Five-Day Fasting Diet Could Fight Disease, Slow Aging - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/five-day-fasting-diet-could-fight-disease-slow-aging <comment><USER2> The preliminary human trial and the animal experiments have been discussed on HN before: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9741137](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9741137) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8831739](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8831739)

Fulltext: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/ajmrgno9b38ncgi/2017-wei.pdf](https://www.dropbox.com/s/ajmrgno9b38ncgi/2017-wei.pdf)

"Fasting-mimicking diet and markers/risk factors for aging, diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease", Wei et al 2017:

"Calorie restriction or changes in dietary composition can enhance healthy aging, but the inability of most subjects to adhere to chronic and extreme diets, as well as potentially adverse effects, limits their application. We randomized 100 generally healthy participants from the United States into two study arms and tested the effects of a fasting-mimicking diet (FMD)—low in calories, sugars, and protein but high in unsaturated fats—on markers/risk factors associated with aging and age-related diseases. We compared subjects who followed 3 months of an unrestricted diet to subjects who consumed the FMD for 5 consecutive days per month for 3 months. Three FMD cycles reduced body weight, trunk, and total body fat; lowered blood pressure; and decreased insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). No serious adverse effects were reported. After 3 months, control diet subjects were crossed over to the FMD program, resulting in a total of 71 subjects completing three FMD cycles. A post hoc analysis of subjects from both FMD arms showed that body mass index, blood pressure, fasting glucose, IGF-1, triglycerides, total and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and C-reactive protein were more beneficially affected in participants at risk for disease than in subjects who were not at risk. Thus, cycles of a 5-day FMD are safe, feasible, and effective in reducing markers/risk factors for aging and age-related diseases. Larger studies in patients with diagnosed diseases or selected on the basis of risk factors are warranted to confirm the effect of the FMD on disease prevention and treatment."

<comment><USER3> "Calorie restriction or changes in dietary composition can enhance healthy aging, but the inability of most subjects to adhere to chronic and extreme diets, as well as potentially adverse effects, limits their application."

Well, obviously, when they call fasting / keto / etc. "chronic and extreme" within earshot of potential subjects, and use scary warnings, compliance will suffer.

Other result of note: _" No serious adverse effects were reported."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dieting is hard because of the abundance of food.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've found that learning about food helps somewhat. When you learn that, for example, your favorite candy bar's filling is essentially whipped vegetable oil and sugar, it's a lot easier to pass on it.</comment></comment>


I need help scaling (profitable from day one) - <AUTHOR>

So I've had a hidden gem in my pocket that no one knows about.  I stumbled across a problem and found a way to meet the needs and from day one I was profitable.  It netted over 2k the fist month with little, trivial effort.  I know it can be made bigger and scale on a much bigger scale.  I only put in limited time and money and was profitable and have never lost money.
It's not a need that absolutely no one has done nothing about, but there's not a solution for the majority of people that is efficient, friendly, and usable.
It leverages physical and virtual sides of things.  I know it can be taken farther with the right help.  I'm looking for a technical founder that is familiar with business or a business guru that can help me take it to the next level and make some serious cash.  I'm young, ambitious, and I work hard.  I hope you can say the same (with the exception of young.)  Email me if you'd like to have a chat.  Email is in the profile.  I can't think of a better group of people to ask. <comment><USER2> Read carefully and reflect: [http://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-find-a- technical-co-founder...](http://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-find-a-technical-co- founder-to-help-build-a-social-search-company)

That said - if there are actual money involved, it becomes more realistic of a negotiation</comment>


Show HN: Small app to save battery on Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.bx-labs.com/

<comment><USER2> How is this any different from all the other android power saver apps?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it's hard to compare with "all the other android power saver apps", as there are many ways to save power. Comparing with the apps that shut down Internet connection, BX Power tries to by smarter by observing the accelerometer (detecting movements to new locations = new network environments) and it also monitors the WiFi connection more deeply (IP connectivity check by HTTPS connection to big sites). In future we plan quick bandwidth estimation and seamless roaming between WiFi and mobile. BX Power is backed by a scientific research project.</comment></comment>


First time in human history: CO2 levels breached 415 ppm - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/EricHolthaus/status/1127681719216353280 <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19897250](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19897250)

</comment><comment><USER3> This will likely get flagged as duplicate to the highly contentious previous thread[1], but I hope it doesn't since the other thread was a mess.

It seems that in any climate change thread, many if not most of the comments get downvoted, much more to an extent than other topics.

Could someone scan the 50+ comment climate change posts and compare the controversial comment ratio (e.g. number of greyed-out vs non-greyed-out comments) and compare it to other types of 50+ comment posts? If the ratio is much higher for climate change posts, it seems like there's something nefarious going on (brigading, astroturfing, etc.).

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19897250](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19897250)

<comment><USER2> The site guidelines ask you not to make insinuations about things like astroturfing and brigading. People typically reach for those explanations to account for behavior they dislike, like people expressing an opposing view, when a much simpler explanation almost always suffices: divisive topics are divisive.

If you're really concerned about it you can email email@example.com and we'll look at the data. But please avoid casual insinuations of nefariousness, because those are a problem in their own right—they erode community. And from everything I've seen, having looked at it a lot, this is actually a much bigger problem than the underlying phenomenon people are worrying about.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

I've written about this a lot if anyone wants more: [https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturfing)</comment></comment>


AOL To Sell Bebo For Around $10 Million - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/16/aol-to-sell-bebo-for-around-10-million/

<comment><USER2> The Birch family made out handsomely in this whole fiasco, leaving shortly after Bebo was acquired. Everyone else got fleeced.

This deal reminds me of the many horrible deals done at the beginning of the decade. It's not a surprise that AOL never learned their lesson.

<comment><USER3> Who got fleeced exactly? No one force them to buy it. Seems like Aol destroyed all the value the site had by losing to the competition.

<comment><USER4> AOL shareholders didn't get fleeced, but certainly were done a huge disservice by AOL mgt. NO way in hell that Bebo was EVER worth $750m.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Michael Birch is one brilliant/lucky dude.. 70% stake in an $850mil exit and the thing goes from slump to garbage bin within two years of his leaving it. Epic

</comment><comment><USER6> Reminds of this great graphic ("The AOL- Bebo Value transfer equation"): [http://www.broadstuff.com/archives/790-The-AOL-Bebo-Value- tr...](http://www.broadstuff.com/archives/790-The-AOL-Bebo-Value-transfer- equation.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> > _Here's why – complicated corporate tax rules will let Aol write off the > full purchase price of Bebo if they declare it worthless and abandon the > asset._

...yet another perverse outcome of overly-complicated, micro-managed tax codes. The law of unintended consequences strikes again! <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences>

</comment><comment><USER8> I'll catch it on the rebound for $1K

</comment><comment><USER9> still overpriced by, um, $10 million.

</comment><comment><USER10> EPIC FAOL</comment>


DOJ asks Facebook to halt end-to-end encryption plans - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2019/10/03/doj-facebook-end-to-end-encryption-whatsapp-instagram-messenger/ <comment><USER2> The wording of this article makes e2e encryption seem bad and icky, which is a little thoughtless or the author</comment>


Ask HN: What is your favorite Linux distro? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Ubuntu LTS.

My computer isn't a Raspberry Pi or a creaky Thinkpad from 2007 that I hang on to as some sort of streetcred hacker Shibboleth so Gnome's resource utilization is irrelevant to me.

What isn't irrelevant is stability.

Ubuntu LTS is as close to a de-facto standard as you can get in the Linux world and it is supported by most, if not all, third parties when it comes to installing things like Tensorflow and CUDA.

With other distros you have to hold your nose and dive into personal blogs (where my Fedora if-not-true-then-false readers at?) and add third party repos hosted in Malwaristan to get things done.

You don't have to run pacstrap to install i3, apt can do that. I also have $20 in my storage budget so I don't care about saving 376kB by running a "lean" install.

</comment><comment><USER3> Arch. Always liked the rolling releases and the community is excellent. Even when I don't use Arch, I'm almost always finding myself on its forums when I need some help or guidance on something.

<comment><USER4> I'm on Arch since 2010, so almost a decade! Tried other distros, none worked for me as well as Arch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Usually I roll with XFCE on top of a debian clone. Right now I'm using Ubuntu MATE and enjoying the more polished UI.

</comment><comment><USER6> GNU+LinuxBBQ LinuxBBQ.com

GNU+Debian

TAILS

OpenBSD

It's a shame that so many people are mentioning their desktop environments, as if if you were to take this away and leave them with their distro at the command line they may switch or choose something that better fits their use case. My two cents. i3 and NoX user here.

</comment><comment><USER7> Currently my wife and housemate are both really enjoying Ubuntu MATE. It seems to provide a simple and responsive GUI on older laptops without elaborate gaming-level video support.

</comment><comment><USER8> (2014) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7230840](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7230840)

</comment><comment><USER9> Mint with XFCE. Fast, lightweight, and good stability.

</comment><comment><USER10> openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma desktop

</comment><comment><USER11> debian

</comment><comment><USER12> Fedora.

</comment><comment><USER13> NixOS

</comment><comment><USER14> kubuntu!

