The Coronavirus Recession and What It Means for Developers - <AUTHOR> https://www.swyx.io/writing/coronavirus-recession/ <comment><USER2> I'm currently about to change jobs. The company I'm leaving is a small AI company with much of its business coming in the form of speculative investments/proof-of-concept contracts from large corporations with research budgets.

I'm _mainly_ leaving because the new opportunity is more exciting. But between the economic downturn and the "AI autumn", I'm definitely feeling like I made the right decision.

The new company is small but solid, unbeholden to investors, and it provides a very tangibly valuable service to an industry which itself provides a very tangibly valuable product that basically everyone needs. So it feels like a good place to be when the storm hits.

<comment><USER3> > unbeholden to investors, and it provides a very tangibly valuable service to > an industry which itself provides a very tangibly valuable product

if you wouldn't mind sharing, what do they build/provide?

<comment><USER4> This is the company: [http://www.marginalunit.com/panorama.html](http://www.marginalunit.com/panorama.html)

They provide a dashboard that helps electricity transmission companies make better bids on transmission contracts.

<comment><USER3> thanks for the link. looks like very cool and interesting place. I bet it's also recession proof. congratulations and also good luck it sure looks exciting :)

<comment><USER2> Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm working in a travel startup, so this is quite scary. I hope that travel picks up quickly once the initial hit is ingested. But honestly right now I worry more about the health of older relatives than my job as a developer.

</comment><comment><USER6> "FAANG types aren't going to be as affected as early stage startup types or freelancer types."

I wouldn't be so sure. Corporations use down cycles to shed employees. And often they will hire contractors.

<comment><USER7> Given how difficult it is for FAANG to hire highly qualified engineers, I really doubt it. These companies are sitting on mountains of cash.

<comment><USER8> True, but...

every company of more than about 100 people has some dead weight. Often, low level managers know who they are. In good times, it might not be worth doing anything much about it. In bad times, the rest-and-vesters are out.

Well... at a well-run company, it works that way. At a less-well-run company, they instead squeeze everyone with more work and more hours and less benefits and no raises, figuring that some folks will leave and do the downsizing for them. This is a losing strategy, though, because you lose the best people first that way.

<comment><USER9> I had to deal with this in the first recession.

It was an hourly position, but they started doing 'required' overtime; 66 hours a week for an hourly person was still 'cheaper' than hiring another person.

And yeah. As a result we had a whole team did 50-60 hour work weeks for 17-23$/hr (lol, being paid 23$ an hour to do C#, LISP, entry level Oracle and SQL server DBA alongside drafting.) Physical and mental health injuries happened across the team.

They also took away our holiday pay, and changed the PTO structure so that 1st year employees didn't even have enough PTO to cover being paid for the holidays.

Yes, they lost most of their good people. I was among the first wave to go when the economy in my area started picking back up (We didn't really start to recover here till 2012-2013.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm curious, as someone who wasn't in this field in 2008, what was that period like for devs?

<comment><USER11> I started in 2008. People weren't changing jobs very often. You didn't see signing bonuses, or having multiple offers from top companies. It was like having a normal job. There really wasn't bootcamps or a crazy startup culture at that time. Most people I worked with got into it because they loved computers or programming their whole lives. But in general, compared to the horror stories I hear about the dot com crash, it was nothing.

<comment><USER7> If you started working at Google, Amazon, or especially, Facebook (a bit more of a stretch) in 2008, you would be pretty happy right now.

<comment><USER12> Depends on if you held the equity or sold immediately. Seems like people sell as soon as they vest nowadays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I didn't even think about the Airbnb IPO until I read this, pretty horrible timing for them.

<comment><USER6> I think that window had closed regardless. Maybe nail-gunned shut now, but I don't think it was ever going to happen.

<comment><USER7> I'd love to invest in temporarily cheaply-priced Airbnb shares right now.

<comment><USER13> Until they solve the "I'm the condo owner so I have the right to broadcast naked fotos of your wife and daughters over the Internet" b.s., I wouldn't use or invest in Airbnb in any capacity.

<comment><USER14> Airbnb has more scumbaggery than just this, so I'm not really sad about their complacent employees not getting their stock options...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not familiar with the author. Do they have a track record for predicting things like this, or are they just speculating?</comment>


Work Directly in the Cloud - <AUTHOR> https://www.welcometothejungle.co/fr/articles/reasons-work-cloud <comment><USER2> I don't see any benefit if the costs are going to be the same anyway. The time you need to optimize your setup for the cloud can be time you use to write code that pays your bills if you are a freelancer or self-employed.

If you are making this decision as a CTO be warned that developers worth their salt won't be too enthused about working on $500 Acers even if your cloud game is on point.

Lastly, most of my RAM and CPU cycles are used up by Firefox, Chrome, VS Code, Slack[0] and other "development environment" stuff. These are programs that need to run in the local environment and suck up a lot of RAM.

[0] - I tried running Ripcord as a Slack client and went back to Slack after a couple of weeks because the feature parity just isn't there. For example Ripcord doesn't support Ctrl-K to join any channel or direct message anyone, only those that are in your Recents list.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's worth nothing though, that a C5D (c5d.2xlarge) instance kept up for 40 hours/week costs $75/month with on-demand pricing and comes with 8 cores, 16 GB ram and 200GB of nVME ssd disk space.

It would be interesting to see how much would it cost to have AMI snapshots everyday.</comment>


The FBI is investigating Mithril Capital for financial misconduct - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/9/12/20859055/mithril-capital-federal-investigation-peter-thiel-ajay-royan <comment><USER2> >> Royan has frustrated some of his investors by sitting on some of their money rather than investing it in startups — while almost certainly raking in millions of dollars in fees for himself.

its the first time i hear about legal consequences of not doing anything to the funds' money. the investors are free to leave the fund if they are not happy with the management, right?

<comment><USER3> Theoretically, if he has fiduciary duty, he has to act in the best interest of his clients. I'm not sure if he has that duty (I've googled but can't find anything) but if he did they could argue leaving money in cash is clearly not what's best for investors.

<comment><USER4> Yea but investing in a startup is far from a sure thing. They could easily lose their money

<comment><USER5> It's possible that the best performing startup fund will be one that invests in nothing, collects a fee, and returns the rest of the money later.

<comment><USER6> It's possible the best performing knee surgeon will be the one that doesn't perform knee surgery, collects a fee, and returns your knee in the same condition it was in.

Nonetheless, that would be fraud.

<comment><USER7> > the best performing knee surgeon will be the one that doesn't perform knee > surgery, collects a fee, and returns your knee in the same condition it was > in.

Why not? Eg: "Sorry sir, but as you are a weak/old/high-risk patient, knee surgery would be very dangerous — my advice is to stay in a wheelchair"

<comment><USER4> This situation occurs fairly regularly with cancer when they find out it's inoperable once they open you up. You still gotta pay for it though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What exactly is the alleged financial misconduct - is it just not investing money?

That doesn't make too much sense to me in terms of incentives. The VC will make this fee no matter what they invest in. They make more money if their investments go up, and they make the same amount of money if their investments go down. So there isn't really an incentive to sit on the money and do nothing. If anything VCs have an incentive to invest in stupid investments rather than sit on the money..

</comment><comment><USER9> Article reads like a hit job on Thiel, as if he 's anyone's darling

> who heads an enormously influential network of tech investors, startup > founders, and political allies across Silicon Valley.

I thought nobody liked him there, thats why he left?

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if they are using Palantir in the investigation...

</comment><comment><USER11> For a second I though LH of mithril.js started a hedge fund.

</comment><comment> gjsman-1000 I thought for a moment that Moria is the Mithril Capital of Middle-Earth, so "FBI Investigating Moria" would be a bit...</comment>


Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/jessicahagy/2012/05/02/nine-dangerous-things-you-were-taught-in-school/ <comment><USER2> When I was a poor kid from the rust belt, I dreamed of becoming an adult and getting a Phd. and talking deeply with the intellectual elite. I never got that Phd. but I became happily upper middle class, and thus got to hang out with a lot of Phds., often from good schools. Not surprisingly, many of them came from upper-class areas, and upper middle class or wealthy families.

What surprised me of this bunch was the general lack of curiosity, passion, and depth that many of them had - it jarred my world view. These were people that I dreamed of being around, when I was a kid. And, they just seemed like normal people, nothing special.

Over much time and after talking with many of them, I realized that many had pursued the Phd. (or equivalent) not because of any innate passion or ability, but just because that was what was expected of them. They did it because that's what people did in their world. It was then that I realized that many poor kids from the rust belt probably just did what they believed that people did.

<comment><USER3> That is _exactly_ my experience in growing up in a poor rural area and getting a big scholarship to a fancy private liberal arts school. I had lived and breathed ideas and that naturally led to good grades. I assumed that the first day of college would be like those rare episodes of the Simpsons where Lisa finally meets a group she fits in with. I was, frankly, devastated. These people weren't smarter or more curious, they were just richer and _better educated_. My wife, on the other hand, went to a huge state school, but enrolled in the inner honors college within it, and had much more of the experience I had been looking for.

