Hadoop: When grownups do open source - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/11/hadoop_dziuba/ <comment><USER2> The Register: When children do journalism.

He may have some points in there, but any real content is drowned by the noise of the baseless insults, ad-hominem attacks, and poor writing. The angry rant style can be made to work, but it needs to be backed up by actual skill at writing, and it _definitely_ doesn't substitute for content.

This article makes me sad.

<comment><USER3> Read it for entertainment purposes only and it becomes... better.

 _Along with the data processing framework, Doug Cutting also included a fault tolerant, replicated, distributed file system with Hadoop just because fuck you._ \-- I laughed!

Also, it makes fun of Ruby so another point for it.

It's unlikely this article is accurate or really serves any purpose whatsoever other than immature linkbaity sort of content, but that's fine with me because I never put it in the category of "real journalism."

<comment><USER4> The article was definitely entertaining. I definitely laughed at

"Starling is the Ruby-based messaging system that runs Twitter's backend. Yes, Twitter, the nonprofit web service known widely for its downtime, dropped its disaster-producing shitpile on the world."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This guy is so annoying. You might think that the non-success of his own startup ([http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/19/pressflip-is-a-belly- fl...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/19/pressflip-is-a-belly-flop/)) would make him slightly more humble, but apparently not.

<comment><USER6> Maybe he decided to focus on his most sellable skill.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I apparently those that can, do, and those that can not, talk trash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And people complain about Zed Shaw's expletive-filled writing style? At least Zed has a sense of humor and blasts just about everything in sight. As for this article, let's see. Hero worship? Check. Ad hominem attacks? Check. Uninformed comments ("RubyForge? What... is that?")? Check.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, this is disappointing. Mostly because Hadoop is, in fact, a pretty nifty piece of software. But it's a cluster thing, and individual hackers don't do clusters for some pretty fundamental economic reasons. So to Dziuba, that means that the Hadoop people at Yahoo and elsewhere are "grownups". Sigh.

<comment><USER9> I thought that was an odd distinction. For some reason, he equates open-source with the Web 2.0, Ruby crowd. The first things that come to my mind are Linux and gcc, which are two of the most important software projects on the planet.

<comment><USER10> No, he doesn't. He's clearly drawn a distinction between Web 2.0 open source and the "rest" of open source. His entire point is to belittle and laugh at Web 2.0 open source attempts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone on HN have any first-hand experience configuring and using Hadoop? If so, how was the process - was it straightfoward or complex, did it require lots of peeking into the source, any major pitfalls, etc - and, are you satisfied with how it's currently working and with your ability to add new boxes easily?

<comment><USER12> Hi,

I've setup a hadoop cluster for a start-up I am working in. Initial reason? The amount of incoming log data was getting too slow to process on a single machine and having had a single graduate course in distributed systems I knew a) what is required to go from a single script to a system distributed across nodes b) that I am not in the capacity (alone) to create this system in a time window that will meet business needs.

As a result, I saw hadoop as offering a solution to: implement a distribute process where by records are processes in parallel by multiple machines without having to worry about implementing locking and message passing; distribute disk seek times across a cluster of nodes, pool together disk space with ability to add disk space by simply adding new commodity machines to a cluster.

If you have these specific needs: a) need to rapidly and robustly process more data than a single machine can handle (think of it this way -- if you do data processing with a Perl script on a single machine, will the data be simply too old by the time the Perl script is done?) b) ability to add storage for new data without powering machines down c) the data is non-relational (i.e. you aren't exporting data from MySQL and then re-importing it again - if your data can be stored effectively inside a MySQL cluster and queried in a relational manner, you don't need to use hadoop).

Now, if you still think you need hadoop (in most of the cases, answer is "you don't"):

To get hadoop going minimally to be useful right away is actually almost trivial.

However, as your dataset grows, the amount of jobs and the size of the cluster grow as well as the expectation of hadoop to also be a reliable data store grow, you will run into plateaus that you'll need to overcome.

To answer your questions directly: \- Getting it going is easy, trivial. Do it first on your desktop (if you run Linux directly, if not under VMWare). Process is straight forward. \- Peeking into the source is not required to get it going \- Pitfalls: * Use enough memory, JVM is a memory hog. Always make sure you have sufficient swap (4x your memory) * Find the optimal size of input data for your task (if you are using compressed files for input).

(Yes, I will write these learnings up eventually).

<comment><USER11> Great reply. My current thinking for the project I'm working on is that I don't need Hadoop...yet. That said, if it's trivial to implement on a single machine it might be wise to just begin the project in Hadoop so that I don't have to make the switch later. Always balance between 'premature optimization is the root of all evil' and 'choosing the right tools for the right job'.

I'll give it a shot on my desktop to start - thanks for the tips!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow. That might be the most unprofessional thing I've ever read.

<comment><USER14> I, on the other hand, have read other articles from The Register. This is par for the course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Heh - I'm working on a MapReduce blog post as we speak (see <http://tinyurl.com/6oylnr>). So I suppose I'm prone to his attack.

I actually think he makes one good point, that virtually no one actually needs to use MapReduce, let alone implement it, let alone write a blog tutorial on how to implement it. That said, virtually no one needs to write a compiler either, and yet understanding compilers (or even writing one) is not a waste.

Also, his comparison of a message queue (Starling) to MapReduce almost makes you wonder if he really understands MapReduce. Starling has nothing to do with MapReduce, and MapReduce is completely unrelated to Twitter's scaling problems.

<comment><USER16> And, Starling is not the reason for Twitter's scaling problems. It's actually a very very simple and very useful and it works as advertised.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The question I had is whether Dziuba built something interesting. Zed has.

<comment><USER14> He built a search engine called Pressflip which has a neat idea(say which searches are good or bad) but fails on the execution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Parts of the article made me laugh, especially the Twitter as drum major quip (me being an old band/drumcorps member). Not knowing much about hadoop or map reduce, I gather he doesn't really have a clue based on his dismissal of Twitter as a failure. Last time I checked, they're going strong.

<comment><USER18> I hope someday I manage to build something that people laugh at as much as they're laughing at Twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a troll of epic proportions.

Well, not really epic. Mini-series proportion is probably more apt.

<comment><USER20> I gathered that much just from the title. If you trained a Bayesian filter to recognize trolling, "grownups" would probably be one of the strongest troll tokens. adequacy.org even subtitled itself "news for grownups".

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm pretty much done with that e-rag.

</comment><comment><USER22> The only thing I got from this article is reaffirmation that Ted Dziuba is a huge Hadoop fanboy and still hates Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER23> Amazing article, only because it called out so many types of people simultaneously.

<comment><USER14> It's like Zed Shaw without the factual accuracy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "...but rather as an act of mercy for his keyboard"

-Classic.

</comment><comment><USER25> heh... "Along with the data processing framework, Doug Cutting also included a fault tolerant, replicated, distributed file system with Hadoop just because fuck you"</comment>


Losing a credit card due to automatic user behavior - <AUTHOR> https://jenny.berlin/2015/09/24/how-to-lose-your-credit-card-due-to-automatic-user-behavior/ <comment><USER2> > it would certainly help to show an explicit note that attracts the user's > attention and gives him or her clear instructions about how to act next.

Signs do not work.

For an examples of signs that don't work look at any large building that has fire doors. These doors (at least, in the UK) are marked with a short, clear, unambiguous, mandatory instruction:

"Fire door. Keep closed."

The consequences of not following this instruction are, in the very rare occurrence of fire, increased chance of death.

But you'll often see these doors left open, sometimes propped or wedged open, or blocked.

signs are mostly not useful, and may be harmful. It's probably best to reduce the number of signs people get.</comment>


Social Audio - <AUTHOR> https://subvert.substack.com/p/social-audio-connection-over-community <comment><AUTHOR> Social audio has grown rapidly over the past few months:

I wrote about why it's growing so fast here: [https://subvert.substack.com/p/social-audio-connection- over-...](https://subvert.substack.com/p/social-audio-connection-over- community)

Checkout why Clubhouse is becoming a commodity, why @roadtrip_fm by is killing it, and where the next big opportunity lies.

