Abacus use can boost math skills - <AUTHOR> http://kottke.org/17/03/abacus-use-can-boost-math-skills-and-other-lessons-on-learning <comment><USER2> I find play to be the most effective way of learning.

When I was learning, for example, the backpropagation algorithm, no amount of lectures could've helped me understand better than just drawing a network, thinking "what happens when I change the weights here?", and toying with the equations. It gives you an intimate familiarity and understanding that you can't get anywhere else.

<comment><USER3> Play disengage a very bad emotional state often found in classes.

You don't fear ridicule much, you're eager to try, lots of iterations in a small time; often instant results.

<comment><USER4> This is what I like about common core. I think a lot of hate for it comes from the fear of being wrong in school that a lot of people have growing up. The common core homework people post online with captions like "how is my child supposed to know the answer to this?" The point is they aren't, they are supposed to come up with a guess and explain their reasoning.

<comment><USER5> What I don't like about common core is that it is leaving my son and his classmates hopelessly confused and without basic calculation skills.

If we want to actually fix elementary math education, that would be simple. Singapore has developed a math curriculum that puts them top in the world in testing. Every research study that has used their system has found that it works far better than we do. But we have an entire educational establishment whose profits depend on our having periodic crises that let them rewrite all of the textbooks and charge top dollar retraining all of our teachers. Switching to something that works wouldn't make them money, so they will undermine the political process to guarantee that it doesn't happen.

As for homework, that's a giant can of worms. There is plenty of research on homework. It shows that homework is net neutral on actual learning, but a strong negative on creating stress. Digging in, it turns out that it can help or hurt, but whether it helps or hurts depends on whether there is someone at home who makes sure that the child does correct practice rather than incorrect practice. Therefore assigning homework's main impact (after home stress) is to widen the educational gap between children of different socioeconomic statuses.

The problem with common core homework is that the children don't know how to do it, the parents can't figure out what the teacher wants, and the end result is utter confusion. I've seen this first hand. I have a masters in math, but I'd look at my son's 4th grade homework and say, "I can think of several things that the teacher _might_ want, but I have no idea which one she does." The end result was utter confusion in my son. Confusion that resulted in his lacking basic skills until we hired a tutor to fix that.

Anyways Common Core is a complete and utter disaster. We aren't too far from parents' resentment rising up and causing a new reform movement that will predictably get hijacked by the same interests who guaranteed that Common Core would fail. Which is nothing new. It has happened every 5-10 years for longer than I've been alive...

<comment><USER6> > _As for homework, that 's a giant can of worms. There is plenty of research > on homework. It shows that homework is net neutral on actual learning, but a > strong negative on creating stress. Digging in, it turns out that it can > help or hurt, but whether it helps or hurts depends on whether there is > someone at home who makes sure that the child does correct practice rather > than incorrect practice. Therefore assigning homework's main impact (after > home stress) is to widen the educational gap between children of different > socioeconomic statuses._

That sounds very interesting, and really matches what I've seen so far. Do you have a link to some of this research? I'd like to share this with some friends but would like to share more than a link to a single hn comment!

<comment><USER5> That comment sums up what I learned from [http://www.alfiekohn.org/homework- myth/](http://www.alfiekohn.org/homework-myth/).

Every so often I run across more recent research on the same topic. It always comes to the same conclusion.

But parents generally feel better about their kids having poor results if they see evidence that their kids are at least putting out lots of effort. Homework serves as evidence, so it is hard to get rid of it.

In the meantime I'm lucky that 3/4 of my children get to go to [https://www.vandammeacademy.com/](https://www.vandammeacademy.com/) which believes in doing what is proven to work. Therefore they have a no homework policy, adopt proven methods like Singapore math, and so on. Which is why 3/4 of my children are getting a truly superior education with far, far less work.

Just to give a relevant anecdote about how strongly parents can feel about it, I know a fellow parent there who turned down a $400k/year job at Google because it would have meant that he had to move to Silicon Valley. He is convinced that he has found the best K-8 school in the country and won't take that away from his children.

He's far from the only parent at the school who feels that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So from the hour I wasted yesterday poking around the web after reading this article -

[http://webhome.idirect.com/~totton/abacus/PDF.htm](http://webhome.idirect.com/~totton/abacus/PDF.htm)

Seems like the best free resource.

This book seems like the standard english text on soroban -

[https://smile.amazon.com/Japanese-Abacus-Its-Use- Theory/dp/0...](https://smile.amazon.com/Japanese-Abacus-Its-Use- Theory/dp/0804802785/)

The first few chapters are great. This book from the sixties mentions that abacus are actually a middle-eastern invention and came east with trade.

Abacus in fixed frames are a later invention for speed but earlier versions would have more resembled a backgammon table using pebbles.

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

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

This led to this pretty interesting paper -

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.4349.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.4349.pdf)

It seems like there is a pretty large gap in our understanding of how people actually did calculation?

Cheers

</comment><comment><USER8> In my opinion the best abacus you can get is the 5 beads per rod one (soroban).

The 7 bead one pictured in the article header is slower to work with (classic suanpan).

The 10 bead one used in the west for kids may be good to have an intuition about quantities, but for practical use it is the worst.

You can get a soroban, learn the basic algorithms, then use an soroban drilling app to gain speed. With practice, you can exploit muscle memory and stop using a physical abacus.

The abacus provides a workable mental model for numeric operations. In contrast, calculators are opaque machines. They take inputs and provide an answer but do not expose their inner workings in a way that can be assimilated and learned by the user.

<comment><USER9> I have a couple of soroban at home. One has lovely, bright, colourful beads to attract the children. They are attracted, they try to use them as roller- skates. Which soroban drilling app have you used?

<comment><USER8> This Android one is free and very responsive.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=br.net.btco.so...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=br.net.btco.soroban&hl=en)

There are Youtube videos explaining the algorithms. A basic exercise is just counting, and then do a countdown. And then try to do it as quickly as possible. Then do it in intervals of 2 rather than 1, then 3, and so on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maria Montessori had a lot to say on the importance incorporating tactile elements in early education. This is why Montessori schools generally incorporate tools like the abacus (at least mine did). Not surprised we're re- learning some of her findings today

<comment><USER11> The Montessori school I went to didn't have an abacus for us to use, but to your point, the physical representations of 10^1 (a row of 10 beads), 10^2 (a 10x10 square of beads), and 10^3 (a 10x10x10 cube of beads) using beads helped me understand exponents much more quickly. Unfortunately we did not have a 10x10x10x10 tesseract of beads.

<comment><USER12> I'm a huge fan of the Montessori binomial cube:

[http://www.montessoriworld.org/sensory/sbinoml.html](http://www.montessoriworld.org/sensory/sbinoml.html)

<comment><USER11> Of course! We had those too. I had totally forgotten about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Related to abacus use. Sam Harris podcast "Complexity & Stupidity" [https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/complexity- stupidity](https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/complexity-stupidity) mentions abacus skills. The skill "spreads" to other areas of the brain they call it "complementary cognitive artifacts"

Quotes :

Harris: What else would you put on this list of complementary cognitive artifacts?

Krakauer: The other example that I'm very enamored of is the abacus. The abacus is a device for doing arithmetic in the world with our hands and eyes. But expert abacus users no longer have to use the physical abacus. They actually create a virtual abacus in the visual cortex. And that's particularly interesting, because a novice abacus user like me or you thinks about them either verbally or in terms of our frontal cortex. But as you get better and better, the place in the brain where the abacus is represented shifts, from language-like areas to visual, spatial areas in the brain. It really is a beautiful example of an object in the world restructuring the brain to perform a task efficiently—in other words, by my definition, intelligently.

</comment><comment><USER14> There's a cute story in _Surely You 're Joking, Mr. Feynman_ where a man with an abacus challenges him to an arithmetic contest: [http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html](http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html)

<comment><USER15> And in this story he claims that abacus use is mechanical and rids you of having to "know" numbers or approximate methods or understanding anything about the computation and why answers come out as they do. You're just executing steps and the more complex the computation, the more steps you do with no understanding whatsoever. So the opposite thesis from TFA.

<comment><USER16> It's not really an opposing thesis.

The moral of the story is that his opponent became married to the use of the abacus and convinced of its superiority and that led to an overreliance on it and inflexible thinking.

The thesis of the TFA is that the abacus can be a great tool for teaching arithmetic and number sense. It doesn't argue that it's the only thing you'll ever need and you should use other tools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It seems like the things that are more painful to learn and use make your brain work harder, and thus make you learn better. Or, maybe it is the case that people who know to use the hard stuff are interested in the subject enough to learn how to do it the hard way. You wouldn't be surprised that those who use Assembly to program tend to have better programming skills compared to those who only can program in Visual Basic, would you?

Veritasium also mentioned this recently: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBVV8pch1dM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBVV8pch1dM)

The more interesting question to ask to me is (1) whether it is the abacus that makes children learn better, or it is just that children who choose to use the abacus learn better (2) whether teaching abacus use at the beginning has the same effect as teaching abacus use later on after the students already know how to use the calculator. If children who choose to use the abacus learn better, then it wouldn't surprise me, but it means that teaching abacus wouldn't help. If that is false and (2) is true, then we know we better off teach abacus (or assembly) -- it doesn't matter when. But if (2) is false, it means that we have a huge trade-off to consider. Because either we teach the hard stuff at the beginning and discourage a lot of students, or we don't and have worse learning outcomes.

<comment><USER18> Your Assembly/Visual Basic question is going to be badly biased. The barrier to entry with VB is lower, so you'll see more low-skill programmers. This reduces the average competence of the entire cohort, but doesn't tell you anything about the high-skill users.

