You Are the Exception to the Rule - <AUTHOR> https://zapier.com/blog/2012/06/17/you-are-exception-rule/ <comment><USER2> This type of saccharine feel-good prose irritates to no end. No, chances are you're not the exception to the rule of mediocrity; that's just a matter of statistics. Believing so in absence of hard evidence to the contrary is delusional and won't make things better.

Entrepeneurs fail every day. Hundreds, maybe thousands. Don't fall for the cheap words of encouragement.

[ADDENDUM: I still don't trust the "Most coders can't do FizzBuzz" meme that generally accompanies the flowery you're-a-special-snowflake-talk. Applicants maybe, but that doesn't say much. There's tons of decent programmers out there, and 99% of them won't get famous or found a sustainable business.]

<comment><USER3> Conversely, I see zero value in this kind of reactionarily pessimistic you're- average-at-everything-and-even-if-you're-good-you'll-probably-fail-anyway stuff that always turns up on any encouraging article.

You get zero points for being able to say "See, I was right" when someone fails. Completely aside from that, it's factually wrong; people on this site are quite likely to have skills and resources that the average person cannot _comprehend_. Being a "decent programmer" is a fabulously valuable skill in the modern world. You aren't guaranteed to be able to leverage it into capital right away, but if you work hard and get out of your own head it's fully achievable.

<comment><USER4> I like to think:

"I am not a special snowflake, the sun does not shine out of my ass. But, if I work hard and apply my skills creatively in areas where others aren't it doing it as much, I may well have a shot at something cool. At least, a better shot than if I did nothing today"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have to say, my startup has struggled with this. We're a two-man shop, and neither of us buys phone apps, pays for virtual goods, clicks on ads, etc. It tends to make us think that other people don't do those things either, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Part of the article's conclusion is, "Get the product in front of your core audience," and I suspect that's the only way for the inexperienced to accurately gauge the value of their product.

<comment><USER6> It's the way for anyone, experienced or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just go to donwload.com or Apple's appstore and look at the tens of thousands of applications/apps there. All those programmers who created those applications/apps can do FizzBuzz and more. But only a fraction of them make good money from these applications. Making good money from a software product is hard. Yes, go for it, but these kind of motivational posts will be a bit irritating after your first failure.

<comment><USER8> Many of these apps and tools do not have unique creators - there are devs who churn out apps like crazy, multiple of apps per year. Also, many do not try to make a living off of this - go figure, how much can you possibly earn with a top-10% mobile app? How long will earnings last? Seems more like a lottery to me. The article's writer means SaaS products, and I doubt that your chances of financial success are nearly as high with mobile apps you put in stores.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> As developers we often have the mistaken belief that "anyone else could do what I can do, would rather do it themselves and won't pay for anyone else to do it for them".

This comes from a mindset that because _I_ can do something, would rather than do it myself and wouldn't pay for someone else to do it for me means that no one else would either.

Just because you can solve a problem yourself, would take the time to do so and wouldn't pay someone else to do it instead doesn't mean the rest of the world thinks like that.

For most people, they can't do what you do and/or wouldn't take the time to do it and/or would rather pay someone else to do it for them. That's the rule to which you're an exception.

</comment><comment><USER10> As a non-programmer who works in a field that 99% of programmers aren't aware even exists, I would like to point out that there are a lot of simple software programs to be made for specialized purposes in various fields. They don't exist because nobody who can build them knows they're necessary, and the people who need them don't know they're possible.

</comment><comment><USER11> I met a 50ish solo programmer a few months ago. His application handles an issue for a specific subset of nonprofit org (I'm probably not giving away too much if I say, churches). The app is not web enabled, it's not social, it doesn't run on ios android or mac. From our conversation I inferred he spends hardly any time on marketing it because he doesn't need more users. Yet he makes a comfortable living solely from the licenses, doesn't touch the app for weeks at a time, and adds new features on his own schedule.

</comment><comment><USER12> Question: is zapier.com profitable?

(I'm asking because if zapier is profitable then blog post has some merit. If not then... oh well)

<comment><USER13> They're set up very well. Can't say more than that, I'll leave it to their team to give the details they choose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is absolutely true. Market validation goes both ways! Don't assume a product is either viable _or_ unviable without confirmation from the intended consumers.

</comment><comment><USER15> _if you search around the internet you'll find dozens of products that aren't complicated, but make stacks of Benjamin Franklins for the developers of those products_

I think this is particularly true if you can target a point of friction in the sales process, e.g. real-estate. I have had agents tell me that if they think something will make them one extra sale a year they won't even hesitate to spend a couple of hundred dollars on it.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think people tend to generalize things. I, for example, have the mentality that if I understand\learn something with little effort, then others can do the same. The truth is, the others usually don't bother to put forth that little effort, which makes me the exception to the rule. For example, I recently made a decent chunk of money by creating a simple WordPress site that was valuable enough for my client...I would've paid a fraction of what my client paid if I was him. So I definitely concur with this post.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've seen SEVERAL times that "most programmers can't solve fizzbuzz." I did this after just a few months of learning python, on paper no less (Ok, i had one if/elif statement in the wrong spot. a quick run of the script in the command line showed me it didn't work how I thought it should and I fixed it).

But are there any DATA that corroborate this largely anecdotal statement? I figure, it _has_ to be much less prevalent than these statements. (Or if it isn't, I better get my ass in gear and really learn to program so I can make the big bucks).

</comment><comment><USER18> Bullshit.</comment>


Ask HN: Thoughts on 3D printed guns? - <AUTHOR>

In 1822, Charles Babbage wrote about a plan to print mathematical tables using a machine. Yet not until 1979, 157 years later, did Epson's competitively priced printer hit homes, establishing a market for such trinkets. The burgeoning realm of computer printers was launched. Today, mass-produced printers flourish, present in nearly every North American home, owing to a visionary mathematician.
In 1984, Charles Hull invented stereo-lithography: the ability to print tangible 3D objects. By 2002, scientists had engineered a functioning kidney, demonstrating the idea of printable organs. In 2008, the first printer capable of printing most of its own parts was created. The year 2012 saw the first 3D-printed prosthetic implant. Printing 3D objects is a technology poised to bloom.
In 1901, Ransom Olds invented the modern assembly line, ushering an era of mass production. His idea allowed manufacturers to make everything from horseless carriages to automatic weapons on an unprecedented scale, but not with free rein. Factory owners, distributors, and stores must abide by certain regulations, including strict gun controls. In a world of mass-produced, manufactured goods, drafting laws that restrict who can buy or produce guns makes sense.
Hardly will it take 157 years for 3D printers to go from hobbyist tinker-toy to standard home appliance. The technology is advancing faster than a speeding bullet. A decade hence will dawn the age of 3D printers, wounding the mass production industry and killing certain government controls.
Once people can print plastic cups and assorted nicknacks from their couch, the proliferation of untraceable guns could be... explosive. <comment><USER3> I'm doubtful of the 3D printing revolution that everyone is expecting or is claiming is occurring.

Guns are an interesting example. Printing a 3D gun is somewhat viable but a 3D printer is not a dispenser where you can just press a button and a perfectly crafted glock pops out for your 5 year old. 1) You have to have strong enough materials for the casing 2) The inner surface of your barrel better be smooth (something even high precision 3d printers are relatively bad at) 3) If 1 or 2 is in any way flawed its going to be your own hand thats blown off - <USER2> get it right.

3D printing is going to have to compete with a global distribution system that is already extremely efficient. Take for example coffee cups - great example of something to print but I'd probably never print a coffee cup. Why? Because they are damn cheap and ubiquitous. By the time I get done with downloading the model, purchasing the materials, printing the cup, preparing the surface (shining, painting, whatever) Ive spent more time and money than just hopping over to Walmart and spending a few bucks. Guns within the rings of people who want them in mass who you are mostly likely worried about are in a similar situation - they can get one down the street.

On top of it, 3D printing currently competes pretty much only with the lower tier of manufacturing... stuff made out a single material with usually at most a few parts. Whenever I see what can be done with a 3D printer its honestly not that compelling - toys, utensils, models, etc. I think 3D printing has potential but also think it will be a long time until everyone is printing everything they want.

<comment><AUTHOR> At TurboSquid.com you can search and download 3D models in 60 seconds. Printing cups is a parallel task, so only a few minutes are lost. You can also print in various colours, so painting is not necessary. You would, of course, have to buy the material spools, but those will come down in price and you can order them online quite quickly.

If you make $30 per hour as a consultant and it takes 15 minutes to get to Walmart, 5 minutes to purchase the item, then those cups have cost ~$20 in your time, plus gas.

You might like this article, showing the strength of mixed materials:

[http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/140084-nasa-3d-prints- roc...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/140084-nasa-3d-prints-rocket-parts- with-steel-not-plastic)

And then there's this video of a printed gun in use:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuDCW_Rn5JI>

For a gun to be lethal, it need only successfully fire one bullet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There was a really interesting article on Forbes about this a couple of months ago. Ultimately, only a receiver for an AR-15 was printed, but it is scary thinking about the possibilities:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2012/07/28/the-end- of-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2012/07/28/the-end-of-gun- control/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder outside of TV, how many crimes are prevented by tracing guns?

At some point we have to trust our fellow man to use good judgement. Every day I drive past cars going the other way at a combined speed > 60mph and the only thing protecting me is a couple of lines painted on the road.</comment>


Running Oracle JDK on Docker? You're Breaking the Law - <AUTHOR> http://blog.takipi.com/running-java-on-docker-youre-breaking-the-law/ <comment><USER2> Or just download the jdk normally, accept license, create your own docker image with the jdk fully installed and you are ready to go. Not breaking any laws here (or even licence agreements, there's a difference you know!), so please change the silly headline.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're distributing your image in any way / creating copies etc. then you do

<comment><USER3> If you're giving copies to other people, that's distribution, which is dicey, but if you're making copies for your own use, that's reproduction, which is fine.