Names such as have become household names in tech.

Others such as @roadtrip_fm have reinvented TurntableFM with their own spin to create a straight up vibe of an app.

Social audio is only going to grow from here on out.

Over the next 6-12 months we're going to see rapid adoption of an audio first strategy -- companies and consumers alike are going recognize the potency of audio, the ability to create valuable connection and it's advantage over traditional social & media.

One of the more interesting opportunities in this space will though is creating the solutions to power these new social audio networks.

Give companies the tools to drop in audio/audio social networks into their existing apps and good things will happen IMO.

Checkout out the memo linked above for more on this.

</comment><comment><USER2> Loved this, what do you think the catalyst was for these social audio cos to start popping up? and how do you think FB will go about this?

<comment><AUTHOR> corona played a huge factor -- lots of free time and a lot less physical contact.

FB will probably leverage the existing social graphs within their networks to start testing this. They already have distribution/discovery nailed ... they just need to role out a sub product that mimics these features.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Will so many people working at home cause the internet to collapse? - <AUTHOR> I set up a video chat with a group of friends last night and someone posed the excellent question -- if 50x as many people are streaming video calls all the sudden, is the internet backbone actually capable of handling it?
Once the university I work for starts doing all virtual classes, will students be unable to connect due to internet outages in their locality or be unable to understand the lecturer?
Our conclusion was "probably if people's video is degraded a bit and people mostly just use voice and text" but I'm curious if HN people at places like Zoom have a better grasp on how scalable video chat is.
What best practices would be helpful to make sure that students can access online courses being streamed live, especially ones where students and teaching assistants are having a Q&A based on lecture material? <comment><USER2> There are reports from Switzerland that the government considers to block video streaming as the Swisscom infrastructure is overly taxed.

I have only been able to find German language sources (I'd suggest to try DeepL translator or similar) like this one [https://www.nzz.ch/technologie/die-kommunikationsnetze- sind-...](https://www.nzz.ch/technologie/die-kommunikationsnetze-sind-am- anschlag-swisscom-ruft-kunden-zu-vernuenftiger-nutzung-auf-ld.1546698)

<comment><AUTHOR> That makes sense, thanks.

How can they tell when for instance zoom is encrypted, or generally the main presenter does need to show their presentation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Pretty sure the internet isn't the problem but the services you depend on being able to scale properly. The service that does the streaming needs to be able to handle the extra traffic on their servers or else everything will just crash. This is also why IT / Infrastructure people are valuable assets to an organization even though they're viewed as an expense generally.

</comment><comment><USER4> We are trying to keep it going and so far, no worries.

We all have various contingencies planned, and I can see the backbone operators de-prioritizing non-essential traffic if it came to that.

</comment><comment><USER5> If it can support all the Netflix streaming and gaming by night, I don't know why it couldn't handle the video conferencing by day.

<comment><USER6> At least for Netflix, a lot of the traffic doesn't leave the ISP edge network, because they use Netflix caches (and YT ones also). So that can be very different from video conference traffic.</comment></comment>


Romney victory site goes live by mistake - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57547222-71/romney-victory-site-goes-live-by-mistake/

<comment><USER2> "Indeed, the Mitt Romney.com site still bears the headline: "Smaller, Smarter Simpler Government."

Any hack manager that comes into a new corporation immediately attempts to recreate some past victory that he had elsewhere.

Romney's experience is buying companies, cutting them back to appear profitable, then flipping them when he could or plundering them into bankruptcy and personal profit when he couldn't. "Harvesting" is the term he used.

So that's all he knows. Cuttting. "Smaller."</comment>


Is there a server admin guide for noobs? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I was building this app the other day and because I'm a complete cloud server noob I deploy all my apps onto phpfog.com but there really lacking some features essential to my web app so I was really hoping to take the time to learn linux servers.
I've used rackspace in the past but nothing more than copying and pasting commands from a tutorial so when it comes to anything beyond the scope of what's in it I become stumped so I really need to learn how to fish in this case.
I want to become more acquainted with servers like Centos so does anybody know where I should get started?
Thanks a lot <comment><USER2> While there are several books to teach you basics of Linux, the best way to learn is to do hands on.

\- Install Virtual box ( or any other free VM hosts).

\- Download CentOS.

\- Set yourself a goal on what you need to achieve - e.g I need to run php version x with apache configured to do x y z tasks.

\- Install CentOS as a VM ( you could skip these steps and run a cheap VPS as others have suggested) .

\- Understand the various steps in the installation - Disk partition, Software selection etc. Don't just blindly select anything unless you understand what you are doing.

\- Figure out what software you need to install to achieve your goal and install it one by one.

\- Ever time you get struck, if you find some command to fix the issue, don't blindly copy paste it - understand what the issue is and figure out what the command you are trying to run is doing to fix the issue.

Once you have everything up and running, destroy the machine and start over with a slightly different goal.

Google is your friend! Good luck.

<comment><USER3> >Don't just blindly select anything unless you understand what you are doing.

That's important advice: anytime you run up against a selection option and you don't know what you should choose or why the default is what is it, search for more information to understand what is going on. I believe you can teach yourself anything just by setting a goal and learning as you go (with plenty of time and acceptance for mistakes).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://vagrantup.com> is a good way to get started on your local machine (without paying a VPS provider). You can install a minimal operating system and build up your stack from there. Because it is completely free, you can recreate your server and really experiment with different operating systems until you feel comfortable to go live.

Once you get the hang of running on a virtual machine, use Puppet or Chef to learn how to automatically configure your servers when starting a new VM. This will save you a lot of time setting up your public VPS later.

An important difference between your local virtual machine and a VPS is that you will have to take some steps to secure a publically accessible server. Points to take into consideration here are: key vs password based SSH authentication, iptables firewall.

I've found the Linode library to be a good source of introductory documentation about setting up a VPS: <http://library.linode.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this!

Running from a local machine is going to be really helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Linode Library has a ton of great tutorials that are mostly not Linode- specific, and don't require you to have an account there. They even have LAMP setup guides for both CentOS 5 and 6: <http://library.linode.com/>

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't know what kind of answers are you hoping to get here, but from the way you address the issue, I would say that there is no easy way to this.

If you want to learn linux server administration, IMHO the easiest (or at least the one which will _make_ you learn) way is to try and use linux as a desktop for several months.

And don't go for something "easy" like ubuntu. Try Slackware, Arch Linux or Gentoo. This will force you to see what kind of knowledge you need, what kind of problems are common. Things like kernel tweaking, dependency resolving, filesystems, shells, etc.

Of course, you can continue to copy/paste from tutorials. It will probably work... to some degree... until things go wrong...

<comment><USER7> I'm in a similar boat to the OP. But when I read "kernel tweaking"... it terrifies me.

Do Linux server admins actually... change anything related to the Linux _kernel_?

I mean, I pretty much gave up on trying to understand Linux when the "certified" tech support at Rackspace couldn't figure out how to upgrade the version of PHP on my servers, apparently something to do with incompatibilities between the way the Red Hat PHP distribution was set up, and the official PHP one. And these are guys who have taken _courses_ of years+ on configuring Linux, and that's still inadequate to achieve what would appear to me to be a trivial uninstall / reinstall.

Am I missing something here, or is Linux really this insanely hard to configure, to the point where I shoudn't even bother trying, and just leave it to the experts?

<comment><USER6> Nowadays, you will most likely never need to recompile your kernel. At least not if you are doing "normal" stuff.

Let me give you an example of what kind of stuff you will come head to head with:

Recently I was installing and configuring a Riak cluster. I wanted to configure it to use multi backend with a large partition ring. What these are is not essential to our discussion here. What is essential is that I hit the riak user's limit for simultaneously open files. This is a thing controlled by the kernel, but configurable in userspace. If you are interested, you can find how to raise the limit by using Google.