<comment><USER15> Same. It's my first. But as I install things and modify it I'm not finding it disappointing. Also I've used RedHat at work a few times, fwiw.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the dumbest thing you've done on the job? - <AUTHOR> Could be a programming mistake, shooting yourself in the foot with a boss, scoping a project terribly, etc. Bonus points if it's something you knew was dumb before doing it anyway. <comment><USER3> I was trying to deploy a CI/CD pipeline for a small project and testing some changes in the test step before deploying. I wanted to collect env variables into a global location in the pipeline and put some defaults for the tests, but I have used the same variable names for them, so the global ones that were for production deployment were being used for the tests as well, and the tests were starting by wiping out the connected database.

As if this was not enough, I didn't understand what was going on because tests that used to take 5 seconds were taking 3 minutes at that point, so I ran them at least 10 times to make sure this was not a pipeline glitch. This also helped me to make sure that the database was completely wiped.

<comment><USER4> how could we structure things differently to prevent anything remotely like this from ever happening?

<comment><USER5> When we migrate databases, we execute a Docker container with a specific environment variable to let it know that it's time to migrate. The CI environment doesn't actually have a network connection to the DB; it just updates the Docker images and then when the deploy task executes it starts this Docker task remotely and polls for success/failure.

I think Kubernetes has some nicer features that could make this easier but I haven't had a chance to try this out yet.

In fact, the CI environment and production environments are on different AWS accounts. This way if you accidentally execute tests with the wrong connection strings (and we have done this before), they just fail because they can't connect.

<comment><USER4> > the CI environment and production environments are on different AWS accounts

yep, that's one way to structurally enforce isolation (unless you go out of your way to configure cross account permissions)

there's probably a bit of a tradeoff between things being safe and isolated, and things being seamlessly automated.

<comment><USER5> Indeed, I didn't find it all that hard to configure a role in the production account that has the permission to launch containers that the CI environment can assume. I locked it down as much as possible but if the CI environment gets hacked someone could launch a container in the production environment.

I did think of a way to make this more secure but I haven't done it yet - <USER2> could write a script that waits for input from a website where you have to log in via SAML. The script then passes the AWS credentials for the role back to the deployment task. Effectively, it's a second step authentication process where you'd need to be authenticated using a security key for the deployment to proceed.

I haven't quite figured out all the details yet but that might help you get the assurance you need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We just did a large migration, transitioning our deployment pipeline and front facing web server to a new set up. I stayed at work till like 4 am. Everything went smoothly.

The next day I woke up and realized I forgot to enable password protection on the staging environment. I opened up my laptop, navigated to the dashboard, add the flag and reload the config. 5 seconds later, my phone starts beeping. Tons of alerts that the production website was down and responding with "403 access denied". Immediately tens of people jump on Slack "website down?!".

Turn out, with my sleepy head, I added the flag to the production website instead of the staging website. And thus enabled password protection on the live website. As soon as I noticed, I undid it and in the end, downtime was roughly a minute.

Suffice it to say, I got slapped for this fuck up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh noooo! Can't believe you had to stay that late at work. Poor planning leading up to the migration, or just unexpected issues?

<comment><USER6> No other time to pull it off. We run a large website in a different part of the world, so we're several time zones behind. We could only do this migration during low traffic, which for us meant the middle of the night.

Sounds worse than it is. Got to work in the afternoon, got pizza and took a couple of extra free days exchange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Probably the longer I think about it the dumber and dumber things I will remember, but one that comes to mind is unintentionally configuring a test suite to use a live SMTP connection instead of a mock one. When the tests ran, thousands of e-mails to invalid e-mail addresses tried to send for real, bounced, and temporarily affected the "reputation" score on the transactional e-mail service.

</comment><comment><USER8> While inbording, i have been given shell script that is supposed to take a copy of the data in production, anonymize it, and set it up locally on my machine.

It took 2 parameters, the first one is the IP address of the production database and the second one my IP address.

I guess it was inevitable for those to get mixed up, and I guess no one did bother to prevent write access to production.

</comment><comment><USER9> I stored an entire 30GB PostgreSQL production database on an AWS ephemeral volume (gets automatically wiped on restart) because I mistook the device ID for one of a regular volume I thought attached.

Found my mistake months later, was able to fix it before disaster struck.

</comment><comment><USER10> One time I tried to use Visual Studio's git integration and managed to delete the entire remote repository and all commit history. Good thing I kept religious zip backups because I was bad at git back then.

</comment><comment><USER11> Bringing up an embedded system that was its own development environment. I messed up and deleted the boot file.

The system still booted, because the boot sector pointed to the sectors that the deleted file had occupied, and the contents of those sectors had not been over-written. I ran that way for two days until I got it to a point that I could restore the boot file. I spent those two days afraid that any step would over-write the wrong sectors and the system would be dead.

</comment><comment><USER12> My very first project at my new job. First "real" programming job. Due to bad assumptions of dates in the db, I got a user stuck in a loop. We emailed them some 400k times: "Your credits are low, upgrade your account!" I felt terrible. Our only way to reach out? Email :(

<comment><AUTHOR> 400k emails?! Oh my god. Did you ever hear back from the user?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not my screw up but working for a fairly large e-commerce site we had a cron job to pick up 'stuck' orders and push them down to the warehouse every 30 minutes.

For a combination of reasons there was one order which was picked up every time the job ran.

This went on for a very long time and nobody in the company realised. The warehouse staff were all agency workers who dispatched B2B and B2C so sending a pallet wasn't unusual for them. It was only when the customer got in touch asking us to please stop sending the same thing that we were alerted.

Apparently she had ordered the items to her friend's office and they were getting very frustrated having to deal with them.

Even worse the customer was in China and the company had to order a shipping container to retrieve the stock.

</comment><comment><USER14> After many hours trying to convince the IT director to do this in a off peak time, and with proper planning, he just wouldn't listen to me.

Hyper-V live migration from a HP EVA4400 to a 3PAR Storage. 45 hosts migrated without a hitch. The one that couldn't fail, a SAP production server, failed hard. The EVA crashed hard, both controllers went offline in the middle of the migration. After a couple of seconds later, one of the PSU's shut off. The other one was waiting for replacement part. My face turned white. Huge downtime to recover everything from a Tape backup. A couple of days later, I had a major burn out.

It was a really bad day at work :(

</comment><comment><USER15> I once crashed a production server by accidentally running an infinite loop.

</comment><comment><USER16> I misspelled pharmaceutical, which was part of the company name, and also appeared on the splash screen of the power builder application. Was not noticed by anyone before several cases of floppy disks were delivered to us. The App required a dozen floppies or so per set... so we had a lot of 'spares' laying around. My personal cone of shame.

</comment><comment><USER17> Formatting a USB stick from Terminal only to realize I referenced the wrong drive. Killed the process too late, the Macbook crashed and failed to boot. Apple couldn't save the drive or recover anything.

Thankfully all but the last day's work was on Git, but I was using the laptop as a temporary photo storage (only device with an SD card reader at the time) and lost 9 months of important photos.

</comment><comment><USER18> Transitioning from military to civilian life is difficult, especially right after a deployment. I shot myself in the foot a few times because I just didn't fit in. To be honest, I was a real asshole. For instance, shredding someone to pieces like a PFC who's just done something really stupid - it just doesn't work in the "real world".

</comment><comment><USER19> DELETE * FROM <table>

Yeah, I forgot the WHERE.

This was 15 years ago at my first job and I haven't done it since. I was lucky that we had backups.

<comment><USER6> I wonder whether tooling that is commonly used to query a database should detect these common mistakes and warn you. `psql` could easily pop up a warning "Are you sure you wanna drop this entire table?".

An alternative would be for databases to add an option to prevent accidental deletion. When enabled, would make it impossible to truncate or delete entire tables. I would enable such a setting on my production databases.

<comment><USER9> JetBrains DataGrip does put up a warning like this before you can do a DELETE on a table, unadorned by a WHERE clause.

<comment><USER19> DataGrip is my #1 DB tool for my team for reasons like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not taking the 83(b) election...</comment>


Ask HN: Non-Cliche Quotes That Really Hit Home - <AUTHOR>

 "When I see a new web startup trying to increase click-thru ad-rates by 10%, it breaks my heart a little. It's not that what they're doing is wrong. But I just can't help but feel like I'm seeing incredible entrepreneurial talent wasted on something that fundamentally doesn't matter much." (by Nathaniel Whittemore)
Felt this was a perfect quote for me to hear as we work on our lead generation startup. Sometimes we just get waaay too caught up in the metrics rather than focusing more on creating more impact.
I'd love to hear of any non generic quotes that made a difference for you <comment><USER2> Regarding Optimisation:

        You can't make a computer work faster,
        you can only make it do less.

        This code isn't optimal, so it hasn't
        been optimised.  It's just less bad
        than it was.

Regard the work ethic:

        The harder I work, the luckier I get.
        (Often attributed to Thomas Jefferson)

And regarding luck:

        Fortune favors the lucky.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Sometimes we just get waaay too caught up in the metrics rather than focusing more on creating more impact."

Wow! I agree 100%. Now, click-thru ad-rates are important, but the impact on your clients, customers, and how they perceive you & your business is also super-duper important too. I like to say: "what produces me to use this product, or download this app, or use this "service", and what I find, is that I'm always looking for: who built the app, who runs this company, and what impression I get from the web-copy/content. The cloak and dagger approach does not work, especially if you're trying to get "respectful" clients; clients that actually pay for the service you render or who respect what you do as a company.

