Some corals regrow after 'fatal' warming - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-10-dead-corals-regrow-fatal.html <comment><USER2> Corals naturally suffer from many hazards, and they naturally recover. Climate change makes it worse. How much worse? I am not qualified to answer that.

"...disturbances such as bleaching, cyclones and crown-of-thorns outbreaks are occurring more often, are longer-lasting and more severe.

This means coral reefs have less time to recover..."

[https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/reports-of-the- gre...](https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/reports-of-the-great- barrier-reefs-doom-are-exaggerated/news- story/500e73695109b027df6f5b4a8a398f80)

<comment><USER3> > Climate change makes it worse.

You should probably cite that.

<comment><USER4> Probably, but also a quick google finds dozens of supporting papers and articles. It isn't exactly a controversial opinion amongst people who believe in climate change.

Here is a great summary from the Australian government, a government that is doing everything it can to worsen the situation yet at least acknowledges that it is something real and happening right now:

[http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-work/threats-to-the- reef/climat...](http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-work/threats-to-the-reef/climate- change)

<comment><USER5> > Probably, but also a quick google finds dozens of supporting papers and > articles.

Disclaimer: I _believe_ in antropogenic warming, but i'm not qualified to judge

One of the arguments that I find compelling, from individuals who would advocate for a less dramatic reading of the climate news, is that there's A LOT MORE MONEY available for researchers to find out how bad the situation is & not a lot of money (or encouragement from peers) available for folks who consistently find that there's less reason for alarm.

Bit of a confirmation bias, there? Maybe.

<comment><USER6> There's a lot more money in climate research than from the fossil fuel and other companies seeking to maintain the status quo? Colour me unconvinced. I suspect the Koch funded foundations and think tanks alone could eclipse most nation's science budgets.

<comment><USER7> The government is a firehose of money, and only government (academic) research gets reported on by the media. So yes it's entirely possible for private sector research to simply disappear, relative to the output of academia, whose papers utterly dominate the conversation.

How often do you see private sector studies be cited by the media? The sort of people who become journalists are the sort of people who immediately write off any study funded by industry without even bothering to read it.

I can't actually remember the last time I saw an industry or thinktank funded study being cited in US media, other than maybe by Breitbart. These studies do exist: go read any climate skeptic blog and you'll find quite detailed surveys, meta-analyses and the sort of content you'd find in a published paper if these people were the sorts of people who published in academic journals (they're not). But the press normally just ignores them, and on the rare occasions they don't, it's only to paint them as science-hating bogeymen.

For instance, I linked in another comment to a study on ocean acidification by Patrick Moore, who has a PhD in ecology and used to be a regional leader of Greepeace. This paper has all the same things you'd expect to find in a normal academic paper: citations, data and it says it was subject to double-blind peer review prior to publication.

[https://fcpp.org/sites/default/files/documents/Moore%20-%20O...](https://fcpp.org/sites/default/files/documents/Moore%20-%20Ocean%20Acidification%20Alarmism.pdf)

And here's the Guardian commenting on Moore's work:

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet- oz/2015/apr/1...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet- oz/2015/apr/16/ask-the-real-experts-about-ocean-acidification-not-climate- science-deniers)

The piece is titled "Ask the real experts" and starts with 9 paragraphs of hate-filled invective that compares Moore and the scientists who support him to UFO believers, Elvis spotters, calls them "crazyballs", claims they're "blinded by beliefs and ideology", states that their views should never be allowed into national newspapers, falsely claims Moore has not written any peer reviewed publications (but e.g. [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012804...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128045886000136?via%3Dihub)), and then cites as evidence three "actual experts" who, of course, all work in universities.

The Guardian is a particularly extreme enclave of hard-left journalists who think only government-funded academics can understand a scientific topic, but the rest of the industry has similar biases.

As another example, here's a rather detailed replication and peer review of Al Gore's famous CO2 in a bottle experiment:

[https://wattsupwiththat.com/gore-and-bill-nye-fail-at- doing-...](https://wattsupwiththat.com/gore-and-bill-nye-fail-at-doing-a- simple-co2-experiment/)

It discovers that the original experiment was fraudulent (this isn't stated to mean anything beyond Al Gore being a fraud; the author fully accepts that CO2 is a greenhouse gas).

<comment><USER6> Well if we're going to talk about people being frauds...

Patrick Moore burnt every last atom of his remaining credibility in his now famous Canal+ Glyphosate interview. Not that he had much being a paid _PR_ consultant to various logging corporations and the nuclear industry, trying to leverage his former Greenpeace role for money.

They "falsely" claim Moore has published no papers in a mid 2015 Guardian article? Yet you link to a chapter in a year later 2016 book, not a paper as proof.

WUWT has _NO_ credibility being one of the most well known deniers on the planet, putting out endless FUD, and infamously the instigators of the appalling shitshow that was Climategate.

That was looked into in great detail, and a series of independent investigations showed that the scientists did no wrong. Note, those investigations were UK and US, including the Science Select Committee, a Public Inquiry, the NSF and the EPA among others. _All_ of them cleared the scientists.

It took _years_ for the damage WUWT did with Climategate to settle.

Inadvertently I'm sure, with Moore you provide anecdotal evidence for my point. :)

<comment><USER7> Actually, I think you're the one illustrating my point, inadvertently I'm sure.

 _Yet you link to a chapter in a year later 2016 book, not a paper as proof._

The book is a journal published by Elsevier, a major academic publisher. You know, academic papers are frequently published in books.

You're right about the date though, I hadn't noticed that. The claim may have been true at the time, but no longer is. The rest still stands. The journalist in question was never going to take anything written by a non-academic seriously.

Now, the core point you've missed yet are making for me is very important: you have to understand that most climate change skeptics (which I am not, btw) aren't really skeptical about climate change _per se_. They're really better described as _science skeptics_ or more accurately still, _academia skeptics_.

If you really engage with their arguments, which I get the feeling most people here never have done, you'll notice that what they're actually talking about is the problems of the scientific establishment. A lot of their arguments could transfer just as well to e.g. the healthcare industry, or academic psychology. And often what they're reacting to is not lobbyists or PR spending but what they see as over-credulous belief in the moral and intellectual purity of academics.

Your post is an excellent illustration of this:

• Shoot the messenger, ignoring his arguments because he isn't paid by the government.

• Shoot another messenger, because they're "well known deniers". This is a circular argument. You're saying "anyone who disagrees with what I believe has no credibility" which is a vacuous statement.

• Assert that a bunch of government funded environmental scientists investigated a bunch of government funded environment scientists and concluded it's all legit.

The latter part is really highlighting the underlying understanding gaps here. If you truly understand _why_ Climategate created a whole lot of newly minted skeptics, then you'll understand that it was due to apparent duplicity and collusion in the scientific establishment, the possibility/likelihood of which is a major plank of climate skepticism. Thus saying those scientists were cleared by other scientists just like them won't convince anyone of anything, as it misses the point by a mile.

And BTW the Climategate guys weren't exactly cleared. For instance the Muir Russel review, in the words of the Guardian, concluded:

 _" It found the scientists had not fudged their results or silenced critics. But it found serious shortcomings in the openness with which they worked, posing a risk to the credibility of UK climate science and indicating a transformation in the way science has to be conducted in this century."_

And it was apparent that the scientists in question had been deliberately and illegally frustrating attempts to check their work via FOIA requests:

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/09/freedom-...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/09/freedom- of-information-hacked-emails)

The dust from that never really settled, and it wasn't some random blog causing trouble. The behaviour exposed by Climategate was covered in all the major newspapers at the time. It _did_ rather strengthen the basic skeptics case but only in the same way that the replication crisis in psychology and medicine strengthened the case of other kinds of "expert skeptics".

<comment><USER6> It should not matter whether research is done in academia or industry. What matters is the conflicts of interest and funding sources.

It makes no odds if a study comes from work done at Oxford Uni or Exxon if it's funded by fossil fuel interests. I, along with most others, am going to be naturally suspicious of claims without independent verification. Likewise a study of the health impacts of red meat funded by some US cattle interests (as randomly cropped up on HN a while back) carries far less weight than the same study from an independently funded source.

