The Beermat Entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beermat-Entrepreneur-Really-Great-Business/dp/0273659294

<comment><AUTHOR> Anyone here read this and have anything to say?

<comment><USER2> Got halfway through (and it's one of those on my shelf that I do intend to finish).

I found it enjoyable, which is pretty generous given I have low opinion of most business books. Afraid I can't give a more thorough review since (a) It's been a while since I last read a chapter and (b) I haven't finished it yet.

Hope that's useful.</comment></comment>


The Brutal Lifecycle of JavaScript Frameworks - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/01/11/brutal-lifecycle-javascript-frameworks/ <comment><USER4> One of the things I don't think it accounts for in talking about the downfall of something like jQuery is that as time goes on, the questions have already been asked.

So of course there's going to be less questions asked about jQuery in 2017 versus 2009, because if I need to figure out how to select elements based on an attribute rather than a class or id, it's already there.

<comment><USER5> On the same note, the older frameworks solved older problems. jQuery was the killer framework because it handled browser compatibility back in a time when people not only needed to support IE8, but IE6, and few companies felt comfortable telling people to just update their browser. Well, those days are past, so that problem is no longer a reason to choose a framework, and when you take that out of the picture, jQuery just isn't so needed.

The same path is likely on all frameworks - they were designed to solve specific use cases, and as the entire industry matures, different solutions will embed themselves in the industry in different ways, reducing the raison d'etre for each framework, over time.

<comment><USER6> Yeah with jquery we were composing templates server side. Compared to Vue trying to do a SPA in jQuery is a season in hell. It can be done but it's brutal and fragile.

<comment><USER7> I'm quite surprised at this conclusion. I've always felt that doing SPA with jQuery was the easiest thing I've ever done in my development career. It's so easy to get something set up and running. And it's a breeze to figure out and read the code too: even when it's 10s of thousands of lines of code.

Is it just me, or are many of the newer frameworks actually harder to use? I tried Angular 1 about 4 or 5 years ago and it seemed like a complete disaster. Recently, I've been working on Vue and this seems a bit better.

<comment><USER8> Depends on the SPA. If you're trying to do something relatively simple, where the events and state clearly map to the UI, jQuery isn't too bad. It's even fun.

Once your SPA goes through an iteration or two with a few different programmers, you find your events have nasty ordering dependencies and your data becomes inconsistent all on its own. You have no idea why because you can't reproduce any of these issues on your own. You have to watch other people interact with your app just to reproduce bugs ("why the hell would you double click a link?") and git bisect becomes the most productive tool in your toolbox. Most project discussions end with a shrug. You yearn for the days when it was possible for a single human to ever understand the entire app, but that was six months ago and management steadfastly refuses to fund a rewrite. You look wildly around for any sign of hope...

As for Angular, agreed, but I'd rather work with it than a bunch of jQuery. React and Vue are quite pleasant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is not really a brutal lifecycle at all, to be honest.

Everyone loves a good rant about how fast the JS frameworks burn out, but it is not frameworks that burn out, but rather:

In the 8+ years since Iphone/Android duo made a HUGE change in how we consume web content, we went from:

\- Having static resolution for websites to dynamically changing site resolutions \- Having static HTML renders with some dynamic bits sprinkled over to full-blown SPA-s because of a variety of reasons* \- Having major new JavaScript versions and INSANE amounts of Javascript engine speedups that allow things that were unimaginable 8+ years ago \- Having gone from "nothing" to a CPU-based <canvas> to a full OpenGL ES-implementation, full GPU-based (<webGL>), \- Had went from procedural code to semi-class based systems towards functional towards functional reactive programming systems

And I could go on and on and on and on.

The DOM api matured during these years. The renderers got replaced. Their performance altered dramatically. Layouts went from "JUST USE TABLES" towards CSS, then towards Compile-to-css alternatives, etc. Single-core event systems got SharedArrayBuffers, webWorkers, we got from callbacks to promises, towards async/await. And do not get me started on almost getting observables properly.

The web has seen more transformations in terms of what is an "app" or a "website" in 8-10 years than ANY OTHER area in programming. It is only natural that widely different tasks need widely different tools to work with.

<comment><USER10> (heads up, you need have a blank space between lines in HN to render them on different lines)

I completely agree. Many people claim the web is overly complex, but then go back into the C++ world where you need a build tool to build your makefile which builds your project using cross compilation on a handful of platforms.

I like to remind people that 10 years ago Android didn't exist, streaming video was still only just becoming a thing, and the iPhone had just been released and wouldn't have an "app store" for another 6 months.

There have been several massive changes to the web and to computers and how we use them in that time. It only makes sense that we will use different frameworks and paradigms to create applications.

<comment><USER9> Thank you! Oh, now that you mention it: just a few years ago, web streaming was not possible without using either flash or (maybe?) silverlight or something else because it was not implemented yet. Youtube crashed my pc regulary during the hd4850 end-days due to driver crashes. Node was not even a thing yet, let alone Electron/NWJS....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The interesting story in this post is not about JS frameworks. It is about StackOverflow.

The Ember community made a proactive decision to abandon StackOverflow around the 2.0 release (about 2.5 years ago). StackOverflow simply does not provide the tools we needed. For example when you answer a question: Are you answering for version 1.0 of a library? 2.0? Perhaps the "correct" answer for each is different. Perhaps, over time, an answer that once was correct is now suggesting something deprecated or not in line with best practices.

StackOverflow doesn't provide any features for dealing with versioning and changes in what is correct over time.

If your community has a StackOverflow moderator, perhaps you can update all the answers you want on a regular basis. I don't know, because our community had no such person, and the StackOverflow team was disinterested in helping us come up with a solution (the Ember project reached out).

Additionally as a tool matures (Ember is over 5 years old) you take more of this stuff under your own wing. Ember has a robust set of companies offering video training, in person training, and books. We have a community chat, a forum, and very active meetups. All of these things are controlled by members of our community, meaning they can respond to changes more fluidly than StackOverflow (moderated by some people outside our community) ever could.

StackOverflow just is not designed for long-lived multi-versioned software. So guess what happens? Users of that software don't stick around on StackOverflow. For living projects the short-term trend will almost always look better than long-term trends.

Ember's story here is not universal. I'm glad there are developers finding StackOverflow useful for other libraries. I think the story StackOverflow should tell is one that focuses on what they do well. But to draw a meaningful lesson about the JS community as a whole from such a idiosyncratic data source is a fools errand.

<comment><USER12> I think this is the most important takeaway. It's especially true for smaller libraries and commercial libraries. And even for huge ones like Rails, questions answered 6 years ago might be little more than a catalog of improper practices by now!

For a hard numbers example of "trends" being poor, I develop a JavaScript diagramming library, GoJS: [https://gojs.net](https://gojs.net)

It has competition, such as JointJS, jsPlumb, etc. If I look at StackOverflow tags, I would think we're in big trouble:

* 180 questions tagged gojs

* 449 questions tagged jointjs

* 518 questions tagged jsplumb

These aren't even enough to show up on StackOverflow's trend tool, and they make the case look pretty dire for GoJS!

But behold, Google trends: [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=gojs,joi...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=gojs,jointjs,jsplumb) (ignore the last, partial-data month)

In search interest GoJS is clearly ahead of these other two libraries. What's more, if you compare the forums for each product, you'd see that GoJS gets 10x-100x the traffic of the others.

StackOverflow is simply not the a good place to gauge library interest and activity over the long term, and its not a good place as you say to ask or find answers to questions for products that have ecosystems which continuously improve their APIs and evolve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The PHP and Vue correlation can at least partly be explained by the fact that Laravel, a popular PHP web framework, has first-hand support for Vue and installs Vue by default in projects bootstrapped with their cli tool.

<comment><USER14> WordPress.com But Vues triumphal march starts before Laravel or WordPress.

<comment><USER15> My understanding is that this tweet [https://twitter.com/taylorotwell/status/590281695581982720?l...](https://twitter.com/taylorotwell/status/590281695581982720?lang=en) kickstarted the Vue popularity. Taylor Otwell is the creator of Laravel.

Here's Evan You (creator of Vue) [https://youtu.be/D_z- RAweP1k?t=3m9s](https://youtu.be/D_z-RAweP1k?t=3m9s) talking about the tweet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As an aside from the interesting article, does any one else find it pretty scary and privacy invading that stackoverflow think it's ok to match our IP addresses to the company we work in?

It seems like a massive invasion of privacy (which I guess lots of websites are doing).

But to me that SO can so casually mention the mass surveillance and privacy invasion they're doing without thinking that there's anything wrong with it is the worst part of it.

I certainly never knowingly agreed that they could check my IP address and then try and figure out what company I work at from it.

EDIT: Once GDPR is live in the EU, I think it might be interesting to see if I can challenge this privacy invasion and inappropriate use of personally identifying data. I guess we'll see if GDPR has any actual teeth in this instance.

<comment><USER17> Your IP is public, so you can't hide it; privacy invasion is a non-argument there.

IP data retention, on the other hand, will be interesting. On the one hand, law enforcement wants to have ISPs and companies to track and remember those, for future investigations. But on the other hand, privacy advocates want that kind of data to not be stored at all.

<comment><USER16> It's not the IP address that's the problem, it's that they're processing personally identifiable information about their users in a way they haven't asked permission for and is not related to the service they're providing.

Here's the UK's ICO guidance for what you can process, as far as I can tell they've got no lawful basis for trying to match a user's IP address to a company without the user asking them to.

