Want to end mass incarceration? Stop blindly reelecting your local prosecutor - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2015/5/27/8661045/prosecutors-mass-incarceration <comment><USER3> Democracy as a whole is kind of illusory at this point; the world has grown to such a scale and the general public so distracted that they often can't make valid decisions at the polling booth because they are so disconnected from the issues. In the old days, there were only so many things people had to understand before they were given a vote and, while those issues were more impactful on everyday life, they were also less complicated.

Today, the real issues have gotten complicated and nuanced, but the average human IQ and curiosity level has not caught up. As a result, we are handed lots of small and barely-relevant decisions to give us that illusion of choice, both for practical reasons and to shut us up. Local elections certainly have more impact on one's life, and really aren't hard to understand, but life is too good for most people to care enough. And, with people more infantilized than ever, the more they want surrogate mommies and daddies to make the tough decisions for them, just as their own parents did for them in childhood. So, when we are handed a piece of paper so we can say who we want to be our surrogate parents, most of us say "meh" and vote for the incumbents because, well, we have our smart phones, TV, Starbucks, and gourmet restaurants, so the current politicians can't be doing that bad, right?

<comment><USER4> This is why direct democracy doesn't work, and it is also why representative democracy is good.

We have just gotten ourselves into a position where decades of "let the people decide" has led to your ballot including a dozen citizen choices you do not care about.

In a saner world, we would be focusing on the representative part of the republic - why am I directly electing judges, magistrates, and prosecutors when it would be significantly better to select representatives to make all these electoral choices for me?

Political parties have become a bad proxy for true representation. People just start voting party line and the powers that be love that kind of model - <USER2> means great persons cannot rise independent of them, and it means you can blame the bad on the individuals but the success on the party as a whole. And party affiliation has always been a horrible proxy for effective leadership.

Instead, we are in a situation where our "representatives" are representing millions of people individually, while we vote for dozens of esoteric local elections for things that aren't particularly representative. What we _should_ have is much more localized elections of representatives that then make such bureaucratic appointment decisions themselves, including for the higher levels of government beyond them. IE, you can have a representative for every 3 thousand rather than 3 million people, and that representative will join a local council that appoints the judges, city council, higher level reps, etc.

<comment><USER5> I would like for there to be a greater discourse on "true representation". When I look at citizens per representative I absolutely don't believe it's representative.

I think for congress it's near 600,000 or something now. In LA we have the county board of supervisors, and that's a group of 5 people running a city of 10,000,000

I find these numbers mind-blowingly unrepresentative, nowhere near "true representation".

<comment><USER6> One radical proposal would be to pick a representative of the population (Read : Stratified Sampling) and allow them to vote.

<comment><USER7> Juries - chosen at random and vetted from a representative sampling of the population - choose whether a defendant is guilty or not. It's part of the civic duty of a US citizen / resident.

Could we make choosing people to choose whether a law should be passed or not a similar responsibility? "Oh I have to take a week off to go to Washington DC, there's some law I have to hear testimony on and decide the outcome."

First I've heard of such an idea!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Growing up in Tennessee, the practice of electing low-level judicial positions like prosecutors and local judges always seemed like a bad idea. Incompetent or corrupt judges who apply the law in bad or farcical ways create real harm and grief[0][1].

Appointments don't prevent incompetence or corruption, but at least it uncouples local popularity or a lack of voter knowledge from deciding who ought to have the authority to apply the law. It seems like vetting experienced lawyers who have a real understanding of not only what the law is, but also how it should be applied, as happens in the UK[2] can't help but produce a more legally sound criminal justice system at the very least.

But then, I suppose it depends on your priorities. If holding judges accountable to the electorate's sense of justice is a higher priority than holding them accountable to what the law actually is, then this is a fine system.

[0]: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/12/tennessee- judg...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/12/tennessee-judge- messiah-martin) [1]: [http://www.knoxnews.com/news/crime-courts/dcs-campbell- judge...](http://www.knoxnews.com/news/crime-courts/dcs-campbell-judge-took- children-from-their-homes-without-legal- grounds-2a7cd13e-fd20-604d-e053-0100-367048301.html) [2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_Appointments_Commissi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_Appointments_Commission)

</comment><comment><USER9> The issue here is win rate. Ask any lawyer or prosecutor and they take pride in that win rate and how many people they have "put away". To get that rate up, they often go after the poor and people who have committed petty crimes while ignoring real white-color and blue-collar crime because it is laborious to prosecute.

If you want to lower the rate, you have to lower the industry incentives for this type of thinking.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is a great article. The DOJ needs to get more involved in keeping state and local policing in line. The civil rights lawsuit filed against Ferguson, MO, earlier this year is a good start.

Long-term, getting rid of elected prosecutors and judges at the state level would be a huge help.

<comment><USER11> This would mean more power residing in the federal government. Do we really need more power to be centralized? It seems to me that the fed is already a bit over their heads. What we need is educated voters and more alternatives to prison. We also need a more reasonable trial system; how can a low income defendant hire a decent lawyer? I think that there are things that the fed can do to better the situation, but butting in to states' jurisdiction is a slippery slope. The Ferguson suit is a case of 'good because it aligns with my beliefs'. What if the fed stepped in and did the opposite?

<comment><USER12> According to what I understood from the article, a trial is not even relevant. Lawyers are barely relevant. A prosecutor threatens someone with a life- destroying extreme sentence, and they take the short plea term. Confess to this crime you may have committed or we will destroy you. End of story. No trial, no long discussion, your lawyer will advise you to take the deal because facing 30 years in prison for a minor offense is a very real possibility. The cops will lie in court and be believed, forensic science will be fabricated, it's just not worth the risk. Federal or state.

<comment><USER13> After being in a car accident (my fault) without insurance and in which another driver broke an arm I was arrested and held in jail for two months at which point I was given the option of going to court on a charges of "assault with a deadly weapon" and related miscellany or pleading to "hit and run" and getting released immediately with time served. This despite the fact that I was arrested next to my capsized vehicle. The prosecution had completely fabricated police statements that I said I was trying to kill people. I felt terrible for causing that accident and the related damages and harm but the system truly is deeply fucked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "One of the most baffling aspects of the US criminal justice system is that incarceration rates continued to rise even after crime began dropping in the 1990s. If crime was dropping, it stands to reason that there should have been fewer criminals to lock up."

That isn't necessarily correct. Crime rates and prosecution aren't directly coupled. It could be that we are simply incarcerating a larger proportion of criminals.

Chicago, for example, had a murder clearance rate of 26% in 2015 compared to the national average of 64%. There is clearly an opportunity (a need in my opinion) to incarcerate more murderers especially in Chicago even though the murder rate has been decreasing in recent years.

</comment><comment><USER15> Want people to participate in local elections? Stop federalizing politics.

<comment><USER16> Local governments severely lack the funding and resources needed to engage with the community like they should. It's really sad, but by the time the fed and state take their cut, there's not much left for the city or county.

<comment><USER17> It's not like the federal and state governments dictate taxation and revenue (entirely), take their cut and leave the rest with local governments. Local governments can raise revenue with various kinds of taxes independently of rates and schedules at the Federal or State level.

The real reason local governments typically lack resources for truly local needs is that the most vocal locals tend to be NIMBY typea and anti-tax types.

<comment><USER16> You've clearly never worked in local government if you think it's that easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Coming from a country with non-elected state attourneys and compulsory prosection the American approach to this seems rather weird. Wouldn't electing prosecutors essentially make them politicians?

