Silicon Valley Is Filled With Liars - <AUTHOR> http://nickoneill.com/silicon-valley-is-filled-with-liars/ <comment><USER3> When I was about 12 I remember doing some school craft competition where we had to make and then sell our wares to our teachers. A teacher said something to me that's always stuck, but I always struggle with following.

It was "Don't point out your own short comings"

I was saying things like 'in the final run the paint job will be better', highlighting the deficiencies of our Xmas decorations instead of highlighting the positives.

If you've ever met a good sales person working for your company, they're almost blind to the deficiencies in your products. It's not that they're deceiving you, it's that their internal reality is that that they see the positives, that's all they talk about. That's the product they're selling. If you try and say 'well this bit isn't great', they give you a confused look.

As soon as the 'negatives' click, their sales plummet. It's a built in defence mechanism to add confidence and to be honest it's up to the client to see the deficiencies, not the sales person.

That's kind of like a start up founder is, they've got to focus on the positives just to keep going. To stay working the hours, to keep their team going. To keep believing it will work out in the end. Having been part of a failed startup, I think the time for honest reflection and learning is afterwards.

But saying you've met x and y and z, worked for a company you haven't and photoshopping yourself in photos?

That's not the same thing at all.

That's just fraud.

Let's not conflate the two as this article has.

<comment><USER4> As we discussed in the comments of the post, I think I simply blur the definition of "lying". Stretching the truth, or purposely omitting the other side of the story is a form of lying if you ask me. Am I completely wrong here?

<comment><USER5> Aaron Swartz has a post on dishonesty: <http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/intellectualdishonesty>

> _Dishonesty has two parts: 1) saying something that is untrue, and 2) saying > it with the intent to mislead the other person._

He goes on to agree with Feynman: there are times where we "should ben[d] over backwards to show how [we] are maybe wrong" [1].

Yet, Aaron later states that "intellectual" honesty is an "impractical standard" to apply to every-day life. Some occasions call for it, others don't. Unfortunately, where we draw the line seems to be moving towards the latter.

1\. <http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm>

<comment><USER6> It takes two people to lie, Marge - one to lie, and one to be lied to.

      -- Homer Simpson

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What especially bothers me about this sort of trend is that it forces those of us who aren't big on bullshitting to do it anyway.

The impression I've gotten is that prospective investors and the like expect that you're going to contort your numbers into a just-over-the-horizon hockey stick. So, any stance that rejects this fake 'crushing it'[1] mentality is viewed as an indication that you're failing miserably.

[1] For the record, I absolutely hate this term. I'm sure Gary Vaynerchuk is a great guy, but I think he's done the world a disservice with this asinine idiom.

edit: I'm not justifying engaging in this behavior at all. See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4457448>

<comment><USER8> _> What especially bothers me about this sort of trend is that it forces those of us who aren't big on bullshitting to do it anyway._

The slippery slope that reminds me of the Harvard cheating article that was on the HN frontpage today [1]. It also reminds me of doping among professional athletes.

If others are lying/cheating/doping to get ahead and succeed, I wonder what the "right thing to do" is, for those who manage to have the perspective to think of how they _should_ act.

[1]<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4456210>

<comment><USER7> > I wonder what the "right thing to do" is, for those who manage to have the > perspective to think of how they should act

I'm consulting enough to pay my bills and live comfortably, while building products for which I will charge money. If these products work out, then awesome! If not, no harm done. I've learned a bunch of new skills and added some cool new pieces to my portfolio, which I can flip into picking up new clients at a higher rate.

I guess I'm pursuing a 'lifestyle' business. More power to the folks who want to raise a round of funding and work 80 hour weeks, but it's becoming less and less interesting to me over time. Especially now that I've been through a few soul-crushing startup experiences.

<comment><USER9> "I'm pursuing a 'lifestyle' business"

Nothing at all wrong with starting small and building up from there. Don't apologize. Work 80 per week in your "lifestyle" business and you will see it grow.

<comment><USER7> I'm definitely not apologizing, nor am I working 80 hours a week on my 'lifestyle' business :)

The contract I'm doing right now is, by far, the best job I've ever had. My stylist remarked to me the other day that I haven't lost any more hair in between my last two visits to him. My girlfriend thinks I'm generally more relaxed and happier than she's ever seen me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Every place full of ambitious people is full of liars, but I've lived in several such places and overall the _ratio_ of lying to ambition here is lower than anywhere else I've found. There are a lot more posers in New York and LA and Cambridge than there are in SV.

<comment><USER11> New York poser: Lies about how much money they have, how much they enjoy investment banking/BigLaw, the cool bands they know, etc

LA Poser: Lies about being friends with celebrities, deals they're working on, movies they're making etc

Cambridge poser: ??? How many books they've read? How many ancestors came over on the Mayflower?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You think Silicon Valley is bad? Hahaha. You should see Toronto. The distribution here is totally bimodal. The 10 to 15% that get it and the remainder that are so totally clueless it isn't even funny.

I once, when I was younger and dumber, had a self-proclaimed "angel" investor tell me that he needed to ask his wife if he could invest 25k after leading me to believe he could close a whole round himself. Of course this was 3 or 4 months after we first started talking to him.

Man, I have to stop myself or I'm going to end up being quoted in a Tech Crunch article. At least in SV lies at least have some _point_ to them. Make more money, or initiate a relationship. Over here people don't even lie for a purpose, they do it just to try to look cool and waste other peoples time.

<comment><USER13> I really wish we could fix the situation here in Toronto. I really don't want to have to go to the Valley, there are competitive reasons why I want to keep my startup here. But if funding is as difficult to find as Torontonians make it out to be, I may have to move.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I agree with the general point of this, but disagree on the tone and the implications.

The main thrust here seems to be "everyone lies, get over it", which seems counterproductive. There also seems to be some equivocation over, say, using a true but empty metric to promote your business... and photoshopping yourself into a picture with a celeb, or falsely claiming to be an employee of a company.

These things are both fibs, but one is IMO much, much greater in magnitude than the other. We're all used to people being overly optimistic and deliberately withholding damaging info, but we're not used to outright fraud at this level.

Imagine if a startup claimed to have indexed billions of user contacts (as pointless of a number as it may be) but in fact has indexed only hundreds - all of which from the founders' own phones. This is the severity of fraud we're talking about.

<comment><USER9> Using a "using a true but empty metric to promote your business" is more like being creative in that the reader, if careful, should be able to spot the bullshit. The same as when you read product labels or any advertising copy.

I've seen web hosting companies refer to their hard disk space as "premium" storage or with other adjectives to make it appear as if you are getting something which is better than an ordinary seagate server grade hard drives (as if some server company is going to use consumer grade drives). Colo companies talk extensively about biometric security at their facilities (note if your stuff is that important that you care about that you should probably go onsite and verify it, right?).

So what the startups are really doing is just what ad agencies have done for decades. They are using words to sell their product in a creative way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The _world_ is filled with liars. I can come up with examples of this happening outside Silicon Valley for almost all of these points.

Vanity metrics? "Customers saved an average of $200 by switching to Geico"

Acquisition boasting? I'm sure this happens all the time, but nothing comes to mind immediately.

Perpetual Euphoria? Enron's CEO talked the company up until the last minute.

Perpetual Euphoria for Investors? Housing bubble.

Lying about firings? How many people who publicly resign are actually fired? Happens all the time in DC.

Lying about how committed you are? I'm sure this happens all the time, but nothing comes to mind immediately.

Lying about how much money you're losing? Enron. WorldCom. Banks.

Lying about who you're friends with? Every high schooler in existence.

TL;DR - The world is _filled_ with slimeballs.

<comment><USER16> > _Lying about who you're friends with? Every high schooler in existence._

Who would a high schooler lie about being friends with? Was I really that lame that I don't recall ever doing that?

<comment><USER15> Ok, so maybe it's an exaggeration to say that _everyone_ does that. I bet you'd be surprised if you _really_ sat down and thought about it though.

"You know, Leslie Fischer and I are totally BFFs. She went to the dance with Bobby Jones and told me _all_ about it. She told me he dumped her to hang out with his friends and then started dating that tramp Haley Freeman."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Maybe it's because I don't live in Silicon Valley... or because I'm less "into the startup scene" than other people on HN... but I'm surprised anyone even cares about the TechCrunch article.

Shirley Hornstein is a nobody to me. She fooled some people, which is a shame. But, how many people are really affected by photoshopped pictures with some celebrities on her facebook page. The rest of this isn't particularly newsworthy either.

The TC article is irrelevant gossip. This blog response is sort of a stretch too.

</comment><comment><USER18> I see this often in academia as well, and imo it really damages the scientific literature. When I read an article, I really want an honest assessment by the author of the strengths and weaknesses of their approach and others. I don't only want to hear about how great the author's approach is, but I also want to hear positive things said about the "related work", and negative things said in the Conclusions about their own work. But usually neither of those happens, because then your paper won't be accepted: you need to demolish the existing work and play up your own great contribution. I think it's what happens naturally in environments that are based more on competition than concern for accuracy.