[https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general- da...](https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data- protection-regulation-gdpr/lawful-basis-for-processing/)

<comment><USER18> I skimmed that link and couldn't figure out what they mean by "processing". (It's related to compliance with a law, so I assume that the common sense meaning of a word isn't necessarily what is meant.) Do you understand what they mean by "processing" in this context?

It seems like you're saying that analyzing IP addresses a user connected from in order to determine their likely employer is against the UK's GDPR guidance, _even if the data is released only in aggregate_ (but that it might be fine to keep that IP data since perhaps there are other uses for it which would be legitimate). Is that your understanding?

<comment><USER16> It's not about what you release to the public, if you're processing this data in private it's still culpable.

This page gives it some context:

[https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general- da...](https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data- protection-regulation-gdpr/lawful-basis-for-processing/)

Further down are the 6 reasons for processing.

We know the first 5 don't apply:

        consent - there's no consent
        contract - it's not necessary to provide the Q&A answer site
        Legal obligation - there's no legal obligation
        Vital interests - <USER3>
        Public task - <USER3>

So what it falls under is "Legitimate interests", SO want to use a user's IP address, process it to add company name, store that and then use that data for profiling their customers to serve them ads.

One of the problems for SO is that further down they go into this a bit more and there's a few key questions:

        Would individuals expect this processing to take place?
        Are some of the individuals concerned likely to object?
        Are you able to stop the processing at any time on request?

Which I would think would be answer No, Yes, No. Which seems to indicate that there's some problems with SO's approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Stack Overflow Trends lets us examine how each of these technologies has > been asked about over time.

So what are we measuring here? It seems obvious that more popular frameworks would generate more questions, but so would:

\- Newer ones which not as many people are familiar with.

\- Poorly-designed ones which lots of people nevertheless use.

\- Ones which disproportionately attract inexperienced devs.

</comment><comment><USER20> I always have to show up to reiterate this is not a problem limited to Javascript. There have been framework fads for as long as there have been frameworks. I have dim memories of dozens of C++/Java/Python/Ruby/etc. next- big-things.

It does seem like there are more of them and they rise and fall faster in the Javascript world, but this is probably better explained by the sheer number of Javascript programmers than anything else. The labor statistics I can find peg the number of US software developers in 2002 at around 612,000 and around 3.87 million in 2016 - and most of the new ones focus on web development. There are way more web programmers out there than there have really ever been, so it makes sense that the rate of frameworks appearing (and to a degree, the overall lifecycle churn) would be accelerated.

<comment><USER21> > I have dim memories of dozens of C++/Java/Python/Ruby/etc. next-big-things.

While true, none of them have changed so quickly as JavaScript ones, which seem driven by devs eager to create portfolios on Github.

<comment><USER22> > which seem driven by devs eager to create portfolios on Github.

Is this supported by any facts? It seems like a hand-wavey hasty generalization.

<comment><USER21> The increasing trend of startups asking for Github accounts on their job offers.

You just need to search on job boards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why is the measurement on questions asked for the first couple of graphs and then user traffic for the latter set? I wonder if traffic is the better measurement for the first two as well but I bet the graphs won't look quite as doom and gloom.

<comment><USER24> The first few graphs use the interactive [Stack Overflow Trends]([http://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends](http://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends)) tool, which is all public data. This is useful since it lets readers modify the graphs (for example, to add a few more tags to the comparison).

The later graphs use data that's already not public (what tags users visit together, and what countries tags are visited from), so there's no reason not to use visits instead.

The graphs for visits over time do look very similar (in general question traffic by tag roughly matches questions asked, but as a slightly lagging indicator)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > PHP developers [...] visit a disproportionate amount of Vue.js questions.

I would guess this is because the installer for Laravel (one of the most popular PHP frameworks) defaults to scaffolding a Vue.js app for your frontend.

</comment><comment><USER26> Remember that Merb was merged into Rails? That's a community converging, that's what brought Ruby to the point that it is recruiter-speak synonymous to Rails.

In the JS world: not so much. But that prolly has many reasons. I can think of: the language changing rapidly, the community not very "close", people coming to JS from widely different places, and the fact that a JS framework can span either the FE or the BE or both!

<comment><USER27> io.js?

<comment><USER26> Yups. Nice one!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I thank YUI and later jQuery for getting me my first real software development job.

Today it looks surreal that a mere portfolio of mind boggling animation effects would be enough to get a 21 year old an $84k job, but back in the time of peak web 2.0 craze, just having words jquery and 3 years experience on your resume was just enough to get 3 to 4 calls with ready offers every month.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's easy to see graphs trending down and say, oh, interest is waning. But the initial spike could just be lots people going through a learning curve. It tells you something about popularity, but ease-of-use, quality of docs, etc. must all factor in as well. I tend to see the high number of questions on certain frameworks as a red flag.

</comment><comment><USER30> I certainly agree with the hypothesis of this article. I'd like to see how this compares with languages and not just frameworks overtime. How does this curve compare with mature/in-demand languages such as Java, PHP, JavaScript, .Net, Python etc. Do we find a similar graph with languages?

</comment><comment><USER31> IME Vue is so well designed, that I hardly have any issues with it. If I do, my go-to reference is the official documentation.

You shouldn't base your usage assumptions on the amount of questions asked; Vue just doesn't require so many questions...

<comment><USER32> Ditto for React. Pretty much every "how do I do this" is covered in the official tutorial and every "how _should_ I do this" is covered by supplemental guides (still official docs).

Some good ones: "thinking in React", "lifting state up", "controlled components", and similar docs in redux: "you might not need redux"

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> My question as a Java/Swing developper is this: what is the difference between React and Web Components? As far as I understand, both create self-contained components that you can use in your HTML, and that will react when you alter their DOM structure (for example changing an attribute value, or binding an HTML input value with an internal value inside the component).

And from that perspective, will we see in the future off-the-shelf HTML components (based on React or Web Components) just like we can use custom Swing components ?

<comment><USER21> That could be the idea, but currently it seems Angular devs are more open to that idea, given that WebComponents are mostly driven by Google.

[https://summit.polymer-project.org/](https://summit.polymer-project.org/)

[https://developer.chrome.com/devsummit/](https://developer.chrome.com/devsummit/)

You can some components here, as well as, the current state of browser support.

[https://www.webcomponents.org/](https://www.webcomponents.org/)

Currently only HTML Imports seem to be a point of disagreement.

I am looking forward to them, as they can be the way for more sanity on Web development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Pretty much a Gartner's Hype Curve like behaviour on each case. Accelerated adoption, a peak, then delusion kicks in causing many people to lose interest and step away from the technology. Late adopters find lower barriers of entry later on caused by lessons learned and improvements made to the same technology. Usage increases again but a lower level when compared to the initial peak. Expectations around tech's capabilities are now more concrete and realistic, bringing stability to the ecosystem as a whole.

</comment><comment><USER35> About to make an App using React(and react native?)

Up until this point, I usually would make most things from scratch and pull in libraries sparce. No big deal because my previous programs didnt need to. (Self taught programmer for 11 years.)

For the next 3 months, I'll be working on this almost alone. Is it worth using some of my resources to hire a React developer?

Also, this topic implies React will be gone in about ~5 years? That sounds good for me.

<comment><USER36> I would learn React if I was you. Check out create-react-app on Github. It will set you up with a working app to play with in a matter of seconds. If you're expecting to use React Native it looks like they have a create-react- native-app also.

<comment><USER35> Right now I'm stuck working on getting SDKs installed.

I got my android app running which was easy after all the installs and updates.

Now I'm doing some weird command line stuff to try to get my Javascript server to wake up. Changing ports, more SDK updates, etc... Changing my App.js doesnt update, except if I turn everything off and back on again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I moved my frontend (I mean "in browser" by that) dev to elm about a year ago, and it's been a year of peace. I know elm has flaws, and it's development workflow can be criticized for being too slow or conservative, but it's been so predictable, so easy to work with, so maintainable and so solid in production, I have never been so happy about frontend dev.

</comment><comment><USER38> Alternative hypothesis:

Brand new frameworks have zero docs and zero questions in Stack Overflow. Older frameworks have (hopefully) complete docs and a library of SO questions. In between you get a gradient.

I'm just not convinced that the data they're looking at means what they think it means.

</comment><comment><USER39> Just because the number of questions decreases about a framework does not mean people have stopped using the framework. I ask very few questions because I am normally working behind the bleeding edge and can get my questions answered simply by searching.

</comment><comment><USER40> Woah...

Was honestly surprised to see Vue.js was so tiny in comparison to Ang and React regarding "% of Stack Overflow questions that month".

I thought it was much bigger

<comment><USER41> Vue.js has a spectacular tutorial that answers most if not all questions one might have about the framework.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Why are 'angular' and 'angular.js' seperate tags?

<comment><USER43> AngularJS refers to major version 1, Angular refers to 2.

<comment><USER42> Wow. That's really unintuitive.

<comment><USER44> I agree with the sentiment. Most people view them as distinct frameworks. I believe the use of the name Angular for major version 2+ helped retain a lot of users. I've seen a lot of uninformed devs and managers assume that because they already have so much code in AngularJS that Angular is the next logical tool for their team to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Knockout isn't a Microsoft technology

</comment><comment><USER46> The JavaScript/jQuery community (no difference from outside) was absolutely cancerous. It was impossible to find a javascript question that didn't include top answer "In jQuery...". Makes my blood boil just thinking about it years later.

