PHP5 Database Iterators - <AUTHOR> http://leftnode.com/blog/2009/09/php5-database-iterators/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm the author and submitter of the article, and I'd honestly love to hear what people think about this. I know there's a lot of (understandable) disdain for PHP, but I think you can do some neat things with it. This is one application that I've found particularly useful and wanted to share it.

<comment><USER2> I don't generally comment on anything related to individual programmer's styles or programming methodologies; I think those are targeted more at inexperienced programmers that are still developing their technique.

That said, my personal take on things like this is that it defeats PHP's strengths in an attempt to make it behave like something it isn't. The primary reasons for coding web applications in PHP instead of Java, Ruby, or Python or what-have-you is speed and portability. Your code isn't compatible with PHP4 -- which a lot of servers are still running -- and you're spending an awful lot of code to duplicate functionality that's already built into PHP. You can already perform a query and get the results back and if you want to iterate over them, you have an array to step through. That would be maybe around 5 lines of code, and you wouldn't need comments explaining what it does because it would be clear and obvious. That's a lot less code for the parser to evaluate, and a lot less code for it to run, which will probably translate to being able to handle a lot more hits.

It would be interesting to load your code onto an app, and then load a simpler, more direct version that does the same thing, and see how their performance compares.

Nicely written article though.

<comment><USER3> _The primary reason[...] for coding web applications in PHP instead of Java, Ruby, or Python or what-have-you is speed_

This seems like a bad reason: [http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=php&lang2=java&box=1)

PHP even uses more memory than Java on some benchmarks, which is pretty damn impressive. You have to work quite hard to use more RAM than Java.

(You'll also notice that source size of PHP is not much smaller than the equivalent Java program. PHP is a very verbose programming language compared to its other "dynamic language" brethren, and even to non-"dynamic" langauges like Haskell.)

<comment><USER2> That's a really interesting link, thanks. Something about it kinda smells though: it doesn't match my experiences with PHP at all. (I can't speak for Java in this case.)

I've got half of a CMS under development that's just recently -- sadly -- topped a thousand lines of code. It has a built-in parser for its own human- readable configuration file, which it has to parse every time; it has built-in cache management; it merges templates; it handles recursion for nested templates; and it does on-the-fly high quality image resizing. All of my out- and-back server response times are well under 1 second for all this work.

I'll look around and see if there are other trustworthy benchmarks that corroborate this.

EDIT: Yeah, IEEE disagrees: [http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/ICWS.20...](http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/ICWS.2008.71)

I'm not surprised by PHP's memory usage, actually; I long ago figured it must be enormous just based on the way it handles data types. I don't think the shootout link is deliberately deceptive; rather, all the tests that I looked at were massively recursive, and this is not a task for which PHP was designed -- I think I would expect Java to perform better in those cases.

<comment><USER4> > Something about it kinda smells though: it doesn't match my experiences with > PHP at all.

Did you look at what the programs do before announcing that "it kinda smells"?

Did you look at the "really interesting link" enough to realize the benchmarks game website is written in PHP?

Did you look at that particular web page enough to see "PHP is rarely the bottleneck (HTML slides)" ?

<comment><USER2> Yes, I saw all of those before making my comment.

None of them were a substantive response to the results of the graph.

When being presented with data, you should answer with more data, not conjecture.

<comment><USER4> > Yes, I saw all of those before making my comment.

So when you say "it doesn't match my experiences with PHP at all" are you talking about your experience writing planetary simulations in PHP?

> When being presented with data...

You presented opinion not data.

> all the tests that I looked at were massively recursive

Name them.

<comment><USER2> This kind of nonsense is precisely why engaging in language debates is a pointless waste of time. Why, sure, I would love to take time out of my day to deal with you.

> _So when you say "it doesn't match my experiences with PHP at all" are you > talking about your experience writing planetary simulations in PHP?_

No.

I was being somewhat unclear earlier so that I wouldn't have to come right out and say that at first glance the "benchmark" site looked like complete bunk. The real game would be to figure out in exactly which way it was bunk, and initially I wasn't interested in that.

The test results posted there -- based on the actual numbers, not on the horribly-formatted and nearly useless graph -- were showing a nearly 100-fold disadvantage to using PHP or Java.

That's where my experience comes in. Now, I happen to know that AT&T is playing around with an internal presence application for the iPhone and they're hosting everything on Java servers with Tomcat and they're pushing millions of messages per day through them with no trouble. So, I know Java is a reasonable server-side environment. But, there's no way that PHP is nearly 100 _times_ slower, not when the total request time for complex text operations is averaging 800 milliseconds.

 _Those_ are the experiences I was talking about, and they were the reason that I said simply that the results smelled funny.

> _You presented opinion not data._

Yes, I did, and you missed the point entirely.

I said simply, "the conclusions don't seem right". You responded, argumentatively, with a couple of pointers to what is presumably your site (based on your comment history). None of those had anything to do with the data. You were presenting a completely unrelated slide from a PHP presentation, plus the fact that the site apparently runs on PHP, and you wanted to know if I'd even bothered to look at the test programs.

And, you know what? None of those has anything to do with anything. They're pointless. Useless. Less than useless, they're a waste of time.

 _That_ is what I was referring to when I said that data needs to be answered with data. You and I could sit here and waste a lot of perfectly otherwise productive hours arguing back and forth with whose website runs PHP and whose website runs Java, or we could just present some data.

And, that's exactly what I did. I went looking for data, because I wanted to know if in fact my experiences with PHP over the last however-many years had been atypical, or if Java had really become that incredibly fast, or for any other explanation. It took some digging before I could find anything else even remotely resembling a comparative analysis, and I did: IEEE. Well, they usually know what they're doing. (Kind of.) And, their results much more closely matched my experiences.

There, see? Data versus data. Now if you want to try to argue that there's something wrong with my conclusions, you'll have to look at the data and answer with more data -- because your opinion isn't a good enough response to data.

> Name them.

Ah! And here, you did indeed catch me. The very first test I looked at was binary_trees, in part because the memory usage for it was enormous. While I did give a cursory glance to fasta, n-body, and mandelbrot, I stopped paying close attention pretty quickly.

That said, now that you've forced me to pay closer attention to this, I think I can support my main point even better than before.

The current user-submitted PHP test for pidigits is particularly stupid; it re-calculates the same digits of pi over and over and over again as it displays them in groups of ten. Of course it's going to be slow. Moreover, the test results clearly show PHP running on a single processor, while the Java version is running in parallel across 4 processors. I haven't worked in Java, so in the thirty seconds I'm allowing for it I can't say for certain that the test program for pidigits there is re-calculating the same ratio over and over again, but it doesn't _look_ like it is. In fact, it looks like it's been pretty sweetly optimized for this specific test environment.

binary-trees at least is recursive in both implementations.

And for the Fannkuck test, Java is able to take advantage of its built-in threads library, while PHP is forced to fork() and implement IPC via network pipes.

And so on. I really can't be moved to analyze the results or the test any further, because I already found other data that does a better job of answering to these tests.

Finally, the "benchmark game" itself is completely misleading, and almost useless as a benchmark of any kind. There are all kinds of arguments out there on the value of benchmarks, but when you're not even attempting to create a level playing field between different test cases, then the benchmark becomes useless. It's much more a game than a benchmark.

After looking at all of it much more closely, I now think that using that site as any kind of evidence that one language is slower than any other (or vice- versa) is about as silly as writing a blog post on just how bad C is at being object-oriented. (C, not C++.)

<comment><USER3> _But, there's no way that PHP is nearly 100 times slower_

I too am confused that it's only 100x slower. Consider the operation "2 + 2". In Java with JIT on, this eventually becomes a single instruction, "add". (Ideally 2 and 2 are already in registers from previous manipulation in the function, and you don't even need a "load".)

In PHP, this operation is hundreds of instructions. You start with the AST node. Then you look up the variable names. Then you look up their bindings (fast because PHP has no scope, in Real Languages this is at least a linked- list traversal). Then you finally get the object representing the value. Now it needs to be coerced into the right type for +. Once that is done, we can finally run the add operation. Then the result needs to be boxed.

You are surprised that that is 100x slower than a native CPU instruction?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well written article, very clear. Nice job.

The only thing that I do not like is that you would have to put some database field name in the controller to set data to the persistence instead of having a DataAccessLayer to handle it. The main problem is if in the future you refactor the persistence of change it, you will have to go to multiple place to be able to make everything work. I might be wrong... but at the first look, this is what I see. Oh by the way, do you always but your email address on each method of all your code :P ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comments.

Most of that code was copied from my framework, which is full of Doxygen comments, and I use my username in our subversion repository and my email address for the author of each method since several methods can have multiple authors.

