GitHub renaming default branch to "main" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Una/status/1271180494944829441 <comment><USER2> Several discussions here in the past few days:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500093) (138 points/224 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23518123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23518123) (127 points/206 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23519813](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23519813) (44 points/84 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23522859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23522859) (15 points/5 comments)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is what happens when you bow down on everything the "I'm so offended by <insert some random bullshit here>" -people whine about.

I guess I better get rid of my Master's degree before some people think I'm a slave owner.

<comment><USER4> You see it as bowing down. I see it as standing tall and making a principled choice -- not because it's going to save the world, but because the change has essentially zero cost and sends a positive message; despite the outcry of people who are offended by such things.

<comment><USER5> It's an empty gesture that requires negligible effort or sacrifice for largely zero effect on the actual problem; basically the progressives' equivalent of "thoughts and prayers". Moreover, it adds a inconvenience, albeit minor, to those outside the United States who are not a party to this debate at all.

We're not against anti-racism, we're anti-nonsense and this is just about as nonsensical as it gets. Actual effort to solve the very real problems that the US faces with regard to race would involve donations of money and staff time to help out minorities, enough to cause some level of financial stinging. If these organizations did that, that would be actually worthy of praise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it's important to note that master has no relation to master/slave. It's master as in master copy or master key.

<comment><USER7> You are mistaken. The terminology came from BitKeeper, which did use the terms in the sense of master and slave repositories: [https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel- list/2019-May/...](https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel- list/2019-May/msg00066.html)

In any case, the git dev responsible for the choice has made their views known: [https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1271477451756056577](https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1271477451756056577)

<comment><USER8> The git dev responsible for the choice has said it had nothing to do with master/slave:

> "master" as in e.g. "master recording". Perhaps you could say the original, > but viewed from the production process perspective.

> A clueless Central European youngster whose command of English was mostly > illusory came up with the term, which is why it isn't very obvious...

[https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441?s=20](https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441?s=20)

I always thought it meant "master copy"...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a nice gesture but it's silly.

There are multiple definitions of 'master'. This has no connotation with master and slave. My other branches are not someone inferior to the master branch, and the master branch does not command the other branches. The other branches are normally an improvement on master, and master is usually transformed to resemble another branch.

If you want to fight systematic racism in society, changing the word master, when master has nothing to do with master/slave, seems a nice gesture, but rather kneejerk, and forces people to do a lot more work, all because someone failed to use a dictionary, which causes annoyance rather than a change of mindset.

</comment><comment><USER10> Say what you will about the motivations for changing the name, but why-oh-why did they choose "main"? "trunk" continues the tree analogy ("branch") much better...

<comment><USER11> Trunk would have been the best choice from the beginning.

Maybe elephants will be offended by this name? Who knows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anybody else think it's a nice gesture, but cringing at the thought of updating all your deploy scripts?

<comment><USER13> What I expect them to do is leave automation & api as they are, and only change what happens when you use github web ui. But you never know I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This tweet from the person who claims to have selected the master branch name laments his choice. [https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1271477451756056577](https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1271477451756056577)

If he wants to change it from master to main/upstream I'm on board. _shrug_

If something this ... inconsequential to me can make some folks more comfortable I don't care. Think of it this way, it saves 2 bytes! Course upstream then takes those bytes from origin. So it is a wash after all.

<comment><USER15> Im yet to see anyone on hn say it will make them more comfortable. Just a bunch of white knights coming to do thier song and dance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I personally don't have a problem with renaming master to main or so. These are just terms, and I lived with `master` branches and `main` branch won't bring me any harm, if this actually helps people to feel more comfortable.

What bothers me a lot, that a group of people basically decide for the whole world, cultures and countries how should they feel about things. This clearly was a case with Rubocop renaming, where bunch of developers aggressively attacked Bulgarian maintainer [0] to rename Rubocop library because of the `cop` part. They obviously didn't care, that in many other countries police is actually protecting people and is being respected. And argument of "(in US) the word "cop" has an uncomfortable feeling about it" was enough to outweigh the arguments of maintainer, that renaming would bring a lot of problems and breaking changes.

[0] - [https://github.com/rubocop- hq/rubocop/issues/8091](https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop/issues/8091)

<comment><USER17> > that a group of people basically decide for the whole world, cultures and > countries how should they feel about things

Hopefully people see now the plight of the Palestenians citizens of other regions in that area, about what the West did to them post WWII.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> it seems ironic to me that the people who are complaining about others being offended are usually the people who are most offended.

<comment><USER11> The only people of color that I could spot in the discussion were against the change. Some Asians were especially annoyed by the proposed change.

Looks like a cult-like group of white SJW developers within GitHub/Microsoft have painted themselves into a corner with this suggestion. It will be difficult to get out of this situation without losing face or causing more damage.

<comment><USER18> honestly who cares. this change is so benign.

<comment><USER15> Chsnging a branch name is benign? You really cant see how that could cause problems for software?

I know its the default bit there will be a bunch of people that go in and change it for the sake of virtue only to expect dependent libraroes to manually go in and fix things. Which, wont happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is as useful as a picture of water to a person stranded in a desert.

</comment><comment><USER20> The domain "Maincard.com" just became very valuable. For when Mastercard has to change its name too.

</comment><comment><USER21> Isn't the word "pork" offensive to some halal or kosher developers?

[https://github.com/search?q=pork](https://github.com/search?q=pork) <\- 800 results

Since such name changes impose a lot of breakage and work downstream, we should find an objective way to designate which ones are necessary. An example could be an ongoing github poll, with the results averaged over years to prevent fads from creating work. A code of conduct could specify that if more than x% of the userbase over y years vote that <word> is offensive, it would be scheduled for deprecation in major version +1 and removal in +2.

</comment><comment><USER11> The discussion on this issue for git for windows got really heated and then shut down. It looks like a massacre now (scroll all the way down to see the massacre):

[https://github.com/git-for-windows/git/issues/2674](https://github.com/git- for-windows/git/issues/2674)

<comment><USER22> It's crazy how much effort people expend fighting against this.

No one is asking you to do development work to make it happen. No one is forcing you to update your repositories or change your workflow. You're free to continue using whatever names you want for branches in your own repositories.

If other people want to do this change and are the ones doing it, why spend so much time getting so heated about it?

<comment><USER23> I would not get worked up about it if it came from individual OSS projects, out of their own free will, one by one.

However, in several OSS projects I follow, it was always corporate steered "open" source devs who "proposed" the change and rammed it through, often against the majority opinion. To further their careers and stroke their egos.

Now GitHub, who still does business with sketchy companies (as does MSFT) does this entirely meaningless virtue signalling change.

Just to show OSS devs who is the boss and that they can do whatever they like with their money.

<comment><USER24> All of these meaningless gestures to you add up over time. A single company supporting BLM was untenable when the NFL players were doing their protests but they continued. The current protests were considered meaningless but they continued and are effecting change in society and also in legislation. The small things actually matter and it seems this small gesture matters to a lot of people on here even as they continue to say it's meaningless because removing references to slavery actually isn't meaningless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> what's next? will master degrees become something else? these changes are utterly stupid and don't help anything

</comment><comment><USER26> Utopia has been achieved!

We haven't solved lots of computational problems or made the internet and computing more usable/available to everyone, but not to worry, we changed the naming standards on a tool used by a small subset of the worlds population to placate an even smaller subset of loud and vitriolic people.

<comment><USER15> > "If it prevents even a single black person from feeling more isolated in the > tech community, feels like a no-brainer to me," she wrote.

I agree with the sentiment, but oh sweet summer child. You cant make decisions off of what one person feels. That barely scales up to work with just one person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Flagged - this is a link to someone asking Github to change their policy, and Nat Friedman's response saying they will ([https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1271253144442253312](https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1271253144442253312)) is non-trivial to find in the resulting thread because Twitter has made their site nearly unusable.

Could we get some mod action to change the link? Either to Friedman's response (which would show the original question above, since it's a reply) or to something like [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53050955](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53050955) ?

Edit: Or if it's a dupe submission of something that's been beaten to death on HN several already, maybe it's not worth fixing.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how many websites are going to break over this when everyones master branch imports break.

I, know, default, still, some idiot's gonna break something big with this.

</comment><comment><USER28> Man, when technicality is used as a basis for such a change you have to wonder how vain the people who push for it are

</comment><comment><USER29> I am on board with a lot of changes, even symbolic, to assuage issues of discrimination in culture.

This feels like "Okay, we know this isn't a big deal, but 60 Minutes is going to run a segment on "Master/Slave" hard drives and Twitter is going to blow up if we don't fix this".

Like spoken elsewhere, the "master" branch is not the opposite of a "slave" branch. Those who are triggered would be showing their ignorance at the etymology, and it seems Github is just getting ahead of an outrage storm.

</comment><comment><USER30> Is there anything more official than a tweet? Like an official statement?

<comment><USER31> Bad link. This is just some random person on Twitter asking about it. No relation to Github.

Nat does have a reply buried in the responses; that should have been linked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I suggest they go protest chess tournaments. There they have not just masters but also grandmasters. And while we're at it, let's ban the might and magic series on the same grounds.

<comment><USER11> Did you know that the initial rank at chess is grandslave? /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> They should go protest chess tournaments, there they have not just masters but also grandmasters. And while they're at it, call for banning Might and Magic series on the same grounds.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm offended by the octopussy. That is really problematic. Can that be removed as well?

<comment><USER34> But she was a beautiful Bond villain...

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Smh. Great progress.