I wonder what effect this has on usage. How likely are new developers to use it if virtually every question they have is answered by this (no matter how irrelevant the answer should be today).

<comment><USER47> To be fair, that's because the jQuery solution was usually orders of magnitude simpler. Although newer versions of javascript have absorbed enough of the jQuery api that this is no longer the case.

<comment><USER46> Acceptable way would be "Hey, it's done like this, but since the language sucks there's this random library where you can do it this way".

Including jQuery for one small task would be stupid.

Including jQuery in a non-web project would be weird.

Including jQuery in some es variants would be impossible.

<comment><USER47> At that time, javascript was used exclusively for client-side web development. It was pretty much impossible to write ajax requests in any sane fashion that worked cross-browser. It's not such a stretch to assume the user asking the question could use jQuery.

<comment><USER46> The first part is not true.

And while I agree with the second, I'm talking about general language questions not related to web in any way (no DOM manipulation, no http requests, etc..).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: how do I save a HN story? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I found this fantastic thing in my profile that is "saved stories" (http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=yourNick) and I hoped that that was the list of all upvoted stories... but it is not.
I have no idea how I "saved" some stories and I could really use a list of upvoted stories as a sort of local bookmark. I often find cool articles which I need to go back weeks/months later, but they're almost impossible to find.
Any help appreciated, thanks! <comment><USER2> You aren't the only person having problems:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3885839>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you mz. Looking at the other thread I wondered if perhaps all the stories I upvoted were killed, but that's highly improbable. Either it's a bug or I don't have enough karma to use this feature ?

<comment><USER3> Same thing happening here. I have only 23 saved storied, latest is 28 days ago and I sure have clicked alot more stories, also thinking I have saved them for further reading. Also would like to know if its a bug or karma thing.

[edit: 28 days ago]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think there's a difference between a story you want to save and a story you voted for.

</comment><comment><USER5> Any story you upvote goes on that list.

<comment><AUTHOR> I upvoted dozens of stories, however the list only shows 10 stories which are also very old, none of recent voted stories appear on this page.

<comment><USER5> <http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=dewiz>

That _should_ have all the stories you voted on + a more link at the bottom to browse older ones.</comment></comment></comment>


PIA Airbus 320 Crashes near Karachi - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52766904 <comment><USER3> This incident occurred in my neighborhood. The plane crashed in a residential area and the overall death toll is still unknown. There are a few confirmed survivors so far: President of Bank of Punjab and a 3-year-old kid.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if it was a fuel issue. The "we lost two engines" near the destination airport makes me think of that.

<comment><USER5> Based on pictures circulating on Twitter, it looks like the plane's engines may have scraped on the runway (presumably in a landing attempt without landing gear down) before taking off again.

<comment><USER6> Very unlikely, if the landing gear has problems to the extent that you scrape the runway with the engines, then taking off is almost impossible and useless, you just stop to a halt. If your landing gear does not extend and lock properly, you abort the landing way before touching it.

<comment><USER7> This assumes experienced pilots who were paying attention and following the checklist. If they weren't and forgot the gear on the first pass they might have panicked and tried a go-around.

<comment><USER8> I'm not an expert (y'know, like everyone in any given HN comments section), but surely there must be automated systems in place that warn the pilots if the landing gear is not deployed when within x meters of the ground?

<comment><USER7> Yes there will be an automated warning. On the airbus it calls out "retard" below 20 ft. Edit: This wrong, see reply below.

<comment><USER5> "Retard" is a normal callout during touchdown. The gear up warning is a separate "too low gear" callout from TCAS.

<comment><USER9> "Too low, gear" (and the other terrain alarms) are from GPWS, not TCAS.

<comment><USER5> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ran out of fuel after 3 aborted landings, pilots perhaps distracted by an engine failure?

<comment><USER11> The FAA and ICAO regulation for flights above 18,000 feet is that you need to have enough fuel to reach your destination, an appropriate alternate airport, and cruise for an additional 45 minutes. I doubt they ran out of fuel after 3 attempts to land at the original destination airport.

<comment><USER12> I'd love for a heavy pilot to comment on the math involved. Fuel burn on takeoff is a lot more than cruise. I'd assume ~3x as much. Throw in the amount of time to fly around a pattern and that 45 minutes doesn't give a lot of flexibility if you start botching landings.

<comment><USER13> This may surprise you, but the fuel burn for holding is essentially constant vs altitude. What suffers is the range, flying at low altitude is much worse for fuel range because at high altitude, true air speed increases for a given indicated air speed.

Page 17 shows ~5000 lb/hr at mid weight: [https://www.air- septimanie.com/pdf/technical/A320/en/A320PER...](https://www.air- septimanie.com/pdf/technical/A320/en/A320PERFORMANCE.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A transmission of the pilot's final exchange with air traffic control, posted on the website LiveATC.net, indicated he had failed to land and was circling around to make another attempt, reported AP.

"We are proceeding direct, sir — we have lost engine," a pilot can be heard saying.

"Confirm your attempt on belly," the air traffic controller said, offering a runway.

"Sir - mayday, mayday, mayday, mayday Pakistan 8303," the pilot said before the transmission ended.

source: [https://www.dawn.com/news/1558944/at-least-80-killed-as- plan...](https://www.dawn.com/news/1558944/at-least-80-killed-as-plane- with-99-onboard-crashes-into-residential-area-near-karachi-airport)

</comment><comment><USER15> How big are the chances that the most prominent passenger is the sole survivor of a plane crash (yet, but I don't expect many more)? The Bank of Panjab president, whow! Lucky guy.

<comment><USER16> Decent, given that the current fatality count is 11 out of 91 passengers and an unspecified number of crew.

Certainly the fatality count will rise, but with modern planes survival tends to be more about escaping the post crash fire. If >50% of the passengers and crew live, I wouldn't be surprised at all.

<comment><USER17> I'd expect a lower survival rate as it appears to have crashed into buildings, and not into a field or similar.

<comment><USER16> Crashing in a city means that you crash into buildings that are both flammable and hinder escape, as you've said. But it also means that you're crashing near a means of rescue, rather than having to wait precious minutes for rescue services to locate you. Only time will tell which of these factors was more important.

Good news is that crashes on landing tend to involve a lot less fuel, which should improve survival chances significantly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Lots more details here, as usual:

[http://avherald.com/h?article=4d7a6e9a&opt=0](http://avherald.com/h?article=4d7a6e9a&opt=0)

</comment><comment><USER19> The mention of Pakistan's "chequered aviation safety record" got me wondering how it compares to other airlines.

I came across this site [0], and found the data to be really interesting. Pakistan International Airlines ranks decently well, while Southwest Airlines ranks among the worst.

[0] [https://www.airlineratings.com/safety-rating- tool/](https://www.airlineratings.com/safety-rating-tool/)

<comment><USER20> This finding is an artifact of their methodology. Southwest is not EU admitted because they only recently expanded to routes outside of the US and have not so far expanded outside of the Americas (they may not want to as it would introduce real complications to unified-fleet their business model). They are not fatality-free in the last ten years, but their fatality in 2018 was the only passenger fatality they have ever experienced. This incident also seemed fairly fault-free on the part of Southwest as it resulted in guidance changes requiring more frequent inspection of the engine model involved than previously.

Perhaps they _should_ undergo IOSA audit, but it is entirely optional and is viewed as less necessary in the US because the FAA's mandatory safety oversight is similarly strict. It is mostly a certification obtained by airlines to demonstrate that they are "as safe" as their peers, and as the largest carrier in the US with an excellent safety record, Southwest is probably just not very inclined to go to the extra expense for a certificate to hang on the wall.

I would say this is a basic problem with evaluating airline safety based on external accreditation rather than on their actual safety record. However, I'm sure the latter would be much more difficult to do globally.

<comment> kube-system This is like ranking software engineers solely on the number of Microsoft certifications they have and the total number of open issues in their GitHub repos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The first thing I thought of here were some of the concerns around return-to- flight after planes have been sitting around due to the pandemic.

</comment><comment><USER22> Hope there are more survivors both from aircraft as well as on the ground -- Karachi, Pakistan is a densely populated City.

</comment><comment><USER23> I am wondering why editing the original title was allowed in this case?

</comment><comment><USER24> :(

I think I will be the first of many to say this: When they will finally get PIA privatised for good?

<comment><USER25> Can you provide more context? Why would this help?

<comment><USER6> For example in the national flag carrier I know (I used to work 5 years in that sector and I am still a licensed pilot) many people were hired and appointed in positions based on political influence, not on competence. It happens less in private companies.

<comment><USER26> But do we have evidence that privately owned airlines have a smaller record of accidents and incidents than those not?

<comment><USER6> Hard to compare, because not many countries have at the same time government owned airliners and private. In the case I know, the record is flawless for private companies (zero accidents) and 2 crashes for the flag carrier (a relative was part of the crew in one crash). I would not make a general statement based on a single country, but looking for airplane crashes in the past 20 years most involved government owned companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wrote a thesis on place name ambiguity [1], so not surprised. There are tons of people flying to the wrong place with the same name all the time - <USER2> only told me when I mentioned my thesis topic.

There's even a book about a guy who visited half of the places called 'Aberdeen' on earth, which took 10 years.

[1] J. Leidner (2007) Toponym resolution in Text

<comment><USER28> You think the plane flew to the wrong place?

<comment><USER29> probably wanted to comment on [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23270232](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23270232) instead

<comment><USER28> How can you accidentally comment on the wrong article?