Now if you could show that _learning_ assembly led to better programming skills, you'd be talking about something similar. I suspect that a comparison of introductory programming via assembly vs a modern high-level language would find lower overall proficiency in the assembly group, although a few students would do fine.

Personally, I suspect that there isn't anything particularly unique about using an abacus, compared to other manipulation techniques. These are probably all superior to calculators, which are generally awful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> >"Based on everything we know about early math education and its long-term effects, I'll make the prediction that children who thrive with abacus will have higher math scores later in life, perhaps even on the SAT"

Also not so suprisingly, children who thrive in early math education will tend to have higher math scores later in life.

That's about all we seem to know about early math education anyways.

</comment><comment><USER20> Probably off-topic but I checked Isaac Asimov's "Realm of Numbers" from my library on the recommendation of HN and it's great. One of the earlier chapters outlines how the abacus and its concept of 'the unmoved row' could have helped forment the idea of zero. Very interesting text, no idea if the ideas are considered incorrect these days but still entertained and educated. 10/10 read.

</comment><comment><USER21> Do you have references about how to use an abacus?

I just know how the obvious uses: counting, summing and subtracting. There is a famous story about Richard Feynman and the abacus: [http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/abacus/feynman.html](http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/abacus/feynman.html) where the guy makes a lot of difficult calculations.

<comment><USER21> I've just found a great one: [http://webhome.idirect.com/~totton/abacus/PDF.htm](http://webhome.idirect.com/~totton/abacus/PDF.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I absolutely see this. Just today I've been helping teach a friend's child to do multiple-digit multiplication on paper. In that kind of thing, understanding place values (the ones-tens-hundreds columns) is _so_ important. It's amazed me how many high school students even don't quite get the idea of place values and what base 10 means. The abacus requires a good understanding of that concept from the start.

So, while the "skill spreading" might also contribute, with the abacus, it's a basic and essential concept to really understand for all higher-level math.

</comment><comment><USER23> I see these kinds of benefits in over-learning keyboards as well. The few classes I've taught to children and teenagers, you can see a dramatic difference between the students who are familiar with keyboards and those whose parents--I speculate--don't allow them screen time.

This extends into adulthood. The people I work with who have that well- practiced familiarity with keyboards and keyboard shortcuts--using them as if extensions of themselves--easily adapt to any new software interface. The adults who hunt around the screen with a mouse have a great deal of difficulty with change and are almost helpless when confronted with a new interface--even if the menu items are all in the same places as the last software.

It's a comfort and familiarity with the computer that allows the user to easily adapt to new things. It totally makes sense to me that working with an abacus would have similar benefits for making students comfortable with math.

<comment><USER24> It's all gone down hill after we stopped using the command line. Back in my day ...

<comment><USER25> I did plenty of mavis beacon and such and hated it (though it drilled the basics into me, at least) and used the DOS command line a bit, but what made me _fast_ and _accurate_ was busy real-time chatrooms and IM. Basically Yahoo Chat and ICQ, especially the former. If you wanted to chime in you had to be very quick. If I'd never found something that _forced_ me to be fast if I wanted to participate, I might well still be a crappy, slowish typist.

<comment><USER26> Online games were also great for this! You have to type quickly so that you can keep up with actually playing the game, and you can't stare at the keyboard because you need to keep an eye on what's actually going.

In some ways I owe my career to Warcraft 3

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's a great way to understand our base 10 number system.

That definitely gets lost when using calculators and computers.

As well, I have to believe it would help a child understand any other number system such as binary, octal and hexadecimal.

</comment><comment><USER28> The American elementary and high school education system would do young students a huge favour by abandoning the use of electronic calculators. I have no doubt that the abacus is a superb pedagogical tool but simple pencil and paper calculation would be a huge improvement over the calculator culture in early mathematical education.

I majored in Applied Mathematics in university and did not use a calculator in a single class or exam - it was explicitly forbidden to use them.

But I was also educated in the American elementary and high school curriculum. I am thoroughly convinced that the use of calculators in the American system does a huge disservice to students. The calculator culture begins at an astonishingly young age, in elementary school, when kids are first introduced to the Texas Instruments TI-108 calculator [1]. This bright blue and red, solar-powered gadget is very exciting for children in a classroom, but it is poison. At the very age that students should be drilling mental math, they are instead given this huge crutch. It's like never taking the training wheels off a child's bicycle, robbing them of the opportunity to actually learn to ride a bicycle.

The same story is repeated in middle school (with the same TI-108). And then you reach high school. You would think that at least now the the training wheels would come off. But instead, you are "upgraded" from bicycle with training wheels to an adult-sized tricycle. I am, of course, speaking of the Texas Instruments "graphing calculator" [2]. This abomination is a full- fledged programmable computer with CAS software. You are encouraged (even required) to use this machine all the way through Advanced Placement Calculus. If you are not distracted in class playing video games on your "graphing calculator," then you may use it to automatically solve algebraic and trigonometric equations and evaluate derivatives and integrals. Why bother memorizing identities when you can just program them into a computer? If you have been programming from an early age, then you may be in the worst place possible because you are predisposed to wasting your time trying to program your way out of math homework instead of focusing on learning math. When students complain about why they have to learn Calculus, your American math teachers tell you that nobody "in the real world" actually solves integrals by hand and it's all done on computers, but you have to learn it anyway for obscure pedagogical reasons. An aspiring future Comp Sci student is likely to take this as a clear signal that it's all a waste of time, and soon high school will be over and you'll never need to worry about this antiquated Calculus thing again - your computer will do it all for you.

There are other ways in which American mathematics education is extremely flawed, but the calculator culture is the worst offence by far. I suspect that the bureaucrats who decide on such things rationalize this by calibrating the curriculum to what they see as the "lowest common denominator" student who will never need to learn anything beyond basic algebra and arithmetic. The goal of the system is to train this student to be a productive, low-wage worker, with just enough mathematical training to be able to mindlessly punch numbers into a cash register or simple spreadsheet on the rare occasion that the need for numerical computation may arise in their "careers."

I have a three year old and I have no idea what I could do to save him from this insane system, short of moving to a different continent.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-108](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-108) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Texas_Instrument...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Texas_Instruments_graphing_calculators)

<comment><USER29> Calculators are tools and just need to be used in an appropriate context. Engineering programs in Canada allow no calculators for math classes (Calculus, Linear Algebra, etc) but they are an absolute necessity for for Engineering classes (e.g. dynamics). It's a very nice balance because the math classes hone your abilities to think and reason mathematically unaided by the engineering classes hone your ability to apply those skills without getting bogged down in details about calculations.

<comment><USER28> I don't disagree that computers/electronic calculators are appropriate tools for engineering, science and business classes, even at the secondary or primary school levels. Those are contexts where numerical computation with "messy" numbers are necessary. Insisting on manual calculation in such a context would be tedious and of no pedagogical value. I was only talking about math classes, where exam questions can be made up with "clean" numbers so that there is never any need for using a calculator.

Although, given that we are in 2017, I really don't think that the traditional pocket calculator is a good tool in any educational context. In any context where using a pocket calculator makes sense, a full-fledged computer makes much more sense (except perhaps elementary school science classes). If you are numerically solving equations in an engineering class (e.g. dynamics), then you should really be using something like MATLAB or Python (or Julia!). Similarly, if you are analyzing a financial statement in an accounting class, it would make far more sense to use a spreadsheet rather than an HP 12C calculator. Using a computer would be much more convenient and have far greater pedagogical value for "real-world" training in such contexts.

I think the only reason that pocket calculators are prevalent in higher education contexts (such as your dynamics course) is that it is more difficult to cheat on an exam using a calculator (e.g. smuggling in notes) than it is with a full-fledged computer. But that is really a computer security issue and there ways to solve that problem which don't involve a throwback to antiquated, 1960s desktop computing technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can anyone recommend an actual abacus to buy?

<comment><USER31> To add and subtract, I'd suggest a soroban, the Japanese 4 and 1 bead per row abacus in hand-held size. Those were in wide use until a few decades ago, and can be operated quickly. They're still available on Amazon and Alibaba. Get one where the beads are cone-shaped, not round; those are easier to manipulate. Don't bother with a "reset button"; you can do that with one finger in a second, rattling down the columns.

It's not a very useful skill, but it's not hard to learn. I wouldn't inflict it on kids.

The 5 and 2 bead form is more of a school thing.

I probably still have one, packed away with the slide rule. My HP-11C is on my desk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> vim</comment>


Improved Secondary Indexing with New Query Capabilities for Cassandra - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/xedin/sasi <comment><USER2> Super exciting!</comment>


Facebook engineering team's slogan - Fix more whine less - <AUTHOR> http://itechtalks.blogspot.com/2011/09/facebook-engineering-teams-slogan-fix.html

<comment><USER2> More blogspam from this submitter, it's another copy-and-paste job: <http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150277682538920></comment>


Excel Messenger:Messaging app where the server and clients are excel sheets - <AUTHOR> http://tristancalderbank.com/2016/09/06/excel-messenger-a-terrible-experiment-in-vba/ <comment><USER2> Great technology. What is your plan for an MVP? Is this other intern you mention your co-founder? I can see great potential for an enterprise messaging / social network app.

