Deploys at Slack - <AUTHOR> https://slack.engineering/deploys-at-slack-cd0d28c61701 <comment><USER2> Interested in how they handle DB updates/migrations (I don't know what Slack uses for data storage backend).

IMO those DB migrations are the most difficult/fraught with risk because you need to ensure that the different versions of the servers that are running as they are deploying can work with whatever state your DB is in at the moment.

<comment><USER3> Mostly MySQL that is moving to Vitess (transparently sharded MySQL). I believe they use gh-ost for migrations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's always nice to see how other teams do it. Nothing too groundbreaking here but that's a good thing.

I did notice the screenshot of "Checkpoint", their deployment tracking UI. Are there solid open source or SaaS tools doing something similar? I've seen various companies build similar tools but most deployment processes are consistent enough to have a 3rd-party tool that was useful for most teams.

<comment><USER5> I've built that tool 2-3 times now. The issue is really the deploy function and what controls it. It's always a one-off, or so tightly integrated into the hosting environment, that reaching in with a SaaS product is somewhat difficult. That being said, the new lowest-common-denominator standards like K8s make it way easier. If anyone is interested in using a tool just leave a comment and I'll reach out.

<comment><USER6> Please provide a way for people to reach you without commenting here.

<comment><USER5> Just ping here for now. email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fun to read, but there's a lack of detail here that I'd like to see. For example, this talks purely about code changes. However times a code change requires a database schema change (as mentioned above), different API's to be used, etc. In the percentage based rollout where multiple versions are in use at once, how are these differences handled?

<comment><USER8> For database schema changes, here is the standard practice: - You have version 1 of the software, supporting schema A. - You deploy a version 2 supporting both schema A and new schema B. Both versions coexist until the deployment iis complete and all version 1 instances are stopped. During all this time the database is still on schema A, this is fine because your instances, both version 1 and 2, support schema A. \- Now you do the schema upgrade. This is fine because your instances, now all runnning version 2, support schema B \- At last, if you wish you can now deploy a version 3, dropping the support for schema A.

<comment><USER9> We do it the other way (and I've always seen it done this way): database change is compatible with current code and new code. So deploy the database change, then deploy the code change. It usually allows you to rollback code changes.

<comment><USER6> This is generally harder to pull off though unless you do things like force all DB access to go through stored procedures.

And then you're really still pursuing the same strategy described above, except for your stored procedures instead of your app code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Even strategies like parallel rsyncs had their limits.

They don't really go into detail as to what limitations they hit by pushing code to servers instead of pulling. Does anyone have any ideas as to what those might be? I can't think of any bottlenecks that wouldn't apply in both directions, and pushing is much simpler in my experience, but I've also never been involved with deployments at this scale.

<comment><USER11> I can't speak for Slack, but it's not unreasonable to believe that a single machine's available output bandwidth (~10-40Gbps) can be saturated during a deploy of ~GB to hundreds of machines. Pushing the package to S3 and fetching it back down lets the bandwidth get spread over more machines and over different network paths (e.g. in other data centers)

<comment><USER12> We do it similarly except we push an image to a docker registry (backed by multi-region S3), then you can use e.g. ansible to pull it to 5, 10, 25, 100% of your machines. It "feels" like push though, except that you're staging the artifact somewhere. But when booting a new host it'll fetch it from the same place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm surprised at the 12 deployments per day, if that's truly to production. There's bugfixes etc., but feature wise Slack has been... let's say slow. Not Twitter slow, but still slow, in making any user visible changes.

<comment><USER14> Far too many people on HN seem to think the public facing code that we see is all that the engineering team in a large company works on. There's _so much_ more to running a large SaaS business. If Slack is like all the other SaaS companies I've encountered they'll have dozens of internal apps for sales, comms, analytics, engineering, etc that they work on that people outside of the business never see[1]. Those all need developing and all need deploying.

[1] They might buy in solutions for some business functions like accounting, HR and support, but they'll still have tons of homegrown stuff. Every tech company does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder why they didn't evaluate at some point using an immutable infrastructure approach leveraging tools like Spinnaker to manage the deploy? They sure have the muscle and numbers to use it and even contribute to it actively, no? I mean, I know that deploying your software is usually something pretty tied to a specific engineering team but I really like the immutable approach and I was wondering why a company the size of Slack, born and grown in the "right" time, did not consider it.

<comment><USER16> I had similar thoughts when I read their article. Their atomic deploy problem completely disappears had they gone with an immutable approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm kind of surprised they don't have a branch-based staging. Every place I've worked at has evolved in the direction of needing the ability to spin up an isolated staging environment that was based on specific tags or branches.

<comment><USER18> It's become more common to eschew long-lived release branches for SaaS applications. For example: [https://engineering.fb.com/web/rapid-release-at- massive-scal...](https://engineering.fb.com/web/rapid-release-at-massive- scale/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's cool to see how big organizations have deployment setups, while it feels like there is not enough resources about how one should setup a deployment system for a new startup just in the beginning.

The setup I currently use is custom bash scripts setting up EC2 instances. Each instance installs a copy of the git repo(s), and runs a script to pull updates from production/staging branches, compiles a new build, replaces the binaries & frontend assets, then restarts the service, and sends a slack message with list of changes just deployed.

It works good enough for a startup with 2 engineers. However, I'd like to know what could be better ? What could save my time from maintaining my own deployment system in AWS world, without investing days of resources to K8s?

<comment><USER20> You don't have to do a big-bang style Google thing. You can just invest in some continuous improvement over the next few years:

Iteration 0: What you have now.

Iteration 1: A build server builds your artifact, and your EC2 instances download the artifact from the build server.

Iteration 2: The build server builds the artifact and builds a container and pushes it to ECR. Your EC2 instances now pull the image into Docker and start it.

Iteration 3: You use ECS for basic container orchestration. Your build server instructs your ECS instances to download the image and run them, with blue- green deployments linked to your load balancer.

Iteration 4: You set up K8s and your build server instructs it to deploy.

I went in a similar trajectory, and I'm at iteration 3 right now, on the verge of moving to K8s.

It's your call on how long the timespan is here, and commercial pressures will drive it. It could be 6 months, it could be 3 years.

<comment><USER19> Thanks a lot for the answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> No mention of feature toggles what so ever. I guess that's why it took them a long time to fix the thing with the new WYSIWYG editor, where after 2 weeks or something, they offered a toggle for people to change back.

Anyone knows their reasoning behind not employing feature toggles? I would feel very slowed down if I didn't have the guarantee and confidence I could quickly rollback in the event of errors.

<comment><USER22> They had an undocumented feature toggle for that since day 1. A JavaScript snippet was issued was posted on a thread here that reverted it to the old functionality. So they are using them but not always surfacing them

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nice write-up! It would be interesting, however, to get more details on what types of errors were caught in dogfooding, which made it to production, what kind of hotfixes have had to be made in the past, etc...

It's nice to know what Slack does to mitigate bugs in releases, but it would also be useful to know what kinds of bugs each step catches and what bugs still slip through.

</comment><comment><USER24> How do they choose which shards are included in the first 10% canary group?

This is a tricky problem. It's tempting to include only small (less valuable) accounts in the first group. But some bugs only occur with large accounts, so you need some of those in the first 10%.

Many bugs affect only a small portion of customers. There are many categories. A canary becomes more effective when it includes members from each category. Example: account type, number of users, client type (web/ios/android/macos/windows/linux), client version, web browser type and version, ipv4/ipv6, vpn, TLS MITM proxy, language, timezone, payment currency, country, tax region, mobile service provider, etc.

</comment><comment><USER25> Interesting, last year I wrote a blog post on this subject and it seems pretty in line with Slack's approach :)

In regards to deployment monitoring, besides "error monitoring", I would also add "Health Monitoring" as valuable for early detection of deployment issues:

> In this line of monitoring we are interested in assuring that our > application is performing as expected. First we define a set of system and > business metrics that adequately represents the application behaviors. Then > we start tracking these metrics, triggering an alert whenever one of them > falls outside of its expected operational range. [1]

[1] [https://thomasvilhena.com/2019/08/a-successful-deployment- mo...](https://thomasvilhena.com/2019/08/a-successful-deployment-model)

</comment><comment><USER26> It's interesting that atomic deploys weren't in from the start. That was one of the few deployment practices we really insisted on from day one at my own businesses, if only because the uncertainty you get from trying to trace problems where your system isn't in any known state makes it all but impossible to work systematically.

A related challenge where we've never really found a good solution is how to handle deploying updates atomically when both code and data model are changing. That is, we need to migrate both our application software and our database schema in some co-ordinated way.

In practice, this usually ends up being done in multiple stages, where during some intermediate part of the process we are actively maintaining both the old and new database structure and running both versions of relevant code, at some point in the process there will be a bulk conversion of existing DB data that was only in the old format to the new one, and then hopefully at the end we switch to reading only the new version, retire the old code, and if necessary remove the old DB contents that are no longer in use. Even then we probably still want to keep an implementation of our previous data API available that is reverse engineering data from the new format, just in case we have to wind back the application code due to some other problem.