<comment><USER30> Well to be fair, commenting on the wrong article with a comment about going to the wrong place kind of proves the point.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


First clear evidence cell phone radiation can cause cancer in rats - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1241867/cell-phone-radiation-can-cause-cancer-in-rats-according-to-the-final-results-of-a-us-government-study/ <comment><USER2> Ars covered this particular story and were deeply skeptical, attributing the findings to selective use of p values:

[https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/a-critical- analysis-...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/a-critical-analysis-of- the-latest-cellphone-safety-scare/)

<comment><USER3> At least we know for sure the male vs. female incidence is completely bogus:

 _But there 's still one significant increase in cancer in their data, so let's look more closely at that: "A statistically significant increase in the incidence of heart Schwannomas was observed in treated male rats at the highest dose." When it comes to this type of cancer, the control group of 817 rats developed four tumors. But critically, all of those tumors occurred in females; none in males. This apparent sex bias will necessarily exaggerate the impact of any tumors in any of the male experimental populations.

And that's exactly what you see happening. In one female population, 2.2 percent of an experimental group developed this type of tumor, but that was not a statistically significant result. By contrast, in this male population with the significant difference, only 1.5 percent of the animals developed these tumors. A low-dose group of males had the same number of tumors, but the group was larger and so the result slipped below significance.

These numbers suggest that the one statistical effect seen in this study is caused by the unusually low tumor incidence in the control group, rather than a specific effect of cellphone radiation._

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure I buy this. Given that the prior plausibly is low and earlier studies have not found any increased risk of cancer, and it sounds like they were looking for increases in _any_ kind of cancer, this seems like a result that was bound to happen by chance anyway.

If they replicate these particular findings in a preregistered trial, that might move the needle (even better if someone else does).

Unfortunately, if a new preregistered trial does come out showing that this is negative, I doubt it will be as widely disseminated, or undo the association between cell phones and cancer created by this story.

</comment><comment><USER5> > When the draft results of the papers were published earlier this year, all > results were labeled "equivocal," meaning the study authors felt the data > weren't clear enough to determine if the radiation caused the health effects > or not. But the panel of peer reviewers (among them brain and heart > pathologists, toxicologists, biostaticians, and engineers) re-evaluated the > data and upgraded several of the conclusions to "some evidence" and "clear > evidence."

The study was conducted on Male and Female Mice and Rats and initially found no conclusive evidence at all.

On reevaluation peer reviewers found that there was evidence for Male Rats only (as I read it) which is a pretty weak result.

The full study results are here:

[https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/about/org/sep/trpanel/meetings/doc...](https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/about/org/sep/trpanel/meetings/docs/2018/march/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Assuming this data is accurate, I'm curious how this will affect smart watch usage, since these devices are in such close proximity to body parts that normally wouldn't be exposed to radiation by a cell phone. My Apple Watch 3 with cell functionality is not only on my wrist, but somewhat often close to my head, hips, and stomach.

<comment><USER7> It only causes heart cancer, so that's OK. Also OK for women and non-mice.

<comment><USER8> I don't generally hold my phone near my head _or_ heart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In his circa 1985 book Body Electric, Robert O. Becker M.D. cites to several published research studies he conducted related to acceleration of mitosis by electromagnetic fields.

</comment><comment><USER10> What the Quartz article says the results were:

> "The papers found that, in male rats, this exposure increased malignant > tumors called schwannomas in the connective tissues that surround nerves in > the heart, raised the risk of heart conditions, and led to evidence of DNA > damage. Baby rats born to mothers during the trial had lower birth weights. > The scientists also found a statistically significant increase in lymphoma > (cancer of the lymph nodes) among female mice and heightened rates of liver > cancer in the male mice."

What the paper says the results were ([https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/about_ntp/trpanel/2018/march/t...](https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/about_ntp/trpanel/2018/march/tr595peerdraft.pdf)):

> "In the 2-year studies, there was significantly lower survival in the shared > male sham control group compared to almost all exposed groups, for both > modulations. Survival began to decline at a faster rate than in exposed > groups after week 75. In the sham control group, 28% of animals survived to > study termination, compared to 48% to 68% for exposed groups across both > modulations. Lower survival in sham control male rats was largely attributed > to higher severity of chronic progressive nephropathy and there was a > spectrum of lesions in other organs considered secondary to chronic > progressive nephropathy that occurred at higher incidences in male sham > controls. Survival in the shared female sham control group was significantly > lower than the 6 W/kg CDMA-exposed group; however, it was similar to all > other exposure groups, across modulations. At study termination, there was > no effect on body weight in male or female rats, and there were no exposure- > related clinical observations."

So the Quartz article says cell phone radiation kills rats, and the paper says that rats are less likely to die if they're exposed to cell phone radiation. Then the paper p-hacks its way through a bunch of specific conditions and subtypes of cancer, but really, that won't fool anyone who actually reads the paper and actually understands what they're reading. But it did fool the Quartz author, apparently.

<comment><USER11> The paragraph immediately below in the paper states:

> At the 14-week interim evaluation, there were increased incidences of right > ventricular cardiomyopathy in the heart of male rats following exposure to > GSM- and CDMA-modulated cell phone RFR compared to sham controls.

And a little further down:

> Following exposure to GSM- or CDMA-modulated cell phone RFR, there were > increases in the incidences of malignant schwannoma in the heart of male > rats

<comment><USER10> Right, that's the p-hacking section. If the death rate goes down and also the causes of death shift around, it's dishonest to focus narrowly on the subset of causes of death that went up. And if you look at so many different things that something as obscure and specific as "malignant schwannoma in the heart" is, then your paper better mention multiple-hypothesis correction, which this one doesn't.

(I predict that this paper, which went to the press before peer review, will not pass peer review, for this reason.)

<comment><USER12> As a person who reads papers and is (seemingly) confident in their ability to debunk claims that manipulate data, could I ask your advice?

How do you approach hot-button questions in health-related fields? I find it hard to navigate the deluge of information out there related to keeping in good health re: diet, exercise, personal routines and habits, etc. It feels like there are so many conflicting opinions, all with people trying to influence your behavior and nudge you towards living one way or another. Weasel words, twisted data, fake news, or whatever you want to call it seem to be a big part of this, too.

To relate to this specific post, I'm taking a course as part of my EE degree right now on EM Wave Propagation and even that prof gave a little talk about the negative health risks of cell phones, which I found... odd, to say the least. I still don't know what to make of his cautionary words, or whether I should take them to heart.

I feel ignorant and naive, and am unsure of how to live my life at times. What do you do to navigate all of this?

<comment><USER10> Never start from a news article, unless your goal is to help others by debunking it. News articles rarely reflect the research they claim to report on, and even if they did, they'd be reporting on a highly skewed subset of the research.

Read sources that are intended for people who genuinely care about getting the right answer. For exercise, that means writing where the target audience is professional athletes and their coaches. For nutrition, try to start from Wikipedia (if you don't have a specific question) or PubMed (if you do). Carefully avoid anything that's focused on weight loss, because that's where the crackpots, laymen and officially-respectable conmen are.

Japan has the longest life expectancy and the lowest obesity rate. Every time you see a claim about what a good diet is, check it against the Japanese diet; if the Japanese are doing the supposedly-bad thing, reject both the advice and its source.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure whether your reasoning about Japan is a good way to evaluate things. That's because Japan could be different because of a particular thing out of all the possible factors. The reason I say that is because I am thinking of the effect of lead exposure on crime rates as an analogy. There are a million things that could and probably do affect crime, but lead in the environment seems to dominate. If the Japanese are particularly healthy, it could be to one particular factor, say fish oil consumption (just to be arbitrary) and everything else might conceivably be irrelevant or harmful. Assuming the "goodness" is distributed equally among the various characteristics of the typical diet could lead you astray when you focus on something that doesn't matter or is harmful. It's the same issue as if you observe some people living a very long time while smoking - is smoking contributing to their lifespan or working against it?

<comment><USER10> It's not a completely reliable heuristic, but it's easy to check, and the things it's flagged that I've checked have turned out to be bullshit. (Sometimes highly respectable, promoted-by-mainstream-institutions bullshit, but not supported by quality studies if you read carefully.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This study is like a bad penny.

</comment><comment><USER14> How long until laws are passed making it illegal to sue cell phone manufacturers or carriers for selling a product that causes cancer?

<comment><USER15> if cigarettes found a way to stay in business cellphones won't die soon</comment></comment>


Show HN: Gesture recognition using optical flow and hidden markov mode in JS - <AUTHOR> http://riomus.github.io/GestureRecognition/simple.html

<comment><AUTHOR> For best performance please use Firefox

</comment><comment><USER2> what is F score of your implementation?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've never calculated it, sorry.</comment></comment>


Researchers suggest that empathy should be a factor in medical school admissions - <AUTHOR> https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-07/aoa-rse072219.php <comment><USER2> Interesting philosophical question - is this discrimination?

What if people trust tall doctors? could that be a factor?</comment>


List of tools and resources related to React and GraphQL - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hasura/awesome-react-graphql <comment><USER2> Sometimes I get the feeling that the supply of frontend toolings is outpacing the demand.

<comment><USER3> I would have said this a year ago without blinking an eye, but React is a little different.

