Is There Anything Good About Men? - <AUTHOR> http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm <comment><USER3> First, let me just say this paragraph alone made the article worth the read...

 _Seeing all this, the feminists thought, wow, men dominate everything, so society is set up to favor men. It must be great to be a man.

The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who's in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who's homeless? Again, mostly men. Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs? US Department of Labor statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men. Likewise, who gets killed in battle? Even in today's American army, which has made much of integrating the sexes and putting women into combat, the risks aren't equal. This year we passed the milestone of 3,000 deaths in Iraq, and of those, 2,938 were men, 62 were women. _

With that said I don't agree with the premise of this article.

The problem I have with classic feminism AND the people making counter arguments (like this article) is it's all inherently irrational. In the end the rational thing to do in society is to match each job with the person who has the most compatible skill set. Whether that person is man, woman, monkey, or whatever doesn't really matter.

Now some say these arguments have to be made to stop people who believe women are inherently inferior to men. Well the problem with that is you're trying to use a rational argument to convince someone who has decided to disregard any rationality. It's dumb foundingly obvious that some women are better than their male counterparts.

In the end the most disturbing thing about this article, imho, is the fact that someone felt the need to right it in the first place. I mean, if there really is someone out there who thinks either sex is expendable is there really any point in trying to convince them otherwise?

<comment><USER4> _Now some say these arguments have to be made to stop people who believe women are inherently inferior to men. Well the problem with that is you're trying to use a rational argument to convince someone who has decided to disregard any rationality. It's dumb foundingly obvious that some women are better than their male counterparts._

This makes no sense. Obviously when you say group X is better than group Y, you don't mean that the worst member of X is better than the best member of Y. You might mean that average ability in X is better than average ability in Y, or perhaps, that the best people in some domain tend to come from X.

<comment><USER3> Not really. You're taking things out of context by putting things in the macro instead of the micro. I have no problem with someone saying "men are usually stronger than women." That's statistics.

But Anti-discrimination laws are designed to keep someone who is offering a job from picking a less qualified man over a more qualified woman. So if someone had a job that required strength and hired the man even though the woman was stronger that would be irrational.

So you see, one's a macro discussion and the other's a micro one. In the macro using statistics is rational in the micro it's not.

<comment><USER4> Who would argue with you about the micro? That's obvious. The article is about the macro.

<comment><USER3> Ummm...Anyone who wrote, voted for, or is in favor of the millions of anti- discrimination laws that are in place in every country in the world.

As for the article it was a counter point to classic feminism which is the movement that was behind all the aforementioned laws.

<comment><USER4> I mean almost anyone would agree that you should pick the better candidate for a job. That point is obvious.

Some may argue that it should be ok to discriminate in the presence of insufficient information. While that may be rational in a probabilistic sense if you are lazy, it should be and is illegal.

Anti-discrimination laws force you to evaluate the candidates more carefully, and ultimately, to pick better candidates for the job.

<comment><USER3> But why are the anti-discrimination laws necessary?

You really have to try to step out of your own perspective for a second and realize that maybe not everyone is enlightened as you. That the whole purpose of feminism is to fight against those who are not as enlightened as y ou.

You saying "almost anyone would agree you should pick the better candidate" tells me that you can't see out of your own perspective long enough to realize there is discrimination out there.

Which is why you can't see my point. My whole point was that these people are out there and that reasoning with them is pointless BECAUSE they aren't making a rational decision in the first place. So the feminist who try to fight against them with rational arguments are wasting their time BECAUSE those people have choosen to disregard all rational evidence.

<comment><USER5> I'd say anti-discrimination laws being around has a ton more to do with governmental power over society than all the points you are attemping to make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Despite the linkbait-ish title, this is actually a very thorough and well written article.

<comment><USER7> This is one of those articles that could be labelled "worldview changing." I mean this in the sense that to gain knowledge of certain facts and arguments has immense corollaries for how one understands and interprets the world. Here are two other recent examples I can think of:

\- Moore's Law and the resulting implications regarding the "singularity"

\- "Happiness" turns out to not be a Platonic ideal or otherwise specially- valued conception, but simply an ever-present state with slight fluctuations (and then perhaps "getting" happiness refers to obtaining the highest positive fluctuation--which will however stabilize over some time). See the recent TED talk on synthesizing happiness.

The key fact in this article, from which all other conclusions naturally seem to follow, is that males as a statistic exhibit much higher traits of extremity (in all aspects) due to the historically much higher probability of a woman being able to obtain a partner and reproduce.

<comment><USER8> I think the author did have some interesting things to say. His idea of men going to extremes on either end of the productivity scale was interesting. His points that men occupy the top rungs of society as well as are considered expendable are interesting as well.

Completely disregarding centuries/millena worth of cultural, historical and legal issues seems a little intellectually dishonest, however.

Women have had difficulty for centuries across many cultures in obtaining property rights: [http://womenshistory.about.com/od/marriedwomensproperty/a/pr...](http://womenshistory.about.com/od/marriedwomensproperty/a/property_rights.htm)

Women have had to fight to obtain the basic right to vote: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage>

Women have also had to fight to obtain the right to higher education, work in certain categories of jobs, etc...

Dismissing all the cultural, historical and legal evidence to the contrary, and chalking it all up to evolutionary pressures seems a little dishonest. It's hard to evolve aggressive women, when aggressive women are imprisoned or killed. You still the effects of that in some very conservative muslim countries. I imagine that would have some evolutionary pressure on culling certain aggressive genes in women.

In fact, it seems dangerously close to, "well, men evolved to be stronger, therefore, only men should be able to be ['soldiers', 'policemen', 'construction workers', 'etc...'].

<comment><USER9> > In fact, it seems dangerously close to, "well, men evolved to be stronger, > therefore, only men should be able to be ['soldiers', 'policemen', > 'construction workers', 'etc...'].

Funnily enough, everytime someone tries to say that male ascendancy in society isn't a conspiracy by evil men to put down women, there is always someone who construes this as a moral validation of male dominance, or even as an imperative for it.

That cultural, historical and legal issues might have been side-products of gender differences rather than their cause seems to be unthinkable for the typical feminist kool-aid drinker.

The feminist ideology requires us males to be villains, because otherwise there is no war (because males aren't fighting it, and probably never have), and they become obsolete. Which is of course exactly what they are. Gender-gap in pay, academic and economic achievements, or even domestic violence have little or no cultural basis nowadays, so feminists are about as useful as slavery abolitionists would be today in western societies.

<comment><USER10> > "feminists are about as useful as slavery abolitionists would be today in > western societies"

In other words, very useful and laudable pursuits:

<http://www.antislavery.org>

The article is very good. Incomplete, but very good. Your response is disappointing because it dismisses the suffering of many people: women and slaves. Just because some university professor came up with a good explanation for the origin of suffering, it does not mean that the suffering is good, or that we should tolerate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won't have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities. Sailing off into the unknown may be risky, and you might drown or be killed or whatever, but then again if you stay home you won't reproduce anyway. We're most descended from the type of men who made the risky voyage and managed to come back rich. In that case he would finally get a good chance to pass on his genes. We're descended from men who took chances (and were lucky)."

<comment><USER4> In recent times, if you want to maximize your chances of finding a wife, it's better to have a safe career as an employee with a stable income. The only risk involved is in aiming for a career for which you have insufficient ability.

Maybe it wasn't like that a long time ago. Maybe having an average job then did not generate enough wealth for the survival of a family.

<comment><USER12> I think what you're saying is that ambition is not rewarded in the dating/mating game, which is decidedly not the case (today or a long time ago). If you took birth control out of the equation, which men do you think would father the most babies today in the US, men with high ambition or men who chose a "safe career" and "stable income"?

<comment><USER13> >If you took birth control out of the equation

And if pigs could fly...

Birth control changes everything. The number of children a man has is inversely (and counterintuitively) related to the number of sexual partners he's had.

[http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2008/10/fewer-sexual- partners-...](http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2008/10/fewer-sexual-partners- means-more-babies.html)

You can have all the sex you want, but if it doesn't result in babies it doesn't count (at least not in this context).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >"That means that if we want to achieve our ideal of equal salaries for men and women, we may need to legislate the principle of equal pay for less work. Personally, I support that principle. But I recognize it's a hard sell."

This is a great article but the premise of that argument doesn't make sense to me - even if he admits its a hard sell.

I'm all for equality but paying someone more for doing less work to bring fairness seems illogical. If someone is genetically less motivated to be a workaholic then how does taking money from the person who does work an extra 10hrs a week, so the the other person can be paid more, make the world a fairer place?

