Most items of clothing have complicated international journeys - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39337204 <comment><USER2> Related: [http://www.npr.org/series/248799434/planet-moneys-t-shirt- pr...](http://www.npr.org/series/248799434/planet-moneys-t-shirt-project)

NPR's Planet Money podcast created a T-shirt and attempted to follow it every step of it's economic journey. An interesting look into the gears and cogs of global manufacturing of an everyday object.

Also related: [http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/26/491342091/plane...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/26/491342091/planet- money-buys-oil)

Planet Money buys a barrel of crude oil and follows its journey through the various actors and entities in between pumping it out of the ground and selling it as a final product.

<comment><USER3> Another relevant podcast: in this episode of Adam Ruins Everything, Adam talks to Laura McAndrews, Professor of Textiles, Merchandising and Interiors at UGA and former PM at Gap and Urban Outfitters about "fast fashion" and what it takes to get your $6 t-shirts made

[http://www.maximumfun.org/adam-ruins-everything/adam- ruins-e...](http://www.maximumfun.org/adam-ruins-everything/adam-ruins- everything-episode-22-why-fast-fashion-fails-us)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I remember reading The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy (1) for an undergrad class about globalization - a light, quick read but one that stuck with me through college and post-graduation. Highly recommended.

The narrative follows the lifecycle of a t-shirt, from the farming of cotton in the southern US, to China where the shirts are created, back to the US for sale, and ultimately to Africa after donation.

1) [https://www.amazon.com/Travels-T-Shirt-Global-Economy- Econom...](https://www.amazon.com/Travels-T-Shirt-Global-Economy- Economist/dp/0471648493)

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed. As well as the globalisation aspect, I found the political vs economic point interesting. As the BBC article ends:

"Rather than a story of how people were competing - how do I make a faster T-shirt, a better T-shirt, a cheaper T-shirt - what I found is that the story of the T-shirt and why its life turned out the way it did was really about how people were using political power," she says. The current backlash against global trade is a direct result of this kind of political interference, she believes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The song "Are My Hands Clean?" from the 1980s, by Sweet Honey in the Rock, covers this exact subject. It traces the path of the materials used to make a cheap blouse you can buy at Sears from fields to the store. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vv60O2mk10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vv60O2mk10)

</comment><comment><USER6> For a moment, I was really wondering how clothing can complicate international travel (border guards taking offense at your clothing?!). Then I realized the ambiguous grammar...

</comment><comment><USER7> Start a small market site for local (for some value of "local") clothing production that maintains provenance and estimates footprint for all the articles.

<comment><USER8> I actually have a friend who started that very business. He established a strong relationship with one textile facility and one garment-making factory in Southeast Asia, and then resold those garments out of a boutique online shop in the US, all the while making transparent the footprint of his garments from textile factory to online shop.

It was a lovely idea, but he just couldn't make enough to sustain the business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> All that shipping around must completely offset the gains of the sustainable alternative to cotton.. though i guess it would do the same journey even with cotton.

<comment><USER10> Cotton itself is a very unsustainable crop. It takes 20,000 Kg of water to produce 1 Kg of cotton, and it's mainly produced in countries that do not have sanitation provided to a majority of their populations.

Cotton farming has had a devastating effect on drainage basins across the world.

[http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_freshwater/freshw...](http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_freshwater/freshwater_problems/thirsty_crops/cotton/)

<comment><USER11> _> It takes 20,000 Kg of water to produce 1 Kg of cotton_

Closer to 10,000kg for 1kg of cotton if these Guardian statistics [0] are correct. While still quite wasteful - it is half as wasteful as you claimed (but still more wasteful than nearly everything)

[0] Data [https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/10/how- mu...](https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/10/how-much-water- food-production-waste)

<comment><USER12> I've never really understood where this water "goes". A kilogram of cotton can contain no more than 1 kg of water, so the rest of the water must somehow be involved in growing and processing the cotton.

However, suppose I use 10,000 L of water to irrigate my cotton plot. A lot of this water is lost to evaporation and transpiration. A little bit is bound up in the non-harvest-able parts of the plant too. However, none of this water seems like it's really "lost"\--it eventually comes back as rain or snow, right? If we're not spending tons of energy moving the water around, this doesn't seem too awful. The worst possible outcome seems like it would involve the water evaporating and then returning as rain over the sea, which would make it more expensive to reuse as fresh water.

On the flip side, I can imagine that some water is also contaminated by the processing in a way that makes it expensive or impossible to reuse. That seems much worse.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rooting your Dropcam  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.includesecurity.com/2014/04/reverse-engineering-dropcam-rooting-the-device.html <comment><AUTHOR> Reversing the Dropcam Part 1: Wireless and network communications

[http://blog.includesecurity.com/2014/03/Reverse- Engineering-...](http://blog.includesecurity.com/2014/03/Reverse-Engineering- Dropcam-Communications.html)</comment>


VueJS 2.0 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-vue-point/vue-2-0-is-here-ef1f26acf4b8#.tcqo248xx <comment><USER2> Why does nobody mention the remarkable similarities between vue and knockout?

<comment><USER3> There are certainly some similarities in the reactivity system, but I find them quite different otherwise (especially in Vue 2.0). There's a comparison between Vue and Knockout here: [http://vuejs.org/guide/comparison.html#Knockout](http://vuejs.org/guide/comparison.html#Knockout)</comment></comment>


Soylent's Next Chapter - <AUTHOR> http://blog.soylent.com/post/168437321722/soylents-next-chapter <comment><USER2> This reminds me of a comment (here on HN I believe) after David Sacks took over Zenefits after its compliance debacle:

"When the old CEO writes the announcement letter, it was her choice. When the new CEO write the letter, it was the board's choice."

<comment><USER3> What if, as in this case, they both wrote it?

<comment><USER2> Per the spirit of the "rule" (whether it reflects reality is a different question), I'd say that what matters is whether or not the first CEO took part in the announcement at all. The fact that the new CEO also wrote something seems less significant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Probably in the majority of the cases it makes sense for the founder to step aside for a new CEO, but I can only imagine how brave and difficult decision must be.

Edit: Maybe some HN folks who have done the same can share their stories?

<comment><USER5> Never easy to do this. But most founders' mindset is to do whatever is best for the survivability and growth of the company. That's the path I took.

<comment><USER6> I don't know if that's the mindset of most founders, but it is probably the mindset of most founders who have a company that is still alive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's neat to look at the two pictures:

Rob is holding up a bag of Soylent, presenting it to the reader, bag in focus Rob considerably out of focus. Background is hard to make out, maybe a lag, kitchen, or kitchen-lab?

Bryan is sitting at a table, clearly in a situation where he's "on display" (jacket, microphone, earpiece), face well-lit. The product is in front of him, almost as out of focus as Rob is in the first photo. In fact, although the bottles are branded, you can more easily make out the Soylent logo on Bryan's shirt even though it's folded than you can on the bottles.

I'm just saying, if this were a movie I know what the message the director/DP would be trying to convey is: Rob was all about being the CEO who invented Soylent and brought it to the world. He makes a bag of powder the star of the photo of himself. Now it's Bryan's time, where the focus of the CEO's office is the CEO: Bryan.

Of course, this is not a movie. They're probably saying a lot less than that with their photo choices in real life.

<comment><USER8> As a video editor, I'd say you are close. imho, to me it doesn't say that Rob was making his leadership of the company all about the product (you'd really have to go back and look at past photos to see if this is true) but more that he is now fading into the background of the company, while Bryan is "focused" on future of the company (looking towards the viewers right which is typically the future). Although many decisions like that in films often tend to be happy accidents (or subconscious choices), it is pretty clear that they are deemphasizing Rob.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there a template out there for these types of "farewell letters", it feels like every leaving CEO, every startup that pulls the plug and every company that is bought by one of the big ones, these letters all have the same buildup and delivery.

<comment><USER10> As I read this, it's the standard shorthand for "after a product setback, the board got worried that I'm too eccentric and not managerial enough, so they brought in an MBA". I mean, that's a _bit_ harsh, but I don't think I'm wrong - the dot com bubble produced so many of these letters that they really are down to a standard template.

If this isn't a respectability move after Soylent's recently quality struggles, I'll... drink a bunch of Soylent, I guess.

<comment><USER11> Soylent hasn't had any quality struggles in the past 6 months that I'm aware of.

12-18 months ago they had multiple issues: sporadic mold under the caps, some people severely allergic to the algae-based ingredient they used, and occasional long shipping delays. But all of those issues have been ironed out while Rhinehart was still CEO.