People forgot that we are human, and when you make someone feel that humans run a company - your impact will be huge, and you will notice this with customer satisfaction, and retention.

Take the social approach.. Be open, show who runs the company, have a blog, communicate with your customers, show them that you're real and have fun. Some companies that do this: dropbox, google, tendeapp, Ycombinator, Fogcreek, etc. etc.. the list goes on, and how many people use their service, or even pay?

</comment><comment><USER4> "What is a good idea? One that happens is. If it doesn't, it isn't." – Paul Arden

"Plans are nothing; planning is everything." – Dwight D. Eisenhower.

</comment><comment><USER5> "The hard fact is if a user cannot learn how to use a feature, it might as well not exist." - Dale Harvey, from this page: [http://arandomurl.com/2010/07/07/design-tips-for- programmers...](http://arandomurl.com/2010/07/07/design-tips-for- programmers.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Fortune favors the bold. Cliche? Maybe, but I don't see or hear it often. It really applies to everything in your life. The fact that it's an ancient roman saying with a lot of history makes it even more relevant (to me, at least.)

</comment><comment><USER7> "Everything happens to the best of us, but it happens more often to the worst of us."

</comment><comment><USER8> If you don't make things happen, things will happen to you. - Robert Collier.</comment>


Russian computer hackers are seven times faster than North Koreans - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/03/09/in-the-cyber-break-in-stakes-the-champion-is-russia <comment><USER2> Why would I want to register to read that?</comment>


Google Workers Fume Over Executives' Payouts After Sexual Misconduct Claims - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/technology/sexual-harassment-google.html <comment><USER2> Kind of funny how the NYT publishes the original story to generate outrage, then after successfully doing so to an extent, cherry-picks examples of the outrage in order to generate yet another article that is apparently worth publishing.

Of course some Google employees are upset, there are 85,000 of them. You could have cherry-picked ones who weren't upset as well and written an article the opposite of this if desired. I'm not commenting on the claims themselves but it's just funny how the NYT is able to completely run their own show here.

<comment><USER3> I think they published it because it was news. Many details in the news outrage me, but as long as they are based in fact, I consider that reporting of the news of the day, not an attempt to incite outrage.

Also, "Callous Googlers Don't care about sex harassment payouts" doesn't seem like a particularly good potential news piece, if that's what you are suggesting they could have done.

I mean, I was outraged by the Snowden revelations. Were those stories generating outrage, or just revealing an outrage that others had already perpetrated?

<comment><USER2> >but as long as they are based in fact, I consider that reporting of the news of the day

The issue is that they get to pick which facts are reported and which are not. They could publish 100 articles on all the good things Google is doing, or they could publish 100 articles on all the bad things google is doing, and they don't have to lie to do either of these things, but yet they would both give their readers very warped perspectives on reality.

We see this a lot in politics, where we can have far-right and far-left websites that both technically report nothing but 'facts', but due to the extreme sampling biases used, present completely opposing views of reality.

I'm not defending Google, I'm just pointing out who is running the show here, and the answer is the New York Times. They decide what happens next. Their next article could talk about all the positive discussion and improvements Google is making in this area, or it could talk about how many additional employees are upset and don't think things will get better.

<comment><USER4> That's what happens when they are conditioned to produce content that maximizes view/click counts. Who created that incentive? Google did.

<comment><USER5> While this may be true, it falls flat once you consider that this has been done to many non-google organizations too.

<comment><USER4> You only get to understand what a massive role Google plays in the like/click/view generating ecosystem when you spend time in a modern digital publishing/advertising/marketing firm. It's like watching a huge cattle auction where peoples views/clicks etc are being traded 24*7.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've never seen a contract contain the clause, "We don't have to pay you what we owe you, simply by having one of our employees make an accusation of sexual harassment against you." I would never sign one.

<comment><USER7> Do you think that termination clauses given by google to employees have zero conditions attached to them? Even if you're an executive there are _absolutely_ things you can do that would forfeit the contract. If you were fired for stealing secrets, do you think they'd pay you out? Certainly the same clauses could be written to avoid paying if you have to be let go because something you did caused some other sort of harm to the company. We can talk about whether or not the contract included such a clause and whether or not thats a failure on Google's part, but I have a feeling that's not why you posted this comment.

And btw I think it's clear that if I offered you the sort of money this dude had you probably wouldn't pass it up based on what the conditions for termination payout clauses were.

<comment><USER6> Why don't you say why you think I posted this comment?

<comment><USER7> Because I didn't think it was relevant at all: I don't believe you want to talk about whether or not google is representing its own interests contractually.

But now that you bring it up I imagine my intuition is correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We seem to have moved from one person (Snowden type) dissent of institutional bullshit to groups standing up.

The current bunch of leaders are great at keeping the ship on course to well known destinations (scale at all costs/maximize profits/wage war to keep peace).

If the destination has to change, a new crop of leaders will have to take this bunch on. And it won't happen without employees making their voice heard.

<comment><USER8> >If the destination has to change, a new crop of leaders will have to take this bunch on. And it won't happen without employees making their voice heard.

I think some form of labor organization, enforcing principles like the ACM Code of Ethics, is the only sane way forward. We in tech have to move beyond this reactive posture in how we approach what are really structural problems with how decision-making, power, and resources are distributed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Mass resignations threatened like after the James Damore memo?

Doubt it.

Sexual misconduct is more acceptable at Google than writing gender biased dogma.

<comment><USER10> It's also acceptable for our head of state, so expectations for justice are extremely low.

<comment><USER11> And has been since just about the dawn of the Republic.

Turns out you don't have to be a Saint to be leader of the free world. Might go as far to say that a Saint wouldn't be particularly well suited for the job.

<comment><USER10> Since we've presumably never had a 'saint', how would we know that they wouldn't be better for the job? It's hard to imagine that someone who had integrity and respected other genders would make a worse leader, so I'm interested in why you'd thing so.

<comment><USER11> There's a pretty wide margin between having integrity and respecting other genders, and Sainthood.

IMO, I think that down on planet Earth two people may get into a sexual relationship that is anywhere from uncouth to unwise to unacceptable to illegal. As long as these affairs are consensual my own position is who the heck am I to judge?

Further, someone who is so abjectly in control of their passion — someone who is so dispassionate — I think would have a hard time fighting so hard day in and day out for a grueling 4 or 8 years.

Good leaders tend to have the personality, charisma, confidence, and ambition that they will go after the things they want even if it means some rules or social mores will be broken. To even think oneself possible of leading the Free World does require a certain arrogance. I certainly wouldn't want a President feeling imposter syndrome in the Oval Office, even though it is certain to happen to some extent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Don't be evil."

I really believe they believed it, at first. As the old saying goes, power corrupts.

<comment><USER13> I think the foolish view is that there is an option that ISN'T evil, and Google chose the wrong one.

So think that one through. Rubin was accused of whatever, and Google owes him money. Which is NOT evil:

A. Not pay any money to Rubin - despite legally owing him some - because the mob has decided that is best?

B. Pay the full amount he is owed to get rid of him?

C. Negotiate a reduced amount, as he is indeed owed money?

C. Take this to court, and make all parties go through all the hassle, be forced to keep Rubin, what, employed but suspended? and then hope that by some miracle you get the outcome you desire?

Again, I think the foolish view is that there is an option that ISN'T evil, and Google chose the wrong one. They are all TERRIBLE options.</comment></comment>


Dealing with SVG images in mobile browsers - <AUTHOR> http://kristerkari.github.com/adventures-in-webkit-land/blog/2013/03/08/dealing-with-svg-images-in-mobile-browsers/

<comment><USER2> I doubt that many people will bother replacing

      <img src="foo.png"/>

with tons of javascript to handle browsers not supporting SVG.

If something is well supported except for the 25% of cases where it isn't, it isn't well supported.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some reasons why SVGs shouldn't be used all the time in webpages:

* Display time - Rendering and displaying images in a browser is incredibly time-critical. A non-trivial SVG is likely to take much longer to render and display than a PNG. My desktop still struggles to show a wikipedia map of the world - I especially don't want my phone to waste time or battery when it doesn't need to.

* SVG's are built for infinite precision. If you are browsing webpages full of small SVGs its likely you'll waste a lot of bandwidth and processing-time on sub-pixel non-displayed cruft.

* Often you actually need pixel-perfection in display, which SVG isn't really built for (hence the S) and you'll just end up drawing 1-pixel wide lines in SVG form.

tldr: Displays are based on pixels. SVGs aren't built for pixels.

<comment><USER4> > My desktop still struggles to show a wikipedia map of the world

Are you sure? Mine can render and zoom into it instantly - once the data file is cached. The first time you load it it loads in country-by-country since that's how slow it's getting the data (the typical Wikipedia world map SVG is 1.5 MB, although to be fair the PNG version is only 350 KB).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a depressing read, honestly. I can't believe it's 2013 and we can't reliably use SVG images.

</comment><comment><USER6> Whoa, I had to look up the word "polyfill", since I had never seen in in this context before. Extra confusing since the topic was close to the filling of polygons (a common operation in vector graphics rendering).

Turns out the word was coined by Remy Sharp, and means "replicate an API using JavaScript (or Flash or whatever) if the browser doesn't have it natively" (quote from <http://remysharp.com/2010/10/08/what-is-a-polyfill/>).

