The Brain Is Particularly Vulnerable to Trauma at Two Distinct Ages - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/470751/your-brain-is-particularly-vulnerable-to-trauma-at-two-distinct-ages/ <comment><USER2> Interesting. Our daughter is 2 months away from her 2nd birthday and just in the last month or so, her speech has started accelerating at quite a pace. Whereas from 8 months or so she was making noises and started to form her first words, these days it's almost one new word per day, and she's starting to make lots of 2 and even 3 word sentences.

Another interesting point: we're bringing her up to be bi-lingual (Dutch and English), and because her environment is primarily Dutch, almost all of the words she speaks are in Dutch, though she understands a decent share of English too, now. I wonder if because language development is a bit more prolonged with bi-lingual children, if this vulnerable phase is also then prolonged, or if the brain starts to be more resilient as soon as a "first language" is settled in?

I love this stuff!

<comment><USER3> Somewhat related, I found my Son's bilingual exposure very interesting. From 3 months to 20 months he was in a bi-lingual montessori (english & spanish). Teachers and assistants always use both languages to work with children. We also reinforced at home wherever possible. Our limited spanish skills were mostly from the things he brought home and told us and a few books.

Then we moved and he was in another school, english only, from 21 months to 38 months. The decline of spanish skills was slow at first, even while we worked with him at home, then became very rapid. English skills continually improved, as would be expected.

At 39 months we moved back to the original bilingual montessori. He quickly learned/learns new spanish words and phrases, but the previous ones (colors, numbers, shapes, animals) are mostly gone. Even though I recall 90% of them, all learned as an adult, he doesn't.

<comment><USER4> The first three and a half years of my life I lived in Ghana and, apparently, spoke Dutch, English, Spanish (with the local nuns) and Fante (a dialect of Akan, a Ghanaian language). I no longer speak the latter two, although I've been told that I can "bluff" Spanish pronunciation very convincingly off the page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The age ranges:

\- year 2 or "terrible two's"

\- years 13-18 or teenage years

</comment><comment><USER6> I knew that the onset of a variety of mental health problems is during the late teenage years, so I'm not surprised at all. What did surprise me was that the babies sustain lasting damage because they were never "cuddled and played with" in their early years. So much that it appeared in brain scans when they were adults. Interesting.

<comment><USER7> This is why I feel particularly sad when watching a parent screaming profanity at their child on the NYC subway. A poorly-regulated parent produces poorly- regulated children.

<comment><USER8> And so the cycle continues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Throughout the first two years of life, the brain develops at a rapid pace. > However, around the second year, something important happens—babies begin to > speak.

I began to speak way before learning to walk, around my first birthday. I personally know of child that began to speak before his first birthday. As in, complete sentences.

Is that rare and my sample set has been biased? I thought it was normal for babies to start speaking at age 1, not 2.

</comment><comment><USER10> > In short, your ability to maintain proper social skills and develop a sense > of empathy is largely dependent on the physical affection, eye contact, and > playtime of those early years. Even something as simple as observing facial > expressions and understanding what those expressions mean is tied to your > wellbeing as a toddler.

Crap, is that true? Anyone knows other studies confirming this?

</comment><comment><USER11> Spoiler alert: "the terrible twos" / "toddler" and "teenage years." So, a broader range than the clickbait title implied.

<comment><USER12> Those are distinct ages.</comment></comment>


Knockback.js: Knockout.js magic for Backbone.js - <AUTHOR> http://kmalakoff.github.com/knockback/

<comment><USER2> It is a lot more clear from the description on <https://github.com/kmalakoff/knockback> what this is about:

When I was evaluating client-side frameworks, I liked lots of the pieces, but wanted to "mix and match" the best features. I started with Backbone.js and really loved the Models and Collections, and used Brunch to get me up and running quickly.

After a while, I found the view coding too slow so I wrote Mixin.js to extract out reusable aspects of my views. When I was looking for my next productivity increase, an ex-work colleague suggested Sproutcore, but at the time, it wasn't yet micro-frameworky enough meaning I would need to learn something big and "to throw the baby out with the bathwater" as they say (it is hard to give up Backbone models and collections!). Then, I discovered Knockout and knew it was for me!

Knockout provided just the right building blocks for a layer between my templates and data. As I used it more, I built additional functionality like Backbone.ModelRefs for lazy model loading, localization helpers for truly dynamic views, and most recently, an easier way to sync collections and their model's view models.

So here it is...the refactored and shareable version of my Backbone bindings for Knockout: Knockback.js

<comment><USER3> I really appreciate KnockOut too, because it can really be added gradually to an app without much assumptions nor getting in the way. For those who do not know it, make sure to have a look at the interactive tutorial at <http://learn.knockoutjs.com/>.

It also seems that Angular.js is a natural progression from KO to something more full-featured (when needed).

I'm curious if you compared Knockback to Angular?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In all honesty, I think that the way javascript apps are created needs to be rethought when you have to combine your MVCs with your MVVMs to change a View that's somewhat like a Controller into a ViewModel that can maintain state and pass it to a View.

I'm going to propose the FuckThis paradigm until I can come up with something that makes some sort of sense.

</comment><comment><USER5> _ViewModels differ from Views exactly in this: they own states, methods and properties allowing the views to be logic-less._

If you consider, in Backbone.js, that your templates are the views, then the Backbone Views are a kind of controllers. What are the advantages of Knockback.js here? I'm sure there are but it's not clear to me given the description.

Alternatively in backbone.js you can create object models related to View but that are not part of your business logic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Main benefit of Knockback.js over Backbone.js is that:

\- It makes a clear distinction between _Views_ and _logic_ by providing _ViewModels_. You don't need to have the a single class rendering data and processing logic also.

\- Provides the _data-bind_ based templating which cleans up the backbone.js render function that requires DOM manipulation through libraries like jQuery.

<comment><USER6> Can the person(s) who downvoted this please explain the downvotes? As someone unfamiliar with both of these some context would be very appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another alternative: <https://github.com/toddlucas/uppercut>

This is a simplified version of Backbone designed for use with Knockout and other client side rendering frameworks.

Disclosure: I'm the author

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you should mention the dependencies here: <http://toddlucas.github.com/uppercut/>

<comment><USER7> Thank you. I will. ATM, it's mainly jQuery or Zepto, just like Backbone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've tried both Knockout and Backbone with Circle (<https://circleci.com>), I can totally see the use case here. Knockout is great for syncing between the client and server, and does history and routing well. However, it's not great at model form synchronization.

However, Knockout really excels at that, and allows you to do great live updates.

In the end, we chose Knockout + Sammy.js (history and routing) + manual templating (pretty easy really).

</comment><comment><USER9> Am I right in saying backbone and knockout do not solve the same problem? I fancy dipping my toes into a javascript framework, and being primarily a .net dev I'm being pushed towards knockout. However backbone seems to be better adopted and more mature. Is knockback the best of both?

Can another provide examples of where one would be superior over the other?

<comment><USER10> From what I've seen of both (and having used Backbone professionally), while backbone has more documentation on the web, the problem is it's a very flexible framework and it doesn't force much upon the developer, which is great. However, it does mean that a lot of tutorials talk in different paradigms.

As a .NET guy, I'd go for Knockout. I also like what I'm seeing with Angular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another option of data binding: <http://viejs.org/>

Uses RDFa annotations to automatically construct views and models.

</comment><comment><USER12> for background, here's a stackoverflow answer explaining how knockout and backbone serve different purposes:

<http://stackoverflow.com/a/6340870/231589>

<comment><USER13> Looks like SO thinks this question has been deleted, but I would enjoy reading this. Any other links?

<comment><USER12> That's too bad, I had bookmarked it as a really good explanation of the difference between ko and backbone... Sorry for the bad link. I'll see if I can find the original text tomorrow.</comment></comment></comment>


Analysts say attack on Google is part of widespread spying effort - <AUTHOR> http://www.macworld.co.uk/digitallifestyle/news/index.cfm?newsid=28293

<comment><USER2> _Google's security team eventually managed to gain access to a server that was used to control the hacked systems, and discovered that it was not the only company to be hit._

This appears to be new and interesting information.