<comment><USER4> I'm agreeing with you because the alternative would make deployment processes of snapshotting built images for faster startup time against the law. If you couldn't use AMIs in AWS because the Oracle JRE is installed but instead are forced to install at launch time then that makes Oracle largely irrelevant to use in the cloud - no one wants to limit their startup time by a multiple minutes to download and install for a scaling event (and barring any network issues on their servers if hosting the installer package is seen as distribution as well). I haven't heard of any issues with moving around your own internally built virtual images with Oracle Java if you have accepted the licensing agreement for during the build and snapshot process, and using docker seems no different.

<comment><USER5> This has absolutely nothing to do with installing at launch time. This has to do with installing, then _not distributing_. Distributing is a very well defined term in the industry, and does not simply mean making copies, or deploying to your own machines.

Distributing means giving the built artifact to a 3rd party.

Yes, you can create your own JDK docker base image. Yes, you can deploy it at will on any of _your_ systems. No, you can't push it to a public respository for other people to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The title is misleading. It should state "Oracle JDK" instead of "Java". As proposed in the text, with OpenJDK, you are just fine.

<comment><USER7> Ok, we'll s/Java/Oracle JDK/ above.

<comment><USER8> The whole thing is misleading and mostly clickbait. Merely running Oracle's JDK on docker does not violate the license nor break any law.

<comment><USER7> In such a case, it's best to flag the story (as users indeed have).

<comment><USER8> Oh I did. Was just sticking to the first rule of flag club.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We switched from the Oracle JDK to OpenJDK a couple of months back and it's going fine. It's nice to "yum install openjdk" and not have to worry about license gotchas. What are the advantages to the Oracle JDK that we're missing?

<comment><USER10> I believe the only worth feature missing is Flight Recorder/Mission Control.

You gain debug symbols that can help you investigate JVM crashes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For what it's worth, Red Hat's OpenJDK release is validated with the TCK. So not all OpenJDK builds are equal... [https://access.redhat.com/articles/1299013](https://access.redhat.com/articles/1299013)

</comment><comment><USER12> These days is there any great benefit to Oracle JDK over Zulu? It can be deployed with Docker easily [1].

1 - [https://www.azul.com/products/zulu/docker/](https://www.azul.com/products/zulu/docker/)

<comment><USER13> The main advantage is the monitoring/profiling tools, and in particular the awesome Java Flight Recorder. It doesn't make a difference in practice (assuming you don't want to pay for JFR, though many would), as JFR is free for use only in a development environment and not in production.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wasn't aware of this, thanks for sharing. The lean JVM installation script is also useful (I won't re-distributed the image built that way though).

</comment><comment><USER15> Should not be exclusive to Docker. Vagrant boxes, AWS AMIs and other premade OS images with (Oracle) Java preinstalled could fall into the same problem.</comment>


On Campuses Far From China, Still Under Beijing's Watchful Eye - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/us/chinese-students-western-campuses-china-influence.html <comment><USER2> And China's government have also bought nearly all Chinese language press in Australia:

[http://www.smh.com.au/national/chinese-language- newspapers-i...](http://www.smh.com.au/national/chinese-language-newspapers- in-australia-beijing-controls-messaging-propaganda-in- press-20160610-gpg0s3.html)

And actively entering into mainstream media:

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-03/birtles-australian- med...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-03/birtles-australian-media- playing-into-chinas-grand-strategy/7472870)

<comment><USER3> Good idea for a startup if it's a near guaranteed buyout.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In 2016, China landed a robotic rover on the moon. The NY Times had fairly extensive coverage. For a solid month, the main article was in the top ten of forwarded articles, assuring that all nytimes.com readers would repeatedly see it in a prominent sidebar. This is unusual behavior. NY Times readers are interested, but easily jaded by space travel. And nothing lasts forever a month.

Finally, I complained to the nytimes.com ombudsman. Gone in a day! Someone there must have agreed with me. Click farm behavior.

<comment><USER5> >> This is unusual behavior.

>> Click farm behavior.

2010 U.S. Census reported[1] 695,000 who self-identify as Chinese in the NY metro area _alone_...never mind LA, Bay area, Boston, and Seattle...only a few of the largest, wealthiest, highly educated cities in the nation. Are you sure?

[1] [https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-11.pdf](https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-11.pdf)

<comment><USER6> I think if the nytimes were to actually have responded to agjacobsons claim, it would have been with an internal investigation, and then any action would have been taken only after the results of that investigation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the Chinese government is making a huge mistake in the way it is oppressing freedom of speech at home and broad.

China is now on its fourth political and economic system in the last century and a half. The present system is an accidental conglomeration of three quite contradictory philosophies: Confucianism, Marxism, and liberalism. It seems quite likely at some point it is going to prove unworkable.

At that point China is going to need to really think things out from basic principles and decide what sort of country it wants to be over the long term. That will take a great deal of intelligent, independent thinking. Alas, that is just what Xi Jinping is doing his best to stamp out.

<comment><USER8> _China is now on its fourth political and economic system in the last century and a half. The present system is an accidental conglomeration of three quite contradictory philosophies: Confucianism, Marxism, and liberalism. It seems quite likely at some point it is going to prove unworkable._

The current system is working far better than the last few systems. Until 1985, China had regular famines. Now it has the largest GDP in the world.

<comment><USER7> You're right, China has been doing far better. The question is whether the present political system, which is to a great extent the product of a series of accidents, will hold up over the long term.

I think the reason Confucianism was so successful for so long is the same reason the US system has lasted for centuries, namely both are based on a coherent, well-thought out political and economic philosophy. China at present doesn't have anything like that.

As I see it, the problem with Confucianism is it was designed for an agrarian civilization, whereas today it is an industrial one. The Chinese have never really thought out what sort of system they need for today's world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've noticed similar things at my university [am research faculty; disclaimer: throwaway account since my usual one identifies me].

Something I've seen often is unfamiliar faces specifically at seminars presented by academics of Taiwanese origin. My department has a pretty static set of seminar attendees, so it is quite noticeable when three or four undergrad-aged people I don't know slip into the back of the room.

</comment><comment><USER10> China is buying influence Globally as the United States and Europe cede soft power after years of war in the middle east.

While not fantastic for rights of freedom loving people everywhere it is probably a good thing for Africans in general since they seem to be getting a lot of economic love from China in exchange for mineral rights.

[http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/03/africa/what-africans-really- th...](http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/03/africa/what-africans-really-think-of- china/)

<comment><USER11> War in the middle east is ruining the West. I don't understand it and I don't buy the oil explanation. With the absurd cost of these wars we could just buy the oil, or pay for megaprojects to replace it with gas (even gas to liquids), nuclear, and renewable power. There seems to be no rational explanation for the immense gravity well of Middle Eastern war and how it drags in Democrats and Republicans alike even if they seem initially opposed to it.

I also don't buy the religious or Israel explanation, as neither of these groups have that much influence. The need to constantly involve ourselves in the Middle East seems like an imperative that supercedes all other concerns.

I wasn't a fan of Trump and did not vote for him, but I did have a little bit of hope that at the very least he might be against these wars on "America first" grounds. Looks like the answer is no as his administration is slowly taken over by the war party.

It's almost like when presidents are elected they learn something nobody else knows.

<comment><USER12> _War in the middle east is ruining the West. I don 't understand it and I don't buy the oil explanation_

The conspiracy theory is that the war serves to dislodge the population and increase refugee flows to Europe to destabilize the region economically and politically. The war in the Middle East is in truth a war against the European Union, especially Germany. So the story goes.

<comment><USER11> I haven't heard that one.

I have heard that it is a proxy war against Russia or China, but I'm not sure that makes sense either. Russia in particular has tons of oil and doesn't need any from elsewhere.

The only thing that makes a little sense is that it's an end in itself: we must have war to support the war industry and it's associated jobs and social programs. It's not just corporations with an interest in this. For many poor Americans military service is the only way to advance, and military service signs you up for a much higher tier of social programs than the rest of the public. In truth America does have socialism. It's just enlistment to grave, not cradle to grave.

If there were a prolonged period without war, people would start questioning these expenditures.

<comment><USER13> > Russia in particular has tons of oil and doesn't need any from elsewhere.

Russia seeks to deny it to potential geostrategic rivals. It's not a military advantage to have oil; it's an advantage to have it and deny it to your opponent.

Also, Russia may have enough for internal needs and modest exports, but that's perhaps insufficient for what is antiicoated in the event of a major conventional war.

<comment><USER14> More prosaically, Russia wants it's oil to be worth more. The crash in oil prices due to the US shale/fracking revolution, and Saudi pricing war to try to bankrupt the frackers, has smashed Russian oil profits, and caused Putin heartburn. Destabilizing the middle east raises oil prices, enmeshes the US in a no-win conflict, and imposes massive costs on EU powers, leading to xenophobia, rise of far right, and possibly the breakup of the EU. Win, win, win.

And POTUS likes Putin? What a doofus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Israel's been doing this for a long time. Try inviting pro-Palestinian activists to campus and see what happens.

At the end of the day, everyone has the right to protest, whether that's Black Lives Matter or the Westboro Baptist Church or any other group. Always distressing to see it used to further what I see as oppression but there's not really a whole lot to be done about it. You get your opinions and I get mine.

If people want to miss their kids' graduation, well, kinda sucks to be them I guess. Not everybody agrees with their graduation speaker, but you choose to make it political instead of being, you know, _about your kids ' achievements_. I had friends who had George W Bush speak at their graduations, in 2008 no less.