<comment><USER3> What value do you derive from documenting the author of each method? That seems like a lot of overhead for very little benefit, especially when your VCS can do an annotation and give you more detail than one comment can.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't have much formal CS training, and I code primarily in PHP. That being said, I don't see how this is useful at all. I've started coding more in PHP5 recently: my last two projects have been using classes. I started creating a DBHandler class. Then, whenever I need a DB query, I have a method like this:

        function getSnsWithoutIds($customerid) {
    		$query = sprintf("SELECT aim_sn FROM add_queue WHERE aim_id=0 AND cid=%d", $customerid);
    		$result = mysql_query($query);
    		$sns = array();
    		while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
    			array_push($sns, $row['aim_sn']);
    		}
    		return $sns;
    	}

And then I simply iterate on the array back in the code.

       $dbh = new DBHandler();
       $arr = $dbh->getSnsWithoutIds();
       foreach($arr as $ele) { doSomething(); }

What is the advantage to doing things your way?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, imagine that the query returns 1000 (or a million or what not) results. You've looped through it once already in the getSnsWithoutIds() to build the $sns array (which you should use $sns[] = $row['aim_sn'], its faster). So, you've looped through everything, which takes some time, and now you have a huge data structure in memory that you may not need.

Then, you loop through it again with the foreach. What if you wanted to paginate those results quickly? What if you only wanted a subset of the whole pie?

This class, as I'll show in a future article, can easily be extended to allow for easy pagination and filtering of your data.

<comment><USER6> Well, it takes a trivial amount of time to loop through an array with a million results. So can you please clarify the benefit of the class as-is, besides its purported future extensiblity? I don't get the time to unset() the array before I return it, but you do?

BTW I did a test, and it seems that $array[] is a faster way to append.

<comment><USER3> _BTW I did a test, and it seems that $array[] is a faster way to append._

Classic PHP-style micro-optimization. If you can't use the right algorithm, you can at least make the wrong one run 0.34% faster.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Glenn Greenwald on fake news - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2017/01/04/washpost-is-richly-rewarded-for-false-news-about-russia-threat-while-public-is-deceived/ <comment><USER2> I always enjoy reading Glenn Greenwald's posts, even if I don't always agree with them or if I'm a little uncomfortable with the hyperbole.

But I do wish The Intercept would promote his stories like this one as "Opinion" or market them as columns because they don't feel like journalism, they feel like editorial. I appreciate opinion pieces, I just like to consume them with a different mindset than journalistic content.

<comment><USER3> You're an adult now. Everything you read in the media is redolent with opinion judgement. In the nyt, wsj, the post. This article does you the service of making the authors judgement obvious and providing the sources so you can form your own informed opinion - disagree by all means.

Is there somewhere else you can find out the facts about how the post hypes false stories and buries their reaction? Note that Putin, whether he is evil incarnate or not is the current bogeyman for military funding. So you can see why media coverage of the "putin threat" might be important. WMD coverage isn't a long time ago. Do presidential candidates still sing "bomb iran" to a beach boys melody?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> His view count and credibility slip by the day regardless of whether he's right or not, partially as a result of his focus.

Wonder who will be the next? Would be fun to see someone involved in the same sort of journalism, without the baggage.

<comment><USER5> That's your opinion. My opinion is that Greenwald is one of the most important journalists alive today. It feels like there is mass disillusionment with institutions of all kinds, from both conservatives and liberals, and especially among millennials. The more people learn to think critically and independently for themselves, the better off the world will be.

<comment><USER6> Thinking critically includes questioning the point of view that something can't be happening (ie: Russian propaganda sponsoring fake news) just because it makes mainstream America look a _little tiny bit_ better by contrast.</comment></comment></comment>


Let's Quit Fetishizing the Single-Family Home - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/opinion/california-single-family-housing.html <comment><USER2> It doesn't help to call the desire for single-family homes "fetishizing".

The reality is that single-family homes are the most desirable way to live for most people. It may not be sustainable, but it does make for a more enjoyable life for the people living in them. That's not "fetishizing", that's trying to live the best life possible.

It would be better to acknowledge that rather than being dismissive of it.</comment>


Sacha Baron Cohen tells Mark Zuckerberg 'history will judge you harshly - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/sacha-baron-cohen-criticize-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-2020-1 <comment><AUTHOR> this makes me think,

1\. If history is written by the winners then how does it matter?

2\. If history is written once you depart then how does it matter?

3\. Finally, if leaving a legacy that important; how far one would go to write it the way they want?

<comment><USER2> For whatever it's worth, as one of many conquerors of a land once inhabited by Native Americans, it's increasingly becoming public knowledge that we weren't exactly kind to them; just because we won doesn't mean their side of the story remained entirely/indefinitely eclipsed.</comment></comment>


How to Estimate Fixed-Price Projects Effectively - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/running-a-digital-development-agency/running-a-digital-development-agency-part-2-how-to-estimate-fixed-price-projects-effectively-fc8fbbcf498e

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to get HN's thoughts on our post about fixed-priced projects. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!</comment>


Why we Die - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-why-we-die-global-life-expectancy <comment><USER3> 'The article starts "A baby born in the U.S. this year is likely to live to blow out 78 birthday candles . . . " That would mean he or she would make it to age 12.'

I like this comment :)

<comment><USER4> Even if you take 78 birthday candles to mean reach the age of 78, then there is still an issue with that statement. Likely to reach the age of 78 implies that the median age is 78, not the average. The median age is likely different than 78 (my guess is lower due to the distribution being skewed left - <USER2> that is just a guess)

<comment><USER5> A left skew would imply that the median is to the right of the mean.

<comment><USER4> I totally mean skewed right. The big part of the curve is on the left.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems to be more of a "How we die" rather than why, but regardless it's a well done visualization.

<comment><USER7> It was a "well done visual," and does put some things into perspective. For example, the "War on Cancer" began in about 1971. While I'm optimistic about the near-term future in cancer treatment, the chart doesn't reflect much historic clinical success.

<comment><USER8> I'd encourage a different interpretation of the data: Cancer holding steady actually is an improvement.

Everyone is guaranteed to die of something, and the longer you live the likelihood of that something being cancer greatly increases. So as people shift away from other categories, i.e. heart disease and childbirth, and live longer, they're going to shift towards the cancer category. I'm actually amazed that cancer hasn't gone up significantly.

<comment><USER7> This is a very good point. Although the data (at this link) are not isolated, using a GUI window as a ruler, you can see a clear decrease, just not a visually compelling one. And yes, I agree that as you reduce the mortality associated with other diseases, getting cancer becomes more likely.

What would be more interesting to see, in this particular context, is the mortality associated with different disease groups for different age cohorts. For example, how has the treatment for cancer progressed for people between 40 and 50, rather than all cohorts at once.

<comment><USER9> The yellow band is also getting eaten from below by the blue (presumably AIDS deaths?).

US median age grew by about 2 years per decade between 1990-2000 so that also supports thisisnotmyname's point.

Some of the decline may be due to lifestyle changes (e.g. lung cancer has probably peaked in the US) but there has also been dramatic progress in treatment for some cancers (Breast, testicular, Hodkin's).

<comment><USER7> Agreed.

Also, some of the recent treatment modalities are genuinely revolutionary. For example, Gleevec (subsequently exposed problems aside) is pretty damn amazing. Obviously, new things are becoming possible because of a long-growing body of research. The question is whether we have reached the tipping point. As I said previously, I'm optimistic -- I think we have. That being said, cancer is _fucking complex_ and even if we were at some tipping point, progress is measured in years and decades, not weeks as the breathless popsci articles always seem to imply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I saw a presentation from an evolutionary biologist who may the point that we die because there is no evolutionary pressure not to die. Once we've birthed and raised out young, we are no longer relevant from an evolutionary perspective. He tested this with fruit flies by separating the young by gender for increasingly longer periods of time effectively delaying breeding so only the longer lived specimens could live to breed. By doing that over many generations, I believe he tripled the life expectancy of his test group.

<comment><USER11> You don't have to go into biology to explain why we die; the physics is sufficient. Everything is subject to entropy.

<comment><USER12> There are plenty of examples of (admitted, simpler than humans) organisms which are effectively "immortal". The heat death of the universe will get them all, but human mortality is nevertheless a good deal more complicated than just entropy.

<comment><USER11> Right, so the question is why we die _when_ we die, not why we die at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We die because we are born.

"Our birth and death are just one thing. You can't have one without the other .It's a little funny to see how at a death people are so tearful and sad, and at a birth how happy and delighted. It's delusion .I think if you really want to cry. Then it would be better to do so when someone born. Cry at the root, for if there were no birth, there would be no death. Can you understand this?"

-Ajahn Chah

<comment><USER14> Dying is one of the most important things a person can do. I was in the airport last week sitting near a little fog-tornado machine and guess which age group was curious enough to go over to it and mess with it? Only the kids. The grumpy old men were angrily waiting for their flight, the stressed-out moms telling their kids to be quiet, and all the people my age were mesmerized by their phones.

Over time we get too world-weary and cynical. How many innovative startups that push us forward are started by people over 50, or even 40 for that matter?

<comment><USER15> How much value -- how many stories, how many glimmers-of-an-idea, how many things-I-learned-growing-up-in-the-thirties are lost when an old person dies?