<comment><USER3> What's required now is just to scale out! It seems at the workplace they already have a critical mass, so it's just a matter of time. First the user- base, then the revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Repository: [https://github.com/tristancalderbank/excel- messenger](https://github.com/tristancalderbank/excel-messenger)

</comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me of "The Website is Down" [http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com](http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com)</comment>


What k-pop can teach us about design - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@JonathanZWhite/what-k-pop-can-teach-us-about-design-6253a85f469c#.kgcl2n5mz <comment><USER2> Telling a story... good use of color, etc... These are not really lessons FROM K-Pop. I guess K-Pop as much as any highly popular and commercialized product is going to have to fit the bill though, but why study the shadow on the cave wall instead of the perfect form?

<comment><AUTHOR> The principles of good design definitely don't come from k-pop. You're right. Any designer can go out and read about what constitutes good design.

I wanted to show designers that you can learn about design from any communication medium… As long as they practice looking. So following along your analogy, sometimes looking at shadows can be just as effective as the original form.

<comment><USER3> Also, k-pop is funner than a design textbook :)</comment></comment></comment>


How much time do scientists spend chasing grants? - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/04/25/chasing-grants/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheEndeavour+%28The+Endeavour%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> I've been involved in research, and spent a lot less than 40% of my time "chasing grants" (although it's unclear what activities that one does might be considered "chasing a grant").

And there really isn't that much of a bureaucracy barrier to submitting and maintaining grants, particularly if you have any kind of institutional support. I daresay the kinds of hoops one jumps through to get and keep funding from VC et al make grant applications look like a joy.

In any event, the things you do as a researcher on a day-to-day basis - keeping up on the literature, writing papers and disseminating your findings, thinking hard about your research problem...if done competently, make grant submission easy.</comment>


PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/phantomjs/9aI5d-LDuNE <comment><USER2> IMO it'd be a really smart move for Google to hire Vitaly to help with the launching of this feature and things around it. He has done a great job with PhantomJS.

Even an _acquisition_ [1] of PhantomJS would totally make sense, then let him keep working on it but based on headless Chrome and with real resources.

[1] Careful how you spin it for this route, learn from TJ/Express [https://medium.com/@tjholowaychuk/strongloop- express-40b8bcb...](https://medium.com/@tjholowaychuk/strongloop- express-40b8bcb8e5af)

<comment><USER3> Could you elaborate on the TJ/Express? The post you provided looks like the last one of series of events.

<comment><USER2> Yes, there was some controversy in the Node.js world because he sold the project of Express to StrongLoop just as he was leaving for Go. I think it was totally a problem on how things were communicated and that he had really a good intention. What didn't help much though is that StrongLoop then left the project unattended so the main person contributing to it (Doug Wilson) wasn't even acknowledged.

So if an open source project is being sold:

\- Make sure everyone knows it's because it'll be better handled and not because of the money.

\- At least get a decent amount of money! According to TJ it was half a month worth of money.

\- If you are the company buying it don't leave it unattended afterwards.

Anyway, now TJ is surely remembered with a lot of gratitude in the Node.js community and I'm so happy he helped it grow so much!

This is all better explained here (and read the comments for TJ opinion): [http://thefullstack.xyz/history-express-javascript- framework...](http://thefullstack.xyz/history-express-javascript-framework/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b Wow, I'm very impressed. At this stage it is a very wise decision to step down and to focus onto something else, rather than to hold on to a project that will eventually disappear. It takes a lot of courage to move on from a project that had to be maintained for several years and that had such a reach.

We can only be thankful for all the good work that went into PhantomJS, and wish the maintainers the best of luck in their next endeavors.

Cheers!

<comment><USER4> He says in his message it's been a slog for some time, looks like a good time to be done with it. Open source is great, we all like it, but demanding unpaid jobs can get old, too.

<comment><USER5> And it makes sense. You want Chrome in your tests if your users are using Chrome. Very few (if any) of your users will ever visit your app with a headless PhantomJS browser, so it's not a platform that you should go out of your way to support.

I've been using Selenium Driver with Chrome in xvfb for my headless testing needs, and I've used PhantomJS for some automation things in the past where it was great, but since I switched I really haven't looked back!

I had things breaking subtly that I couldn't fix, and they did not manifest as problems in the Chrome browser or Selenium. I still don't know what was wrong, I just know that my Rails app won't pass its JavaScript functional tests if I use PhantomJS. When I did the evaluation of 3 test drivers, I found that the one with the actual browser in it was the one that worked most reliably.

<comment><USER6> Thanks so much to the PhantomJS maintainer for his hard work over the years! To me, it feels like his decision is the correct one here.

After we realised that we hadn't seen a "one-browser" bug for 2 years in our massive angularjs app, we got rid of all browsers but PhantomJS in our karma suite. PhantomJS' slowness, lagging-behind in webstandards and just my general gut feeling (these facts above made me question the point in running JavaScript tests in an actual browser at all) made me port our karma test suite to jest w/ jsdom and haven't been happier since we, years prior, got rid of our gnarly Selenium test suite that caught 0 bugs but was the major cause for maintenance headache.

<comment><USER7> > After we realised that we hadn't seen a "one-browser" bug for 2 years in our > massive angularjs app

Really? When I was writing JavaScript I thought I'd hit one ~ once a month. As a matter of fact I hit a v8 bug just yesterday which apparently doesn't support /Etc/GMT[-+][0-9]{0,2} timezones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Open source software has to be one of the least efficient markets out there.

If you sum up the very real value PhantomJS has delivered to very real companies over the last several years, napkin math tells me we wouldn't have the project being abandoned for being a "bloody hell" to work on.

<comment><USER9> It's a classic "public good" \- an economic activity whose benefits are impractical or unworthwhile to deny to those who don't pay. Things like emergency services, last-mile road infrastructure, and environmental protection work. A special-case of positive externalities. These are a classic example used by economists of a natural place for government in the economy.

<comment><USER10> Which makes me wonder why governments don't give more grants for writing open source code.

They do it for research, which is another thing that would otherwise probably not pay for itself.

I guess if they started doing it a lot of commercial companies would complain to them about the competition.

<comment><USER11> I think that in the US, we've been fighting for some long about how much to cut government, the idea of proposing to create a new category of spending just doesn't occur to Democrats. The closest they can come to imagining something new is free college (which is the same what we have now [free high school, college scholarships] but more so) and free daycare (which is like free preschool but younger).

<comment><USER12> You're kind of in a bubble, there is a lot of U.S. government support for open source and most agencies use it. See [https://code.gov](https://code.gov) for a starting point. There's never going to be a huge multi-billion dollar grant program because it is unfair to closed-source companies (who pay taxes) but you are imagining a debate or hangup that doesn't exist.

<comment><USER13> Why is it unfair? Those companies presumably charge for their software, and maybe will be incentivised to go open source.

<comment><USER14> It's unfair because those companies can't extract their required funding at gunpoint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Also Firefox will get headless mode in few releases [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1338004](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1338004)

<comment><USER16> And while people wait, you can already do a 'poor mans' headless Firefox thanks to SlimerJS and xvfb.

Phantomjs is less resource heavy if you're constantly spooling up and down lots of instances but I prefer SlimerJS w/ Firefox since it lets you keep up to date with a modern version of Firefox (rather than relying on sporadic QTWebkit updates from Phantomjs).

If you're using Casperjs, SlimerJS is virtually a drop in replacement for Phantomjs (though I worry about how long/well Casperjs will continue to be maintained).

<comment><USER17> One can use Xvfb to run normal Chrome as well (with few gotchas like --no- sandbox, --disable-gpu and dep on dbus-x11). A test I'm working on at the moment takes 28 seconds in PhantonJS and 6 in Chrome under Docker and Xvfb.

<comment><USER18> Very interesting comparison! Could you write a note on your experience somewhere?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Though a collaboration between the two projects might not be out of the question: [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/phantomjs- dev/S-mEBwuSgKQ/PQ...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/phantomjs- dev/S-mEBwuSgKQ/PQdE1A5FAwAJ)

<comment><USER20> google should hire him

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > I even bought the Mac for that!

I did too, then found out you also needed a dev license for users being able to run your app. Supporting Mac/OSX is damn expensive if your app is free.

<comment><USER22> For iOS development I believe they got rid of that requirement, you can develop iOS apps (at least) using a personal dev account; only when you want to go to the app store do they ask for the license fee.

<comment><USER23> How do I do this without buying dedicated hardware?

<comment><USER24> Illegaly (virtualization) or in the cloud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> PhantomJS enabled us at the time to bootstrap a big project at work where at the end workflow the app had to turn HTML orders to PDF on the fly, eventually we moved to WKHTMLTOPDF ([https://wkhtmltopdf.org/](https://wkhtmltopdf.org/)) which is much less hungry with resources but nonetheless PhantomJS played a huge role during the early days of the project and was easy to setup. If I remember correctly the only down side was to find the correct format for our HTML template so PhantomJS would render proper page break and repeat the header for super long orders.

I can understand why stepping down is the right decision, maintaining such project by himself is an amazing feat on its own and even more when it proves to be useful for so many companies. Sadly when it becomes your second job you might always be on the lookout for a clean exit and such opportunity just became a reality.

Good luck in your future projects Vitaly!

<comment><USER26> We have used PhantomJS and WKHTMLTOPDF both. Phantomjs hogs a lot of resources but is very good when you want print large PDFs (500+ pages). WKHTMLTOPDF struggles with larger HTMLs.

<comment><USER27> checkout [https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf](https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf). Its based on electron.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > Chrome is faster and more stable than PhantomJS. And it doesn't eat memory > like crazy.

Wait, can someone tell me where to download this doesn't-eat-memory-like-crazy version of Chrome? Activity Monitor is showing me 2GB of Chrome processes right now and that's even with The Great Suspender having paused almost all my tabs.

<comment><USER5> I saw a trick where you can run Chrome and give it less memory, and it uses less memory. This is done using cgroups.

