Germans React to UK's micro:bit - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2016/10/18/germans-react-to-uks-microbit/ <comment><USER2> It's somewhat surprising to me that the "block editor" thing is so popular in these beginner kits. My son (almost 11) was introduced to it at school[1] and did not find it intuitive at all. We then got an Arduino and started to write some simple programs, and he took to it right off the bat. The Arduino programming platform is simple enough to get a 10-year old started off and scales so well to "professional" projects. IMHO, schools should probably just use the Arduino platform. But I guess different kids think differently, learn differently, and what's intuitive for one might not be so for another.

[1] [http://biboxlabs.in/](http://biboxlabs.in/)

<comment><USER3> I think 11 is already too late for those blocks. I did some lessons with Blockly [0] in my son's class last years (kids of 6 and 7), and that worked fine for the oldest/smartest kids, though it was still a bit too hard for some. I plan to do it again this year (ages 7-9) to see how that goes.

But after that, I think it's time for some Ruby or Python. I did Basic at that age.

[0] [https://blockly-games.appspot.com/](https://blockly-games.appspot.com/)

<comment><USER4> You know, what way is there today to get the simple experience of a C64 or a ZX spectrum? Several things there:

\- Instant on with a high level language interpreter

\- Simple architecture/ISA one can grow into

\- Maybe a monitor/assembler available from the interpreter

\- Powerful graphics, with simple things possible from the language, and full power available from machine code

This would be perfect for around 8-10 year old. I can't tell if I'm underestimating kids but it feels like starting with a Linux or comparable modern OS/machine just has too many layers of abstraction to get that "cozy" feeling of a micro.

<comment><USER5> About 15 years ago I started with my graphing calculator. Dont know if those have changed any over the years.

It was texas instruments flavor of basic. Simple enough to get started, automating my math homework :) Just move right to get to the edit 'tab', and select the program you want to edit. Right once more to create a new one.

By the way, if any of you reading this happened to be the manager who decided to spend a few extra cents including explanations for if/then, for loops, variables, etc in the back of the manual, THANKS! You are probably the reason I have the career that i do today. Once I realized that an evening spent programming meant no math homework for a few weeks, I was hooked!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I saw a micro:bit keynote at a big conference somewhat recently. Overall I have to say I'm not all that impressed with the strategic decisions. There were some reasons for rolling their own but they could have partnered with existing alternatives (the keynote struck me as a tad bit too "nationalistic" for lack of a better word...basically "we must do it ourselves because...REMEMBER ACORN GLORY DAYS").

Now it seems Germany is also rolling their own...meh. At least the machines will get into the hands of kids eventually and the software is open source which I like a lot. But I mean why not just ship the micro:bit (or other existing alternatives)?

And I agree with the blog post...if you must roll your own you might as well go the complete open hardware route.

tl;dr: Too much not invented here going on with these projects.

Edit: There's a reasoning for not choosing the micro:bit provided on the calliope website: no speaker, rgb light or microphone + the arrangement is strange and students would short circuit it too often; for not chosing arduino/pi etc.: too complex/needs too much extra stuff and is thus impractical in school use

<comment><USER7> Hi,

It was probably me you saw keynoting - perhaps at this year's EuroPython? I'm one of the volunteers behind the MicroPython related work for the micro:bit.

Sorry you thought I was nationalistic. That's completely the __opposite __to my intention. :-(

To set the record straight, my point about the Acorn BBC micro was only:

1) The BBC already have done something like this before and have "form", resources and reach in this respect. 2) The BBC micro gave the 8yo me the sense of wonder and excitement in computing that inspired me to become a programmer.

These points have absolutely nothing to do with the decision of the BBC to create the micro:bit project.

They wanted a device that wasn't as complicated as a Pi but that also contained enough hardware to be a compelling "device for thinking" as Seymour Papert would put it. A huge amount of research, development and testing that went into working out how the device should function. It certainly wasn't a case of NIH - we were painfully aware of the danger of wheel reinvention. That the BBC is a UK based organisation is completely beside the point. In fact, all the Python related work was done by an international group of volunteers - reflecting the Python community's diversity and something I want to celebrate. Furthermore, the team who did the Microsoft related work are Seattle based.

Personally, I think it wonderful there is a German team working on an alternative. I'm also hopeful they'll be a lot more open about the hardware - the BBC have been dragging their feet in this respect although I know they intend to eventually open source hardware schematics.

Let many flowers bloom!

The important thing is kids get exposure to platforms that help them realise that programming is something that'll help them do valuable stuff. This isn't just about creating a new generation of engineers; Rather, I'll know we've succeeded if in fifteen years I meet doctors, teachers, artists, musicians, lawyers, civil servants and other professionals who are computer literate enough to know how to effectively explore and make use of such technology.

David Allen, the producer involved with the original BBC micro from the 1980s, said it best: "The aim was to democratise computing. We didn't want people to be controlled by it, but to control it."

This isn't nostalgia for the Acorn "good old days" \- it's a sentiment that's just as valid today as it was back in the 1980s.

I look forward to seeing how kids get on with all such devices. :-)

<comment><USER6> FWIW, it wasn't EuroPython. It was Muc2016 in Aachen, Germany (human computer interaction conference)

Thanks for the explanation :) We're pretty much in agreement overall, some project choices just seemed odd though. These projects tend to be bureaucratic beasts on top of the technical challenges. One of the interesting takeaways was that the micro:bit team learned a lot of non-technical lessons that are valuable (how to best deploy the devices, what kids will do with them, what's especially interesting etc.)

"""A huge amount of research, development and testing that went into working out how the device should function. """

I guess that's where I disagree. I feel all this afford could have been invested into creating better software for existing solutions and focusing more resources on pedagogical aspects. At the end of the day the micro:bit costs 13-15 pounds a pi-zero costs maybe 6? I don't feel the hardware side of things provided the most value for the invested tax money I guess. HUGE DISCLAIMER: if the hardware is open sourced fully eventually (I also heard/read it's planned eventually) then I'm actually cool with building yet another smallish computing device.

"""This isn't just about creating a new generation of engineers; Rather, I'll know we've succeeded if in fifteen years I meet doctors, teachers, artists, musicians, lawyers, civil servants and other professionals who are computer literate enough to know how to effectively explore and make use of such technology. """

Completely agree.

<comment><USER7> Great stuff and many thanks for responding!

Hah... it wasn't me talking at Muc2016. I wonder who it was? I'd love to know who... :-)

FWIW, here's my EuroPython keynote, including singing micro:bits:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVaF6uZuSIU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVaF6uZuSIU)

Would love feedback!

<comment><USER6> It was David Crellin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Eh, this was posted about the same minute I was ordering one Micro:bit from Amazon UK (this one: [https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01G8X7VM2/](https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01G8X7VM2/) \- perhaps the AAA battery holder is not really needed, if one has an USB power bank, but ...).

Intended for a couple of youngsters with many hours of Minecraft under their belts, and curious about making games, etc. Did not go too crazy about fizzbuzz in Python on a terminal screen (youth these days ;-)

<comment><USER9> Fizzbuzz? Were you interviewing your kids for a tech Job? :)

<comment><USER8> The other way around ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting. As the article says, Germany really has to play catchup here, as there's no culture comparable to the UK education system here (we had no equivalent to the BBC Micro, for example).

</comment><comment><USER11> Having played around with Raspberry Pi, Arduinos of all stripes, and micro:bit I was disappointed by the micro:bit. But I've also seen children use it in a school environment and seen the sheer delight of writing code that makes something do something.

It's biggest limitation is the display. It's a pity that something with a bit more pixel density wasn't possible because displaying text on it is a pain and 5x5 is really limited for graphics.

<comment><USER12> They've hinted at a new release next year with higher pixel density - as the Foundation is looking at a worldwide audience they need to display other scripts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The motor driver , speaker and mic are great additions. One thing I like About microbit is its power consumption. It can last months on a battery. I just wished it was smaller.

As a software guy who plays more with hardware, I really just want a phone with a gpio output, small form factor and low power consumption enough that it could run off solar power.

Why can't we have that?

</comment><comment><USER14> So this post is not about React? because captial R ...

<comment><USER15> Words in titles are conventionally capitalized (with the exception of "the", "a" and similar).

<comment><USER16> I've often wondered: Is it an English thing or an American thing? Is it recent or has it always been the rule? Does it depend on the 'class' of the publication?

To me it is unreadable, a real PITA to process such capitalised titles. Especially with English language, for it has very short words, hence capitals can harm the reading rhythm every 4 or 5 characters; and the same word can be a noun, an adjective or a verb depending on the context (and there is close to no context in a title).

<comment><USER17> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Headings_and_publi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Headings_and_publication_titles) doesn't have much info, but does claim:

 _" As regards publication titles it is, however, a common typographic practice among both British and U.S. publishers to capitalise significant words (and in the United States, this is often applied to headings, too)"_

As to readability: I think you should see title case as a way to make text more noticable without going for the nuclear option "ALL UPPERCASE". If you look at it that way, you will be happy whenever you see title case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> People really upvote anything that contains "react" these days...

<comment><USER19> Your comment reminds me of quantum theory (you know, the part about observing...)

I didn't vote on your comment, but it looks like it contains "react" and got downvoted, so stating that "anything" would get upvoted obviously wasn't true.

However, if you hadn't had written it, the claim could have still been true.

So, your writing about some fact... might have changed it.

Is there a name for that kind of occurence?

<comment><USER20> > Is there a name for that kind of occurence?

Heisenberg uncertainty principle [1].

Another example is this "died in a blogging accident" xkcd comic: [https://xkcd.com/369/](https://xkcd.com/369/).

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> deleted

<comment><USER22> That thing looks nothing like the Star of David.