This is the kind of "kernel tweaking" one usually needs to do. 1. How to make it work 2. how to make it persistent after server restart 3. WTF?! it's not the same in debian/ubuntu and Red Hat (half of the solutions I found don't work)

But the harder part is not finding the solution. The harder part is finding out what is the problem. In order to do so, you need to have experience. Know where are the logs, know which logs to look at. Know how different systems behave under such conditions (in my case, Erlang VM). Be proficient with shell tools for diagnostics. Be able to use emacs or vi(m) on the spot (you have no graphical environment) etc.

And there is no easy way in obtaining this skills. The only way is to get your hands dirty. Very dirty. Build systems, break systems, fix systems. You can't be good by just following tutorials, nor by using a sandboxed environment like a VPS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Slicehost articles are quite good - <http://articles.slicehost.com/>

Linode also has a library - <http://library.linode.com/>

</comment><comment><USER9> Solving a problem is the easiest to learn and retain that knowledge. Get an account in development EC2 which I think is free, or something cheap in the cloud like prgmr.com and build a linux server and learn. Deploy your application manually and solve all the issues you face. Linux is so wide spread these days, there are very little that you can't an answer on the web.

I say CentOS or Ubuntu (w/out UI) is a good way to start. Those 2 distributions have many step by step solutions scattered on the web such as stackoveflow and forums posts. Slackware, Arch Linux or Gentoo are great for their target audience. IMHO they provides very little out of box for a noob and it's very easy to get lost in what you can set, break and/or fix. There is nothing more demoralizing that spending 2 days digging around the web for a problem that has numerous answers and you've no idea what everyone is on about.

Books are very useful guidelines, but getting your hands dirty is how you'll really learn.

<comment><USER10> I'd suggest avoiding prgmr (who I think are awesome by the way) and opting for somewhere like Linode, just because it makes it so easy to wipe your VPS with a clean image and start again. (I'm talking specific to this thread, not as advice for everyone.)

<comment><USER9> For me that is a very helpful feature. I've done installation many times and I've done them to a cheap machine at home so I'm quite familiar with the process. It's the ins and outs of the linux that I was not able to get for a long time. Being able to wipe a VPS with a clean image allows me to quickly start over when I have mess things up so bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hi! I teach Linux server administration basics in college, on Centos. I've been thinking about writing an ebook or some sort of guide for other developers to get started with Linux/Centos. Would you care to share what kind of things you'd like to learn? Are you talking about real linux basics, maintaining software, setting up Apache, ... ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

Essentially getting apache up and running and actually understanding the commands I'm using, other things are ssh, setting up FTP and another thing that daunts me incredibly is setting up the virtual host, I find it so easy to break things when I don't know what I'm doing.

There are probably a couple things I missed out on but a noob to ninja type ebook would be great.

Thanks a lot

<comment><USER11> Sounds exactly like the basics I'm teaching my students. It isn't all that difficult to get started with linux once you know how to approach things. Thanks for the feedback, I'll think I might get started on an ebook that clearly builds things up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> HOWTOs. <http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/index.html> <http://www.tldp.org/guides.html>

This treasure trove of quick-start guides for newbies enables you to learn a wide variety of software and ways to use the Linux operating system. There are several docs on using Linux, common command line tools, server/network administration, Bash programming guides, set up instructions for server software, and tons more. You will become a Linux ninja by reading and following through with these HOWTOs.

</comment><comment><USER13> Start with the shell/command line and study its infinite capability. A good place to start would be Zed's site. <http://cli.learncodethehardway.org>

After that follow the advice of kcvv - take notes, rebuild VM's again and again building on your new knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER14> 10 years old now (and that's the 3rd edition), but still a good tome: Essential System Administration from ORA <http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596003432.do>

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd love a modern guide on how to secure a modern webstack.

What do I really need to do to secure an EC2 image, or an AppEngine application or a Heroku application?

</comment><comment><USER16> It would probably be easier for us to give advice if you told us which specific features essential to your web app you need.

</comment><comment><USER17> Make backups. Take backups often. Ensure the backups work.

Remember these and most other things are just window dressing.</comment>


Russian parliament asks to prohibit Windows 10 use in state organizations - <AUTHOR> https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A//top.rbc.ru/politics/21/08/2015/55d7022b9a79472a7602e4e5 <comment><USER2> Probably a smart thing to do.

For security reasons, it seems like country's using secure open source software that they can audit makes a lot of sense.

I like Microsoft and Apple but who knows what pressure might be applied to them to back doors computers shipped to specific countries.

<comment><USER3> Bet you wouldn't be downvoted if it was any other country :-).

I don't like the Russian government, but they have a point - Windows 10 borders on 'insane' when it comes to the user data it shares "anonymously". Plus it helps the open source communities...

Then again, I don't trust Android and Google Docs apps that want access to my files, information, contacts, microphone, and more...

<comment><USER2> I use an Android Note 4, but I don't install many apps. I use a web browser instead for Facebook, Twitter, and many other sites instead of installing apps. I do this because of the permissions many apps require, even though they don't need some permissions to support their functionality.

<comment><USER3> I'm also surprised at how many apps need to run in the background. Notepads, music players, file explorers, an expense manager - why would they need to run all the time if I don't even use them and haven't set up any syncing.

Not to mention that Google Play Services is draining my battery like crazy by using GPS and keeping the CPU awake for way too long...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Technically, it is not that the parliament as an organisation asks to prohibit Windows 10.

It is only coming from a representative of one minority fraction «Just Russia» (generally considered fully and completely loyal to government (as opposed to mostly loyal Liberal-Democrats, who are not liberal democrats in any Western meaning, and Communists), but even more populist than the government pseudo- party United Russia). He is a deputy speaker (deputy chairman) for parliament; each minority fraction has got a deputy speaker position. So this plea may be ignored. Or it could be used as a trigger to issue arbitrary regulations on arbitrary possibly unrelated topic.

If there is a political decision to move to open-source tools (this is a big if), it will be actually not that hard to implement (if we are speaking about office use). Sensible options for use in government organisations include ALT Linux (an RPM-based independent distribution developed mostly in Russia which managed to obtain a few Russia-specific certifications) and MSVS (Mobile System Of Armed Forces; think CentOS with some special access control tools).

Threats of forbidding Microsoft Windows use in some settings (previous attempts, for example, promoted allowing training and support expenses but forbidding licensing expenses in school budgets) apparently were previously used as bargaining tools in Russia.

(Russian is my native language and I live in Russia)

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if they'll continue supporting ReactOS. Would be good to see increased resources to support its growth.

[https://www.reactos.org/node/946](https://www.reactos.org/node/946)

Looks like jobs are available, so if any C/C++ coders wanted to be paid to work on an open-source Windows-compatible OS, the opportunities exist...

[https://www.reactos.org/node/785](https://www.reactos.org/node/785)

<comment><USER6> I don't have the C skills necessary but I would love to see ReactOS reach mature (-enough) state for work use soon: the new, privacy invading, direction that MS are taking their OS in with Win10 is unacceptable to me and yet my productivity on Windows in general is so much higher than Linux/OSX (probably just habit to be honest, I'll soon enough find out unless MS comes out with different approach to privacy defaults)

<comment><USER5> I'm in the same boat as you. I definitely won't be switching to Windows 10 with the privacy settings as they are, but I prefer working on Windows over Linux, mainly because I'm more confident that it won't break in some way (I've not had the best of luck with Linux, though I've seen it get progressively better, and I'm glad about the emerging work on Wayland/Mir, I just wish the audio stack had an overhaul too). Fingers crossed ReactOS will be stable by the time Windows 7 is no longer supported, either that and bite the bullet and switch to Linux/BSD.

<comment><USER7> I've been using both Unix and NT since about 1996. I agree with you entirely.