<comment><USER19> Afaik the idea behind elected prosecutors and judges is to make sure that the law represents what the people want, since a prosecutor or judge that fails to convict when the people want a conviction won't get re-elected.

So yes, they are politicians, and I'm not convinced that's a good thing.

Of course, being north of the border, I'm not exactly versed in American state politics.

<comment><USER18> But isn't it up to the legislative branch to make/amend laws? Why elect the judiciary branch, which is only supposed to interpret those laws?

<comment><USER20> This is actually a big deal in America and a fundamental change in how our government operates. Your idea is right, but since the 1960s judicial authority has grown in a way that increases their responsibility to the point where they're almost legislators themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Voting for a prosecutor or judge is tough to do, speaking from experience. I tend to rely on outside authorities for this sort of thing - namely, the local papers' endorsements.

The lack of data mentioned in the article is a big deal.

Another thing that's probably underrated in a lot of districts is the lack of competition. Where I live, if you're not a Democrat, you don't really get a relevant primary vote for people on the municipal or county level. The article notes that "85 percent ran unopposed in general elections", but many of those might have had a much tougher primary fight, which excludes the other party and independents.

<comment><USER3> Voting for judges is also in conflict with the notion that they are supposed to be impartial. Maybe we should change the system so that judges aren't elected by the public, but they can be ousted by the public.

<comment><USER21> I don't know if it's possible to avoid impartiality these days, if it was ever possible. The Merrick Garland nomination speaks to this.

Recall votes would be just as motivated by politics; they'd just be more favorable to incumbents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> 1\. I love how this bilthely leads with, "The electoral process is thoroughly corrupt, here's George Soros pushing money through the system to pursue his agenda," and then jumps aboard the train of said agenda with no further questions asked. Good lord, you want us to participate in THIS? Par for the course for Vox.

2\. As the article itself makes clear, prosecutors are actors who will respond to whatever incentives we create for them. The evidence and arguments in THIS VERY ARTICLE undercut the notion that we should focus on the role of the local prosecutor, who is basically just a law enforcement officer, and rather focus on changing the laws to reflect the already-shifted moral substrate.

3\. Why _doesn 't_ Vox ask us to focus on changing the laws? Our only role in their vision is as fodder - herd voters responding to the signals of a billionaire-funded campaign to harry local prosecutors (to what end? who should we elect instead, and why would they act differently?). This, again, is in line with my (limited) understanding of the Vox perspective - "Trust the experts to figure it out, just nod and sign your name here." We, the vox populi, would obviously never be involved in the actual construction or framing of laws. Just vote.

</comment><comment><USER23> 85 percent [of prosecutors] ran unopposed in general elections. I would speculate the remaining 15 percent were assistant running against their boss -- which even in America, is a huge career gamble.

</comment><comment><USER24> > Over the past few days, news has trickled out that liberal billionaire > George Soros has poured millions of dollars into local election campaigns > against "tough on crime"

Because of lack of education, awareness, care and time, along with the easy with each elections (especially local and state) can be manipulated, we are left at the discretion of benevolent billionaires to fight for us.

I remember first becoming aware of this issues after watching Hot Coffee documentary. There is a large part there around how corporate interests can easily manipulate state Judicial branches -- by sponsoring judges which are more favorable to them (in that case it was capping maximum damages people could win during corporate settlements on appeal, and yes, lawyers knew to always appeal).

> But that's not the case in much of the country, where prosecutors don't file > records that would explain why, for example, they pursued prison time > instead of probation for a defendant. "We don't really know why prosecutors > do what they do," Pfaff said.

I think aside from padding the stats and pleasing voters with "tough on crime", there is a very good reason for prosecutors to prosecute more. It helps prison guard unions (keeps them employed), private prisons, state prisons (cheap labor). Each one of those interests can spare a good amount of cash to sponsor the "right" prosecutor. It is like a long term investment. In fact, they'd be stupid not to do it.

</comment><comment><USER25> The people who really control your day to day life are these people, the local legislators and executives. Way more people need to vote and vote intelligently in their local elections

<comment><USER26> The funny thing is that local and federal politics has been reversed from what I'd consider the desirable order. I think the federal government should be filled up with starry-eyed idealists and the local government should be run by pragmatic conservatives. But for some reason we've got the conservatives in power at the federal level and at the local level, at least where I live, the most useless hippies you've ever met.

I don't know how it got to be that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Open data initiatives might lead to apps that help keep people informed about local politics.

I'd like to see city council votes when I check the weather in the morning, for instance.

<comment><USER28> Unfortunately, for a huge percentage of people, it won't be seen if it doesn't show up on a facebook feed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Stop electing members of the Judiciary to begin with, and implement a better system of oversight. Hopefully that has as much local input as national.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is a good reminder. I should check up on my local prosecutor's position on "innocent until proven guilty." This is not directly enshrined in the US Constitution. Rather, it is inferred from several places. Apparently, this leaves some room for local jurisdictions to soften or abrogate this principle for the sake of enforcement/deterrence.

</comment><comment><USER31> Want to end mass incarceration? End the war on drugs. The vast majority of inmates are non-violent drug offenders.

</comment><comment><USER32> Stop re-electing any prosecutor.

</comment><comment><USER33> For local elections, I make a point of always voting against the incumbent.</comment>


Skypipe : a cloud based named pipe - <AUTHOR> http://klaig.blogspot.be/2012/08/skypipe-cloud-based-namepipe.html

<comment><USER2> This look very cool. I wonder if they'll have any legal issues with a name that sounds like "Skype". After all, Microsoft went after a guy whose business was Mike Rowe Software.

</comment><comment><USER3> If it's useful in shell pipelines, show examples of actual shell pipelines, instead of a useless use of cat(1).

      cat /etc/issue.logo | skypipe gentoologo     # no
      skypipe gentoologo < /etc/issue.logo         # yes

<http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html#cat>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thx for the note, I edit my post accordingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The idea looks pretty good, and it's OK if someone hacks it for themselves, but the implementation is lame, in my opinion. I understand that I can be a bit off-topic or ranting worthlessly on a simple hack that was intended to be just that, a simple hack.

It looks like people forgot how to develop simple protocols for this sort of thing. A simple protocol for remote named pipes, a client and a server, and a wrapper/gateway for dotCloud/HTTP wouldn't take a (very) long time to develop, wouldn't be completely dependent on an external service, and would probably develop into something bigger --- even for anonymous file sharing!

I really would like to know why programmers, in general, seem not to be doing this sort of thing anymore. Sorry if it looks like some sort of misplaced criticism, I'm posing all of it genuinely as a question to the community.

<comment><USER5> Resume Oriented Arcitecture

<comment><AUTHOR> Lol, love it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> self hostable alternative, F*EX and the sex command : <http://fex.rus.uni- stuttgart.de/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Is it ? Is it doing pipes ? because I see only file transfers there which is not exactly the same as you loose the realtime / streaming factor.

<comment><USER6> Search for "stream" on the homepage : <http://fex.rus.uni- stuttgart.de/SEX.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> ha ok, cool

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Grammar edits:

\- "Skypipe : a cloud based named pipe" should be "Skypipe : a cloud-based named pipe"

\- "... no IP to know, no tunnel to setup, nothing." should be "... no IP to know, no tunnel to set up, nothing."

\- "then asks you and remember your credential for access" should be "then asks you and remember your credentials for access"

</comment><comment><USER8> Can't you do the same thing with netcat?

</comment><comment><USER9> great! btw a friend of mine did a thing like that for Windows clipboard - <http://ybex.com/>

</comment><comment><USER10> Lovely idea, and I think it's damn useful: I just wish it didn't have an external dependency on dotcloud!

