Shut Out at Home, Americans Seek Opportunity in China - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/business/economy/11expats.html <comment><USER2> Look, we can get one thing clear here: "Communist China" is not some dark gulag where people are beaten while walking down the street for having vaguely pro-democracy thoughts or something.

Indeed, it's increasingly not accurate to call China a communist state any more. Communism is about collectivism, planned economic policies, and egalitarianism. China began abandoning these policies nearly immediately after the death of Chairman Mao in 1976. Granted, there are still warehouses full of grain and pork, and only the government can officially "own" land, but the reality at street level is that it's a pretty thriving capitalist state with 100 year leases on land, increasing dismantling of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and a vibrant mercantilism I've not seen anywhere else in the world.

What China is, though, is an autocratic state with a single party central government that maintains tight control over the press. Look closer, however, and it exercises the tight control over a few key topics with which most Westerners are familiar (and porn - porn is bad). If you are a reporter, then these controls can be frustrating, if not downright aggravating, but otherwise, life here is pretty relaxed and open.

The reality on the street? The locals engage in vibrant discussions and arguments about Taiwan, Tibet, or whatever online on a daily basis. Sometimes they use encoded keywords to keep the noise level down, but they talk about it all the time. What the government really cares about is people organising - that is verboten. I've tried to avoid talking about all these "sensitive" subjects in my years here in China (largely because politics stresses me out), and I am constantly approached by locals who want talk about it and give me their opinions.

The Great Firewall isn't nearly as big of a deal as you'd think either. No Twitter? Facebook? Livejournal? Guess what? The locals weren't using it anyway (not in appreciable numbers). They were (are) using local Chinese equivalents, which are far better at catering to their needs and desires. I don't know a single foreigner who hasn't found a way around the firewall to use Twitter on a daily basis either.

So, to summarize: China is an autocratic state, it has some definite problems with various values and things that many Westerners take for granted as important, but to just sit on the sidelines saying "Boo, China" isn't going to change a thing. China will gradually change by engaging with them and by working to move forward with them. Indeed, by not coming here to visit and or spend a bit of time, you're denying yourself experiencing one of the more vibrant and fascinating places on earth.

<comment><USER3> No need to tell the head of Rio Tinto in China about dark gulags. He's been under arrest without charge for several weeks now for allegedly stealing "state secrets" that allowed Rio Tinto to negotiate good prices for iron ore from China's steel mills.

Yesterday the Chinese authorities said Rio's "spying" had cost the country $102 billion over 6 years. Only problem with that story is that Rio's total _worldwide_ iron ore revenues for the last 6 years was $40.75 billion. More here: [http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/The- real-...](http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/The-real-Rio- story-pd20090810-USBZ8?OpenDocument&src=sph)

So by all means do business in China - just don't be too successful. Because your competitive negotiation with a state run business might just turn into spying on "state secrets". The Chinese government has some growing up to do.

<comment><USER4> Also no need to tell the head of Rio Tinto about bribery, corruption, theft of state resources, perversion of justice and even murder - his company has been implicated in all these and more at numerous sites around the world. Their involvement in the Grasberg mine in Papua has been particularly egregious.

I don't have many good things to say about the Chinese govt, but Rio Tinto is an absolutely awful company and it would not surprise me if they had tried their dirty tricks one too many times and been caught trying to bribe or blackmail officials.

Let's wait until the facts come out in this case.

<comment><USER3> Not a big fan of Rio either, but does simply working for a bad company justify imprisonment of the local management without charge? The facts should come out before arrests are made, not after.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't justify it, of course, but it does set the scene, as in it's quite likely there's been bad behaviour of some type. If we're going to be drawing conclusions about China's intentions, it behooves us to consider all the relevant information.

These mega-corps always work within the letter of the law, but not the spirit. They can wreak horrendous damage, taking actions in obvious bad faith, and yet get off scot-free because they've legally dotted every "i". Well, it would not surprise me if some part of Officialdom there is really pissed off at Rio for something they've done, can't actually hang anything specific on them, so is just holding them without charge for a while to punish them. That is also within the letter of the law, but not the spirit.

China could be sending a message here - "you play dirty, we'll play dirty". Anyway, just a theory and probably not a good one, but I hope it demonstrates that Rio's unclean hands are relevant to any discussion of the matter.

Simply stating "be too successful in China and this is what happens!" is unlikely to be the whole story.

<comment><USER4> I'd like to follow this up with the information that Hu has now been formally charged:

[http://www.businessday.com.au/business/rio-spy-case-stern- hu...](http://www.businessday.com.au/business/rio-spy-case-stern-hu- officially-charged-20090812-ehc0.html)

As expected, the charges are commercial bribery and obtaining "commercial secrets of China's steel and iron industry through improper means" in violation of "the country's Criminal Law".

I am not trying to whitewash China here, but I doubt this case is all that unreasonable, and I for one am hardly less confident about business dealings in China because of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Unemployment in urban areas is 4.3 percent, according to government data._

Credulously reporting unemployment statistics from the US government is naive. Credulously reporting unemployment statistics from a Communist dictatorship is journalistic malpractice.

<comment><USER6> They said that it was government data. For anyone who knows anything about China, that's a tip-off. Credulous reporting would leave that tidbit out and treat the statistic as fact.

<comment><USER5> _For anyone who knows anything about China, that's a tip-off._ It appears to me that the writer does not know anything about China then, because they make a non-obvious positive claim and then back it with government statistics.

 _[T]he Chinese economy is more hospitable for both entrepreneurs and job seekers, with [government lie]. Unemployment in urban areas is [government lie]._

Absent the statistics, the "more hospitable" claim is the reporter pulling something totally out of their hindquarters to make the story work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been working in Hong Kong for almost 6 months, and there definitely seems to be opportunity here. There is a lot more optimism than I've been seeing in the states when I go back, and software is perceived as an area in which the skill levels that you can find among the local Hong Kong population are lower than you would expect from westerners because there is such an emphasis on finance here.

<comment><USER8> Is Hong Kong still an appreciably freer market than mainland China? China has always seemed like it has problems with political corruption, to the point where having influence over the right people in the party/govt. is an essential business skill. How is Hong Kong on that?

<comment><USER7> There might be certain areas of the economy where this is the case but I haven't seen anything like that since I've been here. I work for a startup financial firm and we have no "local" partners I'm aware of. The regulatory requirements are similar to operating a financial business in the US or UK. The legal system here is based on common law, I'm able to read and understand contracts as well as I can in the states, and I've personally met people who received legal training in the UK and practice in Hong Kong. Frankly, I think the market here is appreciably freer than that in the US given that the taxes are much lower and the infrastructure is on par.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "It's China's fault that I'm still here," he said. "It's just so cheap to start a business."

This is just an anecdote, but it really caught my attention and made me think about what the future may hold. That's a Harvard graduate who left the US and ended up starting a business in China.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is there a start-up scene in China?

I would think doing a web based company would be limiting if you have to deal with the government's internet policies.

<comment><USER11> most of Internet start-up here in China are, rip-off of existing sites and translate of interface and function.

And any user generated content is strictly forbidden by the government because eventually UGC will involve politics topics.

And corruption, you have to go through months apply process of a video site 'license', or blog site 'license' or news site 'license', and they are managed by different bureaucratic departments of the central government.

And big companies like QQ.com is likely to copy your idea and deploy it on their own QQ.com infrasture and overtake your start-up by one day.

So overall it's very hard to do start-ups in China, unless you have a very strong social background.

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry, but nearly every single one of these statements is simply incorrect.

1\. Chinese sites are all "[rip-offs] rip-off of existing sites and translate of interface and function"

When anybody comes up with a good idea, a dozen other people will try the same thing. Have you ever seen Freundfeed? How many blogging sites are there out there (livejournal, blogger, blogspot, wordpress)? Copying of your idea encourages competition and innovation.

Indeed, the reality is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what you said: western companies fail here in China because they come and translate the interface and functionality, and then expect the locals to flock to their site and use it in the same way westerners would. They bring in a team of western managers to hire some locals to do the translation, and then basically sit there waiting for the $$ to roll in.

The problem is, the locals use the Internet in a radically different way from Westerners. The locals are nearly all kids, spend hours and hours a day in front of the computer, and are lonely and bored. (single child policy). They don't want to "connect" with their friends and post daily updates of what they're doing / eating for breakfast. They want to meet new people and play and talk about crap.