The killer for me is a weird combination of Stockholm syndrome and a seemingly drug-like addiction to Windows that I just can't shift. One minute I'll be swearing at the 15th problem of the day that occured on Windows and then spend all Saturday installing a Linux distribution and killing off my Windows Phone and Live accounts.

By Sunday it's got Windows back on it and I'm at it like a raving crack addict again. But I know it's hurting me. I know Linux well and am responsible for a fair chunk of Linux kit but I always end up with it on Windows again.

Last time: unity won't show file copy dialogs suddenly, duplicity backup won't work due to a bug in Ubuntu that has been open for over a year, my FortiClient VPN drops every 5 minutes, I can't find a RDP client (so I can still connect to my day job) that works properly.

Argh just kills me this. I want to do something else for a living now.

<comment><USER8> A lot of friends have these problems at University. Turns out the common factor is Ubuntu. After I tell them to install Debian and enable non-free sources, they never have weird bugs again.

<comment><USER9> I sometimes get this feeling that Ubuntu is giving Linux a bad name, with all the weird stuff that happens (or unexpectedly fails to happen) when running it. Of course, I only have anecdotal evidence here...

I've switched to Arch about a year ago and sure, the installation was a bit painful, but after that, I don't know... it just works (including the switch to the new 4.x kernel, but I'm given to understand that the jump was fairly minor). Oh, and Plasma 5 is pretty :)

I had Debian for a while, but the outdated packages were killing me (and I was on testing). Other than that, I couldn't really complain.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. I've run the last two LTS releases on our ops servers and it has been a pain in the arse to be honest.

I would like to have a bash at Arch but I can't be bothered to install it and it doesn't have a great security reputation.

I'm not too fussed about up to date packages but a recent Python 3 would be nice.

<comment><USER5> Have you considered trying out CentOS on those ops servers? There's plenty of support and documentation online. Package versions do tend to lag a bit, but I believe Python 3 is available (EDIT: It is... [http://sopel.chat/python3-centos7.html](http://sopel.chat/python3-centos7.html) ).

<comment><USER7> Yeah we've got a number of CentOS 5 boxes and a CentOS 6 proxy. They are rock solid but terribly out of date.

Python 3 is a compile it yourself on centos I understand.

<comment><USER6> Interesting, I'm also servicing an ailing CentOS 5 server; un-upgradeable and a pain: currently having to migrate the core application onto a new server, haven't had issues with Ubuntu LTS for server usage in the past so that's what I'm going for but the discussion here makes me want to go with Debian instead next time!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why ANY government would use closed-source US software has always been beyond me. The only explanation I can think of is utter ignorance. Not even bribery explains it (which I know is a BIG part of it, but still makes zero sense from national security perspective).

</comment><comment><USER11> I commend Russians for being pretty savvy about operating systems these days. Building their own, sponsoring Linux variants, and now this. I can see how Microsoft's OS can be seen as a USA trojan horse for other countries, and I won't be surprised if others (China) follow suit. Even as other US companies tout increased security practices (Apple Apple)

<comment><USER12> This is not new, whether it is RedFlag Linux in China and Munich bending over backwards trying to accommodate Linux etc. There is a dose of envy about US corporations around the world. Remember China did some kind of quasi ban on Windows 8 ? Time to time, there is a bureaucratic circle jerk, which becomes headline news but just the reality of the world hits.. every one forgets and moves on.

<comment><USER11> Windows 10 is much more egregious that Windows 8

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Doesn't surprise me, honestly. The USA has gotten a fairly bad reputation the past two years after Snowden revealed all that. Didn't they start using Russian made microprocessors? Makes sense that they start banning Windows 10. Companies like Microsoft are at the mercy of the American government, at least up to a certain extent. It's sad, but that's how it works.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps it's sad, but maybe it's the catalyst for change we need. Microsoft can lose a few individuals as customers and not blink an eye. Losing significant quantities of foreign governments as customers due to US government policies and actions may not go over so well with their bottom line.

<comment><USER15> The silver lining in all this is that there would be increased demand for programmers of all sorts !

Paradoxically mistrust between government helps money to flow in science.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Totally agree.

I'd even move to allow importing software and hardware (firmware) only under the condition that the sources be released, audited by the importing country, validated and recompiled (with validated compilers) by the importing country.

I can see only advantages to such a scheme:

1- promotes free(dom) software / open source,

2- improves security by forced auditing,

3- by increasing the cost of importing software, promote local production of software, therefore

4- reduce unemployment,

5- this would detect bad firmware (toyota, jeep), before it can be used in deadly applications.

etc.

</comment><comment><USER17> Maybe this will be the year of Linux on the desktop.

<comment><USER18> Hopefully.

But it seems they'd rather push ReactOS.

<comment><USER19> Linux user here, but I'm still pretty glad to see an open source version of windows being supported, even if it the russian government.

<comment><USER18> Yes.

AFAIK ReactOS works together with Wine, so it could probably improve the integration of Windows apps in Linux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Isn't the enterprise/managed version of Windows 10 different? I thought that the larger organisations to manage their own updates (WUSUS?) and that there would not be the need to process information on Microsoft's servers?

</comment><comment><USER21> Well, they're not wrong to do that.

Note that Medvedev is behind this. He's Putin's alternate; when Putin hit his term limit, Medvedev ran for Premier and won, then deferred all decisions to Putin. So this is official policy, not some minor Duma member.

Windows 10 may be the worst product change since New Coke.

<comment><USER4> Medvedev has not yet said anything on this topic.

He is the receiver of the plea by deputy speaker (deputy chairman) of parliament representing «Just Russia» (a minority ultra-loyal fraction in parliament).

By now the voices for banning or restricting Windows 10 are from Levichev («Just Russia») and some defense lawyers.

The receivers (not authors) of such petitions are currently Medvedev (current prime minister and former president), supreme state prosecution/oversight office (has some similarities and some differences with attorney general and his staff) and communication oversight agency (the agency responsible, among other things, for allocating radio frequencies and for keeping the internet censorship blocklist).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> With FASHIONCLEFT being public knowledge, I'm surprised there's any controversy about this:

[https://www.eff.org/document/20150117-spiegel-technical- desc...](https://www.eff.org/document/20150117-spiegel-technical-description- fashioncleft-protocol)

</comment><comment><USER23> I would hope that the US government would ban Windows 10 on government computers.</comment>


Microsoft's updated Xbox agreement prevents "unauthorized" hardware and apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement/Updates.aspx <comment><AUTHOR> From the summary:

"We've added that for any device that can connect to Xbox Services, we may automatically check your version of Xbox console software or the Xbox App software and download Xbox console or Xbox App software updates or configuration changes, including those that prevent you from accessing the Xbox Services, using unauthorized Xbox games or Xbox apps, or using unauthorized hardware peripheral devices with an Xbox console."

</comment><comment><USER2> And that is why I don't own any gaming consoles these days...</comment>


People are recycling too much garbage, and it's threatening the industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny-news-recycle-garbage-economics-20180620-story.html <comment><USER3> The real problem is that we manufacture garbage and buy it at a virtually infinite pace.

 _Everything_ you see in the supermarket is garbage - one what is in it has been consumed.

Tell you what is garbage - recycling is garbage.

Our planet is already awash in plastics and that isn't going to stop until we put a stop to the garbage manufacturing industry - i.e. the packaging industry.

"Recycling" is the concept that the packaging industry maintains so that you don't scream in anger at how that industry is polluting the planet.

The truth about recycling came out recently when China stopped accepting recycling from overseas and now the "recycling" i.e. garbage is piling up in incredible mounds here in Melbourne.

Local recycling companies have started to admit they are just throwing it all in landfill.

We need to turn off the garbage manufacturing tap.

<comment><USER4> > _Everything you see in the supermarket is garbage - one what is in it has > been consumed_

Only when you buy junk, which I assert is not actually food anyway.

Stick the outside and you'll buy fruit, vegetables, meat, beans, rice and pasta.

