What is your favourite mind mapping software and why? - <AUTHOR> I am looking to do a proper brain dump of my ideas and connections, but cannot decide what software to go with. Ideally it should have the following attributes:
   - Easily entered/managed by keyboard only
   - Machine-parsable exports
   - Ability to embed links and notes
   - Cross platform support <comment><USER2> I'm building a personal knowledge management application based on topic maps that allow for (semantic) mapping of knowledge domains together with (network) graph visualisations: [https://github.com/brettkromkamp/contextualise](https://github.com/brettkromkamp/contextualise)

I'm probably still a couple of months away from completing the application, so if you need something straight away this would be of no use to you. But, topic mapping in general is something that could be of use to you in this context: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous- versions/aa480048(...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous- versions/aa480048\(v=msdn.10\))

<comment><USER2> A visualisation of a small set of topics looks like this in Contextualise: [https://github.com/brettkromkamp/typed- tree](https://github.com/brettkromkamp/typed-tree)

What's more: Contextualise's network graph visualisation is interactive in that it allows the user to navigate between topics of interest by clicking on the actual node that they want to navigate to.</comment></comment>


Do Antidepressant Drugs Really Work? (A: As well as sugar pills) - <AUTHOR> http://nutritionfacts.org/video/do-antidepressant-drugs-really-work

<comment><USER2> The basis of this link is the 2008 New England Journal of Medicine article by Kirsch at [http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa065779](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa065779) .

Quoting from a more recent (2014) scientific article on the issue, "Are antidepressants clinically useful? Conclusion of a decade of debate" at [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4102296/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4102296/) (the key paragraph is at the end, but I provide the first few paragraphs for context):

> During the last decade, a number of meta-analyses have questioned the > clinical usefulness of antidepressants, and exposed a significant > publication bias and low effect size in comparison to placebo 1–9. The most > important implication has been that antidepressants might not have any > effect at all in mildly depressed patients 1,4,5. Several authors and > agencies, such as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence > (NICE), have suggested the utilization of "alternative" treatment options > (e.g., exercise and psychotherapy) in mildly depressed patients, and > pharmacotherapy only for the most severe cases. An immediate consequence of > this is that patients suffering from mild depression may be deprived from > receiving antidepressants.

> The Kirsch hypothesis concerning depression 10,11 is that there is a > response which lies on a continuum from no intervention at all (e.g., > waiting lists) to neutral placebo, then to active and augmented placebo > including psychotherapy, and finally to antidepressants, which exert a > slightly higher efficacy probably because blinding is imperfect due to side > effects (enhanced placebo). This hypothesis has triggered much interest from > the mass media and from intellects outside the mental health area, often > with a biased and ideologically loaded approach 12.

> Two early efforts to re-analyze the Kirsch data set using different > methodological approaches 15,16 independently reported results quite similar > between them but different from those published by Kirsch. A recent multi- > meta-analysis 17 utilized the Kirsch et al dataset and concluded that the > most probable effect size of antidepressants relative to placebo is 0.34 > (0.27-0.42) and that there is no significant effect of the initial severity > of depression.

...

> The series of meta-analyses performed during the last decade made > antidepressants perhaps the best meta-analytically studied class of drugs in > the whole of medicine. The results of the recent multi-meta-analysis is > likely to close the debate, _suggesting that antidepressants are clearly > superior to placebo and that their efficacy is unrelated to the initial > severity of depression. Thus, there seems to be no scientific ground not to > use antidepressants in mildly depressed patients._

(Emphasis mine.)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you hire a startup lawyer? - <AUTHOR>

I hear that lawyers are doctors for companies -- they keep them in good health. However there is little discussion about how to find a good one. My specific questions for HN are:
How and where do you find a good startup lawyer?
What traits should I look for in him/her?
What questions should I ask to find if he/she has those traits and would be good fit or not?
What background makes a good startup lawyer (corporate law/IP law/both)?
If it helps you to know, I am in the greater Los Angeles area. <comment><USER2> In my experience as a startup founder thus far, you may be over-thinking this one. Your lawyers are a valuable source of information and reaction, and help provide some guidance, but they aren't making or breaking your day-to-day existence as an entrepreneur.

Having just gone through a long selection process to find our attorneys, the combination of things we were looking for: 1) Deferral of fees. There are some reasonable arguments that this can actually be counter to your best interests, but if you're bootstrapping and don't have a big nest egg in the bank, it's hard to choose someone who doesn't 2) Affordable rates. Because even if fees are deferred, you will ultimately have to pay them 3) Relevant expertise. I would argue that this has more to do with startups similar to you (e.g. in your industry) than it does with a particular domain like corporate law or IP. He or she should obviously be able to serve you in diverse areas, or introduce you to the right people who will 4) Personal fit. You have to want to work with these people through formation, fundraising, and negotiations.