Suck it up for 15 minutes, nobody is forcing you to march in support of some college graduation speaker.

<comment><USER16> There's a very interesting investigative documentary by Al Jazeera that shows how Israel funds and manages the Israeli lobby in the UK. I'll look for the link and edit this comment.

 _Edit_ : Here is a link to part 1 of the series: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceCOhdgRBoc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceCOhdgRBoc). You can follow the "Up next" link to watch the other parts; there are 4 parts in total.

<comment><USER17> Not sure that the mouthpiece of the ruling family of Qatar is a reputable source for anything, much less any topic involving Israel.

<comment><USER16> You _might_ be able to say that about AJ Arabic, but AJ English is an entirely different entity. You'd actually be surprised how much autonomy AJ English is given in its reporting.

Also, you could say AJ's reporting on Israel is biased, but why do you dismiss everything else? AJ has some of the best journalists in the world and continually pushes the barrier in its reporting worldwide.

<comment><USER18> Until you just referred to them as AJ, I had no idea that they were the same as Al Jazeera. I saw videos on YouTube by AJ and just figured they were some other entity.

<comment><USER16> Ah yes, I believe that's their US branch. IIRC, the AJ America news channel didn't do so well, so they pivoted to an online-only presence and rebranded to AJ+.

You'd be amazed how many branches Al Jazeera has worldwide. Heck, they even have AJ Balkans[1]!

[1]: [http://balkans.aljazeera.net/](http://balkans.aljazeera.net/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Reminds me of that one time when some students at UCSD protested against the university hosting the Dalai Lama for a graduation speech.

[https://qz.com/908922/chinese-students-at-ucsd-are- evoking-d...](https://qz.com/908922/chinese-students-at-ucsd-are-evoking- diversity-to-justify-their-opposition-to-the-dalai-lamas-graduation-speech/)

I've always felt that in an increasingly globalized and connected world, we will start to see increased external influence in America from parties that are not the Democrats or the Republicans. China is arguably the world's largest and most powerful political party, and with no domestic competition, it pretty much has the freedom and ability to overshadow smaller, more divided political entities.

<comment><USER20> The UCSD Dalai Lama incident is literally the subject of at least the first four paragraphs of this article.

<comment><USER21> The leadoff photo is literally outside the main library at UCSD.

<comment><USER21> The second photo is literally the chancellor of UCSD with the Dalai Lama.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Let's not forget the market pressures watering-down American Hollywood movies to not being banned in China.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/hollywood-movies-in- china-201...](http://www.businessinsider.com/hollywood-movies-in- china-2016-10)

</comment><comment><USER23> At some point, someone with gravitas has to come out and say "Money is not everything!".

In Flint, MI city officials say, "We're not spending money to upgrade water pipes"

For healthcare, "I don't want to pay for somebody else's healthcare"

For housing "I don't want a low income neighborhood next to mine reducing my property value"

For race relations "The criminal justice system is just fine"

....And now "Don't offend the Chinese"

This has to stop, money is not everything. At some point we need to do what's right (and show empathy) before money.

There are lots of things that people don't like, the world doesn't revolve around them. If the US claims to be a free society and wants to uphold it's true values, man the eff up and stop catering to almighty dollar. It'll hurt in the short term, but will bear dividends later.

</comment><comment><USER24> This link is a Readability-style view of [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/us/chinese-students- weste...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/us/chinese-students-western- campuses-china-influence.html)

It looks good, but it's a not good canonical link for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER25> Blocking other speakers isn't speech, and it is not protected. _Speaking out_ against an invited speaker _is_ free speech, but if they were successful in blocking an invitation, that would be grounds for a lawsuit against the university.

So, condemning China for their attempts to block a speaker isn't so wrong. They have the right to say what they like. However, when they say "this is trampling my free speech rights" they're just as wrong as democrats who felt that way about Milo at Berkeley.

It often takes a lawsuit to demonstrate what is and isn't free speech. There are some good examples on thefire.org [1] which I learned about during the Yale Halloween costume debacle.

[1] [https://www.thefire.org/category/cases/free- speech/](https://www.thefire.org/category/cases/free-speech/)

</comment><comment><USER26> [http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-25/uts-professor- preve...](http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-25/uts-professor-prevented- from-boarding-flight-from-china/8386982)

[https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/world/asia/china- xinji...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/world/asia/china-xinjiang-ban- muslim-names-muhammad-jihad.html)

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/anderscorr/2017/05/03/china- bul...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/anderscorr/2017/05/03/china-bullied- australia-into-ejecting-taiwan-next-time-show-china-the-door)

We are dealing with an increasingly totalitarian state, which bullies other countries through money. Present Chinese leadership is increasingly dictator like and has conflicts with every neighbour. China is not good news for our future. Western countries beauty is the free speech culture. You have to experience the suffocation of living in China, the fear of retribution and no basic han rights accorded to you. Trade with China should be shunned, hope was that trade would make the society open but instead it has made them even more brutalistic on the citizens.

</comment><comment><USER27> I am sure they will be welcomed alongside third wave feminism and radical islamic groups to the great coallition of the outraged.

</comment><comment><USER28> Of cause the students will protest Dalai Lama.

China has a database for a list of certified overseas universities. There was a school removed from that list for allowing Dalai to talk about Tibet in his visit.

:(

</comment><comment><USER29> I just don't think all that effort is going to make a difference in anti-China sentiment in the US or anywhere else.

<comment><USER30> It might make it worse. I actually have many things I love about China and wouldn't mind moving there for a few years if it wasn't for this oppressive stuff.

<comment><USER31> If you don't involve yourself deep into politics the most oppressive thing there is that you have to eat with chopsticks.

It is hardly totalitarian dystopia. As long as you are there to make money and help the chineese do so you are fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> China doesn't represent Anglo Saxon culture or ideals. Canada, NZ, Australia, the UK and the US are the reason we have freedom of everything.

</comment><comment><USER33> I've met Chinese grad students who said the students at Tianamen square were terrorists.

<comment><USER34> A friend of mine played hosts to some Chinese students in London, as there was one happening he took them along to a demonstration that was happening that day. They were utterly baffled, he said, they asked why anyone would want to protest against the government?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I don't know how I feel about posting outline.com articles that are from the NYTimes.com without their consent...

Seems pretty unethical since I don't have a subscription and would like to support them somehow.

</comment><comment><USER36> Globalism can be a real bastard.

</comment><comment><USER37> Link to source, which I could not find in the posted link: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/us/chinese-students- weste...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/us/chinese-students-western- campuses-china-influence.html)

<comment><USER5> It's literally at the top, plain as day, in a hyperlink labeled _SOURCE_ , immediately to the right of a label denoting that it came from NYT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Seems like a war of culture vs. culture, who will win?

<comment><USER39> The one with the money.

<comment><USER40> More specifically, the reserve currency.

<comment><USER41> The culture with the reserve currency has lost its mojo and is confused about its values. It that continues there's no way it's going to win.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's interesting how many people instantly try to twist this into an anti- Israel thread.

<comment><USER43> I'm not sure what you're implying when you say it's "interesting".

If you have a problem with the equation of anti-Tibet political intervention by China and anti-Palestine intervention by Israel then state your case.

<comment><USER13> > If you have a problem with the equation of anti-Tibet political intervention > by China and anti-Palestine intervention by Israel then state your case.

As much as Israel has colonized parts of Palestine by way of settlements, its nothing like the Chinese annexation and colonization of Tibet.

<comment><USER44> What about the white annexation and colonization of America?

<comment><USER43> Equally bullshit. I can admit Israel is better than colonial America. Kind of a low bar though.

I don't think I'd have a problem with people advocating for settlements if they acknowledged they were colonizing native people in order to eradicate their culture.

At least be honest about it. People act like Israel is some sort of liberal state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> For better or for worse, China's interpretation of freedom seems to match their culture.

Culturally, in much of Asia, criticizing someone else is more offensive than in the West. "Saving face" seems more prevalent to me in Eastern offices and families than Western institutions.

So, punishing someone for offensive speech in China probably feels normal to a lot of people. More people there avoid pointing out each other's mistakes, and talk miles around problems to avoid that.

I think that results in a situation where people spend effort trying to win certain battles that people in the West would let go.

</comment><comment><USER45> I wish we could somehow curb Chinese immigration and trade here in Canada. Our government seems to be bending over backwards for them.

<comment><USER29> I wish we could somehow make people less ignorant and more tolerant here in Canada. People are always blaming immigrants for their problems.

<comment><USER12> Rising housing prices in Vancouver are a valid concern. I don't understand why the grandparent is downvoted. You don't combat racism by not recognizing valid grievances.

<comment><USER45> how am I being racist? We have rich chinese immigrants from mainland literally buying their permanent residency and driving up the price of housing here. We have the chinese government pushing us around and our weak government isn't standing up for Canadians. I think it's a valid concern.

<comment><USER29> Hmmm, it's just a hunch I have given how you don't want any more Chinese immigration? And trade with them is automatically bad?

\- What's wrong with immigrants buying their residency? This happens all the time. At least you know they won't be a 'burden on the system' as some people would say. What the rich Chinese immigrants were doing was legal until some people didn't like seeing more Chinese people driving around town in their expensive cars and "flaunting" their wealth. And it's definitely not like half the town is made of rich Chinese immigrants as one HN poster put it. The last census puts Vancouver at about 18.7% Chinese (which includes over a hundred years of Chinese immigrants who helped build/shape the city).

\- Your assumption that rich Chinese immigrants are responsible for driving up the price of housing is ignorant at best, racist at worst. One report says that 5% of buyers are foreign. They are buying the high-end properties which means the majority of properties are being fought over by Canadians. Vancouver is the only major city on the west coast of Canada and many people want to live here. Plus let's not ignore the many Canadians who are involved in speculation too. Did you know that mortgage debt (of Canadians) has been on the rise? The issue is complex and can't be boiled down to "the Chinese caused it".