So, companies like xiaonei, that take the basic Facebook formula, but then add in tonnes of gaming and fun ways to interact with other people will of course kick the foreign companies' collective derrières. Ebay failed because they don't understand how locals pay for things. Taobao came along with a better idea and won the market.

2\. "... any user generated content is strictly forbidden by the government ..."

China has a zillion BBSes (sorry, I don't have the exact number. It's huge). There are over 2 billion registered BBS users here in China - For only 300+ million internet users. People spend hours online with multiple accounts and personalities so that they can chat with their various girl- and boy- friends and take on different viewpoints in different places. (* note these are not old school dial-up BBSes but basically online community forum websites they just call BBSes).

People talk about politics all the time, either directly, or indirectly via codewords and the like. Avoid talking about organising large demonstrations and strikes, and you're likely to avoid the ire of any officials or censors.

Websites like Tudou.com, youku.com, and yupoo.com have massive massive massive amounts of content uploaded to them daily. Of course, lots of it is pirated TV and movies, but the locals are also constantly uploading the same kinda stuff you see on youtube and flickr. (Funny sidenote: the locals go to Herculean efforts to try and get around the ban on pr0n too. It turns out, they like it as much as anybody else in the world).

3\. Months to get a license.

You can get an ICP, which is the local internet content license, in a matter of days. One of the big restrictions is that you usually need a local to do this registration for you. However, the reality of the matter is that few (if any) foreign companies succeed without local partners and the like here anyway (foreigners -really- don't get the local market), so it's not that onerous. Worst case, find somebody with a local husband or wife and just get them to help you with the whole process.

4\. Companies copy your idea and overtake you.

What company in the US or Europe doesn't worry all the time that Google, Microsoft, or Apple isn't going to do the exact same thing? This is like saying "competition is bad". It's the cornerstone of what we're all doing here. And again, if your idea is good and you know what you're doing, you'll have a big edge over these guys. (There are one or two big examples to the contrary to what I've just said, but they're in court here in China and could very well go the way of the "little guy").

Every market in the world has its peculiarities, differences, and problems. China is no different. Look closer, spend some time really trying to understand the market, look at the numbers, and you'll find that this is a very fun place to do startups. Only 25% of the country is on the internet here right now. There are hundreds of millions of bored and lonely kids (and adults) who want to play and connect with others. The growth opportunities are staggering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This link should get you past the registration: [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/business/economy/11expats....](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/business/economy/11expats.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's the same link?!</comment></comment>


Rob Pike comments on Ryan Dahl's rant - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/115094562986465477143/posts/aEJE2vff4jS <comment><USER2> For people who have a hard time seeing the image, here's the text of the comment:

 _Rob Pike - It's a different kind of mess, and for different reasons, but the Unix/POSIX/Linux systems of today are messier, clumsier, and more complex than the systems the original Unix was designed to replace.

It started to go wrong when the BSD signal stuff went in (I complained at the time), then symlinks, sockets, X11 windowing, and so on, none of which were added with proper appreciation of the Unix model and its simplifications.

So let the whiners whine: you're right, and they don't know what they're missing. Unfortunately, I do, and I miss it terribly._

<comment><USER3> Click on the image. It should bring it up as a readable image.

<comment><USER4> Not if you're using a screenreader.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Of all the things he mentions for sure signals are the worst thing. To do such a simple thing of delivering a tiny bit of information to a process the implementation and semantics of signals is so bad that you have to use atomic variables, deal with interrupted system calls, write reentrant functions, and so forth.

<comment><USER6> It's funny that you should bring that up... During this whole back-and-forth I can't help but think that Apple's libdispatch solves most of the issues brought up by both sides:

* Use a dispatch queue and dispatch_async a block to handle computation. Since the queues work from a shared thread pool and are managed at the kernel level, a long-running Fib calculation won't hold up other blocks from processing on any concurrent queue (it would still hold up a sequential queue...obviously).

* Use dispatch_sources to do your IO. Now you don't have to worry about clumsy callbacks, and your IO operations are perfectly happy co-existing with your long-running computations.

* Use dispatch_read/dispatch_write to persist to disk and you don't have to worry about different latency and throughput characteristics of files vs sockets

...and to the point about signals:

* Use a signal dispatch_source to do things in response to signals that you would never have thought possible. This is possible because libdispatch sets up a trampoline to catch the actual signal and then turn around and queue your dispatch_source block. It's not a complete panacea, but it's close...

...now if only Linux would implement kqueue

<comment><USER7> What does kqueue give that epoll doesn't?

Note also that signalfd() can do something similar to your dispatch_source.

<comment><USER8> Epoll is limited to file descriptors. Kqueue also supports waiting on process events (process exit, process fork, process exec, etc), on filesystem events, and a bunch of other things. Epoll also does not support batch updates and requires multiple system calls to apply updates for multiple file descriptors, while kqueue supports batch updating _and_ polling in a single system call. All in all kqueue is just superior to epoll. See also <http://pod.tst.eu/http://cvs.schmorp.de/libev/ev.pod> for various ways in which epoll is broken (search for "The epoll mechanism deserves honorable mention as the most misdesigned of the more advanced event mechanisms")

<comment><USER9> Not to mention that kevent contain the number of bytes to be read, or the number of connections to accept, which can avoid you a system call that returns EAGAIN in a non-blocking socket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Plan9 was a project that intended to be more Unix than Unix. For example, when Unix says "Everything is a file... except sockets, windows, etc." Plan9 says "no really, _everything_ is a file." Here is a list of things that are not in Plan9 <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhatIsNotInPlanNine> Oh, and did I mention Pike was one of the original leaders of the Plan9 project?

<comment><USER11> > Unix says "Everything is a file... except sockets, windows, etc."

Unix said that, but in fact meant "everything has a unique descriptor associated (an integer)".

Directory is not a file, it's a set of files and other directories. Unix doesn't even tries to camouflage this simple observation and returns EISDIR.

<comment><USER12> Even in 6th Edition Unix, devices were files in the filesystem as well. And in 6th Edition Unix, you could open and read a directory as a file; that was how you found out what its children were. There was no EISDIR. I believe this behavior persisted until at least SunOS 4.

Adding sockets and windows outside the filesystem is one of the things Rob is specifically complaining about here, and in fact complained about at the time as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Doug McIlroy (inventor of pipes, original author of diff) was on my undergrad thesis committee. I think he would agree with Rob here.

While the design of these additional features violates the "UNIX way," it doesn't violate pragmatism. Too often in our field, perfect is the enemy of good enough. Is BSD's model and implementation of sockets perfect? Surely not. Is it good enough? From the purists perspective, maybe not. From the pragmatists perspective, absolutely. I probably wouldn't be typing this today (on my macbook pro) without the implementation of BSD sockets.

<comment><USER14> I recall this missive from Linus Torvalds on the design of Linux:

"If you want to see a system that was more thoroughly _designed_, you should probably point not to Dennis and Ken, but to systems like L4 and Plan-9, and people like Jochen Liedtk and Rob Pike. And notice how they aren't all that popular or well known? "Design" is like a religion - too much of it makes you inflexibly and unpopular."

<http://kerneltrap.org/node/11>

<comment><USER15> Yes, like Apple.

.. oh wait.

It is rather that good design make you popular and not so good design doesn't.

<comment><USER16> Apple's internal design was a mess pre-OSX though. Still kind of is. Apple's praised for end-user interface design.

<comment><USER17> OS X design is still a horrible mess, a monolithic BSD kernel bolted on top of a monstruous Mach 'micro'-kernel. Not to mention things like the new XML-based init system, property list files, hacks around 'extended attributes' (or whatever they call them) and many other aberrations.

<comment><USER18> And those are a mess because?

Property list files: a big f*n win compared to the ad hoc mess in a Linux/BSD /etc directory.

Hacks around extended attributes: any reason not to like those? Or just because in 1977 a file was just a file, and that's the way it should be, god damn it?

XML-based init system: a sane init system. And XML added in for standardization.

OS X is a mess in several ways, but those are not it. And the "monolithic BSD kernel bolted on top of a Mach 'micro'-kernel" sounds like a win-win situation. Monstrous why? Because it doesn't fit some idealistic model?