<comment><USER11> SEX is free! :-) <http://fex.rus.uni-stuttgart.de/SEX.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is really cool. Thanks!

<comment><USER13> Hacker news anyone want to test this out with me? Drop your public email address.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> nice thout!</comment>


Ruby Draft Specification - <AUTHOR> http://ruby-std.netlab.jp/

<comment><USER2> It would be great if our community of Ruby hackers could read this spec and supply feedback via their comment system. Remember that classes and methods that aren't included may not be present across implementations.

A few omissions that jumped out just from my quick scan:

\- String.index & String.rindex \- String.strip \- Array.compact \- Array.pack/String.unpack \- Array.index & Array.rindex \- Array.uniq \- Enumerable.sort_by \- Dir \- Marshal

Would you be interested in a language that lacked these classes?

</comment><comment><USER3> This to me is great news...a first step towards a "standard" ruby. With the various implementations running around out there, having a documented specification to refer to (and the ruby equivalent of the Java TCK, which I believe rubyspec is attempting to become) will be immensely helpful and will help further the language.

<comment><USER4> Yes, but their use of 1.8.7 as the baseline is an epic failure in my eyes. If we're moving to 1.9, _use that_. If you really must use a 1.8 series, don't use the weird-o transitional one that no one uses. That just doesn't make sense.

I also think they should work with the RubySpec (<http://rubyspec.org>) folks to make sure the executable spec is in sync with the written one.

But the Ruby core unfortunately isn't known for really reaching out across the Pacific, mostly because of the language barrier. :-/

<comment><USER5> FTA:

 _Some might argue that we should use Ruby 1.9 as the primary reference, but Ruby 1.9 is moving fast and its features change frequently. Once we draft the specification based on Ruby 1.9, the specification and Ruby 1.9 would get quickly out of sync._

<comment><USER4> Well that's going to happen no matter what. It seems to be a lot of wasted and duplicate effort to base it on a soon-to-be-obsolete incarnation of the language. Build it piece by piece, starting with things that are definitely settled, then update as needed.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Reaching 200K events/sec - <AUTHOR> http://aphyr.com/posts/269-reaching-200k-events-sec <comment><USER2> If you're wondering about the workload, this is the trivial Riemann config this benchmark uses:

      (streams
        (rate 5 (comp prn float :metric))

Which means for each five-second interval, sum all the metrics of the events flowing through this stream, divide by the time elapsed, and print that rate to the console.

I'm using this setup to put the heaviest load possible on Riemann's client and TCP server while I optimize those layers--it's not meant to stress the internal stream library, the state index, or pubsub. When I start optimizing those components, I'll have more "real-world" numbers to report.

I should also explain that this particular post explores the high-throughput, high-latency range of the client spectrum. End-to-end TCP latencies (not counting wire time) for single-event messages are on the order of ~100 microseconds-1ms, with occasional spikes to ~30ms depending on JVM GC behavior.

<comment><USER3> You are likely doing something wrong. My in-memory redis server clone that also uses netty reaches 1.5M requests/s on an arguably heavier workload with a more complicated protocol. I'd love to help you optimize it if it matters.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the offer! I, uh, certainly didn't mean to claim that Riemann is extraordinarily fast. Up until this point I've been working as hard as I can just to make the darn thing turn on and accomplish something useful. This is quite early in the optimization process, haha. :)

The principle bottleneck in this particular test is actually the client-- Riemann itself spends ~94% of its time waiting on epoll in this test. The client is a total hack using Java OIO, calling flush() on every message, Nagle's algorithm disabled for low per-msg latencies... it's a wreck, haha. Part of next week's optimization push is replacing it with a Netty client and tuning TCP options for various workloads.

<comment><USER4> Things will probably look better once you switch your client implementation to Netty as a similar test I did with Netty 4, Protobufs and batching of messages produced low seven figure numbers too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >> Throughput here is measured in messages, each containing 100 events, so master is processing 200,000–215,000 events/sec.

So in reality it is ~ 2k messages/sec. This is a rather poor throughput, as even off-the-shelf generic web servers (e.g. nginx) have the throughput an order of magnitude higher, and proprietary systems can reach 500k messages/sec over the network.

<comment><USER2> Ah, I didn't intend for this post to reach Hacker News absent context. If you haven't been tracking Riemann, this post might not make sense. ;-)

Riemann is not an HTTP server, or anything analogous. It's an event processor, and reacts to incoming events by running them through an arbitrary set of functions. Events are the logical "requests" against the system, if you're thinking in HTTP terms. Messages are just a bundle of events for synchronous transport, and events can be repackaged in varying bundles of messages depending on latency/throughput requirements. The clients can do this for you.

For instance, the code which generated this benchmark looks like:

      (send client
        {:host "test"
         :service "drop tcp"
         :state "ok"
         :description "a benchmark"
         :metric 1
         :ttl 1
         :tags ["bench"]})

which is a synchronous call, returning when the event is acknowledged by the server. It's making that call 200,000 times a second (in various threads). The clients are doing all sorts of internal buffering and pipelining to make that possible--this particular test uses a batch size of 100 events/msg.

Take a look at <http://riemann.io> for more. :)

<comment><USER5> Well, I'm sure there are specific use cases where Riemann would be preferable to a generic web server. But for most developers in most situations, it is a no brainer to choose an HTTP-based protocol with off-the-shelf HTTPD server over a 10x slower proprietary system.

<comment><USER2> Er, I don't mean to be contrarian, but Riemann is anything but proprietary. I'm an unemployed OSS developer. Every bit of code from clients to dashboard to server to integration tools to the website is open source: <http://aphyr.github.com/riemann/>. I'm not trying to sell anything. I'm just building a tool to solve a problem I faced in developing distributed systems.

Second... I guess I can reiterate. Riemann is not an HTTP server. It's an event-stream driven monitoring system. The protocol uses existing standards (e.g. protobufs), is simple to implement, and the community has written clients for many languages: <http://riemann.io/clients.html>.

As an aside, I do plan on adding an HTTP interface to Riemann, but HTTP processing (and using JSON for serialization) comes with certain unavoidable costs in bandwidth, memory and latency. It'll fill a complementary space to the existing TCP and UDP interfaces.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, by "proprietary" I meant "custom". I admire people who have skills and dedication to built OSS, this was just a wrong word to use.

I completely agree that for specific uses Riemann is great. Your post was, though, about the performance/throughput, and so my comment was about the performance/throughput. Streaming messages/events over the network is an old problem, with well-known limitations, and this was what my comment was about.

<comment><USER6> Please don't criticize what he's built before you even barely understand it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> TLDR: Burned by framework magic. Talk about side effects.

Ten layers (and probably buffers) traveled through until your data hits the wire. Layer _x_ decides to change its IO model and your throughput takes a dive. It's exactly why there was a post recently about building an operating system just to run some network daemon.

<comment><USER2> I dunno if I'd call it magic, per se. Netty is a big library and it has good reasons for behaving this way. I just don't think I came through the right documentation path is all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8>
      (defn execution-handler
        "Creates a new netty execution handler."
        []
        (ExecutionHandler.
          (OrderedMemoryAwareThreadPoolExecutor.
            16       ; Core pool size
            1048576  ; 1MB per channel queued
            10485760 ; 10MB total queued
            )))

It is a farce, isn't it?))