</comment><comment><USER36> Can we also stop using master/slave: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master/slave_(technology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master/slave_\(technology\))</comment>


On the Eve of a Computer Playing Jeopardy: a Tale about a Chess Playing Robot - <AUTHOR> http://www.peebs.org/2011/02/jeopardy-artificial-intelligence-and-a-chess-playing-robot/

<comment><USER2> This article should have had Legos and Lisp in the title.

</comment><comment><USER3> An amazing thing with a few weeks of notice and pre-launch publicity.</comment>


Global Forecast System source code - <AUTHOR> http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/GFS/code.php <comment><USER2> Independently I was just wondering tonight why weather forecasting does not use some Machine Learning techniques as there is an abundance of training data. Wouldn't any number of regression ML algorithms find a more accurate prediction model? If Google did weather....

<comment><USER3> Sometimes Machine Learning is the wrong approach. Direct mathematical modeling, if the underlying causal phenomenon are well known, bypasses the whole learning aspect of an explanatory system. Machine learning might help make sense of the residual noise that can't be accounted for with direct mathematical modeling. But at the level of sophistication that I've seen (predicting wind patterns using Finite Element Analysis methods mapped to topographical patterns fine-grained enough to model small buildings), I can't imagine any machine learning methods that could make any sense of the residual noise.

<comment><USER2> I agree that Machine Learning is not always the right approach but wouldn't it be a relatively inexpensive experiment to see if it could be used for more accurate predictions? I'm surprised that topographical patterns are mapped that precisely when ASOS and AWOs stations are so far apart. Also the weather data from commercial airplanes is so far above the surface that modeling small buildings would be meaningless.

I heard a talk from ex-Googler climate.com (now Monsanto) guys. Their forecasts were accurate enough to build a very profitable insurance business. I bet they used Bayesian rather than FEM techniques.

<comment><USER4> Is it that 'physics simulation' forecasting is best for short timescales (e.g. < 1 week in the uk), whilst ML can be better for estimating next year's weather statistics in some particular place? (Because your butterfly effect means that simulating the actual weather out to 1 year 'accurately' is not possible).

Presumably any short-term ML forecasting would use the physics simulation as it's main input, and then try to improve slightly on it (e.g. maybe you observe that in a particular small area, the rainfall is on average 10% more than the physics simulation, so your ML method would add 10%, giving you a slight forecast improvement)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do they also make raw sensor data available for free? I.e. if I wanted to build my own forecast system based on this code, I would still need all the data they collect with weather balloons, right?

<comment><USER6> To create a global NWP system from this code you would need observations (soundings, SST, satellite measurements) as well as a super computer.

<comment><USER7> WCOSS (Tide & Gyre): IBM iDataPlex/Intel Sandy Bridge/Linux

208 trillion calculations/sec; 10,048 processing cores; 2,590 trillion bytes of storage

[xref: [http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/GFS/doc.php#comopesys](http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/GFS/doc.php#comopesys)]

<comment><USER8> Here's a really interesting read about the trials of upgrading to WCOSS: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather- gang/wp/...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather- gang/wp/2013/06/25/new-weather-service-supercomputer-faces-chaos/)

<comment><USER4> I'd assumed that 'trials' meant 'snafu in a big software project'.

But actually it's about the butterfly effect making it impossible to get exact agreement between the old and new systems for forecasts longer than about 5 days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fortran 90 is still the language computational stuff is made in today. I'm not convinced, however, that that choice is really for performance reasons over cultural reasons.

Still, Fortran 90 is hell of a lot better than Fortran 77, which unfortunately is the language of choice for some of the people I'm being asked to work with.

<comment><USER10> I'm a part of this community. I assure you speed in number crunching is a huge reason this is written in F90.

<comment><USER7> Indeed, automatic (and largely implicit) use of SIMD and OpenMP by the compiler is very very good with F90 compared to almost all other widely used languages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is really cool. If I knew the slightest bit about Fortran, I'd be distracted for weeks.

<comment><USER4> imo, fortran90 is about the easiest language to follow - if language is all that is stopping you (and you know some other language already), then you should just pile straight in.

From looking at some of the code, what is hard for me to follow is the 'overall view'. The documentation (of the model) looks quite nicely done, but there must be a huge amount of fluid dynamics etc etc knowledge, that would take me years to learn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why don't they just release this on Github?

Also, it would be rather interesting for a rewrite of this by the open source committee.

<comment><USER13> Your first sentence sniped me and I almost wrote a Big Response before I read the second line and realized you're obviously joking…</comment></comment>


Terraform 0.3 - <AUTHOR> https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/terraform-0-3.html

<comment><USER2> Is anyone here using this in production (besides Hashicorp of course)?

I'd love to hear about how it works with Ansible, Chef, etc. for real deployments. From the docs:

> Terraform is not a configuration management tool, and it allows existing > tooling to focus on their strengths: bootstrapping and initializing > resources

But configuration management tools can be used for provisioning infrastructure too - is it worth splitting your configuration across multiple tools?

<comment><USER3> We were at my work, but unfortunately Terraform was lacking a number of critical features for AWS at the time. It's an amazing tool, but it needs a bit more time in the oven for our use cases :)

We ended up writing a "clone" of Terraform that just did the things terraform was missing using Boto, except our state files were readable JSON instead of a binary format.

<comment><USER2> What was it missing? Does it have those features now?

<comment><USER3> Tagging and a lot of VPC features, as well as managing EBS volumes properly. A lot of little stuff, basically, that meant that we couldn't fully automate our infrastructure using this. A lot of that has been fixed in 0.2 and now 0.3, so I have very high hopes!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We got pretty far with using Terraform to set up reasonably complex AWS architecture (VPC, multiple subnets etc.) There were several blocking bugs which @hashicorp and friends fixed fairly quickly, but not quickly enough for us to use it instead of AWS CloudFormation.

I can see us using Terraform when it is a little more mature - basically more AWS providers. Give it 2 to 3 months :)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm pretty interested in Terraform, but have a hard time to draw the line between this and a config management + orchestration tool like Ansible.

Ansible has a nice declarative syntax in YAML to describe your infrastructure+services and you can manage reusable components with roles.

How do they compare?

</comment><comment><USER6> How is this an improvement over Cloud Formation and/or troposphere (a python DSL to generate Cloud Formation templates)?

<comment><AUTHOR> This was discussed a bit in the first post about Terraform: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8098496](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8098496)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How does Terraform compare to e.g. Mesos? Or am I comparing apple and oranges here?</comment>


Made in Detroit: Guitars crafted from city ruins - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/made-in-detroit-guitars-crafted-from-city-ruins/

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologize in advance for autoplay video but thought it was worth sharing.

To me the story emphasizes perfectly the gritty Motown spirit. Lots of creatives doing interesting stuff.</comment>


Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/software/204139/now-would-be-excellent-time-yahoo-employees-jump-ship

<comment><USER2> Honestly, I find this article ridiculous and borderline offensive. I would love if the author would come talk to a few of us and maybe take a tour of the place and see what makes this place work.

I work at Yahoo, joined a few months ago, run engineering management for a couple of teams working on high-performance cloud stuff very core to the way Yahoo works. I find the engineers sharp and smart, the technology problems fascinating (insane scale/perf requirements) and in general, look forward to getting up and driving to Sunnyvale every morning.

None of that is going to change unless something really dramatic happens.

P.S We're hiring. :) If any of you want to work on a platform serving a ridiculous (and I do mean ridiculous) number of requests and users, hacking on cutting-edge distributed programming work, send me email (address on my profile).

<comment><USER3> Do you guys use erlang anywhere in that stack?

<comment><USER2> Nope. But we have our own constructs for a lot of the semantics Erlang provides written from the ground up in C/C++. Sorry, can't talk about it more except in broad strokes :)

<comment><USER4> Apache Traffic Server?

<comment><USER2> Nope, this is not public. Traffic server ( and the stuff it lead to) is built by a peer group under the same VP I report to.

<comment><USER4> I see. I asked because I recently listened to FLOSS Weekly's "Apache Traffic Server" episode featuring some Yahoos who were involved with it from its beginnings, and which is apparently used heavily within the Yahoo infrastructure.

<http://twit.cachefly.net/floss0179.mp3>

 _"We talk about the Apache Traffic Server, a proxy server that you probably don't realize you are already using.

Guests: Leif Hedstrom and Bryan Call"_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was given a very good job offer from Yahoo around the same time Carol Bartz was fired. I have yet to sign anything yet because of what I've been reading about Yahoo's condition. I get the feeling that most of the news about Yahoo's demise are just being sensational, yet at the same time I can't ignore the fact that Yahoo employees have been leaving the company every other week (according to my friends who have worked there).

My worst fear is relocating and then being totally screwed over. I don't know what to do.

<comment><USER6> Where would you relocate to? I'm assuming that if Yahoo gave you a good job offer, you'd be able to find other employment in the area without too much problem.

<comment><USER5> Santa Clara, CA. I'm just worried that if I move out there I'll be left hanging while I have expenses to keep up with.

<comment><USER7> Ask for a signing bonus of n months expenses (where n is how long you think it will take to find a job), and then put that in a savings account. Problem sovled. And if Yahoo ends up being okay, you have a big chunk of money you can apply to the down payment of a house (or fund a team of pro bike racers, or wahtever).

<comment><USER8> This is the best option. If you're good, then you can easily get a job very quickly in today's conditions. So a signing bonus, of, say, 3 months salary is ample.

Also: Yahoo is known for _very_ generous severance benefits. Typically you'll get 3-4 months of salary.