I got tired just _writing_ that, and it feels similarly dirty actually deploying it. How is everyone else handling this? Has anyone found a satisfactory way to migrate code and data forwards, and if necessary backwards, without timing or data loss issues? Controlled deployments of application code seem to be largely a solved problem with modern tools and a bit of common sense, but the database side of things doesn't seem to be nearly as clean, at least not with any of the strategies I've encountered so far.

[Edit: I see that while I was writing this, someone else has already raised a similar point elsewhere in the discussion and a few people have replied, but unfortunately only along the lines I mentioned here as well. This does not make me optimistic about finding a cleaner strategy, but further comments are still welcome.]

<comment><USER27> I've never seen it solved. You either write and test migration scripts to roll it back or you restore from a backup. Idk what you do if you add a new column that's populated in the new version and you rollback. I guess this would be a good place to roll out as small of piece as you can and hope you don't find out it's busted a week later.

<comment><USER26> _Idk what you do if you add a new column that 's populated in the new version and you rollback._

I think that one depends on what you are rolling back and whether you have your application code somewhat isolated from your underlying database via a well-defined API.

Assuming that you will at some point need to populate your new column for all your pre-existing records in some well-defined way, you can handle rolling back the application code _as long as_ you have a version of the database API that still provides the interface the older application code requires. You might no longer be updating your new column with new data at that time, but the data you did get is still there, and when you later want to move your application code forward again you can populate the new column for any extra records that have been added to your database in the meantime just as you did on the initial migration.

Given the practicalities of a multi-step migration involving both application and database schema, you might already have the necessary extra code in your database API to support running old application code against the new database schema, and even to fill in any missing data for that extra column according to the same rules you used for migrating older data from before transition and ensure any new constraints are satisfied. So this way, you can wind back your application code but not damage your new database.

If for some reason the database schema itself needs to be rolled back, and you can't just fake it at the API level, things become a lot more difficult as you have potential data loss issues to contend with. Likewise if it's possible that the old application code would not maintain any new database records in a way that satisfies all required constraints and you can't handle that at the API. Fortunately, this doesn't seem to happen very often in practice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Seems very relevant to many existing SaaS services today: 1\. They are not doing CD, but they do deploy frequently. 2\. They are using K8s, or even immutable infrastructure, so far as I can tell. 3\. They have a lot of people involved in maintaining their deployments system. 4\. Speaking as a user, I do not recall many significant outages, so on the surface, it seems that they have sufficient reliability.

Speaking as a heavy user of Kubernetes, evolving from an existing VM-based application to something like what Slack is doing seems like it might be more sensible than a "move everything to microservices and Kubernetes" modernization strategy.

</comment><comment><USER29> A few questions I have left unanswered:

\- does the deploy commander create the hotfixes or the engineers who authored the commits?

\- it seems that the deployment is fully automated, but engineers still have to be available in case of problems, does that impact productivity?

\- "Once we are confident that core functionality is unchanged", is there a particular metric to assert that?

\- how long does deployment take currently?

\- switching directories doesn't seem like a fully atomic operation yet, isn't there a delay from loading the files and wouldn't that generate 502s from the service? Maybe it's better to create new instances with the new files and then change the router to use those (blue-green)?

<comment><USER30> With PHP (What slack was using at one point for some of the services. I think everything uses Hack now which may still maintain a similar model). Switching directories can be mostly atomic.

PHP-FPM with opcaching doesn't need to access files once all the opcodes are cached (turn off file modification checks in production). When you move the directory, you will restart the service.

Unless a request hits a file that is rarely used and not cached, you should be not receive any errors moving the directories.

<comment><USER29> My point is that if there is any downtime for the switch, for example restarting a service, it's not atomic. A small percentage of failed requests can still be high in absolute terms for a company like Slack, so why not using a paradigm [1] where you have atomic switch? And also instant rollback.

[1] [https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/BlueGreenDeployment.html](https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/BlueGreenDeployment.html)

<comment><USER31> Nginx can hot reload a config file while running that's pointed at a different directory, or perhaps they're updating a symlink?

<comment><USER29> Possible!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I constantly wonder if all of this UI is better expressed as a slack chat room (instead of a whole new UI)

Flowdock thought of this long time back - [http://blog.flowdock.com/2014/11/11/chatops-devops-with- hubo...](http://blog.flowdock.com/2014/11/11/chatops-devops-with-hubot/)

Github Hubot is of course a modern interpretation of it..but I wonder why chatops doesnt have the mindshare that gitops has.

Slack's deployment is human driven. It's a natural fit for a chatops style model.

<comment><USER33> > an engineer is designated as the deploy commander in charge of rolling out > the new build to production.

When I last did ops we pushed the automation and alerting hard, so the idea of someone being formally assigned to a deployment is interesting. This sounds like they have a ton of manual or semi scripted steps. At some point, removing the dedicated deployment commander and relying on alerting is helpful, although preference of where that point is can be debated.

<comment><USER32> i think the notion of a commander is a very interesting people-ops strategy. it keeps the little element of subjectivity in things like - when do you kick off a build, how long do you run the integration/release process, etc

You do lead with automation, but the introduction of human subjectivity is a low-overhead way to still have flexibility.

<comment><USER34> More likely, they have a few bugs here and there in the deployment tools that require human supervision and intervention, and they don't have the resources right now to fix them and to make it more reliable.

There is no need for flexibility in a repetitive process, unless there are bugged edge cases

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Their deployment UI looks nice but this feels like they made their own wheel here in order to keep their In-place upgrade method over something such immutable infrastructure using pre-existing deployment systems.

I wonder if this was ruled out for some reason or perhaps for a large company with people dedicated to deploying this doesn't matter. One example, as they are on AWS autoscaling groups with prebuilt AMI's could have been used to roll new machines instead of copying files to the server.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is very similar to the process fb had for years. With some caveats (prod deploys once a week, handled by a central team)

I think this kind of process can last a company well into the thousands of engineers.

Great work

</comment><comment><USER37> Do they use Kubernetes at Slack?

<comment><USER38> Doesn't seem like it based on

> Instead of pushing the new build to our servers using a sync script, each > server pulls the build concurrently when signaled by a Consul key change.

<comment><USER37> does that mean they are not even using containers?

<comment><USER13> Plain EC2, backend in PHP.

<comment><USER39> > Plain EC2, backend in PHP.

That's slightly horrific. Weirdware NIH deploy system, no containers, PHP.

<comment><USER40> If I was using PHP, I wouldn't use containers either. Just sync the latest code over, change a sym link to the new build, done.

<comment><USER41> capistrano is perfect for that. we use it for all our deployment needs and it has been wonderful!

<comment><USER42> second this. I haven't needed cap in a while for the work I'm doing, and I don't often see it mentioned (perhaps because I'm not looking) but it's a fantastic tool for managing atomic deployment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Can anyone explain why they do 12 deploys a day? Are engineers pushing to production as a way of iteratively testing a feature?

<comment><USER44> They're not deploying untested software, if that's what you're asking. They most likely simply deploy each change when it is ready, rather than building up work-in-progress and deploying many changes at the same time. It's a lot safer to change one thing at a time, see [https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35747076-accelerate](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35747076-accelerate). Releasing changes as soon as they are ready can also enable them to gather feedback faster - in this sense they would be iteratively 'testing' the product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> 12 deploys in an 8-hour window is only 40 min per deploy. Do they really perform all of those steps in 40 mins, or do they have multiple deployments going at once (pipelining)?

<comment><USER45> I was thinking the same, especially since they mention manual testing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> How are deploy commanders chosen? On my (very small currently) team, the person who is on-call is also our deploy commander, but it seems like you might need something else for a larger team.

</comment><comment><USER47> What happens after hot-fixing the release branch? Does the release branch get merged back into master?

<comment><USER29> Github only merges to master when it's 100% deployed and working for example. I like their workflow better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> HHVM, didn't expect this (PHP yes, HHVM not really).

</comment><comment><USER49> Link 404's

</comment><comment><USER50> This link has now been reposted 6 times in the past two weeks:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22816645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22816645)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22729766](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22729766)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22801191](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22801191)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22784712](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22784712)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22720028](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22720028)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22806810](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22806810)

<comment><USER51> That's an indicator of interest. I actually emailed one of the submitters to repost the article for that reason. (Yes, we're thinking about software to detect cases like this.)

On HN, a submission doesn't count as a dupe unless it has had significant attention. This is in the FAQ: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

<comment><USER50> Fair enough, only reason I noticed is because I was actually going to post this link yesterday but did a search to make sure sure I wasn't reposting.

Plus they didn't get much traction anyway, so I wrongly assumed there wasn't interest.

Know for the future now!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> <sarcasm>

How nice of them to volunteer 2% of their paid customer base as "canary" without them specifically opting in to it, or perhaps even being aware.

</sarcasm>

Or perhaps they do it exclusively with the free service tier, which is much more understandable.