You can put all of those into re-usable bags or containers and buy everything you need to eat very healthy meals with no waste at all.

If it comes in a shiny plastic package, plastic bottle or tin can, you shouldn't be eating it anyway (in general)

<comment> brian-armstrong Do you carry chicken breasts uncovered in your cloth bag or do you just carry them in your bare hands?

<comment><USER5> You can bring a container that they can weigh and use like a Mason jar.

<comment><USER6> I live between two major supermarkets, and neither of them provide any way for me to do this. All the meat in both is pre packaged (in store) before it hits the shelf. If you go to the butcher counter, they will package it in front of you.

<comment><USER7> But this is something which could be changed.

<comment><USER8> AS far as I know, meat MUST be labeled, which kind of necessitates a container for the label to affix to.

<comment><USER9> They can just use ... butcher paper.

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty certain you can't recycle waxed butcher paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The rules are too complex. If you move home to a few miles away the rules change.

Various parts of the recycling chain are highly fragile and far too easy to pollute (as the article discusses), or too susceptible to not being profitable. We've known that for years. Seems like a giant exercise in missing the point.

Should profit be the prime motive? Should we be recycling when re-use used to work so well for many products? Do we want to _actually_ preserve the planet or merely go through the motions with recycling theatre until waste grows _another_ order of magnitude? The waste from a weekly supermarket shop is horrifying compared to the equivalent waste in the nineties.

I think the time has come to take a cue from earlier times and simply require the manufacturers and retailers to cover the cost - you made it, you pay for its disposal, recycling or reuse. Suspect things would start to resolve quite quickly.

Before you say that can't possibly work, for many categories it used to, and it worked very well. For other categories, it should be ample encouragement to return to less packaging, or for fruit and veg, no packaging. We'd start to see some properly biodegradable solutions.

No, I don't suppose this will be too popular, especially with me wanting regulation to "encourage" it.

<comment><USER11> We actually have this in Germany for over a decade [1], if not two. Personally, I'd say we got more packaging not less. So I am not sure such we can say it failed, but it's not really working either.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_\(symbol\))

<comment><USER12> Deposit-return schemes are also required in Germany for all disposable drinks containers, and are gaining momentum in other European countries.

At the very least, these schemes are effective at reducing litter and ensuring less plastic waste reaches the environment and oceans.

<comment><USER11> Yes, and the introduction of deposit-return for non-reuse bottles "killed" the reusable bottles. See [1] on page 8 (only in German), "Einweg-Kunststoff" (non-reusable plastic) won the game. With "Mehrweg-Glas" (reusable glass) loosing the most.

Not sure if reusable glass was so much more environmentally friendly (think transporting heavy empty glass bottles through the countryside by trucks), but environmental effects through transportation might be easier to mitigate long- term than plastic pollution.

Side node: While plastic won the race for water and soda/juices, Germans still prefer their beer to be served in glass.

[1] [https://diw-econ.de/wp- content/uploads/2017/05/DIW_Econ_BGVZ...](https://diw-econ.de/wp- content/uploads/2017/05/DIW_Econ_BGVZ_Oekonomie_der_Getraenkeverpackung_v2.0-1.pdf)

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure either - and there's one of the problems. We're not given the full cost and consequence of each alternative.

I did read a piece a few months back discussing glass against recycled plastic. Plastic apparently needs far more washing, and at higher temperature and pressure, before it can be recycled. The washing to remove glue, labels and dried food which are all more difficult to get off plastic, and also because plastic recycling is so easy to pollute and ruin the whole batch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Part of the problem is that the rules are complicated and there's no feedback loop.

Maybe once every week, 1/52 of the bins should be checked manually before being dumped in the truck. And the owners informed if there are problems like envelope windows or pizza boxes.

Yes, it's expensive to have a separate process to provide that feedback, but it might increase the quality of the recycled materials enough to actually raise the value above the cost of doing it.

<comment><USER14> For sure, my area doesn't allow glass or paper and there's some weird thing about cardboard, has to be brown or white only or something like that. So we recycle plastics (you can do numbers 1-5 now!) and brown cardboard in the provided bins and take glass, paper and other cardboard to a recycle center once a month. My previous home allowed glass, plastics (1-2 only), cardboard (anything unless it had food pieces on it), and paper; it was about 6 miles from current home. Just different county.

<comment><USER15> Officially our recycling program takes a lot of surprising stuff, including wax cartons, all types of plastic, and even pizza boxes; glass and metal, too, of course. But no plastic bags and no styrofoam!

Unofficially, though, they only want plastics 1 & 2 and very clean cardboard and paper, if even that. And the metal, but probably not the glass. The thing is that around here the same folks who handle the landfills also handle the recycling, and they will take whatever they can get for free (no money changes hands) if they think they can monetize it - a situation which seems to change on a daily basis. I suspect that an awful lot of what we think we "recycle" around here actually ends up in one of their landfills instead.

<comment><USER16> its sort of worse than that, a lot of these recycling programs that local councils start running are in fact just rubbish offshoring.

They do deals with big Chinese companies to send recyclables to china to be recycled. Three big problems with this:

1) the climate impact of actually shipping this stuff over seas is huge.

2) There is no oversight on how these companies behave, there has been numerous reports of them NOT recycling at all and many reports of slave labour being used to "sift" the rubbish

3) China is now clamping down on it, they no longer want the rubbish, many councils have no backup plan for this eventuality and yes its likely to head to infill.

<comment><USER15> In our case we're too centrally located to make shipping stuff offshore economically viable, unlike say the coastal cities. But around here we do have plenty of cheap land available for landfill space, so that's where a lot of our stuff probably ends up. I know that our local recycler does feel at least some of the effects of the Chinese situation, though, and while it hasn't happened yet I fully expect that sometime soon they will be making changes to our current recycling system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sometimes I feel that recycling for most of us is just another coping mechanism. It's a way to explain away the amount that we consume. We throw our recycling into the designated bins blindly without being critical about where it's going. Just recently, here in Australia, some of us, including me, learned that much of our recycling is simply being sold and shipped to China and other countries:

[https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2018/china- recycling/stor...](https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2018/china- recycling/story/index.html)

What we really need to do is stop and think about the consequence and byproduct of our consumption. We can start with packaging, especially single use packaging. It's difficult to go the supermarket and buy produce that doesn't come pre-wrapped. Not to mention the issue of our online shopping purchases coming in multiple packages.

Although, there does appear to be change coming. Just recently, our biggest supermarkets just announced that they will cease providing single use plastic bags:

[https://www.sbs.com.au/news/woolworths-plastic-bag-ban- start...](https://www.sbs.com.au/news/woolworths-plastic-bag-ban-starts-today- here-s-what-you-need-to-know)

<comment><USER18> That is not the point of the article.

The point is that people are putting things which are not recyclable into their recycle bins. You can't recycle greasy paper. You can't recycle grocery bags. If it isn't clean and well sorted, it costs more to process and ultimately becomes a "feel good" way to send things to the same dump.

People need to be much more careful about what and how they recycle so as to keep costs down and have fewer things which could be recycled thrown in the dump.

A load of paper can be contaminated with food scraps so that is becomes impossible to recycle.

TL;DR don't put something into a recycling bin unless it is clean and you are sure that it is recyclable (read the guidance you get from your local authority)

<comment><USER19> > You can't recycle greasy paper.

> People need to be much more careful about what and how they recycle

I'd say maybe pizza boxes should stop saying they're recyclable and start saying "DO NOT RECYCLE AFTER CONTACT WITH FOOD"...

<comment><USER20> My local recycling company clearly states that I should recycle used pizza boxes in the "paper packaging" box when searching on their webpage. So I guess it depends on the recycling process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can 98% of my mail not come just so I put it in the recycling bin without review?

As for the disposal industry, we can learn a lot from Japan, but it starts with cultural expectations and education. It can get weird in some countries like Argentina (this knowledge is over a decade old, this may have changed) you don't get the cartons or jugs for your milk. You get a plastic bag. The store keeps the carton and recycles it for their own monetary reasons.