I wouldn't wish death on a single person.

<comment><USER14> > _I wouldn't wish death on a single person._

I wouldn't either. I hope I didn't imply that. And the "grumpy old men" are just a stereotype I often see. My grandfather, for example, is _the_ happiest (and wisest) man I know. But he isn't going to go start a company tomorrow that will revolutionise the way we communicate.

Can you really deny that the curiosity that children have is essential to society moving forward and staying youthful, and has to always be replenished?

<comment><USER16> I really think the reason why grumpy old men are grumpy is because they don't have the energy and capable bodies of youth. I think a 70 year old with the body and hormones of a healthy 20 year old will still party like it's the 60s.

Mental scar tissue is another issue too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The data here seems to fly in the face of another story on HN (a week or two ago) that suggested that the increase in life expectancy was almost completely from reducing infant/child mortality. This data shows a very different story.

<comment><USER18> Both can still be true.

The majority of people do not die as children, but the effect of those who do is disproportionately large on "life expectancy" because it's an average.

Let's say that 23% of children die in their first year (true in Sweden in 1751). Let's say everyone else dies at 80. Life expectancy is 61.6 years.

Now let's say time passes and now 0.2% of children die in their first year (true in Sweden today) and everyone else dies at 80. Life expectancy is now 79.7 years. It jumped over 18 years (30%) with no one living any longer than before. Additionally, the percentage of children dying was never even 1/4 of the total, so the vast majority of people still died from other causes.

The point is that the linked chart represents numeric percentages of people dying, while life expectancy weights younger years much more heavily.

Most of the progress that has been made in life expectancy is from young children, but most of the progress in "what actually kills people" has been for older people.

<comment><USER17> On phone... Short reply. Life expectancy since 40 increased at a rate comparable to expectancy since birth. That is, we've made huge gains in keeping ppl alive even starting from age 40.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "A baby born in the U.S. this year is likely to live to blow out 78 birthday candles."

Considering you blow out a candle for each year since you were born every birthday, I think they just said that we're all going to live until age 12.

</comment><comment><USER20> How hard is it for them to make the key colors match the graph colors? They're off by quite a bit and it makes this chart very difficult for my eyes to parse.

<comment><USER21> Not just that, but I'm really sick of these stacked graphs where data floats on top of other data. It makes the image "prettier" at the expense of being harder to read. It makes it extremely difficult to compare the trends for the graph lines floating on the top of all the others, because they're moving all over the fucking place.

Why not just start all the graph lines from the bottom? If you really need the total, just have it be its own line?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What is that bump in worldwide deaths around 1985?

<comment><USER23> I think the bump you're referring to is 1996. A World Bank sourced Life Expectancy chart[1] seems to indicate problems in both South Africa in general and the economic depression in Russia coincide roughly with that time period.

//edit: Events in Korea, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Congo caused dips as well. I guess the next question (and an interesting one) would be if there was a human condition of some sort that unified these different situations.

[1] [http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...</a>

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> IMO, too much money is being spent attacking the proximate causes of death (cancer, heart disease, etc.) but not enough is being spent attacking the root cause: aging. Yeah, if we cure cancer then life expectancy will go up some. But those who would have died of cancer are still going to grow older, become weak, and die of _something_. It seems like a more efficient use of resources to fight aging than to fight all the problems it causes individually.

<http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html>

</comment><comment><USER25> Reduced mortality from heart disease seems to account for essentially all the mortality reduction. How are we reducing deaths so much in the face of rising obesity, etc.?

<comment><USER26> Statins are probably one major reason.

<comment><USER27> I don't disagree that they're probably a major contributor, but the first statin came on the market in 1987 (Mevacor, by Merck), and the line is well on the down-slope by that point. In fact, more than half its drop (for US data) comes _before_ that point.

<comment><USER28> Smoking rates have declined significantly since the 60's

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Something in the charts doesn't make sense to me. Death rates per 100,000 are about 1.5x higher in 'global' vs. 'U.S.', yet life expectancy for 'global' and 'U.S.' is almost the same. Any explanations?

</comment><comment><USER29> Something seems wrong: 1e5 /(deaths per 1e5) should be about equal to the life expectancy. But the drop in deaths per 1e5 is much bigger than the increase in life expectancy.

Am I missing something, or is the data SNAFU?

</comment><comment><USER30> The charts show plainly that either in the United States, or in OECD countries

[http://www.oecd.org/general/listofoecdmembercountries- ratifi...](http://www.oecd.org/general/listofoecdmembercountries- ratificationoftheconventionontheoecd.htm)

as a whole, life expectancy is going up throughout the human age span. Life expectancy at birth is up quite a lot over the decades shown in the charts, but life expectancy at ages 40, 60, 65, and 80 have also increased.

The New England Journal of Medicine has a free access article from earlier this year (to celebrate its 200th anniversary)

<http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1113569>

with much information on changes in mortality in the United States over the last two centuries.

The current prediction by demographers who specialize in life expectancy research is that a girl born after the year 2000 in a developed country has a 50:50 chance of personally living to the age of 100.

[http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/projects_publications/publicatio...](http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/projects_publications/publications_1904/journal_articles/broken_limits_to_life_expectancy_1022.htm)

[http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....](http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.aspx)

[http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/projects_publications/publicatio...](http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/projects_publications/publications_1904/journal_articles/biodemography_of_human_ageing_3811.htm)

(I'm glad for that news on my daughter's behalf.) That's based on steady improvement in mortality and morbidity outcomes across the age span in those countries, and what can reasonably be expected simply from more thorough provision of existing preventive treatments and treatments of acute and chronic diseases. Already it is hard for twenty-first century Americans to remember that once even kings and queens had many children die in early childhood from communicable diseases, and someday it will be difficult to remember that children ever died from much besides volitional human behavior (accidents, suicide, or homicide), with even those causes of death being in decline.

AFTER EDIT:

Several of the other comments in this thread refer to cancer mortality rates. An excellent article by a cancer researcher, "Why haven't we cured cancer yet?"

[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/why-havent- we-...](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/why-havent-we-cured- cancer-yet/)

which was submitted to HN when it was first put on the Web, discusses the several reasons why cancer mortality has declined only a little over the last few decades, despite much research devoted to finding more effective treatments for cancer and preventive measures against cancer.

</comment><comment><USER31> When you switch from US to Global, the lifespans all stay roughly the same, or go up a bit. Yet the deaths per 100,000 in practically all categories go _way_ up. How does this make sense?

</comment><comment><USER32> 1\. We die because we accept it. 2\. < dramatic pause > 3\. ???? 4\. Enlightenment</comment>


Ask HN: Software for writing a diary that will be around in 20 years from now - <AUTHOR> I guess this is a bit of an unusual question. Yesterday, my first child was born and I decided to start writing a diary. The twist is that in this diary I want to write about our experiences together as a family and include pictures and other digital material there. By age of 18, my gift to him will be to give him access to the diary.
So far I've considered opening an email account and sending mails to it so that it keeps everything in place. The other would be to keep stuff as files and use some software to manage it. Backup would be spread across my own devices and the cloud.
Is there anything the HN crowd can recommend that for sure will be there in 20 years? The email option sounds good, but I won't ever trust Google to keep a service running, and other paid options are not better. A self-hosted email-server is too much of a hastle.
Maybe there is someone who has been writing a diary / journal for a long time and wants to share how they do it? <comment><USER2> I would use the most low tech thing imaginable. Structurally your "Diary" folder might contain a series of timestamped folders, one for each entry. The time stamp you'd want to use is YYYYMMDDHHMMss, for easy sorting. Inside each of those folders I'd write the diary entry as a plain .txt file and you could include the digital artifacts ( .jpg ) in the folder as well, or create sub folders "images", "audio", etc. Using this as your "system of record", it is easy to create a recursive zip file of all the entries, and this zip file is easy to encrypt and sync around ( email, Dropbox, Google Drive, USB sticks ). If you ever need to compare or merge you can use a tool like Beyond Compare which makes it a snap to recursively examine/compare two folder structures.

<comment><USER2> I also wanted to say it is easy to iterate over this basic format and use a script to generate HTML for example as a derivative work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Plain text is your best bet. You can just save images along beside it. Backup often.

If you must have images inline, you could probably use Markdown to include them. Markdown will almost certainly be around in 20 years, but if it's not, writing a parser for it will be self-explanatory and won't take long.

</comment><comment><USER4> Emacs with Org-mode. Emacs has already been around for longer than that, and will surely be in 20 years. Org-mode is a part of Emacs and isn't going anywhere. Plain text with extensive markup support, including inline images, code, inline HTML/LaTeX, etc. Easily export to HTML, PDF, blog, etc. Easy to store, backup, sync, version-control, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> I see how a mail server would be annoying to maintain. How about a file server with server-grade hard disks setup in RAID?

I hope current digital file storage strategies and Ethernet internet exists in 20 years!