<comment><USER8> Even standard system calls are messily implemented. poll() is broken. kqueue is broken. See [http://pod.tst.eu/http://cvs.schmorp.de/libev/ev.pod#OS_X_AN...](http://pod.tst.eu/http://cvs.schmorp.de/libev/ev.pod#OS_X_AND_DARWIN_BUGS)

Last year I even discovered a kernel bug in their file descriptor passing implementation that, AFAIK, still isn't fixed. Various signal handling properties are more buggy than on Linux.

<comment><USER19> TCP_NOPUSH is broken, too - if you enable it and then later disable it with setsockopt, it doesn't immediately send any pending data (as it does on FreeBSD, and as TCP_CORK does on Linux).

IIRC, a lot of their code came from FreeBSD back in the day. I wonder why they didn't keep it in sync?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Assuming for a moment that they're right:

What's the alternative? OS/2 had nice features; it got crushed. BeOS had some nice features; it got crushed. (Yes, I'm aware that they're probably still around in some OSS version.) Plan9 keeps being mentioned, but do regular users understand it? (Is there a "this is why we do things, and this is why that's good" written for people who haven't written their own compiler?)

Are people working on experimental new OSs to "fix problems" in existing systems, or have we gone way past the point of no return? Is there any work on new microprocessor architecture? How much stuff in my modern OS is there because of legacy 8086 stuff?

I think, but I'm not sure, that the length of time it's taken people to get (for one example) IPv6 rolled out shows that change is not likely.

Plan9 LiveCD and installer: (<http://cm.bell-labs.com/plan9/download.html>)

Haiku: (<http://haiku-os.org/>)

<comment><USER17> > Plan9 keeps being mentioned, but do regular users understand it? (Is there a > "this is why we do things, and this is why that's good" written for people > who haven't written their own compiler?)

Yes, you can start with the main Plan 9 paper: <http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/9>

And follow up with The Organization of Networks in Plan 9: <http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/net/>

And The Use of Name Spaces in Plan 9: <http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/names>

This will give you a good overview of the basic design decisions in the system and their rationale, for further details on how Plan 9 deal with issues from toolchain design to authentication and security see the rest of the papers: <http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/>

They are a wonderful read even if you never touch Plan 9, they are full of insights, ideas and criticisms of existing approaches, and many even include discussion on how to apply them to existing _nix systems (sadly most of this has gone almost completely ignored by the_ nix community).

<comment><USER21>
        >> Plan9 keeps being mentioned, but do regular users
        understand it? (Is there a "this is why we do things,
        and this is why that's good" written for people who
        haven't written their own compiler?)

        > Yes, you can start with the main Plan 9 paper:
        http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/9

So, he asks about regular, ipad-toting, angry-birds-playing, how-do-I-turn-on- my-printer users and you link to a technical paper containing buzzwords such as "compilers", "internet gateways", "distributed systems", "POSIX", and "remote procedure calls". Do you see the problem with this?

<comment><USER22> The problem is that he thought the "regular users" referred to people who use the operating system itself rather than your iPad users.

Do your regular iPad users understand Unix, iOS, BeOS, or OS/2? No, they don't. They understand point and click interfaces on top of them. The operating system is irrelevant to people who want to Play Angry birds. Users who can't turn on their printer are irrelevant to a discussion on the merits of one operating system over another. The user interface on top the system and its programs is a separate topic.

<comment><USER21> As a programmer, I can make my programs do whatever I please. If I want to autosave all of my documents, I can write an Emacs script to save after every hundred keypresses. If I want greater security, I can write a tool to encrypt my files and network traffic, and a firewall to prevent unwanted connections. If I want to sync my files over the net, I can write a dropbox-clone. If I want to get better battery life, I can set my disk to spin down, reduce my screen brightness, or disable wireless. I am also more likely to know about existing versions of these specialized tools, because it's me and my friends who build them.

But as an "iPad user", I don't know any of that. If the feature isn't included in the OS, "turtles all the way down" and enabled by default, then I will never even know that such a thing is possible (and even if I did, wouldn't know how to get it).

So it's really exactly for the non-expert users that OS development is so important. Everyone else (and by that I mean the minority), is informed enough to figure these things out no matter what OS you give them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So this flies over my head a bit. Can someone explain why:

(a) Ryan Dahl is qualified to speak about these issues (i.e. he worked on the original Unix design or something)

(b) Rob Pike's comments are a big deal to Ryan, and

(c) whether Ryan is right or wrong?

I'm one of the "new guys" that doesn't know what he's missing, and I'd love to put this into context.

<comment><USER24> (a) He is qualified to speak about these issues in so far as he is the designer of node.js and is a programmer.

(b) Rob Pike's comments are a "big deal" because Rob Pike is one of the "original neckbeards" that worked on Unix, Plan 9, and has recently been developing the Go language at Google. i.e. He helped developed the OS that Ryan is complaining about.

(c) "right or wrong" depends heavily on what you are trying to accomplish. Much like anything in the real world, there is no right or wrong answer.

<comment><USER25> 'Rob Pike is one of the "original neckbeards" that worked on Unix'

Do you know that 'neckbeard' is a slur? It refers to someone who tries to grow a beard but can only grow hair on below their jawline, which is typical of adolescents.

FWIW, Rob has never had a beard. Ken, dmr, and bwk all have/had full beards, not neckbeards.

I am kind of surprised to find myself writing this post, but here I am.

<comment><USER26> I was under the distinct impression that 'neckbeard' had been reappropriated, like 'nerd' and 'geek'.

<comment><USER25> Not to my knowledge. It doesn't make much sense.

<comment><USER27> I think "neckbeard" may have gotten confused with "greybeard," which is used to refer to the elders of ages since past, whom have bestowed upon us mortals the eternally fecund gifts of unix, posix, C, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Now we just need to get Niklaus Wirth complaining about ancient Unix' complexity to close the circle…

Ok, maybe Chuck Moore complaining about Oberon after that. Can we go any deeper?

(Also: Discussing this on the web is a wee bit ironic.)

</comment><comment><USER29> When I was a teenager, my bubble only talks about Operating Systems: Linux, BSD, Amiga. OSNews.com was the "it" place next to SlashDot.

It was fun back then.

I think I'm going to grab my time machine and warp back.

<comment><USER30> You forgot BeOS, which lives on in Haiku. One of my favorite "alternative" operating systems of the time. I still wish I had more hours in the day so I could hack on Haiku once in a while.

<http://haiku-os.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Wait, what? Is he saying symlinks are bad? I like symlinks.

<comment><USER32> I can understand why he wouldn't like symlinks. They weren't introduced until 4.2BSD and they seem like a bit of a hack. Compare them to hard links. If you move the destination file the hard link remains, but the symlink is broken and there's no simple way to figure out where the destination file was mved to. Also hard links include reference counting so you know that someone is pointing to your file. Not so with symlinks. Also, hard links mirror the permissions of symlinks.

Note that the history shows up in the ln command which originally only created hard links, and then got the -s parameter when symlinks were introduced.

<comment><USER33> I tried using hard links back in the late nineties when I was new to linux. Instead of creating a second link to the file it copied the file to the new directory. I discovered the problem when I modified one copy and found the second copy, which was supposed to be a hard link, wasn't changed. I don't know what went wrong, but with symlinks available, I just never bothered trying hard links again.

ADDED: Note that I avoided hard links after that, because I was worried about what would happen if I modified one file and deleted it, thinking it was a link to another, when it was actually a copy. A person could lose a lot of work if that happened. At least with a symlink, I know that something is or is not a link.

<comment><USER34> What probably happened there is that your editor helpfully broke the hardlink for you. Some editors do that by default...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "(It appears you cannot link to comments in G+…so I'll just leave this screenshot)"

Pity.

<comment><USER36> Too bad the comments aren't just exposed as a file descriptor somewhere ..

<comment><USER37> Or a URL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Utilizing single purpose programs with a highly unintegrated scripting language breaks the whole idea of do one thing and do it well as there are now n things that do the same thing but with different trade offs. We have n flags, massive unmaintainable messes of bash, posix sh and other variants. Sun's shot with a 'managed' os with javaos was more than ahead of its time.

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't quite understand the reason for thinking BSD sockets are horrible?

<comment><USER40> I would guess the problem with sockets is in the whole creation process. Instead of just calling open() on a magic pathname (like how you deal with devices in Unix), you call socket(), then bind()/listen()/accept() on the server side, or connect() on the client side. Luckily they didn't totally screw it up, and it's just a regular file descriptor after that point... except on Windows, where they did screw it up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> A G+ post of an image of someone's comment about someone's rant. Can we be done with this "topic" please?

