"Flower of Battle," a combat manual created in the first decade of the 1400s - <AUTHOR> http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2015/03/fiore-dei-liberi.html

<comment><USER2> I've been watching HEMA videos, and it's quite interesting how little resemblance fighting with sword/spear/shield on TV and in movies has to the real thing. I am not a HEMA practitioner, however here is a some of what I've gleaned from their videos:

No one sane would take off their helmet in the middle of a battlefield for the most important fight/battle. You don't slice with a sword through plate armor or decent chain mail. It just doesn't happen in real battle conditions. For that matter, it's not so easy to slice through padded cloth gambeson armor! Also, the "reality-tv" shows that have covered historical weapons are often bogus. You "half-sword" to wrestle your opponent to the ground, then guide the stabby point of a specialized sword through an eye-hole or other gap in their armor. Likewise, real battles between knights didn't consist of them bashing at each other, using their swords crudely like glorified metal clubs.

Long exchanges of blows/parries in movies are just for show. In fact, there are fighting manuals that urge you not to parry if you can help it, but rather always "bind" a weapon in the process of some kind of counterattack.

Social class meant a hell of a lot. On the battlefield, it determined how much armor you could afford to keep up, which made a big difference to how likely you'd be killed.

Most swords were sidearms, not main battlefield weapons, analogous in role to an automatic pistol vs. an assault rifle. For most of western history, and in many other parts of the world, the main battlefield weapons were polearms, often used in conjunction with a shield. This even applies to a certain extent to Japan! (Though the naginata fell out of favor and for awhile actually became a sign of social status for women.)

Katana are not magic, and there were and are european, middle-eastern, and indian subcontinental swords capable of equivalent feats of cutting.

<comment><USER3> In the movie "The Lion in Winter" there is a fight scene that is quite similar to what you describe as accurate. It's actually quite disturbing, as it depicts the frightening amount of intimacy involved in wrestling someone to the ground, pinning them to the ground, and then struggling to stab them to death. Not exactly the glorious victorious violence depicted in most movies.

<comment><USER2> If you want disturbing, try the "Hardcore History" podcast where he explores the personal implications of what we know about being on the losing side of the Battle of Canae. Very disturbing, and even backed up by archaeological data.

<comment><USER4> I haven't bought them, but it looks like the podcast archives can be bought:

[http://www.dancarlin.com/product-category/hardcore- history/c...](http://www.dancarlin.com/product-category/hardcore- history/classic-hardcore-history/)

I was disappointed that they weren't a free podcast, but ... I guess that's a reasonable price if the material is well done.

<comment><USER5> It's worth it. My only regret is that the bundling/sales model just makes it hard to track what you have and also to fill in gaps in your collection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was wondering who the figure with the beard and golden crown was - turns out it might be a depiction of the author himself! (According to this [1], which also has a full translation.) I love this bit from his preface:

"I say that when I taught this art I taught it secretly, so that no other person was present except for the student and some close relatives.

Also, it happened that when others were present they stayed with Sacramental promise not to divulge the plays they saw from me, Fiore.

And most of all I was wary of fencing Masters and of their students. And they invited me, the Masters, out of envy, to fight with sharp and pointed swords in an arming jacket, without any other armour except for a pair of chamois leather gloves, and all this had happened because I did not want to practice with them nor teach them anything of my art.

And this accident happened five times, so that I have been requested ['called out']. And five times, for my honour, I have had to fight in strange places, without relatives and without friends, not trusting others, but in God an the art and in myself, Fiore, and in my sword. And by the grace of God I, Fiore, remained with honour and without scars upon my person."

[1] [http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Fiore_de%27i_Liberi](http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Fiore_de%27i_Liberi)

</comment><comment><USER6> If you want to read the full book, or any other original sources on European martial arts, there is a well known wiki where to find them all:

[http://wiktenauer.com/](http://wiktenauer.com/)

<comment><USER7> Awesome site!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you like old combat manuals, you should checkout Hans Talhoffers' "Alte Armatur und Ringkunst". It has been digitized in nice quality. Page 162 is especially interesting.

[http://www.kb.dk/da/nb/materialer/haandskrifter/HA/e-mss/tha...](http://www.kb.dk/da/nb/materialer/haandskrifter/HA/e-mss/thalhofer/thott-2_290.html)

<comment><USER9> Do you mean the man and woman? pp 163+ (eg 164, 165) - the series shows a man in a hole with what appears to be a sharpened club or an unusual short sword. The man is fighting against a woman who bears a length of cloth with a weight in the end (perhaps a stocking with a stone in). The man and woman are in a small arena and wear white tabards/surcoats decorated with the St.George cross.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you are interested in some amazing HEMA(historic european martial arts) videos check Matt Easton channel [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt14YOvYhd5FCGCwcjhrOdA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt14YOvYhd5FCGCwcjhrOdA) I been an addict for a long time. It is fascinating just how bad depictions of fighting are in movies, even ones considered good.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sure Fiore is cool and all but Kunst des Fechtens by Meyer is where its at. :P

</comment><comment><USER11> There's a place in Chicago that teaches longsword classes based on the reconstructed fencing school of Fiore dei Liberi, who wrote this book.

</comment><comment><USER12> I love the first image [https://www.flickr.com/photos/bibliodyssey/16180332158](https://www.flickr.com/photos/bibliodyssey/16180332158) I bet it says : "Don't aim for the head, you need to aim for vital parts. Hit the balls"

<comment><USER13> The swords illustrate the seven basic "strokes": six in a "flower", and one stab (the bottom one). Mastering all of the ways to get your weapon from point "A" (near you, in a proper guard), to point "B" (somewhere inside of your opponent), through one of these directions, is the purpose of the book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Oh man what a cool manual. The hand combat style looks a bit like Wing Chun, anybody else see the resemblance ? :)

<comment><USER15> Funny, I was just thinking about that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't have nothing useful nor interesting to say, but I was born and I live in Premariacco.

That's it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Not sure why - but this looks as fake as a six dollar bill ...</comment>


U.S. Navy Shows Off Unmanned Autonomous 'Swarm Boats' - <AUTHOR> https://gcaptain.com/u-s-navy-shows-off-unmanned-autonomous-swarm-boats/ <comment><USER2> I've heard that the air force has similar technology for autonomous swarm aircraft and it's a game changer. If there's ever another war with serious air to air combat it will be done without pilots on the US side.

Even if outnumbered, the tight coordination of a swarm makes it a powerful force. But since they are pilot less drones, they are cheaper to build and, especially deploy. They don't need regular training, like a pilot.</comment>


Amazon's Creepy Twitter PR Army Is Growing - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59npad/amazons-creepy-twitter-pr-army-growing <comment><USER2> I don't understand why they don't just improve working conditions. Why don't they improve compensation and make it more human for the humans involved? It's not going to make their business less scalable. It's just going to lift the cost curve up a few notches. Amazon can definitely handle that additional sunk cost, and the good (and actually deserved) PR they would get from that would be enormous. Not to mention it's the right thing to do

<comment><USER3> How much would they need to raise wages to make it livable?

At 650k employees, $1 an hour raise, assuming no overtime, equates to about $1.3B plus some for payroll taxes.

So it might not be exactly a drop in the bucket, even for Amazon.</comment></comment>


The Not-So-Celebratory Reaction to Snap's I.P.O. In Its Home Town - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-not-so-celebratory-reaction-to-snaps-i-p-o-in-its-hometown <comment><USER2> I hate the moral outrage against gentrification. It's natural to desire something that good but, somehow immoral to express that desire.

Venice and the south side of Santa Monica used to be kinda a sketchy place to live and had alot of crime though, it was on the beach.

Crime went down (as it did all over LA) and went from an undesirable place to live to a desirable one. When people express that desire by actually moving themselves and their businesses there, the people that were previously there are outraged.

I get being mad at market rates going up in your neighbourhood; it's basically a selfish desire to keep things as they were for yourself. Especially if it goes so far as to move you out of your neighbourhood but, to make it moral as if these people who naturally moving to the best place they can find for a price they can pay are somehow trying to personally inflict evil on the people that already live there is silly.