So if you're even half-way decent, you should be OK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If vultures are descending, I would think it would be better to wait. The bidding war will temporarily bump up your stock price & options, giving you a better time to sell them. Then the vultures will offer buy-outs to encourage employees to leave. I doubt the vultures will be overly generous in their buy- outs but it can still amount to a substantial amount of cash if you've been there a while.

<comment><USER10> Most people's stock options are so underwater they're eternally worthless. An increase of a few bucks in the stock price isn't worth the cost on your morale.

<comment><USER8> How's your open-source Flickr coming along, man?

// sorry, using a throw-away account..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Funny, this article seems to be written by one of those vultures.

People that don't work at Yahoo! telling people that work there to quit remind me of the pope telling other people to abstain from sex. If you're not playing the game don't tell others how to play it or to stop playing it.

Yahoo! has had a rough time but it still has plenty of life in it, let's wait to see what they intend to do once they've found their new bearings.

Carol Bartz was a disaster, she did the worst thing any CEO could ever do, which is to wreck the culture that pervaded Yahoo!. Now it is up to new people to try to restore that culture or at least a semblance of it and then possibly the oil tanker can be turned around. It isn't over until the fat lady sings.

Yahoo! is huge, has a pile of interesting tech, lacks polish and needs focus. If Apple could be turned around then so can Yahoo.

<comment><USER12> > _Carol Bartz was a disaster, she did the worst thing any CEO could ever do, > which is to wreck the culture that pervaded Yahoo!._

Sorry, but what culture do you believe Bartz destroyed? I was at Yahoo before Bartz, and left only about a month before she was fired. I don't believe that Bartz destroyed anything. Yahoo has never had a great culture. They've always had an identity crisis. You can go read PG's older essays and see that.

Bartz was fired because she couldn't work a miracle. Yahoo needs some truly amazing changes in order to avoid Sun's fate, and I'm not sure anyone out there can/will deliver what's needed quickly enough. You mentioned Apple as a turnaround example. Exactly where do you think Yahoo is going to get a Steve Jobs?

<comment><USER8> One thing off the top of my head: she ended the year-end parties. Those parties were great, because they brought lots of people together, and for one night, you forgot everything else and enjoyed yourself, with your spouse/s.o./friend . It was fun to see geeks bathe, shave and dress up for this yearly event.... ;-)

I keed, I keed about the bathing. :-)

<comment><USER13> "Culture" is defined by parties? I think you are confusing "culture" and "perks". I love the culture at Yahoo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm curious - can someone explain to me how Yahoo still has a higher P/E ratio than say, Apple?

For that matter, why is EBay's P/E higher than Google's?

<comment><USER15> Asian assets are a very large part of the 'P'

<comment><USER16> Yahoo! is only a minority shareholder in Yahoo! Japan, with SoftBank owning 40+% of the shares.

<comment><USER15> Yahoo! owns over 40% of Alibaba which is a multibillion dollar company. I have seen valuations over 30B, but these are rough estimates since it is not public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't like the idea of a writer telling people to quit their jobs with little first hand knowledge. If they like working for Yahoo they should stay till they can get the severance package or continue working there.

Afterwards you probably have some savvy friends you could convince to join you on making your own future, in the form of a startup.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's weird to see Y! get a lot of hate on HN, because it seems like working there would be a lot like working at a startup. You're trading off risk (will this company exist in _n_ years) for reward (higher salary, greater control over job responsibilities). The best Y! employees also probably have a ton of visibility, working on projects like Hadoop, YUI, YQL, and so on.

What's wrong with this analogy?

<comment><USER19> Well, working at a startup is rewarding because you have a small team of peers, very little bureaucracy or management overhead, no legacy to deal with, etc. I don't think the analogy addresses the core reasons why you'd pick a startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This article is based on a false premise. The effect of LBOs on job creation is ambiguous:

<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1034178>

Silver Lake, in particular, is more of a growth equity firm that happens to use debt.

(I work at, but by no means speak for, Yahoo.

<comment> barry-cotter What happened to DDD?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone still owns YHOO stocks? Got some at around 13 after the collapse of Microsoft buyout. The book value was/is good. Was hoping there's another acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER22> With a fresh top level CEO, could Yahoo survive?

<comment><USER23> What would Yahoo have to do for you for it to get your business?

<http://everything.yahoo.com/>

Take a look at all the services yahoo offers.

Has anyone ever sent you a "Yahoo Video" link? I didn't even know it existed until just now. And the prominent video on the main page is "Jazz for Cows" _which I can't get a direct link for to paste here_. Yahoo only offers me the option to embed it. It's fun enough I want to send it to my friend who plays in a local orchestra, but Yahoo is not concerned with the organic spread of links. <http://video.yahoo.com/>

It isn't just youtube Yahoo competes poorly with. Craigslist, Gmail, ESPN, every news site on the internet.

Just take a look at their "security" offering <http://security.yahoo.com/>

Paragraphs of copywriting but no product to download or install. Click "Protect your PC" it's just more words. Lots of words. Someone at Yahoo took the time to create this page _for what purpose?_ There is no direction whatsoever.

Their primary search function is powered by Bing now too. About the only near- market leader Yahoo controls is Flickr and that's only because pros like it over Facebook.

Yahoo! became the bitbucket to store second rate implementations of every idea the internet has ever had, and they aren't cutting the cruft loose, or differentiating on the products that are quality.

In fact, take a look at their mobile offering. [http://m.yahoo.com/w/sports/ncaaf/teams/ncaaf.i-a.2?.ts=1316...](http://m.yahoo.com/w/sports/ncaaf/teams/ncaaf.i-a.2?.ts=1316199330&.intl=us&.lang=en)

That's the Big East Team list for College Football. It's not standings. It doesn't show records. Some project manager at Yahoo accessed the mobile sports site and either didn't care enough to say "Why can't I see the standings?" or didn't know enough about sports to care about standings. Why does Yahoo! have someone like that in charge of the mobile sports division (If they even have someone in a leadership position anywhere close to such a segment). Someone thought displaying 8 teams in alphabetical order was good usability.

<comment><USER24> > Yahoo only offers me the option to embed it.

Clicking the up arrow icon provides me a URL along with an embed link. Or you could just copy it from your browser's URL bar.

<comment><USER23> It appears that the promoted/lead video displayed at <http://video.yahoo.com> does NOT have a link field in the up arrow menu.

Once you find a video's specific page the same video has a link available. At least on ubuntu with flash 11,0,1,129 installed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Really sad article -- I'd love to see Yahoo turn it around. It's an amazing company, in many ways.

</comment><comment><USER26> Anyone have a mirror or cache link?

</comment><comment><USER27> Wouldn't it be wiser to wait until you see if you get fired, so you get the severance package? And if you don't, then get out?

<comment><USER28> By then the market may be saturated with your former co-workers..

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I remember this type of Schadenfreude during the tech collapse in 2000. People seemed to just love hearing about other people losing their jobs. This editorial certainly has undertones of wanting to accelerate the collapse of Yahoo.

Be careful what you wish for.

</comment><comment><USER30> If Yahoo! is acquired by AOL, then I think there might be some bright future for Yahoo! and for AOL.

For example, they could focus on Yahoo! Finance to be the place for investment, stocks info on internet.

In order words, it is too early to predict whether Yahoo! will be sold to PE firms.

EDIT: Stupid comment: AOL is way smaller than Yahoo!

<comment><USER31> _If Yahoo! is acquired by AOL_

Yahoo's market cap: $18.91B

AOL's market cap: $1.5B

<comment><USER30> Stupid me. I was honestly thinking that AOL's market cap is about 20B. Wow...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I don't understand why Yahoo still exists (or at least why it still gets so much coverage). At this point it's just a cheap knockoff of everything google does. Has anyone ever used Yahoo mail? It's a POS, it's bloated, slow, prone to failure - and it doesn't even work on linux. Same thing for yahoo maps, news, search, etc. I just don't get it.

<comment><USER33> A sinking ship still has momentum.

<comment><USER34> I'd have gone with derailing train.

<comment><USER35> And that's a lot of momentum!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Flea Marketers Rejoice TSA Auctions Large Lots For Cheap - <AUTHOR> http://freedom-or-safety.com/blog/flea-marketers-rejoice-tsa-auctions-large-lots-for-cheap/

<comment><AUTHOR> Wonder what kind of market there would be for a site called something like "TSA Took My Knife" where you could sell people their stuff back to them?</comment>


Will operating systems move  towards micro kernel based architecture? - <AUTHOR>

Processor are cramming more and more cores and on the contrary clock speeds is approaching saturation. Isn't this a call for operating system designer to reconsider monolithic design and go back to micro kernel or exo-kernel based operating.<p>What is your opinion ? <comment><USER2> People are definitely reconsidering OS design for multicore (cf. K42, Barrelfish, fos), but it's fairly orthogonal to microkernels.</comment>


A Bitter Guide to Open Source - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/codezillas/a-bitter-guide-to-open-source-a8e3b6a3c1c4 <comment><USER2> That's the great dilemma. Either you write the actual fkin' code, or you do roundabouts all around "project management" tasks, which in itself can be seen both as a needed means for a project's success, and as the perfect procrastination tool.

If you have 100 hours to write something and do ALL that is noted here you'll end up not shipping anything at all. I'm currently the main developer and maintainer of the Kurento project [1], and I've been working hard on all these accessory but important details because my vision coincides with that of the article's author, but at the same time they feel like a time sink which distracts from doing _actual_ work on issues and bugs.

[1]: [https://www.kurento.org](https://www.kurento.org)

<comment><USER3> The main thing all these guys do is to ship the most trivial thing that will work (is better than competitors) but leave it open for improvements.

