Ask HN: Is your marketing site outsourced? - <AUTHOR> I'm curious to know if your engineering org handles the "marketing site". Does your team have a conceptual distinction of "app" vs "marketing site" or are they the same thing?<p>Does your team own your marketing site or did you outsource it to an agency?  Why? Pros and cons in your opinion? <comment><USER2> If you are any type of web based application than the app and marketing are intertwined and should not be separated, at least in terms of appearances from the outside. That said, when I was doing this type of work for companies as a consultant, we many times built out a Wordpress based marketing site and tied it to a custom developed application. It was seamless to the user but allowed the business team to add and update content without getting the dev team involved (or hire it out easily). In fact many times I would hire a wordpress agency to build out the template and initial marketing content while my team worked the custom application. This also allowed us to deliver and have marketing, email collection etc all setup well in advance of the app launch.

Only time it is acceptable to outsource your marketing site is when your site is not part of your product. At that point, it doesn't matter if it is outsourced for development and maintenance, as long as things are getting updated timely.

There is a strong argument to be made that even in an organization when app and marketing are somewhat to fully integrated that not the same teams are working on them, since the two end goals are generally quite different and have their own timelines. e.g. you don't want your developers who are fixing issues and developing features for clients worrying about the fact you need to replace content or update the look of the blog.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! So I assume for the companies you consulted at they were not a web based application? (per your "app and marketing are intertwined and should not be separated" comment)

I'm curious how did you "tie" the Wordpress site to the custom app? Did you simply use subdomains like app.example.com or was there a deeper integration?

Also, if the Wordpress site went down, who was getting paged in the middle of the night? The agency, the eng team, or both?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Are you asking only about SaaS apps? For ecommerce, the whole site should be the marketing site. For a mobile app, website is the smallest piece of the marketing puzzle.

Frankly, I think marketing is much more important than technology for success. And I say that as a software developer. It doesn't matter how good your product is if nobody knows about it. It doesn't matter if it's better than the competitor's if the competitor is better at telling people why they should use their product.

I currently work at a SaaS business. Our app and marketing sites are one and the same. Some of that is for historical reasons, but I believe that for us it's an advantage. We grow steadily in part because the product team works more closely with the marketing team than with anyone else in the company. Exposure, conversion, and retention are baked into every feature and every decision we make. We could never do that nearly as effectively with an outsourced marketing department.

One caveat: we are a mass market B2C company. I wouldn't be surprised to find that there's a sliding scale for how closely marketing and product need to be integrated depending on how high-touch the sales process is. An enterprise B2C where there's no way to try the product at all without a custom-negotiated contract has no reason to integrate the marketing site with the product.

That said, I'm always skeptical about outsourcing marketing entirely. See the first point above.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'm interested in both ecommerce and SaaS though I suppose you're right in that ecommerce they will always be one in the same.

Does everyone on your eng team share that same belief in the importance of working with marketing? I ask because I've been in situations where engineers would've rather worked on juicy technical challenges of the main application. Marketing "asks" for a new analytics tool or CMS were viewed as a nuisance and sometimes outsourced to a Wordpress agency.

<comment><USER3> To be honest, aside from some moderate scaling issues, the technical challenges of our main application aren't all _that_ juicy. Like a lot of SaaS, we're mostly glorified CRUD. Our biggest technical problem is generally around keeping complex business logic from breaking when we extend it.

But anyway, we try to avoid hiring prima donnas. We hire people who are focused on making the product and the business succeed, not on scratching their personal technical itches. There are plenty of engineers out there who get their satisfaction from knowing that their work is being used or helping users or the business or their co-workers, rather than from playing with algorithms. I've never heard a complaint or even a foot-drag from anyone on this team, nor the previous one I worked with (medium-high-touch B2B with a separate marketing site managed in-house).

If you have a deeply technical product, you still need someone who's going to build out dashboards and other UI. Just make sure you have at least a few people on your team who are willing to work on the stuff that maybe you don't find glamorous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've done both at various jobs 30-70 outsourced to engineering owned, 40-60 marketing site/app vs just one app. The most traditional "marketing site" is a wordpress website that's really designed to pitch the company or a product. If you're working for a company that does sales, you most likely have this. These are typically outsourced to an agency that specializes in wordpress. The advantage of this is that you can get a highly polished website that's designed to impress your clientele that's built with all the SEO you need or want. The main consideration here is whether you're expecting to update the website often (beside blog posts). If you really think you're going to be doing a lot of updates, then you most likely want to bring this in-house. If you're going to own the marketing site then you probably need a person full- time who's only job is going to update the website. Generally, most places don't have a ton of people that want to maintain and update wordpress sites. The other reason why people have "marketing sites" is because you're using something to run marketing campaigns. This typically will be something that will allow you to spin up custom landing pages and have built in tracking or multiple sign-up flows (think regulated industries or multiple marketing/sales channels). This will often be owned by engineering, as they will need to create new landing pages or add new logic.

Generally, the reason to not have a separate marketing site is because you have an integrated app with only one product line. You're a SAAS or ecommerce play where the sign-up is really built in. This works well, but does make it difficult to add multiple products or build out multiple marketing channels (outside of digital). Essentially you've tightly coupled your sign-up flow/marketing/etc to your application. At some point at scale you may need to decouple this (or not. See Facebook, Google or Twitter as examples where the main product hasn't been decoupled although other products do have marketing sites)

<comment><USER5> Very related, can someone recommend an SEO consultant, with a proven portfolio of at least one great result, and doesn't use grey area techniques that'll get me de-ranked?

I think I've got my ducks in a row, but don't want to risk most of my sales on it.

<comment><USER6> What's your email?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nope, those two are managed & planned separately.

The reason is:

\- Marketing is running usually specific landing pages that are tailored to the campaigns we have going at the time. Having them hosted via a 3rd party, allows the non-technical people to change, update & publish changes to the copy, tracking codes & design on the fly.

\- The "app" landing page in most cases is the registration/sign-in page.

Both of these sites are tracked via the same analytics tool to understand the breakdown of the marketing/onboarding funnel.

It's worth hiring a marketing agency if you have the revenue/funding to spend on it, since most likely they can handle a larger number of marketing experiments running at the same time, compared to an internal team.