When I was 15 I accepted the fact that I'm wasn't born tall enough to play basketball professionally so I focused my efforts on something that I was capable of being great at.

<comment><USER15> It was a joke.

Men work longer hours, so if men work at the same rate then you pay them more. Saying there is a problem with people getting paid more for working more seems silly thus the joke.

<comment><USER16> I guess the joke is that the author would like to work less?

<comment><USER14> Ha I completely missed that if that's true. Makes sense.

<comment><USER16> No worries. I completely missed the joke, too, until Retric said it was there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a very well written article. However, I must admit I don't really understand the wide interest the (western) world seems to have in the men vs women viewpoints.

Perhaps (and I'm just guessing here), it is because the culture in the west has changed so fast that men and women are struggling to find new "places" in society. I don't know - it's just a guess.

I'm going to pick on one point to discuss - the WAW effect (Women are Wonderful).

>Both men and women hold much more favorable views of women than of men. Almost everybody likes women better than men.

leading to:

>perhaps nature designed women to seek to be lovable, whereas men were designed to strive, mostly unsuccessfully, for greatness.

Sounds reasonable until you see he has skipped over the middle:

>It was not always thus. Up until about the 1960s, psychology (like society) tended to see men as the norm and women as the slightly inferior version. During the 1970s, there was a brief period of saying there were no real differences, just stereotypes. Only since about 1980 has the dominant view been that women are better and men are the inferior version.

It seems strange to draw such broad conclusions that completely ignore the past in favour of present circumstance. Plus I can tell you, in India the bias is more towards liking men than women.

In any case, I wish I understood the fascination the west has with men vs women debates. The fact that men and women are different is obvious as is the fact that they tend to complement each other. The fact that men and women are similar is also obvious as is the fact that they tend to compete with each other.

So what??!

<comment><USER5> India is pretty young. I remember your movies being incredibly prude in the mid 90s. I just watched a recent clip of a top boxoffice film in '08 and let's just say it was insanely racy compared to just ten years ago. I bet India will be having the same insane feminist driven society in 50 years.

<comment><USER17> That's an excellent point! I really hope it doesn't work out that way but let's just wait and see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> When Lawrence Summers resigned I was highly disappointed about the entire incident, as it seems no one can question, with good intentions, generally accepted facts about gender equality in the interest of the truth, rather than what might be the socially acceptable answer. I was glad to find an article that posits some alternative hypotheses and simply acknowledges that the answers are not so simple as they might seem, and that discusses the issue from a neutral, non-activist viewpoint. I read Pinker's article in The New Republic, but this one talks about the issue more than about the discussion itself.

One thing I kept expecting the talk to mention as I was reading was the importance of outliers. While I agree that comparisons of fundamental ability between the sexes, as opposed to factors such as motivation, is probably flawed, I think it might make the argument more immune to activist criticism to point out that there are always outliers in either group. Just because men may be, on average, more inclined to build large businesses, for example, does not mean that each man is more inclined to build large businesses than every woman — the curves overlap. Of course, the different shape of the distributions are important, as Baumeister pointed out (the male curves tend to be bimodal in certain cases whereas the female ones might be more normal). But there are always outliers, and so there will probably always be certain woman who are better at any given thing than most men; even though there may be more men than woman who are 'really good'. The entire talk discusses generalities and statistical tendencies, I know, but might easily be confused by less sophisticated readers as talking about individuals, which seems to be the common criticism of such talk.

</comment><comment><USER19> This paragraph struck me:

"That means that if we want to achieve our ideal of equal salaries for men and women, we may need to legislate the principle of equal pay for less work. _Personally, I support that principle._ But I recognize it's a hard sell." _(emphasis mine)_

It takes a special kind of commitment to the truth to write an extended, compelling piece that ruthlessly undermines any rational basis for a position you support.

<comment><USER20> I personally support extravagant pay for no work at all, however I don't think many people will give me a $5 mil salary for sitting at home all day.

There's always the slim chance interest rates will hit %10,000 and I'll be able to cache an unemployment check for $5 mil, but that kind of defeats the prospect of being a millionaire by not working.

It's quite easy to back a policy that rationally doesn't make sense. I agree with him, I support the principle of equal pay for both men and women, however equal pay is complete BS. There shouldn't even be equal pay between solely male or female workers, because quite simply no one does the exact same amount of work.

Even if you're tasked with making 50 microchips a day and two people produce 50 microchips a day, there's still lots of other factors involved. What if one person's trained in first aid? What if one's a real douchbag and pisses everyone off, shouldn't they be punished because they aren't conducive to a company environment?

The variables are huge, and unless two people are identical duplicates beamed down from space, then I don't believe they should be paid the same _just because it's nice_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think this is especially interesting in light of the fact that I and most people frequenting this website are interested in startups. This seems to be the essential male proclivity for seeking greatness at work. I wonder if that is why there seem to be fewer female founders (AFAIK).

However, the worst thing to take away from this article would be that you can predict how an individual will react given their gender. That is definitely not true. Although, if you look at a group of people, you can probably predict some of the distribution.

</comment><comment><USER22> This was an interesting article, and a very important counter-point to the notion that any difference between men and women is evidence of discrimination or at least socialization.

That said, I think the article is a little extreme. I suspect that the genetic benefits of "playing it safe" for men and "risk taking" for women were greater throughout our evolutionary history than the author suggests.

For starters, a brief glance out into the world suggests that women do take risks and seek power - sometimes through a man, but often independently. They may not build boats and sail to far away lands, but they sure will follow the yellow brick road to hollywood on a pipe dream of becoming a high status movie star or singer.

The author used the example of Genghis Kahn as an example of why men would benefit from high status in a way women wouldn't - GK fathered hundreds (thousands?) of children, whereas a woman wouldn't be able to exploit this power in the same way. This isn't necessarily the case. Sure, a woman can't have hundreds of thousands of kids, but her sons may be able to. In fact, the biggest fights among Bonobo apes are between Females, usually over their son's status in the mating hierarchy.

For men - I've read (and sorry, no cite here) that many hunting gathering societies are quite egalitarian, mainly because the leverage that great wealth and concentration of power aren't present. While good hunters do more mating than poor ones, the opportunity and benefit to shooting the moon with extreme risk taking may not be nearly as prevalent in our evolutionary history as the author suggests. Again, a brief glance out into the world suggests that the norm among males is to exhibit some risk taking and status seeking behavior - and perhaps a bit more so than women - but ultimately, I suggest that for at least some of our evolutionary history, many males had the opportunity of, well, behaving more like females, but acting fairly monogamous and playing it safe.

Still a good article, I just think it overstates the case considerably.

</comment><comment><USER23> I had a discussion about this with a friend recently. She linked me to this:

[http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2008/07/math_performanc...](http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2008/07/math_performance_in_the_us_boy.php)

Of particular note: "The present study also indicated that the variance ratio for boys and girls is inverted for Asian American students -- the girls have higher variance. Thus, higher variance in boys is not always a robust finding."

I can't speak to the significance of this, it being way out of my knowledge, but if true it certainly suggests something strange is going on.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is a very interesting and well thought essay. Especially the stats and facts behind some of the positions he is taking are very interesting. With regards to creativity, I would tend to think that: if we look at nature, there seem to be two inherent trends emerge from time immemorial: 1) nature is interested mainly in prorogation of species(thru reproduction) and 2) at the subject level creativity seems to be one of the big driving factors. Meaning, if we look at every species, it is hardwired to reproduce, and lot of physical and non-physical characteristics/actions are specifically put in place by nature, so that species propagates(including humans). Second, behind lot of our endeavors, creativity is the underlying force. And so, for example art, music, scientific discovery (and even sports or programming), the underlying desire is to create(something). I tend to think, even behind the desire to be powerful (for example CEOs/other powerful positions etc, in present times is nothing but desire to create(or failure there of fulfilling this desire and thus reflecting in powergrab). And so in case of women, this particular desire(to create something) is inherently fulfilled(or fulfillable) by giving birth and creating a human being. And of lot their energies over centuries has gone towards this (and then tending and caring for their created product). Whereas men has no such outlet, so they need to express it somehow - <USER2> this is also one reason why see men all over the place at top in lot of fields.

</comment><comment><USER25> So, I read this article early today. Then later, I was just googling interesting things, and thus surfing ensued...

I landed here ([http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090119104804AA...](http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090119104804AAyQ7aF)), and noticing the nature of the comments/avatars. Do you think it would be possible to find "reliable"-confirmation that "even on the internet", 'female personalities', in situations where one would expect 'care ethics' to be emergent on the social graph (perhaps health care industry), could one find numerical-"confirmation" of the one-to-one vs one-to-many interactions hypothesized in the article?