<comment><USER19> My Ph.D. thesis advisor and I are trying to combat this trend in our field. We are working to develop a suite of benchmarks to evaluate and compare different methods/algorithms. The goal is to require everyone to run their code against a set of accepted standard problems in the field and obtain a fair comparison. As reviewers of papers we can and must hold authors accountable to their claims. You can't just claim that your algorithm is superior without comparing it to the work of others on a set of community agreed upon benchmark problems. The scientific review process needs to hold authors accountable for their claims. It isn't an easy task, but with some work it is possible to establish fair metrics. Once these metrics are in place it should no longer be possible to present your ideas in an biased light.

<comment><USER18> That's an interesting approach that I do think can improve some things, but I think the underlying problem is that incentives need to be changed. It's not only metrics, but just giving honest opinions: what use-cases do you _really_ think your algorithm is suited for, not looking at it in the most optimistic possible light? If academia weren't as ultra-competitive as it's become in the past two decades or so, I think there would be more chances of getting honest and useful answers to such questions in papers. One still finds them sometimes in papers of people who don't have to play "the game" anymore: papers by senior full-professor types are often quite interesting because of how they can say what they really think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think the general rule is people who don't do things well that well have to lie about these things. Like everywhere else, Silicon Valley has probably a greater number of people who don't do things well than people who do, so there are lots of people fibbing.

That said, there are some people in Silicon Valley who are doing a great job at what they do, and for them statistics, etc. are useful tools to show what they are doing well.

As a general rule, it is probably better to focus on the people who are doing things well and to attempt to imitate them, rather than the people telling you about their tech startup while they run a food truck.

</comment><comment><USER21> I have decided that for me personally, the comments defending the original TC article are what I'll point to when I say "HN really has gone downhill". The article was awful journalism (it shouldn't even be considered journalism) and read like a gossip rag except no one knew or cared about the girl in question.

It's not good to lie but writing a takedown piece about a nobody makes you look like a bigger ass than the subject of the article itself. Especially when the entirely of the story could be summed up as "this girl lied about being a big shot. Here's some pictures that may or may not have been made by her and may or may not be innocent like how lots of people photoshop people next to famous people". There was no research, it was a dumb story unworthy of coverage by a widely read blog like TC, and I think it's shameful the story ended up on HN at all without being killed let alone the front page.

Yeah sure, it sparked a discussion about ethics and whatnot but if you look at the comments a lot of them read like people discussing the one-sided farces that are reality shows.

</comment><comment><USER22> The author may have a point in general, but using Holstein is sounding more and more like the wrong example to stand behind.

One of the comments in the blog post points to a very in-depth betabeat article that says that Holstein was involved with much more than just name dropping... she has been accused of credit card fraud and ripping off people around her. If the allegations are true, it might be that she is a criminal and a pathological liar with likely mental issues.

[http://betabeat.com/2012/08/shirley-hornstein-shirls- credit-...](http://betabeat.com/2012/08/shirley-hornstein-shirls-credit-card- fraud-records/)

<comment><USER23> That isn't necessarily credit card fraud though. It could just be unapproved expenses and incidentals.

When I worked with Fortune 500 Co, I had unapproved expenses that I had to pay for. I wouldn't consider that "stealing." All we know from that article is "several thousands".. could that be dry cleaning bills over 3 years or is she buying HDTV's on amazon. hard to say.

The problem I have with all this, is all this evidence seems rather circumstantial. I don't even know this woman or have any interest in this topic other than playing contrarian and thinking to myself if someone kept tabs on all my poor behavior over the course of a few years, I'm sure I too could come out looking like a pathological liar with mental issues.

<comment><USER24> The e-mail from Michael Herzog, assuming it's legitimate, is pretty damning. Unapproved incidentals doesn't account for using someone else's work credit card to purchase multiple plane tickets. I agree with your broader point, however, and don't think this story is particularly appropriate, at least for HackerNews_(t-3).

<comment><USER23> I went back and read the article you mentioned, and I still don't. I see a corporate credit card being used for travel expenses and incidentals. He even says in the "damning" email that she met a business associate of his.

I see an accusation, but I also see a business meeting and a corporate credit card being used.

I don't see theft, pathological lying and a mental disorder, but there very well could be dishonesty going on. Who knows, though. This is why we have courts of law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've just returned from a three-week vacation, and one thing that strikes me as I re-enter our little world of tech is how much of the attention and focus of our incredibly rich and fortunate community is spent on bitterness and negativity. I'm not claiming any kind of superiority (I've engaged in my share of negativity), it's just an observation, and I want to see if I can avoid it in the future while still participating in the extreme mental stimulation that drew me to tech in the first place.

<comment><USER26> I think part of the hacker ethic is not being afraid to point out when you think something's wrong, because it's how communities (and software projects) improve. You may take this post as negativity, but I think it's intended to start a discussion about how things can improve, which is a positive thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Its worth considering why this happens.

A startup hub like Silicon Valley is partially valuable because founders / investors / etc run into each other, and presumably something good comes out of these chance meetings.

Let's assume John is running a failing startup. John goes to TC Disrupt and meets all sorts of people, some of whom ask him how his startup is doing?

John can't say that his startup has no traction, or that they can't get investors lined up, or that the last startup he ran was a failure. If there's a shot this person can help John out, he's best served by presenting an optimistic and selective version of the truth. Which is where things like vanity metrics come in.

Even if Valley folks didn't judge startups for having a tough time, it would be in every founders incentive to present a positive outward image.

There's an art to this where you shouldn't lie or present metrics so ludicrous they tip off the bullshit-meter of whoever you're talking to. But some combination of honesty, optimism, and determination seems like a better formula than listing the shortcomings of your startup in your first casual conversation with someone you just met.

</comment><comment><USER28> There's a difference between positive euphemism/spin and outright fabrications.

Also, when creating/leading you often have to preemptively believe things at the edge (or just over the edge) of plausibility, in order to have any chance to "make them true". Such statements are not 'true' in a rigorous academic or legal sense, and even have a risk of becoming completely falsified as events develop.

But at the time and in the spirit in which they were offered, they declare the speaker's honest hopes and beliefs about what's possible. Sometimes the speaker is even deceiving themself, by signalling more certainty than is warranted about uncertain outcomes.

Culturally, people should understand that implicit disclaimers apply... as when a coach tells their team, "we're going to outplay our opponent" or a commander tells their soldiers, "we're going to take this objective". The statements are aspirational, not yet literally true, and they are spoken aloud as an intentional mechanism for increasing their chances of coming true.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think lies are the nature of our industry: it is a self-propelled train, with each element of a chain working mainly to 'sell' everything to the next one, with little regard about its intrinsic value, more to the ability to be sold to the next one (which goes straight to the IPO, see Facebook). In the end, public and pension funds pay for that, so we are basically cashing out people's future pensions now (as we know, almost all pension programs are underfunded, mainly for this reason: their managers invest in shit, for the lack of anything else). This is much like how MLM works, except the last level (victim) is more clearly defined.

I am not telling things are totally that bad, but i am sure it is a big part of Silicon Valley success: it is a collection of top sellers in the world, and they are more successful in mortgaging other's future that everyone else.

People who are trying to play it fair are labeled 'lifestyle businesses' and ostracized.

</comment><comment><USER30> Most lies in the startup community are shallow lies that mislead those who don't have filters or don't care enough about a particular entity to do their homework about them. It's deep lies where people attempt to mislead even those that are doing due diligence that are high risk. Shallow lies have a lower, but still significant, risk to the liars.

I think it's good to ask why someone is singling out a single person or company for shallow lies, as it might reveal a bias. Something doesn't seem quite right about that TechCrunch post.

With some shallow lies, large amounts of money is at stake. Investors will make mistakes and lose money. These shallow lies are worth paying attention to and so are those who keep getting fooled by them.

</comment><comment><USER31> And then here is Steve Blank, beloved by so many here, asking everyone not to lie: <http://steveblank.com/2012/07/30/lying-on-your-resume/> while companies are allowed to lie.

</comment><comment><USER32> It seems disingenuous to compare what "Shirls" did with many of the points made in the article.

"We're doing well, our investors are happy!" is saving face (or, perhaps they want to believe it so badly that they do).

What she did is the equivalent of falsely saying "We have an investment from Andreessen Horowitz -- see, here's a copy of our term sheet!" and then using the person's credit card to buy yourself a plane ticket.

Everybody lies a bit to themselves feel better when things are going badly. Congressmen leave to spend time with their family, breakups are always "mutual", etc. This is completely different than the TC article.

</comment><comment><USER33> Show me an honest company with a solid service or product and I will be more than willing to support them financially.

At the end of the day I think people who work for companies like that feel better about what they're doing than [famous lying CEO] wannabes.

When you rely on lying over and over again, your whole life becomes a lie. Maybe you are worth something to a market, but to many people you are worthless. As a liar you have no value to them.

There is huge value in honesty. Maybe it can't be measured in financial terms. But I personally will pay a premium for honesty. It's of limited supply and always in demand.

+1 for nickoneill

</comment><comment><USER34> The most successful people I know are straight shooters who tell it like it is. Even the mild bullshitters I know are struggling to make anything happen.