I honestly think this situation is closer to young Larry Page stepping aside for 10 years while Eric Schmidt ran Google than it is to anything particularly bad that Rhinehart has done. By all measures I've seen, Rosa Labs is highly successful and growing fast.

<comment><USER12> While I agree with you, I want to point that last October Health Canada decided that soylent could not be sold in Canada anymore, because it doesn't meet the minimum requirement of a meal replacement.

<comment><USER13> I'd be interested to hear what requirements it failed. Because on the surface (which is as deep as I've looked into Soylent) it seems pretty comprehensive, no?

<comment><USER14> It didn't have enough carbs (seriously). Canada has very specific nutritional requirements for a "meal replacement".

The KetoChow guy gets around this by recommending to their Canadian customers, instead of mixing with cream, to mix KetoChow with maple syrup.

I kid not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What's going on with Soylent these days? They've been out for a while, so I'd be interested to learn about any (relatively) long term studies that came out about the health effects of a soylent-only diet.

<comment><USER16> Not sure if it's a meme, but reddit/hackernews seem to harp on soylent and prefer Ensure which seems to have more nutrients per meal.

<comment><USER17> Ensure is made with milk, though, which a lot of people are allergic to

<comment><USER18> Milk is a common allergen, especially among young children, but Soylent is also made with common food allergens (notably, soy protein and gluten), so on balance that issue is kind of a wash (or, maybe, advantage to Ensure), though specific users may avoid one or the other based on their specific allergies and conditions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Soylent has been unavailable in Canada since October: [https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en- us/articles/115005267426](https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en- us/articles/115005267426)

<comment><USER20> Yeah. And I'm running out of my stash. It's what I have at lunch when I'm not interested in walking away from my code.

I'm not even romantically interested in Soylent. I will use any brand. It just has to have a low glycemic index. =(

<comment><USER21> I would suggest KETOCHOW if you are looking for a lower glycemic index.

Also I laughed out loud at your typo. Please don't edit it.

<comment><USER20> I explicitly put "romantically" :)

I meant that I don't have a, "I'm a Soylent fanboy" attitude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Aw, not soylent again! I was wondering why _this_ is being linked on _HN_ , but then I reminded myself that Soylent is supposed to be food hacking. Great... Scott...

</comment><comment><USER23> That's cool and all, but maybe just focus on fixing the overly-tight bottle caps now? I can't drink it and buy more if I can't open it...

<comment><USER24> This is not how we do things these days - you will have an option to buy an accessory on every delivery for $9.99 extra.

<comment><USER25> You can actually use Amazon Opener instead of purchasing the Soylent holder and turner. Plus Amazon Opener can open Soylent using your phone app. Very convenient in my book to get Amazon Opener on Prime, since they give 24 months to pay @ $17/month, and you still get free app updates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Soylent Food Bars were the only vegan food bars on the market. Now they're gone. Please bring them back.

<comment><USER27> ???

What?

There's _tons_ of vegan food bars on the market: Luna Bars, Larabars, Clif Bars, ProBars, and probably a lot more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> There's a lot of valueless appeals to taste/opinion in this discussion... possibly the least informative commentary I've ever seen on HN

<comment><USER29> That's just every Soylent thread, or more broadly every nutrition related thread. It's one of those things everyone thinks they know a lot about, whether from investing a lot of time and money into a fad diet or just from watching a youtube video with more emotional than scientific content.

Since small changes in diet don't really affect the health of most people when compared to the sum of everything else, I imagine we tend to get a lot of meaningless confirmation, too. One time I gave up on eating vegetarian because I was feeling worse. So I wrote off the idea of vegetarian meals for years. Looking back on it, the problem was probably more about my extremely high stress levels at the time than the food.

<comment><USER30> Also, being vegetarian doesn't mean eating healthy. I was vegetarian in college and ate tons of fries and quesadillas. I eat meat now but try to eat mostly vegetables.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Ctrl+F Canada

And crap. Looks like I'm not going to get more Coffiest any time soon.

</comment><comment><USER32> Good time to start a Soylent competitor if you've been thinking of it.

<comment><USER33> Huel just came to the US. I haven't tried Soylent, but I have to say I really love Huel. Keeps me full, no stomach issues, the vanilla just tastes like lightly sweetened oatmeal.

Plus it's vegan, gluten-free, non-gmo, low fodmap, etc etc. You'd have to try REALLY hard to find a stomach condition that wouldn't allow Huel.

<comment><USER34> I have a bag of Huel in my kitchen gathering dust because I just couldn't get past the consistency of it(the little chunks of oats or whatever). Also the name reminds me of "Human Gruel" meanwhile everyone I say it to immediately thinks "Human Fuel", which I think is amusing. I guess my brain burned the connection to those two words after trying the stuff for a couple weeks!

<comment><USER33> I actually don't mind the chunks, but I am probably the least picky eater I know. That said, I have gotten to the point where I can mix it to a fairly uniform consistency (just shaking a lot and doing the right ratios of liquid to powder) so maybe it just takes practice.

<comment><USER34> I think the chunks definitely help with being able to feel very full after drinking it. Maybe I'm just not letting it mix/soften well enough before going for it. I'll do more experimenting!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is only semi-related, but is it possible to order a sample of Soylent?

They ship in bulk on Amazon and I just want to try it (maybe 1 bottle per flavor) before buying an entire set.

<comment><USER36> They make a variety pack, but it's only available with the caffeinated flavors.

<comment><USER35> Do you have a link to the variety pack? There used to be one on Amazon but I can't find it anymore.

<comment><USER37> Here's a link to the 12-bottle variety pack of the caffeinated flavors: [https://www.amazon.com/Soylent-Replacement-Drink-Variety- Bot...](https://www.amazon.com/Soylent-Replacement-Drink-Variety- Bottles/dp/B073WW761F/)

There are ASIN's for smaller packages (e.g. [https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer- listing/B01MTBJCR6/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B01MTBJCR6/)) but the pricing isn't rational.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Distribution is really key for their business, and refrigerated shelf space is pricey and hard. If an industry insider is needed to make it happen faster, go for it

<comment><USER39> Maybe it will help that Soylent doesn't need to be refrigerated before opening? Though that might be the preferred way to drink it, like soda.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I've been waiting a long time for them to ship to New Zealand. Still no option :(.

<comment><USER41> I've been getting Aussielent after the local brand Sipreme uh... imploded.

Worth checking out and is actually slightly cheaper.

<comment><USER40> Thank you madam prime minister

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> First thing for new CEO, add more countries. Last time I checked they still missed a number of countries including Sweden. Strange that they couldn't fix this in their first two years.

</comment><comment><USER43> I was hoping this would be some new product rather than just a change of leadership.

</comment><comment><USER44> I hate Soylent so much. If you like the idea of eating efficiently, just get some whey protein and possibly a veggie shake mix. Oh wait, that's not good enough. I need to seem hip, cool, and into the latest fad diet plan.

<comment><USER45> Right now what kind of whey protein, and which veggie shake mix? Do I need to buy a blender?

It's more complicated. Hate is a strong word already. I don't think anyone (okay maybe a very tiny minority in sv or something where cool is defined differently from everywhere else) drinking soylent is trying to be hip or cool.

Do you hate people trying paleo diets? How about gluten free? I doubt it.

<comment><USER18> > Right now what kind of whey protein, and which veggie shake mix?

Pretty much any of either that is on the market. Soylent isn't that remarkable, nor is there a well-understood narrow optimum (despite Soylent both pretending that there is and that it is always right at that point even with the major formula changes.)

> Do I need to buy a blender?

No, just a closed container for shaking will work tolerably well, or a blender bottle/cup (the ones with either an agitator ball or internal fixed plastic blades to help with shaking a powder) is even better.

<comment><USER45> there isn't a well understood optimum but it's easy to screw up and get a vitamin b12 deficiency for instance, or to put too much fiber or sulfur and constantly pass gas, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Chapter 7?

</comment><comment><USER47> "Soylent's CEO is replaced." Saved you a click, and reading some PR mumbo jumbo.

<comment><USER48> Probably a good thing for Soylent and the former CEO.

The guy always seemed like the kind of eccentric dynamo who excels at starting companies, rather than running them.

<comment><USER49> Excels?

<comment><USER48> [https://www.google.com/search?q=excels](https://www.google.com/search?q=excels)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Picture of new CEO Bryan Crowley looks like a parody. And this line!

> First of all, I want to take a moment to say hello and thank you to all of > our Soylent friends out there who have helped turn Rob's vision into one of > the most talked about and fastest growing brands in the food and beverage > industry!

<comment><USER51> How can this be the top comment? Making fun of someone's look? Is this what we've become?