</comment><comment><USER22> > Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European > countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options > that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We > continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all > readers with our award-winning journalism.

<comment><USER23> AKA: "Tracking you without consent was part of our DNA; oops"

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I would bet its globally more optimal to have all trash sorted and cleaned and recycled at a plant than to have each individual in every household do a poor job of it themselves.

<comment><USER25> I tend to agree with this although I haven't done all of the math.

It seems however that their might be a net social good to create a recycling industry which consists of living accomodations, facilities for sorting, facilities for cleaning, and facilities for reconstituting bulk goods out of recyclable material, and then a set of factories that would use that to create 50 - 100% post consumer products for sale in the general market.

The purpose of these economic units would be three fold, one it would provide housing and an income to anyone who was willing to work and it would not require a lot of pre-requisites for the work. Second it would reduce the landfall load and burdened cost of recycling by minimizing transportation costs while effectively recycling. And lastly it would provide a stream of goods and bulk materials for industry that would provide a means to offset some if not all of the cost of the operation.

As a government sponsored activity I feel it could simultaneously provide living accommodations and meaningful work for a large chunk of the homeless population and an even larger fraction of the post-felony population.

<comment><USER26> Recycling goods and people, so to speak.

But seriously, why should businesses get to externalise the costs of disposal of the junk they make? Just make businesses responsible for the life cycle of their products.

<comment><USER27> Businesses will simply pas that cost along to consumers, making consumers ultimately responsible - just like we are now. I'm not sure what model of 'make business pay for it' doesn't translate to 'make consumers pay for it'.

<comment><USER26> Of course, that is the point! Then the business which produces lots of waste (and has to charge for it) is competing with business which produces little waste.

>edit

Consumers pay for some of the cost individually now, and some of the cost socialised through government. But neither consumer nor government have the power to minimise waste in the production of goods. Putting a clear monetary incentive on the backs of consumers and the responsibility with the market _will_ actually change things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The page is GDPRed. Cached copy: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JDyVEp...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JDyVEp- rR3cJ:www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/environment/bs-md- recycling-20180618-story.html+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=pl&lr=lang_en%7Clang_pl)

</comment><comment><USER29> My wife tells me that growing up in India, people would come door to door to collect metal and paper to be recycled -- to make money. That's not practical in the U.S. because people's time is much more valuable. If recycling really made sense, you would not need to mandate it.

<comment><USER30> People (like, random people, not officials) still do this for aluminum cans in US states with bottle deposits. They go door-to-door pulling cans out of recycling bins and bringing them to deposit centers _en masse_. I've seen this both in Boston and in the rural town I grew up in. The guy who frequented my childhood home actually made enough money to leave each "customer" a jar of peanuts each year at Christmas.

And even if you have to pay someone to take recycling it makes sense because the damage to the environment is less than just dumping it in a landfill. That's a cost that's externalized by manufacturers and not easily recouped without mandatory recycling. (The alternative is to tax manufacturers and importers for all the trash they generate, equivalent to the environmental damage it causes. Bottle bills effectively combine these two approaches.)

<comment><USER15> > pulling cans out of recycling bins

That's illegal in my area, and I assume in most areas with recycling programs. You want to pick up stray cans and recycle them then that's one thing, but pulling them out of recycling bins is considered theft.

<comment><USER31> It's kind of funny. The waste management firms worked with the city to require recycling. So now every home has to pay an additional fee for a recycling bin plus pick up. And of course the management company only wants to be in this particular business if they can sell the materials on to someone else. As soon as China stopped buying our recyclables WMNW started asking the city for permission to just stick everything in a landfill.

I am required to sort my trash, compost, and recyclables. I'm supposed to wash and peel labels. I have to pay to have it picked up. The least that should happen is that the waste management company be required to actually recycle this stuff.

<comment><USER32> See... we've known for ages that recycling is a bit of a losing proposition: otherwise we'd get paid for our used TP rolls like we do with aluminium cans.

The distribution of labour in this case makes the economics even worse. The scenario you describe is a (I'm guessing, you're on HN), well-paid highly education citizen literally washing garbage before throwing it out, and paying for the privilege of an inefficient disposal system that requires routine intervention... I think an end-to-end total cost accounting wouldn't look too favorable.

<comment><USER15> Penn and Teller (of all people) actually covered the recycling situation in detail some years back, so in spite of the fact that I myself am a conscientious recycler I know that a lot of this is probably wasted effort. But in my situation it effectively doubles my weekly waste disposal capacity, which I've used to great effect over the years.

BTW, our local recycler doesn't require a lot of effort on our part, nor do they have a lot of restrictions on what we try to recycle. No food scraps, no plastic bags, and no styrofoam, but that's about it. Also no washing, no label removing, and no sorting on our part.

Penn & Teller Bullshit! - (2-05) - 205 - <USER2>

[https://vimeo.com/216389085](https://vimeo.com/216389085)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Because partly, what can be recycled where is very confusing!

Where I live, our recycling facilities can't recycle certain "recycle numbers". And they have a "no plastic bags" policy even if they have recycling numbers and indicators.

We also have an additional bin for compostables, which sometimes increases the confusion for certain items. For instance, paper goes into recycling but not shredded paper, which needs to go with the compostables.

</comment><comment><USER34> Let's find the best possible explanation that doesn't acknowledge the insanity of accepted consumer packaging practices and made-to-replace product cycles.

</comment><comment><USER35> Placer County in California pays for one bin recycling. Don't make people think, just allocate resources to cover recycling as a part of the waste stream.

</comment><comment><USER36> The economics are broken. Incent cleaner waste stream, and you'll get better outcomes. I have no idea how to incent it except to note cash-back schemes aren't being pointed to here.

The economics of garbage sorting are broken. but that doesn't mean garbage is broken, or recycling is broken. It means we need to look at what we want. If we want more people to recycle more, we need to tool up to handle more incorrect waste going into the input buffer.

If we want people to recycle "better" we need to be prepared to lose some inputs, because of the cost burden in the community of dealing with contamination. Or, we need to remove the complexity by making it easier.

Personally, my bugbear is the local (Qld, Australia) refusal to take the shopping bags full of recycles. The bags are recyclable, the contents are recyclable, but our local provider has decided not to accept the bags, but only the contents "because reasons"

</comment><comment><USER37> This needs to be removed from the hands of the public and forced onto the recycling industry. These are solvable problems, and I would go so far to suggest they perhaps are not that difficult to solve.

Recycling as a profit center is part of the issue.

Some areas I've lived in have a single recycling bin for all recyclables, some force it on the households to separate paper from metals and plastics, and some have a bin for each.

As the article mentions paper and cardboard can be mechanically separated from other materials, the reason some areas don't do this is not because they don't have the resources, it sometimes because different recyclers are paying the municipality (or whoever is in charge) for the material. So the sorting is then pushed on to the households to do.

Aside from being too complicated, with too many overlapping rules, the sorting of packaging should be placed on the recycler who is in the business of recycling.

</comment><comment><USER38> In 1996, the New York Times reported that recycling is often just expensive virtue signaling.

[https://mobile.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling- is-...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is- garbage.html)

</comment><comment><USER39> The system in the Bay Area is especially broken because it is built to nudge everyone to put as much as possible in recycling/compost. We've got very limited trash space, expensive upgrades to larger trash bins, and huge recycling/compost bins.

</comment><comment><USER40> Crazy bonkers idea...

The cities I've lived in (in the US) provided the garbage and recycle bins. How about printing the recyclable materials and exceptions ON THE BINS. Put it on the lid, so it can be easily customized for each community. It amazes me that no one has proposed this yet.