There are a few things that make react different from stuff I've seen before about core react itself 1) Extremely fast release cycles with huge updates 2) Immense amounts of effort in backwards compatibility and codemod tools 3) Very cool and hard to do things being implemented in the core layer

For an example of 3, watch this talk: [https://reactjs.org/blog/2018/03/01/sneak-peek-beyond- react-...](https://reactjs.org/blog/2018/03/01/sneak-peek-beyond- react-16.html)

Dan Abramov does an amazing job at conveying some hard concepts beautifully.</comment></comment>


Kaggle: Data mining competitions - <AUTHOR> http://kaggle.com/

<comment><USER2> Just the kind of thing I've been looking for since the end of the Netflix Prize and the cancellation of its sequel. Seems that the site is relatively new, hopefully it'll get some traction.

Out of curiosity, is the submitter one of the founders involved with the site?

</comment><comment><USER3> This sounds like a way to get free labor. Maybe its just the fact that I've never heard about Kaggle and so it has no weight in my mind.</comment>


Tons of New Apartments Are Being Built That Almost No One Can Afford - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3bnme/tons-of-new-apartments-are-being-built-that-almost-no-one-can-afford <comment><USER2> I would call this article deliberately misleading.

It tries to make the point that new luxury apartment construction is bad for rent prices:

>And ideally, developers say, building more units for wealthy tenants means they'll move out of their smaller apartments, leaving them available to lower- income renters. An analysis out of the Joint Center For Housing Studies of Harvard University found this isn't happening.

The article then links to an analysis that contradicts their point by saying: >> expanding supplies of new luxury apartments pushed up vacancy rates, helping to slow rent growth.[2]

The article tries to convince the user that these units are sitting empty: > one in four new luxury units built after 2013 remain unsold, according to the New York Times.

That's an odd way to say three out of four of the new luxury units have been sold.

[1] [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3bnme/tons-of-new- apartm...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3bnme/tons-of-new-apartments- are-being-built-that-almost-no-one-can-afford) [2] [http://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Harvard_JCHS...](http://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Harvard_JCHS_State_of_the_Nations_Housing_2018.pdf)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> > "The news that 80% of new units this year will be luxury further illustrates > that the private market fails to provide housing for the lowest-income > renters," said Diane Yentel, president of the National Low-Income Housing > Coalition. "The argument that the production of luxury rental homes will > ultimately benefit these renters through filtering is misguided, given what > they can afford to pay. Significant federal investment is needed to both > increase the supply of affordable homes for low-income renters and preserve > the existing supply."

</comment><comment><USER3> This has been happening for years in my city. Tons of luxury apartments and homes being built, almost always with taxpayer help, that nobody can afford.

The promises from developers that housing will "trickle down" so that normal people can afford it has proved to be complete nonsense.</comment>


QNX, Not the PlayBook, Is the Key to RIM's Future - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/mobile/qnx-not-the-playbook-is-the-key-to-rims-future/

<comment><USER2> I doubt that a company which is trying to write an emulator for android apps gets this. You can either spend your energies chasing someone elses rapidly evolving apis and make them seamlessly integrate or you could build a platform that you believe in.

<comment><USER3> Though if their long-term belief is that apps will be web-based, riding the coat-tails of another platform while the industry changes isn't a bad strategy.

<comment><USER2> Its an incredible distraction though. And keeping up with android is a fulltime job that few other companies besides htc and motorola are able to do. Even partners like Sony and Samsung lag quite a bit when it comes to being upto date with latest android releases.</comment></comment></comment>


Space Is Full of Planets, and Most of Them Don't Even Have Stars - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/03/13/space-is-full-of-planets-and-most-of-them-dont-even-have-stars/ <comment><USER2> Based on the inverse correlation between star size and frequency, this doesn't surprise me at all.

It seems like there is an obvious further inference to make - people have debated whether life originated on earth or not. Given that the vast majority of planets do not have a star, and given that we know there are chemotrophs even on Earth that prove it is possible to live without a sun, it seems overwhelmingly likely that life came from one of these rogue planets that was large enough to retain enough heat underground for the evolution of life over the first few billion years of the universe. That would also neatly explain why evidence of life appeared so soon after the Earth became solid.

<comment><USER3> If you're a fan of Moore's Law and the Singularity, you'll love the reasoning of backtrapolating the exponentially increasing complexity of life over time... to get 0 well before the formation of the earth [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/513781/moores-law-and- the...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/513781/moores-law-and-the-origin- of-life/)

<comment><USER4> What about Fermi's paradox though? I mean, where _is_ everyone?

<comment><USER5> Uncontacted tribes in the Amazon likely wonder the same thing. It's such a big Earth, yet only a few hundred humans are known to exist.

Why are there no other detectable signs of human life, like smoke signals, territory markers, or emissaries from any more but a handful of other tribes? Surely if advanced humans existed, they would have contacted these tribes by now, to share technology, discoveries, and medicine. Yet they haven't.

How can the whole planet be so... silent?

<comment><USER6> If they're not aware of any other humans (let alone all the cities out there) then they're likely not aware of the actual size of the earth. Perhaps they only consider it in terms of the surrounding territory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interstellar travel now seems a lot more hazardous than it did before. To quote one of my TAs in college, "it's the stuff you can't see that gets you" ...

<comment><USER8> The article states that planets may outnumber stars 100,000 to 1.

The Milky Way has 4E^11 stars.

It has an upper estimate of 4E^16 planets.

It has a lowest estimate diameter of 100kly.

It has an estimated thickness of 2kly.

It's lower estimate volume is 63,000 kly^2.

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

If planets are uniformly disrupted (they surely aren't), there are ~17 planets in every cubic light year. Sure, that's a hazard.

<comment><USER9> > ~17 planets in every cubic light year.

The change of hitting one while traveling one light year is in the order of 10e-16.

<comment><USER10> About the same as getting shot while drowning in bathtub stricken by lightning?

<comment><USER11> That's how my uncle died.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> New 4x games should now include plenty of planets between star systems. Cold and still, but potential mining boons and refueling bases.

<comment><USER13> And I demand Star Trek TNG be reran with scientifically appropriate visits to rogue planets. /s

<comment><USER14> The Founder's homeworld on Deep Space Nine was a rogue planet

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can't help but think of how the various Star Trek series handled rogue planets... and then later on how IRL science delved into rogue planets as more of a reality than previously realized.

<comment><USER16> Could you provide an example? I don't recall such an episode.

<comment><USER17> "It is unclear how plant life could survive on Dakala. One scene, however, shows the surface covered in the dim light of a nearby star, perhaps supplying enough energy for some form of photosynthesis. Another theory, from the Star Trek Encyclopedia (4th ed., vol. 1, p. 177), is that the plant and animal life was supported by the surface heat from volcanic vents."

From [http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Dakala](http://memory- alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Dakala)

<comment><USER18> FYI, you're just quoting some technobabble.

Back in reality there were popular magazines like _Discover_ that would have flashy covers about things like _ROUGE PLANETS!_ Mostly just sensationalism.

Some semi-unemployed Hollywood writer would be paging through these while smoking out and get inspiration for a script. That is Star Trek's scientific insight.

And I'm a trek fan. OP probably just doesn't know a lot of this stuff was "ripped from the headlines" (of popular science magazines).

<comment><USER17> Yes, you're right. I think it's fun though :-) sci-fi is by its nature just technobabble, see the annoying protomolecule stuff in "The Expanse"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If this is recent information, how does it bear on dark matter, i.e. machos? An excellent read, btw.

<comment><USER20> This is not super recent information. There have been estimates that there are about as many rogue planets as stars since 2011. There's still a pretty wide variation in the estimate of the number of rogue planets from study to study, so the frequency is pretty uncertain. But even if the numbers are on the high side, it's not anywhere close to explain dark matter. Supposing that there are 10 Jupiter mass planets for every star, that would only increase the luminous mass of the Galaxy by 1%. Dark matter accounts for more than ten times the mass of the Galaxy as luminous matter.

<comment><USER21> Not a physicist. If napkin calculation goes, that's 1000 Jupiters per star. Is that really improbable? There is a lot of space outside of solar system radii.

<comment><USER20> I think it would require more like 10,000 Jupiters per star to account for dark matter in the Galaxy. The issue is that these microlensing surveys put an upper bound on the number of rogue Jupiters that can be floating around and this bound is much less than 10,000 per star.

<comment><USER22> Can microlensing account for the whole continuum of black hole sizes that might be floating around in the galactic halo?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This sort of space real estate is the biggest hindrance to developing long term interstellar traveling tech.

With so many asteroids and planets lying around. There is no real motivation to travel very far distances for resources. Once you start mining the first set of asteroids and settling your race in space. You could grow organically, and at some point mine a terrestrial planet. At that point you have so many resources at your disposal it doesn't really make much sense to move out to very large distances unless for science or your population is just multiplying beyond control.

</comment><comment><USER24> I wonder what happens to the planets in the solar system when a rogue planets gets sucked into the star (sun) ?

I mean, yeah it'd be bad if a rogue planet smashed into us, or even came close enough to mess with our gravitational pool (or the moons). but I imagine if an earth sized or bigger slammed into the sun, that we'd feel the effects of this.

massive solar flare roasting our planet alive? a shower of ejecta from the collision that we pass through? it changes the mass of the sun in a significant way that changes the pull it has on the planets around it?

<comment><USER25> Napkin math (aka pure speculation) suggests that unless the rogue planet hit the star directly and at an angle that could send ejecta our way, the results would be more observational than catastrophic.

The Earth is roughly 333,000 times less massive than the Sun. Think of it this way, If an asteroid hit the Earth that was, in relative terms, the size of the earth relative to the sun, it would be about 1/3 the size of Ceres. Everything on Earth would die but the other planets would probably not notice.