Look for them by asking for referrals from other startups in your industry. Local meetup groups for your industry are a good place to meet those people.</comment>


From the ground up (or how to encourage a school boy) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jgc.org/2013/05/from-ground-up.html

<comment><USER2> An amazing story! However, it's a good thing you did this in the 1980s. Today, instead of a friendly letter of encouragement, you'd probably get a "cease and desist" letter from a lawyer saying that reverse-engineering their client's proprietary network code was a criminal act.

<comment><AUTHOR> How sadly true that is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> By the time I got to school RM machines were called the Nimbus and were 86s (or possible 186).

The apps were very very good; I particularly remember Newspa and wish there was something similar for my kids to use today.

I learnt to program BBC Basic on it. Very fond memories.

I think in my final year we got a single RM Nimbus 286 and by then all pretense at custom software stack was gone; it was a windows 3 machine.

</comment><comment><USER4> ahh, the joy of Z80 assembly. Such fond memories I had of hacking at my Laser 200[1], bought with my own money (I didn't have enough to buy a Thompson MO5[2], I was only 13 at the time).

You had to plug it into the TV, there was no way to record your programs although I got a tape recorder later. I later completely mapped the circuit board to understand how it was working and built a 16K static memory expansion (the original was too expensive).

I started bypassing basic and hacking away using PEEK and POKE commands, then hand-compiled small assembly programs (had to find out the OP-codes to directly store them in memory).

I later got an Amstrad 6128 that I bought from a friend. It had CP/M and a proper assembler, and a floppy drive, and a lot more fun was to be had with this one.

I still got my Laser 200. It probably still works, I hope.

These early computer were great: with a bit of perseverance, you could understand everything about them. The electronics, how the ROM was working, it was such fun to discover all these undocumented capabilities, to try to lift the hood and make sense of it all.

I don't know if this is a lost art today. The success of the Arduino and Raspberry Pi platforms give me hope that there is still an interest in low- level hacking.

As a young boy, it was so extremely formative to live during that era. Even though we didn't have the Internet, I still feel very fortunate for having access to these eminently hackable early personal computers.

[1]:[http://www.old- computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=155&s...](http://www.old- computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=155&st=1) [2]:[http://www.old- computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=...](http://www.old- computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=12)

<comment><USER5> Low level hacking is alive and well; not just with Arduino and Raspberry Pi but also with the jailbreak community - I was fascinated at the speed with which a bunch of kids built an entire iOS tool chain from scratch, with no documentation and against the wishes of the owner.

There are now more hackers and makers than ever before. Good things will come from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how many breach-of-trust lawsuits Graham Martin would face if he did that today.

</comment><comment><USER7> Did you keep in touch with Mr. Martin, or with anyone else at the company, after this?</comment>


That WoW server blade - <AUTHOR> http://augustl.com/blog/2014/that_wow_server_blade/ <comment><USER4> Wow, the memories and the pain. Its weird because I spent enough time in Azeroth that I think of it as a 'place' and as a place with fond memories that I cannot go back to as Blizzard has moved on, its oddly painful for me. It was the only game where the social aspects were as fun, or sometimes more fun, than the game play.

That said, I worked at NetApp when WoW first released and their architecture at the time was these blade servers talking to oracle database instances that were using EMC SAN boxes for storage. We tried to convince them they would have less down time if they converted to Oracle over NFS as Oracle had done in their big data center in Texas.

As an engineer it started me thinking about the whole 'world as a database transaction' sort of model of things. How that got built, where did latency matter, where did it not? What could you un-do and what had to be at-most- once. And then the scale of that with respect to localizing transactions when actors (characters) were within scoping distance of database changes. Quite the interesting challenge.

Oh and the 'weird custom board' on that blade is a compact flash to IDE adapter. The blades booted from compact flash.

EDIT: Hmm, not CF adapter, going back and looking again I think that was the NVRAM card which allowed them to recover transaactions after a server crash.

<comment><USER5> Moved on how? I haven't really played except for the original beta, so I haven't been following WoW news much.

<comment><USER6> Regarding the social aspects, they've made the game so accessible to casual players that they've eliminated the need to form strong social bonds for 99% of the content that people play.