One might as well try to stop the tide from rising. We live in a capitalist society. Real estate is one of the largest markets there is, literally trillions of dollars in value. Even small changes in value can have huge effects.

There is no simple solution. Even if Snap, Inc. did move to a suburb in the valley somewhere, they would lose a significant, expensive chunk of their workforce. The young, mostly childless employees of Snap, Inc. are exactly the kind of people that love living in Venice. Everyone loves living there, how do I know? The rental prices in Venice are astronomical. People already have sacrificed alot to live there, they aren't going to move to the valley. They are going to keep their friends and their short commutes and move to a company in their neighbourhood.

<comment><USER3> Snapchat is a unique case because they've insisted on shoving their growing workforce into a bunch of small bungalows, retail spaces and storefronts-- including Nikki's, a beloved neighborhood bar--scattered throughout Venice. This has had a really outsized and unfortunate effect on the neighborhood that goes well beyond the standard gripes about gentrification and rising rents.

They've taken one of the most walkable, lively communities in LA--where you could just wander around ambling into funky shops, cafes and bars--and turned it into their private, cordoned-off distributed campus.

One of the most vibrant neighborhoods in the city has turned dead and boring. I lived in Venice when I first moved to LA and absolutely adored it, but there's literally nobody left except techies and tourists. If that's the sort of place Snapchat employees want to live then more power to them. Let them stay by the beach as LA's center of gravity continues to shift to DTLA and the eastside.

<comment><USER4> Move them off to an industrial park so everyone can complain about traffic and how every lives so far from where they work, instead of having live/work neighborhoods!

<comment><USER3> You can have live / work communities without shoehorning a $35 billion company and its 2,000 employees into a bunch of retail storefronts originally built as single-family dwellings in the 1920's.

There's plenty of large commercial space nearby in downtown Santa Monica, Culver City and Plays Vista. None of those are the distant industrial parks you allude to. Based on your comment I'm reasonably certain you have zero familiarity with this area.

<comment><USER4> I was not attempting to speak to the area. I was speaking to the attitude that nobody's ever happy. Good economy? Things are getting too expensive! Labor/goods are cheap? Everyone's pissed they can't find work! Jobs? Traffic! Unemployment? Poverty!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems to me that the more cohesive and interconnected a community is, the more that community desires the status quo.

This makes for delightful places to live and work, but also provides a natural resistance to large unexpected change.

</comment><comment><USER6> Does it feel like there have been a bit more 'hit pieces' about Snapchat recently? Is this typical around IPOs?

<comment><USER7> I would say it's just tons of journalists trying to get a "unique" take on the big business story this week. Some of those are going to be negative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Amazon in Seattle is the most extreme example of a tech company dominating its hometown that I know of. Block after block of Amazon buildings, right in the heart of the city. I personally think it's alright, but I expect locals that know what got pushed out are less sanguine about it.

<comment><USER9> _Block after block of Amazon buildings, right in the heart of the city. I personally think it 's alright, but I expect locals that know what got pushed out are less sanguine about it._

When I was growing up, downtown Seattle was a wasteland at night and South Lake Union worse. Amazon has a large but consolidated presence in places that at one point contained almost no housing.

It wouldn't be hard to make Seattle's overall housing situation a LOT more affordable: [http://crosscut.com/2015/09/the-burden-of-building-low- incom...](http://crosscut.com/2015/09/the-burden-of-building-low-income- housing/), but most wealthy existing owners don't want that to happen. Hell, even legalizing three-story townhouses: [http://crosscut.com/2015/04/bring- back-the-townhouse-can-mil...](http://crosscut.com/2015/04/bring-back-the- townhouse-can-millennials-and-boomers-change-the-regions-housing-mix/) would do a lot.

<comment><USER10> Agreed. Reading this story, Snap struck me as the anti-Amazon. Whereas Snap moved into an established neighborhood and took over, Amazon focused development on a neighborhood that was derelict and turned it into a ripe area for other developers (e.g., Paul Allen's Vulcan).

> Amazon has a large but consolidated presence in places that at one point > contained almost no housing.

Exactly, and SLU now has a lot of new housing, mostly filled with Amazon employees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Spike Lee spoke pretty well about how gentrification marginalizes people.

[https://soundcloud.com/daily-intelligencer/spike-lee-on- gent...](https://soundcloud.com/daily-intelligencer/spike-lee-on- gentrification)

</comment><comment><USER12> Is the tech company story line in Netflix's Flaked[0] about Snap? I had no idea.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4973548/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4973548/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Echoes of Palantir and downtown Palo Alto.

<comment><USER14> Palantir does seem to becoming the dominant player there, but hasn't Palo Alto been gentrified already for decades?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> They closed Nikkis. Fuck em</comment>


Show HN: Deep Q-Learning (DQN) Implementation for Atari Pong - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/KaleabTessera/DQN-Atari <comment><AUTHOR> Hi Everyone,

I recently just completed and open sourced my Pytorch implementation of a Deep Q-Network(DQN) to play Atari Pong. The implementation follows from the paper - Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DQN_neurips implementation) and Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning (DQN_nature implementation).

You can train your agent from scarch or load a trained policy from a checkpoint file and see videos as your agent is training.

Here is a video ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcyMFIKsVNI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcyMFIKsVNI)) of one the agent's games once it had learned a policy.

Any comments or points are welcome. :)</comment>


Ask HN: Can Paying Founders Too Much Hurt Productivity? - <AUTHOR>

Curious for anecdotal experiences or links to studies that explore correlation. <comment><USER2> IMHO there's a 'Goldilocks' zone for their pay. You want them earning enough so that they don't need to take on a part-time job, but not so much that they're content with the status quo. Keeping the founders "hungry" (figuratively) is difficult, but anecdotally I'd say it's key to fostering a winning culture.

</comment><comment><USER3> The question is badly stated. Asking about "paying founders too much" suggests that negative effects are expected. What you seem to be asking is "What is the relationship between founders pay and their productivity?". That should lead to another question: "How do you measure productivity?".

<comment><AUTHOR> Negative effects aren't "expected" \- but I've seen multiple instances where early stage companies were paying certain founders too much and getting too little in return. I also noticed that, broadly speaking, founders who were taking less salary were producing more. I'm now wondering if there's a correlation.

As far as measuring productivity - I'm defining it as meeting deadlines.</comment></comment>


Does Google really index 0.04% of the Internet? Really? - <AUTHOR>

"Google estimates that the Internet today contains about 5 million terabytes of data (1TB = 1,000GB), and claims it has only indexed a paltry 0.04% of it all! You could fit the whole Internet on just 200 million Blu-Ray disks."  I saw this on makeuseof.com but cant verify it. <comment><USER2> Well, searching videos, for one, seems like a significant challenge (not video titles, not video comments: video _content_ ). Incidentally, video also takes a lot of space...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats true. Also, link spam might have something to do with this low number of 0.04% (if it is indeed true)

<comment><USER3> Also the "deep internet" is frequently postulated to be "huge" by "people".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_web></comment></comment></comment>


Exploring how different framings of the same learning task affect performance - <AUTHOR> https://andersource.dev/2020/07/12/supervised-task-framing.html <comment><USER2> I haven't read the post yet but right away I noticed how well the information is presented. I think it's because the post has a tree-like structure - I can take a quick look at the titles and the images underneath them and have an idea about both approaches, then I can read about the details. This way it's much more interesting than if there were no images. It's also aesthetically pleasing. I also love the combination of text, code snippets, diagrams, tables and charts - this way I can look at the issue from multiple perspectives. So cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting post and very nicely arranged.

I wonder if framing the problem "correctly" and applying domain-specific transformations (as you mentioned are out of scope for this post) would present a synergistic response, that would otherwise be lost in poorly framed solutions?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I would guess that certain transformations can be efficiently exploited by certain framings, but I have no intuition as to whether some transformations are dominant regardless of the framing. That's a very interesting question!</comment></comment>


Know your auditory impact - <AUTHOR> http://www.audioanalytics.org/ <comment><USER2> A forward looking idea. But the website information is sparse. In fact the comments here gave me more of an idea about what this is then the website. I would like to use this but I need more.