<comment><USER3> If it was government, why would they risk hacking more than one company from the same machine?

Edit: Seems more likely that the anti-hack claim is bs, as other comments are suggesting Google employees did the hacking from within the office. This would suggest the attacks against the other companies were on Google-run apps used by those companies.

<comment><USER4> If you go to Nart Villeneuve's blog <http://www.nartv.org/>, which Google's blog post linked to, he's got a cool pdf on tracking GhostNet (Chinese government cyber-espionage network). The command and control servers that were discovered in earlier attacks do in fact operate this way.

In tracking Chinese infiltration of the Tibetan movement, they discovered compromises in various embassies and other organizations in countries all over the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is interesting:

 _they did manage to get some "account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line."

That's because they apparently were able to access a system used to help Google comply with search warrants_

This implies that Google handles gov't requests for information through a filtered system that can only access meta-data. If this is true, I appreciate that protection.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This quote is awesome:

"Right before Christmas, it was, 'Holy s __*, this malware is accessing the internal intercept [systems],'"

<comment><USER6> I think that should give a large number of Gmail users food for thought.

<comment><USER7> It sounds more like a private version of Google Dashboard, which indeed only shows subject lines as the hackers apparently managed to obtain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Could you change the original title's construction? It currently suggests Google initiated an attack.

<comment><USER9> It _does_ say "attack __on__ Google"...

<comment><USER8> Awesome. It looks like a mod here changed the title for HN. The original article has a misleading title reading "China: Google attack part of widespread spying effort".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I just missed reading "attack on" for a second and was shocked!</comment>


A river of lost souls runs through western Colorado - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/a-river-of-lost-souls-runs-through-western-colorado/2016/11/03/154fd1a0-8651-11e6-a3ef-f35afb41797f_story.html <comment><USER2> _"It's really hard to withdraw from antidepressants," said New York psychiatrist and pharmacology expert Julie Holland. In some cases, "people feel like cold water is running down their spine. They can feel their brain sloshing around, or electric zaps in their head."_

Dang.

If it's true as claimed that medications only help half the time, this seems like a strong encouragement to try things like exercise, yoga, and lifestyle changes before going the medication route.

Unless you're so depressed you honestly can't make those changes... as commenters have mentioned, sometimes medications are absolutely helpful, needed, and life-saving. I've heard of cases where being on a medication just for a short time helped people break out of a rut.

If you're getting a prescription, it seems worthwhile to ask docs for options that are less problematic to get off of.

<comment><USER3> Especially for depression, prescribing medications is about stabilizing a patient's mental health and building a safe platform from which the patient can work to minimize the negative consequences of their depression (or many other mental illnesses, for that matter) on their daily life. No psychiatrist is going to suggest that there's a magic pill, dosage, or regimen that will make the depression go away. What medication can do, though, is help keep a patient's depression from overwhelming them. Ideally, medication gives the patient both time and enough separation from those negative emotions and consequences to make changes that become well-reinforced habits. That can be through traditional talk therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, simple exercise, changes in diet and sleep patterns, etc. Medication can serve as a sort of barrier between emotions that can overwhelm you and keep you from getting out of bed at all. It doesn't make those feelings go away entirely, but it gives you the breathing room you need.

Of course, the public doesn't necessarily see things that way. There's a common belief that the right medication will 'cure' the problem for you or, barring that, make it go away. After all, that's how other medications work! Blood pressure problems? Take a pill. Bacterial infection? Antibiotics, and poof, it's gone! That's a huge problem for psychiatry, and it's one that's probably not going to go away anytime soon. Your GP might be willing to prescribe an antidepressant, an ethical psychiatrist is almost always going to be the better choice precisely because treatment isn't about just receiving a script and heading to the pharmacy.

<comment><USER4> I agree with what you said.

Of course, I've also heard psychiatrists call me irresponsible for going off medication that was actively holding me back from the energy and motivation I need to work well (and feel good about my life).

There is certainly a diversity of opinion amongst practicing psychiatrists even what the role of the medication is.

<comment><USER5> Did you go off the medication without any input or supervision from a doctor? I've had doctors accuse me of being irresponsible for doing that, and I have to agree.

<comment><USER4> I think I fulfilled my end of the doctor patient agreement; I used the medication for years and tailed myself off slowly under supervision.

The SSRI detox is no joke, but it was a relief compared to sleeping much more than necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _" nearly 1 in 4 white women ages 50 to 64 is taking an antidepressant, according to federal health officials."_

This is the saddest thing. My wife remarked that there was a weird sense of expectancy that if you were a white female of middle age you were expected by your peers to be taking anti-depressants.

<comment><USER7> Out of the other 3 in 4, how many are self-medicating with something else?

Coincidently, my mother has three sisters, and all of them are in this age range. Two are on antidepressants. Two of them drink a bottle or two of wine a day. There is some overlap there.

Mother's little helper...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Worth discussing: Positive association between altitude and suicide

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3114154/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3114154/)

<comment><USER9> Really interesting - thanks for posting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm just going to throw this idea out - although I have no evidence either way, but: is there something in the water?

Durango's water supply is the Animas, which is downriver from Silverton, and many old, abandoned mines and basically SuperFund sites (even though there's pressure to not call them that - or get that Federal $$$ to fix the problem, for fear of tourist dollars leaving). Are there known correlations between the types of acidic chemicals and heavy metals found in this type of polluted water and mental health?

I ask because Durango is a beautiful, sunny place. It's hard not to be there in the summertime and not feel wonderful. Yes, in the winter, it's a little more clausterphobic, and you ARE in the middle of nowhere, but it doesn't have the depressive anxiety feeling of a place like Leadville used to have, when their main Moly mine closed down.

[http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/12/opinions/pagel-animas-river- po...](http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/12/opinions/pagel-animas-river-pollution/)

<comment><USER11> The city of Durango does not normally pull its water supply from the Animas River but rather the Florida River which is not known for a large heavy metal load. Animas river water is used as a backup supply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Long ago, a cousin of mine and her husband raised their family in Durango. I think they all felt it was a great place to grow up, especially because they were passionate about exploring the wilderness around them. Attempting to settle there as an adult with only a high school education and build a life is another matter. Three of their four sons moved to the Front Range to go to college, raise their families, and pursue careers.

</comment><comment><USER13> Having traveled through this area of colorado, I'm not surprised that depression runs rampant. There is literally nothing out there, no industry, no jobs, nothing. When travel through these towns it's as if you travel back in time and the majority of these people are stuck there. They have no way out. I'm not sure what solution is for towns like these.

</comment><comment><USER14> > according to a Washington Post analysis of federal health data.

I wish they'd released this.

<comment><USER15> Ask them to.

EDIT: I just emailed the article author asking if they'd release the data in a Github repo [1]. Default to action.

[1] [https://github.com/washingtonpost](https://github.com/washingtonpost)

<comment><USER16> [1]. Default to action.

There is a maxim worth adopting.

<comment><USER17> That is one way to end up with too much to do.

<comment><USER16> Maybe depending on the person and which side they come from. Personally I come from the side of defaulting to doing nothing. Deciding against action is easy to me. Defaulting to action means avoiding the doldrums of apathy. I imagine more are like me than otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Am I the only one who react when they write in the article

"Although more men than women take their own lives, the rate of suicide has nearly doubled among middle-aged white women since 1999..."

And the whole article is about women who take suicide. The writer is a woman but this is typical for big publishers like Washington Press. They very seldom write about mens problems and challenges.

<comment><USER14> Men die more often than women. But women have started using more lethal methods than they used to, and women make more attempts. This combination - increased lethality of method and greater number of attempted suicide is worrying.

