Rare 'goat-sheep' born on Irish farm - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26870598 <comment><USER3> Such a creature is called a "musimones", as I recently learned from reading "Natural Magicks" by Porta, an endearingly incorrect popular science book from 1584. I quote his discussion of these creatures below. The rest of the book is quite amusing.

[http://www.mindserpent.com/American_History/books/Porta/jpor...](http://www.mindserpent.com/American_History/books/Porta/jportac2.html)

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>

There is a beast called "Musimones", gendered of a Goat and a Ram. Pliny says, that in Spain, but especially in Corsica, there are beasts called Musimones not much unlike to Sheep, which have Goats hair, but in other parts, Sheep; the young ones which are gendered of them, coupling with Sheep, are called by the Ancients, Umbri. Strabo calls them Musimones. But Albertus calls them Musini or Musimones, which are gendered of a Goat and a Ram. I have heard that in Rhetia, in Helvetian confines, there are generated certain beasts, which are Goats in the hinder parts, but in the former parts, Sheep or Rams; but they cannot live long, but commonly they die, as soon as they are born. And that there the Rams being grown in years, are very strong and lustful, and so often times meet with Goats, do run over them, and that the young ones which wild Rams beget of tame Sheep, are color like the sire, and so is their breed after them; and the wool of the first breed is shaggy, but in their after- breed soft and tender.

<comment><USER4> Just a slight correction: the musimones is the inverse sexual partnering - <USER2> male sheep and a female goat (as specified in the text you quote). The offspring of the hybrids referred to here as 'umbri' were also written about by Wallace in his book, on the Theory of Natural Selection (expanding on ideas he had at the same time Darwin was coming up with his theory of evolution):

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

 _" It has been long known to shepherds, though questioned by naturalists, that the progeny of the cross between the sheep and goat is fertile. Breeds of this mixed race are numerous in the north of Europe." Nothing appears to be known of such hybrids either in Scandinavia or in Italy; but Professor Giglioli of Florence has kindly given me some useful references to works in which they are described. The following extract from his letter is very interesting: "I need not tell you that there being such hybrids is now generally accepted as a fact. Buffon (Supplements, tom. iii. p. 7, 1756) obtained one such hybrid in 1751 and eight in 1752. Sanson (La Culture, vol. vi. p. 372, 1865) mentions a case observed in the Vosges, France. Geoff. St. Hilaire (Hist. Nat. Gén. des reg. org., vol. iii. p. 163) was the first to mention, I believe, that in different parts of South America the ram is more usually crossed with the she-goat than the sheep with the he-goat. The well- known 'pellones' of Chile are produced by the second and third generation of such hybrids (Gay, 'Hist, de Chile,' vol. i. p. 466, Agriculture, 1862). Hybrids bred from goat and sheep are called 'chabin' in French, and 'cabruno' in Spanish. In Chile such hybrids are called 'carneros lanudos'; their breeding inter se appears to be not always successful, and often the original cross has to be recommenced to obtain the proportion of three-eighths of he- goat and five-eighths of sheep, or of three-eighths of ram and five-eighths of she-goat; such being the reputed best hybrids._

[http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Darwinism_by_Alfred_Walla...](http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Darwinism_by_Alfred_Wallace_1889.djvu/185)

</comment><comment><USER5> Better name it Swapfile, because clearly this system doesn't have enough ram.

<comment><USER6> This comment is perfect, in that it simultaneously gets my goat and pulls the wool over my eyes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How closely related are the two species. Hybrids between species of horses and cats are common. Same for canines. But it didn't occur to me that wheels and goats are that closely related

<comment><USER8> Goat and sheep lineages diverged approximately five to eight million years ago[1]. For reference, human and gorilla lines diverged roughly six to eight million years ago[2].

Also, different breeds of dogs are considered the same species (and likewise with cats).

[1] [http://hal.archives- ouvertes.fr/docs/00/89/44/91/PDF/hal-008...](http://hal.archives- ouvertes.fr/docs/00/89/44/91/PDF/hal-00894491.pdf)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolutionary_genetics#Div...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolutionary_genetics#Divergence_times_and_ancestral_effective_population_size)

<comment><USER9> Humans and gorillas? What about our ancestors and those of pigs? I found this hypothesis fascinating:

"A chimp-pig hybrid origin for humans?"

[http://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-pig-hybrid- humans.html](http://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-pig-hybrid-humans.html)

from the article:

" I asked McCarthy if he could give a date estimate for the hybridization event, he said that there are a couple broad possibilities: (1) It might be that hybridization between pigs and apes produced the earliest hominids millions of years ago and that subsequent mating within this hybrid swarm eventually led to the various hominid types and to modern humans; (2) separate crosses between pigs and apes could have produced separate hominids (and there's even a creepy possibility that hybridization might even still be occurring in regions where Sus and Pan still seem to come into contact, like Southern Sudan)."

<comment><USER10> That's one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read. We've _done_ genetic studies on humans and apes, and we share some huge fraction of our genome with them (99%+, right?).

It's quite telling that in this era of abundant genetic data, this guy bases all of his arguments on anatomical similarities and says nothing about genetics. It's all but impossible that a link like what he's suggesting would have been overlooked if pigs had made any significant contribution to the human genome. (Just for example, we've got all sorts of estimates of species divergence dates among primates based on genetic data that should have given nonsensical results if there had been massive influxes of pig DNA in the middle of that history.)

<comment><USER8> The champion of the theory attributes the lack of genomic similarity to repeated back-crossing to one of the parent populations. To put it in other words, the droplet of initial hybridization got diluted in the larger gene pool, but the novel genes (and thus traits) remained and underwent selection.

That being said, diluted gene contribution is not the same thing as no gene contribution. To even begin accepting such a theory I would require direct genetic evidence showing considerable horizontal gene transfer between porcine and hominid lines.

<comment><USER10> I saw that claim in the article, yes. I'll admit that I don't know enough about genetics to make strong claims here, but it doesn't sound remotely plausible to me. He wants to simultaneously claim that 1) hominids got so much porcine DNA that they have lots of substantial, recognizable anatomical features as a result, and 2) hominids have so little porcine DNA that it's all but invisible in our genetic code.

I'm not going to say that's impossible, but it sounds like one heck of a stretch. Even just sitting here thinking about it, _most_ genetic inheritance happens one full chromosome at a time. We clearly don't have any full pig chromosomes, so to make this theory work you'd have to have a whole lot of lucky recombination events (chromosomal crossover, etc.) that preserved _only_ the precise genes involved in all these "distinctive pig traits" and got rid of the rest. So what's the selective effect that selects extraordinarily strongly _for_ this random selection of pig-like anatomical traits but _against_ all of the other pig genes that would have usually been linked to them?

In short, this is a very extraordinary claim, and it requires equally extraordinary evidence, especially given how remarkably consistent the known genetic evidence has proven to be.

<comment><USER11> I don't see why it's that implausible. You are descended from almost every single human being alive 1,000 years ago. Can you find any significant amount of DNA contributed from only a single one of your ancestors?

What he is suggesting is that a single hybrid made it's way back into the hominid population. It had children with other hominids, and those children would have had half as much pig DNA. They had children with even less, and so on. After awhile there would be almost nothing left of the pig ancestor. The only genes that would survive such dilution would be ones that were significantly selected for.

<comment><USER12> "You are descended from almost every single human being alive 1,000 years ago."

If a generation is about 30 years then you will have close to 33 ancestors lines in your family tree over those 1000 years. That makes 2^33 ancestors or 10 billion, that's impressive (well there is probably a large overlap)

<comment><USER13> Yes, but remember the "bottleneck" from 70,000 years ago, when the human race was nearly wiped out. At that time, because of a nuclear winter brought on by a volcanic supereruption, there may have been fewer than 10,000 humans in the entire world.

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

So, based on that, we're descended from fewer people in the past than most people realize. Another way to say it is that most of our ancestors were cousins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > the farmer said he was not planning to send the geep for slaughter

I'm ignorant about most things farm-related, but maybe someone knows what rules apply to meat coming from unusual mixes? I assume it's harmless to eat it, but would it be legal to sell?

<comment><USER15> My first thought was, "I hope it isn't sterile." If goat/sheep hybrids are this rare then a fertile "bridge" (even in one direction) would be of some scientific (and agricultural) interest.

Food is a distant second...

<comment><USER16> It's almost certainly sterile. Look at what happens to mules, and horses and donkeys appear to have diverged closer in time than goats and sheep.

<comment><USER17> While mules are overwhelmingly sterile, I thought it was neat to learn that there are instances of fertile female mules, though no male ones are on record as having been fertile.

<comment><USER15> With fertile female individuals I'm amazed (would be amazed if?) people haven't made an effort to breed and maintain animals right along the spectrum (or at least one half of it.)