The blog post is somewhat old[1] and not in sync with the version that is in Git[2], you might find a way to do this without Docker (I was using an old version of Docker and kernel that couldn't get it to work. But I need the old version of Docker for reasons.)

Chrome will aggressively consume any memory you give it (up to a point?) to "make your browsing experience better" somehow. You're not wrong. But there is modern technology that can make it better. If you have a fast SSD, then Chrome can still use Swap to make your experience better. The later version in the Dockerfile linked on Git also leverages swapaccount with the seccomp setting.

This may be one great use of Docker for people that wouldn't yet have been convinced to use Docker for any serious reason.

[1]: [https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the- desk...](https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the- desktop/#5-chrome) [2]: [https://github.com/jessfraz/dockerfiles/blob/master/chrome/s...](https://github.com/jessfraz/dockerfiles/blob/master/chrome/stable/Dockerfile)

<comment><USER29> You can just use cgroups on their own without docker

<comment><USER30> I would guess ulimit -v might work as well, so you may not even need cgroups.

<comment><USER5> Hah! Something new is also something old. Thanks for that.

But won't you run into issues with child processes, of which Chrome tends to spawn a zillion? (I'm reading that each one gets its own limit under ulimit...)

And potentially get your browser killed when it hits the limit? I haven't tested this and I don't really know how ulimit works, but I think it's a less effective solution than the cgroups for at least one reason.

<comment><USER30> Yes, it is per process, so it would only limit memory-per-tab. I believe you get the "aw snap" window in chrome if it hits the limit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Wow, that was a quick reaction.

Thanks to the maintainers for all the good work!

To me, it's always a sad occasion to see diversity diminished. Nothing against Chromium, but I hope it won't be the one browser to rule them all. It's always good to have alternatives.

<comment><USER32> They know since June about the project. This is an interesting conversation:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/phantomjs- dev/S-mEBw...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/phantomjs- dev/S-mEBwuSgKQ)

( posted by askmike in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14105613](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14105613) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Naive question here. What makes headless mode so difficult?

<comment><USER34> It's a very good question. One might imagine that the browser renders everything into a buffer at some point, and you could simply ask the engine to give you a pointer to that data.

The reality is very different. WebKit/Blink rendering is intimately tied with the graphics system of each platform, in particular through the use of native widgets and native window system compositors.

For example, on the Mac, a lot of compositing within the browser window is done using Core Animation layers. This is a really good idea for performance, because it leverages the work done by Apple to improve their GUI performance.

The downside is that capturing the output becomes very tricky when the browser doesn't do the final compositing. Previously this didn't really matter because 99.99% of browser rendering is for end users and they don't need to capture the output (or if they do, they would just use platform GUI functionality like screen capture).

An increasing demand for headless rendering has effectively forced browser engine teams to rethink some of the internal APIs so that a pipeline can be built to capture the final rendering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Thank you for PhantomJS! Been using it for testing, generating PDFs and screenshot.

<comment><USER36> Yes, thanks PhantomJS!

I'm wondering, are there any examples out there for generating screenshots on headless Chrome?

<comment><USER37> From the docs it sounds like it is largely compatible with Selenium [https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkgr/headle...](https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkgr/headless/README.md)

If that is true, the takeScreenshot() should work as normal hopefully.

<comment><USER38> I can confirm that. Here's an example of how we take screenshots when automated tests fail, using Selenium + Chrome:

[https://gist.github.com/masonmark/2332c1238a2fa70b5e4fcfffdc...](https://gist.github.com/masonmark/2332c1238a2fa70b5e4fcfffdcd76ca3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I am happy for the guy as he seems to be able to let go without letting anybody down (which seems to be important to him). At the same time, it is sad when people have such a pressure for something they probably started as a fun project.

</comment><comment><USER40> Question for those of you more involved with such headless tasks. Do you think that chromium and firefox supporting headless will induce a surge in bots crawling the open web from now on?

<comment><USER41> Right off the bat: No. The reason for that is that crawling using a proper browser (i.e. Chrome) is a lot more resource-intensive than using a dedicated tool which only gets the top resource and maybe tries to parse some additional resources. With these kinds of tools you're limited by available bandwidth and IO speeds if you want to store things. If you're looking at a browser, you'll be limited more by things like memory consumption and CPU time, so you'd need a bigger box or more of them to drive the same amount of traffic. There is also not the same amount of ready made applications which take care of crawling, storing and maybe even indexing your data, so not something you can do without actually implementing a lot of things yourself.

Of course, that is only talking about wide-scale scanning. If you're only looking to scrape a single target, for whatever reason, then having an instrumented headless browser will greatly simplify things. Headless Chrome should be more efficient than running it in a (virtual) framebuffer. Plus the whole setup for a powerful crawler is reduced to "install Chrome, start it, point $crawler at the API endpoint". My guess is that we might see turnkey crawling / automation tools appear where you supply a list of URLs and the library + Chrome does the rest. Then, browser-based large scale scanning will be within everyone's reach, only limited by their resources.

Background: I created [https://urlscan.io](https://urlscan.io) which will simply visit a website and record HTTP interactions (annotating the resources with some helpful meta data). I've been preaching the power of headless instrumented browsers for the better part of a year now ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> With chrome headless we still need an api like phantomjs or slimerjs to have the same functionality.

</comment><comment><USER43> My colleague from automatic testing says that phantomjs actually is much more stable than chrome...

<comment><USER44> That's true, but in my experience the instability of Chrome comes from opening and closing it's windows repeatedly as a large test suite often does - occasionally it doesn't seem to like opening a new instance while another is closing. Headless mode should resolve that problem.

<comment><USER45> There was also the issue a few years ago (last time I wrote automated scripts) where the Chrome driver for Selenium would go too fast for the browser to keep up, causing false failures.

I had to implement a "wait between actions" feature to handle it, while Phantom had no such problems. I'm assuming this will not be an issue with headless Chrome, since I think half of the problem was due to graphical rendering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It's both sad to see an incredibly useful project be sunsetted and exciting that it's no longer needed. I remember a project that used phantomjs to scrape an old government camping site to build a compatibility layer on top.

Thank you, if you're reading.

</comment><comment><USER47> Good riddance! PhantomJS is a non-stop firehose of random errors and productivity breakdowns. It's also a way better JS driver than anything else out there. I'm glad Google is following in their footsteps and integrating Phantom's features directly into Chrome, where it will be supported by a large team and (hopefully) headless use of the Blink engine will be standardized so your test integrity doesn't depend on a patch version upgrade of your underlying JS implementation.

So, cheers to you Vitaly and anyone else who's helped make Phantom & Poltergeist into my favorite Capybara web driver!

</comment><comment><USER48> This is sad, phantomjs is better stripped than Chromium headless, if you ever try to install Chromium on servers without X, it requires shit ton of dependencies, while phantomjs was properly modified requires only minimal library.

<comment><USER49> I don't really see the problem. After all, you just install those deps once in your Dockerfile, right? ;)

<comment><USER48> chromium-browser requires these

        chromium-browser chromium-browser-l10n chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra cpp
        cpp-4.8 fontconfig fontconfig-config fonts-dejavu-core hicolor-icon-theme
        libasound2 libasound2-data libatk1.0-0 libatk1.0-data libatomic1
        libavahi-client3 libavahi-common-data libavahi-common3 libcairo2
        libcloog-isl4 libcups2 libdatrie1 libdrm-intel1 libdrm-nouveau2
        libdrm-radeon1 libfile-basedir-perl libfile-desktopentry-perl
        libfile-mimeinfo-perl libfontconfig1 libfontenc1 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0
        libgdk-pixbuf2.0-common libgl1-mesa-dri libgl1-mesa-glx libglapi-mesa
        libgmp10 libgnome-keyring-common libgnome-keyring0 libgraphite2-3
        libgtk2.0-0 libgtk2.0-bin libgtk2.0-common libharfbuzz0b libice6 libisl10
        libjasper1 libjbig0 libjpeg-turbo8 libjpeg8 libllvm3.4 libmpc3 libmpfr4
        libnspr4 libnss3 libnss3-nssdb libpango-1.0-0 libpangocairo-1.0-0
        libpangoft2-1.0-0 libpciaccess0 libpixman-1-0 libsm6 libspeechd2
        libthai-data libthai0 libtiff5 libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0 libx11-xcb1 libxaw7
        libxcb-dri2-0 libxcb-dri3-0 libxcb-glx0 libxcb-present0 libxcb-render0
        libxcb-shape0 libxcb-shm0 libxcb-sync1 libxcomposite1 libxcursor1
        libxdamage1 libxfixes3 libxft2 libxi6 libxinerama1 libxmu6 libxpm4
        libxrandr2 libxrender1 libxshmfence1 libxss1 libxt6 libxtst6 libxv1
        libxxf86dga1 libxxf86vm1 x11-common x11-utils x11-xserver-utils xdg-utils

phantomjs:

        fontconfig-config fonts-dejavu-core libfontconfig1 libjpeg-turbo8 libjpeg8

<comment><USER49> Err, that's... simply not right. The difference isn't that dramatic.

      $ docker run -it ubuntu:16.04 sh -c 'apt-get update && apt-get install phantomjs'
        134 newly installed. After this operation, 339 MB of additional disk space will be used.
      $ docker run -it ubuntu:16.04 sh -c 'apt-get update && apt-get install chromium-browser'
        202 newly installed. After this operation, 615 MB of additional disk space will be used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Besides testing, my team uses phantomjs to convert pages to PDF and also to convert javascript generated charts to images. This is sad news, I'm don't think chrome eventually will add support for.