...or is that just a cyclical thought... a bias?

</comment><comment><USER26> Great stuff.

I found a bit disconcerting the constant use of words like "fairness" and "morality". I tend to see them as "quick and dirty" models useful for everyday behavior. But in a scientific work, which is supposed to study the real thing, I find them not so fitting.

</comment><comment><USER27> One important factor is that naturally a lot of women die in childbirth, So a successful man in the past would often go through multiple wives.

</comment><comment><USER28> As Artie Johnson might have said, verrrry interestink, (long drag on cigarette, turn back to camera) but risky.

</comment><comment><USER29> Bjork went through this stage where she used to say, "Boys are only good for sex and beats."

</comment><comment><USER30> Brilliant!

</comment><comment><USER31> This also was utterly fascinating: "The first big, basic difference has to do with what I consider to be the most underappreciated fact about gender. Consider this question: What percent of our ancestors were women?

It's not a trick question, and it's not 50%. True, about half the people who ever lived were women, but that's not the question. We're asking about all the people who ever lived who have a descendant living today. Or, put another way, yes, every baby has both a mother and a father, but some of those parents had multiple children.

Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two years ago. Today's human population is descended from twice as many women as men."

I had no idea... they must have tested mitochondrial dna or something?

<comment><USER32> A good way to visualize this is to imagine a family tree going back for many, many generations. You'd find that certain males were your ancestor "more than once", i.e. you might find the same man was your ancestor on both your mother and father's side.

Of course, females can also be your ancestor "more than once"; it's just that, as a matter of fact, more men have this property. This is due to the fact that some men have dozens of children, by several different women.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I didn't exactly remember the quote, but there are another 'biological' prove of this concept - in case 'one man, hundred women' there are guaranteed survival for entire specie, while 'hundred men, one woman' is a lose case.

In simple words, men are consumables, and this fact is known for ages. Especially in poor countries.

</comment><comment><USER34> Interesting stuff. However it would be better if he had not talked about groups or cultures competing, which is ultimately incidental, and talked instead of genes and memes competing. Evolution could give a damn about the group. It cares only about genes. Similarly, cultural (memetic) evolution could give a damn about the culture (or society or whatever). It only is concerned with the meme.

Basically his thesis is that women are good at close-knit relationships, and me are good at broader networked relationships. So roughly, though women are protected and valued in society because of reproduction, men are valued in society for the culture they create with their penchant for wide social networking. Fair enough perhaps but this misses the point.

I think rather than say woman have a usefulness to the group for the creation of offspring, both in terms of having in offspring and having a higher chance of reproducing, and men have a usefulness to the group because of their cultural contributions, I think we need to look at usefulness with respect to what. The "what" is the gene and the meme.

Woman are good for the gene. If I am a selfish gene, I want to hitch a ride with a chick. Why? Because as much as 8 / 10 of women who ever lived reproduced. Only about 4 / 10 men who ever lived reproduced (according to the article). So if I want to become part of evolution's junk DNA (and 95% of our DNA is junk, true "selfish genes"), then I have a better chance hanging out in the junk DNA of a female than a male. Women are good for me as a selfish gene. Women are useful to the selfish gene. Men? Well, hell, we can always invent pathogenesis in a pinch as a certain kind of shark in a zoo has done. Men are a nice to have to broaden the genome which enhances fitness, but we can ultimately do without them if we need to ("we" referring to the genes).

On the other hand, if I am a selfish meme, if the author is right about men preferring wider social networks (like politics or religion) than I have a better shot infecting the brain of a man than a woman. Why? Because the dude I infect will know more dudes, and can pass me along to them before he gets eaten by a saber tooth cat.

So do the author's conclusions make sense? I think so. But he needs to understand what "usefulness" means. Usefulness with respect to WHOM.

If I am a selfish gene, women are more useful to me.

If I am a selfish meme, men are more useful to me.

However I would say though it is hard to put numbers on this, that the higher advantage chicks give the selfish gene versus dudes is greater than the higher advantage endowed by dudes to the memes versus the chicks. This is a guess, but it is my gut feeling. I think that tho genes find chicks more important and memes find dudes more important, a gene can live without the dudes more facily than a meme can live without the chicks. Since whereas women might not network quite with the same alacrity as men, still they network. Anyway. So I like this article. But better clarity could be had in my opinion by looking at the men vs. women thing from the perspective of genes and memes, which again, is all biological and cultural evolution respectively care about.

So yes, if you are a meme, you like men. But you kind of can go both ways. If you are a gene, you really prefer women, and are less inclined to go both ways. :-)

<comment><USER35> There's something in your observation that echoes old mythologies and models of the world: men represent Spirit, women represent Matter. I always thought there was some kernel of truth to that metaphor, but couldn't quite put my finger on it. I think you did.

<comment><USER36> Actually, I think if one looks across most old mythologies and religions, particularly many pre-dating Jeudeo-Christian, one would find quite the opposite.

<comment><USER35> Hm, I'm having trouble parsing that.

It's not just the religions of the Book which use that metaphor. The whole Buddhism, the whole Hinduism (to the extent that such a thing does exist) - they all say: man = spirit, woman = matter.

<comment><USER36> Yeah, well I guess it's a hard thing to really pin down, but I have always interpreted the less male dominated religions as seeing the female as the spiritual or guiding or creative force and the male as being the force which works to bring that creative energy into solid form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> No. Next article!

</comment><comment><USER38> "If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who's in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners?"

A somewhat disturbing equation. A political prisoner is precisely the (potentially extra-) societal actor that is relegated to the "bottom" by the state through punitive measures.

In any event, what's good about men is that we cut code; no 'Y', no 'hacker' ...</comment>


Myrtille, an Open Source HTML4 / HTML5 Remote Desktop Protocol Client - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cedrozor/myrtille <comment><AUTHOR> Myrtille provides an easy access to remote desktops and applications through a native web browser (without plugin).

Nothing to install for the end user, lightweight RDS gateway.

Works on all devices and operating systems.

Version 1.2.1 available.

[http://cedrozor.github.io/myrtille](http://cedrozor.github.io/myrtille)

<comment><USER2> Curious how Myrtille compares to Apache Guacamole.

[https://guacamole.incubator.apache.org/](https://guacamole.incubator.apache.org/)

Also if it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Show HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, yes it's quite comparable, just more specific for Windows as it uses IIS and .NET.

Thanks for the advice regarding Show HN. It meets the guidelines.</comment></comment></comment>


Quasicrystals Are Nature's Impossible Matter - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/quasicrystals-are-natures-impossible-matter <comment><USER2> Not a single word about Paul Steinhardt?

[http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/paul- steinhardt/](http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/paul-steinhardt/)</comment>


Global Cities Ranked by Time Spent in Optimal Temperature Range (Click Headers) - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303302504577325612586019258.html#articleTabs%3Dinteractive

<comment><AUTHOR> My company came up with this data for the Wall Street Journal, so I should explain that the title here is a bit of an over-simplification.

The main point is that if you sort in ascending order on e.g. the "Average number of degrees temperature deviates from 60-80 range in last five years" column you should have a good indication of how the cities compare in terms of the time and extent to which their air temperature deviates from a comfortable range.

But if you're interested in more detail, the figures in that column are actually derived from:

\- The heating degree days (HDD) with a base temperature of 60 F summed for each day over the last 5 years (measuring the time and extent to which the temperature dropped below 60 F in that 5-year period).

\- The cooling degree days (CDD) with a base temperature of 80 F summed for each day over the last 5 years (measuring the time and extent to which the temperature rose above 80 F in that 5-year period).

We summed the HDD and CDD together to get a relative measure of how much and for how long the temperature was outside the optimal range over the 5-year period. Then we divided by the number of days in that 5-year period to get the total degree days per day. The day bits cancelled out, effectively giving the average number of degrees that the temperature deviated from the optimal range. (I think the WSJ sensibly thought that expressing the data in terms of average temperature deviation would make it more accessible than if it were expressed in terms of degree days, which most people probably aren't familiar with.)

We did that calculation for each of the 66 "global cities" listed in the 2012 list that you can find on Wikipedia at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city>

Anyway, irrespective of whether the meaning of the figures themselves is intuitive, I think they're ideal for ranking the cities in terms of how favourable their climates are in terms of temperature.

The main body article also has some interesting discussion of the ins and outs of using temperature as a measure of a given location's comfort levels.

Probably of more interest to me than most as I'm quite chuffed that my company's data was used in the WSJ :) But putting my shallow ego aside I do think the numbers are cool as I've long been intrigued by the idea of finding the locations on earth with the perfect climates.