Another idea - randomly choose streets to spot check recycling behavior and flag the cans based on their score. Nothing exotic - don't have to do it constantly or over large areas, simple 3 score system (good, acceptable, and poor), and just a quick peak in the bins as they are manually thrown into the truck. Your score is affixed to the bin, which you are rolling out every week for all the neighborhood to see. Of course there would have to be some discretion, like people just moving in, hence the process being manual, and probably some exemption process. The next week, those rated poor will be rechecked and rescored. Fail again and you get a warning that has the problems checked off from a list. After 4 consecutive failures you receive a fine. Or maybe you have to deliver your garbage to a sorting facility where someone will go over the process. Or there's a class.

There are lots of options beyond throwing up a website hidden behind 3 different local government portals.

<comment><USER41> The items that are worthwhile to recycle change depending on what various buyers are paying.

<comment><USER40> But that doesn't really matter to the average resident - I've never received a notification that the recyclables list has changed, let alone fire pricing reasons.

Different communities have slightly different rules (they've been 90%+ the same from my experience), but that's why I said to print on the lid. Same bins can be bought in bulk and the only logistics would be dealing with a smaller, easier to transport lids.

Or just use a big, super strong sticker. New rules? New sticker covering the old one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Wow. Did I just see a page informing me about the site being blocked in Europe?

</comment><comment><USER43> "And then there are items that should go straight to the trash — garden hoses, wood pallets, or, on one recent afternoon, a bound stack of roofing shingles."

Ideally this stuff should be redistributed to places it can actually be used ("freecycling")

</comment><comment><USER44> Now this is something that AI should help with.

<comment><USER45> Or you can just cut the problem in half overnight by mandating that manufacturers indicate on the packaging whether or not it is recyclable. We already have the recycle logo on the most common items, but as the article indicates, the biggest issue is with people hoping that an item can be recycled and throwing it in the blue bin in earnest optimism. Putting "Please dispose in trash, this item is not able to be recycled" on the container will take you further than any tech solution.

<comment><USER46> If you make manufacturers label the material, it becomes an easier AI problem to solve.

<comment><USER45> I'm genuinely curious as to which side of the equation you'd like to implement this solution - the consumer who throws the item away or the central sorting center that receives the items? Sure, a metro area sorting center might be interested, but many are government owned and require approval or even a referendum to increase the budget for this type of system. Rural sorting centers have no budget and the most high tech piece of equipment are the metal detectors positioned along conveyors (just before a couple scores of humans who do the actual sorting). You can give people an app to scan an item before they toss it, but that implies they'll actually use it. I want futuristic automated flying trash-sorting robots too, but I also don't think we've exhausted the easier options before jumping right into the high-cost tech solution.

<comment><USER46> I don't know the best solution, but making it an easier problem to solve is always beneficial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Obviously the ideal is to reduce "disposable" waste and we have lived 6000+ years as homo-sapiens without most of this modern stuff.

I like the idea I heard about in a European country (sorry, forgotten which), where there is a disposal tax paid on all goods by the manufacturer so that the removal of waste is already paid for and doesn't require people to fly-tip etc. This is presumably a nice financial incentive for people to make better packaging to reduce their tax and therefore their sale prices.

<comment><USER48> The country is Germany, the program is called 'Der Grüne Punkt' ('The Green Dot'):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_\(symbol\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> In Sweden we incinerate[1] the trash in super hot ovens and use the resulting heat to heat our homes. We do recycle as well but as we sometimes even import trash to burn (it's a cold country after all) I don't feel so bad when throwing something in the ordinary bin instead of sorting it proper.

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

</comment><comment><USER50> In our area, landfills are scarce, so local governments are incentivized to push waste into the recycling stream.

The result is that they trained people "when in doubt, put it in recycling". Now that recyclers don't want to accept the low grade stuff from them, they have a re-education problem on their hands.

I imagine the government employees who put out the bad information leading to this are all still employed and have probably been promoted.

</comment><comment><USER51> Stanford / Palo Alto gave up on a lot of recycling and went to "off-site sorting." Stanford used to have 5! bins.

Another fail is "recycling" at Costco, where basically no recycling happens and people just throw things in carelessly into any of the 3 bins. Worse, the staff contribute to its demise equally by eliminating the sorting signs and turning bins around to hide their labeling. Red, green, blue ... go figure which is which.

</comment><comment><USER52> Up here in Portland they only give us a tiny trash can and a full size recycle so we kinda don't have a choice BUT to recycle everything. When I lived downtown they only picked up trash every other week. They've recently introduced a 2 dollar/month "recycling surcharge" because they're effectively just trashing all recycling.

</comment><comment><USER53> That GDPR wall made me LOL

</comment><comment><USER54> Straight up: If recycling things was valuable, recyclers would be paying people for their recyclable goods, independent of what trash collection does.

Recycling may be the best option for the environment, but economically it's somewhere between a wash and a cost. Cities should budget appropriately

</comment><comment><USER55> "Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries".

Is there another way to access this?

<comment><USER56> > "Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European > countries".

> Is there another way to access this?

GDPR (and, for that matter, all state interference in the internet) in a nutshell. What a shitshow.

(Of course, it's also the fault of websites doing the sorts of bad-faith tracking that GDPR, in good-faith, tries to prevent, but the result is predictable all the same).

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Recyclable materials already have stamps on them to indicate how they should be recycled (if at all), but it seems nobody was ever taught how to use them.

I'm not sure why this is downvote-worthy. Did you all get taught how the recycling codes work?

<comment><USER56> I can't fathom why you're being downvoted.

I remember clearly in elementary school being taught the names of every single type of cloud, but I'm sure I never, ever had anyone sit me down and explain the recycling codes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> State and Federal governments should outlaw any non-recyclable plastic. I'm okay paying higher prices, but they should streamline the plastics that are used in packaging and in products so that everything can be recycled and consumers don't have to think about it. When I order things from Amazon, and it comes in things like styrofoam, it is absolutely maddening, in 2018.

The Federal government should pass a law where absolutely no non-recyclable plastic can be used anywhere. Let our costs go up, it will make things like recycling a lot more economically viable by simplifying things incredibly.

<comment><USER59> This isn't going to help.

Almost all plastic is recyclable already - but not when it's mixed with other junk.

What they should do is stop recycling glass, and recycle paper separately. That would solve the problem much easier.

<comment><USER60> I think what docker_up is saying is that if all materials were recyclable there wouldn't be "other junk" to mix in. I actually agree strongly with this, although I'm not sure how it could be practically implemented.

<comment><USER59> The other junk can be recyclables as well - glass for example.

But when mixed, it's too hard to recycle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Site says it's unavailable in Europe. What happened to the first2 Ws in the acronym WWW?

<comment><USER62> GDPR happened. But to be honest, if news site needs so much information about me then I don't want to visit that website...

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I don't like to recycle cans at my apartment bins because I know the bins will be contaminated. Not a big surprise. You can't guarantee that everybody will follow the rules. And the rules change too.

<comment><USER63> To be clear, I take the cans to a nearby depot.</comment></comment>


A father knitted his baby's first year of sleep pattern data into a blanket - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/21/20699484/sleep-blanket-data-visualisation-seung-lee <comment><USER2> This reminded me of the quipu:

 _A quipu usually consisted of cotton or camelid fiber strings. The Inca people used them for collecting data and keeping records, monitoring tax obligations, properly collecting census records, calendrical information, and for military organization.[4] The cords stored numeric and other values encoded as knots, often in a base ten positional system. A quipu could have only a few or thousands of cords.[5] The configuration of the quipus has been "compared to string mops."[6] Archaeological evidence has also shown the use of finely carved wood as a supplemental, and perhaps more sturdy, base to which the color-coded cords would be attached.[7] A relatively small number have survived._

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

</comment><comment><USER3> 1st child: September 15, 2019: here is exactly how long Aiden slept that night!

2nd child: June-August 2021: I think Jayden slept pretty well that summer.

3rd child: 2024-2032: Braden was born and entered third grade.

<comment><USER4> true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love that he chose to turn it into a baby blanket - it resonates so much more than if it was just a print or digital image.