<comment><USER17> There are only 60 known instances of fertile female mules in the last 500 years, according to Wikipedia, and they don't breed true - their offspring appear phenotypically to be pure donkeys or pure horses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder what it tastes like. I love the taste of lamb but cannot stand the taste (and smell!) of goat meat even though it's a delicacy where I'm from.

</comment><comment><USER19> Bizarrely enough, this article caused me to lose an argument with my sister- in-law... Months ago she insisted such a hybrid would be called a 'geep.' I agreed with the general idea, but felt it would be better if it were spelled 'gheep'...

For the record, I still think my spelling is better...

</comment><comment><USER20> While I find this fascinating, it does seem a bit curious to post this in a hacker forum. I was half way expecting to read that the farmer had been "bio- hacking" trying to come up with a healthy hybrid.

<comment><USER21> "bio-hacking": is this what we call genetic engineering now?

<comment><USER20> Hacking != Engineering

<comment><USER6> Unless you go by recent popular usage, in which case every possible interaction with anything that is not specifically laid out in that thing's accompanying instruction manual is now considered "hacking." Case in point: Life has no instructions, so people happily call almost anything "life hacking."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Paddy Murphy"

theres no way this is real, right?

<comment><USER23> There's a Patrick Murphy on _this very thread_ [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7533877](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7533877) , you insensitive clod. ;P

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I hope people actually listen to the interview, some of the quoting can be taken out of context. I'm from an Irish framing background, and wasa little scared of the way this might be taken. I think it is worthy of hn, looking at things from a difference prospective but i quietly hope it doesn't rank high.

</comment><comment><USER25> All I could think was what does it taste like..

Seriously interesting though how closely related are the two species?

</comment><comment><USER26> Proud parents. [http://thebentangle.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/goat-and- she...](http://thebentangle.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/goat-and-sheep- friends.png)

</comment><comment><USER27> My understanding is that human-neanderthal interbreeding rarely resulted in viable offspring (though some did, and is where blonde/ginger hair and blue eyes come from in modern humans).

Is that similar here? Are there traits in modern goats or sheep that came from the other?

<comment><USER28> ...where do you have that "understanding" from?! Are there any actual information about the 'Homo sapiens sapiens' <-> 'Homo sapiens neanderthalensis' contact and relationship or are you just spreading someone's wild guesses?

<comment><USER29> Most Europeans have Neanderthal genes.

[http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2014/04/neandertals-gave- europe...](http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2014/04/neandertals-gave-europeans- lipid.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> @lacero - you are hell-banned

<comment><USER31> Lacero is not "hell-banned" or any other kind of banned. Lacero's comment came from an IP that had been caught by a spam filter. I just unbanned the IP and unkilled the relevant comments.

Please don't claim things on or about Hacker News that you can't possibly know are true. Concerns about dead comments and anything else about HN can be sent to firstname.lastname@example.com.

Edit: I deleted things that were too harsh.

<comment><USER32> I guess we've just found out how we're going to be treated by the new moderators.

eps was obviously trying to be helpful to lacero. If lacero was hell-banned, he wouldn't know it to email you, would he? And for his trouble he gets this mean reply from you.

<comment><USER31> I try hard not to be mean. If you'd care to suggest how to improve my wording, I'd be happy to. It's possible that my frustration after a year and a half of reading such comments as eps's with no ability to reply to them leaked through.

A better way for eps to help lacero, if that's all he or she wanted to do, would have been to email and ask us to check why lacero's comment was dead. We would have replied with a thank-you note saying what the reason was and that we had restored all the comments in question. But it doesn't feel to me like helping others is the only agenda going on with comments like eps's, which as you may know are something of a cottage industry on HN.

How you're "going to be treated by the new moderators" is with as much fairness and clarity as we can possibly muster, and willingness to correct our mistakes.

<comment><USER33> > A better way for eps to help lacero, if that's all he or she wanted to do, > would have been to email...

This is now understood, but you say it in a severe way - as though you think it should have been obvious for eps to know this. You seem to be making an assumption that, by not doing what you prefer, eps was deliberately acting with negative intent.

From an outside point of view, it is very hard to understand how eps should have known what your preference was (even after rechecking the Guidelines and FAQ). As such, it is hard to understand that eps's intent was anything but positive.

<comment><USER34> Is it in anyway possible to have automatic emails sent to people who have been hellbanned?

<comment><USER31> Many HN accounts don't have email addresses.

We would like to implement a better feedback mechanism for HN moderation, but that's a long-term prospect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Goat and a sheep? that's disgusting... just totally inhumane for farmers to allow something so horrible to happen... I'm really worried about the future of the human society, what next? a dog and a cat? a human being and a chimpanzee? bunch of perverted maniacs deface what it means to be human, to be pure beings under name of Jesus Christ, we should all repent for our sins to the lord and the savior who created us 6000 years ago.

<comment><USER24> Love it! I started to get pissed off at the beginning then as I read I started to laugh out loud! As a farmer Ireland, I was really surprised to see this on here. It was like taking a coffee break from work!

<comment><USER36> Yeah! HN is too sensible and having just migrated from /. I want some ignorance, indignation and quotes from Our Lord in the comments to warm up my day.

Not even kidding! :D</comment></comment></comment>


When Unpaid Student Loan Bills Mean You Can No Longer Work - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/business/student-loans-licenses.html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=Trending&version=Full&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article <comment><USER2> The education industry is kind of a racket. The state pays to send children to 13 years of schooling, but at the end they haven't learned much of anything. Someone here at HN had this comment about their experience:

"Really just screw public school in general. The whole place was 95% waste of time followed by a 'congratulatory' piece of paper." -[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14047919](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14047919)

If a politician was courageous, and didn't care about getting re-elected, they'd point out that the system could be fixed by getting rid of Kindergarten, replacing 1st and 2nd grade with structured activities instead of 'classroom time' (prison for children), replacing high school with something more like community college, and allowing the remaining years to be much more flexible - conducted for the learner's benefit, rather than the system's...

But school has been transformed from an important social institution into a jobs project. Children & teachers are both trapped.

<comment><USER3> Unpopular opinions: let's not lose the forest for the trees here, macrologically the US is turning out productive and world-competitive minds and workers. The system can have flaws and gaps without it being a total racket in need of ground-up rehauling. We don't live in a concrete world so if you end up holding opinions at the extremes, you're probably missing nuance.

<comment><USER4> There is some nuance missing in your claims too. Those productive world- competitive people more than likely did not go through the public school system in the US. They tend to have had a great deal of socio-economic advantage. The US is the richest global power, so it makes perfect sense that there are a lot of people who have such advantages in the US.

<comment><USER5> > Those productive world-competitive people more than likely did not go > through the public school system in the US.

That is highly unlikely. Even at elite Ivy universities, a majority of students attended public high schools.

Public education is a lot better than people give it credit for. There's wide variation in quality but there are certainly plenty of excellent public schools available.

<comment><USER6> Public education is good in the areas where the upper middle class live.

Old Greenwich, Cos Cob, and Riverside have great public schools because that's where all the IT professionals, quants, and middle managers move to raise their families. Those districts have access to many adults with an interest and ability to participate in the school community, and so the district ends up with a lot of extra resources.

But the hedge fund upper management send their kids to Brunswick School, Sacred Heart, and the like, and the district on the super rich and the poorer, primarily-Hispanic sides of town, has a poorer reputation.

<comment><USER7> The correlation is there, but I'm not convinced about causality. I know people pay good money to buy properties near a good public school... so, I suspect it's not that "public schools are great where upper middle class live", but that upper middle class moved where great public schools are.

<comment><USER8> It's a loop. In many areas, schools are funded by property taxes, so higher property value leads to more funding for the school, which leads to perception of better school, which drives more people to want to live there, which produces higher property values, which...

<comment><USER9> That doesn't fully explain it though. Many of the worst schools also have some of the most funding per student.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This just seems completely irrational. Do lenders imagine they're _more_ likely to recover their money this way? This article needs more information to explain how something so completely irrational-sounding could arise.

Questions I still have after reading this article:

* Are we specifically talking about loans by the government, or student loans in general?

* If the latter, does the lender have any say in this, or does the government just do this unilaterally?

* How the hell did this happen? Yes, it was part of a bundle of "aggressive collection tactics" but... really, more information is needed here. Is this, like, a case of the government having the wrong incentives, needing more to look tough than to actually recover their money? If this applies to private loans, what did private lenders have to say about this at the time? Etc.

<comment><USER11> >Do lenders imagine they're more likely to recover their money this way?

When the mob cripples/kills a gambler who can't pay, they're not trying to get the money back. They're sending a message to other gamblers.