Newspapers often report the fact that rates of death by suicide are rising. (It's a bit more complicated than how they report it - there was a decline in rates for many years). Most of the rise is in women. In the UK rates of death for men have dropped a bit, but rates for women have risen a bit, causing the overall number to rise.

Washington Post has written before about the disproportionate number of male deaths by suicide, so they're not ignoring it.

A couple of examples:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health- science/the-h...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/the- high-suicide-rate-among-elderly-white-men-who-may-suffer-from- depression/2014/12/05/2bad6ea0-222e-11e4-958c-268a320a60ce_story.html)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired- life/wp/2016/08...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired- life/wp/2016/08/31/men-die-by-suicide-at-alarming-rates-this-hashtag-tells- men-its-okay-to-talk-about-mental-health/)

If you want an anti-feminist article that mentions in passing male suicide: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/30/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/30/feminists- treat-men-badly-its-bad-for-feminism/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> [http://www.livescience.com/50813-low-oxygen-increase- depress...](http://www.livescience.com/50813-low-oxygen-increase- depression.html)

High altitutes can increase suicide and depression in certain people. While in others, they get a sense of feeling "at home".

<comment><USER20> Altitude apparently shows up both as an increase in depression and a decrease in ADHD. One researcher hypothesizes that altitude affects both serotonin and dopamine production, decreasing serotonin and increasing dopamine.

[https://mic.com/articles/104096/there-s-a-suicide- epidemic-i...](https://mic.com/articles/104096/there-s-a-suicide-epidemic-in- utah-and-one-neuroscientist-thinks-he-knows-why)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> There is really no substitute for family, and for coming to know God. The government or this-or-that philosophy will not give our lives purpose and direction. The Mormon missionaries can help. Really.

<comment><USER14> Do you have any evidence that there's a lower rate of death by suicide for people in the LDS church?

One group at increased risk of death by suicide are LGBT people (at all ages). Religious groups tend to do badly by these people, and anecdotally there's a few news article about deaths by suicide of LGBT teens who were part of LDS church.

[http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865646414/LDS-Church- lead...](http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865646414/LDS-Church-leaders- mourn-reported-deaths-in-Mormon-LGBT-community.html?pg=all)

<comment><USER21> Thanks for your polite response. I've seen references debating general suicide levels in Utah, USA (one interesting, later debunked I think), but I think people tend to believe what they want, and I haven't researched it. My personal experience seeing a wide variety of situations in my own family and others, including many problem types that people experience in life, strongly bears out the quote (Tolstoy?) that happy families are all alike, and miserable ones are each miserable in their own way. Following certain principles leads to the predictable results. We all have hard problems; having the life tools available to deal with them and use them as building blocks instead of being crushed by them, makes me feel very fortunate.

I hope you don't mind if I add, to to try to somewhat dissuade others' anger: Some people respond harshly when one who is not atheist simply says what one knows personally from experience. It's usually good to hear a variety of viewpoints. I just know what I see, etc and how it all relates. So I just try to keep going forward with purpose and direction, because I know where it leads, and the things I can't control will be OK eventually.

<comment><USER21> ps: I certainly don't mean all sadness is one's own fault, or that medication is never warranted, nor do I wish to minimize the realities we can all face as individuals. But life decisions, perspective, forgiveness, knowledge of purpose and answers to the big questions, support systems, etc etc, seem to matter most of all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So women are now committing suicide at the same rate as men?

<comment><USER14> No. Men are still dying more than women.

But women attempt suicide more often than men. And women have started using more lethal means than they used to. And the combination - more suicide attempts, more lethal methods, is worrying.

<comment><USER2> Right. The way I look at this, suicide attempts are just the tail, the extreme cases -- even more people are not quite that desperate, are suffering at a level that's only _almost_ unbearable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Women aren't the demographic with a suicide problem in that age range...

But my compassion is gone after the election.

<comment><USER24> If all it takes to destroy your compassion is losing an election, you never cared to begin with. You only claimed you did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Depression is not caused by a deficiency of medications, but by a deficiency of hope, so medications cannot cure it.

<comment><USER26> Depression is a label for a wide range of complex illnesses. I am sure that what you say is true for some people, but in some cases it simply isn't. I've got friends who have been helped by medications, and I've got friends who have tried medication and it didn't help. One thing that is counter productive is to assert that these medications don't work ever, because they do appear to be extremely effective in some cases. Which figuratively and factually is a life saver.

<comment><USER25> You aren't responding to what I actually said.

I didn't say medications doesn't help some people. I didn't say medications don't help ever.

I did say that medications can't cure depression.

<comment><USER27> It works around half the time. So, yea it can cure depression though it does not cure everyone of depression.

It's kind of like rebooting a computer, it does not always work and sometimes it makes things worse. But, comparing the cost vs benefit it's generally worth trying.

<comment><USER25> Can you provide any evidence that medication cures depression at all let alone 50% of the time?

<comment><USER28> Your insistence on evidence for a "cure" is nonsensical.

Doctors don't have a cure for depression at the moment, it's true. They also don't have cures for HIV/AIDS, or diabetes, or asthma, or lots of other chronic medical conditions (see [https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data- and-Systems/Sta...](https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and- Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/Chronic-Conditions/CC_Main.html) for a list of the most common ones).

But they _do_ have medications that can make it possible for people with those conditions to lead long, productive, more or less normal lives. Are you suggesting the people with these conditions should be turning those medications down? That they should refuse any treatment short of 100% removal of the underlying condition, even if by doing so they reduce the length and quality of their own life?

Why, exactly? Why on earth make the perfect the enemy of the good like that?

<comment><USER25> Nice strawman.

I did not suggest that people should turn down medication, or refuse treatment.

I didn't say anything other than that medication doesn't cure depression - which I stand behind.

Let me turn the tables on your indignance for a moment - why don't you care about the causes of depression? If the incidence is on the rise, the causes must be getting stronger. How can you condone simply restoring people to productivity with drugs when there is an increasingly serious problem harming them in the first place?

<comment><USER27> You are trying to redefine terms here. Depression is not the same as _the underlying cause of Depression._ You can go from Depressed to not Depressed without becoming normal or happy.

Further, it's not clear that the actual incidence is on the rise or if this is reversion to the mean etc. We have shifted what people call Depression and how willing people are to seek treatment. The age adjusted suicide rate was actually higher from 1950 - 1980 than it is today.

In 1950 the rates of suicide for 75–84 years old people was 31.1 in 2010 it was 15.7. If you look at the actual rate by age it's all over the map. [http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0779940.html](http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0779940.html)

<comment><USER25> It's actually unclear what your argument is here. Remember that these comments are in response to an article about rising incidence of depression treated with multiple medications.

It sounds like for some reason you are now just trying to say that depression isn't really on the increase in certain places.

Why would you say that?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Turnover Hits Apple's Famed Industrial Design Team - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/turnover-hits-apples-famed-industrial-design-team-11556225563 <comment><USER2> I suppose anyone leaving Apple's ID team (especially Jony Ive's inner circle) would get the equivalent of Jony Ive's job at any number of companies around the world. And companies would be happy to have that calibre of talent on board.

Some of it might be better career prospects, and some of it might really be "I've been at the pinnacle of my profession, I think I'm done"

<comment><USER3> Or something as human as, "I'm tired of designing laptops, phones, and peripherals. I want to try designing something very different for a while."

Life is fleeting. Go start new careers every 5-10 years if you have the luxury of that option. You decide what "career" means. Maybe you go become a stand up comedian. Maybe you just go program something different than you have been.

<comment><USER4> That's what I'm going to try to do. After being paid to code for over 10 years, I simply don't want to do it anymore.

I'm going to start an aerospace company and try something radically different.

I'm single, I have no kids, and don't own a home. Why not? You know?