<comment><USER51> There's wkhtmltopdf[1] when you need the PDF functionality. It is licensed with LGPL, so you can make it interop with your commercial product.

[1]: [https://wkhtmltopdf.org/](https://wkhtmltopdf.org/)

<comment><USER52> While it's much better than PhantomJS, still causes a lot of issues. We run a paid pet project [1] for html to pdf conversion and most of our customers have stories beginning with PhantomJS then moving to wkhtmltopdf then finally going for something else due to issues with both.

Headless Chrome might solve this issue once and for all though.

[1] [https://restpack.io/html2pdf](https://restpack.io/html2pdf)

<comment><USER51> For me the only issue was kerning with some specific fonts on windows servers. Do you have any other examples?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Many thanks to the maintainer for his work. I think this isn't unexpected, and actually encourage other unpaid maintainers to follow. Reason I'm thinking this is that the current state of voluntary support is unsustainable anyway, and by letting it go we maybe could make the market for dev tools economically viable again.

</comment><comment><USER54> PhantomJS is a great tool, I implemented it as a PDF report generating system. But will Chromium be able to replace it in this regard? Will Chromium have paging features? Will it be able to repeat table headers when a table body content extends to the next page?

<comment><USER55> I can't answer all of your questions, but this thread may interest you: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14102248](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14102248)

<comment><USER54> Huge help, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> You deserve a nobel peace prize.

I recall fondly informally introducing colleagues to chrome dev tools, injecting jquery via a booklet, and querying the dom like xml xpath. Then taking this headless (server-side) with almost minimal wrapping due to your work.

Hail you and damn regexp.. :)

</comment><comment><USER57> Anybody know how to port code from using PhantomJS to headless Chrome? I have been using CasperJS that wraps to PhantomJS. PhantomJS had its own set of commands. headless chrome will have to be different one way or another.

<comment><USER58> I wrote a bit about how you can get started here using Node: [https://objectpartners.com/2017/04/13/how-to-install-and- use...](https://objectpartners.com/2017/04/13/how-to-install-and-use-headless- chrome-on-osx/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> NW.js v0.23 will support headless with Chromium 59. I've been collecting feature requests and sharing the plan. Please see [https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/issues/769#issuecomment-259867...](https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/issues/769#issuecomment-259867271) and [https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/issues/769#issuecomment-294064...](https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/issues/769#issuecomment-294064358)

</comment><comment><USER60> I found PhantomJS pretty unusable for my use-case. It always spits logs to stdout and there's no way to change that. Filed a bug and he said "fix it yourself"...sorry I don't know Qt.

<comment><USER61> As a developer, I wonder how hard can it be to disable console logging on any project if the source code is provided.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I maintain a web driver too (Selenium-based) and have been wondering about how it would compare to Selenium ChromeDriver headless. Mine is built in Java and uses Java's embedded WebKit. If anyone has feedback this is where I'm discussing it, [https://github.com/MachinePublishers/jBrowserDriver/issues/2...](https://github.com/MachinePublishers/jBrowserDriver/issues/273)

</comment><comment><USER63> I think is a wise decision too. As an OSS collaborator is hard to explain how important/demanding this work is. I really understand his feeling, and I hope that more people like him could collaborate in OSS projects. Thanks for everything!

</comment><comment><USER64> PhantomJS was the first thing we used for Neocities screenshots and I've always had a special affection for this project for that reason. Neocities really wouldn't have been possible without the ability to do screenshots.

</comment><comment><USER65> This is a great move. I appreciate what Phantom (and the maintainer) were trying to do, but I have always loathed PhantomJS. It has never worked well. In fact, I'd been away from it for some time, but just last night needed to install it to run some tests and it caused massive frustration.

I pulled a Node repo that ran tests using Karma (why people use Karma is a complete mystery to me). I pulled the repo, ran `npm install` and then `npm test`. Sure enough Karma explodes out of the gate.

Phantom can't start. I'm on Windows 8.1. I debug for an hour, eventually finding a magic custom binary Ariya created. I then have to copy this binary to the `/node_modules/karma-phantom-launcher/node_modules/phantomjs2-ext/bin` directory.

All this to run some Jasmine specs.

If Chrome headless support is really as good as "works just like Chrome without the GUI" then I will be one happy camper.

<comment><USER66> I personally use Chrome at the moment as on larger projects PhantomJS as non forgiving with syntax errors and tests will simply fail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Where's Ariya in all this? He seems to have also completely abandoned Phantom...?

</comment><comment><USER68> Is there any way to donate to the PhantomJS project? This seems like a good time to throw some money their way, in thanks for what the maintainers (mostly Vitaly over the past few months, at least, it looks like) have done.

</comment><comment><USER69> I run phantomjscloud.com, I guess this is the writing on the wall and I better start building another [chrome] back end soon. Probably a name change is in order too!

</comment><comment><USER70> I appreciate all the hard work.

In my last job, I used PhantomJS with highcharts to provide a web service for generating charts. And used it with the poltergeist gem for headless testing.

</comment><comment><USER71> Hey dude... thanks from a grateful dev in Scottsdale, AZ. Your hard work enabled a lot of really cool stuff for us! Good luck in your future adventures!

</comment><comment><USER72> Thank you for your work Vitaly, it's truly inspiring, you've made a difference for the community. Good luck on your next project.

</comment><comment> amiga-workbench Thanks for the work, PhantomJS made generating screenshots to show different UI states in bulk effortless.

It has saved me days of effort over the last year.

</comment><comment><USER73> Thanks Vitaly for your work! SEO4Ajax would certainly not exist without PhantomJS. It helped us to deliver the service efficiently at the time.

Unfortunately, we had quite a few compatibility issues with it leading us to migrate to Chrome (with xvfb) one year ago. Since then, we must confess that we are very happy of this choice. Chrome is indeed very stable, fast and more importantly for us, always up-to-date.

</comment><comment><USER74> Have been using PhantomJS since couple of years for data scrapping. It's a really good project.

</comment><comment><USER75> That's quite sad.

<comment><USER76> It might be for the best. One of the many companies using PhantomJS to make money could go ahead and employ Vitaly to work on the project full time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> I'm curious - What is the utility of headless browsers?

Are there people who earn money by getting it to automatically fill out forms, enter competitions etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> While we're on the topic, does anyone know where one might find scripts to scrape bank statements so you don't have to download them manually every month? (This is one thing I would find headless browsers useful for...)

<comment><USER78> Every UK bank I've used allows some format of csv/qif/ofx export.

Are you in the US?

<comment><USER79> They generally do. But many UK banks make it hard to _automate_ things. Either insisting on 2FA in all cases, or having a secondary login without 2FA that only gives very limited access.

Some way of authorising API access to read-only access to things like statements would be fantastic, to the extent that I'd consider changing banks over it, if you know of any UK banks that offer it.

<comment><USER80> As well, most bank OFX/CSV exports I've dealt with are truncated in some ways (e.g. truncated labels), which make it harder to really leverage sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> How does this news fit in with Selenium?

<comment><USER82> Selenium won't really be impacted, as it's higher-level than PhantomJS.

This is also a great example of why it's smart to use Selenium or something like it for scripting the tests. You can easily swap out for another backend in Selenium, but if you wrote tests in pure PhantomJS, you're now stuck with a codebase that depends on unmaintained software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> That sucks for any scraping use case. I have to imagine google has built in some way to detect headless browser mode serverside, even if only they can access it.

<comment><USER84> i use phantomjs with the chrome webdriver, or whatever it may be called, already, all the time.

if they wanted to do that, theyd already do it. this change doesnt seem to be all that big.</comment></comment>


US doctors are hoping to start offering women vaginal fluid transplants - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/health-49646907 <comment><USER3> Some years ago I did some searching on scholar.google.com about bacterial vaginosis.

While douching is generally discouraged as non-helpful at best or counter- productive at worst, I remember reading a study that found washing the vagina with iodine mostly eliminates all bacteria - desirable and undesirable - <USER2> that the beneficial lacto-bacteria are the first to repopulate the cavity.

Quotes and links to two studies about this approach are below.

I recall that when I was looking into the matter, I noticed that Walmart's store brand of iodine wash has that chemical in spermicide that some women are sensitive to. The adjacent bottle of brand-name iodine (Betadine?) doesn't have that chemical. Searching now, it must've been Nonoxynol-9 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonoxynol-9](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonoxynol-9) / [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Povidone- iodine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Povidone-iodine)

I'll look at my pictures... (EDIT: maybe it's been reformulated: "Active Ingredient: Povidone-iodine, 10%; Inactive ingredients: C12-13, PARETH-9, citric acid, disodium phosphate, glycerin, sodium hydroxide, water" \- [https://www.walmart.com/ip/Equate-First-Aid- Antiseptic-8-fl-...](https://www.walmart.com/ip/Equate-First-Aid- Antiseptic-8-fl-oz/236247392)

This one has Nonoxynol-9: [https://www.walmart.com/ip/Betadine-skin- cleanser/46068801](https://www.walmart.com/ip/Betadine-skin-cleanser/46068801)

Betadine without Nonoxynol-9: Active Ingredients: Povidone-Iodine (10%) (1% Available Iodine). Purpose: First Aid Antiseptic. Inactive Ingredients: Pareth 25-8, Purified Water, Sodium Hydroxide. - [https://www.walmart.com/ip/Betadine-Solution-8-fl- oz/1732500...](https://www.walmart.com/ip/Betadine-Solution-8-fl-oz/17325005) /EDIT)

tl/dr: use iodine to wipe out all bacteria, so the lactic-acid producing bacteria can repopulate the area.