<comment><USER2> I see you just launched an API. Looks like you're working off a dump of WU's data? Nice dataset there.

For the back-of-the-envelope calculations I always do, I would probably just write a script to scrape WU's data myself and do the HDD/CDD calculations manually. It's a shame that there's no free trial of your data (~50 request/day or similar). It would make me far more likely to fall in love with your API. Then, on the not-inconceivable chance that I write energy software in the near-future, I would be far more likely to query your API instead of rolling my own solution.

I definitely agree with you that we need to bring more computation to energy. I'm gifting someone a Nest thermostat later today, which embodies the kind of innovation we need. The fact that the Nest is considered as innovative as it is shows just how lacking we've been in this area. It's just an Android on the wall, after all!

Thanks for posting. I take it email@example.com reaches you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your thoughts there! Yes we are working off of WU's data. They have an awesome database of weather data and they've been very kind in allowing us to use the temperature part of it for our degree days system.

We do have a free API trial actually, though it's limited in the sense that you can only get data for the Cape Cod area: <http://www.degreedays.net/api/test>

We'll happily give most people a full free trial if they ask. We don't offer that publicly, partly because a lot of people are just looking to assemble a database of 5-year-average data and then quit, and partly because the number crunching to calculate degree days properly is pretty expensive so we have to be careful about watching our costs. A proper free tier could kill us, particularly if a manufacturer of popular installable energy-related hardware or software decided to wire things up so all their customers fetched degree days from our system whether they wanted them or not.

But perhaps we should re-consider the current setup for trials... We only launched the API recently so at the moment we're still playing it by ear somewhat.

If you mention "bromley" in an email to that address or just email info at degree days dot net it'll get through to me - and I'd love to hear from you or anyone else developing software for energy-related applications.

<comment><USER2> >particularly if a manufacturer of popular installable energy-related hardware or software decided to wire things up so all their customers fetched degree days from our system whether they wanted them or not.

I always check the TOS of any "public" API I use, and I suspect most developers are the same. Perhaps this could be mitigated by some carefully- worded clauses? If someone does it anyway, you could protect yourself by blacklisting their API key for TOS violation.

We should continue this over email.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's possible that could work. Our current testing API is rate limited only on IP address but if we required a sign-up we'd have more options. A free tier couldn't go too far out of control if we could stop taking new sign-ups at any time.

But at the same time we already have a full free tier in the sense that anyone can download free data from the website. At the moment we're seeing the API purely as something for those that want more data than the website practically allows. My hunch is that it's probably best to keep the API paid only... Free accounts with really low rate limits would be frustrating for the people using them (as they'd hit their rate limit all the time) and would just increase our support costs. In the end we'd have to increase the costs of new paid accounts to support them, which is not something I'd want to do.

Never say never though... My thoughts on that could change over time as we get more customers and feedback.

I got your email, thanks, will get back to you shortly :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> My problem with this is that I think degrees over are much worse, and humidity is also such a major factor in temperatures over 80. 85 and dry is perfect; 85 and humid is miserable. Also, with typical NYC humidity, 90 is _a lot_ worse than 50 (assuming you have access to appropriate clothing). You don't want to do anything outdoors in NYC 90 unless you know what you're doing, whereas biking or running in 50 is pretty easy. NYC 90 is equivalent to 35, and 100 is equivalent to 10.

<comment><AUTHOR> These are fair concerns. The journalist just wrote a related blog post at <http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/modern-thermometers-1132/> that discusses the "experience" of temperature more.

An improvement on the analysis might be to adjust all the temperatures for humidity and wind speed etc. before calculating the deviations below 60 F and above 80 F. My company's system doesn't do that because those other factors are much less important for energy consumption calculations (which is what degree days are traditionally used for). But I think they probably would be good factors to include for a more thorough analysis of human comfort. (I say "probably" because the complexity would increase considerably and also the figures would become less clearly defined in a sense as well. So it wouldn't be 100% positive.)</comment></comment>


Facebook's algorithm is blocking photos of the Yemen war - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/ShadyGroveO/status/1074426791736107019 <comment><AUTHOR> Not sure how to title twitter threads. I tried posting the nyt article myself, and confirmed that it couldn't post. (It was flagged as spam in my case)

I then tried the twitter thread, and it was also flagged as spam.

This is the NYT article in question: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/yemen-children- fa...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/yemen-children-famine- war.html)</comment>


Share your trips and real-time location from Google Maps - <AUTHOR> https://blog.google/products/maps/share-your-trips-and-real-time-location-google-maps/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm hopeful about this -- it looks like it fits my personal use cases anyway.

I've used several location sharing apps to share my location with family during commutes & road trips -- and all of them suffer from various feature, reliability or performance flaws. There might be better ones than I've tried so far, but I basically stopped trying new ones out of frustration. (Plus, I'm usually running Google Maps anyway...)</comment>


Ennio Morricone has died - <AUTHOR> https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ennio-morricone-dead-prolific-italian-composer-was-91-858358 <comment><USER3> Ennio Morricone single-handedly "invented" the typical style of Italo Western film music. US-American Western film music used to be lush orchestral scores, instead Morricone used electric guitars, whistling, screaming, Mariachi trumpet playing, various percussion instruments, etc. The music for "A Fistful of Dollars" was something people have never heard before.

However, I can see a similar approach in Masaru Satō's music for Kurosawa's Samurai movies with its sparse instrumentation and inclusion of jazz elements. The whole score is in stark contrast to the music of earlier Jidai-geki movies, which also favoured large sweeping orchestral music.

Given the fact that "A Fistful of Dollars" was basically a remake of Kurosawa's "Yojimbo", I have been wondering if Morricone had been influenced by Satō in any way.

<comment><USER4> Morricone himself addresses this in an old interview ([https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2016/12/11/morricone- interview...](https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2016/12/11/morricone-interview- cinema-papers/))

 _Your first big film success was A Fist Full of Dollars, whose score is very different from that of the Hollywood Westerns. Your cultural perspective is obviously different. What were the stimuli?

The stimulus was the film itself. Leone had made an ironic and, in a certain sense, a grotesque film in that it was funny, a caricature. It was necessary to respect the clarity that Leone wanted for his characters. Besides, I was not, and am not, a specialist in American folk music, so what sense was there in my treating the characters like Americans? If that is required, use an American composer. So, I treated Leone's characters by attempting to re- invent, in my way, American folk, bearing in mind certain musical and technical data. And then the caricatured treatment of the characters encouraged me to introduce strange sounds into the score so that the character would have the charisma Leone wanted._

Not that I know much about it, but I find music in some old japanese movies very interesting, like Woman In The Dunes ([https://youtu.be/UFbJ9iDeZgg](https://youtu.be/UFbJ9iDeZgg)) or Kwaidan ([https://youtu.be/v_OFoOwzPZY](https://youtu.be/v_OFoOwzPZY))

<comment><USER5> The Soundtrack Show podcast had an interesting three episode series on Morricone and the making of the Leone movies themselves:

[https://pca.st/episode/21779b37-f458-496a-a3c8-3828e1dec912](https://pca.st/episode/21779b37-f458-496a-a3c8-3828e1dec912)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for sharing this,but I found there are only two episodes,did I have missed episode III?

<comment><USER5> You're right, my old eyes inserted an extra 'I' looking at the phone :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Claudia's theme from Once Upon A Time in The West is as good as it gets.

[https://youtu.be/AHe07HT5NQA](https://youtu.be/AHe07HT5NQA)

Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone has to be one of the greatest partnerships in film history, so many unforgetable moments:

[https://youtu.be/qwb3P0fuM1c](https://youtu.be/qwb3P0fuM1c)

Here is a very good old interview, with several references to their collaboration:

[https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2016/12/11/morricone- interview...](https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2016/12/11/morricone-interview- cinema-papers/)

Their last film together:

[https://youtu.be/Jj5Xczethmw](https://youtu.be/Jj5Xczethmw)

<comment><USER7> [https://youtu.be/qwb3P0fuM1c](https://youtu.be/qwb3P0fuM1c) That's awesome. So many crappy movies these days. 50+ years old, its amazing to me the quality is so high as well. I'm going to have to rent this.

<comment><USER4> You should. The visuals are stunning, the score is highlights galore, and Henry Fonda is the ultimate villain.

<comment> saiya-jin This movie for me is the ultimate proof that less talking is often better. The picture itself can speak volumes, I mean first 15 minutes of the movie there are like 10 sentences being said altogether, yet the story is well laid out.