<comment><USER5> I mean, know what you're walking into, but if you have that, then yeah. My family makes me risk averse. No complaints. Happy as is, you can chase after whatever, as long as you're vaguely relevant in the field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This might be the only video of most if not all of the ID team at Apple [1]. I've been following Apple since I was 16 or 17 and I think in that time they've been pretty anonymous in the Apple story. Found a photo of them [2].

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEW4D_CERkE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEW4D_CERkE)

[2] [https://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/09/Apple_I...](https://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/09/Apple_Industrial_Design_team_2014-780x575.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER7> I personally think right now that industrial design, architecture and still fashion have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to designing great things with regards to technology. Gone are the days where you can be concerned with the physical looks of a thing. I've met designers who can do everything just that the upper management team(s) don't get it.

If we can get these super thin laptop designs why can't we create new form factors? It's purely because people are afraid right now to create new product segments or try new things.

I imagine a lot of these designers are leaving because they're trying really hard but keep making things that never see the light of day.

<comment><USER8> Ted Selker at IBM Almaden Research had an amazingly successful streak of getting useful innovations from the lab to the market with the ThinkPad, including the TrackPoint (the red joy button), the butterfly keyboard, and the transparent LCD display with removable back cover that works with an overhead projector (at a time when overhead projectors were much more common that expensive video projectors).

IBM Pointing Stick #1 - 10_25_91:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6guBllqPPY&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6guBllqPPY&feature=youtu.be&t=26s)

(Not Edwin Selker!)

Ted Selker Oral History:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpw7Bml_XvI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpw7Bml_XvI)

>He worked for short times at Atari and Xerox PARC before joining IBM in 1985. At IBM, first at T.J. Watson Labs, then at Almaden research labs, he rose to Fellow, inventing the TrackPoint cursor control device, making major contributions to the ThinkPad notebook computer, designing artificial- intelligence help and teaching systems, designing wearable computing devices, researching eye tracking systems, and designing an intelligent "living room of the future".

(Check out his red TrackPoint lapel pin!)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_760](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_760)

>IBM ThinkPad 760CDV - Similar to the 760CD, this unique model had a removable back cover on the LCD that would permit light to shine through for use on an overhead projector.

IBM ThinkPad 701c "butterfly" keyboard:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLj3aCfqzOM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLj3aCfqzOM)

Opening and closing IBM ThinkPad 701c with unique keyboard folding mechanism.

ThinkPad TrackPoints - how do they work?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3A7LDyizlc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3A7LDyizlc)

Early TrackPoint prototypes:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4Ss6F1qIHU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4Ss6F1qIHU)

<comment><USER9> I had a 760CDV. That was an amazing machine in an era where you had to carry projector panels around. It never failed to amaze onlookers.

<comment><USER10> That sounds really interesting. You don't happen to have any pictures of it? I didn't find anything through Google, just that it existed.

<comment><USER11> there are pictures of the 755CDV doing that, if that's of any interest:

[http://www.lenovoblog.cz/wp- content/uploads/2016/02/3566815....](http://www.lenovoblog.cz/wp- content/uploads/2016/02/3566815.jpg)

[http://www.lenovoblog.cz/wp- content/uploads/2016/02/755cdv.j...](http://www.lenovoblog.cz/wp- content/uploads/2016/02/755cdv.jpg)

[http://www.lenovoblog.cz/wp- content/uploads/2016/02/thinkpad...](http://www.lenovoblog.cz/wp- content/uploads/2016/02/thinkpad-701c-pml-800.jpg)

(from [http://www.lenovoblog.cz/2016/02/historie-rodiny- notebooku-i...](http://www.lenovoblog.cz/2016/02/historie-rodiny-notebooku- ibmlenovo-thinkpad-1993-1995.html) )

[https://thinkwiki.de/755](https://thinkwiki.de/755)

<comment><USER9> Yeah those pictures show it very well. The only thing you don't really see is the existential dread as you hook your expensive laptop to the projector in an inbalanced fashion using velcro straps....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Do these three people have 45 years combined experience on the industrial design team, or do you get promoted into that team after substantial experience on other teams at Apple? That could be the difference between a dramatic loss of institutional knowledge and ho hum normal turnover (12% annually).

<comment><USER6> From the New Yorker profile of Jony Ive a few years ago:

>Apple employs three recruiters whose sole task is to identify designers to join the group; they find perhaps one a year.

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/shape- things-c...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/shape-things-come)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if any of them were involved in the Macbook Pro keyboard.

<comment><USER14> Do you think the industrial designers were actually involved in the engineering of the keyboard (the source of the issues) or just the aesthetics (which look fine)?

<comment><USER15> Given that the old keyboard worked fine, and the only reason we have a new one is to shave a few millimeters, then yes I believe the designers are most directly responsible. Plus ID would tell you their role is much more than "aesthetics."

<comment><USER16> Maybe I'm an outlier, but I actually really like the feel of the new mbp keyboard, and going back to the old keyboard feels like i just stepped back in time and my ipod has a wheel on it again... This opinion subject to change if keys stop working.

I would, however, give up some thinness for better battery life, that's for sure...

<comment><USER17> I use a mechanical keyboard (blue) on desktop, and previously used a relatively thick Lenovo laptop. If my 2018 MBP wasn't constantly double typing 'e', I'd rank it right up there with them in terms of feel. It's shallow, but very crisp, with just the right activation force.

Though, if Apple couldn't fix its issues in three generations, it may be time for them to move on.

<comment> village-idiot I still own a 2012 MacBook Air. While the old keys have a hell of a lot of depth, they're also much more vague and "mushy". I too prefer the new keyboard, although I wouldn't rank them anywhere near an actual mechanical switch.

My main fear with the new switches is the durability, but since my only new MacBooks are company machines, I won't pay should some dust disable a key.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hopefully it's the people who thought the macbook pro keyboard was a good idea...

<comment><USER19> that's just a natural step in the "thinness is the top priority in a laptop or phone" direction they have been following for years, I'm afraid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't think Apple leadership is concerned about being the world's most valuable company in any given quarter or any given year.

This article alludes to a tie between design team departures and declines in sales growth.

Apple did not get big chasing quarterly profit numbers, it got big releasing game changing products and product improvements at the right time.

While this design group deserves strong regard, building AR glasses and software interface to control them is not something that a dozen people solely define, it comes from trial and error and enlightened engineers building and offering alternative ideas based on what only they could know is achievable in windows of potential release.

In fact, over the air updates, which was one of the most amazing accomplishments and features of iOS has little design at all. It's just smart engineering that works well.

So I do not see these departures as a threat to glasses or autonomous systems because the prestige of the company combined with its quality of "taste" as jobs put it means it is not going wayward because three people leave.

<comment><USER21> > Apple did not get big chasing quarterly profit numbers, it got big releasing > game changing products and product improvements at the right time.

they released those products over a decade ago. they got big because they took the momentum from those innovations and turned them into a lifestyle, creating "upgrade" fever and everything else that came with that. in the meantime, they became an industry bully, pressuring suppliers and vendors for more and more discounts while pressuring consumers to pay more and more for moderate iterations of their products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Are these people being pushed out over the keyboard fiasco, or is no one in the company being held accountable for that disaster?

</comment><comment><USER23> I like the MacBook Pro butterfly keyboard.

<comment><USER24> I did, too... until it failed for one of my teammates and myself. It's a pretty awful feeling to have spent money on what's considered the best-in- class laptop only to have the keyboard - something that's never failed on any iBook or MacBook I've owned in over 15 years - have really weird error modes.

They need to fix this.

<comment><USER25> Me too. I like the keyboard and the feeling. But after 1.5 years now I get stuck keys from time to time, and this is just bad for a computer of this price range. It is good if you do not have any problems, but sooner or later everyone will get problems - it is a ticking bomb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder how many are going to Juul. They already have the guy who was in charge of the iPod.

<comment><USER27> What has changed in the design really? I keep getting the most recent generation as they don't have a long lifetime and they are good with warranty replacements. All I can tell is the material is a bit darker and the corners are more beveled.