Given that the surface of the Sun can be treated, to a first approximation, as a fluid, an impact that was perpendicular to the surface would likely have the same characteristics of a milk drop. Which is to say a large wave would race away from the impact point and the collapsing of that wave in would eject a bit of coronal mass roughly equal to 1% of the mass of the impactor (note this makes a big, and unsupported, assumption about the viscosity of the solar corona.)

The only scary bit comes if the rogue planet enters the solar system slightly off the plane of the ecliptic and hits the Sun in a glancing blow. In such a scenario it could transfer a huge amount of momentum into the coronal mass which would then immediately begin to head away from the Sun. If the Earth were in the path of that mass it would probably wipe everything out after blowing off our atmosphere.

This wouldn't be good for the rogue planet either, which would probably enter a hyperbolic orbit and shoot away from the solar system on a new trajectory. In the unfortunate circumstance that this "coronal braking maneuver" was sufficient to slow the planet enough to be captured by the Sun, the remaining planets would get to witness periodic brushes with the Sun by the rogue planet until it had lost enough energy to fall into the Sun.

That would be mitigated if the orbit it fell into pulled it by Jupiter or another large planet which, by virtue of its gravity circularize the orbit sufficiently that it would not come near the corona on future orbits.

<comment><USER26> Let's say the rogue planet is a massive, super-cold planet. How big and how cold would it have to be to lower the Sun's energy output just enough to trigger a "Snowball Earth" scenario? Assume a direct hit.

<comment><USER25> I think the only way this works is if the planet _doesn 't_ hit the Sun. One could imagine a scenario (but the orbital mechanics don't work out) where a massive rogue planet enters into the solar system and interposes itself between the Earth and Sun, thus shading the Earth and dropping its temperature the required amount. Sort of like a month long solar eclipse or something. But at that mass it's probably pulling Earth out of its orbit so that scenario is not really very plausible.

If it hits the Sun, it really doesn't matter how cold or how massive it is (up until it becomes a brown dwarf at which point we're talking binary star interaction levels of mass).

The thing is that the Sun is really spectacularly huge. You could fit over a million earth size planets inside of it. And it is a run away fusion reactor so it is kind of like throwing frozen beer cans into a 500 acre California wildfire. Very little effect on the fire (although any embedded Hot Shot firefighters will appreciate your effort).

But things are even easier than actually hitting the Sun in this case. If you're trying to just screw up the Earth, any rogue planet that flew through the Solar system and pulled earth more than about 6 - 8% off its existing orbit should completely wreck the climate. If you were a fiction writer you'd want it to be bad enough that people could survive long enough to write a story about it or course.

Generally though any astronomical mass that would nominally qualify as a planet flying within a million miles of the Earth is going to likely trigger an extinction level event. Especially if it is off the ecliptic by some amount.

<comment><USER27> _" where a massive rogue planet enters into the solar system and interposes itself between the Earth and Sun, thus shading the Earth and dropping its temperature the required amount. Sort of like a month long solar eclipse"_

For our planet's distance from the sun, I have a hard time imagining how anything without self propulsion could maintain a stable orbital position to cast a shade over us for a long enough period (e.g. a month).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Has the IAU come around to a sensible definition of "planet", or are these officially non-planets?

<comment><USER29> Current definition requires the object to be orbiting the Sun (and only the Sun not other stars) so by IAU definition these are not planets.

> A "planet" is a celestial body that: (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has > sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that > it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has > cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.

> A "dwarf planet" is a celestial body that: (a) is in orbit around the Sun, > (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces > so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, (c) has > not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.

> All other objects, except satellites, orbiting the Sun shall be referred to > collectively as "Small Solar System Bodies".

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why would we visit forbes.com to learn about astronomy?

<comment><USER31> We would not, because with javascript disabled, it only displays blank page. :)

<comment><USER32> Same. Here's an archive:

[http://archive.li/TUHro](http://archive.li/TUHro)

It would be great if HN had an auto-archive feature now that more people are becoming privacy conscious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> [deleted]

<comment> King-Aaron Roger</comment></comment>


Sure, let's colonize Mars – but without Elon Musk's help - <AUTHOR> https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/mars-elon-musk-space-exploration-nasa-colonization/ <comment><USER2> How divisive. If Mars ever gets colonized, it'll be accomplished by those with wealth, drive, and scientific know how.

I welcome anyone, including Elon Musk, to attempt it. Barring anyone is an affront to human progress.</comment>


Why Liberal Arts Majors Make Great Product Managers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/startup-grind/why-liberal-arts-majors-make-great-product-managers-39bf6d38cf18#.rutz2vmjx <comment><USER2> sure, why bother with CS since "computing tasks can be done by machines or workers in low-wage countries" /s</comment>


Linux Profiling at Netflix - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/brendangregg/scale2015-linux-perfprofiling

<comment><USER2> Can anyone speak as to why Netflix needs so much computing power? As far as I can tell, content delivery is handled separately, so all these talks are about the non-content side.

Sure we need to see various personalised lists when first connecting, but no activity while actually watching things. The personalisation seems very light - eg their lists of comedies look like they show the same to everyone. And it doesn't seem intelligent at all, like for example hiding items you have already seen. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9083196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9083196)

<comment><USER3> The microservice architecture results in a larger footprint than you might find with a more monolithic app stack; which provides us with improved engineering velocity and reliability. Although the content playback is served by our CDN, all other device interactions are handled by the services on AWS. We also have some blogposts which provide a glimpse into some of the work we do behind the scenes ([http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/01/netflixs-viewing- data-ho...](http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/01/netflixs-viewing-data-how-we- know-where.html)). Oh yeah, we also encode and run our big data services on AWS...

<comment><USER2> This still doesn't answer why it is so large. Or more accurately my experience as a Netflix customer doesn't reflect the apparent size of all these backends. Compare to something like Reddit where every page is customised, I go through lots of them, and my interactions are frequent. My Netflix interactions look like recently viewed being custom, and everything else being generic (same for all users). If you told me my recommendations are recalculated once a month I'd believe you. The majority of time is spent viewing which is just periodic progress updates. In other words my user experience suggests Reddit having an infrastructure many times larger than Netflix.

<comment><USER4> I read that Netflix encodes each video 100+ times to ensure good performance across a wide range of devices. In addition to the "social network" side of the site (recommendations, what your friends watch, etc.) there is a lot of processing going on in the background.

<comment><USER2> I vaguely recall the number being encoded 120 different ways. In any event this is independent of the number of users, and proportional to the amount of new incoming content. It also isn't real time, and doesn't really matter how long it takes other than marketing deadlines when they announce a new season of something far in advance.

The recommendations don't show any evidence of being calculated frequently, nor do they have to be done in real time. There is certainly _way_ less appearing to go on than a site like Reddit.

"There is a lot of processing going on in the background" doesn't really answer the question :-)

<comment><USER4> Sure, this processing does not need to happen in real time, but it _does_ need to happen.

My point was that to assume the user-visible portion of the site accounts for most of their computing needs is probably incorrect. Video encoding was just one of the first things I thought of, and I bet there are many more.

I admit "processing going on in the background" was a real hand-wavey way to phrase it, but I think you know what I mean. It's an iceberg - there's a lot happening under the surface. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The SCALE 13x videos are going up here: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN2nbMPLJWv3Y__4JuF_hMQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN2nbMPLJWv3Y__4JuF_hMQ) Does anyone know in what room and day Brendan spoke?

<comment><USER6> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhDpncTDDvI#t=892](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhDpncTDDvI#t=892)

<comment><USER7> You can format the time like this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhDpncTDDvI#t=14m52s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhDpncTDDvI#t=14m52s)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those who missed today's post [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9121015](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9121015) because it got downvoted (wrongly) for being a duplicate: accompanying blog post and video now available: [http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2015-02-27/linux- profiling-...](http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2015-02-27/linux-profiling-at- netflix.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> I really like the workflow chart on slide 22. I can't help but think this is a useful way to visualize common workflow sequences of commands (think git add, git commit, git push).

Honestly I wouldn't mind if man pages came with ascii art to visualize this type of documentation.

</comment><comment><USER10> It often feels like the only users of perf are its developers and Brendan Gregg.

<comment><USER11> I use it - perf is wonderful. Back in the dark days of grad school, getting performance counter data for your program required hacking your code to call into PAPI ([http://icl.cs.utk.edu/papi/overview/](http://icl.cs.utk.edu/papi/overview/)). Being able to tell a program, "Hey, run this for me, and tell me how many branch mispredictions there are. And where they happen" is like _magic_.

If you do any performance analysis of software, learn perf.

Official manual: [https://perf.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page](https://perf.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page)

Brendan Gregg's perf page: [http://www.brendangregg.com/perf.html](http://www.brendangregg.com/perf.html)

</comment></comment><comment> X-Istence This talk was absolutely fantastic at SCALE13x. Lot of good content that will help a lot of people get started with CPU profiling.

</comment><comment><USER12> Those flame graphs look hella useful, hopefully the JDK patches make their way in so we don't have to futz around with customizing too much. Thanks for this!

<comment><USER13> Absolutely, I had no idea there is a way to export the symbols and make them known to perf. Its magic, and I want it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Omitting the frame pointer is a default on x86_64 its specified in the abi so it's going to be mighty tough to change that. I don't understand why you recommend not using the debug info when you already have to use it for symbol name resolution.