<comment><USER23> You can probably thank the US election for a lot of general confusion about what the Star of David looks like, and let's not even get into sheriff's badges. At least it's over soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I hate to rat-hole on the tiniest nit, but the term "Alligator Clip" overtook "Crocodile Clip" in about 1938...

[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=alligator+clip...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=alligator+clip%2Ccrocodile+clip%2Croach+clip&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Calligator%20clip%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccrocodile%20clip%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Croach%20clip%3B%2Cc0)

(OK, maybe it's a regional thing.)

<comment><USER25> Yep. Regional. If you choose the British English corpus you will see Crocodile Clip is significantly more popular.

I am British and would say Crocodile Clip, not that I care much either way.</comment></comment>


Hardware requirements for running AltaVista search engine in 1996 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/alicemazzy/status/655306196128280576 <comment><USER2> Just think. Those machines ran a search engine. Today, only one--perhaps two-- would be capable of running a web browser, even then extremely slowly.

<comment><USER3> This is tragically accurate. Using [http://www.jcmit.com/memoryprice.htm](http://www.jcmit.com/memoryprice.htm) I see that RAM was about £30/Mb in 1996, meaning that the Firefox process I'm typing this in which is using 400Mb of RAM would have cost over ten thousand dollars.

(I remember upgrading my PC to 4Mb so I could play DOOM round about then)

<comment><USER4> To be fair the price was 1/10 that a year later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> By 1998, there were way more than five back end servers. I don't remember exactly how many 8400s we had -- 20? 40? Something in that range. They'd gone up to 12 GB of RAM apiece, which came on boards the size of a fairly large baking sheet. The servers were as big as a refrigerator.

The primary datacenter was a floor above PAIX in the middle of downtown Palo Alto. Pricy server space.

Oft-forgotten bit of history: Elon Musk's first big success was selling Zip2 to AltaVista (under Compaq).

</comment><comment><USER6> The Alphas of that age were great servers. It's not really surprising that they used an AlphaServer for the indexer, and just one of them. Clustering was still pretty exotic technology at the time (although IIRC VMS already had it). At this time (which was the time I started using altavista, because it was "fast") our machine room had a few alphaservers in it, and the managers and I were always arguing over whether Intel boxes would replace Alphas (and HP, and IBM, and SGI) as high performance computing servers.

When Google came along I proudly add their web search form to my home page with the note "They use linux" because I felt it validated my belief that Linux would become the server platform of choice.

<comment><USER5> AltaVista was originally a DEC project, which was the biggest reason for using Alphas. It's a search engine and a marketing tool! But I agree, the speed was great. There was a spare TurboLaser 8400 which was occasionally used for SETI@Home and usually lived in the top five individual servers when it was looking for aliens.

<comment><USER6> Yep, back in those days I loved DEC and AltaVista and Alphas, although they were out of my budget, so I purchased linux machines. In the lab next to me was a bunch of old DEC-heads who upgraded their alphaservers to Tru64 and then TruCluster. I have a great deal of respect, especially for late-stage Alphas such as clusters of GS1280s running TruCluster. They were engineered for throughput and reliability and I know many important loads ran on them.

I don't think that DEC ever really managed to market AltaVista and Alpha to the extent it could have in the rapidly growing period of the Internet.

<comment><USER7> _I don 't think that DEC ever really managed to market AltaVista and Alpha to the extent it could have in the rapidly growing period of the Internet._

In 1996 they had some sort of program to provide discounted hardware to web startups, I worked for a company that took advantage of it, and while I was there started adding their great high availability system.

This revealed perhaps their biggest problem, a legacy system, you might say, of configuring and selling hardware, the very process of buying it from them was difficult and required acquiring all sorts of domain knowledge.

Some years earlier when they were all proud of their expert system that would correctly configure a system, I compared it to buying a Sun workstation where the most difficult decision was choosing your preferred keyboard (e.g. old school Sun/UNIX vs. PC layout, and language), and the right power cord for you country.

I think they largely failed to capitalize on the dot.com boom, especially as COMPAQ was fumbled just about everything they were doing when they bought DEC in 1998, and when the dot.com bubble went bust....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really hope this whole linking-to-an-image thing is just a fad. Fascinating information; it's super annoying not to be able to copy bits out of it or zoom in without blurring.

<comment><USER9> I agree.

In this case, the text of the email is on the Wikipedia article for AltaVista: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista)

<comment><USER10> Nice find, perhaps the link could be changed to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista#Origins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista#Origins) ?

(In case it does, original link was [https://twitter.com/alicemazzy/status/655306196128280576](https://twitter.com/alicemazzy/status/655306196128280576) )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> AltaVista was my favourite search engine when I was a teenager... I remember how back in the day I refused to change to that newcomer named Google... Amazed to know it was running in only 5 servers with those specs! It says it all about how many people was connected to the net in the early days of commercial web. I'd love to know the concurrent connections they had to deal with...

</comment><comment><USER12> Any information which programming languages and server software they used?

<comment><USER6> I believe it was in C, written mostly by Mike Burrows (also known for the Burrows-Wheeler transform). He went on to work at Google, where he has had an extremely productive career building some of the most fundamental technologies at google (Chubby) as well as their high performance primitives ([https://www.chromium.org/developers/lock-and-condition- varia...](https://www.chromium.org/developers/lock-and-condition-variable)).

He is one of the few people I've worked with who is a veritable genius programmer. He understands atomic locking at the physics level.

<comment><USER5> This is correct, although as I recall every now and then Mike rewrote core functionality in assembly for speed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Perhaps a lesson to learn here is consider who won. While AltaVista focused on physical details (number of servers, resource usage, etc...) they missed the boat on the bigger picture - how to significantly improve search engine results. Brin&Page did, filed a couple of patents, secured investment, registered google.com, scaled, etc and won.

Perhaps this is another example of what you measure is what you become. I realize it's just one email and we're missing all sorts of context, but to me, this email seems to boast at their technical prowess of being able to pull off the scaling aspects. Perhaps this email indicates measuring physical resources was a higher priority than _DRASTICALLY_ improving search engine results.

<comment><USER7> Maybe a bit more nuanced than that. Google gave better search results for mere mortals, there was a period during which I used AltaVista because it's old school search inputs allowed me to better find what I wanted (and I miss a lot of that nowadays, especially proximity searching).

But it was definitely branded to show off DEC's hardware.</comment></comment>


US official: Canadian marijuana users, workers, investors risk life border ban - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/story/2018/09/13/canada-weed-pot-border-783260 <comment><USER2> We're becoming a stupid and hateful country.

<comment><USER3> This is my worry from across the pond too. Perhaps I'm too young and nothing has actually changed, but I hope the pendulum will swing back.</comment></comment>


The Ragtag Squad That Saved 38,000 Flash Games from Internet Oblivion - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/flash-games-digital-preservation-flashpoint/ <comment><USER2> > Right now, the Flashpoint torrent is 241 gigabytes, downloadable to any > Windows user for free

Or any other operating system...</comment>


The only unclaimed territory on the planet - <AUTHOR> http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bir_Tawil

<comment><USER2> I think this may be the perfect time to kick start my own country. It can be used to incubate and test ideas and policies. Perfect timing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Last chance to play SimCity and Civilization in real life.</comment></comment>


Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/ <comment><USER2> Amusing personal anecdote -- the Knight debacle caused the market in general to tumble. The week before a coworker of mine -- sure of a market drop but for other reasons -- had bought a raft or puts on the S&P 500. When I saw looking glum at work after the Knight news broke, I asked him what was wrong didn't you make a ton? Yeah, he said, but I can't get out cause my account's with Knight.

<comment><USER3> Cool story, didn't happen. There were no retail trading accounts at Knight. In fact, there was no outside money of any kind. The S&P500 fell about 0.75% on the day in question: a non-trivial decline, but not really remarkable. It was up about 0.4% on the week. Also, this is incredibly not how the OCC deals with members in default.

<comment><USER4> >There were no retail trading accounts at Knight.

The article states "The NYSE was planning to launch a new Retail Liquidity Program (a program meant to provide improved pricing to retail investors through retail brokers, like Knight)"

This pretty strongly implies Knight was a retail broker.

I assume I'm missing something- can you clarify?

<comment><USER3> I don't know precisely what the article means. The NYSE Retail Liquidity Program, which still exists, describes two categories of participants: member organizations (MOs) and liquidity providers (LPs). MOs have retail orders, which are defined as originating with an actual person, ie not a computer. LPs provide liquidity to those orders, ie they take the other side of the trade.

I believe Knight would have been interested as an LP. It is not inconceivable that in some circumstances Knight would have been able to submit retail flow as an MO, but 100% of that flow would have been routed to it from brokerages holding actual retail accounts.

Knight was a trading firm, not a hedge fund, and certainly not an institution which held outside money in retail accounts. But consider an entity which does have retail accounts and also has propriety trading for its own account. Suggesting that the former would become inaccessible if the latter lost lots of capital in bad trading is absurd, would mean that retail-customer and proprietary monies were mingled, and would require the violation of untold numbers of regulations. This did not happen with Knight and indeed has never, ever happened.

<comment><USER2> As an example in the case of Lehman Brothers their bankruptcy didn't affect retail customers who were protected by the SIPC and whose investment accounts were quickly move to other brokerages.

But it's not always so sanguine. To find a bankruptcy with commingled prop and customer funds you need only look to MF Global. To find a retail brokerage bankruptcy with commingled funds you can go "Wolf of Wall Street" and look at Stratton Oakmont.

And despite how smooth everything turned out for Lehman there was a period of a day or two for some retail guys where it wasn't exactly clear where your money was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Back when I used to smoke I would ocassionally hang out with this guy from an investment bank that traded on the Japanese exchange. They had really cool working hours (started a lot later in the day) because we were based in Hawaii which is a few hours behind Japan.