VCs will not hand over tens of millions of dollars to someone they know is a liar or habitual exaggerator. Sure, they don't always find out in time. But I really haven't seen that strategy work out.

There is no benefit to telling a good story unless you actually have a good story.

<comment><USER35> _The most successful people I know are straight shooters who tell it like it is._

Once you're successful, you can be that way. I think it's pretty rare that people get successful as "straight shooters". Telling the truth makes you a bearer of bad news a lot of the time. I know, because I've been described as "pathologically honest", and often it doesn't end well.

You can "speak truth to power" if you wish. Power already knows the truth. So the only thing you do, by doing so, is identify yourself as a threat, now that they know you know. And the last thing power wants is an epidemic of truth- knowing (i.e. a morale problem).

<comment><USER34> I've found that a lot of people will use "telling the truth" to rationalize a lot of negative behavior. We can all easily mistake our own uninformed opinions for "the truth". One way to learn the difference is to notice when "telling the truth" causes you to be misunderstood often.

The successful people I'm referring to were not bullshitters before or after their success. Bullshitting really not a success trait. It's a wannabe trait that ends up losing.

<comment><USER36> What I think works is being totally forthcoming about problems, risks, etc. in the past and present, but maybe being a bit optimistic about future possibilities. i.e. "This quarter our sales were down 10%, but we think it was due to reason x, and we have strategy y in place to address that. We will be monitoring closely and adjust as needed.".

You don't want to say "there wasn't a problem", but you also don't want to say "sales went down, we have no idea why, we're just going to continue" or "sales went down, we're doomed."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The premise of the article is wrong. The post would lead to an argument saying every marketing effort is a lie. Which is a dangerous argument, since it would imply everyone trying to say "it cost me x dollars to do this. pls pay y" - <USER2> which case, no business would exist.

Everyone does a bit of marketing - big mac says total burgers sold a number that always goup. nothing wrong with that, IMO

</comment><comment><USER38> White lies are a necessary evil in business and in life. Would you tell someone with terminal illness that they look like shit and that there's no hope? It is a good thing, however, that YC has been turning back the dial on presenting vanity metrics + funding pitches at their demo days. At some unquantifiable threshold, white lies do become outright lies.

<comment><USER39> Traxler: How do I look?

Vukovic: Like shit, boss

Traxler: Your mama!

 _The Terminator_ , 1984

</comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands To me it's funny to hear people complain about people lying in the startup and tech industry. You should hang out with some outside sales people sometime. Those guys make what she did look like a girl scout bake sale.

</comment><comment><USER40> Like them or not, these kinds of exaggerations and not-quite-lies are common in business for a good reason: if customers, partners, investors, and/or employees ever perceive a company as a failure, _they will start leaving the company_. Once a company starts losing customers, partners, investors, and/or top people, it can quickly find itself in a downward spiral that is extremely difficult to reverse.

When it comes to entrepreneurs specifically, more often than not the positive spin is just a sincere effort to generate momentum 'out of thin air' when facing the harsh realities and stomach-churning odds of entrepreneurship.

What that woman profiled in TechCrunch did, however, was very different: she crossed the line.

<comment><USER41> > When it comes to entrepreneurs specifically, more often than not these white > lies are nothing more than a sincere effort to generate positive momentum > 'out of thin air' when facing the harsh realities of entrepreneurship.

Which is why talk is cheap. Anyone can bullshit, startup founder or no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> America is full of liars. The world is full of liars. 90% of all employees are incompetent. Doesn't cancel out your point, however.

</comment><comment><USER43> She's very good at photoshop. I wish I had more to say.

</comment><comment><USER35> People are piling on Shirley Hornstein because (1) she got caught, and (2) she's female. The second of these is 90 percent of it.

If you "trick" powerful people into accepting you as one of your own by claiming connections you don't have, and succeed in doing so, you've earned it. (If you fail, then slink away quietly and try again in a couple of years.) A lot of people are dumbasses who let the crowd make their decisions for them, and they deserve what they get from people who can mislead them about the crowd opinion (and mostly, those outsiders are just as competent, and would only be rejected because they weren't born in the "right" place).

Overt fraud is wrong. If you claim to be a doctor and don't know a thing about medicine, that's quackery and it endangers people and you belong in jail. If you convince the powerful that you are part of their club until the lie becomes true, then it's not really my thing, but I see nothing wrong with it.

<comment><USER44> Claiming that you worked at company X when you didn't is like claiming that you have a degree from a university that you didn't attend, and is one of the most clear-cut and common examples of professional deceit. I don't think this is a sexism issue at all -- look at how roundly Alexey Vayner was mocked. While I don't think the TechCrunch article was an example of charitable judgment, people are bloodthirsty and love to string up an "example case" every so often.

<comment><USER35> The more I read up on her, the less I like her.

I agree. "Borrowing fame" is one thing, but claiming you worked at a company where you didn't is unethical.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to replicate dev and production? - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to determine how I should set up a virtual machine to match my production environment. The choices between Salt, Chef, Ansible, Puppet, etc. are overwhelming. They also all seem to have a focus on many machines in a network, whereas I'm just worried about my local dev VM and a single VPS for personal projects. Maybe I should just use a plain bash script? All I'm looking to do is automate the installation of nginx, node, etc.. Configure all the virtual sites, create and manage some user accounts and other configuration. <comment><USER2> There are some great sites for building configurations: [https://puphpet.com/](https://puphpet.com/) [http://phansible.com/](http://phansible.com/) [http://rove.io/](http://rove.io/)

I've had great success recently with builds based on a setup from Puphpet. It's fairly easy to add additional PuppetForge modules and build out your installation with custom scripts.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Dotnet Core mature enough for production use in a startup? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I see it being used more & more in production after an internal test. 1 of the companies has > 1000 employees.

As i assume, they have testing thoroughly after they are moving it to production applications.

To answer your question: Yes

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Why I even care? I am continually being impressed by VSCode's and on digging deeper I found it's a product by a company called Microsoft.

So, I figured out that they also have a language called C# and dotnet core platform.

Now I am left wondering whether, it's something as impressive as VSCode or not.</comment>


Ask HN: Thriving in Information Systems Development/Consultancy - <AUTHOR> I work as developer for 13 years in IT/Business Consultancy and I feel stagnated in the field. I never liked this area, I was passionate in CG/AI when I took the degree but I ended working for consultancy like companies.
I have been doing tables and forms all my career, never been promoted to manager role.
Do you see any future in this area? Are the IT Consultant developers the new administrative employees? The new secretaries with the democratization of software development?
How do you thrive and keep motivated if you are working in this area? And why business area development still need engineers when the patterns are all the same like form/tables/validation/database management cycle. Is this area doomed to low wage due to skills necessary to perform the job? <comment><AUTHOR> It is not difficult to imagine a public servant writing some lines of code in the end of the day, after doing administrative tasks.</comment>


Intel announces new $7B fab from Oval Office - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-intel-whitehouse-idUSKBN15N29X <comment><USER2> Main discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13600527](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13600527)

</comment><comment><USER3> Marketing and Trump sucking. Factory was planned and spending committed long before Trump ever stole the election.

Nice to see who's going to stand up for democracy.

<comment><USER4> The U.S. Dept of Energy and NSA are massive Intel buyers. Especially for Intel MIC. They can't sell MIC to China so there is very much a deal in play.

<comment><USER4> Loser of course is IBM. Trump will axe DOE POWER purchases unless IBM starts onshoring more.</comment></comment></comment>


Handling big data with probabilistic data structures.  PyCon 2011. (video) - <AUTHOR> http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/pycon-2011-handling-ridiculous-amounts-of-data-with-probabilistic-data-structures-4899047 <comment><USER2> Request: could submitters of long videos add a few words in a comment to say what it's about and for whom it will be worth watching?

From listening to the audio while doing other things:

This talk was largely about shotgun assembly of genetic sequence graphs using Bloom filters. There is some detail on Bloom filters, with Python code, and how to piece together overlaps of strings using them. There is high level discussion of how it would be nice to chunk up biological problems to make them map-reducable, but (understandably) not much detail.

The talk's pretty slow for anyone that has seen a few uses of Bloom filters, but it's a clear and nicely motivated talk for anyone that hasn't seen that flavor of data structure.</comment>


The Shell Hater's Handbook (2010) [video] - <AUTHOR> http://confreaks.tv/videos/gogaruco2010-the-shell-hater-s-handbook <comment><USER2> I spent many years avoiding shell, in large part because all the arbitrary- looking syntax and features (like quoting rules) the speaker highlights make it frustrating and difficult to master, and I felt like it was a treacherous enemy to be overcome through desperate struggle, rather than a tool and ally to rely on. I know some people thrive on mastering complex and intricate rules, but that's not my forte. I do better with overarching principles and a unified set of orthogonal constructs, such as C (ok, debatable, but compare to C++), Lisp, Python or Haskell.