<comment><USER12> Gamblers are under a very autonomous incentive structure: _they_ want to gamble, and _they_ can be scared into not doing so by consequences that would befall _them_ personally.

Student loans don't work like this, I think, because most kids going to college aren't doing so because _they_ want to. Instead, they think they _need_ to, either because their parents demand it, or society demands it.

When you think you _need_ to do something (i.e. there are no other options/routes to not-dying), adding risks to it doesn't have any effect on the math.

<comment><USER13> They also _need_ to select correct course and actually finish it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well-connected banks and major corporations who make bad decisions and financially crash get bailouts. Citizens who make similar mistakes when they're young get their lives destroyed. Makes it pretty clear who "our" government really serves.

<comment><USER15> When major banks fail they take out major parts of the economy. I'm sure we all remember the mayhem the big banks caused in the Great Recession.

Secondly, the bailouts the banks received were loans -- they've now been repaid with interest, and the federal government has wound up making a profit.

I'm no banker or Wall Street apologist, the big banks and executives should've faced large punishments for their role in the fraud that triggered the economic crisis.

But we also need to be pragmatic and realize that the Bush and Obama administrations had very limited choices to fix the recession, which was made worse because banks basiclly stopped lending any money.

By all means let's elect politicians who will regulate and break up big banks, but let's not score cheap populism points by deriding economic policy without proposing a viable alternative.

<comment><USER16> So a viable solution to student debt is for the government to forgive it all?

<comment><USER17> Realistically, I think that's going to have to be what happens. The horse is out of the barn. We can close the door through reforming student loan programs, but we have to bring the horse back, first.

I say this as somebody who graduated college in 2010 with fairly minimal debt that I've already paid off. I was extremely lucky in my choice of career (and knowing I wanted to do it at the time) and I made better choices than most with regards to picking colleges and what school I attended, and so it kinda pisses me off a little bit--but me being pissed off is distinctly secondary to _we have saddled two entire generations with impossible debts in the chase for "employability"_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Yes, student loans are a disaster in this country, but of all things.. nursing is used as the example here?

Nursing is one of the easier ways to get value out of an education. A fresh graduate with a 4 year BSN can make ~70K to start, and nearly every major metro has an affordable community college nursing program. This isn't underwater basket weaving here, this is a very marketable skill that requires a fairly low cost (compared to many fields) amount of schooling.

The article also states the program is in fact successful at getting people to repay loans, and that people truly unable to pay simply had to enter into a payment arrangement to get their licenses reinstated. This sounds more like people flat out not paying their loans, more than being unable to because of a predatory student loan culture. It's the exact same thing they do to child support non-payers in most states, and it works because the reality is rarely true inability to pay - and when it is, the states are generally sane about it and have programs to accommodate. Pitchforks are coming out way too fast about this, I think.

</comment><comment><USER19> South Dakota is kind of crazy when it comes to this. They cross references people who hold SD drivers licenses with student loan debt databases and buys up the debt. If people fall behind at all, they get a letter warning them that their license will be suspended in 30 days unless they pay up.

South Dakota is a very rural state. There are no metros like NYC, SF, or Seattle where you can rely on public transit to get around.

[http://www.ksfy.com/content/news/State-law-sparks-student- de...](http://www.ksfy.com/content/news/State-law-sparks-student-debt- controversy-446255773.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> From the article, it sounds as if records are pretty informally kept in most cases, if at all. I'd be interested in how this breaks down across gender lines. When I think of (jobs requiring licensure) INTERSECTION (jobs that don't pay enough to pay down student loans), I come up with non-doctorate level healing/helping professions, like nursing, social work, and education, all of which are predominantly female.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is another example of society putting morality above practical considerations. The result is cutting our nose off to spite our face. The moral calculus is: people who welch on their debts are cheating. Cheaters must be punished. The most effective way to punish someone who hasn't actually committed a crime is to strip them of their "privilege" to work. The net result is to make it even harder for them to pay their debt, which nobody actually wants.

This is not an isolated example. Another is the way in which "cheating" is discouraged in school. If one kids convinces another kid to do their homework for them, that's called cheating and it's punished. But in fact the ability to persuade other people to work for you and negotiate a deal where both sides feel like they've come out ahead is one of the most valuable skills a person can develop. What the education system calls "cheating" is often budding entrepreneurship, and it really ought to be encouraged. But it isn't.

<comment><USER22> If society put its morals in front of its face they would abolish bankruptcy and let people drown in debt.

Society doesn't because those writing the rules _like_ having bankruptcy protection. But at the same time, the electorate dictating laws is also way past college age, but also wants their kids to be guaranteed to go to school (and if student loans weren't protected there would be dramatically less money for kids to go into lifelong debt with). If they are in debt for the rest of their lives... thats their problem, but I'll be damned if my kids are _not_ going to college!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm surprised how little attention is given to the fact that things like this are a side effect of a car-based society. If you don't build a world where people depend on their cars to do absolutely anything or to economically function, restricting their freedom isn't nearly as easy.

I mean, to the residents of most European towns and cities, this statement sounds absurd. So you took away my driving licence: so what?

<comment><USER22> Trick is the residents of those European towns and cities are going to school for free or nearly no cost that they can pay for in real time, don't have to declare bankruptcy if they break a bone a month out of college, and don't need to invest in a car to be able to go anywhere.

I really feel the future is in Europe. The winners of American capitalism might be burning a great fire, but it has no kindle to last. Most of Europe burns calmer but more sustainably, at learn in terms of having an educated and skilled population that isn't endemically mentally ill or drug addicted from all the abuses of their society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Whether it's about a student loan or some other kind ow loan, how exactly are people supposed to pay with their professional licenses suspended? Isn't this policy purely nonsensical? Doesn't suspending such a license in such a case mean preventing the person from ever repaying the debt actually? Isn't it in the best interests of a creditor to help their debtors earn money rather than to prevent them from earning?

<comment><USER25> The idea is to set an example. You basically write off this debtor, in the interest of encouraging your other million debtors to think before defaulting on their loans.

<comment><USER24> Thanks. This way it makes at least some sense. But isn't it a way too brutal and still a way irrational from the society point of view? Effectively ridding a skilled person of a life, setting them broke and probably homeless as the result at the same time while funding other peoples welfare and undertaking all kinds of efforts to solve homelessness and joblessness problems on the other hand?

<comment><USER18> The article states that those with inability to pay were able to get their licenses back by entering into a payment arrangement. This is targeted at negligent non-payers, not people unable to pay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The dismal quality of state government is a damning indictment of federalism. Any idiot would realize that blocking someone's professional license is a completely counter productive way to collect on a debt. It's no comfort to realize that the same people who make laws like this also craft laws regulating key aspects of our economy, from zoning and construction to policing.

</comment><comment><USER27> I would call this as yet another consequence of not having free education.

<comment><USER28> I would call it a consequence of supply management. Once you get past the headline, you soon see this has nothing to do with education at all. Rather, these professions have created a regulatory environment where only those who buy into it are allowed to participate. This artificially limits the supply of workers to artificially inflate incomes. If the 'quota' was freely accessible to anyone then the whole reason for the supply management would be lost altogether.

<comment><USER27> So not having student dept would not help these people, is that what you are saying?

<comment><USER28> More or less. If schooling (education truly is free already) was hypothetically free and accessible to all, then the professional bodies would simply move the fees away from the school system entirely. The debt would remain, just as it already does in professional organizations who aren't tied to the school system (taxi medallions, for example). You're not really any further ahead as it relates to this topic. The regulatory body wants their money, and if you don't pay up they will happily give the spot to someone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I find absolutely ridiculous that a license can be taken away because of not having money.

It is unbelievable.

</comment><comment><USER30> In North Dakota's defense, the law here was probably put into place when the Bank of North Dakota was doing the majority of loans (SLND). It was really, really hard to default since you could get a deferment with a phone call or change your payment amount the same way. I had about 5 years (various lengths over the loan) where I didn't pay on my student loans because my take home was too low.

I don't know what the situation is now but SLND was really, really easy to get to something that was acceptable.

[edit] hold the heck up: The section of the North Dakota Century Code these websites are quoting is 28-25-11 which has the title "28-25-11. Property applied - Wages exempt - Suspension of recreational licenses for nonpayment of defaulted state guaranteed student loans." \- note the word _recreational_ www.legis.nd.gov/cencode/t28c25.pdf - no hunting for you - _The court may withhold or suspend any certificate, permit, or license issued by lottery, tag, electronically, or over the counter by the director of the game and fish department which the judgment debtor is required to obtain before engaging in a recreational activity._

</comment><comment><USER31> I live in Texas (DFW). I pay close to 10k a year to the school district. They spent over 2 million dollars on my sons high school this summer to replace the grass on the football field with artificial turf. They also destroyed what looked like a brand new baseball field to replace it with a brand new baseball field. Across the street at the middle school they also replaced the grass with artificial turf for the grade 6-8 kids. The football field is of the same caliber as the Dallas Cowboys use.