<comment><USER15> Are you talking about [http://www.x86-64.org/documentation/abi.pdf](http://www.x86-64.org/documentation/abi.pdf), and footnote 7 on page 16, which reads:

"7 The conventional use of %rbp as a frame pointer for the stack frame may be avoided by using %rsp (the stack pointer) to index into the stack frame. This technique saves two instructions in the prologue and epilogue and makes one additional general-purpose register (%rbp) available."

%rbp is mentioned elsewhere, eg, "optionally used as frame pointer"

This ABI does not appear to specify that the frame pointer is omitted. It uses the words "may" and "optionally". Which means, the gcc engineers can choose to do what they want. And they should choose to keep the frame pointer _by default_, and _optionally_ omit it (for when the sacrifice is deemed worth it): -fomit-frame-pointer. This would better follow the language used in the ABI! :-)

We've found debuginfo to be large (size, bytes), which can slow down instance creation, which means we must run with a higher headroom to accommodate. A stripped-down debuginfo that just enabled stack walking might do.

<comment><USER14> Compress the debug info? Gdb handles it no idea about perf though, there is also dwo to remove redundant debug info.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why FreeBSD for content delivery?

<comment><USER17> From [https://openconnect.itp.netflix.com/software/index.html](https://openconnect.itp.netflix.com/software/index.html):

For the operating system, we use FreeBSD version 10. This was selected for its balance of stability and features, a strong development community and staff expertise. All code improvements, feature additions, and bug fixes are contributed directly back to the open source community via the FreeBSD committers on our team. We also strive to stay at the front of the FreeBSD development process, allowing us to have a tight feedback loop with other community and partner developers. The result has been a positive open source ecosystem that lowers our development costs and multiplies the effectiveness of our efforts..

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So some aren't confused. Content delivery is on FreeBSD, not Linux.

<comment><USER19> ZFS drives?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Surely they use Linux, yet they still can't offer a proper Linux client. DRMed much.</comment>


'Walkie-Talkie' skyscraper melts Jaguar car - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-23930675

<comment><USER2> Title of this submission: "'Walkie-Talkie' skyscraper melts Jaguar car"

Title of the actual article: "'Walkie-Talkie' skyscraper melts Jaguar car _parts_ "

This is like saying, "Prime minister discusses end of world rumor" and leaving off "rumor".

<comment><USER3> The original seems fair enough to me. Are you insisting that the entire car is melted into a puddle before the title can leave the ' _parts_ ' bit out?

<comment><USER2> That depends. What does the title say, if it's intended to convey facts?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A friend of mine worked on one of the few "laser disc holographic" arcade game machines. (ex: [http://www.oobject.com/revolutionary-arcade- cabinets/1991-ho...](http://www.oobject.com/revolutionary-arcade- cabinets/1991-hologram-time-traveler/6848/)) The "hologram" was a visual trick involving a large, curved mirror. They had to do a recall after one arcade establishment positioned the machine next to a window. The sunlight shining through the window was focused to a point on the side of the wooden cabinet causing the machine set itself on fire and burn down the arcade! A quick redesign later and they had a variation on the "holographic" effect that used a convex mirror instead of a concave one.

</comment><comment><USER5> Didn't this happen with a Gehry building in Los Angeles too?

The concert hall was reflecting "hot spots" in various areas, etc..

[http://architecture.about.com/od/ideasapproaches/ss/Controve...](http://architecture.about.com/od/ideasapproaches/ss/Controversy- DisneyHall.htm)

<comment><USER6> This also happened with the Aria in Las Vegas, [http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39403349/ns/travel-news/t/death- ra...](http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39403349/ns/travel-news/t/death-ray-vegas- hotel-pool-heats-guests/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if this is Jaguar specific or because it was an aluminium monocoque. But I would hope that Jaguar would have something to say about this. Especially since one carrying dick van dyke went up in flames. And especially since i have one and am now a tad worried.

Also < £1k for those repairs sounds very very low.

<comment><USER8> I'm sure it's a plastic part. The exterior looks fine apart from that small panel. The car looks like an XJ which have small panels on either side of the rear window. [http://carsfolia.com/photo/im/jaguar- xj/03/](http://carsfolia.com/photo/im/jaguar-xj/03/)

<comment><USER7> Ahh for some reason I just assumed XK. My bad. That makes sense then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It seems that they've inadvertently built a giant parabolic reflector. Out of glass...

I wonder what the solution to this will be, and to what extent the developers will be held responsible. Is there any laws against focusing light intensely onto the street? I'd imagine that the cost of either increasing the light absorbed by each window or somehow adjusting the windows so they don't create such a uniform reflector will be rather high.

<comment><USER10> > _Is there any laws against focusing light intensely onto the street?_

Laws tend to be passed for things that people think of. This will now be something people think of, and will probably end up in building codes. In the mean time, tort/delict laws may still serve to make the developers/owners financially responsible.

<comment><USER11> Is that really true? Seems to me that laws tend to focus more on outcomes than mechanisms. If I invent a totally new way to kill people and then use it to murder my neighbor, I'll still be convicted of murder even though the law predates the invention of the weapon.

Similarly, this would fall under laws covering property damage. Since intent plays a big part in the law, and this was almost certainly not intentional, I'm sure they won't be found guilty of anything particularly bad, but it seems certain that they would be liable for the cost of repairs.

<comment><USER10> The concept you're looking for is the one I mentioned in my comment: torts. Not all law is criminal law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One potential solution might be to coat the reflective glass windows with a transparent layer that diffuses rather than reflects the light. Sounds like that would be the simplest and least costly approach.

<comment><USER13> That would be frosted glass. I don't think the people who've stumped up huge amounts of money to get premium office space would be too happy to be presented with a blurry view of nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How, exactly, do you design a gigantic curved reflective surface without considering things like this? I mean, the basic idea dates back to at least Ancient Greece if not further.

<comment><USER14> Ha, my first thought was "Archimedes" when I read this.</comment></comment>


Introducing Mantrid (runtime-configurable, Python load balancer) - <AUTHOR> http://www.aeracode.org/2011/11/2/introducing-mantrid/

<comment><AUTHOR> In the article I cover why we moved away from HaProxy; someone's also asked me why we didn't choose Nginx. It's because we needed HTTP/1.1 support to the backend (for things like WebSockets), which Nginx doesn't have (yet).

</comment><comment><USER2> To give some context, Andrew Godwin is the guy behind the Django database migrations library South. This looks interesting and I'm excited to see what other gems they open-source.

Some talks he's given: <http://lanyrd.com/profile/andrewgodwin/slides/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Just FYI, apache mod_proxy_balancer also supports HTTP 1.1 and you can configure it during run-time if you have mod_status enabled.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, interesting, everyone always seems to forget apache. I imagine it still doesn't support the holding-connections-open-during-bootup bit, though?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does this support sticky sessions?

What are the balancing options are available (weighted round robin, least connections, etc.)?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's no sticky sessions, and the balancing is purely random (so statistically roughly the same as a round-robin) - it was primarily designed for large numbers of small backends, rather than one or two sites with ten backends, though we'll be adding in more balancing types as we go.

<comment><USER4> By purely random, you mean not weighted, so all your backends need to be roughly equal in capabilities?

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly, as at Epio all our backends are identically sized. Obviously this isn't the case for everyone - but it's easy to add that code.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to find a business partner from San Francisco? - <AUTHOR>

We are a small app(iOS, Android, WP) dev company based in Colombo Sri Lanka. Looking for a partner to represent us in San Francisco targeting startups. What would be the best way to find such a partner for this purpose? <comment><USER2> One of the ways would be to find a cofounder on sites like cofounderslab.com, founder2be.com, et al.</comment>


Microsoft exec admits Windows Phone was response to Apple's iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/01/07/microsoft_exec_admits_windows_phone_was_response_to_apples_iphone.html <comment><USER2> Is there really any shame on admitting that?

<comment><USER3> No. Everything after 2007 was a response to the iPhone. MS is in good (?) company.

<comment><USER2> except many of them (hello, Samsung) won't ever admit it :)</comment></comment></comment>


I googled myself and found my hn comment leading someone else's blog - <AUTHOR> http://www.mmakai.com/startup.html I vividly remember writing that.  Glad to see someone else felt strongly enough about it to include it on their site.<p>The links are pretty good, including some to pg and dhh.  Pretty good company, I'd say. <comment><USER2> That was genuinely inspiring and great timing for me personally. I talked my fiancee into quitting her job this week and she's turning in her notice today, for pretty much the same reasons: life's too short for her to drain her soul away at some place just because it looks good on the resume (intensive care unit at a good hospital here in SF). She's got a few other opportunities lined up already closer to her interests (reproductive health) and the pep is back in her step again. But first, we're going to concentrate on thoroughly enjoying our 3 week honeymoon!

I'm living vicariously through her - I've never quit a gig without having another one lined up, which also explains why our wedding in Aug is my first vacation in about 5 years.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting.. actually, that's my website. One day while bored I fished out some of the best startup links from my Delicious bookmarks and put them on there. When I went to put an introduction to it that quote popped into my head. Hope you don't mind.

<comment><USER4> _"... One day while bored I fished out some of the best startup links from my Delicious bookmarks and put them on there. When I went to put an introduction to it that quote popped into my head. Hope you don't mind ..."_

Cited.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I vividly recall writing that. Glad to see that someone else felt strongly enough about it to include it in their site.

Some good links below, including some to pg and dhh. Pretty good company, I'd say.

[EDIT: A little scary, too. Anything any of us say here can end up anywhere. Kinda makes one wanna slow down and think a little before posting.]

<comment><USER5> That was a great quote and I am so at that point right now.

