Why the Guardian is changing the language it uses to describe abortion bans - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/07/abortion-the-guardian-style-guide <comment><USER2> > "anti-abortion" over "pro-life"

Seems fair.

> and "pro-choice" over "pro-abortion"

ok... what

<comment><USER3> And here they said they were doing this to _avoid_ political obfuscation. I sense they're being a bit disingenuous.

<comment><USER4> Not really. "Pro-life" isn't a very accurate statement as the definition of "life" is not agreed. "Pro-choice" is accurate, as it denotes a position which is in favour of giving women the choice to abort, it's not "pro-abortion" in that it is encouraging women to have an abortion.

<comment><USER5> Eh pro-choice seems just as misleading to me. Choice could mean any choice about anything. Seems like they're trying to conflate a choice about abortion with being in favor of any ordinary choice. Both sides have their own preferred terms that try to conflate something uncontroversial with a highly disputed position. That's a common enough thing in politics for sure. It's highly biased and not as all neutral to allow one side to pick a misleading name while requiring the other side to use a more literal name.

<comment><USER3> I think we should use "pro-abortion" and "anti-abortion". That is, after all, the relative positions of the two sides, and it tells us the specific issue at question.

But the word "abortion" has negative connotations, so being "pro" abortion has negative connotations.

It's a PR problem, mainly.

<comment><USER6> I, personally, am against abortions. I, however, understand that it's not my body that a baby will grow in and it's not my circumstances that the persons considering an abortion live in. I can't put myself in their shoes. I'm firmly pro-choice. It's their bodies and their lifes.

I'm also pro-life as in "create the circumstances that make as few people as possible face that choice." Create circumstances where being a single parent is not the first ranking cause of being or becoming poor. Create support networks. Create a suitable safety net. Ensure proper childcare options. Make sure that mothers don't die during childbirth from entirely preventable causes. If you want to be pro-life in a real sense of the word, care about what happens after the baby is born.

<comment><USER3> I'm genuinely curious, so please don't take this as an attack. It sounds like (and please correct me if I'm mistaken here) that you're against abortion essentially because they don't affect you or isn't something you would choose to do. Is that accurate?

I'm curious what makes you against abortion, then? Most people who are against abortion don't want anyone to have them (with certain exceptions) because it's effectively taking a life. But that's obviously not your reason, and I'm must confess I'm struggling to come up with a scenario wherein you can be against abortions, but think they're okay for other folks. That doesn't sound like against it to my ears, because you are supporting it in general (i.e. you wouldn't vote to make them illegal). And supporting abortion would make you pro-abortion.

Again, not trying to attack or belittle or anything like that, I'm absolutely, genuinely curious.

<comment><USER6> Ok, I'll try to explain in different words:

I, personally, would not choose an abortion. But I'm male and well enough off with a sufficiently good support network by friends and family so that I'm fairly confident I could make a good living even as a single parent. We do have a 2yo kid, so I have a rough idea of how much work even a single one can be :) I wish that no abortions were necessary. It's an ordeal. A human in the making doesn't get to live. (I consciously avoid "killed", I don't consider 8 week old embryos living beings). In that sense I'm against abortions. I wish we wouldn't need them. For the record: I'm not religious.

However, other people's circumstances differ. A woman has to actually carry the child to term. Pregnancy is a major health risk. Kids rate high as risk factor for poverty. Men tend to leave families and leave the kid behind. They might not feel ready for a kid yet. I value their bodily autonomy higher than my limited personal view on the matter. I can't possibly enforce my choice on them.

I'm pro reducing abortions. I'm against banning them. It's their choice to make and I've know people go through that and I've never felt like it was an easy choice to them. I consider myself lucky that I was never forced to make that decision.

The only way out of that dilemma is to help people not end up facing that choice (sex education, easy access to birth control, ...) and to make it easier for people to decide against abortions (health care, child support, ...) Reduce total harm inflicted. I consider anyone calling himself pro-life without first tackling those issues to be a fake.

So that's where I'm at.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Say what you will about abortion, but this is giving me some serious 1984 newspeak vibes.

<comment><USER8> The term 'fetal heartbeat bill' certainly has that vibe, which is why The Guardian is opting to use different more neutral (and certainly scientifically more palatable) terms.

<comment><USER3> I am thinking you've drastically missed the point of the comment you're replying to.

<comment><USER9> > I am thinking you've drastically missed the point of the comment you're > replying to.

Nope, youre the one missing his point. The commentor above is accusing the newspapers of Orwellian newspeak, where really they are just responding to the orwellain newspeak in use by the people naming the bill to begin with.

The newspaper is seeking to clarifly the misleading actions of others. Doing so is not newspeak. Its their role in soceity.

<comment><USER10> And here I thought I was supposed to trust what's in the newspaper because their job is to report the facts, unlike those biased websites that are _often_ run by agents of a foreign government (or, so I read in several newspapers).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For some reason, any sort of styleguide discussion always reminds me of this: [https://33hpwq10j9luq8gl43e62q4e-wpengine.netdna- ssl.com/wp-...](https://33hpwq10j9luq8gl43e62q4e-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/04/1984_-_newspeak_dictionary.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER12> > Some doctors who opposed the bans say the term was developed as political > tactic to win support for the bills.

Isn't this what all political bills are though? Often the fight over this stuff is over language? I mean we still have the Patriot act - no one feels the need to redefine how we talk about that one?

Also, considering this:

> "What's interpreted as a heartbeat in these bills is actually electrically > induced flickering of a portion of fetal tissue that will become the heart > as the embryo develops."

Isn't a heartbeat in general to be considered an "electrically induced flickering" of sorts?

Seems weird for the newspapers to not at least call the bills what the legislators are calling it and then explain why in long-form why they're wrong.

<comment><USER13> > Isn't a heartbeat in general to be considered an "electrically induced > flickering" of sorts?

You need a heart to get heartbeat.

This is already a slippery slope argumentation.

Is gutted fish without a head alive just because its muscles are spasming?

<comment><USER3> > Is gutted fish without a head alive just because its muscles are spasming?

The difference being that a gutted fish will not eventually turn into an alive fish. But the "electrically induced flickering" detected in a mother's womb will, in fact, turn into a heart, inside a "blob of cells" that will, in fact, turn into a human.

<comment><USER6> 8th week is so early the risk of loosing the embryo naturally is still very high. I know more than one couple that lost embryos at that stage - my mother in fact, multiple times. So that blob of cells is very much still in the "might turn into a human" state.

<comment><USER3> My mother-in-law had this happen several times as well. But " _might not_ turn into a human" is, in my opinion (and my mother-in-law's), insufficient reason to allow abortions for _any_ reason, up to (and in some cases, after) the moment of birth.

You _might_ turn out to be a murderer; you wouldn't appreciate it if we preemptively threw you in jail.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Wait, Google Sent Me" chrome extension not available - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wait-google-sent-me/igloabeeeiagmdkhellmibpnlnjdmdbb?down <comment><AUTHOR> This was previously noted on hacker news nearly 3 years ago, but didn't stick: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9551613](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9551613)

Previous discussion when the extension was posted in hackers news (while present): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531941)</comment>


How Big Technical Changes Happen at Slack - <AUTHOR> https://slack.engineering/how-big-technical-changes-happen-at-slack-f1569d25ee7b <comment><USER2> Slack is one of those few platforms, where their success makes no sense to me at all. I hate using it, I hated their bloated desktop apps, I hate the separate passwords/emails for every location you log into. I hope to one day understand the magic behind Slack, Salesforce, Sitecore and a few other huge tech successes, that have subpar tech.

<comment><USER3> A large majority of people who use Slack disagree with you. I've never really had a problem with it and I actually enjoy Slack quite a bit.

<comment><USER4> Just anecdotally, I've noticed a high correlation between:

a) People who hate Slack

b) People who hate open-plan offices

c) People who can't imagine why anyone would ever have a different opinion than them on such topics

<comment><USER5> How is point "C" anything more than "People on that side of the fence are not thoughtful, unlike people on this side of the fence"?

<comment><USER6> That they didn't actually say people on their side are any better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > we are ruthless in killing experiments early that do not prove valuable.

Ed Catmull of Pixar calls new ideas "ugly babies." Ugly because they're covered in warts -- aspects that are easy to change, but that doubters seize on because they destroy value. For example, the script for the first Bond film, Dr. No, had an intelligent monkey for a villain. Babies because they don't have value in their current form, they need more work and iteration before they have value.

How does slack identify technologies that don't have value now, but whose problems are superficial and fixable?

<comment><USER8> > Babies because they don't have value in their current form, they need more > work and iteration before they have value.

That's a highly disturbing and misguided framework if you ask me.

<comment><USER9> It's a metaphor. Maybe Catmull is a sociopath, but more than likely he believes babies are valuable in and of themselves.

The point is that a baby is a being with _potential_ \- and require outside input to reach that potential.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I very much disagree with the fads vs. revolutions division in this article, or rather - I find it unfair. A certain technology succeeding often has a lot to do with its quality, but it's impossible to ignore all the complex social processes happening around it.

Sometimes great solutions simply arrive at a bad time, or don't have proper funding, or marketing, etc. It definitely makes sense to be on the lookout and try to improve your chances of identifying the winner early on for business reasons, but that doesn't mean the winner is always the best.

Once you're as big as Slack, you might even be actively harming others by doing that - i.e. a better but less popular technology might have won in the end, had they backed it.