However, if you're early stage, I definitely recommend doing it all yourself, the more you learn the better down the line when hiring someone to do the work for You.</comment>


Introducing the Backbone.js Boilerplate - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.bocoup.com/introducing-the-backbone-boilerplate

<comment><USER2> "Boilerplate", as I understand it, is text you copy and paste, and then edit to your needs. But the name of the game in programming is "don't repeat yourself", that is, don't copy and paste text. (And "eliminate dependencies," but that doesn't come into play here.)

So, in programming, boilerplate is always bad. Boilerplate is the enemy. Boilerplate is what makes software unmaintainable. Boilerplate multiplies bugs. Boilerplate is not a "best practice". Boilerplate is a worst practice. Boilerplate is not canonical; it is demonical. Boilerplate is the failure to factor your software into reusable subroutines. Boilerplate mixes your green, red, and yellow code all together.

This seems to be a combination of a decent development environment (a reasonable selection of libraries: Underscore, jQuery, Backbone, node.js) and 1000+ lines of actual boilerplate.

I don't know why people here seem so willing to forgive the use of boilerplate. This post has 193 upvotes as I write this so I guess there are at least 193 non-hackers reading and voting on Hacker News. I hope I never have to fix their code.

<comment><USER3> I don't agree.

Recently I started to work with node.js and after switching from Rails where you have a pre-configured ready-to-go project within seconds, with node you need to assemble the whole thing yourself.

For example there is no "standard" file layout, there is no "standard" way to initialize your ODM and there is no "standard" way to package your assets.

Am I supposed to just choose something for myself re-inventing the wheel again?

Thanks, but no thanks.

Instead I'm browsing other people applications on github and, yes, templates and boilerplates.

<comment><USER2> > Recently I started to work with node.js and after switching from Rails where > you have a pre-configured ready-to-go project within seconds, with node you > need to assemble the whole thing yourself.

I haven't used Rails in a while, but last time I used it, the "boilerplate" in the newly created project was something like 20 lines, not 1000. But I object to that, too.

If you need 1000 lines of text to have a ready-to-go software project, your development tools suck.

> Am I supposed to just choose something for myself re-inventing the wheel > again?

The things that you aren't inventing shouldn't be in your project; they should be in a library. Your project should have only the stuff you're inventing. (Subject to "eliminate dependencies", of course.) That way, you can upgrade to a new version of the stuff you're not inventing later, fixing bugs and adding features in it; and somebody looking at two of your projects can see what's the same and what's different between them without resorting to running diff.

I mean, seriously, this is one of the two most fundamental things about programming. If you disagree with it, it's not a matter of us having different subjective opinions. It's a matter of you being completely sodding ignorant about how to program.

Of course, there are overall similarities in structure; lots of C projects, for example, have a main.c, a .h file corresponding to each other .c file, and a Makefile. But generating a "boilerplate" project with stuff you edit doesn't save you any significant time over just giving you an example project you can look at and then type.

<comment><USER3> First of all, the stuff you are not inventing NOT always should be in the library. sometimes the best a library can do is to have a generator, let people run it and modify the resulting code.

> I haven't used Rails in a while, but last time I used it, the "boilerplate" > in the newly created project was something like 20 lines, not 1000. But I > object to that, too.

"config" directory alone in the newly generated Rails project is 330 lines. and another 60 in "app", 25 in "test". Those are mostly comments and configuration variables, but thats the whole idea.

> If you need 1000 lines of text to have a ready-to-go software project, your > development tools suck.

you completely missed the point.

The reason I'm looking for the boilerplate is because the library "sucks", not the tools.

expressjs doesn't provide me with what I need. had express js generated a full featured project for me ready to customize like rails does, I wouldn't be looking at boilerplates.

Where am I supposed to put my models? I'll go with app/models but thats ONLY because I've used such layout with Rails. I'm sure a lot of express developers are "sticking" their models somewhere else.

With express you need to decide where to put every single thing you need in your project instead of just 'lets use the standard layout which is ok for like 99.99% of all apps'

In case of rails I get (out of the box):

\- standard layout for files, e.g. where to put models, controllers, helpers, views, external libraries, test files etc. The directories are already added to the load path etc. I don't need to do shit. just write my code.

\- standard initialization sequence, nicely separated into boot.rb, application.rb, environment.rb, a file for every config environment, a directory of initializers and configs for various parts of the stack. (in the latest version the whole setup greatly simplified, but the idea still holds) \- standard "example" testing framework. \- standard Rakefile with a bunch of tasks \- standard way to localize

Some of those files you rarely need to change, but they still do not belong in the library.

if I go with the 'default' ORM I need to only put user/password into config/database.yml (and not even that since my mysql's root has empty password locally) and I'm ready to go.

With express I get almost none of this stuff. Well, the generated app.js certainly does some of the things but it does it in a kind of 'split it up as you wish into logical files' kind of way. i.e. for any non-trivial production application app.js will be split into files and it will probably be in a non- standard-just-invented-here kind of way.

I'm pretty sure if you look at currently running production express.js applications you will see much more wheel reinvention with how to configure/start/layout the app then you will find in any Rails project.

So until the standard generator will do this people will keep looking for boilerplates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Might also want to check out my company's bones framework: <https://github.com/developmentseed/bones>

Expressjs + Backbone, with plugins, multi-process servers, settings management, etc. It's used by large applications like our hosting service: <http://tiles.mapbox.com/>

<comment><USER5> The first time I see a company recommending to install VirtualBox and Ubuntu on it just to get the app to run on Windows. Better than saying Windows is not supported at all I guess :). Must be getting a lot of support tickets though. But it does look like interesting OSS project.

<comment><USER4> We're hard at work on a native Windows port. The software was released far before node.js had any Windows compatibility, and the priority has always been to make it better in an absolute sense, and then port it when possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks fantastic, especially with the integration with HTML5BP. Awesome work!

Just wondering if you considered using RequireJS instead of namespacing? Backbone plays quite nicely with RequireJS if you use James Burke's version which has been forked to be compatible: <https://github.com/jrburke/backbone/blob/optamd/backbone.js>

More info here: [http://jcreamerlive.com/2011/12/09/backbonejs-modular-app- us...](http://jcreamerlive.com/2011/12/09/backbonejs-modular-app-using- requirejs/)

<comment><USER7> Yup, <https://github.com/tbranyen/backbone-boilerplate/issues/22>

Currently anyone can use require.js. Delete the build folder and update the index.html.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd be curious to hear someone from Bocoup describe how this boilerplate fits in when you're already using a web framework.