</comment><comment><USER3> What does this tool do?

<comment><AUTHOR> It provides you with lightweight actionable audio metrics so you can see most played, audio to cta conversions, etc.</comment></comment>


Glenn Greenwald's partner detained in London for nine hours - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/08/18/david_miranda_gleen_greenwald_s_partner_detained_for_nine_hours_at_heathrow.html

<comment><USER2> Previous thread, heavily flagged but still _just_ on the homepage here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6233646](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6233646)

<comment><AUTHOR> How can you tell that it's heavily flagged?

<comment><USER2> Compare the relative position of other threads and their upvotes and ages. There are older threads with far fewer upvotes that are higher up on the page. That implies flags. The fact that this thread has 1000+ points and is this low means it must have been flagged extremely heavily.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah.

Hm, I guess I should delete this submission. The Slate piece does seem to be subsumed by the Guardian.

<comment><USER3> Quite the opposite. You should leave it to offset the flagging of the other thread.

<comment><AUTHOR> OK, twist my arm.

Thanks for helping me out of a moral dilemma :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I got to say the mafia was smarter. The worst you can do to your rival is make him think his family is in danger. That would just motivate him more to take you down since he won't feel safe if he doesn't. That little piece of honor kept business and family separate.</comment>


How Australia Bungled Its $36B High-Speed Internet Rollout - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/11/world/australia/australia-slow-internet-broadband.html <comment><USER2> Every country town in southwest western Australia has fibre optic cable to every exchange.

This means most country town houses are less than 1 km down to a few metres away from a fibre optic cable.

Every country town exchange is wired and ready with an ADSL2 connection. But Telstra Will not give this service to anyone and will actually lie about it. I found out by accident when a technician had the job of trying explain why I was first told I could have it then was told no sorry I can't so he Spilled the beans to me.

So there you have it.

All of WA's country towns could easily have optic fibre to the home, or at second best ADSL2 by doing nothing, but not even allowed ADSL1.

instead They have to have Satellite which costs the government an extra $2000 per residence or Telstra mobile style broadband.

</comment><comment><USER3> Previous discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14320121](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14320121)</comment>


How WHO Became China's Coronavirus Accomplice - <AUTHOR> https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/02/china-coronavirus-who-health-soft-power/ <comment><USER2> An item on page 3 of the current edition (No. 1519) of Private Eye in the UK and headlined "Money talks" touches on this.

The article ends with this paragraph: _" WHO's kow-towing might just be related to its own precarious financial position, which makes it increasingly reliant on Beijing. Recent figures show that the US, nominally WHO's largest funder, is late with its two latest annual fees, owing almost $100m as part of a general withholding and delaying of payments to UN agencies. China, second- largest contributor, is more reliable."_

Edit to add: Private Eye is a fortnightly news magazine, bitingly satirical in parts, and renowned for its dogged campaigning. Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Eye](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Eye)

</comment><comment><USER3> WHO is hilarious. They told us only what we already knew. For instance, they told the world that there was a pandemic only when everyone knew the pandemic was happening. I mean, what's the use of WHO if it couldn't even forecast something so obvious?

No wonder a meme is WHO cares.

<comment><USER4> The WHO is a coordinating body. They don't exist to tell anyone anything new. They didn't "tell the world that there was a pandemic". They formally declared that the pandemic fulfilled the criteria to be officially recognized as such. Maybe you don't see any use in that, but someone who needs to plan for the event of a pandemic probably appreciates it that they can simply write "if the WHO declares a pandemic" and rest assured that this will happen if and only if there's actually a pandemic.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Buzzways – a Twitter Bot which sends you the best Twitter Threads - <AUTHOR> https://buzzways.at/collection/989/ <comment><USER2> I tried it twice. Twice I was disappointed. Some right wing Shilary conspiracy garbage and then some snore-fest about generation differences.</comment>


Being Slow to Criticise - <AUTHOR> https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/BeingSlowToCriticise.html?te10hn <comment><USER4> There's another factor at play in these discussions: Cynicism tends to look smart to outside observers.

Cynicism is often mistaken for competence to outside observers. If a piece of software has a specific problem, the person chanting "This software is garbage" is going to look smarter than the people saying "Hold on, maybe this software is this way for a reason".

There are various (somewhat weak) studies on the topic. For example: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29993325](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29993325)

> Four studies showed that laypeople tend to believe in cynical individuals' > cognitive superiority. A further three studies based on the data of about > 200,000 individuals from 30 countries debunked these lay beliefs as > illusionary by revealing that cynical (vs. less cynical) individuals > generally do worse on cognitive ability and academic competency tasks. > Cross-cultural analyses showed that competent individuals held contingent > attitudes and endorsed cynicism only if it was warranted in a given > sociocultural environment. Less competent individuals embraced cynicism > unconditionally, suggesting that-at low levels of competence-holding a > cynical worldview might represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the > potential costs of falling prey to others' cunning.

In toxic and mismanaged environments, being a cynic from the sidelines can be a better political strategy than being the positive person in the trenches trying to find solutions and compromises.

<comment><USER5> I think the same thing is going on with the commentary on economy currently. Whenever I browse around Reddit for example the comments that get upvoted are the cynical ones, "markets are irrational", "feds are pumping up the stocks" etc, but they do not put any real thought into what is happening with the markets and why.

<comment> grey-area Nobel prize winners in economics think the markets are irrational in important ways, this is not a fringe view, nor is it particularly cynical.

[https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691173122/ir...](https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691173122/irrational- exuberance)

I don't think starting from the EMH is correct either, I suspect nobody really knows why the US stock market doesn't reflect the deepest recession since the 1930s, though of course everyone has opinions. The market may simply be wrong in its assessment of risk at this time (it tends to swing wildly around the true future returns), or the recession might be very short (as mr market currently believes).

<comment><USER5> How long do you think market is predicting the recession to last?

There's predictions expecting 30% unemployment since March for Q2, and also predictions expecting 50% GDP drop for Q2.

So current market should have these predictions priced in.

I think one major thing that people fail to consider is that this recession is not like other recessions - namely, it's not failing of economics, or a bubble popping, it's a temporary natural disaster and economy is deliberately shut down. So it shouldn't be compared to other recessions which were issues with how economy worked. Right now there's no evidence that economy or system is failing by itself. Of course it might, but there's no evidence.

I think current market price stems from rational strategy by investors. This is why I think markets are rational. Current recession doesn't have implications 5 years into the future. We might lose some potential developments we could've had right now, but it just gets delayed few years, so it's not a big deal.

Maybe it is hindsight to me, but to me it seems clear why stock market has the current price it is. Maybe I'm "overfitting" somehow my theory, but it seems to make sense to me and I'm not seeing a clear logic error with my theory. I've argued a lot on this topic on this forum and reddit, and I haven't seen good retorts yet, it's just that I'm not getting any responses or somebody says "I just disagree and that's it".

<comment> grey-area If it lasts long enough, a temporary natural disaster becomes an economic disaster.

I think the rough market consensus at the moment is as you state it - this is a natural disaster which will be over soon. That is a possible outcome at this point, but a second wave in the US for example would have significant impacts and cause entire industries to fall into bankruptcy - wiping out shareholders and leading to significant second-order effects on other industries and supply chains, plus causing a consumer-led recession. It seems increasingly unlikely to me that this will be over as soon as you expect. Just to pick one example - that 20-30% unemployment will not go away quickly if this is not over in the next month or two for the US and those people rehired. Companies will not rehire unless they are certain it is over.

 _Current recession doesn 't have implications 5 years into the future_

Remind me in 5 years! I don't think it will impact _behaviour_ massively in 5 years, but I do think there is a danger this recession could trigger significant other events which have impact for more than a few years - <USER3> example unrest in the middle east after 2008 led to regime change in many countries, and ongoing war in Libya. Economic depression, unrest and wars are a common occurrence after smaller crises than this one.