<comment><USER26> I don't know but he's been there since the beginning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Apple's industrial design team was great when Steve Jobs was alive. After his passing the team hasn't produced anything good. Take Homepod for example. It is an amorphous blob. Google Home has a better industrial design, and so does every single Bose speaker. Apple's industrial design team is coasting on the reputation built during the Jobs years; their current work is crap.

<comment> village-idiot As someone who's wearing an Apple Watch and listening to AirPods, I'm inclined to disagree that Apple's ID is resting on their laurels.

<comment><USER29> Agreed. Just picked up my first Watch (S4) and it's probably the most successfully "Apple-y" Apple product I've used for a long time (meant as a compliment!). Beautifully designed hardware and the combination of thoughtful software and hardware design has created a device that enhances your day to day life with useful functionality and keeps an eye on your fitness without being intrusive, annoying or addictive. I like it much more than I expected to.

I also think iPhone X and the new iPad Pro are fantastic pieces of design. As someone who used the iPad for music software, I really wish they hadn't got rid of the headphone socket, but otherwise it's a very well designed device.</comment></comment></comment>


Michigan House bill would add a mark on immigrants driver's licenses - <AUTHOR> https://www.freep.com/story/news/2018/04/10/bill-would-require-special-immigrant-drivers-licenses/485567002/ <comment><USER2> It's seriously intellectually dishonest that the article omits that differentiating legal citizens / permanent residents from others is required for MDLs to be accepted under the Federal RealID act.</comment>


What's your method for pushing database changes from development to production? - <AUTHOR>

I just started using (and loving) git, for keeping track of changes that I'm making, being able to work on different features simultaneously with separate branches and merging to master only when I've finished a specific feature or change and then pushing changes easily from a development environment to the live environment.
I'd like to be able to do the same thing for a mysql database, is there the equivalent of git for database schema and data management?  Afterall a database is really just made up files is it not?
Any help would be greatly appreciated <comment><USER2> If you're using a framework like rails, it has built in functionality to manage database versioning, but you have to do everything "the rails way", or else you won't get the full benefit of it. The good thing there is, it'll also handle reversing out of a version as well (downgrading).

There are third party takes on this system as well, but I've never tried any of them.

Various places i've worked for have had a very similar (to each other, not to rails) approach to doing versions.

First and foremost, you need a core set of scripts that you are always updating to be the "latest", so that you can very easily spin up an empty db + required static data + any bells and whistles you wanna throw in (like a default user account, for example - although you don't want to run that script on production, clearly).

Then you need another set of scripts that you keep in directories named for their version. Those scripts either reference the scripts inside of your core script directory (for example, if in release 1.4 you're adding a new stored proc, you'd define the proc in your core folder, and in 1.4 you'd have a script that runs all the 1.4 changes, which references the file from the core location), or comprise the DDL changes you're making that are now reflected in your always-updated core scripts (for example, if you modify a table, you'd update the core script to have the latest definition, then add a modification script under 1.4 that just does the diffs to that table)

The most important piece here is an environment to run things in that will handle making changes in a transaction, and rolling things back if something fails (so you can safely do your updates and recover without putting any database in an incomplete or corrupted state). On Windows, Powershell works fine for this (although PS isn't the best thing in the world, it gets the job done). On *nix, i'd imagine you can accomplish the same thing with a bash script. You absolutely do not want to be running scripts by hand, 1 after another. You should have a light set of scripts built around whatever file structure for your sql files you have, that follows a convention based approach to locating an "upgrade.sql" file, which then invokes the rest of the sql files needed for that upgrade.

Hopefully this approach makes sense as I've described it. It's by no means perfect, but as I've said I've seen it in use in several places, and it seems to work just fine.</comment>


Intel SGX Enclave Support in Windows 10 Fall Update [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.alex-ionescu.com/Enclave%20Support%20In%20Windows%2010%20Fall%20Update.pdf <comment><USER2> Interesting thing from the PDF:

"At this point, it should also be stressed, that if you have already purchased a Skylake processor, you likely did not get an SGX-compatible part. In an incredible, pretty non-talked about snafu, only Skylake parts after October 26th, at the earliest will have SGX enabled, and you're likely to be able to buy them only after November 30th.

These parts have a different "S-part" number, but otherwise have the same CPUID, Stepping, Model Numbers, etc. Manufacturers are free to interchangeably sell you whichever part they have in stock, without any recourse to you, the buyer. You can read Intel's Product Change Notification (Intel, 2015) to see which parts you should attempt to buy, if your vendor will let you verify this information before buying.

Worse, even if you end up getting a compatible S-part processor, your BIOS must still be updated to set the appropriate enable bit in the IA32_FEATURE_CONTROL (0000`003Ah) MSR, in this case the SGX Global Enable Bit (18) and your BIOS must additionally reserve a region of RAM for SGX use."</comment>


Build a REST API in Minutes - <AUTHOR> http://okl.io <comment><AUTHOR> I'm working on this project since a month ago, as a solo founder :D. I'll be launching in December, and would like to get prior feedback beforehand :)

How do I overlap with Firebase / Parse.com? Yes, that's a good question! And I do overlap a little bit, but Oklio is more focused on letting you set and design your business structure (like designing a database) and expose it in a REST API. We'll even allow importing SQL files and transform that into a RESTFul API, how cool is that? :D

You'll be able to define how open/closed you want you REST API to be, define the level of authentication and even decide if you want us to use an standard like JSONAPI in you RESTful resources.

Please join us in our prelaunch phase! I'll be giving unlimited premium access during our beta phase, and all the kind beta testers will get an special discount once we start charging :)</comment>


ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs - <AUTHOR> https://abopen.com/news/arm-offers-free-as-in-beer-cortex-ip-to-combat-fossi-threat/ <comment><USER2> The press release linked by OP doesn't give the full story. For a better perspective see [https://abopen.com/news/arm-offers-free-as-in-beer-cortex- ip...](https://abopen.com/news/arm-offers-free-as-in-beer-cortex-ip-to-combat- fossi-threat/)

If you're just joining us, Arm very much sees the up and coming RISC-V stack as an immediate threat to the future of their business and is taking pro- active countermeasures - doing everything from awkward, backfiring smear campaigns against RISC-V[1] to straight up license dumping their own product to prevent developers jumping ship.

It's interesting to see because RISC-V is wonderful and Arm seems to recognize that. Arm Holdings is acting rationally as someone in a privileged competitive position would do. At the same time, big players like Western Digital are migrating to RISC-V so Arm is internally freaking out [2].

[1] [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/)

[2] [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/01/wdc_risc_v_edge_str...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/01/wdc_risc_v_edge_strategy/)

<comment><USER3> _If you 're just joining us, Arm very much sees the up and coming RISC-V stack as an immediate threat to the future of their business and is taking pro- active countermeasures_

By any chance, does anyone know if Intel is funding RISC-V? According to the logic of "Commoditizing the Complement" one way of hurting a competitor is to make their product a commodity.

<comment><USER4> Intel Capital participated in SiFive's Series C funding round. Besides that I don't know of anything else Intel has done for risc-v.

<comment><USER5> They were one of the funders for RISC-V at Berkeley but that may have been funding EECS rather than RISC-V.

[https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/Data/106902...](https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/Data/106902.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is ARM's definite response to RISC-V. As people develop their FPGA products, they will have to decide what their long term target is. If the intent is to eventually turn the code into an ASIC, RISC-V maybe the economically more sensible solution since there is no licensing costs there. However they will have to be patient with the toolchain. If the idea if the code will only be a pet project, wouldn't benefit from RISC's customization abilities, or long term is expected to use an ARM core, this is definitely the right pick. The ARM toolchain being more mature is a draw for many hardware developers.

I'm definitely very interested in trying a project with either RISC-V or ARM.