In Rails, or Django, or whatever, wouldn't you want to use the built-in JavaScript folder structure and asset building strategy?

<comment><USER7> You would modify the folder structure of the boilerplate to accommodate the framework. Assuming your framework does asset building as well, you can just delete the build folder.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, boilerplate structures based on the most popular frameworks would be cool small project and time saver. I'm gonna adopt this idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's my boilerplate for GAE + Backbone.js + Require.js, which is very good for large scale Javascript development.

<https://github.com/ronreiter/webapp-boilerplate>

I've seen your source code, and your build directory makes a lot of sense. I'll add it to my boilerplate as well.

Thanks for your code!

<comment><USER7> Awesome, its still new, so make sure you report any issues you find.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nitpick:

 _I recently began to organize this work into a _conical_ boilerplate for Backbone._

I think you mean "canonical" :)

<comment><USER7> Fixed thank you =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Glad there are people spearheading discussions around backbone project organization.

I agree that backbone is very powerful, but talk is just beginning on how to fit it in to current web app projects that don't fit the boostrapped-singled- html page model

<comment><USER13> Yes, I too would love more information on integrating backbone into existing apps. We're adding a lot of JS at $work and I'd like to better organize it and reduce boilerplate code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Without getting into the technicalities of this, I am grateful somebody came up with this. I am working on a backbone + jq + mongo app right now & this might have been useful, at least in the early days.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is really cool. As someone who has only a little experience with backbone, I've really been looking for a more opinionated approach to backbone.

</comment><comment><USER16> This has been very helpful for me, learning Backbone.js: <http://ricostacruz.com/backbone-patterns/>

</comment><comment><USER17> Hats off to the hard-working Tim Branyen and the rest of the crew at Bocoup. Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER18> Commenting so I can look at this later.

<comment><USER19> just so you know, you were probably downvoted because hn approach is to upvote the story and then click your name to enter your profile and finally click "saved stories" to peruse at your leisure.

<comment><USER18> I'll note this for next time.

I would have preferred a "save this story" feature instead though (especially since "vote story" didn't immediately equate to "save story" for me)

<comment> brown9-2 You should check out instapaper or readability. Both offer browser bookmarklets for "Save for Later" functionality.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


One DNA test said he was likely to get Alzheimer's, the other said he wasn't - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/15/opinion/sunday/23andme-ancestry-alzheimers-genetic-testing.html <comment><USER2> Ancestry.com is known to report one of the ApoE-SNPs wrongly. I wouldn't be surprised if this happens for more rare genes as well.

> Word of caution to those with data from Ancestry.com: in our experience, > based on data in OpenSNP and from Promethease users since 2006, Ancestry > data always reports rs429358 as (T;T), even for people who's data from other > sources indicates they are (C;T).

[https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/APOE](https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/APOE)

</comment><comment><USER3> > "It's not about the issue being half-baked," the doctor replied, "but what > the heck do we do about it, once we know, other than create high anxiety?"

Loads. Are you seriously telling me that you can't think of _anything_ useful to do with this knowledge? (What about if he wants to have kids?)

> The doctor referred Mr. Fender to a geneticist, but it turned out he did not > see patients under 50 who were not symptomatic and had no family history of > the disease.

> Mr. Fender then tracked down Jill Goldman, a genetic counselor specializing > in dementia at the Taub Institute at Columbia University Medical Center, who > described a multistep process of counseling and confirmatory testing that's > been the standard of care for 25 years. She typically serves people at high > risk of inheriting a disease, and insurance usually covers both the > consultations and the tests. But it was unlikely to cover the costs in the > absence of family history. "It was like a chicken-and-egg thing," Mr. Fender > observes. "I needed a medical test to prove to them that it was real, but I > couldn't get a medical test until I could prove to them that it was real."

> Meanwhile, he happened to see a holiday special — $69 — for Ancestry's > genetic risk test.

There are problems here, but they're not with 23andMe or Ancestry.com, I don't think.

<comment><USER4> Really? You don't see a problem with these companies selling tests to people and then dumping the cost of confirming the result and dealing with the implications on the already strained healthcare system? Meanwhile 23andMe makes billions selling the data to pharma?

<comment><USER3> I don't because 23andMe didn't flag it in the first place, disconfirming it was an order of magnitude cheaper than his interactions with the supposed adults turned out to be and didn't involve any catch-22s or bullshit reasoning (a geneticist should know that family histories can be wrong and de novo mutations exist, and anyone with 2 brain cells to wire together should realize the incredible value of learning you have early-onset AD rather than paternalistically dismiss it as useless data), and the DTC companies are approaching 10 million customers with few major issues - not that this could be called a major issue in the first place.

> implications on the already strained healthcare system?

The healthcare system didn't do squat. That's kind of the problem here. In fact, if we're going to discuss the system as a whole, I would point out that not sequencing everyone is immensely costly and a major failing of the healthcare system, as testing would pay for itself just in terms of better dosing of drugs like warfarin. There shouldn't even be a question of learning whether you have early-onset AD, it should already be known.

> Meanwhile 23andMe makes billions selling the data to pharma?

They don't. The deals are in the low millions as far as is publicly known (and if you're referring to GSK's recent _investment_ in 23andMe, that wasn't a sale). And if they are, it's not clear whether that makes 23andMe even net profitable (they're at >$1b in total VC), and even if they have revenue, that doesn't mean their investors have made 'billions', and finally, if they did, good for them, because that means they created value by subsidizing DTC testing for almost a decade, cut through the regulation, and created a large useful database on par with the UK Biobank, which wouldn't've happened otherwise. (If you don't believe me, ask someone how useful the Million Veteran Project has been compared to 23andMe or UKBB; or just do a site search on biorxiv.org...)

<comment><USER4> You haven't stated the population risk of having a pathogenic de novo PSEN1 mutation. This would be an essential preface to whatever argument you are trying to make about the case described in the parent article.

'few major issues' is a liberal interpretation of being shut down by the FDA. Besides, nobody is measuring the impact of the test, so how do you know there are 'few major issues'?

> not sequencing everyone is immensely costly and a major failing of the > healthcare system

I do cancer genomics in my day job. I would not agree with this comment on any day of the week at the present time. The problem with 23andMe and their ilk is it just isn't that useful. Warfarin use is being phased out anyway, because of the many non-genetic causes of variability and the availability of drugs with more reliable pharmacokinetics. This same principle applies to the vast majority of serious medical conditions - lifestyle factors greatly outweigh any genetic component.