<comment><USER4> I agree, when I enrolled on CS I expected there would be plenty of people who had been doing interesting stuff with tech for years. While there were a few like this , the majority were just bright kids who would have otherwise done Law or Accountancy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wish I could recall the name, but I read an essay on the general concept of this topic not too long ago. Essentially the author referenced how schools are stratified into a series of groups: lower class, lower middle class, upper middle class, and elite (not sure if these are 100% accurate).

The author explained (from a series of in-person observations) the differences in education at each of the various levels. Children at the lower class level were taught to always listen to their teachers, be on time, and not to question things too much. Jump to upper middle class and the children were taught how to organize into groups or promote consensus (much like a mid-level managerial position). Finally at the top, children were given less concrete homework and were asked to explore their creativity. They were also taught to question their teachers, and most class time was spent as a dialogue between the group and not a lecture from the "instructor."

Really interesting topic and I wish more people paid attention to these things. Imagine where we'd be as a society if we didn't mold each other into groups or social brackets. Blows my mind.

<comment><USER6> I can relate to this based on my experiences from high school. I don't think that things are structured like this intentionally. (I think that few teachers and principal's would intentionally hold back the lower class students) But, if you have a kid who tends to do his homework less, think school is 'not cool,' and in general doesn't like authority (something I feel was more prevalent among the poorer students in my education), you get a much stronger attitude of 'sit down and do your homework' from the teachers.

Then you have the upper level classrooms, where assignments were almost never turned in late, and students generally had less animosity towards authority in general. They still disobeyed and did creative things and whatnot, but they did it out of curiosity, and not because they were trying to irritate the teachers.

Actually, I'm thinking of several cases specifically in my class where students held visible animosity towards these teachers. These students consistently had the lowest grades in the class.

<comment><USER7> There's definitely something to this.

If the students won't cooperate/behave/listen, how could the teacher ever hope to progress beyond reinforcement of "you need to cooperate/behave/listen"?

It's sort of like the old adage that you need to understand the rules before you can break them. If one doesn't understand why you have to listen to the instructor, they're far less likely to be productive in a setting where interruptions are expected/encouraged.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Errr? I don't know what schools are like in the Unites States, but I was probably taught the exact opposite of what is presented in this Forbes Article. For instance:

"The people in charge have all the answers." > My history teacher would like to have word with you.

<comment><USER9> This is a great observation. The list is bewildering to me as well. I think the author is trying to play up this strawman of conservative authoritarianism and perhaps reflects her upbringing but I don't think its typical of the American educational experience.

"The best and brightest follow the rules" bothers me the most. From a young age I've been taught by the establishment that inventors and industrialists who purposely broke away from the norm became successful. I think the US encourages this kind of thinking. "There is a very clear, single path to success" is also unforgivable.

Maybe the dangerous lesson here is beware thumbnails of cute authors and easily to digest comic strips that reflect your own biases.

<comment><USER10> They are not talking about teachers standing up in front of you and saying literally, "I have all the answers. Shut and become good factory workers." They are talking about the fact that you have a few teachers telling you to question authority... while you are sitting in seats in front of them, not making noise, taking tests when told on what told, coming in and leaving on a schedule... and probably even the teachers telling you to question authority won't, say, actually let you walk out of the classroom and play basketball, no matter how much they feebly protest that you should question authority. (And if they did, they wouldn't be teaching for long. The system would not permit it.)

Yeah. You had a couple of people mouth some words about nonconformity, while spending hours every day inextricably enmeshed so deeply in a system built around conformity that you apparently can't even see the conformity, if you think that a few people mouthing words without actions was enough to counteract it. The teachers said some words while you were _embodied_ in a contrary system.

Mind you, all that conformity isn't necessarily a bad thing. I like civilization. But I think it is still important to see it, and choose it when you want it, and be aware of what is going on so others can't use it against you, attacking you on a level you can't even perceive.

Also, this article is tripe. I shouldn't have had to elaborate on it in this manner when it should have said it. And those are clearly something more like 5 points than 9; numbered lists strike again.

<comment><USER11> _They are talking about the fact that you have a few teachers telling you to question authority_

People don't need to be taught to question authority, they figure it out on their own at a pretty young age. Usually the moment an authority tells them to do something that they don't want to do.

At the age of two, "questioning authority" manifests itself by throwing a tantrum in the supermarket when the authority tells you to stop trying to grab things off the shelves. At the age of fifteen, "questioning authority" has moved on to the more direct form in which you assert that your parents and teachers are idiots who don't know _anything_ and that you should be allowed to smoke, skip school and pierce your septum if you feel like it.

The process of growing up is largely a matter of getting out of this phase and accepting that actually those authority figures were right about _some things_ all along.

 _"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years"_ \-- Mark Twain (maybe, though snopes says falsely attributed)

Everybody on Earth fancies themselves anti-authoritarian; it's easy to be anti-authoritarian when an authority is telling you to do something you don't want to do, though much harder when the authority is telling other people to do things that you really think they ought to.

<comment><USER12> I feel like you are twisting the meaning of the phrase "questioning authority" into basically pure "rebelling against authority" as I would say they are two separate ideas.

The notion of "questioning authority" I would argue is similar to your statement of accepting that authority figures are right about some things, as in, they are most likely not right about all things and that it is important to spend time figuring out which is which.

I'm not sure where that is similar at all to the idea of a child throwing a tantrum in a supermarket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a big difference in how students are taught and what students are thought to think from school to school, which is mostly correlated with income bracket. It's not that our leadership structure or general society has this 'keep the poor down' mentality, it has to do with the general mentality of the teachers and the general mentality of the students.

Think of the demographics of the teachers. In low income areas, the teachers are much more likely to be people that grew up in poor income areas themselves. Generally, that also means that they will be less familiar with higher-level concepts like 'when given lined paper, write the other way.' Even if they've heard these quotes and can tell you what they mean, they are less likely to be able to answer questions like 'Why 5 paragraphs?' and 'When in real life am I going to use the Pythagoras theorem?'

In high income areas, you are much more likely to get teachers that come from high income families themselves, which means they are much more likely to have gone to a reputable school. My high school (William Fremd High School) is seated in a high income area, and actually had several teachers (2 or 3) with Oxford level degrees. Many teachers in the English department actively rejected the idea of a 5 paragraph model, and told you to write the essay 'until it was done.' Many of the teachers, having been through some level of engineering school themselves, could tell you that the Pythagoras theorem is very important to things like Architecture and mechanical engineering, and that the seemingly useless mathematics you are learning actually have very powerful real life applications.

<comment><USER13> > _Many teachers in the English department actively rejected the idea of a 5 > paragraph model_

Hmm. There are problems with that - writing to a limit / self editting is a skill in itself. Work needs to be equable in format to be readily compared.

Should every piece of prose be written to a format requirement, no. Should the idea of writing to a particular format be rejected? No IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "On average, a four-year degree is the equivalent of an investment that returns 15.2% a year." - [http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/30/a-college- degree-r...](http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/30/a-college-degree- returns-more-than-the-stock-market/)

Stay in school kids.

<comment><USER15> How much of that is due to having more knowledge, and how much is classism? i.e. having upper class parents is probably a very high return aswell.

Also that only really works once. If spent 40 years, doing 10 4 year degrees, by this logic, I'd be a multibillionare right? Something is wrong with this theory.

<comment><USER14> "having upper class parents is probably a very high return as well"

True, which is why the studies account for factors such as family education and family income in order to attempt to isolate the impact of the one factor being measured: the subject's education level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Most of these things, I think, stem from the fact that it's much easier to take care of a class that believes in all 9 facts, than to take care of a class that doesn't.

How many teachers could justify the 5 paragraph essay if all the kids started questioning them on the arbitrariness of that number?

If you reward that kid that's really easy for you to take care off the others will follow, right?

Standardized tests measure your value because they measure the teachers value (in paychecks).

I have little respect for the school system. It's basically rigged to make the teachers lives as simple as possible and make the kids as miserable as possible.

<comment><USER13> I've a rule to let my kids question anything once - they must provide a rationale if they wish to reverse my decision. However, it does sometimes come down to a simple exertion of authority (ie because I say so trumps the unsupported objections). I find now that J at 6 can usually answer my side and rationalise why an _a priori_ arbitrary demand is being made.

Surely any teacher could readily answer a challenge like 'why not 3 paragraphs?' and this is a valid and worthy question for a student.

Unfortunately at some point the student will have to accept irrational or limited reasoning and learn to live with that, eg why does the law require me to learn that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The print version is on one page [http://www.forbes.com/sites/jessicahagy/2012/05/02/nine- dang...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jessicahagy/2012/05/02/nine-dangerous- things-you-were-taught-in-school/print/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Having gone through north american public schools I definitely agree with most of the article's points.

However most of those graphs make absolutely no sense. Clearly the author was being a free spirit on "how to make a graph" day.

<comment><USER19> The author of the Forbes article also has a blog which features this sort of tongue-in-cheek graphics:

<http://thisisindexed.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This one's great IMO: "Days off are always more fun than sitting in the classroom."

Not exactly well-phrased—I believe prolonged sitting is indeed not quite fun for various physiological reasons. However, this makes it fair:

"You are trained from a young age to base your life around dribbles of allocated vacation."

It appears to be about splitting life into work and vacation despite the alternative of doing things you love and loving things you do. (It's hard to convince people, though. They continue hate most of they regular 9-to-6 day and watch TV in the evening.)

