Ironies of Automation (1983) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.ise.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica.pdf <comment><USER3> Speaking as someone who has been responsible for "turning the lights back on" to fix problems with "fully-automated", "lights-out" factory lines, much of this paper still rings true forty years on - if nothing else as a check against our engineering hubris. It remains tremendously difficult to quash entirely the long tail of things that can go wrong in a factory.

That said, many contentions raised here really have been resolved substantially with increased computing efficiency and ubiquitous connectivity. The touted expert human operator's ability to see and understand processes from a high-level, informed by years of observing (and hearing, and "feeling") machine behavior has truly been eclipsed by an advanced machine's capacity to collect increasingly granular snapshots of its complete operating state - <USER2> temperatures, vibrations, positions, and other sensations of its various organs and elements - every few milliseconds, hold on to that data indefinitely, and correlate and interpret that data in ever-expanding radii of causation.

The best human operators (of any technology) not only respond to problems, they anticipate and prevent or plan around them. Massive data, advanced physics-based simulations, and "digital twinning" capabilities of manufacturing equipment afford pre-emptive testing of virtually infinite scenarios.

Not only can you simulate throwing a wrench in the works - you can simulate the effect of the wrench entering the works at every possible angle!

It's not infallible, and will for a long time still require a human-in-the- loop at some level, but as the author rightly put it themselves near the end of the paper:

"It would be rash to claim it as an irony that the aim of aiding human limited capacity has pushed computing to the limit of its capacity, as technology has a way of catching up with such remarks."

<comment><USER4> Do you think that with integrating AI/ML techniques fully into manufacturing automation that in our lifetimes people will become fully obsolete for this kind of work? As a cloud/software/network guy I am curious to see someones opinion who is knowledgeable in this area.

<comment><USER3> Within our lifetimes (say, the next 40-60 years), no, personally I don't think we'll see completely autonomous end-to-end manufacturing widely implemented (as much as I'd like to, considering it's a problem space I focus on!).

Some pockets of industry are much further ahead than others, but it will take A LOT of work to reach parity across the board. If not for technical reasons (which I'm more optimistic about), then for political and social reasons, as these systems and understandings adapt. That's a whole 'nother discussion...

AI/ML will play a huge role. Not only in machine resilience once commissioned and operating, but upstream and downstream as well. Better (AI/ML-assisted) tools for designing products and the factories/equipment that make them will preempt some of the challenges caused by the currently disjointed process.

I disagree with the comment that AI/ML techniques are only useful once you've physically built a plant - there are of course emergent behaviors that only crop up when dynamics of the whole unique factory are at play, but any given problem that arises is almost always traceable to one or a small number of subcomponent failures, for which better, more granular datasets are becoming available to train AI upon.

And, as I mentioned in my comment about throwing virtual wrenches in virtual works - simulations can begin to generate training data sets as well!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is one of my favorite papers. The core point that I think should get a lot more attention is this one:

> When manual take-over is needed there is likely to be something wrong with > the process, so that unusual actions will be needed to control it, and one > can argue that the operator needs to be more rather than less skilled, and > less rather than more loaded, than average.

The "remaining" operational work once automation has done it's job is more complex and weirder and requires more knowledge and skill than the basic task. On top of that, computes can (and do!) get systems into states that humans wouldn't, so those skills may exceed the skills needed by manual operators. This is something that people who work on things like driver aids talk about a lot, but I don't see as much attention to in the systems observability field.

> One can therefore only expect the operator to monitor the computer's > decisions at some meta-level, to decide whether the computer's decisions are > 'acceptable', If the computer is being used to make the decisions because > human judgement and intuitive reasoning are not adequate in this context, > then which of the decisions is to be accepted ? The human monitor has been > given an impossible task.

This is particularly visible with things like data integrity in a complex database schema. Above a trivial scale, things both change too fast for a human to monitor, and change in ways that don't make sense to humans. When a human sees an anomaly, who's to know if it's expected?

Still a great, thought-provoking, read after 37 years.

<comment><USER5> For example, one of the things that computers do a lot in cloud "control planes" is placement optimization. I've got this compute job, or data, or packet, where should I put it? Computers can solve these kinds of problems much faster than humans, and much better when the dimensionality goes up. If things aren't looking as rosy as usual, is it because the workload has shifted to being harder to pack, or because something's gone wrong with the automation.

These problems, with humans operating numerical optimization processes, are only going to get harder and more relevant as ML techniques become more ubiquitous. At least we need to be prepared for some very tricky post-hoc analysis of computer decisions. Years of work to understand a millisecond of decisions might not be unusual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> See also

2019 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19132724](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19132724)

2018 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18230258](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18230258)

2016 (1 comment) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12749342](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12749342)

2014 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726496](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726496)

<comment><USER7> Since we're talking about automation, isn't it time this function was outsourced to some code that doesn't mind working on a holiday?

<comment><USER6> You might be surprised at how much curation goes into those seemingly mechanical lists. I try to exclude the cases that aren't interesting, and unfortunately it's pretty hard to write software the distinguishes the interesting from the uninteresting. In fact, if I knew how to write such software, I could automate my job!

<comment><USER8> There's a bit of a difference there in that an automated list that's half as good as what you'd manually curate is nearly as useful as your version, especially if people know it's automated. This isn't at all the case for most other aspects of moderating that depend on human input. The previouslies don't really have to be dang-quality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The heuristic to think about automation is using a hand screwdriver (manual) vs a drill screwdriver (automated).

The latter dramatically enhances productivity, but also introduces some overhead and complexity.

This is also as good a time as any to link to the [automation FAQ]([https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_automation](https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_automation))</comment>


Secret Service raids Apple store webcam 'artist' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14080438

<comment><USER2> What's the problem? It's a photo taken in a public space. It's not like the government doesn't do the same thing to everybody 20-40 times a day (and more like 400 times a day in the UK). It's not like the guy went around breaking down people's doors because he thought he heard them flushing drugs down a toilet*.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the problem is that he installed software on a private piece of property (a laptop in an Apple Store), recorded people's images without their knowledge (usually you know when you're being recorded) and posted them online without their consent.

Was there any actual harm done? I don't think so, but were his actions "right" or un-punishable? That's up for debate.</comment></comment>


Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming? - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/did-setting-a-timeline-doom-the-fight-against-global-warming-35f9f18c7a2d?source=friends_link&sk=00d55144ada068d326a5f80f7a65186f <comment><USER3> Climate change was never going to be reversible with behavioral measures. Even if everyone had followed the Kyoto protocol to the letter starting in 1992 that wasn't going to avert climate change, because nobody contemplated how quickly China and India would develop. There is no calculus where you can significantly limit climate change through behavioral measures that also allow the third world to have comfortable, modern lives. There will be 400 million people in Nigeria by 2050 and there is no political regime to address climate the change that's workable unless it allows them to live a life at least as decent as say Eastern Europe. The west could reduce GHG emissions to zero and it wouldn't do the trick.

People have viewed climate change as a political issue and its not. It's a scientific issue. It's the astroid hurtling toward earth in the movie Armageddon or the aliens in Independence Day. The solution to climate change is not governments and politicians and lawyers. It's engineers. It's always been engineers.

<comment><USER4> It _is_ a political issue. The technology already exists--courtesy of the scientists/engineers of course. Whether that technology is deployed is a problem of politics.

For example, if the price of fossil fuels reflected its true cost to society-- think climate change, extreme weather, stronger storms, droughts, ocean acidification, etc--then fossil fuels would be prohibitively expensive compared to renewable or nuclear energy. This is what a carbon tax is, and it's what many scientists and economists have been pushing for decades now. But they've been fighting a losing battle against the oil and gas lobby, and one party in particular that is wholly captured by them.

In fact, James Hansen, NASA scientist and head of the Goddard Institute, got out of the science to focus specifically on the politics. He urges people to join the Citizens Climate Lobby, which has lobbied for carbon pricing legislation for over a decade now: the Energy Innovation Act has bipartisan support in Congress right now ([https://energyinnovationact.org/](https://energyinnovationact.org/)). Many other scientists are involved in the politics these day as well (Katherine Hayhoe [atmospheric scientist], Michael Mann [climatologist]).