My son told me a couple of days ago that the PC's in his computer lab are complete garbage and barely work (I bought him an Mac Airbook for his birthday) so he uses his own laptop. He says the lab equipment(physics, Chemistry, Biology) is also marginal. The ignorant fools in my district just passed a Bond Election for like 300 million dollars for God only knows what. My taxes went up by about $500 bucks to the school district.

It now almost costs the same amount to send one kid to High School as it does to send the other kid to UoT (Dallas). Where does it end? I don't know.

<comment><USER32> I live in the same area and agree with your complaints.

You may have already accounted for this in your $10k figure, but keep in mind that because property taxes are pretty much the only funding for school districts in Texas a percentage of rich school district's budgets are recaptured for redistribution among poor school districts. I paid $3300 for the school district portion of my property taxes this year, and about $800 goes to the state (which I don't have a problem with for the record).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> While not directly related, Bryan Caplan of George Mason University argues that pushing everyone to college doesn't make sense and most of what's learned in school is a waste of time from the job market perspective. The degree is about signaling how competent someone is instead of the useful skills and knowledge obtained via education.

The link to the podcast from 2014 better represents this nuanced argument.

[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.html)

His book on the topic will be released in January 2018 [https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System- Waste/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System- Waste/dp/0691174652)

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm not sure what california's policy is but I have licensed work with 5 defaulted school loans, and nothing has happened in 5 years

</comment><comment><USER35> Isn't this what garnishment is for? Garnish their wages if necessary why revoke the ability to work

<comment><USER36> There's garnishment limits. Since they have to leave you with at least 30 hours worth of minimum-wage earnings per week, a lot of people who can't afford their loans are effectively un-garnishable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I believe that legal barriers restricting qualified people's working rights are the next big thing ought to be abolished after slavery has been. Hopefully in future every person that actually can and wants to do a job will be legally allowed to apply, no matter what.

</comment><comment><USER37> It seems like having a license to work is more about barriers than making things safer.

</comment><comment><USER38> So... Don't get student loans, but if you do, don't borrow an amount your career wont pay for?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Modern day debtors' prison.

</comment><comment><USER39> The two photos in that article tell two different stories. I wonder why.

<comment><USER40> what is the difference, and why is the difference noteworthy such that you wonder about it?

<comment><USER39> One is set in a spare hospital corridor. Its subject wears scrubs and a woebegone expression. The sense is one of desperation - of at best a forlorn hope, if not of hopelessness outright. It is in every respect commensurate with the textual depiction of the subject as someone struggling nobly under an unjustly imposed burden.

The other is lush, full of color and interest and expensive appointments: fine curtains, musical instruments, a leather sofa. Its subject wears a stylish outfit and a look that lies somewhere between a smirk and a sneer. One need not read a subtext of entitlement into the image. Entitlement is the whole of its text.

Yet these photographs depict two people whose situations the article they accompany would have us regard as effectively parallel. It's an odd juxtaposition, and one whose origin in mere happenstance would surprise me greatly of so consummately professional an A-list blog as this.

The cliché is that a picture is worth a thousand words. These two pictures are worth two very different thousands of words. Such things do happen by accident, but not, I think, at the New York Times. So I'm curious about the purpose that underlay their selection.

<comment><USER41> This is the most odd post I've read in quite a while.

I was going to reply defending the subject of the article -- a middle-class person with hobbies and a home who fell on some temporary bad luck and was pounded into the ground by an objectively bad confluence of policies. But then I realized you think blue and red pigments are symbols of extravagance, and even in 1905 I'd be pretty lost on how to reply to that...?

<comment><USER39> No, I don't. I wonder why one person is made to look like she's living an extravagant lifestyle, and the other just this side of privation. I'm not a professional photographer, just an amateur - and if I did that, I wouldn't have done it by accident. I see no reason to imagine a professional would do it by accident, either. You don't take just one photo and call it good, after all. You take a lot of them, and then you sort through them to choose the ones you publish. The question I'm asking is: why choose these?

I think I'm seeing a deliberate attempt to manipulate the reader's sympathies, is what I'm saying. I don't understand what purpose that would serve, but I think it must have been done to serve _some_ purpose, and so I wonder what purpose that was.

<comment><USER41> I see.

I think you're reading too much into it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Namecheap still does not support TOTP based multi-factor authentication - <AUTHOR> https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/9905/5/how-can-i-use-the-onetouch-method-for-twofactor-authentication <comment><AUTHOR> After a raft of social engineering attacks on it's SMS-only 2FA system Namecheap promised to introduce Authy-based authentication instead back in May 2017. Instead, they rolled out a custom solution called OneTouch which requires the Namecheap mobile app and is still tied to your phone number...and doesn't actually integrate Authy or TOTP based passwords

[https://blog.namecheap.com/authy-based-2-factor- authenticati...](https://blog.namecheap.com/authy-based-2-factor- authentication-is-coming/)

</comment><comment><USER2> I currently use their OneTouch, and it works pretty well for a custom solution. However, I still hope that they support real TOTP's soon because I can securely store all of my TOTP's together.

It'd be very annoying to have an app for each single service.</comment>


Passive Income Hacker vs. Startup Guy (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://myles.io/thoughts/passive-income-hacker-vs-startup-guy <comment><USER2> This post is hilarious. Here's the original HN post with 258 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6108092](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6108092)</comment>


Trump administration to send U.S. cellphones a test alert on Thursday - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-alerts/trump-administration-to-send-u-s-cellphones-a-test-alert-on-thursday-idUSKCN1LV0N6 <comment><USER2> Federal law mandates all modern devices support it, although it's usually seen as a last resort channel of communication, like a nuke going off in DC

</comment><comment><USER3> No way to opt-out? Just another reminder that our hardware isn't really ours..

<comment><USER4> This is a reminder that radio waves are not yours, this is not about your hardware. Your phone number is accessible to anyone, even if you don't give your number out, it's still accessible to someone through random chance (a wrong number, for example.) - there are things we can own that have identifiers, a car is another one of those things, and if the DMV sends you a letter to renew your license, it's not a reminder that your car doesn't belong to you, it's a reminder that the DMV has your details.</comment></comment>


Oscilloscope watch - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/920064946/oscilloscope-watch?ref=card <comment><USER2> Oscilloscope Specifications:

Maximum Sampling rate: 4MSPS

Analog Bandwidth: ---> 200kHz <\---

Arbitrary Waveform Generator Specifications

Maximum conversion rate: 1MSPS

Analog Bandwidth: ---> 50kHz <\---

This is certainly not the first project in the "super miniaturized hardware tools" category, and as much as I like the idea of having a single tricorder- like device that can replace a lab full of hardware, all of the similar projects that I've seen have fallen short in exactly the same way: analog bandwidth - the one spec that actually matters.

I would pay a _lot_ of money for a miniaturized tool that took RF performance seriously.

<comment><USER3> What analogue bandwidth do you want? Does the device need to have a display, or is a USB device ok?

<comment><USER2> I actually prefer the USB scopes. I paid a lot for a high resolution laptop display, and I'm going to have that with me anyway.

At work, I'm generally okay with a 400-500 MHz bandwidth for some of the more fiddly stuff. At home, 100 MHz is usually plenty, although I've occasionally had to take parts of my projects to the lab.

I'll concede that many hobbyists don't really need all of this capability (e.g. the Arduino + LED crowd), but I'd have a really hard time recommending a scope that doesn't do at least 100 MHz simply because you can already get 100 MHz hardware for dirt cheap.

It's gotten significantly easier for hobbyists to play with relatively high- end hardware that would have been out of reach a decade ago (FPGAs, fast memory, wired/wireless communication ICs, cameras, etc). A lot of this hardware requires relatively high bandwidth interconnects to work well (or to work at all), but today's hobbyists seem undeterred and are figuring out how to make it work.

But when the shit hits the fan, you don't want to be banging your head against the wall because of crappy test hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had a calculator watch as a kid. Great idea, but not terribly useful due to poor ergonomics. Still, it undeniably had appeal. This is like a calculator watch for a new decade, but also for a greatly reduced audience (Fewer people use oscilloscopes than calculators). This doesn't seem likely to find much of an audience unfortunately, but a part of me still wants one!