This was one of few movies from the west that was allowed behind iron curtain, it became part of my childhood. I've seen it at least 15 times, it never gets boring even for a second. Timeless story, character, and the music... Leone/Morricone understood (in similar vein as George Lucas and others) that music can make one hell of atmosphere for the movie, much better than just awesome visuals and something mediocre in the background.

I like it even better than rest of Leone's movies, maybe a bit sentimental remainder from my childhood.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a spotify playlist with a bunch of Morricone's pieces on it, and oddly I discovered him as a teenager listening to a super weird goth band called Fields of the Nephilim, whose schtick was basically dressing up as vampire cowboys, and they sampled Morricone as a leitmotif throughout a whole bunch of their songs. Most familiar will be this one: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mcg- iCBivbw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mcg-iCBivbw)

It's easy to miss that there was a lot of truly great art wrapped up with what we were taught was kitsch, camp, and schmaltz.

<comment><USER9> Can you share the playlist?

<comment><USER8> Sure, there's a bunch of other stuff in it for classic guitar as well since I assembled it essentially as workout music for schooling horses in the summer with some guitar repetoire: [https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5nFrK21I8wIZin0T7i71zH](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5nFrK21I8wIZin0T7i71zH)

YMMV, but there is a Morricone highlight reel in there, along with some other epic stuff. If you are a Quentin Tarantino fan, you'll recognize things like L'Arena and others from Kill Bill, with a bunch of other homages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> He toured with live performances very frequently, only retiring from live music last year, at age of 90. I saw him twice and both were filled with really serious fans of all ages.

While he was prolific (350+ movie scores credits on imdb), I really feel as I am re-experiencing the movie while listening to Morricone's soundtracks, more than from any other composer, especially for "Cinema Paradiso", "Frantic" and, I think, the most meaningful Spaghetti Western, "Duck, You Sucker" (!).

<comment><USER11> Another name for "Duck you sucker" is "Fistful of Dynamite".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't know most of his work, but I've had two channels into it in my life.

1\. I have distinct childhood memories of the score from Once Upon a Time in the West from when my dad watched it (and then watching it myself). It still stirs something deep, that's not just nostalgia.

2\. Following Mike Patton's musical journey and finding the haunting version The Ballad of Hank McCain in collaboration with John Zorn - from an album composed entirely of covers of Ennio Morricone tracks (The Big Gundown).

I'll need to educate myself further.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm a very big fan of him. It's so sad but we all knew he was in the late stages of his life.

He was for me the biggest composer of the second half of 20th century, which just happened to do music for films (also for some Italian pop music, but it was less prolific there).

Requiescat in Pace. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3SAOQfMA44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3SAOQfMA44)

<comment><USER14> How about the first half? Shostakovich?

<comment><USER15> Ravel!

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This has made me sad :(

Metallica introduced me to his music and then I explored a lot. Had a privilege to witness his performance live once. Ennio Morricone is a legend! RIP Maestro!

</comment><comment><USER17> Metallica always called him Maestro:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hmtzRo- Qro8](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hmtzRo-Qro8)

Anyone who hasn't been in a Metallica concert, it is totally worth it, especially their (always the same) intro!

<comment><USER18> I believe Hardwired Tour did not use this intro.

<comment><USER17> From Wikipedia:

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

"American metal band Metallica has used "The Ecstasy of Gold" as the introductory music for its concerts since 1984."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> He never had the public recognition he deserved unfortunately. I'm still surprised at how many people can whistle many of his pieces without knowing who he is.

<comment><USER20> Are you sure about that? At least in Europe, Morricone has long been recognized as one of the great.

<comment><USER19> My statement is biased by my own experiences I admit. Maybe the honorary Oscar he received in 2007 is somewhat a more objective illustration of what I meant.

<comment><USER21> He did get an Oscar for The Hateful Eight in 2015, though.

<comment><USER22> He should have gotten one for 'the good, the bad, the ugly'. Didnt check though who else got it that year.

<comment><USER20> This one did: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_Free](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_Free) (original score by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barry_(composer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barry_\(composer\)) )

Fun fact: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly did not receive an academy award nomination in any category.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Of course his soundtrack work is immortal. However, he also composed some iconic Italian pop songs! His most famous one is probably Mina's "Se Telefonando". [1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6fpSiE953w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6fpSiE953w)

</comment><comment><USER24> Once upon a time in the West has probably the best soundtrack ever made.

Great cover: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIipUjO2ckk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIipUjO2ckk)

</comment><comment><USER25> A couple random things:

1\. How did Adam and the Ants never get sued over "Jolly Roger"? [1] The melody and even the arrangement are pretty much a straight copy of Morricone's "The March of the MacGregors" [2] from the movie "7 Guns for the MacGregors". Morricone should have at least got songwriting credit on "Jolly Roger", but it is just credited to Marco Pirroni and Adam Ant.

2\. There are some interesting covers of Morricone songs. The Ramones did "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" in some of their live shows. Their version was pretty straightforward...if you heard it in isolation you would not have thought "Ramones".

Wall of Voodoo did "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly". Their version sounded like a Wall of Voodoo song.

Great music stays great even if arranged for and played on instruments quite different from what it was written for. An example of that is the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain's version of "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly" [3].

3\. If all that comes to mind when you hear the name Ennio Morricone is a bunch of great spaghetti western music, it is worth getting a compilation or two of his work and listening to it.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR4n-oo32Jg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR4n-oo32Jg)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peGmy_oRz38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peGmy_oRz38)

[3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLgJ7pk0X-s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLgJ7pk0X-s)

</comment><comment><USER26> One of my favorite Morricone creations is main theme for one of the greatest horror films of all time, John Carpenter's 1982 remake of _The Thing_.[1]

I can't find it now, but in an interview Carpenter said something like that when he first worked with Morricone on this film, the latter came up with a very flowery, melodic theme, and Carpenter went to visit him but had trouble getting his ideas across to Morricone because of the language barrier, so he just said (through a translator): "Less notes"[2], and this is what Morricone came up with.

[1] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfcc9U35hPY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfcc9U35hPY)

[2] - Which reminds me of the "too many notes" scene from _Amadeus_ ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6_eqxh- Qok](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6_eqxh-Qok)), but unlike Mozart, who took offense, Morricone seems to have taken the suggestion in stride and come up with a classic.

</comment><comment><USER27> I am such a big fan. Ecstasy of gold in the final scene of the good bad and the ugly was so good.

<comment><USER28> You may like this then:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajM4vYCZMZk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajM4vYCZMZk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> So very sad :( One of my all time favourite composers. Such emotive music that bring back so many memories, not least my wife walking down the aisle to me to Gabriel's Oboe. RIP.

<comment><USER28> That piece gives me gooseflesh every time I hear it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is a wonderful and hilarious short interview with Morricone in the 80s: [http://sdarchive.com/premiere2.html](http://sdarchive.com/premiere2.html)

I've listened to Morricone scores more often than I can count. This is very sad news. He was still working too.

<comment><USER31> This is great:

Fagen: But isn't it true that the Leone films, with their elevation of mythic structures, their comic book visual style and extreme irony, are now perceived as signaling an aesthetic transmutation by a generation of artists and filmmakers? And isn't it also true that your music for those films reflected and abetted Leone's vision by drawing on the same eerie catalog of genres - Hollywood western, Japanese samurai, American pop, and Italian Opera? That your scores functioned both "inside" the film as a narrative voice and "outside" the film as the commentary of a winking jester? Put it all together and doesn't it spell "postmodern", in the sense that there has been a grotesque encroachment of the devices of art and, in fact, an establishment of a new narrative plane founded on the devices themselves? Isn't that what's attracting lower Manhattan?

Morricone: [ shrugs ]

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Another Morricone score worth mentioning is that for a great film - <USER2> Paradiso.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlQh4PeB8PE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlQh4PeB8PE)

</comment><comment><USER33> Ci vediamo Ennio! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEjaip1ePYM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEjaip1ePYM)

</comment><comment><USER34> Another of the great melody writers is gone. He will be missed. His _Cinema Paradiso_ theme is one of my all-time favorites -- not the love theme that's most commonly associated with the film, but the main theme, which plays during the opening. It's so infinitely tender and nostalgic.

[https://youtu.be/BvD8EiibPVo](https://youtu.be/BvD8EiibPVo)

<comment><USER35> Here's the love theme performed by Pat and Charlie [https://youtu.be/qEwXcgwzIYE](https://youtu.be/qEwXcgwzIYE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> A lot of people have seen the Clint Eastwood "Man with no name" westerns but if you haven't watched "Once Upon a Time in the West" I would definitely check it out. One of the best movies I've seen and if you're not fan of westerns (which I wasn't) you will appreciate the genre some more after seeing this movie.