<comment><USER11> I didn't see the author pass any judgement on the quality of the technologies, or whether it was fair or unfair that they didn't get adopted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can't fathom why slack is so slow, on MacOS i see a channel that is white, new messages await. I click it, and honest to God sometimes seconds pass while slack loads the _text_.

How can this be? How could my slack client with a 30 Mbps connection have received the signal that there was a new message but also not downloaded the few bytes of text as well. Maybe it did but a MacBook pro from 2018 takes seconds to render text? AOL or MSN didn't back in the day.

<comment><USER13> Electron.

The trade off between packaging a html/css website as a standalone app in it's own standalone web browser minus toolbar vs apps using native toolkits such as AOL or MSN.

<comment><USER14> That's not entirely it. VS Code is Electron (not to mention doing a lot more) and somehow its faster than slack and uses about the same memory.

<comment><USER15> You're comparing a software that runs locally to a service that runs mostly through the network. A fairer comparison to vscode would be emacs.

Suboptimal code might have something to do with it as well, though.

<comment><USER14> What about vscode remote? That's how I'm doing it. Everything is over the network for the most part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Server-side, we've been migrating from PHP to Hack since 2016

A 3+ year migration of the bulk of your codebase is sort of intense. Though the Hack team at Facebook has made some great tools to ease migration, their fairly aggressive sunsetting of PHP features in Hack has presumably made this job a little harder.

Also notable: Slack is the only equivalent company (outside of Facebook) that uses Hack, at least that I know of. I wonder if that makes Slack a more likely acquisition target.

<comment><USER17> Bad choices always bite you at some point.

<comment><USER18> To be fair the bad choices are what allowed them to ship quickly, get to product-market fit, and get to the point where the bad choices started to hurt them.

Most startups never see the effects of their bad (or good) choices because they go out of business.

<comment><USER19> Hard to say. Their bad choices definitely didn't stop them from shipping quickly but it didn't necessarily help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Microkernels; EPIC architectures like IA-64; object request brokers; and > 1990s'-style neural nets are gone, and will not return.

I am not entirely convinced that they are gone:

\- Xen is essentially a modern microkernel. The most popular "microkernel" from the 1980s, Mach/BSD, evolved into Xnu/Darwin which powers macOS and iOS. L4 and other microkernels still exist.

\- VLIW lives on inside GPUs as well as x86-compatible CPUs

\- ORBs turned into microservices

\- Neural Nets turned into Deep Learning

<comment><USER21> I find the negative sentiment regarding microkernels premature as well. There are some really interesting projects underway:

[https://mirage.io/](https://mirage.io/) [https://www.redox- os.org/](https://www.redox-os.org/)

Don't microkernels have a real shot at replacing containers? Maybe we can stop running the huge linux kernel for every microservice?

<comment><USER22> > Maybe we can stop running the huge linux kernel for every microservice?

Ehm that's exactly how containers DON'T work. They share the kernel... (and only the kernel)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't hate slack but I'll share my least favorite parts In the hope someone will see these good ideas and fix them

1\. The rich text editor (thankfully you can turn it off — I am very sad for non savvy users who don't know this)

2\. The UX of snippets - I paste something long into a code fence — fine its too big and you need to send it very a different mechanism — just di that please don't ask me and make me click around - ideally you'd see the big text blob inside the code snippets and just extract those into something the reader on the other side can click - this way I can provide exposition and give the reader the option to get more details if I've convinced them there's something they should look at. Present options all require me to either lose formatting of my exposition or manually copy stuff out if the message and into one or more snippets

3\. Link unfurling - yes I can turn it off for me but the readers not for readers on the other side ... they are less likely to engage properly with what I write because of this crap and I can't fix it for them ... would be great if I can turn it off for messages I send and receive ...

<comment><USER11> For 3: There is an "x" next to the unfurl that you can click to make it go away for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is Slack known for their good engineering practices?

<comment><USER25> Will Slack be known for their good engineering practices after a few well placed articles in well regarded technology focused websites.

<comment><USER26> Indeed, these blog posts are recruiting devices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If Slack uses Slack it's amazing they do any work at all.

</comment><comment><USER27> Aren't people starting to use microkernels for virtualization hypervisors?

And people still sometimes use non-deep neural networks because depth can increase overfitting.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is a great policy. I appreciate that they provide a roadmap for engineers to propose and explore technologies, as opposed to most places (in my experience) that have a blanket diktat of the allowed technologies, and any evolution has to happen in the shadows, guerrila-style.

It's nice to see a company factoring in the evolution of technology in their product, for a change.

</comment><comment><USER29> The crossed out parts of failed revolutions of tech migration was brutal to read. It really underlined the article's message.

</comment><comment><USER30> > The new type annotations also caused some problems along with the bugs they > were catching, and a canonical static vs. dynamic typing debate unfolded and > ran its course. Through debates and accumulating experience, a rough > consensus emerged that increasing type coverage would do more good than > harm, and a majority of teams elected to use types.

I went through the exact same thing (word-by-word) at my last team and we came to the same consensus.

I caught a bug in our custom made static type checker for Python and argued that all type annotations should be dropped :D but they argued that there are more benefits, mostly because it is easier to understand code in isolation so we kept it and invested in even more type-annotation throughout the whole code base.

</comment><comment><USER31> > Microkernels; EPIC architectures like IA-64; object request brokers; and > 1990s'-style neural nets are gone

As someone who uses #1 and #3 every day, I wonder what it is like coding in the 21st century :/

<comment><USER32> What kind of work do you do? I'm not aware of any major operating systems that use a micro kernel architecture off hand.

<comment><USER33> There aren't any major desktop or server OSes that use microkernels but they're common in the embedded space. QNX, Minix, FreeRTOS, etc.

<comment><USER28> gosh I miss QNX...

(been working with a custom in-house RTOS for the past few years...)

(but I _do not_ miss QNX's build system. Recursive makefiles!?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > Most new things in technology turn out to be fads: [...] Microkernels [...] > are gone, and will not return

Uh... What about Zircon[1]? It powers Google's new mobile operating system: Fuchsia[2].

[1] [https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia- src/concepts/kernel](https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/kernel)

[2] [https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts](https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia- src/concepts)

</comment><comment><USER35> Ironacally, Slack IS using at least couple of fads on a product-defining level: Hack is dead by PHP 7 and PHP 8 will dance on it's grave this year. Electron is awful when used atop of big JS framework-based apps (it is more or less okay with nicely crafted Vanilla JS).

And at the same time it is a great commercial success. This last one I cannot understand.

<comment> safety-third Commercial success has little to do with your tech stack choices. I don't understand why people are so obsessed with jumping ship for the latest shitty framework just as the old one is getting really good and stable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> i really wonder why the C++ lib was discontinued. The explanation was a bit short unfortunately.

<comment><USER37> Honestly, it read like they stopped because it was harder then they wanted to pay for. Or at least the next step would have been.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> How do commercials keep getting posted here?

</comment><comment><USER39> FTFY: How to make a chat room app sound complex and difficult</comment>


The Little Printf - <AUTHOR> http://ferd.ca/the-little-printf.html <comment><USER2> Very well written. It reminded me of the writing style of Paulo Coelho, though I am not his big fan. But this article/story I like.

</comment><comment><USER3> This little story taught me so much about programming I had forgotten! Great job!

</comment><comment><USER4> the lil' printf seems like a lil' snarky s---.

I'm somewhat reminded of "learn programming" chatrooms, where a majority of discussions take the form of "how would I do X" "don't do X". Then that is the end of it.

The person's problem stays unsolved, the answerer gets the satisfaction of putting someone down, good times.</comment>


Just what we need. Another package manager.  - <AUTHOR> http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2014/03/just-what-we-need-another-package-manager/ <comment><USER3> I don't know about anyone else, but I treat my system and language specific package managers _completely_ differently.

My system package manager has root access, it can make or break my machine. As a user, I am trusting the distribution I use and it's package maintainers. Package vetting, stability testing and signing are what I expect from my distribution.

For language specific package managers, those things would be nice, but completely unreasonable to expect. There is no trust involved, how can there be? Most package repositories have no vetting process, it's publicly writeable.

For python, there is virtualenv. Packages are "installed" in their little environments with user privileges. For node, I personally have a dir in home for modules and then ln -s cli tools into ~/bin. Again, all with user privileges.

The crazy thing is, for some people there is no distinction. In fact, I noticed a trend in the node community in that they all give instructions to install their modules globally. Literally every single installation instructions I have seen for node cli tools have said the same thing, install globally.

This is pretty baffling. If you were on a Windows machine, would you download some random setup file from a public ftp and run it as administrator? I don't know why an entire community (of power users and developers no less) seem to think it's somehow acceptable practise.

<comment><USER4> If you're a C or C++ dev your system and language package managers are usually the same thing.

And even in your case I would argue you don't need several different package managers, merely several different environments.

It's just a matter of having different databases/install paths depending on what you're trying to do, you don't need a whole new packager.

That would fit within the unix philosophy of having "one program that does one thing and does it well" instead of having a hundred package managers, each with its share of bugs and quirks and unique features.

<comment><USER5> Is this actually true? It seems to me that wget+configure+make is the corollary to gem/pip/npm/cargo for dependencies on active development, while everybody uses apt-get/port/brew for system packages.