\- The Canadian government eliminated the investor immigrant program, is that bending over backwards? How about the creation of the 15% foreign buyer's tax?

\- What you see as Canada being "pushed around" is trying to maintain good relations with its trading partners (one of which is China) which is a delicate dance. Do you see how the Canadian government handles the US? Carefully.

\- I don't know why I waste my time writing this because people are more swayed by the sight of some Chinese person driving an expensive Audi. As I said, the Chinese govt is wasting their time and money too.

<comment><USER31> First - it is not racism if the gp would react disapprovingly to other nations also buying. If Russia and China places were changed, I have a feeling that he would complain about those pesky Russians buying in Vancouver.

Second - for a lot of people obtaining citizenship and residence permit in any other way than by being born or married into it is not acceptable. And outright buying it is disgusting.

Five percent in market with inflexible demand and severely constraint supply is huge.

And lets not start on the money origins which could be very shady. Do you want people with shady money in country? And why?

Disliking the side effects of immigration is not in anyway racist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I see this as an outgrowth of left-liberal student bodies clamping down on conservative speech on college campuses. If leftist students can block Ann Coulter from speaking then why can't Chinese students block the Dalai Lama? Every speech is guaranteed to offend someone and that's verboten in today's campuses. As a libertarian, I was always worried about this and it was a main reason why I opposed social justice warriors. Sadly, our fear has come to pass and censorship now reigns in universities. In the future, children's fairytales will be the only safe topic to discuss.

<comment><USER47> It has nothing really do to with that. Chinese government doesn't care about left wing American students and what they think. It is just doing what it can to promote its message, like it has been doing for decades.

<comment><USER48> the chinese government may not care what left wing american students have to say, but if those students establish a precedent that speakers deemed 'offensive' can be shut down solely for that reason, then the groundwork is laid for parties who _aren't_ left wing students to abuse that precedent as well. this is why we must defend the principle of free speech even when we disagree with the speakers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Good for them. What a waste of time. China can't even tell that there really wasn't any anti-China anything at college campuses to begin with.

It's like me going to a bakery and making sure they aren't putting hand grenades in the ovens, and posting conspicuous warning signs about the dangers hand grenade shrapnel poses to croissants and the people who eat them.

What is it with totalitarian states, and this thing where they don't get that it's not about them?

I hope they keep it up. If this is their idea of effective sentiment manipulation, fucking awesome. I'd love to see what happens if we turn up the volume on this kind of ridiculously inept play at influence.

I'd imagine it starts to look not unlike sudden emails from Nigerian princes, thoughtfully explaining their ardent desires to share their clutch of investments with me, if only I'd helpfully provide the bank account to wire all that fabulous money into.

</comment><comment><USER50> Url changed from [https://outline.com/RFwceY](https://outline.com/RFwceY), which copies this, which violates the HN guidelines, which ask submitters to submit original sources.

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

</comment><comment><USER51> TIL that pro China talk is against freedom of speech, how ironic.

<comment><USER52> "freedom of speech" refers to specific legal principles related to what kinds of reprisals the US federal government can take against you for speech (fun fact: there are types of speech which can send you to jail [0]). It has nothing to do with what kinds of actions society can take against you, or private citizens, or private institutions.

This is an article about astroturfing.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions)

<comment><USER53> >"freedom of speech" refers to specific legal principles related to what kinds of reprisals the US federal government can take against you for speech

Legally yes, but colloquially it includes non-governmental actions[1].

[1] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/freedom_of_speech](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/freedom_of_speech)</comment></comment></comment>


Insulator Changeout on H-Structure, Northwest Lineman College [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wW_oDL6Cew <comment><AUTHOR> A POV video of a timed lineman training exercise: a lineman climbing an overhead power line H-structure, hoisting up a ladder, using the hoist to pull himself and the ladder out on the arm towards the insulator, then hoisting up the line to swap out the insulator.</comment>


Record your terminal and share the recordings - <AUTHOR> http://ascii.io/ <comment><USER2> There are commandline tools for this :). Should be available on nearly every UNIX OS.

script and scriptreplay.

"The script command appeared in 3.0BSD"

[http://linux.die.net/man/1/script](http://linux.die.net/man/1/script) [http://linux.die.net/man/1/scriptreplay](http://linux.die.net/man/1/scriptreplay)

<comment><USER3> Script still (OSX) produces nonsense if you run vi in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like it. I had a similar idea a while back, but for using output from the already widely-available 'script' command.

I wonder if there was a technical reason to create a new 'recorder', or if it was just a question of ease-of-use?

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a great idea! However, it has a few issues:

1) How do I make a screencast private? 2) There isn't a way to save this locally. I don't really want to upload this to a site and then have to embed it :-)

</comment><comment><USER6> Is there any reason for not using the existing terminal configuration of the user?

I love the idea but I have a lot of aliases I use for development and not having them is _quite_ inconvenient.

</comment><comment><USER7> OMG, such service was on my ToDo list for a long long time... but I never sit down to actually do it.

Good job!

</comment><comment><USER8> when I go to here

[http://ascii.io/docs/record](http://ascii.io/docs/record)

in this section

"3\. Create profile (optional)"

I click this link

"Btw, see my profile."

which redirects me to this url

[http://ascii.io/~sickill](http://ascii.io/~sickill)

which gives

404

You shouldn't be here. Really.

You are welcome ;-)

</comment><comment> mh- can anyone recommend a service like this for realtime sharing?

<comment><USER8> you can use tmux

<comment> mh- sorry, to clarify: I'd like something web-based for the people viewing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of shelr.tv. Just with a better UI.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does it support Unicode?</comment>


Ask HN: Non-traditional startup thoughts - <AUTHOR>

I have a few ideas I've been floating around in my head for a while now - some I've even got a fair amount of exploratory code for - and I'm toying with the idea of making a go of one of them.
I know "lifestyle business" can be thought of as a pejorative term, but to hell with that. I'm a little older and a little greyer than the poster boy rockstar-ninja founder and I have far more important things in my life than work. This doesn't mean I don't work hard, but it does mean I'm not sacrificing the things most precious to me for a web app. Paradoxically this could mean I need to work much harder within my constraints and I'm fine with that.
I have a few thoughts on how I could go about this - and they are only ill-defined thoughts at the moment, but I would be much obliged for any input this community has to offer.
Ideally I'd like to work with others on this. I've tried the sole founder thing before but I miss having people to bounce ideas off, share the workload, share the spoils or just without them knowing it, getting me through one of the dark days that are bound to come along.
I'd want to split things as evenly as possibly, skewed just enough in favour of the person who is best to guide things along (this doesn't even necessarily have to be myself, though I don't foresee it not being). When money comes in, we each take our split. With a little luck we've all got some walking around money without any of the burn-out inducing hours and load that can happen.
Which brings me onto my next thought: time. I see this as being a part-time venture in terms of the hours put in. We all work say 16 hours/week - as much as possible on a schedule convenient to that person. I haven't thought out the exact number too much yet but I think 16 is low enough to fit comfortably around a fulltime job, yet enough to get things done if there are at least a couple of us.
This isn't something to make you rich beyond the dreams of avarice, but with a bit of luck and a bit of time, maybe it will be provide a nice little income. Maybe one day it will turn into something worth going full time at (and compensated accordingly of course).  If it all blows up, then fine, we go our seperate ways and hopefully everyone had a good time, at least got a little money out of it and can still go back to the day job.
Like I said, these are still-forming thoughts at the moment and I'm sure there are huge holes to be torn in my thinking but I do believe that somewhere in here is a system that can be made to work. It won't be for everyone, but your traditional startup isn't for me so I'd rather have likeminded folks on this anyway.
I may still be a little drunk from last night but I'm a long-time member of this site (even if I'm cowardly hiding behind a throwaway) and I value the insights I know a lot of you can offer.
Have at me! :) <comment><USER2> I see your query has been here 5 hours and gotten no reply. I wouldn't be posting at all if you had something substantive. I suppose that makes this a Pity Post (sorry). FWIW, here are my thoughts on the topic as someone trying to figure out such questions myself (and I'm a tad older and greyer as well):

[http://www.novemberwest.com/blog/2011/07/02/lifestyle- busine...](http://www.novemberwest.com/blog/2011/07/02/lifestyle-businesses- and-the-unreasonable-woman/)

Best of luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that (and the pity!). I think maybe either my timing is off, or more likely it's a little incoherent and a lot of saying not much at all :D Maybe I should spend a bit more time thinking over it than posting on here!</comment></comment>


Sock Puppets. Online Reviews: Completely Worthless or Only Mostly Worthless? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/08/sock-puppet-spectacular-are-online-reviews-completely-worthless-or-only-mostly-worthless/ <comment><USER2> (meta question) image credit here links to flickr, where the photo is shared under CC non-commercial license (<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc- sa/2.0/>). Is a techcrunch post really considered non-commercial usage? (non- rhetoric question)

<comment><USER3> A for-profit blog is definitely commercial usage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I'm browsing products on Amazon, I've found the reviews there to be very helpful and they've saved me from buying a lot of terrible products.

And on the flipside, I've never bought something because of good reviews that all turned out to be lies when I had the product in my hands a couple of days later.

<comment><USER5> I find the reviews themselves helpful, the scores less so.

It seems that scores follow an interesting distribution, people mostly review things they love or hate. People rarely seem to want to take the time to point out something is just ok.

You see this bimodal distribution for Yelp restaurant reviews. Reading through the reviews I find the reasoning of a lot of reviewers quite spurious. I think it would be an useful application of machine learning to determine the validity of claims and generate a real score, an automatic Zagat-machine.