</comment><comment><USER21> True danger is serious business. Approaching an unexploded IED is dangerous. So is going in to reactor #2 to pump out radioactive water.

There's a difference between incorrect and dangerous.

<comment><USER22> Dangerous does not have to mean deadly.

<comment><USER23> Said from your safe little bubble. Dangerous is "I might misstep by half an inch and orphan the children."

The college educated computer workers who post here haven't experienced danger since climbing trees as children. And certainly don't experience danger professionally.

Roofing a house is dangerous. Delivering Pizza is dangerous.

Picking between State U vs Private U? Choosing between Python and Ruby? Choosing between iOS vs Android for your initial deployment? Choosing VC A over VC B? Telling your Boss he's wrong? Calling any of that dangerous is an insult to people who face real danger daily.

<comment><USER24> Speaking as a college educated computer worker who posts here, I suspect that you might not have a clue. I spent a lot of last summer welding heavy metal, I am no stranger to hard-hats, safety boots and building sites. I have worked assembly, labour and construction, alongside code, graphics and networks. I get bored of desks quite regularly and have to go off and lift heavy things for a while. Is a bit like going to a gym where they pay you.

Be very careful of stereotypes, especially among groups that are well known for idiosyncrasies, which at the last count is pretty much all the groups.

<comment><USER23> Did you really think you needed to point out that I might be making a sweeping generalization about tens of thousands of users? I'm glad you decided to share.

<comment><USER24> Well, from the way you stated your first post, I thought it might be worth reminding you, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think the prevailing mood among people who think of themselves as "business people" is nowhere near risk-averse enough.

</comment><comment><USER26> Nothing like a proper education to give you all the reasons an idea can't be done - instead of giving you the tools and confidence to tackle a problem no on else has even thought of and succeed. I'm still looking for the later.

</comment><comment><USER27> There's a bunch of straw men in the emergency room today.

</comment><comment><USER28> It could be argued that all those sentiments listed are actually driving force that accounts for most of the creativity now.

</comment><comment><USER29> For a similar take on the school system, here's John Taylor Gatto's essay The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher:

[http://www.altruists.org/static/files/The%20Six- Lesson%20Sch...](http://www.altruists.org/static/files/The%20Six- Lesson%20Schoolteacher%20\(John%20Taylor%20Gatto\).htm)

</comment><comment><USER24> I always suspected that the way that schools were set up was borrowed heavily from the old establishments for training the children of the lower ranks of the aristocracy in how to be military officers.

The regimentation and rote of your average maths classroom was obviously never designed for teaching the subject, yet is the main memory of the experience for most people, rather than what is supposedly being taught.

<comment><USER30> Ironically, schools that _were_ set up like that produced more literate and numerate kids, i.e. Grammar schools. In fact these were a key route to social mobility for bright but poor kids. They were killed off by politicians who relied on the lower classes for their votes...

<comment> UK-AL Except many exist today, and there mostly populated by the middle class with ridiculously low levels of poor people. Like 1% on free school meals and majority were tutored for the entry test? Most poor people can't afford tutors.

With stats like that, they REINFORCE class structure, not break it.

And do poor people want to pay for the education of the elites? Which is what current grammars effectivly do.

<comment><USER30> That is only because there are so few grammar schools left. When they were all over the country, anyone who passed the 11-plus, regardless of their family's wealth, could go.

These days they are _intended_ to reinforce class structure. You don't need a left-wing, if you don't have a poor working class...

<comment> UK-AL Even in the past they had relatively little working class people in them. Even then they had tutors for people getting in, my dad went to grammar school(We're not working class, his parents were business owners) and he was tutored. His 63 now. Even I was tutored for the 11+(My county has them).

The only reason for populist support for them at the moment(Daily Mail, Telegraph, UKIP, BNP and other populist parties all support them), is most people THINK their kids will get in although most won't(By definition). When they come realise that, populist support will disappear again, and they will go out favour once again.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: My app is live, should i register a company? - <AUTHOR> i have completed the first version my app (on the app store), this is a side project for me, and registered under myself.  should i register a company, my reasons for incorporating would be to absolve personal financial liability and i do plan on charging money for the service so from a tax persepctive, separating the company taxes from my personal taxes, right now the app is free.  anyone have experience on this, or can recommend a good lawyer with this type of background in the states?  i am thinking particularly of a c corp in deleware.  regarding equity, i had some folks helping me on the project, but i don't think they deserve any equity, but i've heard that single founder companies are not that desirable, funding is something i'm seriously considering, but the project is too early phase and i am doing most of the development and soon to be marketing myself.  thanks in advance <comment><USER2> If you don't have one already, set up an LLC for your development/consulting company to operate under. Until you get traction or funding, keep the app under your LLC. When you get funding, set up a Delaware C -- your investors will want it set up right so wait until then and have an experienced startup attorney do it properly. Regarding equity, unless they are a 50/50% co- founder, don't be doling out equity here and there. When you set up the Delaware C, your attorney will set up a vesting schedule for co-founders, employees, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks much!</comment></comment>


Feeding 10B People Will Require Genetically Modified Food - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-17/feeding-10-billion-people-will-require-genetically-modified-food <comment><USER2> Earth's population has more than quadrupled in the past century, and yet food scarcity is farther away than ever, and food prices are cheaper than ever. And somehow, we did that without GMO. So I'm not convinced that GMO is the _only_ way to solve the modest 25-30% population bump we'll get over the next century.

(Before you flip out, I'm not saying GMO is a bad thing. I'm saying this is bad logic.)

edit: _Selective breeding is not GMO_. If your argument is "We've always done GMO", you're wrong. Would you be willing to ban CRISPR and similar tech and do it all the old-fashioned way? No? Then GMO is not selective breeding.

<comment><USER3> > _And somehow, we did that without GMO._

I think you're confused. You probably eat genetically modified food on a daily basis. It's everywhere.

The question isn't "should we genetically modified food?" because we already are and have been doing it for centuries.

The question is "which GMO techniques should we use?"

<comment><USER4> >You probably eat genetically modified food on a daily basis. It's everywhere.

I assume that is only if you live in US? GMO Food are near non existent in EU.

<comment><USER5> Only if you don't count selective breeding as GMO. Which I do. We've "genetically modified" our food to have greater yields, better taste, pest resistance, etc. Just because someone in a labcoat wasn't hunched over a petri dish doesn't mean the genetics aren't being tweaked. The corn we eat today is all but indistinguishable from what we ate in our past.

Genes are genes, and changes to them are changes to them.

<comment><USER4> >Only if you don't count selective breeding as GMO

Well if selective breeding is GMO then there is nothing on earth that isn't GMO. We have been doing selective breeding since before age of industrial revolution.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, which is why I find the health scare rather silly. Are there arguments still to be had on the ethics of what we are changing? Perhaps. But the health risk has been basically proven (as much as anything ever is in science) to be nonexistent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Desalination and farming the Sahara could get us to 10B people without genetically modified food. GMO would on the other hand cost less.

The meat industry also generally gets less competitive as food becomes less plentiful. Feeding the worlds 600 million cows takes significantly more food than feeding 600 million people would. Granted not all cattle are fed from productive farmland, but it's a common practice.

<comment><USER7> Farming the Sahara would require huge amounts of energy, no?

There is plenty of space but other than that...

<comment><USER8> Luckily, Sahara also happens to be a somewhat decent place for production of solar energy. The question is, in other words, not if we can, but rather if we want to throw all those resources at such a project. I suspect the most difficult task will be to stabilize the region enough for large infrastructure projects to be viable.

<comment><USER7> Ok, you have electricity, and then what?

How do you get constant massive quantities of nutrients, water, and other farming supplies? This would require lots of energy.

Don't forget that you'd need greenhouses that can withstand pretty extreme temperatures, both hot and cold. Manufacturing and transporting those also requires lots of energy.

Finally, people would have to live there, no? I could be wrong, but I don't think a small city in the desert, far away from everything and under extreme weather/temps, would be very sustainable.

<comment><USER6> You don't need greenhouses, deserts get extreme temperatures because of the minimal water. As Egypt demonstrates when you irrigate land the temperature swings stop being an issue.

Essentially as you irrigate near deserts you cause local climate change via huge amounts of water evaporation and thermal mass. The more land under irrigation the stronger the effect becomes.

<comment><USER7> Sounds interesting. Do you have any links about that?

<comment><USER6> I don't have a great summery on hand.

 _High desert regions typically have the greatest diurnal-temperature variations, while low-lying humid areas typically have the least._ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diurnal_temperature_variation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diurnal_temperature_variation)

Soil temperatures under cotton in Egypt: [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of- agricultu...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-agricultural- science/article/soil-temperatures-under-cotton-in- egypt/07DFCE2559BB77C34B4D3291240E9B7E)

(4) The main effect of irrigation on soil temperatures is to reduce the amplitude of the daily temperature wave, no sudden change of temperature in the root zone taking place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is nothing wrong with genetically modified food. People in the US eat it all the time, even if they don't know it. What annoys me about articles like this is that they skirt around an obvious solution to this and other environmental problems: don't let the world's population grow to 10 billion people. We already know how to do this, and they are things we should be doing already: empower and educate women, provide better family planning, provide better healthcare.