</comment><comment><USER6> There are a few distinct issues at play:

1\. Authoring software

2\. Schema and metadata that relates the entries to each other into a cohesive whole

3\. Format of a single entry at rest, including multimedia

4\. Persistence and backups

A lowest common denominator solution is "plain" text files with all the entry metadata included in each file; or a dated folder for each entry and all associated data (pictures, videos, etc) in that folder.

Email does give you an out-of-the-box solution for this, because authoring software is widely available, and each MIME message includes the posting date, the author, the body (in multiple formats, if you so wish), and any attachments.

IMAP can be used to copy messages up and down, POP can be used to download them such that they disappear from the server, and some cloud providers like Gmail have their custom APIs to access messages. A robust way of backing this up is to have a custom script that downloads messages through IMAP, copies them up to a different cloud provider, and saves a local structured backup (.mbox or Maildir) as well. These formats are commonly understood and don't venture very far from the innate structure of Email itself, so even if software to parse them becomes rare, they can be understood in a simple text editor, and could even be reasonably reverse-engineered.

For multimedia, stick with formats that are widely deployed today and backed by major standards bodies or industry consensus -- even if they are patent- encumbered. Installed base often trumps ideology, for practical reasons. JPEG is 24 years old and still in common use. H.264 is an official codec for Blu- rays, so it'll likely be supported for a long time, similarly the older codec MPEG-2 was used on DVDs, and is unlikely to irrevocably disappear. Uncompressed PCM, MP3, and AAC-LC should be your choices for audio.

I'd be wary of the archival potential of formats that are solely used on the Web with little usage on tangible physical hardware by major commercial publishers -- the Web of today moves very fast and technologies come and go. Google is pushing WebP, WebM, but work is already under way on a big consensus format called AV1. When AV1 comes out, new VP8/VP9 content will likely no longer be produced. Browsers periodically prune older features, 20 years is almost as long as the web has been around, and given enough time support for the format may only be available in software that make format coverage an explicit goal (ffmpeg, libav, VLC). Opus is being made a mandatory audio codec for WebRTC, teleconferencing is usually ephemeral -- will there be lots of .opus files sitting on disks in the future? Too early to tell, not worth gambling on.</comment>


Etcd 3.2 now with massive watch scaling and easy locks - <AUTHOR> https://coreos.com/blog/etcd-3.2-announcement <comment><USER2> I wonder why it took them so long to use persistent connections for events.

Watches in etcd were so bad, they needed a full http request respond cycle for each event. And when you weren't fast enough to reconnect again you could miss events..

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this in the critical path to enable Kubernetes to scale over 5000 nodes?

<comment><USER4> Every little bit helps, but no, etcd has not been an issue for Kube since 3.1. We already have a watch cache in the apiserver that supports large number of watches.

The issues right now are about optimizing how nodes communicate with the master for the tens of related resources used for pods (config maps, secrets, PVCs, etc). That's more classic optimization of how we batch that data.

I will say etcd 3.2 is fantastic because it removes the snapshot size limit for etcd2 - we've got Kubernetes clusters with 1-2Gb of etcd data and when the write rate gets high enough we are snapshotting so fast that if a member drops out you can't rsync the snapshot to the remote system fast enough to do a restore before the next snapshot hits. So this is a big win for us - thanks to the etcd team for getting that in at the last moment!</comment></comment>


EYETOK, watch the world live through other people smartphones - <AUTHOR>

How many times have you ever thought: "I wish I could see it with my own eyes!" ? , but you could not make it to be there…
Eyetok is a unique and global service based on a mobile app to watch live what's going on anywhere in the world, like you've never seen it before, through other people's smartphones live video streaming, like they were your eyes. (Available now on iOS for iPhone)
Any smartphone turns to be a "walking webcam", you can contact and interact with in real time, to watch what others see. Plus, receiver can guide broadcaster and interact with while video streaming in real time through chat and driving arrows (as joystick to guide broadcaster)
It's the social discovery engine: a "Google Street View", live and on demand. Eyetok solves the need of watching right now what's happening, ephemeral events, verify and check live anything, virtual traveling, report and broadcast news or incident, eyewitness curiosity, live life hacking with your own eyes, anywhere, as you were right there and then.
Imagine we could make it so students use it right now in Hong Kong Occupy…we could see what's going on, as we were there…or they could share live too to show what's going on.
Let us know your comments and feedback at firstname.lastname@example.com <comment><USER2> A few questions: 1) Why would one want to be directed by someone sitting half a world away other than journalistic situations? 2) How would this be different from Skype, hangouts, facetime, etc.? 3) What is the incentive for someone to open up their smartphone's camera feed for broadcasting specially if it incurs data costs for the broadcaster? 4) What is the guarantee that the broadcasts are not of someone's genitals, ala, chatroulette? 5) Unless video is HD the feeling of "being there" is diminished considerably and having HD video takes high bandwidth and costs for the broadcaster without an incentive to do so. How would you address this conflict?

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting idea, personally I think it might be just a bit a head of the curve for general public at the moment. I think the rate limiting factors here are bandwidth/camera quality. As mobile data speed improve and mobile cameras improve as well this could really be a game changer and I can see even in a few years something like this really taking off.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm intrigued enough that I would try it if you had an Android app. What's the business model?</comment>


Zkeme80 – A Forth-Based OS for the TI-84+ Calculator - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/siraben/zkeme80 <comment><USER2> I also wrote a forth system for the Z80 TI calculator series when I was in high school, about 20 years ago now (wow).

Very happy to see young people still fooling with this stuff, despite the ubiquity of smart phones etc.

I just uploaded the code to github: [https://github.com/hoytech/tiforth](https://github.com/hoytech/tiforth)

To anyone else interested in really understanding forth, Brad Rodriguez's "Moving Forth" series is the best I've ever read (and I don't imagine much has changed since), including a great explanation on "DOES>", widely regarded as the most difficult part of the forth kernel. You can read it online here:

[https://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/index.html](https://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/index.html)

Also I have to confess I stole the division routine for my forth from Brad's CamelForth: [https://github.com/hoytech/tiforth/blob/master/forth.z80#L50...](https://github.com/hoytech/tiforth/blob/master/forth.z80#L501-L552)

Quickly looking it over I notice I used m4 as the macro-expander (haha I've since grown out of that).

</comment><comment><USER3> Worth noting is that this is written by a 17-year old

[https://old.reddit.com/r/Forth/comments/a3ipn6/im_17_and_i_c...](https://old.reddit.com/r/Forth/comments/a3ipn6/im_17_and_i_created_a_forth_interpreter_and/)

<comment><USER4> Nice! Writing a Forth in 8086 assembly was how I got into programming as a teenager too (my Dad had been into Forth as a hobby for a long time). It was a great way to start -- a Forth compiler/system is relatively simple to build yourself from the ground up. [https://github.com/benhoyt/third](https://github.com/benhoyt/third)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't really know forth, but it seems like people who learn it _really_ like it; can someone give me a high-level explanation to while it's easier to write Forth instead of C for low-level programming?

<comment><USER6> In addition to other comments, as I understand, bootstrapped Forth and similar languages usually compile down to code that is not optimal speed-wise, but a lot more compact that usual, because it's basically all CALL instructions (i.e. every word definition defines a function, and every use of the word inside the definition is a call to the corresponding function). This can be a desirable trade-off when you're dealing with a platform that has, say, 8 kilobytes of RAM to work with for all your code.

<comment><USER3> > _(i.e. every word definition defines a function, and every use of the word > inside the definition is a call to the corresponding function)_

Yeah, which supposedly brings one of the big downsides of Forth, which is that one easily ends up with a program that has been refactored _too aggressively_ into smaller words.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is super cool- Forth seems like a perfect fit for the platform.

<comment><USER8> Yeah... RPN et al... :)

<comment><USER9> Though famously (I believe) it was HP calculators that were known for reverse- Polish notation.

<comment><USER10> That's the joke, I imagine.

RPN is Forth-like in that they're both stack based. Their 28/48/49/50G line shipped with RPL(Reverse Polish Lisp) which was heavily inspired by both Forth and Lisp. Very weird language but I always enjoyed programming those calculators.

The ancient HP41 and HP71 did have Forth interpreter ROMs available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can someone clear up how to refer to Forth? I've heard "a Forth", "your Forth", and just "Forth", and the title says "Forth-Based.

My best guess is it's "a Forth" because you're implementing a new language yourself, in the style of, but distinct from, the original Forth programming language. Is this correct?

<comment><USER3> With Forth there are a handful of core words you really need to get things going, some ubiquitous but not mandatory convenience ones, and then it's up to what best fits the platform. There is no such thing as "the" Forth.

Isn't Lisp just the same?

The TI-84+ series is such a specific technological niche that it makes sense to write a Forth customized for it platform, which the author of this OS did earlier[0]. This repo is an OS though, so "Forth-based" means the OS is built on a Forth platform but with enough extra features that it is more than just a Forth language at this point.