Two studies that seem to support using iodine washes to take out all the bacteria:

" [...] Contrary to that the lactobacilli counts from patients treated with povidone iodine suppositories decreased after the first week but increased in the second one. Potentially pathogenic germs, e.g. Gardnerella, Bacteroides and Enterobacteria were reduced in a higher extent and with a longer lasting effect after treatment with povidone iodine suppositories than with capsules containing lactobacilli. The results of this study show that native lactobacilli rapidly re-colonize after the antiseptic treatment with povidone iodine. Therefore, there is no need to use lactobacilli in addition." \- _Efficacy of Povidone-Iodine Vaginal Suppositories in the Treatment of Bacterial Vaginosis_ \- [https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/57731](https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/57731)

"Repeated vaginal washings with 3% H2O2, 15% NaCl and 10% providone iodine were initiated. At the end of each washing, vaginal walls were thoroughly cleaned up with a small gauze. After 10 days of treatment the odor and the vaginal discharge had ceased and 12 months later no relapse had occurred" \- _Recurrent Bacterial Vaginosis in a Virgin Adolescent: A New Method of Treatment_ \- [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s15010-002-2001-9](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s15010-002-2001-9)

<comment><USER4> Was this something you actually did and had success with? If so, did you have chronic BV or just acute BV?

Things we've tried: \- boric acid suppositories (this helps but the BV always comes back) \- hydrogen peroxide douche (no results) \- a couple essential oil mixtures (no results) \- antibiotics (BV comes back)

Through research it seems the problem may be biofilms. You kill all the bacteria except those hiding in the biofilms and so they just repopulate.

A cursory google shows iodine may bust biofilms, so this May be worth a try.

<comment><USER5> There are some probiotic blends that focus on lactobacillus that some have found helpful. These can be used externally or internally. See papers like [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1198743X1...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1198743X14606017) and [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24299970](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24299970) for instance. If interested in this, check out the particular types of lactobacillus mentioned in these articles and make sure the product you're purchasing has those, rather than a general lacto blend. It appears that antibiotics should be a short course and probiotics a long course: killing is fast, growing is slower.

The science isn't conclusive but there are ~ zero negative side effects, so it's a good expected value.

<comment><USER4> Yeah I'd neglected to mention that we'd tried some of that as well... but the only available probiotics matching the "correct" lactobacilli strains were in Europe... so we tried a few weeks of them but between their cost and not being certain they'd even survive the long journey to California we didn't get many doses and as mentioned weren't confident they'd be active on arrival.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> All: comments are welcome as always, but please check that you're not posting because you find the topic activating. That always makes threads less interesting. Ditto for flagging; some users flagged this, but it's obviously a legit topic for HN, so we turned the flags off. Intellectual curiosity is the spirit: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

Edit: I switched to what looks like a better article instead of [https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/09/transplanting- poop-c...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/09/transplanting-poop-c...). Hopefully the BBC is a little more sobering.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for always looking up for HN site to keep its sanity. Could you reactivate my voting right please?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you want to go direct to the publication:

"Conceptual Design of a Universal Donor Screening Approach for Vaginal Microbiota Transplant",

[https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2019.0030...](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2019.00306/full)

</comment><comment><USER9> I have nothing to add on this procedure, but fecal transplant turned out to be remarkably successful, so it makes sense that researchers would want to try again here.

According to Wikipedia, fecal transplant was used as far back as 4th century China, with the modern treatment dating back to 1958. A 2013 study on the procedure was stopped early due to the high effectivness (81% cured after 1 procedure, 90% cured after 2).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_bacteriotherapy#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_bacteriotherapy#History)

[https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/gastroenterology_hepatology/...](https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/gastroenterology_hepatology/clinical_services/advanced_endoscopy/fecal_transplantation.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Alkaline vaginas are more susceptible to BV. As are multiple partners. Sometimes even menstruation.

A healthy vagina is mildly acidic and lactic acid suppositories were often used but it's benefits were iffy. If you went back to sex without condoms or multiple partners(male or female) BV will return. It flares in the absence of sufficient acidity in the vaginal environment..as it were..

BV is caused by a cocktail of bacteria and we have masses of bacterial colonies..good and bad..in our bodies.

The imbalance occurs due to moving them around. Abstaining from sex will often rebalance or getting rid of all bacteria and repopulating with good bacteria will work.

Many times, prevention is better than cure. This isn't a STD or a terminal condition. BV just needs education and good sexual hygiene. I remain unimpressed by science's efforts to moderate female sexual organs.

<comment><USER5> Your first paragraph is not quite accurate. The high iron levels that occur during menstruation tend to retard growth of some of the problematic flora (although this is more true of yeast infections).

<comment><USER10> Sperm and blood can make BV worse as they are alkaline in the vagina's environment.

That iron retards problematic flora needs some citation.

Bacteria will likely flourish more in an iron rich environment. But BV is different kinds of bacteria. At the end of the day, it's a ratio. If the lactic acid strains become fewer than the pH changes to more alkaline. Sperm and blood increase the alkaline levels by diluting the acid environment of the vagina.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I suppose the whole thing makes sense if you see humans as just a composite organism with colonies of functionality. I wonder if we'll get mouth bacteria transplants for tooth health next!

<comment><USER12> "Ear, Nose, Throat" is a clinical medicine specialty in the US. Don't know about the rest of the world.

But yeah: every interface between inside and outside of the human body is a great place to look for microbiome etiology.

<comment><USER13> Of course it is a specialty. In romance languages (at least Catalan, Spanish, French and Portuguese) we call them otorhinolaringologists - otorrino/otorhino for short. I have to say, the ENT doctor thing has always seemed very silly to me.

<comment><USER14> English too:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It seems like we are constantly learning more about human microbiomes, but it's an area I found highly unintuitive. "Poop pill" transplants, food with special bacteria to help digestion, now this. Are there any frontiers still left in this area, like armpits, feet, ears, or other internal systems?

<comment><USER12> Of course there are frontiers. It's a paradigm shift for mainstream science and [Western?] medical practice: we are not feeding a single organism, not applying drugs to a single creature. The human body is an ecological niche for an array of critters we know we little about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> the recently discussed C-section vs. natural birth wrt. priming of the neonatal gut microbiome comes to mind. One can wonder whether the BV results in adverse consequences here.

<comment><USER5> Before you get to neonatal biomes, you have the problem that BV can result in premature birth.... which has its own side effects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if microbiome transplantation ends up like sperm donation. You can pick your donor for the transplant and there will be a financial incentive for healthy people to donate.

<comment><USER18> Is there really a financial incentive for _healthy_ people to donate? Where are these sperm banks paying top dollar for better sperm?

Based on what I've read in the news about artificial insemination outcomes using sperm sourced from banks, there's just enough financial incentive for _poor_ people to donate, and they lie in the poorly vetted paperwork about their health, education, background, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if like intestinal bacteria, vaginal bacteria is in a large part controlled by what is eaten?

</comment><comment><USER20> are frequent uti's sign of bv?

<comment><USER21> possibly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The articles tone is like the Register but on vaginas. It's hardly serious and full of innuendo. For serious discussion, link to the scientific article?

<comment><USER23> "In the afterglow of successful fecal transplants, researchers are now sniffing around vaginal fluids for the next possible bodily product to improve health—and they're roused by the possibilities."

Were the article authors attempting to be funny, or were they seriously going for the worst-sounding opening paragraph to an article on fecal and vaginal microbiota transplants?

<comment><USER6> It's dumb, but please don't make this thread dumber by turning that into the topic.

<comment><USER24> I don't think it's commenters' fault if the article's... you know, like this, and they comment on how it's like this. Topic's fine but if commenting on the article's not OK then it should be different article.

<comment><USER6> There are two problems: annoying articles, and comments that rush to complain about the annoyance. Both are at fault.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Simcity's senior producer finally releases a statement - <AUTHOR> http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9342980.page

<comment><USER2> It really bothers me that none of the official responses have adequately addressed DRM, which is the real controversy, and is what created the server crisis in the first place.

<comment><USER3> To each their own, but honestly I don't view DRM as "the real controversy". To me, the more important thing is that I paid them for a product that doesn't really work properly or reliably. Had SimCity shipped with on online play requirement but reliable servers such that the online requirement was unnoticeable...I doubt I would have cared all that much.

I think it's also technically incorrect to say online DRM is the root of the technical issues. The server requirements necessary to support online DRM would seem to be much less than the server requirements necessary to support online city-state storage and inter-city interaction. Had the online component ONLY been about DRM, I doubt they would have had capacity issues at all.

I appreciate the fact that a lot of people are militantly opposed to DRM (the more invasive the DRM, the stronger the opposition). And I don't necessarily disagree. But it also seems like the fundamental problem with SimCity isn't the DRM so much as it's the online gameplay nature of the game combined with a totally inadequate server capacity. The less shouldn't be "don't use DRM" so much as it should be "do a better job planning server capacity".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Quick summary: They have a server shortage. They are adding new servers but this takes time (three days, apparently). Also, they're disabling Cheetah speed.

If only there was a way to start virtual server in less than three days...

<comment><USER5> They're using EC2, so I'm not sure why it takes them so long to add new servers.

<comment><USER6> Just because you're using EC2 (or any other "cloud" platform) doesn't mean you can just simply add new servers to your infrastructure, your application architecture needs to cater for this. With EC2 you have the "ability" to architecture your application in such a way that you can take advantage of this but if you don't then you have to do everything manual. Cloud is not a silver bullet.

<comment><USER7> If they're truly using EC2, and they haven't architected their infrastructure to be able to horizontally scale at the push of a button, then they're incompetent. Period.