It's worse for complicated products, if I was a manufacturer I'd want to be able to rebut them. For example, I was looking to buy a coffee grinder and the reviews were all over the place. It's obvious that a lot didn't read the instructions or had higher expectations than a product at that price point would provide. People complain that a $30 item is made mainly of plastic.

One of the advantages of Amazon is the sheer quantity of reviews for most items, the outliers--whether positive or negative--get lost in the noise. It does penalize products with only a couple of reviews, it starts to make you nervous and reconsider the purchase.

This really is the tyranny of choice, you waste a lot of time looking for the "perfect" product, when traditionally you'd just walk into your local store, make a decision based on imperfect knowledge, and probably be happy with what you ended up buying.

A good example is my recent purchase of a nail brush from Amazon. It's a sub-$10 item that in the past I'd have just walked into my local drugstore and picked up the cheapest out of whatever they had in stock. The category[1] has 843 products that I wasted a good hour deciding on the "best" to purchase.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/s/?url=node=11063531&rh=n:3760911,...](http://www.amazon.com/s/?url=node=11063531&rh=n:3760911,n:!11055981,n:11062741,n:11063461,n:11063531)

<comment><USER6> >It's worse for complicated products, if I was a manufacturer I'd want to be able to rebut them. For example, I was looking to buy a coffee grinder and the reviews were all over the place. It's obvious that a lot didn't read the instructions or had higher expectations than a product at that price point would provide. People complain that a $30 item is made mainly of plastic.

You can rebut. I mean, for a long time the first hit for 'prgmr.com' was a thread on webhostingtalk[1] where someone was complaining that I hadn't set them up and that I had problems. Fair complaints, on the other hand, at the time, five dollars was an unheard of price for what I was providing (It's no longer an unheard-of price. Moore's law abides.) I responded and eh, I think I ended up coming out looking okay.

I guess the thing is, acknowledging your mistakes, yes, is very unprofessional, but really? I think people are sick of dealing with professionals. Showing some humanity and some humility (even when it's the 'false humility' we all put on so that our arrogance is less irritating to others.) can help you a lot.

On the other hand, on that same website, I'm trying to sell burstable 10G cogent ports[2] for a price that is currently unheard of, and I've gotten no bites, so It's possible that people prefer professionals for expensive things and humans for cheap things.

Note, though, (and this is the 'false humility' I describe) you don't want to directly say "you are too dumb to use the product" - even if they are. I mean, you want to explain the proper use of the product, and you want to back out the deals (refunds, usually) with the people that are unwilling or unable to do it correctly. Saying things here like 'Oh, I should improve this documentation here' or 'oh, I should link to this other documentation over there' is also good, especially if you really can improve that documentation. Personally, I think having a reputation for being not particularly easy to use is very good. You don't want to deal with the people that want handholding, especially when your product is as difficult to use safely as a Linux server.

[1][http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-541344.htm...](http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-541344.html)

[2]<http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1186971>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If a review is littered with phrases such as "modern masterpiece", "will touch your soul" or "a magnificent book", I'm not likely to take it seriously. I pay attention to reviews in which the reviewer can (a) convince me that they've actually read the book and (b) show me that their criteria for a good book have something in common with mine.

<comment><USER8> Exactly; maybe it's just because of age, but by the time on-line reviews became important my BS filters were well developed. Its not very difficult to detect the chaff, and it doesn't take too many heuristics---I like "specificity" a lot---to recognize the honest ones. Then doing your step b is easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe adding the social factor could improve things? A platform that finds me a review from my third degree connection would be nifty. The biggest problem probably being not enough close connections who bothered to review. Sigh, back to good old asking around (maybe at least using e-mail or IM.)

</comment><comment><USER10> I find this article ironic...

Techcrunch is a "publication" I've always found questionable and wondered how much sock-puppetry was hiding under the covers. Note I have no hard evidence, just a feel.

Sock puppets complaining about sock puppets... Go figure.

<comment><USER11> I assure you, I am not a sock puppet.

Of course, that's exactly what a sock puppet would say. Hmm. Is there a sock- puppet Turing test?

<comment><USER10> >>Hmm. Is there a sock-puppet Turing test?<<

You could make millions! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Disappointed - I thought this was going to be an honest review about sock puppets. I was hoping to see how well our mascot fared (<http://bidkat.com>) ;)

</comment><comment><USER13> Hypothesis: Yelp relies on blackmail.

Disprove it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Sock Puppets. Tech Crunch: Completely Worthless or Only Mostly Worthless?

Seriously, though. Every source with a grain of salt.[1,2]

______________

[1] <http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html>: _"If anyone is dishonest, it's...reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them."_

[2] That's not a knock on this submission. If anything, just an application what we learned inside (ie,its principles). Or, as the author un-ironically notes, _"Even the honest reviews are mostly written by people who are stupid..."_. That sounds fair and objective, right?

</comment><comment><USER15> only somewhat. But techcrunch cant think outside of superlative and hyperbole.

</comment><comment><USER16> "Real Actors Reading Yelp Reviews" justifies any amount of sock puppetry.</comment>


Heritability of Human Longevity Substantially Inflated Due to Assortative Mating - <AUTHOR> http://www.genetics.org/content/210/3/1109 <comment><USER2> So the Howard Families from _Time Enough for Love_ might not be that far- fetched.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is assortative mating?

<comment><USER4> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assortative_mating](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assortative_mating):

 _Assortative mating is a mating pattern and a form of sexual selection in which individuals with similar phenotypes mate with one another more frequently than would be expected under a random mating pattern. Some examples of similar phenotypes are body size, skin coloration /pigmentation, and age. Assortative mating, also referred to as positive assortative mating or homogamy, can increase genetic relatedness within the family._</comment></comment>


What are the ethics of sharing things you see on Hacker News on social? - <AUTHOR>

What's the proper/preferred way (or is there one) of giving credit to Hacker News community when you find something interesting here and want to share it on social?
I often say things like "via Hacker News."
Are you giving credit to this site/community? Is that necessary, you think? Do you tag @newsycombinator when sharing what you saw here on Twitter?
Just had this question come to me out of blue right now. I like to give credit where it's due whenever possible. If I see a friend share something interesting on Facebook - I try to tag them if I want to share that same thing on Twitter, etc. <comment><USER2> Wow are you ever overthinking. You don't need to credit HN.

<comment><USER3> _You don 't need to credit HN._

It was polite to ask, however. Usually I say "Hat tip to Hacker News for the link" or "Hat tip to [screen name of user] for the link" as I post something I first see here to one of my other social networks. But I only do that if the other social network includes thoughtful people who would be good participants here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I dont post much on Facebook (almost nothing anywhere else), but a few times I see somebody post an article on a topic i read about on HN and I'll reply with a link to the discussion saying, "I also saw this on Hacker News". I think linking to the discussion gives plenty of credit and provides readers with excellent content from the community here.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you link directly to the HN post and the visitors upvote, this could penalize the post due to the no self promotion rule. Any mods want to comment on this effect?

<comment><USER6> Is there a no promotion rule? Or just a no self-promotion rule?</comment></comment>


I Only Work on "Shiny" Projects - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/design-founders/847701785dae

<comment><AUTHOR> Unshiny products may not make your friends envious, but it's where the real impact is, not to mention learning and passion. Just substitute each instance of "Designer" in the article with "Engineer" or "Founder".

<comment><USER2> Yes, agree. Another section header in the blog post could very well have been "Unshiny = Opportunity"</comment></comment>


A Town That Lost Its Walmart - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/24/business/walmart-edna-texas.html <comment><USER2> The high level of narration makes me suspicious that this might be reading into things a liiiitle too much. I think this is mostly a non-story that got written up anyway. Let's investigate their investigation.

As they mention briefly, it was a tiny Walmart, in a land pockmarked with lots of huge walmarts. There's, I dunno, maybe 20 Walmarts in the area: [https://imgur.com/a/M6mX97Q](https://imgur.com/a/M6mX97Q)

The closest Walmart is now a 23 minute drive away. For most people in New Hampshire a 23 minute drive is nothing, I can only imagine its even less of an issue in Texas. I suspect a lot of the employees _still have jobs with Walmart,_ just working at different stores. And of course its the biggest employer in the town, it probably still is!

So I think the premise is a bit of a canard and the writeup is weak.

> Some former workers from the Edna store have told friends that the drive to > their new jobs has been wearing on their cars and the cost of gas was eating > into their wages.

Eehhh. I suspect most people in tiny Texas towns commute lots, just like in NH.

> This fall, Edna received a pleasant surprise. Sales tax revenue did not drop > the way city officials feared it would after Walmart left. To many, the > numbers showed that Edna's retail stores had filled the void.

> "People learned they need to shop at home," said Mr. Hermes, the former > mayor.

Oh hm, wait a minute, maybe there is a story here!

> The revenue numbers also likely include the purchases Edna residents made on > Amazon and other large e-commerce sites.

Oh, never mind!

<comment><USER3> Thanks for using the word 'canard', which I did not recognize. I looked it up, enriched my vocabulary by one word. Gracias!</comment></comment>


Grafi.js – JavaScript Image Processing Library - <AUTHOR> http://grafijs.org/ <comment><USER2> You can do many of these effects in plain CSS using the filter operator. As a bonus, you get hardware acceleration if you combine them with translate3d(0, 0, 0).

<comment><USER3> That's cool, but that doesn't interfere with the library main goal:

"grafi.js is a library intended for learning about how image processing works"

<comment><USER4> Also - CSS tricks don't work if you're writing command line tools or backend code in JS.

<comment><USER2> That is true, but grafi.js relies on a browser's canvas API to convert an image to a Uint8ClampedArray of colour values, so it won't work on a command line or backend either. As a way to learn about convolution filters it seems fairly good though.