Tests are written sometimes second, not first. Specifically regression only testing is pretty good and less intensive than full testing everything. But to know about regressions and problems you need reports and to do that, the software has to be shipped, in use and the report channels have to work well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This "guide to OSS" doesn't tell you anywhere, but talks about creating a JavaScript library, resulting in advices like "your OSS project needs to have valid package.json", which reads very strangely. Could use some "for example"s here and there.

<comment><USER5> This is a very strange article from a universe where the only languages available are JS and TS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> this "Medium" style of writing kills me. Lots of words, little substance.

<comment><USER7> It's fine if you don't like his style, but the "little substance" part is hardly true. I contribute to OSS on a very regular basis and I was left with four or five solid takeaways after reading the article. The author even admits he isn't good at writing but a lot of people asked him to write the article. I'm glad he did.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. I'm about to release a fairly large JavaScript service as open-source (the Sidekiq to Kue's Resque, as it is), and I got a _lot_ out of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Repo Prerequisites

> README.md

> CONTRIBUTING.md

> LICENSE.txt

> A valid, filled out package.json

Hmmmm...one of those is not like the others.

</comment><comment><USER10> > Some a$#h@!& is gonna come in and whine about something

This is very true just like in our society (good or bad intention it may be). Nice article Ken Wheeler by the way.

How much time do you normally spend writing OSS?</comment>


Why are functions in Ocaml/F# not recursive by default? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/900585/why-are-functions-in-ocaml-f-not-recursive-by-default

<comment><USER2> One advantage of having to mark a function as recursive is that it makes you think more about having a proper termination condition, and the need to put recursive calls into tail position. Without an explicit recursive marker on functions it'd be harder to review functional code.</comment>


Ask HN: PRogramming Language for 2013? - <AUTHOR>

I've been reading articles to see which programming language is going to be most promising this year. It seems like every blog I read is different. Some say python is first or others say C, or Java, or Ruby and Go. PHP seems to be in 3rd place for all the blogs I've read. Im wondering what HN thinks? <comment><USER2> I'm sure hipster-cool 5.0 will be amazing this year, there has been no frost so far so the crop is amazing.

Programming languages are not fruit, "promising this year" means nothing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Try to wrap your head around Factor: <http://factorcode.org/> Possibly it will not break out this year, but I'm sure it will become fairly popular in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's interesting I never heard of Factor. What do you think about python or ruby?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Personally, if I were to start learning a new language today from the up and coming language with the intent of using it in production for the next couple of years, I'd choose Go, Clojure or Rust. Of the proven languages with large markets, I'd choose Python. Definitely wouldn't choose PHP.

</comment><comment><USER5> oop = c++/java/ruby/python funtional = c/scala/ruby/python don't use: php web: java/ruby/python desk: net/c++/java try: clojure, scala, f# nice to know: groovy(for grails) javascript = no categories

<comment><AUTHOR> PHP is the first language I learned what is so bad about it? I think its pretty robust language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What about javascript ? Development of various JS frameworks and languages build on the top of JS is fast nowadays.

</comment><comment><USER7> a) Whatever gets the job done.

b) The one everybody will talk about is whatever one was used to build the coolest site.

i.e. Wordpress, Flickr, and Tumblr were written with PHP

Though I think Javascript is probably universal to what makes a lot of the cool sites cooler. Maybe CSS3.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What I would like to know is, how do you determine which is better? Is it speed or something else?

</comment><comment><USER8> i still love C. the idea of a yearly programming language is confusing though, are "last years languages" suddenly useless? or is it a personal learning thing?

<comment><AUTHOR> who knows I'm with you

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm currently infatuated with Clojure.</comment>


LoveRoom is like Airbnb for dating - <AUTHOR> http://tryloveroom.com <comment><USER2> Pardon me but I don't know about this one. How exactly do you make money? Why did you come up with this idea?

And reading the manifesto, "finding out if they are good in bed or plain boring"? So a quick romp is also thrown in there?

Also, if you say loveroom is like Airbnb for dating then why does this blog post by you guys say loveroom is safer than Airbnb? See where I am going with this? [https://medium.com/@teamloveroom/why-loveroom-is-safer- than-...](https://medium.com/@teamloveroom/why-loveroom-is-safer-than- airbnb-117124afdd7b)

I am interested in seeing the facts/stats. that back that blog post.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Josh Bocanegra is a serial entrepreneur and visonary with a passion for social innovation. When he isn't working, he likes to spend his time at high- end Hollywood lounges."

"Jeanine Marie is a model, dancer and writer. She posses the constant urge to defy the things society labels as unorthodox or non-traditional."

Is this a real product or a parody?</comment>


WhatsApp Payments runs into trouble with Indian authorities - <AUTHOR> https://factordaily.com/whatsapp-payments-sharing-data-with-facebook/ <comment><USER2> That is the news from May 16 this year. As of recently, Whatsapp payments is ready to launch after complying with all the demands of the regulatory authority, like keeping the transaction data in the country itself, and preventing round tripping. No news about sharing the data with facebook though.</comment>


Mapping company ESRI acquires GeoIQ - <AUTHOR> http://blog.geoiq.com/2012/07/10/building-from-the-inside/

<comment><AUTHOR> There's an interesting commentary about the acquisition by James Fee. [http://spatiallyadjusted.com/2012/07/10/esri-eliminates- geoi...](http://spatiallyadjusted.com/2012/07/10/esri-eliminates-geoiq/) He argues that, "...there is one company in that (geospatial govt contractor) space and it is Esri. Either you work with them or you don't work at all."</comment>


Approximately Hard: The Unique Games Conjecture (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://www.simonsfoundation.org/mathematics-and-physical-science/approximately-hard-the-unique-games-conjecture/

<comment><USER2> Also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8169672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8169672).</comment>


After Birth (Image Forensics of Obama's Birth Certificate) - <AUTHOR> http://hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/428-After-Birth.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm actually somewhat loathe to submit this because of the political aspect of the story. But the image analysis is genuinely interesting on a technical level, which is why I submitted it.

The TL;DR for those who ask for such things is that PDFs are weird and chop up the image in weird ways to compress them, but there's no evidence of tampering here.</comment>


Snowden and the American flag: His first big PR blunder? - T-A http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/13/media/edward-snowden-wired-cover/index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Even the CNN commenters call this article a troll. I don't bother up-voting this.

</comment><comment><USER2> This has to be the first time I have ever heard a US media outlet saying that a US citizen holding a US flag is a PR blunder for a US audience.

edit - besides, that flag probably needed a cuddle - [https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7056/6814006164_3d3d3b9673_z.j...](https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7056/6814006164_3d3d3b9673_z.jpg)</comment>


Update on T-Mobile Network Issues - <AUTHOR> https://www.t-mobile.com/news/update-for-customers-on-network-issues <comment><AUTHOR> "This is an IP traffic related issue that has created significant capacity issues in the network core throughout the day" Uh, what?

<comment><USER2> When call and sms routing failed, everyone checked their account to see if they missed a payment. Their websites are not designed to handle the entire user-base logging in at the same time.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone here doing personal income/expenses tracking? - <AUTHOR>

Hi there<p>I'm just looking for some personal (rather than business) expense tracking software, preferably online.  Thought I'd ask if anyone here here has created anything like that or if anyone has anything that they would recommend. <comment><USER2> I use a spreadsheet. Why not start with Google Docs for same (online requirement) to get started?

I found that getting a read on financial affairs for a couple of months was good enough for me to create personal budget expectations, arrange my income accordingly, project future income/savings, etc.

I just check back in occasionally, and do the project again. I have too much on my plate already to add another daily/weekly ongoing requirement. ymmv...

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea. I think I'll give that a go

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I know the space well and would be happy to help. I made <https://www.pearbudget.com>. Depending on what you're looking for, it might be just right for you. Or, of course, it might not.

If you let me know what you're looking for, I can help you find something. Either here or on Twitter (@charliepark).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'll check out Pear Budget. Basically we use Quickbooks for our accounts, but I've been finding that I don't really know how much we (my family) spend. With the New Year I'm wanting to get a handle on just how much things are costing - fuel, entertaining etc.

<comment><USER3> The scenario you're describing is exactly what we focus on. Ultimately, there are three different ways we "spend" money. There's how we _want_ to spend money, there's how we _think_ we spend money, and there's how we _actually_ spend money. A good expense tracking / budgeting tool is going to bring all three of those circles into alignment. Also, our opinion is that the tool shouldn't be too complicated. Most people only need 1% of the options Quicken gives you. I have more opinions on it, but I won't flood HN with them right now.

I probably won't be checking this thread super-often, so if you (or anyone) have any questions, or if there's a specific feature that you _need_ to have available in a budgeting app, ping me on Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm using www.pearbudget.com, I just upgraded to their paid account recently. It is simple enough not to be a hassle, and its tags system allows me and my boyfriend to track our expenses together, knowing how much either of us spent separately. I can recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER5> GnuCash is great; I use it for both personal and business.

If you have it use PostgreSQL for the data store you can run it at home (keeping the database there or on a server somewhere if you like) and then connect to it from another machine wherever. I haven't tried that yet as it's a new feature in 2.4.0 which I just upgraded to.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm working on an expenses/purchases app at the moment. I have small businesses in mind but I am also considering a personal aspect. What is it that you want to get out of such an application?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there. My requirement isn't really small business as we currently have an in-house book keeper and we use Quickbooks. It's for personal use. I just want to be able to put in our regular monthly income/costs and then evaluate spend (for example on beer!). I've done some analysis and turns out I spend nearly $200/month at a local pub (bar), so that prompted me to start looking at everything to see where I could reduce easily

<comment><USER6> I have that same problem as you. Since my personal monthly budget is very low I tend to keep track of my expenses closely. I still don't know how exactly I'm going to market my app but I'm leaning towards having a "personal" version without the stuff businesses need.