</comment><comment><USER5> This looks really handy. I know they're working on the design, but it would definitely need to be a lot more ergonomic and more attractive. I also hope they improve the buttons and the size/contrast of the text. If the watch buttons are anything like typical watch buttons, extended operation of the oscilloscope will be really annoying.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is bulky and unattractive, but man I want one.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've met Gabriel at a few Mini Maker Faires and have one of his XProtoLab boards. It isn't a replacement for a real oscilloscope, but it is a fun tool to always have around.

</comment><comment><USER8> Max sampling rate (4MSPS) is too small. Note that for more or less proper measurement you need at least Sampling_rate=Freq*4. So, for something real you need 200MSPS or even more. Beside that the idea is very cool, would buy one.

Eagerly waiting for a Spectrum Analyzer Watch to pop up on Kickstarter any time soon. :-)

<comment><USER2> It's worse than that. The 4 MSPS doesn't do a damn thing for you when your analog bandwidth is in the kHz. It doesn't matter how fast you sample if your signal can't get to the sampler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Kind of a novelty, but cool. Looks like they're going to hit their goal.

</comment><comment><USER10> Just like a calculator watch, the form factor is too small to interact with. And the analog bandwidth is too low. And I can't think of any actual use cases for this product.

But yeah, the little kid in me wants one.

</comment><comment><USER11> If I remember correctly, he was selling these screens at Maker Faire NYC last year. They are a lot of fun, and he is a really nice guy!

</comment><comment><USER12> It's not beautiful but it is likely a fun little cool object</comment>


Oliver Sacks's Twins and Prime Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://www.pepijnvanerp.nl/articles/oliver-sackss-twins-and-prime-numbers/ <comment><USER2> Note to readers: read till the last paragraph, to placate the implication that that Oliver Sacks was possibly just 'spicing up' the narration.</comment>


Father and son send iPhone into space - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/16/father-and-son-send-iphon_n_765369.html

<comment><USER2> This was already posted a few days ago.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1750517></comment>


Would Anfroid be a less shitty ecosystem if we stopped giving kids smartphones? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.onyxbits.de/maybe-android-would-be-a-less-shitty-ecosystem-if-we-stopped-giving-smartphones-to-children-590/ <comment><USER2> My children would go bonkers if I took their smartphones away. As long as they have them, thinks stay quiet for me.</comment>


Free Computer Science and Technology Books - <AUTHOR> https://www.bookfusion.com/books/free?category=Computers+%26+Technology <comment><USER2> How do you download them? Is this another Scribd?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can download them directly to your desktop after you sign up. Or read them without our app.

No we are not just another Scribd. We allow readers to upload, read, sync and share their eBooks across all devices while also being able to purchase eBooks from our store. Think about us as a modern calibre ebook alternative. More at [https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud- library](https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library)

Additional startups and other organizations can easily create their own private digital library to distribute and share eBooks with their members securely. [https://www.bookfusion.com/business](https://www.bookfusion.com/business)

A few of the organizations that selected to list their libraries can be seen here [https://www.bookfusion.com/libraries](https://www.bookfusion.com/libraries)

<comment><USER2> > You can download them directly to your desktop after you sign up

So, just like Scribd then.</comment></comment></comment>


I am a puts debuggerer - <AUTHOR> https://tenderlovemaking.com/2016/02/05/i-am-a-puts-debuggerer.html <comment><USER2> I'm an everything debuggerer. I use print statements when its convenient (mainly when i want to know what's going on in a longer process), i use interactive debuggers when its convenient (mainly when i want to inspect complex data structures), sometimes i run the interactive debugger and then dump a complext data structure to STDOUT with a print (mainly when i want to reference it later on).

I don't get the people who insist on using only one thing, and claim that their thing is the best. There's lots of tools and all of them have different optimal use cases.

<comment><USER3> The fact remains that when we think of debugging tools we tend to build monolithic debugging environments rather than unix-style primitives that do one thing well. Thinking deeply about when prints work best and how we can ameliorate their drawbacks is a fertile place to change this. A couple of concrete ideas:

a) For a while now, I've experimented with editor macros to comment/uncomment code that insert a special marker after the comment leader (like say //? for C++ or Java) that allows me to programmatically distinguish real comments from commented-out code. An immediate benefit is that I can select large ranges of text and enable/disable prints without messing up interspersed prose. A more subtle benefit is that it lets me leave prints in version control for weeks of time and watch which prints I use most often when debugging. I've also experimented with a couple of subsidiary experiments: a1) highlighting //? comments differently (much less saliently) than real comments, so they don't bother me as much in my editor, a2) having my comment macro set/increment a per-line counter which provides even more fine-grained telemetry about how my codebase is used. It's illuminating to save all the prints you made while debugging a problem that ends up being just a one-line fix. Even if you end up deleting all the prints immediately in the next commit. And if you think it makes merging harder, well that's just a task for another simple unix-like tool: to filter out commented-code before merging, and add it back in afterward.

b) A big problem if you do a lot of printing is to find the right prints that help you debug your problem now. Print too much and it becomes easy to get lost in all the verbiage. I've tried battling this problem with a 'zooming editor' which reads a potentially huge log but displays only stuff at the highest level of abstraction, letting the user selectively click on lines to expand more and more detail around them. I can even bring up this zooming editor automatically when my program dies in debug mode: [http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/090trace_browser.cc.html](http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/090trace_browser.cc.html) [1] This is an incredibly useful tool, because it turns a two-sided problem into a one-sided one; instead of having to walk the tightrope between too much logging and too little I can just log everything and poke at it in my leisure.

Not all these ideas are good. I gave up on a2) above after a few months, for example. But there's lots of room for questioning conventional wisdom and trying new things.

[1] Details on my literate format: [http://akkartik.name/post/wart- layers](http://akkartik.name/post/wart-layers)

<comment><USER4> > Print too much and it becomes easy to get lost in all the verbiage.

very much related to how much is too much. If you can simply filter out lines you don't want to see, like `grep -v '^first comment'`

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Re: I only want to see the stack trace in certain cases

(C++) One of my favorite middle grounds between console debugging and loading up the debugger is to output the actual stack walkback as a string of hex addresses in production code (on a conditional log level). This is relatively very cheap and avoids the entire cost of loading up the machinery to resolve the addresses to symbols in the critical path. It is assumed that you know what binary is running where and that you associate the stack walkback with the unique binary and thus can resolve the symbols out of band at a later date. (.. or have some handy automation that is notified and does it for you out-of-band and puts the results back into the central logging facility :))

At Bloomberg we do this using part of our infrastructure libraries and have wrapped up the logging-the-stack-as-hex part into a simple drop-in call: [https://bloomberg.github.io/bde/group__balst__stacktraceutil...](https://bloomberg.github.io/bde/group__balst__stacktraceutil.html#3.1.3)

All of the conditional logging machinery is pretty important as well, as it lets you maintain all of your detailed logging statements with the flexibility to configure however you wish at runtime in a production build while debugging. There's many different solutions for this in the C++ world, but ours is here: [https://bloomberg.github.io/bde/group__ball__log.html](https://bloomberg.github.io/bde/group__ball__log.html) The rest of the components are all in that package: [https://bloomberg.github.io/bde/group__ball.html](https://bloomberg.github.io/bde/group__ball.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> In the embedded world, sometimes you can't even be a puts/printf debuggerer. There have been some situations, typically early in development, where I've had to be a "turn the LED on or turn it off" debuggerer. Amazingly, that binary output is usually enough to fix whatever problem is happening and bootstrap into printf debugging or full ICE interactive debugging.

<comment><USER7> Once upon a time in the olden days, if certain makes of PC couldn't successfully complete the Power On Self Test and couldn't initialise video output to report the problem, it would beep the fault code through the system speaker.

<comment><USER8> Most motherboards still do this.

<comment> steve-howard Just not as often, I imagine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've noticed that the more stateful my code, the more use I get from a debugger. Being able to poke and prod and see the various values in memory can be extremely helpful when I'm writing in an OO language, that just spitting to console doesn't really do (because I don't know up front what I'm going to care about; what influences what, what values are in the stack, in a containing object, etc).

Conversely, the less state I have (and, typically, the more functional my code), the less useful debugging is. It becomes easier to see my bugs up front (as they have more to do with explicit logic, that is expressed directly in my code), and to trace through in my head what must be going on, and all I need to do is check to confirm my understanding, and that my fix addresses it correctly, which can often be done more easily by just running the code twice (with a puts/print statement), than attaching a debugger twice.

<comment><USER10> Yes, this exactly! With OO-based PHP 7 codebases I work on, XDebug with the amazing Codebug client is brilliant. Breakpoint, then poke around the actual data structures within a running request, and see what happens!