<comment><USER5> >This is what a carbon tax is, and it's what many scientists and economists have been pushing for decades now. But they've been fighting a losing battle against the oil and gas lobby, and one party in particular that is wholly captured by them.

You missed the forest for the trees. As the OP pointed out, the US going to zero emissions overnight will not even help. US politics will not solve Nigeria's, China's, or India's populations from expanding to modern western consumerism.

<comment><USER6> Perfect is the enemy of good.

Of course we can't instantly solve global carbon emissions. But we can do our (very large) part here in the U.S. By shifting where our dollars go. By moving from carbon to renewable sources, we'll drop the price of renewables, helping small economies afford to do the same.

Progress is virtually always incremental. We need to begin by stopping dragging our feet.

<comment><USER3> That's like saying we should try to bail out the boat with spoons because "progress is incremental." It's not only pointless, but actively dangerous, because it's a distraction.

The "Green New Deal" is a great example. A jobs program obviously won't do anything to seriously address climate change. Worse, it wastes money and political capital on things that could have more utility. If you spent that money on nuclear energy research and gave it away to developing nations, then you could really move the needle.

<comment><USER7> But is it a distraction? To overuse the analogy, GP is proposing to yes, get most of the crew to spoon, to buy some little extra time while the engineering team is trying to fix the pumps. The alternative is to have the crew drink or pray to deities for the pumps to be blessed and magically start working.

If the development of the developing world is a problem, you can't expect the solution to come from developing world. On our end, like in the example of the ship's crew, most people aren't able to contribute to a proper solution - <USER2> lack the necessary skills and opportunities. Unfortunately (in this case), we live in free market democracies, which means there isn't a body that can reallocate huge amount of resources to retraining and retooling towards mitigating climate change. The market doesn't care, so we have to do things the hard way - we have to force our governments to force the market to start allocating resources, so that engineers and scientists and logisticians can deal with the problem directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There was a lot of talk about how the world will be "uninhabitable by 2050" or "civilization will crumble by 2050" and anecdotally, that really backfired for all my elderly aunts and uncles. They happily admit that climate change is real but don't care because they will be dead by 2040. Hell, I'll be in my 80's.

<comment><USER9> Kek, in 1970 crude oil was predicted to run out in 2020. They also predicted the world will be inhabitable by now because of intense pollution.

How are we? We breathe cleaner air and use more petroleum than 1970.

I will be 55 in 2050, and I bet my entire fortune that the world will be better then.

<comment><USER10> Not sure that works. That's like telling a child, "Watch out for that car. Oh! Lookout for that one, too." And the kid thinks, "Well, neither of those hit me, why should I care?" And the next one flattens him.

Just because you can pick two things from the past that didn't turn out as expected doesn't mean the next potential danger isn't valid. Now, maybe we come up with some clever CO2 scrubbing technology and we start engineering the atmosphere, but that doesn't mean the danger doesn't need to be addressed. There was a lot of work that went into finding new ways to get oil and regulation to improve the air. Without acknowledging the problem we could have had those catastrophes.

<comment><USER11> > Just because you can pick two things from the past that didn't turn out as > expected doesn't mean the next potential danger isn't valid.

Correct, perhaps those issuing the warnings should accept the unfortunate reality that this is how average people behave and adjust their messaging. Rather than repetitive warning after warning, why not pool resources and focus on building and improving one single large educational resource that tells the whole story ( _including_ full disclosure of the uncertain and imperfect aspects, rather than having people learn of those in conspiracy forums, in order to build trust) from a variety of angles so it is approachable by people from all different intelligence and economic levels?

More of the same isn't going to work.

<comment><USER7> Part of the problem is that there isn't a centralized Science Propaganda Council issuing these warnings, which could be told to do better. Scientists publish studies and sometimes strongly worded letters; journalists and authors pick it up and twist into something that (then) sells publications / (now) attracts eyeballs to advertisements; people mishear these reports further, freak out and tell to each other (or, today, post on social media).

<comment><USER11> > Part of the problem is that there isn't a centralized Science Propaganda > Council issuing these warnings, which could be told to do better.

The layman listening to how this is covered could very easily come to the exact opposite conclusion ("97% of scientists....!!"), and much of the armchair experts seem to behave as if there was.

But this is my point: why _isn 't_ there something akin to a centralized Science Propaganda Council where the very best science on the matter is agreed upon by the experts, and open to criticism by those who disagree? Isn't this how any large project would be organized (well, the "central" part of it if not the openness to criticism)? Does having a bunch of splintered groups arguing inconsistent viewpoints seem like the optimal approach to something that may very well be an existential threat to life as we know it on the planet?

> Scientists publish studies and sometimes strongly worded letters; > journalists and authors pick it up and twist into something that (then) > sells publications / (now) attracts eyeballs to advertisements; people > mishear these reports further, freak out and tell to each other (or, today, > post on social media).

Bingo. And intelligent people sincerely wonder why this isn't having success. The situation is so utterly absurd to me, it boggles my mind that no one else seems to notice any imperfections in our current approach (and this applies to _all_ the issues facing the world, not just this one).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wouldn't it be nice it it were something as simple as setting a timeline. The reality is, it's a combination of two things (mainly):

1) We can't afford to undermind the economy. That is, any plan that cuts back on consumption (even in the short term) is going to hurt an already hurting economy[1]. However, there aren't any "leader(s)" who want to be pinned with such things so the buck gets passed.

2) Along the same lines, we've convenience'd ourselves into a corner. At this point, sacrifices (in the context of status quo lifestyles / cultural expectations) need to be made; habits needed to be changed. But again, there's no leader willing to disrupt that which needs to be disrupted. We talk a good game when it comes to wanting change but then once the call comes in, we whine. "Leaders" that cause people to whine don't get elected / re-elected. It used to be, "at war" mean the POTUS (in the USA) had carte blanche to ask for help and sacrifice. Now we live in a world where "at war" means to keep the masses distracted by keeping up with the Kardashians.

[1] Not to get off topic (but to prove my point); there's a reason fracking hocket-stick'ed under the previous POTUS. That reason is, the Fed had shot it wad and keeping the cost of fuel down is a proxy for economic stimulation (without having to say so). Ultimately, we tossed Mother Nature under the bus to keep the economy from going tits-up. If that's what "green presidents" can get away with, then that doesn't exactly raise the bar for the rest.

<comment><USER13> > We can't afford to undermine the economy.

Heh. This is such a brilliant phrase that perfectly encapsulates everything that is wrong.

We can't afford to not afford things. :D

<comment><USER7> No, it's actually very much right.

We can push the economy a bit. We can try to replace the more emission- intensive aspects of it. But we cannot do it too hard - because if we break the economy, that's quite literally game over. After humanity emerges from ensuing wars, famines and starvation, the survivors will be left stuck with medieval-era technology on a thoroughly broken planet.

I have this feeling that people forget that economy isn't just zeroes on the accounts of bank executives; it's the food on the table of everyone, it's the medicine and the running water, and everything that keeps civilization together.

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, and even more so, let's not replace the bathwater with gasoline and set it on fire.

<comment><USER13> Sure, but the idea that it's untouchable is absurd.

Everything changes. The economy was different last year, in 2010, in 1950 and so on.

The country I grew up in is very different to the one that exists today.

Change is constant. No-one is talking about burning it down, the idea is more that the exceptional growth of the past few decades has likely overshot what is sustainable.

<comment><USER7> I'm not saying it's untouchable, just that it needs to be handled with care.

Think of it as doing live repair on a running engine of your airplane, mid- flight. You can do it if you're careful, but if you break it, we all die, and the airplane isn't going to fly anywhere anytime soon.

In particular, ideas like "we need to halt _economic growth_ ASAP" I sometimes see in climate change threads are essentially suicidal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It annoys me when people act like Y2K was apocalyptic scaremongering. No, Y2K was a _real_ threat, which the human race spent huge resources to meet and thereby mitigated appropriately.

<comment><USER10> I remember my father, a mainframe programmer, spending _years_ correcting code for Y2K for the bank he worked for. COBOL and assembly. At the rollover, it went without a hitch, but there was a lot of sweat to make that happen

<comment><USER8> My uncle (a COBOL programmer in the 60's) got together with some other retired guys and made a lot of money doing exactly the same thing in the late 90's. One of his contracts he landed because they found his name all over the code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> No matter how you put it, people will find tendentious excuses for ignoring the issue, and when they are no longer tenable, they will switch to another, without any concern as to whether it is consistent with their previous position.