<comment><USER4> Good point. [https://www.npmjs.com/package/get- pixels](https://www.npmjs.com/package/get-pixels) can help parse an image to pixels, but it returns a different format than the canvas API's Uint8ClampedArray.

<comment><USER5> I haven't tested but I think you can convert ndarray to Uint8ClampedArray by doing

        new Uint8ClampedArray(ndarray.data);

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For node.js I really like lwip [0], there don't seem to be many image processing libraries around but this one covers the most common manipulations and it's written in C++ so it's quite fast.

0: [https://github.com/EyalAr/lwip](https://github.com/EyalAr/lwip)

<comment><USER7> Does it work with node 4+ now? I was using it on node 0.12 and it worked like a champ.

<comment><USER6> Using it with node 4.4, no issues to report.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A while ago I wrote a similar library, running on the GPU using WebGL[1].

It's interesting how the library just became a _wrapper_ around 3 very simple pixel shaders (color matrix, convolution and blur), with the GPU doing all the looping over each pixel for you. Imho the shaders explain the idea of each filter much more clearly than iterative code could.

[1] [http://phoboslab.org/log/2013/11/fast-image-filters-with- web...](http://phoboslab.org/log/2013/11/fast-image-filters-with-webgl)

</comment><comment><USER9> on a browser with canvas support:

Uncaught exception: DOMException: NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR Error thrown at line 58, column 6 in formatter(pixelData, width, height) in [http://grafijs.org/grafi.js](http://grafijs.org/grafi.js): return new window.ImageData(pixelData, width, height) called from line 471, column 4 in invert(imgData) in [http://grafijs.org/grafi.js](http://grafijs.org/grafi.js): return formatter(newPixeldata, imgData.width, imgData.height) called from line 147, column 4 in <anonymous function: $img.onload>() in [http://grafijs.org/](http://grafijs.org/): imageCtx.putImageData(grafi.invert(original), 0, 0)

</comment><comment><USER10> I have to imagine this will be entirely too slow to do any heavy lifting. Low level matrix support is really important otherwise your convolution is big fat nested loops.

</comment><comment><USER11> What's the point of using Uint8ClampedArray instead of just a normal array?

<comment><USER12> More than speed, it's easier working with the Uint8ClampedArray since the values correlate to RGB values (0-255). If it was a matter of speed only, the author would have used Uint32Array, which gets the speed benefit of typed arrays but allows for larger values (meaning smaller overall array size, but it's more complex to work with).

If you hop down to the annotated source, you can see Uint32Array used here:

[http://zschuessler.github.io/DeltaE/demos/de76-chroma- key/](http://zschuessler.github.io/DeltaE/demos/de76-chroma-key/)</comment></comment>


Modern Auto Layout (4th Edition) by Keith Harrison - <AUTHOR> https://useyourloaf.com/autolayout/ <comment><AUTHOR> Keith Harrison released the 4th edition of his book Modern Auto Layout. It details how to use the layout system on iOS, macOS and tvOS. He updated it with the following points:

Chapter 2: iOS 13 adds iPad multiple window support. Chapter 4: updated the examples for the new Xcode 11. Chapter 9: Interface Builder now shows custom alignment rectangles in the canvas. Chapter 11: Scroll view frame and content layout guides are now supported in Interface Builder. Chapter 12: Environment overrides in the Xcode debugger make it easier to preview different dynamic text sizes. Chapter 13: Interface Builder now correctly sizes self-sizing table view cells in the storyboard (but not NIB) canvas. Chapter 14: There's a potentially layout breaking change for trait collections in iOS 13.</comment>


US 'the enemy' says Dotcom judge - <AUTHOR> http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10819927

<comment><AUTHOR> After more reading, I'm struggling to find fault in the reporting. The judge is part of a pressure group who are anti the Trans Pacific Partnership, a deal which seem bent on forcing US interlectual property law on NZ. From the NBR report I linked >>District Court Judge David Harvey said New Zealanders had to realise the TPP would affect their everyday lives, too.

He gave the example of how, today, many DVD players let you play discs designating for other regions – a practice that is legal under the Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Act 2008 but which would be criminalised under the TPP.

(Some may find Judge Harvey's sustained attack on the US negotiating position intriguing in the light of the fact he is also a pivotal player in the Kim Dotcom extradition saga).

An Australian government representative gave another potential everyday example from the floor: low-cost, third-party inkjet printer refill cartridgess becoming illegal.

All af the above examples could occur if the US gets its desired section (or "chapter") on IP (intellectual property) included in the final version of the TPP.

Judge Harvey summed up, "We have met the enemy, and he is the US"<<

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Have you got a source for that? Tvnz news, NBR and the herald are all saying the same ("U.S.") and obviously that's hugely wrong if that's not what he said. I know all three of those sources can be terrible (well, herald and NBR anyway), but I don't think it's incorrect what they are saying...

[http://m.nbr.co.nz/opinion/we-have-meet-enemy-and-he-us- judg...](http://m.nbr.co.nz/opinion/we-have-meet-enemy-and-he-us-judge-harvey- tpp) [http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/dotcom-judge-calls-us- enemy-...](http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/dotcom-judge-calls-us- enemy-4972019)

</comment><comment><USER2> "There are all sorts of ways this whole thing is being ramped up and if I could use Russell [Brown's] tweet from earlier on: we have met the enemy and he is [the] U.S."

Judge Harvey's remark is a play on the line "we have met the enemy and he is us" by American cartoonist Walt Kelly.

\----

Actually, Judge Harvey's remark WAS the line "we have met the enemy and he is us". The '[the]' is annotated to show it was inserted by the editor, and obviously the punctuation on 'us' was inserted as well. Very deceptive editorial spin in order to justify the entire article's existence.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://publicaddress.net/hardnews/judge-harvey-my-part-in- hi...](http://publicaddress.net/hardnews/judge-harvey-my-part-in-his- downfall/)

Russell Brown's take. I think youre right, but Im not sure... Could it be that he meant what was quoted, but was misquoted? He was being tongue in cheek?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> More specifically: "we have met the enemy and he is U.S." This guy knows what he is doing when it comes to unravelling the totalitarian psyche. Most authorites right now are just guzzling it down and pissing it around.</comment>


What things do you do to stay healthy and happy? - <AUTHOR> Writing this because I'm currently feeling down in the dumps (not sadness, just generally no energy and no desire to do anything other than sit in a couch and browse the net).
I am starting to realize that I am growing older, I am almost 22 years old and I just feel bloated and tired throughout the day, and I'm developing a fat belly. I also feel constantly grumpy because there are so many worries in adult life.
Would like to know what things you do to stay healthy and happy and have a clean mental state for coding. <comment><USER2> I can totally empathize -- I was in a very similar place a couple years ago. I've since changed much of my lifestyle and the results have been pretty incredible. I'd go around preaching about it if I could do so without being annoying haha.

1) I eat super clean. No junk food, lots of non-processed meat, veggies, fruits, nuts and seeds, fish, yogurt, etc. There's a lot that could be said here but I'll keep it short. Everything you need for a breakfast of champions full of vitamins and nutrients.

2) Exercise 5 or 6 days a week. Find an activity you enjoy so it's easier to keep the habit.

3) I meditate every day. This can be replaced with yoga or something similar you enjoy.

4) 8 hours of sleep every day. Going to sleep and waking up at the same time consistently is a huge help with developing and keeping this habit.

5) [This one's less critical than the others but still somewhat important]. I'm careful about what influences I'm taking in e.g. listening to uplifting music vs something dark and depressing. What tv shows I'm watching, who I'm hanging out with, etc etc. Build a kickass life with friends and hobbies you really enjoy.

This is just what's worked for me personally but I think research generally backs them up. The details are, of course, a bit contested, like how much meat you should eat.

Like any habit, it'll be hard to get into the routine but it'll definitely get easier -- your palate will adjust to eating healthier, you'll start to enjoy working out. Plus each of these things helps the others -- e.g. over time, exercising improves quality of sleep. Pretty soon, though, you'll see results that make it much easier to keep the routines and develop them further.

The results are pretty phenomenal. I'm much healthier and happier, more optimistic, relaxed, motivated, and productive, and have more energy and focus. You're gonna love the way you feel, I guarantee it haha. Hope some of that helps :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds good, I'll try all these. Thanks !

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > stay healthy and happy

> have a clean mental state for coding.

First, you need to pick one of the above. If you happen to get both, that's great and lucky, but you cannot aim for both.

Health and happiness are dependent on the complex system that is your body, mind and heart. If you want to find the true answer, you can't start off with a presupposed one (a clean mental state for coding).

</comment><comment><USER4> I run. For me, sometimes you need to clear your head and running does it for me though I live in Hong Kong which makes it easy. (amazing weather)

</comment><comment><USER5> close your eyes and try not to think of anything for few minutes</comment>


Get your online marketing reports in your inbox every 5 days - <AUTHOR> https://www.trybaseline.com <comment><AUTHOR> The best way to get a feel for this is to show you a real example from your own website.

I've just added a free report for the Hacker News community. Would love for you to test this and see for yourself. You can try it here - [https://www.trybaseline.com/partners/hacker- news](https://www.trybaseline.com/partners/hacker-news) You don't need to create any accounts, passwords to test this. But you do need to have access to your Google Analytics account to test this - else there will be an error.