<comment><USER52> I'm not sure the comment was about the CEO's looks as much as the photo itself. It has a stock/cliche feel to it with the product in the foreground, slight smile, pose, clothing, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> TLDR: Transitioning from lovable nerd as CEO to oddly-similar-to-Tony-Robbins CEO.

On the surface, about as appealing as the thought of drinking Soylent.

</comment><comment><USER54> function bullshit_translator(post) {

      if (/(next chapter|incredible journey)/.test(post.title)) {

        if (/new ceo/.test(post.content)) {

          return "I'm stepping down as CEO";

        } else if (/joining/.test(post.content)) {

          return "We ran out of money and our VCs saved us and themselves by acq-hiring us to the company."

               + "Even though we made 0 money from this and will be stuck with this company for next 2 years for vesting,"

               + "this is the part where you say 'Congrats!"

               + "so that I can call my self a 'serial entrepreneur' and put 'my company got acquired by XXX corp' on my resume"

        }

      }

    }

<comment><USER55> Soylent is definiteeellllly not out of money

<comment><USER54> that's not how this code works

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> The plant estrogens in this soy filled pseudo-nutrition are harmful for men's health. No idea why dudes drink this stuff.

</comment><comment><USER57> The soy boy memes must have really got to him.

<comment><USER58> Oh, come on. Don't downvote this. Had a big chuckle xD

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I wonder if this was submitted as a grand announcement or as a case study. The idea of a drink having a "next chapter" is pretty comical.

What radical twist is in beer's next chapter? More hops?

<comment><USER6> That was beer's last chapter.

<comment><USER27> Yeah and beer's next chapter seem to be sours... Which I can get on board with.

<comment><USER6> Sours are already sour enough and I do like some of them. If they follow the same trajectory as IPAs it will be a race to be the most sour and I don't look forward to that.

<comment><USER27> Exactly.

However, there's going to be some standouts.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Firefox & Chrome Cache on RAM Drive -Fedora / Ubuntu - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxreaders.com/2011/01/11/firefox-chrome-cache-on-ram-drive-fedora-ubuntu/ <comment><USER2> But Linux caches files in memory anyway. I doubt this speeds anything up. Did they bother to benchmark this?</comment>


The Scandalous Zines of Renaissance England - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-scandalous-zines-of-renaissance-england <comment><USER2> Rather reminiscent of this New Yorker article about a man who collected sensationalised publications about murder in the early US: [http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the- indispensable...](http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the- indispensable-guide-to-early-american-murder)</comment>


The Lava Layer Anti-Pattern (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-lava-layer-anti-pattern.html <comment><USER2> I sometimes see legacy systems as old cities:

\- The classic old town (the older parts of the system that tend to use older coding practices and technologies, but have most of the bugs stamped out and more or less "just work")

\- The slums (the parts that tend to be bug prone, but are impossible to fix. I.e. no one wants to touch that code)

\- The apartments/row houses (parts of the code that involve lots of the same types of objects/classes/modules that follow a similar pattern)

\- The art district (the place where someone tried some odd/experimental libraries or code patterns)

\- The residential district with windy roads and lots of courts and loops (places in the code where there are lots of objects calling each other with really deep stack traces; easy to get confused where you are when debugging)

Legacy systems are bound to have inconsistencies, but as you become more familiar with a system you begin to notice localized instances of consistency. These localized instances of consistency become the "districts" in our mental map of the system.

To my mind, if you're working on mostly new code (within a large existing system) unless it is already a highly consistent code base I would just use whatever conventions make the most sense to the developers working on it.

<comment><USER3> I love this. I think I might add some tour-guide comments to our codebase.

<comment><USER4> "You probably shouldn't leave any private methods parked near here."

<comment><USER5> "private methods are routinely broken into and used for nefarious purposes"

that'd describe quite a lot of code I've seen.

<comment><USER4> "Over there is our haunted module - it's been empty for years, and the callbacks aren't even wired up anymore, but people swear they've seen breakpoints triggering in the upstairs windows during late night solo debugging sessions"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I often feel lost when reading such articles because they never seem to quite acknowledge how bad legacy systems can be. The following examples all originate from the same project I have worked with in the past.

Example 1: You cannot "favor consistent over new/better" because one of the main problems with the old code is that it is horribly inconsistent already.

Example 2: You cannot "favor consistent over new/better" because the legacy style you would try to be consistent with is so bad that you cannot even understand tiny fragments of the code, let alone write new code in a consistent way.

Example 3: The legacy system was built in a way that makes it impossible to store the code in any kind of VCS, so being consistent with that means breaking well-established best practices.

Example 4: For some part of the system, nobody knew how to make the magic code generators produce code that is consistent with the legacy code (and if you try to write that code without the generators, you are in for a trip to hell).

That said, the article helped a lot in that I now know the name for a problem I somewhat recognized but couldn't describe well.

<comment><USER7>
        The legacy system was built in a way that makes it impossible to store the code in any kind of VCS

Come again?

<comment><USER8> Maybe it's in something like Smalltalk?

<comment><USER9> Another alternative is one of the PICKs where the source code is (used to be perhaps) stored in the database, or I think COBOL on some systems didn't exactly lend itself to flat files from the little I saw (or at least the OS wasn't embracing CVS/SVN/Git in favour of some hugely expensive and utterly inferior product...).

<comment><USER8> Ah, right, or "business logic eval()ed from database text" systems.

<comment><USER10> Or, more commonly - stored procedures.

<comment><USER8> Stored procedures are a little easier to handle provided your deployment system does a wipe/replace, similarly to overwriting scripts/executables.

I was thinking of a grimmer scenario, where the system has an disquieting aspect of polymorphic, run-time code editing... central to its "flexible" production behavior. There are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in sane philosophy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Print this out and post it on a wall where you see it every time you leave your desk or come back:

Refactoring is a bottom up process.

You make local changes, and those reveal the paths of least resistance in the code. Contiguous refactors start suggesting further refinements or even new features and it spreads and spreads across the app.

By the time you are making structural changes to the app, the avalanche should have already started and it is too late for the pebbles to vote. If that isn't happening for you then put it down to impatience borne of frustration with the rate of change.

One of the best ways I know to speed this process up without violating the 'rules' is to start with the build scripts and work your way through the initialization code of the app, chipping away at smells until it starts looking right. With good code to the 'left' you have a beachhead (and a line in the sand) you can use to push out into various subsystems improving as you go.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's the reality of a large codebase that there will be parts that followed the best practices of 5 years ago, best practices of 10 years ago, and so on; that's not an anti-pattern (indeed I'd be horrified if the code from 5 years ago wasn't noticeably worse than today's code - that would imply that the industry and the team had made no progress in the past 5 years).

What makes the single supporting example given for this supposed "pattern" bad is that it's full of churn, parts rewritten in a different way that wasn't better, just different. The idea that this is an antipattern relies on the fallacy that all choices are tradeoffs and there's no such thing as a better way of doing things. Whereas actually e.g. NHibernate is enough of an improvement over DataSet that an application that's half NHibernate and half DataSet is much, much nicer to work on than one that's all DataSet, despite the inconsistency.

The real antipattern in the story is making technology choices without team consensus/buy-in. If one developer adds a code-generation framework that only they can maintain, it should be rejected during code review. There's very little value in one developer unit testing on their own if the rest of the team doesn't care about maintaining tests. That's the real problem, and none of the suggestions in the article address it.

</comment><comment><USER12> in the Mythical Man Month, Fred Brooks asserts that conceptual consistency is the single most important quality of a large, successful software project. Although I was skeptical at first (it seemed a little too believable to be true), experience has led me to believe that Brooks is correct. If a change makes a project conceptually incoherent, it should be rejected, and a new project started. I think this article is one very good illustration of this phenomenon, albeit in an agile rather than a waterfall setting.

As a corollary, I think people often use agile as an excuse for introducing conceptual incoherence. I think this is almost always a mistake, and represents laziness, short-sightedness, and immaturity on the part of devs and managers alike.

edit: I'll add that I think under-investment in quality principal engineers is what gets one in this mess in general. If you replace your architect and her copilot with a handful code monkeys and one or two arrogant senior devs, you get crap stew unless you're careful to manage around your team's lack of experience and maturity.

<comment><USER13> I was thinking of making a comment here, describing this as precisely my experience. I work on an old legacy system. I have done so for some time, from junior to lead. [Edit: wait, I meant to say "i have discovered this same principle but you expressed it better than me". instead, i just described my experience.]

And I can see from experience that every refactor we did that was "this is the latest and greatest and we'll write the new feature like this and we'll just start migrating everything over to this eventually" has been an utter failure.