</comment><comment><USER37> So many amazing moments in the Sergio Leone movies alone. One of my favourites is the pocket watch from "A Few Dollars More" which features on its own and also as part of the final duel:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JPnR7C8mZQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JPnR7C8mZQ)

Such a haunting piece of music.

<comment><USER38> Our building superintendant had it as his ringtone and spoiled the song for me.

<comment><USER37> This is where I'm supposed to empty out my HN eggcup, wear it on my head like a hat, and tell you that you're wrong because it's not a song, because it doesn't have any singing , vocal signal or poetry in it.

[https://www.dictionary.com/browse/song?s=t](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/song?s=t)

But in all seriousness, I'm sorry that happened to you, that's terrible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm Italian, living in San Francisco, in my 40s.

For essentially every Italian, in Italy or abroad, Morricone is one of these timeless figures.

His work is considered by many so inspirational and innovative in its own way; and if you pick one of the many contributions he made to music or cinema, you will find layers and layers of details to unveil, often to reveal important aspects of Italy's culture of the second half of the 20th century.

As an example: he composed "Se telefonando" [0], performed by Mina and written by Maurizio Costanzo.

Mina is "the female voice" of Italy's economic boom (1950-1970). He was then ostracized by every media outlet (TV, newspapers, etc) because he had a son without being married, and the Church heavily condemned it.

Maurizio Costanzo is one of the most important figures in Italian TV, and has had a show, the "Maurizio Costanzo show", for decades. Think of him as the Italian Oprah.

You can do this hundreds of times with many pieces that Morricone composed or arranged.

He kept performing at concerts until recently, despite his old age. In Italy people often remember his last appearance at La Scala (the most iconic theatre in Milan, considered to be THE place for Opera and high music, among other things), and concerts at Arena di Verona (a smaller Colosseum in Verona, hometown of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet), the Colosseum in Rome, and the "Terme di Caracalla" also in Rome (ancient public bath houses, the second largest ever built).

He will be truly missed.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Se_Telefonando](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Se_Telefonando)

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

</comment><comment><USER40> The Danish National Symphony Orchestra has a great rendition of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The guest conductor is Sarah Hicks, of the Minnesota Orchestra

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

</comment><comment><USER41> A great interpretation of the main theme of _For a Few Dollars More_ by an Italian street musician: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1IeozjGrck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1IeozjGrck)

</comment><comment><USER42> I loved the soundtrack of The Mission. Might watch it again this week. RIP.

<comment> the-rc His themes were often iconic for their distinctive instrumentation and perhaps The Mission was the clearest example. It's a crime that he lost the Oscar to Herbie Hancock. Although the surf guitar sounds a bit cheesy or dated today, the main theme for The Sicilian Clan is another underappreciated and original creation of his: [https://youtu.be/GwmdscZNTQU](https://youtu.be/GwmdscZNTQU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I went to see his live performance in Amsterdam a few years back. The show had been postponed due to back injury but it ended up happening a year later, and it was mesmerizing.

</comment><comment><USER44> I had the privilege of seeing him live a few years ago. It strikes me how, despite his world-wide-acclaimed genius, he managed to remain so humble and reserved. It took decades for the world to finally recognize his greatness (he only got a honorary Oscar in 2007 and finally in 2016, at 87 years of age, the first Oscar for a soundtrack), but it did finally happen. If you have 2 minutes, look for the video of the acceptance speech. It's difficult to avoid crying.

</comment><comment><USER45> Once Upon A Time is the first Western I watched and became fan of Leone, Morricone and Bronson for life. I found it slow initially but the background score won't let me leave it. And from then on I binge watched as many Westerns as I could. Btw rendition by Danish Orchestra is also awesome [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=efdswXXjnBA](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=efdswXXjnBA)

</comment><comment><USER46> RIP sir and thank you for the art. Once Upon a Time in America and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly have burned a huge amount of my entertainment time.

</comment><comment><USER47> He scored "La Bataille d'Alger"[1] ("The Battle of Algiers"), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, which depicted events that took place in Algiers (specifically the Casbah), Algeria, during the war for independence. Algeria celebrated its independence day yesterday.

So long.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb- OBWU4qY4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb-OBWU4qY4)

</comment><comment><USER48> Bobak Ferdowsi, an engineer who wrote a lot of the operating procedures for the Curiosity Rover was a huge fan as well, and paid tribute in a tweet that encapuslates Morricone's spirit [1]. [1] - [https://twitter.com/tweetsoutloud/status/1280043423429345280](https://twitter.com/tweetsoutloud/status/1280043423429345280)

</comment><comment><USER49> Coincidentally, I watched Inglorious Basterds last night and have always loved the end credit music, so I let it run to the end. R.I.P. Ennio

</comment><comment><USER50> Interesting that the article has attributed "Chi Mai" to a British TV series. But I always thought it was from the 1981 Belmondo movie (Le professionnel). In fact it was written in 1971 for another movie (Maddalena).

Absolutely beautiful: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbHP9NtSnB0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbHP9NtSnB0)

</comment><comment><USER51> The Mission soundtrack was one of my favorites as a kid. And I just learned that his work on The Thing was nominated to a Razzie Award!

</comment><comment><USER52> I was lucky enough to see him at Radio City about a decade ago, with the entirety of the Roma Sinfonietta playing for him and for us. It was one of the most impressive and moving musical performances I have ever seen in my life.

Seeing a coloratura soprano do The Ecstasy Of Gold right before me was mindblowing.

</comment><comment><USER53> What also amazes me about his music is that how even some obscure movies he scored for had really great soundtracks:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqre0jAq724](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqre0jAq724)

</comment><comment><USER54> I just rewatched The untouchables a week ago and remembered why I loved the music of that movie so much [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu2FekMaTQc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu2FekMaTQc)

<comment><USER55> Al Capone's theme is so great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Legendary composer.

Wish more young people knew his stuff, but kids really get bombarded with John Williams' stuff when they watch Star Wars.

But yeah, Ennio Morricone is every bit as important and influential as John Williams.

<comment><USER14> Morricone re-scoring Star Wars would have been interesting :D

<comment><USER56> I think the Mandolorian kinda gives us a preview of what that could look like and so far so good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Morricone did the score for "Treasure of the Four Crowns"; the explicit silliness of a film never seemed to stop him from putting in 100% effort to produce great music for it.

</comment><comment><USER58> A personal favorite album is John Zorn's _The Big Gundown_ , an album of arrangements of Morricone's film music. Two great tastes that go great together, as they say.

<comment><USER59> I didn't expect to read the name John Zorn here. This forum keeps surprising me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enuOArEfqGo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enuOArEfqGo) A fitting tribute, I think

</comment><comment><USER61> I was listening to his masterpieces just yesterday and thought how wonderful his compositions are. I will miss him definitely. RIP

</comment><comment><USER62> Died from a broken femur, how is that something so simple can just kill a person?

<comment> saiya-jin When you are 93 years old? very, very easily from all kinds of complications

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Chi Mai

</comment><comment><USER64> I regret missing his concert a few years ago. He is amazing!

</comment><comment><USER65> An amazing composer with a magic sound

</comment><comment><USER66> "Prolific" is a bit demeaning. He took soundtracks into mainstream consciousness in the '60s, and "The Good The Bad and The Ugly" is still an absolute masterpiece.

<comment><USER67> "Prolific" doesn't sound demeaning to me. It just means his oeuvre is large.

<comment><USER68> In criticism the word prolific is often used in a demeaning manner to imply that the artist under question has not put as much thought and care into their pieces as they might or should have, but instead went for quantity over quality.

I think though this usage has fallen out of favor and at any rate was probably more common among poor critics, I think nowadays it is understood that quantity of output might be necessary for some creators to achieve their best work (by producing some that is not as great as their best)

on edit: so the word is sometimes sort of a snob-whistle, ooh prolific, well they're saying he's not that good then. But I doubt that is the way it is being used here.

<comment><USER69> It is also very often used of outstanding creators who are incredibly productive. I have seen it used that way many times. If anybody is using it pejoratively they need to stop. I think it would be a terrible shame if we had to tip-toe round our use of language because of misuse by others. I'm firmly against letting a small minority who are abusing language set the linguistic agenda in that way, although I have to say I don't remember seeing that usage myself.