<comment><USER2> Heh, I originally cargo-culted this line from somewhere in Netty's docs: [https://github.com/aphyr/riemann/blob/732a6e8986f75c638c30b5...](https://github.com/aphyr/riemann/blob/732a6e8986f75c638c30b5f406ba22fa4afcb15d/src/riemann/transport.clj#L44)

After finally digging into how execution handlers worked, the puzzle started to unravel. Netty's docs are pretty good, but you have to understand what all the names mean before you can understand, well, any one part of the system. Bit tough to piece together, at least for my little brain. ;-)

<comment><USER8> All I'm trying to say is that switching to the prefix notation adding parenthesis does not make Java a Lisp. ;-)

I'm also not sure that JVM itself is a good idea, especially for serving content, but I do respect people who are trying nevertheless.)

<comment><USER2> Some of Riemann's code is very much like Java, especially where I interoperate with Java libraries. Other parts of the code are... definitely not Java:

      (defn where-partition-clauses
        "Given expressions like (a (else b) c (else d)), returns [[a c] [b d]]"
        [exprs]
        (map vec
             ((juxt remove
                    (comp (partial mapcat rest) filter))
                (fn [expr]
                  (when (list? expr)
                    (= 'else (first expr))))
                exprs)))

I wouldn't categorize Clojure as a "pure lisp"--it relies heavily on the JVM type system, for starters--but idiomatic Clojure feels closer to Lisp than Java, to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Offtopic, but it's refreshing to read blogs with clean designs and readable texts, without commercials or widgets inviting to click on things and all that crap.</comment>


Ask HN: Should articles visible only after paying be flagged and removed? - <AUTHOR> It is really annoying to find a big fraction of HN posts readable only if I pay, this is really discomforting. <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

The short version of that policy is: no, they're allowed.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I understand that mass-media "outlets" are happy and get a lot of money making free advertising of their product here, but isn't this reducing the quality of this medium?

</comment><comment><USER3> In my opinion yes, they should be.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you.</comment></comment>


The ShoeMoney Effect - A Shoemoney review drives more traffic than mashable - <AUTHOR> http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/02/05/the-shoemoney-effect-high-sales-and-quality-traffic/ <comment><AUTHOR> been a fan of shoemoney for a while - interesting to see the kind of traffic his blog is driving</comment>


The Serotonin Levels-Depression Link Is a 'Marketing Myth,' Psychiatrist Claims - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-serotonin-levels-depression-link-is-a-marketing-myth-psychiatrist-claims <comment><USER2> I can't speak for the depression remedy, but SSRIs have certainly helped my anxiety issues.

A few years ago, I started having incapacitating panic attacks. They were so pronounced that I'd end up in the hospital ER several times a month.

Eventually, I was prescribed an SSRI, and the anxiety attacks went away completely. Maybe it's placebo, but when I tried to stop taking them, the anxiety attacks came back. (reverse placebo?)

I'm not a big fan of big-pharma, but for me, SSRIs were a literal lifesaver. It's easy to criticize, but unless one has an alternative solution, it's best to let things be until better treatments come along.

<comment><USER3> I've been taking SSRIs for more than a decade. In the last few years I've learned that they don't seem to work much better than placebos. That may be true but it does not matter. They work for me and the side effects are minimal so I will keep taking them. SSRIs have made a huge difference to my quality of life. I don't care if I'm just taking a placebo at this point, as long as I'm getting the results I need.

<comment><USER4> do or did you drink alcohol? and did you stop or not?

*Edit: The reason I ask is because most SSRIs say do not drink alcohol while taking this medication. It could be discontinuation of alcohol that relieves depression.

<comment><USER5> To support what you say here's the nice guidance for problem drinking combined with mental health problems. The guidance is very clear: you treat an alcohol addiction before you treat the depression because the depression is likely to become less severe as you treat the problem drinking.

[http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg115/chapter/Key- priorities...](http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg115/chapter/Key-priorities- for-implementation)

> For people who misuse alcohol and have comorbid depression or anxiety > disorders, treat the alcohol misuse first as this may lead to significant > improvement in the depression and anxiety. If depression or anxiety > continues after 3 to 4 weeks of abstinence from alcohol, undertake an > assessment of the depression or anxiety and consider referral and treatment > in line with the relevant NICE guideline for the particular disorder[3].

So, it's true for the general population. But it's a bit rude to ask one individual if they had problem drinking or to suggest their illness was problem drinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it's important to note that although studies of serotonin levels don't show a connection with depression (i.e. lower serotonin levels = depression), that doesn't mean that drugs which decrease reuptake/increase (by proxy) serotonin levels won't improve mood.

It's sort of a red herring to say "Depression isn't caused by a serotonin deficiency, therefore SSRIs are bunk", which is what this article seems to veer towards. SSRIs could affect a completely different body system as long as they wind up showing a statistically significant effect over placebo in a double blind study, then they are acceptable forms of treatment by our current scientific/medical standards. (Which apparently they do for most patients--so I wouldn't rule them out.).

<comment><USER7> There seems to be a growing view that inflammation plays an important role in depression. See for example [http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/200](http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/200) .

The idea is that depression could be a feedback loop in which negative life events cause the brain to become chronically flooded by stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine.

These are pro-inflammatory factors whose chronic presence promote run-away inflammatory responses which kill glial cells, decrease neuroplasticity, retard neurogenesis, and also contribute to a whole constellation of other health problems like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

What closes the feedback loop is that this inflammation-mediated form of brain damage, particularly in the hippocampus and amygdala, directly compromise a person's cognitive ability to deal with life stressors constructively. The ability to process emotion, fear, and memory degrade.

Speaking a bit poetically, you could say that a severely depressed brain is one that has rewired itself to be a stress-processing circuit.

SSRIs no doubt work for some people, and the modern thinking is that they might be promoting neurogenesis through upregulating BDNF and other growth factors; there are multiple lines of evidence, one fun one is the fact that the maturation time of new neurons roughly matches the time it takes for SSRIs to start affecting depression (3-6 weeks).

Exercise also works, seemingly about as well as SSRIs for many people with moderate depression (Googling will provide examples of studies from the last few couple decades to that affect). I haven't read much about this but I would imagine that the metabolic and cellular stresses of a bout of heavy exercise (in which millions of cells die) promotes the production of growth factors all over the body, including in the brain.

<comment><USER8> I think "negative life events" are more of a symptom than a cause. Temporary grief over loss or other genuinely bad things happening in life is normal in healthy people. What's so different about depression is that the patient seems to feel bad without a clear cause. You hear them going on about things that to a healthy person don't seem like such a big deal, or easy to fix, or so long ago a healthy person would have been over it by now. It's more a sign of the depressed brain trying to rationalize why it feels bad, and looking for outside causes to blame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's worth reading [http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/05/chemical- imbalance/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/05/chemical-imbalance/) for a more balanced take on this issue IMO.

<comment><USER10> This entire article is based on a complete mischaracterization of Robert Whitaker's book/article. How exactly is that balanced?

<comment><USER11> [See also this follow-up.]([http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/18/polemical- imbalance/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/18/polemical-imbalance/))

<comment><USER10> It's still a complete mischaracterization. What RW is saying, to vastly simplify, is that pharma companies and psychiatrists are selling drugs that haven't been proven to work by using the monoamine hypothesis, which is a largely discredited theory.

What this blog is saying is that when psychiatrists talk about a chemical imbalance, they are merely saying that brain chemicals are involved in depression in some way, rather than that a lack of serotonin causes depression. The latter has literally nothing to do with what Robert Whitaker is actually talking about. It's just nonsense pharma propaganda designed to trick people who haven't actually read the original book, which sadly is the vast majority of people.