Anyway, the guy told me that they had multiple big red physical kill switches so that they could immediately turn things off if shit ever hit the fan with their systems.

If you have ever spent time in Michigan you'll notice that the manufacturer test vehicles have a big ass red button on the dashboard to kill the vehicle in case something goes wrong.

I cannot imagine doing anything remotely close to this sort of thing without a big ass red kill switch on my desk.

<comment><USER6> They did have a kill switch. What they did not have was someone with the authority and guts to throw it in time.

This may have something to do with the fact that killing a HFT bot without some kind of orderly wind-down might leave you with some _very_ expensive open positions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure the conclusion of the post is the "One and Only Answer" because a fully automated deploy process has another risk that has bitten both AWS and Google at some point: fully automatically taking down huge amounts of instances.

<comment><USER8> A lot of times those issues have been "fully automated (but with human inputs)" or "fully automated with no guardrails"

<comment><USER9> This seems to cover all the cases. Either there are guardrails (as human inputs), or there aren't. Unless I'm missing a middle ground here?

<comment><USER10> Automated checks. For example, in this case, confirming that the other containers are quiescent (as they are supposed to be) and locking them down before the potentially conflicting operation.

<comment><USER9> I'd be willing to bet that it's extremely rare for a fully automated process to have absolutely no guardrails/checks/tests, and it's also extremely rare for a fully automated process to have 100% test coverage.

If this check existed and the system failed in some other way, it would be characterized as "fully automated with no guardrails" (for the scenario which caused the failure). "We had tests but missed an edge case" usually doesn't get you any sympathy.

So what's left? Formally proving correctness is overkill for most things. The "end-to-end" argument [1] might be able to detect when something goes wrong at the end to rollback or alert, but what if the intermediate steps have already caused damage or prevent the "end" from being reached entirely? If a run is taking longer than usual, how do you differentiate between harmless delays in the intermediate steps, and the run being entirely broken somehow?

[1] [http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~bart/739/papers/end-to- end.pdf](http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~bart/739/papers/end-to-end.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Previous discussions on HN:

2014: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7652036](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7652036)

2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8994701](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8994701)

<comment><USER12> Thanks - the top comment from vijucat in the 2015 discussion is anxiety inducing.

" - Ctrl-r for reverse-search through history \- typing 'ps' to find the process status utility (of course) \- pressing Enter,....and realizing that Ctrl-r actually found 'stopserver.sh' in history instead. (There's a ps inside stoPServer.sh)"

<comment><USER13> I had a habit of doing `sudo shutdown now` on my desktop as I'm leaving my office. I don't know why, it takes longer than simply hitting the power button.

Didn't notice I was still SSH'ed into "the" server which was at the time a single point of failure for my entire project, and as a lowly not-an-IT- person-just-a-developer in our corporate environment, I didn't have access to the machine to go power it back on. And the IT people I knew who could help had gone home for the day.

Felt super dumb writing that up in the downtime log the next day.

Having read this article, it makes me super glad I'm working on very niche slow-paced stuff which, when goes down for ~12 hours, is a minor annoyance to our users rather than "you're costing us millions of $currency per minute" :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is less DevOps and more poor software engineering practices (code reviews, unit testing, paying off your technical debt through refactoring/removing old code, etc), although properly managing and instrumenting deploys might have stemmed the bleeding and kept losses manageable.

It's good though; poor decisions must have a cost. The only way to enforce good engineering practices that are human time intensive is for there to be a cost not to.

<comment><USER15> I think at it's core it is right in the guts of DevOps. The "flag" that protects dead code is dev, and the unforeseen deployment scenario is ops. With a DevOps mindset you need to think of both. I think it is a stellar example of what can go wrong if you don't consider both the dev and the ops aspects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> off topic, but a "knightmare" is also a chess term. It's a good-knight-vs-bad- bishop position that went horribly wrong for the owner of the bishop.

<comment><USER17> Also a Batman alternate timeline

<comment><USER18> And a late 80s early 90s children's TV programme.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What's to take away from this?

Automate deployment? Fine but boring. That's the prevailing dogma today. I don't remember where the devops hype train was in 2012. Package management had already been a solved problem for years even though it was (and continues to) be regarded as involving too much "icky reading" and a repository system using plain directories on vanilla webservers; all way too unoptimized for resume padding.

Learn how to identify and manage risk like an engineer? Understand how business process and software can implement risk controls and mitigations?

I kid, so I don't cry.

<comment><USER20> There's a whole slew of lessons to learn from this. Leaving dead code in your system and then deciding to _repurpose_ it. Manually deploying with no verification. No checks in place to disable a system during crazy behaviour. No real alerting system. No procedures in place for when a system goes wrong. No audit log to refer to when rolling back.

The lesson from this article is kind of funny

>It is not enough to build great software and test it; you also have to ensure it is delivered to market correctly so that your customers get the value you are delivering

While true, I don't see any indication this was great software or that it was properly tested.

>Had Knight implemented an automated deployment system – complete with configuration, deployment and test automation – the error that cause the Knightmare would have been avoided.

Or to put it another way - had Knight implemented a higher quality deployment system than the quality of any of their other systems, they _might_ have avoided this issue.

These stories are never about a single thing gone wrong. The whole point about critical systems is that you _should_ need dozens of things to go wrong for them to fail, and then you should fail safe.

<comment><USER21> The fundamental truth of software. Your system is only as good as its worst component. every. single. time.

Deployment is a component. Monitoring is a component. They are also OpEx and therefore "inferior"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> (2014)

<comment><USER23> Added. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Origin Story - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/physics-and-information-theory-give-a-glimpse-of-lifes-origins <comment><USER2> A key fact is always omitted from these stories.

So far as we know, nowhere in nature does any organism make a membrane _de novo_. Every membrane in use anywhere came from extending an existing membrane, and maybe splitting it.

So, arguably, the real basic stuff of life is not nucleotides, but the primordial membrane we are still busy extending.

One thing we can be certain about is that the world where life originated was very little like today's. Besides lacking oxygen, whatever got in the water stayed until it degraded or stuck to something else. Today, anything of any value gets eaten in short order.

We can imagine seas teeming with random nucleotides and RNA. A remarkably simple RNA can reproduce others it bumps into. Once any two of them encountered one another, the seas would instantly be filled with (near) copies of whichever was even infinitesimally faster at it. It wouldn't matter if they were unstable, because they would always be making more.

When you have trapped some in a semipermiable membrane, you are most of the way to life as we know it.

<comment><USER3> "The Role of Lipid Membranes in Life's Origin"

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5370405/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5370405/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it really so preposterous to consider the role of intelligent design?

<comment><USER5> it's role here is the same as relating the beginning of the universe.

from an experimental standpoint it is completely possible that the universe started a few minutes ago or that the laws of physics changed in completely random ways, but we still want to study how the universe could have started given our current understanding of it.

there is no reason why the big bang is a truer hypothesis than intelligent design/creationism for the beginning of the universe, but one of them can help us improve our understanding of our current universe the other does not.

the situation is the same for the creation/evolution of life: assuming darwinism helps developing new drugs and intelligent design does not.

personally I take it as: if an intelligent entity created of guided the universe it also carefully added the traces of an undesigned origin for us to study.

<comment><USER4> I appreciate your thoughts and reply - thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Thought Ocean offers a solution to the community degredation / dilution problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.thoughtocean.com/what/dilution

<comment><AUTHOR> also see: <http://www.thoughtocean.com/what/biggeridea>

</comment><comment><USER2> So basically Advogato 2.0?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the first I've heard of Advogato. They are similar to Thought Ocean in that they also use a trust metric. The algorithm looks quite different though. It will take me some time to learn about the algorithm and compare it to Thought Ocean's.</comment></comment>


JS Sequence Diagrams – UML Sequence Diagram in SVG from Text - <AUTHOR> http://bramp.github.io/js-sequence-diagrams/ <comment><USER2> When I was at Disney back in 2011, we used this daily for a year: [https://www.websequencediagrams.com/](https://www.websequencediagrams.com/)

If you have a good tech architect running a meeting this tool is great to create sequence flows on the fly. It's also got great builtin features like exporting and an API for integration.

Last but not least, it has the Rational Rose theme @haddr mentioned but my personal favorite is boring ol' Blue Modern

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this the same syntax that PlantUML uses? [http://plantuml.com/sequence.html](http://plantuml.com/sequence.html)

<comment><USER4> It seems similar to [http://www.websequencediagrams.com](http://www.websequencediagrams.com), which plantuml was modelled after.

And that has a million integrations available, including a pretty good emacs- module[1] ;)

[1] [https://github.com/josteink/wsd-mode](https://github.com/josteink/wsd- mode)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am a big big fan of [http://www.gravizo.com/](http://www.gravizo.com/) as well. It's amazing.

</comment><comment><USER6> Related: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MscGen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MscGen)

</comment><comment><USER7> This lib isn't new. Glad to see it here on HN. I remember building a simple editor for it on jsbin a few years ago:

[http://output.jsbin.com/ebahuh](http://output.jsbin.com/ebahuh)

</comment><comment><USER8> This reminds me a lot of [https://github.com/tpatel/OpenSequenceDiagrams.js](https://github.com/tpatel/OpenSequenceDiagrams.js), which was designed to be collaborative (eg, [https://thefiletree.com/demo/diagram.sequence](https://thefiletree.com/demo/diagram.sequence)).

It seems way more streamlined, produces more beautiful results, and probably could be made collaborative as well.