<comment> friend-monoid Seems reasonable to me? Better to deploy gradually in case the deploy is bad, right?

<comment><USER53> If the users are aware and consent to being beta testers, versus what's already likely stable (caveat being when you're rapidly pushing out a hotfix because your last deploy broke something).

<comment><USER54> At some point a new build needs to roll out to production. There's always going to be some risk that something goes wrong, so better to test with 2% of the population initially rather than 100%. By then, the build has already gone through integration tests/dog-fooding, so if something goes wrong in the canary phase, it's generally due to some production environment configuration issue.

<comment><USER53> Not disagreeing, simply stating users should be aware and get a say (an option would be fine to opt in to early release access), especially if they're a paying customer.

<comment><USER54> I hear where you're coming from, but from my experience, the canary phase usually lasts less than an hour. And the traffic is usually split randomly, so the same 2% of users aren't at elevated risk for every deployment. I don't know how Slack does it, though.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is it time for schools to try to boost kids' emotional intelligence? - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/04/05/the_other_kind_of_smart/?page=full <comment><USER2> "In recent years, the results have started to come in, and they suggest that emotional knowledge can indeed be learned in the classroom. Emory University psychologist Stephen Nowicki has found that interventions can teach kids to read faces better. Mark Greenberg of Penn State has found that emotional learning classes can make kids better at controlling themselves when upset. Researchers looking at a curriculum called the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program found that such classes also made children less likely to falsely misread intent - in particular less likely to assume hostility in ambiguous social situations."

I Googled for some scholarly citations before posting this extract of the submitted article. It's interesting to hear that there are possibly some interventions in this area with a research base. The term "emotional intelligence" is almost certainly overbroad in designating a variety of modular abilities not closely related one to another, but some of those abilities appear to be subject to training effects, and most have plenty of real-world usefulness, so this will be an interesting area of research.

To answer the question posed by the article title, I would like to see schools do much better at teaching reading and math, supposedly their current job, before investing too much time in trying to teach emotional intelligence, which I think is more a family's job.

<comment><USER3> Why are some parts of the country considered more "laid back" than others or considered to have more "nice people?" I suspect that environmental factors are very important in terms of teaching people emotional and social coping skills. The Lord of the Flies environment we've created in many schools, where the only adults that kids can model after are in the same unpopular, beleaguered position as umpires at a baseball game, and the only other available models are kids who have just been there a couple of years longer.

It's not that schools teaching emotional intelligence is a great idea. It's more that the status quo at most schools is just plain bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm fairly certain this is the worst idea I have ever read. The "programming" done by public schools is bad enough already, trying to get kids to think the same. Now they want them to feel the same.

</comment><comment><USER5> That would require teachers who possess emotional intelligence themselves.

</comment><comment><USER6> > Is it time for schools to try to boost kids' emotional intelligence?

Please no. They will only do harm.

</comment><comment><USER7> heh. Emotional intelligence: something liberal arts people made up so they don't feel quite so bad about being kindof dumb.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes! Just my 2c!</comment>


'Freedom isn't a handout': Chinese professor's graduation speech - <AUTHOR> https://www.inkstonenews.com/education/chinese-college-professor-qu-weiguos-full-graduation-speech/article/3015786 <comment><USER2> Wow, and bravo. Everybody everywhere would do well to hear/read this.

> Under the impact of complicated thoughts, shameless suppression and > temptation, defending your freedom of thought has become very difficult.

> We usually believe that learning can make you powerful, but in the process, > our independent will or freedom of thought is often hijacked, wittingly or > unwittingly. Everyone thinks that learning is a good thing, but if we lose > our independent will or freedom of thought, the outcome might be even worse > than not learning.

[..]

> This is why the concept of "freedom and the pursuit of non-material goals" > is incredibly important, but also incredibly fragile. Not only does it allow > us to pursue our own lives, it also prevents us from becoming tools of > crime.

> It is humanity's first line of defense, or we should say the last. Actually, > it's the sole line of defense.

This reminds me of something I love to bits:

> _But if you choose the liberty and pride and strength of the single soul, > and the free fraternization of men, as the purpose which your life is to > make manifest then do not sell it for tinsel. Think that your soul is strong > and will hold its way; and slowly, through bitter struggle perhaps the > strength will grow. And the foregoing of possessions for which others barter > the last possibility of freedom will become easy._

> _At the end of life you may close your eyes saying: "I have not been > dominated by the Dominant Idea of my Age; I have chosen mine own allegiance, > and served it. I have proved by a lifetime that there is that in man which > saves him from the absolute tyranny of Circumstance, which in the end > conquers and remoulds Circumstance, the immortal fire of Individual Will, > which is the salvation of the Future."_

\-- Voltairine de Cleyre

</comment><comment><USER3> Modern day Thomas Paine</comment>


Noam Chomsky: A Green New Deal Can Create Jobs and Livelihoods - <AUTHOR> https://lithub.com/noam-chomsky-a-green-new-deal-can-create-jobs-and-livelihoods/ <comment><USER2> > The Green New Deal moves us in the right direction. You can raise questions > about the specific form in which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey > introduced it. But the general idea is quite right.

I really wish the "Green New Deal" wasn't mentioned in these pushes for the future. I don't think there was ever agreement on what the "general idea" of it was, and I don't think it deserves any credit for the few good ideas that it did contain. Sure, it's recognizable, but not necessarily in a good way.

<comment><USER3> The new deal created the middle class in America, rescued it (very lately) from the Great Depression, and set it up for the post war prosperity that made America what it is today. I think the idea of a green new deal is to do that again, as well as save us from the climate grave we are digging ourselves into. In my mind it is poetry.

<comment><USER4> There's another narrative in Europe about how we actually build our prosperity on the back of the southern hemisphere.

<comment><USER3> Yeah I don't disagree with that but it's a separate problem IMO. Americans don't give a shit because if we lose our job we're fucked, the government doesn't give a shit about us, we're stressed and worried all the time about things Europeans take for granted. The quality of life in the US is horrible. And if it were better people would be more capable of organizing and speaking the truth. But the truth has just been squashed in the interest of the ultra wealthy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> But it probably won't fix the climate:

[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2019.15...](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2019.1598964)

<comment><USER6> Who knows what's going to happen with the climate? No one, because the climate is a chaotic, non-linear, dynamic, multivariate system. Right now, as we speak deep sea thermal vents are leaking geothermal heat into the oceans. Underwater and aboveground volcanoes are erupting. One good solid eruption and you can have a whole year without a summer ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer)). A string of Mount Tamboras or one good super volcanic eruption could plunge the earth back into a deep glacial period for the next 100,000 years. You pair the above with the geomagnetic reversal that's going on ([https://www.space.com/earth-magnetic-north-passes-prime- meri...](https://www.space.com/earth-magnetic-north-passes-prime- meridian.html)) along with the really deep solar minimum period that's likely to dominate for the next few solar cycles ([https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2019/04/10/experts- predict-t...](https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2019/04/10/experts-predict-the- solar-cycle/))...and who knows? One thing I know is CO2 may push the temp ceiling slightly higher but it doesn't provide any kind of floor for base temperature (see Mars).

<comment><USER2> In my mind, this is like putting a candle under a rope that's holding an anvil above your head and saying "We don't know how thick the rope is".

Regardless, we know there's a flame there. Let's at least try to move it away a few cm, if possible, since that's the only thing we have control of.

<comment><USER6> No it's not. It is the nature of chaotic systems. In chaotic systems, the uncertainty in a forecast increases exponentially with elapsed time. Hence, mathematically, doubling the forecast time more than squares the proportional uncertainty in the forecast. This is why, despite our best efforts and 50 years or so of Moore's law increases in computation, we still cannot predict the weather beyond 10 days with any sort of accuracy. Likewise, I have no idea what the Lyapunov time is for the climate, but it's certainly smaller than 80 years.

If human beings had any sense at all, we'd accept that we cannot control the climate and we'd do well to prepare for either a warmer or cooler climate. In other words, we should be adaptable. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_time](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_time)

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

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

<comment><USER7> So why is it that climate scientists - the most educated people on this topic - overwhelmingly believe that evidence supports a theory of anthropogenic climate change? Is it more likely that they are all wrong, that they are all in on an elaborate conspiracy, or that you are wrong?

<comment><USER6> Number one they're not all in agreement. Number two, outright, science does not work on consensus. The only reason climate relies on consensus is because they cannot validate their models. They are stuck on the hypothesis step of the scientific method. It doesn't matter how many people you get to agree with your hypothesis. Without empirical experimentation, it proves nothing. You cannot beat chaos theory. The current crop of climate scientists are not being honest about the extremely exponentially high levels of uncertainty in their forecasts. You would do well to read from first principles on chaos theory and ask yourself whether I'm the crazy one for claiming that the future of our climate is unknowable.

We understand weather far better than we understand climate. And we cannot predict it more than 10 days into the future.