<comment><USER2> We're already doing those things. If you dropped the birth rate 50%, the population would _still_ grow for the next few decades. Why? Because the primary cause of population growth today isn't high birth rates - it's increased life expectancy.

If you want to control the population, you'll have to resort to more old- fashioned means, like banning antibiotics and vaccine and the occasional genocide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nobody solves the problem from its roots. Population control would solve most of the problems, unless and until that happens, human population will be seen as a cattle field for the minds at the top.

<comment><USER3> That's like saying " _lungs are the root of a smog problem._ "

A growing population isn't a problem. How that population behaves is the concern.

There are plenty of resources on this planet to sustain more people. How the population uses and shares those resources is what needs to be addressed.

<comment><USER11> I don't see how "population is the root of the food availability problem" compares to "lungs are the root of the smog problem". Can you elucidate?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Those of you arguing for population control should think of the methods governments have used in the past to do so. Is this what you have in mind? Scary.

Birth rates will decline when a level of poverty in an area goes down to below replacement levels. This happens everywhere measured.

Here's an unpopular idea: I like bring alive. I think most people do. I'm glad that there are many people on this planet living. I know that the environment suffers because of it but I'd rather have more people.

We humans can meet the challenges of our population on earth though the world will be changed for it.

<comment><USER13> You can still have people: just have fewer kids later in life. Governments can encourage people not to have kids by reducing tax breaks for families with more kids.

<comment><USER12> China's one child policy did essentially that - financially encouraged people to have less children and the result was the murder of female babies. So many that there is an alarming amount of boys versus girls today: 118.06 boys to every 100 girls born (measured in 2010).

Remember that high birth rates are only a problem in poverty.

<comment><USER14> Because all cultures have sex discrepancies and a tolerance to infanticide so that would be the outcome everywhere on earth ?

And how can it be a problem only in poverty ? Doesnt the average American consume like ten fold what the average Indian does ?

<comment><USER15> > Because all cultures have sex discrepancies and a tolerance to infanticide > so that would be the outcome everywhere on earth ?

Most do. And is abortion infanticide? Because abortion is widely accepted across the first world, and can result in the same thing.

> And how can it be a problem only in poverty ? Doesnt the average American > consume like ten fold what the average Indian does ?

Yes, which is the point. Those who say "population control" is the answer are essentially saying "make third world countries with less consumption but higher birthrates change, not first world countries with low birthrates and high consumption". The US actually have stable, ideal birth rate currently. And I doubt even the most delusional population control advocate thinks reducing the US birth rate by 10 fold (from somewhere a little above 2 to .2) is a good idea (though I could be wrong). And many first world countries are even lower to the US, to the point its actually creating major societal problems (like Japan and Sweden). What the above commenter is trying to say is that as poverty levels go down, birth rates drop to replacement level or below.

So essentially to say "population control" is the ideal solution is to say make the areas of the world with high birth rates (largely developing nations, mostly in Africa) stop having children, rather than improving the consumption patterns and efficiency of those of us living in the first world.

Seems problematic to say the least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The last time we revolutionized agriculture to feed a growing population, we gave the scientist responsible a Nobel Prize: [http://www.asianews.it/news- en/The-man-who-saved-India-from-...](http://www.asianews.it/news-en/The-man- who-saved-India-from-famine:-Norman-Borlaug-16336.html).

The diminished, superstitious minds of today, however, condemn the new generation of scientists who are doing the exact same thing.

<comment><USER11> Because we are realising there are limits to growth, and the cost of ever- expanding deforestation is visible in ways it never was before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> That's a brilliant solution, what a shame that is also part of a problem.

GM crop is by definition commercial crop, half of Indian agricultural problems are because of death of local farming vs conventional farming (think energy costs, supply chains effectiveness, technology dependence and lack of biodiversity which hits food chain hard).

Why are we exactly fixed on GM crop but not on better food management policies, promotion of local farming and climate-related tech (ie. irrigation)? Is it because GMO has clear profit margin where above mentioned (and many more) doesn't?

One can argue even about selective breeding which also has its own costs (fragility of a given genetics), but GMO should, by rule, be heavily limited.

<comment><USER18> I think this brings up some important points.

I'm not "against GMO" because I think it makes frankentomatoes that will eat us, or because I think that gene modification is intrinsically unhealthful. I'm (sort of) against GMO because genetically modified organisms are controlled by profit-focused corporations who lock farmers into a financial system that disadvantages them and promotes heavy use of brand-name herbicides that are not good for the surrounding ecosystem. Especially in 2nd/3rd world countries where people rely more heavily on waterways for water and their backyards for food, as opposed to the US where we can pay to outsource these problems, local ability to maintain a healthy environment without paying a multinational on a yearly contract is essential.

People have been able to plant saved seeds for all of human history. Programs that prevent the ability to grow your own food for only the cost of labor put farmers and local areas at a significant disadvantage by eliminating the possibility of subsistence farming. I know that GMOs are designed to increase yields -- but that's focused on farming as commodity.

Neotokio's remark about the "clear profit margin" of GMOs is, I think, exactly on the money.

<comment><USER2> That's exactly where I am, too.

Just because GMO can be used to solve human problems does not mean GMO _will_ be used for human problems. It's more likely to solve corporate problems instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Maybe, if we don't have an abundance of food for 10 billion people, people will think twice before having more children? The environmental challenges with our existing number of people are already overwhelming.

<comment><USER20> I don't know nor have I heard of a single couple factoring the environmental impact of having a child into their decision.

<comment><USER21> Not to mention that population growth is generally higher in lower income and lower educated populations, even within a country.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The adult human body operates at a daily minimum of nutrients to survive, and adding more bodies to the fray increases the resource load on the planet.

While I personally prefer not to eat GMO food because of the uncertain effects it has on the body, at the population scale I believe it will eventually (though we don't know when) be the case that advances in food efficiency are needed to withstand higher carrying capacity. I believe we're already seeing the effects, with steroid/hormone use in animals, and with GMO crops.

There was an HBS article the pitted Solow's ideas on technological advancement against Malthus' population theory. I think both would agree that if population continues to rise, efficiency will be a necessity.

</comment><comment><USER23> The amount of quality farmland in the US that has become tract housing and strip malls depresses me every time I think about it.

</comment><comment><USER11> We could just ensure the population stays below 2B. Education, emancipation of women, access to contraceptives and abortion, immunisation, and improved healthcare for new mothers and infants: these are proven time and again to reduce fertility rates.

There's no sensible reason to keep using infinite expansion as a measure of the health of national economies. We should change the goals to improved access to services, and more even distribution of national wealth (ie: lower spread between richest and poorest).

When we run out of fresh water, desalination should not be viewed as the answer but only as an emergency measure. Desalination requires abundant energy and pollutes the marine environment with over-salinated water. Recycling sewage I to drinking water only works as long as the equipment is maintained fastidiously and never breaks.

Rather than producing more food, we should focus on producing fewer people.

</comment><comment><USER24> Ignoring the topic of global warming, one of the things happening is the northern places like northern canada and russia are melting for the first time in 30,000 years. There's significantly more growing space.

We also have grow lights, vertical farming, and urban farming. Which will greatly improve food yields.

Flipside, how many people have heard about gluten sensitivity 10 years ago? Why are so many people trying crazy diets like vegan, keto, carnivore? Virtually all of these diets have 1 thing in common, eliminating sugar from the diet.

Where do we get our sugar? Oh right, pretty much 100% of sugar beets are genetically modified.

I'm not trying to beat up GMO, but there seems to be something bad in our diet and perhaps it's these GMO plants.

<comment><USER25> I find it treacherous to assume that people didn't have gluten insensitivity in the past. See: cancers existed in the past, but diagnosis and treatment often wasn't on the table.

<comment><USER24> I never said nobody had it, but certainly far more common today than ever before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Vertical farming is about to explode as an industry. Any discussion of planet- wise nutrition is silly without acknowledging the enormous effect it will have.

What feeding X0e9 people requires is energy.

<comment><USER27> Vertical farming will never explode because even after accounting for transportation costs it will still be cheaper to grow staple crops in open fields with direct sunlight. Only high value specialty produce makes sense for vertical farming. Even increases in solar panel efficiency and artificial lighting won't significantly change that equation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't like the way the thread is going. It's pure bike shedding whether GMO includes selective breeding or not. Then everyone redefines the word however they like to strengthen their argument. We might as well replace GMO with something arbitrary like toilet paper.

"Maybe anti-toilet-paper movements that might lead to believe that they are not used yet" Now everything sounds ridiculous but no one argued about the actual problems or advantages.

</comment><comment><USER29> There are way too many people on Earth already. There were barely 3 billion people alive in 1960, now it's over 7.5 billion and going up.

The equivalent of the surface of Africa is already being used for crops and going up, most of it to feed livestock.

There are projections of fishless oceans in less than 30 years, and we got 12 years to stop global warming. What could go wrong?

</comment><comment><USER28> In a world with global monopolies that drive out local farmers in developing countries through their hyper efficiency, importing GMO food aid from the USA is obviously required.

If countries were able to produce their own food then GMO food isn't necessary.