But the changes that were by their nature spread throughout the system automatically have been so much easier to work with. You don't even notice them. (Which makes it harder to get credit for it. If I have to train a new dev up today, I can say "the system is a little crappy, but we're trying to make it better". But they'll never see that we've made huge progress. But they will see the four different database abstractions we've got going on and they'll curse me, because this is where you see some work.

It is better to have a crappy core that you gradually fix, then do have a crappy core that remains there and five crappy other cores from each different dev. And whatever problems are caused by the shitty database abstraction some idiot dev created are always going to be there, so you might as well just live in that world.

<comment><USER12> i really appreciate your taking the time to write up your experiences in response, thank you. I think it's really important to continually articulate hard, possibly unpopular truths learned through experience. Otherwise how will our children's children have anywhere to look for guidance (lol... but seriously)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8772641](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8772641)

<comment><USER15> Just curious, but why not automate your link to the previous discussion? Why does Hacker News rely on people like you to post links to previous discussions? If there has been 3 discussions of an essay, over the course of 8 years, why not list all 3 discussions, when someone posts it again in the year 2021?

<comment><USER16> This already exists -- the "past" link under the submission title.

<comment><USER17> I don't think the 'past' link conforms to current best design patterns. We should refactor it so that it automatically posts a comment on the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I came into a position where my first job was to make a certain process scalable. The code had all of the smells of bad design - huge monolithic classes, in a huge monolithic solution with unrelated projects. The less mature me would have said this crap needs to be rewritten. Now I would like to consider myself more practical:

1\. Form the monolithic repo and start taking out unneeded projects and classes and recompiling often.

2\. Encapsulate the entire executable in a Docker container

3\. Use AWS's ECS, Fargate, and Autoscaling.

Now we have scalability.

For maintainability, every time you touch a part of the code, extract the functionality into a lambda microserve.

The code that never changes, doesn't need to be touched and you slowly start decreasing the size of the monolith and it's easier to find bottlenecks and make changes without affecting other parts of the code. Replace "lambda expressions" with microservices/separate modules etc as appropriate for your use case.

<comment><USER19> > For maintainability, every time you touch a part of the code, extract the > functionality into a lambda microserve.

Funny, for maintainability, every i time i touched a Lambda microservice, i would integrate it into a single codebase.

<comment><USER18> The end goal is to get rid of servers completely. By keeping the services small you enforce a culture of small, loosely coupled, single purpose functionality. Especially helpful when you're either dealing with jr. Developers or developers who have been at one company for 10 years and never learned how to properly structure code.

<comment><USER20> In my (albeit limited) experience, projects which consist primarily of lambdas suffer one of two problems:

\- the code is awful, because lambdas were an excuse to keep bad developers in their own playpens (aka juniors and those who don't learn)

\- the code is just fine, and would be easier to maintain if most of the lambdas were combined back into one or more "monoliths"

<comment><USER18> I agree, if you don't have junior developers (or worse outsourced developers), it is easier to maintain a well constructed monolith that has separate, focused modules, and clear boundaries between the modules. Microservices help contain the damage of bad programmer skills.

<comment><USER20> I guess my point wasn't that damage containment was a perk. I view it instead as a lack of support- either cultural or structural- from the more experienced developers.

Microservice / faas may help mask it, but you're still stuck with a lot of bad code... Only now, there's less oversight and / or accountability.

<comment><USER18> Yes but the biggest issue with maintaining "bad code" is it's brittle. You make a change one place and it breaks something else down stream. With a microservice, the invariants are well known and the boundaries are clear. It's easy to know whether you are introducing a breaking change and just create a new version at a different endpoint.

<comment><USER20> You're not wrong, but I think missing my point. This is how we end up with a hackathon golang microservice saving a company 50k a month when a simple correction to poorly written code would have done the same thing.

Granted, I only skimmed bits of that article, so I'm not sure those were the exact details, but it makes for a nice analogy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting article, but it seems to leave out some really important points:

1\. Tests

I really like Michael Feathers definition of legacy code being code without automated tests. I've worked with some pretty bad legacy code bases, but the ones with decent test coverage were mostly easier to change and to refactor in smallish steps.

2\. Documentation

Good documentation describing the reasons for the architectural decisions made (and, somewhat more importantly the reasons why other ways of solving the same problem were dismissed) could have prevented most of the bad choices made in that story.

3\. Management

Where was management in the story? They should have seen the red flags (high turnover on that project, ...), done at least exit interviews with people leaving, seen the risk of the tech debt in the code base and taken appropriate action.

</comment><comment><USER21> At a previous job I inherited a steaming pile of legacy that needed improvement (it was broken and clients were complaining) I went with an approach of being explicit about new layers with classes like CompononentV2. This is an often maligned approach but I found it works quite well.

Basically all new code get's written against V2, old code get's slowly migrated as requirements or opportunity allows and sooner or later you hit a point where only a few places are referring to v1 so you can bite the bullet and remove them entirely.

Semantic versioning like this within a project get's beat out of us early as something source control should handle, but source control doesn't handle long slow migrations of code to new layers.

</comment><comment><USER22> That article is classic worth rereading. In my view, lava layer antipattern is lack of architecture. A situation like this could helped by assinging single role to make architectural decisions and maintaining documents describing them.

Another aspect is despite good intentions, an urge to use newest techniques and disregard for bigger picture signals lack of seniority. Everyone loves to use latest tech, but it takes courage, experience and confidence to slowly improve big project without using "latest and gratest". You need someone really experienced in charge to do that.

</comment><comment><USER23> > _TL:DR Successive, well intentioned, changes to architecture and technology > throughout the lifetime of an application can lead to a fragmented and hard > to maintain code base. Sometimes it is better to favour consistent legacy > technology over fragmentation._

Nice idea in theory, sometimes impossible in practice.

A few years ago I came onto a project that had a very clearly defined separation of concerns, with a business layer, data access layer, presentation layer, and Entity Framework. This was resulting in a number of SQL queries that took over a minute to run and caused web pages to time out.

I ended up cutting right through the layers, bypassing Entity Framework altogether and replacing it with hand-crafted SQL. This ended up cutting down the query time from six minutes to three seconds.

<comment><USER24> Abstractions and hard-interfaces rarely result in increased efficiency.

Breaking through the barriers and merging layers often allows a more inefficient solution in the same way as denormalisation increases performance through ignoring the "rules".

<comment><USER23> Well in the example I've just given they reduced query times from six minutes to three seconds. If that isn't increased efficiency, then I don't know what is.

The fact is that sometimes you have to ignore the "rules," because the "rules" were designed to serve a purpose that does not apply in your particular case, or perhaps never even applied at all in the first place.

The problem with trying to separate your business layer from your data access layer is that it's often difficult if not impossible to identify which concerns go into which layer. Take paging and sorting for example. If you treat that as a business concern, you end up with your database returning more data than necessary, and your business layer ends up doing work that could have been handled far more efficiently by the database itself. On the other hand, if you treat it as a data access concern, you end up being unable to test it without hitting the database.

You need to realise that software development always involves trade-offs. Blindly sticking to the "rules" is cargo cult, and it never achieves the end results that it is supposed to.

<comment><USER24> (I was agreeing with you, not down-voting you).

<comment><USER23> My apologies :)

Incidentally I wrote a whole series of blog posts a while ago where I cast a critical eye over the whole n-tier/3-layer architecture and explained why it isn't all that it's made out to be.

[https://jamesmckay.net/category/n-tier- deconstructed/](https://jamesmckay.net/category/n-tier-deconstructed/)

<comment><USER25> Man... I read your blog. It's all true. I find so hard to explain this to Jr devs. They read a lot of best practices, and take it as a religion. Lots of uneeded code is created.

Anyway, I would like more skeptical devs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not really a software anti-pattern, as it does not result in any particular software mechanism.

If anything, this is a development-process anti-pattern (not even software specific). Its also extremely obvious and non-specific so doubtful that its worth naming as an anti-pattern.

<comment><USER13> If it's so extremely obvious, why does it happen time and time again? I think I've spent all of my time arguing against this process. It's bad. It's better to improve on a bad design, than to make a bad design worse by adding another design to it. But it's hard to notice that.

<comment><USER24> Because its extremely difficult to do something about it.

Its normal for people to change what they're working on, this is inevitable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Disagree with comments below blog. A Dilbert comic dated 2013 was not yet "classic" in 2014, and arguably still isn't. Classic Dilbert is 1994-ish vintage.

<comment><USER27> Really, classic dilbert is Scott Adams blog posts about how Donald Trump is using hypnosis to control the electorate. What happened to that dude!?