Also, arguably, the part where it is compiled through Scheme might make the purists say it's not a true Forth (which tend to be self-hosting).

[0] [https://github.com/siraben/ti84-forth](https://github.com/siraben/ti84-forth)

<comment><USER12> > There is no such thing as "the" Forth.

> Isn't Lisp just the same?

Not really.

Most Common Lisp folks have hijacked the word "Lisp" to mean Common Lisp.

Then you have Lisp-1 and Lisp-2 definitions, so when you say "a Lisp" people will wonder which you fall into, and it'll be one of the first asked questions.

Depending on your audience, they may have a very fixed idea what "Lisp" means, and it may be a very detailed concept.

Forths don't tend to suffer from those problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wouldn't it be easier to just get a HP calculator to begin with ?

<comment><USER14> You would not learn nearly as much from that. This is analogous to '17 year old builds car' and then going 'wouldn't it be easier to just buy a Toyota?'. Sure it would be easier, but this was never about ease.</comment></comment>


Better Google Logo - <AUTHOR> http://dribbble.com/shots/808880-Google-revisited?page=2#comment-2283882

<comment><USER2> How so?

It's trite, overly-simplistic and limits Google's scope to that of mere search.

Looks like it's been set in Gill or Johnson too, which tends to imply British origins, which Google.. er.. very much isn't.

<comment><AUTHOR> geez

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hmm, this has an interesting effect on me. I can't really point to anything I don't like about it. But it's really unsettling.

I think it's an analog to the uncanny valley effect. It's too close to something familiar to me (Google's actual logo) that it's slightly off- putting.

But trying to ignore that, I think it's alright, though agreed it's appealing to the flat fad.

</comment><comment><USER4> Gqogle? The first O makes it look too much like a Q. Not really going to fly.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm tired of seeing everything flat, specially in Microsoft (and most going along the same way)</comment>


Ask HN: Game Engines as Movie Renderers in 2016 - <AUTHOR> Hey, everyone!
I've been (re)-investigating the question of using realtime renderers to create animated movies in 2016, given the existence of fast GPU conventional rendering techniques.
I know we've got some serious experts here in this field, so I'd be really interested in thoughts and comments.
My initial tests and experiments are written up over at
http://www.strangecompany.org/development-notes-unreal-engine-as-a-movie-renderer/
Very interested to hear if anyone has suggestions of other pipelines, other engines to try, or ways to solve the problems I found! <comment><USER2> Clickable: [http://www.strangecompany.org/development-notes-unreal- engin...](http://www.strangecompany.org/development-notes-unreal-engine-as-a- movie-renderer/)</comment>


Ask HN: Please review my webapp: Tweeght.com - <AUTHOR> http://tweeght.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN,

I launched <http://tweeght.com> a few days ago. It's a Twitter based application to share your thoughtful and insightful tweets with #tweeght tag. Other users can Vote up, Retweet or Reply to your tweets.

The idea was born out of simple necessity - to share my thoughts, and follow thoughts from other interesting people on the Twitter. But due to other noise available on the Twitter, these thoughtful tweets were getting buried, and were hard to discover. So I created Tweeght in one week. Instead of following such tweets from interesting people in real time, I can just read interesting Tweets voted up by others.

So please review the application and let me know your all kinds of inputs.

\- Do you find it useful?

\- How was the usability, design and performance?

\- Do you have suggestions, ideas to take it to next level?

Also, if you like this app, then I'll really appreciate if you could promote it amongst your Twitter followers.

Thanks a ton in advance for your inputs,

\- Aditya

<comment><USER2> Can't help it but my first impression was something between an echo chamber around the echo chamber and an interactive fortune cookie collection.

Wouldn't it make more sense to vote on whole discussions instead of individual tweets?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Couple of points:

1) I understand the use case, but asking people to trust you with their twitter credentials is bad news bears. Isn't some combination of OpenID/OAuth supposed to fix this (once twitter gets around to it, or whatever)?

2) I think the intersection of digg with twitter is interesting (don't know if it is novel), and using a tweet tag is a clean way to do it.

3) Your design is pretty clean, don't know if I like the color scheme or name though.

4) Is "thoughtful tweet" an oxymoron? Is there a good use case for high SnR microblogging?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. I completely understand the issue with Twitter account credentials. That's why I kept it with minimal requirement - provide it only when you want to Post, Retweet or Reply. When I say we don't store your credentials, I do mean it. That's why I ask it every time it is needed. But as you said, once Twitter fixes it using OAuth or so, definitely I'll support it.

3\. My idea was to keep the domain name short and find the one which is available :). So its' mix of Tweet + Thought = Tweeght.

4\. I've seen many people just post their insights, interesting observations, inspiring quotes, etc. So is the idea :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would make the last point number 1 on your site. Before I care about how to sign up, I want to know what on earth its for. Once I waded through all the different ways of interacting with tweeght (which I'd never do in a real site, but I did here), and found out what the idea was, I thought it was really cool. The voting is whats important in my mind, since you can already retweet and quote people with vanilla twitter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the input. I'll review it and see how effective it looks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1) I might find it more useful if it was limited to tweets from the people I follow or where the votes were from people I follow. I know that is much more difficult data and that it requires much greater adoption to be viable. But I think that would make it useful for me. (you could also use favorites as votes if you can get the data).

2) The design and performance seemed fine. The icons seem less harsh on twitter.com because the row height is closer to the icon size. Also, maybe only display the instructions the first time I visit the page. Go from Popular to Recent and back to Popular. The instructions get in your way.

3) I guess I rolled this one into the first answer.

Now, it sounds like I may want different things from twitter than your target market since for me it is more about ambient relationships than insightful commentary.

Congrats on your launch!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your inputs.

1\. For this suggestion, I'll need your Twitter login details. Who you are on Twitter. But right now there is negative mindset about giving Twitter account details. So I started with minimal requirements on user side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pretty neat idea.

I'm amazed at the variety of different apps that have been popping out around such a simple concept. Kind of reinforces the concept of Twitter as more of a protocol than an actual tool.

What kind of mining are you doing on twitter? Public timeline? Firehose? Can you make the original data available? There were news of some data being made available some time ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=406664> but it quickly got taken off line.

Any body else has any data they can provide privately (or otherwise)?

</comment><comment><USER7> I like the idea, but I don't think you need the big explanation box at the top. You built a very intuitive site.

The only thing that needs an explanation is how to post. So I suggest having a button that says "post" and when it's pressed, show the different methods.

</comment><comment><USER8> i like the layout and design, esp the color scheme, you managed to pull off the brown.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! appreciate it. Brown represents classic theme. It doesn't represent modern outlook. So wanted to have brown theme for quotes/thoughts related site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why do people use mispellings for their domain names? It's not a good idea.

<comment><USER10> In this case, I actually find the baroque "misspelling" charming. It's like Ben Franklin is spelling the word "tweet." The overwrought spelling fits the tone of the site: a little more weight is expected here than in the usual Twitter message.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't understand the point of the app, is it just a place to vote on insightful tweets? Your app needs to tell me somewhere prominent why I should use it and what benefit I will get from using it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Lot of people share very insightful, thoughtful and inspirational tweets. Unless we are on Twitter for 24x7 it's impossible to follow such great tweets in real time. The search.twitter.com is good for people who can afford real time monitoring of tweets.

But for the rest of us, it's good to check good tweets voted by other users just few times in a day. That's the purpose of Tweeght - to learn from these insightful tweets. Hope it is clear now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yo dawg, I heard you liked Twitter....

=\</comment>


Show HN: CoinTouch now finds friends of friends that trade all major altcoins - <AUTHOR> https://www.cointouch.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my site, developed in Scala/Play/Neo4J/Mongo/Nginx.

After much frustration with exchanges I built [https://www.cointouch.com/](https://www.cointouch.com/) to find friends of friends that want to trade cryptocurrency.

CoinTouch shows offers to buy and sell within your extended social network. Prices are pegged to market rates, at your chosen spread, and thus automatically update every minute. There are no fees or delays, as CoinTouch transactions are truly peer-to-peer.

CoinTouch can price in all major world currencies and altcoins.

Currently supports Facebook login - Google and LinkedIn coming soon.</comment>


Facebook Net Income dropped 49% on the first semester of 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2019/Facebook-Reports-Second-Quarter-2019-Results/default.aspx <comment><USER2> This seems solely because of the recent fines: "Includes an additional $2.0 billion legal expense related to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) settlement and a $1.1 billion income tax expense due to the developments in Altera Corp. v. Commissioner, as discussed below. As the FTC expense is not expected to be tax-deductible, it had no effect on our provision for income taxes. Excluding these expenses, our operating margin would have been 12 percentage points higher, our effective tax rate would have been 30 percentage points lower and our diluted EPS would have been $1.08 higher."

<comment><USER3> Why is the legal expense $ 2.0 B? Is that only including lawyer fees and not the $ 5 B from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20515235](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20515235) ?