When people say the market is irrational it is more to point out that the market valuation swings about the future expected returns quite wildly - <USER3> example if what you say is true, the market should not have crashed quite so strongly when coronavirus first spread then bounced back quickly again, but it did, because people panic. It does the same in the opposite direction based on incomplete or incorrect information about drugs/vaccines. There's a nice graph in the above book of the expected return from stocks (pretty much a straight line up and to the right, with small bumps on the way), and stock market valuations (massive swings around the expected return based on sentiment in that moment).

<comment><USER5> How do you determine whether it was panic or just uncertainty?

It could be a rational reason for markets to swing wildly because of uncertainty about future. It might take time to gather enough data to assess the risks properly, and while risks are as unknown it is rational that market will be valued lower.

Each bit of knowledge makes uncertain a little bit less uncertain.

<comment> grey-area I don't think we know enough to decide _why_ markets swing wildly around the actual return, but that they do is demonstrable fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love this short post. Software development is fundamentally hard, despite many frequent statements to the contrary by the "everyone should be a programmer" folks.

It requires uncommon persistence, and a love (if not an aptitude) of abstract reasoning in pure form.

I think the thought process goes like this: "What's he doing?" "He's doing THAT!?" "Why?!" "I don't understand why." "This software is garbage."

Some people claim to be able to glance at code and know what it's doing quickly, but it's just not possible to ingest a few thousand lines of self- referencing logic and understand it quickly if it is doing much more than shuttling data between a database and some kind of display rendering.

If you've learned to program, you must have learned patience for yourself. You have to show that same patience to the authors of other programs if you want to understand their work. There are many thoughts embedded in their code. It is deeply complex as the person who wrote it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Another vector for unwarranted criticism to watch out for is self-insertion, not only in software. All of us (probably) constantly do self-insertion and imagine fictional situations where we are victims of some strange injustice.

Hacking mostly in the evening, and at latitudes where the sun doesn't shine for much of the year, I was recently momentarily mad at Libreoffice Calc for having lackluster dark-mode support. But the vast majority of people who use spreadsheets I assume do so at day in well-lit offices so I was inserting myself in a context which basically didn't concern me.

There are a lot of things which triggers us to self-insert, not all of it unwarranted or negative. Maybe one situation which causes problems is when people do it without an invitation...

</comment><comment><USER8> Empathy and patience are underrated qualities in developers. The empathy to not immediately blame the developers and the patience to find the actual reason behind the problem.

Blaming developers reminds me of the Design of Everyday Things where Norman discusses human error. He makes the point that human error should be an extraordinarily rare cause of an incident. Instead one can always go further and find the root of the human error. Why was the code quality poor? Were the developers being rushed? Were proper standards not put into place? Did we hire the wrong people? Did we misunderstand the problem? Was there a miscommunication between management and developers?

<comment><USER9> > _" find the root of the human error"_

And sometimes there're many roots, like a chain with many weak links

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Social stuff has gotten complicated by living in a world with a global internet. We each individually bring our personal experiences and prejudices to the table and often have no idea what the context is.

I got my first experience as a moderator on an email list with about 300 members and they were all "gifted." It was a parenting list for people with gifted kids, basically, and every single person there was used to being the smartest person in the room. So if you disagreed, obviously, you must be an idiot who had no idea what you were talking about.

It took a long time to lay some groundwork and convince people they were, for the first time in their lives, hanging out with 299 other people just as smart as they were who had read just as much as they had on the topic and so forth and, in some cases, drawn other conclusions.

That felt like a long, hard haul to me and then I quit after about six months because I was relatively new to the forum and my boss basically told me I was stabbing her in the back for doing my job and I was all "I ain't being paid enough for this." because it was a volunteer position.

I quit and let her know what she was doing wrong as a going away present, because I'm generous like that. I'm sure my analysis wasn't appreciated. It was most likely interpreted as sour grapes and as me pissing all over her as I left.

HN is better than most places about this kind of thing, but it's just hard communicating on the internet and not knowing the same things about the people we are speaking with that we tend to know about people physically in the same room. We haven't gotten all that sorted out yet and we may never sort it out.

If we don't sort it out, the result may be massive die back of the human race to a level we know how to cope with. The internet is our opportunity to sort a bunch of things that aren't working well, but I don't know if we are successfully tackling those questions.

Perhaps this post by Colin is one small crumb that can move that forward. And perhaps not. Perhaps it will get lost in the crowd and make no real difference.

</comment><comment><USER11> What the author is really railing against is thoughtless critiques. Declaring software garbage is a usually useless contribution because it only identifies that software can be improved, which is almost always true. However, it fails to provide any concrete advise for improvement that could be debated. There's the saying "it's not science if people can't disagree with you." Seeing how engineering involves the application of science, it's not engineering either. Therefore, these kinds of comments have no place in a professional community.

Being fast to critique _is_ good, provided the critiques are thoughtful. A thoughtful critique takes a clear stance, meaning it can be debated and (in an engineering or scientific setting) experimentally measured to verify it produces the intended effects. A thoughtful critique also poses questions not answered by the original body of work.

In the example described here, fixing the software would have been ideal. However, we can imagine scenarios where this isn't possible (e.g. you have a binary from a now-defunct entity that you must continue using.) The original story should have explained this. If it didn't, the critique "fix the garbage software" isn't unreasonable, albeit badly phrased (instead, "why didn't they fix the software?")

<comment><USER12> I think what the author is railing against is the tendency to criticize something before becoming deeply familiar with the problem

There's a tendency I've observed nearly everywhere I've worked where a developer wants to totally rewrite some piece of software because "it is garbage." In actuality, his motivations tend to be a combination of "other peoples' code is hard to read and this is not how I would have done it" and not having the depth of familiarity with a problem that you attain doing implementation work.

In any cases, asking why something is a particular way is a good thing to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Saying that some piece of software is "bad" (or any synonym of "bad") of course isn't helping anyone. It's demoralizing and counterproductive. I suspect a lot of the bad blood is because so much of the software world is like the faceless behemoths we all love to hate:

\- The process of reporting bugs is onerous for most big projects, especially old and/or big ones, which tend to have behemoth issue tracking systems and a bajillion rules (written and unwritten) about what should be in a report, how it should be structured, where it should be reported, and so on. Bonus points for having completely inscrutable fields (domain-specific tags like "T+" or "BZTM" being popular), a manual sign-up approval process, no way to upload files, or not responding to reports for anything older than HEAD even though it's a stable package in major distros.

\- The chance of success of a bug report (that is, it's fixed by the time I move to some other alternative) is effectively random. Even heavily funded projects like Firefox leave popular bug reports by the wayside for years, while lots of tiny projects fix even minor issues within days.

\- As users become more sophisticated they realize that almost all software is garbage by today's standards. If it's not garbage today it'll be garbage in a year, when it no longer works with any of the surrounding software ecosystem, doesn't implement the latest version of the relevant standards, doesn't use secure crypto primitives, emphasizes [old way of working] over [new way of working], you name it. Software can only stay ahead of the curve by being tiny and actively maintained, or by being _really_ actively maintained.

</comment><comment><USER14> Holding back on criticism is one of the founding principles of the brainstorming technique... that and listening.

<comment><USER15> And research has shown that it's counterproductive. Culling bad ideas quickly makes for better results.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's fascinating ... can you provide references for that research? We've found the careful controlling of criticism to be invaluable in getting ideas up front quickly so they can then be dissected, mutated, co-evolved, and their best points combined.

Iterating quickly and ejecting bad ideas quickly has its place, yes, but not always. I'd be interested to see the underlying context for your statement here.

Thanks.

<comment><USER16> This doesn't support the point but the conversation reminded me about something I read a while ago that is related. Maybe you will find it interesting.

[https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/minds- business/the...](https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/minds- business/theres-a-better-way-to-brainstorm.html)

The researchers found that a problem with brainstorming is the verbal component - due to social factors and limited oral and aural bandwidth, less ideas get shared, and people forget what they were about to say.