<comment><USER28> Whatever went wrong with his brain, it happened a long time before Trump ran for president.

Scott Adams Poses As His Own Fan On Message Boards To Defend Himself: [http://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos- sockpuppe...](http://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos-sockpuppet/)

In April 2011, Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, created an anonymous account at Metafilter, then proceeded to vigorously & furiously praise himself, and insult other commenters. It wasn't the first time he'd done this, but it was the first time he got caught. [http://mefiwiki.com/wiki/Scott_Adams,_plannedchaos](http://mefiwiki.com/wiki/Scott_Adams,_plannedchaos)

Dilbert creator outed for using sock puppets on Metafilter and Reddit to talk himself up (he is also plannedchaos on reddit) [https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/gqzgx/dilbert_creat...](https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/gqzgx/dilbert_creator_outed_for_using_sock_puppets_on/)

As far as Adams' ego goes … he has a certified genius I.Q., and that's hard to hide. -plannedchaos^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HScott Adams [https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Adams](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Adams)

<comment><USER27> Wow. I was just sorta giggling quietly at what seemed to be a mild case of blogs-about-weird-things. I had no idea how deep the rabbit hole went</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would a $10B prize accelerate development of a COVID19 vaccine? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> No, it wouldn't be worth it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have zero credibility to make this statement, but:

I feel like we might run into a Mythical Man Month dilemma if we toss TONS of money at it.

</comment><comment><USER4> give me some up front and it will for sure.

considering the nobel prize is about $1 million and all due prestiges, im sure it would

</comment><comment><USER5> From a layman's perspective: No not at all. Companies around the world are rushing full steam ahead to build one, you simply can't release medicines that quickly in the developed world.

They had multiple Zika vaccines completed within months of the outbreak years ago, most look incredibly promising and seem to work. Not a single one has been approved for clinical use yet and will likely be another year or two before it hits the market.

<comment><USER6> Not only is the process complicated to get to release, but scaling up manufacturing isn't trivial either. Just because a woman can make a baby in nine months doesn't mean nine women can make a baby in one month.</comment></comment>


Walmart announces next-day delivery, firing back at Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/13/walmart-announces-next-day-delivery-firing-back-at-amazon.html <comment><USER3> I hope they can do a better job than Amazon but I'm not confident. I'm currently gaming their system of one day delivery failure credits because they can't seem to wrap their heads around the fact hat USPS won't deliver to my door and the packages are too large. USPS gets a box, it won't fit, they take it back to the post office and tell me I can pick it up the next day. I contact amazon, tell them it's late because the package is too large and they picked the wrong carrier and they give me a $5 credit. I tell USPS I'm not circumnavigating a lake to pick up the package and they can send it back. I border again and go through the same thing. I've told Amazon that they can't ship large items to me via USPS but they can't seem to figure out how to handle it. I even asked them to not use USPS (they're unreliable anyway) but they're stick in a loop. I'm openly and publicly doing this and they don't care. It's stupid. Thankfully it's a low priority item and I don't actually need it. Some day it will show up... maybe.

Walmart, if you can figure out that problem, you'll have my money.

<comment><USER4> I am in the same boat. I have called and begged and pleaded and escalated to get Amazon to stop using USPS but it just doesn't work. Here in Brooklyn if anything is unusually large they just punch in "attempted delivery" a couple days in a row and send it back. They don't even bother trying, I'm pretty sure it never even leaves the regional sort facility and gets on a truck.

I'm not sure I blame them. Amazon once used USPS to send me half a dozen office chairs. I called Amazon as soon as I saw the shipping update and said there's zero chance whatsoever they will ever reach my door. Nothing they could do. I just ordered from another vendor the same day and waited the inevitable 2-3 weeks for the Amazon order to work its way through the system and back to Amazon without delivery ever attempted.

It's one of a few things that perplex me about Amazon. Like why can't I just flag a shipping method as unusable. Why can't I search for stuff only sold by Amazon. Why can't you fucking stop selling fake chargers and headphones?

But what do I know about running a multi billion dollar business right?

<comment><USER5> >It's one of a few things that perplex me about Amazon

Their price match policy is pretty silly too. I bought a robo vacuum that got a $150 off promotion a week later. They were unwilling to refund me the difference but are willing to let me return the old one for a full refund while buying a new one at the discounted price.

<comment><USER6> That may make sense if the inverse of percentage of people that actually go to the trouble of returning a bulky item multiplied by the margin is higher than the shipping cost of a new item.

<comment><USER7> It's pretty easy. I've done this with hard drives that I had already installed.

Just printed the return label for the higher priced item, and slapped it on the box and gave it right back to the carrier when he delivered the same, lower priced item.

<comment><USER8> Yes, but it doesn't matter if you do it, it matters if most people do it. His argument (which I believe) is that notably fewer people will do it if they have to return the item and get a new one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know if Walmart has consigned, third party merchandise like Amazon does (e.g. sold by X, but shipped prime)? And if so, does it get commingled with the Walmart supply chain inventory?

My issue with Amazon is that I'm afraid of knockoffs, counterfeits and plain old cheap crap with fake reviews (really, 2000 people decided to review your plastic drinking cups?).

These days, I'm shopping more and more at Target, who offers free two day delivery on orders above a certain threshold, good prices, a curated selection of items, good website experience and most importantly, no third party sellers intermingling their fake wares.

<comment><USER10> At present Walmart does not commingle its inventory with 3rd party sellers. Things sold 3rd party are also shipped 3rd party so it is currently immune to the counterfeit problem that amazon is having.

<comment><USER11> That's not entirely accurate. Walmart offers DSV (drop ship vendors) which is basically inventory as a service. Walmart pays the third party sellers for storing and shipping the item, but takes on the overhead of customer service and returns. The customer is never made aware of the fact that they bought it from a third party because even the shipping label is customized to match Walmart's labels.

<comment><USER10> Right but they don't have the "we pulled a counterfeit widget out of the community widget bin and have no idea who's to blame" issue that Amazon had since they aren't co-mingling inventory from multiple suppliers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Whenever Walmart is mentioned I like to use the rise of Dollar General to illustrate my complete lack of confidence in anything the company attempts. How on earth did Walmart see the rise of Dollar General and not think: hey we could do that, or hey we should buy them, or hey Amazon has slow rural deliveries let's innovate there. They simply gave it a half-effort attempt and then gave up the small town / discount markets (which contained many loyal existing customers), blinded by their efforts to become Amazon and attract customers who don't care about Walmart brand. Dollar General's stock has doubled over the past 5 years and has a market cap of $30 billion, I have difficulty believing anything Walmart can do in efforts to become Amazon will add value equivalent to acquiring or cloning Dollar General around 2009. The thing that really kills me is that when Dollar General started gaining momentum during recession in 2009, Walmart was still nearly three times as large as Amazon and could have used Dollar General strategies to put Amazon on the defensive in some markets, but for some reason they didn't and have been struggling to figure things out ever since. I don't even have a horse in the race, and probably dislike Walmart when I really think about it, but every time I see a Dollar General I start thinking about this and end up getting frustrated that a company could so fundamentally lose it's way, striving for something it will never have.

<comment><USER13> Dollar General is a vulture that swoops in to clean the corpse of towns that Walmart has killed. Your argument that walmart isn't racing to the bottom efficiently enough could be right on its own terms, but what's the point? It's like arguing over which ocean to dump plastic waste into.

<comment><USER14> Dollar General and Family Dollar are not Dollar stores. They are small retailers who sell a limited inventory of groceries and such.

They are also closing alot of under-performing stores this year. I think Wal- mart might have known more then people give then credit for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What I wonder: why did it take them this long? Walmart has warehouse-sized stores that are close to almost everybody. And most of America's houses are already visited 6 days a week by a delivery person. Walmart could and should have made a deal with the USPS a decade ago. It would have been great for all concerned.

Instead, they let Amazon practically own the concept, eating away at their huge distribution advantage.

<comment><USER16> Deal with USPS? Would be hard to find a manager who can make this work and not obviously post it as a huge disaster on their resumee. USPS continues to bleed money, is always understaffed, continues to misplace the mail and is bugged with pretty old technology that is hard to upgrade. Add unions to it and you have a perfect government entity altho USPS is not actually a government organisation. If anything it would make more sense for Amazon mail to offer USPS a helping hand ;)

<comment><USER17> Wow.

USPS continues to bleed money but that's due to the mandate from Congress about pre-funding pensions. That's a requirement that nobody else has - <USER2> the articles about the 3rd-largest coal company declaring bankruptcy and shedding its pension obligations.