At any rate of you want to hear it from true experts here are a few:

Richard Lindzen, PhD Atmospheric Sciences, MIT [https://youtu.be/X2q9BT2LIUA](https://youtu.be/X2q9BT2LIUA)

Patrick Moore, UBC [https://youtu.be/kHZKo13HV2A](https://youtu.be/kHZKo13HV2A)

Henrik Svensmark, Danish Space Institute [https://youtu.be/wU1qg8HceGI](https://youtu.be/wU1qg8HceGI)

Freeman Dyson, Cornell [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BiKfWdXXfIs](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BiKfWdXXfIs)

NASA admitting they have no model for clouds: [https://youtu.be/ra9AFNco3lI](https://youtu.be/ra9AFNco3lI)

<comment><USER8> Predicting the weather is fundamentally different from predicting climate.

Let's play a coin game. We'll throw a fair coin 100,000 times. Beforehand, I predict the number of heads +-0.5%. If I'm right, 1,000$ for me, if I'm wrong, 1000$ for you.

The probability that my prediction is correct is more than 99.8%. Nevertheless, I can predict a single coin flip only with a 50% chance.

A single coin flip represents a weather forecast. Climate, however, is the long term average, represented by the total number of heads. Even if I cannot predict the individual events (like tomorrows weather), I can say something about the averages with high probability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just don't understand the rhetoric here. The climate disaster scenario is

> everything is expected to change: the air we breathe, the food we eat, the > water we drink, the landscapes we see, the oceans, the seasons, the daily > routine, the quality of life. Our children will have to adapt or become > extinct. They will have to dress differently, behave differently, live > differently.

Sounds bad! I'm open to ideas on how to prevent such radical disruptions. But the author suggests that we need to end fossil fuel consumption, reconfigure our economic system, reconsider what it means to have a decent life, and eliminate our desire to consume lots of goods and services. Shouldn't we expect a comparable amount of disruption from these huge changes?

<comment><USER10> Would you like to be driving the car when it veers off the road, or in the passenger seat. Passively waiting for the disruption of climate change to ravage normalcy, is probably going to be worst then trying to dealing with it aggressively. The equity of disruption will be extreme in the passive case.

<comment><USER9> I don't agree with the intuition. Even in the worst projections, climate change will be somewhat gradual; we won't wake up one day to find all the corn in Iowa is dead. The day we expropriate the factories, as the author insists we must, will be pretty extreme.

<comment><USER11> If only there were a current event that illustrates the danger of this line of thinking when it comes to things that can spiral out of control exponentially...

<comment><USER12> What? The two aren't related. You can't just take one event that demonstrably exhibits exponential-growth characteristics (via the R0) and another event that demonstrably doesn't, and then declare them to have the same growth characteristics just because they're vaguely similar in level-of-catastrophe.

<comment><USER13> > another event that demonstrably doesn't

I would like to see a demonstration that ecological collapse cannot happen exponentially in response to a linear change in the environment. I am no ecologist, but I don't believe it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Bernie Sanders would have been so good for the American capitalist economy. He is the only one who would have after the monopolies, which would help level the playing field that is currently just consolidating into big companies. The social safety net would also spur a lot of new business creation.

I am not very confident about America's ability to handle global warming disasters in ten years.

</comment><comment><USER15> >If you eliminate the massive subsidies that are given to fossil fuels, renewable energy is probably already more cost-effective.

Because there is a lot of subtlety in the way we contrast subsidies with normal tax deferrals, it may be clarifying to consult this fact sheet from EESI, which is a successor of the Environmental Study Conference caucus originally in the US Congress:

[https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel- subs...](https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subsidies-a- closer-look-at-tax-breaks-and-societal-costs)

>Well, what's the difference between the Green New Deal of today and the New Deal from the 1930s? Several things. One thing that's different is large-scale labor action.

It wouldn't be a Chomsky essay without a paean to the labor movement.

I think that the "Green New Deal" is the wrong name. The "New Deal" was a principally economic initiative. Climate change affects the economy, but climate change is really about physics. The appropriate analogy would be to the Manhattan Project, not the New Deal. (Nuclear technology has also had a massive effect on the economy!)

One unfortunate consequence of the naming trend "Green New Deal" has been an excessive focus on economic remedies which overshadows the most important scientific advances. Recently the most important advances have been in the production and price of lithium batteries.

There are approximately 500 trillion pounds of lithium in the ocean, as well as many cheaper sources on land. The lithium iron-phosphate chemistry is not dense enough for use in cars or portable electronics, but on a cost basis it is quickly eclipsing all other forms of energy storage. At present, the development of this technology is limited mostly by low demand, which is utterly ridiculous when you consider that the widespread adoption of grid- scale energy storage is absolutely essential to there ever being a near-zero- carbon electricity market.

The other key technology that needs to be developed further is the heat pump. Heating buildings with gas accounts for a large fraction of our carbon emissions and can't be easily replaced by Joule heating because the electricity requirements are so large. Therefore the near-zero-carbon replacement for gas heating must be some variety of heat pump, be it vapor- compression, magnetocaloric or otherwise. The current commercially available air-source heat pumps are limited to a minimum outdoor air temperature of about -20 C, which means that they are not viable for year-round heating in many large global cities, including e.g. Chicago, Moscow, Harbin, et cetera. Ground-source heat pumps by contrast have high installation costs which increase with the desired power output. Improvements in one or the other are needed to reach the necessary endpoint where nearly all of the human population can stop relying on gas heating.

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting to see an anarcho-socialist calling for one the biggest government interventions in history.

<comment><USER17> One of the points Chomsky makes frequently is that anarchism (at least in his view) is not opposed to any and all power structures. Legitimate ones can exist but they need to justify their existence.

<comment><USER16> Almost anyone would assume that authority has to be derived legitimately, as a matter of common sense.

<comment><USER17> Here is a discussion with Chomsky on the topic.

[https://chomsky.info/20020322/](https://chomsky.info/20020322/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I find it incredibly unlikely that we are going to be able to avoid the brunt of climate change. Mass flooding is going to happen and countries like Bangladesh will be swallowed up by the sea. Refugee crises are going to happen at unprecedented scales and there will likely be wars. Even the paltry GND, which is almost certainly not going to be instituted, would not prevent this.

This was inevitable under capitalism. As a system that requires constant growth, it is incredibly brittle and does not lend itself well to long-term, sustainable planning. The only question for me now is: how do we best prepare ourselves for the upcoming crisis, such that we might be able to construct an equitable, sustainable society out of it? Crisis doesn't guarantee revolutionary change — but it can if we're organized properly.

<comment><USER19> Do you believe all coastal, sea-level cities will be swallowed up by the sea?

<comment><USER18> No. But those that lack the capital to be able to take appropriate countermeasures (largely in the global south) certainly will.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The New Deal has such a ridiculous glorified position in the view of the left. Of course it was a total failure and thankfully rules unconstitutional. The US had the deepest Great Depression, deeper then countries that didn't do a 'New Deal'.

You can pin-point the start of the recovery to the leaving of the gold standard (literally in the month by month producing you see it jumping). It was actually the New Deal that stopped the bounce back.

The politicians behind the new deal saw the Great Depression as an opportunity for social revolution, not as an economic recovery program. It is no secret that many of the primary architects behind the New Deal were strongly inspired by early socialism and fascism.

Further I would say Noam Chomsky has absolutely zero credibly in any topic related to economics. He is a weirdo socialist and we could go down 3 levels deep of what type of socialist exactly he is, but needless to economics and political science would agree that his ideas are not practical. So why take a advice from him on this.

You don't need a 'New Deal' you need to apply your budget and countries strategy with the long run goals you have and make good investments. The New Deal was the exact opposite, it was the embodiment of 'lets throw shit on the wall and hope for the best' often doing massive damage in the process. Mass slaughtering of pigs and destruction of other foods being the most absurd examples of such idiocy. The Blue Eagle program might be the worst regulation ever passed in American history. The list goes on.

Depending on what exactly you want to achieve, their are far, far better solutions then having the government bureaucrats blow billions of 100s of billions on politicians pet projects. Its totally contrary to how good government contract is done.

Just as with the original New Deal this Green New Deal is not about achieving results. Its is about achieving social and governmental revolution along the principles that the authors believe in.

</comment><comment><USER21> Give me billions of dollars to hire people to dig holes in the desert and I'll create a lot of jobs, and you'll get, a lot of holes in the desert.

The "job creation" benefit myth needs to die. Some jobs are bad jobs, some have little or no economic value. Green New Deal advocates need to focus on the economic benefits of these plans, such as a healthier population due to less pollution, saving economical important properties from flooding, maintaining healthy fish stocks, etc, etc.

<comment><USER22> Funny how this argument is rarely leveled against the defense industry, the vast proportion of which is at best boondoggle busywork and at worst outright grift.

<comment><USER21> And it should be, because it's equally valid. Having Boeing build F-35s instead of 787s lowers our standard of living.</comment></comment></comment>


Growing a Language, by Guy Steele (1998) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0 <comment><USER2> Great talk, one of my inspirations.