I don't know _anyone_ who has an over-credulous belief in the moral purity of academics. That's absurd. There's probably more likelihood of moral purity than in an industry lab, thanks to fewer overt conflicts or agendas to push, but there's no reason to blindly believe without peer review, replication and analysis, as appropriate.

On climategate:

Yes, they were cleared of wrongdoing, Russel's investigations criticised the openness, but concluded:

 _The "rigour and honesty" of the scientists at the Climatic Research Unit were found not to be in doubt. However, the panel also concluded the scientists were insufficiently open about their work_

That sounds like cleared to me. I did not claim they were found to be perfect. No human (or scientist) has yet achieved that.

It's too long ago to remember exactly what was covered by the various FoI requests, but it seems entirely _inappropriate_ to release data under FoI for work in progress before publication with analysis and conclusions. After that, requests for both raw and processed data should be honoured. So openness will always come with limits. That would apply to work in any field, whether in academia or industry.

Science isn't, and can't be perfect. Mistakes will be made, techniques will be sloppy, occasionally there will be outright fraud etc. There are processes to catch, correct and withdraw.

Meanwhile the CATO Institute's Michaels and WUWT were pouring lies and oil onto the fire, trying to stoke maximum damage. They managed to come out of the episode with pretty much no credibility at all. Of course there were no independent studies into _their_ behaviour, or honesty, or any consequence for their lies. In fact they appear to be held to no standards at all. How convenient.

WUWT is not a peer review journal. They are not a messenger, they are a blog with an agenda. If Watts or any of his colleagues want to put out papers into the corpus in a reputable source, their results can stand or fall on their accuracy. The few times papers proposing alternatives to AGW have come out they have not, so far, stood scrutiny. I rather hope they do, as it would be nice to discover it was all a big misunderstanding and everything will be fine really.

At this point it's difficult to conclude WUWT are acting in good faith on any level. It appears to be an intentional attempt to distract, confuse and muddy whilst taking time and energy from anyone who is trying to actually advance (or disprove) the science. It's the tobacco and asbestos playbook. When they make a credible case it'll be in Nature or some such. I won't hold my breath.

As a last point:

> Assert that a bunch of government funded environmental scientists > investigated a bunch of government funded environment scientists and > concluded it's all legit.

OK, so now what? Science apparently has no checks or balances acceptable to you, or is it all a global conspiracy? It doesn't matter that the Climate Research Unit is NOT government funded. Sponsors have included BP, the Nuffield Foundation and Shell. How very strange their results have gone against the interests of their sponsors. It makes it damn awkward to build a convincing chain of corruption and conspiracy though.

That's unanswerable.

<comment><USER7> Sure, the funding source is what matters. So why do people assume that academics have neutral or independent funding sources?

The basic argument that climate scientists wouldn't get funding to do their jobs if it weren't for their predictions of global catastrophe, is a sound one. If climate scientists were reporting "our models suggest the climate is sorta like it used to be, there's probably not much going on", it'd be a backwater with almost no funding and absolutely no media interest. If economists took a stance of, "the economy is too complex to model or predict, but we'll collect a lot of data for you" then how many economists would be employed, or have newspaper columns?

There's a structural incentive to be very confident in your ability to predict the future, if you're in certain areas of academia, as there are effectively no other employers. It's not just a climate issue.

I'd feel a lot happier and more confident in the narrative if I felt sure this structural problem was at least recognised, ideally dealt with. But I don't see it:

\- The media present academics as neutral 'experts' whose word is beyond question.

\- Academics themselves encourage this and never talk about their own conflicts of interest.

\- Famous journals are run by academics with the same set of incentives.

This is how you get stuff like [https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed- rev...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/) happening, where 450 different studies over multiple decades investigated an effect that in the end didn't exist.

We're told "science" self corrects and will always yield the right answer in the end. That may well be true if you use a wide definition of science that includes analysis done by random bloggers and anyone else who wants to contribute. But it's not at all clear that's true for the government funded academic apparatus, on at the scales needed, or on any reasonable timescale. It's entirely possible to believe in the scientific method whilst still retaining skepticism about the output of particular groups of people who do scientific work within particular social structures.

Note: The CRU shenanigans were revealed through email hacking, not any kind of formal scientific process. In fact the researchers were deliberately evading laws put in place to try and stop that kind of thing. And even though we know ordinary science can self-correct because major faults like 5-HTTLPR are caught, it took decades. Psychology is riven with entire sub-fields that were studied since the 60s and are now known to be totally wrong. How many similar bodies of knowledge are waiting to collapse? There are plenty of examples of things thought to be "science" that evaporated when examined closely, often with scientists involved simply denying that anything had collapsed at all!

It looks especially bad when climate scientists start adjusting old datasets to make their predictions come true, as has been happening recently with the new versions of the global temperature datasets. For many years the temperature data showed that global warming had stopped: average temperates were stable. This violated all prior models predicting what would happen and was a major problem for climate science as an endeavour. Now there are new 'versions' of old temperature readings that mysteriously disappear the plateau from the public record.

There might be solid, scientific reasons for this. It _might_ be that for many decades global temperature readings were fundamentally wrong and nobody detected it. But if something like that happens, climate scientists need to be very publicly _screaming_ about what went wrong, and why, and what lessons they learned from it, because otherwise it looks suspicious as hell. It _looks_ very much like they're adjusting the data to fit the models in order to preserve their own jobs.

 _It doesn 't matter that the Climate Research Unit is NOT government funded. Sponsors have included BP, the Nuffield Foundation and Shell._

In the 1970s yes, before it was researching global warming. Currently it's a part of a university and gets its funding from governments (including the US Dept of Energy).

<comment><USER6> People _don 't_ assume that academics have neutral funding sources. That's why many will always look at the potential for conflict of interest, and look more carefully into the why. An academic in a university research body will get loads of funding from private foundations and industry. Even when it's not helpfully labelled as the Microsoft Campus, Oxford University. Who knows, I might be suspicious of some work coming out of there that is reporting a result that happens to be in Microsoft's interests.

Given they supposedly have to find change to keep their jobs, how is it that all the research around the world is pointing to similar changes? If they're just making shit up, I'd expect predictions all over the map.

The days of constraint free government funding for Blue Skies research are _long_ gone. The world is far worse off as a result. That doesn't mean every single project, from every source is now corrupt. It does mean that some projects and studies do indeed have an agenda.

Offer some evidence that academia is entirely corrupt. Or worse than industry.

The CRU's current About Us includes:

 _" sponsored by contracts and grants from academic funding councils, government departments, intergovernmental agencies, charitable foundations, non-governmental organisations, commerce and industry"_

To me that is _not_ proof of "gets its funding from governments". It's one of multiple sources of funding. Regardless of how much you want to paint them as some government funded state puppet.

Yet even then I fail to see how that helps your cause célèbre, the British government has been decidedly anti AGW and renewables in the last decade, with policies distinctly in favour of fossil. If the CRU were as corrupt as you keep claiming, the climate unit would surely be busy proving how harmless petrol and gas are, to get more of that filthy Conservative government lucre.

We're not going to reach agreement, thanks for the conversation. :)

<comment><USER7> No problem, I find this conversation enjoyable and useful.

I went looking for info on the funding of CRU. The best I could find was this:

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/copenhagen-climate- ch...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/copenhagen-climate-change- confe/6735846/Climategate-professor-Phil-Jones-awarded-13-million-in-research- grants.html)

The Climategate docs had a spreadsheet with funding sources. So that's quite old now, but back then it was about £13 million from various sources, all of which were the government. I suppose they probably do get a bit of funding from non-government sources, but it seems it isn't likely to be much.

 _It shows Professor Jones, along with other academics at the university, received more than 50 separate grants with a value of £13.7 million from a number of funding bodies including the European Union, Nato, and the US department of energy. Several British bodies also gave substantial sums including the Met Office, the Environment Agency, the National Rivers Authority and the Department for the Environment._

Perhaps this article doesn't list any private sector grantees, but there are plenty of government bodies to go around.