Interesting, but depressing to be so "out of touch". Cue shouting about lawn, et cetera.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have mixed feelings about what to take away from this article. We actually rely exclusively on SVG in the startup I work at, so it's nice to see this topic getting some love. Then again, the lack of serious support, especially in mobile browsers (no mention of SVG not really being supported that well on iOS 4 or lower) means we have to carefully pick our battles or perhaps rethink our stack. Sad.

<comment><USER8> _"no mention of SVG not really being supported that well on iOS 4 or lower)"_

I'm guessing the author felt it doesn't need to be mentioned, as usage share for iOS <v5 is negligible (estimates range from 1% to 4%). In contrast, Android <v3 makes up more than 50% of Google Play users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I made a few decisions in my startup that will rule out compatibility with IE6-8, and old versions of the Android stock browser too. I'm now quite worried about this.

I have a horrible feeling Android's "clone wars" will have the same effect as Windows did back in the day. Create a popular platform with a default browser. Stop supporting the browser on that platform, except for the newest versions/devices. A legacy that makes web developer jobs harder.

<comment><USER10> The bright side is that no-one holds onto their phones as long as they hold onto their PCs. A given phone has a ~2 year lifespan thanks to carriers subsidizing upgrades. Now if only they would stop selling Android 2.x phones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yeah whenever people would recommend Raphael.js, I'd find out they didn't even realize that android < 3.0 didn't even support SVG. Not to mention drawing to canvas is faster than SVG. At least there are plenty of canvas alternatives like paper.js</comment>


RailsBricks 3 released: Create Rails apps. Faster - <AUTHOR> http://railsbricks.net/news/railsbricks-3-is-live

<comment><AUTHOR> Only two days since it was released and already updated to 3.0.1: [http://railsbricks.net/news/railsbricks-3-0-1-has-been- relea...](http://railsbricks.net/news/railsbricks-3-0-1-has-been-released)

</comment><comment><USER2> This is a two-for one. Not only do you get a framework framework, but a mixed metaphor to boot!</comment>


Review of Eloquent Ruby - <AUTHOR> http://programmingzen.com/2011/03/07/eloquent-ruby-review/ <comment><USER2> Not much in this review. This review of the book was more insightful: [http://www.rubyinside.com/a-review-of-eloquent-ruby-by- russ-...](http://www.rubyinside.com/a-review-of-eloquent-ruby-by-russ-olsen- it-rocks-4432.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks nice, but I don't want more Ruby books. There are too already too many and I never get through them.

Why not more interactive tutorials? The one on the Ruby website is good but very short. I liked Rails for Zombies, and I actually completed it (unlike most books I purchase).</comment>


StartupCTO.io Podcast – CTO of DigitalOcean talks about scaling your dev team - <AUTHOR> http://startupcto.io/podcast/0-27-scaling-a-rocket-ship-w-julia-austin-of-digital-ocean/?ref=producthunt <comment><USER2> Great question about the utility of a Master's or MBA for someone going down the VP Engineering / CTO track. I really like Julia's suggestion of seeking out a program with a niche for what you want to do rather than just getting one as a prereq. It's really nice to see how HBS's offerings have evolved based on real needs from startup founders in recent years.</comment>


Packing the Instruction Pipeline - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/knappador/pipe-packing-demo

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice article. Here are some quick thoughts about it and the code, realizing that I don't quite understand your computational goals.

 _Padding the inputs to align the loop and changing the conditions could improve this more._

Not sure which 'conditions', but I'm doubtful that you'll gain my aligning the loops. Loops this small should be running out of a "loop cache" or "micro-op cache" that doesn't care about instruction addresses.

 _You will almost never have a hint to tell you that a pipeline is waiting on results to become available._

Probably true, although using 'perf' or 'likwid' to measure instructions executed per cycle can answer the question if you think to ask it.

 _assert(fv.valley != NULL);_

Using 'assert' for error handler is strongly discouraged. You could argue for it, but you are bucking tradition.

 _/ / three yields almost no changes, so it's not implemented_

Looks like 3 is implemented, but 4 is not?

 _This PoC demonstrates that in a very tight loop, read-dependency causes the loop body to be so small that it doesn 't even fill the entire pipeline (12-14ish on modern x86 CPU's) and therefore expanding the loop body to do more work will increase performance._

There are ways to interpret this that seem correct, but I don't like phrasing the goal as 'filling the pipeline'. The goal is avoiding pipeline stalls: the length of the loop is mostly irrelevant. Tight loops (shorter than pipeline depth) are just fine if the loops are independent, and if they are not independent, you may find it difficult to create the parallelism you need to interleave.

You allude to it in the description, but I think a lot of the gain you are seeing may be due to Superscalar Execution (instruction level parallelism) rather than "filling the pipeline".

I find Agner Fog's articles and charts tremendously useful for trying to understand and optimize performance at this level: [http://www.agner.org/optimize/](http://www.agner.org/optimize/)

Related to this, you didn't mention what CPU you are using. The clock speed is largely irrelevant to intepretting your numbers, but the 'generation' (Nehalem vs Sandy Bridge vs Haswell) can be very significant to how instructions fit together (their latencies and which can be executed simultaneously).

 _90% of the execution (more?) is spent in the following code sections._

If you are on Linux, start using 'perf' to answer questions like this quickly.

 _Only an object dump will tell if the actual assembly is tighter and thereby more sensitive to speculative execution optimization._

Intel's IACA is another great tool to know about. It's buggy and awkward, but does a great job of replacing the process of scribbling latencies on napkins. Once you figure out how to interpret it's results, it will generally answer your questions about data dependence:

[http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel- architecture-...](http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-architecture- code-analyzer)

 _The convert instruction moves two doubles into a single?_

No, not really. Intel's docs are probably the best reference for these questions: [http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/...](http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/manuals/64-ia-32-architectures- software-developer-instruction-set-reference-manual-325383.pdf)

The various abbreviations used in the instructions are useful to understand. For example:

      ss: scalar single precision
      sd: scalar double precision
      ps: packed single precision
      pd: packed double precision

_s_real = ((drand48() - 0.5)_ 0.001) - 0.743643135;*

The conversions you are seeing are actually a problem. The floating point literals default to double precision. As a result, you are doing the math as a double and then converting back to a float. You probably should tack an "F" on to the end of your constants to specify that you want single precision floats like your variables. I'm not sure it will improve performance here, but it will definitely make the assembly simpler to understand.

 _GCC (and probably most others) seem to have essentially zero awareness or capability to deal with instruction-level parallelism._

Generally true, although Intel's compiler is worth comparing. They offer a free academic license.

 _Unfortunately the compiler had reasons to rearrange certain operations..._

This is a very dangerous assumption to make. I think a better attitude is "something I did in the code made the compiler do something strange" or even just "compilers are dumb". Assuming that strange changes a compiler makes improve the code is often a losing bet.

Hope this is helpful. Thanks for the write up.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for review. Bookmarked so I can eventually improve my write-up.</comment></comment>


1.usa.gov is a DNS alias to bit.ly - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/1jwj4h/op_trolls_b/cbj8v4k

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, don't visit the links in the image or the top comment. Apparently, the "joke" is that redirect is to a search query on fbi.gov and involves committing a felony.</comment>


Which countries are most in favour of the free market? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/04/public_opinion_capitalism <comment><USER2> Interesting. I believe an additional survey asking people what they consider to be a free market would be quite enlightening. Welcome to 2010 and witness the world where your market economy fails every three to five years due to the greed of human beings.</comment>


Introduction to Data Driven Propaganda - <AUTHOR> http://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/NCO-Journal/Archives/2017/November/Data-Driven-Propaganda/ <comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this piece as I was leaving the Army, I was planning on letting it sit in the archives for a while but I guess I'll go ahead and explain what it's talking about.

1\. The Russian information operations are not about the American elections. It's been a sustained information warfare campaign for the last several years, and the elections were part of it.

2\. The Russians are playing on existing differences in society. The key difference between their modern campaign and traditional campaign is they have population data to target their propaganda, so they can identify arbitrary fracture lines in groups.

On a side note, this is the same technique that traditional human intelligence uses, which the Russians are good at. Most people are generally good people and don't manipulate others intentionally, so if this is new to you the US Army's FM 2-22.3 covers about 20 different methods (non-exhaustive) of manipulating individuals with this sort of information, intended for interrogation. It covers playing on peoples' fears, their ego, love, etc. The Russians are just doing this on a wide scale, albeit it's also the same thing other advertisers do, just more widespread and coordinated.

3\. Undermining groups is not random. It's using an evolutionary strategy of undermining groups threatening to Russia's interest rather than creating groups out of thin air. Without having the data that they're using for analytics for identifying sub-populations, it's rather hard to figure out what group a given set of divisive propaganda is targeting. Also, it isn't just the bots or the social advertising. It's full-spectrum.

4\. The Russians are not the only ones that are using these techniques. However, they are more aggressive about it because Putin freaked out that the US was going to try to overthrow him. They're in a corner and acting out of weakness, not strength. That being said, we're not all that great about responding to events in the world so there isn't a guarantee we come out of this with a good outcome.

I didn't choose the top picture, the wording just frames it for why it was relevant to the Army (keeping it apolitical).