The "nub" (slightly edited):

"A language design can no longer be thing. It must be a pattern, a pattern for growth".

"My point is that a good programmer does not just write programs. A good programmer builds a working vocabulary. A good programmer does language design, though not from scratch, but building on the frame of a base language"

[https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0](https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0)

Oh, the paper if you don't want to watch the whole thing:

[https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf](https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf)

<comment><USER3> "nub" \- I think you might mean "point" or "crux"?

Main Entry: bottom line

Part of Speech: noun

Definition: indispensable content

Synonyms: basis, conclusion, core, crux, determination, essence, fiber, final decision, fundamentals, income, key point, last word, loss, main idea, main point, main thing, meat and potatoes, name of the game, net, nitty-gritty, nuts and bolts, point

<comment><USER2> > "nub" \- I think you might mean "point" or "crux"?

"This is the nub of what I want to say" is a direct quote from the paper/talk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A classic that is relevant today as it was 20 years ago. Thank you for the repost, it's a good reminder to (re-)examine what I'm doing these days in a larger context.

"..plan for growth with help from users. This is a win for you because you have help. This is a win for the users because they get to have their say and get to bend the growth to their needs."

"Parts of the language must be designed to help the task of growth. A good set of types, ways for a user to define new types, to add new words and new rules to the language, to define and use all sorts of patterns — all these are needed."

</comment><comment><USER5> Previouslies: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22growing%20a%20language%22&s...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22growing%20a%20language%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

</comment><comment><USER6> 20 years later. What does Guy Steele thing about how Java ended up? We still have no operator overloading, no value types. There are plans, sure, but Java grows very slowly. Good thing? Bad thing?

Does anyone know if there is a follow up on this?

<comment><USER7> Thank goodness there is no operator overloading. I maintain 15 year old java codebases and am very happy they did not add user defined operators...

<comment><USER8> I always find this an odd reason to be against usable features. I have inherited codebases in extremely confined languages as have I inherited codebases in very permitting high-level languages Python, and never have I though "Thank good this language decided to restrict its reach in order to confine the programmer to a smaller subset which made it harder for him to mess up."

Often have I though "My good, if only the language had better supported what the programmer is trying to implement himself through horrible hacks, then I wouldn't be sitting here trying to wonder exactly what mistakes he made that casuses everything to crash inexplicably."

<comment><USER9> I guess the culture around a language matters significantly. For instance, there is quite a specific culture around the Rust community/language. The focus on the language ergonomics is also reflected in many packages. Same goes for the mutability/immutability aspect of code.

A second example of this culture is the go language. I read a few repo's, and the same style of programming is seemingly applied throughout.

For the Java case, I can actually see operator overloading going haywaire over many codebases. The same as overengineering is a typical trait associated with Java.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is one of my favorites. They played it for us when I was at [https://www.recurse.com](https://www.recurse.com). I half appreciated it then, but it's gotten better with repeat viewings.

</comment><comment><USER11> Thank you for this! I'd forgot the name of the talk, and I spent some days looking for it, with no success...

</comment><comment><USER12> this was the first video handed to me when I started in Java</comment>


Google and Motorola: What the #*%? - <AUTHOR> http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2011/08/google-and-motorola-what.html

<comment><USER2> Decent analysis but misses two significant points:

\- Moto has a Java license that should change state on the Oracle lawsuit, in which they are currently being hammered by the judge

\- The settop box business is decidedly non-trivial if (and it's a big if) they can get the cable companies to move into the 21st century. Comcast boxes, for example, lose 100% of their programming guide in the absence of power and can take more than 72 hours to reload the standard 13-14 days of content. Search sucks and presentation is close behind.

While Google's processes may need some adjustment to suit the hardware business I disagree that this will cripple or kill them.</comment>


How SSDs conquered mobile devices and modern OSes - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/inside-the-ssd-revolution-mobile-devices-and-modern-oss/ <comment><USER2> It's interesting how this has played out exactly the way Clayton M Christensen predicted in his Innovator's Dilemma book years ago. Back then, flash was barely on the radar of most consumers, and yet, Christensen identified flash as a primary candidate to make traditional harddrives obsolete the same way desktop harddrives had made mainframe harddrives and minicomputer harddrives obsolete. Chalk one up for the guy, his Innovator's Dilemma model is _really_ well thought out.

<comment><USER3> Is this really so surprising? I think anyone who knows how semiconductor manufacturing works would have looked at the scaling graphs of magnetic storage vs. transistor density and seen that they cross. We've all been using flash-based embedded systems for well over a decade -- it started with cameras, then fixed-function network gadgets, then phones, then... So now it's hitting PCs.

If anything, magnetic storage has actually scaled faster than expected (frankly it's so cheap in bulk that it's effectively free relative to the power required to run it).

To me, the only surprise was that consumer applications never found a need for more than about a quarter TB of storage, so that's where the crossover happens on PCs. We haven't actually hit the cost-per-byte point yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's just as well that 256GB is enough for anyone. Maybe I'm pre-empting the next part in this series, but it looks like simply scaling NAND flash geometry might be a dead end:

 __"While the growing capacity of SSDs and high IOP rates will make them attractive in many applications, the reduction in performance that is necessary to increase capacity while keeping costs in check may make it dif- ficult for SSDs to scale as a viable technology for some applications." __

[http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/swanson/papers/FAST2012BleakFla...](http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/swanson/papers/FAST2012BleakFlash.pdf)

<comment><USER5> While SSDs are still scaling, like you said they won't scale forever. Memristors have just recently been proven to exist and there are a lot of companies showing that they have working memristors. I hope that by the time we reach "peak silicon" on SSDs, memristors will be there to pick up the slack. They've been a long time coming, but now that they finally exist we should be seeing them soon. According to HP, they should have memristors on the market in about 6 months.

[http://www.dailytech.com/HP+to+Deploy+Memristor+Powered+SSD+...](http://www.dailytech.com/HP+to+Deploy+Memristor+Powered+SSD+Replacement+Within+18+Months/article22963.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here is some neat work done for using SSD's effectively in network appliances and data cache servers. <http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~abadam/ssdalloc.html></comment>


Introducing Dora: Zumper's new rental search - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zumper.com/2015/02/introducing-dora-next-evolution-rental-search/

<comment><USER2> I suppose it is so named because it's for virtually exploring an area to find apartments?</comment>


A fusion energy system for space propulsion - <AUTHOR> http://www.aresinstitute.org/spherelab/papers/third_party/Advanced%20Fusion%20Energy%20System.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Google talk: <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606#></comment>


7 Reasons why it's a great time to be a tech entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://markmaunder.com/2008/7-reasons-why-its-a-great-time-to-be-a-tech-entrepreneur/

<comment><USER2> Tech entrepreneurs have always needed three (3) things:

Technology, Money and Time.

It used to take a lot of money to buy mostly okay technology that took too much time to learn and use.

In 2008, the technology is stable, powerful, and reliable. The cost of entry, development and delivery is very low. Only time remains a factor, but it's getting better.

So hell yeah, cast your net. And thanks Mark for an optimistic article in the midst of doom and gloom on Wall Street.

What would happen if the U.S. spent $810B funding start-ups and paying everybody's college tuition?

I mean, what would we do with the $500B (1/2 trillion) left over?

</comment><comment><USER3> Great article, but it's talking more about the long-term than the short-term.

In the long-term, the removal of a "false economy" is great. In the short- term, there are an awful lot of entrepreneurs that are a wee bit dependent on that false economy.</comment>


How I got to Google - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/10/how-i-got-to-google-ch-1.html

<comment><USER2> I've this happen a few times, seemingly minor actions snowball into life changing events.

However it is always important to realise that these things aren't coincidence or luck. They are the cumulative result of many years of action. Take the sysadmin Aaron, he obviously is a talented engineer who has worked hard to become so. Aaron is also diligent and takes the initiative above and beyond what is required of him. All these things lead up to the opportunity of talking direct to a senior engineer who had recently been impressed with Aaron's skill. And, this is the crux folks, Aaron saw the opportunity and took it.

So lay the foundations, create opportunities and always be on the look out for these moments so that you can take them when they happen.

I got both my partner and job in this manner btw.

</comment><comment><USER3> The other possible point is that your employees shouldn't be allowed to report problems to companies that might actually hire them :)

Congrats to Aaron. I agree with hartor. Aaron worked to be the best sysadmin that he could be and when the opportunity presented itself to work at google, he was qualified to do so; both in motivation and skill.</comment>


Robinhood maxed out credit line last month amid market tumult - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-10/robinhood-maxed-out-credit-line-last-month-amid-market-tumult <comment><USER2> I've worked in "FinTech DevOps" for the past 10 years and this reminds me of a story from a past job:

We hired the Global Head of Clearing [0] from a big bank and on their first day they were giving a presentation on their background and how financial clearing works.

Someone asked "What is your nightmare scenario?"