Re: everyone getting the same results, is academia corrupt.

The research around the world doesn't agree _entirely_ , but it's pretty close. However, it's all based on the same datasets. There are only a few temperature datasets available, really only two major datasets and one is maintained by the CRU. It's really an incredibly influential organisation, which is presumably why someone hacked it and why it was such a splash.

Now, if the temperature record is unreliable all climate research based on that record is also unreliable. You can't argue the world is getting warmer unless you can reliably measure temperatures, that's pretty basic.

Unfortunately we know for sure the temperature record must be unreliable, because the historical temperature dataset scientists use (which goes back to about 1850) keeps being revised. If you use the dataset that was current in the 1990s, then compare the dataset to the ones being provided today, you can see that the historical temperatures have been changed.

This isn't done entirely secretly; the idea is that thermometer readings have to be adjusted to take into effect various confounding factors and that's perfectly legitimate. But there are practical problems:

1\. People have been measuring temperatures with thermometers for over a century, yet scientists are _still_ changing how they adjust the raw data today, with the result that the official temperatures seen back in the 30s and 40s, or even earlier, are still changing. The results of the adjustments are massive and fundamentally change the conclusions of the science. But by logical implication, if modern scientists are actually correct to do these adjustments then all previous analyses of the climate made until now must have been wrong. Why is nobody alerting the world to the prior wrongness of climate datasets?

2\. Temperature dataset creators like the CRU have a nasty habit of claiming they destroyed or "lost" the raw, unadjusted data. They have also fought very strongly to block the release of raw datasets, and engaged in other sorts of behaviour that scientists aren't meant to engage in. That is, the only datasets available are those that have been "retouched" by people who get multi-million pound budgets because of predictions of warming.

This large conflict of interest requires enormous trust in the climate scientists. It is thus unfortunate that revisions of historical data _always_ create warming effects where previously none existed. The apparent pause in rising temperatures was discussed by scientists for many years - the latest temperature datasets from CRU rewrite history and erase it entirely.

So you have to understand that climate skeptics are entirely understandable. Their positions aren't weird or crazy. Climate scientists are asking the world for staggeringly huge amounts of trust: to trust them about their understanding of climate trends although they're simultaneously claiming that _all recorded temperature data_ , even as recently as 10 years ago, _was wrong_.

This graphic illustrates the kind of thing that happens:

[https://realclimatescience.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/10/Re...](https://realclimatescience.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/10/Reykjavik2012-2013-1.gif)

Last thing:

 _the British government has been decidedly anti AGW and renewables in the last decade, with policies distinctly in favour of fossil_

Hmm, did you notice Theresa May's last act before she resigned? She committed the UK to massive climate change spending:

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/11/may- defe...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/11/may-defends- inspiring-green-plan-as-critics-call-for-immediate-action)

That's not the act of a government that's anti-AGW.

<comment><USER6> I'll not go too far into CRU, as I have no definitive proof of their funding beyond what is publicly known.

I can't imagine why the Met Office or NRA would have any interest in promoting research with an agenda. They want to forecast the weather accurately, and manage UK rivers respectively. Their interests are served by accuracy, not agenda and incorrect data. DOE was _abolished_ by the Tories which you might well think reveals their stance.

Talking of, the Telegraph piece you link is after they stopped being a reputable newspaper with a rightwing but honest perspective, but were well along their journey to rightwing bullshit comic of today (ie after the Barclay brothers bought them). Which is a damn shame as I once used to buy Telegraph, FT and Guardian to get the spread of perspective. There isn't much available for honesty on the right from UK newspapers now. Which is not to discredit your link, I simply do not know. They still hadn't quite ditched all pretence to honesty around then. :)

> did you notice Theresa May's last act

lol. OK, I'll bite. The last act of a leader, as a "fuck you" to whoever might follow, after presiding over a famously weak government, coming shortly after the cross-party Select Committee's detailed plan to decarbonise. Greenwashing that was entirely empty words and the sound of kicking the can down the road. As significant as Boris Johnson's "I will lie in front of Heathrow bulldozers" speech. What legislation was brought to require movement towards her very distant targets?

What have the Conservative government done towards meeting that target since? What policy have they? Hint: nowt beyond the vague "so far in the future we don't care at all" target.

On other climate, renewables and efficiency related bills, the Conservatives have very consistently voted them down. They ended onshore wind completely, they removed feed tariffs for home solar - initially with no plan for replacement causing a 90%+ reduction in installations and decimating the industry, approved the Heathrow expansion, approved and promoted fracking - though even their own party membership objected to this so they wound it back somewhat, voted down the climate targets (two or three times), voted down the vehicle emission limits. It goes on, and on. You found one speech with nice words.

Also note that it was Parliament, _not_ the Conservative Government that declared a climate emergency.

Coincidentally just today the Grauniad put up a very nice summary of how MPs have voted on recent climate issues, with an overall summary graphic: [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng- interactive/2019/...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng- interactive/2019/oct/11/guardian-climate-score-how-did-your-mp-do)

The actual voting patterns reveal everything. The data allows me to stand 100% by my claim of UK government's actual stance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've always wondered how coral reefs stuck around for hundreds of millions of years if they're so fragile and prone to death without recovery.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps they like warmth and will spread towards the poles from where they are now - the hottest waters.

[https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/coralwaters.html](https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/coralwaters.html)

The IPCC doom predictions simply make no sense to me given that large parts of the oceans are currently too cold for corals (by 10+ K).

<comment><USER10> > The IPCC doom predictions simply make no sense to me given that large parts > of the oceans are currently too cold for corals (by 10+ K).

Coral reefs don't get built over two weeks, or even two centuries. Furthermore warm-water corals need sunlight, and proper depths.

<comment><USER11> You are right it takes about 50 years given the only data we have on how fast they regenerate. The Bikini Atolls being the only data point we have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _But the researchers found that in 38 percent of the impacted colonies, the > polyps had devised a survival strategy: shrinking their dimensions, partly > abandoning their original skeleton, and gradually, over a period of several > years, growing back and starting a new skeleton._

Is it that 38% use this method or they all try to use this method and only 38% are successful?

<comment><USER13> Also, who's to say they "developed" that? That makes it sound like they're dealing with something completely new (fits into man-made climate change narrative). Is it possible that through millions of years of evolution the earth had many such warming experiences and they developed this technique well before we arrived on the scene?

<comment><USER14> If you'd RTA you'd have answered your question. We've long had evidence for this type of recovery happening. The problem is that the evidence is from the Paleozoic fossil record. It's vanishingly unlikely that /no/ corals ever undertook this process in the past 300 million years but it's not typical behavior and it's extremely significant that it's been observed in modern corals.

We know that catastrophic climate change has occurred in the past. Climate scientists are not proposing this is new on a geological time scale. But it's new to us and to most extant species. We don't all have these tricks up our sleeves.

<comment><USER15> It's not new to us and most extant species. There were several rapid ~10 C temperature changes at the end of the pleistocene period 10-15k years ago: [https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/19/the-intriguing- proble...](https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/19/the-intriguing-problem-of- the-younger-dryaswhat-does-it-mean-and-what-caused-it/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Of course they do, but this is not the real question here.

Zooxanthellae in temperate reef corals like C. Caespitosa are relativelly tolerant to temperature change. Tropical reef corals are machines infinitely more complicated. Having a lot of Acropora growing really fast is not necessarily a good symptom, for example.

<comment><USER17> You say "of course they do" as though it's not a novel finding and "this is not the real question" as though this is the answer to a question and not a scientific finding.

Neither is the case.

<comment><USER16> 1) Bleaching in corals is not one disease. They are (at least) five different types associated to four different genuses of bacteria. All of them could be symptoms of another problem instead the real causes, as seen in research done in Oculina, the other ubiquitous species from Mediterranean Sea with Cladocora (see Ainsworth et al 2008).

And there are other kinds of necrosis caused by viruses, echinoderms and polychaetes.