<comment><USER12> How can it be a mischaracterization? RW explicitly argued against the blog post in question here: [http://www.madinamerica.com/2015/04/psychiatrists- still-prom...](http://www.madinamerica.com/2015/04/psychiatrists-still- promoting-low-serotonin-theory-depression/) If he was being mischaracterized, wouldn't he have said that instead of repeating exactly what he was claimed to be saying?

> pharma companies and psychiatrists are selling drugs that haven't been > proven to work by using the monoamine hypothesis

Where's your evidence here? SSRIs do work (I assume this is the class of drug we're talking about). For sure, they don't work for some people (or some types of depression; hard to say which is the issue at this point). But they still beat placebo on average.

In fact, the monoamine hypothesis was _based_ on the fact that SSRIs work. The cause/effect is the opposite of what it would have to be for your claim to make sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If I eat some bad sushi, the pain in my stomach is not caused by constricted blood vessels or an excess of COX enzyme. But if I take a Tylenol, a COX inhibitor, I feel better. Then a few hours later I'm "cured" in that I no longer have stomach pain, headache or fever.

Did the Tylenol cure what was ailing me? Not at all. What it did is made me feel more comfortable while the root malady was being taken care of. If the pain persisted after one or two doses of Tylenol then I'd suspect something more serious than indigestion were at fault and I'd start looking for a reason. What I wouldn't do, and what I hope a doctor would be responsible enough not to do, is to keep taking Tylenol or a more serious pain medication to cover up the pain without considering the actual cause.

<comment><USER4> Tylenol, interestingly, has an antidepressant effect.

<comment><USER14> Would that have to do with its anti-inflammatory property?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Depression probably is not a single illness with a single cause

The serotonin hypothesis is probably wrong

There are problems with some of the studies used for SSRIs / SNRIs / etc, as with many drugs.

Studies show stronger effectiveness of meds for more severe depression

Fromt line treatment for depression and anxiety is not medication but is a talking therapy or a talking therapy and a medication combined.

None of this is particularly new. IAPT (Improved access to psychologicl therapy) is the UK national health service programme to help local health providers implement NICE guidance on depression and anxiety disorders. IAPT started in 2006.

<comment><USER15> > The serotonin hypothesis is probably wrong

The serotonin is one _possible_ cause. It sounds like you are suggesting that SSRIs are incorrectly used as a universal treatment, which I'd agree with completely.

I think it's important to distinguish between depression and sadness. I've noticed a very sharp increase in the amount of people (especially youth) who claim to be depressed. They go to a doctor, get a SSRI prescription and next thing you know their brain has a dependency on SSRIs to maintain normal serotonin levels (they are now actually depressed). This is why this is important:

> talking therapy or a talking therapy and a medication combined.

I was _clinically_ depressed for the longest time. Turns out it wasn't caused by serotonin but instead a genetic mutation[1] that something like 80% of human samples have. It can results in a condition is called homocystinuria. In layman terms your body is unable to activate (turn into usable form) one of the forms of Vitamin B. Unsurprisingly the symptoms 5-MTHF (the activated Vitamin B) deficiency can be strikingly similar to depression.

My fix for depression is to simply take a vitamin for the rest of my life. I'm just lucky that the doctors I went to cared enough to not default to the SSRI prescription.

[1]: [http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/gene/MTHFR](http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/gene/MTHFR)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The editorial is here:

[http://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h1771](http://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h1771)

Some of it I agree with, some I don't; I'm going to bed, but my primary objection relates to why the tricyclic antidepressants fell out of use. First of all, they're not gone; if you go to a psychiatrist and ask for amitryptyline or imipramine, you might just get it. But they're only used in depression which doesn't respond to SSRIs, because in some patients tricyclics can cause mania, hallucinations, and muscle twitching in addition to the infamous weight gain and sexual anhedonia seen on SSRIs. As such they were rarely prescribed even when they were the only drugs available.

Otherwise I agree, but the question "why don't we use tricyclics?" has a lot of excellent answers.

</comment><comment><USER17> There were several drugs I tried where I couldn't stand the side-effects, and only one that I actually liked.

As a patient, if you feel the drugs aren't helping, you should be prepared to fire your doctor or even stop taking them. (I know that's a big medical no-no, but I never would have found someone competent if I didn't fire several psychiatrists and refuse to take drugs that had harsh side-effects. My first psychiatrist was so incompetent that I believed that they all were incompetent and all the drugs were harmful.)

<comment><USER18> If you choose to stop taking an anti-depressant, please be careful and consult a physician. If you don't taper off the drugs, you can feel some really nasty effects. This seems to be particularly problematic with Cymbalta. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antidepressant_discontinuation...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antidepressant_discontinuation_syndrome)

<comment><USER19> You bring up an important point. If you STOP taking an SSRI, you will feel depressed, because your serotonin levels will drop. What's happening is that the SSRI has been fighting your body, pushing up your serotonin levels, and your body has been fighting back. When the SSRI is cut off, your body's fight continues for a while, pushing levels down. Often patients feel suicidal at this point.

Healy and Whittaker point out that the clinical studies initially used to justify the use of SSRIs cleverly took advantage of this effect. Patients on SSRIs were compared to those who had just been cut off the drug. Of course the latter group, perversely included as "placebo", fared worse than the ones taking the drug.

<comment><USER5> Discontinuation effects are not "feeling more depressed".

<comment><USER20> But you feel like shit and may try to kill yourself. That's sort of the reason why stopping medication without external supervision is discouraged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> We do know that MDMA is an incredibly potent anti-depressant and serotonin releasing agent. It may be able to cure depression in a single dose.

Unfortunately it was banned by the DEA under very controversial circumstances, against the recommendation of doctors and scientists, (who wanted it to be schedule 3) so a promising avenue of research was shut down.

Of course it can be harmful, if abused, but if used correctly it's quite a benign substance.

We also know from decades of studies that SSRI's don't work very well, often not at all, and that they also have paradoxical effects such as suicidal feelings and depression.

</comment><comment><USER22> For me and others close to me anti-depressants proved to be a joke/a placebo.

I was on five to six different drugs to cure an odd social anxiety, that went away as I got older and grew more comfortable in my skin. How in the world can a drug cure an odd internal social behavior that leads one to feel anxious/uncomfortable? Answer for me is .. it can't.

Another example being my g/f. We started dating six years ago and up until a year ago she had been on 4 different anti-depressants each year. Her doctors would say oh that one isn't working lets try this one and so on. Finally she realized this stuff isn't helpful, what's the point?

For those it has helped that's good to hear, but for me, my g/f and many others I know... these drugs are just lining the pockets of the drug companies.

<comment><USER23> Anti-depressants didn't ever do anything for me, either. Although I suspect that the only anxiety attack I've ever had could very well have been caused by them.

In his awesome book Bad Pharma, Ben Goldacre also hints that the link between depression and serotonin levels is not very well established. For those of you that don't know, Ben Goldacre is not some quack that pretends that science is wrong or something like that; in fact, what he asks for is precisely more rigorous science (specifically, more rigorous medical trials, all made public).

On the other hand, apparently there are a lot of people who have had a measurable level of benefit. My non-educated hypothesis is that there are several causes of depression and serotonin levels may be only one of them.

<comment><USER24> It's probably best to view depression as a symptom. It could have several immediate causes (i.e. the physical processes that make you feel that way) as well as many other root causes (i.e. what leads your body to be in the state that is causing you to feel depressed).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> One alternative (maybe fringish, I don't know) theory I've heard for the action of antidepressants, are that they work by being antimicrobial.