</comment><comment><USER16> The part about divers crying into masks hit home. It was on my bucket list to dive in the Great Barrier Reef but it's now been declared dead. 95% of my diving has been in the last 25% of my diving career because I know I have a limited time.

<comment> radford-neal What? "Declared dead?" Here's a BBC report from a few days ago that says that it's in danger, but certainly "not dead yet".

[https://www.bbc.com/news/world- australia-49520949?SThisFB](https://www.bbc.com/news/world- australia-49520949?SThisFB)

Since the BBC is now officially a climate alarmist organization, I think one can be sure that this report is as alarmist as one can be without blatantly disregarding easily verifiable facts.

<comment><USER17> > _now officially a climate alarmist organization_

What exactly does that mean?

(The BBC report is summarizing a report from the Australian government, and unless it's just lying its level of alarmism will pretty much track those of that report itself. So whether the BBC is "officially a climate alarmist organization", whatever that means, matters less than whether the Australian government is one. Regardless, it would be nice to know what you mean.)

<comment> radford-neal See, for example, [https://www.carbonbrief.org/exclusive-bbc-issues-internal- gu...](https://www.carbonbrief.org/exclusive-bbc-issues-internal-guidance-on- how-to-report-climate-change)

Even when reporting on a report, it's possible to emphasize certain aspects, or misleadingly paraphrase its conclusions. I haven't looked at the original report to tell whether that has happened here.

<comment><USER17> OK, I read it. I don't see anything there that _to me_ seems to justify calling them "officially a climate alarmist organization". Could you elaborate on what exactly about their position you're describing by those words?

<comment> radford-neal Well, for instance, it says that the BBC has an official position that "there is very high confidence that there will be more extreme events – floods, droughts, heatwaves etc." (Presumably, by "more", they mean an increase of substantial importance, not, say, 5%.) This seems more alarmist than the scientific consensus.

Regarding the consensus, they say "The BBC accepts that the best science on the issue is the IPCC's position". Here, you have to read between the lines. Do you think that this means they will "de-platform" people who are _more_ alarmist than the IPCC? I doubt it. In that respect, it's always, "the latest research, too recent for the last IPCC report, shows that it's worse than we thought...".

<comment><USER17> It looks to me as if the comment about "extreme events" is an illustrative example rather than a specific statement of BBC policy. Which is just as well, because I agree that it seems to go beyond current consensus.

The BBC is not proposing to "de-platform" everyone less alarmist than the IPCC so no, I wouldn't expect them to de-platform everyone more alarmist than the IPCC either. Here are some things they do say:

> _As climate change is accepted as happening, you do not need a 'denier' to > balance the debate. Although there are those who disagree with the IPCC's > position, very few of them now go so far as to deny that climate change is > happening. To achieve impartiality, you do not need to include outright > deniers of climate change in BBC coverage_

and

> _There are occasions where contrarians and sceptics should be included > within climate change and sustainability debates. These may include, for > instance, debating the speed and intensity of what will happen in the > future, or what policies government should adopt._

all of which seems to allow for a considerable degree of variation away from the IPCC's position before anything like "de-platforming" is on the table.

(I'd still like to know what exactly "officially a climate alarmist organization" means. By "climate alarmist", do you mean the same as "believing that climate change is real", or something else?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My takeaway is different: we are beyond the tipping point. Even if we technically would not, our inability to make good decisions as a group dooms us. The good strategy is to prepare to live through the extinction event, and use that as the proof of need for better group decisions (a.k.a. politics). We do have the scientific knowledge to design a much better system, but the same knowledge hints that the momentums of the system, set by the current motivational structure would not allow a change for better without a collapse.

</comment><comment><USER19> > The only rational path is a virtuous cycle of better politicians enacting > better policies and promoting better public understanding of climate change. > But as of today, there is no sign the world is moving in that direction.

Suppose my politicians fight the good fight and we enact the necessary policies. What about the other countries, especially those that aren't as well off?

<comment><USER20> A well off industrialized nation making progress on energy and pollution reduction would a) demonstrate what things works, and b) provide investment dollars into those technologies, which _usually_ results in optimizations and lowering of costs ... so even if those "other countries" don't follow immediately, their adoption could be enabled by earlier adoption by us

<comment><USER21> We should thank Obama for pushing green energy initiatives

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Would sure be nice if we spent those war trillions to solve the real problem. Unfortunately most people seem to have discovered climate change in November 2016.

Good that they did. Better to see more focus on solutions. It would be great and exciting to work on mass scale solutions and government can easily create laws to incent it

</comment><comment><USER23> What are the implications of 'irreversible'? Practically irreversible? Cannot be reversed naturally? If we run out of ice, what's to say cooling down the planet by halting carbon production won't recreate the ice caps?

<comment><USER24> You will find that predictions of climate change have been 100% false. Nobody has a crystal ball and nobody can predict what will happen in the future. So lets look into the past.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/media/File:All_palaeotemps.svg)

About 20,000 years ago the earth was 10 celcius colder. For the last 20,000 years the earth has been warming pretty steadily.

About 100,000 years ago the world was 5celcius warmer than today.

If you look at the black/red dots from the IPCC predictions. All of those have already been disproven as false and not going to happen. Overall on the graph what's happening is that we are more or less exactly flat.

However look at those spikes: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#/media/File:EPICA_delta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#/media/File:EPICA_delta_D_plot.svg)

Temperature on earth frequently rapidly spiked up in temperature.

So what happened to life on earth when it was 5+ celcius warmer? It was fantastic for life. Frozen wastelands like Canada and Russia thawed and became extremely livable. People moved into these northern places.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene)

The Eocene 50 million years ago was 14celcius warmer and life thrived better than no other time in history.

<comment><USER17> > _predictions of climate change have been 100% false_

That statement is itself 100% false, so far as I can tell. Here's one example. In 1982, some of Exxon's scientists wrote a memo for their management containing a graph (figure 3, page 7, of [http://www.climatefiles.com/exxonmobil/1982-memo-to-exxon- ma...](http://www.climatefiles.com/exxonmobil/1982-memo-to-exxon-management- about-co2-greenhouse-effect/)) saying that by 2020 CO2 levels would be in roughly the range 400..430 ppm and global mean temperature would be up by roughly 1..1.3 degrees C compared to 1960. Here we are in 2020 and the figures are about 410ppm and +0.9 degrees C. That matches up pretty well, wouldn't you say?

> _For the last 20,2000 years the earth has been warming pretty steadily_

What the graph you yourself linked to shows is something very different. There are wild oscillations in the Pleistocene (i.e., _before_ 20k years ago), ending up with temperatures much colder than the present. Then a rapid increase from 20k to 10k years ago. Then near-flat temperatures for the last 10k years. And -- though it's over so short a period that it's hard to see on that graph -- an extremely rapid increase over the last ~50 years.

> _All of those have already been disproven as false and not going to happen_

How? By whom?

> _we are more or less exactly flat_

This [https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global- temperature/](https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/) is not what I would call "more or less exactly flat".

> _look at those spikes ... frequently rapidly spiked up in temperature_

You're looking at a portion of the Pleistocene, also known as the last Ice Age. Glaciers came and went, and the Eemian "spike" is one of those periods in which the glaciers melted. So, yes, indeed, temperatures "spiked up" and we had a transition from a large fraction of the earth's land area being covered in ice to hardly any of it being. Are you suggesting that we shouldn't be worried about climate change because the consequences might not be any more severe than those of _the melting of an ice sheet covering the whole of Canada_?

> _it was fantastic for life_

Pretty good for life overall, yes, and the climate change we're causing might be too. However, my own interests are parochial enough that I care much more what happens to _our_ species and the others that we've grown to depend on, which is any entirely different question. For instance ...

