

</comment><comment><USER3> > _"It's usually a problem to ship it by plane because of the pressure, but I > made some phone calls and there was a pilot who agreed to keep it in the > cockpit with him."_

Wouldn't an exploding bottle of spruce beer be _more_ dangerous in the cockpit than elsewhere in the aircraft?

I can't imagine it would pack enough punch to cause fire or bring down an aircraft, but in the cockpit it could incapacitate a pilot or damage controls and instruments!

<comment><USER4> Yes, but this would be the only place that a pilot could store such a thing. Cargo is not pressurized, which is why the spruce beer can't be flown normally.

And I doubt he had it in his lap the entire flight. It was likely stored in his personal bag.

<comment><USER5> What!? If the aircraft is pressurized, then the cargo area is pressurized too. There aren't any aircraft that have separately pressurized compartments. That would be a very bad design.

Also, I would suspect that the bottles were bagged and in a box and not necessarily right next to the pilot.

<comment><USER6> To expand on this, the cylinder of the airplane's fuselage is the pressure vessel (like a submarine). It would take additional structural material to have the pressure vessel be a truncated cylinder (i.e. a half-circle shape), as you're introducing corners.

However, just because the cargo hold is pressurized doesn't mean it's warm in there -- it can be quite cold, and pets stored below occasionally die.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Birch beer is my favorite. Very nice wintergreen flavor. Boylan's has a good version that's pretty widely available in the US.

<comment><USER8> You must be talking about white birch? Pennsylvania Dutch birch beer is very similar to root beer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Redwood tip beer available in the bay area: [https://moonlightbrewing.com/beers/working-for- tips/](https://moonlightbrewing.com/beers/working-for-tips/)

I have still not tried it, but want to.

</comment><comment><USER10> Very interesting, it's cool how far back it dates in Canada, I'd not heard that before.

Does anyone know about the history of pine ale in Scotland out of interest, was reading this [https://www.williamsbrosbrew.com/beer/alba](https://www.williamsbrosbrew.com/beer/alba) which says 'A traditional Highland recipe, popular in Northern Scotland until the end of the 19th Century. '

</comment><comment><USER11> If you are thinking of brewing some, or just want to read more about North America's version of Spruce Beer, this fine article provides more detailed information: [http://zythophile.co.uk/2016/04/20/a-short-history-of- spruce...](http://zythophile.co.uk/2016/04/20/a-short-history-of-spruce-beer- part-two-the-north-american-connection/)

</comment><comment><USER4> The bit about the guy in Newfoundland warmed my heart.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've had spruce beer on a few occasions and it's exactly what it sounds like.

Bubbly liquid spruce. If you peel a few needles off of a Christmas tree and chew on them, you'd get the same flavour.

</comment><comment><USER13> Question: Doesn't the fermentation process destroy some/much of the vitamin C content of the spruce?

</comment><comment><USER14> It's really awesome how Roys shipped the dying man his last drink. Touching.

</comment><comment><USER15> >> and the water from Montreal, which Roy claims to have just the right purity level to produce his spruce beer's unique taste.

Must be the result of this: [https://www.cnn.com/2015/11/12/americas/canada- montreal-wast...](https://www.cnn.com/2015/11/12/americas/canada-montreal- wastewater-dump/index.html)

<comment><USER16> My neighbour growing up had a great patch of wild rhubarb in the back yard. Giant stalks with giant leaves. Turns out his septic tank was leaking and it was directly under the rhubarb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> That first sentence brings back not-so-fond memories of Canada's cuisine.

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

<comment><USER18> It is very likely that if you had poutine and didn't enjoy it, you ate what we call tourist poutine.

It bring me shame to say but a lot of tourist spots will sell the worst possible poutine. If what you had was some dry french fries with some low quality gravy on top, it isn't poutine. McDonald's poutine is also a joke.

Poutine is an incredible diverse dish. My favorite kind has chili, caramelized onions and pulled pork over it. Freshly made fries in quality oil and the best possible quality local cheese curds are a requirement.

To get a good one, you need to either go to a restaurant that specialize in poutine or to a pataterie.

Here, take a look:

[http://labanquise.com/en/gallery.php](http://labanquise.com/en/gallery.php)

[https://www.instagram.com/poutineville/](https://www.instagram.com/poutineville/)

[https://www.mtlblog.com/best-of-mtl/best-montreal-poutine- re...](https://www.mtlblog.com/best-of-mtl/best-montreal-poutine-restaurants)

All of this being said, poutine is greasy fast comfort food. It is not for everyone, especially if you usually eat healthy.

It is best eaten at 3 AM after the bars close for the night (a lot of poutine stops are open 24h/7 or close very late in the night).

<comment><USER19> I had the plate with the poutine thrown on my table in Montreal. I am not sure the reason for such bad service. The waiter told the tip is 10$ before taking my order. Is tipping mandatory or something in Montreal ?

<comment><USER18> Tip is expected to be 15% for regular service and 20% for good service. Restaurant staff are paid under the minimum salary and the government expect them to make up the missing half with tips. Mimimum wages are $12 an hour but only $9.80 an hour for employees receiving tips.

Bad service isn't to be expected and should be reported to the managers when it happen.

[https://www.retailcouncil.org/resources/quick- facts/minimum-...](https://www.retailcouncil.org/resources/quick- facts/minimum-wage-by-province/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>