<comment><USER26> That would be pretty easy to test, no? Just put some anti-depressant on different bacterial cultures and see if they die.

<comment><USER3> Oh we know they are anti-microbial, we just don't know how that might affect your mood

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I can't speak to the drugs or the study, but having had a significant other showing signs of depression and working with them to get them active (physically), outside more, and an additional avenue to focus on (in this case, something in common that happened to be outside activity) helped with the depression symptoms significantly. Not fully, but definite signs.

Just an observation/data point.

</comment><comment><USER28> I didn't even know I was depressive until my mid 30's...when apparently (according to stats from the shrink I visited) a lot of people manifest symptoms. Mine were sudden panic attacks, which when they happened first, I thought I was dying so I called 911 for nothing and was told there's nothing wrong w/my heart even though I felt chest pains/tightness (a common occurence w/MDD, but who'd know, right?)...which then got worse over time, despite what I did, exercise, vitamins, supplements, sleep, drinking, and other things I won't name, only because I (formerly) despised psychiatry as a profession and thought it was gobbledy gook.

For reason I won't outline here, someone strongly suggested, after having fought this unsuccessfully for quite some time and needlessly suffering, that I visit a psychiatrist because in his view, I had MDD. This is someone I truly trusted and he apparently dealt with his MDD in the past, so I was like, ok, I'm at the end of my rope so I'll give the MD a shot.

The best way to describe what happened few months down the road after a few trial/errors to see which SSRI fits me best (and that's how everyone finds out - trial/error, any doctor worth his salt will admit this- or they lie to your face if they say otherwise), is a persistent feeling developed, or I should say, resurrected only because I forgot how it felt to feel normal since I was a kid - of being lifted out of a deep hole that I seem to have been in for years, if not decades.

All the b.s. about sexual dysfunction they petrify guys with - for me was not true, in fact, it was quite the opposite as I regained control over that aspect of my life, rather than desensitizing myself with some activities which may have eventually led to ED, despite some "logic" that was telling me that I was doing the "right thing" ...

I could focus better at work, I was calmer in general with my wife, kids, and was more chipper and lit up overall. It's not a high or a dependency...to test it, I stopped, went through what one might call a "withdrawal", but then the MDD kicked back in in full force after a few months of being off it.

Since then, I went back on and decided it is much more important to be productive and focused on an SSRI, than a panic-induced, anxious, crying fits, lost mess without it.

So do SSRIs work? They worked for me - in conjunction with some therapy. Do they address the EXACT cause of depression? Unlikely. MDD is multi-causal, some nurtured by choice, some genetically inherited, no one really knows... but SSRIs treat it well enough in many cases.

Don't dismiss anything out of hand - would be my advice. Depression (clinical, not just depression cause you lost your job or gf/bf - which tends to go away) is real and it is sucks big time. Mine was classified as MDD of moderate to severe character...and I asked the doc, what's really severe - his response was, curling up into a ball on the couch and not being able to function. Some are worse and potentially self-destructive...(i.e. suicide). There is help...SSRIs are just one of many ways to treat this. Point is to reach out for help when someone points it out to you - if you trust them, and you've struggled w/it long enough to the point of unmanageabiility. Study upon study show high causality between SSRI therapy and major reduction of MDD symptoms...

good luck!

</comment><comment><USER20> I compare this to giving a machine a hit with a wrench. So there is this cliché about machines which have hickups or stop working and then when you hit them hard enough, they work properly again.

But that doesn't mean they were designed to only work under continous beatings. Same thing with serotonin: In depressed brains, SSRIs will "hit" the brain, and that works surprisingly often, but it doesn't mean the brain was supposed to only work with high serotonin levels.

<comment><USER28> ECT hits it harder, and allegedly, in many cases, "reboots" it to a point of being normal (i.e. non-depressed), if the SSRI hits fail to work.

Wanna hear something even trippier from my shrink's mouth? In cases where ECT failed - and not many at that - as an alternative, nicotine therapy broke the depression, restored feelings of normalcy. :)

Obviously, they didn't have the patient take up smoking, since there are other ways to administer nicotine only without the 4000 byproducts of smoke, but it made sense, since I believe most of my family is depressed and the whole lot of them have been decades long smokers, to this day.

Cool stuff huh? Grab that Camel pack now ;)</comment></comment>


Der Spiegel: Are we witnessing the implosion of a superpower? - <AUTHOR> https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-american-patient-how-trump-is-fueling-a-corona-disaster <comment><USER2> American citizen here.

I really think this is over the top. The US economy was doing very well prior to the outbreak, the US doesn't seem to be doing much worse than other countries. (Actually, the US seems to have a little better stats, judging by death-per-million.)

Why is Der Spiegel posting such a one-sided story? Are they hoping in some way to influence American politics? (Legitimate question.) If so, what is the reason?

<comment><USER3> Not sure where you get your news from, but clearly you need to read more widely about what is actually happening on the ground in the US...

<comment><USER4> I am sure he is just referring to Worldometer. Is there much beyond that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Outline.com is bypassing the paywall: [https://outline.com/gvLNek](https://outline.com/gvLNek)

</comment><comment><USER6> Working Link: [https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-american- pati...](https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-american-patient-how- trump-is-fueling-a-corona-disaster-a-024a5cc9-2c07-419a-a351-67837b47f6bb)

</comment><comment><USER7> 404

</comment><comment><USER8> Is there a link to the content please?

It seems to be heavily paywalled in a way I can usually get past.

<comment><USER9> [http://archive.is/6WHB8](http://archive.is/6WHB8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a link that works for me: [https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-american- pati...](https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-american-patient-how- trump-is-fueling-a-corona-disaster-a-024a5cc9-2c07-419a-a351-67837b47f6bb)

You should note that "Der Spiegel" is left-leaning and has probably never lost a single good word on Trump ever. Without having read the article, I expect this to be based more on wishful thinking by doomsayers than on real concerns.

</comment><comment><USER11> TLDR: German author now understand that Americans have a system that intentionally thwarts top-down control, and that, even so people, can still learn to adapt and do the right thing even in a backdrop of insecurity.

Bonus Antics: German author uses "(sic)" in photo caption to imply that black nurses from Brooklyn are not speaking proper English.

<comment><USER12> The caption is a Trump quote from the paragraph above, intended to be ironically juxtaposed with the nurses' actual problems.

<comment><USER11> Good catch. Even weirder in my opinion putting it next to nurses recuperating from their work.

Der Spiegel didn't even get the date right - it was January 24th when Trump said "We have very little problem [sic] in this country at this moment—five [confirmed cases]. And those people are all recuperating successfully." according to the sources I can find.

<comment><USER13> I don't know what sources you're looking at, all the ones I could find say the 30th:

\- White House press release: [https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings- statements/remarks-pres...](https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings- statements/remarks-president-trump-usmca-celebration-american-workers-warren- mi/)

\- Reuters: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-china-usa- trump/tr...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-china-usa-trump/trump- says-coronavirus-outbreak-is-very-well-under-control-idUSKBN1ZT334)

\- Politico: [https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/30/trump-close- coopera...](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/30/trump-close-cooperation- china-coronavirus-109701)

\- Vox: [https://www.vox.com/2020/4/17/21225010/trump-who-attacks- cor...](https://www.vox.com/2020/4/17/21225010/trump-who-attacks-coronavirus- warnings)

\- ABC News: [https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/wary-irking-china- tr...](https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/wary-irking-china-trump-offers- rosy-virus-threat-68632175)

\- Al Jazeera America: [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/cloneofcloneofcloneof...](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/cloneofcloneofcloneofchina- battles-coronavirus-o-200129233906291.html)

This wasn't difficult, I just searched "Trump coronavirus very little problem" in Google News to get a vague idea, then limited it by date to get more specific results.