That some species of corals at least can recover relatively fast after bleaching is know since... dunno, but probably since 80's at least. A bibliographic search should find early documents about it. Other species never bleach and other just die (Levas et al 2018)

2) The real juicy question to answer there, is not if corals bleach and recover, we knew that they do it since decades even if was not reported for Cladocora. The question is _what_ corals bleach and _what_ corals recover, in my not so humble opinion.

<comment><USER17> 1) OK, but I'm not sure how it pertains to your point that there are multiple causes of bleaching.

2) In this case, Cladocora caespitosa

<comment><USER16> Corals can recover from "bleaching" and can overgrow skeletonised areas (at some extent), but neither all bleaching cases are equal, nor all of the around 3500 species, if I remember correctly) of extant hard corals are equally resilient.

The real cause of bleaching is unknown. Vibrio can invade the area and accelerate the killing of coral tissue, but is unclear if they are a cause of the disease or a secondary effect of the disease.

<comment><USER17> The real cause of bleaching isn't in question. The article has little to do with the cause of bleaching. It doesn't suppose that the 3500 species extant hard corals are equally resilient. You are telling me things that, while certainly interesting and appreciated as such, don't really address any problems with the article or its assumptions.

<comment><USER16> Sorry, but I'm not interested in peer reviewing the article here if this is what you expected. I was not asked to do so in any case by the editors, and this is not the place for it.

The article is great, but the problem is more complex than that, for several reasons that as you pointed, are out of the scope of the article (so I will not discuss them here). Feel welcomed to talk about the article, and only about the article, if this is what you want. I will listen carefully.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Global Warming politics aside as easily as a catastrophe can be pushed aside.

Is anyone more informed able to explain how the KT Extinction event affected corals?

How were they able to survive the mass extinction event of the dinosaurs if they're so sensitive to temperature changes?

<comment><USER11> They are not that sensitive to temperature change, the article is bad science, the reefs are being bleached and killed by titanium and zinc much of which comes from sun screen. That is why the only reefs that are surviving are in remote areas that do not see the population density to elevate the water to the ppm that its needed to bleach the coral, I live less than 3 miles from Mote marine and run into and talk to many of their researchers not one of them has ever told me that they have data that warming alone is bleaching the reefs but they know for a fact titanium and zinc are, they are one of the foremost research centers on reef science and reef restoration:

[https://www.icriforum.org/sites/default/files/ICRI_Sunscreen...](https://www.icriforum.org/sites/default/files/ICRI_Sunscreen_0.pdf)

[https://time.com/4080985/sunscreen-coral- reefs/](https://time.com/4080985/sunscreen-coral-reefs/)

IIRC Hawaii has already banned sunscreens that contain those products and we have banned it in the Florida Keys. It is what is causing bleaching, we know it for a fact. My daughter while not a marine biologist yet, is well on her way, she does a lot of work on reef restoration and focuses her studies on Coral as it is what she wants to do. The entire focus on reef restoration is in the areas of agricultural run off, micro-plastics and suspended micro metals elimination as well as reforesting. Ocean temperatures are not killing the reefs if it was it would be as simple as troughing deep water and using tidal flow to up flow cooler water over the reef. I actually had this conversation with one of the researches once, as I interact with them from time to time due to my daughters interests.

Coastal mainland Florida has lost all of it's reefs, they where alive when I was a kid but where dying. It was also the time when Florida saw a huge tourism and population boom. The reefs in the keys where fine at that time, but by the early 90's the lower keys from the 7 mile bridge to Key west started to see signs of bleaching, meanwhile there was no evidence of it in the upper Keys which sits right in between the dead reefs of mainland Florida and the dying reefs of Key West. The difference was Key West became a larger tourist destination in that time due to the formation of the tourist development council in the years preceding. For the most part Key Largo still does not have the same problem (it is happening though, due to agricultural run off) because it sees less tourism than Key West and the tourism it does see is more SCUBA based tourism who generally do not wear sunscreen.

Another culprit is agricultural run off, while I am not a fan of the article below because it states it's global warming out of the gate, then offers no fact to back up said statement and omits the fact that the study they cite noted in the study that there where no increases in average water temperature in the Keys during the study, or the fact that the Keys has seen a Keys wide drop in average water temps for the past decade. There where several spikes in temperature above the threshold and die off where only observed when massive runoffs where in place. When the temps exceeded the threshold and runoff nitrogen and phosphorus where observed to be in low PPM there where no recorded die-offs. That being said it does do a good job of explaining what said runoff is doing to the reefs. Basically when the water hits a certain N:P ration in the presence of of warmer water, it kills the reef. Without the N:P ration the reefs thrive in the warmer spikes so, water temp is second to the fact that the presence of agricultural run off creates the chemical environment that is toxic to the reef. The heat is only the catalyst when those chemicals are presence.

[https://www.hwhfoundation.org/news/nutrient-runoff- starves-c...](https://www.hwhfoundation.org/news/nutrient-runoff-starves- corals-in-the-florida-keys/)

[https://www.npr.org/2019/07/16/742050975/floridas-corals- are...](https://www.npr.org/2019/07/16/742050975/floridas-corals-are-dying- off-but-it-s-not-all-due-to-climate-change-study-says)

In the Keys we have banned fertilizers for lawn maintenance and we have moved the population centers to sewage whereas just a decade ago every house outside of Key West and Marathon has septic systems. But we still have a huge issue with Big sugar dumping water into the everglades which runs out of the gulf and over our reefs.

I am very concerned about our reefs and it is important that people know exactly what is killing them. Fixing global warming is not going to save our reefs. It gives people a false sense of security and needs to be rebuked as bad science.

<comment><USER19> The first article you cite says:

 _" The chemical UV filter oxybenzone has been studied most intensively and the following effects have been described: Bleaching of coral fragments and coral cells from various species of hard coral. This effect is more pronounced at higher water temperatures."_

Sounds like, as with many things, the story isn't simple. Multiple environmental changes simultaneously can have consequences where each, by itself, would have much less effect. In general, we need to tackle all the causes to some degree to have much hope of success.

<comment><USER11> It is fairly simple, they do not die in the same temps when the PPM of these chemicals are low, the temps are secondary and are allowing the chemicals to make certain bonds that are toxic to the reef. Absent the chemicals the reefs tolerate the temperatures just fine. They are only sensitive to temperature when the chemicals are present thus the chemicals are the primary source of death and thus their elimination is paramount to the survival of reefs. The chemical are what kill the coral not the temperature as if you heated the water to threshold, then cooled it, then poured it on coral it will kill it as the water has reached threshold, thus the bonds have been made. This study was actually done here in the keys, I will see if I can find the paper.

Both agricultural run off and sunscreen follow a similar pattern.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Very interesting.

Read a 2012 study a few days ago on what kills coral. Have not found a more recent follow up yet. (I was snorkelling on the reef a few days ago, the parts I saw looked pretty good, so wanted to find out more.)

They studied a fair number of reefs, on the Great Barrier / Coral Sea area. My quick summary, from memory, about half of reef coral "cover" damaged at that time. Only 10% from bleaching, the rest split between cyclone damage and crown of thorns. Their conclusion, if crown of thorns are eliminated the reefs will recover naturally.

Fortunately in my 3 days of snorkelling I didn't see a single crown of thorns. The crown killing operation is hopefully that effective on most of the reef.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm seeing a lot of comments speculating on how coral reefs got along for hundreds of millions of years. While coral species have existed for this long, that is _not_ how long these ecosystems have existed. What we think of as coral reefs have only been around for ~24 million years. This tweet has a nice diagram and pointers to resources:

[https://twitter.com/RemoteReefs/status/1141255435200192512](https://twitter.com/RemoteReefs/status/1141255435200192512)

<comment><USER22> Then they would have missed the Eocene hyperthermal 55.2 million years ago a rapid 5 to 8 C warmup due to a huge influx of carbon into the atmosphere (8 to 20 times all human activity). Its not known where all this carbon came from yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Honestly this tastes like nothing. With phytoplankton, acidification and the threat of the methane trigger

<comment><USER24> Methane is a nothing burger. It breaks down so quickly it doesn't affect much.