<comment><USER4> They already expensed $3 B last quarter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Includes an additional $2.0 billion legal expense related to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) settlement and a $1.1 billion income tax expense due to the developments in Altera Corp. v. Commissioner, as discussed below. As the FTC expense is not expected to be tax-deductible, it had no effect on our provision for income taxes. Excluding these expenses, our operating margin would have been 12 percentage points higher, our effective tax rate would have been 30 percentage points lower and our diluted EPS would have been $1.08 higher."

This accounts for more than the difference YoY. In other words, without these, net income would have actually grown

</comment><comment><USER6> This title is very editorializing, and ignores the fact that outside of legal expenses as others have pointed out, net income is actually up. In other words, on core business metrics, they are better year-over-year.

</comment><comment><USER7> Increase in costs & expenses by $5 billion,while revenue from advertising is up by $3.6 Billions... My only question is where did those $5 billion gone to??

<comment><USER3> Maybe here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20515235](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20515235) ?

<comment><USER7> I haven't been FB user for years,so don't follow news related to them,looks like the fine explains the numbers pretty well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mostly due to their 2bil legal fees for their settlement with the FTC and Altera Corp. v. Commissioner. Actual revenue is up across the board.</comment>


Principles of Distributed Computing (lecture collection) - <AUTHOR> http://disco.ethz.ch/lectures/podc_allstars/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a lecture collection created by Roger Wattenhofer of ETH Zurich and Microsoft Research.

It is a teaching of a lot of the theory shared via PODC ( <http://www.podc.org/> ) in recent years.

As lectures notes it's aimed at being taught in 2 hour blocks, but if you've found yourself out of touch with distributed computing then as Roger says in his email asking for help from other members of PODC:

"I sometimes call the course the "Pearls of Distributed Computing", as I believe that teaching the nicest algorithms and techniques is better than teaching a complete picture of the most important results."

<comment><USER2> One of my favorite lectures when I was still studying at the ETH.</comment></comment>


We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI <comment><USER2> Without sounding pedantic, I think it's fair to say that the mass media put out a LOT of material into the public domain merely to acquire the largest market share of attention.

It is very rare that I read a story in a newspaper or hear one on television that isn't some form of salacious gossip or eye catching spectacle.

Though I haven't read most of it, Chris Hedges' book: Empire of Illusion, speaks to this with much greater acuity than I can.

I wish we could all just take a breath of fresh air (whoops, there is an allusion to another, though admittedly fairly neutral, piece of media) and remember that we are often much better off without the media dictating what we think should be important. I fear that the fractionism that George Washington cautioned us against in his farewell address is driving most of what we consume from the mass media.

I hesitate even to post this for fear of sounding too alarmist, and for the possible repercussions on myself from the powers that be in their never ending fight to be 'right', but I do think that this is a subject that is important enough to stand up and say "enough is enough". I know I sound paranoid, but as we become ever more connected, it is not as far fetched as it might seem that such things transpire. It is imperative that the power remain in the purview of the public and not those with access to what information money can buy, or cookies can acquire.

<comment><USER3> > I read a story in a newspaper or hear one on television that isn't some form > of salacious gossip or eye catching spectacle.

I am not American and can't comment on all of the stations but I know PBS has neither of those. Likewise similar public broadcasters do tend to be more serious and moderate in their reporting: BBC (UK), Deutsche Welle (Germany), ABC/SBS (Australia) etc

Unfortunately in a competitive media landscape you need viewers. And humans are just wired to respond to gossip and spectacles.

<comment><USER4> > And humans are just wired to respond to gossip and spectacles.

A lot of the more worrying things happen as a result of our evolutionary background I think. We evolved to trust one another ("Was there really a lion over there, Bob?"), and that trust can easily be manipulated if you leave your ethics/morals at the door.

I think there should be laws/regulations against anything that manipulates people based on our evolutionary "upbringing".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think AI signed our death warrant, it just made for better plausible deniability. I think being able to measure effectiveness fairly concretely even on the micro level is what did it.

What if you couldn't run JavaScript code on a webpage, track every movement and send it to a server? What if you couldn't even tell if someone viewed your webpage? Would AI seem so scary then?

We're giving away too much for too little in return. Better ad tracking isn't worth losing almost all of our privacy on the most important and influential information platform of our time.

<comment><USER6> I remember a story in Wired back in the 99-00 time frame about two guys that were diamond retailers in Canada. They were enticed by venture capitalists to move to California to dotcom their business.

After a year or so they shut it down and went back to Canada to return to the business they'd built over generations. I forget all the details but there is one detail I remember. They owners were disenchanted with the whole affair and their take was the internet was nothing more than a massive direct marketing platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you want to stop ad-related problems, change the incentives. Consider using AdNauseam ([https://adnauseam.io/](https://adnauseam.io/)), which not only hides ads like a traditional adblocker, but also clicks them for you. If enough people use it, it lowers the value of an ad click, and thus lowers the incentive to optimize for them.

</comment><comment><USER8> The title reminded me of a quote from an early Facebook employee [0] :

> The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click > ads [1]

There's the transcript of the video here btw: [https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...](https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads/transcript)

[0]: [https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/)

[1]: The quote itself is a reference to the first line of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howl)

> I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,

<comment><USER9> I remember thinking the same thing in gradschool. There was a lab partnered with Microsoft, and all their research was focused on ranking search results. That's it. I felt so bad for the grad students there, who had big dreams about changing the world, but instead were optimizing ways to get people to click search results.

<comment><USER10> Ranking search results is not the same as clicking ads - it's about organizing information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Who is "we"?

Because this is what really matters, what makes a difference: are you deliberately creating what makes people click to get money, without any consideration of consequences, or are you creating something beneficial for others - they find it beneficial and that's the reason they click? Unfortunately, most content creators, especially on YT, belong to the first category.

<comment><USER12> It's comical how hn always thinks they're above the lowly YouTube famous content. That type of content exists because people like it. When Jon doe gets off his 12 hour shift at the factory he's not interest in hn style content, he wants some mindless slapstick comedy.

<comment><USER13> When I'm done with a 10 hour day working on infrastructure and code, I have no interest in HN style content. I want mindless slapstick comedy, mostly because I have no mind left after 10 hours in the office.

<comment><USER14> sad truth...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My hope if we will adapt and improve own heuristics and filers to get better at information processing. It used to be if you saw someone credible looking on TV tell you something, you mostly filed it away as 'true'. We are learning that 'truth' isn't really a thing you are told. Someone can tell you something but they have motives and even with the best of intentions, they're conveying one perspective or approximation of a complex and chaotic reality. We learn to be suspicious of entertainment masquerading as news or to catch ourselves when we begin slipping into a pattern of mindless consumption. In some respects this is a good thing - we're becoming more cognizant and critical of our reality.

<comment><USER16> We need a better way to automate that filtering. I'm about as good as one can get at epistemological filtering and it consumes way too much of my mental effort. I'd like to just ignore the news and concentrate on artistic activities but that's irresponsible at this juncture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's even better: we're building massive surveillance so a few amoral people can pay poor people to pretend to be rich people clicking on ads. When that bubble implodes, the holders of the surveillance data will find worse ways to make money from it.

<comment><USER18> Can you elaborate? Are you referring to "advertising fraud", where these amoral people host ads and hire poor people to click them, getting a penny from the advertiser each time? And the poor people are incentivized to pretend to be rich people because ad impressions on a rich person's eyes are more valuable?

Or are you saying that the advertising networks themselves train their users to act like rich people because an ad network with rich people is more valuable to advertisers (although in this case, the networks aren't _paying_ the poor people)?

<comment><USER17> The former: surveillance companies don't have much incentive to stamp out click-farms, even when they don't run them themselves. See e.g. [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/530961/the-hidden- world-o...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/530961/the-hidden-world-of- facebook-like-farms/)

<comment><USER18> Certainly this is a waste of human potential. I can see that one could argue that the platforms may be acting unethically by not stomping these like farms out, or by misleading advertisers by including these unauthentic ad impressions in their reports, but how are the rich people operating these like farms acting _immorally_?

Side note: I'm not convinced that the people operating the like farms _are_ wealthy by western standards. Having at one point been involved in the business side of paid captcha solving, this type of business attracts a lot of entrepreneurs with little experience who just want to make a quick buck.

<comment><USER17> > Side note: I'm not convinced that the people operating the like farms are > wealthy by western standards.

I completely agree -- click farming is a way for second-world people to make a living using third-world labor. In the short term, this benefits the surveillance companies at the expense of their clients. In the medium to long term, it probably costs their investors and helps inflate another tech bubble. Seriously shady folks (think Experian, but completely unregulated, at best) will buy the data when it bursts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is the whole "Facebook records what you type, even if you don't hit post" real, or just an urban legend?

I've seen Facebook offer me to save a draft of the wall post so I can continue in case I switch devices, in that case of course it would store my draft server-side; but I feel like that reiterated claim is an urban legend.