But the biggest problem with acting like 23andMe is a useful test is they don't actually do a proper test for the most common genetic condition that leads to a serious condition with high penetrance - BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations and breast and ovarian cancer. They don't do a proper damn test, they just test 3 out of the thousands of variants in the gene. Why do you think that is? Why don't they do a proper version of the most useful and important test, which can actually be used to prevent the patient getting cancer? The related question is - who benefits from 23andMe testing? The company or the 'Me'?

Re the 'billions', which of the following is more likely:

\- VCs have given 23andMe >$1b in total because they think it can make multiple billions by selling the data \- Any other reason

<comment><USER3> > You haven't stated the population risk of having a pathogenic de novo PSEN1 > mutation.

The population prevalence of any early onset AD is, and always will be, extremely low because of its pathogenicity, just like any other gene which is terminal with ~100% penetrance. The prior probability will be low, even without checking, and the posterior won't be large either for the usual Bayesian reasons. I shouldn't need to state this about the population risk, it should be obvious, especially to a cancer genomicist. Unless you want to argue that the mutation in question is very common...?

> 'few major issues' is a liberal interpretation of being shut down by the > FDA.

Being nearly shut down by the FDA is no one's problem but 23andMe's. I was actually referring to unwanted discoveries about family secrets, which are the major downside of 23andMe testing. (Infidelity is a good deal more common than early-onset Alzheimers.)

> Warfarin use is being phased out anyway, because of the many non-genetic > causes of variability and the availability of drugs with more reliable > pharmacokinetics. This same principle applies to the vast majority of > serious medical conditions - lifestyle factors greatly outweigh any genetic > component.

'Warfarin is being phased out' is another way of saying 'warfarin is still used', and the uses go well beyond just warfarin ([https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/07/23/065540](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/07/23/065540) covers a number of other drugs, 2 years ago), the uses only increase with time, and of course there's a chicken-and-egg thing here: drug response can't be predicted without large datasets, and large-scale sequencing supply will induce its own demand. (Just like how the UK Biobank's results induced even more interest in genetics.) Many other things can be usefully predicted and PGSes are increasingly of clinical utility ([https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/heritable/2018-khera.pdf](https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/heritable/2018-khera.pdf) [https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/selection/2018-torkamani...](https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/selection/2018-torkamani.pdf)) and they add onto 'lifestyle factors' prediction, considerably, there is no reason to use only one.

> They don't do a proper damn test, they just test 3 out of the thousands of > variants in the gene. Why do you think that is?

Presumably because validating the other thousands of variants to the degree it took to satisfy the FDA for the 3 variants they do look at would be extremely expensive, and I suspect there may be other reasons as well (why would their Illumina chips look for those variants in the first place given that they are rare and they can't use them?). And knowing isn't that useful. DeCODE knows the Icelanders with BRCAs, but isn't allowed to tell them: [http://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/right-not-know-when- igno...](http://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/right-not-know-when-ignorance- bliss-deadly)

> Re the 'billions', which of the following is more likely:

You're backpeddling furiously. First it was '23andMe made billions' off poor helpless customers, now it's merely they _might_ make billions. So now you're damning them for doing what they haven't even done yet. Wow. It's not a negative-sum game, you know.

<comment><USER4> You misunderstand my point.

Obviously, there are perfectly accurate and FDA approved tests for BRCA1 and BRCA2. The point is 23andMe don't do these tests. Therefore, how can you argue that their testing for lowly penetrant poorly characterised ultra-rare risk loci (which means most of the positive tests will be errors, as in this case) is somehow a great benefit to humanity, if they don't offer by far the most common, clinically significant and life saving genetic test there is?

As I said, the answer is of course that 23andMe are acting in their own interests. Anyone paying for the privilege to give away their genetic information to a private company should realise this.

> why would their Illumina chips look for those variants in the first place > given that they are rare and they can't use them?

And testing for ultra rare lowly penetrant AD loci is more useful?

Your entirely tangential example from DeCODE makes no sense. DeCODE was not a user pays self-referred program. It was a research project.

If you read my original comment, I did not state in past tense that 23andMe made billions (I presume you are merely careless in reproducing what I said, rather than disingenuous). My comment specifically was 'Meanwhile 23andMe makes billions selling the data to pharma?', indicating that there is potential for them to make billions or that they are in the process, not yet complete, of making billions. Their valuation by VC funding is entirely supportive of that potential and process. The CEO has come out many times stating their business plan is to sell population genetic data to pharma.

<comment><USER3> > Therefore, how can you argue that their testing for lowly penetrant poorly > characterised ultra-rare risk loci (which means most of the positive tests > will be errors, as in this case) is somehow a great benefit to humanity, if > they don't offer by far the most common, clinically significant and life > saving genetic test there is?

How can one thing be good if another thing is even gooder?

> As I said, the answer is of course that 23andMe are acting in their own > interests. Anyone paying for the privilege to give away their genetic > information to a private company should realise this.

It is not a negative-sum game. It is from the self-interest of the butcher we are able to buy dinner, not his benevolent regard for humanity. 23andMe can do a lot of good while seeking to do well.

> And testing for ultra rare lowly penetrant AD loci is more useful?

Apparently. Illumina and/or 23andMe chose to put it on the chip, so they apparently felt it was worthwhile.

> Your entirely tangential example from DeCODE makes no sense. DeCODE was not > a user pays self-referred program. It was a research project.

My point there was a comparison of the regulatory regimes that genetics _companies_ (DeCODE is not a 'research project', is a former NASDAQ-traded (DCGN)corporation which is now private post-bankruptcy, which did in fact use 'user pays self-referred programs' in addition to the national database they were hired for) are under such that even when they know with high accuracy about very serious mutations like BRCA, which you brought up as a huge dereliction, they may still not be allowed to tell people, which illustrates the incoherence and harm of the medical system in regards to genetic data; given the question about whether they would even be allowed to tell people (like you think they should not be allowed to tell people about AD loci), why would they spend resources testing for it?

> My comment specifically was 'Meanwhile 23andMe makes billions selling the > data to pharma?', indicating that there is potential for them to make > billions or that they are in the process, not yet complete, of making > billions

Oh, so the rest of that paragraph where you were contrasting how 'Meanwhile 23andme makes billions' to things that had already happened or were happening were also just 'potential' too? I see. How very careless (not disingenuous) of me.