Edit: I made a realtime collaborative plug, here is an example: [https://thefiletree.com/espadrine/sequence.sequence](https://thefiletree.com/espadrine/sequence.sequence)

However, the syntax is not as extended, it seems.

</comment><comment><USER9> Neat.

Threw together a usermacro for Atlassian Confluence that uses this as a quick and dirty proof of concept: [https://gist.github.com/gregmac/fa89a3d86dcb1a008153](https://gist.github.com/gregmac/fa89a3d86dcb1a008153)

</comment><comment><USER10> This look similar to mermaid diagrams, but mermaid seems more complete

</comment><comment><USER11> Hey these are great. Anyone know of one that will produce a playable animation through the sequence?

</comment><comment><USER12> I prefer fast & simple SVG over "hand-drawn-generated" SVG. Does your generation support this? I noticed a lot of DOM junk in the current generated graphs.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is really cool and looks fun. Ive been trying to find something like in the past. Ive been using software to do uml and it just wasnt fun.

</comment><comment><USER14> Very cool. Would love to see this for class diagrams.

</comment><comment><USER15> Impressive! Any reason you chose Raphael over D3?

</comment><comment><USER16> State diagram will be useful.</comment>


Do Real People Really Use Tag Clouds?: Research To Help Separate Web 2.0's Hits From Hype - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitaldesignblog.com/2008/04/11/ia-summit-2008-do-real-people-really-use-tag-clouds/

<comment><USER2> It was an interesting deck of slides. For those of you who don't have time to go through them, the answer was "35.08% of users used tag clouds at least once in a while."

<comment><USER3> In more detail:

3.78% said "All the time"

7.98% said "Most of the time"

23.32% said "Sometimes"

64.92% said "Never"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> problem with the study: they surveyed consumers about their behaviour instead of observing their behaviour firsthand... a lot of details were missing too, like the demographics of the people they studied. not to mention the prominence of tags differs from site to site

</comment><comment><USER5> Some excellent information in there.</comment>


SQLAlchemy performance analyzed with RunSnakeRun (SQLA v0.5, v0.6 and v0.7) - <AUTHOR> http://techspot.zzzeek.org/2010/12/12/a-tale-of-three-profiles/

<comment><USER2> In my experience, it's pretty rare for a project of this maturity to continue to get faster and leaner--usually you see more features and bloat bringing performance decreases. Somehow SQLAlchemy has managed to not only add features, but get faster and more efficient (even if these profiles do exaggerate its improvement over time.) It's an excellent project.

<comment><USER3> we're doing it in reverse ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just as we have compilers for programming languages the same now applies to databases queries and database abstractions, for better or worse. Hopefully SQLAlchemy's speed trend will continue and merely by upgrading to the next version your site can become faster.

Having used both relational databases and SQLAlchemy recently in production on an Alexa 500 website I'm quietly reminded that for the vast majority of applications relational is still a good match, especially with tools like this that can remove so much of the database overhead.</comment>


Hotmail will allow emails to run Javascript - <AUTHOR> http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2038675/hotmail-allow-emails-run-javascript

<comment><USER2> MS will also allow Malware to run on PC's with this!</comment>


Ask HN: Any recommended book for social entrepreneurs? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I think running a successful social enterprise is largely similar to running a successful vanilla for-profit.

That said, I found the How I Built This episode with Perry Chen from Kickstarter quite insightful on the social enterprise topic: [http://pca.st/episode/dbc5c113-aa4d-4d68-8da0-0befdf6809f8](http://pca.st/episode/dbc5c113-aa4d-4d68-8da0-0befdf6809f8)

</comment><comment><USER3> Try "Pencils of Promise" by Adam Braun. I've not read it myself but I've heard good things about it. pencilsofpromise.org might also be worth checking out.

</comment><comment><USER4> what's an example of an anti-social entrepreneurs?

<comment><USER5> I think they meant social entrepreneurship in a do-good sort of way[0].

0\. [https://www.socent.io/](https://www.socent.io/)</comment></comment>


Windows RT Jailbreak Tool released - <AUTHOR> http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2092158

<comment><USER2> is there an instruction on how to compile an existing code project for RT?</comment>


Pullup, the site you join via pull request - <AUTHOR> http://pullup.io <comment><USER2>
      "We figured pretty much everybody knows JavaScript"

Haha, that's funny. I guess all of the world's software runs on the web and is written in Silicon Valley. Oh wait, what's that you say, some programmers actually work on all those weird machines like satellites, assembly lines, medical devices, power plants, and even my car?! People actually write new operating systems, compilers, web servers, load balancers, and device drivers?! No way! Why don't they just make a web app for that stuff?

Yeesh. I realize that you can't please everyone, but some people chose to live in their own little worlds.

<comment><USER3> Hey there, one of the creators of the site here. When we put this line on the site we never expected it to be this controversial! It isn't meant to be a universal truth, it's just in terms of a "website you join via pull request." So, perhaps better written as: "Almost everybody who works on a website knows JavaScript."

The satellite that you join via pull request can be written in whatever you want :)

<comment><USER2>
      "Almost everybody who works on a website knows JavaScript."

That I can agree with.

<comment><USER4> I would prefer to have that statement qualified with "knows of" ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the about page

> We figured pretty much everybody knows JavaScript

Even with the implied "everybody" being "everybody that would be interested in joining our site", this is a poor assumption. Not everyone is a ninja-rockstar web developer. In fact, some of the best content on HN comes from people who most likely don't know JS. I get the idea for the site, but the description seems very naive.

(FWIW, I do know JS)

<comment><USER6> What language would you recommend, if you wanted to make something accessible for, say, teenagers who haven't even taken the perfunctory "Introduction to Control Structures In Blub" course yet? Javascript seems like a good guess for "language you might pick up just from everyday computer use." (Another two being, I think, Windows batch files, and Excel macros.)

<comment><USER2> I can't imagine how anyone would pick up bits of js just from everyday computer use. How many people even now the the "view source" button in their browser even exists? Excel and batch files / shell scripts I could see though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You know, it just occurred to me: if instead of pull _requests_ , they just accepted all pushes... that'd sort of make this the programmatic equivalent of a wiki, wouldn't it? A site anyone could edit, in a more literal sense: not just the content, but the features.

Oddly enough, you wouldn't necessarily require people to use the command-line for this, but nor would you need to build any editing UI; instead, the site could just, say, provide a context menu that contains links to the GitHub code-editor view of all the source files, _and_ content files, that were used to render that particular element.

If you really wanted to do this, to be practical, you'd need a pretty good continuous integration server to block the deployed build from failing, but for the codebase _itself_ , I think it'd be a fun experiment to just let people do whatever they like.

\---

... _or_ , on a different tangent, you could have something like a CI server that evaluates and accepts/rejects pull requests based on arbitrary criteria. This'd basically be a black box (not part of the editable codebase) serving the same purpose that the site administration currently does.

This process could have _very_ specific rules, like, say, that not only does every test have to pass, but that the commit can't delete any code _from_ a test. So features can be added to a codebase through this black box, but not removed.

Attaching such a black-box-evaluator + automatic CI deployment process to the public web would almost be like throwing a genetic algorithm at your codebase: it would "evolve" roughly according to the constraints of the algorithm, even though people are doing the work.

<comment><USER7> > not only does every test have to pass, but that the commit can't delete any > code from a test.

Good idea, but this is easily gamed by e.g. adding a test that starts failing on a certain date. I've thought about this before, and it's really hard to come up with mechanisms for a system to incorporate untrusted modifications without totally collapsing.

It would be hilarious to design a program that accepts Bitcoin payments, and automatically accepts merge requests from the highest bidder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The top link on Pullup is a link to this HN post with the title: "Pullup HN Update post, everyone upvote/comment"...

</comment><comment><USER9> "We figured pretty much everybody knows JavaScript"

Honest question and not trolling. Can I send a pull request to update this text to "We figured JavaScript is very popular these days....."

EDIT: I just did it anyway. Feel free to accept/reject

<comment><USER10> Perhaps "and the changes sufficiently small"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting idea.

One thing that this would be good for is almost by default members get experience working with the technologies the site is running -- they learn to use Github, deploy node.js, etc. It gives them a working technology base for their own projects.

One problem I foresee is that without a clear discussion about where the site is going, it could quickly become rife with lots of poorly-interacting features. Another is that delays in merging might well turn away valuable members.

Still, interesting project.

<comment><USER3> Getting experience with the technology involved has definitely been a side effect. For example, I'm a whole bunch better at managing lots of pull requests in git versus a few days ago. It's been a really fun ride so far, no idea where it'll end up but excited to see what happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wouldn't it be easy to join by simply coming up with a username and adding it to [https://github.com/larvalabs/pullup/blob/master/config/userl...](https://github.com/larvalabs/pullup/blob/master/config/userlist.js) – and then submitting a pull request for the merge?

<comment><USER13> Presumably you need to make some other code change/improvement as well with the pull request or else it will be rejected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Previously [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7193353](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7193353)

<comment><USER15> It looks like they've had some success with their idea - the site looks quite a bit nicer and has had several new features added since then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Yea, they still have a workflow problem that was never solved: [https://github.com/larvalabs/pullup/pull/5](https://github.com/larvalabs/pullup/pull/5)

On the bright-side at least the project is MIT. Good ol' MIT.

<comment><USER17> Already solved same-day: [https://github.com/larvalabs/pullup/pull/11](https://github.com/larvalabs/pullup/pull/11)

But never implemented / merged. Surprised the powers-that-be are resisting the most elegant solution. Then again, I came up with it, so I remain bitter and biased :)

<comment><USER18> I think the logic is that the current way isn't a big problem now that there is a standard of how you add your username to the file, and has allowed for some flexibility on the membership.

The old saying, "don't fix it if it ain't broke."