Is always understaffed? Yeah, there are lines a lot of the time. So go to USPS.com if you can and buy postage online. Go to the offices that have ATM- like machines if you can't. My usual problem is that I have a letter that I don't want to send Priority Mail and I've gotten out of the habit of having 10 different amounts of postage labels.

Misplace the mail? I signed up for their service that sends me a picture of almost every piece of mail that gets delivered. The last problem with the mail that I can remember having was dropping off a check at the airport while leaving on a trip. The contractor suggested that mail there got extra inspection, which delayed it. I'm not sure that's right but I can see somebody dropping something "bad" in the mail right before they leave the city/state/country.

They're certainly not perfect and I bet it's not any more fun to work there than when "going postal" was a thing. But I'm pretty happy with USPS.

<comment><USER18> The unusual pension funding requirement forced on the USPS might be an instance of: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast)

<comment><USER19> Perhaps. But any company who makes the claim of pensions or "we'll promise to pay you more later" should be legally required to store that in escrow.

So if/when they try their little bankruptcy schemes, it won't work.

<comment><USER18> I agree, at least for modern for-profit corporations. The USPS has a better track record than that class, is at least quasi-gov't, and, as a citizen, I'd be happy considering all USPS obligations backed by the full faith and credit of the US gov't.

<comment><USER19> I would disagree.

My wife and I will have different payouts for Social Security, because the younger have been stolen from. Every year that the federal govt adds to Social Security is one year less I get. And that matters to my housing, quality of food I eat, medical help, drugs I need, and basic quality of life.

[https://www.ssa.gov/planners/retire/retirechart.html](https://www.ssa.gov/planners/retire/retirechart.html)

I pay in the same percentage as older, yet they can retire earlier and get their money. And given my family proclivities of massive heart attacks in late 50s/early 60s, I'll see none of it. And I'm diabetic - this country cares little to none about health care... How many "supplements" will I need for medicare when I'm close to retirement age?

Where I'm sitting, I don't have that much to look forward to, given how much I've (forcefully) paid in. And I have little trust in the chuckleheads in office the last 20 years - since I've been able to vote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> They don't need next day delivery. They need a search that works, reviews that aren't fake, and a way to get products that aren't counterfeits half the time.

Amazon has skated way out onto very thin ice and is ready for disruption.

<comment><USER21> > and a way to get products that aren't counterfeits half the time

How often do you actually get fakes?

My family probably gets an Amazon delivery three or four times a week and we've never received a counterfeit item.

<comment><USER22> For a few years I was in the same boat: dozens of items delivered without issue. Within the last year or so it's become more common to hear about counterfeit issues on HN as well as personally be confronted with them--I've had to return 4 items that were obvious fakes and a 5th item that was already opened and probably not legit.

<comment><USER21> Is there any area in particular that seems problematic?

<comment><USER23> For me it's board games, and more specifically expansions. The last expansion I bought had slightly differently colored card backs than the base game, meaning you could tell if someone had expansion cards and making the expansion unusable. I had to compare them both to a friend's sets to know which was counterfeit.

<comment><USER24> Outside of the biggest major game manufacturers, that's long been a problem with _legitimate_ board games having inconsistencies like that, for instance because different printers with slightly different process were used for different print runs of the same expansion.

Its perhaps a sign of the times that counterfeits are perceived to be common enough that the natural assumption when this occurs is "counterfeit" not "QC/supply chain issues".

<comment><USER23> My natural assumption was "QC/supply chain issues", because I've seen those too. In this case the designer actually posted about the issue on a forum, which was later linked by the publisher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm excited for the future when we'll finally have day-before shipping, where ML predicts what I want before I even order it.

<comment><USER15> This honestly strikes me as getting close to doable. For Amazon to do next-day and same-day shipping with reasonable efficiency, they clearly have gotten good at this on a statistical basis, as the stuff needs to be in the warehouse in advance of shipping.

A plausible next step to me is something like the Amazon Corner Store, where they have neighborhood caches of goods. I go to order something and they say, "Hey, we figured you might want that, so it's just down the street if you want to pick it up now, or we'll drop it off later today." Or once self-driving improves a little more, maybe a mobile truck-sized warehouse with delivery bots, so they get delivery times down to 10 minutes or so.

And for the future, they have huge historical baselines for a lot of customers; I've been using them for more than 20 years. Most of the day their software sits in my pocket, so it wouldn't be hard for them to start collecting the sort of sensor data that gives them a very good idea of my activities and metabolic stats. It seems entirely believable to me that they could know that, for example, colds are going around, that sensor data indicates I'm going to feel the symptoms soon, and to dispatch a delivery robot with a package of tissues, OJ, and Nyquil.

<comment><USER26> Amazon does something similar now -- if they see you're following a repeating pattern (say, ordering detergent the first day of every month, or you buy the newest installation of an annual video game on release day), they'll prep loading the product onto their delivery trucks in anticipation of a last- minute order.

<comment><USER15> Really? That's very cool. Where could I learn more about that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I tried to get a pair of airbuds delivered to upstate NY. Two weeks after they were lost in transit, WMT put the onus on me to speak with the shipper and track down. I canceled. Amazon has nothing to fear.

<comment><USER28> That Amazon announcement was a bait in disguise. Amazon can pull this off because they have massive logistics efficiencies that are optimized for their e-commerce business.

Walmart has to do way more because their core business is still walk-in retail. They have to literally force their model to make this happen and that's why you get low reliability on the customer offering and an unprofitable dynamic in the business operation.

<comment><USER29> There's some forcing for sure, but they already had a _lot_ of the hard parts in place when they started the process. I've witnessed since the fall of 2016 their sending me many packages from various locations to almost always shipping one package, and without any promises many of those packages then and now arrive the next day if I order them in the morning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> That is maybe the first sign of brick and mortar retail finally waking up. Considering that technically they have one fulfillment center in every small town they should be able to achieve really short lead times out of these. Fulfillment Centers obviously being all their stores. While it is a non- trivial thing to connect all these stores to last mile courier services it is not necessarily overly complex.

Just what that means for Amazon and retail will be seen. I for my part won't be surprised if Amazon will change its focus more to Walmart. In turn that could open opportunities for new competitors.

<comment><USER31> > That is maybe the first sign of brick and mortar retail finally waking up.

Hasn't Walmart been inching into this space for a while? I already cross-shop with Amazon all the time, and for me Walmart's delivery is often quicker than Amazon's already.

<comment><USER10> >Hasn't Walmart been inching into this space for a while?

Yup. An aircraft carrier cannot turn on a dime but when it finally comes around it's bad news for anyone in its way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Amazon has rolled out same day delivery for my area and it is too convenient to pass up. I used to go to Brick and Mortar to get my items faster and I felt good that I was supporting them, but now I will have a hard time saying no.

Walmart has always had a terrible website experience for me. It's difficult to find items that will be in store for pick up and difficult to tell which items are part of the third party marketplace. Going to Walmart in person is equally terrible. There are so many trashy people I just stopped going, even though the prices were lower. It's the worst of both worlds.

I hope that same day delivery becomes something that every b&m retailer can provide regardless of their infrastructure. Maybe this is through Amazon or another third party. I'm wary of giving Amazon too much, but maybe this is the future and everyone else needs to get on board.

<comment><USER30> Coming up with a next day delivery service on scale for every brick and mortar retailer out there sounds like a good start-up idea. Kind of Uber for Walmart or some such thing!

<comment><USER33> Who says that once Amazon figures out one day delivery at scale that they won't sell it as a platform? Seems obvious.

Uber says that they are the Amazon of Transportation. I'd argue that Amazon is the Amazon of transportation.

<comment><USER34> Actually, Amazon just announced they are willing to throw money at you to start a company to do delivery for them.

[https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/13/amazon-offers- employees-10...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/13/amazon-offers- employees-10k-and-3-months-pay-to-start-their-own-delivery-businesses/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I recently ordered an iPad for my mother from Walmart (after comparing prices at Amazon, Costco and Apple store, and found Walmart's one to be $20 cheaper).

The iPad arrived literally the next day. The iPad covers, although apparently shipped from abroad, arrived in less than 7 days. I was impressed. Next time around, I'll definitely be checking out Walmart before I purchase any other items above $100 for sure.

Side note: I never had prime subscription.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm pulling for Walmart! I've seen the death of so many stores that I dearly miss (Sears, JC Penny, etc.). I can no longer get good hand tools or good t-shirts locally. And, the online stores are full of rip-offs and forgeries. Walmart is the last bastion of honest retail (where I can talk to a fellow human in person). I really hope they make it.