You can level pretty quickly just by soloing, so you don't need to find a buddy to help. With the Dungeon and Raid Finders, you don't even need to join a guild or have a set of regular friends for tackling harder content.

With the battleground queues, you don't need friends to participate in PVP.

Unless you want to attempt the harder versions of the same Raid content or try to compete more rigorously at PVP, all of the classic reasons to meet and keep friends in WoW are gone.

<comment><USER5> Very interesting. There's "raging" debate over in some Destiny threads (which shares some MMO traits) regarding the lack of matchmaking for certain raids (the designers require you to form up your own band of friends, because it's intended to be a difficult challenge that a random lot could probably not take on) and whether or not things should be accessible to all or tailored for a more dedicated few. I saw several comparisons to how WoW had watered the experience down, and now I know more. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've worked extensively with HP equipment. I've just sent August an email with a _ton_ of extra detail about this blade.

The 'weird custom card' mentioned in ChuckMcM's comment is actually a SmartArray 6i raid controller. The black slot is to put a small stick of ram into to act as cache.

Happy to answer any and all questions about the server :)

Out of interest, there are two CPUs in this server, and they're both an AMD Opteron 275 (2.2 GHz, dual core). The 512MB Hynix ram sticks would have come from the factory, while the 2GB micron sticks would have been an upgrade.

<comment><USER8> Thank you for reaching out and helping to complete the story of this box.

Maybe someone from Blizz can even tell them what the server's role was...

<comment><USER7> Posting the email I sent:

I saw your blog post about your WoW blade, via Hacker News, and couldn't help but want to contribute.

I have worked as a sysadmin and hardware specialist for the past 5-6 years, with a lot of experience with HP equipment - I was wondering if you'd like me to help provide better descriptions of any of the parts of your blade? Extra detail like the fact that Hynix ram came in the machine from the factory, but the micron ram was added as an upgrade. Your machine probably only ever had those 6 sticks in it, as the next generation of servers used newer DDR2 and wasn't compatible (hence no reason to remove ram from this blade). That blade is what is called a 'half-height blade and it would have sat vertically in a Blade Enclosure, ie, the HPBL25p text would be horizontal. Blade enclosures usually hold up to 16 half-height blades, or 8 full height blades, but yours is a p-class blade, so it would have been in an enclosure for half-height blades only (8 blades max). The network ports and all other connections are on the blade enclosure. If you'd like a full spec sheet on your blade and the enclosure, you can look at this PDF from HP: [http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/images/ap/BL25p_v7.pdf](http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/images/ap/BL25p_v7.pdf)

Regarding your concerns about the CPUs and heatsink paste, etc: The CPUs will actually be attached to the heatsinks and you should simply be able to lift them out as a unit. This is done so that if a CPU were to fail in the blade you can replace the CPU in just a few minutes. The detail of which CPU you have is more than likely attached to the underside of the heatsink as well, next to the processor, but you can actually tell which one you have from the model number (that sticker that says 392439-B21). It's an HP ProLiant BL25p 275 2.2GHz-1MB Dual Core 2P 2GB Blade Server. This means your CPUs are AMD Opteron 275s, and you have two of them. The '5' in BL25p also indicates an AMD CPU. Intel servers end in a zero.

I can also tell you what most of the bits of hardware on the motherboard do too, if you like.. I'm happy to annotate photos. The large green card towards the rear of the server with the little silver heatsink and the empty black slot is the hard drive controller. In this server the model would be a SmartArray 6i. The slot is for a small stick of RAM (128MB for this model) that the controller would have used for cache - it probably never had any installed though.

As general information: the little 'add in cards' are called daughter-boards, and are actually completely normal in servers, especially of this size, partially due to space constraints. The main reason for daughter boards though is so you can quickly and easily replace a failed component. Servers are generally designed to be easily and quickly serviceable. I've personally replaced a server motherboard in under 10 minutes (from power off to power back on again). It's generally all tool-less and extremely modular.

The clear magnetised lid on these server is definitely not standard - <USER2> must have added this when they decided to memorialise the server. The standard lid would be metal and held on with a quick-release lever mechanism.. I really like the magnetised approach though :)

I can keep going on, but yeah, let me know if you'd like any information or more insight into the server. Glad to see that it's in the hands of someone who obviously cares about the equipment though :) it's nice that they made them into a collectible rather than just selling them to a used equipment vendor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would really like to know the software architecture of a WoW realm. (Beyond the basics of... one blade for each continent).

OS, tools, programming languages, how did the different parts of the software (such as, again, continents) communicate between themselves... For example, I was told once dungeons and raids were/are scripted in Lua.