> _The Eocene 50 million years ago was 14 celsius warmer and life thrived_

... 50M years ago, sea levels were something like 100m higher than they are now. There's a handy tool at [http://www.floodmap.net/](http://www.floodmap.net/) that lets you explore the consequences of a given increase in sea level (though it's a bit glitchy and it looks like maybe it doesn't have data for anything too far from the equator). At 100m, things we would lose include: about half of England and Ireland; all of the Netherlands; half of Belgium; most of western France; all of Senegal, the Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau; huge amounts of the eastern USA including more or less all of Florida, Louisiana, Delaware and Rhode Island.

I'm sure _life_ would thrive. The human race would adapt too, no doubt; we're a very adaptable species. But a whole lot of us would have our homes under water, and large regions of what's now the inhabitable world would become inhospitable to human life. E.g., a temperature rise of 14 degrees C turns San Francisco into Death Valley.

<comment><USER24> >That statement is itself 100% false, so far as I can tell. >the figures are about 410ppm and +0.9 degrees C. That matches up pretty well, wouldn't you say?

I certainly concede that not literally 100% of the predictions will be wrong. In fact I bet I could go predicting and we'll be within similar error margins.

My assertion was more to do with consequence predictions. Sorry for being unclear.

In 2001 the IPCC predicted that wildfires would be out of control because of climate change. In that the increased temperatures would make the summers dryer and make the fires worse. Which is a really bad prediction to start with because smokey the bear is dead because the actual movement to prevent forest fires resulted in the current situation where we have too many trees. Which the IPCC in 2001 did know about fire ecology. They were creating a self- fulfilling prophecy.

In 2012 they reiterated this flawed prediction: [https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20120703/climate- change-s...](https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20120703/climate-change- scientist-ipcc-wildfires-global-warming-drought-pine-beetles-west-forests)

Except they are wrong: [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170629175502.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170629175502.htm) Fires declined 24% in their prediction period. Not only did they cheat in their predictions, they were still wrong.

How about an even more wierd prediction:

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11555-global- warming-...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11555-global-warming-will- make-earth-spin-faster/)

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/dec/11/climate- chan...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/dec/11/climate-change- longer-days-glaciers-north-south-pole)

Only a few years apart. The climate scientists are predicting days will get longer and shorter at the same time because of climate change. Except in the last 50 years the earth rotation has sped up and slowed down. These are patently false.

>This [https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global- temperature/](https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/) is not what I would call "more or less exactly flat".

The most common thing climate scientists like to do is show only the last 150 years. I provided much much better information showing far larger swings in temperatures in history with no problems at all.

>You're looking at a portion of the Pleistocene, also known as the last Ice Age. Glaciers came and went, and the Eemian "spike" is one of those periods in which the glaciers melted. So, yes, indeed, temperatures "spiked up" and we had a transition from a large fraction of the earth's land area being covered in ice to hardly any of it being. Are you suggesting that we shouldn't be worried about climate change because the consequences might not be any more severe than those of the melting of an ice sheet covering the whole of Canada?

The point I was making is that climate change isn't a problem. It's a good thing. The climate does change as I proved. That's not a problem.

>Pretty good for life overall, yes, and the climate change we're causing might be too. However, my own interests are parochial enough that I care much more what happens to our species and the others that we've grown to depend on, which is any entirely different question. For instance ...

A couple degrees celcius isn't going to result in any problem to our ridiculous species. We already regularly live in the hottest and coldest places on earth. Winterpeg Manitoba Canada might become habitable soon if climate change doesnt get lazy.

>... 50M years ago, sea levels were something like 100m higher than they are now. There's a handy tool at [http://www.floodmap.net/](http://www.floodmap.net/) that lets you explore the consequences of a given increase in sea level (though it's a bit glitchy and it looks like maybe it doesn't have data for anything too far from the equator)

Very flawed tool with so many assumptions that make it appear far worse than it really will be.

Furthermore, you are correct. 100 metres higher IF the world is 14 celcius warmer.

I actually don't know of any climate alarmist who claims we are going to warm the planet 14celcius warmer. In fact the graph I provided shows around 7 celcius warmer at the 8.5% increase per year rate. Which has been disproven. Their 8.5% rate is more like 0.85%. Furthermore, fossil fuels are going to run out long before their year 2100 prediction. The world is much greener today than for a long time. It's actually quite unlikely we will see more than a couple celcius increase at current predictions.

> huge amounts of the eastern USA including more or less all of Florida, > Louisiana, Delaware and Rhode Island.

In fact Al gore's propaganda film the inconvenient truth predictions have failed. This should have already happened: [http://www.npr.org/programs/fa/features/2006/may/flaafter_lg...](http://www.npr.org/programs/fa/features/2006/may/flaafter_lg.jpg) according to him Florida should be under water like this. Hurricane doesnt count.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure I'm seeing the wrong predictions about wildfires; it looks to me as if there are two separate things going on.

1\. Hotter drier summers make for more and worse wildfires in places like Yellowstone (where a big wildfire in 2012 was the context for that 2012 article). If human activity makes the climate warmer, these will be worse.

2\. Increasing agriculture tends overall to lead to fewer fires, for complicated reasons that differ from one environment to another.

The climate is warming, but at the same time the population is growing and many parts of the world are getting richer and more "developed". So you get both #1 and #2 happening.

The IPCC in 2001, and Steven Running in 2012, weren't (so far as I can see) saying anything about #2. Quite possibly they never thought about the impact of increasing population and development on wildfires, which seems fair enough: that's not really their remit. I haven't seen anything to suggest that #2 is wrong. (The 2017 _Science_ article mentioned by Science Daily reiterates that warming climate tends to increase fires; it just says that over the period they studied the effects of human activity have been larger and in the other direction.)

What's the problem here?

> _an even more weird prediction_

Again, I'm not sure what the problem is meant to be here. One scientist tried to model the effects of climate change on the length of the day. Some others did the same and also measured what the effect actually is. It seems like the first one got it wrong. Scientists in all fields get things wrong all the time. I don't see that we can conclude anything from this other than that oceanographers aren't all infallible, which is ... not a surprise.

> _far larger swings in temperatures in history with no problems at all_

Those are in _prehistory_ , which is relevant because we don't have the records that would tell us whether there were "no problems at all".

The most recent of those "far larger swings" you identified is between ~20k years ago and now. That time 20k years ago was the so-called "Last Glacial Maximum", and at that point Canada was completely covered by an ice sheet, as was much of northern Europe; sea level was ~125m lower than now.

I am curious about what you consider "no problems at all".

> _I actually don 't know of any climate alarmist who claims we are going to > warm the planet 14 celsius warmer_

Sure. I used that figure because you were saying how fantastic everything was when the planet was 14 degrees C warmer. It may have been excellent in some sense, but I think it would be very bad for the human race if we returned to those conditions. I'm not saying we _will_ (I doubt it), just disagreeing with your apparent opinion about what it would be like if we did.

> _the graph I provided shows around 7 Celsius warmer at the 8.5% increase per > year rate ... more like 0.85%_

Sorry, which graph? I guess you mean the one on the Wikipedia page, which is mostly of (pre-)historical data, with IPCC projections for 2050 and 2100?

What is it that those projections assume an 8.5% increase of per year that's actually more like 0.85%? (I haven't found anything for which that's accurate, but I haven't looked very hard because presumably you can just tell me.)

> _This should have already happened_

Could you be more specific? What exactly did Gore say was going to happen by when, and where did he say it?

I'll be frank: I _do not believe_ that Gore claimed that large fractions of Florida would be underwater by now, and suspect you have been lied to. But I could be wrong!

Here's the best match I can find for that claim. Gore said something (I can't find his exact wording; it seems to have been vague, perhaps deliberately) about a 20ft (~= 6m) rise in sea levels. If there were a rise that big, then the southern part of Florida would look a little like that picture (though I'm not convinced it's very accurate). But so far as I can tell he didn't put a timescale on it, and I bet he never said or implied that it would happen within 13 years.

Now, I'm pretty sure we won't in fact see a 6m sea-level rise this century, and depending on exactly what Gore said he may have been badly wrong. But not -- unless you have more detailed information to offer that says otherwise -- wrong in the specific way you say he was wrong.

<comment><USER24> >The climate is warming, but at the same time the population is growing and many parts of the world are getting richer and more "developed". So you get both #1 and #2 happening. What's the problem here?