When I'm working on functional codebases (our JavaScript is done in a very functional style, and I personally write Clojurescript and Wisp for my personal projects), I find printing the result of function calls completely sufficient, though I suppose one can consider a REPL not that conceptually different from an interactive debugger: in fact, Codebug and I think Komodo's XDebug client actually give you a REPL to play with, set to the context of the given breakpoint

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> printf()-based debugging is okay when these statements are temporary, or when they are only present in development branches.

At $previousjob we had a guy who literally spent a year adding printf() statements everywhere to production code in order to help himself understand the existing code base he had to work on.

"It's not printf()-debugging, I'm doing extensive permanent instrumentation".

He even developed a whole framework for printf()-based debugging, to print messages in an artistic way.

The actual code became very hard to read due to the omnipresence of debugging cruft.

He also made the whole test suite dependent on the output of the debugging printf() debugging statements, making any kind of refactoring impossible.

I showed him how to use gdb and bought him a hard copy of the dtrace book, but it didn't help.

<comment><USER3> Oddly enough, I've spent some time working on "white-box" tests that check the log. It takes taste to do well: you have to be careful to log what your program figures out about the _domain_ , rather than just random details. Done right, I find it actually _helps_ refactoring. My unit tests now usually call some top-level function rather than just the sub-component they test. As a result I can make radical changes, like going to client-server or from sync to async, without having to change any tests.

More details: [http://akkartik.name/post/tracing- tests](http://akkartik.name/post/tracing-tests)

</comment></comment><comment> steve-howard Since we're all sharing debugging lessons I thought I'd include one for .NET. In System.Runtime.CompilerServices, there are attributes that can be very useful for a logging interface: CallerMemberNameAttribute, CallerLineNumberAttribute, and CallerFilePathAttribute. These add compile-time info to method calls like so:

        void Error(string message,
        [CallerMemberName] string callingMethod = null,
        [CallerFilePath] string filePath = null,
        [CallerLineNumber] int lineNumber = 0);

You then simply call `Error("something wrong with the frobnicator")` and the source line you need to come back to is already there. The only caveat is that this won't work in conjunction with variadic formatting for the message (`params object[]` arguments can't coexist with default arguments). `string.Format` feels like a small price to pay.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's nice to see I'm not alone! I haven't really used a 'legit' debugging tool since my days as a C# developer. And that was because how easy debugging was in Visual Studio. I have yet to find something that just works, as easily. (I imagine XCode works perfect too, never programmed in Obj-C though).

<comment><USER13> Gdb works well for embedded Linux targets, provided you have Ethernet or a serial port. You can bring gdb up I the target and then connect the host to it and debug from there. If you're using an Eclipse-based tool then you can set that tool up to connect to a remote gdb.

At least, that's how it works when I'm developing under Linux. I'm not sure about Windows or Mac OS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've used gdb a few times, but I've always defaulted to print statements. It just... it just works, okay?

I get that there are definitely times when a legitimate debugger would come in handy, but I've never gone wrong with "puts debugging."

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't even understand the 'have to learn a debugger' statement. Is he referring to things like pry? I rather enjoy the debugger in Rubymine, and part of the reason for this is that it more or less works like every other debugger I have ever used (eclipse, vs, chrome debugger, etc.)

There is not much to learn if you have used any debugger in the past.

<comment><USER16> That which is not learnt is innate.

GDB is not innate.

Therefore GDB has to be learnt.

\---

I don't understand your lack of understanding :)

 _EDIT:_

Addendum: Symbolic debuggers like GDB are non-trivial to pick up, is that what you're arguing against?

<comment><USER17> Writing to the console is good if you have a console, and don't need to stop the program and examine the state of memory, files, processes immediately before the problem occurs. Otherwise it's a big fail.

Are we supposed to believe that some people can understand unix, c++ etc but cannot learn/keep a cheatsheet handy so they can employ the ~10 commands needed to use gdb fruitfully?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's great find people like you and me :)

I'm a pprint, fmt.Println, panic, console.debug, log.Print debugger !!

<comment><USER19> does golang even have a debugger with horrible gdb hacks?

<comment><USER20> There's godebug[0], which has all the hacks you could ever want! But I'm guessing you meant 'without', to which the answer is: no.

[0] [https://github.com/mailgun/godebug](https://github.com/mailgun/godebug)

<comment><USER19> ah yea I meant without.

Godebug doesn't work with 1.5 vendor-ed deps, sigh !

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I guess it is by far easier to be a puts debugger than a printf debugger (I'm saying that as someone who prefers printf over a debugger but pry on Ruby over simple puts).

You can get a much longer way with what Ruby lets you do with puts than you would with printf in C/C++.

Like the example with `method(:render).source_location` from the article. You can't do that in C/C++ on a general base.

Or pretty printing a struct is cumbersome. In Ruby you just do `puts obj.inspect` and get a readable representation of the object.

<comment><USER22> __FILE__, __LINE__, __FUNCTION__

Yes, there's no default pretty print for structs, but no sane C programmer would ever expect or want that blubber to come available by default. Mainly because there's _very_ rarely a need to printf-dump anything more than a select variable or a struct field. Different language - different debugging realities.

<comment><USER21> Those only act on the currently defined context.

Especially __FUNCTION__ is by no means an equivalent to source_location.

__FUNCTION__ tells you, in what function you currently are.

source_location tells you "in what file has this method of this object been defined". Because of duck typing this is much harder to answer in Ruby. But even in C, because of linking it can be non obvious what function actually gets called.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I am a printf/gperftools/asan/gdb/valgrind debuggerer too:

[https://github.com/vmorgulys/sandbox/blob/master/stackcity/r...](https://github.com/vmorgulys/sandbox/blob/master/stackcity/run.sh#L202)

Sometimes but rarely, I use Nemiver:

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

</comment><comment><USER24> Any time you use the console or a printed output to debug something, that is an embryonic test assertion in the making, and all you have to do is move it to a proper suite. ;)

If you are doing it because you are deep in some nested conditionals... you need to refactor.

</comment><comment><USER25> "Tender love making"? "Debuggerer"? If this safe for work?

</comment><comment><USER26> I've always found people skilled with debuggers look like they have super powers. Symbolic debuggers really are tricky, and these are some good tips.

<comment><USER27> I used to think symbolic debuggers were tricky until I actually bothered to pick up GDB. It seems hard and complicated at first, but it's really not. You can get very far with just "break", "next", and "print". It's _so_ much nicer than printf debugging (and I used to be a hardcore printf debuggerer).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> it's the 21st century. i use a debugger.

</comment><comment><USER29> Sometimes, just dumping stuff out to the console is the best.

Especially in multi-threaded code, it can be the only way - hitting a breakpoint and stepping through causes other threads to time out in unnatural ways, and you're hosed tracking down things that wouldn't actually happen. It's not uncommon that I've run into issues where attaching a debugger or a profiler gets its hooks into something in the depths of whatever COM library I'm using that breaks it anyway (I love RedGate's performance profiler, but I can't use it for some things on Windows 10, because of some security something or other, while it works on 7 & 8...)

Log4net is, without a doubt, my favorite dependency. ColoredConsoleAppender FTW. Even better, if I take the slightest care with my log levels in code, I can tune the log output up and down just by tweaking the config. So I can leave full diagnostics in a release, tune things down to hide the verbosity, with minimal performance hit, and dial it back up to debug levels if I encounter an issue in production.

</comment><comment><USER30> This appears to be a post by a novice developer, discouraging the use of time tested, invaluable debugging tools? Encouraging slower, worse debugging...for what?

And "tender lovemaking" for the title of a tech blog? That's childish and short sighted.

Rails has vibrant problems in its ecosystem (everything is global, tracing behavior is hard, everything is magic, many Rails developers have no idea how what they're using works), and this is both a product and a cause of that.

<comment><USER31> Just wanted to point out that you may disagree with him here but @tenderlove is far from a novice [https://github.com/tenderlove?tab=activity](https://github.com/tenderlove?tab=activity)

<comment><USER30> Yes, it appears I am wrong about my label of "novice" from the pure verbosity point of view. Being a core contributor to anything does not imply being a good programmer. I don't know this person (and don't care, I have no ties to the Rails community). I think that dismissing the use of a runtime debugger is a novice action.

<comment><USER32> I think being a core contributor to major pieces of software does imply you are a good programmer rather than a novice, whether you know of them or use that software or not. "Pure verbosity" \- Really? You want to disparage his contributions? Take it easy, man.

He doesn't "dismiss the use of a runtime debugger", he says "I don't say this to disparage people that use a Real Debugger. I think Real Debuggers are great, I've just never taken the time to learn one well."</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tachyon – A memory-centric distributed file system - <AUTHOR> http://tachyon-project.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone have any experience using this?

</comment><comment><USER2> Last week a project called photon, and now a project called tachyon, I don't get it, what's the idea? can't you find a proper name to your project?