<comment><USER4> > How can one thing be good if another thing is even gooder?

Why bother to be flippant this far down a thread on HN?

> It is not a negative-sum game.

I remain surprised that you should be quite so sanguine about the mutual benefit of giving away data to tech companies. 23andMe and others recently announced they would ask for explicit consent before sharing DNA information with other parties. How a genomics company could go on for this long without guaranteeing the privacy of its users is baffling.

> Apparently. Illumina and/or 23andMe chose to put it on the chip, so they > apparently felt it was worthwhile.

'Worthwhile' and 'marketable' to a consumer audience are not equivalent, as I have repeatedly pointed out with BRCA testing.

> My point there was a comparison of the regulatory regimes that genetics > companies...

You referenced the sequencing of Icelanders, which was indeed a research project (you've read the papers surely) and not a self-referred program, regardless of what else DeCODE does or is. You can't make a point about regulatory conditions in that setting and transfer it to consumer testing. But are you trying to say that it isn't worth testing BRCA because DCT companies might not be allowed to tell people the result, even though 23andMe are currently offering BRCA results?

> Oh, so the rest of that paragraph...

I would suggest that your ongoing efforts to tell me what I meant in my comment are better spent elsewhere. Particularly since as a privately held company, we don't know 23andMe's revenue, what deals have been made or what their future plans and projections are. What we do know is how much VC funding they have received, and the return on investment that VC's expect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is why the entire field of genetic counseling is a thing. Barring a few specific diseases, genetic determinants of health are very complex and poorly understood. Moreover, genetic testing, especially of the consumer sort, are not always right. Even high-accuracy clinical tests have false positives/negatives. You need more than a web portal to work through the personal implications of genetic testing data as a patient.

</comment><comment><USER6> Perhaps he simply has multiple genomes? [https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/science/dna-double- take.h...](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/science/dna-double- take.html?_r=0)

"But scientists are discovering that — to a surprising degree — we contain genetic multitudes. Not long ago, researchers had thought it was rare for the cells in a single healthy person to differ genetically in a significant way. But scientists are finding that it's quite common for an individual to have multiple genomes. Some people, for example, have groups of cells with mutations that are not found in the rest of the body. Some have genomes that came from other people."

<comment><USER7> Last I heard, 23andme was using microarrays. The transition to massively parallel sequencing didn't go well and they rolled back.

The DNA placed on the chip will be a heterogeneous mixture of whatever kind of cells provided. How they'd handle mosaicism, whether somatic or otherwise, I don't know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> perhaps it's de rigeur to mention this in a thread about genetic tests, but if you've had it done already by one of the major providers, the service mentioned in this piece (promethease) is really fantastic.

if you're lucky it won't tell you much you don't know, but learning about all the possible things to look out for (heightened risk of diabetes and adverse reactions to a medication, for me), sorted by magnitude, is exactly the kind of thing you'd hope to learn from personal genotyping. it's much more granular than what is offered by eg 23andme's health service, and is updated with new research. it's more than worth the $5.

<comment><USER9> How can we be certain that they aren't keeping a copy of our genome and/or sending it to other people?

<comment><USER10> Speaking of this issue, is there no FLOSS effort to create software that could provide this analyzing service?

<comment> another-cuppa Almost all the software used in biology is FLOSS. The problem is you need a lab process to get the data in the first place.

<comment><USER10> Say I have my genome in a text file, is there actually software that could give me disease predisposition data?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> IMO feeding the anxious with fear about supposed medical maladies is why their practices are unethical.

<comment><USER12> At least there are a million disclaimers, specifically saying if you have depression or anxiety disorder or hypochondria to not enable the health checks.

<comment><USER13> The concerning prospect, which seems inevitable, is that the government gets heavily involved (after the nth scare story), regulates the hell out of the sector, and then I'm paying $5,000 for a service that used to cost $99. That is, after - if - I get permission and approval through my insurance provider, and after I give a doctor $500 before and after each test. Then I'll be reading articles about how expensive simple genetic services are in America and nobody can figure out why. Then more laws will be proposed to fix the problem, for something must be done about the gouging fees charged by genetic services providers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is why they need to report QC scores with each SNP's genotype. They definitely have this data.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the most interesting take home coding challenges you have seen? - <AUTHOR> We want to improve the coding challenge we give candidates as part of our interview process. The challenge is usually a take-home exercise in our process.
We are looking for inspiration on interesting problems that not everyone has solved already, where you can easily copy+paste the solution online and that can be solved in less than a days work.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> My favorite was the Mars Rover challenge.</comment>


Instapaper Outage Cause and Recovery - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/making-instapaper/instapaper-outage-cause-recovery-3c32a7e9cc5f#.7bc50snwr <comment><AUTHOR> What happens when you lock yourself in to RDS.</comment>


IBM Power System E980 – Up to 64TB RAM per node [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp5510.pdf <comment><USER2> The redbooks are hidden gems - what documentation should be. When I used to work with these (very nice) bits of kit, the redbooks were my bible.

They'd tell you the gory details, you could learn from the experiences of the authors. The "official" documentation was good, but wouldn't ever say "you don't want to do it this way, it'll end in tears".

PS: Note that the book is 2 years old now. And my experience with them closer to 10 ;-)

<comment><USER3> It's hard to convey how different acquiring knowledge used to be in the old days.

There was so much less information .. no Google, no online groups, and certainly no stack overflow .. but red books were true compediums of hard won knowledge.

Today the core skill is being able to drive Google, to quickly sift search results, to parse through page after page of shitty low quality cruft to find the nuggets of knowledge you need.

Back in the day, you could read a red book on a plane flight and land with a greatly enhanced foundational understanding of the subject.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> (Page 3:)

>"The Power E980 server provides the following hardware and components and software features:

Up to 192 POWER9 processor cores.

Up to 64 TB memory.

Up to 32 Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) Gen4 x16 slots in system nodes.

Initially, up to 48 PCIe Gen3 slots with four expansion drawers. This increases to 192 slots with the support of 16 I/O drawers.

Up to over 4,000 directly attached SAS disks or solid-state drives (SSDs).

Up to 1,000 virtual machines (VMs) (logical partitions (LPARs)) per system."