The problem is that they themselves have made predictions which contradict themselves. This is pretty much the status quo for climate change science. They predict everything to happen. When some route happens they claim success.

When you remove these nostradamus folks. You are left with virtually nothing in climate science.

The climate is changing no question, the problem is that the hippies/commies have taken over climate change and are using climate change to propose their political positions as the fix to climate change. Except they have absolutely no basis in their proposals. Go read the "new green deal" and find out why there was unanimous support at crushing it. Yet the presidential candidates are all pushing effectively the same thing in the name of climate change. The new green deal has nothing to do with climate change, it has everything to do with economic inequality.

>Again, I'm not sure what the problem is meant to be here. One scientist tried to model the effects of climate change on the length of the day. Some others did the same and also measured what the effect actually is. It seems like the first one got it wrong. Scientists in all fields get things wrong all the time. I don't see that we can conclude anything from this other than that oceanographers aren't all infallible, which is ... not a surprise.

Point I am making is that climate scientists are rolling out the bullshit train. Just to keep their government grants coming in.

>Those are in prehistory, which is relevant because we don't have the records that would tell us whether there were "no problems at all".

Actually we do; whether you think geology and archaeology is a science or not I guess would be the decider here. We know during these warmer periods we have significantly more life on earth. In fact the areas near the equator became more green. Which isn't a surprise, places like the congo or amazon or other places at the equator arent deserts, they are more green than anywhere else.

If we are currently at "4 nuclear bombs a second" of climate change. Obviously implying imminent and immediate death. Then the Eocene which was 14 celcius warmer would have been a desert planet. Protip; it wasnt. What this 4 nuclear bombs a second actually is... is doomsayers. It's climate alarmism that has been ongoing for 30 years. They are saying we are doomed for 30 years and it's no different than the Mayan Calendar folks.

>The most recent of those "far larger swings" you identified is between ~20k years ago and now. That time 20k years ago was the so-called "Last Glacial Maximum", and at that point Canada was completely covered by an ice sheet, as was much of northern Europe; sea level was ~125m lower than now.

Do you also assert that warming since the LGM is manmade? Overall I'm not seeing the problem at all.

>Sure. I used that figure because you were saying how fantastic everything was when the planet was 14 degrees C warmer. It may have been excellent in some sense, but I think it would be very bad for the human race if we returned to those conditions. I'm not saying we will (I doubt it), just disagreeing with your apparent opinion about what it would be like if we did.

How would it be bad for the human race? Even if the climate alarmists are correct(which we know they are not) and it's suddenly mad max desert out there. Humans will live just fine; we are planning to move to far more inhospitable places like mars or space.

>What is it that those projections assume an 8.5% increase of per year that's actually more like 0.85%? (I haven't found anything for which that's accurate, but I haven't looked very hard because presumably you can just tell me.)

The report which is linked right in the graph with the 2050 and 2100 predictions literally explains itself. They predicted 5 different levels. RCP0, RCP 2.6, RCP 4.5, RCP 6.0, and RCP 8.5

The predictions in the graph pretty much assume worst case scenario of 8.5.

Except this report has been out for over 10 years now. We now have the actual data to say which of them is happening. The actual number? RCP 0.8

They were off by a multiple of 10. When you look at how bad RCP 0.8 is... the 2100 prediction is like 0.5celcius warmer. Virtually none of the predictions like Al Gore's underwater florida can happen by 2100. This is from their own data. They have been completely discredited.

>Could you be more specific? What exactly did Gore say was going to happen by when, and where did he say it?

Al Gore in the Inconvenient Truth said Florida would be underwater by 2014. [http://www.oprah.com/g/image- resizer?width=670&link=http://s...](http://www.oprah.com/g/image- resizer?width=670&link=http://static.oprah.com/images/tows/200612/20061205/20061205_108_350x263.jpg)

There's literally the picture of him standing infront of his prediction that Florida would be underwater.

As far as I'm aware we have passed 2014 and he's wrong. Just plain wrong.

>But so far as I can tell he didn't put a timescale on it, and I bet he never said or implied that it would happen within 13 years.

Actually he said it on video MANY times since the film released. To be fair, he's not a scientist. He's just entirely financially dependent on pushing climate alarmism. He was reiterating what the other climate alarmists were saying.

Here's a more recent quote of his: These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.

>Now, I'm pretty sure we won't in fact see a 6m sea-level rise this century, and depending on exactly what Gore said he may have been badly wrong. But not -- unless you have more detailed information to offer that says otherwise -- wrong in the specific way you say he was wrong.

I actually believe we will see a sea-level rise. Not because of fossil fuels but simply population and renewable energy.

When every house has solar panels and nuclear fusion is pumping out 1cent/kwh electricity. People will use more electricity and this will result in even more waste energy which will heat up the world.

<comment><USER17> > _they themselves have made predictions that contradict themselves_

Some scientists have made predictions that contradict other scientists' predictions. That happens all the time, in all fields. Eventually, with a bit of luck, experimental evidence makes it clear who was right, or someone spots the mistake one of them made. It doesn't mean that the branch of science where it happens is bullshit. (That standard would make _everything_ bullshit. People make mistakes and work with incomplete and imperfect information. No getting around it.)

> _climate scientists are rolling out the bullshit train. Just to keep their > government grants coming in._

Could be true, though frankly I see _much_ more sign of money-motivated bullshit on the anti-climate-science side. But nothing you've said so far is any evidence to speak of for it, because all you've done is find places where scientists disagree about something. Again, that happens all the time, in every field, and the most negative thing it actually tells us is that human beings are fallible.

> _during these warmer periods we have significantly more life on earth_

Sure. But, as I already said, _total amount of life_ is not necessarily what we want to optimize for. If every human being died and was replaced by a million fruit flies and one elephant, that would be an enormous increase in the total number, and the total size, of living things on earth, but I wouldn't regard it as an improvement.

No one is saying that climate change is going to wipe out life on earth. (Well, I dunno, you can find idiots saying pretty much _anything_ , but it's not a common view anywhere that I know of.)

> _" 4 nuclear bombs a second"_

The thing I think you may be missing is that, in the context of weather and climate, _nuclear bombs are pretty small_. A big hurricane is something like three nuclear bombs per hour (depends on the size of the hurricane and the size of the bombs, of course).

I haven't heard "4 nuclear bombs per second", for what it's worth, and if the back-of-envelope calculation I just did is right the correct figure is more like 5 x 10^-5 nuclear bombs per second. But "nuclear bombs per second" is a stupid measure because our intuitions for how much energy a nuclear bomb puts out are bad in this context.

> _Do you also assert that warming since the LGM is manmade? Overall I 'm not > seeing the problem at all._

Then perhaps I'm not explaining it clearly. (But, first of all, no, of course I am not saying any non-negligible warming earlier than, say, 1800CE is manmade.) My point is that (1) something could be good for "life on earth" but really bad for the human race, and (2) the _state that would result from 14 degrees of warming_ (or whatever other geologically-inspired figure you might choose) might be entirely survivable, but that doesn't mean the _process of getting there_ in a hurry wouldn't be a big disaster.

(You could live in many other places besides the house you currently live in. But if I knocked it down, it would be a big deal for you.)

> _The report [...] literally explains itself. [...] RCP8.5_

It does, indeed, explain itself, and RCP8.5 _does not mean anything like "8.5% per year". The "8.5" in RCP8.5 means that radiative forcing reaches 8.5 W/m^2 by the year 2100. It has nothing whatever to do with 8.5% of anything or with anything per year.

There is no possible way we could "now have the actual data", because (to repeat) the 8.5 in RCP8.5 is defined by a state of affairs in the year 2100, and it's still only 2019.

Whoever or whatever told you that RCP8.5 means an 8.5% increase of something per year and that we're only at 0.85% was _lying to you _. Sorry to be so blunt, but I don 't think there's any alternative.

Incidentally, RCP8.5 isn't a prediction, it's one of several scenarios used by the IPCC. That is, they say "if X happens, we expect Y to happen" for various X and Y, and RCP8.5 is one choice of X, not of Y. I think it's the most pessimistic of their scenarios. (It's rather early to say how reality compares with those various scenarios; it's not that many years since RCP8.5 and the rest were first defined.) I don't know why the graph you found on Wikipedia chose to use RCP8.5 rather than one of the others, but given that the graph is mostly about past rather than future temperatures I'm betting it wasn't anyone on the IPCC :-).