<comment><USER25> Methane has a residence of a decade in the atmosphere. "Methane trigger" is short for the clathrate gun hypothesis, which is the rapid release of methane sequestered in methane hyudrate deposits at the poles. Those are very large deposits of methane hosted in water ice, currently estimated at roughly ten times conventional methane reserves. If ambient temperatures exceed the melting point, the methane is released.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis) is a much more detailed summary. It is strongly correlated with mass extinction events. It is also appears to be beginning: [https://www.newsweek.com/methane-boiling-sea-discovered- sibe...](https://www.newsweek.com/methane-boiling-sea-discovered- siberia-1463766)

<comment><USER24> From the very same wikipedia article you referenced, under "Current Outlook":

 _Most deposits of methane clathrate are in sediments too deep to respond rapidly, and modelling by Archer (2007) suggests the methane forcing should remain a minor component of the overall greenhouse effect.[28] Clathrate deposits destabilize from the deepest part of their stability zone, which is typically hundreds of metres below the seabed. A sustained increase in sea temperature will warm its way through the sediment eventually, and cause the shallowest, most marginal clathrate to start to break down; but it will typically take on the order of a thousand years or more for the temperature signal to get through._

<comment><USER25> I hope so, I don't know what the cause of the Siberian seep is. I hope that it's submerged permafrost. Appreciate your pointing that out.

<comment><USER24> Right, and youay ne thinking, let's play the odds. But there is only once chance, so what do odds mean anyway in that scenario? Will you wall away a failure and still take solace in the fact that by the odds you were _supposed_ to be correct?

But if there is only one chance, how can you know what the odds of anything? You have the past, and you have the future and you may prescribe a certain significance to that past for what reason you don't really know. How could you, it just feels right, doesn't it? Your memory, regard8this as truth, it just feels right. But consider.. one point in time and space, in however many dimensions there may be, and the only reason you believe in a certain outcome is feeling that your so called memory is representitive of reality..Wnat evidence do.you have it.is.right? I.claime none.at all. None.ag.all.none.sfall

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Taking a step back, coral reefs have been around in some form or other for at least 500 million years. I would be greatly surprised if they weren't resilient enough to survive a lot of things. That's not to say we shouldn't work to protect them, but it does make me skeptical that they could be lost as easily as we seem to be assuming.

<comment><USER11> They can and it truly is a huge risk at the moment, the problem is the AGW camp is trying to subvert the research for their gain which is a detriment to what we need to accomplish the fact is agricultural run off, and sunscreen micro metals are a creating toxins which the reefs are unprepared for, Which has caused massive deforestation of reefs in areas close to population centers. as well as more remote areas where said population or agricultural centers, waters off-spring over their reefs. These toxins are a new threat to coral and one that they have not seen before, time will tell if they can adapt but it is known that all of the mainland Florida reefs are now dead due to these toxins and have not regenerated since the 1980's when the last of them died off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've always wondered about this because corals have been around during much warmer and much more acidic periods in the ocean.

</comment><comment><USER28> We should do whatever we can to preserve the coral reefs, but as usual, cataclysmic forecasts from scientists proved to be wrong yet again, and nature is a lot more resilient than expected.

Put me firmly in the camp of "we need to protect the environment at all costs" (ex. I believe that companies that pollute our waters should get shut down, I believe boats that produce massive amounts of pollution should be sunk by our navy, etc), but I also tend to no longer believe the click-bait headlines that our entire society is rife with. These headlines produced by journalists, not scientists, are the information that gets propagated and that is poisoning our society with misinformation.

<comment><USER25> _" We should do whatever we can to preserve the coral reefs, but as usual, cataclysmic forecasts from scientists proved to be wrong yet again, and nature is a lot more resilient than expected._"

Yet again, someone falsely ascribes views to scientists that they never had. I keep track of this stuff, and I don't know what forecasts you are talking about.

Actual forecasts (ipcc reports), if anything have been overly conservative. And they are grim. There is active research as to why they are overly conservative and reality is proceeding worse than the already grim forecasts.

<comment><USER29> this is how the reactionary mind works. the problem isn't the problem. the problem is how THOSE PEOPLE _reacted_ to the problem such that now I, THE REASONABLE AND INFORMED ADULT MODERATE, must now devils-advocate (aka advocate) for the problem.

<comment><USER30> As I've gotten older I've realized that "moderates" who generally agree with you but advocate for less action (and often inaction) are generally the biggest stumbling block to getting things done.

MLK's letter from Birmingham jail is still really true to me today (you can just search for "moderate" to find the part I'm talking about) [https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....](https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html)

<comment><USER31> I've found in my personal life (so maybe this doesn't hold true on the internet, but maybe it does when there is something at stake, like karma points) that moderates who advocate for lesser actions, but 'agree' with me are really just people who don't agree with me at all but don't want to take an action (disagreement) they perceive as possibly being damaging to a relationship.

One Person's Source: All of the people who say 'I'm fiscally conservative but socially liberal' in my life have turned out to be veeerrrryyyy socially conservative.

<comment><USER11> You ever though that maybe they have seen this bullshit before and realize it is not the end of the world, That we need to do something just like we did for Acid rain and the Ozone layer but that all of the bullshit predictions that where made where nothing but bullshit. They where real and valid issues, we dealt with them and we did so in measured and moderate courses. But the radicals had us all dead multiple times over while we dealt with them with moderate action.

<comment><USER29> If you think the greenhouse gas problem is comparable to the acid rain or ozone problems then you fundamentally do not understand the science, and you as an engineer fundamentally do not understand what "orders of magnitude" are.

It is only from a position of wholesale ignorance of the scientific reality that you can make such a facile equation.

To put it in a simple analogy, you just said "those alarmists told me it was going to rain last week and it didn't, therefore this hurricane warning is bullshit i'm not evacuating".

<comment><USER11> I do understand what orders of magnitude is, I also understand that none of the orders of magnitude predictions have come to pass. If you cannot make accurate predictions, it's not science plain and simple. In less than a week there have been two articles on this site attributing their phenomena to global warming. Both subjects I am extremely knowledgeable on, the first being a claim that the climate exodus has begun in the the Florida Keys due to global warming. The article was a lie on it's face, I live there, people are leaving because there is an economic crisis in the Keys. I cited very specific evidence in that discussion as I literally hear people every day talking about it and why they are leaving. I talked to the guy this morning that owns the auto-shop 1 island down from me, he told me he had a contract on his commercial property and is getting out, he is in his 70's works alone and is getting too old for it. He cannot get help due to the affordable housing crisis and can sell his property and retire so he figures it's time. This is the reason and a reporter could have spent 5 minutes in the Keys and came to that conclusion, but the headline for the story was written and then the facts where put together to fit the foregone conclusion.

The second was this one which is also bad science. I drink with some of the worlds top scientist in the coral research area, I live on the same island, my daughter volunteers at their facility and I help with reforestation efforts in this area, when they do reforestation dives. in my other posts I clearly articulate the facts as to what is causing reef die off. I did not say global warming is not a problem, I said radicals are lying and trying to co-opt every bad thing that happens in nature to AGW, because they "want" it to be orders of magnitude. They did the same thing with acid rain and the ozone layer both where fixed by addressing and banning products (lead in gas, CFC's, refrigerants) not by silly proposals like cap and trade. Or suggesting that we are all going to have to just reduce our standard of living to save the world in 10 days.

A measured approach to migrating to Solar, Wind, Tidal and electric vehicles is how we will address global warming. Not creating a stock market for carbon. It's literally the stupidest idea ever and is advocated because it's a great way to skim money off the top by the elites and to limit entry into industry via regulations.