<comment><USER2> What role did you have in military that you were asked to write this (very impressive) piece?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was a human intelligence collector, although I'd also been running a small cell out of South Korea doing analysis in the region in 2016.

The paper was in response to the July prompt of a quarterly contest, "Is the Army too antiquated in how it fights the Information War?" ([http://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/NCO-Journal/NCO- Jour...](http://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/NCO-Journal/NCO-Journal- Writing-Excellence-Program/)). This piece went through several extra months of trimming and editing and the program was subsequently discontinued.</comment></comment></comment>


Audio interview: Thomas Fuchs on Scripty2 and the future of Prototype - <AUTHOR> http://thechangelog.com/post/1408568115/episode-0-3-9-scripty2-zepto-js-vapor-js-and-more-with-t

<comment><USER2> I really wish we'd solve the problem of transcribing spoken words. There are many things I'd like to listen to, but I can't listen and do anything else at the same time, except walk or drive, but I can scan text pretty quickly. :/

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> ~ 28:00 "bored developers create testing frameworks and templating languages"</comment>


Phoenix 1.4.0 released - <AUTHOR> https://phoenixframework.org/blog/phoenix-1-4-0-released <comment><USER2> One thing worth highlighting in the post is that Phoenix now uses Ecto 3.0. This latest version of Ecto separates Ecto's data mapping and validation from Ecto's SQL adapters. Practically this means you can use Ecto's changesets when you either don't need persistence or aren't using a SQL database.

Additionally there are a number of features that make Ecto 3.0 a great release: [http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2018/10/a-sneak-peek-at- ect...](http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2018/10/a-sneak-peek-at- ecto-3-0-breaking-changes/)

<comment><USER3> The best one is piping aggregate and other functions in queries!

Something like:

from foo in Foos, select: foo.id |> filter(foo.bar > 3) |> count()

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Been waiting for this release to start playing with Phoenix.

I'm super interested to see how liveview turns out. Can it be a game changer and free us from JS framework morass? Anyone know if there's a public liveview repo/work to look at somewhere?

<comment><USER5> There's no public repo yet, but I'd like to open it up soon. I've been ironing out the details of the programming model before opening it up – namely nested live views and how the remote client spawns and reconnects to the server processes. I made solid progress last week, and posted a sneak peak of the nested views and error recovery: [https://twitter.com/chris_mccord/status/1059273315666350080](https://twitter.com/chris_mccord/status/1059273315666350080)

<comment><USER6> absolute unit

This is terrific work!!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thank you Phoenix team - changed my career for the better. My stress levels dropped drastically since moving to Elixir and Phoenix.

Immutable language, blazing fast predictable performance, super quick test suite, real-time capabilities that don't require gigabytes of RAM... the list goes on.

<comment><USER7> There's not that many production elixir jobs out there. I'm hiring full time remote or NYC elixir devs if anyone is looking to find this kind of development experience. firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER8> thanks for your effort, noted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yay for webpack as default. My perception of phoenix is not only that it is the best in class but that it also keeps getting better instead of bloated.

<comment><USER10> Not to take away from your excitement or the validity of the change, but non frontenders find webpack rather bloated. To be fair, I've met more than one front-end developer with the same perception.

<comment><USER5> There's no panacea when it comes to front-end build tools, but the webpack 4 release vastly improved configuration and docs, which was a big reason for us to make the jump. We've maintained the old brunch workflow for non-js pros, where you place js in assets/js and css in assets/css and things Just Work™, so folks fond of the old brunch way can continue to handle assets exactly as before, but webpack will be used underneath. I also like to think we now strike a nice balance between zero hassle asset bundling and professional front-end engineers using phx.new and quickly getting to work.

<comment><USER11> As a professional front-end engineer I thank you. The old system was a constant pain point for me. Every time I started a new Phoenix project I agonized over how to integrate the front-end workflow I liked with Phoenix. This will be a big productivity win for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Kind of feel bad for this one: [https://www.manning.com/books/phoenix-in- action](https://www.manning.com/books/phoenix-in-action)

Still a MEAP, and only covers up to 1.3

Elixir and Phoenix seem to have very fast release cycles. I don't know if it's a good or a bad thing. It's great to add a lot of features, or remove the ones that don't really work, but it also renders literature obsolete pretty quickly.

<comment><USER5> This book actually should be in great shape since Phoenix 1.3 included the larger re-org of project code. A book written for Phoenix 1.3 will be entirely relevant for Phoenix 1.4. I think we had a total of two deprecations, with no breaking changes. As another commenter said, our last major 1.3 release was 2017-07-28, so if anything, I would expect folks asking us to speed up the release cycle a bit :)

<comment><USER12> Yes the book will probably be mostly relevant technically. But from a marketing point of view, it's dead. If I know nothing about phoenix, I check the website and see that the current version is 1.4, am I gonna buy the book that covers up to 1.3?

Re: my comment about release cycle, you're right. It was probably more applicable to elixir than phoenix.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can't wait for telemetry. Better monitoring will be a huge addition to the ecosystem!

<comment><USER14> Agreed, I'm pretty excited to wire up some prod apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The Phoenix team has been very accessible for help and growth of the language. Very happy to work with it every day and to be able to contribute back occasionally!

</comment><comment><USER16> And now I can't wait for Phoenix LiveView!

</comment><comment><USER17> Congrats and a big thank you to the Phoenix team! Any word on the previously discussed metrics telemetry?

EDIT: Oops. Didn't read bottom of post.

<comment><USER18> It's mentioned in the article.

[https://github.com/beam-telemetry/telemetry](https://github.com/beam- telemetry/telemetry)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Have a question for phoenix veterans. The server performance in benchmarks like techempower have not been stellar, yet concurrency is one of its most touted features. If i wanted to build an app like hackernews and host it on digital ocean free drop, how many concurrent users can i hope to serve with request latency less than 100ms. A rough ballpark figure here will help me visualise phoenix's performance better.

<comment><USER20> Sadly this thread didn't pick up much but I found this [https://www.cogini.com/blog/benchmarking-phoenix-on- digital-...](https://www.cogini.com/blog/benchmarking-phoenix-on-digital- ocean/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Big thanks and props to the team on this, very exciting! Looking forward to pitching in on the guides or other areas where some contrib help may be needed.

</comment><comment><USER22> If BEAM/Erlang/Elixir is so great for web development, why the leading web company Google would bother to develop Golang?

</comment><comment><USER22> When you talk about BEAM supervision magic, you forget that in the end it's just a regular process of the OS. If the BEAM's process is killed, supervision magic won't work.

It's not any different from the Golang's process of the same nature.

</comment><comment><USER22> LiveView technology won't work well with high latency internet connection. In other words, on most mobile devices. Which is 50%+ part of the market.

Also there may be privacy concerns with sending every browser event to the server.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is there any benchmark comparing two architectures , one using OTP, the other using containers + kubernetes ( let's say in go or java) ? In terms of availability, performance, maintenance cost, etc.

<comment><USER24> You can use Docker + containers with OTP, they are not mutually exclusive. Daniel Azuma gave a talk at the most recent Elixirconf about this subject.[0]

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

<comment><USER14> I've been using ECS and it's been a good way to write stateful apps that can dump state on tear down ore crash and start back up and keep working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Fun fact, Firefox used to be called phoenix. The rename happened over a trademark for another product called phoenix (a database if I recall correctly).

<comment><USER26> _The rename happened over a trademark for another product called phoenix (a database if I recall correctly)._

They first renamed it from Phoenix to Firebird due to a trademark dispute with Phoenix the BIOS company (which doesn't exist any more). They then promptly got called out by Firebird the Open Source database project and eventually had to change their name again to Firefox.

<comment><USER3> That story is kind of funny.

"Let's call it Phoenix!" _gets sued_

"Uh okay, a Phoenix is like a fire bird right? That sounds pretty cool, let's do that!" _gets called out_

"Okay well what's another animal we can use? How about fox?"

<comment><USER26> Yea, you'd think if you're forced to change the name of your product due to the name clashing with and existing software project/company, you'd take some time to make sure the new name you chose doesn't also clash with an existing software project/company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder what the biggest deployment of Phoenix is at this point.

I've written a few cowboy apps, but my professional Erlang experience has only been with chat servers that do not use HTTP. I'm not sure if I'd choose Erlang to build web services in. Cowboy is a single maintainer project, and Go has had HTTP2 support for ages now.

<comment><USER28> Please stop spreading FUD about Erlang/Elixir at every opportunity, thank you.

<comment><USER29> it's a legitimate concern. the only alternatives to cowboy for http2 are chatterbox and ace which are both single maintainer and, as far as i know, not in wide use (even by erlang standards). for http1 you have elli but it's also never been widely deployed and it's unmaintained as of years ago

<comment><USER30> Not really. As mentioned elsewhere, there are many contributors to Cowboy and major companies using it as well. Heroku, AWS uses it in Cloudfront last I checked, Incapsula too.

<comment><USER29> heroku uses a fork of cowboy that diverged in 2013 and has less than 100 commits since then, including only 8 since 2014

cloudfront does not use cowboy</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some niche or alternative news aggregators worth checking out? - <AUTHOR> I know this question has been asked before, in one form or the next. But I'd like to make a push to expand my media diet. Are there any domain specific aggregators you use, or are there any promising new plays in the news aggregation space? <comment><USER2> Newsmap is my go-to: [https://newsmap-js.herokuapp.com/](https://newsmap- js.herokuapp.com/)

It's a real-time graphical representation of the most popular news stories in a variety of topics in global or (configurable) regions. Very useful.