It's forgivable that it doesn't happen automatically, as automatic provisioning in response to load isn't always an easy problem to solve, but if it's going to take them 3 days to bring up new machines on EC2 to handle load, they're doing it wrong. The ability to do this sort of thing quickly is one of the top few reasons to use something like EC2.

<comment><USER8> They very likely DID do something to bring up servers quickly. I bet they can spin up stuff like NA East 3 rather fast. Just because there is a DB somewhere who can't handle 2304982309482 people trying to slam cheetah mode while 230492340 are editing trade deopots, which is just a test they didn't happen to simulate well enough in load testing, doesn't mean they're utterly incompetent.

Server outside EA are pretty new to EA from what I understand

The weirdest crap melts sometimes when you apply real numbers of real non- tester peoples to things. Weird crap you cannot test for. Often has little to do with raw power, but instead is small architectural inefficiencies you cannot easily fix.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The First convertible All-Road-Bike - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/8barbikes/the-8bar-mitte-the-1st-convertible-all-road-bike <comment><USER2> I don't see this as a real problem being solved. People who are interested in cyclocross and road riding buy two bikes. Same if you're into touring.

I was thinking that had done something clever with a rotating headset to change the angles (which has been done before), but they expect you to change the fork and change your tires. Not difficult, but not something you're going to do on a regular basis either.

If you're that serious about cycling, you'll have one bike for each. If you're not that serious, but want the flexibity, you'll get a cyclocross bike and run roadier tires.</comment>


Interpreting Signals in the Labor Market: Evidence from Medical Referrals [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sarsons/files/sarsons_jmp.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> "PCPs become more pessimistic about a female surgeon's ability than a male's after a patient death, indicated by a sharper drop in referrals to the female surgeon. However, PCPs become more optimistic about a male surgeon's ability after a good patient outcome, indicated by a larger increase in the number of referrals the male surgeon receives. PCPs also change their behavior toward other female surgeons after a bad experience with one female surgeon, becoming less likely to refer to new women in the same specialty."</comment>


The weirdest (but working) iPhone 4 reception trick I have ever heard - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/03/15/the-weirdest-but-working-iphone-4-reception-trick-i-have-ever-heard/ <comment><USER2> Not really weird. There's a boundary there between the air in the glass and the glass itself. So you've got a dielectric boundary and you'll get some reflection going on inside the glass. Lots and lots of things reflect radio waves to a certain extent. I'd guess that's what's happening here.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-line-of- sight_propagation#R...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-line-of- sight_propagation#Reflection_losses_at_dielectric_boundaries)

<comment><USER3> I don't think by weird the op meant "Wow, this is a miracle that can't be explained by science." It was more along the lines of "Wow, this interesting and I would never have expected that to work. And boy would it look strange if everyone walked around with their phone in a cup."

And I agree with that statement. So yes it is weird, despite the fact that it has an explanation.

<comment><USER4> Is this a good illustration of the phenomenon?

<http://i.imgur.com/cDgjD.jpg>

The glass is the antenna and the shape (here a circle) radius at a given point is the signal strength at that point.

The glass is exploiting some anisotropies(?) in the cell phone signals. i.e. the red arc is somehow bigger than the black arc. I am using the circle as a way to depict an isotropic signal. If the signal is not isotropic, the shape would be somewhat more bulged in the left region (pear-shaped).

Sorry, IANAP, if someone can explain it better...

<comment><USER5> I think what OP is referring to is when light hits glass, some times it is reflected and sometimes it will move through the glass, depending on the angle it makes with the surface of the glass. So the signal is probably bouncing around inside the glass so the phone is able to pick it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you stick it in a pint glass it makes the speakerphone a lot louder as well.

I can foresee some funny looks from strangers however, if you were to sit there in a bar on your own shouting at your phone in the bottom of a glass. Maybe that kind of thing is normal in california, I have no idea.

<comment><USER7> This was Amsterdam, people in Amsterdam are weird to Americans, so who knows :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I suspect this is more about isolating the phone from the radio energy sinks of the human body (surface moisture on the skin & saline blood plasma) than anything to do with the glass itself.

Any suitably insulating (capacitive) enclosure (such as a "napkin swan", teacup, etc.) which preserves a largely vertical orientation (perpendicular to the local ground plane) should work just as well. We're still comfortably within the far-field <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-field> performance envelope for transmission, but well within transmission-line power transfer regimes at these frequencies with a cell-phone-sized antenna.

If the glass were lead crystal (extremely unlikely in the bog-standard bar tumbler pictured), there's more potential for interference and a spatial locus of signal above the noise floor is possible. Typical window and utensil glassware is essentially transparent to these frequencies.

<comment><USER9> This seems like the most plausible explanation to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is questionable. A couple stray observations for the boffins at HN:

1\. Confirmation bias. Sure it works, because when it doesn't we don't think about it or publicize it on the net.

2\. Glass holder removes your big meaty hand from the equation. Your hand absorbs radiation and is the equivalant of wrapping a phone in a steak.

3\. Only works because the iphone radio is such a mess. You may be looking at bar strength changes that are happening anyway.

4\. Works but because of orientation. Holding up compared to laying it down may give you better reception.

5\. No controls. He should try this with a plastic holder or hanging it in the same orientation with a string. I wish the "aha I discovered something amazing" crowd would learn what controls are.

<comment><USER11> I love that people are thinking about confirmation bias, but you can't really "confirmation bias" your way from "I can't receive calls at all" to "Now I'm getting three bars and reliable signals of some types". There's an empirical state transition there, not just an opinion the way "I went from 2.1 bars to 2.8 bars" is unreliable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So, he's in this uber cool restaurant, spending a nice evening with his daughter. And the first things he thinks of? Yeah, "checking in" and "tweeting". Am I the only one who finds this sad?

<comment><USER13> Those two things probably take 30 seconds total.

<comment><USER14> While typing from inside a glass?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Tested with an Apple Bumper case and a 500ml Arcoroc glass in my apartment: no effect.

Tested without the Bumper: still no effect.

Perhaps only certain kinds of glasses will work? Certain shapes or sizes?

<comment><USER16> yes only certain types of special glasses. you can buy them from my online store for $29.95

<comment><USER15> Sorry, I only want it if a) Jonny Ive designed it and b) it has a nice etched Apple logo on the side and c) it's an ideal size for quaffing fine bourbon.

There should also be a stainless steel band around the base which interferes with reception if you hold the glass the wrong way, ideally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> just tested it in our office in germany with o2 as carrier, went vom 1 bar to three bars in about 20 seconds inside the glass... amazing.

<comment><USER18> Why would it take 20 seconds for this to work? Radio is not slow.

<comment><USER19> Surely it's just a result of the bars being smoothed/some sort of running average of strength.

<comment><USER18> But if I move my iPhone around in the room, it seems to change pretty quickly.

<comment><USER20> To save power, the phone shouldn't be constantly trying to acquire a signal when it can't find one. It should try for 10-20 seconds, give up, then go to sleep, only waking every 30 seconds or so to try again, briefly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm going to risk sounding like a dunce here, but IIRC some frequencies are more prone to bouncing off glass - for example in metropolitan cities with lots of high-rise buildings. While this is a detriment in the city, it could also be acting as a "satellite dish" making it easier to collect stay signals while also directing most of the transmission upward. Considering the antenna is supposed to be at the bottom of the phone the effect should be more pronounced as more of the glass can be used to direct the signal.

Am I crazy?

<comment><USER22> Mobile devices tend to operate in the 700 to 900 MHz range which translates to a wavelengths of several inches, so it's quite possible the geometry of the drinking glass is providing a bit of focus to the signal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> If you don't have a glass nearby, this also works when putting your 3GS (and probably other phones as well) at the same angle inside an upside-down clear plastic CD spindle cover. Went from 2 to 4 bars. Took the phone out, dropped down to 2.

</comment><comment><USER24> It probably has more to do with antenna response characteristics due to polarization (antenna is similar to a j dipole <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slim_Jim_(antenna)> or a modified inverted V (since it's a U) maybe <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_vee_antenna> ) + isolation from your hand. Without your hand (which is similar to a non- efficient ground plane) screwing up the antenna response, a vertical iphone would likely have better reception, _especially_ if it's a dipole-like.

<comment><USER24> Also of note, most antennas at towers tend to be an array of dipoles with reflectors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Your glass will always be half empty with an iphone in it.

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder, is the glass just holding the phone at the right angle for the polarity of the phone's antenna and the available signal to match up? If so, this trick wouldn't likely work places other than that restaurant.

</comment><comment><USER27> Works on my cheap Galaxy Apollo in a pint glass - nice.

</comment><comment><USER28> Could there be a metal component to the glass?

<comment><USER29> It could be lead glass.. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_glass>

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> So....let's try it...here's the glass..in goes the phone..[20 seconds later]...dang...doesn't work...oh wait, wasn't there waterrrr.....sh##, double sh##... :P</comment>


Business Is Booming for America's Survival Food King - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-11-22/business-is-booming-for-america-s-survival-food-king <comment><USER2> I always found the prepper mindset a little curious. It seems to me that any kind of major disaster that would totally knock out reliable access to food and aid for 3-6 months (i.e. something worse than the recent hurricanes, more along the lines of climate-change-driven famine apocalypse) will also probably have knocked it out for far longer than that. What happens when one runs out of one's few months of stockpiles?

For those of the prepper mindset, it would make more sense to start homesteading instead. That is, learning to grow and preserve one's own food, instead of stockpiling a little food but in the end still relying on our national food supply network. Homesteaders, I think, will be the ones who survive the true nuclear/climate change apocalypse, not preppers.