<comment><USER37> Walmart is the reason vast numbers of people can no longer buy anything good locally. They were killing local stores before Amazon was.

I'm rooting for their death, as I have since I first heard about them in the mid 90s, pushing out local music retailers so they can sell the censored, watered-down crap they strongarmed labels into producing.

Never spent a penny there, never will.

<comment><USER38> >Implying local is better

I've found local/mom and pop is significantly more expensive, than our national counterparts.

[https://efficiencyiseverything.com/dog-food-per-dollar- store...](https://efficiencyiseverything.com/dog-food-per-dollar-store-vs- store-and-protein-calories-vitamins-ingredients/)

I don't think lowest income Americans could live at their current standard of living off local mom and pop stores.

<comment><USER37> >Implying megacorp forcing their values on people is undesirable

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The relentless competition in retail never ceases to amaze me. I remember when online order delivery times for basic items were measured in weeks. Now, I can order the most obscure of items and get it at my door in 1-2 days.

<comment><USER10> >Now, I can order the most obscure of items and get it at my door in 1-2 days.

For anything obscure but to big to fit in a bubble wrap envelope you're still going to pay big bucks though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I've been trying to use Walmart for most of my household internet shopping needs because I dislike a lot of Amazon's practices[1].

In general Walmart is...ok. Their shipping times are pretty accurate, though they will sometimes split up shipments and don't clearly inform you. It also seems like their shipping pipeline is a lot rougher on boxes than Amazon. I ordered a window-mounted AC unit and the box showed up _wrecked_ \- the unit was badly dented and never worked.

Like Amazon, they have the problem of "seamlessly" integrating 3rd party sellers into their store which means you need to look closely or 4/5 things in your order will arrive day after tomorrow and 1/5 will arrive in 2-3 weeks.

[1] Walmart is no picnic either, but only so many companies can ship me the random products I've gotten used to.

<comment><USER41> Wal Mart's practices have certainly been much worse than Amazon's in aggregate.

<comment><USER42> How so? As a consumer, I personally have a lot less trust in Amazon. At least with Walmart I know I'll get what I ordered instead of some cheap Chinese knockoff.

<comment><USER43> Walmart's bad practices by far predate the founding of Amazon and have been well-documented. Walmart moves into towns and undercuts prices on locally- owned stores, putting them out of business and destroying Main Street America. They demand products sold on their shelves reduce the quality enough to make the items disposable, which forces the manufacturing offshore to China or Mexico, further destroying American towns.

As a consumer, Walmart is better than Amazon in the very short term. Long term, both Amazon and Walmart are causing serious damage to the economy of America.

[https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal- mart](https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart)

<comment><USER44> Good riddance to those "main street" stores and their overpriced business model.

<comment><USER43> Yup. Good riddance to downtowns, to store owners who put their customer and employee needs before pure profit. Good riddance to community, to knowing your neighbor, to walking. Good riddance to sustainable pricing and sustainable wages.

Much better that we drive out of town to Walmart, pick up dinner at the drive- through, drive home, and never have to talk to anyone or walk on a sidewalk. Much better that the profits leave the town, the county, the state, and move to a corporate headquarters. Much better than the main economic center for a town is outside city limits so the city gets no tax revenue to maintain roads, schools, and water/sewer service. Much better that the taxpayers subsidize those rollback prices that force their employees onto food stamps and welfare checks. Much better that you can buy something so cheaply that when it breaks you just throw it in the ocean and buy another one.

Good riddance to America. The United States of Amazon is just _so much_ more convenient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Delivering physical goods is a surprisingly persistent problem. Circa 2003, my thinking was that by the time amazon inevitably folds and the next generation of ecommerce takes over, commodity delivery systems will have gotten good enough to enable a drop-shipping future. The sites would be aggregators (stumbleupon, digg, etc.) with a good UI and packages would come directly from wholesalers and manufacturers.

Meanwhile, it's the 20s and delivery is still a strategic capability that the largest companies on earth compete on.

</comment><comment><USER46> Target is also experimenting with this locally.

When you order something online, instead of shipping it from a warehouse, it is instead shipped directly from a local Target store via UPS (you can tell from the shipping label). I've had several things delivered next day as a direct result.

The major difference is that Target aren't yet advertising that this will be the case, and therefore don't guarantee it or similar. But I anticipate we'll see Target officially announce this service when they've worked out the kinks.

</comment><comment><USER47> I actually ordered a CPU from Walmart.com a few days ago. It'll take a week to get to me, but it's still amazing to me that the order happened at all.

<comment><USER29> My goodness, they sell a bunch: [https://www.walmart.com/search/?cat_id=0&facet=retailer%3AWa...](https://www.walmart.com/search/?cat_id=0&facet=retailer%3AWalmart.com&query=intel+cpu#searchProductResult) (substitute amd for intel in that query if you prefer) including a $1,629 Ryzen Threadripper $70 cheaper than Newegg, free 2 day delivery or local store pickup. The multi-thousand dollar Xeons seem to be more in the receive next week category, but a couple of the most expensive 18 or 28 core, $3K plus or minus, are 2 day, at or just a bit more expensive than what Newegg is charging for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> One thing I don't understand why Walmart hasn't invested in: change the web interface!!! Their website is just not attractive at all!!!

<comment><USER49> They're shooting to keep it as close to the in-store experience as possible, in that regard ;)

<comment><USER29> You joke, but with the recent update they do have similar design aesthetics. If you're already a happy Walmart physical store customer that's perfectly OK, "familiar" is a good thing, even if it's not as attractive as you'd like.

I personally wouldn't say the design aesthetic for either is "attractive", but they're pretty clean and functional, and that is worth a lot. Walmart.com transactions are now a bit easier than Amazon, before you factor in the tremendous amount of effort the latter requires to avoid counterfeits. Walmart.com search is a _lot_ better once you get the right terms, and turn off 3rd parties which they make trivial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> This is still only on orders over $35.

Walmart still does not realize what Bezo's has done with Prime. He has made it the default option and incentivized users to check there first by removing all the friction.

Having these weird caveats and no 'membership' (which again, makes users think of Prime first) is going to keep Walmart behind for a long while.

<comment><USER51> Walmart did realize what AMZN did with prime membership. But they probably also realized their customer base wont pay for another membership.

<comment><USER52> They already have a bulk retail subscription with Sams Club. A membership that includes access to both the retail store and one-day walmart.com shipping could be attractive.

<comment><USER29> Possible evidence they could be thinking about this: a few minutes ago I filled out a survey of their's about my last Walmart.com purchase, and one of the questions asked was if I, or an immediate family member had a Sam's Club membership.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> They have this already for groceries in some markets. The problem is $13+ of delivery fees and tips. This has got to be worked down to $0.

</comment><comment><USER10> Walmart seems poised to steal a lot of cost conscious shoppers from Amazon because Amazon simply doesn't offer a lot of the "value priced" product lines that Walmart does and they've basically been competitive with Amazon for shipping times for quite awhile now.

</comment><comment><USER54> My family has started using Walmart's grocery pickup service. You select your groceries online, then schedule a pick-up time. You drive up at the agreed upon time, Walmart workers come out and load your car trunk with groceries. You never leave the car.

Walmart's not sitting still.

</comment><comment><USER55> It is for orders above 35 dollar and only available on certain items?

How is this a shot back?

Does Amazon have a money printing side business that allows them to subsidize/ keep prices near 0?

Until then, this is the equivalent of pissing in the wind.

If I was an investor, this looks like WMT opex just increased big time.

</comment><comment><USER42> It's good to see some viable competition to Amazon, but it's regretful that it comes from, and probably can only come from, another mega-corporation with an extremely poor track record around worker treatment.

I wonder how viable some sort of supply-chain co-op would be. Basically, get all of the medium players together to share resources to try to match these gargantuan companies on the delivery and returns front. It just doesn't seem possible for them to match these companies on their own, and a third-party would basically just be UPS.

<comment><USER56> In a sense some of the food delivery companies are doing exactly this. Perhaps if one of them branched out...

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Target needs to get on this too.

<comment><USER58> Dataset of one, but I've been more and more impressed with Target's online offerings lately. I've gotten a little sick of the fakes/third party nonsense on Amazon so I tried both Walmart and Target. As long as you're ordering over $35, Target does free two-day shipping, and they've been pretty seamless for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Too little too late!