When they attribute these things to AGW, make predictions and they don't come true then they are engaging is agenda and advocacy and not science and it causes real issues. When these lies get exposed as they have, like with the CRU and the pause-buster papers, it gives ammo to the likes of Trump and the Koch Brothers to gut the EPA and roll back hard won environmental changes that where back by real science that made accurate predictions. the radicals insistence that AGW be tied to everything, gave us opening of public land to drilling and fracking. The radicals directly defeated the hard won battles fought by the moderates that won them. So you will forgive me when I see a statement that we the moderates enable the opposition, when it has been the radicals and their willingness to bend the facts that has enabled the deniers to throw the baby out with the bath water. People that mask advocacy and agendas as science, have no right to, they are stealing hard work and research to further their agenda. Which is unfair to the people that did the real work. AS their disinformation allows the properly done work to be discredited by showing the agenda, and then pandering to it, to discredit the real data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I had a turning point with climate change when I realized carbon emissions almost definitely won't transform Earth into a martian wasteland incapable of supporting life. The natural ecosystem adapts to ice ages, meteors, and other world altering events, and the planet without us would probably revert to something lush and diverse in a few millennia.

I still cannot explain why, but shifting the perspective in my mind from "Humanity is Earth's savior" to "Humanity is Earth's abusive consumer" was a humbling epiphany, and helped me learn to revere nature.

<comment><USER33> I find it sad that the only two perspective seem to be the extreme ones: humans are either destroyers or saviors.

How about the middle ground? We are part of nature and like any other animal we are trying to survive and make our life better. And it's not that other animals are perfectly respectful of nature either. Remove predators and herbivores will graze everything to the point of creating a wasteland and dying of starvation.

Nature, as a whole, is full of equilibrium, but single species try to maximize their survival in any way possible. We are not that different. We are only conscious of what we are doing.

It's not that nature is not tough on us. Everything out there is trying to kill us. Nature provides our sustaining, but it's also harsh, something we don't seem to appreciate from our lives in safer-than-normal cities, with always available food, heating, transportation, medicine.

I think the best perspective is aknowledging that we can have an adverse impact on the environment, and try to address it, istead of hating our own species as if it was a disease.

<comment><USER34> _Nature, as a whole, is full of equilibrium, but single species try to maximize their survival in any way possible. We are not that different. We are only conscious of what we are doing._

Someone fucking up the environment to garner an extra $100K or two on that annual bonus isn't doing it for survival. Wolves aren't taking down entire herds of deer they'll never eat so that they can say they have more rotting deer meat than the other wolf packs. Domestic house cats are the only animals that I can think of that demonstrate such behavior, with the modifier "domestic" being emphasised; i. e., we made them like us. (Yeah, that last bit is a stretch.)

I'm sure there exist other species that hoard, just because...well, we can't be the only ones. But we're the ones with the mechanized means to do at destructive scale.

<comment><USER35> Squirrels and birds seem to have a selected desire to horde nuts in a similar way to people hoarding extra resources for lean times. Cache Spacing or having various hordes of food spaced around in hidden locations seems like a rough analogy for having various Swiss bank accounts and the like. Ravens in particular are clever and will deceive potential raiders by moving caches, and raiders will try and appear disinterested.

As an aside cats are slightly odd for domestic animals as they're arguably semi-domesticated versus dogs or farm animals. African Wildcats look and act a lot like house cats in videos and are genetically similar, which I think is part of what makes them fun as pets.

[https://www.livescience.com/53571-suspicious-ravens- detect-t...](https://www.livescience.com/53571-suspicious-ravens-detect- thieves.html)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4260561/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4260561/)

<comment><USER36> Most squirrels are scatter hoarders: almost everyone's seen a squirrel bury a nut in a lawn. They bury their nuts all over their territory and remember the locations and retrieve them later.

What you might not know, is that in old growth oak forests, most trees were accidentally planted by squirrels.

The acorns that they forgot and didn't retrieve, sprouted and grew into oak trees.

So the analogy of a squirrel as ruthless acquisitor is not quite apt, because their manner of caching their hoard actually helps to plant the next generation of trees.

(Acorns do not sprout as well when the just fall to the ground.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > I am not qualified to answer that.

God I wish more people could admit that. Things would be much more sane then. For one, anti-vaxers would be far fewer

Back to the subject, note that this was limited to some colonies and even there it will not be able to grow to any significant size.

<comment><USER38> But what if I'm not qualified to admit that?

<comment><USER39> Unfortunately, I'm not qualified to answer that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The planet is going to be fine. It will still be here a billion years from now.

We will be gone just as the dinosaurs before us.

The universe cares about our fate just as much as we care about some random star in the night sky, and frankly, if we're collectively going to remain as self-defeating as we are, I don't care about our fate either.

I just hope I get to respawn somewhere else.

<comment><USER41> No, in a few billion years, the planet will be engulfed by the enlarged, dying sun. [https://phys.org/news/2016-05-earth-survive-sun-red- giant.ht...](https://phys.org/news/2016-05-earth-survive-sun-red-giant.html)

<comment><USER40> "This will last for another 4.5 – 5.5 billion years" right in TFA..and I did mean A billion :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Buy this book: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JHIDON6/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JHIDON6/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)

<comment><USER43> Looks like typical far left "replace religion with climate science" and then attack things like Capitalism while we're at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Hmm. That's interesting.</comment>


Manage Android dependencies versions using gradle extra properties - <AUTHOR> https://segunfamisa.github.io/posts/android-gradle-extra-properties <comment><USER2> I'm using similar approach. The only problem is the lack of android studio support. It's not highlighting when there are newer version available.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello. That's a bit strange. Android studio highlights for me when there's a new version. See screenshot: [http://take.ms/VQV49](http://take.ms/VQV49)

<comment><USER2> You're right current version supports it :)</comment></comment></comment>


Hexo – A fast, simple and powerful blog framework - <AUTHOR> http://zespia.tw/hexo/ <comment><USER2> Writing "incredibly fast" and not providing any clues of how fast is it is not exactly the best way to promote an application IMO.

Update: okay, it generates simplest site possible with 250 posts in 7 seconds. This is not the worst performance (it's faster than Jekyll), but I won't call this 'incredibly fast'. :\

And why the downvote, by the way? Is pointing out statements, which may not hold any value, wrong? Especially if they do not hold any value?

<comment><USER3> I'm guessing you're getting downvotes because it's a trivial reply that doesn't add to the discussion.

One could make the argument that Hexo is fast because it's:

\- fast to compile: probably faster or equal to industry standard Ruby/Jekyll

\- fast to install: npm

\- fast to deploy: single command for Heroku / GitHub Pages

\- fast to write: Markdown

You're taking the one word "incredibly" and blowing it out of proportion. We're not talking about super computing here, fast is a relative construct.

<comment><USER2> > \- fast to compile: probably faster or equal to industry standard > Ruby/Jekyll

Jekyll is slow enough to not count something faster than Jekyll 'incredibly fast'. It should be much faster than Jekyll to be at least 'fast'.

For me, fast is that it can regenerate page while I'm switching from editor to browser. This one can not (7 seconds for almost nothing).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks like a nice, Node port of Jekyll. Not really how I prefer to blog.

My idea for a blogging platform (maybe even a service), if I ever get to it, would be a combination of _Jekyll and Posterous_. In other words, you'd have:

* A Jekyll dir structure on the server

* You write a post via Email

* The email is POSTed to the service via MailGun

* The service writes a new HTML file in the Jekyll dir and runs `jekyll build`

BAM, you have the speed of a static site, the wysiwyg editing features of whatever email client you use, and the ability to post from any computer/phone/tablet (not just one with git configured).

<comment><USER5> >>* The service writes a new HTML file in the Jekyll dir and runs `jekyll build`

With Jekyll once it is up on say AWS you don't have to worry about it. You add a service in the mix, that means you need a server, that means you have an attack vector to worry about, among other things.

People like Jekyll because it is so simple. Once you start adding services, it's no longer simple.

<comment><USER6> > _With Jekyll once it is up on say AWS you don't have to worry about it._

You still need to update the base system.

<comment><USER5> Right. But when a security vulnerability is announced for Apache, MySQL, Postfix, etc, I don't have to worry about it.

<comment><USER6> We're going to wind up splitting fine hairs, but here goes:

Having to worry about updating because of security defects is the same as ... having to worry about updating because of security defects.

Reducing the attack surface still leaves an attack surface, is my point. You can't just "forget about it", your server can still be subverted to unpleasant ends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems interesting, I've always appreciated the simplicity of a Jekyll-type approach.