<comment><USER7> Equally by offering this for Xilinx, it makes them more palatable over Altera offerings (owned by Intel). So a very tactile move on many levels.

But as an end user, I like competition like this, as long as there is competition tomorrow.

<comment><USER8> The release of the M1 is not just for Xilinx.

ARM is releasing the M1 for Xilinx, Altera, Actel FPGAs. These are firm (i.e. technology mapped) cores adapted for each FPGA family.

Here for example is the documentation for the Altera version. Note that it sports the Altera Avalon bus interface which would not be used in a Xilinx design.

[https://developer.arm.com/docs/dui0395/latest/introduction/a...](https://developer.arm.com/docs/dui0395/latest/introduction/about- the-processor)

And here is the announcement/information about the M1 core for Actel/Microsemi FPGAs:

[https://soc.microsemi.com/products/ip/search/detail.aspx?id=...](https://soc.microsemi.com/products/ip/search/detail.aspx?id=652)

<comment><USER8> This article from EE Times lists all FPGA vendors as well as EDA vendors supporting the M1 cores:

[https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1303843](https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1303843)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow, not only FPGA-optimized Cortex-M1, they also releases Cortex-M3, one of the most popular MCU IP.

BTW, are there many applications integrating a MCU core with FPGA rather than a AP core? I only have seen Xilinx products that uses Cortex-A core.

<comment><USER10> Yeah the newer zynq-MP have a 4 core A53 as well as two realtime class cores on there.

<comment><USER11> Those are actually silicon hardware cores all of these are soft-core applications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Let the battle begin! Wonder how RISC-V movement in the open source ISA front has influenced this decision.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sounds really good. Is it only free as in free beer or editable too?

The interesting applications for RISC-V are Vector Extensions and other application specific mods.

<comment><USER14> Beer. Pretty sure they will be precompiled RTL blobs.

<comment><USER15> Not even. You have to pay a royalty to ship one of these M0 designs, still. It's just designed to be more appealing to research.

<comment><USER16> The blog post said royalty free though... I agree its not exactly super clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The commetization of the CPU market was bound to happen eventually. As modern production techniques for chips and FPGA programming start to converge rapidly.

What is the ETA until we get a GNX "GNX is Not X86"? An Open source i386 core that people can run existing applications on? Much like GNU offered a standardized FOSS platform people could run existing Unix workloads on.

<comment><USER18> A great question .... all the 386 patents are out of date now right?

<comment><USER19> The wikipedia page says that AMD64 must be licensed from AMD. The market for a new 32-bit x86 clone would not be large.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86)

"...x86-64 may require an additional license from AMD."

<comment><USER20> That changes in a couple years though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I would love ARM releasing ARM1 and ARM2 processors (both with a 3-stage pipeline) for FPGAs, not because of economical interest, but because of historical and coolness purposes. And more, so you could e.g. run a synthesized Acorn Archimedes from a FPGA, for free, running Linux on top of it :-)

<comment><USER22> They come close to that here, a gate level simulation of an ARM1.

[http://visual6502.org/sim/varm/armgl.html](http://visual6502.org/sim/varm/armgl.html)

<comment><USER23> That's how the ARM1 was made in the first place: by being simulated. On a BBC Model B. First silicon worked, which nobody really expected but they surprised themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Free != Open Source. Are NDA's/vendor secrecy required? Is the core, in whatever form it is provided in, not obfuscated in any way, and well documented? Does ARM permit companies using it to modify the design? Free != Open Source.

</comment><comment><USER25> so how many LE's do these cores consume compared to a similar RISC-V or any other CPU design? Are there advantages just beyond familiarity of ARM?

</comment><comment><USER26> Why did the article claim that "Free and Open Source Silicon" is a threat to ARM?

Thinking further, we already have RISC V up and running, but doesn't it really impact traditional chip OGs like ARM and Intel?

<comment><USER27> Of course RISC-V impacts ARM and to a lesser extent Intel. Most costumer that goes to RISC-V would have picked ARM.

Of course changes like that don't happen in 1-2 years. RISC-V is still young, 2015 is when it actually went public with the foundation.

Not to mention that back then many things we not frozen, so now basically everything you need for a Linux stack is frozen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How suitable is RISC-V for military use? If we were to redesign the F-16 from scratch in 2018, would be able to make it using hardened Arm or RISC-V chips in place of x86 processors?

<comment><USER28> I wouldn't assume the F-16s have Von Neumann.

<comment><USER29> Do you have a source for this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Will there be a version for Lattice FPGAs? These are more interesting targets because they are lower cost than Altera or Xilinx.

</comment><comment><USER31> Single-digit Cortex-M models? Dinosaurs, all.

Hold your applause until we can see the innards of an AArch64 implementation.

<comment><USER32> Several billions of such chips are shipped per year. Many established segments are still moving from 8 bit to 32 bit micros, and new segments are still growing rapidly. So shipments of Cortex-Mx devices is likely to grow quite a bit still.</comment></comment>


I am Mt. Gox's first employee – AMA - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fe92x/im_ashley_barr_aka_adam_turner_the_first_mtgox/ <comment><USER2> Notable tidbits (most of which were already public record if you followed the story very closely) include:

\+ Mt. Gox commingled depositor and corporate funds. (Corroborated in the Japanese version of their docs released by the bankruptcy trustee.) Many in the community believed that they had promised not to do this (true) and they this was impressively unprincipled (I lean against this understanding).

\+ Mt. Gox had standards of engineering professionalism which were not what one would hope would prevail at a financial institution with $500 million in assets. True and previously reported. Specific examples include lack of a staging environment, source control, testing procedure, engineering leadership, auditing... it goes on. Also might suggest in future not putting all code into MySQL.

\+ At one point all BTC deposited at Gox were accessible by VNCing into a particular box, which suggests that claims that Gox had cold storage secured by keys kept in diverse physical locations were not consistent with conventional interpretations of engineering reality. (The new information here is "VNC." It was previously known that at one instant in time Gox proved its reserves by moving all it's BTC in a single transaction. This could be done in a way consistent with what the community thinks "cold storage" should mean; the VNC bit militates against that understanding.)

\+ Employees of Mt. Gox believed, on the basic of public evidence, that the firm was losing money even at the peak. (I'd be interested in seeing their math for this; that was not the conclusion I reached in a napkin calculation in mid-2013.)

\+ Wages at Tibbanne (which provided 100% of employees for Gox) were consistent with prevailing wages in Tokyo startups i.e. scandalously low. 50% of employees earned less than $2k per month; director-level salaries in order of $4k, except for...

\+ ... explicitly alleged looting of customer funds to support director lifestyles.

\+ Management was unable or unwilling to answer basic queries regarding finances internally.

\+ Gox's bus number was one, and that bus would have resulted in $500 million being unrecoverablu lost. Management, when asked about this, lied brazenly. (Last part is new info, first part obvious.)

There's more at the link.

<comment><USER3> > \+ Wages at Tibbanne (which provided 100% of employees for Gox) were > consistent with prevailing wages in Tokyo startups i.e. scandalously low. > 50% of employees earned less than $2k per month; director-level salaries in > order of $4k, except for...

I've been told that employees at a certain like-deviantart-but-good startup are paid about as much as a convenience store worker. On the other hand, the conbini won't sponsor your visa.

<comment><USER4> that does not tell anything - are they employees in a different country ? Convenience store workers in the US earn about 20K USD per year - that is double the salary what a comp sci fresher from a tier 2 college (non-IIT) would earn in India. And that's a reasonable salary - at 10K USD per year, you can eat out everyday at pizza hut ("regular" food is cheaper), drink a couple of times a week and share a 3 bedroom apartment.

<comment><USER5> The "deviant-art-like-but-good" bit is probably referring to pixiv, a popular Japanese art site.

You're not going to live anywhere near a comfortable life in Tokyo on 2 million JPY a year, much less 1 million JPY a year. Convenience store workers here make around 950 yen/hr depending on what shift you're working on.