If you want, drop me a line at my-hn-username at gmail (or checkout rabbitpurchasing.com) and I'll let you know when my app is ready - you will be able to record and know that you spend X per month on beer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've had a good look today and there's not much out there that's good. There's a few decent Mac apps (I'm Mac-based) but I'm looking for web-based as thats what I'd prefer. My situation here is that I earn decent money from my business, but my personal spend is not really recorded and the small amount of analysis that I've done has shocked me at the money I waste :)

In terms of marketing your app, maybe you could focus on how your app will let you focus a bit more. Just a thought

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We've got our budget set up using Mint.com and evaluate it using their tools. Since they're the 800 pound gorilla in that space, how're you thinking about differentiating from them?

<comment><AUTHOR> Firstly we're not planning on differentiating from them - I'm looking for something to use for myself (not to build something). Also, I'm based in the UK and am unable to use Mint</comment></comment>


Proposal for tax revolution: 3% income tax, 4% wealth tax - <AUTHOR> http://rayhano.com/post/30672762834/solving-the-uks-tax-problem

<comment><USER2> > 4% wealth tax

We already have a wealth tax. It's called "inflation." If the government wants to tax wealth, all they have to do is print money. The culture of living within your means and saving for the future basically died before I was born, so the point that this kind of policy punishes responsible citizens who are capable of living frugally, within their means, and saving the future is essentially moot.

Sales and income taxes are easy to implement because they're based around money actually changing hands. Property taxes are easy to implement because the physical thing that's being taxed is clear. General wealth taxes rely on accounting and valuation of illiquid assets, which is easily subject to gamesmanship.

If this was implemented, you'd just cash out your bank account every day, then tell the tax authorities you "spent" the money (in reality you keep a suitcase full of large bills under your mattress, but they have no way of knowing that). As long as you don't make a ton of money, and could conceivably be spending it on living well (vacations, movies, good food, alcohol, flowers for the significant other, etc.), how are they going to prove otherwise?

If you have more money, it gets more difficult to use that particular trick, but you'll also have more political power to get loopholes written into the law, and pay accountants to figure out how to make the loopholes work for you. And it'll also become more worthwhile to go to the trouble of keeping money overseas out of the range of taxation, or set up exotic financial structures like life insurance policies, trusts or derivatives, which don't have a definite value until they become payable.

I'm not an accountant, so some of the details might not be one hundred percent right, but it feels like that's a fair first approximation to what would happen.

<comment><AUTHOR> > We already have a wealth tax. It's called "inflation." If the government > wants to tax wealth, all they have to do is print money. The culture of > living within your means and saving for the future basically died before I > was born, so the point that this kind of policy punishes responsible > citizens who are capable of living frugally, within their means, and saving > the future is essentially moot.<

Not true, in the slightest. Inflation benefits those with income producing assets, like rental property. Inflation is a trick to make the rich richer. All the evidence points that way.

And let people be vague with wealth valuations. This is about being more fair, not being burdensome. Those with obvious wealth will finally pay a fair share of tax. Those who work hard will finally have some reward for their work.

The comment about cashing out your bank account every day is absurd. You pay 40%+ in income taxes right now. Would you not like to keep 97% of what you earn instead of less than 60%?

<comment><USER3> > Not true, in the slightest

Your opinion differs from the field of economics where they actually study this sort of thing. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation#General>

> Inflation benefits those with income producing assets, like rental property

Huh? The value of an asset is determined by what it produces in the future, both actual income and utility. Inflation adds risks to that - for example for the income to remain constant, the rental prices charged have to go up by the rate of inflation each year which people hate. Inflation introduces volatility in the face value of money which makes things riskier (eg loans to buy/build the rental property have to take that into account).

> Inflation is a trick to make the rich richer. All the evidence points that > way.

Inflation devalues savings which is what the rich have and the poor don't have. If you could produce any of this evidence (let alone "all the evidence") you'd completely revolutionize economics. (Or you could be wrong.)

> You pay 40%+ in income taxes right now

No. You pay it once at the point you earn it. With your scheme you keep paying the taxes over time. The longer you save it the more goes away in taxes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There is absolutely no accounting for how people will react. The obvious example is that people will move their wealth elsewhere. It also isn't fair to the poorest, unless there is a separate mechanism enabling a minimum quality of life.

And it completely ignores how you would define things. For example if I have a bridge on my property, does that qualify as wealth? How exactly would I pay 4% of the bridge in taxes? If I invest in a new factory, am I going to have to pay 4% of that investment every year before the factory is even profitable? When I liquidate things to pay for taxes, is that going to count as income?

Since interest rates are less than 4% this completely discourages any form of saving unless the returns are at least 4% plus the rate of inflation. Although it isn't immediately apparent, savings are something that enables economic growth as the money is lent out again.

TLDR:

* People adapt around scheme you have so your numbers won't work in the real world the way your spreadsheet says they do

* It gets really hard to work out what actually constitutes wealth and income once people have to pay tax based on it - part of the reason for the complexity of the tax codes worldwide

* It will greatly discourage savings and investments

* People will avoid illiquid wealth since you'll have to keep coming up with 4% of its value each year

* You'll need an army of people to work out out how valuable things are.

Reducing tax rates is generally an admirable goal, as is simplifying tax codes. But if you start from almost nothing like this proposal you'll soon find yourself having to add lots of complexity back in, because it is complex.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right about not being able to account for behaviour. I would love to sit down and model the macroeconomic possibilities, as well as the potential behavioural implications.

In response to some of your points, if you have little considerable wealth, the 3% income tax is an incredible incentive to earn.

But let's assume you have considerable wealth and will have a larger tax liability than you currently have (which is an incredibly small proportion of people - I have to work it out, but estimating that it is 3% of the population).

So you are part of the (estimated) 3% that will pay more tax. If you put those assets to work, then they earn an income to pay tax (which is what those who work have no choice in).

If you are sitting on your assets, then this encourages you to participate in the economy.

For those who are poorest, we have this problem in the UK where you have to earn £20,000 per annum to have the same lifestyle as being on social benefits. Why? Because of high income taxes. Those who are poorest will benefit from a massive increase in take-home-pay. That is the key aim of this proposal: encourage/reward people to work.

And yes, the spreadsheet is simplistic and implementing this would be much more complex. For example, economic assets like factories would have to be ringfenced as disposal of those would be detrimental to the economy.

Clarifications: wealth would be net (i.e. less debt)

When you say saving, do you mean sticking cash under the mattress or in a bank? Inflation is higher than interest rates right now; why is no one telling the US/UK governments to stop printing cash?

Investment in business yields a much better return than the stock market (which by the way is not investment - the investment happened when the shares were originally issued; if you buy shares on the stock market, you aren't an investor).

<comment><USER3> > If you are sitting on your assets, then this encourages you to participate > in the economy.

No, it encourages me to pay people to work out how to reduce my tax liability through every legal scheme possible taking advantage of every definition and ruling, and considering every alternative. Those alternatives include sending the money elsewhere, schemes where I pay myself with my own money, getting assets valued at less (after all they depreciate by 4% extra per year), moving to another EU country that doesn't tax wealth (instant 4% gain doing that), schemes that are (borderline) illegal weighing the probability of being caught etc.

> For example, economic assets like factories would have to be ringfenced as > disposal of those would be detrimental to the economy.

And so begins the complexity of your tax code. And a loophole for people with wealth to exploit. And now you have to increase your tax rates to take into account the wealth that isn't being taxed.

> Clarifications: wealth would be net (i.e. less debt)

Cool another loophole. Have a look at Larry Ellison sometime. What many people don't know is that he doesn't sell his shares in Oracle. Instead he borrows money against the value of his shares and is at over a billion dollars in debt.

> When you say saving, do you mean sticking cash under the mattress or in a > bank?

Saving as in economics. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saving>

> Inflation is higher than interest rates right now; why is no one telling the > US/UK governments to stop printing cash?

Huh? When interest rates are low it encourages investment because the cost of money is low. It also encourages finding places with higher returns (remember housing bubbles?)

Money printed by governments that is at a higher rate than economic growth results in inflation, and less results in deflation. Neither is particularly desirable, although most aim for a little bit of inflation due to human nature. The US and UK central banks are independent and generally target an inflation rate which is why nobody has told them anything <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation#Monetary_policy>

> Investment in business yields a much better return than the stock market

It doesn't work that way. In general returns are correlated with risks. There are greater returns where there are greater risks. It would be rather foolish to take lower returns for greater risks or to offer greater returns for lower risks. Under your plan investments lose 4% per year all else being equal which reduces the potential returns. (Unless your tax code has yet more complexity.)

> stock market (which by the way is not investment - the investment happened > when the shares were originally issued; if you buy shares on the stock > market, you aren't an investor).

You aren't even trying now. It is true that the share issuer only gets money when the shares were first invested, but that does not mean that everyone buying shares after that point are not investors. At the simplest case a company produces dividends, so purchasing a share gives you access to those dividends. Your expectations are that the value of those dividends are greater than the NPV of the money you use to buy the shares. It is of course more complex than that - shares also reflect the assets of the company, dividends can be "paid" by increasing the share price instead of payouts, profits reinvested defer dividends and asset increases to the future etc. Going back to the original share purchasers, part of their investment reasoning is that they can sell in the future when their opinion of the risks/rewards do not match their desires. And finally the current price of shares set expectations of what value the company would get if it sold newly created shares. Note that most larger companies are constantly creating new shares such as through employee and manager incentive plans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why would I bother investing money at all then? You can expect an annual return of around 7% on the stock market, subtract 4% wealth tax and 2% inflation and you're left with nothing in real terms.