Apologies for semi-hijacking to mention it but, I take a slightly different approach in my personal blog (custom, messy code) - I rsync markdown documents to my webserver which are compiled into HTML and put into a redis in-memory collection which the server uses to render the blog. That gives you in-memory caching for free and avoids having a whole bunch of static files having to be generated every time. I use node on the backend and angular on the frontend to allow for a single-page website.

Currently the solution involves regenerating all HTML each time files are rsync by a script run remotely via SSH, however I ultimately intend for it to use an inotify-style approach to only import files that have actually changed, running both locally and remotely, so publishing an article need only require you to write some markdown and save it in a particular folder.

Though of course all this (currently) requires you to have a server such as linode to which you can rsync + have a remote serving script watch a folder, I mention it so to ask whether anybody would be interested in me cleaning it up and open sourcing it?

<comment><USER8> If you have compiled it to HTML, wouldn't it be more efficient to serve it up as static HTML files via nginx (or any web server). Why store the HTML in redis and serve off it via an application?

<comment><USER7> With aggressive disk caching on servers static files are probably near enough in-memory anyhow (+ I'm sure you could configure a modern web server application to cache anyhow), so yeah it's probably pretty fast.

However it's more limiting to simply serve static files - you're limited to what you've generated. With redis you can serve it as json data and use it dynamically for e.g. search or showing all articles with a given tag, in a given date range, etc.

Additionally, I'm not a big fan of a whole bunch of static files sat in a folder somewhere that needs to be regenerated every time I change something. Personal preference, perhaps :-)

<comment><USER9> If you're generating static HTML, why not generate static JSON? Then you can use it for client-side search, for example.

Check out my website's repo: <https://bitbucket.org/devlinzed/devlinzed.com/src>. It has a JSON format for just about every URL, but is still entirely static:

<http://devlinzed.com/2013/may/keeping-all-your-data-safe>

[http://devlinzed.com/2013/may/keeping-all-your-data- safe.jso...](http://devlinzed.com/2013/may/keeping-all-your-data-safe.json)

<comment><USER10> Your site loads very quickly. (PageSpeed Score is 97 out of 100 -- only suggestions are for the gravatar.)

Would you care to reveal a little more about where/how you host your site?

<comment><USER9> I host it in DigitalOcean's New York datacenter (on a 512 MB VPS). They're pretty alright, but any VPS would do the trick. In fact, I only use a VPS because I can't properly set caching or gzip headers on GitHub pages.

As far as I know, the only thing that I do that most static sites don't is precompile gzip files for HTML pages, and minify pretty much everything (including HTML and images.) PageSpeed, Pingdom and RedBot were very helpful for providing web server optimizations. I would just observe and implement every tweak they mentioned; there's a lot you can do managing your own server that you can't with AWS or GitHub.

And make that 100/100. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It would be nice to see some benchmarks, comparing with WordPress and others blogging platforms.

<comment><USER3> There is no need for benchmarks, because presenting static files will always be faster than dynamic web apps like WordPress.

Hexo (and Jekyll, Pelican, etc) pre-compile from Markdown to HTML which then gets served up as a static resource from the web server. On the other hand with Wordpress, the server has to compile the HTML _every time a user visits_.[0]

For the server, HTML is just another static resource to transmit. You might as well ask to see benchmarks between displaying an image vs WordPress blog.

[0] This can be mitigated with caching, but static resources are easier to cache and the caching logic is now handled by the app rather than CDNs.</comment></comment>


Boxes 2 iOS App Is in Beta! - <AUTHOR> http://box.es A place for your stuff. Organize. Discover. Buy. Sell. <comment><USER2> Not to pick on this particular website / product; I've seen too many posts to HN that are just previews, but why:

1: can't you tell us what the product actually does 2: not post this until your actually ready to show the world a product and 3: pertaining to the first 2, why should I give you my email address?

It's like vaguebooking - if you want to tell the world you've created something you think they might find useful - then just come out and tell them when your ready.

Theres not even enough content on the home page for idea validation.

Nice video though - But if it wasn't for the text on the homepage, I'd have thought it was a new pixar movie.</comment>


Why MVC is not enough - <AUTHOR> http://plaban123-blog.tumblr.com/post/156215895479/why-mvc-is-not-enough <comment><USER2> This is a good post, many people adopt using this kind of "services" package already. Most of the Time I call mine a 'manager' however.</comment>


How to Game Silicon Valley's System - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/02/moneyball-for-startups/ <comment><USER2> The article is essentially arguing that entrepreneurs should be contrarian: not set up shop in the same place as everyone else, not try to hire the same people as everyone else, not have the same office setup as everyone else, etc.

Of course, to win, it's not sufficient to be contrarian — you have to be both contrarian and right. Whether or not these choices are right for you is probably highly dependent on what you're doing. But the idea of being contrarian, and not always following the received wisdom, is sound.

</comment><comment><USER3> I always took "cultural fit" to mean stuff like, do you prefer to work only with Big Design Up Front, or are you cool with a more Agile process? Are you more comfortable at a big company, or a small one? Do you take yourself seriously, or are you willing to joke around a bit? How do you deal with changing requirements?

Not something like "what kind of music do you like". That shouldn't be a factor in hiring. Right?

</comment><comment><USER4> The main idea of this article is that you should hire normal "older" (aka people over 30 with children, and women, and minorities? really!?) people and allow them to have a life.

Crap like this is why I stay far away from silicon valley. The saddest part is, it is mostly true.

<comment><USER5> There are a lot of companies that hire these people in silicon valley, including startups!

Usually the founders are older. Or the work is harder / involves a whole bunch of C & C++.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My experience is that there are two places where you can't sell remote work: the bay area and NYC. In both of these areas people refuse to believe that the best talent (or the best talent that will work form them) doesn't come from next door.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. The Bay Area in particular bitches and moans about "lack of talent" but has such hiring myopia that only a few companies can see talent that is more than 50 miles away.

<comment><AUTHOR> I once had a co-worker (who lives inside the San Francisco city limits) say: "San Jose? Why would I ever drive that far south?! As for as I'm concerned, San Jose is Southern California." He was serious.

<comment><USER8> So? Nobody who lives in SF would drive themselves to San Jose every day. The traffic is insane. You would kill 3-4 hours a day easily.

Hence the point that companies (say in San Jose) should allow remote work to attract employees in SF.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I should have connected the dots to the parent comment. It means he wasn't interested in recruiting new hires from San Jose or anywhere else that wasn't a short commute into the city... unless of course, they agreed to move.

<comment><USER9> Because it would be a bad hire. Those 50 miles are at _least_ a 90 minute drive each way most of the day.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course a 90 minute commute is a horrible idea. So why would they have to drive? Why couldn't they work from home? If code is checked into GitHub and deployed to cloud servers, why are we requiring new hires to work in the SF office every day? (That was my point.)

<comment><USER9> ah, I understand

you're preaching to the choir

<comment><AUTHOR> :-) I could have also mentioned that this particular co-worker had influence over recruiting and office policies...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> At the Minneapolis Star Tribune, we hire almost entirely based on "cultural fit." And that culture has only two requirements - you must be really excited by development, and you must really like to learn. There are no technical questions in the interview process, and beyond a cursory glance to see if the candidate's got an active Github account, not much in the way of code review. We'll ask about hobbies, but it's totally OK if they're not the same things everyone else is into - it's mostly because we're curious.

This has resulted in one of the most diverse and fun developer groups I've ever worked with. We all love code, and we're a mix of ethnicities, genders, and ages.

I imagine that Silicon Valley is missing out by not following a similar path.

<comment><USER11> That's interesting. I'm not a huge fan of the technical interview either. I'd really like to see the industry find a way to assess technical ability without forcing developers to re-take their data structures and algorithms exam every time they interview for a new job.

So if you've been successful without this ritual, you have my attention. But what (if anything) are you doing to see if someone is good at writing software. Do you know the candidates you interview already, by reputation?