<comment><USER6> I believe that what they are trying to say is that, if the correct libraries aren't installed, there would be a failure at the configure point wherein you would then spend some time with the system configuration manager and get the required libraries.

This is all well and good assuming that your system repository has the library you need (let alone the exact library you need). However, when developing new software you generally need to link with something newer than what the system package manager can reasonably provide and being that most system level package managers were created before the days of GitHub you are stuck in a recursive loop of downloading and configuring.

Whenever I get 3 deep into a make loop like this I start pining for a package manager to sort it all out for me.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, that was pretty much my point. Instead of using gem/pip/npm to download, build, and install things in an accessible place, you use wget to download things, configure and make to build them, and make install to install them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It was inevitable that there will be a package manager for Rust. Packaging, versioning and distributing programming libraries still is an unsolved problem.

The requirements for an OS package manager are very different to one that is used for installing libraries to your development environment. Things move relatively slowly and there's less need to get bleeding edge versions included.

All of these programming language specific tools have their specific needs when it comes to version and dependency management. In contrast with OS package management, there is frequently a need to have several versions of a particular library installed. Libraries are usually installed in a per-user or per-project sandbox rather than system wide.

As much as I wish there was one package manager that could serve all these needs, I don't see that happening in the short term. The situation where we have half a dozen popular OS package managers and one (or more) package management systems for each programming language is less than ideal, but trying to unify all of those would be quite an effort. That would need getting the correct people sitting around the same table. And the end result would be a compromise of some kind.

I hope this happens but I don't know who would put the time and the effort to do it and what it would take for it to gain traction.

Question to the OP: which package manager would _you_ have picked for Rust? You point out a lot of problems in the post but don't come up with obvious solutions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Op here.

I'm not sure what the right solution is.

Each of the major package management solutions have provided ways to talk to independent repositories. I think that, in some ways, it makes a sense for a language to maintain repositories for each of the major OSes. This isn't without problems, of course, because then instead of writing software, you're spending time packaging and testing that, when you could just make a ruby gem and be done with it. Which is what happens now.

Honestly, even a way to conclusively enumerate the installed packages, versions, and sources of each package would be an improvement. That way, I could at least be reasonably assured of recreating the environment.

<comment><USER8>
        I think that, in some ways, it makes a sense for a language to maintain
        repositories for each of the major OSes.

_Specifically_ with regard to rust, what exactly does that mean?

Are you suggesting that if someone writes a rust library they should publish an .rpm, a .deb, an insert-here for osx, and an installable .exe (or nuget package) from a centralized repository? Or push them to the upstream providers for each distribution?

Or something else entirely?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As I've argued before, language-specific package managers are evil. Unfortunately, so are system package managers that are too cumbersome or can't/don't keep up with what's going on in the faster-moving language communities. This results in projects being packaged by people who don't actually understand it, while the people who understand it don't (and shouldn't need to) understand the minutiae of how to package things for a particular platform. This in turn causes far too frequent breakage.

What we really need is system package managers that can _cooperate_ with their language-specific brethren to get info about packages under other managers' control, direct other managers to install something according to its own rules/methods, and so on.

"Hey apt-get, please tell me the status of this Ruby package" <<apt-get turns around and gets the info from gem>>

"Hey yum, please install this Go package" <<yum turns around and tells go to do it>>

The rules for how to talk to each language-specific package manager shouldn't even need to be very complicated. The real work would be getting all of them to use a common format for talking about versions, file lists, dependencies, etc. It would be worth it, though, to have those dependencies tracked properly across all languages/formats instead of being lost at each boundary.

<comment><USER5> Ha, I knew this would already be here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7421759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7421759)

I do like that your idea isn't "build something perfect" but rather "teach the imperfect things how to talk to each other". Could be very neat. Not sure what it would look like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _Please, accept that a tool someone else wrote that you see as imperfect may > actually solve the problem, and know that the world may not need another > solution that does the same thing._

For Rust specifically, can you suggest any?

(I can't think of any, but that doesn't mean there aren't any.)

<comment><USER11> rpm, dpkg, windows MSI file, .App folder on Mac. These will all work with any language that you want, plus, you get the added benefit of standardized placement and having the USERS of each platform know what to expect when they install whatever you've decided to throw on their machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> My favourite solution to this would be an APT extension which allows installation of binaries into $HOME by unprivileged users and for all these language-specific things to be turned into simple APT repositories.

I can still have dreams, right?

<comment><USER13> You can probably accomplish that today with fakeroot.

<comment><USER12> At the dpkg level, this mostly works, yes. I can extract to e.g. ~/local, set $PATH, $LD_LIBRARY_PATH etc. and stuff works.

However, I'd also like to have some dependency resolution (ideally including already system-installed packages where possible, no need to install libc6 twice) and some more magic - for example, I have to manually adapt the file /etc/bash_completion if I want it to work out of ~/local, similarly, many programs only look at /etc/foo and not ~/local/etc/foo.

fakeroot doesn't really help and chroot again requires root privileges.

As I said, dreams :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The path to a standard package manager starts with a standardized protocol for package management.

A service protocol that is able to serve a repository of packages over http and ftp. A client protocol that can keep track of installed packages and can index, search and look for updates on installed packages.

Split package management into layers and only try to standardize bit by bit. People will never agree on deb vs rpm. People will never agree on using json vs python vs Makefile vs ruby vs shell vs whatever else - they'll always want their most familiar language for their package manager, which in domain- specific packaging means the domain-specific language.

So don't try to standardize those. Standardize the rest. Give us the protocol that can power all of this and increase interoperability. Separate the repository layer, the package format (deb, rpm), the packagefile format (setup.py, Makefile, PKGBUILD) and the package manager (interface: yum, apt- get, aptitude, pip, npm) from the rest of the protocol.

Make this potentially usable for things such as browser extension repositories, android package management, vim bundles and what not.

Someone please work on this. I'd do it but it just occured to me I have to clean my oven.

<comment><USER15> Yes, I think this is the right approach. Most package managers use the same command functionality under different synonyms. I don't mind all the different applications so much as the lack of a standard that they are built too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My knee-jerk inclination to this post is to yell, "oh holy hell, yes!"

That said, and as others in this thread have noted, there are actually two use cases that need to be satisfied.

1\. Here, you've got a base system, and you want to install some piece of software in order to use it. You want this to be guaranteed, for some reasonable definition of "guaranteed," to work with your existing base system.

2\. Here, you want to install packages within a segregated environment, and you want those packages to work with any packages previously installed in said environment. You're probably attempting to do something like recreating your deployment environment locally.

It strikes me that there are only two issues preventing the latter from being subsumed by the former.

1\. Not all package management systems provide a means to have multiple versions of a package/runtime/what-have-you installed at the same time. Often, this capability is there , but packages need to be specially crafted (unique names, etc.) for it to work. See Debian's various Ruby and Python runtime packages for example.

2\. Not all package managers provide a way to install a set of specific package versions in a contained environment which is segregated and requires intention to enter.

(Note that I'm ignoring the "there are different package formats" issue; I don't think is in practice a huge barrier, and the package maintainers should be involved anyway.)

If we could get RPM and YUM to provide those services, then we could remove the vast majority of this duplication.

Alternatively, if we all agreed that developers should just use Linux containers as development environments, then all we'd need is upstream to use native OS packages (which is, really folks, not very hard).

Can we do that pretty please??

</comment><comment><USER17> _So how do I rebuild the compost heap infrastructure that I used to build my environment?_

This.

Has anyone ever tried [https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm](https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm) FPM yet?

<comment><USER18> Yes, I use FPM quite a lot to make debs for any ad-hoc installations on Ubuntu. It's a lot easier than the actual Debian packaging tools!

E.g.: [https://github.com/threedaymonk/packages/blob/master/go.sh](https://github.com/threedaymonk/packages/blob/master/go.sh)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > _Suppose I used entirely off-the-shelf puppet code. Nothing custom, just > modules I found. And I erased my repo which contains my puppet modules. How > would I rebuild it and get the same thing that I had before?_

Well, there's Blueprint ([http://devstructure.com/blueprint/](http://devstructure.com/blueprint/)) which purports to reverse engineer servers and spit out Chef / Puppet modules.

But... I'm not sure I understand the question. It seems akin to asking "I deleted all of my source code, how do I rebuild what I had before?" That's why we have version control. That's why we have backups.

I also don't understand this rant in the context of Rust and its Cargo package manager. There are several distinct domains involved, and it seems pretty reasonable for each to have its own management tool.

Puppet, Chef, Ansible, or Salt for handling machine configuration. Yum or APT for handling system-level packages and services. Pip, Gem, NPM, or Cargo for application-level dependencies. Seems pretty reasonable to me.

If you need it to instantiate brand new machines, you can get into VMs (VirtualBox / VMware) or containers (Docker), each of which can also be trivially scripted (Vagrantfiles / Dockerfiles).

The whole array of tooling seems more complementary than competitive.

<comment><USER20> > Yum or APT for handling system-level packages and services. Pip, Gem, NPM, > or Cargo for application-level dependencies.

That's the thing: what is the distinction between "system-level" and "application-level"? Has it really gotten to the point where the only thing we can use /usr/bin/python for is to run other things in /usr/bin? This may very well be the case, but it strikes me as slightly strange given that we never used to be afraid of linking against /usr/lib or running our scripts under /bin/bash.