<comment><USER20> Yep, they even released a study based on the data they collected: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15831574](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15831574)

</comment></comment><comment> cup-of-tea Yeah we told you this would happen 15 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER21> Related: [http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2017/11/...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2017/11/those_disturbing_youtube_videos_for_kids_are_a_symptom_of_tech_s_scale_problem.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> The following is a conversation between Sam Harris and Zeynep Tufekci, where they further explore the topic: [https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/persuasion-and- contro...](https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/persuasion-and-control)

</comment><comment><USER23> utopians building dystopia? more empty alarmist sedation.

bad ideas should be pushed to the front, so they can be viewed and scrutinized by all.

</comment><comment><USER24> If Facebook gave a damn about any of this, they would stop selling ads and start charging users for their services. Simple as that. Your move Zuck.

<comment><USER25> Facebook is a publicly traded company, with a duty to its shareholders to m̶a̶x̶i̶m̶i̶z̶e̶ ̶i̶t̶s̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶f̶i̶t̶s̶serve their best interests. If Zuck decided to he probably would get thrown out.

<comment><USER26> He can't be thrown out. Facebook issues special classes of share so that Zuckerberg can never lose control of the company.

[https://www.economist.com/news/business/21729813-multiple- cl...](https://www.economist.com/news/business/21729813-multiple-class-share- structures-are-controversial-are-probably-here-stay-facebook-and)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Essentially the moment our society had food, housing and basic necessities guaranteed pretty much by default. The optimal way for people to make money is advertising. If we can automate it so that we increase clicks (a measure for demand) even artificially then of course that is what will be done until we discover that has no long term use.

<comment><USER28> If food and housing were guaranteed, there would be no homelessness and losing your job wouldn't be stressful. It's true that we can have more now but we still always have to worry about falling down to nothing again.

<comment><USER27> Let me clarify. I mean for all intents and purposes we don't have a vast majority of the population working in industries that would be essential for life and well being but rather producing goods which are not really needed but wanted and thus need to be marketed for people to want them.

Mea culpa for a lack of clarity.</comment></comment></comment>


The Journey to Hijacking a Country's TLD – The Hidden Risks of Domain Extensions - <AUTHOR> https://thehackerblog.com/the-journey-to-hijacking-a-countrys-tld-the-hidden-risks-of-domain-extensions/index.html <comment><USER2> And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why DNSSEC is a really terrible idea... That's what tptacek would've said, I guess.

But seriously, having such a weak security for something so fundamental as name server scares me out.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure this is an indictment for DNSSEC; if DNSSEC were widely deployed, it would actually address one aspect of this: you wouldn't be able to takeover a latent glue record, because you couldn't provide properly signed answers.

If you takeover email domains, and ask IANA to change the signing keys, or take over the servers and recover the signing secrets; DNSSEC wouldn't help, and might provide some air of legitimacy though. And, of course, then you could provide false keys for whatever subdomains you hijacked. On the other hand, if you control DNS, it's not hard to get a domain validated certificate, although some CAs will run your domain through a list of high value names before they will issue a fully automated cert.

In a world with domain validated certificates being very common, it doesn't seem like we gain much by declaring that TLD operators are untrustworthy, so we can't explicitly trust them to provide DNSSEC signatures and enable DANE, when we are implicitly trusting them to provide correct information when CAs do domain validation.

There's certainly an argument that we don't gain very much by knowing an untrustworthy entity has certified something, though.

<comment><USER2> Yep, this discussion about DNSSEC happens here from time to time usually with the same arguments.

Once Chrome even supported DANE certs for domains but deprecated it for I think performance reasons:

> Some years ago now, Chrome did an experiment where we would lookup a TXT > record that we knew existed when we knew the Internet connection was > working. At the time, some 4–5% of users couldn't lookup that record; we > assume because the network wasn't transparent to non-standard DNS > resource types. DANE records are going to be even more non-standard, are > going to be larger and browsers would have to fetch lots of them because > they'll need the DNSKEY/RRSIG chain up from the root. Even if DNSSEC record > lookup worked flawlessly for everyone, we probably still wouldn't > implement this aspect of DANE because each extra lookup is more latency > and another chance for packet loss to cause an expensive timeout and > retransmit.

Source: [https://www.imperialviolet.org/2015/01/17/notdane.html](https://www.imperialviolet.org/2015/01/17/notdane.html)

Is DANE currently used for anything? XMPP certs?

<comment><USER3> I don't think DANE is really in use; although there's some hints it may be usable with SMTP (postfix has support).

I'm not sure DANE is realistically usable anyway -- unless it was for a protocol which specified DANE only, you'd need to have a CA signed cert for interoperability with clients that didn't support it; in which case, you may as well just use that. I guess it makes sense for SMTP -- generally certificates are not validated when delivering mail, under the theory that encryption with an invalid cert is better than plaintext, and there's not a usable UI to let the sender pick what to do. In that case, DANE can work, but I kind of doubt there's much adoption still.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One huge question is: why are entire countries' TLDs being hosted on free DNS services?

<comment><USER5> Budget cuts? :)</comment></comment>


AWS API Gateway and Let's Encrypt SSL Certs - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/quote-unquote-serverless/aws-api-gateway-lets-encrypt-ssl-certs-b6841bf570a4 <comment><USER2> "once you have completed the verification process for a given sub-domain you do not need to go through the same process again to issue a new certificate"

Authz (the ACME terminology for a data structure recording that your account is validated for a particular FQDN) have finite lifetime, right now it's 90 days, long enough to get one default renewal but it is expected to shorten to seven days or less at some point.

So, you should still expect to re-do the DNS validation challenge a few times per year.</comment>


Man jailed over Facebook password refusal - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-45365464 <comment><USER2> Its important to remember that different countries have different customs, even if we share a language.

In the USA, people have the right against self-incrimination, aka the 5th Amendment ("Pleading the Fifth"). I'm not entirely sure if Britain affords the same right to their citizens.

Ideally, this kind of article would have some analysis and background for the American audience. Legally understanding the promises our governments make to us citizens is important.

Anyway, its clear that self-incrimination is an issue, otherwise this wouldn't be news at all. But I can't help but wonder that my ignorance of British law is making me misunderstand an issue, or otherwise make me biased. In particular, I know that British citizens have a completely different relationship with their Police force compared to US Citizens with our police force. (Ex: British police don't normally carry guns).

But I really don't know the full scope of cultural or legal differences that are needed to even understand this short article.

<comment><USER3> This is a bizarre comment, although certainly familiar. A British publication writing about a crime in England, and you're faulting it for not offering context comparing it to the American situation. As an Australian, should I expect the international press to compare every issue to my own nation's laws? Of course not. And yet the entitlement that all of the internet should cater to the American audience is alarmingly popular.

<comment><USER2> I'm not "faulting" it. I'm simply commenting on my own ignorance. Especially since other directions in this thread don't seem to offer a British perspective, or an explanation.

I understand that things are different over the pond. But that's about all I really understand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's bad enough that people have border security, job applications, etc. all depend on access to social media accounts. Yet _fake_ accounts are clearly a thing (I've seen two versions of "friends" on Facebook and LinkedIn), and some people have never created accounts on even popular services. What do you do when a guard is screaming at you to unlock an account that isn't even you? And if you lie and say you don't have a Facebook account, I bet they aren't aware of the possibility of fake accounts and simply assume it's impossible (so what, you miss your flight if you never even had an account, because some scammer made one for you?).

<comment><USER5> Fake accounts are clearly a thing, you are right, so it seems silly to then assume that the police and justice systems wouldn't be aware of them or assume they were impossible. What do you do in any other scenario where you've apprehended wrongly or are wrongly suspected?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> kind of silly that the court isn't just asking facebook

<comment><USER7> ...i think the approach is that since he refused to provide a passwd and stymied the investigation, there is now a real basis in law to hold and prosecute him...i.e. put him in jail, with a bunch of others that dont like such ilk...a point of leverage i would think..

<comment><USER6> It's a weird situation because if a facebook engineer reset his password to something else, he'd never be able to get out of jail? Seems odd to make a criminal court order based on a commercial authentication scheme.

<comment><USER5> If he forgets the password or it gets magically reset somehow and he legitimately no longer has access to the account (a stretch....password resets are a thing for this reason), then perhaps he should still serve his time anyway as the crime has already been committed. If it was unrecoverable, then of course he'd still be able to get out. It even says in the article he was sentenced to 14 months, not until he gave up the password.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


China mall introduces 'husband storage' pods for shopping wives - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-40609115 <comment><USER2> It's a nicer alternative to the "idiot chair" that's usually in shops.

With the comment about why come out at all: some shopping we'd do together, others parts not. I am not interested in (insert item here) and my wife is not interested in a bored husband for example. I'd rather spend the rest of the day with her, do the shared shopping and then head off for a while and do something I'm more interested in and let her enjoy the part she likes.

We don't have to be attached at the hip or in different towns, there's a happy medium.