The response:

 _We have a large overnight position in a security. Our Prime Broker (PB) [1] comes back and says "We disagree with you on the position so you can't trade." Even if it turns out that the PB is wrong, by the time it all gets sorted out, the market has moved so much in that security that it bankrupts us. I've seen it happen to other firms and it's not pretty._

I also started at Knight right after their big outage. [2] People like to talk about the big tech outages sinking financial firms but it can just as easily be plain old issues with bookkeeping that can blow up a firm.

0 - [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/clearing.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/clearing.asp)

1 - [https://www.investopedia.com/articles/professionals/110415/r...](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/professionals/110415/role- prime-broker.asp)

2 - [https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/knight-capital- sh...](https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/knight-capital-shuts-down- trading-on-electrical-outage-11752932)

<comment><USER3> Totally talking out of my butt here, I have no finance knowledge. But just as a matter of general game theory stuff I understand that sometimes you have to push all your chips in on a position, but that doesn't seem sustainable? Like how often is it reasonable for a big bank to have a position in a single security that could bankrupt them?

<comment><USER4> For some companies, every single night!

Money chases the sun. At the end of trading in New York you make a swap with a company in Japan that at the end of trading in Japan does the same with London then back to New York. Any money not swapped doesn't make money overnight.

This is called the overnight repo market. But if you don't get your money back in the morning, you've got a problem.

<comment><USER5> Is it possible to quantify how much "active" vs "passive" money/capital there is?

<comment><USER4> I doubt that it is possible to properly quantify how much capital there is, let alone to classify it.

[http://www.fintools.com/docs/Warren%20Buffet%20on%20Derivati...](http://www.fintools.com/docs/Warren%20Buffet%20on%20Derivatives.pdf) is nearly 20 years old, but Warren Buffet's criticism of how we account for the value of derivatives is as true today as it was then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "We determined it was prudent to draw on our credit line during the week of Feb. 24 in light of market volatility. That capital was returned in full last week."

Headline should read "Robinhood used credit that was available to them and paid it back"

But that wouldn't generate the desired panic or clicks now would it

<comment><USER7> > "Companies don't tap their credit line unless they need to," said David > Ritter, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, who spoke generally about the > issue without commenting directly on Robinhood. When companies do, it's > "perhaps not a good signal with regard to their cash burn, which could make > creditors nervous."

It's yet another sign that this company is teetering on the edge of collapse. That isn't irrational panic. They were completely offline for an entire day during the biggest market rally in over a decade, and have had smaller outages during other recent volatile trading days.

This company deserves to crash and burn. Anyone who still keeps a balance there is insane. People have lost millions and are going to continue to lose because Robinhood is run by amateur clowns.

<comment><USER8> > Anyone who still keeps a balance there is insane.

Robinhood accounts are protected by the SIPC. Although with other discount brokers introducing free trading, I would tend to agree with you that continuing to use RH with its simplistic interface and appalling execution is pretty silly.

<comment><USER9> > _Robinhood accounts are protected by the SIPC_

This is correct. But SIPC reimbursement can take months. For non-trivial balances, one may need a lawyer to prove ownership.

After that, an accountant would likely be needed to reconcile records, including for tax purposes. (Tax forms are not automatically generated for brokerages in receivership.)

<comment><USER10> We have a similar insurance for cash deposits in Canada. I've always imagined that for some balance (perhaps in thousands of dollars), you're better off just letting it go if the company goes down. Now that you mention taxes, I think letting go may not even be an option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a small investor (investing around few thousand USD), how do I know which app to trust? There is Robinhood and Stash for ETFs and Stocks and then there are robot-wealth mangers like WealthFront etc.

Should I always stick to big firms like Vanguard or Fidelity? Thing I don't like about firms like Vanguard and Fidelity is that you cannot buy fraction of a unit which Robinhood/Stash allow you to do.

Any advice?

<comment><USER12> Haven't both Vanguard and Fidelity started supporting fractional shares? E.g. [https://www.fidelity.com/trading/fractional- shares](https://www.fidelity.com/trading/fractional-shares)

<comment><USER13> M1 is the only one that has full support for fractional share trading, I believe.

Fidelity has started to offer fractional shares, but it has some limitations: Only market and limit orders, only trades through the basic trade ticket in the mobile app, limited to NYSE/NASDAQ stocks, etc. [1] Another thing to watch out for is that fractional shares can't be transferred; they must be liquidated if you want to switch brokers.

Schwab has said they'll be launching fractional shares over the summer.

Note that most brokers already support fractional shares indirectly through DRIP [2], but that's unrelated to _trading_.

[1] [https://www.fidelity.com/trading/fractional- shares](https://www.fidelity.com/trading/fractional-shares)

[2] [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dividendreinvestmentpla...](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dividendreinvestmentplan.asp)

<comment><USER14> > _Another thing to watch out for is that fractional shares can 't be > transferred; they must be liquidated if you want to switch brokers._

What happens if I buy .5 shares of AAPL every week for 53 weeks? Do I have 26 undivided shares that can be transferred and one half-share that has to be liquidated, or do they treat it as 53 half-shares that all must be liquidated?

If the latter, seems like a great way to keep people locked-in. But the former could be a headache for basis reporting, especially if you could transfer to a brokerage that doesn't natively support fractional shares.

<comment><USER13> I don't know for sure, but I'm pretty sure they're combined behind the scenes. Fractional shares are really abstractions over an underlying instrument. The _broker_ is the actual owner of the shares, and you have an indirect ownership. Among other things, it leads to a situation where you cannot take part of normal shareholder activites such as voting. The broker still needs to keeps records of the cost basis of each fraction you purchased, of course.

<comment><USER15> This is generally true of whole shares too – that the brokerage technically owns the shares. And why brokerages will set up proxy voting for shareholder activities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why would they have needed to draw down their credit line and then pay it back over a two week period? I don't have an answer to this question.

<comment><USER17> I can't get past the paywall, so maybe the article answers this question. But, in case not, one major reason could be margin. If you pay Robinhood $5/month then you have access to borrow money from them to buy stock. The first $1000 is interest free and additional "margin" incurs interest.

When the stock market plunges, some people will see that as an opportunity to buy more stock at a reduced price. If they don't have any liquid funds in their account, borrowing money from the broker is instantaneous (assuming you've previously enabled it). I don't know what happened, but I could see their line of credit getting eaten up very quickly if enough investors decided to leverage their available margin.

If investors sold those shares within two weeks, they could pay back the credit line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I hope they aren't insolvent yet, there's a 3-6 business day waiting period for transferring your positions/balances to a different broker with ACATS.

Does anyone know what happens to any open positions in the event that they do become non-operational?

<comment><USER19> What would even lead you to believe they are in _danger_ of becoming insolvent? They had some severe technical issues and a ridiculously long downtime yes, but at the end of the day their company is still operating just the same as before.

<comment><USER18> There are a lot of unhappy customers which are probably trying to get all of their money out of Robinhood ASAP, myself included. It's not unthinkable that they may run into problems and become insolvent due to the unexpected outflows.

<comment><USER20> It might be a naive question, but if you buy shares through Robinhood then don't you just own those shares? It might take some time to transfer them to your preferred broker, but I don't understand why you'd lose anything in an insolvency. Plus any cash you had would be held in a customer account, so again it's simply a matter of dividing up that cash between customers according to their balances. (Note: I've never used Robinhood, so I'm assuming they're a regular stockbroker with added Silicon Valley hype, rather than something else)

<comment><USER21> I think that is indeed the case for actual shares (I was certainly able to participate in Rite-Aid's most recent Board of Directors election, solely based on the shares I bought through Robinhood), but I'm curious about how it'd apply to cryptocurrency, since Robinhood (last I checked) doesn't expose the private keys for the underlying wallets or otherwise offer a mechanism to transfer crypto assets out of Robinhood.

Not that it really matters for the, what, $2 I put into Dogecoin, but still.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's almost always a prudent decision for a company to draw on loan facilities if they think things are going south. Draw while you still can and before you trip a covenant.

</comment><comment><USER23> Let me reword some things in the article:

> and is now backed by venture capital firms including Index Ventures, > Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia

So these big players (aka "Smart Money") have granular access to everyone's personal & financial details, have access to trading information, are gaining deep knowledge on how Retail (aka "dumb money") operate/trade, their patterns, per age/gender/region/etc. That information is priceless, and then this happens: Sardine Feeding Frenzy: Whale, Shark, Dolphin and Sea Lions | The Hunt | BBC Earth [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zOarcL1BSc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zOarcL1BSc)

<comment><USER24> You think the VC investors of a brokerage get access to individual customer transaction data?

I'm sure it's happened before, but I have to imagine such a thing is incredibly rare and illegal if violating the stated privacy policy (due to GLB law).

<comment><USER23> VC that have equity, yes. Because if they got equity and they own part of that business they sure as hell will siphon the data and nobody and nothing can stop them. It is like telling me that a Holdings company does not have access to a Subsidiary's client data.