Assuming you find somewhere super cheap and livable (we're talking slightly larger than a single bed, maybe not even including a bathroom) for 50000 yen/mo, that's already 600,000 yen/yr on housing alone. You can see that there's not much left over for utilities, food, transportation, clothes, medical, etc... and we're not even talking taxes and luxuries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The entire codebase was stored in a database, only accessible via a client Mark maintained, with no version control nor lock controls meaning if we both had a file open we could overwrite one another's files and undo work. There was no pre-production environment. Meaning changes were supposedly deployed untested or made straight on production. I was told I could not touch the backend, although they were working on getting access to this via Mark. Although it was taking time because Mark was more busy with his Bitcoin cafe. They said that despite all this, it was still a decent place to work because there was literally no pressure to perform. "

Just wow.

<comment><USER7> The thing I don't get is why anyone would use their own 'code storage'. This isn't laziness, it would take much less time to setup git.

<comment><USER8> I think it's a phase most programmers go through - I jokingly call it "code graphomania". You make up some sort of overengineered project, then keep implementing it even though there might exist better alternatives. You'd experiment with various language features, try to cram in some wild design decisions that have no basis in real life patterns, etc. It's hard to explain concisely, but I do observe this in other hackers a lot.

And I think Karpeles was going through that phase at this time. I vividly remember seeing his blogposts on reimplementing an SSH server in PHP, just to show that it's doable. I wouldn't be surprised to see that code and other similar terribad ideas running in production.

<comment><USER9> I think a large part of this is the 1 Hour rule. Where when things are really bad whatever you can do in 1 Hour that improve things slightly get done. Then Repeat.

People basically just keep chasing local Optima until the unholy mess becomes self-sustaining as real improvement becomes more difficult and you can always look back and say, well at least we have "backups" even if it's just a copy on another disk in the same machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For what it's worth, there doesn't appear to be any proof that this person is whom they claim to be.

The question was asked but somewhat suspiciously dodged: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fe92x/im_ashley_b...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fe92x/im_ashley_barr_aka_adam_turner_the_first_mtgox/ctnt9rs)

<comment><USER11> /u/MtGox_Adam is the same reddit account as previously used by the Mt.Gox CEO. Of course it's possible the account has been hacked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting stuff. Sounds like a bunch of kids that had no idea how to handle $500 million dollars. However, the owner did seem to handle things with malice. Why would he share a bank account with all the customers assets - I'm no lawyer but that sounds extremely ilegal and obviously a conscious choice.

You're given such a large opportunity and to piss it all away. Yikes.

</comment><comment><USER13> There are other good summaries but here is mine, in no particular order (All is C&P, no editing other than adding in my own commentary in "[]", putting commenters questions in quotes, and adding in "Mark" where "he" and other pronouns were used. Also "..." is a clip):

* As far as I know, no one else at Mt.Gox ever had access to the backend of Mt.Gox, nor the cold wallets. At my time there, only Mark had access to the Database. ... Mark said that if he died there would be hints that one of his best friends could follow to find and unlock the cold-wallets. When I asked said friend, he said he had no idea what Mark was talking about.

* We then looked at the expenses (eye-witness expenses only [AKA, we collaborated and make a list of things we had seen were purchased for the company] so it's not accurate, but surely less than what was actually spent), and used the trading data to calculate some averages around Mt.Gox's profits. The expenditures far exceeded every model we had for income. [This is in relation to the AMA'er being asked to be CEO of Mt. Gox and what happened when he tried to do due diligence, Mark wouldn't give him access to the books]

* Around the same time, we learned that Mark only had one bank account, shared with Mt.Gox's customer deposits.

* Mark was receiving a lot of pressure for "proof of solvency". I was behind him when he VNC'd into... somewhere, used the bitcoin otc app to send the money from A-to-B, and then posted about it. [In case you didn't catch that... THERE WAS NO COLD WALLET. ALL of it was hot and on a machine (running in graphical mode of all things...)]

* "How likely do You think it is that Mark Karpeles was running the Willy bot?" \-- To be honest, before you asked this question I had never considered it wasn't Mark. ... I just know my ex-employee contacted me about with the impression that Mark owned this account, I hadn't questioned it, and it was presented as "Mark is at it again"

* I think gross incompetence happened, and Mark tried to cover it up. I don't believe he is outright malicious, but certainly ignorantly-malicious.

* [Mark's] salary was the same as mine at that time. ... I started at 240000yen/month (~$3.1K/mo - ~$37K/yr), and was paid 320000yen/month (~$4.1K/mo - ~50K/yr) from about August 2011. I was the highest paid employee (including Mark) when I left the company.

* "Where do you think the millions of depositors fiat have gone to?" \-- Nooooooo fucking idea. I hope to read about it the same as you do. I want answers.

* "Why was Ross Ulbricht's Gox account banned very early on?" \-- Honestly, no idea. I know that Mark banned any accounts blatantly linked to SR. Some people emailed that they needed to use their undeposited cash to buy things on SR. If that made it to Mark, he banned it. I think it was safe practice.

* "Since this is AMA: How come you chose this particular time to come out with this AMA? Why now and not earlier?" \-- I think I mentioned in different comment threads, I had an NDA that prohibited me from talking about Mt.Gox. It's still enforceable, but I think Mark has other things to worry about at the moment... I hope :/

* I stopped believe anything he [Mark] said after a month of working there.

* "Reuters reported that expensive toys were being purchased by MtGox/Mark. Do you have any more examples of luxurious spending?" \-- He bout a NAO for $5k in August 2011, a Makerbot a little later, and... Ahem, I had to talk him down from buying a Lamborghini as his first car. Respectively, the Honda civic was a modest purchase. (how to fuck could I explain a Lamborghini to 50% of the employees making under $2000 a month... it would have killed moral, even moreso

* "I find it incredibly irresponsible that no employee or ex-employee blew the whistle on what was going on." \-- There was no proof, no one (mark) gave anyone access to anything directly. Everything was inferred. (Spent 900K, made x00K?) where did that come from? No answers... what can you report on that ... :/ It sucked....

* "Do you think Mark is guilty of actually manipulating data in a fraudulent manner, or merely negligence in operating MtGox?" \-- Both. but only the latter do I have an experience.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Around the same time, we learned that Mark only had one bank account, shared with Mt.Gox's customer deposits."

</comment><comment><USER15> No offence to his guy but he seems woefully under qualified. A CEO that doesn't have accounting report to him... makes less than 50K/year. Does anyone know what valued he thought he brought to the table?

<comment><USER16> Mark, the founder, asked him to be CEO[1]. An incompetant current CEO, who isn't giving details to someone who he asked to be CEO.

[1]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fe92x/im_ashley_b...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fe92x/im_ashley_barr_aka_adam_turner_the_first_mtgox/ctntusz)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fe92x/im_ashley_b...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fe92x/im_ashley_barr_aka_adam_turner_the_first_mtgox/ctnyhxb)

>The entire codebase was stored in a database, only accessible via a client Mark maintained, with no version control nor lock controls meaning if we both had a file open we could overwrite one another's files and undo work.

>>Like, PHP source stored in mysql tables?

>PHP, CSS, JavaScript, HTML. Errything.

>There was no pre-production environment. Meaning changes were supposedly deployed untested or made straight on production.

>I was told I could not touch the backend, although they were working on getting access to this via Mark.

WAT

</comment><comment><USER18> What was the company culture like? We hear about a lot of bad but obviously there had to be some good things going on to work there.

<comment><USER19> This isn't the actual AMA, click the link at the top to get to it.</comment></comment>


Have you cut the cord yet?  Why?  Why not? - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/video/cord-cutters-are-young-educated-and-employed/

<comment><USER2> I moved to England, which essentially made the decision for me:

      - TV license costs about $300/yr, which gets you...
      - something like 3 channels, which will show you...
      - one reality show
      - one popular soap opera
      - one admittedly good show about cars
      - lots of documentaries about cheese.  in Welsh.