<comment><USER18> Yes, because the origin and presentation of the comment matters so much more than the contents of the comment itself, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Oh look. And old operating system idealist is agreeing with a newbie that everything's not the perfect way they want it.

I don't care.

Learn to use what you have or get something else and _stop fucking complaining_. The End.</comment>


Magic mushrooms may 'reset' the brains of depressed patients (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/182410/magic-mushrooms-reset-brains-depressed-patients/ <comment><USER2> South Wales Valleys UK now Sep-Oct is the the place for magic mushrooms, guess they love sheep manure and rain. Was there in my late teens, had so many incredible experiences indelibly printed in my memory. Mushroom tea was the best, tasted a bit gross initially, but soon forgiven. Ridiculously the UK gov has since banned collecting such, doubt it has stopped the teenagers of today though. A truly wonderful gift of nature that everyone should try at least once.

</comment><comment><USER3> May? This is something that is established by serious scientific inquiry about every 15 years, since the early 60's. Also, LSD and Ayuhasca have similar effects.

<comment><USER4> One interesting aspect was the dosage they used:

"In the recent Imperial trial, the first with psilocybin in depression, 20 patients with treatment-resistant form of the disorder were given two doses of psilocybin (10 mg and 25 mg), with the second dose a week after the first."

I've always been under the impression any anti-depressant effect of psilocybin would be primarily based in psychology, but at that low of a dosage it seems unlikely which makes one wonder if there is also a significant biological basis.

<comment><USER5> Microdosing is huge now. As always, psychedelics should be used as a last resort for those with treatment resistant illness. But yeah, for me and mine, it works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would really like to see legal places where people could seek this treatment. With suicide rates going up, it seems like clearly the compassionate thing to do.

But that said, I don't understand the desire for others to control what people put into their own bodies in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER7> A dosing method and use it as treatment will surely help "depressed" patient as it may alter one's mind into positive outlook towards life. It has been used many years ago and have been tested and proven among others. Patients must be monitored and have them observed. Magic Mushroom taken with other substance may cause different effect if not monitored. It has been banned on Amsterdam because many people experiment it with other drugs and alcohol. If one is getting treated with mushroom, it only has to be mushroom and nothing else.</comment>


Ask HN: Flurry vs MixPanel Vs Countly Vs? - <AUTHOR>

Wondering which is the best analytics platform available for iOS apps these days. <comment><USER2> There was a discussion about this subject 3 months ago : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4417367>

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, i have heard flurry has not many updates for long time and others are outpacing them.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why dont more laptops have sim card slots? - <AUTHOR> As mobile devices get smaller and smaller,This question always plauged me that why didnt laptops have simcard slots <comment><USER2> The overwhelming majority of laptop users only use their computers in places that have wifi, so a mobile data connection isn't something they'd be willing to pay for. Plus, for those who do want to use their computer in more remote places, tethering to a phone is a perfectly acceptable solution.

In other words, too few people want one to make it worthwhile making them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Whilst tethering is an option it would be more convenient for the laptop to have its own HSDPA connection. My phone uses up more battery power when I have the hotspot function activated, so I generally don't have it turned on. As for WiFi, when you are on the move, having to connect to different WiFi networks becomes a chore.

When using my iPad I really do like that fact that it automatically connects to the 4G network without me having to do anything. So I would buy a laptop with a SIM as long as it runs OS/X or Linux.</comment>


How do you cope with stress in IT? - <AUTHOR> I work in a fast pace IT workplace. I'm a UNIX admin for several hundred trading systems, we're essentially a stock exchange. We deal with hundreds of millions of pounds a day, 4 second downtime could cost a few million easily. My colleague is out for 2 weeks vacation so it's down to me to keep our European operations running. When there's two of us it's great as we can fall on each other for support. But when I'm on my own sometimes I realize I'm running the operation singlehanded and the stress gets to me. Stomach cramps, loss of appetite etc. How do you guys cope in these situations? I've been here two years and I still get stressed when I'm working on my own. I don't eat poorly and I try to exercise regularly outside of work. How is it for programmers, testers and other sys admins out there? <comment><USER2> i smoke, there's no time for anything else</comment>


Only 14 percent of Earth's species have been discovered  - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/08/110824-earths-species-8-7-million-biology-planet-animals-science/

<comment><USER2> A thought:

This summer, I gave myself the goal of photographing every kind of wildflower in my area. It turned out to be quite a large project; I ended up with about 6000 images of perhaps 130 species.

When I started, I figured the big question I would be answering would be this:

\- Here is a plant; what species is it?

But as I progressed, I found myself confronted with the surprising difficulty of answering a somewhat different question:

\- Here are two plants; are they the _same_ species?

This article suggests yet a third question:

\- Here is a plant; is it a _known_ species?

It is interesting to think that, for some of my 6000 images, the answer may just be "no".

</comment><comment><USER3> Who has counted the remaining 86%?

<comment><USER4> There are also techniques from "metagenomics" where environmental samples are taken from ocean water captured in filters and dna-sequenced en-masse (see "Global Ocean Sampling"). It is then possible to statistically infer the number of distinct species by analyzing the sequence data.

This was first attempted in the Sargasso Sea which had been thought to be relatively sparse in microbial diversity. Instead, it was found to have a shocking number of entirely new microbial species.

The scary thing is not simply that species are going extinct, but that species which we may never know of may go extinct in the near future.

<comment><USER5> I'm trying to grasp what you mean by _scary_ in this context.

<comment><USER6> We destroy species before we have any knowledge of them. That's my interpretation but I can see why you're asking it.

<comment><USER5> I was just thinking in the line of "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?".

Why should we feel bad if a species comes and goes without we ever knowing about it? Isn't that expected and natural? Doesn't that happen all the time in the universe?

<comment><USER4> Sure, it happens all the time and has happened since before humans existed. The concern is about how much extinction humans are CAUSING. Given that extinctions can impact entire ecosystems, we (as a species) should be worried about the impact we're having on other species, if only for our own selfish reasons.

The fact that there are species that we don't even know about means there is still a lot to learn about life on Earth. It is generally a bad idea to aggressively mess around with a system that is not well-understood, that is what we're doing and this news items demonstrates how little we actually know about our ecosystem.

<comment><USER7> For our own selfish reasons, we should get better at designing and building ecosystems, instead of expending resources on discovering, categorizing, and protecting unknown species. The former gives us a better future, whereas the latter produces mostly a constant state of guilt about not doing enough.

For example, I am appalled at how we still farm outdoors, where we have little control over pests and weather, especially given that our main methods of pest control tend to hurt us, such as through chemicals or through Monsanto-style genetic modification and patenting. We could begin to move in a completely new direction, and that is to create something like the Ultima Tower, as envisioned by Eugene Tsui.

It's clear that if we don't take grand steps towards engineering a sustainable future, we won't be able to survive a variety of calamities to which we are now exposed, and in that grand scheme, untold numbers of species dying, whether at our hands or due to our carelessness, is irrelevant.

<http://www.tdrinc.com/ultima.html> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Tsui>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just when you think that we have become masters of our own domain something like this comes along. It truly is hard to imagine that with all our technology, all our exploration, we have only just begun to understand our own world.

How many of these unknown species exist in places we cannot yet go? The deep sea, namely.

<comment><USER9> >How many of these unknown species exist in places we cannot yet go? The deep sea, namely.

I've thought the same while seeing The Blue Planet. It's interesting that we seem to be more interested in exploring the galaxy than the deepest depths of our oceans.

<comment><USER10> It's not an either/or situation. There is active work in both areas.

<comment><USER9> It is when it comes to money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The original paper is available via the open access journal PLoS: [http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjo...](http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001127)

Also worth reading is Robert May's commentary "Why Worry about How Many Species and Their Loss?" [http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjo...](http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001130;jsessionid=2084C66767709ED73A918850DEC2041B.ambra01)

</comment><comment><USER12> They'll be extinct before they get counted

</comment><comment><USER13> Everyday, that % is going up... not always because we're discovering new ones everyday, but because everyday 300 species die off because of the destruction we cause.</comment>


How Big Data Is Taking Teachers Out of the Lecturing Business - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-big-data-taking-teachers-out-lecturing-business&print=true <comment><USER2> The widespread availability of mass produced books should have taken teachers out of the lecturing business. I'm not sure if it's true that lecturing started because books were so expensive that one person read out the one chained to the lectern and everyone made their own copies, but it feels about right. It certainly makes much more sense than the modern spectacle of someone reading bad powerpoint slides badly. But books didn't supplant lecturers, nor did radio, television, VHS video tapes, computer aided-learning, nor the internet.