Cheers

Arjun</comment>


Tell HN: The content is great, but this site is terrible - <AUTHOR> I know that this post isn't really in the tradition of HN, but this site sucks.
I have been reading HN daily for years and won't stop anytime soon. I rely on HN to keep up and enjoy learning about random interesting things throughout the week. If I had to pick only one website to access, this would be it.
BUT, it is time for an official upgrade. There UI is really frustrating. I engage less b/c I am never quite sure if I just upvoted or downvoted that last post while on mobile. And I am not sure why, but I post more typos here than anywhere else. (Maybe it is the tiny text box? Or maybe it is that every other place I want to post a comment had a native app.
The thing is, this is the best place for content. I know there are 3rd party apps and maybe I should just suck it up and go install a bunch of random App Store apps to see if any of them are decent, but it would be so much better if HN would just give enough of a shit to try.
Just my 2¢. <comment><USER2> This might be a hot take, but _" modern" user interfaces fucking suck._ Current front-end web development is a folie a plusieurs where worse is better and outright nonsensical is the ideal. This issue affects everything from the development process to the interface. It really does need to stop.

Hackernews is one of a dying breed of sites that provides an information density suitable for somebody over the age of 12, good use of screen real- estate, fast loading times, and an uncluttered interface. Although its good design is wasted on its userbase, 4chan is another site in the same vein as HN design-wise.

There are some great mobile clients for HN. You're always free to use an existing CSS reskin or create your own (this isn't a horribly complicated site).

<comment><USER3> Like you I prefer text driven sites. It runs clean. YC runs like how I like my Desktop UI to work. Clean and functional.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have you read any of the past threads about HN redesigns?

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hacker%20news%20redesign&sort=...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hacker%20news%20redesign&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

You could always get a chrome extension to reskin the desktop site. I personally am not a big fan of the mobile apps either so I tend to limit reading to desktop.

</comment><comment><USER5> After you upvote/downvote a comment, you will see a link next to the username/time that says "unvote" or "undown". It ony work for a small time (5 minutes?) in case you realize you made a mistake or you change your opinion.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Case in point: I was trying to type "The UI is terrible" and it came out "There UI is terrible." Which when I tried to type just now, my phone auto- corrected to "Their".

Maybe the answer is that I can't type on my phone and just happen to do better in every other app, or... maybe this site needs a refresh.</comment>


Ask HN: Escaping comfort trap after getting rich? - <AUTHOR> This is #firstworldproblems and I am ashamed to ask it, but it's worth a try.
I was working as software engineer til 2015, when I made a bet and invested most of my savings into BTC (about $70k). Then in 2017 the value got up and I cashed out at the right time (around $3m).
I didn't plan to get rich from BTC and it happened out of blue, so I simply proceeded going to the office for a few months. Then I noticed I'm annoyed with some parts of my job, some tasks are tedious and kept asking myself "what am I doing here, i have enough money to not work".
I quit my job on Dec 2017, now it's 2019 and I haven't been employed since. I have lost touch with most of my social circle (I've been a "nomad" last 2 years) and colleagues (since I'm not in the office anymore).
My tech skills deteriorated - turns out I didn't enjoy programming as much, and I can't make myself to keep up with the news (reading manuals and debugging for hours now sounds way too boring).
I cannot make myself find another job, as I don't need one to survive and I dislike office routine (waking up on time etc) even when I like the project. My monthly expenses are low, I feel financially secure for next say 20-30 years.
I fail to engage with a new goal, as I feel too comfortable. I remember before 2017 I've had truly happy days here and there. Solving hard problems, meeting up with friends after work, water cooler talks etc. Now days are grey and bland.
If I sound like an ass, just ignore this post. But I would appreciate any advice, especially if you have been in a similar  situation and can share your story! <comment><USER2> Hi, I hope it's not.to late to reply, but I would recommend you to read 'the 4 hour workweek' by Timothy Ferriss. It's eaxctly about this: what to do of your free time when you have enough money to sustain your lifestyle.

Also if you can read french, I would recommend 'le bug humain' by Sébastien Bohler. It's an introduction of the inner working of our brain. Basically it says that the only sustainable thing that can both please our lizard brain and do not destroy our planet is learning.

Happy new year :)</comment>


Bootstrapping CC (for OSX, using Homebrew) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/Bootstrapping-CC

<comment><USER2> > Since Xcode is no longer free

Turns out Xcode was never actually _free_ : previous major releases were synchronized with OS releases. Xcode 2 came with 10.4, Xcode 3 came with 10.5.

The reason why they were "free" and Xcode 4 is not is... that Xcode 4 has been released "mid-cycle" before Lion landed. Previous Xcode were "paid" through the OS they came with, even if you downloaded them from Apple's website as it was the OS entitling you to the relevant Xcode install.

With that said, where are we so far on Xcode?

* Since Lion has not been released yet, all macbooks but Air come with the standard DVD set which contains an Xcode install

* Xcode 3.2. _6_ and the iOS 4.3 SDK _are still available as free downloads_ for the Air (or to replace older Xcode installs), just go into the dev center and you are given a link to Xcode 3. You even get a download link for Xcode 3 from the Xcode 4 page: [https://connect.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MemberSite.woa/...](https://connect.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MemberSite.woa/wa/getSoftware?bundleID=20792)

I understand that people kind-of freakout (I did originally), but if you actually look at the events with a cool head, and previous devtools-related- events (as well as previous instances of Apple's wonky SOX-related decisions), it seems extremely likely Xcode 4 will go back to "free for everybody" on Lion, it might even be an at-install option (à la OSX Server).

Oh yeah, and there are already binary distributions of OSX compilers: <http://llvm.org/releases/download.html> has both Clang and LLVM-GCC binaries for OSX.

<comment><USER3> That makes sense. Following that logic, the version that will be "free" will require Lion.

<comment><USER2> Indeed, that is what I meant, but I may have lost myself in my word-soup.

(note: "free" for everybody, Xcode 4 is already "free" if you're part of Apple's subscriber developer programs at $99/year).

On the other hand, it's annoying that Apple leaves everybody in the dark: if Lion is released in, say, 6 months. And if Xcode 4 is "free" on Lion. Does that mean non-subscribers bought 6 months of Xcode for $5? Isn't that a bit sucky?

<comment><USER4> That's less than 3 cents per day; not a huge cost, especially if you're using it for work. How many other things can you rent for less than $1/month?

<comment><USER2> > That's less than 3 cents per day; not a huge cost, especially if you're > using it for work.

If you use it for work, I'd expect you have a (paid) developer account, therefore you got it for free.

Professionals using Xcode for work are _by far_ the least likely to need to pay for Xcode 4. Hobbyists or free-software developers, on the other hand...

<comment><USER5> No hobbyist needs to pay for Xcode 4. You can use Xcode 3 for free, or you can pay $5 and use Xcode 4 without having to wait for and buy Lion, or you can just wait and get it free with Lion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is silly -- these are just blind leading the blind questions. I guess I can provide some answers ...

\- homebrew should just provide binaries rather than trying to bootstrap a compiler for everyone.

\- Barring that, homebrew should wait and see if Xcode4 is free with Lion.

\- A compiler isn't enough. You also need an assembler, linker, etc. Those can be found in Apple's cctoolz and ld64 projects.

\- Headers are are also required. Those belong to Apple and are not freely redistributable.

\- GCC 4.2 is still the default, not clang. Apple still builds the majority of the OS with GCC.

\- Apple does modify the compiler. Look at PLBlocks (<http://code.google.com/p/plblocks/>) for scripts that can drive an Apple compiler build.

\- homebrew is learning why "do not dupe" is not viable when dealing with Apple in the longterm, and is going to just wind up being a less mature macports clone after going through a few more release cycles.

<comment><USER7> \- We are going to provide binaries for the CC toolchain.

\- We can't wait for Lion, nor expect everyone to use Lion.

\- The wiki page even says we need the whole toolchain

\- Headers is a good point

\- GCC is not the default /usr/bin/cc for Xcode4

\- Yeah, we know that.

\- Macports needs Xcode too.

<comment><USER8> _We can't wait for Lion, nor expect everyone to use Lion._

But nothing has changed. The presence of Xcode 4 does not invalidate people's existing copies of Xcode 3 already installed or that exist on their OSX DVD. Further, the version of gcc is the same.

If this whole episode is what finally gives people the motivation to have an easier-to-install binary of gcc, then great. But the actual need is the same today as it was last week.

<comment><USER9> The need is the same... 'ish. Personally I think Lion will have xcode 4 free (bit like Facetime has been done). Here's the thing tho, compiler bugfixes etc. need you to sign up to the dev. program or, at the moment, buy xcode. This is bad imho and therefore it's worth the effort to give the user of homebrew an option.

<comment><USER2> > Here's the thing tho, compiler bugfixes etc. need you to sign up to the dev. > program or, at the moment, buy xcode. This is bad imho and therefore it's > worth the effort to give the user of homebrew an option.

Xcode 3.2.6 was released at the same time as Xcode 4 and is freely downloadable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Regardless of XCode 4 free or paid, it would be nice to have a compiler separate from XCode. Installing the whole IDE you never use has always seemed like an overkill.

<comment><USER11> I couldn't agree more! I do all my work on a 11" MacAir with 64Gb HD and having something I never use take up 4Gb is just silly!

<comment><USER12> I agree with both of you, but at the end of the day, you can just delete all the unneeded stuff from the /Developer folder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The cost or otherwise of xcode is irrelevant. This is about repackaging apple's distributions of various tools for our convenience. As others have said the $5 is simply a push to do something that probably should have been done before.

In light of this I am personally in favor of simply taking the binary pkgs out of the xcode dmg, in pursuit of maximum compatibility and minimum duping, and general adherence to homebrew's stated project goals.

However this would obviously require some research as to the specific licensing issues involved, and some dialog with apple. If it turns out to be OK, then the whole thing would be pretty trivial.

If it doesn't pan out, then look at messier options like using different builds, making your own headers (yuck) etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't get why everyone is freaking out when Xcode 3.2.6 is still available from free.