<comment><USER10> >Beyond the basics of... one blade for each continent).

On launch there was 2 continents, but 4 server blades per _server_.

Scripted events take place in Lua. But most raids until I believe Cataclysm weren't scripted so much as it was just mob abilities + cool downs.

Note: Not a wow server architect just played _way_ to much WoW

<comment><USER9> These things I know. WoW server reimplementations are pretty monolithic and that causes a lot of problems on heavy loads. I know of a private server that's working on having some "load balancing" to avoid that.

What I mean by this is that currently the only way to have lots of players playing at once in the same realm is to buy very expensive hardware. That plus the amount of DoS attacks you receive if you are popular means that having a private WoW server online is anything but cheap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Oh man, my first year of college I was in a freshman seminar and idly bid on one of these with a fairly low offer (~$200). Twenty minutes later I was the proud owner of a WoW server.

My lack of foresight has led to it being stuck, still in the original shipping box, in my parent's basement.

<comment><USER12> I envy you greatly. When these were put on sale a freak snowstorm happened to hit the northeast and me and everyone else around had no power for close to a week. I was after one of the more populated servers (Kil'jaeden) and my phones battery just didn't last long enough to get that final bid in. I still regret not just putting in a higher bid earlier that day.

<comment><USER11> I just found my winning bid e-mail: I got Quel'Thalas for $212.50 on 2011-10-24. I remember that freak Halloween snow storm.. somehow it managed to avoid hitting me the capital region.

I'll probably sell the server at some point but I have no idea what a fair price for it is. Perhaps I'll sell it using a double-blind auction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wWPD9Dl...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wWPD9DlVIJAJ:augustl.com/blog/2014/that_wow_server_blade/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER14> Out of curiosity, do you remember how long my blog was down? Linode reports 100% uptime and no monitoring show traces of congestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I still wonder about how many players those servers could hold, and what about other MMO games networking architecture ? For examples I know that in guild wars, once you get out of town, you don't see other players. In wow they also merged many zones so they are "cross realm".

How does EVE online work by the way ?

I'm fascinated by this stuff. I wish there was an unique realm MMO game like wow.

I guess EVEO is unique level.

I'd love to see a game using more p2p architectures to enable small parties to offload servers.

<comment><USER16> Patrick Wyatt (worked at blizzard on WC, starcraft, battle.net, then on guild wars) blogged a bit about the design of some of these games: [http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/scaling-guild-wars-for- massi...](http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/scaling-guild-wars-for-massive- concurrency)

Worth a read

<comment><USER17> Less tech-oriented and more design-oriented, Alexander Brazie has blogged a lot about various design decisions he and his team made at the time in WoW.

[https://alexanderbrazie.blogspot.co.uk](https://alexanderbrazie.blogspot.co.uk)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra What's the definition of a blade? I thought it was a diskless server but this one used to have a hard drive.

<comment><USER18> _> 'What's the definition of a blade?'_

I'm not sure there's any hard and fast definition.

Generally, a blade is going to share power at least, likely network uplinks as well. Diskless configurations are common, with some sort of shared storage being used, but local disk is finding its way back into blades via SSD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> 4 blades to run an entire realm? That's more impressive than I thought.

<comment><USER20> That was probably the case back in vanilla (pre-expansion) WoW. With the introduction of cross-realm battlegrounds in 1.12 - a month before the first expansion - followed by the activation of arenas in the first expansion, they most likely considerably expanded their server capacity to accommodate for the increased load. I remember seeing news articles back in the day just a few months before Burning Crusade's launch that Blizzard had bought a massive amount of servers, but the only thing I can find now is this blog post: [http://www.rahulsood.com/2006/02/blizzard-going-crazy-for- op...](http://www.rahulsood.com/2006/02/blizzard-going-crazy-for-opteron.html)

However, it's important to note that around this time Blizzard was heavily improving their Battle.NET service and launched a download service where you could register your CD keys from their previous games such as Starcraft and Warcraft III and download a fully working ISO that did not require the physical CD to run. The server purchases may have gone towards that instead.

Would love it if Blizzard wasn't so secretive about everything, especially their tech. CCP, makers of Eve Online, have been very forthcoming in talking about their entire stack in their developer blogs and videos - <USER3> infrastructure and hardware, to how they profile their code and the software design choices they make.

<comment><USER21> The market for private WoW servers in the past has been a major concern for Blizzard and I'd imagine has been a large motivator in their decision to closely guard their infrastructure design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone know when exactly they changed their specs?</comment>