It took a lot of pushing from a mentor for me to finally click with the overarching principles of shell and see how to master it and become productive with it. He really forced me into it as well, I wasn't a willing pupil for quite some time, but he kept persisting and finally I started listening to him. I'm so glad I did. I've never read any book or tutorial or guide that teaches what he taught me either, despite searching several times. Also, I don't think I could have learned to master shell if I hadn't learned functional programming first. The day I realised how amenable shell is to higher-order thinking was a real epiphany.

These days shell is a really important tool in my toolkit, and I can see just how much some of my colleagues are held back by not knowing it.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the video, it was a nice exposition.

<comment><USER3> > _These days shell is a really important tool in my toolkit, and I can see > just how much some of my colleagues are held back by not knowing it._

Perhaps, but the shell is still a badly accrued (more than designed) set of options.

<comment><USER2> Yes, totally agree. But it offers something different to say Python, as the video points out. Some things are more compact in shell than in Python, because it's not the same sort of programming language as Python. And I reach for Python as well, when it's the right tool.

<comment><USER3> True. I'm not against a DSL for working with CLI programs, pipes, output streams, processes, etc. Just that the shell as we know it is not the optimal (or even close to optimal) example of that.

Something like ZSH and the modern Fish shell showed how much traditional shells can improve, but we also need some better primitives, and more controlled experience.

Oh, and they should NOT be based on emulating 40+ year old teletypes anymore, except as part of a "legacy" mode.

<comment><USER4> Totally agree, the concept is nice and really useful but its implementation is for a large part really a big pile of fragile and confusing hacks. Most of the power comes of powerful tools like find, sed, awk (being a programming language on its own), etc. The language gluing them together is nicely compact but apart from that very disappointing. Also the everything is a string approach has its limitations. A python script may sometimes be longer but a lot less riddled with annoying corner cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This[1] Stack Overflow question sums up everything I dislike about shell scripting. Not only does it highlight the finnicky string-oriented nature of it, but the answers...

Multiple contradictory answers, disagreement, sub-sub-sub explanations, historical context, caveats, workarounds, hypothetical scenarios, portability, personal taste, different versions and implementations all show up. One answerer felt the need to include a _footnote_.

It's like the opposite of Python's "there's one right way to do it": There are 50 right ways to do it, all of which are wrong in some case or another, potentially depending on which way the wind is blowing.

All in regards to _checking for an empty string_.

[1] [http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/136628/bash- script-x...](http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/136628/bash-script-x1-x)

<comment><USER6> Not to start a war, but Python's "there's one right way to do it" is nothing more than an ambitious claim with little ground. Maybe it applies for doing something brainless like printing a string, but the claim completely falls apart when trying to do something as simple as list indexing/slicing or even iteration. I'm not condemning Python in anyway, I am a fan of the latter mention features, but that "zen" of Python is not applicable.

<comment><USER7> > Python's "there's one right way to do it" is nothing more than an ambitious > claim with little ground.

Probably better described as an _ideal_ , not always lived up to, but serves as a guiding principle...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So... He was ... Bashing bash?,

I for one like my shells dirty with hidden corners and black magic. Name anywhere where you do not have bash available; embedded, grub, rescue boot shells. I don't do embedded. Never will.

But on a serious note, does anyone know a good resource where I can pick up a better la guage and never have to bash script again? I love writing it. It I am sooo restricted by it, yet keep solving problems with it and also making good money like last night. Maybe Python is the way?

<comment><USER9> I'm familiar enough with Bash to have written an opinionated but more-or-less comprehensive guide to it. I think Bash should be avoided as much as possible. Bash is great for things that you would have had to type out anyway, but using it to write programs is foolish. My rule of thumb has become, "if it's more than 30 lines long, or if it uses more than two variables, it should be written in another language". That said, I'm in the process of learning how to do that myself.

Python is definitely a capable language for scripting, but I would also point out that Homebrew is built on Ruby and uses that to great effect. You might also check out this article on scripting with Ruby:

[http://radek.io/2015/07/13/ruby-scripting/](http://radek.io/2015/07/13/ruby- scripting/)

And if anyone else has any tips on this subject please do pass them along.

<comment><USER2> I appreciate your point, but I think the choice to write all or parts of an application in shell depends a lot on what you need to achieve. Writing 100 lines of shell to glue parts of your application together may be the best way to ship something today, even if you plan to replace that with another language in 3 or 6 months time.

Would you care to give a link to your guide? I'd be interested to read it.

<comment><USER9> With a few caveats:

* It's a work in progress and a bit lacking in visual presentation at the moment

* The target audience is the novice developer

* I am writing from my own experience and I am not an expert

* "comprehensive guide" should probably have been "comprehensive primer". This is what I think beginning devs should know about the shell.

[https://tenebrousedge.github.io/shell_guide/shell_guide.html](https://tenebrousedge.github.io/shell_guide/shell_guide.html)

Commentary, contributions, and criticism are invited.

As far as 'shipping something today' is concerned, that's what keeps me from learning vim. At the moment I'm both working and going to school full-time, so I feel like I can't _quite_ justify the time investment, but I know I'm holding myself back from being a far more effective programmer.

I also have an acquaintance doing computational biology for whom Bash is an essential part of his toolkit for DNA analysis. Bash sometimes is the right tool for the job. It excels at text processing. It's just archaic and ugly, and we have nicer options available for programming languages.

(and now that my SO is up I think I'll watch this video)

<comment><USER2> Thank you. Looks like you've packed a lot of good stuff in there already.

I only skimmed so far, but this quote stuck out:

"Programming is fundamentally a way to save human labor, and that includes our own labor."

I'm continually amazed at how many software engineers seem to miss this point.

<comment><USER9> Yes, that line came out of arguments with greybeards about the problems of the younger generation and using all these fancy frameworks and wasting memory and CPU cycles.

I will also add the further caveat for anyone else who arrives here that this was written in stolen hours in the last two weeks, and specifically because the page of 'Assumed Knowledge' referred to in the introduction seems to have been the only instruction in the shell given at Epicodus' Intro to Programming. I'll never love Bash as a programming language, but given that it's a tool developers use every day, I do think there's a certain minimum amount of knowledge required to use it well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> the resource that he made has been moved to [http://shellhaters.org/](http://shellhaters.org/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Reading this thread and the discussion of the pros and cons of the shell, reminded me of this:

The Bentley-Knuth problem and solutions:

[https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/07/the-bentley-knuth- problem...](https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/07/the-bentley-knuth-problem-and- solutions.html)

It is about an interesting programming problem to do with text processing - involving finding word frequencies (apparently initially posed by Jon Bentley to Donald Knuth).

The above post (on my blog) has two solutions by me, in Python and shell, and links to the original discussion on another blog, where I first read about the problem - which was an interesting read, with many comments:

More shell, less egg:

[http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less- egg...](http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Inevitably when shell programming is mentioned, particularly bash, I hear quite a few devs/programmers talk about how "shell is bad and you shouldn't use it" maybe with an added "for anything not a one-off or over 20 lines"...

I completely disagree. As the sysadmin who has been the guy actually managing devs/programmers messes in prod, shell is the one thing that just works, is easily readable, is easily documented, is fairly easy to write, and generally keeps me from pulling my hair out or become violent with the devs.

Take it from the guy who actually has to wrangle all your strange python/perl/go/node... bullshit, shell is something you shouldn't be bashing.

<comment><USER7> > shell is something you shouldn't be bashing.

But apparently, bash is something you should be s(h)elling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Don't use "[ ... -a ... ]". It's not portable and has unclear semantics.

</comment><comment> m-j-fox [https://youtu.be/olH-9b3VJfs](https://youtu.be/olH-9b3VJfs)

</comment><comment><USER13> So where's the actual handbook?

</comment><comment><USER14> Funny presenter.</comment>


ArduSat - Your Arduino Experiment in Space - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/575960623/ardusat-your-arduino-experiment-in-space

<comment><AUTHOR> ArduSat is a Kickstarter project that will put an Arduino-based satellite up for rent to run your own experiments (or even your own code) in Space.

Crowdfunding + OpenSource hardware + Shared usage via rental = Democratization of Space!</comment>


Hired Raises $15M Series A At Valuation Around $60M - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/24/hired-raises-15m-series-a/

<comment><USER2> I've used Hired in the past and it was an unbelievably good experience. A few hours after filling out a profile offers started to come in from companies ranging in size from 5-200 employees with salaries ranging from 90% to 170% of my current. My 'Talent Advocate' helped arrange interviews, bought my plane ticket, and showed me around the city. I wish these guys the best!

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats to the Hired team! I went through two auctions last summer, and it was an excellent experience. I didn't wind up joining one of the companies from the auctions, but I got several quality offers/interviews and an excellent referral bonus for referring a friend. I highly recommend giving it a shot if you're trying to look around for a new opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's great! Our analysis last month predicted a $70M valuation:

[http://www.telegraphresearch.com/hired](http://www.telegraphresearch.com/hired)</comment>


Almost Always Add Swap Space - <AUTHOR> https://haydenjames.io/linux-performance-almost-always-add-swap-space/ <comment><USER2> This is bad advice when the swap is backed by spinning disk rather than SSD, in large part because paging in once the problem is solved is not aggressive enough.