TV is essentially not an option here.

Still, though, I get angry letters from the TV Licensing people several times per week. Different ones each time, with new creative threats about what will happen to me if I don't disclose the hidden TV they know I must have and pay up. If they'd simply put the people writing that stuff to work making television programs, they might be able to come up with something worth watching, thus prompting me to buy a TV and pay them money.

<comment><USER3> I'm against the TV licence, but your points are flat out incorrect. The TV licence costs £145.50 (about $233) per year and gets you approximately 50 TV channels (some in HD!): [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_digital_terrestrial_tel...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_digital_terrestrial_television_channels_\(UK\)) (all those listed as "Free to view"). The BBC's output is typically high quality (BBC 4 being nearly entirely high brow documentaries) and is _commercial free_.

You're certainly welcome not to pay the licence fee and not watch TV, but spreading lies about how supposedly bad the British TV system is is disingenuous and perpetuates a silly North American myth similar to that about British food or teeth.

Now, I'm off to clean myself as I've just defended the licence fee, something I'm not entirely keen on myself ;-)

<comment><USER2> To be a little more correct, that $233 doesn't actually buy you those 50 channels. You still need to get a cable or satellite subscription, since all you can pick up off the air are the aforementioned cheese documentaries.

All you're buying for the license fee is a break from the constant stream of anger and threats from the TV Licensing people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I cancelled my landline when ADT offered to upgrade my security system to GSM for free. I cancelled my Verizon TV once I got Roku HD / Netflix. Now all I have is a FiOS internet connection and I'm very happy. Finally, I'm at a point where I no longer rely on any of the traditional media/communication technologies.

I listen to music on my iDevices using Zumocast (streamed over 3G/Wifi from my home PC). I have unlimited Netflix on my TV/iDevices and so does my wife. I don't have to sync my music or videos anywhere. I drove from Florida to Utah and back this past fortnight and I was able to stream my media almost everywhere (except Chaco Canyon, NM). I took a 3 mile trail down the Grand Canyon and was streaming music from my home PC. Technology is finally where I want it to be. And hopefully, things will continue to get better.

</comment><comment><USER5> It makes me a tiny bit sad that for the purposes of these stats I'm counted as someone with cable. However, I never watch it; I only keep it because the $8/month basic cable subscription gets me a $15/month discount on my cable internet...

Makes me wonder if there are others in my situation and what real numbers might look like.

</comment><comment><USER6> I lived 3 out of 4 years in college without cable, I just couldn't afford it. Couple that with not being a big sports fan and never having had things like HBO it was actually pretty easy to keep from jumping back in an buying cable.

Hulu, Netflix, and other network specific outlets (ComedyCentral) provide 99% of the content I care to consume.

Sure I miss some of the programs that play on channels like Discovery, and History. However, I've also realized that most of the time the return on watching TV is nothing or negative. I'd rather spend my time making things.

</comment><comment><USER7> The tv went completely this year. The only time it's missed is for sports' events. But if it's a must-watch, there's always somewhere showing it, and that often turns into a fun social event.

Here in the UK, we do have the wonderful BBC, which has the fabulous iPlayer service for free. (A licence fee must be paid to watch programs live, though.) It's an innovative service -- more than just tv on the web -- and it's interesting that a licence funded organisation is the one doing the innovating, and not its commercial brethren.

</comment><comment><USER8> Traditional tv is going the way of the newspaper. Had they been smart, they would have seen it coming instead of trying to scramble in the coming couple years like the newspaper industry has been doing for the past 5.

<comment><USER9> If they were smart, they'd already be streaming everything on the web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yep, we got rid of it about 8 months ago. All of the programming we watch is, for the most part, available on the public TV stations (NBC, ABC, etc.), or on Hulu. I set up a Windows Media Center PC to DVR our shows on broadcast TV, although we could just as easily rely on Hulu if we were willing to wait a day or two to see the shows. We also have Netflix.

We are also serial Pay Per View watchers, but now that $5/movie is going to either Playstation Network or Xbox Live/Zune, depending on which TV we want to watch it on, for about the same price. We have also been known on occasion to pay for TV series on iTunes (such as Tudors) that aren't available anywhere else.

For sports, we have ESPN3, which is also coming to Xbox Live shortly.

We are a 2 income household making a 6-figure income, so it is most decidedly not that we can't afford it -- it is simply that we got tired of paying for something so worthless.

What would get us to come back? Reasonable, a la carte channel ordering. I would, for example, shell out $2 or $3 per month for Bravo and a half dozen other stations that feature content we actually watched. But we had 300 channels and I didn't watch 297 of them -- why should I pay for them?

Also, I've never understood why everything isn't just available on-demand (like Hulu). If I have access to Bravo, I should be able to see any already- shown episode of Top Chef that I want, without having "recorded" it -- that should just be part of the subscription. Live TV should only be used if you want to watch sports, or the premier of an episode. Makes no sense not to provide this and make your customers happier.

</comment><comment><USER11> I had cable for a short period of time in the 1990's. I thought that the quality was never as good as free over the air broadcast TV. Where I grew up we had a very big TV antenna on a tall mast with a rotor that could be positioned with a dial that sat beside the TV. We could pick up a lot of channels, and we could even get different broadcasts on the same channel depending on the position of the antenna. I know that there were way more unique broadcasters than what you find today on 500-channel satellite TV. By the way, I think that most digital flat screens can receive free over the air digital high-definition TV.

For quite a while, I have not had a TV. I don't miss TV. And, when I do see TV somewhere else, I marvel at how inane the content is.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have no choice but to keep it because tv + internet is apparently cheaper than just internet.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've never owned a TV. So, I've never had any motivation to get cable television or an antenna for viewing local broadcasts. I don't even know what channels there are locally.

But, I do watch a couple TV shows.... On the Internet. I can count them on one hand, and have no motivation to pay for a Cable service that delivers programming I'm not interested in, and makes it hard to access what little programming I _am_ interested in.

If I could get something like Cable TV, and only had to pay for what little material I actually _watched_ , I might perhaps be interested in considering it.

</comment><comment><USER3> On top of the £12/mo licence fee, we pay £49/mo for Sky TV (the main, Murdoch- owned premium TV service in the UK - cable is not so big here) with all channels except sport.

I'm just about to downgrade it to the minimum (but still keep Sky, terrestrial reception here is crap) but not for the reason all these examples provide. We've got a kid. And 99% of the time, the TV is stuck on CBeebies (the BBC's under 5's channel) so there's no need for all those other channels ;-) I never thought a kid would lead to _lower_ expenditures in some areas..

</comment><comment><USER13> I rarely sit in my living room, so why should I pay for tv service that I can only use there? I canceled my video service and bought a cable modem so I don't have to pay a rental fee that's equivalent to buying a new modem every year.

There are so many good shows that I am behind on, that it doesn't bother me that the most recent season isn't available for streaming on Netflix. There's enough content already available to keep me occupied for years, and I can watch it on my phone or iPad wherever I am.

</comment><comment><USER14> I cancelled my satellite service last week. We were paying $100/month for hundreds of channels, and all it amounted to was a backlog of DVR'd Family Guy and Simpson's reruns. I'm much happier so far with Netflix and AppleTV, with the occasional torrent or Blu-ray for the things they don't carry. It takes a lot of AppleTV rentals to match what were spending on satellite.

</comment><comment><USER15> No. Sports. Tivo ameliorates having to use the cableco's godawful services. If I could get the EPL, UEFA and FIFA games over the 'net (as I currently do for MLB), I'd cut the cord immediately.

<comment><USER16> EPL and UEFA Champions League are available on foxsoccer.tv. FIFA World Cup matches were streamed for free in Canada, so for a $15/mo Canadian proxy server I got those too.</comment></comment>