</comment><comment><USER30> I find it weird we worry about a "Malthusian" catastrophe still. The theory being proposed in 1798. What is the Information Age version? That deals with, "when do we kill the earth by our attempts to get everyone a cellphone?"

<comment><USER11> We avoided that early catastrophe by using fertilisers sourced from mined phosphates. We have about 300 years reserves at current consumption rates. If we double our consumption, we halve the reserve longevity. No amount of genetic engineering cleverness is going to address the need for onoohsates.

Just because we avoided the early catastrophe doesn't mean Malthus was wrong.

At some point in the future we need to focus on farming ocean plants that recover the minerals we have been leaching into the oceans for the last few hundred years. Once we can close the loop on phosphates we can start talking about post-industrial-revolution population levels being sustainable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Here's a thought experiment - assume that you do not have Genetic Modification at your disposal. Given that, what can you do to ensure you feed 10Bn people?

It's important to understand the challenge before posing a solution.

<comment><USER11> Take the number out. What can we do to ensure we can feed all the people. Break it down to the level of consumption per person, and methods we have of sourcing the inputs and disposing of the outputs. What fresh water, energy and land area is required per person?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Other than "capitalism needs growth!!111" \- why are we trying to get to 10 Billion people? Shouldn't the objective at this point not be "how do we keep growing" but - "how do we stop growing"?

Fighting global warming would be a LOT easier if we were encouraging people to not have 10 kids...

Ahh, good ol hacker news. Downvotes without a single person having a cogent argument against attempting to limit population growth.

A bus full of people texting on their phones with nobody in the drivers seat and everyone refusing because "it's not my problem". Instead of addressing the glaring issue, let's add WiFi to the bus!

<comment><USER33> Honestly? We don't even have to try. It's a tragedy of the commons thing: life forms will reproduce and spread until they die off. Smear some bacteria in a Petri dish and the same thing happens. A lot of it has to do with reproductive healthcare (the lack thereof) in developing nations. Basically, people keep having unprotected sex. Biological reproduction is so fundamental that even if every nation in the world had a stable government, I'm not sure there's anything we could do that isn't super dictatorship-y. And even then..

It's pessimistic, yeah, but we don't have to even try to have babies. People will keep making that individual choice until we run out of food or energy or something and lots of people, most likely the poor, die.

<comment><USER32> >life forms will reproduce and spread until they die off

Because they don't have the higher level thinking skills to realize their reproduction will have negative consequences. That's a horrible reason to not at least attempt to address the issue.</comment></comment></comment>


Do you really know how to program or you just copy-paste stuff? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/unanswered/Do-programmers-really-know-how-to-program?share=1 <comment><USER2> The body of work that's focused on making programming easier, faster, and more efficient is immense and purposely includes code examples that are designed to be copied and pasted and configured. If you know how to use them you are programming. If you don't, well, you won't get far.

Once you understand the basics of programming you can apply them to any language so the problem becomes the syntax they use and really, if you focus on learning that on a "need to know" basis you can be productive even without being fluent by using a "copy-paste-configure" approach.

The end goal is to produce something so, in short, it's smart to leverage that huge body of work and, in fact, clearly wasteful to ignore it.

<comment><AUTHOR> My question comes from the fact that how we code and how our tools look like and what is code and what structure it[code] is, says that we are coding in most stupid way possible, most error prone way there is and most slowest one. No to mention we are hitting walls in darkness.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, structure is an issue and I agree that there is no good common way to go about it. We're all pretty much winging it. You make tools and add features as you need them and no matter how you approach it you end up with a Rube Goldberg kind of machine.

Before I wrote code I built custom cars and the process is really much the same. You know what you want but there is no book of directions on how to make it and nothing else out there is quite like it so you just start making it and keep working on it until it's done.

Every app is essentially hand built and every builder does it a little differently. It's pretty much impossible to structure that process because that limits the potential to build something new and different.

What has gotten a lot better over the years is the off the shelf parts we can bolt together and get started with. It amazes me how much code I depend on to make an app and how many features it provides.

That's really the fun part of it.</comment></comment></comment>


Man faces possible felony for making parody Police Department Facebook page - <AUTHOR> http://www.cleveland.com/parma/index.ssf/2016/03/parma_man_charged_with_felony.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is the freedom of speech issue we should care about.

</comment><comment><USER2> Even though is not really fair, because in my opinion this is not a felony, he would have had to realize that he'll be in trouble for nothing.</comment>


Washer: a Python Whoosh-based CLI tool to index and search your files - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fiatjaf/washer <comment><AUTHOR> The only other tool that does this CLI magic out of the box is swish-e[1], as far as I know, so here's my alternative.

[1]: [http://web.archive.org/web/20160310064654/http://swish-e.org...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160310064654/http://swish-e.org/docs/swish- search.html)</comment>


Goproxy China – The most trusted Go module proxy in China - <AUTHOR> https://goproxy.cn <comment><AUTHOR> Note that Goproxy China has been completely handed over to China's well- trusted cloud service provider Qiniu Cloud today, it's now a business- supported project rather than a personal project, and it has been CDNed.

If you live in China or travel to China, then we hope that you'll think of the goproxy.cn in the first place. :-)

By the way, the goproxy.cn supports proxying checksum databases (sum.golang.org). So don't worry, you are safe.</comment>


Testable theory suggests information has mass - <AUTHOR> https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5126530 <comment><USER2> The assumption seems to be that you can transfer mass and energy into information in a way that subtracts from total mass+energy of the system but still shows up when weighed.

To test the hypothesis it's not enough just to weigh the memory. You must ensure that the energy stored in the memory has not been increased, because energy increases the weight of the memory device. (relaxed spring weighs less than tensed spring, storing energy in capacitors increases the weight of the memory).

The paper: [https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794](https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794)

>Here we formulate a new principle of mass-energy-information equivalence proposing that a bit of information is not just physical, as already demonstrated, but it has a finite and quantifiable mass while it stores information.

(...)

>Assuming that all the missing dark matter is in fact information mass, the initial estimates (to be reported in a different article) indicate that ∼10^93 bits would be sufficient to explain all the missing dark matter in the visible Universe. Remarkably, this number is reasonably close to another estimate of the Universe information bit content of ∼10^87 given by Gough in 2008 via a different approach.12 In fact, one could argue that information is a distinct form of matter, or the 5th state, along the other four observable solid, liquid, gas, and plasma states of matter. It is expected that this work will stimulate further theoretical and experimental research, bringing the scientific community one-step closer to understanding the abstract nature of matter, energy and information in the Universe.

ps. AIP advances is so called scientific mega journal. It has very low selectivity and don't select articles based on importance. They are "peer reviewed" only in the lowest criteria possible.

<comment><USER3> Newbie question, would this imply that there's something like an "information particle"?

<comment><USER4> Not in any of the usual meanings of "particle" (an "excitation of a quantum field", which of course is not a particularly elucidating explanation if you are lacking context).

<comment><USER5> In Light Emitting Diodes, electrons move across the electron transport layer, while "hole" particles move through the hole transport, where they meet at the heterojunction to combine and emit photon particles. Holes aren't really like other atomic particles, rather they represent the lack of an electron in an energy field that has an affinity for electrons. But it's still a type of manifestation of energy (or lack thereof), thus represents a unit of mass (albeit negative), which effectively signifies the presence of a manipulatable minute piece of negative matter - the definition of a particle.

So, I don't see why you couldn't use the particle label when referring to information. How about an "infon"?

<comment><USER4> Yes, holes exist and are a useful formalism. But you are wrong, holes very much behave like other elementary particles (pseudo-particles), and you get to call these things particles, exactly because they behave like excitations of a field.

If you insist, sure, you can make up an infon and call it a particle. However, it would not behave like anything a physicist would call a particle, nor would it use any of the mathematical tools that were developed to deal with particles, nor it would provide any useful intuition or insight, nor would it provide any pedagogical value. And at that point why bother calling it a particle if it does not behave like one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From TFA: ""This idea is laboratory testable in principle," said Vopson. He suggests taking mass measurements of a digital data storage device when it has full memory. If it has more mass than when the device's memory is cleared, then that would show the mass-energy-information equivalence is correct."

While the idea is interesting, the actual proposed experiment is laughable. It's like suggesting that a mechanical light switch should have different weight when switched on or off.

<comment><AUTHOR> > a mechanical light switch should have different weight when switched on or > off.

Well, in principle it should have a different weight to account for the extra electrons moving around when it's turned on. Every time you have a change in charge you have a corresponding mas change.

My problem with this idea is the fact that not all information is electronic in nature, in which case you would be arguing that the weight of a completed puzzle is different than the total weight of the individual pieces, for example.

In general, this would imply that changes in entropy would correspond to changes in mass...

<comment><USER7> It's more complicated than that. A single light switch stores exactly 1 bit of information. Its either on or off and both positions convey the exact same amount of information.

<comment><USER8> This raises what I view to be a falsification by counter-example of the original premise. If information (and not _the representation of_ information) has mass, then does a piece of uncompressed information weight the same amount as the compressed information?

Furthermore, information is related to interpretation. A string of bits may be an uncompressed text file, a set of numbers, a compressed image, etc. But it's always the same amount of bits. How can my interpretation of that set of bits affect its mass?