<comment><USER4> They should definitely offer windowed cases, lots of colored LEDs, and neonz.

<comment><USER5> You joke, but supercomputers often have elaborate, decorative racks and vinyl decals.

<comment><USER6> Isn't there a story about how a supercomputer used a macbook just to display a nice the logo on the door - and for nothig else?

<comment><USER7> as I recall a reporter quipped to Seymour Cray that Apple uses a cray to help design the mac to which Dr Cray replied he uses a mac to design his supercomputers

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://yourdatafitsinram.net](https://yourdatafitsinram.net)

<comment><USER9> It doesn't mean anyone will take any notice (or that it's feasible to get data in and out). Long ago, supporting crystallography, I pointed out that each image would roughly fit in the cache, and the whole dataset in memory. (On Alphas with ~10MB and 1GiB, I think -- though the storage array was only ~250GB.) The developer of the processing program still didn't see fit to replace the disk-based sort written for a PDP11, which was where the bottleneck was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> 64 TB is all that that anybody would ever need on a computer.

<comment><USER11> No, that's 640.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h ...in fairness, I _do_ struggle to think what you could ever do to exceed 640TB of RAM, other than some very big scientific/simulation things (or SAP or Google Chrome;]). I mean, that's more _persistent_ storage than I expect most people to need for at least another decade (or at least whenever virtual reality really takes off), let RAM.

<comment><USER12> A sufficiently complex immersive VR with enough resolution could take up that kind of memory, but it's very much in the realm of science fiction right now.

When I'm dead and my mind is uploaded to one, a machine like this may prove comfortable.

<comment><USER13> > a machine like this may prove comfortable

Future virtual real estate listing: "Spacious 640TB expanse gives you room to let your mind wander. Large enough for two entities to share and even spawn subprocesses!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> IIRC, you can get E980-based VMs on IBM cloud running AIX or i. Also, IIRC, under PowerVM, these cores run 4 threads each.

</comment><comment><USER14> People here seem to be struggling for what to do with 64TB of memory.

The obvious ones are fluid dynamics, weather simulations, n-body problems, and simulation of quantum systems.

I know that Capital One gave a talk about they had an in memory anomaly detection system for fraudulent transactions which was under 1 Terabyte.

A less obvious one would be to accelerate trading of NLP systems like training GPT-3. You need the memory to not only keep the dataset and model you are training in memory. NVIDIA seems to have this idea:

[https://top500.org/system/179397/](https://top500.org/system/179397/)

Also, you could clean data by just loading all of the data that you collected in RAM and then cleaning it instead of swapping to disk often. Never underestimate the power of just buying ram.

<comment><USER9> > The obvious ones are fluid dynamics, weather simulations, n-body problems, > and simulation of quantum systems.

Those are typically run on distributed memory; the question should probably have been about shared memory. They're likely to be memory bound, depending on the application, but it's not obvious that shared memory in ~100 cores would win. Then consider checkpointing, for instance. (In my experience it's bioscientists who think they need huge shared memory but may well not, or couldn't feed it fast enough anyhow.)

Recent top supercomputers have had ~1PB or more total memory, though that's pretty variable, and there probably won't be many jobs using a large fraction of the machine. They may also (or only) have HBM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Most implementations of transactional memory are based on software. The > POWER9 processor-based systems provide a hardware-based implementation of > transactional memory that is more efficient than the software > implementations and requires no interaction with the processor core, > therefore enabling the system to operate at maximum performance.

Wow. You'd need a compiler that supports this feature (I think I read that GCC 4.7 has experimental support). This would support their traditional customer base - banks and other firms that want atomic operations at speed. There's probably some limitations around transactions across nodes, since you'd be leaving the chassis.

</comment><comment><USER16> Such an amazing machine. If I had a too much money and time on my hands I'd put one of these systems into a "pocket" machine room (one cold, one hot aisle). The ideas you could explore would be pretty amazing.

</comment><comment><USER11> NetBSD wasn't mentioned so I am left wondering if it runs on this "toaster."

<comment><USER17> Of course it runs NetBSD.

<comment><USER18> Funnily enough, POWER is one of the notable platforms NetBSD has basically no support for at all. NetBSD will run on 32 bit PowerPC Macs, but only those. No support for 64 bit kernels or userlands, and only the most bare bones support for early 32 bit OF power systems.

OpenBSD recently added support for the PowerNV/OpenPOWER platform, could probably use their locore to bootstrap a NetBSD system. Still wouldn't run on a PowerVM system like the E980 :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Who is the typical customer for this product, and to what application is it usually put?

<comment><USER20> These guys are analyzing one use case where you can sidestep a clustered Oracle pricing peak. If you can cram your whole thing in memory you have lower latency from disk and also on slow remote DB queries and smaller Larry bill.

(zoom the pictures for details)

[https://precisionitinc.com/project/sample-total-cost-of- owne...](https://precisionitinc.com/project/sample-total-cost-of-ownership- tco-analysis-oracle-exadata-vs-ibm-power9/)

<comment><USER21> insane that oracle DB for that many cores costs 7M USD</comment></comment></comment>


The Web We Have to Save - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426

<comment><USER2> Extensive discussion a month ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994653)</comment>


Show HN: Please review http://GetLocalNe.ws - <AUTHOR>

Originally begun as a sort of 'weekend' project, it has been a bit of a struggle, but finally I think we've brought it to a state where I can request reviews, feedback etc.:
http://GetLocalNe.ws
Please feel free to report bugs/problems or post feedback/suggestions on any aspect of it.
Geolocation accuracy (or inaccuracy) reports will be highly appreciated.
Quality of data is being rigorously assessed now, but the current data should be at least reasonably okay. Please let me know otherwise.
Work on identifying and integrating XML/RSS feeds from news sources is on now and this will be implemented in phase-II, within a week or so.
Identification and addition of new news sources is also being carried out now. You can help (greatly) by suggesting additional news sources known to you using the 'Suggest a News Source' link.
Please feel free to post feedback at the site Guestbook too.
Over to you now:
http://GetLocalNe.ws <comment><USER2> Nicely done, I like the minimalistic/simple look.

I'm not sure who the target audience is: if I'm living somewhere, I probably know about the local news sources, and if I'm in a shorter visit, I probably don't care (or if it's in a foreign country, I might not know the language).

One suggestion: add the posibility to suggest modification of the source data. Eg. a few of my local sources have missing diacritics. I'd love to contribute that small fix back, but can't.