Everyone (even the super-wealthy) would spend all of their income as soon as they earn it. Sounds great ("imagine all the production it would stimulate!") until you realize that no one is making capital investments. Factories rot, infrastructure decays, and innovation stops.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have wealth right now, you have two options:

Sit on it

Invest it

Currently, if you invest it you are penalised by income and capital gains taxes in excess of 20%. Under my proposal, you are taxed at 3% for investing.

<comment><USER3> With current schemes you are only "penalized" for capital gains when you actually have them. If you buy an item for $100, and sell it ten years later for $110 then you pay taxes on the difference. With your scheme you would have spent $40 in taxes in the mean time.

Additionally with current schemes you can balance losses against gains (rules vary by country) and you aren't penalized for investing: eg money put into a factory doesn't incur taxes until it starts producing returns.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting.

Would you also not have suffered massive real loss from inflation over ten years eroding your return?

<comment><USER3> Depends on the item. For example a car or a house also provides utility which is value extracted and not a loss. Most items should appreciate in line with inflation, all else being equal - after all inflation doesn't change real values, just the digits used to express that value.

And in this example if I sold it for $100 then no tax would be due at all under current schemes. In your case I still have paid $40 in taxes in addition to the losses from inflation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most of that wealth (ownership of non-corporate businesses and real property, to start) is completely illiquid. You can't sell 4% of your house.

<comment><AUTHOR> But you can earn... surely you would earn and pay taxes, as you do now? The idea is to discourage those few who horde assets and do not participate in the economy.

There is a chance that some vulnerable people may be disadvantaged (like when losing a job).

<comment><USER3> Lets take a regular person in a 150k GBP house. They need to pay 6000 GBP every year in tax on that "wealth". They lose their job. Where does the money come from to pay wealth taxes? While unemployed they are "hoarding" their house (and car, and TV set, and laptop etc) and not participating in the economy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What is this other than deferred taxation? If one earns 100k in year one, it is taxed as income at 3%. I put the net 97k in the bank and from next year onwards it will again be taxed as wealth at 4%, in perpetuity.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're kidding me, right?

Currently, you would be taxed 40% of that 100k. So immediately you would only have 60k. Whatever you do with that: spend it, invest it, you only start with 60k, even though your earned 100k.

And most likely, you will diversify... spend some, invest some, save some.

<comment><USER6> Firstly, not everyone pays PAYE. Having an accountant and structuring your finances in a tax efficient manner is not the preserve of the super rich.

What you describe is a perpetual tax. Cash exchanged for goods of value or other financial instruments still have intrinsic value. Anything classed as an asset would be taxed in perpetuity. I'm sorry, right now I think your proposal is absolutely absurd.

If you earn and invest in the same tax year would you be taxed twice? How does your model handle depreciation? What about property? Can debt finance, e.g. a mortgage, be offset from your taxable assets?

There are so many unanswered questions (and these are what popped into mind with 5 seconds thought) I have to ask, is it _you_ who is kidding?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Everyone would just move their money out of the UK.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry, but I'm going to be harsh with you: that's an incredibly ignorant comment.

Everyone would not move their money out of the UK, because:

\- £3trillion is in UK property - that is going nowhere \- a small proportion have wealth \- those few who try to relocate will be replaced by many more economic migrants because this taxation is cheaper for those who work and expensive for those who don't

So no, everyone would not just move their money out of the UK.

<comment><USER3> The value of those illiquid things will go down and you'll get less tax for them all. Which tax will you increase when there is a revenue shortfall?

If a rich person owns properties worth 100 million GBP, or even a regular person owns a 100k GBP house at the start of this tax scheme, the value will go down because tax is essentially writing off 4% a year. Economics already covers topics like this - see discount rate and net present value. Heck there is even a Black-Scholes formula for how to value things in these kind of scenarios. And people with liquid assets can move them out of the country.

You talk of economic migrants, but remember that they need to actually have the money in the first place to buy things. And since others would be reluctant to make investments (eg factories) or savings (which provide loans) it would reduce the overall amount of work available.

<comment><AUTHOR> So currently £340bn of tax is taken from people. At the moment it is all in the form of income taxes.

With my proposal, we allow people to keep vastly more income (and therefore spend more).

The intention is:

Low-middle class pay much less tax

Upper middle class pay about the same

HNWI pay more (which is universally accepted as more fair, but never instigated with effective policy)

<comment><USER3> We already have progressive tax rates which try to capture this.

The problem that is being struggled with is that HNWI don't have frequent taxable events, generally because they hold assets and make savings. However there is a perception they aren't providing value (which is mostly wrong).

Generally any scheme you come up with to get at them will also affect everyone else, and to a far greater degree since they have less money and diversity to start with. And the HNWI have far greater incentive to move their money and themselves, as well as pay people to work out how to retain their money. You can move to almost any country in the world by plonking down a lump sum as an "investment" or as savings. (eg see how Dotcom ended up living in New Zealand.)

The usual solution to this is to try tweaking the tax code, seeing what the effects are and repeating. However scumbag politicians and the people who vote for them distort that process, so it doesn't have the intended effect.

An actually representative democracy would be a good first step rather than tax rate changes. Watch this talk about the US - the UK pretty much follows behind a few years later <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik1AK56FtVc>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Would really appreciate thoughts AND please do post results here from the new tax calculator at the bottom of the post.

<comment><USER8> I can imagine several issues, but is hackernews the right forum to discuss tax reform? You can either go the respectable economic modelling route and be prepared to do a lot of work to justify it or perhaps try a tea-party forum where simplistic tax gets kicked around all the time.

Tax is complex because the more complex it is, the harder it is for people to reason and try to work around it. A good tax system is like a secure computer, with defense practised in depth. You might breach one layer but another will catch you.

Another issue is wealth is something that is difficult to assess and can cause severe disruption. Say for example you are a FB employee and get a nice asset boost in an IPO. You get a big tax bill, but your shares haven't vested. Now you owe the tax office a whole lot of money that you are unable to raise. By the time your shares vest, they might be worth a fraction of the tax bill.

How about if you start a business. You earn enough to feed your family and suddenly, your "business" is an asset which could be sold, so you get taxed on wealth you are now purported to hold. Is the tax office going to require you to assess how much your business is worth? What if they disagreed with you? You have a family home and its worth has gone up in a property boom. Now you have to pay 4% of the market value, but when the boom is over, you have been out of pocket of those extra amount without enjoying any benefit of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> TLDR: author lacks basic understanding of both macroeconomics and the reasoning underpinning the complexity of modern tax systems (here's a hint: tax codes _always_ start off simple and get more complicated to minimize evasion and loopholes.)

The idea would not work anywhere unless adopted everywhere; a perpetual 4% tax on wealth in one nation would lead to the immediate or near immediate flight of capital to other nations.

On the flipside, a 3% tax on income is generally too low to be meaningful except in ridiculously small European countries. At 3%, you might as well just not bother with an income tax because the cost of calculating and collecting the tax (both on the government and on taxpayers) would in most countries exceed the revenue brought in.</comment>


Fleet Foxes thank piracy for their success - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/fleet-foxes-thank-piracy-for-their-success-090612/ <comment><USER2> A slightly better writeup: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8097324.stm>

</comment><comment><USER3> I can appreciate the sentiment but _"how much does one person really need?"_ isn't really the most compelling argument in favor of file-sharing.

<comment><USER2> I don't think that's their primary argument or that he's trying to make an argument at all; its more an an observation that piracy helped him obtain some of the music he loved most growing up, especially the obscure stuff. Again, I agree with you, its just you're framing his thoughts as an argument that's trying to win people over when I think that is a bit unfair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> no surprise there. i also think if more bands embraced torrents, it would help them get their music heard. sadly there is no monetization model for that though..

<comment><USER5> Artists generally don't make money off CD sales anyway, record labels do. The artists make money from doing live shows. The monetization model for the artist is to bypass the record labels, give their music away for free, and build up a fan base who go to their shows to see them live.

<comment><USER6> _Artists generally don't make money off CD sales anyway, record labels do._

This is often repeated but I've never seen a link to the source. Are there statistics somewhere that show this is true?

<comment><USER7> Trent Reznor said he was making 80cents/sale.

<http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/04/trent-reznor-wa/>

<comment><USER8> At several million copies sold, that comes out to quite a bit.

<comment><USER7> Not really.

Reznor profit: 1,000,000 * .80 = 800,000

RIAA profit: 1,000,000 * 18.98 = 18,980,000

4% profit. Fucking chump change to them; and not to mention that _they_ own your music, _not_ you.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New wearable sensor to help with posture and movement - <AUTHOR> http://kck.st/LVePiI

<comment><USER2> LUMOback is one of the most promising early-stage companies out there. Great technology that friends of mine with back problems have enjoyed beta testing and are more than happy to pay for. I'm personally most excited for when they might let others build apps on top of their sensor data. Solid hardware + platform play ala AAPL :)</comment>


Slackor – A Golang Implant That Uses Slack as a Command and Control Server - <AUTHOR> https://haxf4rall.com/2019/07/09/slackor-slack-command-and-control/ <comment><USER2> My comment that said "ru13z" got flagged and I don't know why, but I meant to say I really enjoyed this article.</comment>


How Not to Die of Botulism (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/how-not-to-die-of-botulism/281649/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Yes, how not to die of botulism: understand home food preservation. That's to say: bad bacteria proliferates without oxygen, without salt and without acid, that's why garlics in oil is a death recipe, it's not only the absence of oxygen but also the high ph and absence of salt.