Yet they should have. Ask anyone who actually wants to learn stuff and you'll find they, naturally, use all these tools and reserve the precious time they spend with an actual expert to mentoring, hands-on skills, subjective evaluation, asking clarifying questions etc. Imagine how stupid you'd feel to hire a world class expert in something and get them to read you a summary of a chapter of their book.

But in Higher Education, having someone, who doesn't really want to teach, has no real aptitude for it and who probably isn't hired, paid or promoted on the basis of how good they are at it, stand in front of a large room of students is basically their equivalent of Homeopathy. A logically preposterous notion, contradicted by all available evidence of efficacy, that mind-bogglingly survives into the 21st century.

No matter how bad this stuff is, and any bit of software being sold to higher education is basically terrible for much the same reasons that nearly all enterprise software sucks, it can't really be any worse than the status quo.

</comment><comment><USER3> We have this same type of thing for a select few number of courses on our campus. Don't let the PR spin get you, these courses are adopted to save money for the college, anything else is a fortunate side-effect.

They seem, in theory, to work quite well. In reality, though, the 'adaptive learning' algorithms are simply "answer x correctly, go to y; answer x incorrectly, go to w" sort of things. They have fancy charts and graphics showing 'knowledge clusters' and 'though pattern analyses', but really, it boils down to my original statement. I've tested, re-tested and counter-tested these programs using various skill levels and completely random answers.

X is right, proceed to y. X is wrong, proceed to w.

From the 2-3000 students I've seen run through these courses in the last four years, there are three types of interaction with this model: those that love it and do well (but would also love and do well in a structured classroom), those that hate it and do poorly (but would also hate and do poorly in a structured classroom), and those that have absolutely no idea why they're being forced to work with a computer that doesn't allow you to answer questions.

I may be a bit old fashioned in my pedagogy and educational theory (yet I'm only in my 20's), but there really do seem to be students that simply respond better to being able to ask questions and receive answers from a living- breathing human being.

Really, the only benefit outside of cost savings to employees and administration of universities and colleges is that these programs allow us to find the exact point at which a particular student's understanding begins to break down. That's new, and fascinating (and brings up whole new concerns on privacy in my opinion).

<comment><USER4> I can't post a long response, but there are many other student-driven reasons, including self-pacing, self-direction, accessibility, drastically reduced discrimination

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not employed as a teacher, but one thing that I learned in a traditional classroom setting was how to teach. I observed fifty teaching styles, and the subtleties of adapting to those being taught. I use those skills every day. If anything, an economy that expects more of us to become entrepreneurs, teaching skill will become more valuable, not less.

I'm betting my career on some things never going obsolete, such as the laws of physics and being able to explain a concept to a non expert or skeptic.

For one semester, I taught the "terminal" freshman math course. The syllabus that I was required to follow was obsolete by thirty years. The switch to online course should really be accompanied by a vigorous debate over the content that is being taught.

</comment><comment><USER6> I thought "big data" meant huge volumes that can't fit in a traditional db (despite that those can scale to several terabytes), or sometimes data collected from multiple unrelated detailed sources (such as correlating local weather, the stock market, and recent cricket scores with how much time your employees spend on HN). This doesn't sound like either.

</comment><comment><USER4> Previous post discussion - [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6120548](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6120548)</comment>


ORM Haters Don't Get It - <AUTHOR> http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2012/05/orm-haters-dont-get-it.html

<comment><USER2> Martin Fowler's recent post is far better: <http://martinfowler.com/bliki/OrmHate.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> The concept of ORM isn't necessarily bad, it's just that most ORMs are terrible and try to map too much of relational algebra to objects, even if it is a bad fit.

Good ORMs like SQLAlchemy first model a relational database and then build the object bits on top of that. That's why you can do an explicit outer join between models so you end up making a constant number of queries (instead of n queries with the naive attribute fetch in a loop).

One almost never has to write SQL when using SQLAlchemy, as opposed to, for example, Django's ORM, which has a much more "mainstream" design. SQLAlchemy is more like a relational/SQL library + an optional ORM-like thing.

</comment><comment><USER4> The misunderstanding largely comes from the name. Things might be clearer if they were simply called _SQL libraries_.

</comment><comment><USER5> ORM offers robustness to a _subset_ of relational database abilities, at the cost of simplicity. That's philosophically wrong IMHO - it's too great a loss of functionality, time and attention for replacing something I don't yet have any need to replace.

Whilst I dare say there're applications where ORM is the only sensible choice, I've yet to see any trace of them in my (fairly) varied experience.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think this guy "don't get" many things about ORM like: \- They insert a great deal of incidental complexity in your solution. \- Most DBAs are specialists in SQL and relational databases not OO or JPQL, etc. \- If you have to read a 880 pages book to really understand your ORM framework there's something wrong with it (java overengineering probably).

</comment><comment><USER7> Maybe if one tries to do as much as possible from within the database itself (i.e. implement business logic using stored procedures, triggers and such, not an external programming language), there will be no need for any ORMs whatsoever? That's a honest question btw, I don't have much experience with databases, just curious to know.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've worked with ORMs that make it difficult to write specific kinds of queries, and that's usually because the ORM is designed to be robust enough. However, even that ORM would allow you manually write a query and then run it and it would convert the results back into lovely packaged objects to pass around and work on.

In a language like PHP there's a lot of annoying boilerplate you have to write around every query you run by hand like looping over the result set that an ORM can just convert into a pretty little associative array for you with a consistent structure.

As far as I'm aware, any ORM allows for hand-written queries, so if the argument is that ORM-generated queries are too bloated/slow, you can still write optimized queries where needed and still take advantage of the automatically conversion of the result set to a useful object.

</comment><comment><USER9> The main advantage as far as I'm concerned is semantic integrity. You stil get to think and model in OOP terms.

That's valuable and good abstractions are worth some trade-offs.

Of course you also get that if you use an object database like ZODB but you face similar trade-offs most noteably speed which is usually solved by using a RDMS for indexing.

</comment><comment><USER10> 5 mins of my life i will never get back. object mappers are good enough, write better oop and embrace sql if you need to.</comment>


Ruby: Shoes considering atom-shell + Opal as backend - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/shoes/shoes4/issues/712

<comment><USER2> One of the coolest ruby projects since a good while. When two important projects like Shoes and Opal meet and cooperate for a third unexpected goal, it is like when the results of two different equations are used to compose a third one, and as in mathematics this process it's beautiful for a number of reasons. Let's hope for the best as this is one of those projects that can bring a lot of spotlight on Ruby, which is needed for the language to grow.</comment>


Mint.com on the definition of a user - <AUTHOR> http://www.redditall.com/2009/02/mintcom-on-definition-of-user.html I'm curious to know if I'm the only one scratching my head about this. <comment><USER2> Hah, what the? Does Alexis work for Quicken?

I think that's a fairly standard definition of a user. Every company out there is looking for ways to maximise their numbers. I think if someone has signed up, then they're a user. If they create an account, they still have the potential to use the site at a later date, or they're exploring. How does that make them less of a user?

If you started culling multiple accounts and inactive users you'd start seeing some very different numbers from every major website. Particularly multiple accounts...</comment>


Ask HN: What product/service would you be willing to pay for? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> A better way to hire software engineers, or to find a software engineering job.

The problem, when I'm hiring, is that so much of the interviewing process is about determining competence. When I'm job-seeking, a lot of my time is spent determining the competence of the people in charge of the company.

In the medical field, doctors and hospitals are accredited. Thus the interviewing process isn't really about a doctor proving his or her competency, nor does a doctor have to worry about the hospital going bankrupt three years after taking the job.

We really need a professional licensing process for software engineers and the firms that hire us. Even though the tools we use change from year to year, the fundamentals of software development change about as fast as the medical field.

I haven't really come across any hiring firm or headhunter who is really good at determining the competency of a software engineer or the legitimacy of a business trying to hire. It doesn't matter who they are, they always boil down to middle men trying to sell whatever goods they have on hand while making a honest attempt to manage their reputation. They need the licensing process as much as we do because they just don't have the background to determine competence.