What happened in the past 10-15 years that changed the world so much that whereas before we ran our applications on top of the system, now we seem to want to run them in individual sandboxes, often inside of other sandboxes inside of other sandboxes? Was it really so bad to yum install and gcc -lwhatever without having special paths everywhere for everything?

<comment><USER19> > _what is the distinction between "system-level" and "application-level"?_

I think it mostly comes back to scope or encapsulation. I expect my host to provide facilities external to my program (databases, sendmail, a webserver), and I expect to have control over the software libraries internal to my program.

Perhaps you're also asking why APT or Yum, which are great at managing system- level package availability and versioning, couldn't be adapted for local use by applications. I'm not sure there's a good answer for that. Maybe it's just portability? If BlubLang runs on 9 platforms, then BlubPM needs to run on those same 9 platforms. It's probably easier to get there if BlubPM is written in BlubLang.

> _What happened in the past 10-15 years that changed the world so much that > whereas before we ran our applications on top of the system, now we seem to > want to run them in individual sandboxes, often inside of other sandboxes > inside of other sandboxes?_

VMs? I once heard a terrible analogy to the effect that we used to treat servers like pets: we gave them cute names and we nursed them back to health when they got sick. Now we treat them like livestock: if one gets sick, you shoot it and get a new one. There's a hilarious send-up of hand-maintained systems in the "DevOps is Ruining My Craft" article at [http://tatiyants.com/devops-is-ruining-my- craft/](http://tatiyants.com/devops-is-ruining-my-craft/)

The more you isolate the applications from the host, the easier it is to redeploy them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I agree, it does harm.

In principle if everyone used their distro packages for things like...say, Wordpress, we wouldn't have as many vulnerable installations on the web (see: NHS). How many people actually use the wordpress package from their distro rather than just uploading a private copy to their webdoc root?

Instead blog admins have to log in to their control panel and perform a (hopefully working) auto update there, and then have to shell in to upgrade other important things like PHP.

<comment><USER22> Have you ever seen how Debian et al package web software? According to the LSB FHS, and that's not only a lot of additional work that requires testing, and goes against how e.g. WordPress tackles the update functionality on their own.

<comment><USER21> Looks pretty reasonable to me, they even provide a setup program of some kind and what is presumably default htaccess rules.

[https://packages.debian.org/sid/all/wordpress/filelist](https://packages.debian.org/sid/all/wordpress/filelist)

for comparison:

[https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/any/wordpress/](https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/any/wordpress/)

What's wrong with it?

The fault is that of PHP developers for not seeing their distributables as system software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Fine, don't use it. But you probably will because after fighting it you will likely find it makes you life easier.

</comment><comment><USER24> Package management is a fractal problem; look at it from a high level and it all looks simple and they all look similar... zoom in and the similarities start falling away.

It's probably theoretically possible to build a meta-package-manager that really could make everybody happy, but it's difficult to imagine what project structure could get us there, and it's also difficult to imagine how to incrementally develop such a thing in a way that it is immediately useful to everybody. Without that you've got a barrier to deal with.

If you view an individual language package manager as essentially creating a container for the code to run in, a combination of Docker plus the Nix package manager is probably getting pretty close to what everybody needs, but you'd still have a long row to hoe getting everybody even remotely on board.

<comment><USER25> Captain metaphor here ... Isn't what you describe (a phenomenon which looks distinctly different at different levels of zoom) the _opposite_ of a fractal?

Fractals are typically described as being self-similiar, i.e. they look the same regardless of the zoom level.

Most things don't, which would seem to mean that package management is like many other things, more than it is like fractals. Many things that are different look alike when viewed from far away, since you don't see the differentiating detail.

<comment><USER24> Two variants of the Mandelbrot with slightly different settings will look very similar at the highest level, but have completely different zoom characteristics.

I have to admit that in hindsight I used a fractal metaphor that assumes entirely too much time spent fiddling around in Fractint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> With regard to Rust specifically, you will always have the option of working like you do with C++: grab some binaries, and either stuff them into a location on your search path or just pass the "-L" flag to the compiler telling it where to look when linking. Cargo is not an attempt to create another walled garden, it's just an optional tool to automate dependency resolution and versioning external libraries.

That said, I agree that it's a huge pain that so many groups feel that the current tools are inadequate enough that they have to design and implement these sorts of things from scratch. I haven't looked much at 0install ([http://0install.net/](http://0install.net/)), but let's hope that something of its ilk saves us from this mess some day.

</comment><comment><USER27> [http://xkcd.com/927/](http://xkcd.com/927/)

</comment><comment><USER28> A huge part of the problem is that many of the language-level packages like .gem are incompatible with system packages like .deb. Some of this is due to the package managers and some of it is cultural. Rust is young enough that the culture is not frozen. Establish the culture that breaking API changes without increments to the major number is a showstopper bug, and that will help. Compare that with the Ruby culture, where Rails 2.3 introduced a huge number of breaking changes vs 2.2. Heck, there were breaking API changes in several of the 2.3.X releases. No wonder Bundler was created to lock versions down.

</comment><comment><USER29> I wonder if it would be possible to build a meta-package-manager that works with all or at least a lot of the existing ones. The OP is totally correct in that having lots and lots of different package managers is insane. One major thing that is lacking currently is managing cross packet manager dependencies.

I don't believe this problem scales well enough to be possible to scale at a centralized point like a distro - there are too many different versions of too many libraries involved, so any solution must be decentralized. Nested support for namespaces would probably also be necessary to scale well.

<comment><USER30> Of course it's possible. I bet it even exists already in some dusty, little- used repository and someone will post it to HN in the next day or two.

<comment><USER31> Or two will be posted, with conflicting requirements, and each will get their own little band of followers that tell people asking questions on StackOverflow why their plugin isn't working "just trust MetaSlackOpkg and it will be okay."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> IMHO the problem is that there is no standard package manager. Therefore everybody keeps backing custom solutions and fragment the ecosystem a little more.

If there was a standard package manager that wasn't tied to a particular OS/distribution then we could all just happily target it instead.

Of course the task of making a package manager that would work on all un*x flavours as well as Windows and probably a couple others and managing to get it accepted by the majority of users/distributions sounds like an impossible task to achieve.

</comment><comment><USER32> Having been in a similar place myself, the solution is to host your own repos for packages and deployment config using Git. Never rely on the remote internet to be as consistent as internally-hosted code. Of course it'd be wonderful if you could do without, but somewhere you'll have to specify and track version numbers in a text file and Git's as good a way as any to track and tag that.

</comment><comment><USER33> Let just all agree that Nix is the way forward and start migrating every linux distro, language repository and app to Nix expressions.

 _sigh_ I can dream.

<comment><USER34> Just linux distros? You think too small. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'd like to see something like Arch, Parabola or similar with packages that are source only, signed, minimal dependencies and just works. Oh and push fixes upstream.

(Glibc makes me sad.)

</comment><comment><USER36> This blog post expresses little understanding of why these other package managers are used, or even how.

They are not supposed to be used to install things under (say) /usr at all. That is up to the platform's package manager. If you do that, it's not the tool but you who is being stupid. If this is a real problem for you, why are you putting the person who does this into sudoers on production machines - <USER2> assume or anyway hope it is not a real problem for you.

I have any number of command-line tools which depend on recent versions of things, and are not project-specific. I can install them under a prefix that is inside my $HOME.

Or when I make a project, I can make a sandbox where the tools get installed.

And I can deploy it in a sandbox, not haphazardly depending on system versions of everything.

None of these things I am doing to make my life as a developer manageable are harming your "architecture" (scripts to run package managers are architecture now?)

There are good use cases for platform packages. But every little thing should not be done with them. That adds up to a HUGE waste of time, with no real purpose.

When I make projects, I often need them to run against any number of different versions of things. But the most minimal requirement is to be able to use an actually-recent version of a dependency, where the platform you have dictated thinks recent means "6 years old." Neither of these can I do with the existing platform packages. So you demand that I make platform packages for every little tool and dependency I may use. Then, everything I want to use has to run against exactly one set of versions. So you are actually asking me to make my own whole-platform upgrades, or never use recent packages. That's not my job, it's not a sane way for me to do my job, and it actually doesn't benefit you at all. It reflects a really profound lack of understanding not only of my job, but actually also of your own job.

Then as an author of a library or tool I made available for free, you are demanding that to satisfy you I make packages for several different platforms, each with their own idiosyncrasies and versions of everything, and in fact that I package half the universe for each platform since most of them do not have recent versions of anything - or again only ever use 6 year old dependencies. All so that your job never has to go beyond running the One True Package Manager, whatever you think it is.

Then after all this unnecessary pain, your "solution" will require me to run an entire fresh VM for each new thing. Because you have stipulated that I have to dump all my dependencies for every project into one big sewer, it is guaranteed that there will be version conflicts. This is amazingly stupid because the tools already exist to avoid it very easily and people are already using them. And on your side, all you have to complain about is vague bruises to your feelings because not everybody is using the One True Package Manager for every little thing.

There is such a thing as a business listening too much to system administrators, when these system administrators do not at all understand software development, because their motivation is to prevent change and have less to do rather than to facilitate development of the business. When you blast this complaint at the whole community, you are asking for time to stand still and for nobody to develop anything new in the entire community. ALL forward progress must halt in order for you to have less work. It's not happening and it shouldn't happen.

If you are paid to be a system administrator, please perform your function as a system administrator. Please resolve these problems within the framework of your own company's division of labor. If you have to build packages for your production platform, I'm sorry but that's probably part of your job. If you don't like it, please whine to HR instead of whining to HN.