<comment><USER4> There are measures that do not depend on interpretation. Entropy of the content for instance. This is what people usually refer to in this context and the ideas of the article have actually been known to physicists for decades.

<comment><USER8> I'm out of my depth here as I've never studied information theory. I suppose there's a larger gap between the theory and the practical aspect of the title of this article than I first imagined!

<comment><USER4> Yeah, our everyday technology is maaaany orders of magnitude away from where this would be detectable. However, it is still important topic if we want to design extreme efficiency computing hardware (and already studied among researchers that want to make nanotech).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Let's say I have three 1TB drives - A, B, and C. A contains 1TB of meaningful data. B contains a sequence of randomly generated bits to be used as a one- time pad for encryption. I use B to encrypt the data on A, store this data onto C, and then destroy A.

B and C now can be combined to retrieve the information that was once stored on A. But B and C by themselves are just random sequences of bits. Where is the information, and therefore mass, of A, which still exists in B and C? If it is in one or both of B and C then I can destroy the information (and therefore reduce mass) in one by destroying the other.

<comment><USER10> Remember the paper is talking about entropy[1] rather than any kind of human- encoded information.

[1]: [https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and- governance/our...](https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and- governance/our-people/our-staff/melvin-vopson)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of the most interesting articles I ever read was in SciAm, arguing (from a thought experiment, Maxwell's Demon [1]) that information needs some minimum energy to be erased [2] (=reset to a low entropy state). Thus, there's definitely a connection between energy and information. Given the known connection between energy and mass, this would establish the final leg of the triangle.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon)

[2] Charles H. Bennett _Demons, Engines and the Second Law_ from 1987.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/demons-engines- an...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/demons-engines-and-the- second-law/)

[https://ecee.colorado.edu/~ecen4555/SourceMaterial/DemonsEng...](https://ecee.colorado.edu/~ecen4555/SourceMaterial/DemonsEnginesAndSecondLaw87.pdf)

<comment><USER12> I'm not certain that Maxwell's demon establishes enough of a connection between energy and information. I think you want more than just a connection, rather some kind of equivalence.

</comment></comment><comment> d--b > He suggests taking mass measurements of a digital data storage device when > it has full memory. If it has more mass than when the device's memory is > cleared, then that would show the mass-energy-information equivalence is > correct.

Er... What?

What does it mean to "delete" information here? You put some movies on a usb drive, and then set everything to 0? and see if there's a mass difference? But a string of 0s is still information, no?

<comment><USER4> Yeah, as I mentioned in a sibling comment, erasure of data is an irreversible process that (because of thermodynamics) will always create heat (even of everything is a efficient as the laws of the universe permit). That heat is energy and it has mass. It is actually straightforward to prove it would have the same mass as the initial information pattern.

A string of zeroes and a random string do have different amount of entropy, so transforming between them requires energy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of Micheal Stevens's (from Vsauce) TEDx talk titled "How Much Does a Video Weigh?". [https://youtu.be/yzQDFKY2uEI](https://youtu.be/yzQDFKY2uEI)

</comment><comment><USER14> The paper is open access: [https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794](https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794)

<comment><USER15> I'm perplexed at what "AIP Advances" is supposed to be. This paper isn't an advance of any sort. It's an application of some decades-old formulas you can grab off Wikipedia; a high schooler could apply them to get this result. It adds nothing to "testability" (and is in fact wrong in its understanding of what "information" in a hard drive really is).

The journal has an impact factor of 1.5. For comparison, Science and Nature are in the 40s. This was a cute letter, but it should not have passed peer- review, whether it's open-access or not, because it contributes nothing novel.

<comment><USER10> Weirdly it's not like the author is some crackpot nobody, he has actual papers under his belt[1] and is a Senior Lecturer[2] (although not at a particularly prestigious university, admittedly).

[1]: [https://researchportal.port.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/melvin-v...](https://researchportal.port.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/melvin- vopson\(2065a4af-19b5-4624-8c75-e96822832377\)/publications.html?pageSize=50&page=0)

[2]: [https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and- governance/our...](https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and- governance/our-people/our-staff/melvin-vopson)

<comment><USER15> His other papers are all in solid-state physics. He's a real scientist playing around outside his domain, discovering a well-known result, and writing a fun letter about it to a low-impact journal.

All of which is fine. It just requires a bit more context than the headline yields. If this had linked to his blog, it would make a lot more sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hey just a thought experiment. Future spacecraft flying through space at say .9c. Mid flight it erases its enormous hard drive and losses a few grams.

Does it speed up? How is momentum conserved?

<comment><USER4> No, because the erasure of the information (irreversible process) will create heat (this is one of the postulates of thermodynamics). Heat is energy which also has mass. It is fascinating how nature provides for these amazing "near coincidences" and then finds a way to close the loophole.

<comment><USER16> Hmm. But the heat could be dissipated.

<comment><USER4> Oh, good point! But you can also just throw the hard drive out of the airlock ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I just had to check my computer's calendar - nope, not April 1st yet.

This is absolutely idiotically bonkers.

Information can be stored with mass, but is not the same as mass. They are not equal. I can't believe anybody is even trying to think up ways to disprove something so momentously bonkers. I mean sure, that's what science does... but buhhhhh

</comment><comment><USER18> Read the paper. Unfortunately this "radical idea" operates completely within known thermodynamics and is just calling energy associated with thermodynamic non-equilibrium "mass of information". Energy _is_ information in that sense, so this adds nothing.

</comment><comment><USER19> This article fails at being precise about what 'nformation' is. Some physical pattern only represents a '0' or '1' if we mean it to.

> Experiments have proven the process of deleting a bit of information > dissipates heat energy, but after information is created, it can be stored > with no energy loss.

To be precise here 'deleting' is a reduction in the number of possible states of a closed system. All '0's or all '1's is not a state of low information. They are both highly ordered states. The state of no information is total randomness, as in heat death. It does require energy to maintain (i.e. keep storing) for information (an ordered state).

</comment><comment><USER20> Are they implying that a storage drive with bits organized to store specific data(say an mp4 file, or the meaning of life) will way more than a drive with randomly arranged bits? If not then aren't they just measuring whatever mechanism is used to physically represent the bits, and not the information itself?

And if so that does seem quite unbelievable. Wouldn't that mean that if you had 2 tiny harddrives that both stored the number 3.14, one harddrive happened to store that number after randomly assigning the bits and one harddrive purposely had 3 digits of PI saved on, the one that was purposely storing the number would weigh more?

</comment><comment><USER21> For what I understand, the proposal- with its suggestion that it may account for dark matter- seems to imply that two different arrangements of exactly the same particles can have different mass, depending on how much information those arrangements encode. Because otherwise, if "information" is intrinsic to each particle and not a collective property, then I don't see how its mass wouldn't be already accounted for by the particles' mass.

</comment><comment><USER22> Due to the particularities of how a storage device works, a 1 should be a tiny amount heavier (or lighter, Idk which way it goes) than a 0.

<comment><USER10> What kind of storage device? I'm fairly sure in a HDD the 1 and 0 states have the same energy, and from what I know about SSDs I think the same is true there.

<comment><USER22> I don't have a great understanding of SSD's but I believe the data is stored as charge in floating gates. And this charge should have weight.

For HDD's I think I was wrong but there is on the other hand an interaction effect between nearby bits. If nearby magnetic domains try to repel each other it has higher energy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow this is such a cool idea. Here are some far out sci fi ideas this might lead to:

Create and destroy mass at will on a spacecraft to make some kind of warp drive.

Artificial gravity on a spacecraft.

Create a black hole with information that you can turn on and off.

(obviously not possible with today's technology. You'd need unbelievably dense information storage mediums)

</comment><comment><USER23> What about a photon? If I use light to transmit information have I given it mass?

<comment><USER2> You forgot the mass-energy equivalence. Photon has no rest mass, but it's energy is equivalent to some mass.

Photon's stress–energy tensor causes similar effect on gravitational field as tiny amount of mass equivalent to the energy of a photon.

<comment><USER24> So basically we have rest mass and relativistic mass. How those two compare? And when we say: energy - mass equivalence we actually mean energy - relativistic mass equivalence?

<comment><USER25> No. You gotta be extra careful when you introduce relativistic mass.

Photon has momentum, zero rest mass. Energy mass equivalence says that you can annihilate mass to create a massless particle. This is true for all the observers.

Relativistic mass is a perceived mass dependent on the observer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can empirically confirm. I keep learning, and gain about 1kg per year.

<comment><USER26> I must be a bit older than you then, I'm gaining weight and forgetting things.

<comment><USER27> So information has mass for sure, it's just that the sign is unclear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> sounds about right?</comment>


Redux vs. The React Context API - <AUTHOR> https://daveceddia.com/context-api-vs-redux/ <comment><USER2> React Redux actually uses the Context API (Update: Old context api).

"Context is what powers React Redux under the hood. The new context API isn't to "replace Redux", it just fixes a broken feature that needs to be provided by React. Whether you use it directly or through another API like RR is up to you" [0]

At the end of the linked article the author states "Today, when Redux is more than you need, you can reach for Context." I'd actually argue the opposite. Redux, specifically React-Redux, is an abstraction. An abstraction that simplifies using the Context API. All I need to think about when using Redux is Flux architecture. There is excellent documentation around Redux, context api not as much.