This way you can also allow your readers to notify you of bad/broken links (ok, you can handle that if you're going to get the rss feeds) or anything else that may happen over time, so you don't need to worry about it, just look it up if reported.

Also, thank you for not requiring my exact location to be able to suggest (correctly) where I am. I'm annoyed by how many sites litely want to know my location just so they can "improve my browsing experience".

<comment><AUTHOR> > Nicely done, I like the minimalistic/simple look.

Thanks. It boosts our confidence a bit; we're not the only ones who like the design theme. :)

> I'm not sure who the target audience is:

You're spot on, based on what is available at the site now. However, as I mentioned in the post, we are working on integrating XML/RSS feeds for as many locations, from as many sources as we can. We hope once this is in place, it'll provide at least a minimum value for a larger mass to visit their local page daily/frequently. What do you think?

> add the posibility to suggest modification of the source data.

Has been on our to-do list already :-) This feature should go live in a few hours from now.

Thanks again for your detailed and _highly_ valuable feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I find your site very useful actually.I would also like to see some data on homepage, for example maybe some random news sources to show up like twitter's Trending Topics (it would be great if they are not just random but maybe most popular or something) just to make me more interested in exploring and to show me some activity on website. Nice job with current data, it looks ok not just for US but also for countries in Europe what i find really useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. We're already working on making the home page at least somewhat more 'engaging' and 'live' - thanks again for the suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm in Padova, Italy, but it reported me as being in Ancona, which is fairly far away, and not by any means the closest major city.

<comment><USER5> (Replying to davidw to keep all the geolocation reports in order)

I am in Amsterdam, Netherlands, but the site listed my location as Aalsmeer - given this is the first item in the list (as is Ancona for Italy), I think the geo lookup works at the country level, but not at the city level.

<comment><USER6> It pinged me correctly. Funny, the only newspaper I surfed to was for Ancona, Italy, which is near a place I used to live. Worked well!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for _all_ the feedback everybody.

I'll post individual replies too a little later.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable:

<http://GetLocalNe.ws></comment>


Body fat link to bacteria in feces - gm-conspiracy http://www.bbc.com/news/health-37452630 <comment><AUTHOR> A recent meta-analysis came out and claimed to show that we don't have evidence right now for a link between obesity and what we've measured so far about the human microbiome [0].

I can imagine a regime where two people with the same diet but with very different bacterial communities would have different health outcomes. It toally makes sense to me that if you have bacteria that are better at breaking down long fats into absorbable molecules, that you'd be getting more effective calories from the same food compared to someone without those bacteria. In fact, this has been shown to work in mice in 2006 [1].

However, in the real world, you aren't living in a sterile cage. You can sample bacteria from the environment and your microbiome is allowed to change in response to your diet. It's possible that in this regime, your diet impacts your microbiome much more than your microbiome impacts the outcome of your diet.

[0]([http://mbio.asm.org/content/7/4/e01018-16](http://mbio.asm.org/content/7/4/e01018-16)) - Looking For a Signal in the Noise - Revisiting Obesity and the Microbiome Sze and Schloss, mBio 2016

[1] [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/abs/nature05...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/abs/nature05414.html) An obesity-associated gut microbiome with increased capacity for energy harvest Turnbaugh et. al., Nature 2006

<comment><USER2> Animals used for meat production are bred for their feed conversion ratio [1] i.e. how much body mass can they produce for a given amount of food. If this can vary within other mammals, I don't see a reason why it couldn't happen in humans. I'm not sure if it would necessarily be microbiome related.

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

<comment><USER3> Surprised this isn't referenced more when people bring up "calories in, calories out"

edit: see my child comment if you somehow think I am arguing against the concept

<comment><USER4> Probably because it's still irrelevant to CICO. CICO doesn't tell you how much calories go in or out, rather it tells you to measure them wherever possible and make adjustments based on your weight changes.

<comment><USER3> It is relevant. You might have thought I meant it debunks it (or supports it), what I meant was it adds color to it. Conversion ratio allows you to quantify the difference from one person to another (the "adjustments based on weight change" you refer to)

<comment><USER5> I still think calories in health science are the last bastion of phlogiston in any of the sciences. It's a deeply over-simplifying metric that implies a false equivalency. We estimate the calories in food by the amount of heat equivalent they create when burnt. We estimate the calorie usage of a human body by the heat it produces during the effort. None of those estimates do justice to the complex biology and chemistry processes at work: not all calories are equal, they never have been, they never will be. (Humans aren't just heat-producing machines. Digestion is nothing at all like producing raw heat from food.)

ETA: It's the health science equivalent of the physics spherical cow fallacy writ large and taken dogmatically.

<comment><USER4> Good job, you've expounded on the obvious short-coming of "simplification". Most people have a hard enough time with algebra, how do you expect them to handle the many complexities of human biology and the digestive process. CICO is meant as a starting point in a diet, not a be-all, end-all encompassing idea. The spherical cow exists to simplify ideas so they can be more easily grasped and learned.

<comment><USER5> The problem with an over-simplification, _especially_ one that leads to a false equivalence (in this case calories != calories because it's an indirect measurement of energy by way of an energy by-product heat), is that it leads to drawing the wrong conclusions. Using CICO as a starting point in a diet is, best case, mostly harmless. On the other hand, it has been shown to be actually harmful to people's self-esteems and generally leads exactly to where we are with a steady stream of CICO "fad of the month diets" that don't produce general, reproducible results and can easily victim blame because "they weren't counting right".

Great, CICO might be a useful superstition for you. I'm not going to stop you from using it just as I'm not going to stop people from consulting their astrology charts. I do take umbrage at anyone that thinks CICO is good science; it really is about as much science as astrology.

<comment><USER4> > harmful to people's self-esteems

Hoo boy, that's what we need, more people with self-inflated self-esteem issues. I think what you mean is that it's harmful to their immediate gratification response.

> CICO "fad of the month diets"

Could you point one of those out to me, because the only CICO diets I'm aware of are things like Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers (oh and maybe Nutrisystem). Shit like South Beach, Atkins, Low-GI, Keto aren't focused on CICO, but on some other aspect of nutritional content.

<comment><USER5> From what I've read, and I know I'm veering towards stuff I don't have the place to discuss, both Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers seem to go through fad periods themselves, measurement revamps, have different scoring systems between each other, etc.