I would still like to see where your "RCP0.8" figure comes from. I'd make a sizeable bet that it's wrong.

> _Al Gore in the Inconvenient Truth said Florida would be underwater by > 2014.*

I do not believe you. Again, I'm prepared to be proven wrong; I certainly could be. But I will need more specifics than the unevidenced claim that somewhere in his movie he said Florida would be underwater by 2014. Can you give me his actual words? Can you tell me where in the movie he says them? (I think I have a copy somewhere, though I haven't watched it; if you give me something sufficiently specific I can check. I'm not going to sit through the whole thing in the hope of finding what you're referring to, though.)

> _Actually he said it on video MANY times since the film_

OK. Tell me where to find him saying it on video and I'll check.

> _a more recent quote of his_

Saying something entirely different. (And without context I've no idea how to interpret it. "Some of the models" could mean, for all I know, that they have a range of 100 models, and one of them with parameters no one much believes says the north polar ice cap is doomed in the very short term. Which could perfectly well have been true; again, scientists make mistakes just like everyone else.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> >Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?

No.

I also see no evidence in the article it has hurt attitudes either way. In fact, polls show general concern about climate change. Doing something is another matter[0], but people are mindful of it. Nonetheless, the article seems to be more about the author's personal feelings than whether it influenced the movement around it either way.

[0] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election- climatechang...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election- climatechange/americans-demand-climate-action-reuters-poll-idUSKCN1TR15W)

</comment><comment><USER26> I was alive in the 1970s when folks like the Club of Rome declared we'll all be dead form overpopulation and Malthusian collapse by the year 2000. Those self-same folks told us this century the arctic will be completely ice free by 2013. In the 1980s, others predicted our total demise due to acid rain and ozone depletion.

Mean time, people are making good progress on both feeding the masses and curbing the exponential growth of humanity across the globe. At the same time, clear progress is happening on the reduction-of-greenhouse-gas-emissions front. Acid rain and ozone depletion have been curtailed.

We'll always have doomsayers, extremists, and prophets. They're so busy with themselves they rarely get in the way of people who actually get work done.

<comment><USER27> Except the people predicting climate change isn't the club of Rome, it's an entire scientific community, who have been double, triple, and quadruple checking every measurement and assumption for 50 years. This is not some hysterical group of panicked hippies. We're talking about broad consensus among all the most educated and intelligent members of our civilization. Please show a little respect and listen to them.

<comment><USER28> You are missing the fact that the salesmen of climate change have been politicians, and politicians lie, and politicians propose political solutions, they want more and more of my limited money, and browbeat people who already don't like or trust them, and frankly that is a bad combination of tactics if the solution is needed that badly across the broad spectrum of the population.

If climate change stops being sold as a one sided political problem with one sided political solutions, you may see momentum on it, but speaking as a conservative, when your pitch men and women are Bernie Sanders, Warren, and Cortez, amongst others, people I don't trust and disagree with already, people who have tried framing me as a stupid person who doesn't get it, you have already lost me entirely on the pitch before it left their mouths.

Change the salesman and the tactic, because the current one doesn't work, and it is doomed to failure because of that.

<comment><USER27> The conservatives will never support addressing climate change honestly, because they are getting too much money from the fossil fuel industries. I mean honestly, that's like saying, I won't believe that we are spending too much money on the military until I hear it from Northrop Grumman. So you're going to be waiting a long time if that's what you're waiting for. None of those people care _at all_ about you or your kids or the worlds future. Not one single bit.

You are literally listening to the people who have the _greatest_ conflict of interest on the subject and the _least_ competence in it. It's no wonder you're confused.

<comment><USER29> Perhaps instead of assuming a position that he didn't actually state and calling him "confused" you could have addressed his larger point that the vocal proponents of climate action alienate large portions of the population by painting them as ignorant or stupid instead of attempting to engage with them.

<comment><USER27> No, his central point was that he would never listen to anyone on the issue that didn't have specific ideological positions, which turn out to be the least likely people in the world to accurately represent the science due to blatant conflicts of interest. It's in impossible request.

To my knowledge the only major political party anywhere in the world to deny the science of anthropogenic climate change is the Republican Party in the United States, and those are the only people he will listen to. It's an absurd situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> With a few notable exceptions, the comments on this post really are a step up from the Medium comments on the original article.

</comment><comment><USER30> Climate change is already solved with nuclear power. You just don't know it yet.

</comment><comment><USER31> I recommend the title be changed to the actual story title or something _actually_ similar. The article is about how setting deadlines for action on climate change came from more of an advocacy perspective rather than scientific, which had an effect opposite what was intended.

</comment><comment><USER32> shaming people is a waste of time, this solution has to be economically viable.

</comment><comment><USER33> You know, there was this guy that made a fool of Christianity when he predicted Jesus would return in 2011. When nothing happened, he said oops and adjusted the date. (People fortunately paid much less attention to him then.)

Kinda getting tired of hearing "the sky is falling" all the time from environmental folks. When you hear "the world is ending next year, it's gonna be too late" every single year, it seems like a thinly veiled push for suckers who want to make campaign donations and bad laws.

Ironic that the author makes this exact point, and then doubles down on it.

<comment><USER34> How does a guy making a prediction make a fool of Christianity? That's like saying if I read a science textbook and then incorrectly predict flying cars by 2020, that I have made a fool of science.

Jesus Himself said: "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark. ... Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day on which your Lord will come. But understand this: If the homeowner had known in which watch of the night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into." (Matthew 24:36-43)

<comment><USER33> Good point. I spoke too hastily. More specifically, brought great disrepute to Christianity, and gave others cause to mock it.

<comment><USER34> >cause to mock it

You _do_ realize you're talking about Christianity here, right? As in, people who worship a homeless man who was rejected by his own people, tortured, spat upon, and nailed to a cross beside common thieves. He died pitifully on that cross, naked and exposed. And you are saying that what gives cause to mock Christianity is ... some dude making idle predictions 2,000 years later???

"You will be hated by everyone on account of My name, but the one who perseveres to the end will be saved." (Matthew 10:22)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Could "Second Livestock" Give Chickens a Virtual Free Range? - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/3030597/could-second-livestock-give-chickens-a-virtual-free-range <comment><USER2> I had a good laugh...</comment>


Comparing Factor with Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://missingfaktor.blogspot.in/2012/07/lisp-factor-features-compare.html

<comment><USER2> Was expecting rather more depth to the comparison, given the title. There's far too little substance to justify his conclusion that Factor "lies way above Lisp," though it seems that supporting that assertion may not have even been his intent.

I feel like I must be missing something with regard to the first question, though. He claims Factor macros are both simpler and more composable than Lisp macros, but neither his explanation nor the linked documentation seem to actually provide any evidence. In particular, as far as I can tell, Factor macros are "composable" in just the same way Lisp ones are: you can nest them and use values obtained from one in another without issue. He then goes on to comment on hygiene in a way that suggests he's not even talking about Lisp macros in general, which in many incarnations are free to violate hygiene.

</comment><comment><USER3> Lisp is easier to read to me, not sure why... I don't think its familiarity, since I have given serious attempts at reading both.

<comment><USER4> it's easier to mentally execute a tree than it is a stack.</comment></comment>


RHEL 6 announcement and download link - <AUTHOR> http://press.redhat.com/2010/04/21/red-hat-enterprise-linux-6-beta-available-today-for-public-download/?intcmp=70160000000IRGjAAO x64 link: http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/rhel/beta/6/x86_64/iso/ <comment><AUTHOR> Direct x64 ISO link: [http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/rhel/beta/6/x86_64/iso/RHEL...](http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/rhel/beta/6/x86_64/iso/RHEL6.0-20100414.0-AP-x86_64-DVD1.iso)</comment>


A Look at MyRocks Performance - <AUTHOR> https://www.percona.com/blog/2018/04/30/a-look-at-myrocks-performance/ <comment><USER2> Just going to point out that percona IMHO is potentially hugely underappreciated in the MySQL world...