<comment><USER25> I can go out and buy Schwab equity tomorrow. Will they turn over their data to me?

I recognise that's reductio ad absurdum, and I'm not saying it's impossible that data is misused. But the idea that equity holders of regulated financial institutions can just get whatever data they want out of that institution is... not true.

<comment><USER23> I have seen this happening in every Bank I've ever worked in/with that was big enough to expand or small enough to be M&A-ed. When a bank buys out a significant part of an Insurance, Factoring, Securities, etc. company, the next day the clients get a nice letter (or email nowadays) about the news and that is that. And a few weeks later the vertical sales begin. All banks that grow through M&A (mostly As) do exactly that. I will assume RH to be Securities since they don't seem to be doing something else (give out loans, hold deposits). So, again, if those fine people that have £€¥$ to RH are JUST VCs the above is not happening. But if they DO have equity, and that would be north of 5-10%, and they BDO have some management over RH (BYOCommitees) it is naive (not mean to insult you or anyone) to think that they don't siphon data. It is like saying that MS didn't get a copy of LinkedIn the very next day, or that FB didn't get their hands on WhatsApp's phone numbers, or that a BANK who just bought a Securities company for which they are NOW LIABLE in the eyes of SEC did not get ALL the data to run KYC/AML/OFAC etc. That company has a $1.7bn valuation where own funds where...? And three big players may own 60-70% of that?

I have seen this happening so many times.

And there are myriad ways to get the data. The easy ones is through their DWH where suddenly (with the correct mapping) all reports etc work on day1 with the new data.

If you know this from experience (ran due diligence pre M&A, worked with the DWH post M&A) or have some other experience on the matter, feel free to share names. I will only share two SocGen and BofA and leave it at that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> [https://archive.md/E9zBL](https://archive.md/E9zBL)

</comment><comment><USER27> The irony of credit is that it's least likely to be available when you really need it.

</comment><comment><USER28> Misleading headline from Bloomberg, at least in effect.

</comment><comment><USER29> credit is so cheap nowadays. i'm sure their creditors were happy for the business

</comment><comment><USER30> > Robinhood said last week that a confluence of factors -- record account > sign-ups along with highly volatile and historic market conditions -- led to > unprecedented stress on the firm's infrastructure.

> That heavy load caused the so-called Domain Name System, or DNS, to fail.

Not a developer. Is it not customary just to hard-code IP addresses instead of domain names when the app is communicating with your own servers? I would assume that would make every interaction faster and is something that would be done anyway.

<comment><USER31> Straight ip addresses can't have tls certs afaik.

<comment><USER32> counter-example: [https://184.108.40.206](https://220.127.116.11)

<comment><USER31> Interesting</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Artificial intelligence versus clinicians: systematic review - <AUTHOR> https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m689 <comment><USER2> This sounds about right to me intuitively. I've read a ton of ML/AI papers in the area, and the vast majority don't get past the "maybe this is an interesting idea, hard to know until it's tested properly". Easy to recall interesting ones, hard to remember good one off the top of my head.

This is fine; of course the standards for "is this publishable" are vastly lower than "is this clinically applicable", but it unfortunate how often the lay science press fails to make this distinction.

The other thing is that raw performance numbers, even if properly validated, are only a small part of the story. We've had ML techniques that did better nominal sense/spec than average clinicians for very specific tasks for 20+ years now, but the workflow impact, liability, etc. combined has sometimes limited the implementation, and even if you do roll it out the actual impact can be minimal.

<comment><USER3> Have a look at the Stanford Machine Learning Group projects [1]. What most articles miss in my opinion is that AI progress heavily depends in the data being available and that's where there are huge opportunities in the future.

[1] [https://stanfordmlgroup.github.io/](https://stanfordmlgroup.github.io/)

<comment><USER2> They have a good group and are thinking/heading in the right direction, mostly not there yet I think.

I certainly don't disagree that there is potential for impactful use of AI in some areas of healthcare. Some of them just aren't going to practically happen without a) fundamentally reworking our approaches to data access and sharing and more importantly b) spending a lot of resources on quality labeling.

Regardless of whether or not those preconditions are actually met, we'll get a lot of breathless claims on small retrospective sets, of course :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very interesting paper, thanks. It was time someone looked into it. I can't take these equally populist and unsupported reports anymore that some neural network is doing better than a medical specialist with decades of experience. It may well be that this applies in individual cases. But obviously there is a lack of proper studies and unbiased evidence.

<comment><USER3> > It may well be that this applies in individual cases.

Well from a machine learning perspective it will probably be in all cases where enough, qualitative data is available and not a lot of contextual knowledge is necessary that cannot be represented in the data. My guess is that this will be the case in a vast majority of cases and it's just a matter of time - but I'm definitely biased as an ML researcher :).

<comment><USER4> It's still a "proof by induction". There is no reason to conclude from the individual cases that it works in all cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A few thoughts below as a medical student with some ML background. I'm quite interested in hearing what others think: 1\. The majority of clinical ML applications are still focused on narrow (e.g. binary) image recognition tasks. This makes sense because it's where CNN's excel. Also, many of these tasks are well reimbursed. I expect the performance to continue improving as datasets and annotations improve. 2\. There is less activity on broad image recognition tasks, like reading a CT Abdomen and Pelvis. Here the domain of possible diagnoses is rather large. For example, patients sometimes have unusual anatomy from prior surgeries. Or, a cancer may obliterate common anatomical landmarks. An experienced radiologist or surgeon can figure out this anatomy in a few minutes, whereas ML may need new approaches to get to this level. 3\. The history and physical exam are clinician-generated, not just for dataset annotations but for every new patient. This is notable because the history and physical exam determine the majority of what a patient needs. It is not only a matter of knowing which questions to ask, it also requires follow-up questions and a degree of mental processing before findings are written down in a note. A lot of patients will not fully cooperate without patience and empathy. So "AI" replacing doctors actually trend perilously close to AGI. This is both interesting, and difficult. Of course, NLP of human-generated notes / unstructured data is a very interesting area, but it still requires a human in the loop.

<comment><USER6> Another medical student here, also with a very similar ML/programming background. Like the other commenter, I couldn't agree more with your analysis of the main issues plaguing current DL applications in medicine. When I was working on deep learning projects as a undergrad before coming to medical school, I naively assumed that solving a simple image classification problem for cancer detection would be enough. However, as one learns in medical school, imaging is only one component of an entire clinical vignette. Even before a patient undergoes a specific test, the history and physical exam really drive the initial protocols. Sometimes, without having this background knowledge, the classification from a simple program has no utility. A radiologist or pathologist typically has access to this information and can interpret this in the context of the clinical suspicion being put forth. I still believe AI has a role to play in easing this workflow, but "replacing" physicians will take a lot more than detecting some disease "better" or more "accurately" than a physician.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This paper references two tools for assessing the risk of bias: the Cochrane risk of bias tool and PROBAST. Does anyone have any experience with these tools? Are they something that are mainly only practical/useful in the medical field, or are they useful in other domains applying AI models?

<comment><USER8> The most common model that we are putting in front of FDA several times per week for many companies is the AUROC model with minimum FDA requirements for specificity and sensitivity. I have some concern that the commentators on this article aren't actually aware of how many of these ML based software packages are actually being cleared by FDA at the moment through the DeNovo and 510k processes.

<comment><USER2> There are a lot more systems going through 510(k) for sure, partially due to new developments, but partially driven really by marketing.

On the other hand there have been ML/AI systems since the mid-late 90s at least, and they haven't for the most part shifted clinical practice much. The reasons for this have not shifted radically in the last decade, although some are moving a bit now.

FDA approval to market doesn't mean anything beyond you have an argument that you haven't introduced new risks (safe) and in at least some cases you can improve something without making others worse (efficacy) but this may in a very narrow indication.

I guess my point is, the purpose of the FDA has never been to ask "does this really work better? should it be the new standard of care?", but rather to balance the risk in new technology or drugs against the potential reward. Even with a PMA it's risk reduction, not proof of how it will play out in the wider world if interactions and practice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Haven't had the time to read the paper but spoke a lot about something similar with a friend.

In terms of crisis, the medical system just doesn't scale. You think leaders were worried about running out of ventialtors?

No! You can start pumping them in hundreds of thousands if you really need it.

The problem is that you have only so many doctors and trained nurses to work with. Limited capacity. Training takes 10 years.

No scalability.

It doesn't matter where the tech is right now. The world will push 100% for whatever can be done via apps, sensors and unskilled workers.

Check out Jonathan Rothbergs vision for a diagnostic kit by everyones toothbrush

</comment><comment><USER10> The sad truth is that most patients cannot communicate their symptoms clearly and a computer will fail them. More importantly, the nonverbal communication, the compassion, and the reassurance from personal interaction are what drives the demand for personal service. Just look at the number of negative reviews on health grades. Many people are so unhappy with the way they were treated, even though the actual care they receive in this country is good- access to CT scans, antibiotics, home nursing, hospital service, etc..