<comment> Anthony-G I fully agree. As a lover of both music and cinema, I've (thankfully) never come across this linguistic abuse of "prolific". If I did encounter it, the writer would immediately lose my respect and I'd probably stop reading.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


America's Greatest Inventor - <AUTHOR> http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Personal/Americas-Greatest-Inventor

<comment><USER2> Henry Ford wrote a brilliant book about Thomas Edison that's available here:

[http://atomicacreative.com/images/ACG_EdisonAsIKnowHim.pdf](http://atomicacreative.com/images/ACG_EdisonAsIKnowHim.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Regarding Tesla, this consulting company publishes another book which includes "How brilliant scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla destroyed himself". I guess he needed a better marketing consultant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > He certainly has been an inspiration to me in my career.

Indeed. Both Gates and Edison are known for their anti-competitive business practices.

Foundation era Gates is great, Microsoft era Gates not so much.

</comment><comment><USER5> Um, [http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla](http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla)

<comment><USER4> Coincidentally, [http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/05/18/nikola- tesl...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/05/18/nikola-tesla-wasnt- god-and-thomas-edison-wasnt-the-devil/)

<comment><USER5> Hehe yeah, I agree with that article's assessment. Tesla and Edison weren't arch rivals, and both of them were important. I still find the comic fun to read :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks like Gates didn't read that: [http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla](http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla)

</comment><comment><USER7> I tempt to compare SteveJobs vs BillGates to Tesla vs Edison

</comment><comment><USER8> _along with a few photos of some of the Edison-related items I'm lucky enough to own._

He also owns Da Vinci's notebook [http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1esdvq/til_bi...](http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1esdvq/til_bill_gates_purchased_the_codex_leicester_one/).

Must be nice to be a gazillionaire...</comment>


The Mega Machines Helping China Link the World - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-41206772 <comment><AUTHOR> I don't think America should fear what China is building but it should only serve to encourage it. Why shouldn't you be able to board a 300 mph train in Los Angeles and get off 30 hours later in Buenos Aires? Imagine a Colombian rose grower being able to use rail instead of plane to ship his product to the US West coast. I think it could lead to a huge boom for entrepreneurs in South America.</comment>


The last Sears in Chicago is closing - <AUTHOR> https://www.msn.com/en-us/finance/news/the-last-sears-in-chicago-is-closing/ar-AAzRFpI <comment><USER2> Sears continues to be a very interesting (and sad, for employees) "death of an empire".

As has been said countless times now, Sears pioneered a "remote ordering system" of sorts where pictures and specs and prices of products were presented a la carte in a discoverable manner, and consumers simply just placed an order by mail. Before long, the product would show up at the door, and value was exchanged every step of the way.

Now, most consumers prefer to make these orders electronically, and through a series of blunders and laziness, Sears is not the name consumers trust anymore. The resulting death spiral of this company is viewable publicly, with lots of qualitative and quantitative data readily available.

From the thousands of unemployed workers, to the shuttered stores, to the discount sale of Sears assets and inventory, the death of Sears is a public spectacle where a select few customers, stakeholders, vendors, and employees are still eeking out value (revenue, a paycheck, a bargain on a washing machine).

If you were looking to bet on Sears' failure, you missed the boat by about 10 months ago. What was left of the stock went from $15 to $2.50.</comment>


Facebook Grader For The Sad, Sad People Out There - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/19/facebook-grader-for-the-sad-sad-people-out-there/ <comment><AUTHOR> Wasn't quite ready for this attention, but so it goes.

You win some, you lose some.

<comment><USER2> It definitely seems like an overly harsh review. It almost sounds like you bruised his ego because he was only rated 90/100, and that's why it's so negative. I mean come on, 99% of the facebook apps I see are way more useless than this one.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Tagged memory and minion cores in the lowRISC SoC - <AUTHOR> http://www.lowrisc.org/docs/memo-2014-001-tagged-memory-and-minion-cores/

<comment><AUTHOR> lowRISC is a project to produce a fully open-source SoC using the RISC-V instruction set architecture, intending to reach volume production. Please do ask away if you have any questions.</comment>


Make a vaccine? I'm trying to teach my kids the alphabet - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-companies-schools/make-a-vaccine-im-trying-to-teach-my-kids-the-alphabet-idUSKBN2470K8 <comment><USER2> Good to see corporations identify that their "knowledge production units" are often also people with the full spectrum of human experience and responsibilities. This should actually be a strange observation to make because most corporations are staffed with people. But incentives can skew this reality.

The flip side of this is companies that are family hostile. I've worked in and around multiple kinds of businesses. Any that are family unfriendly are usually defective in the long term due to bad fundamentals. I now view businesses with poor people-connectivity, including a lack of awareness of families, as somewhat suspicious.

Its kind of like how an individual that always shows up poorly dressed to job interviews is likely to be perceived as less suitable. You might still ask questions just to scratch the surface, even just to find out why, but you know something isn't right or working well.</comment>


Finally the Difference Between All Those Rental Car Startups Explained - <AUTHOR> https://www.whttl.com/content/2015/01/18/finally-the-differences-between-all-those-rental-car-startups-explained/

<comment><USER2> Solid summary</comment>


Amazon EBS Update – New Elastic Volumes Change Everything - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ebs-update-new-elastic-volumes-change-everything/ <comment><USER2> This is an amazing new feature... other than the lack of "shrinking a volume" support... I'm definitely going to be using this from now on and this feature is going to make a big difference in my day to day work.

That said... I'd still rather have access to Elastic File System in more regions, and in a perfect world, be able to talk to EFS from Lambda.

<comment><USER3> > other than the lack of "shrinking a volume" support

It looks like you _can_ shrink a volume, the edit box to change this just a "set a size" box. We have tested this and downsized one volume now and _appears_ to have worked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a pretty swell announcement.

While I think I still might do an LVM for adding capacity, the biggest change here would appear the ability to scale provisioned IOPS. While gp2 disks IOPS are primarily tied to storage capacity, which often leads to overprovisvioning for peak loads, the alternatively high cost of smaller and faster storage with PIOPS often times isn't worth it when peak loads only happen occasionally. That changes with this and I am sure this will make a lot of DBAs happy.

AWS in the last year has really impressed with giving you even more knobs to turn to get exactly what you need. While it's still not quite as flexible as GCEs custom instance sizes, the GPU and now storage elasticity sort of make up for it. While it's still pretty expensive, AWS feels more and more like I can use an API to build a custom spec'ed server instead of trying to shove my workloads into only a handful of options.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's one thing that really annoys me about EBS volumes.

You can't attach existing (unattached) persistent volumes to an instance at instance creation time.

So for instance, I can't have a machine boot and expect to see ebs vol-xyz on device /dev/xvdg at boot. I have to boot the instance, use the API to attach it and then have my instance mount it.

</comment><comment><USER6> > _Spiking Demand – You are running a relational database on a Provisioned > IOPS volume that is set to handle a moderate amount of traffic during the > month, with a 10x spike in traffic during the final three days of each month > due to month-end processing. You can use Elastic Volumes to dial up the > provisioning in order to handle the spike, and then dial it down afterward._

At first I was a little dubious of the usefulness of this update, but that features is actually really useful. I'm not sure what the granularity is, but it would be nice to crank up he iops on a DB when doing some large batch operations.

<comment><USER7> If this is possible with RDS, that's huge. It's extremely frustrating to deal with spikes of transitory data into RDS and have to have the RDS disk space be sized to the maximum amount of space always-- it's a huge cost waste.

<comment><USER8> Reading through the caveat page [1], it seems the marketing copy is not quite in line with reality in terms of ability to scale down directly:

> Decreasing the size of an EBS volume is not supported. However, you can > create a smaller volume and then migrate your data to it using application- > level tools such as robocopy.

[1] - [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/consider...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/considerations.html)

<comment><USER9> The blurb is not misleading. PIOPS are a performance measure distinct from volume size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had a volume that needed resizing, so went ahead and tried moving from a 50GB gp2 to a 100GB gp2 disk online. It took 1 hour 40 minutes to do the resize. It's not a quick operation, and from looking at the docs you're limited to 1 modification per 6 hours on any given volume.

<comment><USER11> Whoa I guess that's more or less the same as downtime. Imagine if you were out of space but couldn't do anything for 100 minutes. I am watching EFS and hoping it falls in price or that EBS that backs EC2 instances becomes more automatically elastic.

<comment><USER11> To further my point: what I'm getting at is that EFS has the chance to be the answer to persistent storage for docker swarm and just persistent storage for docker in general. But at .30 cents a gig it's just too much right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What I would really like to see (on any cloud, really) is volumes that can be bound to multiple nodes/images/vm's/whatever. I have yet to find a solid distributed FS alternative to OCFS2 that actually performs in the same league and ease of use.

<comment><USER13> > What I would really like to see (on any cloud, really) is volumes that can > be bound to multiple nodes/images/vm's/whatever. I have yet to find a solid > distributed FS alternative to OCFS2 that actually performs in the same > league and ease of use.