Understand the bacterias ecosystem is also a good way to understand home food preservation, in a salty and no oxygen environment (like salted water) you incentive lactobacillus that will consume sugars to produce lactic acid (and thus lower the ph), hence not a good environment for Clostridium Botulinum and fungi...so yes you can use heat to kill Clostridium Botulinum but you can also use other bacterias and the environment, the problem with heat is that you often kill "all" the bacterias leaving a highway for "pathogen" ones if the heating was not done properly.

Lacto-fermentation is a fascinating world: [https://www.thespruce.com/g00/how- lacto-fermentation-works-1...](https://www.thespruce.com/g00/how-lacto- fermentation-works-1327598)

And as a french guy, here we know a lot about cheese and lacto-fermentation :-) as all cheese, after coagulation, start from the transformation of lactose (a sugar) to lactic acid thanks to the bacterias (and lot of french cheese use...salted water).

UPDATE: the official recommandations to remove the toxin produced by Clostridium Botulinum: boil during 10 minutes, to kill the spore: heat above 120°C during at least 30 minutes, to prevent its proliferation in the first place: water with NaCl at a 15% concentration, OR 2% of acetic acid (vinegar) OR oxygen (but in that case the fungi will gently occupy the place).

<comment><USER3> Boiling for ten minutes will not kill spores, but will inactivate the toxin.

<comment><USER4> Is this true? So if the toxin is already there, and you boil it, you'd be fine? I feel like that's not true.

<comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulism#Prevention](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulism#Prevention)

> the botulinum toxin is destroyed by thorough cooking over the course of a > few minutes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How not to die of botulism: Understand home food preservation and follow the recipe.

The rules are simple: 1\. C. Botulinin is everywhere. It _is_ in the food you are preserving. Deal with it. 2\. Heat kills C. Botulinin. Propper pressure canning times and temperatures of properly diced foods will kill it. 3\. Acidity inhibits C. Botulinun metabolism. Boiling water bath canning of high acid foods like dill pickles is sufficient to keep any remaining microbes from producing toxins. (Botulism toxin is a metabolism byproduct. ) 4\. 10 minutes at boiling temperatures before serving will break down botulism toxin. 5\. When in doubt, throw it out.

Was that hard?

The most subtle mistake to make is if the canning recipe says dice into 1/4 inch cubes, don't use a different size. It changes the convection currents in the jar and it may not reach required temperature/times in the core. Also be careful with home made salsa as the acidity can vary wildly depending on numerous factors.

<comment><USER7> Based on the (2013) article, Heat kills it, but not just boiling water heat - you need the 250 degree pressure cooking heat.

Not really mentioned is that it's lack of oxygen that really enables things to go downhill, which is why you should never make your own infused oils - "homemade garlic infused olive oil, what could go wrong?" DEATH

Also, I can't think of the last thing I ate that was kept at a rolling boil for 10 minutes, and I probably don't want to. Botox is not the only thing that would eliminate.

<comment><USER8> Another reason that contributes to garlic-infused olive oil's danger is that the garlic tends to kill off other microorganisms that could compete with botulism, but it doesn't kill botulism itself.

<comment><USER9> See this is why people die. I had no idea of this danger and was just thinking the other day of making a garlic-infuses oil.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, food safety is a bit of a mine field. Other common foods to watch out for are improperly cooked beans and green potatoes.

<comment><USER10> It is indeed. I often wonder whether there is a website out there that lists every single risky food out there and gives you tips on how to prepare it without dying. As an example, I often wash my hands incredibly frequently when cooking food, but I see professional chefs who just wipe their hands on their apron. Where is the balance?

<comment><USER11> [https://www.foodsafety.gov](https://www.foodsafety.gov)

As far as hand washing goes. Wash your hands at the start. Avoid cross contamination by washing your hands immediately after handling raw meat. You can wipe your hands on a (clean) apron or towel if you want to go from chopping veggies to handling raw chicken but not the other way around.

Always wash all fresh fruits and vegetables even ones you don't eat the outside of (oranges, grapefruits)

When I handle raw meat I always wear gloves and wash my hands after j take the gloves off. The gloves remind me that I'm "unsafe" when I am wearing them.

The health department required us to have separate cutting boards for meat and veggies when I worked in a kitchen. I think that's a good idea for home as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Here is a small summary of the different kind of fermentation to better understand the article. The three main type of fermentation are:

\- Alcoholic fermentation (beer, wine,etc.): without oxygen, yeast produce ethanol from sugar, like when you leave some fruits rotten without too much oxygens...but fruits rotten because fungi proliferates quicker due to the presence of oxygen

\- lacto-fermentation (cheese, yoghurt, etc.): without oxygen and in a warm environment, lacto-bacillus produce lactic acid from sugar

\- acetic fermentation (vinegar) : WITH oxygen (seldom one), acetobacter bacterias produce acetic acid from ethanol

Louis Pasteur said "Fermentation is Life without oxygen", so whenever there is oxygen, you'll see the usual rot produced by fungi (yes, very crude simplification). So the main aspect of fermentation is to ensure an anaerobic environment, often with water or when you remove oxygen from a recipient by aspiring it.

The other types of fermentation are more seldom: propionic fermentation (from lactic acid to propionic acid like in the gruyere cheese), butyric fermentation (like in rancid butter), malolactic fermentation (from malic acid to lactic acid, because the malic acid, found in grappes and apples gives a very acidic taste and is used to lower that acidic taste in some wines).

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm surprised the article didn't explain outright that the botulinum toxin is the most toxic substance on earth. More than cyanide, sarin, VX, plutonium or anything else man made or natural.

Another interesting side note is Napoleon Bonaparte offered a prize to anyone who could preserve food. Armies used to have to eat what they found locally since carrying large amount of food was too tedious. In the late 1700s Nicolas Appert managed to discover heat "pasteurization" (well before Louis Pasteur method in the 1860s). The only problem was Appert used heat that was too high and for too long resulting in mushy food Pasteur's method had better results.

Interestingly Pasteur was inspired by a relative of Napoleon 1st only this time it was a nephew Napoleon III.

<comment><USER13> It touched on it:

 _Botulinum toxin, a protein produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, could be "the most poisonous poison" there is, as writer Carl Lamanna called it in an article for Science, in 1959. First weaponized by Imperial Japan in the 1930s, and later, Nazi Germany, the United States, the Soviet Union, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, a single gram of toxin could theoretically kill more than a million people if dispersed into the air and inhaled._

<comment><USER12> Ah, I missed that. I recall reading that part but missed the parts in quotes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What I wonder is why the bacterium produces such a strong toxin in the first place. Is there any evolutionary advantage to making animals sick, or is just a coincidence?

<comment><USER15> Distracting and compromising the immune system of a large animal while taking advantage of the free resources in the environment would probably have a very strong evolutionary advantage.

Or it could be more like the benefit yeast gets from producing alcohol, which it resists better than most other microbes.

<comment><USER16> There are bacteria that are poisonous, and there are bacteria that aren't. Clearly, both strategies are viable. So I think any explanation has to explain not just that poison is an advantage, but explain when it is and when it isn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I assume this was posted because of the Otto Warmbier situation? [1]

[1]: [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us- canada-40308028](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40308028)

<comment><USER18> Well, I don't want to defend or speak for North Korea. But there was a lot of anger regarding what happened to Warmbier.

Obviously NK overreacted for talking a "propaganda poster". He got XX years hard labor. But a westerner is normally kept in a hotel room in NK until an agreement has been reached and then he is released.

Warmbier had his medical "incident", as far as I know, over a year ago. So they must have fed him artificially and cared for him since. Also, AFAIK, they send an NMR image of his brain to the US doctors before he was released. I doubt that many North Koreans have access to this level of treatment.

So unfortunate this story is, I advise to use caution before reaching quick judgments.

<comment><USER19> They took care of him after the incident that caused brain damage, but is there any proof the incident itself was botulism?

<comment><USER20> His doctors say the pattern of brain damage does not match that of botulism. More symptomatic of a respiratory arrest.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJKmyCKM7W0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJKmyCKM7W0)

<comment><USER21> The pattern of brain injury they're referring to is probably "anoxic brain injury." Botulism itself doesn't cause that, but it certainly can cause respiratory failure (by paralyzing the phrenic nerve), which can then cause anoxic brain injury. There's no reliable way to tell at this point whether botulism was the cause in Warmbier's case (there's no test to find out after the fact). I'm an MD.

Of course the NK story is very suspect. We need more information, but it seems unlikely that we'll get it.

<comment><USER22> We're sure that he wasn't because he was beaten though, right?

There hasn't been any US prisoners in NK who were physically abused during their stay for PR purposes. I'm curious if he sustained a fall or some other accidental injury. Maybe he caused it himself and didn't get proper treatment.

He was held for an unusually long time compared to most people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The open source food safety idea is genius.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder why there aren't any cheap, simple tests for botulism that people could use to test their home-cooked food. You'd think something like that would be available by now.

<comment><USER24> My guess is that it is so toxic that the quantities needed to kill you are nearly undetectable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Please correct me, as this is only my personal understanding of how botulism works.

What kills me? Only the toxin. Neither the bacteria nor the spores are directly lethal.

How does the toxin get into my body?

A) I eat it, from food contaminated with toxin.

B) I breath it, from toxin in the air.

C) I eat or breath bacteria / spores, and they produce the toxin inside my body.

How does that happen?