At $work we are managing a fairly heavy MySQL instance and having scaling issues (~5TB, lots of blobs, and frequent user-managed schema changes for interactive/batch data analysis, many concurrent complex joins involving multiple 1M+ row tables) and after reviewing the various MySQL derivatives, it seems that the percona ppl are really focusing on 'real deal' operational reliability/scalability issues... (e.g. minimizing transaction locking issues for coherent backups, real-time db cloning, replication data integrity testing, etc). I strongly recommend anyone looking at mysql flavors to not overlook their offerings. Looking forward to doing some production tests of their XtraDB mysql flavor in the coming months (for now usage has been limited to unit tests and using the percona toolkit/xtrabackup)

Also: no I am not a paid sponsor.

<comment><USER3> I've found MySQL to have issues with datasets that don't fit into the innodb buffer pool. Are you doing a lot of partitioning to make everything work well?

If everything is behind an ORM, have you considered trying out PostgreSQL w/ the MySQL FDW? pgsql 10's improvements to FDW's make it a truly viable option.

Also to clarify: I'm just saying this as pgsql seems to handle queries that involve disk access and large datasets much better. I have found that as long as your hot dataset fits into the innodb buffer pool and/or you're doing only key lookups (e.g.: select * from tbl where pk=1;) MySQL is most certainly faster for real-world usage. If you're pulling and sorting/filtering millions (or billions) of rows per query, I find that pgsql stands up extremely well to that. Even in a single huge server setup.

Also a semi-unrelated ditty, but as someone who has to run migrations on pretty big (100m rows) tables, ALTER TABLE LOCK=NONE ALGORITM=INPLACE is pretty great (here's a table of what you can user per-situation [https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-create- index-...](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-create-index- overview.html#innodb-online-ddl-summary-grid))

If you made it this far in my comment you'll probably realize I didn't grasp the article well. I just re-read it and tl;dr, MyRocks works well (as expected) with datasets that don't fit into the innodb buffer pool. :)

<comment><USER2> Our workload is application specific and currently requires MySQL - 100% of queries are on primary keys so most 'hot' paths I think tend to stay resident, at least as far as query operations go. Also, we tend to fetch 'chunks' and operate on those in memory rather than running server side so some of the processing is offset by local operations.

Would be good to dig a bit deeper into this - thanks for the pointers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. Innodb is heavily optimized for PK lookups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good to see Percona get some love on HN. They put out really solid work, and have great blog posts!

<comment><USER5> Indeed! Their expertise and quality are something I truly value. Percona Server is killer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wait to see when Percona Server 8 comes out :)

<comment><USER5> Exciting!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> MySQL's pluggable engine really is a killer feature.

From these results you would think it makes sense to have RocksDB the default for MySQL and then have InnoDB be there for the larger users.

<comment><USER7> I actually think the correct conclusion is the reverse: if you can fit your tables in RAM, choose Inno. Otherwise, Rocks outperforms Inno when the working set no longer fits in memory. OP's testing is a little confusing because the working set remains constant and the memory is scaled, where normally we think of this in terms of seeing how much we can scale the workload on a node with fixed resources.

<comment><USER8> That's the right conclusion. Most use cases will fit into memory and InnoDB will win vs Rocks when all of your data fits into memory. Very large users are the ones who would more typically benefit from Rocks, as their data sets may dramatically outstrip available memory.

<comment><USER9> But larger users can also afford more RAM.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is common misconception. The larger there is a cost of sub-optimal performance. If you spend $1000/month on your infrastructure, halving infrastructure cost will save you $500/month which can't justify a lot of investments. Now if it is $100M/month saving $50M a month is worth a lot.... this is why Facebook for example has created many custom built highly optimized systems like RocksDB

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Really confusing title with "Facebooks" missing an apostrophe

<comment><USER6> Can we instead just have the original title: A Look at MyRocks Performance

<comment><USER11> Changed, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Could this be a solution for those of us trying to run a big databases on a small VPS?

<comment><USER13> Perhaps, but it depends on your workload, as is described in the article. In any case: do your own measurements on your own database/application to see if it works for you.</comment></comment>


Justice Louis Brandeis Dissenting Opinion in Olmstead V. United States (1928) - <AUTHOR> https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/277/438#writing-USSC_CR_0277_0438_ZD <comment><AUTHOR> I shared this because I thought the insight provided at that time by Justice Louis Brandeis is pretty impressive in regards to the foresight towards the things to come (internet, NSA etc.)

The one particular passage that is pretty interesting is as follows:

"The progress of science in furnishing the Government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wiretapping. Ways may someday be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home. Advances in the psychic and related sciences may bring means of exploring unexpressed beliefs, thoughts and emotions."</comment>


My career as an international blood smuggler - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/sep/27/my-career-as-an-international-blood-smuggler <comment><USER3> > In the mid-1980s, just as the Aids crisis peaked and US scientists > discovered the virus that caused the disease was borne by blood, American > drug companies knowingly sold HIV-tainted blood products in Asia.

It wasn't just an American company, there were actually two companies, Bayer (German) and Baxter (American). Baxter have a history of very shady things, I'm surprised they're around. I wish the author cite the quote or more clear on that part.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood_products)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baxter_International#1996_Japa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baxter_International#1996_Japanese_haemophiliac_HIV_lawsuit)

<comment><USER4> Not just Asia, Canada also. Bill Clinton approved harvesting blood from HIV- infected prisoners in Arkansas and selling it to the Canadians.

[https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/04/arkansas- bloodsucker...](https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/04/arkansas-bloodsuckers- the-clintons-prisoners-and-the-blood-trade/)

<comment><USER5> other fun bits:

"Cryosan had a shady reputation in the medical industry. It had been nabbed importing blood taken from Russian cadavers and relabeling it as though it was from Swedish volunteers."

and Arkansas way of screening for HIV:

"Pine Bluffs president Jimmy Lord dismissed such concerns and suggested that AIDs was not a problem in Arkansas. "If anyone got caught in a homosexual act," Lords said, "we took them off the roster.""

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a really interesting article that highlights for me a concept that is foreign: paid blood donation.

I was well aware of the exploitation of paid US blood donors (for those who have not taken the time to read the article, or are familiar with the history, paid donation comes about with an enormous decrease in voluntary donation, ie. 'the death of civic duty'. Aus which is a net plasma exporter and which is a volunteer only country has a strange situation where the Red Cross accepts voluntary donations but then gives (?sells - it was nice and simple when the C in CSL stood for commonwealth) it to other companies which refine it, is predicted to be unable to meet its needs should it introduce paid donations) and i'm not overly surprised to hear of exploitation of Chinese donors.

So nothing so new here.

I will say however that the authour throwing 'we don't know what will happen to plasma donors': > _Apart from economic exploitation, the risk to long-term donors is unknown. The product insert that comes with my Baxter-branded Gammagard immunoglobin stretches several feet long and lists everything from blood clots to fever and chills as possible side-effects. For me, an infusion means feeling, at best, like I have the flu for a few days every six weeks. I don't know what happens to people who give raw materials, so I watch my infusion nurse – the donor – as much as she watches me._

So the authour has an autoimmune condition that requires the infusion of IVIG every 4-6 weeks or so. Awful condition, great and successful treatment.

I still can't get behind an elaborate statement designed to cast doubt on the safety of (appropriately scheduled) donation, and actually it is so far from a plausible scientific mechanism of causing harm that I have to call it out. Back in Med school we used to joke about blood/plasma donation as a form of weight loss ('I just gave away 250g of cells!) - the body then has to spend about x2 that in raw energy in the anabolic process of recreating those cells. The rates of donation that are talked about though, of 2 times a week, are so far above what is allowed in a rational donor program (Red Cross Australia only allows a plasma donation once a month). Still, in a healthy person, that would not be an overt drain on the body's Capacity to recover.

Really interesting article though and I hope everyone learned something!

<comment><USER7> > This is a really interesting article that highlights for me a concept that > is foreign: paid blood donation.

The US does not permit paid blood donation, and this article is not about paid blood donation. It's about paid PLASMA donation. Plasma is 1 of 3 components of blood. Blood donations in the US are unpaid (as long as you don't count that free t-shirt or free movie ticket as compensation).