<comment><USER3> There are several differences between the medical field and software engineering, some of which are:

1\. The former is highly regulated because of potentially highly catastrophic outcomes in most cases.

2\. The former also is several thousand years older than the latter.

<comment><USER2> The modern medical field is not thousands of years old. It actually emulates the air traffic control system when it comes to its internal regulations and division of labor. This is how they keep out quacks who still believe in bloodletting.

We could do a lot better if we got over our hubris and tried to learn from how other more mature feilds run themselves.

With self-driving cars on the horizon, and with our entire communications infrastructure defined by software, the potential for catastrophe in our industry is greater than the medical industry.

<comment><USER3> It's not like nobody's tried before. The term 'software engineering' precisely stems from the idea that software development should be more like other engineering disciplines.

That those attempts didn't work out probably has less to do with developer hubris but with software engineering indeed being different from other engineering disciplines.

After all, we don't think of medicine in terms of 'medical engineering' or 'human bio-system maintenance' either, simply because it's something else.

Besides, certificates are rampant in the IT industry. Most of those however tend to say very little about the actual skills of the ones certified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd love to see a SAAS product for watching sports. Similar to Netflix in terms of UI and pricing, but also with the support for live content. I know this probably won't happen any time soon since major US telecom providers have exclusive broadcasting rights to major sports games.

<comment><USER5> DAZN is making moves in Canada + a handful of other locations

<comment><USER4> This looks promising. Although, it seems they only offer NFL, soccer, and tennis coverage currently. Hopefully some day they'll add NHL and NBA games as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Potential spoiler: most people will not actually pay for something they say they will pay for when asked for an off-the-cuff idea

<comment><USER7> Seems to especially be the case on HN. Whenever someone releases something, common responses are "oh this is like X but actually worse" or "I could do this with 10 lines of code in my sleep"

<comment><USER8> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pay someone a small fraction of my salary to show up at work and pretend to be me.

<comment><USER10> Peter: "Is there any way that you could, sort of, just zonk me out so that, like, I-I don't know that I'm at work... in here? Could I come home and think that I've been fishing all day, or something?"

<comment><USER11> One of the best comedies ever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A phone that will last for 10+ years. Easy change of battery, glass, display, connectors, etc without specialist tools. Doesn't matter if it's a bit bigger than a nice form factor phone, I'm just sick and tired of phones dying on me and not being able to service them.

<comment><USER13> I'm convinced this is basically impossible currently.

Promising software updates alone for 10+ years is going to be a difficult sell, even if you really intend to. And it's going to cost a significant amount of money.

And 10 years is a LONG time. 10 years ago android didn't exist, iOS had JUST come out, basically every "smartphone" out there was called a "PDA" and used windows mobile with a stylus. Even getting connectivity hardware that would work on those timescales is starting to get hard.

And let's be honest, the market would be extremely small. Most people _want_ the newest device every year, because hardware is still improving, new features are added, form factors change, and styling is important. Trying to sell a device which looks worse, costs more, is larger and has less features to the general public just isn't going to work.

I get 5 years, but 10 seems to be really pushing it.

<comment><USER14> My current laptop is nine years old. Phones are just smaller laptops without a keyboard. I don't think there a fundamental engineering problems that need to be solved before a smartphone could last as long as a laptop.

<comment><USER13> I wouldn't call it a "fundamental engineering problem", but over the past 10 years there have been some pretty insane strides in power consumption, size, screen technology, and software that have made what we consider today to be the "smartphone" possible.

The change in laptops hasn't gone a fraction as far as it has in cell phones in the past decade. That might stop soon, but until it does getting a phone to last 10 years is a pipe dream, unless you are okay with a severely out of date device, which again, I don't think that 99% of the public will be.

And without customers, a company won't be able to support a phone for that long, so you'd end up with a slow, expensive, dated looking, insecure device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would pay (a little) for a purchasing/problem fullfilment agent.

An example: I have one of the new macbook pros, and it came with a "free" 3rd party cheap-china usb C -> usb 3.0 hub. The problem (which I believe is quite common) is that attaching it, disables wifi - I guess it's just crappy low end chinese design and total lack of care for wireless compliance, etc.

So, I'd like to buy another hub that actually works without disabling my wifi. I don't want to pay Apple prices. I don't want to spend a day reading between- the-lines on aliexpress/ebay to ensure that it is genuinely compatible and non-interfering with my macbook wifi. I'll pay a premium (but not too much) for the best/best-value usb C hub for my purposes.

There are numerous examples of this kind of problem when buying products, particularly electronics, of having to read the fine print to get particular revisions that support some obscure use-case that I'm particularly interested in, and it's a real drag to try and hunt the right combinations.

Another example: I got interested in mechanical keyboards. (I think) I'd like a 68-key layout with rgb backlighting and gateron brown switches. Find one for me.

</comment><comment><USER16> \+ A test or a person that tests and tracks my health and body nutrients or lack thereof. Then designs a list of items or orders the food/vitamins that have all the micro nutrients that a health body would require.

\+ Accurate food product reviews that test what is inside of the item and reflect if the nutrition labels are correct.

<comment><USER17> Labdoor for supermarket foods? Gotta keep them honest, as an app combine it with price comparisons (where possible I know those DBs are hard).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I live in apartment complex. I'd like to buy my own washer and dryer and be able to rent out a place with water/dryer hookups and pay a monthly and usage fees as to not use the gross common laundry machines. To my knowledge no such service exists.

<comment><USER2> When I lived in an apartment without laundry services, I found it was cheaper to just pay a laundry service for pickup and drop-off at my front door. I paid about $50 a month, when an in unit washer dryer would cost a lot more.

I also looked into a washer dryer unit that I could plug into my sink. They are really common in Europe but not in the United States. The problem is that American voltage is too low to run a dryer without a dedicated outlet.

With the way that batteries are going, you could probably make a dryer that has a battery in it so it doesn't need a dedicated high voltage and high amperage plug. Because all dryers need counterweights, the battery really won't add weight to the dryer.

Without technology changes, you can still get an apartment washer dryer unit. Most appliance store should be able to special order one for you. The problem is that they will take all night to dry your clothing, because you are stuck with the limited voltage and amperage that comes out of the standard American wall outlet.

<comment><USER19> It's not just the voltage / amperage. Even if you buy a really expensive over- under that plugs into a 220 the lack of an output vent slows down drying dramatically.

<comment><USER2> Dryers are only vented in the United States. Most of the world uses condenser dryers that don't require venting. They also use less energy.

<comment><USER19> They also take significantly longer to dry your clothes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> a _good_ open source comment system which works with static websites which let's me avoid vendor/one-point lock in.

<comment><USER21> Take a look at [https://github.com/gka/schnack](https://github.com/gka/schnack) [https://posativ.org/isso/](https://posativ.org/isso/) [https://github.com/adtac/commento](https://github.com/adtac/commento) :)

<comment><USER20> They all lack on one point. Schnack: Requires Github or Twitter account it seems (not everybody who comments has a twitter account). Isso: In princible ok too paranoia (strange icons, no Gravatar or any log in at all). Commento: Does not know how to handle links in comments and no login system.

So they are all ok but far away from a Disqus alternative.

<comment><USER22> There's also EffectiveDiscussions ([https://www.effectivediscussions.org](https://www.effectivediscussions.org)), which doesn't have any of those drawbacks. It has email+password login, Gmail, FB, GitHub. Open source, and hosted too, if you don't want to provision your own server.

Demo: [https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded- comments](https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments)

It has improvements over Disqus and HackerNews: [https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news- can...](https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be- improved-3-things). GitHub: [https://github.com/debiki/ed- server](https://github.com/debiki/ed-server). (I'm developing it.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I would pay for a service that gives me constant 6% return on my money. Since all financial advisors tell me that the stock market returns are muh higher they should be all over this and make a lot of money.

<comment><USER24> The good ones subscribe to Modern Portfolio Theory and don't tell you stock market returns are much higher than 6%. The bad ones try to sell high fee advisory with a marketing ploy of getting you "alpha" (outsized returns). It's just a way to take 1-2% of your capital for doing nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'd love to pay taxes for universal healthcare.

<comment><USER26> The future is just not evenly distributed, try Europe.