If you think it will be easy to make every language developer use the same package manager as every other language, it should be equally easy to make all the platforms use one package format instead of the arbitrary hell of different ones they are using now. That is going to be your best bet for actually making one true package manager. Good luck.</comment>


CNN's Anthony Bourdain dead at 61 by suicide - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/08/us/anthony-bourdain-obit/index.html <comment><USER2> Discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17264376](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17264376)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, when was his death announced publicly? This HN post was made "9 hours ago", the BBC article was published "4 hours ago" and the CNN article was at 2 hours ago at the time of writing this comment.

<comment><USER2> The articles will probably have been updated as more information comes in, so the dates on the articles may be updated. I saw the news on the CNN and BBC websites over 9 hours ago.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: If you make more than $200k, how do you manage your money? - <AUTHOR> Hey Everyone,
I've just finished my taxes for 2015 and after reviewing all my accounts I had an interesting thought. Over the last year, my wife and I have really stopped budgeting like we use to. Most of our eight years of marriage has been a combination of graduating university, getting into serious debt, being broke, paying off debt, and now we are financially fine. We have no debt and I've made a reasonable salary for the last three years.
Now that we have no debt and more cash coming in, we've gotten away from our budgeting habits. We use to follow an envelope system to manage money but we've just stopped doing it.
For those of you that take home $200,000+ a year, how do you manage your money? I've started maxing out my employers 401k matching, but beyond that I have no idea. Any good resources, or blogs to read? I've read Dave Ramsey's books, but not sure if there are any others our there that I should look at.
Thanks for any help! <comment><USER2> The amount of money and effort it takes to reliably make money from money are significant. Ron Conway is a billionaire and his full time job is investing.

Whatever you read today about the system by which ordinary people beat the system is the same advice that was peddled in the 80's, 90's and 00's. It worked equally well for the S&L crisis, the dot.com bust, and the recent financial cluster fuck. Which is to say that it didn't work well at all.

My advice from further down the life cycle, put it in the bank and preserve it. The number of people I know who have had their "portfolios" destroyed vastly outweighs those whose investments consistently do well. I don't know anyone who beat the high frequency traders by anything other than dumb luck.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> Assuming FI\ER is a goal, Reddit has a good place you can ask the same question: [https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence](https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence)

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would recommend the book 'The Intelligent Asset Allocator' by William Bernstein, if you happen to find yourself in the position of worrying about what to do with excess funds.</comment>


Show HN: Make your own UI starter kit for Bootstrap - <AUTHOR> https://themestr.app/builder <comment><USER2> Nice. I haven't seen something like this before - I wish I had it when I used Bootstrap in the past. Congrats on getting it out the door.

</comment><comment><USER3> Simple and thought out, this is definitely a useful tool!

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks really nice, I really love the way you start with colors -> fonts -> styles -> icons. I've never seen this way of creating a UI Kit before. Congrats!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for taking a look Alex.</comment></comment>


Software Developers Working from Home During the Covid-19 Pandemic - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.11147 <comment><USER2> Wasn't expecting such a long and detailed paper. Read the intro and a few more paragraphs of the first section, then skipped to pros/cons in the answers in the survey. Looks pretty similar to what I heard from friends.

WFH pros being less time on transport, saving money with eating out or car/parking. And cons of social contact, not being able to have a separation between work and personal life.

Wasn't expecting the third being poor ergonomics.

One thing that surprised me at work (NZ govt company) was that the feedback in my group was mixed from engineers with kids and without kids.

I was expecting the engineers with kids to struggle more, while the empty- nesters to take it easier. But it varied, either because some were able to get the kids to attend online classes, while others struggled to separate work/personal life while kids were at home.</comment>


Twitter Thread of Recent Fake Hate Crimes in US - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1097020092791934976 <comment><USER2> These appear to check out. Here's some additional links.

The organist hoaxer:

[https://www.wthr.com/article/police-brown-county-church- orga...](https://www.wthr.com/article/police-brown-county-church-organist- admitted-to-november-vandalism)

The synagogue defacer:

[https://heavy.com/news/2018/11/james- polite/](https://heavy.com/news/2018/11/james-polite/)</comment>


Jupyter Dashboards Layout Extension - <AUTHOR> http://jupyter-dashboards-layout.readthedocs.io <comment><USER2> In my team we use jupyter as a means of socializing somewhat-digested data intel among educated team members. The idea of using jupyter as dashboard material is ideal for us. It makes a quick and powerful information radiator.

That being said there are many directions jupyter can expand from here. Ive invested time experimenting with numerous jupyter extensions only to see several of them die on the vine.

Given the high amount of flux in jupyter/ipython I'd be reticent to adopt this tech in earnest unless I saw it within some greater roadmap of long-term jupyter support. I want to avoid hitching my wagon to soon-to-be-abandoned great ideas.

<comment><USER3> Good: Jupyter will hopefully stick around for a long time. I just spent a ton of working writing a new separate implementation of the whole compatible Jupyter stack for CoCalc, and Kyle Kelly at Netflix has similarly written another implementation for their use (see nteract).

Ugly: My impression is that the current "jupyter extension" API is actually being deprecated in favor a completely different presumably better API that JupyterLab will use. I think the Jupyter devs have a vision that involves everybody rewriting all their extensions against a new API... Regarding extensions, CoCalc also can't possibly work with Classical Jupyter notebook extensions, so I personally plan to rewrite several popular extensions for CoCalc (I've done some already).

Bad: The Jupyter project seems to be very heavily funded and reliant on Moore/Sloane/NSF. I know that Fernando Perez put a huge amount of effort into helping to get some of these grants, which are I think well over 10million total by now, and I think these grants fund numerous fulltime positions. I'm personally also worried that the grants will run out, not get extended, and the project will be in major trouble as a result. Fortunately, at least soem developers like Jason Grout and Chris Colbert are fulltime at companies (e.g., Bloomberg, maybe Continuum Analytics), so they have more stable funding. Also, CoCalc (my company) isn't dependent on grants, and we will be around for a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Big fan of having an easy to find "understanding the use-case" section in the docs!

</comment><comment><USER5> Looking at the examples provided, you still need to implement your own dashboard widgets _by hand_ using HTML/Polymer (outside of simple libraries with native support like Bokeh), which is the actual time-consuming part of making dashboards that working with Jupyter doesn't mitigate.

That said, the use case of sharing dashboards is interesting, albeit not a new feature relative to existing solutions like Tableau/Looker.

</comment><comment><USER6> Lovely stuff! Any working examples / demos of this anywhere on the web?</comment>


Intel Announces Q4 2017 and FY 2017 Results - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/12371/intel-announces-q4-2017-and-fy-2017-results <comment><USER2> Revenue from PCs: 9B$ (52.5% of Total Revenue)

Revenue from servers: 5.6B$ (32.7% of Total Revenue)

That's ~85% of revenue from products affected by Meltdown and Spectre.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but this include wireless card etc embedded in laptops.

<comment><USER4> And Intel NIC's in servers, which are doing great lately because they support extensions that allow virtual machine isolation levels in hardware. (I know a big cloud provider that uses this, but I'm not sure if they told me under NDA)

<comment><USER5> I'm going to bet that practically 95% of big cloud providers use SR-IOV, at least in some 1gig + offerings if not pervasively.

<comment><USER6> Although, Amazon has recently switched over to a new network card called ENA, which is made by a company they purchased. All recently released instance types use it instead of the intel SR-IOV nics

[http://www.annapurnalabs.com](http://www.annapurnalabs.com) [https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2016/06/introduci...](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2016/06/introducing-elastic-network-adapter-ena-the-next-generation- network-interface-for-ec2-instances/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What tax law caused a 111% tax rate? Western digital reported results yesterday, and they had a similar claim

<comment><USER8> Latest US tax reform included a one-off transition tax on previously untaxed foreign earnings. As a percentage of this years earnings, it is 111%. But, really it is paying tax on parts of previous years earnings that they didn't pay tax on at the time, not this years earnings.

<comment><USER9> But I thought ( I haven't looked into it in a long time ) They have always had some numbers deducted for Tax they owned (debt) IF they had to bring it back to US, so it was always accounted for but not deducted until later date.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And with this, Intel's market cap went up by twice as much as AMD is worth.

If one were to look at AMD and Intel, one would infer that AMD is the nice guy that always plays by the rules and Intel is the brute that's in it to win it no matter the cost.

You might be rooting for the nice guy, but you should never kid yourself that the odds are stacked against him even when he's doing all the right things. The brute isn't looking to play by the rules. The brute is looking to win.

<comment><USER11> AMD lost to intel a long time ago, for purely technical reasons. They had the upper hand circa 2002 or so, before intel trashed that line of development and launched the core duo platform.

<comment><USER12> > purely technical reasons

Sure: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc....](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v._Intel_Corp).</comment></comment></comment>


At ProDecide, We Help People Make Life Decisions, Ask Us Anything. - <AUTHOR> Hello HN!
You may not have heard about us yet, we are a small group of people, but what we do is big.
We help people make their everyday decisions using both human and artificial intelligence.
We want to take this opportunity to let people learn more about us, what we do, our goals, work process, etc. We are open to all your questions!
P.S. Here are our social media profiles:
https://twitter.com/ProDecide https://fb.me/ProDecide https://reddit.com/u/ProDecide <comment><USER2> Are you related to "Informed decision-making with and for people with dementia - NCBI" [1]. If not then this sounds like an unfortunate name clash.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29271251](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29271251)

<comment><AUTHOR> No, we are not. It happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I took a quick look at your reddit history.