<comment><USER17> Have you read the issue? The problem is that the current way things are done requires manual merge requests because of merge conflicts resulting from the updated userlist array. The github api method is 1:1 with the requirements of joining the community and leaves no room for human error (unless the person in charge of pull requests does not standardize their own process for automatic merges).

<comment><USER16> The current solution is humorous: [https://github.com/larvalabs/pullup/blob/master/config/userl...](https://github.com/larvalabs/pullup/blob/master/config/userlist.js#L2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > We wondered what a site would be like where every user had contributed some > code. It should mean no spam..

HAHAHAHA, good luck with that.

(But still, a nice idea for a site)

</comment><comment><USER20> why cloning hackernews?

<comment><USER21> Why not?</comment></comment>


Do startups have a drinking problem? - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/do-startups-have-a-drinking-problem-920139d132a7#47af.5tfoynx3p <comment><USER2> My own experience (and I won't claim this is necessarily representative) is that drinking is a big part of it, but nobody will care at all if you refrain. Asking for water or soda instead of alcohol will barely get a second glance.

I think the title of this article would be better written as "Do startups have an asshole problem?" It just so happened that the asshole problem manifested in terms of alcohol because that's where the author was set up to come into conflict with the assholes.

You could easily have the same sort of experience as a vegetarian in a company that revolved around barbecues and steak. That wouldn't mean startups have a "meat problem," but that they have an asshole problem that manifests in terms of meat because that's where you're in conflict. Other possibilities include smartphone ownership, hobbies, and political affiliation.

Alcohol is certainly an interesting case because it's one of the few drugs that's legal, socially acceptable, and extremely commonly used. The only other one I can think of is caffeine, and even there we tend to go out of our way to make non-caffeinated equivalents available. But it seems to me that hassling people because they don't drink is just a symptom of a larger problem, which is that there are assholes in power, and one of the things assholes do is hassle people who are different.

<comment><USER3> > I think the title of this article would be better written as "Do startups > have an asshole problem?" It just so happened that the asshole problem > manifested in terms of alcohol because that's where the author was set up to > come into conflict with the assholes.

I think startups may have an asshole problem as well, but that's not the context I got from the article. Startups have a much larger problem and that is the insistence that your job is a lifestyle, a culture. It's not enough to show up and do your job well and get along with everybody. You have to fit in as well. If you don't, it affects your future career prospects. Drinking is the norm. It's expected, along with wearing certain clothes, using certain tech stacks and having certain political opinions. There are a multitude of ways not to fit in. Alcohol is just one of them.

<comment><USER4> Totally agree, but I'd take it in a different direction too, which is that startups have an expertise problem by definition. Most of the stuff in this article that just seemed beyond the pale WAS beyond the pale. But most of that stuff:

1\. Came from people who would have definitely not been in C-suite positions at any established company 2\. Would have been completely moderated by someone in HR at a traditional company, if not lead to termination / sanction

But, because it's a startup, you're getting people who have to do jobs they were never trained to do, or were never a good fit for. Your brainiac CEO may be lacking the soft-skills to actually be responsible for other people, and yet, he's the most qualified to really own the product vision. There's a reason these positions aren't mixed in traditional companies, and there's a reason why your CEO isn't the CEO at a stable company pulling in $$MM in revenue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's actually really weird being a young adult (23) who doesn't and has never drank. People will always look at you as if you're from another planet and you'll always be pestered for some justification. I remember taking an etiquette dinner/short class type thing during my college years and being reprimanded for responding, "No, thanks, but I don't drink," when offered a glass of wine. He said that I should always say, "No, thanks, but I won't be drinking tonight," otherwise I'd be making the others at the table feel bad about drinking alcohol.

I'll never understand that, but that seems to resonate through society: don't rock the boat and make people aware of a moral decision to drink or to eat meat or to X. Just go with the flow and let everyone take their soma.

This response came out unexpectedly negative.

<comment> some-guy I loathe telling people I'm a vegetarian for this reason. People think that my decision to not eat meat is an attack on _them_ and not a choice I've made for myself.

Edit: a word

<comment><USER6> To be fair, a ton of vegetarians are smug, moralizing douchebags who do attack others on their decision to eat meat. There's a humorous saying: "How do tell if someone is vegetarian/vegan? Don't worry: they will let you know."

There was a girl in my dorm during freshman year of college who would _literally_ start sobbing if she saw anyone eat meat.

<comment><USER7> The vast majority of people who don't eat meat honestly don't care about anyone else's dietary choices. The reason it comes up is because most people assume everyone eats meat. If I was never offered meat, I'd never have to tell anyone that I'm not going to eat it.

There are always going to be outliers like that girl, but compare the relative frequency of seeing people like that vs the absurd number of bacon products (jelly, soap, toothpaste).

<comment><USER6> The girl I mentioned was an outlier, but hardly the only vegetarian/vegan I've known who always broached the subject of "meat ethics" at every opportunity.

People like that might make up a small portion of the vegetarian/vegan population, but they are a very vocal minority, which skews perspectives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> IMO, The tech industry has a huge alcohol problem in general. It's not uncommon for even largeish companies to have beer kegs and frequent happy hours.

Just recently we had a team event that revolved around alcohol, a mixology class. Although attendance wasn't mandatory, it wasn't exactly optional either. So there was a lot of awkwardness considering a number of people on our team were non-drinking muslims, 1 person was pregnant, and several others just don't drink. This creates an exclusionary sort of culture, and as one of my coworkers said it "I don't really want to be forced to go to the bar with my middle aged male colleagues". If you think about it, it does seem a bit creepy.

Other industries have moved on from this sort of model. Sure, there still can be alcohol at events and the occasional BBQ with beer or happy hour, but they have strict policies about returning to work after consuming alcohol, and alcohol is not the main focus of the event.

I take full advantage of the beer keg at our office, but if it went away I certainly wouldn't be upset. I'd just do what I used to do, and go to the bar after work with coworkers who want to go.

<comment><USER4> What does "it wasn't exactly optional either" mean? For whatever it's worth, Mixology course sounds terrible even as someone who partakes in alcohol.

"Other industries have moved on from this sort of model"

Source? I've worked for a few corps outside of strict tech focus and that was not my experience.

What's the end-goal of this anyways? You can't moderate social interactions, so if your company stops doing alcohol-related events, your teams are almost certainly still going to go to happy hours. I get that this would be a problem if every corporate event solely revolved around getting rip-roaringly drunk, and that would be needlessly exclusionary, but I also doubt that's the reality outside of some really fringe cases. Although maybe that is how it really goes down, and I've just had a sheltered workplace experience

<comment><USER8> "It wasn't exactly optional" was that there was an implied request that everyone would attend. It went on everyone's calendars and was during work hours, not after.

I'm not arguing alcohol should be removed from office functions. I'm saying [a] they shouldn't be the focus and [b] maybe we don't need to have fridges of beer where it is acceptable to grab one and go back to your desk.

My wife's company (a nationwide outdoor retailer) does have alcohol occasionally at events, but those are semi-regular BBQs at the end of the day, and are absolutely optional. My friends work in healthcare where there is zero alcohol. Other friends work in the government, also zero alcohol. My mother works for a shipping company, also no alcohol on premises. In fact, outside of tech no-one I know has alcohol kept on premises.

<comment><USER4> So if you're saying that alcohol maybe doesn't belong in the physical workplace, then I totally agree and see your point completely :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We had someone who came to work for us that told the whole company he was a recovered alcoholic and everyone was real nice about it. The bosses and co- workers in this story just sound like colossal jerks.

I actually have an opposite problem, though. We stock the fridge with craft beer but since everyone is a health nut (I use it as a terms of endearment) no one wants beer at 6:00 so sometimes I end up being the only one and that feels awkward. But I've been at the office 11 hours, I want to treat myself.

Also, I find the thought of Beer Pong at the office to be very alarming. Foosball, sure, but Beer Pong? What are we, Freshmen in college?

But I'm in a East Coast office. We're annoyingly all business here. It is probably different elsewhere.

<comment><USER10> The first time I experienced Beer Pong or Keg Stands was at a software company in the Bay Area

edit: I didn't mind those at all. But I did not care for Pajama Day and the pressure to wear pajamas on Pajama Day

<comment><USER11> thank you for reminding me why I love being a remote worker :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not a sober alcoholic, I'm just a person that doesn't drink for a variety of reasons. I can tell you that this isn't just startups. It's our entire society.

I work at a non-startup and there's a happy hour every Friday at the end of the day. Everyone else is VERY EXCITED for this Happy Hour. I'm still excited because we basically stop working, but not nearly as excited as everyone else.

Even outside work, when I go to social gatherings, people are drinking. Drinking is the main attraction for most people. If I go to a meetup, I'm the only one who cares primarily about what the meetup is supposed to be about. Go to a concert, other people get drunk, I am the only one actually trying to enjoy the music. Even hanging with my friends watching a movie, I'm actually trying to pay attention to the movie, but for everyone else, they have to "enhance" the experience with some beverages.

Go to any conference or convention? After-work party? These events are ALWAYS at bars. What am I supposed to do in a bar? It's the most uncomfortable place in the world to be for someone who doesn't drink. It's like someone who can't swim hanging out at the public pool.

While not drinking makes social life, especially in NYC, a bit more difficult, I do not have the same experience as you. Nobody has ever been a dick to me about not drinking. They just accept it. I've had some people ask why, but that's fine. I'll just explain to them. I guess that might be more troubling if my reason was a past of alcoholism. I've never had anyone get mad or anything. So I think that aspect might just be an aspect of startup bro culture. Not that I needed another reason to never work for one.