Shoutout to the original newsmap.jp which unfortunately requires Flash.

<comment><USER3> Bookmarked this. Found that it displayed several stories I had not seen, at a glance. Will try adding it to my phone scroll-hole rotation.

<comment><USER4> what is scroll-hole rotation?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Memeorandum family of products have been the foundation of my media diet for more than a decade now:

Memeorandum (general news): [https://www.memeorandum.com/](https://www.memeorandum.com/)

Techmeme (tech news): [https://www.techmeme.com/](https://www.techmeme.com/)

Mediagazer (media sector news): [https://www.mediagazer.com/](https://www.mediagazer.com/)

I'm constantly amazed at how many people have never heard of them. To me, they are indispensable.

<comment><USER6> I'd second Techmeme for tech news aggregation; great site and now with a newsletter too.

I actually built a general news aggregation newsletter inspired by Techmeme too ([http://enclude.com](http://enclude.com)) which uses ML to group the leading stories of the day together with the highest quality ones highlighted. My hope was to break people out of their filter bubble by exposing them to high quality coverage on the news of the day.

Did it as a daily email because I wanted it to be pushed to me and I wanted it to be limited meaning once you read it you're done. No need to suck up more time.

I've had no time to work on it and its in a state of disrepair but if anyone is interested in teaming up on it let me know.

<comment><USER7> This looks great! Have you considered adding an RSS feed for it?

<comment><USER6> No, it designed for email so there's not a public web site for the news itself but it wouldn't be too difficult to make. As I mentioned, however, this is a moribund service :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We run AgFunderNews an set up feedit, a HN style channel covering external news on foodtech & agtech

[https://feedit.agfunder.com/](https://feedit.agfunder.com/)

<comment><USER9> This is cool but the color theme closely resembles one used by a popular ad network, so the whole site looks like ad-spam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hey! So I've been working on a news app, that like the others curates to your interests, but instead of emojis uses adjectives which are based on criteria. The idea is to filter out sensationalism engendered by the emoticon (and frankly addictive) rating system. Gem tends to recommend articles from the likes of NYT, The Atlantic, Nature, and Nautilus. Please check it out, and let me know your thoughts: [https://exploregem.com](https://exploregem.com)

</comment><comment><USER11> I set up my own FreshRSS instance and am adding more and more feeds to it. I found that suitable to give me a broad overview over news etc. But you will have to look for sources on your own, that's maybe a problem. Also less and less sites are using RSS/Atom.

</comment><comment><USER12> One option might be to use an ebook reader called 'Calibre' which also has a news aggregator built-in having over 1600 news sources from around the world.

<comment><USER13> I used to use Calibre and get fresh news on my Kindle every morning, back when there was no decent coverage in the subways...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I built [https://statesreport.com](https://statesreport.com) as an ad-free news aggregator. Let me know what you think!

</comment><comment><USER15> I run Pine.blog, a niche feed reader and blogging app and I'd love for it to get more attention:

[https://pine.blog](https://pine.blog)

It's got more of a Twitter-like feel (timelines instead of folders) and a human curated directory of blogs and feeds to follow. If you've ever used Tweetbot, that's what I'm going for.

Its available on the web or on iOS. And there's a premium tier if you want more advanced features (and unlimited access to the API).

A major release is in the works that will add the ability to start a blog from Pine.blog so that you can quickly and easily contribute back to the open web on your own site. Right now you can post to a Wordpress blog if you have one.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't know any better way than using an RSS feed and adding unknowing curators for the domains of interest. Then you add and remove curators as you see fit. Journalists, commenters, niche forums, twitter, bloggers can all be added with some one time modifications.

If you like one curator's thoughts on subject X, they might introduce you to interesting thoughts on subject Y or Z.

Another interesting trick I haven't heard other people using is to send the media firehose to a folder, then only checking news that is 4+ weeks old. Aging the stories allows you to sift through puff pieces vs ones that have staying power and remain important.

<comment><USER17> What's the best way to find new curators? I am sure there are great journalists on twitter, but I wouldn't know where to begin

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but I've found personalized start pages (eg [https://start.me/](https://start.me/) [https://www.protopage.com/](https://www.protopage.com/) ) with RSS and other feeds from a wide variety of news sources to be the best fit for my purpose. This includes a feed for HN and other aggregators.

</comment><comment><USER18> [https://www.notdepressing.com](https://www.notdepressing.com)

</comment><comment><USER19> I built [https://aktu.io](https://aktu.io), it's a rss reader with machine learning and news aggregation.

Main features are: \- items in your rss feeds are automatically categorized, names of people, places, etc... extracted. That means it's way easier to browse/filter your feeds when you have thousands of articles waiting to be read...

\- items in your rss feeds are grouped together if about the same story. It really helps to reduce the noise in your feeds as you don't have duplicates any more, and at the same time it's convenient to have different sources/point of views for articles in your feeds.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've been running Hoxly News for a little while. It's a news aggregator that provides a small crowdsourced summary for each story.

[https://news.hoxly.com](https://news.hoxly.com)

<comment><USER21> Nice site. Did you build it using opensource software or custom? I'm looking to run similar site for a different niche.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Italian users might be interested in [https://gambe.ro](https://gambe.ro), a news aggregator to discuss the technical and social aspects of technology. Likewise, [https://www.journalduhacker.net/](https://www.journalduhacker.net/) for French users.

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of gambe.ro.

</comment><comment><USER23> I built a news app: [https://gopulse.io/](https://gopulse.io/)

</comment><comment><USER24> I also made a newsmap.jp clone: [https://news.brade.zone/](https://news.brade.zone/)

Used to be a bit better when google news told you how many articles existed per story (leading to more meaningful size differences), but it still gets the job done I guess.

</comment><comment><USER25> I stand by SPIDR.

Found it via 4chan. Comments section get get a bit /pol/ but I think it adds a refreshing reminder of what the internet used to be like before we started posting our names and mugshots. [http://spidr.today/](http://spidr.today/)

</comment><comment><USER26> Hey I'm the cofounder of EnergyAnts. Its a news aggregator for the Energy industry. We launched during this batch's startup school. Looking forward to some feedback!

Check it out [https://www.energyants.com](https://www.energyants.com)

<comment><USER27> Are you only focused on hydrocarbons? Or does that just dominate the Energy Industry as a whole? I visited your site and the front page was entirely Oil / Natural Gas

<comment><USER26> We're focused on energy in general, but so far the users have been posting about hydrocarbons as that's trending now considering where the oil price is now and where it's headed. What did you think of the website

Let me know if you want me to send you an invite (email in my bio)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I made [https://masskomm.com](https://masskomm.com). It's a simple news aggregator for some of the main publishers I follow especially from around Asia.

<comment><USER29> Nice work, I like the design too.

<comment><USER28> Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I highly recommend Tildes. It's a small, tight-knit community, pretty well moderated. It's currently my favourite news aggregator.

[https://tildes.net/](https://tildes.net/)

Email me if you want an invite.

<comment><USER29> The first thread I opened up had a full discussion on how people on the right are either literally nazis or atleast effectively nazis... might be a bit too much of a small, tight-knit community for me.

Not bad looking UI though

<comment><USER30> I'm @Adys in that thread arguing against that FWIW, and the votes are essentially even. I find that there's very few "empty" discussions, and it's always possible to actually talk to people. But yeah, fair warning, this is a pretty strongly left-leaning site, and you'll have people with pretty strong opinions about it.

Tildes is also a wonderful community outside of political topics. But if you're looking for _news_ aggregators specifically, most news will likely be political in some form, and have people arguing over politics in its comments. Hell, look at HN.

I agree on the UI btw. There's a few themes you can try as well. It's simplistic but practical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> [https://spane.org](https://spane.org)

for social entrepreneur news

<comment><USER32> hug of death?

<comment><USER31> it's on a tiny server, looks to be back up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've been enjoying reading KnowhereNews.com which attempts to provide bias- free news.

</comment><comment><USER34> drudgereport.com

</comment><comment><USER35> This question has been asked thousands of times. I suggest to build your own RSS feed, but other than this I read Hacker News, [https://freepo.st](https://freepo.st) and sometimes [https://lobste.rs](https://lobste.rs).

</comment><comment><USER36> [http://lobste.rs](http://lobste.rs)

Though it's not unlike HN so not sure how worthy it is if you are already here.

<comment><USER37> I like the articles, but would like to be able to contribute.

Do you happen to be willing to share an invitation?

<comment><USER36> I'm not a member either, just lurking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> barnacl.es is HN for bootstrappers, iirc.

</comment><comment><USER39> alltop.com</comment>


Building an end-to-end Speech Recognition model in PyTorch - <AUTHOR> https://www.assemblyai.com/blog/end-to-end-speech-recognition-pytorch <comment><USER2> Good article. Speech recognition for real time use cases must get a really working open source solution. I have been evaluating deepspeech, which is okay. but there is lots of work needed to make it working close to Google Speech engine. Apart from a good Deep neural network, a good speech recognition system needs two important things:

1\. Tons of diverse data sets (real world)

2\. Solution for Noise - Either de-noise and train OR train with noise.