You don't need to go into implementation details but could you give a high level explanation of how you are using AI?

Just being honest here but it feels like you are giving your opinion and then saying "This is what the AI says you should do."

<comment><AUTHOR> We use both human and artificial intelligence, 60/40, all the decisions are deeply researched and analyzed.

We are planning to describe our approach in detail on the official blog:

[https://prodecide.life](https://prodecide.life)</comment></comment>


Dmoz – The Open Directory Project - <AUTHOR> http://www.dmoz.org/?x

<comment><USER2> The problem with DMOZ is the corruption of the moderators. This is also becoming apparent in some of the other large community moderated platforms. The final frontier, in essence, is a crowd based decentralized platform for all things social.

<comment><USER3> I'm more inclined to trust dedicated moderators than the masses. Moderators may become corrupted but at least it can be eventually identified but if it's decided by the masses, who can be just as effectively manipulated, then it's much more difficult to point out the bias or correct.

<comment><USER4> Trust to masses doesn't contradict with identifying corrupt contributers. Take Wikipedia for an example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I haven't heard anyone talk about dmoz in a long, long time...

</comment><comment><USER6> Dmoz nearly died in 2006...

[http://www.skrenta.com/2006/12/dmoz_had_9_lives_used_up_yet....](http://www.skrenta.com/2006/12/dmoz_had_9_lives_used_up_yet.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> And the purpose of this is...

<comment><USER7> Pretty much how you navigated the web before search engines. Also, something all SEO'ers tried to get their sites into as search engines used to use this as seed site for their crawling process. But, yeah, I don't know why anybody would post it. Maybe they were feeling nostalgic.

<comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this because, although it might be hard to believe, I'm young enough that I hadn't heard of it, and only found it during a random link deep dive. It felt like some eldritch internet horror that the people on HN might know about and be able to explain!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is old is new, I still want a good directory site like this. Spam is just crazy though. I wonder if you could set it up as a request to mail in links via filled out form. That would cut down on the junk.

</comment><comment><USER9> lol really. All the people who have been doing SEO since 2000 are shaking their heads right now.

<comment><USER10> Google still pulls its descriptions from there if it doesn't like your ones!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> isn't this the original yahoo with new paint?

<comment><USER12> The difference being that volunteers edited the data. The whole point of this site pretty much died once Google showed up a long time ago. I'm not sure what makes this site interesting today unless I'm missing something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This has been around since 1998.

</comment><comment><USER14> Who called the nineties?</comment>


Google Search Technique Aided N.Y. Dam Hacker in Iran - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-search-technique-aided-n-y-dam-hacker-in-iran-1459122543 <comment><AUTHOR> [https://archive.is/ZNVGH](https://archive.is/ZNVGH)</comment>


Show HN: Howdoi Web GUI - <AUTHOR> https://how-do-i.app/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all,

So I built a web GUI for the awesome howdoi commandline tool! The commandline tool itself was NOT built by me, but by Benjamin Gleitzman and other open source contributors: [[https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi](https://github.com/gleitz/...](https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi\]\(https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi\))

I hope for anyone who prefers GUIs over command line that this tool can improve your workflow!

Open issues:

\- there's an issue with the colorize option and any code responses with html -- when colorize is active, the howdoi response needs to be parsed directly as html to the color classes work... but if the response itself includes html in the actual answer... well then weird things happen --> though this should only happen if colorizing is set to ON

\- Upgrading the server (my 'server' is an old 2010 Dell laptop), not sure how many child python processes (i.e `howdoi.py`) a node instance can serve up before it explodes, so if this post gets any traffic, it may simply not work, or have really slow response times

Ideas:

\- side bar with top 'most common' searches, ranked 1-10 --> will need to build out a backend for this

\- Linking the code of each response to stackoverflow / wherever it came from (though this may be annoying, maybe a button is better)

\- monetizing it... would anyone pay $0.99, for example, after 10 'free' queries? this way i could also build a login and your favorites would be stored forever, not just in browser storage</comment>


More Bad Angel Behavior - <AUTHOR> http://www.crashdev.com/2013/07/more-bad-angel-behavior.html

<comment><USER2> According to the article's author, companies are entitled to more or less unlimited free services from investors.

Some people may disagree with that view.

Personally, I don't invest cash in start-ups at all, except for founder's stock at truly nominal prices. (I once paid $100 for 1% of a company that soon was backed by AH, Google Ventures & other name-brand VCs.) If they want my services, they can pay cash or offer attractive equity.

In another case, I asked for and received 5% of the founder stock, and was very glad I did when the CEO went for a cheap and early acquihire, with me getting ~1% of the take after retention options and participating-preferred stock.

<comment><USER3> I think that's stretching his point somewhat. Renegotiating the terms of your relationship in general isn't what he's arguing against, it's more about intentionally pulling the rug out from a company and demanding equity immediately before a funding round.

That doesn't really imply good faith bargaining, and is really a lot closer to blackmail ("I'll make this deal tank and your company will go under unless I get 1% more")

<comment><USER2> The article links to an earlier article of his. He does seem as extreme as I suggested, more or less.

I also don't see what's wrong with the behavior he was criticizing. It seems that the offending angel said "If you want me to do more of what I have in the past, please pay me something." If the angel did something worse than that, he wasn't clear in explaining how or why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _an egregious violation of investor trust and ethics._

I agree that this kind of behavior is too obvious and not socially acceptable or common practice. But the concept of the modern style of silicon valley private equity industry (of which angels are obviously within the broad ecosystem) as that operates with any substantial amount of ethics or is deserving of or even expecting trust is so far from my experiences as to be laughable. They just are very loathe to be as obvious, or apply pressure without sufficient supporting influence.

If you've been sitting at the poker table for 30 minutes and you can't tell who the sucker is, it's you.

</comment><comment><USER5> How is this any different from a VC changing the terms on you at the last minute (which I am told happens routinely)?

It is just another form of re-trading a deal.

<comment><AUTHOR> I work with a ton of investors -- both angel + VC -- and this kind of opportunistic self-dealing is not condoned or tolerated by any of the professional / career investors I work with. It takes a long time -- and the help of many people -- to build a real business and folks who want to stay in the early-stage game don't pull shit like this because it undermines trust among both founders and fellow investors when you need it the most.

<comment><USER5> I certainly agree that it undermines trust but don't VCs routinely change terms at the last minute in a series A or B?

Is that really uncommon when you get to the professionals? I've never had to deal with this myself but I am told that it happens all the time. You think you have a deal and then you get a last minute call that says we can't do that evaluation or we want some extra warrants. The rule I have always heard is "you don't have a deal until the check clears".

<comment><USER6> No, they don't. The fact that someone here got screwed once does not in fact suggest this practice is the modus operandi. VC's are not out to screw you, and if nothing else, the reputational harm of the actions you described would be immense. Respectively, this sounds like a naive, 2nd hand perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The investor doesn't sound very sophisticated (sounds pretty stupid actually). The company is about to clear a hurdle that most startups don't, so the investor decides to be greedy and potentially throw a wrench into the whole deal to maximize his short term gain.

I would throw him a bone by creating an option for seed investors to cash out in future rounds of funding, or create some sort of compensation plan if his concern is about his time commitment. Otherwise, suck on it. If he doesn't like the risks associated with startup finance, he can put his money in an index fund and go play shuffleboard.

</comment><comment><USER8> There's no way this is a trend, is it? That's pretty much as low as it gets - "give me additional equity for doing my job." What recourse does a founder have if this happens?

<comment><USER9> You say no.

<comment><USER10> I'm guessing it's a bluff anyway. Presumably they have their own money on the line, so sabotaging their investment is against their own interests. If the CEO caves the angel walks away with more equity for nothing. If he doesn't, no harm in asking, right?

I think the appropriate response is to thank the angel and be appreciative of their contributions but explain that there is no more equity to give.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I just don't see how the angel investor has all the power here if they are interested in getting something back from the investment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Companies are at their most vulnerable just before a new financing, when > cash is short and all hands are required on deck to get the next round > closed.

I think it would be more accurate to write "Companies are at their most vulnerable when cash is short and they're not generating enough of it to support their operations and growth."

When you play _Build A Business With Someone Else 's Money_ and your execution (or lack thereof) leaves you in position where you need more money from Someone Else, you can lament the fact that Someone Else has significantly more leverage than you or you can acknowledge that this was a possible outcome of the risk _you_ decided to take.

<comment><AUTHOR> In my experience the startup community (both founders + funders) is heavily skewed toward people who believe that creating value takes time and teamwork, and that any premature + asymmetric effort to capture value is just counterproductive. Very few really big companies in tech have been built by bootstrapping -- it offers the illusion of control, but typically at the expense of impact.

<comment><USER13> Would you call say Microsoft and Apple were built through bootstrapping?

(I am not trying to be snarky. What's your definition of bootstrapping?)

<comment><USER14> Apple was not bootstrapped. Don Valentine (Sequoia), Arthur Rock (Venrock) were VCs to put money into Apple after angel investment from Markkula in 77. David Morgenthaler was also an early investor.