<comment><USER3> Feel free to make something yourself and name it whatever you want.</comment></comment>


MNPP v0.0.9 has been released - <AUTHOR>

Support for php 5.2.*, Set the php version to use from app preferences, Add default config for wordpress sites and Runs MNPP from console with php52 or php53. <comment><AUTHOR> Download MNPP - <http://getmnpp.org></comment>


Ask HN: How do I stop obsessing about taking care of my hardware (laptop)? - <AUTHOR>

It seems to get in the way of productivity, and it has become an obsession for me to extremely take care of it.
How do I beat this obsesssion? I have OCD.
It's also my only laptop. <comment><USER2> Change how you think about your laptop.

If you think about it as a luxury item or or something that is fragile, you'll always be OCD about it. Perhaps because it is your only laptop, your more careful with it.

If tomorrow, it fell down a flight of stairs and you had to replace it, could you on the spot? How long would it take otherwise? How much work would you loose if it happened?

I was this way a long time ago and probably to a certain point, still am with my primary laptop / phone. To me, they're just tools now to get the job done. A couple months ago, my laptop died and fortunately, I was in a position where the only thing stopping me from getting a new one was a 20 minute drive to the Apple Store. That's not to say that I'm careless with my laptop, but it's just a tool, and tools break.

I remember breaking my fathers Snap On Ratchet once. Fortunately, they're tools are warranted for life, but it was just a tool easily replaceable.

"The things you own, end up owning you"

</comment><comment><USER3> I always buy protective gear for my equipment and extend the warranty, for my laptop I bought a protector case, screen protector, keyboard cover and stickers I like (no protection just fun). After all of that I stop worrying about it, I clean once a week because I hate dirty equipment but if something happens that's just life.

You have to keep tools in good shape, but tools are for work.

</comment><comment><USER4> I used to do this too. But after a couple laptops and smartphones just died on me, I realized that everything truly is designed to fail. Every product now has a limited life, no matter how well you care for it. So use it delicately or throw it on your desk every day. It's still going to die when you least expect it. And you will still need to buy a new one again.

Hardware is now a consumable. Works for a while and then it breaks down. You don't buy it. You just rent it for a couple of years. So there is no need to care for your laptop. You will have to get a new one anyway. It's just the cost of doing business. You may not like it, but it's how things are now.

</comment><comment><USER5> Once you have an accident and get a scratch somewhere you generally start feeling less protective, or at least that's how I am with my tech. I don't stop caring altogether, though - I'm just less bothered about the not-so- obvious cosmetics.

I'm not afraid to take my laptops apart these days. It's my hardware and I've seen it naked.

Maybe it's about seeing "for yourself" that your machine isn't quite as delicate as you had led yourself to believe? I don't even know :)

<comment><USER6> My car would be an analogy for this. We used to live in a sketchy neighborhood and one night our car got keyed by some kids. I was pretty upset and up-in- arms about it for a while. Fixing it would be expensive (insurance covers it, but still have to pay deductible), so we just decided to leave it. Once I got over it, I found myself being much less stressed about the condition of the car in general. As long as I'm keeping it, I'm fine it with it looking not new and as long as its functional, superficial things don't bother me anymore. If it comes time to sell the car, I'll get it fixed up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe think about moving to a cloud-based machine. My actual work environment (I'm a developer) is up on a server. I ssh in and use the machine from virtually any machine.

I can be ready to work in about 5 minutes on a brand new machine.

It's basically a screen and a keyboard for me, nothing more. Lessens its importance.

</comment><comment><USER8> Get something sharp and put ugly scratches all over it</comment>


One Kings Lane sold for less than $30M after being valued at $900M - <AUTHOR> http://www.recode.net/2016/8/23/12588428/one-kings-lane-flash-sales-acquisition-price-bed-bath-beyond <comment><USER2> I'm quietly hoping that more overvalued companies see huge blowouts on their purchase/IPO prices. I don't really know why companies are currently valued for what they are, and this "dishonesty" in the marketplace will cause only heartbreak for the majority of people in it - for me most notably the engineers who see their promised stock payouts wiped, even though they should know better.

</comment><comment><USER3> $30M seems not far off the piece-meal value of their physical assets & hard- dollar equivalents--eg, current inventory, customer lists & purchase histories, a warehouse-sized collection of studio-grade photography gear, (nor sure what else).</comment>


The Power of Fat - <AUTHOR> http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/human-fat-cells-can-be-used-to-heal-hearts-and-joints <comment><USER3> TLDR: Scientists discovered that human fat extracted by liposuction contains adult stem cells. Those could be used to repair heart and damaged joints, but since these particular doctors are cardiologists, they want to repair hearts. It is still not ready for general usage and needs more testing and experimenting.

You should not try to get fat to create a reserve of stem cells.

<comment><USER4> This seems like an obvious conclusion; our bodies are full of stem cells but that doesn't mean they're used for repair. What I would expect them to prove is that the body is actually using fat stem cells for repair of other organs.

I didn't read the whole article (long, information sparse), so I don't know if they came to this conclusion.

<comment><USER3> They are currently focused on extracting stem cells from the fat and using those to repair tissue by injecting the extracted cells directly to the heart.

There are complications, because safe way to do it is not very precise and stem cells would not attach to the heart. Trying it multiple times would increase chances of infection, which is not good for recovering heart, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A terrible byline: "Human fat cells can be used to regenerate damaged hearts and ageing joints. So should we start piling on the pounds?"

Piling on the fat is about as effective as smoking if you want a reliably slow way to shorten your lifespan by a decade or more [1] while at the same time considerably increasing your lifetime medical expenditures [2].

That visceral fat around your organs works a number on your biochemistry, increasing chronic inflammation [3] with all its detrimental consequences. That is bad enough but other unfortunate and more poorly understood changes take place in metabolism when you eat a very high calorie diet consistently, of the sort needed to sustain a lot of fat tissue, pushing nutrient sensing mechanisms into overload. [4]

There is magical thinking everywhere when laypeople talk about medical technologies. But this fat-related example is particularly egregious.

[1]: [http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-07/iaft- sfl07121...](http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-07/iaft- sfl071210.php)

[2]: [http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-12/dumc- hcc12161...](http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-12/dumc- hcc121613.php)

[3]: [http://www.houstonmethodist.org/body.cfm?id=495&action=detai...](http://www.houstonmethodist.org/body.cfm?id=495&action=detail&ref=1003)

[4]: [http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10863-009-9229-3](http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10863-009-9229-3)

<comment><USER6> The article is actually about fatty deposits containing stem cells - <USER2> benefits come from using stem cells.

That's if the automated summary linked to elsewhere is to be believed.

Long articles prompt people to react to headlines rather than the substance of the article. That's why I suggested that a summary was needed, yet was biffed in the head multiple times for.

<comment><USER3> I really don't understand why, perhaps people were mad that you were complaining instead of providing the summary for them ;)

One of the reasons why I enjoy HN is that I can read comments first, which works very fast on any device, does not load 20+ javascript and CSS files and is surely not going to make my browser crawl to a halt. I read comments for almost everything, but only hit the original site once in 20 times or less.

This article was trending and there were no comments, so I figured I would read it, and if it's any good, provide TLDR for the rest of us. It's a way of thanking all the others who provided useful comments to me in the past.

BTW, I did not down-vote you, I actually went to read it and provide TLDR. I guess you were just too eager and could not wait till I complete reading it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An authentic scientific thriller! Shows the excitement of patient research met with failure after failure and, eventually, a cautious success, followed by learning something important and opening up further avenues of research.

Lean entrepreneurs take note! This is your job too!

</comment><comment><USER8> [Not quite TLDR, but call it Cliff Notes... most of this is directly quoted, but I have done some editorializing.]

In 2001, some researchers at UCLA discovered that fat cells (adipose) contain an abundance of adult stem cells. Separate out the mature fat cells and the remaining cells, which they called PLA, can be coaxed into forming bone and cartilage.

Jalees Rehman and Keith March at Indiana University decided to see if they could use these cells to repair the heart and grow new blood vessels. Their "goal was to convert fat stem cells from liposuction aspirates into cardiovascular cells, such as cardiomyocytes or endothelial cells that form the lining of all blood vessels."

Over the course of the next year, although they had a few cultures that did seem to behave like cardiac cells, they couldn't reliably produce them.

The team learned of reports that adult bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells released growth factors that nourished and accelerated the regeneration of neighbouring cells. Researchers were increasingly calling these stem cells 'stromal cells', from the Latin 'stroma' for mattress or covering, to signify their support function.