There are lots of extra challenges that voice recognition problem have to solve which is not common with other deep learning problems:

1\. Pitch

2\. Speed of conversation

3\. Accents (can be solved with more data, I think)

4\. Real time inference (low latency)

5\. On the edge (i.e. Offline on mobile devices)

<comment><USER3> Your point about needing a dataset made me think about how a post on hackernews like this may be a good way to get data. How many people would contribute by reading a prompt if they visited a link like this and had the option to donate some data? That would get many distinct voices and microphones and some different conditions.

The article mentions that they used a dataset composed of 100 hours of audiobooks. A comment thread here [1] estimates 10-50k visitors from a successful hackernews post. Call it 30k visitors. If 20% of visitors donated by reading a one minute prompt, that's another 6,000 minutes, or, oddly, also 100 hours.

Seems like a potentially easy way to double your dataset and make it more diverse.

1 - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20612717](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20612717)

<comment><USER4> You might be interested in a project, doing exactly that: [https://voice.mozilla.org/](https://voice.mozilla.org/)

Audio data of people reading prompts is quite common, what is missing for robust voice recognition is plenty of data of e.g. people screaming it across the room. There is only so much physics simulations can do.

<comment><USER3> That is interesting. I gave my contribution!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems to be a CTC model. CTC is not really the best option for a good end-to-end system. Encoder-decoder-attention models or RNN-T models are both better alternatives.

There is also not really a problem about available open source code. There are countless of open source projects which already have that mostly ready to use, for all the common DL frameworks, like TF, PyTorch, Jax, MXNet, whatever. For anyone with a bit of ML experience, this should really not be too hard to setup.

But then to get good performance, on your own dataset, what you really need is experience. Probably taking some existing pipeline will get you some model, with an okish word-error-rate. But then you should tune it. In any case, even without tuning, probably encoder-decoder-attention models will perform better than CTC models.

<comment><USER6> It would seem that the best practical approach is to use RNNT as it still lets you do streaming predictions (while Attention won't really let that).

<comment><USER5> If you need streaming, then yes, RNNT is a good option. If not, encoder- decoder-attention performs a bit better than RNN-T.

Note that there are also approaches for encoder-decoder-attention to make that streaming capable, e.g. MoChA or hard attention, etc.

Google uses RNN-T on-device. But they are researching on extending it with another encoder-decoder-attention model on-top, to get better performance.

This is a quite active research area, and it has not really settled. But CTC is not really too much relevant anymore, as RNNT is just a better variant.

<comment><USER7> Recent work on transformer transducers with limited right (and left) context seem to give decent results as well: [https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.02562](https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.02562)

<comment><USER8> I opened the pdf, did ctrl+F for 'github', got zero results. Have you reproduced their "decent results"?

<comment><USER7> ESPnet apparently already has implementations of versions of transformer transducers with RNN-T loss (though, with different network architecture). At least the paper cites results on a freely available dataset, right?

<comment><USER8> Why would you not expect Google to post their code? E.g. the transformer paper had it: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762](https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is probably really good but the linked Colab notebook is failing on the first step with some unresolvable dependencies. This does seem to be a bit of a common theme whenever I try running example ML projects.

Edit: I think I've fixed it by changing the pip command to:

!pip install torchaudio comet_ml==3.0

<comment><USER10> Hah, classic. But in all seriousness I think its a pretty interesting issue. A lot of the ML and data science sees people coming in who do not have formal computer science and software development backgrounds. We build tools and methodologies around abstracting away some of the code development process and hope that it lands us in an environment that's easy to share with others. This is unfortunately rarely the case.

Its a problem that as an industry I think we are in the middle of "solving" (probably can't be solved fully, but things are getting better). I'm really excited to see what kinds of tools and tests will be developed around getting ML projects with some better practices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Have a look at NeMo [https://github.com/nvidia/NeMo](https://github.com/nvidia/NeMo) it comes with QuartzNet (only 19M of weights and better accuracy than DeepSpeech2) pretrained on thousands of hours of speech.

<comment><USER12> really interesting repo

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Mentioned once in the other comments here without any link, but another open source speech recognition model I heard about recently is Mozilla DeepSpeech:

[https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech](https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech)

[https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/12/deepspeech-0-6-mozillas- sp...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/12/deepspeech-0-6-mozillas-speech-to- text-engine/)

I haven't had a chance to test it, and I wish there were a client-side WASM demo of it that I could just visit on Mozilla's site.

<comment><USER14> Author here! Deep Speech is an excellent repo if you just want to pip install something. We wanted to do a comprehensive writeup to give devs the ability to build their own end-to-end model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Dunno why (probably dataset) but open source Speech Recognition models are performing very poorly on real world data compared to google speech to text or azure cognitive.

<comment><USER16> One of the main factors for this is probably due to dataset size. Commercial STT models are trained on 10s of thousands of hours of data from real-world data. Even a decent model architecture is going to perform pretty well on that much data.

Most open source models are trained on Libri, SWB, etc. which are not really big or diverse enough for real-world scenarios.

But to max-out results the devil is in the details IMO (network architecture, optimizer, weight initialization, regularization, data augmentation, hyperparam tuning, etc) which requires a lot of experiments.

<comment><USER17> There are new, very large public English speech datasets: Mozilla Common Voice, National Speech Corpus, which can be combined with LibriSpeech to train large models.

<comment><USER18> Amazon worked with 7k hours of labeled data + 1 million hours of unlabeled data - [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.01624.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.01624.pdf)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


No Vacancies in California? Housing Report Begs to Differ - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/26/business/vacant-la-sf.html <comment><USER2> "That was the site for the highly controversial 8 Washington development, a proposal for a towering condominium that set off a voter referendum that handicapped the project and led to its demise this year."

This is actually the problem. There are plenty of places to build houses or apartments. However, the regulations and bureaucracy prevents many developers from even getting their projects off the ground.</comment>


Ask HN: What is your experience with AngelList? - <AUTHOR>

If you have tried using AngelList to raise capital, I would like to know about your experience good or bad.  How did you present your company?  What did you do that worked out?  What didn't?  What was the outcome from the experience (avalanche of checks pouring in in the mail or the sound of crickets!) <comment><USER2> I haven't personally. But two close friends have. They both said "it's a good acceleration tool if you already have traction with well known angels". Can spur a lot of fast followers. Your mileage may vary.

Also, have heard very good things about Naval. I've got to meet that guy at some point.

</comment><comment><USER3> Quora has a stack of answers to the question "what do people think of AngelList?"

[http://www.quora.com/AngelList/What-do-people-think-of- Angel...](http://www.quora.com/AngelList/What-do-people-think-of-AngelList)

</comment><comment><USER4> Poor. Seems like you have to be already greasing the skids before using it, or else you're just another dude with a product.</comment>


Ask HN: Startup jobs for this fall/winter? - <AUTHOR>

Hi there,
I know it sounds unusual but I could start working from this September/October; are there any startups looking for engineeers (even for an internship) from that period?
Both U.S. and Europe-based startups are very welcome(I'm from Europe).
I've graduated last October and I'm currently doing web app development (will send resume by email to anyone interested). <comment><USER2> Hi! I might need an intern in fall. Contact info is in my profile.</comment>


Ask HN: Demo or Video? - <AUTHOR>

I know dropbox had a lot of success by putting together a video of their idea. I created a demo page, do you think this is as effective? http://oim.ae/chatdemo <comment><USER2> I think part of the reason that dropbox's video works so well is it shows you how dropbox solves a problem, if they just had a technical demo of how their stuff synchronises files then techies would see it and realise how it was useful, but a person on the street probably wouldn't.

I can see where your app would be good, but I'm a developer and I have friends with English as a second language. If you had a video that showed someone catching up with a person they'd met on a holiday in another country or something similar then I think it'd put the problem you're solving in context better than the demo.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like that idea of doing a video, but instead of showing what are the different features of the application, show the problems this solves. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Instead of settling for one or the other, you could write some jQuery that interacts with the forms using some predefined dialogue. Maybe have a half- dozen of these scripts made that rotate when the script runs out or the user reloads. Possibly add some humor in these scripts? just to get the user to watch the show a bit longer. When the user clicks in the chat, maybe relinquish control from the javascript to the human so they can test drive it.

FWIW, I think it's neat. But for some reason, my brain acted like a deer in the headlights when I saw the two chat boxes side by side like that.

</comment><comment><USER4> I also suggest so. People like video as it is clear and they can see what they can do without much effort.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think this might work well for people who like to experiment, but it might not work as well for people who like to passively learn about things. It could be interesting to also create a video demo and then split test the two.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will try this! thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Excellent work on the Russian text input. I was easily able to sound out some russian phrases that I know and input them correctly.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking about making that an open source jQuery plugin. If you would like I can provide it to you. There are a few issues with it right now however. After I fix those issues, I can provide it.

<comment><USER6> That would be cool. I'd love to play around with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Definitely do a video, it would demonstrate really well what the app does without need of user interaction.</comment>


Ask YC: What's your favorite sci-fi or tech TV show? - <AUTHOR>

Lost, The X Files, Star Trek (classic series and NG), The Twilight Zone etc. <comment><USER2> Battlestar Galactica (BSG) because it: a) is not a sci-fi show with utopian aliens b) politics (especially Iraq and religion) c) hot women d) space (especially the battles)

</comment><comment><USER3> Futurama! That's counts as a sci-fi show, right? It also has sweet tech, like the smell-o-scope.