They decided 'brainwriting' is more effective, particularly 'asynchronous brainwriting' which alternates between writing your own ideas in a group, then reviewing others' ideas. This method would support want you want - getting all the ideas out quickly, because people are less likely to hold back, then iterating on them.

<comment><USER14> In the paper, group brainstorming was conducted between more than 50 individuals. I would say that 10 is the effective maximum.

<comment><USER16> That's from the paper? I wasn't sure from the article - they mentioned 50+ individuals but then said they had various conditions (group first or individual first) so I assumed they ran them in different groups. I'll agree a single group of fifty is ridiculous - 10 would be pushing it for me. You'll probably get 2 people posturing/dominating in most places.

<comment><USER14> My bad. I just mis-read the article. Just now I went and downloaded the paper, and I see no group size specified, nor indeed any details of the procedure they followed. That might just be the house style of the journal. However, they mention that models predict that creativity increase with the size of the group (to a point). But they don't specify this point.

The recommendations they draw are:

1\. Combining group and solitary brainstorming

2\. Having group brainstormers interact by writing instead of speaking ("brainwriting")

3\. Using networked computers on which individuals type their ideas and read the ideas of others (electronic brainstorming)

They nicely give some recommended readings:

\- Paulus, P.B., & Nijstad, B.A. (Eds.). (in press). Group creativity. New York: Oxford University Press.

\- Brown, V., Tumeo, M., Larey, T.S., & Paulus, P.B. (1998). Modeling cognitive interactions during group brainstorming. Small Group Research, 29, 495–526.

\- Osborn, A.F. (1957). Applied imagination (1st ed.). New York: Scribner.

Many institutional brainstorming sessions I have attended are a complete waste of time, for all the obvious reasons (mostly ego-dominance and poor leadership). This the paper refers to as 'production blocking'. However, I find that managed correctly, there are few better ways to introduce diversity of thought into a process.

<comment><USER16> Well the lack of numbers is a bit disappointing. I admit I'm not interested enough to really dig in but I do find the results interesting. And they did shoot down the previous advice I was given, which is to have everyone set aside time to write down some ideas before the meeting. It seems the presence of the group itself is a strong motivating factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Being slow to criticise, particularly with colleagues you have to work day in and day out with, is critically important.

That said, much of the FOSS currently available is either itself crap, or built on libraries and/or toolkits that are crap. I cite specifically anything of the GTK flavour, many popular things built in C/C++, and to a lesser degree QT.

Why is this? Writing capstone technology (compilers and languages) is very hard. Many industries start life fragmented, but looking now at the tech landscape, sadly there is more hegemony in the proprietary world than the open source one.

If FOSS is ever to be adopted by a wider community that is inviting to newcomers (both users and hackers), this has to be addressed. It is not being addressed, and the power and elegance offered by the tech giants (Swift, C#/.NET etc.) continues to lap open source equivalents.

One example I'll cite is Inkscape. I now honestly believe it would have resulted in better software if this has been written once per platform (WinForms/WPF + Cocoa) rather than with GTK. It's years between minor bug releases, and it gets slower with each release. The (just released) 1.0 is unbearably slow (i.e. unusable). I've spent many hours trying to get familiar with the codebase so I could contribute to it. There's no documentation to speak of for developers, and the little that I've grasped so far leads me to thing it's better left to rot. The core is based on Sodipodi, a project abandoned in 2003.

FWIW I have started writing a clean room replacement in Swift/AppKit, but I'm considering altering this to Swift/UIKit for iPad so it'll be cross platform (albeit Apple only).

<comment><USER18> I'm guessing you mean something other than FOSS (free / open source software) in your critique of FOSS. Reason being, Swift is FOSS ([https://github.com/apple/swift](https://github.com/apple/swift)), both the compiler and the standard library. Likewise, the Microsoft C# compiler is also FOSS ([https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn](https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn)).

You seem to enjoy closed-source platform libraries (WinForms, AppKit), and want to promote developing software that relies on them. The survival characteristics of this approach don't seem very strong. Good luck!

<comment><USER19> BTW WinForms (and WPF) is now open sourced. [https://github.com/dotnet/winforms](https://github.com/dotnet/winforms)

<comment><USER18> Yes, that's true, but unfortunately these libraries only work on a closed- source platform, namely Microsoft Windows. My apologies if this wasn't clear in my earlier post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> People who are slow to criticize seem wise to me. Maybe they've seen similar situations before, they might have ideas about an optimal outcome.

<comment><USER9> Related: I think often when sbd has a seemingly silly idea, there's a good idea just nearby, when tweaking the initial idea a little bit

Then good to keep {those who suggested the idea) happy so they'll help out with tweaking and improving the idea

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> On reflection, I have kind of an interesting relationship with this thesis. Whether you should be quick to criticize kind of depends on the purpose of the discussion. Maybe in the context of the person writing the code that kills webservers, it was a reasonable idea. It could well be true at the same time that the software creating that context is, in fact, garbage.

I tend to think from the perspective of how to build systems tomorrow that are not garbage, so I lean towards labeling as garbage things that cause annoying code to have to be written; it's an optimistic perspective in a certain sense, that things can be better. But if you're going to bother judging past projects, which is already something to be careful with, it seems pretty clear as OP states that you'll learn more about by looking for reasons that the way they did things made sense at the time. With all the pesky humans involved, it may well be a sociological lesson rather than a technical one.

</comment><comment><USER15> Counterpoint: there is a practically infinite supply of possible projects to look at. Maybe we should be more eager to lay a program aside at the first major bug - there may well be five other programs that do the same thing - just as we should probably be more eager to give up on a bad book or movie these days. Maybe such an attitude would lead towards better priorities in software development - currently far too many projects prioritise advertisable features at the expense of working reliably.

</comment><comment><USER22> > Additionally, there might be time pressures, political pressures, > engineering constraints, access problems, and more.

All of those (except possibly "engineering constraints") are merely excuses for why it ended up being garbage, not reasons why it's not garbage.

This conversation goes both ways. When someone calls my work garbage, I can sit there and try to come up with excuses, or I can say "yes it is!" and we can move on towards a solution. Just because someone takes a swing doesn't mean you need to fight them.

Curiously, I only see the author's response in software. In every other field I've worked in, an experienced person is free to call something garbage (or worse), and the recipient of this criticism is expected to not waste everyone's time by making excuses. You'd think the internet would give us a thicker skin, not a thinner one.

<comment><USER23> This is really about maturity I think? With children we do something like:

thoughts > filter > communication > thoughts

With grown ups it should work like:

thoughts > communication > filter > thoughts

You want the full spectrum of gradients of terribility. If I wrote a "steaming pile of crap" I don't want to hear "it is not very good". "not very good" is reserved for things that are "not very good".

food half frozen != under cooked

The alternative is teaching people not to give you feedback because you are emotional unstable and might take it the wrong way.

Just because someone is a dick doesn't mean they are wrong. You have to adjust for their lack of social skills. You want to own the filter, don't require others to maintain it for you. That is a terrible idea! To them the trash talk is treasure.

<comment><USER24> > If I wrote a "steaming pile of crap" I don't want to hear "it is not very > good".

I don't see how either statement is of any use for you?

<comment><USER23> With the first I want to know why immediately with the later I will eventually ask for clarification. It is also an invitation for critical examination.

I do some accounting for who says what. How much they normally complaint? How often are they right? How do they deal with similar feedback?

There is this hilarious place few get to visit where everyone is complaining about everything all of the time while the mood is just wonderful. The work delivered is of exceptional quality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> On a related note, suppose that you already spent too much time to try to really understand the code and asked the developers for the motivations for their strange desing decisions. How do you present criticism in a constructive way then?

<comment><USER26> By showing you understand the constraints the developers were under, and acknowledging their frame of mind. Criticism is fine, giving it without understanding the context is not.

If you are able to summarize the problem in such a way that the developers say 'That is right', and they are not correcting you further on your understanding of the problem, then any criticism from your side is not as much of an attack. By framing it like 'I might be missing some context here, I think X, Y, and Z were your reasons for choosing this approach, but I think there is a factor F you haven't considered' you are having an intelligent discussion instead of just burning the developers to the ground for missing some piece of information.