*In High School I ran my schools 3 annual blood drives and completed all the associated training to do the drives. During the 2 years (and 6 drives) I ran the program, we broke the state record for High School donations 3 times. I personally was a whole blood gallon donor before graduating High School. I've also done plasma donations, concentrated red cell donations, and platelet donations; so I've donated the whole spectrum :)

<comment><USER6> You're correct and I apologise - the US does not pay for red cell or platelet donation

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Starts off extraordinary then gets more so, as it goes into the world of for- profit blood and plasma transfusion in China and the US. And the consequences of the HIV epidemic.

It's not purely a for-profit problem, though; the UK had its own disaster which is still inadequately addressed: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45654783](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45654783)

<comment><USER9> Ehm, didn't the UK buy tainted blood from for-profit US vendors?

<comment><USER10> Something like 1.3% of US exports are blood and blood products.

Plasma is an industry there.

Meanwhile, in Canada, we're steadfast against paid donations. But the volunteer model doesn't generate enough blood products, so we have to import from the US too.

Edit: I had said 3%, but it's 1.3%. Still a lot in the grand scheme of things.

<comment><USER11> > Meanwhile, in Canada, we're steadfast against paid donations. But the > volunteer model doesn't generate enough blood products, so we have to import > from the US too.

Steadfast against paid donations, but yet willing to import paid-donation blood? Wouldn't it be better to regulate your own for-profit blood donation system than it is to trust that the US (or any other country) is doing things the way you want?

I suppose the idea is that discouraging it domestically will eventually catch up to the demand. But if you allow prostituting of blood domestically you'll never get there?

<comment><USER10> Mostly correct. Canada (and most other countries with a volunteer system) are self-sufficient for blood, but not self-sufficient for plasma (a blood product).

The countries that do paid plasma donations end up supplying (and profiting from) countries with only volunteer plasma donor systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder why the article uses "Aids" vs "AIDS" but then uses "HIV" and not e.g. "Hiv"

<comment><USER13> The Guardian style is:

> Use all capitals if an abbreviation is pronounced as the individual letters > (an initialism): BBC, CEO, US, VAT, etc; if it is an acronym (pronounced as > a word) spell out with initial capital, eg Nasa, Nato, Unicef, unless it can > be considered to have entered the language as an everyday word, such as > awol, laser and, more recently, asbo, pin number and sim card. Note that pdf > and plc are lowercase.

[https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style- guide-a](https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I could not read the actual article- seems some script in one of the adds was redirecting me to some spammy Win $1000 sweepstakes every time I clicked the link. Did that happen to anyone else? (Using mobile safari)

<comment><USER15> Same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I admittedly couldn't read more than a paragraph in it due to phobic trigger reasons but it is striking that it is real. Inspired by GURPS listing blood as an illegal substance for dependencies (since obtaining it for vampiric consumption would not be legal). Previously I joked about bugs in game law systems making everybody living automatically guilty of illegal substance smuggling for having blood and causing every official to react accordingly - <USER2> bystander gets shot and they arrest them for being caught smuggling.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you relax without drugs/alcohol/sex/exercise? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I prefer silence. I am fortunate to have a couple of hours/day when my spouse and kid and dog our out, and I use that to shut everything off an just enjoy the silence. I am also the most productive during those hours, and I spend my time cleaning / cooking / just sitting down and drinking my coffee while looking out through the window.

<comment><USER3> sounds great! It is relaxing to read your description as well, which seems like a deep and peaceful state of mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Eh, I have kids, so I don't have time to relax ;)

My favorites recently are:

\- reading \- video games \- programming side projects

Then there's the more productive options (see how bearish I am on my side projects?), like organizing (I'm trying to implement the Konmarie method) or cleaning. I like those things less, but they're still relaxing. Or I'll make something in bulk (yogurt, cheese, boiled eggs), which is also pretty relaxing (little to no mental effort).

I usually just find myself reading, especially just before bedtime.

</comment><comment><USER5> Soaking in a nice hot bath, reading a book. I draw my bathwater just short of scalding hot, jump in the tub, and sit back and read. Sometimes non-fiction - albeit not generally _highly_ technical material (eg, no "Python Data Analytics" or anything of that nature) - but usually fiction if I just want to "turn my brain off" and relax.

Outside of that, just listening to music. I find it very relaxing to just sit and listen to one of Chopin's nocturnes or something of that ilk.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUdoxvigIl8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUdoxvigIl8)

</comment><comment><USER6> Meditation, cooking with my SO, playing video games, reading and napping.

Unexpectedly for me another thing that is becoming relaxing as I grow older is to use my free time to stay on top of my household's chores. Just knowing I wont have the stress of having to rush them latter on because "oh fuck it's Monday morning and I don't have a clean shirt". Still far from perfect at it because procrastination run deep in me, but it's something I'm trying to slowly improve.

</comment><comment><USER7> If I'm really stressed, coding/working on a side-project seems to work well. On normal days listen to music, DJ, an hour or two of Netflix, playing Go on KGS (or vs computer).

</comment><comment><USER8> I read.

I talk to my wife.

I take an interesting online class.

I watch a movie.

I go surfing.

I talk to my parents.

I talk to my friends.

</comment><comment><USER9> Read, go for a walk in the forest, draw, meditate [0], anything that's not in front of or near a source of distraction (phone, computer, &c.)

[0] for a lot of people switching off their devices and sitting down quietly for 15 min without knowing anything about meditation will already have effects.

</comment><comment><USER10> What's the main driver for excluding exercise?

Being outside on my own is pretty good in general. Walking or cycling are the defaults, but maybe count as exercise? I've recently started riding a motorbike and spin on some quiet-ish open roads can be pretty rewarding...

<comment><USER11> Tough to do/enjoy when there's snow on the ground and a wind chill of 5F. Not all of us live in sunny California.

<comment><USER12> For what its worth I live in denmark and I really enjoy wrapping up warm and going out for walks in the snow.

And of course afterwards you can light a candle and relax with a hot chocolate or some tea in the warm.

Why choose to live in a place like this if you don't enjoy it?

<comment><USER11> Career opportunity. Proximity to family and friends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> music - have premium version of di.fm.

you took excersize off the options - and I think taking a walk and tai chi fall in that, although some may say that's not the same.

I have found the best thing to help relax is dedicating 5 minutes to write - get stuff off the brain so you can relax and stop stressing it - pen and paper is fine, notepad, whatever. Write notes, jot ideas, a todo list, some mind mapping balloons.. sometimes some rhyming song lyrics to get stress off the brain and engage the heart in a healthy way.

After things are off the brain and into the paper or digital archive I find it's easier to relax in whatever situation is next.. sleep, hanging out with people, a book..

</comment><comment><USER14> Wear your body out. Then sleep.

</comment><comment><USER15> The place I relax the most is the shower. I don't feel any pressure to think anything there and can let my mind wander. Maybe a situation like that? Such a place can be hard to find for each individual.

</comment><comment><USER16> For about 11yrs I had a cat. Best esperience ever. Make sure to cuddle many before adoption and find a highly affectionate one.

My cat even slept next to me for ~6trs until I got married.

</comment><comment><USER17> I would say that reading+doodling with my remarkable tablet is one of the good things that help me. I also like to play Scrabble alone or play with my kid's LEGOs.

</comment><comment><USER18> Cuddle my girlfriend, we became pretty good at it so far

</comment><comment><USER19> Write, doesn't have to be perfect just whatever comes out.

Drawing, mostly doodles.

Read, I like reading people's stories more than fantasy.

Meditation, it works.

Silence or Radio. Viberadio is one of my favorite.

</comment><comment><USER20> I work on my hobby projects, play with/take care of my cats, go for walks, read, watch Netflix or dumb YouTube videos.

</comment><comment><USER21> Excellent steam room in a gym. Sometimes I just go there to relax. Luckily gym is 5 minutes away from home.

</comment><comment><USER22> Try fishing, one of my favorite hobbies for relaxing.

</comment><comment><USER23> Read hacker news.

Fiddle in green house.

Walk.

Look up old friends and give them a call.

</comment><comment><USER24> Video games are great for that.

<comment><USER25> Quited videogame 5 months sober. I am just more dull often have a lot of time.</comment></comment>