A) Badly preserved food. Normal, fresh food, does not contain toxin, but can contain spores / bacteria. Over long periods of time (how long?), in the right conditions (low oxygen / low salt / low acid) bacteria will proliferate (even starting from the very resistant spores), and eventually produce toxin. This can not be seen / smelled, and is the source of most toxin poisoning.

B) Only in warfare, and not even sure if that's been developed. Maybe even forbidden by international conventions "regulating" warfare?

C) Only if I am a baby. Adult's digestive tract will kill _both_ bacteria and spores, preventing toxin production.

How much toxin is lethal?

According to the article, a microgram can kill an adult.

What is the rate of toxin production by the bacteria? How long do I need to leave toxin-free food exposed to bacteria in order to become dangerously poisoned?

At home we usually leave cooked food standing for the next day (sometimes, against my will, _outside_ the fridge) and then we heat it at low temperatures and eat it. Is this safe? Probably yes botulism-wise, but has other problems.

</comment><comment><USER26> Even if there was no risk of botulism, attempting to make alcohol from potatoes and wild microbes sounds like a bad idea in any case. Yeast can't ferment starch directly, so you'd need some other microbe to ferment it to sugars first. Eg. to make sake, rice is fermented by koji (Aspergillus oryzae) to sugars, and then yeast further ferments it to alcohol. You almost certainly have wild yeasts floating about nearby, but it's less likely that there's something that will convert the starch to sugars effectively. You could easily end up with chunks of rotting potato and no extra alcohol from them.

<comment><USER27> >Yeast can't ferment starch directly

This isn't really true. Saccharomyces cerevisiae can't generally ferment starch directly, but various forms of Brettanomyces can. Wild yeast and bacteria that can ferment starch are pretty common -- a turbid mash (which leaves a bunch of starches in the wort) is still used before putting the wort into a cool ship to be inoculated with wild yeast and then fermented in barrels.

Granted, a true wild sour usually takes a few months to a few years to ferment out all the starches and develop the flavors that are so interesting, but "Yeast can't ferment starch directly" is an oversimplification.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Botulism is incredibly rare in Europe (maybe a handful of cases in each country per year); in which regions is it an issue? The article mentions canned foods which I imagine are not so common in countries with food scarcity.

<comment><USER15> There was a really bad incident in Greenland in 2013[1]. They were making kiviak, auk fermented in the carcass of a seal. I heard it was the use of eider birds instead of auk that prevented proper fermentation, but this article included that a plastic bag was used in the preparation of this batch of kiviak presumably with the auk birds in the plastic bag inside of the seal carcass. Perfect low oxygen conditions for C. Botulinum to thrive.

[1] [https://thefourthcontinent.com/2013/08/07/greenland- terducke...](https://thefourthcontinent.com/2013/08/07/greenland-terducken- real-seal-bird-meal/)

<comment><USER29> > Simply put, about 400 dead birds (usually auk) are stuffed into a body of a > dead seal and left under a rock to ferment for many months. Prepared this > way, the seal's fat tenderises and preserves it, which means that you can > eat the entire bird raw, save the feathers. The innards turn into a liquid, > and a popular way to consume it is by biting the head off and sucking out > the juices inside.

Holy crap. Dying of paralysis sounds like a mercy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Botulism spores are also found in honey. It's in small enough amounts it's not a problem for adults, but this is why you don't give babies honey until 1 year old.

</comment><comment><USER31> Fascinating, I bet the vast majority of the population has no idea regarding the dangers of canning.

Wouldn't this risk apply to all food preservation?

</comment><comment><USER32> This should be in a hitch-hiker's-guide-like guide offline woven into our clothes for the distopian future.

</comment><comment><USER33> Salmonella and botulism are in part the reasons of why canned food usually come with a layer of Bisphenol A (aka BPA).

Botulism is rather infrequent but 2 ways I can think of getting it: 1) giving honey to infants, 2) eating food from dented cans.

<comment><USER34> What does denting do to cans? Increase the pressure?

<comment><USER35> Looks like it compromises the seals. Cracks too small to see let air in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> >Brazenly, he sampled a few drops of this extract himself

Damn that's hardcore. Observes that it kills animals so he tries a little himself. wow.

</comment><comment><USER37> People inject this into their face. Housewives.

<comment><USER29> So? It's safe and effective in that application. My wife used to get it administered in the brow, temples and neck for migraines. You're not going to wind up paralyzed.

See also: formaldehyde, which is both toxic and required by our bodies to create some critical amino acids.</comment></comment>


Epic developer calls iPad 2 graphics leap "astonishing" - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/04/05/epic_game_developer_calls_ipad_2_graphics_leap_astonishing_doubts_android_can_compete.html <comment><USER2> _Sweeney described conventional game consoles as seeing "a 10-20x leap in performance every 7-8 years," compared to the 9x leap Apple claimed for the iPad 2 in just one annual refresh._

This is true, but it's not "astonishing". Conventional game consoles usually push the limits of graphics when they're first released. The iPad didn't push graphics when it was first released, so Apple had a lot of room for "easy" GPU improvement with the iPad 2. Whether we continue to see order-of-magnitude leaps in performance depends on how much "head-room" is left in mobile GPUs, and how improvements in conventional GPUs trickle down to mobile devices.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Epic developer" is kind of underplaying the fact that its Tim Sweeney.

<comment><USER4> Epic meaning Epic Games.

<comment><USER5> Right, and calling Tim Sweeney an Epic developer is underplaying the fact that he founded Epic Games.

Or maybe I have no sense of humor...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hmm.. it must be even harder to develop for such a fragmented platform as the personal computer, then, where there is essentially nothing guaranteed except the OS you are writing for.

<comment><USER7> I'm not a hardware guy, but it's been my understanding that this is why drivers exist. Drivers are a nightmare, though. I don't miss dealing with them.

<comment><USER8> Drivers may provide you semantic uniformity over a diverse set of hardware, but I think Sweeny sounds more interested in performance guarantees, which they may not be able to provide, depending both on the hardware and how well the driver has been optimized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _Optimizations could provide "a factor of 4 driver overhead reduction," he estimated, noting that the current software allows mobile games to look great but restricts them from rendering "a whole lot of objects" on the screen at once._

Anybody know why?

EDIT: I'm guessing because GLES doesn't support geometry shaders (even though the PowerVR SGX chipset does)

<comment><USER10> There's a lot that happens behind the scenes of a modern graphics API. For example, issuing a draw call may cause the driver to incur a flush of accumulated state changes, patch an existing shader, or even trigger a shader re-compile. Cutting down on what happens behind the scenes will allow developers to issue more draw calls within the same time and put more objects on the screen.

DirectX 9 had a similar problem of expensive draw calls but it was compounded by drivers living in kernel-space requiring an expensive context switch when draw calls were issued.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you have an iPhone 4, and you haven't played Infinity Blade, it's a great game and looks beautiful. I am on the verge of buying an iPad 2 for two reasons. 1. I lost my iPad and have a bunch of software I paid for. 2. Infinity blade on a bigger screen.

<comment><USER12> Real Racing 2 is also amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> keywords are "consistent experience"

</comment><comment><USER14> Apparently they have not seen the release schedule for ARM GPUs (for android). What's coming out in 2012 is mind boggling.

Also this right now: <http://www.anandtech.com/print/4243>

(see the benchmarks at the end)

<comment><USER15> That doesn't really make sense. Apple has the same access to GPU's as Android manufacturers have, so there really aren't any 'Android GPU's' they should have a look at.

Their problem with Android is that the hardware they're building for is inconsistent, and that will remain so until some kind of policy change happens with Android. It has nothing to do with the power of (future) hardware itself.

<comment><USER14> Actually, Apple locks up supply channels to buy display and chipset components exclusively. They essentially get "first pick" because of their volume. But that might change in the near future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Read this on an iPad 1. Couldn't tell the difference between the pictures. Oops.

/play him off, KC

<comment><USER16> This board seriously needs to lighten up. But, message received. I'll NEVER try to be humorous ever again. :(</comment></comment>


Show HN: Holopod – Block Slack Notifications When You're in the Flow - <AUTHOR> http://holopod.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all,

I've worked in and managed fully remote teams for 5 years, and while I love Slack have found it harder (especially as the team grows) to find any time in a day to do focused work. I could just shut down Slack entirely, but have found going offline for a day stresses me out and isn't a great signal to the team.

THERE'S GOT TO BE A BETTER WAY!

Holopod is a Mac desktop app that automatically updates your Slack status and turns on Do Not Disturb based on the apps you're using. For example, when I'm in Google docs for more than 2 minutes my Slack status will auto-update and my notifications will be snoozed. My team knows I'm there and working, but I won't get any messages until my status changes back.

The app is free and only available on Mac (for now). Linux and Windows folks - we hear you.

Would love your thoughts!

<comment><USER3> > We're also trying to fund this thing through a "bootcapping" model - <USER2> > just enough capital in to get it to ramen profitability, which I hope > warrants the "BC" title.

That's cheating. The (YC) in a typical YC-backed launch is a specific designation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Updated. Cheating is a strong word, though.</comment></comment></comment>


Larry Aragon: Am I the only one who was disappointed with LinkedIn's financials? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pehub.com/94166/maybe-reid-hoffman-won't-be-an-instant-billionaire/

<comment><USER2> Yes I was amazed - a few hundred million? That's most unimpressive.

The startling thing about LinkedIn is how little money it makes, yet it is at the centre of the recruitment industry which is swimming in cash. These guys don't understand the industry that their product operates in, and they certainly haven't worked out how to make any cash from their product/clients.</comment>