You might still come to the conclusion the devs are dumb, but at the very least you have made a good impression by not barging in like you know better than the people that have probably spent a lot more time with the problem. Step one is showing that you understand the domain, and realistically, quite a few times you won't even get to the next step of asking whether they considered a factor that went unmentioned, since you've missed critical information in your assessment of the problem.

To summarize: Interview the devs about their decision processes and the domain. Show you understand, and repeat the problem back to them in your own words. If they agree with your version, then and only then ask about things you think they missed, or decisions you still can't comprehend given your information. Reduce your ego, as hard a task as that might be.

<comment><USER25> As I said, I already spent too much time trying to understand their reasoning. In the end I just couldn't, and I really tried, avoid the conclusion that they were incompetent. And I failed, even though I really tried, to present my criticism in a way that didn't make my conclusion obvious.

I really, really don't like making people feel stupid.

<comment><USER26> Good, that is already half the battle. Not jumping to the conclusion that the others must be incompetent can be more difficult than it sounds, and judging by your comment it looks like you have that down.

Were you able to ask the devs directly about their reasoning? Asking them about certain decisions, or trying to get them to explain the thought process and repeating it back to them in your own words is an incredibly important step. You might not agree with them at all, but the part of what your own ideas are is parked at that stage. Then, once you've confirmed their thought process, and they agree to your version of it, is the point to ask about improvements or different strategies that you see. 'Would there be any drawbacks to [your approach], because I think it would provide benefit [x], [y], and [z]' is a great point to start off from once you have that confirmation on your version of their thought process.

Now, if you don't have any access to the original devs it will become much more difficult to try this process. Best you can probably do is try and see if you can find a person that is willing to play devils advocate, or working backwards from your reasoning to see if there is any knowledge that when eliminated from the thought process will make you arrive to the conclusion of the original devs.

<comment><USER25> I did interview some of the devs about their reasoning, and they kind of admitted that they probably had screwed up. The problem is the "tech-lead" that claims that he has 20 years [sic] of .NET experience, but can't implement the strategy pattern correctly, but most importantly doesn't understand when and how to use it, which is evident by him hardcoding the "strategies" in the calling methods. He also has six layers before above dapper (no exageration, I have counted them) of classes for a simple stored procedure call. One of the problem is that five of those classes don't add any functionality, since they just pass through the string with the name of the stored procedure and the arguments. "This is how it done", is the answer I get when I question the wisdom of all the empty classes, and then he walks around and telling other people that I don't understand OOP.

After failing in my attempts to be transferred to an other team I'm sending out my resumé.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I agree with this but I have to admit it is hard as hell to practice. If you can become slow to criticize though, when you do it people tend to pay more attention, a great upside to the effort required.

<comment><USER28> > I agree with this but I have to admit it is hard as hell to practice.

You may want to self-analyze your need to criticize. What is criticizing satisfying in you? It must be something otherwise you wouldn't have the urge to do it.

It varies from person to person, but for a lot of academic (and perhaps tech) folks, there is a strong history in their training to be correct (in both research and classes) - therefore they are hyperaware of things that seem off.

In the work environment, though, the focus is on being _useful_ , which has overlap with correctness, but the two occasionally differ. A lot of times such people tend to be correct but not useful. Pointing out a flaw in something where there would be no significant impact were the flaw absent is the opposite of being useful.

Unfortunately, people in the audience often get fooled by this and give the comment more weight than it deserves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I find it very very true, however.

The time necessary to understand why the fence was put up, it is usually greater than the time necessary to push down the fence, test the system, and put back up the fence if necessary.

<comment><AUTHOR> Except that you don't always know all the ways the system needs to be tested. I've come across code that was broken, seriously broken, multiple thousands of pounds broken, because someone replaced apparently pointless code with something simpler, tested every case they thought of, and deployed it.

Are your tests really complete? Have you tested _everything_?

Perhaps we simply work in different fields, and there are things that matter to me that you would shrug off and not care about.

<comment><USER29> Indeed it is a fine balance.

However, what I am trying to convey is that the burder of explaining and testing the code, and why the code is needed, should be on who put it out first.

If we are not brave and decisive when we decide to cut code, the complexity of the codebase will just explode in no time.

It is already extremely difficult to simplify and remove code, if the person doing this job is also the one that need to figure out, from scratch without documentation, why the code was put there in the first place, the simplification is never going to happen.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _... the burden of explaining and testing the code, and why the code is > needed, should be on who put it out first._

Yes. But what happens when that code is there, live, working, and the originator is no longer available, and you need to enhance it. You come across a complex section and you can't really see why it's written like that. It feels like you're suggesting that one should just replace it with the simpler version you think will do the job just as well, and see what breaks.

Due to my usual context, that approach fills me with horror. I've seen it go wrong too many times ever to be comfortable with it. Admittedly, if you're producing simple web sites then usually it won't be a problem, but when there are potentially millions of dollars of revenue at risk when a condition happens that you didn't anticipate and which was part of the reason the original code was so hairy, you become a little more wary of the "move fast and break things, then fix them" approach.

> _If we are not brave and decisive when we decide to cut code, the complexity > of the codebase will just explode in no time._

And if you _are_ brave and decisive and cut code, and it turns out that the complexity was there for a reason you didn't understand, then that can be a company-terminating move.

Again, our contexts are different, and yes, I do understand the need for controlling complexity in code, and simplifying where possible.

Properly understanding and analysing the risks is something I rarely see.

I suspect we'd actually agree in a given context, I'm just horrified to watch people unthinkingly advocating the approach in places where it doesn't apply. I'm not claiming you're one of them, quite possibly you'd do the risk analysis and understand the context, but I've seen it too often to take for granted that otherwise clever people won't do it.

"We'll just re-write it, it won't take long, how hard could it be?"

<comment><USER29> I do actually work on quite low level code. My mistakes are neither millions of euros nor company ending scenario. Just a lot of complaints.

I am not advocating for move early and break things fast. Not at all.

But in my environment I find the need to find a reasonable compromise.

Compromise that can also be having a set of test suites that allow to test things and rollback.

I am the one advocating for "clean code is the one you never have to look at, because it works, not the one that looks nice in the editor".

I understand your point, I understand that we work in different environments, but I also think that a codebase is a living creature that, if left unchecked, will just explode in complexity.

In some environment make sense to tame that complexity, in some other make sense to reduce it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So true.

</comment><comment><USER31> I see Colin is atoning and reforming from even 1 day ago

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23125032](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23125032)

This is good

<comment><AUTHOR> This comment was flagged dead, and I have vouched for it. Please don't downvote it ... it clearly shows an underlying misunderstanding, and as such deserves to be answered.

My comment that you reference was an attempt to find the merit in the idea that I couldn't see, but I assumed would be there because I was assuming the proposer thought it was a good one. I was starting from a position of "Well, this person thinks it's a good idea, but I can't see why, so let's see if we can find how it would work, and what problems it solves. Then we can address any potential drawbacks."

It was intended to be an invitation to get some discussion about how it would work, what it would do, what problems it would solve, and where the value lay. I was surprised and disappointed that no reply was forthcoming, and the thread died.

I guess I just wasn't clear enough, and for that I am saddened.

<comment><USER32> I liked the reply you posted, I'd be happy for getting such feedback / replies. And I think your reply can be edited a little bit, to start in a little bit more positive tone,

by changing from this:

> _There are many, many problems with the idea, ..._

to instead:

> _I can see problems with the idea, ..._

<comment><USER31> Nope. I think it's better to start with, This is interesting. then the questions. if you really see problems, state them. lead with engagement not criticism.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dissolve My Nobel Prize, Fast (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/10/03/140815154/dissolve-my-nobel-prize-fast-a-true-story <comment><USER2> I'm pretty glad I read the comments on this one:

Pastafaarian • 4 years ago "So, it takes the possibility of death in order to get a physicist to use applied chemistry." 58 •Share

<comment><USER3> Doing an undergraduate applied science degree, one of my lecturers taught me the phrase "In theory, there is no difference between practice and theory. In practice, there is."