Let me make it concrete: say 1 GiB of your application's RAM gets swapped out then is later paged in only as needed (4 KiB pages) with no readahead. Now the application's VM space is a minefield: there are up to 262,144 times it can stall for a ~10 ms disk seek (for a total of ~40 minutes). Sequentially reading in 1 GiB of RAM from disk would take only ~5 seconds.

Hopefully OSs use some readahead, but I'm sure Linux and macOS don't use enough. I find a system that has ever swapped to be totally unusable until I do "sudo swapoff -a" (on Linux) to force everything to be paged in, or just reboot (on macOS, I haven't found any other way).

Some of this can happen even without swap: the OS will still drop clean file- backed pages, so unless you mlock() your executables after startup (my production binary at work does this), you can still have major page fault- induced latency spikes.

Swap backed by SSD (or compressed RAM) should be more reasonable, but I've had enough bad experiences with swap on spinning disk that authoritative-sounding articles that encourage swap without mentioning this problem piss me off.

In contrast, if you don't have swap and run out of RAM, something will die and get restarted. In many cases this is a much better failure mode than continuing to run slowly.

<comment><USER3> Swap sucks, but OOM killer sucks more. It certainly isn't a great solution, but it's good for temporary spikes.

You can adjust "swappiness" if it's moving stuff to disk too aggressively.

<comment><USER2> > Swap sucks, but OOM killer sucks more. It certainly isn't a great solution, > but it's good for temporary spikes.

I disagree. The OOM killer usually kills the right thing, and if it doesn't a quick restart is usually better than continuing to run slowly.

You can also just put things in containers and set per-container limits.

> You can adjust "swappiness" if it's moving stuff to disk too aggressively.

What I want is to adjust un-swappiness: aggressiveness of paging stuff back in. Once the memory spike is over, it should page everything back in automatically.

<comment><USER4> The OOM killer is just fine for stateless server applications, but pretty much anything else and it's a disaster waiting to happen.

Containers don't really solve your problem, it just adds a layer of indirection between the processes hogging RAM and the OOM killer, which in my experience adds even more uncertainty into what the OOM killer is going to do.

<comment><USER2> > The OOM killer is just fine for stateless server applications, but pretty > much anything else and it's a disaster waiting to happen.

I won't say there's no circumstance in which the OOM killer is worse, but in general I disagree with you.

A stateful server application: maybe a standard ACID DBMS like PostgreSQL. I'd much rather it get killed (failing whatever transactions were in progress) and restart in a healthy state than continue to run slowly. Here I'm relying on a correct implementation of Durability, but if you don't have that, you have other problems.

Even more so for a quorum-based database server in which the leader dying (and another taking over) is much better than continuing to run slowly.

And yes, even more so in stateless servers, particularly when there are several of them. Going down and restarting quickly (a brief loss of capacity, a brief spike of errors if the client doesn't retry) is a lot better than continuing to be slow (a sustained loss of capacity, possibly leading to cascading overload; and user-visible latency problems if there's no hedging).

For something like a desktop application, it's debatable, but personally I'd still rather endure the up-front nuisance of having to restart it than have the OS try to paper over it until I finally realize why it's so painful and do something about it. (Insert anecdote about frog boiling here; I hear frogs actually do jump out before they boil, but yet somehow the story still rings true, if you know what I mean.)

<comment><USER4> Databases are just one kind of stateful server application though, and yes I would agree with you for that usecase relying on it's underlying durability is a good thing, because it's built with that in mind.

Instead I would like to point out the ubiquity of things like nodejs, which make it all to easy for under-experienced developers to shoot themselves in the foot w/ a chaingun with respect to data design and management. It's not really the internal state of the nodejs process itself, it's the external state that it is inevitably being manipulated in the node process.

<comment><USER2> I'd rather go full chaos monkey and shake out such bugs (/design flaws) than try to avoid them.

<comment><USER4> Completely agree there.

Some times that luxury doesn't exist though and you just have to get shit done and hope playing fast and loose doesn't come back to bite you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was hoping this post was going to say something like turning on some small amount of swap will allow the OS to cache some things that normally it wouldn't cache at all, and so you get some improvement there. What's actually in this post doesn't make any sense to me. If I have enough RAM why do I want things to swap to begin with? The author never explained why putting rarely used pages in swap will improve performance if I have adequate RAM.

And using swap as some kind of "RAM emergency cover" does not make any sense to me. Personally, I have never had a case where I could gracefully recover a host that had started swapping.

First, my production servers are not doing many other things besides being production servers. It's not like they are running a bunch of unnecessary services, and if I kill some then my application can recover. If a process is out of control then it's almost assuredly something important that I'm going to have to kill anyway.

Second, I find it's much harder to detect degraded performance than it is to detect a dead process. It's very, very easy to have a health check that will detect a host who has stopped listening and drop that host from the LB. And alerting on that scenario is very easy as well. The alternative is a host that's operating in a degraded state, which I need to detect with more sophisticated health check + alerting, and in the end my resolution is just going to be to kill everything anyway.

In a properly designed HA environment the loss of a host should be no big deal. Architecture should be focused on making sure a host goes down ASAP if it's having problems, not letting it survive in some kind of zombie state.

<comment><USER6> > _If I have enough RAM why do I want things to swap to begin with? The author > never explained why putting rarely used pages in swap will improve > performance if I have adequate RAM._

The memory freed from a page that got pushed to swap might be better used for serving disk cache, for example.

If you _don 't_ have enough RAM (even for spikes), a preemptive push when things aren't busy might mean that when they do become busy, you won't have to wait.

At least, that's the theory as I understand it. Whether or not it works _in practice_ , IDK.

> _And using swap as some kind of "RAM emergency cover" does not make any > sense to me. Personally, I have never had a case where I could gracefully > recover a host that had started swapping._

I have successfully recovered hosts that began swapping, and even hosts that filled their swap. But it's beyond painful, and in most of the cases where I have a host doing such swapping, an OOM kill would have been a welcome reprieve.

> _Second, I find it 's much harder to detect degraded performance than it is > to detect a dead process._

Agreed, and restarting something that's been OOM'd is simple enough too. Our hosts tend to stop reporting metrics when they start swapping, simply b/c so little is actually getting done, so they get labelled as "down". Linux also exposes a metric called "major page faults" (IIRC, it's "pgmajfault" in /proc/vmstat) that records the number of major (required service from disk) page faults; if the rate of that value is too steep for too long, that ≅ swap thrashing.

<comment><USER7> The key point is that if you have no swap, and you run low on memory, then the OS has no choice but to throw away stuff that is clean. This includes stuff that is being actively used right now, like the code that is in your processes. So your system will still thrash, even though it has no swap, because it is trying to load pages of running code in on-demand, while constantly throwing them away again because it doesn't have enough space. This will incapacitate a server even more thoroughly than if there is swap, and the working set is larger than physical memory. The more RAM a server has, the more severe this incapacitation will be.

For this reason, you want an OOM killer to kill stuff way earlier than when you actually run out of RAM, because if you ever reach that point it is too late. I use a program called earlyoom, which has saved my server from having to have the big red button pushed quite a few times, when fumble-fingered PhD students "accidentally" consume all the RAM in their pet projects.

<comment><USER2> > I use a program called earlyoom, which has saved my server from having to > have the big red button pushed quite a few times, when fumble-fingered PhD > students "accidentally" consume all the RAM in their pet projects.

Along those lines, take a look at this: [1]

> Pressure stall information were added to Linux 4.20 as a way to quantify > resource pressure in the system in a better way than the traditional load > average. PSI aggregates and reports the overall wallclock time in which the > tasks in a system (or cgroup) wait for cpu, io or memory.

> This release [Linux 5.2] lets users to configure sensitive thresholds and > use poll() and friends to be notified when a certain pressure thresold is > breached within a user-defined time window. With this mechanism, Android can > monitor for, and ward off, mounting memory shortages before they cause > problems for the user. For example, using memory stall, monitors in > userspace like the low memory killer daemon (lmkd) can detect mounting > pressure and kill less important processes before device becomes visibly > sluggish. In memory stress testing psi memory monitors produce roughly 10x > less false positives compared to vmpressure.

I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds promising.

[1] [https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_5.2#Improved_Presure_Stall_I...](https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_5.2#Improved_Presure_Stall_Information_for_better_resource_monitoring)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The Linux Kernel will move memory pages which are hardly ever used into swap > space to ensure that even more cachable space is made available in-memory > for more frequently used memory pages (a page is a piece of memory).

Why should I care if I always have enough RAM? Gedankenexperiment: Let's say u'd have infinite RAM, would swap make any sense?

<comment><USER9> what if an application contains a memory leak. it could hypothetically use up your infinite ram, and linux will then start randomly killing stuff to try and recover.... adding swap allows you to trigger on memory issues / overload without random shit getting killed. you could then kill the offending process yourself specifically being triggered by some memory usage monitor or w/e instead of running the risk of other critical processes being killed.