<comment><USER10> The first couple months tell us whether they can write good code or not. We're not going to get a good sense of their coding skill from how well they can spout off buzzwords, or even from a code test. Only by giving them tasks we'd expect one of our devs to do and seeing how they interact with other devs, use information-gathering tools (Google, books, coworkers, etc.), and solve complex problems in a social scenario (no dev is an island) do we really get a sense for whether they can write good software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been thinking about Moneyball as a metaphor for how we should hire, for quite a while. In my opinion there's just a vast amount of talent out there that the tech industry is discarding. It's not like you have to take the dregs, it's the wine that the rest of the industry is pouring into the gutter.

It's true that socially isolated young live-for-work white males are the most prepared to crank out code. But if we were just a _little_ better at supporting different kinds of people, we'd have far more productive and healthy workplaces, while still being fun and weird.

My company is getting there. Interviewing more for values and velocity versus having all the geek merit badges. Plus we're getting more geographically distributed.

<comment><USER9> I think you'd be stunned whom you can hire (and for how much money) in any area where a basic middle class home doesn't go for over $1m and a 500 ft^2 apartment in soma reasonably close to offices for $2.6k/mo, ie the first $52k of pretax income is solely for rent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I remember watching an interview of Jack Ma with Charlie Rose during Davos. Charlie asked him about his experience wit Tai Chi and Jack immediately related the art with his practice in business, which boiled down to something like, "for every misstep, there is an opportunity." The current startup world has been successful at recruiting talent because they separated themselves from traditional corporations by providing a better atmosphere to work. Startup 2.0 will figure out something. It's the nature of evolution.

</comment><comment><USER14> This article is trying to apply startup advice to massive tech companies.

"Culture fit" is actually really important when you have 5-10 people working on a new company. It's better to have hegemony than a diverse set of opinions when your runway is 6-12 mths and you need to make concise decisions to survive.

The reverse is true for huge tech companies. Lack of diversity hurts their business in many ways.

Pretty much everything this article says is startup advice misapplied to major tech companies who are well beyond startups.

</comment><comment><USER15> _"Cultural fit" is one of the most corrosive ideas in the tech industry._

Culture is super-important-- in large part, to help make sure that the 47-year-old female Haskell badass and the 22-year-old male Ruby rockstar work well together-- but "cultural fit" is often used as an excuse for shitty behavior and exclusionist hiring practices.

 _Older developers, for example, bring a lot to the table. One study found that developers actually get better with age._

Very true. But people who've been around the block aren't going to carry a pager except for a project that is absolutely career-making for them (with both internal and external credibility as rewards) or when they're owners (and 0.05% ain't ownership). I hate the age discrimination culture but I know why it's there: there's a fear that older developers will "poison" the young with, you know, real world experience and knowledge about the industry and how it actually works, and of the games often played against politically inept engineers.

 _People often say that tech companies must be near other tech companies in order to succeed._

The Valley's about funding, not other tech companies. The west coast of the US is the easiest place in the world to raise VC. It's still difficult, and the process takes a long time and is generally obnoxious, but it's easier there than elsewhere.

Also, don't downplay "managed outcomes" (e.g. acqui-fails) that are bad for employees but good for founders' careers. Bay Area VCs can call in a favor they're owed, have the thing bought, and get the founders popped into executive positions at Google or Facebook. Harder to do that in Utah. This doesn't matter to employees but it's important for many VC-funded founders, especially since the VCs will push you to take on a much higher degree of risk than most founders would otherwise want.

 _They want privacy. "They say they work in an open office plan and wish they could go back to a cubicle," he tells us._

Cubicles suck, too. Private or semi-private (i.e. two people) offices are the way to go. They're not that expensive. If you must use an open-ish plan, then give engineers booth-style seating where they have walls at their back. Open- back visibility is borderline abusive.

 _Don't have the money for Swedish massages or an in-office coffee bar? There are less expensive perks._

Google's "free massage" perk is overstated. When I was there, you got one (for free) per year. Any more, and you have to pay for it. (That said, the price is quite fair.) This is not to nick Google-- I don't think that any company should be expected to pay for _unlimited_ massage-- but just to point out that the competition ain't that stiff on the massage front. One 60-minute massage per year? That's about $80.

Many of those perks are cheap insofar as they're effective marketing expenditures. For $80 per employee, Google gets "free massage" out there.

Still, as a cynical 31-year-old, I'd rather have few of the "cute" perks and more salary. 401k matching and health benefits are important; massage, I can get on the market.

Finally, for one item that was missed... _Rethink equity_. Personally, I think finance-style profit-sharing (even if the bonus system can be really political) is superior. Also, equity has an uncanny valley. The amounts that non-executive employees get in startups are, quite often, so insignificant that I'd rather have it all in cash. If you are going to make equity part of the package, cut out slices that will make people actually care. This means 3-5% for employee #10 and 0.5-1% for employee #50... the actual numbers seem to be closer to 0.3% and 0.04%, which are in the "who gives a fuck" range.

People gripe about Wall Street's bonus system (in which profits are shared but employees, except for upper-tier executives, are not expected to acquire stock in the company) but it's a much better and fairer model of profit-sharing than what Silicon Valley does.

<comment><USER5> So by employee #50, you have about %50+ of the company tied under employee stock options alone. So either you inflate away everyone else's original equity significantly to pay for new employees or you soon run out of equity.

The reason why the equity slices are low from what I understand is in the end of a VC funded company the numbers are something like %70 investors, %15 founders and %15 employees. If your a unicorn performer like facebook, it's more %40 investors, %30 employees and %30 founders.

But you'll notice the pattern that all employees combined get the same equity as founders.

Also profit sharing is hard to do with the red ocean strategy of VC companies that give equity in the first place. When the company is around for 3-5 years concentrating on getting hundreds of millions of users first before collecting cash, profit sharing is going to be $0. Profit sharing is only something enterprise or product companies can do initially, and it cuts out the new search engine, the new social/messaging network and other long lead time companies that eventually dominate the software world. WhatsApp was purchased for billions because in a couple of years, it could of easily become the world's next Facebook at their growth rates. With under 40 engineers...

So to make the numbers work, angel list is going to be giving %0.25-%0.50 of the company to initial employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> click bate

</comment><comment><USER16> I find phrases like:

"It [the tech industry] often shuns women, minorities, and others who don't fit into the rising "brogrammer" culture."

down right distasteful and a generalization that is pretty outrageous. I would go out on a limb and say most of the tech industry isn't racist, sexist, or anything else.

I'm petty sure the number of women in "tech" reflect the number of women graduating with C.S. degrees. If anything, women seem to get an unfair advantage just because they are women and "under represented."

I'm not saying that there aren't issues, but the author of the article pretty much calls everyone in tech a racists and sexist. Then goes on to write an article that these "techies" are suppose to read.

<comment><USER12> There's a difference between being structurally racist, and viciously, personally racist. The tech industry isn't filled with KKK members or open chauvinists (and anyone expressing such sentiments in public would be ejected immediately).

On the other hand there are a lot of barriers in place, of access and unconscious bias, which cause some very different outcomes.

How else would you explain the wide disparities? There are hardly any women or non-white non-Asians in technology in North America. And it's way out of line with comparable disciplines like mathematics or other sorts of engineering. CS is the only discipline where the number of women is actually going _down_.

[http://flowingdata.com/2014/10/30/decline-of-women-in- comput...](http://flowingdata.com/2014/10/30/decline-of-women-in-computer- science/)</comment></comment>


How I Use Visualization To Drive Creativity - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/17/how-i-use-visualization-to-drive-creativity/

<comment><USER2> I know he calls it creativity but a lot this just sounds like positive visualization tied to structured thinking. Maybe I'm unique, but this seems like common sense to me. Is this something that people really struggle with?

<comment><USER3> A lot of writing on creativity boils down to "Hey, here's what works for me." The approaches are sometimes wildly different and the value of reading other people's approaches is when you find another tool to add to your kit.

If this author's approach seems similar to what you already do, then investigating something less dominated by visual senses might be useful. Twyla Tharp's "The Creative Habit" might provide some useful insights.</comment></comment>