<comment><USER4> He was quoting Yogi Berra.

<comment><USER5> Maybe. Wikiquote says the attribution came later: [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jan_L._A._van_de_Snepscheut](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jan_L._A._van_de_Snepscheut)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> All good, but why did they not use Mercury to dissolve Gold instead ? It's almost instantaneous, and it used to be commonly used for Gold extraction by the mining industry (until they replaced it for safety reasons by other materials).

<comment><USER7> Gold and mercury form an amalgam, so you would still have had something that looks like a big hunk of metal. I suppose you wouldn't have known whose gold that was, but the fact that you had a large chunk of gold-mercury amalgam in the lab would have been not so good.

Edit: Looking at some videos, it appears you could get something that looks like regular mercury. I'm wondering how much mercury you would have needed to solubilize a medal. They may also not have had that much on hand, HCl and nitric acid are way easier to find.

<comment><USER6> > Gold and mercury form an amalgam

Sure, but if you have a sufficient amount of mercury, that amalgam will remain invisible to the eye as Mercury is not translucent - and you can just write "mercury" on the flash and you can be sure no-one will dare to touch it.

<comment><USER8> > you can just write "mercury" on the flash and you can be sure no-one will > dare to touch it.

Remember we're talking about 1940. Whoever discovered it might very well take it off the shelf to play with it. ;)

<comment><USER6> Oh, Mercury poisoning has been known for a very, very long time, and certainly well documented since the late 1800s.

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

<comment><USER9> And yet my parents (both born in the 1960's) both played with beads of mercury on their desks in school on numerous occasions... It was pretty common

<comment><USER6> Sure, I'm not saying the general knowledge of mercury poisoning was commonplace back then, but in the scientific community it was, I believe, well known already.

<comment><USER10> It was the Nazi soldier community they were worried about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Knut Hamsun got rid of his Nobel Prize by giving it as a gift to Joseph Goebbels. It takes all kinds.

<comment><USER12> For those who didn't know, also an interesting story:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knut_Hamsun](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knut_Hamsun)

"In 1943, he sent Germany's minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels his Nobel Prize medal as a gift. His biographer Thorkild Hansen interpreted this as part of the strategy to get an audience with Hitler.[24] Hamsun was eventually invited to meet with Hitler; during the meeting, he complained about the German civilian administrator in Norway, Josef Terboven, and asked that imprisoned Norwegian citizens be released, enraging Hitler.[25] Otto Dietrich describes the meeting in his memoirs as the only time that another person was able to get a word in edgeways with Hitler. He attributes the cause to Hamsun's deafness. Regardless, Dietrich notes that it took Hitler three days to get over his anger.[26]"

"Nevertheless, a week after Hitler's death, Hamsun wrote a eulogy for him, saying "He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations."[22] Following the end of the war, angry crowds burned his books in public in major Norwegian cities and Hamsun was confined for several months in a psychiatric hospital."

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Whoa. That's heavy.

The beaker, I mean. That must have been a very heavy beaker of solution!

<comment><USER14> "The average Nobel Prize medal is 175g"

[http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/books- manuscripts/watson-...](http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/books- manuscripts/watson-james-dewey-nobel-prize-medal-in-5857953-details.aspx)

(That's about $7000 worth.)

<comment><USER15> So, about the weight of a phablet like Galaxy Note 4.

That's heavy, but not too heavy to be noticeable in a large flask containing an unknown liquid of unknown density. And since the flask survived, the Nazis probably knew not to mess with flasks of unknown chemicals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder what the yield was. How much mass was lost between the original medals and the recreated medals?

<comment><USER17> None. Both the oxidation and reduction are quantitative.

<comment><USER18> Nothing gives 100% yield.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does anybody have an idea on how long dissolving a piece of gold that long would take? The article says it's a very slow task, yet makes it seem as if Niels Bohr was able to do it in minutes (or a little longer).

E.g., "...physicist Niels Bohr has just hours, maybe minutes, to make two Nobel Prize medals disappear."

<comment><USER20> We did this when I was a jeweler years ago and the process happens very quickly, it is literally minutes so I would assume that at worst they are looking a a 5 to 10 minute window to dissolve one medal. The real issue is that the gasses given off are lethal and if not done carefully in a very well ventilated location you can do serious harm to yourself and anyone nearby. They would have known this and been fine, but someone just reading the article and thinking, hey, I have gold and some acid laying around let's see what happens, could end up dead.

The gas given off is Nitric Oxide (which combines with Oxygen in the air to create Nitrogen Dioxide) and Chlorine and even a small dose can cause serious damage to your lungs if not be fatal.

<comment><USER19> Very interesting, thank you for the answer.

I love how diverse HN can be. From Ph.Ds in computer science to former jewelers, there seems to be a little bit of everything.

Follow up question: would the gas have stuck around until the Nazis arrived a while (hours or less?) later? Or would their ventilation have dispersed it enough?

I remember in the science classes I took in HS the ventilation hoods pretty much removed most of the fumes, but we also never worked with anything that was particularly... pungent? My last science class was probably 5 years ago, so that's my level of understanding.

<comment><USER21> Fume cupboards work pretty well. If you leave the fan running I think all the airflow is in and up the chimney. I presume Bohr would have used one.

(Just got side tracked reading about old style fume cupboards [http://www.cf.ac.uk/estat/sustainability/initiatives/](http://www.cf.ac.uk/estat/sustainability/initiatives/) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I love reading this kind of stuff on HN.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is an example of actual events that are far more interesting than most WWII movies. I fear that scientists today just aren't that _cool_. That said, I'm not sure I would want to face similar calamity.

<comment><USER24> I prefer to think that we live in times that are less interesting (in the Chinese proverb sense) and that demand less derring-do and intrigue of our scientists.

I'm sure that if a portal opened up and parallel-universe-Nazis-lizards (or whatever) began to invade, we'd see just as much heroism and inventiveness from everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Isn't gold supposed to be soft? Can't you pound it with a hammer? Maybe it wasn't pure gold.

In the Italian Job, the thief of thieves fenced the gold bars, but was discovered because of the image of the lady printed on each one. Bet that'd be easy to pound out.

<comment><USER15> The medals were 23K, so about 95.8% gold.

But even if you could pound them into unidentifiable blobs, how would you keep them safe? The Germans weren't looking for medals in particular, they would have taken anything made of Au. "No gold shall leave Germany", etc. etc.

<comment><USER26> But without the identifying marks, how would they know where they had come from or who had sent them? Wasn't the overriding concern the protection of the two Laureates?

<comment><USER12> I also think hammering the medals would have been a good and fast first step to take to make them unidentifiable. However the gold still looks like gold and it would have been confiscated. Their goal was also to hide it in plain sight. As mentioned in the article, they were sure that even burying gold somewhere wouldn't help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> trimble-alum It is more apropos to use chemistry to hide Nobel medals than say hide them in the walls.

Any mention as to how the lanyards were disposed (acid)?

<comment><USER27> The gold medals themselves were the problem, not their lanyards.

<comment><USER28> But a sensible point - you don't want to go to all that trouble and then have a Nazi Officer holding up a lanyard saying "Nobel Institue" that he found in the bin at the back of the lab.

But I think a regular fire would do.

<comment> trimble-alum Easy to debate unknown, but they already went to the trouble of dissolving gold in acid instead of mercury. If it were me, I would place the the ribbon and all in the solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Here's what dissolving a gold coin in aqua regia looks like, this is about 1/200th of the weight of the 2 Nobel prize medallions: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoqU1GfIOkI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoqU1GfIOkI)

</comment><comment><USER18> I remember hearing this story from my high school chemistry teacher. I've always liked it.

</comment><comment><USER30> Why not simply melt it?

<comment><USER31> Because a lump of gold would still be confiscated...

Still, they wouldn't be implicated for the Nobels at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> "This was not an obvious _solution_ "

</comment><comment><USER33> Puts our current comfortable lives in perspective, the chemist and others destroying a Nobel medal to keep people alive.