<comment><USER10> Well to start, slap default resource limits on your processes so they can't use all the RAM in the world. Then your leaky processes will crash when their mallocs fail and everyone will be as happy as they deserve.

<comment><USER2> I agree with the idea, but a nit: on 64-bit Linux with the default vm.overcommit_memory=0, their mallocs will likely continue to succeed. Those just expand the address space, which is probably not what your resource limits are controlling. [1] The actual limit [2] is hit when they try to use the virtual address space, causing a minor page fault (when it's backed by a zero- filled page of physical RAM).

[1] You can add in such a limit via RLIMIT_AS, but it'd have a lot of collateral damage like preventing LMDB from mmap()ing a big database. I don't recommend this.

[2] I'd recommend setting limits on a cgroup; with a systemd unit file, see MemoryMax= and friends in the systemd.resource-control(5) manpage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have manually added swap on SSD VPS nodes that come without it by default. I was under the impression that the hosting providers were trying to preserve the hardware. Is swap space still bad for SSD drives?

</comment><comment><USER12> It's not quite as black and white as the author makes it out to be. I've worked on (specialized) systems with 512gb of RAM with a 180gb SSD installed... No, you're not going to see any performance improvement at all by adding swap to the already insane amount of RAM, and if you run into an OOM issue where swap would be your parachute, you're already fucked.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have 32GB Ram on Ubuntu 18.04. Can I just turn swap off? If I do, what's the worst that will happen?

<comment><USER14> in a sane OS? Nothing until you run out of ram.

In a Microsoft OS? Depends on the app -- some are dependent (many games) on having swap available (and may err silently or under false pretenses without one).

I've found that a _lot_ of MMO style games include cheat detection systems (see : rootkit) that rely on swap, and fail without it. As to why they do that, i'm unsure.

<comment><USER13> Fascinating. Maybe just as a part of the fingerprinting mechanism?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Swap is good. If it is in RAM. Just use zram. Like so:

[https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/master/packages/bsp/co...](https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/master/packages/bsp/common/usr/lib/armbian/armbian- zram-config)

zramctl output from a tiny NanoPiNeo2 with 1GB Ram, running from a 64GB Sandisk SDXC card:

NAME ALGORITHM DISKSIZE DATA COMPR TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT

/dev/zram1 lzo 496.7M 4K 76B 12K 4 [SWAP]

/dev/zram0 zstd 50M 2.5M 449K 832K 4 var/log

Edit: Formatting (useless)

</comment><comment><USER16> Almost never add swap. [1]

[1] - [https://github.com/ohdns/sysctl_and_thp_test](https://github.com/ohdns/sysctl_and_thp_test)

</comment><comment><USER17> One thing the article doesn't mention for those of us who run Linux on laptops (There are dozens of us! Dozens!) is that having a swap partition at least as big as one's physical RAM (if not bigger) is mandatory for hibernation. Linux (like any OS kernel that supports hibernation) needs to save the current contents of RAM somewhere, and (last I checked) it'll only work with swap partitions (swap files don't work for some reason).

</comment><comment><USER18> What I agree is that these days you should still use swap, but swap should always be either on zram or on zswap if you can't use zram for some reason, have too little ram, can't load zram module or something. Raw swap on disk is just not acceptable anymore for performance, security, wearout reasons.

<comment><USER19> > performance, security, wearout reasons

If memory pressure is low, and the swap is used to page out rarely / never used pages in favour of more disk cache, then there is a performance gain to be had, and wear should be minimal.

You can encrypt swap with a randomly generated key to aid security.

Ideally memory compression and disk swap would be used together; there's a gain to be had by shrinking lesser used pages, but no sense in taking up any space in RAM for pages showing no sign of life.

<comment><USER18> More vfs cache for swap space is not a trade off here, but rather a mostly incorrect oversimplification. The value of more cache is very non linear, it depends on the workload and usually only matters when nearly all of the disk I/O is already exhausted, the exact situation you want to prevent by using more of the same disk I/O for swap. Essentially trading more cache for abrupt performance degradation in terms of latency and responsiveness. I mean, sure, if you can't use zram, say you are on a system that's a bit behind on performance features, like freebsd, very light swappiness might be ok, might free up some of very unused memory and just not be aggressive enough to swap something that causes latency, responsiveness problems, although this is not certain. With memory compression you can swap and compress much more of it more aggressively and be certain that no abrupt performance degradation can happen. It feels like having more ram that's gradually affecting tail latency the more you use it.

<comment><USER20> Zram is nice when you're barely using it, but every time I've seen it get low on memory it degrades quite abruptly, much worse than ssd swap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Swap doesn't make difference, just a parachute for your apps: give some work guaranties, but make things slower & eats resources of SSDs.

I'm prefer add RAM as much my tasks needs it.

<comment><USER7> Without swap, your server could potentially become suddenly unresponsive, as memory pressure forces all your running code out. The system will still be thrashing, and even worse than it you did have swap. If you do have swap, then you get a slightly more graceful degradation, and hopefully a chance to fix the problem first.

What you really want is to never have a severe out of memory situation, and you can do that either by getting enough RAM that you never use it all, or by killing stuff nice and early when memory starts getting low.

<comment><USER21> > Without swap, your server could potentially become suddenly unresponsive

The server never be unresponsive 'cause lack of swap. Don't like the logic "we just add a swap and maybe it will be slower a bit, but still working".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> For another perspective, the Kubernetes community has had a long discussion about using swap space over the course of the last 2 1/2 years, as you can see in this feature thread: [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/53533](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/53533) TL;dr: As of version 1.8 any system running k8s has to disable swap space or formally mark in the kubelet that you are turning the check for it off. There are good arguments on both sides of this issue, and the discussion is still continuing.

</comment><comment><USER23> OP serves up animated ads directly from the origin URL -- unblockable by umatrix. Very sophisticated indeed.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is it true that swap reduces the life expectancy of SSDs by writing too frequently?

<comment><USER25> I think this used to be the case with older SSDs, but newer ones are able to survive much longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Learned about atop. Wish it existed on macOS too.

<comment><USER22> Also check out glances: [https://nicolargo.github.io/glances/](https://nicolargo.github.io/glances/) A good terminal display overview of processes, network, disk, and battery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> SSD V Spinner? Metal V VM?</comment>


Is anyone making something women want? - <AUTHOR>

Not being sexist, but they seem to -want- more than us, and walking into any shopping area seems to confirm that vendors know this.  My problem is that from a tech standpoint, it's hard to gauge what a viable need for them is. <comment><USER2> I was on a first date the other week and was explaining some of my ideas and the lady I was with nearly wet herself with excitement telling me about a webapp she'd love to have. After thinking about it and asking a few other women I know, I'm going to start working on it and apply to YC with it.

Most every idea I came up with seems like someone else has already done. This one... I spent two days searching and found nothing comparable.

<comment><USER3> honestly I don't know why you got 5 points since you didn't mention anything about your app besides that your date "almost wet herself"; and I'm willing to bet that there are 5 other teams with the same idea.

Is it anything like this: (porn for women SFW) <http://www.cafemom.com/journals/read.php?post_id=378609>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In grad school I consulted for a company making CAD software for clothing designers. They said that 60% of the clothing business is women's clothing, and the other 40% shared between men and children.

<comment><AUTHOR> That other 40%, if shared equally between men and children, means that approximately 80% of the purchasing decisions are made by women. I am basing this on the chauvinist assumption that women pick out and buy the majority of clothes for the kids. If this article is correct, that 80% holds for a lot more than clothes: <http://www.clickz.com/3363331>

<comment><USER5> It wouldn't surprise me if women bought, or at least had a say in, a statistically significant portion of men's clothing as well.

<comment><USER6> I used to work christmas week at a men's clothing store..

90% of our customers were women, even though we didn't sell women's clothing at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most of my other ideas (other than my current Virtualmin, Inc. business) were targeted to women. One a sort of niche-focused social network, one a video/photo dating site, and one a porn site (oh, wait...that one would have mainly attracted men, I guess...but everybody in the valley has a backup pr0n plan...it's what you talk about after a couple of beers..almost nobody is really serious about it, me included).

<comment><USER8> what? i'm not the only one with a backup pr0n plan?

i'd be so rich right now, if it weren't for these bullshit scruples.

<comment><USER7> No, you're definitely not the only one. I learned at the last YC dinner that pg and the Viaweb bunch had one, too (a pretty clever one, at that).

<comment><USER8> Here's mine. You ever play Erotic Photo Hunt? It's a game on those touchscreen video kiosks in bars. Each round, you're shown two almost-identical pictures of a scantily-clad girl. You've got a minute to find the 5 subtle differences in the two photos. (It's embarrassingly addictive -- for both men and women alike.)

Build a web-based version of that. After every round, the player is given two options... "play the next round" or "see more pictures of this girl." The latter is a paid link. Weekend hack => goldmine.

<comment><USER9> That's a great idea. Any reason you're not doing it? Can I do it?

<comment><USER8> Hey, thanks! Why am I not doing it? Um, all I can come up with is, "I'm working on other projects... that are more complex... and less of a sure thing." =P

Anyways, if you're inspired, go nuts. Lemme know if you want any help building it. Also lemme know if you want to hear the rest of the idea. (I think Phase 2 could get you one or two patents, and Phase 3 could disintermediate some dirty old men.)