Have you tried EFS? [https://aws.amazon.com/efs/](https://aws.amazon.com/efs/)

<comment><USER12> No, since it is stupidly expensive in itself. Moreover, AWS services in general are ridiculously expensive for what has always turned out to be a sub- par experience. Overly complicated to set up and manage, lacklustre performance, and premium pricing. Thanks, but no thanks.

<comment><USER13> > No, since it is stupidly expensive in itself.

EFS is ridiculous cheap if you use it the way it's intended. It's billed per- byte so you only store things that you actually need shared on there.

If you're looking for an OCFS2 replacement for storing large volumes of data or to run something like Oracle RAC atop then you're probably better off either doing it yourself.

> Moreover, AWS services in general are ridiculously expensive for what has > always turned out to be a sub-par experience. Overly complicated to set up > and manage, lacklustre performance, and premium pricing. Thanks, but no > thanks.

Besides the pricing argument, I'd disagree with all of those points. It's a joy to set up once you know what you're doing and performance is more than adequate for all the services I've used (with plenty of knobs to fiddle). Outside of external bandwidth pricing I don't even consider it that far out of line pricing wise.

<comment><USER12> Hey koolba, I apologise in advance for nitpicking, but I'd like to make some counterpoints:

 _It 's a joy to set up once you know what you're doing_

Which is (in my own long and active AWS experience) another way of saying "You need to make a significant investment in time, effort, and tooling to get to a point where it is fast and simple to bring up a reasonably complex environment. You are re-learning domain knowledge you likely already have, just so that you can use Amazon's product. This in-itself isn't a bad thing, depending on what you get back for it, but the return value is "I now know what I am doing with AWS".

 _performance is more than adequate_

I can get _more than adequate_ pretty much everywhere. I am paying a serious premium, so I really want to be in the _amazingly fast_ bracket, not the adequate.

 _Outside of external bandwidth pricing I don 't even consider it that far out of line pricing wise._

Yeah, they are, both directly as well as in terms of value for money. There are many ways to get increased performance at lower costs with reduced complexity (complexity also cotst real money). I change hosting provider roughly every 12 months to take advantage of investments in new generation hardware and good deals, and everytime I do so, I check out new features, updated pricing, and do the sums to work out value for money (I offer high performance, managed, HA hosting to selected clients)

<comment><USER14> You're charging people to manage their environments (providing expertise) and complaining about needing to develop additional skills to do so efficiently.

If you have the data with price/performance comparisons, I'd think this is something the rest of us would be interested in.

<comment><USER12> _You 're charging people to manage their environments (providing expertise) and complaining about needing to develop additional skills to do so efficiently._

That is a straw man argument. AWS isn't the only way to efficiently manage infrastructure, and it can be argued it isn't even efficient, full stop.

<comment><USER14> Your making value decisions based on expertise in your existing delivery methods and trying to map them 1-1 to aws features, that may or may not map 1-1. You keep disparaging aws' pricing (stupidly expensive, serious premium), without providing an alternative/baseline.

Again, if you have numbers and not broad statements we'd appreciate them.

<comment><USER12> _Your making value decisions based on expertise in your existing delivery methods and trying to map them 1-1 to aws features, that may or may not map 1-1_

eh, no. You have no idea about my areas of expertise, what features I require, or how I map them, or what I map them to, so you cannot make this kind of statement (well, you can, and you did, but it is a fallacy).

 _you have numbers and not broad statements we 'd appreciate them._

I'm sure you do. Doing what I do today in terms of functional parity, but doing it on AWS, will work out roughly 2.5 times more expensive, and will not gain me any additional features or functionality, and will leave me with about two-thirds of reduction in overall performance against metrics that are of interest to me. Also "we"? You speak for others? Who are the "we" that have appointed you as their speaker?

<comment><USER14> You started with general pricing arguments with hostile language without providing numbers to support - making generalizations without that data is useless, right? How is a reader supposed to take those statements? It leads to using your experience statement (I offer high performance, managed, HA hosting to selected clients) to make judgements on the comment.

The we should be anybody bothering to read this comment chain - who wouldn't be interested in seeing AWS' lack of value in your use case / competitors that succeed? Having done migrations to and from AWS for past employers, this would definitely interest me in the least.

<comment><USER12> I apologise if this comes across as an ad-hominem, but you sound like my ex- wife: you keep talking about how I say things, and keep ignorning the actual content of my comments. So, I'll do the same with you as I did with her - goodbye! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is really fantastic. Volume management was always my biggest pain point with EC2. I never understood why they had to make it so complicated.

</comment><comment><USER16> Do you still have to stripe over multiple volumes to get good performance?

</comment><comment><USER13> For those of us running on EBS, this is welcome news. Now you can put off swapping out EBS volumes until you hit the cap of 16TB (or thereabouts).

If you're really clever, you'd set up your AMIs to use LVM and keep adding additional EBS volumes before you reach the 16 TB per volume limit. Though I'm guessing if you have the issue where 16 TB of storage isn't enough for you then you probably can afford to find a real distributed solution to this.

<comment><USER6> There's an entire class of engineers who cooked up clever lvm/zfs partionining schemes to work around this. It's bittersweet to throw away a working, custom solution when something more automated and standard comes around. c'est la vie!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > M3.medium instances are treated as current generation. M3.large, m3.xlarge, > and m3.2xl instances are treated as previous generation.

Why? These other m3 instances are listed as current generation here: [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance-...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance- types.html#current-gen-instances)

</comment><comment><USER18> LOL somebody's going to set up an alarm to automatically increase volume size on low space and one day end up with max volume size on accident.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is excellent, too bad I had to increase the volume size on our prod stack two weeks ago.

</comment><comment><USER20> That's still terrible performance, your average MacBook Pro these days will provide between 100,000 and 300,000 IOP/s on 4k random reads and the average VM we deploy from our storage servers (commodity SSD based linux clusters that are cheap and ultra reliable) provide between 70,000-200,000 random 4k read (and write) IOPs per VM without a sweat and their TCO is significantly lower than amazons SSD storage that's 3 ½ - 10x slower per volume.

Even if you go and provision storage on Vultr, Ramnode or Sitehost all of which are a lot cheaper options and just as if not more reliable provide considerably faster storage with a minimum of 20/30,000 IOPs up to 150,000 IOPs per volume and you don't have the vendor lock-in or the hidden costs such as inter-zone data transfer etc...

Amazon really needs to pull finger on their storage performance, but it's not in their best interest. What they want you to do is scale horizontally which means not only do you need to invest in your system / product design to do this but you also have to put more money into Amazons pockets for additional compute / storage nodes and again the associated hidden costs.

I'm not digging on Amazon / outsourced hosting providers but they truly are pulling the wool over people's eyes while still trying to make everyone think that they're not only the best option they're the _only_ option.

<comment><USER21> EBS is network-attached storage and has its benefits and downsides. I don't think it's fair to compare it to local storage.

<comment><USER22> Amazon's options for local, high speed SSDs aren't very compelling either. You're limited to the I2 instances and have to increase the instance size in order to increase storage performance

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/storage-...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/storage- optimized-instances.html#i2-instances-diskperf)

Compare this to Google Cloud, where you can attach a local SSD to any instance type and you can increase the storage performance by increasing the volume size.

[https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/performance](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/performance)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Change everything"? "Game-changing"? I'll just leave this here:

[https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/introducing- Goo...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/introducing-Google-Cloud- Persistent-Disks-with-non-disruptive-online-resizing.html) (March 2016)

(Disclaimer: Yes, I work on Google Cloud.)

<comment><USER24> Change everything is in context of this feature. Game changing is mentioned in the end in context of EBS and not this feature.

And the entire article is about AWS customers and it really is game changing for a customer like me.

Your comment is in poor taste.</comment></comment>


The LMAX Architecture - <AUTHOR> https://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html <comment><AUTHOR> "The system is built on the JVM platform and centers on a Business Logic Processor that can handle 6 million orders per second on a single thread. The Business Logic Processor runs entirely in-memory using event sourcing"

\- No database \- No multiple threads \- No external dependencies</comment>


Stand-Up Meetings Done Right - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dapulse.com/2014/02/standup-meetings-done-right/

<comment><USER2> Nice ! Goals oriented Stand-up meetings. Instead of the usual I did this yesterday, doing this today. You change the talk to goal oriented - what I've done yesterday to advance this goal, what am I doing today to advance it. Enabling your team to see the big picture.

<comment><USER3> thanks yarivba

yes it's pretty simple but makes a big difference</comment></comment>