I couldn't find any evidence whatsoever for it happening on the 24th. To publish it on the 24th would require either time travel or some insight into planned speeches.

It kinda feels like you're trying to discredit Der Spiegel for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Between the very serious claims that deficits don't matter and free money going around, I think we are seeing the nation change.

There will be a working class, and a leach class. It will forever define politics in the United States. What starts as good intentions will be what causes the end.

Our small business couldn't really afford to pay 15$/hr for a secretary, now with free money as a competitor, I imagine the cost of unskilled labor will only go up.

<comment><USER15> > There will be a working class, and a leach class. It will forever define > politics in the United States.

That's already the status quo. The consequences of coronavirus will only solidify this... just look at Amazon, they're taking over business from a _lot_ of quarantine-closed small stores, no matter if food or non-food. Many people will stick with Amazon, Bezos gets all the money, and entire 'hoods will collapse once the lockdowns get lifted. The biggest companies have enough cash, access to cash or fire their employees to ride out the lockdowns, the small businesses will go belly up no matter how much "stimulus money" gets injected.

I rather suspect that there will be a third class, or to be more precise, it will become evident to everyone that this class exists: destitute people in yet-unknown masses. Dozens of millions of people in the US have claimed unemployment benefits. Give them a month or two to run out of savings and debt options, and they'll be unable to make rent, get evicted, you get the rest.</comment></comment>


After All These Years, the World Is Still Powered by C Programming - <AUTHOR> http://tekhinnovation.blogspot.com/2017/03/after-all-these-years-world-is-still.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> And C++ is used in so many places on top of that. Every web browser is written in C++. Most GUI systems are written in C++ (or Objective C). All gaming engines are written in C++, etc.

<comment><USER3> It's also my understanding that the LLVM, GNU, and Microsoft __C __compilers are technically (1) all written in C++. It 's also my experience that larger embedded projects also tend to be C++. So maybe your microwave is written in C, but your car's control systems are probably C++, at least in the new parts.

(1) So the gcc codebase is almost entirely C but it is compiled as C++. Someone else might be able to explain exactly what features of C++ made this an attractive option . My intuition tells me it has to do with better compiler diagnostics, perhaps involving type checking. I'm on mobile or I would research and provide more authoritative sources.

<comment><USER4> Taylor's slides list the reasons to commit to writing GCC in C++:

C++ is well-known and popular.

It's nearly a superset of C90, which GCC was then written in.

The C subset of C++ is as efficient as C.

C++ "supports cleaner code in several significant cases." It never requires "uglier" code.

C++ makes it harder to break interface boundaries, which leads to cleaner interfaces.

[https://lwn.net/Articles/542457/](https://lwn.net/Articles/542457/)

<comment><USER3> > It never requires "uglier" code.

Again, I mostly agree with everything you wrote, but this is overstating things a little. Because exception safety can be a little more complicated than it first appears, you _do_ end up having to do a bit more work in C++ in certain cases.

One example of this is writing an external ABI in C++. Depending on how nice you want to be to the consumer of your ABI, you might need to add a try...catch(...) to every public function to make sure exceptions don't escape the C++ code. There are also tricky subtleties around writing, say, a swap function in the face of constructors that might throw.

<comment><USER5> You can write exception free code since C++11. All you must do is to add noexcept operator at the end of your function that you don't want to throw an exception and that would do.

Also, in the article it states that cars are using C. If I'm not mistaken, Bjarne himself in a couple of videos he has mentioned certain companies, like BMW and Mercedes, are using C++ for their cars and of course these two companies are not the only ones.

The good thing is that C++ committee _did_ pay attention to what people and companies have suggested and or complained for years and fixed it with the release of C++11.

I really love using C myself, but I wish C had the safety C++ has by default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The comparison to C++ with respect to exceptions is a bit misrepresented. In platforms where size/perf matters they are turned off at the compiler level(along with RTTI). This was always the first thing we did in gamedev right after turning on W4.

Overall decent article though.

</comment><comment><USER7> Immediately thought of this [https://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG](https://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG) and the accompanying discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12312623](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12312623)

</comment><comment><USER8> Isn't a big part of its allure that it is "close to the metal"? When learning assembly language programming in the '80s, I would write a bit of C, and compile to assembly. It was very easy to mentally map from the one to the other.

<comment><USER9> This is harder today due to optimizations, but if you also understand those, you can do it.

<comment><USER8> That I get. I doubt this would work today. Even a simple program would generate reams of "boilerplate" and a reasonably complex program would probably leverage branch look-ahead and other optimizations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> charles-salvia Still, the thing is, I really don't buy into any arguments in favor of starting a new project, in C, _today_. The problem is that C suffers from some really serious disadvantages as a systems programming language, and it has no significant advantages over C++ or Rust, apart from subjective ideas like "it's simpler" or circumstantial issues like "my team doesn't know C++".

Firstly, apart from a simple call stack, C has no automatic resource management. There are no automatic destructors. Thus it is _too_ easy to forget to free some memory or unlock a mutex or decrement a ref count or whatever, especially when many code paths are possible after a resource has been allocated. The other options are to use the "goto cleanup" or "goto err" idiom, which is still way more error prone than automatic destructors.

And secondly, despite being touted as so "efficient", C offers no way to write code that is both generic _and_ free of runtime overhead, apart from preprocessor macros (which are filled with their own issues), or automatic code generation scripts. Both C++ and Rust have metaprogramming facilities which provide the ability to write generic code without sacrificing performance or maintainability.

I mean, with C++, the automatic deterministic allocation/destruction _alone_ is worth using it over C. And all of the downsides (larger binaries, etc.) can be overcome without much effort. I concede that the extra language complexity of C++ over C could be a disadvantage, but in my mind that doesn't outweigh the benefits.

<comment><USER3> I mostly agree, but C compiles in terms of a binary interface, which makes it unique in it's ability to provide language agnostic libraries.

You _can_ do that in C++, but by wrapping your C++ in C, more or less. Rust might provide a compelling alternative here eventually, but it's still a young language.

<comment><USER10> Providing no stable ABI and not being easy to bind to in general is really a major pain point of C++ for library/framework code. In contrast everyone and their dog is able to call into C in practice which is, I assume, a not to be underestimated reason why it is still so popular, even for code not leveraging its low level nature. Rust is really interesting here as they have chosen to make it more than an afterthought to provide compatibility.

> I concede that the extra language complexity of C++ over C could be a > disadvantage, but in my mind that doesn't outweigh the benefits.

It's a problem, C++ is so insanely complex, full of magic which is hard to grasp and provides more ways to shoot yourself in the foot than to do it right (modern C++ seems better in some regards but still…). C is often chosen because people want sth. reasonable simple so I think a language fitting in between, being richer than C but still fairly comprehensible would be nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hello,

I wrote an article about the other side of the coin, the problems I have with a world powered by C.

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/c-must-retire-sinan- akpolat?p...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/c-must-retire-sinan- akpolat?published=t)

I don't want to compare C to another language. I just think that C is old.

</comment><comment><USER12> cowardlydragon, your comment is marked [dead], so most won't see it. That's unfortunate because it's pretty good.

<comment><USER13> What causes a [dead] mark? Is it like a shadowban?