Uh, is it weird that I've put so much thought into this?

<comment><USER9> You should add your email address to your profile so I can let you know if I get something together. Or just email me so I have your address.

I wouldn't worry about having put too much thought into this, I'm sure we've all spent a lot of time thinking about some really far-out things.

<comment><USER8> You know, it is on my profile. At least, I filled out the "email" input box. But that doesn't actually show up on my profile.

I'm not sure if this is a feature or a bug. Either way, you can find me at aguvench on gmail.

<comment><USER9> It's a feature, but not a good one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well, I think that a webapp should be suited for anyone unless it was created for a specific group of people. About women... I'm a man, and as any man should know, It's almost impossible to understand a woman, so asking a lot of women about your new project sounds like a good Idea to me.

</comment><comment><USER11> Well, I was going to mention <http://www.shoutfit.com> .. but they appear down.

</comment><comment><USER12> So what you are saying is that you are having a hard time understanding women's needs? ;-)

Since you asked, our company is in stealth mode on a product geared specifically for women (not a shopping, dating/rating, community or gossip site).. each demographic has their special needs, we're attempting to address those needs..

I do agree that a web app should be built for anyone. We are building in flexibility, for example, for the significant other of a female to gain value from the app as well..

</comment><comment><USER13> Statistically, they also use the internet more than males. If you can find something that they want, It could be a good idea for a startup.

<comment><USER14> According to what statistic? If you mean population count that's not very significant. There's more males under 65 than females in the US/UK. I'd also bet men use the internet disproportionately more.

<comment><USER13> <http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1004775>

Woman users exceed men, and the gap is growing.

<comment><USER8> uh, so... does anyone know what they DO online?

<comment><USER15> they look for Men

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> <http://www.mizpee.com/> might gain a sizable audience among women.

</comment><comment><USER17> _"... My problem is that from a tech standpoint, it's hard to gauge what a viable need for them is ..."_

something like _"all consuming"_ perhaps? ~ <http://www.allconsuming.net>

</comment><comment><USER18> a computer in every kitchen!</comment>


Create native iOS application with more modern way than autolayout - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zhenglibao/FlexLib <comment><AUTHOR> During last weeks, this framework save my workmates a lot of time. I hope it can help iOS developers to speed up their development.</comment>


Show HN: Deep Learning for Program Synthesis - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/deep-learning-program-synthesis/?wt.mc_id=MCR_378116_FB1 <comment><AUTHOR> One of the authors here -- would love to answer any questions about the work! :)

<comment><USER2> Are you going to publish the source code for reproduction?

<comment><AUTHOR> Eventually, yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> As much as I'd love a program to infer my intent to a specific language, I wouldn't think it would help me as much. In my everyday work, most of the time I need to handle edge cases, which need specific instructions for specific scenarios. Once the logic is figured out, the writing part is just minimal.

Machine learning/AI can learn from common cases to infer logic from intent. For such special cases, it may not be as common and need instructions. By then, I may as well write code by hand.

Edit: grammar

</comment><comment><USER4> @suryabhupa How similar is this work to the Grammatical Inference field? There has been a lot of work over the years in specification inference which feels similar. Many of the studies in specification inference learn automata representations of object interactions. I know there have been other application grammatical inference in Software Engineering as well.

<comment><USER5> Program synthesis is grammatical inference grown up, and statistical approaches are being experimented w/ for modern synthesis just as they were for the genetic programming & grammatical inference era. (I believe even now at the SAT solver level today.)

At a quick skim, this seems fun more as (1) an experience report of jumping on the DNN train instead of other ML algs and (2) more intriguing to me, the training formulation (irrespective of neural nets). Dawn Song's recent explorations here also sounded pretty interesting in terms of bridging logical synthesis of general programs with statistical..

<comment><USER6> Grammatical inference learns a grammar from a set of examples, where here it seems the paper is learning a program (a derivation in the grammar) from examples.

Which Dawn Song paper are you talking about here? I think among all the recent approaches proposed recently on neural program induction, this is the first one that is end-to-end trained and learns only from input-output examples without any hacks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would like a web API which when given training examples it generates the program in a given language such as Java

<comment><AUTHOR> That's one manifestation of this kind of research being used in real life by programmers around the world. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> @suryabhupa is this going to be available to try out in Excel?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are talks of incorporating this into Excel at some point in the future, but it may take a _while_ before it can be fully productionized.

<comment><USER6> looking forward to playing with it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Do you ever mess with the system and feed it crazy to see what it does?

aardvark

gorilla

orangutan

elephant

 _select list and extend_

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be pretty cool to see what it learns, but I don't think we've tried that :P</comment></comment>


Adobe Sensei Machine learning and AI is being used by ICE - <AUTHOR> https://www.adobe.com/sensei.html <comment><AUTHOR> Smart tagging is used very intensively with a custom models</comment>


Dunning–Kruger Effect - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect <comment><USER2> So this is what I was screamed at from chess players.</comment>


Joyent Node.js: Reconciliation with io.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/joyent/node/issues/9295

<comment><AUTHOR> The io.js discussion, which provides more useful insight, is available here: [https://github.com/iojs/io.js/issues/978](https://github.com/iojs/io.js/issues/978)</comment>


Basecamp is hiring a Rails Programmer - <AUTHOR> https://m.signalvnoise.com/join-basecamp-as-our-new-rails-programmer-bf7022cb08f7 <comment><AUTHOR> I find surprising that Basecamp doesn't have an endless stream of Rails fans from where to pick one up.</comment>


Checkers or Chess? Applications for Sydney-based Startmate Close Sunday - <AUTHOR> http://www.startmate.com.au/what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it

<comment><USER2> As an alumni I can safely say that Startmate is most certainly the main reason we are where we're at today. Australia's premier incubator, the mentorship from, and companies coming out of, Startmate are world class.

Get on board!

</comment><comment><USER3> We (Ninja Blocks) found the Startmate program invaluable!

If you're thinking of creating a startup, definitely consider putting an application in for Startmate.

Cheers,

Marcus

<comment><USER4> Likewise, we (Flightfox - YC S12) gained a huge amount from our time in Startmate. We went from our first line of code to $40k in sales in about 12 weeks. Highly recommended for early-stage Aust-based startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you come from a Land Down Under, where beer does flow and startups plunder, get your game on and apply to the world-renowned Startmate. Applications close Sunday.

</comment><comment><USER6> Startmate is the perfect platform for entrepreneurs. Apply today for top-notch mentorship and make your startup dream a reality.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you're serious about your startup then apply. There is no better launching pad on offer in Australia.</comment>


Which Skills Are the Most Employable in Tech? - <AUTHOR> https://thehftguy.com/2017/08/29/which-skills-are-the-most-employable-in-tech/ <comment><USER2> > Your cost will be the single biggest obstacle to your employability, for > your entire life.

This is only good advice if being "employable" is the most important thing to you. We work to make money, the money is not some kind of weird coincidence of being employed.

<comment><USER3> Companies pay as little as they can get away with. People try to get as much as they can, but the company get the last word.</comment></comment>


Cavitation Reactors... Is The Future Here? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pr.com/press-release/389652 http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/press-release/nanospire-inc-successfully-harnesses-cavitation-zero-point-energy-to-produce-dramatic-levels-of-fusion-amp-transmutation-in-water-262247.php
Longer, with more details
Evidence of trenches generated by the passage of the water crystal propelled by the LeClair Effect could be seen all over the reactor cores. The positive crystal followed the induced negative charge on the rows and columns of holes of the coiled perforated aluminium plate that formed the reactor cores, with trenches usually going tangent to tangent along the holes, orbiting the holes and also the sheet edges, all guided by electrostatic attraction. Many of the holes were progressively filled with transmuted material, transmuted material also formed on the sheet surface. A uniform width melted heat affected zone (HAZ) along each side of the crystal trenches could be seen. The trench was disrupted at many points along its length by millimeter-sized pits from the apparent triggering of small supernova explosions, which also contained macroscopic amounts of multicolored transmuted elements.
The large scale transmutation of elements was verified by three separate independent scanning electron microscope elemental analysis (SEM-EDAX) of the transmuted material... <comment><AUTHOR> Longer, with more details:

[http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/press-release/nanospire- inc-...](http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/press-release/nanospire-inc- successfully-harnesses-cavitation-zero-point-energy-to-produce-dramatic- levels-of-fusion-amp-transmutation-in-water-262247.php)

 _Evidence of trenches generated by the passage of the water crystal propelled by the LeClair Effect could be seen all over the reactor cores. The positive crystal followed the induced negative charge on the rows and columns of holes of the coiled perforated aluminium plate that formed the reactor cores, with trenches usually going tangent to tangent along the holes, orbiting the holes and also the sheet edges, all guided by electrostatic attraction. Many of the holes were progressively filled with transmuted material, transmuted material also formed on the sheet surface. A uniform width melted heat affected zone (HAZ) along each side of the crystal trenches could be seen. The trench was disrupted at many points along its length by millimeter-sized pits from the apparent triggering of small supernova explosions, which also contained macroscopic amounts of multicolored transmuted elements.