<comment><USER6> The quote was great...

The string of arguments that followed between "flowery evangelist" and "cynical asshole" just as good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great quote...but now HN is pointing to a blog that is pointing to a HN quote.

I really hope he doesn't blog about this thread.

<comment><USER8> As long as no one was planning to garbage collect based on a reference count, I don't see the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's a great f __ __ __g quote. Thanks for the inspiration, I'm outta (where I work at the moment) here as soon as I can.

Not an on-the-spot decision, but another nail to confirm my plan to leave the borg in a few months.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice quote but... I can't understand why you call "blog" what is a plain old website?

</comment><comment><USER11> The original quote in context on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=179639>

</comment><comment><USER12> If you are reading this while at the office, you will probably feel as if he was whispering the words to your ears. One of the Greatest post.</comment>


For Zelda-playing daughter, Dad gives Link a sex change - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/11/i-am-no-man-for-zelda-playing-daughter-dad-gives-link-a-sex-change/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand why parents feel the need to be so politically correct. As 'yummyfajitas is sure to point out shortly, every empirical study ever conducted has shown that males have a statistically significant advantage in slaying Octoroks and Peahats.

<comment><USER3> I find this an appropriate comment by Hofstadter, in the Intro to 'Godel Escher Bach', on the gender of the Tortoise:

The Tortoise turns out never to have been attributed either gender. But when I first read it, the question never entered my mind. This was clearly a he- tortoise. After all, an author only introduces a female character for some special reason, right? Whereas a male character in a neutral context needs no raison d'etre, a female does. And so, given no clue as to the Tortoise's sex, I unthinkingly and uncritically envisaged it as a male. Thus does sexism silently pervade well-meaning but susceptible brains.

<comment><USER4> _This was clearly a he-tortoise. After all, an author only introduces a female character for some special reason, right?_

This kind of thing certainly applies to me and music. For some reason, it's hardly noticed when a North American of Hungarian, Polish, or French descent decides to play Irish Traditional music, but someone with Hispanic, African, or Asian descent playing that kind of music is frequently asked questions about how she/he got into Irish Music, or if they're in conservatory or are studying ethnomusicology, as if only "white" people are the default, normal human beings. A lot of this plain ignorance. For example, there's a thriving pan-celtic music scene in South America in countries like Argentina, where many people are playing the music as part of their heritage from celtic regions in northern Spain, like Galicia and Asturias, so there's no reason why the above attitudes should necessarily apply, depending on where in S. America that person is from.

Most people have a caricatured view of the world, where the only culture that matters is the majority's, and everyone else's culture is just some kind of distracting "flavor of the month" which only survives out of some sort of jingoism and has no deep artistic value on its own. Let me tell you, this perception has nothing to do with artistic value, and is only an illusion woven by political and economic power. Often the best music is made by people who have neither.

<comment><USER5> I think the assumption is that white people are the default kind of Irish people. White people playing some manner of traditional African music get asked the same questions, and it's not because black people are the default, normal human beings.

<comment><USER4> _White people playing some manner of traditional African music get asked the same questions_

This can happen. It depends on the context. There are contexts where white people don't get asked these questions about African music. I'm not so sure there are contexts where I'm not asked those sorts of questions about Irish Trad, just times and places where people are more reticent about asking than others.

Also, there's an additional difference. There is some small fraction of people who seem to think that I'm somehow defective/slightly crazy/deserving of ridicule for being of Korean extraction and playing Irish Trad. It's rare, but there's even sometimes some sense of resentment. More pleasant, but just as telling, there's sometimes some additional delight or pride that I in particular would choose to play Irish Trad, where my race seems to play a part. I never see the above happen in North America with white people who aren't Irish. I've also seen the same sorts of things happen to African Americans.

The third thing is this: mainstream North Americans don't view African traditional or Irish Traditional music as the default, normal music. It's also something of a "special flavor" to them, even though it was just the default, normal music in a different culture. An Asian person playing western "classical" music sometimes results in the same kinds of questions as Irish Trad, but often it's not even questioned at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is great, and adorable. When I was a kid, I hated that I was a girl because boys had all the adventures in books. Fiction by authors that featured tough girls - Tamora Pierce being a notable example - helped turn that around. Girls want to go on wild chases in strange lands too!

<comment><USER7> Probably my absolute favorite book series are The Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede. The protagonist is a princess who grows up hating all the typical princess things she's being taught so she convinces people to teach her swordfighting, magic, Latin, and other things princes are taught. When she gets fed up she runs away to be a dragon's princess and has all sorts of great adventures.

Those books are so refreshing and brilliant that I still reread them to this day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a very cool hack, and I support the intention behind it. Still, it is something I would never do for two reasons:

For one, as an author, I disagree with altering a text for a political purpose. To be sure, this instance is fairly innocuous, and parents frequently change bedtime stories on the fly to suit their kids. Nevertheless I consider the Legend of Zelda to be a text with its own mythology and themes, and just as I wouldn't rewrite Hamlet as a girl for my daughter, I wouldn't do it to Link.

Secondly I think it is important to teach kids to have role-models of BOTH genders. Two of my brother's biggest fictional role-models growing up were Wonderwoman and Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell. In the same way, girls can learn leadership and toughness from male protagonists and heroes. I'm not accusing this father of not knowing this, but it would be my approach were I playing Zelda with my daughter.

<comment><USER9> Both Wonderwoman and Kusanagi are modeled with apparent sex appeal by male authors. Could they really still be good role models? I ask this as someone who don't know much about either comics.

<comment><USER10> Of course they can. Imagine a hypothetical comic with characters of both genders who are all sparklingly excellent role models in the way they behave. Now imagine that this comic was drawn by people who designed all those characters to be blatantly, panderingly sexy -- a fairly common situation, since sex sells, and cross-demographic appeal makes commercial sense. Does this make the characters poor role models, in spite of their good personalities and deeds? I doubt it.

<comment><USER9> These are not hypothetical comics. If the characters are primarly tools to entice male audiences, then they are unlikely to also serve as good role models.

<comment><USER11> Why is that? Males have poor taste in role models?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hayao Miyazaki uses female protagonist not because it is more "PC" but for the advancement of the story.

'Miyazaki: I don't logically plan it that way. When we compare a man in action and a girl in action, I feel girls are more gallant. If a boy is walking with a long stride, I don't think anything particular, but if a girl is walking gallantly, I feel "that's cool." '

<comment><USER13> I accept it's not specifically because it's PC, but that's not advancement of the story, that's just him applying his own perceptions and prejudices.

A girl walking a particular way isn't more significant than a boy walking in a particular way, he just sees it as such.

Generally in these situations it's best not to worry too much about the intentions the person had and just look at the end result. After all, intentions will often be unclear, lied about, recollection of why something was may change over time and so on.

It's interesting to hear what someone says, but what they actually produce is more important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great idea and cool hack.

I'm about to be the father of a baby girl soon myself and there is no end to the anxiety I hold for the struggles she's going to face simply because she's a girl.

Although if she ever wants to know programming, maths, and how to solder a PCB I intend to be there for her... and perhaps editing hex dumps of games as well. Thanks for the tip!

<comment><USER15> As someone who is myself about to be the father of a baby girl any day now, congratulations!

I have to admit, it is pretty shocking to realize for myself how gender- normative I am already being. Her room is Tiffany Blue and all her clothes are already pink. I hope I keep it to these superficial things...

<comment><USER16> It's very easy to encourage and support an outlook where the default gender is female, where heroes are female (even if they are princesses who favour pink). For us, all that was easy and natural. I'm now flummoxed by "Math is hard." And speaking of over-sexualized toys, that cultural norm is also easy to avoid.

It might be that part of our family culture includes a sense of cliquishness, so this all may circle back for ass-chewing later on; but for now it's good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I foresee some confusing conversations with her peers about the series when she is a little older.

<comment><USER18> You mean about how there's no character named "Maya" in the Zelda canon? I think they'll be able to work past the character customization. Somehow even Mass Effect players manage to discuss their game.

<comment><USER11> Mass Effect players know and expect that players will have their own version of the main character with different genders. Nobody has that expectation about the Legend of Zelda.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My young son loves Studio Ghibli films. Nearly all the main characters Kiki, Chihiro, Ponyo, Arrietty, Satsuke and Mei etc are girls. He is a bit young for Mononoke and hasn't seen Nausicaä. About the only one he doesn't like is Porco Rosso. Role models are important but I don't know that all our kids heroes and game characters have to be same sex.

<comment><USER20> I thought Porco Rosso was sad compared to Totoro or Mononoke. My friends who liked other Miyazaki movies didn't like Porco Rosso.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can't wait to read the article about the mom who hacked Lara Croft to have a guy rather than a girl as heroine.

<comment><USER20> Link _somewhat_ looks like a little girl. But Lara Croft as a guy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Dad of the Year Award: For. The. Win.

</comment><comment><USER4> Someone should do a mod of Ico where Yorda rescues Ico.</comment>


Show HN: Evolution of VR Headsets - sam-hedron https://twitter.com/hedronvision/status/1301997023265271813 <comment> sam-hedron We built this to consolidate our own understanding into a visual format, and we're pretty happy with the result! It's still a work-in-progress, so if you have questions, comments, or concerns, direct them to me and I'll be happy to answer them or incorporate changes into a future revision of this graphic!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Seems to have missed out the Valve Index - especially the "Knuckles" controllers and the audio have some great innovations.

Also would love to see the weirder side of 90's VR included as well!</comment>