Ooh, and Chappelle's Show. That's a great tech show. The Haters is Time have a time machine, and then there was that episode where Chappelle visited the interwebs and punched out the spammer. That was awesome!

</comment><comment><USER4> Battlestar Galactica is a current favorite, and I've been re-watching an old favorite, Babylon 5.

I like a lot of Star Trek, but the signal-to-noise ratio in those series is worse than what I would consider "favorite" quality.

</comment><comment><USER5> _cough_ firefly. yup, i said it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Farscape, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly

</comment><comment><USER7> farscape! if you dont know what that is, you owe it to yourself to watch it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Stargate

</comment><comment><USER9> Numb3rs

</comment><comment><USER10> Alias</comment>


Google's Plan to Engineer the Next Silicon Valleys - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/googles-plan-to-engineer-the-next-silicon-valleys-8dc70735f00c <comment><USER2> What is up with these rambling, boring articles which go on for pages and pages without getting to the point?</comment>


SpaceX Dragon Rendezvous and Docking Waved Off for Today - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/2017/02/22/spacex-dragon-rendezvous-and-docking-waved-off-for-today/ <comment><USER2> r/spacex says the issue was incorrect data was uploaded to Dragon. Not a hardware or software issue on Dragon itself.

</comment><comment><USER3> The second attempt at docking Dragon was successful: [https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/834716206930108416](https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/834716206930108416)

Progress MS-05, the first russian resupply mission after the failed Progress MS-04, should arrive tomorrow, February 24th: [http://www.russianspaceweb.com/progress- ms-05.html](http://www.russianspaceweb.com/progress-ms-05.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> In case SpaceX is reading: I would love to read a postmortem.

After having built Spash[0], I have much more appreciation for the difficulty of correctly computing spacial locations.

[0]: [https://espadrine.github.io/spash](https://espadrine.github.io/spash)

<comment><USER5> Oh my ... what is spash doing to my browser history? :-/

<comment><USER4> Just to confirm: are you using Firefox? I think it was generating a circular history, but an unrelated change I just made seems to have fixed it. Strange! I am merely using location.hash.

<comment><USER5> Chrome Version 56.0.2924.87 (64-bit) macOS El Capitan 10.11.6

And yes, it appears fixed now, thanks!

<comment><USER6> Somehow won't back page correctly in Chrome. Please just turn that off, whatever it is. I don't think anyone wants fancy history munging web pages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is fascinating to someone working in the open source Web application space. Large (but decreasing, thankfully) pockets of our culture still need convincing about test coverage; clients still can't be sold on its value.

<comment><USER8> Clients can be sold on bug free features though. Good test coverage is a good way to get those. Past a certain point more tests will probably cost more than fewer bugs will pay, so there is a natural trade-off.

<comment><USER9> This is very true. To build on it Different domains need to understand that trade off is in different places. A self driving car needs and financial software need to be low on bugs, but will rarely kill hundreds like a bad software in power plant or nuclear missile might.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I feel like space is becoming less of a "let's cross our fingers and hope it works on the first try" culture. See space shuttle landing for a typical example.

<comment><USER10> Was it ever? I think millions of dollars doesn't fit "let's cross our fingers".

The Space Shuttle had 1 complete backup system and if that one failed another one to land safely.

<comment><USER11> Millions of dollars _and_ human lives. I think things like the fact that Nixon had an Apollo failure speech ready is the exact opposite of "cross your fingers" and more proof that they tried to think through everything they could, including unpredictable failure.

<comment><USER12> I agree. Eisenhower had a similar speech ready had the D-Day invasion failed. It's just part of leading any large project that could fail spectacularly.

<comment><USER13> Huh, I'd be interested in reading that.

<comment><USER12> [http://www.businessinsider.com/d-day-in-case-of-failure- lett...](http://www.businessinsider.com/d-day-in-case-of-failure-letter-by- general-eisenhower-2012-6)

<comment><USER13> Interesting, thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Organisational Structures for Sustainable Free Software Development [video] - <AUTHOR> https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9087-organisational_structures_for_sustainable_free_software_development <comment><AUTHOR> Referenced books and links: [https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2017/Fahrplan/events...](https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2017/Fahrplan/events/9087.html)</comment>


Failure - <AUTHOR> http://www.possibleprobable.com/?p=150

<comment><USER2> _The Buddhists have a belief that I find intriguing: Before you are born, you get to see what your life will be. You are then asked if the life will be acceptable. If you give your OK, your memory is wiped clean and you get to live that life. Otherwise, you get to look at another life. So, the life you lead, with all its suffering and challenges, is the life you chose on that day._

Not to put too fine a point on it, as this is clearly just a fluffy inspirational quote, and the article itself is worth reading, but this quote kinda sorta makes no sense. Here's why:

 _You are then asked if the life will be acceptable._ What you find acceptable is a function of who you are. Who you are is also largely a function of the experiences you have had in life. What I find acceptable now is not what I found acceptable 10 years ago and probably not what I will find acceptable in 10 years. So, acceptable from what perspective? The perspective of the person who has lived that life, or the perspective of someone else? Those are two very different perspectives that will lead to very different answers.

Another big hole is that there are only a finite number of existences out there. So surely someone has to be stumped with a life they didn't like. It is condescending and incredibly insulting to tell someone whose life really, really sucks that they chose it.

So, a nice article, with a nice fluffy thought at the beginning, but the gaping holes in that fluffy thought kind of bothered me.

<comment><USER3> I've never heard of that belief, and a Buddhist posting on the original blog mentioned the same. Must be some specific flavor of Buddhism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I found this quote interesting: "psychologists have found that a person flourishes when their chance of success is between 80% and 95%. If your chance of success is below 80%, you start to act desperate. Above 95%, you start to get complacent".

I wonder if many startups feel anywhere close to an 80% chance of success.

<comment><USER5> I think it's imperative. From an outsider's perspective, most start-ups look like a bunch of nuts riding the edge of sanity. From the inside, you have to convince yourself that you will succeed.

Yes, it looks a little bit like crazy.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I've ever been that confident on a decent sized project. I'm starting to wonder if it explains a lot of things about me or if its just the latest convenient thing to tell myself :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That post is a good example of what is wrong with blogs. It's basically an interesting intro without a body, 'cause, you know, blog entries are 500 words or less.

<comment><USER5> I disagree, I thought it was an amazing blog post.

The bottom-line is that you have to entertain online. No entertainment, no visitors. And people aren't entertained when they see a big wall o' text.

If you were even slightly entertained, I'll bet you give his blog another chance next time.

Really, I'm not sure what more he could have said, beyond setting the stage for a grander story.

<comment><USER7> _The bottom-line is that you have to entertain online. No entertainment, no visitors. And people aren't entertained when they see a big wall o' text._

I wouldn't even say that. Blogs are blogs. They are a certain medium with certain styles & certain breakable 'rules.' Evolution & survivor bias ensure that most blog posts read are the types of blog posts that are appealing to the the people reading them. I see no problem with that. Same goes for novels, biographies, essays, magazine articles or pretty much any category of writing. Nothing wrong with that. A blog within the framework of the style is definitely a useful one to have out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> BTW, Aaron's the author of one of the finest books on programming, programming Cocoa/Mac in Objective-C specifically: [http://www.amazon.com/Cocoa- Programming-Mac-OS-3rd/dp/032150...](http://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming- Mac-OS-3rd/dp/0321503619/)

If you've ever wanted to write that little iPhone app, pick up his book and you'll be a pro in few months.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've never heard that Buddhist story before! Pretty amazing.

Why do you think you picked this life?

<comment><USER9> To experience life in the upper class of the second to last generation of humanity, Generation Y. It's a learning experience and my post-human soul will have this life added to its knowledge along with all of the other lives it has lived.

<comment><USER10> My sarcasm detector is flipping.

<comment><USER9>
      Teen2: Are you being sarcastic, dude?
      Teen1: I don't even know anymore.

-<http://www.snpp.com/episodes/3F21.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This idea of "..and I think we do our best work when we are conscious of both(success and failure)." has always intrigued me. Do we really need to know the reality of failure?

The explanation I can come up with is that the experience and knowledge of failure gives us an advantage on both sides of the 80-95% spectrum (lets ignore the validity of the numbers for a second). For the times when we feel that our chances our below 80% we get scared and if we had the experience of failure we would be better suited to handle the stress. On the 95% portion I think it keeps you honest by reminding you that you could fail and the consequences if you do.

</comment><comment><USER12> "So let me spell out my thoughts explicitly: If success is the carrot, then failure is the stick, and I think we do our best work when we are conscious of both."

I was disappointed here. This seems far too trite a conclusion for the thoughts he put forth in the rest of the entry. Did he feel compelled to wrap it up quickly for some reason? I don't know. But there's so much more he could have said, even within a reasonable-length blog entry.

</comment><comment><USER13> A startup flourishes when its founders have the belief, whether it is well founded or not, that there chance of success is at least 80%.

</comment><comment><USER14> Final quote:

"So let me spell out my thoughts explicitly: If success is the carrot, then failure is the stick, and I think we do our best work when we are conscious of both."

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting. Though I think the 80%-95% range was made up.</comment>