Until we can no longer access 3.2.6, let's not start spreading FUD.

<comment><USER15> Apple doesn't like to let their old technologies hang around for very long. Suddenly not having Xcode 3 available is what I'm afraid of.

<comment><USER16> XCode 4 will be free with Lion. Anyway, who cares? GCC version in 4 is the same as in 3.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is why people should stop frothing at the mouth any time a company does something (another example: Hudson).

If a problem is significant enough, the Community will figure something out.</comment>


A Look Inside Intel's Future Knights Landing Systems - <AUTHOR> http://www.nextplatform.com/2015/11/30/inside-future-knights-landing-xeon-phi-systems/ <comment><USER2> These integrated omnipath fabric ports... are they going to be competitive with low latency NICs like those provided by SolarFlare/Mellanox ?</comment>


Behind the Windows 7 memory usage scaremongering - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/02/behind-the-windows-7-memory-usage-scaremongering.ars

<comment><USER2> Kind of reminds me the first time I started freaking out over the "Memory Bug" on my Solaris 2.6 install in 1998. So many people got worried by that data, that they modified several of the system binaries to report "filesystem cache" as "free" in later versions of Solaris.

What's old is always new, again.

Linux makes it (reasonably) clear:

       shephard@u804:~$ free
                    total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
       Mem:        515440      39976     475464          0       2684      16452
       -/+ buffers/cache:      20840     494600
       Swap:       192740          0     192740

       shephard@u804:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/475MB bs=1048576 count=475

       475+0 records in
       475+0 records out
       498073600 bytes (498 MB) copied, 73.7244 s, 6.8 MB/s

       shephard@u804:~$ free

                    total       used       free     shared       buffers     cached
       Mem:        515440     508312       7128          0       1760     475756
       -/+ buffers/cache:      30796     484644
       Swap:       192740          0     192740
       shephard@u804:~$

<comment><USER3> Many people don't know how kernel caches and buffers work. Even many developers get confused by this and think that a system is almost out of memory. Luckily someone created <http://www.linuxatemyram.com/> \- that saves me time to explain it over and over to people who panic about the issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm by no means fan of windows, but the article was an obvious troll from the beginning, as it was quite evident that they were mixing up cache with real memory usage.

What really surprised me was that such a pointless 'story' generated so much fuss. Waste of time.

<comment><USER5> > mixing up cache with real memory usage.

And how real is the use of memory for cache?

All this reminds me of a discussion I had with a mainframe admin in the mid- to-late 80's:

Me: Look at this numbers. We are using more than 90% of the processor time and about 100% of the memory. Is it normal?

Sysadmin: Good. We paid them in full. It's better if we use the whole computer, not just part of it.

<comment><USER6> In some cases, the sysadmin is right. Say you are concerned with performance, not energy-efficiency. If you have an I/O-bound workload that is only using 50% of your CPU cycles, wouldn't it be nice to automatically use the other 50% (otherwise wasted, mind you) to figure out some other things you might need in the future and prefetch them? On the memory side, what good is that 1GB or unused RAM doing you? If you need more for your application, the OS can drop its cache on the floor so quickly you'll hardly notice the latency.

Granted, this prefetching is not without downsides. DRAM banks have low-power states you can put them into if they're not being used, so if you can shove all of your used memory into a contiguous region of your physical address space and free up a DIMM's worth, you might be able to save power. This is unlikely, however, because the virtual-to-physical address mapping function is usually designed to spread the load very evenly across all available DRAM banks. One more likely source of power savings is from avoiding the CPU and disk activity of prefetching, especially if prefetch accuracy is low. Most people tend not to care about this though, and want the OS to make their app run faster by using otherwise-idle resources to do prefetching.

<comment><USER5> It was an 80's mainframe. I doubt power saving was one concern. We had folks typing forms in data-entry terminals 24x7 generating the tapes that were then fed to the bigger machine.

But you have an interesting idea. I wonder if there is any OS that changes memory distribution and allocation strategy according to desired power consumption on, say, portable computers.

The Linux kernel supports, IIRC, plug-and-play memory and processors and it could, conceivably (it it doesn't already) power up and down unused parts of the machine in order to reduce power consumption and heat dissipation. Even reads and writes to and from memory could be grouped in bursts if that could save power.

For instance, right now my running applications are within half of the memory, both cores are running slowly and the ethernet interface is disconnected. One memory module, one core and a network interface could be powered off without perceivable performance degradation. Also, as much data could be cached in the remaining memory so the disk could be powered down too or, and that would be interesting, spun at a lower speed.

Lots of interesting ideas in one lazy saturday afternoon. That's what I like in HN. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's surprising that the CTO of a company specialized on system performance doesn't know how OS cache memory work.

<comment><USER8> It's not like you can read the Windows source code to see what it's doing, so I am going to give him a pass.

<comment><USER9> He could read the available documentation and literature. This is not some grand secret. This feature has been around in Vista for years, there's no excuse for this level of ignorance. It's just laziness.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_new_to_Windo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_new_to_Windows_Vista#System_performance)

Better yet, the same article circa Feb. 2007: [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Technical_features...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Technical_features_new_to_Windows_Vista&oldid=110770917#System_performance)

<comment><USER8> Documentation is never accurate. No source code, no knowing-for-sure.

<comment><USER10> Any operating system developer who knows anything about paging would know exactly what was going on. Especially since you can immediately tell using the Windows task manager that it was doing caching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think several people nailed this when the story broke, it really was a pretty superficial observation for such an apparently broad analysis.

Slightly off topic, but it just struck me that I'd like to see app icons in the task manager and windowed programs highlighted in some way. The unabridged list of processes is a little too lengthy if you're looking to quickly nip something in the bud. I know there are task manager replacements, but to me they're not as intuitive.

One for the Win8 suggestion box maybe.

</comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if Windows 7 behaves like Linux in that by default, when faced with memory pressure, it will much prefer to swap out application pages rather than abandon buffer cache.

This is really annoying when this memory pressure is due to trying to fit more (and potentially useless) things into the buffer cache. Let's say you're performing a backup of a 100+ GB directory to another machine using rsync. Linux will want to jam that entire directory into buffer cache, which of course won't fit. Instead of immediately pitching out the existing disk cache, it will aggressively (depending on the value of swappiness) swap out application pages, (potentially owned by Oracle or MySQL) rather than lose existing buffer cache.

This is a real problem, and one that's a pain to fix.

<comment><USER13> Could you clarify how the problem is hard to fix under Linux? If you set swappiness to 0, does it still swap out application pages?

<comment><USER12> Yes. Even with swappiness at zero, Linux will still swap when you don't want it to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why do people even care about what computer uses its memory for. What I care is performance, as measured by wall clock, and energy consumption.</comment>


The Storray Engine, an excellent example of why we use databases. - <AUTHOR> http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classic-WTF-The-Storray-Engine.aspx

<comment><USER2> I think this demonstrates nicely one of the common memes amongst the, shall we say, less reflective programmers out there - 'this is a simple problem, I can solve this easily myself' - the Bob paradox[1] in action. I think the thrill of being able to 'just get stuff done' can have a warping influence on a programmer which causes them to neglect to notice the details which makes the problem at hand a little more complicated than they imagine.

It's funny to see how they rationalise problems later as being entirely necessary to the problem (I've witnessed this first hand), and nothing to do with a misapprehension of the difficulty of the problem.

Am I the only one here who finds the dailywtf sometimes extremely depressing?!

[1]:<http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/being-the-averagest>

<comment><USER3> _Am I the only one here who finds the dailywtf sometimes extremely depressing?!_

My feeling about DailyWTF is similar to visiting an art exhibition with paintings done by an unguided community class. The whole thing is clearly driven by a fundamental need to create something, and many of the exhibited works demonstrate an intoxicating thrill of getting something finished... But at the same time they make it clear why that thrill alone isn't a good enough reason for the work to be shown in public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In-memory databases do make sense for some things if you can: a. easily dump data as code and b. construct good key-value maps.

Incidentally, doesn't HN run as a stoarray?

<comment><USER5> "Incidentally, doesn't HN run as a stoarray?"

This is the very first thing I thought of. The guy seems to have re-invented S-expressions in VB (or whatever ASP language that is). Data is code, code is data. Load it into memory, write it to a file. With 500 products, maybe even 1000 products, maybe even 10000, or more, this might work fine, in terms of performance, at least.

Now, my critique of the code is that there are no apparent abstractions, which means that it will be very difficult to change anything about the implementation later. All of the hard coded indices from 0 to 7 are very opaque and very brittle.

However, change those to JSON-ish dictionaries and add some slightly higher level abstractions, and you could get something that looks a little more like the interface to a MySQL database.

So what I find interesting about putting this as a WTF with no explanation is that the author just seems to assume that everyone should use a relational database for every problem without thinking about how good a fit it is for their specific problem. At least, without more explanation it's hard to tell what exactly the assumed critique is.

<comment><USER6> I've got to say, it's nice to see HN users who look a bit deeper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a groundbreaking implementation of a cutting edge NoSQL storage system! What is it doing on the Daily WTF? Some incompetent tech team in NYC or somewhere should be congratulating themselves for installing it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Typical. There's enough text in the sample to ID the client, they could have been a bit more circumspect there.

When all you have is a hammer...

I think we should see this in light of the recent nosql trend though, this guy was just ahead of the curve.

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow, this takes me back!

Back around '05, I inherited the enviable task of getting a "linked project scheduling system" up and running. The creator of this MS-Project-based marvel had implemented an employee database in a VB module, that not only avoided the hassles of ADO and SQL, but almost managed to do away with arrays completely! Switch/Case statements, anyone?

By the way, if needles and haystacks are your thing, try a Google search on Microsoft Project. Hours of fun!</comment>