<comment><USER13> "It's the most uncomfortable place in the world to be for someone who doesn't drink. It's like someone who can't swim hanging out at the public pool."

No one can tell the difference between a rum and coke, and a coke. It works for me pretty well. We have some similar outlooks, and perhaps you'll find my sneaky idea to be useful. Its much easier to fake drinking than to fake swimming.

I don't even have a variety of reasons not to drink. In the LSD community or whatever you want to call it there's a well known effect called the 50 trip limit or 100 trip limit or whatever number, after doing it 50 times you're either repeating because you never thought about it, or you're bored with the whole experience, or you're hopelessly addicted. Same with alcohol, at least for me. I've done it all, drank incredible amounts, stayed up all night, passed out, puked up gallons, made out, had all kinds of fascinating hangovers, its really an interesting, although fundamentally worthless, experience. I checked every square on the checklist. Once your inner completionist is satisfied, its really a very boring and unpleasant experience. And now that its boring, I just don't do it anymore. It isn't the kind of response that fits in 10 words or less at a bar. So I just order a coke and everyone assumes its a rum and coke.

<comment><USER14> This is a common suggestion, but I don't want to drink Coke, it's really unhealthy. I want to drink nice tap water, which doesn't really look like vodka or gin, since it comes in a giant glass and you drink it at a much faster rate.

<comment><USER15> I ask for a small glass of sparkling water with fresh lime. People assume it's vodka. And I get the hiccups easily, so people then assume I'm drunk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is also the reason why I tend to stay away from Meetups/Startup events/recruiting events/etc.

They tend to devolve into awkward situations for people like myself who don't drink or don't want to waste time with the "oh really? you don't drink at all?" conversations. I'm not an alcoholic, but people consistently feel the need to dive into why I don't drink, choose not to, and have never had a drink.

And as much as people here or anywhere may say that they either A) don't care whether I'm drinking or B) feel awkward around others who don't drink, the reality is that the culture is centred around whether you drink and how much.

<comment><USER17> The stock answer in most places I know in Europe is to say that you can't drink because you have to drive afterwards. It doesn't have to be true but nobody will question it.

<comment><USER18> This is why I love taking my motorcycle to any after hours work/professional events. I can not drink and no one questions it even for a second

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This was an important lesson freshman year of college:

It's OK to drink, even if you're underage, but you MUST provide Equally- Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages (EANABs) at your parties. And you must ensure that people from outside the university cannot enter the party.

The author's boss is quite the philistine to insist that everyone drink! I guess he never worked with Muslims, alcoholics, anyone with an allergy or a genetic alcohol sensitivity, or anyone taking medicines that impact the liver.

<comment><USER20> > but you MUST provide EANABs

What taught you this?

<comment><USER19> The RAs (upperclassmen) and Fellows (resident faculty) in an all-freshmen dorm at Stanford.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think the more pertinent question from the example given is: "Did I work for colossal douchebags?"

<comment><USER16> I disagree, many people I consider to not be colossal douchebags also tend to make the issue of alcohol frustrating and unbearable.

<comment><USER22> They react like the people in this article? This founder sounds like a complete a-hole.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think the USA drinking problem is that the country think it is a problem. All around the world it is legal to drink some wine during lunch. One of the greatest pleasures of the world is to drink a cold beer at the beach, but it is illegal in USA. You can't legally make a Sunday picnic in a park with some beer and wine. You don't have cafe´s with a nice view to a public square where you can spend some time drinking and meeting your friends. These are the greatest drinking problem in America :-)

Don't forget that USA was the country of the Prohibition, and till today its drinking laws is one of the strictest of the West.

<comment><USER24> Savannah, GA has no 'open container' law, and it's pretty nice. But yeah, what a dumb thing to do in the spirit of blind following.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think startups* have a bullshit enforced 'fun' problem in general. Whats fun for the founders may not be fun for me. Its still a job, I'd rather put that wasted money into higher salaries. Thats how IBM do it, their offices are crap and have shitty bare bone facilities but they pay well, you can buy whatever whimsical crap you want on your own dime.

*At least the stereotypical silicon valley style ones

<comment><USER26> It's part of convincing people they don't need money or a life outside of work. "sure we're paying you market rate for a 40 an hour worker and sure you're here 100hrs a week but why would you go home anyway we can get drunk here in the three hours a week we don't expect you to work"

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The behavior of some of the author's colleagues is incredibly embarrassing, and the behavior of some of the author's managers is just reprehensible. I hope that the more reprehensible behavior is simply an indicator of the problems of unexperienced founders/leaders. I know the nature of these anecdotes is not uncommon, but there does seem to be a clear line between the discomfort associated with office-sponsored drinking events and outright harassment.

The larger discussion has merits, but I do think, for better or worse, startup culture is just a reflection of our alcohol focused social culture (and in full disclosure, I enjoy it). Startups are different in that they often blur the line between professional and social. This can certainly be problematic, but it's also one of the most significant reasons that I enjoy working at startups much, much more than traditional businesses.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, the founder at the beginning of the story seems like a real jerk -- taking personal insult at someone for refusing to drink _champagne_ for the celebration, since "this is really big for us"? As if being there to celebrate with them isn't enough? And flipping out at anyone who asked for the same?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Should it be seen as a red flag when you're given a tour of the office (maybe during an interview process) and they make it a point to show your the beer fridge? My anecdotes aren't data, of course, but every time I've had that kind of experience, I've discovered that there's an implicit expectation that you'll stay at work later and drink said beer.

<comment><USER20> A red flag of what kind of harm exactly?

<comment><USER29> I was hinting at that towards the end of my post: the idea that you're expected to drink it if it is offered, particularly after work hours are over. Not all of us fancy sticking around at the end of the day.

<comment><USER20> Doesn't seems too harmful to me. A corp that wants to milk people of overtime are not likely to want them drinking a lot, especially for dev.

<comment><USER29> >Doesn't seems too harmful to me. A corp that wants to milk people of overtime are not likely to want them drinking a lot, especially for dev.

Then you may not have seen as much of this phenomenon as others of us. There are definitely companies encouraging on-site drinking.

<comment><USER20> Do those same companies pressure overtime work?

<comment><USER29> Yes, they invariably do. Again, my anecdotes aren't data, but this is what I've seen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This behavior of someone taking offense to you not wanting to drink with them is something I've seen before. What's particularly infuriating about it is that you shouldn't need any particular reason not to drink. Whether it's because you're a recovering alcoholic, or you just don't feel like it, a simple "No thank you" should be enough.

On a side note, I remember having a discussion with a coworker about after work drinks. She noted how sometimes people would be willing to stay and work more if they knew they were going out for drinks afterwards. I imagine the way alcohol can relive stress with immediacy can lead one to willingly work in more harsh conditions. Hell, I've stood extremely late several times just because I knew I can join up with friends later for a drink.

</comment><comment><USER31> I am 23, work at a startup, and also never drink, but definitely disagree with the implications of this post. Startups don't have any sort of particularly entrenched alcohol culture in the US- everyone does. And it's not really a problem, either. You can't ask for planet earth to be a safe space so you never get tempted by your booze urges again, just continue refusing, it's not something that can- or should- go away entirely.

<comment><USER32> There is a big difference between work being a safe space where no one drinks, and one where your boss berates you harshly for not drinking. The article depicts the latter situation. I drink; I don't care if people don't drink. I would never, ever respond to someone asking for water the way this writer's boss did. The boss acts as though he has been personally insulted. That's garbage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Everyone knows the answer is _yes_ without clicking. The only qualification is to modify "startups" to "startup culture."

Are there exceptions? Of course!

But the prevailing culture enshrines and celebrates a lot of the worst aspects of being young, male, and competitive.

It's absolutely non-unique in this respect, but honestly, there should be a much stronger countervailing voice flatly stating, _we can do and be better than this_.

<comment><USER34> The counterpoint is that it's _still_ true if I modify "startup culture" to "culture". It may be more in-your-face when it's about colleagues, but drinking-as-socialization is an American (and European) pattern, not a startup one.

It goes for college parties, it goes for dinner with clients at big companies, it goes for 4th of July barbecues, and it goes for fancy Sonoma Valley wine tastings. At a certain point it feels like pretense to blame it on startup culture - startup culture is largely an intensified, sped-up version of everyday culture, and everyday culture is plenty focused on drinking.

<comment><USER33> I disagree, though living in San Francisco it's hard to remember how unique and relatively narrow the cultural spectrum of this industry and place are.

The marriage of drinking and and alpha dominance displays of all kinds, are in my life experience dominant elements in contemporary US culture; they are not even tolerated in some circles. In many places I have lived what they call 'nightlife' is strictly demarcated by space and time.

I'd wager this is just one more place where the work / life distinction has become very blurred or has vanished entirely, around here. :/

In any event on the brighter side, we can look forward to the hangover!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> When I click the link it loads and scrolls me all the way to the bottom of the article... very annoying.

<comment><USER36> It's because it's linked to a specific anchor. The mods should change the parent link to [https://backchannel.com/do-startups-have-a-drinking- problem-...](https://backchannel.com/do-startups-have-a-drinking- problem-920139d132a7)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> In my experience working in the Bay Area, this is hardly limited to startups. I worked at over a dozen places if not more, from startups to the giant technology companies, and all but one had massive amounts of alcohol on premises and drank in the office. I've been offered drink in interviews that to me said implicitly: either drink this or you're definitely not getting the job. I've seen coworkers leave work drunk and drive. I've had friends who are recovering from cancer and shouldn't be drinking admit to me that they felt pressured.

It's not an issue of whether there is a drinking problem, but how big is the drinking problem? In my experience, it's everywhere, at least in the Bay Area. I'm not sure about other areas, but I doubt they're much different. It's hardly a wonder that frat culture and brogrammers exist with this amount of drinking, nor is it a wonder that so many things are built to sub par standards, often by sub par people.