<comment><USER3> Every time I enter a clothing shop and see chairs, I thank the heroes of that establishment who thought about bored boyfriends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The only sane thing to do is to find the chair that is always close to the dressing room, sit down and read HN, and whenever she exists the dressing room I put down the phone and make a remark that signals I'm deeply interested, then I give her some advice. Then repeat. Pro tip: Remember to bring a charger or extra batteries.

<comment><USER5> Does she really like such hypocrisy?

<comment><USER6> Giving advice signals he's genuinely engaged. When I take a friend shopping for clothes, you just want someone to give you a second opinion, gender- regardless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why are husbands and men often framed as some degenerated chumps in media (just check the cover pic)? Aren't there any smart guys who just stay home or head to the gym while the wife is shopping? Or some who go along and enjoy the time with their wife/family?

<comment><USER8> For political reasons it must always be portrayed that way. See all TV sitcoms since roughly the 80s, etc.

Two decades of marriage indicates that much like a root canal, thirty minutes of selecting a new shirt for the big party seems like it takes hours of waiting but its really a very small slice of an otherwise enjoyable afternoon.

Due to aspects of contemporary style and higher physical variation in the female form, if we shop together to get new date night outfits or whatever, the vast majority of the time will be spent on her outfit. It drives my wife nuts that I can select a shirt or pants in about five minutes, and they actually fit me and my butt doesn't look fat or whatever it is she's selecting for.

I am so old I remember when enclosed legacy shopping malls had a variety of stores, not just 95% womens clothing stores, I can remember going to book stores and believe it or not, music and software stores when we were newlyweds. Perhaps much as vinyl makes music stores cool again, people will start distributing steam keys on floppy disks again, it could be very hip and cool with the youngsters. Also pre-Amazon, department stores were more interesting to shop at, if she was going to spend three hours trying on jeans I could buy a blender from housewares and I probably needed more AA batteries or dish washing soap or who knows, but now a days if I want a blender I comparison shop on the phone and its delivered tomorrow for cheaper than department store price, also I probably bought it when I thought of it weeks ago, not weeks later when I was bored shopping with my wife. I think of stuff that comes from Amazon boxes today, in the old days I shopped manually while my wife was trying to find a bra that fits or something for hours. Sears is a dead company now, but I spent a lot of time and money in my youth in its hardware store component, for example. To a large extent, "I'm bored" as a male shopper is a very "era of internet shopping" phenomena.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Local coffee shop has a "Free Husband Creche -- just buy drinks" sign. It's located in the front half of a pub, and they have decent wifi. I'm good.

</comment><comment><USER10> The simple answer to this problem that seems to work for us (married 26 years) is to not go shopping together unless its to look at stuff we are both interested in. Which is pretty rare....

</comment><comment><USER11> > Currently, the service is free, but staff told the newspaper that in future > months, users will be able to ...

Changelog v0.2: Now with mandatory payment!

<comment><USER12> The phrasing _users will be able to_ sure was an interesting touch. Don't they mean _users will be required to_?

<comment><USER11> I'm confused, you're not excited by the forthcoming payment feature?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why are these women bringing their husbands/boyfriends along at all?

<comment><USER14> Mobile Storage Facility Usage

<comment><USER15> More like Automatic Mobile Payment System, it is better then WePay or Apple Pay or Cash! It is all automatic!

Seriously this is part of the cultural norm in certain part of SE Asia. And leaving the your wife to do the ( her ) shopping by herself is viewed as inconsiderate and to some degree rude.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if they were inspired by Jerryboree from Rick and Morty.

<comment><USER17> Or Nathan for You? Pretty much the exact same thing. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi-3eRMpOC4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi-3eRMpOC4)

<comment><USER18> That was _insanely_ painful to watch, thank you.

<comment><USER17> Pretty much all of his stuff is amazing. He did Dumb Starbucks awhile back if you're familiar. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo_deCOd1HU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo_deCOd1HU)

One of my favorites is Souvenir Shop: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBzW1xUjwew](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBzW1xUjwew)

<comment><USER19> x10 for souvenir shop. thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> heh, I've always wondered why arcade machines aren't peppered all over shopping malls.

There are so many bored husbands/boyfriends who could use them.

<comment><USER21> Because malls don't want to give broke teenagers a place to hang out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A workable solution for kids would _really_ be something. It's much harder to get anything done with bored kids than with a bored adult.

Maybe the bored adults can take care of the kids while the rest shop. ;)

<comment><USER23> Ikea understood this a long time ago: Småland

<comment><USER24> Indeed. The local IKEA understand this, but there is a time limit (3 hours, I think) which means it isn't very useful unless you need just to go in and grab a few items - if you need new furniture for a room, that will typically take longer.

On the other hand if you offer child care for 8+ hours, people will use it as a cheaper alternative to babysitting, and if you charge for it, most likely fewer people are going to use it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I usually end up talking about supply chains and counterfeiting and such with staff when I go to shops with people, or their inventory management systems, turn rates, numbers of SKUs, etc., assuming I don't care about the product. The other fun game is "why is arbitrary product A worth more than arbitrary product B". This only really works in higher end stores; wouldn't work in a Walmart, but there I'm busy scouring the ammo shelves for deals.

</comment><comment><USER26> Maybe as a solution to this?

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2520753/Chinese- boyf...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2520753/Chinese-boyfriend- jumped-death-girlfriend-insisted-going-clothes-shop.html)

</comment><comment><USER27> In early 2000s a mall in Hamburg did a similar thing, calling it a Männergarten, though theirs had arts and crafts:

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

</comment><comment><USER28> My mom sold men's clothing at a department store, my dad would never go a department store or the mall, I think the crowds spooked him out.

I married a woman who likes woman's clothing stores less than I do.

</comment><comment><USER29> I can't figure out if this is something I'd use or feel that it's insanely patronizing. I suppose the market will tell which is which.

<comment><USER30> Embrace the power of "and."

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> American malls would need a bigger box. Probably three times that size at least.

</comment><comment><USER32> Of course. Keep the guy saying _" Honey, you don't need that! it's too expensive and you already have 6 at home!"_ willingly confined and out of the way. Brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER33> Its nice to see retail outlets catering to the needs of men for a change.

</comment><comment><USER34> Casual sexism is casual.

EDIT: Mayby I should clarify. Assuming that such a feature is only for "bored boyfriends" is casually sexist. And it is also homosexual erasure, come to think of it.

<comment><USER2> I shouldn't rise to this, but it's a relaxed Sunday and I have some time to waste, and think it's important to look at what others say and think about how they may have meant it.

They did not assume it was only for bored boyfriends. They thanked the person who thought _about_ bored boyfriends. That means the chairs are at least _partly_ for bored boyfriends but not _exclusively_ for bored boyfriends. The person replying, if a boyfriend, would have a convoluted thought process if it was 'I'm glad the person who designed the space thought about other people than me that I can also obviously make use of' rather than 'I'm glad the people who designed the space thought about me' when seeing something that benefits them directly.

> homosexual erasure

I feel your assumption that a bored boyfriend being considered is homosexual erasure ignores the boyfriends of other men. Or perhaps you meant something more specific but didn't specify? Perhaps you'd like myself and others to check before jumping to a conclusion about your motives rather than calling you a homophobe? Why not extend us the same courtesy.

<comment><USER34> The comment I replied to could easily have avoided any comment by me by not referencing "boyfriends" as such, but instead "Significant Others" or some such more inclusive term.

I also think you read too much exactness into the original comment; it was casually written, and used the term "boyfriends" as a term for those who come into a store, not to shop themselves, but in the company of someone else who will. I feel that this is casually making unnecessary assumptions, and making some people feel like they are not "normal", such as women who are not interested in clothes.

One must be careful when speaking and writing as to not make people with less- than-majority traits feel unwanted or excluded. Using gendered language where it is not strictly necessary is one such thing which should be avoided.

<comment><USER35> Can't speak for women, but I don't feel particularly "erased". Or normal. On whose behalf, precisely, do you imagine yourself usefully intervening in this way?

<comment><USER34> Anyone not covered by the term "boyfriend" is being implicitly "erased" by the original comment's wording. Some of those people, like maybe a man-woman pair who are platonic friends where the man is not strictly a "boyfriend", are less important to assert their rights for, since their existence is being less denied by the rest of society. Others, like maybe a woman-woman lesbian couple, is more important.

<comment><USER36> Your life must be utter torture viewing every human interaction through the lens of supposed 'gender equality'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I CALL SEXISM!!!!!!

But then again, I like it so what does that make me? O.o

<comment><USER38> As long as wives are also allowed to use the pods while husbands go shopping, I don't think it's sexist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Why not take a laptop to the mall and work where you are? Ever since i learned realizing any dream i have by coding. boredom has been absent from my life.

PS: Objectifying Guys as something to be stored, is okay. And we demand guy- stuff-quotas in every female clothing store.

<comment><USER40> Same here. The only things is not all shopping malls have great coffee shops. I'd happily pay some fee by the hour to have a nice environment for coding and coffee.</comment></comment>