The large scale transmutation of elements was verified by three separate independent scanning electron microscope elemental analysis..._</comment>


Scientists Find Studying For Test To Become London Cabbie Enlarges Brain - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/12/09/143465903/scientists-find-studying-for-test-to-become-london-cabbie-enlarges-brain

<comment><USER2> This particular publication may add new data, but this basic finding about London cabbies is years old - it won the Ig Nobel prize years ago. Not sure if the previous work was by the same research group or a different one.

No mention of that in the article, of course, because press-release science exists in a timeless vacuum independent of context or references.

EDIT: Not surprisingly, the folks at the Annals of Improbable Research are better science journalists than average: [http://www.improbable.com/2011/12/09/taxi-driver-brains-a- fu...](http://www.improbable.com/2011/12/09/taxi-driver-brains-a-further- look/)

<comment><USER3> The big advance here is that the current study shows that the brain change occurred directly as a result of the learning. Previous studies had a weakness in that they only looked at brain size well after the learning had occurred; raising the possibility that people with bigger hippocampi choose to become taxi drivers, or are the only people who pass the test.

So the new study established causation, extending our knowledge beyond the correlation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> First thought when I read the title, was "enlarge as in make smarter, or enlarge as in adema and increased intracranial pressure?"

</comment><comment><USER5> _To become a cab driver in London, you have to acquire "The Knowledge," which is their fancy way of saying that you have to memorize all the streets in London. It's quite a process that takes most three to four years to complete._

Crazy. Any bets on for how long they are going to continue this practice? Seems almost as redundant as to teach them how to drive a horse buggy just for the time their engine is dead.

<comment><USER6> I remain unconvinced that it's crazy. I've been driven in London by a cabbie when there are unexpected road closures and diversions, and there is absolutely no doubt that he did better than any existing system at getting me where I wanted to go efficiently despite the problems.

GPS and SatNav is currently no solution for the streets of London. Remember, it's been there a long time, and initially grew without the existence of cars.

<comment><USER7> I've been driven by cab in London to an address we later found was on the same physical street, it just changed name halfway. The folks at the destination laughed and said that while the cabbie should have just driven straight down the street, his actual route took us about four times the distance it should have...

It seems that The Knowledge isn't necessarily implemented for The Punters :)

<comment><USER8> There's knowing the quickest route to take and then there's taking the longest route you can get away with. Two different problems with the same data set.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, memorization will change brain structure. Interesting.

I'd also bet that people who for various reasons had to memorize a lot (for example, if you weren't ever taught to read either now or years ago when it wasn't a common skill) also have different brain structure.

<comment><USER10> In addition to just memorizing facts, they are building a mental structure for all the connections within the city. I wonder if learning the structure of any large system would have the same effect? For example, a large software system, the economic system, or the political system -- where you understand the relationships of all the political players.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps the political system, or a complex ecosystem with a lot of relationships, but I think software and economic systems are generally much less complex than London. The thing about a city like London is it's pretty much 'incompressible' data. If you want to learn New York, large chunks of it compress by saying things like "the roads are mostly a grid", "these streets are numbered sequentially", etc. London doesn't show that kind of patterned, designed structure that allows other complex systems like software systems to be learned. Imagine trying to learn Unix when anything that would be referenced by a number is referenced by its own name.

Also cabbies need to know traffic patterns for the city to get around it quickly, which means in principle you're learning what the traffic is likely to be like on every road on every day of the week. That's a lot more compressible though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They went over this phenomena in a 60 minutes piece that chronicles are far more advanced version of this, where the people studied actually remembered a highly detailed version of their entire lives. They call it Superior Autobiographical Memory and I strongly urge people to watch it, the details of the things remembered from 30+ years ago are shocking.

[http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/12/16/60minutes/main7156...](http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/12/16/60minutes/main7156877.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER13> I guess they aren't using GPS. If they did, I wonder I studying other brain increasing activities would give the cabbies even smarter brains.

<comment><USER14> It's a point of pride amongst cabbies to have the got past the hurdle of attaining 'the knowledge'. And my guess is that their union will be able to pressure the taxi licensing body not to reduce the hurdle, since that is what keeps the 'riff-raff' out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Would learning a second language over a 4 year period with a 25,000 vocabulary have the same effect?

<comment><USER8> I'm not a neurologist but I believe that not all learning is the same. In this case they were specifically learning spatial mapping (and possibly manipulation and reasoning). The study doesn't say anything about linguistic learning, which happens in a different part of the brain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The article says this offers encouragement to adults wanting to learn later in life. Bullocks. The article simply shows that any claims about the brain's plasticity being "frozen" after a certain age were incorrect (or overstated). I'm sure "old" people have been learning "The Knowledge" successfully for years now. They weren't worried about inaccurate claims of low brain plasticity ... they had a test to study for.

We already had the "encouragement" because people have been passing the test. We didn't need to wait for the scientists to catch up. The finding did not uncover any new ability ... it merely helped explain a capability we should have already observed in terms of increased grey matter.

</comment><comment><USER17> Is there some way to use this for personal gain? Ie I don't want to become a London cabbie but I do want to improve my brain.

<comment><USER18> Practice deliberately on the stuff for which you want to improve your brain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Obvious! Learning all streets in London is hard training for the brain. What a waste of money researching this.

<comment><USER20> I agree! Science never surprises us; all it does is reinforce our prejudices and common sense, so what's the point of funding it? We already know everything it would tell us.

<comment><USER16> Did you intentionally personify Hindsight Bias here? If so, well done, and I got the joke. lol. <http://lesswrong.com/lw/il/hindsight_bias/></comment></comment></comment>


The incestuous relations among containers orchestration tools - <AUTHOR> http://it20.info/2016/03/the-incestuous-relations-among-containers-orchestration-tools/ <comment><USER2> Mesos is not a container orchestration framework. Mesos is a resource management framework your create services on top of. In that sense, it can make sense to run an orchestrator on top of Mesos if you also want to run a different Mesos application alongside your orchestrator.

<comment><USER3> Yes I agree. That makes sense. My point was more around the fact that all of the orchestrator tools out there aren't meant to be run on a "resource management framework" like Mesos.... they provide the whole end-to-end feature set. Marathon on the other hand has been engineered specifically to run on Mesos.

That's why I am defining "surgery" the idea of opening up the other tools to literally remove pieces of code to make them run on top of Mesos.</comment></comment>


Introducing m 1.0.0, a test/unit test runner that can run tests by line number. - <AUTHOR> http://quaran.to/m/

<comment><USER2> GitHub repo at <https://github.com/qrush/m></comment>


Ask HN: Why can't we write down something in our head? - <AUTHOR>

I always scribble down a short note or sentence so I don't forget to think of it tomorrow. Why is this function not a built in in humans? <comment><USER2> It is built in. But since we learned writing and reading, we're underutilizing it, so it's decaying.

Plato, putting words in the mouth of Socrates in Phaedrus _wrote_ :

...for this discovery of yours [writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.

[http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Phaedrus#On_the_decline_of_Gre...](http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Phaedrus#On_the_decline_of_Greek_Literature).

Chess players can play without the chess board.

Some writers prisonners wrote books in their head.

Similarly, if you were separated from your computer you could still write programs, in your head. You would have to be very carefull, but you could reach a stage where the program is debugged well enough that you could just type it out (once you've left out the the prison), and have it run on the first time.

Just avoid TV and its brainwashing (cf. Fahrenheit 451, [http://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury- fahrenheit-451-mis...](http://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury- fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted-2149125) ).

<comment><USER3> > _Similarly, if you were separated from your computer you could still write > programs, in your head. You would have to be very carefull, but you could > reach a stage where the program is debugged well enough that you could just > type it out (once you 've left out the the prison), and have it run on the > first time._

Which while exaggerated a little in your version, is more or less what earlier programmers (without monitors or even terminals and with expensive test-runs) did. Of course they also used paper, but it's interesting how much of the program they could keep in their head.

Heck, even something like "ex" (the editor, which only showed the line you operate on), needs some of that capability to note stuff in your head to ever work.

<comment><USER4> _Heck, even something like "ex"_ not to mention TECO or ed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a function humans can develop, and in the past did. Once writing was common, it was less necessary, and the effort to develop it more often went elsewhere, though people still memorize short things frequently, and longer things occasionally. (Interestingly, many find that the act of writing notes aid memory even when the notes are not later consulted.)

</comment><comment><USER6> How short are we talking about? Pretty sure most people can remember a sentence? I very rarely make notes tbh. The "don't forget to think of it" part is a bit trickier IMO. You have to have some kind of a trigger. With an odd, rare thought it could be tough without a non-mental trigger.</comment>


Did Yahoo Just Pave Its Way To Finally Buying AOL? - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/us/2010/05/19/did-yahoo-just-pave-its-way-to-finally-buying-aol/ <comment><USER2> My question is, how has AOL survived all this time?</comment>