It really wouldn't be that big of a deal if people were mature and tolerant of others who don't drink, not like the asshole bosses described in the article. There is a wide variety of factors why one might not drink, many of which one may not want to share: alcoholism, religion, health, doesn't like the taste, doesn't want to get retarded, needs to drive after, still needs to do work (yes this comes up __often __), etc. Especially for recovering alcoholics, no job is worth drinking over. Stupid assholes in charge, don 't understand that and then they wonder why their company is failing when they're doing their best to keep away qualified workers.

</comment><comment><USER38> This seems to me a problem with an infantile culture, and not alcohol per se. The founder in the anecdote is obviously a person of poor judgment, unable to empathize, egotistical. This kind of enfant terrible is worshipped and celebrated by SV culture, given power, their fits and tantrums indulged and even encouraged as part of their mystique of genius, their disruptive zero- fucks-given.

This problem runs deep; alcohol is only a smidgeon of it.

</comment><comment><USER39> That is a tremendously courageous post. Not many people can publicly discuss their addictions.

I've worked at many places that have had a strong alcohol after work culture, but it's only recently that I've seen it in work hours. As someone who likes to drink, it hasn't bothered me, but I also don't want to be exclusive of people. Many people choose not to drink due to their religion or health goals, as well as addiction.

I wish the world were a better place about this, but this is part of the background checking one needs to know about a new job. If you're worried about being able to take off to see your kid's play, you have to inquire if any of the senior execs have kids. If you are worried about age discrimination, you have to see if others with gray hair are thriving there. And if you're worried about an alcoholic culture, look for people who don't drink. This is very hard to bring up in an interview, but you can learn about culture via back channels.

For what it's worth, when I went through periods of non-drinking, I would just tell people that I was training for a martial arts competition, and needed to keep my weight down.

</comment><comment><USER40> I feel like the author extrapolates her anecdotal experience in a dishonest way.

First, as others have said, this isn't so much a drinking problem as often a culture problem ("asshole problem"). The first "start-up" I worked for didn't allow alcohol in the office, period.

Second, as a 24 year old now 3 years in the professional world and two jobs (so limited exposure), I can honestly say I have never been pressured to drink or go drinking at either of the start ups I have worked at (thus far). In college I joined a fraternity so I'd like to think I have seen first hand what that looks like.

I don't want to belittle the discussion about the bigger picture issues of start-up culture (as well as the bigger picture benefits), but the author here seems like she had a bad _work_ experience that just happened to be at a start-up and now has a chip on her shoulder when it comes to _all_ startups.

</comment><comment><USER41> Things I enjoy doing: When there's some sort of thing where there's free alcohol, and somebody says they don't drink, interrupt _before_ somebody can ask an intrusive question with "excellent, more for me then" and if possible clinking my glass with theirs. Usually spikes (pun absolutely intended) any issue before it starts.

</comment><comment><USER42> See also: _Our Culture of Exclusion_ from 2012. Originally at ([http://old.ryanfunduk.com/culture-of- exclusion/](http://old.ryanfunduk.com/culture-of-exclusion/)), but the author has removed it. There exists a copy here ([https://gist.github.com/jseifer/2314204](https://gist.github.com/jseifer/2314204)) with all references to alcohol replaced with "meat", but you can read it and get the general gist, anyway.

<comment><USER42> Update: Found an available copy on the Internet Archive here:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20130808111450/http://ryanfunduk...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130808111450/http://ryanfunduk.com/culture- of-exclusion/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> My take on this is sharing a drink is one of the major (if not THE major) ways of socializing in our culture. So I can totally understand the INITIAL knee- jerk reaction when someone refuses to drink with 'the team' as this might be seen as a refusal to socialize.

Although if someone politely refuses to drink, it's really none of my business why. I for example wouldn't drink [much lol] before a heavy squat day but I totally don't want to start explaining/justifying this to someone who never lifted anything heavier than a pint.

</comment><comment><USER44> >We began placing orders for the family style meal, when my boss suddenly announced to the room that I wouldn't be eating meat. People began to chuckle, saying things like, "How can you be in Argentina and not try the meat!?" "You're not going to try the beef? You don't know what you're missing!" Then, my boss added, "Yeah, she doesn't drink either. I mean, what the fuck is wrong with her?" Several people laughed alongside my boss.

That is the most important part of the article. Your boss is a dick.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm not sure it is just startups. I think larger/more established companies fit into this too, but they may just be emulating hip startups.

I work at a 100-500 person company. I do not attend most company events because of the amount of drinking. I hate meeting with clients because the amount of drinking.

As someone who used to regularly show up to work drunk, it's not a healthy atmosphere for me. However, I do feel an odd sense of loyalty because 2+ years ago they let me go to rehab instead of canning me.

</comment><comment><USER46> I don't drink now, and I like to say "It works out pretty good - when people drink, they get relaxed. And when they get relaxed, I get relaxed" It's worked well for me, ymmv.

</comment><comment><USER47> Hey 'dang, why is this so far down the front page? Is it because people flagged it? I feel like there's some very good discussion here.

Edit: Uhh... I was downvoted for asking this? Depressing.

</comment><comment><USER48> Speaking of drinking and startups, does anyone else not get the whole "drinking while coding" thing?

<comment><USER49> Yeah in my experience alcohol only helps with high level ideation. It typically makes implementation more difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> People have been having drinking problems since ages. Why put it down to startups?</comment>


How does a startup with an MVP show customer validation with enterprise clients? - <AUTHOR> I have been working on a project with a very good friend of mine. We very recently completed our MVP and were looking to get some customer feedback/validation to find out if there is even an interest in our product in the industry. Our potential customers are mainly businesses and big ones at that. I was wondering what the best way to get some sort of proof of interest in our business will be? Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> YC's Startup School had a good video lesson on just this topic.[0] It shows what kind of questions you must ask during a "customer interview" to see if you are building something that really solves a problem people will pay for. It's a bit disconcerting to think that you've gone ahead and built the MVP without that part...

[0] [https://www.startupschool.org/videos/63](https://www.startupschool.org/videos/63)

<comment><USER3> That seems a bit abstract. It seems impossible to me to just go to a company and say: "Hello, we have absolutely no product to sell (no MVP yet), we just want to talk about your problems and then we'll see if we are building a product. Do you have 1 hour to spend with us?". I guess they just don't take the time to speak about their issues, or in a very artificial way.

How to get a real face to face interview with a person willing to share their problems in a constructive manner during 1 hour or 2?

<comment><USER2> It's only a handful of questions. We tell people it will take 15 minutes and no one has said no yet.</comment></comment></comment>


A New Bytecode Format for JavaScriptCore - <AUTHOR> https://webkit.org/blog/9329/a-new-bytecode-format-for-javascriptcore/ <comment><USER3> I'm unclear, why transform to a bytecode as a first step? Wouldn't it be simpler to instead to transform to an AST and work against that for everything? Wouldn't it make sense to generate the bytecode as sort of a last step before doing heavy duty optimizations?

Seems like with JS you would be constantly transforming from bytecode -> AST -> bytecode -> machine code, such as every time a method adds a new field to an object or some optimization assumption is violated. It doesn't seem like it would be easier or faster to work with. I'm guessing there wouldn't be a whole lot of memory benefits either.

Would someone mind illuminating me on this design choice? (Granted, I've not taken a compilers course, so feel free to call me an idiot for not knowing something basic about how compilers work).

<comment><USER4> * Adding a new field or method to an object at runtime doesn't change the AST.

* You don't translate from bytecode to AST.

* In tiered JIT architectures--typical for dynamically-typed languages like JavaScript where as you point out effective types can mutate at runtime--most code is executed by an interpreter, not as compiled machine code.[1] Interpreters are more efficient when executing a bytecode than walking an AST.

* Translating an AST straight to machine code is much more difficult than translating a low-level intermediate representation, and such representations are often easy to express as simple bytecodes. Compilers like GCC and LLVM use intermediate representations: RTL and IR. Both are effectively assembly languages, and like all assembly languages trivial to express as bytecode. GCC also has GIMPLE, a higher-level intermediate representation earlier in the pipeline which expresses a generic AST. The fact that GIMPLE and RTL coexist drives home the point that you don't want to be translating tree-like representations straight to machine code.

* You don't need to take my word for this, or the word of anyone else. Every programmer should have experience writing parsers, compilers, and interpreters, regardless of whether they took a class or even went to university. By doing this most of the reasons for the way things are done will become immediately clear to you. Note that splitting strings with regular expressions does not count as parsing, not for these purposes. A good project, however, would be to write a regular expression parser, compiler, and interpreter. There are many examples to follow and you can copy their designs exactly; just don't copy+paste as actually going through the motions and understanding the complexities inherent in the implementations is how everything will become clear.

[1] How this mutation is handled and why tiered architectures are preferable is another topic entirely.

<comment><USER5> Swift and Rust also have their own higher-level intermediate representations that they translate their AST to before even going to LLVM IR (SIL and MIR respectively). Rust used to translate their AST directly into LLVM IR but they switched to going through MIR first because it unlocks a lot of optimizations as well as improved user-facing functionality such as non-lexical lifetimes in the borrow checker.

<comment><USER6> Rust has AST -> HIR -> MIR -> LLVM-IR. Two internal IRs and a third external one!

<comment><USER5> Good point, I forgot about HIR, though isn't HIR largely just a desugared representation of the AST?

<comment><USER6> Yes, but also post macro expansion and name resolution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Kudos to Tadeu Zagallo and the JSC team for landing this awesome patch!