They decided to try growing PLA cells side by side with endothelial cells and studying what occurred. When they added PLA cells to the gels, the growth of the blood-vessel-like tubes increased several-fold. "Analysing the PLA genes and proteins they produced, we found not one, but a multitude of factors that promoted survival, regeneration and growth of blood vessels. Synergy between all the factors likely explained why they were so effective. These growth factors not only activated the growth of endothelial cells, they also made endothelial cells more resilient to stress. In the aftermath of this work, I decided to rename PLA cells 'adipose stromal cells' (ASCs), to emphasise the fact that it was their 'stromal' or caretaker function that aided in their ability to form blood vessels."

Especially important was the discovery that ASCs did not just blindly churn out growth factors. Their productivity was regulated by the cell's ability to sense oxygen. When placed in a low-oxygen environment, the ASCs doubled or tripled production of factors necessary for the growth of blood vessels. Since heart and limb muscle tissues of patients with blood vessel blockages suffer from low oxygen levels; implanting ASCs that released therapeutic molecules based on oxygen levels seemed almost too good to be true.

They did a preliminary test on mice, and met with success. (why does it always work on mice?!) They cut off blood supply to the lower parts of the legs of experimental mice. Half the mice then received an injection of human ASCs into the leg muscle. We observed an astonishing recovery of blood flow through new blood vessels in ASC-treated mice, but not our controls.

Since then, clinical trials are proceeding somewhat rapidly, in part due to FDA exemptions for treatment with one's own cells, as long as modifications are no more than minor and cells are re-injected during the same procedure. "The irony is that the less effort such clinics spend on processing and characterising the cells they are injecting into patients, the more likely they are to get away with it." These exemptions may encourage treating with under-processed cells, since too much processing voids the exemption, but it remains to be seen if theres low-hanging fruit here, or if scientists will have to work much harder to refine the processing in order to see actual clinical benefit from injecting ASC.

<comment><USER9> _why does it always work on mice?!_

Mice are cheap, live fairly short lives (a big plus if you're studying hereditary things), easy to handle, genetically quite similar to us, and research mice have been bred to the point of near0uniformity in genetic terms, making for greater reproducibility. Additionally, there are transgenci mice that can express human genes, and mice with no immune systems which are ideal for studying disease.

<comment><USER10> > _research mice have been bred to the point of near[-]uniformity in genetic > terms, making for greater reproducibility._

Doesn't that also introduce a bias toward experimental treatments that happen to work well with the genetics of research mice, but not those of other mice, vs. treatments that don't work well on research mice, but that mice with different genes respond well to?

In other words, would treatment that works really well for research mice but not the majority of other mice be able to make it through mouse trials without anyone finding that out?

Are there different lines of mice to mitigate that? Is that kind of genetic fluke uncommon?

<comment><USER11> Yes, there are many (potential) problems caused by the homogeneous nature of research mice. It's an under-considered variable in a lot of research, and, from my knowledge, hasn't really been studied until recently.

<comment><USER12> I never before heard that this was a big issue; could you please tell what those problems are?

<comment><USER13> Anecdotally, tests for skin-contact carcinogens can be skewed because the lab mice are prone to develop skin cancers anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would love to see human adult stem cells used to repair some organ coupled with a transfusion of "young blood" as well to see the effect on the growth, overall.</comment>


NYT copy desk to top editors: 'You have turned your backs on us' – Poynter - <AUTHOR> http://www.poynter.org/2017/new-york-times-copy-desk-to-top-editors-you-have-turned-your-backs-on-us-update4/465100/ <comment><USER2> > routine copy-editing duties such as fact checking, reviewing sources, > correcting misleading or inaccurate information, clarifying language and, > yes, fixing spelling and grammar mistakes

There should exist a quantitative/scientific editor as well. Almost every non- trade news source is littered with stories where the reporter has clearly failed to understand the methodology and conclusions of a study or doesn't have a basic grasp of statistics.</comment>


New study reveals which messaging app saves you the most data - <AUTHOR> https://www.neowin.net/news/new-study-reveals-which-messaging-app-saves-you-the-most-data <comment><USER2> It didn't include Signal? Not as good a comparison as I'd like to see.</comment>


Popular game developer halts work on Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/mobile-news/popular-game-developer-halts-work-on-android/7117 <comment><USER2> This is a very real issue, that's why there are no Android apps.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, there sure aren't....

groan. There are 10s of thousands of very graphically rich games doing well on the Android market.

<comment><USER4> Are they doing well? I doubt there are 10,000 games doing well on the iOs platform, and iOs people actually pay for their apps.

<comment><USER5> These stories are popular. What is not is the grind. There are few poster children for Android, lots for iOS. The truth is some Android software does fine, and so does some iOS software. Once 100x more Androids are going to be sold, all of a sudden "developers dumping Apple due to lengthy approval process". It's just press at times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Earlier discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3690063>

</comment><comment><USER3> So it this same story going to go front-page every single day for a couple of weeks?</comment>


The cloud is too hard, so Intel launched a sweeping project to fix it - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/2951884/cloud-computing/the-cloud-is-too-hard-so-intel-launched-a-sweeping-project-to-fix-it.html

<comment><USER2> This: [http://opencontainers.org/](http://opencontainers.org/) seems to be somewhat related, and also a good thing.</comment>


Show HN: Mynamid – don't throw away cool stuff you find online. Save it here - <AUTHOR> http://www.mynamid.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey, this is a side-project I've been working on a few months now.

The problem was that a few months after discovering something cool on the web, I forgot about it and thus couldn't re-visit it again. In my opinion bookmarks aren't a great way to organize content and tend to get lost after a while.

So I built this. You can save references to any link, search for books & movies and save them into a "mynamid" - a shape which lets you sort-of prioritize content, but isn't as strict as a top-list. :)

Would love your feedback on this!

<comment><USER2> How is this different from Pinterest?

<comment><AUTHOR> It does have similar functionality to Pinterest, yes. What I wanted to add was a way to prioritize stuff you find more important (drag and drop the blocks of a mynamid) and just as a personal quirk didn't like the way content is shown on a board.

edit: Oh, and I like the idea of incorporating various APIs like movie and book search.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What milestone do you want to achieve in 2017? - <AUTHOR> What is the single milestone you'd like to achieve in 2017? <comment><USER2> Since this is an open-ended question, I would like to describe a somewhat personal milestone for 2017: I want to break free of the depression which has been hanging like a cloud around me for 3 years. I had never thought that I would be the sort of person that depression would hit. But 3 years in the prime of my life has just gone by in a haze. :-(

<comment><USER3> It's hard as hell.

Stay strong, reach out when you need help.

People in all the unexpected places will be there for you, even if those you rely on don't always.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I want to not get fired and not rage-quit from my well-paying, but boring and tedious programming job. The saved money will allow me to quit sometime in 2018 and retrain to do something cooler (preferably a different kind of programming).

<comment><USER5> +1 I like when I hear the truth.

I recently asked a question, (if programmer wages are too low?) Maybe you'd like to answer that: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13253813](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13253813)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Goal number One: To land our first few paying customers

After that, the next goal would be to get to a level of revenue that would let me do this full-time and not work a dayjob.

<comment><USER7> I assume you're talking about Fogbeam. I don't like the tagline, btw: "Easy to use, community-driven, open-source Enterprise software for businesses."

Nobody goes online searching for "enterprise software for businesses". They do however search for solutions to problems like 'advertise to my target customers' or 'chat with my customer on my website'.

<comment><USER6> _I don 't like the tagline, btw: "Easy to use, community-driven, open-source Enterprise software for businesses."_

Yeah, absolutely. That's something that I've been meaning to change for a while, but it hasn't been a big priority since we've been heads down focused on product stuff lately. And this new product represents a little bit of a pivot, so once this is all ready, we'll revamp the messaging as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm going to focus on my own health. I've spent the last half-decade working so hard to help grow the businesses of others, putting in 18-hour days regularly, and it's catching up. Time to hit the gym and pay back some of the non-technical debt that has accumulated.

<comment><USER3> That is a fantastic goal.

Being a workaholic/perfectionist has really hurt me, and the last ten years are all catching up at once.

Take your time, and make sure you enjoy it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> No milestones.

My health is crapping out at me ignoring it for so long and I have a 3 month old daughter.

My focus is on taking it easy, being there for my kid, and actually trying to enjoy a year of life, without become an obsessed workaholic like I usually do.

To keep me sane with a slower pace of life, I'm trying to hook up some Arduinos into something that vaguely resembles a computer.

But that's it.

My milestone: Enjoy, don't do.

</comment><comment><USER9> To actually finish last year's new year's resolution: [0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11452309](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11452309)

Or in a broader sense (that makes me seem less pathetic), to actually implement a game in the framework that it turns out I've been writing for a year or two, when I thought I was writing a game.</comment>