As someone without kids, I also feel like I learned something about baby sleep by looking at it. Neat to see it turn from randomness into something ordered.

<comment><USER6> And how jarring daylight saving time is to a tiny human's sleep pattern. (Assuming that's the big shift at the end/bottom.)

Edit: Looking at the picture closer on twitter it seems like it's ~28 stitches which would be almost 3 hours so not DST.

<comment><USER7> In the thread he mentions it was a cross country trip and he didn't adjust the time zone to local time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What impressed me the most is that he made a webpage to help him do the knitting.

Example of a dinosaur: [https://lagomorpho.com/patterntracker/?pattern=patterns/chro...](https://lagomorpho.com/patterntracker/?pattern=patterns/chromedino-l.js)

This should be a product on its own. Take a photo, use some PyTorch and get a ready made page to help you. Don't know how many times I have printed A4 paper or handed my wife the iPad with a zoomed version of the receipt she is knitting.

<comment><USER9> That's definitely a thing. The knitting world has been pixelating stuff forever and there have been knitting machines with everything from floppy disk interfaces to USB-C.

<comment><USER10> My mother had a knitting machine interfaced with a BBC Model B over a serial connection.

It had four colours of wool, and the knitting area was about a metre wide.

It was like this (video), but the program in the machine would automatically raise and lower the needles according to the wool colour required for each line.

The result is the first computer program I ever used, age 2 or so, was the knitting pattern editor. I think it was the simplest drawing/colouring program, since you just had a large grid with 4 colours.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aEzZ6TdpcQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aEzZ6TdpcQ) (I think this is a cheaper machine. My mum's could change the wool colour automatically: it would beep when this was required, and you dragged the thing (shuttle?) to the far side, where some mechanical clicking would happen and the wool in use would be swapped.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone with kids knows this would be a good source of entropy.

<comment><USER12> Babies make great random number generators.

<comment><USER13> I dunno, it looks like some three-letter agency compromised this baby around the middle of the year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The thing I find most impressive about this isn't the blanket but rather the data acquisition: How do new parents manage to accurately and consistently record every time their baby wakes up or falls asleep?

<comment><USER15> There are a couple of apps out there! Although my experience was that I didn't really have a need for the data when all was said and done. Maybe I should have picked up knitting..

<comment><USER16> I'm not a parent, but my sister, and many of my friends, are of the life stage where they have kids under 5. The amount of tracking I see them do, especially in the first year of life, is insane. Is there a medical use for it? Do parents share the data with their pediatricians? If not, what's the point? Since all these apps are free, I assume it all just feeds some giant data science model that helps diaper companies advertise better, or something else utterly annoying like that.

(Then again, I usually use a sleep tracker, and aside from a quick glance in the morning, never ever look at the data again. But I figure baby tracking has a decent amount of overhead, and parents are already overworked and overtired enough as it is...)

<comment><USER17> Most tracking isn't really necessary, though it's a very uncertain time so it does make you feel like you're doing something useful.

Tracking is genuinely useful though when you've noticed something and are trying to gather evidence of a pattern to bring to a healthcare professional - for example around sleeping or feeding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am currently in the random scattered spot, cant wait to get some normalcy around the sleeping patterns. Side note what a great idea, and did he actually knit this himself?

<comment><USER19> Hang in there. I think mine might have mostly figured out how to sleep from bedtime to 6:30 now at almost eight months. I hope.

That is, when he doesn't wake himself up by bumping his head on the side of the crib, or having a nightmare (I guess?), or just being a baby.

<comment><USER20> Our baby slept for exactly 28 minute stretches day or night. Surprisingly, moving her sleep time to earlier (7pm) improved the situation. It took weeks to get her into an evening routine (dark room, changing, soft song, etc) but that helped flip her sleep bit. YMMV but hang in there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is the kind of content I'm pleasantly surprised by - it's both technically impressive _and_ adorable!

</comment><comment><USER22> Looks like a bifurcation diagram! Order out of chaos

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

</comment><comment><USER23> Is it me or does it seem like the first 1 or 2 days there was no sleep at all... That top margin looks quite a bit wider than the bottom margin.

<comment><USER24> The first two days (sometimes) the baby has stomach ache and s/he doesn't sleep too much and you sleep even less. Most of the times it's only one or two days, so be brave and try to survive.

The ache can be cured with some massages in the tummy. It's not as easy as it looks. Ask the nurse in the hospital for help after you tried for 15 or 30 minutes. The nurses know how to make the massages, it's like magic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> first few months look rough

<comment><USER26> You sleep when the baby sleeps, that's how you survive.

Unless you already have a kid that needs your attention, too. Then you really feel yourself wither away.

<comment><USER27> My daughter (first child) _would not sleep_ on her back. So, after the third week of each of us getting about 45 minutes of sleep at a time, and against current best practices, we let her sleep on her stomach. She slept, we slept in shifts so she wouldn't die on us, and we're all still here 13 years later.

My son (second child) slept from the start. Thankfully.

<comment><USER28> > and against current best practices, we let her sleep on her stomach.

The thing about "best practices" is they always change. My mom told me that when I was a baby the "best practice" was for a baby to sleep on its stomach -- otherwise it might aspirate vomit. Both approaches are honestly probably equally fine...

<comment><USER29> The thing about SIDS is that it's basically a catch-all for every infant death that can't be explained otherwise. The relative risk is already very low and didn't really change after the back to sleep campaign started.[1]

If you look into the research there are a number of things that greatly elevate the relative risk of SIDS. Belly sleeping is, as far as I understand it, way down on the list but for parents that don't have any of the other risk factors going on it's _really_ easy to point at and say "if you do this you will kill your baby because SIDS".

[1]: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3356149/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3356149/)

<comment><USER30> I don't think it's true that the relative risk didn't change. The Back-to- Sleep campaign cut down SIDS cases proper to something like a third, and the overall cases of unexpected infant death to almost half. ([https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/13...](https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/138/5/e20162940.full.pdf))

The paper you cite seems consistent with that also: although the number of discrete risk factors was unchanged, the number of SIDS deaths per year fell to less than half after the BTS campaign, so probably not all the risk factors are equally risky...

<comment><USER29> I'm not convinced that BTS had anything to do with the drop in SIDS. The BTS campaign occurred at a time in the US when smoking rates started falling off a cliff. Between 1990 and 2018 smoking has dropped 42% [1]. Between 1992 and 2017 the rate of SUID (includes SIDS and a handful of other things that used to be commonly lumped in with SIDS) has dropped... 42% [2].

Yes, correlation does not equal causation. That said, by definition SIDS has no known cause and smoking has been identified as one of the biggest risk factors.

Edit to add: one other thing that I think is hard to track. As a parent that tried to sleep two kids on their backs, they slept _terribly_. In the middle of the night, in sleep deprivation fueled desperation, the two options we saw were to put them on their belly or bring them into bed with us. Cosleeping is a far greater risk factor of SUID than belly sleeping but people make that choice every day because of the shaming that doctors and nurses put on belly sleeping.

[1]: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/07/26/poll-u...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/07/26/poll- u-s-smoking-rate-falls-to-historic-low-infographic/#701991c83351)

[2]: [https://www.cdc.gov/sids/data.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/sids/data.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Sweet. Lovely side project. But. Is this is the HN equivalent of kitten makes friends with a Panda "human interest" story? I've been reading a lot of stories where the headline really says it all recently...

<comment><USER32> Meh. It's kinds of an interesting data visualization project, so I'll let it slide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is really impressive (I have two weeks baby)

<comment><USER34> He look at me sleeping for 6 house last night (6 week old). My wife has been tracking feedings, I could probably do something similar.

<comment><USER35> Taking up new skills that required little to no thought when my girls were young was the only way I survived mentally on those days you can barely get going due to their sleep/sick patterns. Some days it was slight progress on a long project that allowed me to not feel like I was trapped in Groundhog day getting nothing done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Amazing!</comment>