<comment><USER3> > I always found the prepper mindset a little curious. It seems to me that any > kind of major disaster that would totally knock out reliable access to food > and aid for 3-6 months (i.e. something worse than the recent hurricanes, > more along the lines of climate-change-driven famine apocalypse) will also > probably have knocked it out for far longer than that. What happens when one > runs out of one's few months of stockpiles?

I would expect that the world would go through several stages after such a disaster:

1\. Disaster happens that destroys normal food production and distribution over much of the world.

2\. Widespread violence breaks out as people realize help will not be coming and starting fighting over resources.

3\. After a couple of months, the fighting and starvation have greatly reduced the population. Most who have survived are weak and out of ammo for firearms.

4\. Those who had 6 month stockpiles and were able to keep them (either by being somewhere away from the violence, or by having sufficient arms to defend them) come out and start working with similarly prepared people to get farming going again in their area. They are in good health and have ammo for firearms and so can deal with any survivors of stage 3 who want to try to steal from them.

I don't think the goal when preparing for this kind of disaster is to live off your stockpile until civilization is back to normal--that would take way more than 6 months. I think it is to live off the stockpile until things stabilize and we have enough regional civilization to enable seriously working on rebuilding.

<comment><USER4> Eventually they build a spaceship and hire a hotshot ex-NASA guy to drive it forward and backward in time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If this is really survival food, it is very complicated and expensive. Plain, normal, rice can be stored basically forever if you keep it dry. A few kilos of rice will keep a family alive through any natural disaster. Looking at the foods offered by this company, their customer base seems to be prepping for post-hurricane dinner parties.

<comment><USER6> White rice has little fat or protein, and brown rice doesn't store very well. The gold standard for prepper grain is hard red wheat: [https://store.lds.org/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Product3_715...](https://store.lds.org/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Product3_715839595_10557__-1__195792)

<comment><USER7> It's mostly a cultural preference...

Rice works as well as hard red wheat as far as calorie density goes and in the short term that's all that really matters for adults. Rice also has some advantages as it's more versatile in terms of cooking and taking flavors. A few cases of Minute Rice, a small camp stove and a variety of seasoning packets would be a win over a large bag of wheat.

Longer term wheat has a higher protein content and has an advantage that it can be sprouted to increase vitamin content but you would need to be in pretty dire straights for that to make a difference. Neither wheat nor rice have enough fat content needed for long term survival.

Neither wheat nor rice will sustain toddlers without a supplemental high quality protein source like milk or eggs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Camper, back packer here. I benefit by this market as consumers demand better tasting food. A lot of dehydrated food tastes horrible, but some companies are competing by improving product. If you want to try some decent dehydrated good, try the Mountain House brand. Their beef stroganoff is surprisingly good.

Doomsday prepping has really taken off in America. It's upsetting to think how many are squirreling away resources in a fortified bunker.

<comment><USER9> Or stashed in a back closet somewhere.

I lived in hurricane country for a long time, and having a week's worth of bottled water & shelf-stable food in the house just made good sense. (I was without power for 10 days after Hugo in 1989).

I will say the taste has really improved over the years. I was fed some of the original MREs back in the 80's (guard duty at a USAF base) and the ones the military have today are way more palatable. Same with the freeze-dried food.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you live in the north and don't have a week of food stores then you are a bit of an idiot. Having long lasting food available is a peace of mind thing. Heck, given some history, having food in your car during the winter isn't a bad idea. Last winter, I was stuck in my apartment for 3 days.

</comment><comment><USER11> I live in a country with regular earthquakes and recent experience with the government response to massive emergencies.

Our preparedness is this: Water for 3 days, food for less than a week. Those things come in quickly from the government.

After that initial couple of days, what people in stricken areas are desperate for: batteries to charge their phones. Toilet paper. Soap. Diapers. Sanitary pads. Plastic bags for waste.

After that, the most important thing is having enough savings to rebuild your life after your home, belongings, town, job are all gone.

</comment><comment><USER12> I was quite surprised to see on the photos that the food processing plant looked quite dirty. Don't they have high standards to adhere to ?

<comment><USER13> Have you ever read The Jungle?

There is a reason we have food regulation. Without regulation, food producers do nasty things. Vomit inducing things.

<comment><USER12> "The Jungle" ?

<comment> fake-name [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle)

Heh, beat.

TL;DR it was basically a massive expose on the conditions in the food and meat-packing industry in 1904 that lead to the creation of what is now the FDA, and the establishment of regulations concerning food sanitation and requirements about ingredient purity that we still greatly benefit from today.

<comment><USER14> Interestingly, it actually wasn't intended as an expose of food/meat-packing. It was intended to show the failings of capitalism and the virtues of socialism. But Sinclair's descriptions of the Chicago food industry made more of an impact than his political commentary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 13,600 calories is enough food to actually feed a family of 4 for about 2 days.

The "servings" of the meals listed on their website are about 250 calories. 500 calories is small meal for many adults.

<comment><USER16> I presume these are supposed to be survival rations. In a survival situation, I damn hope you're on a reduced calorie diet.

<comment><USER17> Why hope that? Having enough calories is essential to being able to do strenuous work. Taking hunger out of the equation is the point of having a food reserve.

<comment><USER18> I'd be more concerned about water TBH. Most of us carry a fair amount of fat, enough to survive several weeks without eating. Having rations available extends that timeline a lot. But without drinking water, that's all moot, since you can't survive long without that.

Really depends on your timelines. Prep for short-term disaster scenarios on a 1-2 week timelines should be manageable for most, and really we should all be doing it. Prep for longer timelines is much harder.

<comment><USER19> >I'd be more concerned about water TBH. Most of us carry a fair amount of fat, enough to survive several weeks without eating.

They used to call it "the law of twos" \- you can live two minutes without air, two days without water, and two weeks without food.

So yeah, water is the big concern. Two weeks without food is the low end, but electrolyte imbalances can kill you even if you still retain plenty of stored calories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why not just buy canned food? Much cheaper and don't have to rehydrate it. Just eat though it.

<comment><USER7> Most people are limited in storage space and canned foods aren't very calorie dense as you're storing mostly water. Inside cans are also coated with a plastic liner and over time that liner breaks down and can contaminate the food. This reduces shelf life especially for acidic foods like tomatoes or fruit. Families that want to store a couple of weeks of canned food need yards of shelf space and need to eat a lot of canned foods to rotate it before it deteriorates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've somehow found my way onto some prepper spam list, and can't for the life of me get off - these people are bat-shit crazy, they need a big food poisoning scare or something</comment>


Redis Load Handling vs. Data Integrity: Tradeoffs in Distributed Store Design - <AUTHOR> https://hazelcast.com/blog/redis-load-handling-vs-data-integrity/?amp&__twitter_impression=true <comment><USER2> I tried to assist Hazelcast persons redirecting them to my colleagues in order to configure Redis properly, since I was in vacation, but they no longer replied and published this article where, the main point is that they don't know how to configure Redis properly. I think I'll stop forever to collaborate with Hazelcast about benchmarks and let them publish whatever they want: fortunately people chose systems according to other standards, that is, real world testing of properly configured setups and past experiences with other deployment of the same software. They even managed to get stuck in a problem that is not really common when configuring Redis with high load, it is not common to have replication problems because the default output buffer size limit.

<comment><USER3> How do you suggest one configures Redis to avoid this kind of possible data loss while maintaining throughput? I think when enabling replication, users will assume that recent writes are safe. This bug or whatever you want to call it, seems to allow data to be unsafe as long as the high load persists.</comment></comment>


Chemical element symbols that are also ISO 3166 country code abbreviations - <AUTHOR> http://fanf.livejournal.com/138594.html <comment><USER9> > _Eu Europium - <USER2>

> _Fr Francium - <USER3>

> _In Indium - <USER4>

These are the only three that align perfectly I think, although technically Indium is named for Indigo, not India, even though both come from Greek.

> _No Nobelium - <USER5>

Kind of! Norway gives out the Peace Prize. Some amusing naming near-misses[1]

> _Am Americium - <USER6>

> _Cf Californium - Central African Republic_

> _Ga Gallium - <USER7>

> _Ge Germanium - <USER8>

1: Near-hits for you George Carlin fans

<comment><USER10> >These are the only three that align perfectly I think

You missed Ruthenium. Rus' and Russia are not really same, but well, they stole that name long time ago.

>The Baltic German scientist Karl Ernst Claus discovered the element in 1844, and named it after Ruthenia, the Latin word for Rus'</comment></comment>


Tell HN: Will work for a nexus 4? - <AUTHOR>

So. Recently with all the hype and chaos about availability issues of Google's Nexus 4, has led many developers like me very eager to test our latest ideas on the device.<p>I am a versatile web developer/ designer who doesn't wan't to work for per hourly rates or checks. The next payload im getting... im definitely gonna ask for a Google Nexus 4 to be shipped to India in return for my services. :D <comment><USER2> Did you see [http://trak.in/mobiles/buying-google-nexus-4-india-price- rs-...](http://trak.in/mobiles/buying-google-nexus-4-india-price-rs-22500/) ?

(Sounds like you should just work for paychecks and buy it that way.)

</comment><comment><USER3> What kind of development skill set do you have ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Most of my projects are node.js, javascript and python based. I mainly work as as web app developer, looking forward to a career in platform specific mobile app development.

<comment><USER4> How can we contact you?

<comment><AUTHOR> You could reach me at email@example.com. Thanks for the generous reply.

However, Someone already hired me. Leave a contact... I'll be free in few weeks. I'll contact you back if you need something done. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>