I've worked on WebKit memory performance in the past, so I'm well aware that these aren't low hanging fruits we're talking about. The type safety bonus features look great too. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Re: Direct vs. indirect threading (aka ordinary dispatch). I had the impression that recent Intel x86 chips did enough trace caching to render any performance distinction basically irrelevant. Is that right?

(Of course, Apple has their own ARM implementations to consider.)

EDIT: Here's the paper I was thinking of in this regard:

[https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01100647/document](https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01100647/document)

<comment><USER4> My first thought when they said they switched from direct threading to indirect threading was that it may have been the worst possible time to do that given Spectre.

The negligible performance difference on modern Intel chips between direct and indirect threading is largely a result of their deep, heavily buffered branch predictors. Spectre mitigations are going to increase the performance differences. Most userspace applications will forgo mitigations in favor of keeping performance, but the browser was the big exception as it has to be concerned about in-process side-channels.

<comment><USER5> Haven't all the browser engines already implemented their own mitigations for Spectre/Meltdown for JavaScript code?

<comment><USER4> I can't speak to their existing mitigations directly, but more generally Spectre will be an ongoing saga for years to come.

I seriously doubt the mitigations in place, whatever they are, are comprehensive even for _existing_ proven Spectre channels. The engines haven't even solved RowHammer. It's a very difficult problem domain, particularly for an application JIT'ing random, untrusted code from the Internet. In many respects they're (IMHO) quietly punting because there just aren't satisfactory solutions. Browsers are really stuck between a rock and a hard place, more so than VM providers like AWS EC2.

One of the more general solutions is simply to stop trusting the browser, if not your entire operating system. Keep your most sensitive secrets inaccessible to software to the greatest degree possible. Use smartcards and other hardware tokens for authentication, for example.

<comment><USER5> My point is you can't say "oh this approach may have poor behavior once Spectre mitigations are put in place", because the browser has _already_ implemented Spectre mitigations.

<comment><USER9> There's more than one mitigation, and not all at the browser level. The kernel may also flush the branch cache on syscall entry, which is going to hurt performance if you depend on predictions being fast. Though as far as I know pretty much nobody uses that mitigation precisely because it's too slow.

<comment><USER10> Direct threading and indirect threading both rely heavily on the indirect predictor. You might even say that direct threading relies _more_ heavily on indirect predictor state and in particular the contents of the IBTB because it has so many more branches and so more opportunity to store per-location history for particular instructions and hence more to lose if the IBTB is flushed.

Indirect threading relies more on strong and deep history pattern matching at a single location, and probably uses less state overall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Impressive improvements.

I wonder how performance and memory use compare nowadays between V8, Spidermonkey and JavascriptCore.

Does anyone have a link to recent trustworthy and thorough benchmarks? (Google doesn't really spit out anything noteworthy...)

<comment><USER12> I believe that JSC is in the lead when it comes to throughput and latency. But that is at least partly based on benchmarks that I had a hand in designing.

I don't know how the VMs stand against each other on memory. JSC is improving in this area a lot recently but I don't know if it's just catching up or leaping ahead or whatever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> When they talked about getting rid of their threaded interpreter, I was reminded of this article from 2008 about writing fast interpreters, if that's interesting to this audience:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2593095](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2593095) [hn link]

</comment><comment><USER14> This is interesting! If anyone from WebKit is in the comments, can you provide link(s) to the bugs discussing the bytecode caching API? I'd love to take a look but my Bugzilla search skills are evidently weak.

<comment><USER15> There are a few bugs related to caching, but the main ones are: The initial implementation of the underlying infrastructure: [https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=192782](https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=192782) Initial C++ and Obj-C APIs: [https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=193401](https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=193401) WIP bug to integrate the cache with WebKit: [https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194047](https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194047)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Do they have a different bytecode and runtime from WASM? Why not unify everything to web assembly byte code?

<comment><USER17> WASM byte code is structured into a tree, which means an interpreter loop wouldn't perform well. You'd really want to flatten it into a simpler bytecode before interpreting it -- and you'd want to do other transforms on it before optimizing it.

I don't think WASM bytecode is a good format for execution, and it's only mediocre as a compilation target.

<comment><USER16> Then why not abandon wasm, and make this byte code a target for llvm?

<comment><USER17> LLVM bitcode is CPU and ABI dependent, and isn't even stable between LLVM releases.

<comment><USER16> Bad question on my part. More relevant: Why wasm? From what I gather, js seems to already have a bytecode for their JIT runtime. Why not expose that so that we can have C++ in the web?

<comment><USER18> I asked the same question, see below for interesting thread

<comment><USER16> _sigh_ I think the modern web was a mistake from hacks of the 90s to share documents. Can we plz get a fresh restart from scratch?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Now please expose a loadFromByteCode api so that we can target bytecode instead of transpiling to js.

<comment><USER19> Suprised no one has posted [https://blog.cloudflare.com/binary- ast/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/binary-ast/) . Its not bytecode but its still a great idea

<comment><USER18> Oh wow!! In a way it's even better than bytecode because it allows marking unused functions for lazy loading, giving speedups of 97% (in theoretical settings;)

Must read.

[https://github.com/binast/binjs-ref](https://github.com/binast/binjs-ref) from below is part of this!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> WebKit2 Qt when? Also, full QNetworkConnection support. That would be great.

</comment><comment><USER21> Is it possible to pregenerate that bytecode?

For example for hybrid desktop/mobile apps.

<comment><USER5> If you're going to precompile your JS, why would you want to emit this bytecode instead of just going to WASM?

<comment><USER21> Because wasm still doesn't support many features that JS does. For example accessing the DOM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> You mean like binast? [https://github.com/binast/binjs- ref](https://github.com/binast/binjs-ref)

<comment><USER23> bin ast is/was an attempt to make a more compact version of JS that was easier to parse.

But parsing JS isn't a significant bottleneck, it's the subsequent work to produce the stuff that actually runs. IIRC proponents also claimed it meant you didn't have to worry as much about validation, which isn't true because it's untrusted content that comes from the internet. It must be validated.

binast also is not designed to be any more readily executable that JS - <USER2> even if it were supported step one would be "produce a bytecode that is fast".

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> And it is already shipped in Safari 12.1 ( Which means many are already using it )

Time and Time again it seems WebKit are the only team that wants to make the Web with better Web _Pages_ with javascript , All the others seems to want the Web to be Fat _Apps_.

In the hope of anyone in Safari team is reading it.

Please make the Tab Overview Cache the Thumbnail or in List format, currently pressing Tab Overview will reload all the tabs in the background. I don't know if this is for generating thumbnails or other reason. Something that kills my machine when I have 300 Tabs, most of them are "cold" and not loaded.

<comment><USER25> > Time and Time again it seems WebKit are the only team that wants to make the > Web with better Web Pages ( And we are far from perfecting it ), All the > others seems to want the Web to be Apps.

I don't see how this blog post supports that view, since it's talking about optimizing JavaScript.

<comment><USER24> By Web page I mean including minimal Javascript, such as making initial JS loading faster, lower latency, lower memory, and in general much better UX. To me Chrome seems to be optimising for the wrong thing, like maximum throughput, WASM, Super fast in Compute intensive usage but eating memory like crazy.

<comment><USER26> [https://v8.dev/blog/ignition-interpreter](https://v8.dev/blog/ignition- interpreter)

"V8 team has built a new JavaScript interpreter, called Ignition, which can replace V8's baseline compiler, executing code with less memory overhead and paving the way for a simpler script execution pipeline."

[https://v8.dev/blog/preparser](https://v8.dev/blog/preparser)

"Lazy parsing speeds up startup and reduces memory overhead of applications that ship more code than they need."

[https://v8.dev/blog/embedded-builtins](https://v8.dev/blog/embedded-builtins)

"V8 built-in functions (builtins) consume memory in every instance of V8. The builtin count, average size, and the number of V8 instances per Chrome browser tab have been growing significantly. This blog post describes how we reduced the median V8 heap size per website by 19% over the past year."

[https://v8.dev/blog/improved-code-caching](https://v8.dev/blog/improved-code- caching)

"V8 uses code caching to cache the generated code for frequently-used scripts. Starting with Chrome 66, we are caching more code by generating the cache after top-level execution. This leads to a 20-40% reduction in parse and compilation time during the initial load."

Etc, etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mathematica algorithm for finding Waldo - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekosystem.com/programmer-creates-algorithm-to-find-waldo/

<comment><USER2> Better to link to the original SO thread rather than the summary: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8479058/how-do-i-find- wal...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8479058/how-do-i-find-waldo-with- mathematica/8479757#8479757)</comment>


Asana - what has been forgotten to implement for $40 million - <AUTHOR> http://mightybuxx.blogspot.com/2013/05/who-stay-behind-its-always-interesting.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I cannot follow activity of my fellows, with inbox in asana, and that's a problem.

</comment><comment><USER2> anyway the system is good enough...though activity log could be more convenient and clear for such money

</comment><comment><USER3> You mean Inbox, maybe?</comment>


Create 3D scenes using language - <AUTHOR> http://www.wordseye.com/frontpage

<comment><USER2> Shame you have to register to try it.</comment>


An 11.88" Retina MacBook Air - <AUTHOR> http://www.fpblog.net/blog/2014/1/20/an-1188-retina-macbook-air How Apple might go Retina with the MacBook Air <comment><USER2> Could this also support the iPad Pro rumour? Perhaps this will also be the stepping stone to touch tablet/laptops if they choose to go that way.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have more to share. Unfortunately the post isn't seeing much traction :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice deductions. Let's see if it plays out!

</comment><comment><USER4> I need a full 13"

<comment><AUTHOR> I unfortunately think the only option for you will be the 13.3" Retina MacBook Pro.</comment></comment>