If you don't feel confident about Redux, or would like to get a better understanding of it, check out these three things (in order):

1\. Understand Flux Architecture: [https://facebook.github.io/flux/docs/in- depth-overview.html#...](https://facebook.github.io/flux/docs/in-depth- overview.html#content)

2\. Understand Redux: [https://egghead.io/courses/getting-started-with- redux](https://egghead.io/courses/getting-started-with-redux)

3\. Implement Redux: Read the documentation at [https://redux.js.org/](https://redux.js.org/). At this point you should have a good grasp on the concepts so pay attention to implementation details here like designing the state.

[0]:[https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/964946781493780480?la...](https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/964946781493780480?lang=en)

<comment><USER3> We use the legacy Context API: [https://github.com/reduxjs/react- redux/blob/47facdbcae2412d3...](https://github.com/reduxjs/react- redux/blob/47facdbcae2412d37d72fa5c37cb4e0cd64a9b4a/src/components/connectAdvanced.js#L139-L146)

This article is looking at the new Context API, which uses React.createContext() to create a Provider/Consumer pair of plain components. This has a number of differences in behavior, most critically around blocking updates incorrectly.

We are looking to switch to the newer API in 6.0. We have two in-progress PRs for this:

[https://github.com/reduxjs/react- redux/pull/1000](https://github.com/reduxjs/react-redux/pull/1000)

[https://github.com/reduxjs/react- redux/pull/995](https://github.com/reduxjs/react-redux/pull/995)

<comment><USER2> Very cool, thanks for the clarification.

To me, this is yet another perk of using RR on top of the actual api. As someone who works on a smaller team, updating our projects to use the new context api would be a significant undertaking. By using RR, the implementation details are left better equipped engineers, our team can focus on meeting business requirements.

<comment><USER4> Yep, and that was always the advice from the React team. "Don't use legacy context directly in your apps. Libraries may need to use it. If you _need_ to use it, wrap it up in a HOC or something so that you can update it in one place later."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Redux contains a number of different ideas/solutions, and I think it's maybe more fair to view them independently. Redux solves prop drilling via the connect function (technically in react-redux, not core redux), and you might say that Context competes with that aspect. Other aspects of Redux are completely unrelated to Context and also good to understand: a unified immutable state tree transformed via composable pure functions in response to a well-defined set of actions represented as objects. Not that you can't do that with Context, but I think it's maybe unfair to view Context as a _replacement_ for Redux.

<comment><USER6> Funny, I vastly prefer the simplicity of passing down props over HOC spagetti - even when heavily nested. It is a simple matter to keep things organized and out of your way, and change detection is taken care of by selectors.

I used to think props were good for dynamic components, but with portals available, I rarelyconsider them a good pattern for anything but components shared between applications.

I use context to pass down actions. IMHO, mapping those into state should be deprecated.

<comment> 52-6F-62 Have you tried MobX? I feel somewhat the same, and I'm that way MobX has been a good in between for my work involving web interfaces. It's been extremely easy to implement into older projects using no globalized state as well.

<comment><USER7> We use MobX as a dependency injector, and it's been great. Scales up very well and is fairly simple to get people up to speed when they drop into our project.

Redux was a "wtf" as it grew in our app and was a real struggle to back out of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My experience seems to be very different. I have used redux extensively for two years and love it. It is well thought out and solved a problem in a brilliant way. I have however, been ripping redux out of all of my projects, one by one and replacing them with the Context API. I remove file after file of actions, reducers et al and replace them with one context Provider.

Someone commented that the power of redux should not be underestimated and that is absolutely true. It is also true that the complexity of redux should not be underestimated. My code bases have been greatly simplified.

In my limited experience the Context API covers 80% of the use cases that required redux, with 80% less complexity. I am sure I will use redux in the future, and I am a better coder for having learned it, but my experience with Context has been very positive.

<comment><USER9> I've had similar experiences. Redux is very elegant in principle but I've found that it results in an explosion of boilerplate and hard to follow code paths. By the time you've pulled in something like redux-saga to handle async the lovely simplicity that made react so popular in the first place is a distant memory. And the mess that an eager but inexperienced developer can make with this stack is truly something terrible to behold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a good article, but the title makes the wrong comparison:

* Context is a dependency injection utility. * Redux is a state-management library.

Redux doesn't know anything about React. In order to use it with React you need to use ReactRedux, which actually uses Context to do it's thing.

The comparison being drawn with the article is still the old:

> React Redux vs React State.

The difference now is that React has a new (and substantially better) Context API.

<comment><USER4> Yes, Redux by itself knows nothing about React. But, the vast majority of Redux users are using React, and it's a reasonable shorthand to just say "Redux" in this case. It's also how most end users would tend to refer to things.

FYI, I'm a Redux maintainer. We are currently working on an internal refactoring of React-Redux's `connect` so that it will use the new `React.createContext` API instead of legacy context. We've got two open PRs with "competing" reimplementations, and I will actually be spending the rest of today hacking on those.

The immediate goal is to make React-Redux at least compatible with React's upcoming "async rendering" capabilities. However, we do have some difficult problems to solve in order for Redux to take full advantage of the "Suspense" feature. We've got a decent idea what the problem space is, but we need some more examples and guidance from the React team so we can try to work on a solution.

Side note: we're also hoping to completely rework the React-Redux docs (since they're mostly just a jargonistic API reference in a Markdown file in the repo), and we're also considering a restructuring / reworking of the core Redux docs as well. Would love to have some suggestions or even additional volunteers to help us!

Issues/links for reference:

\- Roadmap: [https://github.com/reduxjs/react- redux/issues/950](https://github.com/reduxjs/react-redux/issues/950)

\- v6 WIP PRs: [https://github.com/reduxjs/react- redux/pull/995](https://github.com/reduxjs/react-redux/pull/995) , [https://github.com/reduxjs/react- redux/pull/1000](https://github.com/reduxjs/react-redux/pull/1000)

\- React-Redux docs: [https://github.com/reduxjs/react- redux/issues/1001](https://github.com/reduxjs/react-redux/issues/1001)

\- Redux core docs: [https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/issues/2590](https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/issues/2590)

<comment><USER7> The egghead Redux series has been very popular and useful for users. We'd love to talk about how we can compliment this documentation revamping with updated/new free resources. firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER4> Yep, it's highlighted in our README and "Learning Resources" docs pages, and it's the first thing I recommend after the docs in my own "Suggested Resources for Learning Redux" blog post ( [http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/12/blogged-answers- lea...](http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/12/blogged-answers-learn-redux/) ).

Leave a comment in issue 2590, or DM me on Twitter or something - happy for any assistance you can offer!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > I'm going to assume you've got the basics of React down pat (props & state), > but if you don't, take my free 5-day course to learn the basics of React

Gotta love the contextual marketing in a still-useful article. This made me realize content marketing combined with educational tools in an underrated small business idea, which I'm sure could apply to a hundred small niches when done right by legitimate domain experts.

<comment><USER12> Ya. Like a lot of hacker news posts they are really just advertisements.

I bought Dave's book a couple of months ago. It's overpriced in my mind (it's more like half a book and stops short of delivering what I think most people would expect or want, i feel) but he is a good writer and what is in the book is pretty informative and solidly instructional.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the honest comments. What would you like to see in addition to what it covers so far?

While I intentionally kept it focused on "pure React" because I felt that a big part of the "React is hard" sentiment seems to come from how much _other stuff_ gets lumped in with it (and then people feel compelled to learn it all at once), I've been considering expanding it to include some other tangential stuff e.g. API calls, basics of testing... any other ideas would be great to hear!

<comment><USER12> The big hang up I remember having was the desire for a bit more into stubbing out when and where AJAX belongs. I felt like I still had a gap between the dummy application's data handling and how I'd be hitting my server side APIs when I needed them.

I'm a mostly backend programmer and i remember when i was done with the book thinking "ok i can shoe horn my ajax calls into this but I don't feel confident this is how I'm supposed to." ultimately I got set straight on IRC and discord.

I do enjoy your writing style and your blog posts though, and honestly did find your book helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really really like mobx-state-tree (which is way different from just mobx). I'm not sure where I'd use the Context API over MST, but I'm currently toying with comparing both. Offhand, MST seems to be friendlier to Typescript.

<comment><USER15> MST is a beast, I use it for everything. It great for abstraction, has good typescript support. tree based nodes are just a super nice structure for applications in general.

I've used flux, redux, mobx, context, combinations of those, and I think I finally found something that will stay.

If you haven't tried it, I highly recommend it!

<comment><USER16> Do you use it with React Native?

<comment><USER15> Heck yes! [https://github.com/birkir/hekla](https://github.com/birkir/hekla)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you just want to share state use context. Maybe use something like statty or unstated to remove some boilerplate code.

Redux is nice if you need more predictable interactions, for example when you need undo.

<comment><USER18> Context is great to work with and solves most of our usecases. I also recommend looking into Unstated[0], simple api and easy to implement.