It's not entirely clear to me how Microsoft was financed, but there was absolutely outside financing (August Capital: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Marquardt](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Marquardt) ). Also, Bill Gates was born pretty rich. "His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. Gates's maternal grandfather was JW Maxwell, a national bank president." (from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates)). I'd wager his folks were angel investors in one form or another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't really see what's wrong with this.

The angel paid for his shares with cash. If he's also working for the business -- and driving significant value, it sounds like -- he has a right to ask for compensation for his work. And the founders have a right to say no.

Now if he's threatening to torpedo the current deal, that's just childish and stupid.</comment>


And Here's One Secret Reason Apple Is Crushing Google...San Jose State! - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/and-heres-the-secret-reason-apple-is-crushing-google-2012-3?goback=%2Egde_1930382_member_103388404

<comment><AUTHOR> I felt some pride reading this since I am an SJSU Alumnus. It's the only college I applied to because I was working full-time and cannot afford to move to Berkeley or any other school. I did very well in all my classes even though I was full-time with both work and school.</comment>


A sudden loss of wealth may be hazardous to health - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-suddenly-poor-death-20180403-story.html <comment><USER2> > _This sudden loss could have caused stress, inflammation and /or high blood > pressure, any of which could make serious cardiovascular problems more > likely, the study authors noted. In addition, a financial blow of this scale > may well have prompted people to skip important (but expensive) medical > appointments or to stop filling necessary (but pricey) prescriptions._

The cart seems to be before the horse here, in at least some cases. One of the most reliable ways to experience a negative wealth shock is to incur a big medical bill. E.g. if someone develops cancer, it's reasonably likely that they will experience a negative wealth shock and then die, but the loss of money did not cause the death.

The study itself[1] does mention medical debts as a considered liability, but (at least from my skim) I didn't find any other reference to this explanation.

[1]-[https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2677445](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2677445)

<comment><USER3> The problem with that theory is that wealthy people generally have good health insurance.

<comment><USER4> The median net worth of the people that lost their wealth in the study was ~$110k, which is just slightly above the US median at ~$100k.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I protect myself from this risk by not having any money.

<comment><USER6> I have bad news for you

> As bad as things were for those who experienced a "negative wealth shock," > they were even worse for Americans who didn't have any wealth in the first > place.

<comment><USER7> Which doesn't make sense to me. How can you lose something if you don't have anything?

<comment><USER8> The study found that those who don't have anything in the first place had even worse health outcomes than those who experienced a sudden loss of wealth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Status is how most people find meaning in their lives. Without the ability to keep up with your peers, life becomes meaningless. Frustrated status accounts for far more deaths in this country than we want to admit.

Even if you're sanguine enough to accept a loss in status, having your spouse leave you and your kids hate you make it that much more difficult. Even if you don't actually commit suicide, you'll stop maintaining your health and before you know it, you're in an early grave.

Fixing this would mean telling Americans to stop caring about status, I don't see that happening for at least another hundred years.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've heard anecdotally that negative health shocks can lead to terrible wealth loss as healthcare is very expensive.

Is relationship of the magnitude that could impact these results?

<comment><USER11> I used to work with a homeless shelter and the director told me the #1 cause of homelessness was sudden massive healthcare bills. This can even extend to caring family members who foot the bill, leaving them financially at the edge, just before suffering some shock of their own.

<comment><USER12> Hmm... seems like if someone in your household is diagnosed with some terrible (expensive to treat) illness, you should just operate under the assumption that you _will_ be declaring bankruptcy after all is said and done. And therefore:

\- Do NOT touch IRAs or any other asset that might be protected during bankruptcy (i.e., don't liquidate everything in a futile attempt to keep up with the medical bills).

\- Pay as little as you can get away with on those medical bills during treatment. Then sort it all out in bankruptcy court.

<comment><USER13> > Pay as little as you can get away with on those medical bills during > treatment. Then sort it all out in bankruptcy court.

That sounds like a good strategy anyway, since you can't ever be sure a procedure _will_ fix a problem, even if it _should_ , so future expenses are a fairly open question.

You don't have a lot of options if after your first medical solution you've paid everyone in full and are out of money but the problem isn't resolved, but frugal rationing of payments might mean you have quite a few tries before your funds are exhausted (even if you've left a trail of partially paid bills).

Unfortunately, I imagine the length of time involved means it's probably tricky to prevent past bills being reported as debt that might affect future actions.

<comment><USER14> Yea, this really depends on the illness but there is a lot of slack in the system.

It can take 2-3 months before you get a bill after medical treatment add another 60-90 days before it's very late and you have 6 months or so before your credit get's trashed assuming zero payment.

However, partial payments can push this out much further. Remember, companies don't want to sell you debt as they only get a fraction of it's total value so work with them. So, paying say 1% per month is often enough to avoid sending a very large bill to collections.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it the loss of wealth causing the health hazards or is it just that being poor is not good for your health? In the last paragraph they say the group that never had wealth had the worst outcomes of all.

<comment><USER16> They discuss it in the article a bit, as I read it they said "Stress externalizes itself as health issues (high blood pressure, poor sleep, etc) and sudden loss of wealth causes stress in proportion to how risk averse you are."

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This moves beyond water being wet and into quantifying it's wetness. Good for whoever managed to turn it into a published paper.

(I'm not trying to detract from the paper, studying and quantifying the obvious is just as important as replication studies)

<comment><USER18> is water wet though? or are only the things it comes into contact with wet?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm surprised that 1 in 4 people in the study lost more than 75% of their net worth at some point! I wonder if that was a housing crash or dotcom bubble or is just typical?

And that the median amount lost was 92% ($101K)... implying they went from about $109K net worth to $8K on median.

That would be pretty stressful for sure.

<comment><USER20> The volatility goes the other way too - Also 60% of Americans will be in the top 20% of income earners for at least two years during their lives, and almost 40% will spend at least two years in the top 10%.

<comment><USER21> Can you provide a source for this?

<comment><USER20> Sure!

[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/05/05/308380342/most...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/05/05/308380342/most- americans-make-it-to-the-top-20-percent-at-least-for-a-while)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If not centered one'll quickly get psych issues. And if one doesn't eat and sleep well they quickly fall off center. Best to know how to survive on basics and prioritize health, realize mind > matter.

For ex. I've learned to eat only Huel, oranges, dates, potatos, coffee, and a bag of chips or vegan cookie each day for the past 4-5mo. Grew up poor on frozen/fast food, moved to SF and became a foodie for a couple years, started using Blue Apron/Plated to learn cooking, later switched to Vegge option, and now have above diet. I am a foodie when I go out, but instead of 2x daily it's more like quarterly. Wide spectrum, common denominator is addiction to vivid clean feeling from fresh food and 16/8 intermittent fasting.

I also find that sleeping on the floor is most comfortable now with low body fat (inspired by Korean friends in Uni), so I've put my bed against a wall ~3mo ago and doubled my 350sqft premium SF space.

The biggest hazard is emotional health. Friends and ex-colleagues use the time to point out the flaws that have led to and caused the event, in their view. Talking about it with others in general terms sounds like complaining and that's why people don't talk about it openly, much. And it is a waste of time, perhaps beyond once to get it off the chest. All one can do is look forward with a new plan in response to the change... lean into it.

Mind > matter, poverty can be illuminating with right priorities.

<comment><USER23> I mean, great, but all the mindfulness in the world is not going to cure meningitis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm currently living with daily fatigue I have never encountered in my life. This occurred after I had such a wealth shock early this year and I had symptoms of light depression for a week. I am not sure if the fatigue is directly connected to this but I keep all options open, including post-viral syndrome, epstein-barr, being stress out or this.

<comment><USER25> Get these tested: Sensitive E2, TSH, T3, T4, DHEA, Testosterone, Free Testosterone, Prolactin.

All of those hormones cause fatigue when not regulated correctly.

You can get them tested at privatemdlabs.com and get the blood tests locally at any LabCorp.

(this is just a suggestion that ended up useful for me and I am not a doctor)

<comment><USER24> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Seems legit, considering so many people view money as a need, rather than a strategy for meeting needs.

I currently am choosing to live in a way that minimizes the amount of money I make/spend, as well as property I own. I meet my needs through the supportive community I've found, by asking for what I need, work-trading, and signing up for government services.

My life is better than it's ever been, but I had to change my entire mindset. An old friend in the same community hasn't adopted my approach and hasn't worked on leaving behind the scarcity mindset. They worry about everything, including keeping their job. It leads them to act in ways that keep them employed, eating right, and socializing.

This kind of self-imposed stress we adopt over money isn't productive.

<comment><USER23> Losing your home, being unable to pay medical bills, and struggling to provide things for your family isn't "self-imposed stress."

<comment><USER26> Were I to choose to rely on money to meet my needs, I'd be imposing stress on myself.

Capitalism is a collective choice and very few people take responsibility for making it.

I lost my home. I learned to accept my situation. I was lucky enough to be able to move to a state where the state covers medical bills. I'm starting a family and there's such an abundance of things in the world that I tend to need only ask for them.

Learning to grieve & let go of the loss of a resource and how to ask for help are skills not often taught in modern society.

Yes, the events you note are hard and can be out of people's control.

How those people mentally respond to them is something they can control to a degree and develop resiliency for.

<comment><USER23> How exactly does one not participate in capitalism while living in a capitalist society?

<comment><USER26> It's practically impossible to not participate completely, since the government doesn't recognize the freedom from money.