I guess the equivalent of risk these days is leaking information on illegal activities by your government.

I suspect many HN readers would have turned them in.

<comment><USER34> I suspect you're getting downvoted for the last third of your comment. The first two thirds alone might have had the opposite effect.

<comment><USER35> Yeah, the "if you're reading this, you probably would have collaborated with the Nazis" bit was a little jarring.

<comment><USER36> Given the proportion of the populations of the occupied countries that ended up collaborating, I'd say that while it was an unnecessary statement, it's probably correct in a "given a sufficiently large set of people...." sense.

<comment><USER37> I also think it was correct. People don't like when you say them that they probably would have been a Nazi, too, if they had lived as a german in Germany at that time. Nevertheless, I think it's true and makes one thinking.

It was a worthy comment because it was correct and controversial. Those are often the best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Spiderman would be envious.

<comment><USER39> Is this the thread you were looking for? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501780](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501780)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> > The Nazis have declared no gold shall leave Germany, but two Nobel > laureates, one of Jewish descent, the other an opponent of the National > Socialists, have quietly sent their medals to Bohr's Institute of > Theoretical Physics, for protection.

Does it bother anyone else when despotic regimes get called by their chosen monikers (unironically)? Why do we pay this homage to the National Socialists with tongues firmly out of cheek when our distaste for the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea (for instance) is unilaterally considered standard? Unapologetic neoliberalism, I guess, but some slightly less biased verbiage in NPR would be nice to see.

<comment><USER37> Don't worry about the down-votes.

Some misuse the possibility to down-vote to express disagreement with your opinion or when they feel insulted. They didn't internalize freedom of speech or use HN like reddit.

<comment><USER35> I do try to explain downvotes when requested, so here we go: I'm downvoting you for trotting out the tired old "anyone who disagrees with me is an enemy of free speech" silliness.

I'm curious what you think downvotes should legitimately be used for, if not to criticize patently ridiculous statements (like "calling things by their names is a gesture of respect, if you disagree you must be some sort of LIBERAL").

As a side note, are you implying that Redditors _don 't_ downvote when they disagree or feel insulted? Because _wow._ Have you been to Reddit?

<comment><USER37>
        I do try to explain downvotes when requested, so here we go:
        I'm downvoting you for trotting out the tired old "anyone
        who disagrees with me is an enemy of free speech" silliness.

I think you misread me.

I never said, nor implicated nor thought that disagreeing is incompatible with free speech; quite the opposite.

I was talking about people abusing downvoting to express disagreement or feeling insulted.

Maybe you should read more carefully before presuming others wrote something silly.

        I'm curious what you think downvotes should legitimately
        be used for, if not to criticize patently ridiculous statements
        (like "calling things by their names is a gesture of respect,
        if you disagree you must be some sort of LIBERAL").

I have no finished list of things which downvotes should be used for.

However, trolling and trying to derail a serious discussion are part of that list.

Patently ridiculous statements can be downvoted, but I suggest to error on the side of doubt when judging whether it's patently or not. Also, if the statement in question was serious, a comment why it's ridiculous is appropriate.

Disagreement is definitely not part of that list. Because it blocks controversial discussion even when they are serious and rational.

        As a side note, are you implying that Redditors don't downvote
        when they disagree or feel insulted? Because wow. Have you been to Reddit?

I think you misunderstood again.

On reddit exactly what you described happens all the time, and HN should be different in this point.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


US Military Needs Right-to-Repair Legislation to Fix Its Own Broken Equipment - <AUTHOR> https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/302389-the-us-military-needs-right-to-repair-legislation-to-fix-its-own-broken-equipment <comment> T3OU-736 The cynic in me believes that the costs built into the contract for 'maintenance' will provide a very powerful incentive against this. My belief is based on the career pipeline of: General staff officer (so, Lt. Colonel and above) -> Defense contractor lobbyist (whose pay is partly dependent in the size of the contract).

While not universal, this happens often enough to be a significant force.

Uncertain if framing this as a 'Right to repair' changes the fundamental issues or not.</comment>


Show HN: Remember – A progressive Todo app - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/sanchitgn/remember <comment><USER2> I think the link in the ReadMe to the article about the motivations for this project is a much better read: [https://medium.com/@sanchitgn/what-ive-learnt- developing-a-m...](https://medium.com/@sanchitgn/what-ive-learnt-developing-a- modern-progressive-web-app-d3abe69933fa#.lsladuzal)

It clears up why he's using a boatload of libraries. Basically, he wrote it in such a way that you can save the page as a phone app/bookmark thing, and it'll work even if you're offline.

<comment><USER3> Does anyone else find this PWA thing extremely ironic or is it just my age showing? It seems like we're basically reinventing the days of Delphi and VB, but this time it's over the Internet.

<comment><USER4> With a proper sandbox, and on multiple platforms, at the expense of resource usage and annoying dev experience (matter of taste admittedly). So I'm not sure where your Delphi comparison comes from, which IMHO was the opposite on all those 4 counts: quick and easy-to-dev, but windows only and you never knew if that .exe you downloaded was just a Todo app or a virus, a browser toolbar or...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The application is great but you illustrate perfectly what the web development is becoming, tens of files for just 3 features (add, edit, complete)

<comment> ng-user Perhaps it wasn't OP's intention to make the most elegant Todo application, but rather learn a a new set of tools while creating an application (s)he's rather familiar with?

Then again I actually have no idea.

You could easily write a VERY simple Todo application with the three features you mentioned (add, edit, complete) using an HTML file and some Javascript.

At first glance, I don't suspect OP is trying to create the best Todo application of all time.

<comment><USER6> I think you're correct:

 _" I built to learn about progressive webapps or PWA"_

<comment><USER7> What is a "progressive" web app? Serious question!

EDIT: Thanks for the explanations!

<comment><USER8> Google's marketing term for websites that use Service Workers in a manner that allows the site to function while offline. The sites also have to publish a Manifest file with metadata like icons and a start URL to be considered a "PWA."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting, and it did most things I expected intuitively.

One missing piece though...I expected to be able to move items up or down in order. Basically sorting the to-do list. That doesn't appear to work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, There are a lot of features missing (Reordering, lists maybe). I focused on deploying as fast as possible and then adding features along the way. Also my motive my learning and not the application itself (There are a lot of todo apps out there already)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why someone needs "The big ones" plus 9 other libraries to do this? And a package manager!

<comment><USER3> At this moment, the top comment points to the explanation. TL;DR: The author is learning how to do PWAs.

<comment><USER9> Why "progressive" application needs to be so bloated?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It does what it promises. One thing I miss is the option to un-complete a task. Besides that, it's pretty pretty.

I like the the visual style, very minimalistic.

</comment><comment><USER10> The "progressive" part of this is all Firebase.

Firebase handles your offline database, and syncing it for you automatically when you are reconnected.

</comment><comment><USER11> The animation into 'completed' is a little too jerky imo. Also the concept looks very similar to 'clear'.

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clear-tasks-reminders-to- do/...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clear-tasks-reminders-to- do/id493136154?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER12> I see Firebase being used often around here to host progressive apps. Is there something that Firebase offers that is conducive to build progressive apps?

<comment><USER13> It seamlessly handles a changing network connection. When there's no internet connection, you still get to use the local database, and when there is a connection it'll sync everything with the server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Missed opportunity to call it 'Member :P

</comment><comment><USER15> $ yarn start

yarn start v0.18.1

$ react-scripts start

sh: react-scripts: command not found

...The demo site looks cool, though :)

<comment><USER16> To get the react-scripts command, you'll need to globally install the react- scripts package with:

npm install -g react-scripts</comment></comment>


Nigeria's rural microfinance community gets connected using Stellar and Oradian - <AUTHOR> http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/leaping-into-future-nigerias-rural-microfinance-community-gets-connected-using-stellar-oradian-1541238 <comment><USER2> Joyce from Stellar here. We are really proud of this project as it is directly situated in villages all across Nigeria. These MFIs been doing the hard work of offering financial services in really rural areas and now will be able to connect these communities to a larger economy.</comment>