</comment><comment><USER60> WalMart.com lost me at limiting my password to 12 characters.</comment>


Something is wrong with DNS resolver in Windows update - <AUTHOR>

All browser takes around 5-10s for "resolving host" while loading any website. Having this in windows 7 but it's in Windows 8.1. http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1-networking/dns-issues-since-upgrading-to-81-resolving-host/8e5b5a68-e8e6-462a-b53e-cde8915e82df
http://superuser.com/questions/160832/resolve-host-very-slow-windows-7
Considering recent Microsoft buggy update, is it good to install updates automatically? <comment><AUTHOR> [Link 1] [http://answers.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/forum/windows8_1-...](http://answers.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/forum/windows8_1-networking/dns-issues-since-upgrading- to-81-resolving-host/8e5b5a68-e8e6-462a-b53e-cde8915e82df)

[Link 2] [http://superuser.com/questions/160832/resolve-host-very- slow...](http://superuser.com/questions/160832/resolve-host-very-slow- windows-7)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Window Networking TroubleShoot Error: The connection between your access point, router, or cable modem and the internet is broken."</comment>


Hi Haters – The New Inquiry - <AUTHOR> http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/hi-haters/ <comment><USER2> No mention of Disney's role in shooting stars off into oblivion? They find talent, use it up, then push it off on its own where it very often ends in rehab. It could be a coincidence as many other stars that didn't start in Disney ended in rehab, but there is a definite tie between kid/teen stars and rehab, and Disney basically has cornered the market when it comes to getting them in early.</comment>


Build your own Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.buildyourownlinux.com/ <comment><USER2> I was about to go hard on this because I came across a similar link a few days ago that had absolutely no mention of the excellent existing project on this topic, the LFS project [1].

This page does make multiple mentions of it, but in a very offhanded way.

I would encourage the people behind this url to make a case upfront about why someone should use this link as opposed to directly going to LFS, and what do they have that LFS doesn't.

[1] [http://www.linuxfromscratch.org](http://www.linuxfromscratch.org)

<comment><USER3> LFS feels like a dead project. The project presents itself as a "book."

Some of the provided tarballs are riddled with old vulnerabilities (and served over insecure channels ( _!!!_ ) with no integrity checks), and thus it is relegated to educational purposes only, and should not be used for building a secure, general purpose system.

Does it support SATA and UEFI boot disks yet?

<comment><USER4> beside that, LFS on its own was weirdly useless to understand linux. More like linux toolchain / sed tutorial. I made a bootable LFS twice but it was strangely broken. BLFS is where linux knowledge is IMO.

<comment><USER5> I guess it depends where you want the knowledge. When LFS first got started (and a few years before), I found at that time as a home-user, I often had to build the kernel myself (maybe I was trying too hard to be cutting edge), know more about booting (LILO and GRUB), and on occasion I messed up bootable partitions. Recently, I was trying to build a custom version of GCC and dependencies and found LFS docs helpful.

From looking over the BLFS now, I haven't had a lot of use-cases for building more userland-ish things. I've tried to avoid compiling X or Display Managers and stick to package managers if I wanted to try a new Desktop Environment. I've found Arch docs (or man pages) really helpful in configuring these kinds of things when I do need it. I can see this being more useful if I wanted to be more of a sysadmin. I remember trying to customize PAM and setup Kerberos years ago and feeling like there wasn't much help putting this all together or troubleshooting (it may have been prior to BLFS).

When you said "weirdly useless to understand linux" do you mean the linux kernel in the literal sense? Or the low level system stuff of how things are put together?

<comment><USER4> I meant the whole linux system, not the kernel. I guess I'm wrong since it's not gnu/linux from scratch. But the two are entangled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These days, for the situations in which I want to make my own distro, I go to [buildroot]. I recently (well, 2 years ago) built an image to replace DOS on a Pentium 75 system. Built an small distro containing nothing more than a a couple users and minicom, with minicom attaching to the serial port, and ssh access. Sure, I could have done this with a raspberry pi and a usb serial adapter, but this was more of an educational side project. I was already re- using the PC power supply and case to power a standalone APRS setup, and figured I should be able to re-use the computer and serial port to provide remote access.

[buildroot]: [https://buildroot.org/](https://buildroot.org/)

<comment><USER7> +1 for buildroot. I've used it both professionally and on personal projects. All of my rpi projects run on tiny buildroot images (usually with a single go binary). I love that it produces an image I can write straight to an SD card that is ready to go without me having to plug the RPI into a monitor to configure it.

However LFS and BYOL aren't really about making it easy to build a "distro". They really are about learning how all the pieces fit together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The harder part of building a Linux distribution/system would be getting to use the hardware you have and exploiting its full potential, especially those that are not built with Linux in mind.

I switched an old Mac to run Linux sometime ago and have documented issues I faced and the limitations I still live with. Most of it is related to decent trackpad support, GUI options for apps/functions I need, and the customization of keyboard shortcuts system wide (coming from OS X/macOS). A lot of information as well as applications I found were simply outdated and not maintained. I've also spent quite a bit of time just to get the system in a shape that's a bit more amenable to me (as opposed to adjusting myself completely to how a specific distribution of desktop Linux works by default). It's nowhere close to perfect for me, but it's the best choice with constant OS/security updates for old hardware that's unsupported by the manufacturer (Apple, in this case).

My advice to anyone wanting to use Linux would be to look for hardware that has been built with Linux in mind. That will save you time, which you can then use to do more productive work/learning (unless your area of interest is in learning about hardware compatibility, developing drivers yourself, tweaking various config files, etc.).

<comment><USER9> > look for hardware that has been built with Linux in mind

This boils down to a simple thing to check: Are drives for this piece of hardware included in vanilla kernel?

If the answer is yes, it's a good sign, even more when the driver comes from the company building the hw.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Our goal is to produce a small, sleek system well-suited for hosting > containers or being employed as a virtual machine.

This is probably one of the few use cases where building your own linux distro is a sensible idea.

Other projects like LFS encourage desktop users to build their own linux- distro, which is beyond insanity in my opinion. Keeping an LFS system up to date with security patches should be virtually impossible unless you set aside a decent portion of your daily free time for this task, which probably nobody is willing to do. I can see how building your own linux distro is educational and fun, but in terms of security and maintenance it is an absolute nightmare.

<comment><USER11> > Keeping an LFS system up to date with security patches should be virtually > impossible unless you set aside a decent portion of your daily free time for > this task

It's really not that hard once you know what software is actually on your system. LFS enforces discipline because you're less likely to blindly install hundreds of useless packages just because your distro bundles them. On a nice svelte system, all you need to do is monitor a few mailing lists and decide if something is worth upgrading.

More often than not, you'll be able to patch your systems faster than a distro will be able to release an update, because the source is in your hands at the same time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Tangent - when I was 18, I wanted to be hardcore. I thought I was above Fedora and a (then up and coming) Ubuntu. So I printed out the compile-from-scratch manual for Gentoo. It was a solid 20 pages front and back. I made it four pages in and gave up.

This link gave me flashbacks to that manual.

<comment><USER13> 4 Pages? That's the table of contents and the introduction :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Funny how I was just looking for something like this. Just finished a whirlwind summer semester using Gentoo in a course on Linux admin, so I've been wanting to dig in a bit deeper.

<comment><USER5> Back in my day it was [http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/](http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/)

Anyone familiar enough with both to know the difference? I used the LFS docs recently when trying to build a custom version of GCC.

<comment><USER15> Looks like this site may go into some more detail of how the specific packages interact to create a "standard" Linux distribution more than the LFS series does; but I'm not sure how much has changed regarding that in recent times... Even the faded BLFS book I was gifted in 6th grade seems to be more focused on just getting the packages built and installed into the LFS root than going in depth about their internals/function. Even though tools like buildroot/OE/Yocto offer much better tools to make a Linux from scratch, I think both of these offer a great way to quickly gain at least some insight into Linux + userspace

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> how feasible would it be to build a true 64 bit system ? (i.e., the ints are also 64 bits)

<comment><USER17> That's not what "64-bit system" means. "64-bit system" means that _addresses_ (i.e. pointers) are 64 bits wide, not ints.

<comment><USER18> And I believe all the major 64-bit instruction sets actually use 48-bit addresses at present, so software/compilers can use the top 16 as tag bits. (In addition to the bottom 3, assuming alignment on 8-byte boundaries).

<comment><USER19> The address space in x86-64 is specifically designed to prevent the use of unused address bits for tag bits.

"The AMD specification requires that the most significant 16 bits of any virtual address, bits 48 through 63, must be copies of bit 47 (in a manner akin to sign extension). If this requirement is not met, the processor will raise an exception."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Virtual_address_space_d...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Virtual_address_space_details)

<comment><USER20> That applies only when you are actually using such an address for an access; you are free to store anything in those upper 16 bits as long as they are masked off when it's actually used to access memory.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>