Minimizing one's participation can be done through making conscious choices. I choose to keep my income and expenses small. I rely on sharing what I have and asking others to give. I choose to believe there's enough resources in the world for everyone, though the distribution of the resources may lead to localized scarcity.

I'll also be testing the legal theory of the freedom from money. I practice a religion of my own design where that freedom naturally arises from foundational principles.

<comment><USER23> Ultimately even you admit it's impossible not to make the supposed choice you are talking about.

<comment><USER26> Just because it isn't 100% possible doesn't mean we can't minimize things now. We have a government that requires money to interact with it _for now_.

I can choose which direction I want to move toward and so can you.

Simply because I can't guarantee 100% extraction from capitalism at the moment doesn't mean I can't start moving away from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Loss of wealth can be a good thing thought. A close friend who once was overweight, stressed, and in the line to have a stroke gave up on his career to become a travel photographer; Mostly he does some small gigs, but nothing close to his past live, as he's used to say.

Me otherwise, had a really bad time when I lost my job last year. The mind goes first and then the body follows the same path.

<comment><USER28> Your friend didn't _lose_ his wealth, he willingly replaced it with a different life style.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder what percent is correlation and causation. IE if you are losing your health, you might not realize how your cognitive ability is inhibited, and you might make many bad decisions.

<comment><USER29> Then, there is the positive feedback loop. You lose money, you start drinking, now your decisions are worse, you lose more money, you drink more, your decisions are worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> How do we know this isn't just correlation with risk taking in general? Like someone who piles away cash is probably also less likely to own motorcycles etc... just saying.

</comment><comment><USER31> "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

</comment><comment><USER32> Good reminder to not look at my portfolio this year...

<comment><USER33> It's not that bad. As Dave Ramsey says, only those who jump off a roller coaster get hurt.

<comment><USER23> Well, not if the roller coaster collapses. Hopefully that doesn't happen anytime soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I don't have money. But I'am wealthy;</comment>


I'm one of 100 experts urging governors to require public mask-wearing - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/masks-help-stop-the-spread-of-coronavirus-the-science-is-simple-and-im-one-of-100-experts-urging-governors-to-require-public-mask-wearing-138507 <comment><USER2> VTT-research has tested different mask fabrics and made simulations of the spread

With mask: [https://youtu.be/blpit-6A7Yo](https://youtu.be/blpit-6A7Yo) (red is dry particles, blue is droplets)

Without mask: [https://youtu.be/HsGJlANzeq8](https://youtu.be/HsGJlANzeq8)

Tests re-affirm the existing conclusion that non-medical mask-wearing helps from spreading the disease but is not very effective in protect the wearer.

The best available masks are made of microfiber and can filter up to 70% of particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers. Conventional garment fabrics filter 20-45% of particles smaller than 0.65-3.3 microns in size, while FFP2 shields 96% and FFP3 99% of particles up to 0.35 micrometers. This means that a user of fabric masks will receive several times the dose of viruses under exposed conditions compared to a user of professional respirators.

From conventional fabrics microfiber mask is best, second is polyester, cotton is the worst. One should wash them in hot water (90 celsius) after each use or throw them away.

source (in Finnish):

[https://www.vttresearch.com/sites/default/files/2020-05/Medi...](https://www.vttresearch.com/sites/default/files/2020-05/Mediainfo14052020-kangasmaski- simulaatio-teollinentuotanto.pdf)

[https://www.vttresearch.com/fi/uutiset-ja- tarinat/kangasmask...](https://www.vttresearch.com/fi/uutiset-ja- tarinat/kangasmaski-ei-suojaa-kayttajaansa-koronavirukselta-mutta-voi-suojata- muita)

</comment><comment><USER3> That's a good lesson in data science (the author is one). He has all the numbers right but did he forget some things ?

I didn't see anything about re-usability of the masks (no one has an endless stash of mask with a fresh one for every use)? What about using them right when putting them on/off and while wearing them (masks are efficient only when worn correctly, or not?)?

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been following Dr. Fauci's advice. He is the expert.

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

Thoughts?

<comment><USER5> You are correct, Fauci is an expert.

It seems that you are being obtuse to prove some kind of point about how masks are useless and this is a grand conspiracy, especially since you have linked to a "QAnon" YouTube channel, but I will play along.

In this video, Dr. Fauci discusses the usefulness of an individual wearing a mask. The conversation is specifically about a mask's efficacy in preventing the wearer from becoming exposed to viral particles.

Dr. Fauci expresses concern that individuals will believe they are more protected than they actually are, and they may be lulled into a false sense of security, as any mask except a properly fitted N95 respirator will not actually prevent you from inhaling sufficiently small droplets containing viral particles.

Dr. Fauci also expresses concern that the general public may not understand how to appropriately use masks by which he means that it is imperative that wearers do not touch the outward facing part of the mask and contaminate their hands and that they don and doff the mask appropriately.

Neither of those concerns have anything to do with the entirely separate societal benefit of individual mask wearing by preventing you,as a potential symptomatic/asymptomatic/pre-symptomatic carrier of COVID, from contributing to the infection of others. At a minimum, masks reduce the volume and the distance you spread viral-laden droplets by talking, coughing, breathing, etc.

It is also worth noting that your linked interview appears to have been recorded before the push for mask wearing as a potential guard against transmission was a part of public discourse. This explains why the second point is not mentioned.

As an aside, I hope that you can see your way out of this conspiratorial mindset. I am sure you are, like many on this forum, a very bright person, but you have to understand that by posting these things and contributing to the spread of misinformation, you are going to harm people.</comment></comment>


Tattoo You: Immune System Cells Help Keep Ink in Its Place - happy-go-lucky https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/03/08/591315450/tattoo-you-immune-system-cells-help-keep-ink-in-its-place <comment><AUTHOR> I _love_ tattoos. I really do. Just not on me.

People go through cycles, where their personalities and interests shift every decade or so. Hardly anyone in the 40s and 50s is the same person they were in their 20s. I'm in my 40s now, and I love (in no particular order), Iron Maiden, Spiderman, Sci-Fi, LEGO, The Amiga Computer, Batman, Star Trek, Star Wars, Dr Who, Pink Floyd ... and that's just my top ten, _right now_. I couldn't pick something that iconifies my number one love, and certainly not something that I will feel the same about in 40 years time. So for now, I am content to just be a voyeur of other people's awesome tats.

<comment><USER2> I've always wanted a tattoo, still do, but nothing has ever seemed right for this reason—what will stand the test of time? What _won't_ I want to remove from my skin?

Some day I may do something mathematical like a visual proof of a theorem I care about, or some symbol meaningful to me. Or maybe just something like this on my wrist:

        Blood type: A+
        Allergies: Penicillin, Eggs
        If Dead: Cryopreserve

<comment><USER3> I'm sure the blood type and allergies information would be welcome, but the "if dead" bit may be problematic if you don't follow it up with legal docs.

Recently there was a dilemma in an Emergency Room where a collapsed patient had a DNR tattoo on their chest: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your- health/wp/2017/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your- health/wp/2017/12/01/a-man-collapsed-with-do-not-resuscitate-tattooed-on-his- chest-doctors-didnt-know-what-to-do/)

<comment><USER2> You're absolutely right. That was a bit of a joke in reference to exactly that situation, and in retrospect it didn't come through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I dislike tattoos, and I think tattoos are a strong indicator that the wearer lacks impulse control.

OK, so now with that flip comment aside. What makes the current generation lack the impulse control that previous generations had? Or was their lack of impulse control expressed in other ways? Probably a good psychology thesis topic.

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.nhs.uk/news/lifestyle-and-exercise/tattoo-ink- pa...](https://www.nhs.uk/news/lifestyle-and-exercise/tattoo-ink-particles- can-spread-lymph-nodes/)

and

[https://ec.europa.eu/consumers/consumers_safety/safety_produ...](https://ec.europa.eu/consumers/consumers_safety/safety_products/rapex/alerts/repository/content/pages/rapex/index_en.htm)

</comment><comment><USER6> I guess the same research could help design tattoo inks that don't blur as much as they age. Let the new macrophages keep the pigment more stationary somehow.

<comment><USER7> I was thinking along the lines of ink that would degrade less under light exposure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A paper on the subject: [http://jem.rupress.org/content/early/2018/03/05/jem.20171608](http://jem.rupress.org/content/early/2018/03/05/jem.20171608)

</comment><comment><USER9> A question I had for a long long time. Nice.</comment>


Show HN: Codementor launches instant 1:1 help marketplace for developers - <AUTHOR> https://www.codementor.io

<comment><AUTHOR> When we did our first Show HN _way back_ in June of last year, Codementor was an one-man team and a little more than just a landing page.

The support and feedback from HN at the time made us believe and gave us the push we needed. A _huge_ thanks to the community here! Thank you! None of these could've happened without the support here.

I understand we still have tons of work to do - any feedback would be appreciated!

<comment><USER2> This is an interesting idea. I could see it being used by senior and junior engineers alike.

There are times when I'm working in an area where I do not have experience or expertise and think, "it would be nice to have a specialist review what I'm doing here." Sometimes I'll ask a friend, but you can only do that so often. It would be better to pay for that advice.

This could be really useful to generalist developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How experienced are you expected to be if you want to be a Codementor?

</comment><comment><USER4> How does this compare to AirPair?

</comment><comment><USER5> Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER6> Awesome!</comment>