[0][https://github.com/jamiebuilds/unstated](https://github.com/jamiebuilds/unstated)

<comment><USER19> I use constate which is very similar to Unstated: [https://github.com/diegohaz/constate](https://github.com/diegohaz/constate)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm not a React dev, but both approaches seem like they would make testing harder. Prop drilling must be the most testable approach. Am I wrong?

<comment><USER5> It definitely makes testing a bit _different_. The downside to prop drilling is that you get components with lots of props, and it can be tedious to figure out how to render a component at all if you need to pass in 20 props for all of its transitive dependencies. The upside is that you have a clear list of the 20 needed props, and once you've figured them out, your component will work.

With Redux and Context, you might have test setup code always populate the store with reasonable defaults for the 20 different data dependencies. Then, a typical test might update a few things in the store with test-specific values, render  without the need to specify any props, and then perform interactions, inspect the results, etc. There's more going on behind the scenes, but it's also easier to get started because you don't need to figure out 20 props.

(There are many, many ways to think about testing here, though, and this is just one approach.)

<comment><USER21> That's why most people say to separate the connected component (that gets few props) wrapping the unconnected one (that gets a lot of props). You usually test the unconnected.

If you _want_ to test the connected component, it's still good to separate them as you won't test the same things (correct props are passed down, rather than UI renders)

<comment><USER5> Makes sense to test the inner unconnected component when you want a focused unit test on the component. FWIW, I greatly prefer integration tests (using JSDOM and enzyme) when working with React/Redux, since they're often easier to write than unit tests and give me much more confidence in the software, and they don't have the speed or reliability downsides that some people talk about with integration tests. Unit tests certainly have their place, though.

As one (admittedly extreme) example, a while back I hit an issue where a refactor caused a very simple crash: just load the app, click a particular button, and it immediately crashes. All relevant components, actions, stores etc had extensive unit tests, but there was no test to make sure that the component dispatched an action that was compatible with what the store wants. I wrote an integration test for it, "load the app and click this button, and assert the intended effect", and it ended up being about 5 lines. It exercised the same code paths as the hundreds of lines of unit tests, and gives me much more confidence in the overall correctness of the system.

<comment><USER21> Yeah I've had the same kind of problem: 100% test coverage by unit testing but I still had crashes because I wasn't testing integration.

I'd like to move to a page-based testing, where I mount the entire page and interact with it, asserting what's going on visually and in the store

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is great. Love the idea of passing components as props regularly. I have done this a few times before, but I guess in my head I still think of components as something "real" and so passing them down as prop data feels wrong somehow...but it isn't! Now that I have seen Dan Abramov bless it, I feel less guilty.

Off to refactor...

</comment><comment><USER23> It's quite trivial to hack your own react-redux using the new context api. It makes a lot of sense too - you get type safety, redux state management, and the redux dev tools. Although I do worry that old-mate react-redux hasn't transitioned yet for a good reason.

Anyway, as soon as I realised that the two are complimentary, I was always kind of upset at articles like this that misled me for so long.

<comment><USER4> Please see my other comments in this thread about our current work to refactor React-Redux to use new context.

FWIW, it's not "just" about new context - there's a lot of other aspects we have to take into account, including trying to figure out how to best make React-Redux work with the upcoming "async rendering" capabilities of React, as well as the multitude of ways the community is using React-Redux beyond just the standard patterns.

<comment><USER23> Yes, and I'm really excited to see it. Not to say I don't already use react- redux, it's simply a good academic process to write your own.

It's good to know that everyone is together with bringing on async rendering. Thanks for your efforts!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Redux solves the problem of managing state and state changes.

Context solves the problem of passing props to nested components.

Context doesn't replace Redux because they solve different problems. This is also evident in the fact that Redux internally uses Context to pass props.

</comment><comment> crooked-v Why not both? [https://github.com/icopp/react-redux-provider- consumer](https://github.com/icopp/react-redux-provider-consumer)

<comment><USER4> See the other comments in this thread from Tim and myself about updating React-Redux to use `React.createContext`.

Also, as a side note: we're open to adding a render props-based API at some point in the near future, since there's a number of people who have expressed interest in that.

<comment> crooked-v Something like the Consumer usage, and a way to apply it to arbitrary transformations of state (see the README on that repo for an example), would go a long way towards de-boilerplating a lot of things. The code I deal with has a painful number of connect() calls just for outputting pieces of data from the store.

<comment><USER4> Mmm... not sure I really see a difference between that and what `connect` does right now. Can you clarify with a specific example?

<comment> crooked-v Compare...

        // with connect
        import { connect } from 'react-redux'
        import { defaultSomething } from 'src/store/ducks/something'

        const Whatever = ({ something }) =>
{something}
;

        export default connect(state => ({
          something: state.something || defaultSomething
        }))(Whatever);

...to...

        // with consumer
        import { identity } from 'ramda';
        import { SomethingConsumer } from 'src/store/consumers'

        const Whatever = () =>
<SomethingConsumer>{identity}</SomethingConsumer>
;
        export default Whatever;

One more line in the second also goes away if the consumer defaults to an identity function if not given a suitable child.

        // with consumer
        import { SomethingConsumer } from 'src/store/consumers'

        const Whatever = () =>
<SomethingConsumer />
;
        export default Whatever;

The boilerplate in the first case also gets much, much worse if you're using Typescript, as type inference gets wobbly at best with HOCs and so for even simple usage you have to also define out your "inner" and "outer" props for each component you want to use connect with.

<comment><USER4> So... 5 lines of code, vs 4 or 3?

Perhaps it's just that I'm very used to `connect` as the "standard" way of doing things, or that I don't use TS myself, but I'm really not seeing that much of a change in those examples (especially if you're importing pieces from other files that already abstract some aspect of the process).

After we get done with version 6 (update to use new context), we are open to ideas for new API approaches for a v7. If you've got specific suggestions, please either file an issue, or wait for us to open up some discussions and give us your thoughts then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there something equivalent to the Context API in Vue.js?

<comment><USER25> > Is there something equivalent to the Context API in Vue.js?

Don't think so, but I still feel like Vuex is better than Redux and Context API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26>
      // Note that it's named with UpperCase, not camelCase

Refers to Pascal case

</comment><comment><USER27> How do you test all this magic going?

</comment><comment><USER28> My rule of thumb: if you need Redux or the React Context API then your app is too big to be worth writing.</comment>


Singapore fake news law polices chats and online platforms - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-48196985 <comment><AUTHOR> Same story as [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19869281](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19869281) .</comment>


Radical Solutions - <AUTHOR> https://www.damninteresting.com/radical-solutions/ <comment><USER2> Galois would be happy to know how important his work on finite fields was to discovering and formalizing cryptography, both for the ways in which it has empowered political revoloutionaries, and also for the irony that it is one of the most applied maths in the world.

As a cryptographer once said to me in jest, "I wish I were able to make an impact like Galois. But if I were Galois, I'd already be dead."

</comment><comment><USER3> This article is a mini-biography of the mathematician Évariste Galois, founder of Galois theory.

</comment><comment><USER4> > _Galois ... suggesting there was something fishy in Poisson's delay._

Heh

<comment><USER5> _poisson_ = fish in French

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The third-year curriculum had just been changed, and would now introduce students to arithmetic and geometry alongside their continued study of the classics. Galois was about to meet mathematics. Few blind dates have gone so well."

LOL... great line.

But really, yet another proof how an apparent "failure" can lead to unexpected "success"

Or as some put it, "When one door closes, another opens."

</comment><comment><USER7> It's great to read a sympathetic biography of someone like this, who in modern times would get labeled with a personality disorder and heavily medicated for it. Makes you wonder though about all the people like this that did not invent Galois theory.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've thought for a few years that there's a great movie to be made of his life.</comment>


Out of date Chrome results in ERR_CERTIFICATE_TRANSPARENCY_REQUIRED - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=664177 <comment><USER2> If I'm reading this correctly, out of date versions of chrome (>10 weeks old) simply weren't loading sites like [https://www.amazon.com/](https://www.amazon.com/)

This exact issue was affecting my girlfriend's machine a few days ago. I restarted chrome to update and the problem went away. At the time, I just thought it was an overly pushy new feature by google to force people to update.

<comment><USER3> Ah, that just happened to me last night. I opened it in Safari instead, and thought "Boy, Chrome can be so annoying these days."

The only indication you should update Chrome is some small red dots near the right edge of the window.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> am I the only one who had trouble reading that title?

<comment><USER5> You are not the only one.

Skimming the ticket comments, it smells like an idea that, ten weeks after Google's compile, a given release will start throwing SSL cert handshake alarms for at least _some_ major websites.

Anybody that does not permit Chrome to auto-update might anticipate many intrusive SSL security warnings, every 10 weeks or less.

While you may have downloaded and installed Chrome on a given date, the download's compilation timestamp could be any point up to ten weeks in the past?

All because anti-virus?

<comment><USER6> Not anti-virus. Symantec. You might even call it a bit pro-Symantec, in that the time bomb is an accommodation added especially for them. I certainly would not call it antisymantec.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This came up on HN a month ago as well: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12953172](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12953172)

</comment><comment><USER8> Holy crap am I understanding this correctly? Out of date Chrome browsers will not load Amazon and other sites utilizing Symantec SSL certs??? Amazon and everyone running Symantec certs dropping Symantec in T-minus: 3 ... 2 ...</comment>