<comment><USER27> Or Uruguay here in South America, or New Zealand... You can actually emigrate here very easily.

Maintaining an U.S. lifestyle OTOH is much more expensive, but healthcare is a BIG plus.

And you WILL pay a lot of taxes - Healthcare-only taxes are 4.5 to 6% of your gross income, and sometimes more on top of it. And then you have 22% VAT and something like 30% of your salary if you're a software developer, and the 12.5% social security tax (all of those on your GROSS salary, and almost no deductions)... prepare to get paid less than half your gross salary in hand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There's a better way to ask this question if you want Good responses. Just ask for unsolved problems and listen or even better...go out and observe.

</comment><comment><USER29> An app/service which provides the location of one mobile phone to another mobile phone. It should work across different manufacturers (iphone <-> blackberry), across different service providers (verizon <-> t-mobile).

<comment><USER30> I don't like it, but WhatsApp does that.

<comment><USER29> Good to know but it is a no go since WhatApp is ending support for BlackBerry on Dec 31st, 2017. [https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000617/WhatsApp-support-for- mobi...](https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000617/WhatsApp-support-for-mobile- devices) . May be it is time for me to move away from Blackberry altogether.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Alert me when my service providers introduce newer better deals and quietly grandfather me onto older worserer ones. Like today I called my ISP to upgrade to a faster connection that is _cheaper_ than my old slow one.

</comment><comment><USER32> Twitter without bullshit (algorithmic timeline, "how to follow", ads, tracking, t.co).

<comment><USER33> Oh yeah? And how much do you believe you would pay for that =)

<comment><USER32> 5$ per month

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Password manager!

<comment><USER35> Why would you pay for something that is already free ?</comment></comment>


Rediscovering the beauty of text on the internet - <AUTHOR> https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/beauty-of-text.html <comment><USER2> Text _can be_ beautiful, but only if you don't go out of your way to make it less so.

This is a view of my entire screen when this page loads. [https://imgur.com/Lh3Ibo3](https://imgur.com/Lh3Ibo3)

That's decidedly not beautiful.

And while WCAG checkers all swear that both this site and the linked tilde.town pass text contrast guidelines with flying (* ahem *) colors, my eyes just cannot cope with trying to read the text on those backgrounds.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback. In trying to make the text look good in medium to small screens, I hadn't considered what the page could look like for people reading on a screen that is more than 1440 pixels across. I've modified the css file. Clear your browsing history and try looking at the article again.

<comment><USER4> If you want to see an example of what (I and some others) think is a nice typographic layout for the web have a look at [https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte- css/](https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/)

It is what I used for my personal blog and I've liked it a great deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Many of us have been pursuing personal projects to breathe new life into old technologies:

Nick Black has been doing great work creating a successor to ncurses. He took the latest and greatest modern C++ / UNICODE development practices, and made it work really well for the old school terminal stuff from decades ago, which was easier said that done. [https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses](https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses)

See also Cosmopolitan, which is more focused on the use case: "All I want is stdio and math; how can I do that without all the breaking builds and broken hearts?" [https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan](https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan)

Please consider supporting us. These old technologies are widely supported and have stood the test of time. Any positive developments towards making them fresh again, is going to benefit both you and the technology community as a whole.

<comment><USER6> Can't say anything about Cosmopolitan, but I'm a huge fan of TUI:s, so notcurses is a great initiative.

However, a text-centric web doesn't have to be "old technology". With HTML5 and CSS3, pages can look and feel very modern indeed and still not use tons of JavaScript frameworks. And with just a bit of added care, things can work swell in TUI browsers, phones and "modern" browsers alike.

<comment><USER5> I agree that the web is an outstanding platform. Many things exist that command line programs are much better at doing, e.g. web serving, text editing, matrix multiplication, and relu. We need to know that PCs will continue to be an open affordable alternative, which continues to maintain backward compatibility as designed. Technologies such as WebAssembly and GPU interfaces are still too new and experimental for many of us to feel comfortable opening it up to every news website we visit. We need to know that operating system vendors will continue to feel comfortable allowing us to easily share simple open source programs that have access to things like Intel's new instructions.

<comment><USER6> Oh, I just meant that text-centric doesn't necessarily mean it should be considered "old": plenty of nifty features of semantic markup and CSS can be utilized to make a "plaintext" web page look and feel very contemporary. That excludes things like JS, WebAssembly, WebGL etc.

<comment><USER7> Plaintext and text are two different things. Plaintext generally means unformatted

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article makes some good points but it fails in one respect to follow it's own premises. It starts with a nice and funny but completely useless image. This might be a pet peeve of mine but I really prefer articles that get straight to the point and start with their main argument. For good examples see the blogs of Drew DeVault, Dan Luu or Gwern.

EDIT: Ha, I should not comment without having read the article thoroughly to the end. It indeed addresses this very point:

 _" You are no doubt aware that this article begins with a picture. The reason I include pictures in most of my articles is in the unlikely event that an average Internet user stumbles upon one, he will be less likely to leave immediately."_

Is there any hard data that the bounce rate increases if there is no image at the beginning? Are there good examples of pages where this image really ties in with and adds to the content that follows?

<comment><USER9> > Is there any hard data that the bounce rate increases if there is no image > at the beginning? Are there good examples of pages where this image really > ties in with and adds to the content that follows?

I don't think picture itself is the thing, human seek novelty and visual impressions come naturally. If you can afford to design each page to be slightly different and memorable you should achieve the same effect, if there is one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I recently made [https://neat.joeldare.com](https://neat.joeldare.com) based on a few of my favorite "text only" examples from the web, although I wouldn't call them that.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was with the author until he started ranting about why he doesn't vote in political elections anymore

</comment><comment><USER12> I haven't read the whole article, but I'd like to add that I really love to see more simpler webpages. For many sites (e.g. news), text only would be fine.

In Thailand (where I live) I recently found a super-cheap internet subscription, paying about 1,00 USD (30 THB) per month [0]. Of course, this internet is really slow, not usable for modern sites / web apps like YouTube or Google Maps. But could be very decent if more sites would be trimmed in content to the bare essentials.

\---

[0]: [https://oilinki.com/blog/worlds-cheapest-mobile- connection-g...](https://oilinki.com/blog/worlds-cheapest-mobile-connection- go-plearn)

</comment><comment><USER13> Posting this comment because I didn't see it mentioned in the article. This is a wonderful collection of old text files: [http://textfiles.com/](http://textfiles.com/)

<comment><USER14> Thanks for this! I completely forgotten about the site.i remember those CDs with all the text files such as this, excellent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was recently wishing more articles on the internet were written like unix man pages: purely textual and structured.

<comment><USER16> Yes, I should think so, too. Use a subset of HTML, with no CSS, and using commands such as <H1> and so on to specify headings and so on. Will any browser have a "table of contents" menu that uses these headings to automatically generate a table of contents?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love this idea. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing better than a well executed modern site with all the bells and whistles, but there is still the adage , just because you can, doesn't mean you should. People reading news, want just that, nothing more, well, I guess that is what I prefer.

</comment><comment><USER17> A good stand-in for page quality to me is size of bodytext:total payload. I should analyze my own blog to see what that ratio comes down to, I'd hope it would be quite good.

</comment><comment><USER18> While there are some truths in the article, many that I share, I think the author usually reaches to wrong conclusions from some true premises.

Text only websites, while revolutionary and nerdy, are not the solution. We need well designed websites, optimized and lightweight. Images and videos are incredibly powerful, attractive, and can give an incredible amount of information (the cat example is ridiculous), removing them makes no sense.

If you think too many people read gossip magazines and tabloids, don't blame the pictures and go asking for text only magazines and books. Blame the publishers chasing easy money, blame the education system, blame the amygdala... But not images.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, I think the author overgeneralises that videos are a bad medium for technical information. I watch a few channels with ML paper discussions and they are incredibly well made, maybe better than reading the paper itself for grasping the core message.

Yannic Kilcher - [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZHmQk67mSJgfCCTn7xBfew](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZHmQk67mSJgfCCTn7xBfew)

Henry AI Labs - [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHB9VepY6kYvZjj0Bgxnpbw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHB9VepY6kYvZjj0Bgxnpbw)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Something about the contrast between the pink and black makes this site unreadable for me.

The text is also cramped inside a small container that doesn't utilize my screen real-estate.