<comment><USER14> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> C and C++ are in use _but_ it has become easier than ever to bridge in higher- level languages. It is also hard to code sanely on a large project without a higher-level language.

Not every line of a program must be ultra-fast, and maintainability is still huge. If you are _not_ offloading the less-critical parts of your project to languages that are easier to program in than C++, you are doing it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER16> It would have been a nice article but there's just too much ridiculous hype in it.

I'm not saying C is a shitty language or anything, but the reality is that the only reason why C is still around is the long history it has and the dominant position it used to have.

<comment><USER17> Not really. With the exception of rust, you can't match the speed of C short of writing assembly. When you start a project you must decide what is important to you, and if speed is the number one issue, topically you use C. Many, many new projects start with C, mainly because so many of the fast libraries are written in C.

<comment><USER18> Fortran, Ada, D? I guess D is out because of the garbage collector, and I've not heard of Fortran being used as a systems language, but it's certainly performant with C.

However, OSes have been written in Lisp, and it has been used for embedded programming, so it's possible to make a language with more abstractions available similarly performant.

<comment><USER19> > _However, OSes have been written in Lisp, and it has been used for embedded > programming, so it 's possible to make a language with more abstractions > available similarly performant._

You can use anything for writing an OS or an embedded program, if you expand the scope of what people consider an OS or an embedded program.

While OSes have been written in Lisp, no mainstream OS people actually use has. Experimental research OSes don't really count. People have written such things in all kinds of languages, even Java.

And while you can use whatever language for "embedded" programming, actual in- the-trenches embedded programming is done mostly in C, in chips and specs where those other languages wouldn't really fit or be performant enough.

<comment><USER20> > _if you expand the scope of what people consider an OS_

You mean expand it beyond "currently mainstream OS with a big installed base" rather than in any technical sense.

> _While OSes have been written in Lisp, no mainstream OS people actually use > has. Experimental research OSes don 't really count. People have written > such things in all kinds of languages, even Java._

Lisp machines were shipping production hardware.

Who has shipped hardware programmed in nothing but Java? Java code taking interrupts, programming DMA controllers, managing memory, etc.

<comment><USER19> > _You mean expand it beyond "currently mainstream OS with a big installed > base" rather than in any technical sense._

Well, the technical sense ("to boot some hardware and coordinate some processes") is too low a barrier.

It's all the other stuff, managing memory efficiently, making the most of software, being fast to make it worthy to run it, making the battery last, etc, being a good server, etc, that make an OS an OS and not a research vehicle/toy/expensive niche workstation (like the LISP machines).

<comment><USER20> > _to boot some hardware and coordinate some processes_ is too low a barrier.

No it obviously isn't. If it boots and coordinates processes, it's an OS.

> _expensive niche workstation_

In the Lisp machine era, _anything_ that actually had a "real OS" was an expensive workstation (or mini, mainframe, etc).

Affordable consumer machines had software most examples of which didn't control processes, yet was still called some kind of OS: MS-DOS, Mac OS, and the like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> With the arrival of WebAssembly this might see another boost.

<comment><USER21> Appreciate the downvotes, currently hiring c/c++ developers to build for the browser/WebAssembly!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've noticed a lot of open source projects that likely would've been written in C ~5 years ago (like databases) are now being written in Golang. Stuff like Caddy, Kubernetes, InfluxDB, etc.

<comment><USER23> e.g. Docker, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Good!

It's really awesome</comment>


Cost of a Join - <AUTHOR> https://www.brianlikespostgres.com/cost-of-a-join.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17762067](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17762067)

190+ points, 69+ comments</comment>


Harder to read = easier to recall - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/14/reading_fonts/

<comment><USER2> No, no, no, no, no! This tripe has been circulating the 'net for a while and it really bothers me to see this gain some semblance of acceptance/traction.

Yes, studies show that poorly set text causes you to spend more time reading it because it's _hard to read_. However, this is not the proper solution to improve recall! This is a through-and-through design problem that can be solved without destroying readability. There is most certainly a visual solution here that would improve recall, but this is not it.

Can you imagine reading an entire textbook or novel that looked like it had been printed on a greasy old photocopier? I certainly can't.

<comment><USER3> So, are you saying, for example, we should get subjects with good copies in these experiments to spend the same amount of time reading as those with bad copies?

Or, do you think it's some other factor?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think that one of his assumptions is wrong:

As far as I know, Comic Sans is actually easier to read than Arial, especially in children and dyslexic people, and I'm not sure that a 60% grey is much harder to read than a 100% black. IIRC, dark greys are more readable than pure black (on screen at least). At last, once again IIRC, in the midrange, font size doesn't impacts readability at all.

I don't have the time to look for citations right know, but I'm fairly sure I'm right.

The author simply doesn't test whether that Comic Sans and Bodoni are less readable, and doesn't provide any citation backing his assertion.

This is somewhat questionable, methodologically.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some people screamed and gnashed their teeth when one of my blog posts was discussed on HN not long ago, and they discovered I use Museo 500 as my body copy. (article: <http://fayr.am/41ns> commentary: <http://fayr.am/41wI>)

But now, I stand vindicated under the cold light of science. :)

(let the downmods and typography-forest-for-the-trees comments begin!)

<comment><USER6> It's probably less effective when your audience isn't forced to read your text.

<comment><USER5> And yet they acted like reading it was a horrifying, mandatory experience. And then they _voluntarily_ extended that negative experience by talking about it online. It seems inexplicable to me, but there it is.

Seems like another data point in favor of the theory in this article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The experimental noise band/art collective Throbbing Gristle used to systematically mis-spell certain words in all their writings (e.g. "the" -> "thee", "of" -> "ov") so people would have to concentrate to read them.

This reminded me of that (esp. the "salt:p_pp_r" thing).

</comment><comment><USER8> This study was previously reviewed by the economist and discussed in this comment of NH:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1810857>

</comment><comment><USER9> easier to read == easier to understand == less need to recall

</comment><comment><USER10> The more you focus on decoding something, the more neurons are activated, so more connections are made. But are these connections superficial, or are they actually meaningful? They should have asked critical thinking questions rather than easy "recall" crap.</comment>


Russian firm Orbital Technologies reveals space hotel plans - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2026534/Commercial-Space-Station-Russian-firm-Orbital-Technologies-reveals-hotel-plans.html <comment><USER2> How will they reduce the costs of putting someone in orbit from $30-40mil like it is today?

<comment><USER3> Lesser safety standards?

<comment><USER2> Not down to $500K per person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 2016? That's quite optimistic.</comment>


Wait, Plastic Can Be Good for the Environment? - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wait-plastic-can-be-good-for-the-environment/ <comment><USER2> Quite alot of spin here. One issue is that plastic production is not "environmentally friendly" in the first place. Second is the waste of a valuable resource we cant get back. Is plastic bottles and all the little bits of plastic junk we produce REALLY the best use of petroleum? Who wrote this article? Coke?

</comment><comment><USER3> Sure, biodegradable plastic bags are slightly better than TetraPak and polystyrene packaging. Polypropylene if properly recycled would be on par, but recycling almost never happens right.

So, pure carton, if it works, is the best. (Apparently waxed cannot be recycled, but still it's compostable and clean to burn.) Cans and glass jars follow.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is an advertisement for Pepsi and Coke's upcoming PET bottles. The crux of the article is "biodegradable plastic bad, buy coke bottles made with PET".

Look at the rest of the author's articles. If you read in between the lines on them, they could all be summed up as "don't worry, keep the consumer habits you already have, change is coming".

</comment><comment><USER5> That didn't make any sense</comment>