<comment><USER11> If you make a comparison with the same amount of time for both, that's true. But software can ask questions for an hour. A doctor won't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Important study to do, but feel like I have to assert that in principle, ML is not as useful for diagnosis as it is for aggregating longitudnal data because the consequences of a false positive/negative in the individual diagnosis are life threatening, and even if it catches something doctors don't, it just means a doctor has to look at them.

However, across a population, nobody is being harmed by the ML analysis, and it can pick out patterns a person could not at speed and at scale. Spending research to get your individual diagnostic ROC curve a few percent higher is a waste of time if the consequences of it being wrong are greater than the time savings it provides.

It's fine for veterinary medicine, and maybe prisoners and keeping people with hidden symptoms out of crowded places, but for regular people, using ML has got a host of ethical problems that aren't being dealt with at the policy level. You can use rules engines (literally, DROOLS) instead of non- deterministic ML schemes to do diagnoses and prescriptions.

Have said before, ML is only useful for problems with asymmetric upside, and it is worse than bad for ones with asymmetric downside.

<comment><USER13> > It's fine for veterinary medicine, and maybe prisoners and keeping people > with hidden symptoms out of crowded places, but for regular people,

Excuse me but did you just compare the application on prisoners and animals versus whatever "regular people" are supposed to be? What the hell?

<comment><USER12> Countries treat prisoners as less than human everywhere in the world. It's awful, but it's real, and substandard health care from machine learning applications is precisely the kind of thing states everywhere would likely use. Most people are not so easily shocked by this.</comment></comment></comment>


Today we woke up to a gross hate crime at Harvard Law School - <AUTHOR> http://blavity.com/this-morning-at-harvard-law-school-we-woke-up-to-a-hate-crime/ <comment><USER2> Interesting… looking at the images, my first thought was that this was a demonstration trying to comment that recent happenings at Harvard and other colleges are diminishing the legacy that the black professors there have created (or something to that effect).

</comment><comment><USER3> So the juvenile act of putting (what appears to be) electrical tape on photos now classifies as a "gross hate crime"?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's pretty bad, and at Harvard no less. You'd expect better from a prestigious place like that.</comment>


QA testers - <AUTHOR> How can I find QA testers for my site? <comment><USER2> I know a few people in that line of work, having done it myself.

Shoot me an email describing what you want and on what terms.

My address is in the profile.</comment>


Obama on how to create a team and lead it - <AUTHOR> http://mathoda.com/archives/525 <comment><USER2> Can I repeat the plea made yesterday on this forum to slow up with these constant "Obama this" and "Obama that" postings?

If the content is relevant to the focus of HN then well and good but otherwise the postings are cluttering up the 'new' page and making the site look too much like Reddit ;)</comment>


jQuery UI 1.0 launched! - Widgets, Components, and Interactions - <AUTHOR> http://ui.jquery.com/ <comment><USER2> that looks sweet, i've been playing around with jQuery recently and it makes javascript much less painful to deal with.</comment>


Atto – smallest functional Emacs in less that 2000 lines of C - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hughbarney/atto <comment><AUTHOR> Name: atto - smallest functional Emacs in less that 2000 lines of C last changed/verified: Dec 8 2015 original distribution: Nov 16 2015 version: 1.4 base language: C implementation language: C extension language: none scope of implementation: command set, multi buffer, multi-window, search, cut, copy, paste hardware/software requirements: UNIX, LINUX organization/author: Hugh Barney <h...@gmail.com> free, from github [https://github.com/hughbarney/atto](https://github.com/hughbarney/atto)</comment>


Microsoft has surpassed GitHub in total stars - <AUTHOR> http://githubstats.lip.is/ <comment><USER2> hehe.. didn't expect it here :)

<comment><AUTHOR> shared from /r/microsoft :-)</comment></comment>


WeedMaps Tops $400,000 a Month in Revenues, Public Listing Imminent - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/18/weedmaps-tops-400000-a-month-in-revenues-public-listing-imminent/ <comment><USER2> anyone care to enlighten me how exactly these guys are making money?

<comment><USER3> Good question... From what I'm seeing, one of the things they do is connect potential patients with prescription writing doctors. Maybe this is a revenue source. Also they seem to list prices of current strains. Maybe they are taking a listing fee from the dispensaries.

These are just guesses, but it wasn't immediately clear how they generate revenue (at least to me).</comment></comment>


How to Fix Poverty: Why Not Just Give People Money? - happy-go-lucky http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/08/07/541609649/how-to-fix-poverty-why-not-just-give-people-money <comment><AUTHOR> But then their enlightened betters can't control them.</comment>


Brain games don't make you smarter - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2010/04/21/study_brain_games_dont_make_you_smarter/?camp=obnetwork

<comment><USER2> That's old news...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1280015></comment>


Voyager 2 Engineers Working to Restore Normal Operations - <AUTHOR> https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7587 <comment><USER2> More technical info here [https://www.universetoday.com/144812/voyager-2-went- into-fau...](https://www.universetoday.com/144812/voyager-2-went-into-fault- protection-mode-but-engineers-brought-it-back-online/)

It must be awesome for the original designers and engineers to look back and know that their baby is still floating away and sending us valuable data.

<comment><USER3> Not only that, but it will be floating away for a very, very long time (unless it manages to hit something along the way). It blows my mind to think that even if we manage to destroy ourselves, that both Voyagers, Pioneer 10 and 11, and New Horizons will be out there. (Cue reference to TNG: The Inner Light)

Unless we invent warp drive, it's pretty crazy to think that these things could be the first to visit another star.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 17 light hours away. I wonder whether they will be able to communicate with them when they get to one light day away.

<comment><USER5> The Voyager probes are running out of power[1] and hydrazine[2], seems about 10 year left of either. At their current speed it seems they need about 14 years to reach a light day[3]. So likely we will not get to find out, but one could remain hopeful.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program#Power](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program#Power)

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2#Attitude_control_and...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2#Attitude_control_and_propulsion)

[3]: [https://www.google.com/search?q=7+light+hours+%2F+%2817+kilo...](https://www.google.com/search?q=7+light+hours+%2F+%2817+kilometers+per+second%29)</comment></comment>


Uber AI Labs Open Sources Pyro, a Deep Probabilistic Programming Language - <AUTHOR> https://eng.uber.com/pyro/ <comment><USER2> See yesterday's

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15619634](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15619634)</comment>


ICANN has been hacked - <AUTHOR>

Reset ICANN.org Website Login Password 05 August 2015
We are writing to inform you that ICANN has reason to believe that within the last week, usernames/email addresses and encrypted passwords for profile accounts created on the ICANN.org public website were obtained by an unauthorized person.
These profile accounts contain your user preferences for the website, public bio, interests, newsletter subscriptions, etc.  There is no evidence that any profile accounts were accessed or that any internal ICANN systems were accessed without authorization.  While investigations are ongoing, the encrypted passwords appear to have been obtained as a result of unauthorized access to an external service provider.
You are receiving this notice because your email address/username and encrypted password for ICANN.org may have been compromised.  The encrypted password is not easy to reverse, but as a precaution we are requiring that you reset your password.  When you next visit our site, go to the login page and click the forgot password link:  https://www.icann.org/users/password/new - to create your new password.
Most importantly, if you have used the same password on other websites or services, you should change it immediately on those other websites or services.  As a general matter, you should avoid reusing passwords across multiple sites.
No operational information, financial data or IANA systems were involved.
If you would like further assistance or information, you may contact us at - firstname.lastname@example.com. This notice was not delayed as a result of a law enforcement investigation.
Thank you for your attention to this.  Again, we deeply apologize for any inconvenience or concern this incident may cause you. <comment><USER2> [https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2015-08-05-en](https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2015-08-05-en)</comment>


How the Welfare State Corrupted Sweden  - <AUTHOR> http://mises.org/daily/2190 <comment><USER2> what is the sudden burst of right-wing swedish thinking coming from. This isn't the first article on Hacker News about this in 24 hours.

Its not like its a widely credited opinion in sweden itself...</comment>


CEOs Like PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi Brag They Get 4 Hours of Sleep. That's Toxic - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedailybeast.com/ceos-like-pepsicos-indra-nooyi-brag-they-get-4-hours-of-sleep-thats-toxic <comment><USER2> I hate such life style and I hate it more when people glorify such thing.

Many people are actually following such behavior and think they should do it too.

</comment><comment><USER3> And all this not because they want to change the world, but because they want to sell colored sugared water?

<comment><AUTHOR> and potato chips or whatever works at the moment. Pepsi and Coca Cola are very well diversified [https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/coca-c...](https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/coca- cola-and-diversification-a-love-story)</comment></comment>


The success of nonviolent civil resistance: Erica Chenoweth at TEDxBoulder - <AUTHOR> https://hooktube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w <comment><USER2> Nonviolence, plus the 2nd Amendment:

[https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/2018/07/15/charl...](https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/2018/07/15/charles- e-cobb-jr-on-this-non-violence-stuffll-get-you-killed/)</comment>