<comment><USER21> You'd think a website that was devoted to being mainly plain text would at least put a little effort into making the text more readable.

<comment><USER6> The beauty of "plain text" web sites is that with any decent web browser you can either turn CSS off, load your own CSS or switch to reader mode.

<comment><USER21> So, just make it the users' problem?

<comment><USER6> You honestly think it's a problem to tap a single button on your phone or pressing Ctrl-Alt-R?

Of all the problems created by web and UI design, this isn't one of them.

<comment><USER22> You honestly think the users should load their own css?

<comment><USER23> I'm not the one you're asking, but... yes.

User stylesheets are even part of the standard. The fact that the most common (and maybe "oppressive") browser doesn't support them is itself a problem.

<comment><USER22> Doing that if one wants to is one thing. But to say we all "should" is another. Anyone who expects users to load their own css for every site they visit has lost his grip on reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've been thinking: what prevents a lynx-like desktop browser that effectively defaults to a Reader-Mode-only on all pages?

</comment><comment><USER25> "to wish that the average engineer would suddenly begin to care about using his work day productively."

I know no one likes to hear this but if you must pick a pronoun for a hypothetical "average" engineer you should use "they" or "she" to help readers be more mindful of the unconscious bias in our field.</comment>


Price-O-Matic: Easy answers to "What's it Worth?" for all your junk - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/mmPAztu.png

<comment><AUTHOR> I had an idea. If it already exists, please tell me!

Trying to cash in my miscellanea is like a second job, and I'd rather spend my weekends doing something else. I liked the idea of using Amazon Fulfillments posted here on HN, but I found that it's moderately annoying to have to look up every single thing yourself. I have a box of a couple hundred different cables and random electronic parts, for example.

I'd love to just snap some pictures with my phone and have someone tell me what's worth selling; that way, I could just gather together the most profitable items to sell and donate the rest.

I know how to implement this system and make it sustainable, but my question is: do you think it's worth spending time on?

<comment><USER2> Go ahead. If I could turn photos of my stuff into money, I would do it.

Hell, I would get rid of so much stuff I don't feel like finding their worth. Cards, old consoles, old textbooks, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! I have exactly the same feeling. I have so many boxes of things that I've collected ...and moved with... but never use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> dude. just make it. do it in iterations so you can test it out to get feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the first step was to figure out if it's been done before. I only put in about an hour thinking about it... and it's so simple that I imagine it's been tried, and the people who would know would be on HN. :)</comment></comment>


A bunch of rants about the cloud - <AUTHOR> https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/06/scale/ <comment><USER2> I always agree with a lot of what Rachel writes, and she gets a lot right here too, but having said that flexibility also has value. Like her I've done it both ways... actually I've done it more than two ways. Servers in the closet, servers at the co-lo, VPS from a hosting provider, virtual machines from a cloud provider. No question in my mind that a good cloud provider lets me do more, faster, and for (at least initially) less money. And the stuff we build on their platform is way more flexible and adaptable to changing conditions than it ever has been. This doesn't obviate one little bit her main point that it all has to be overseen and controlled or it gets out of hand.

<comment><USER3> Ain't no fixin' daft, but you can scale daft, apparently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
        Some of these "cloud" places, though, don't have that kind of oversight. They build their systems to just auto-scale up, and up, and up. Soon, there are dozens, then hundreds, then even thousands of these crazy things. If they write bad code, and their footprint goes up every day, they don't even realize it. Odds are, the teams themselves have no idea how many "machines" (VMs in reality) they are on, or how quickly it's changing.

        There's no equivalent of my friend to stand there and tell them to first optimize their terrible code before they can get more hardware. The provisioning and deploy systems will give it away, and so they do.

        What usually happens is that someone will periodically run a report and find out something mind-blowing, like "oh wow, service X now runs on 1200 machines". How did this happen? That's easy. Nobody stopped them from needing 1200 machines in their current setup. People wring their hands and promise to do better, but still those stupid instances sit there, burning cash all day and all night.

Most accurate picture of shops struggling with the problem of doing cloud well.

Not only "cloud", but 3rd party APIs/managed services as well. Slab based pricing, pricing on various rates, pricing on data. what not!

I have come to believe that most of the cloud/API vendors make bill tracking so convoluted and hard on a definitive purpose, just so that people can't get easy visibility and early-warning of impending disasters.

Any firm/outfit that says "we want to use cloud for its elasticity" must be prepared for that "elasticity in the billing" too. If they are not, they will find themselves in deep troubles.

</comment><comment><USER5> In mobile development, the bar is pretty clear: your app should not drop frames, never hang on the UI thread, and interactions should not take longer than the user-perceptible 100ms. The silicon is N years old and it can't scale horizontally, so either the user has a fluid experience using your app or they don't.

How do backend developers determine what is and is not reasonable performance for a given service?

I see so many stories from companies of "we switched to the right tool for the job and saved so many CPU cycles!". From the outside it sounds like half of the problem is determining you have a problem in the first place.

<comment><USER6> > How do backend developers determine what is and is not reasonable > performance for a given service?

Well it depends on what the backend serves. It's either "the frontend is not perceived to be sluggish" or "batch jobs don't overrun".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > I'll say it up front: I prefer physical hardware. I know exactly what I'm > working with, and there's no spooky stuff going on when I try to track down > a problem.

I roll my eyes as I look at my desk with a multimeter, oscilloscope and pile of hardware with multiple (more or less buggy) board revisions full of jumper wires and cables going to serial pin headers..

I shudder to think about all the open tickets about hardware related issues. Of course, probing boards is only partial help since the other half of hardware lives in drivers that may or may not be based on reverse engineering, incomplete or missing specifications, etc.

The network is being odd, sometimes, and I still don't know why, and I can't reproduce it reliably.

Sure, virtualization adds more complexity.. but sometimes it's nice to know that hardware is someone else's problem.

</comment><comment><USER8> So the conclusion we should draw is that a well run data center is better than a badly operated cloud?

</comment><comment><USER9> Nothing beats pure hardware for performance. The app will be able to run in CPU L1-L3 cache. With shared cloud hardware there is bound to be cache evictions for the program making it slower. Ie other programs will compete for L1 cache.

A fun comparison would be the same program implemented as a monolith on metal vs micro services on the cloud. Why monolith on metal will run in cache and not do rpc network calls. That must be like a hundred times faster.

We have global warming programs should be maximum efficient.

Performance numbers everyone should know [http://highscalability.com/numbers- everyone-should-know](http://highscalability.com/numbers-everyone-should-know)

</comment><comment><USER10> Spoken from a place of ignorance, as I've never worked at a large tech company: I wonder how much of this is a feature and not a bug? Undergoing a performance review by an overbearing infra dude ever time you need a new server sounds hellish. So maybe the alternative is paying AWS seven figures a month for reasons nobody truly understands, but look at how _productive_ everyone is!

</comment><comment><USER11> Love it. this perspective us lacking. Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've always thought about at big companies that are "well managed" and all-in on the cloud, how much money is leaking away due to rushed implementations or bad architecture? And as customers of those companies we are paying for it.

</comment><comment><USER13> This to me is a bit like saying we should go back to assembly because programming languages are too much of an abstraction from machines. As with everything it comes down to tracking solid metrics to avoid wasting resources and getting decent logs when bugs occur.

<comment><USER14> Couldn't agree more.

In the 80s, I wrote in assembly. In the 90s, I saw Microsoft release operating systems which were _incredibly_ bloated and memory hungry. At the time, I thought it was insanely inefficient.

In hindsight, they were right and I was wrong. It's true that Microsoft's software was bloated, but they were prophetic enough to see that RAM and storage was going to get cheap. The hardware became powerful enough to make the bloat of the operating system unnoticeable.

<comment><USER15> > The hardware became powerful enough to make the bloat of the operating > system unnoticeable.

No it didn't. Lots of stuff that was instant on the computer from the past, is slow on modern computers. Basic things like displaying content of a directory etc.

What changed is public perception - people accept bloated and terrible software as something normal.</comment></comment></comment>


WatchOS 7 Removes Force Touch Support from Your Apple Watch - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/guide/watchos-7-force-touch-gone/ <comment><USER2> Interesting interaction that wasn't discoverable, just like 3D Touch. I wish they had guidance in the watchOS Human Interface Guidelines for migrating away, especially in full-screen apps.</comment>