There are blogs and tumblrs devoted to the cycles that Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers tend to go through and the abusive victim blaming to people that occurs within their programs, especially to "repeat customers". You might not care anything about that sort of abuse (and in fact from many of your responses seem more than happy to fat shame), but it is a real problem that is hurting real people, compassion would go a long way...

<comment><USER4> For as long as those two have been around, I would expect that they have had to adjust their system based on the changes in nutritional science and to better balance their scoring systems (much like video games often do).

Abusive victim blaming? Really? You mean people don't like being told they're fat. That the only reason they aren't losing weight is because they aren't staying true to their diet. Don't get me wrong, some people are downright abusive, but that falls on the individual not the diet system. On the other hand if you're a repeat customer to something like this, it really shows you aren't learning how to control your diet on your own (which should be the ultimate goal of these programs, I don't know).

I don't put any stock in blogs that dedicate themselves to finding these stories to share (I consider them something akin to conspiracy websites, very different from, say, Yelp). A program so focused on customer abuse should have closed up shop long ago from a lack of customers.

<comment><USER5> For as long as those two have been around I'd expect they'd have solved weight loss entirely if it was truly as simple as CICO. I'd assume they would have worked themselves out of a business model. They are both for-profit companies and their revenues rely as much on that fact that they don't actually solve the problem as they do on revamping the system every few years to score new customers or returning old customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This strikes me as a classic place to consider whether this link is a correlation or a causation. It's really easy for me to imagine that diets likely to produce a great deal of body fat also produce a home for particular sorts of gut bacteria.

It's less obvious, but it's also not such a stretch to imagine mechanisms for positive feedback, in which some of these bacteria reinforce chemical signals that lead to consumption of more of the food they thrive on.

<comment><USER7> There have been studies that show stool transplants can suddenly cause massive weight changes in individuals. As is often the case with treatments to IBS. It matches up a lot with this study.

In addition a similar study has been tried on genetically identical twins. The difference being the bacteria.

How someone cultivates these bacteria, still a mystery. It could be antibiotics as much as potato starches.

<comment><USER8> > There have been studies that show stool transplants can suddenly cause > massive weight changes in individuals.

Which is weird, because:

> "The researchers found the strongest links with visceral fat, participants > with a high diversity of bacteria in their faeces had lower levels of > visceral fat."

A stool sample _decreasing_ biodiversity sounds counter-intuitive to me

<comment><USER9> The "massive weight changes" from stool transplants are most often weight loss, to my knowledge.

If so, this would be consistent with increased biodiversity (from the stool transplant) correlating with reduced visceral fat.

At any rate, the interaction is probably more complex than our current understanding, as this is a very new area of research.

<comment><USER10> It works both ways, but once people doing FMT realized that transplanting feces from an obese person to a thin person makes the thin person gain weight, they stopped doing that. All of the stool banks now screen for obesity and won't accept donors with high BMI. So now you should only see weight loss after FMT, or no significant change.

<comment> gm-conspiracy That is very interesting.

Can you provide any links for this FMT screening process?

<comment><USER10> Sure, here's one: [http://www.openbiome.org/stool- donation/](http://www.openbiome.org/stool-donation/)

<comment> gm-conspiracy $40 per stool. Nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you eat only fruit, veggies and lean meat, it makes sense that your gut bacteria would be different from someone who eats high levels of processed carbs and sugars. The things you eat already are known to cause body fat.

Links like this do not seem like a leap forward, to me.

Did they control for the critically important variable: the subject's diet?

<comment><USER12> That's assuming that slim people are always people who eat perfectly healthy. Yet seems we all know that one skinny person who eats the worst food ever, and never gets fat.

<comment><USER4> Probably because that one skinny person eats jack-all outside of the times you are observing them.

<comment><USER13> No, it's that some extreme outliers have insane BMRs. It's still a calories- in-calories-out situation, it's just their _base_ calories out is so high without doing anything special it's like a superpower. I've only met a few, but it's a real thing! Most of us go through something similar (but to a lesser extent) in our teen years. A few seem to keep it forever.

<comment> semi-extrinsic I'm curious whether anyone can provide some scientific evidence supporting the theory that these people actually burn calories faster? Seems like it should show up very clearly on their core body temperature (thermodynamics and all).

An alternative hypothesis would be that these people have a less efficient digestive system, so more of the calories just pass through.

<comment><USER13> Here ya go:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4535334/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4535334/)

<comment> semi-extrinsic Oh neat, they use oxygen consumption as a proxy for metabolism rate. That's actually really clever.

Still would be interesting to see whether it's correlated with body temperature, or if people with high metabolism naturally shed heat faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What was the name of the startup that would analyze your biome?

<comment><USER15> [http://ubiome.com/](http://ubiome.com/)

There may be others...

</comment></comment><comment> gm-conspiracy Anybody with fecal transplant experience care to comment?

<comment><USER16> I had one after having a c. diff infection. Didn't turn into a fatso. I did lose 25 lbs from the c. diff, though, now mostly gained back. We're very unclear about how the microbiome affects us; to be a FMT donor you must be in perfect health: not fat, no mental illness, etc.

A FMT is not a panacea for everything that ails. It can cure c. diff, but the results of it for anything else are much less clear. We don't really know why it works and the long term effects of such a dramatic treatment are unknown.

<comment><USER10> I don't know that I'd call FMT a _dramatic treatment_. It doesn't seem any more dramatic than a course of antibiotics, which we know wipes out most of your microbiome and tends to lead to IBS and weight gain, or taking probiotics which are intended to introduce bacteria strains into your microbiome.

<comment> gm-conspiracy Take a look at this book, _he Second Brain : The Scientific Basis of Gut Instinct and a Groundbreaking New Understanding of Nervous Disorders of the Stomach and Intestines_ :

[http://amzn.to/2dmlrM4](http://amzn.to/2dmlrM4)

It touches on how the enteric nervous system has similar structures to the brain and also produces neurochemicals.

Interesting perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I still have not managed to find the original paper.

<comment><USER18> There are some here, [https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/michelle.beaumont.html](https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/michelle.beaumont.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Isn't it possible that families tend to eat similar foods/diets and this social construct creates the obesity to begin with?

</comment><comment><USER20> As a mere reader of this article, my only question is:

Couldn't the bacteria be instead the result of a high body fat percentage?

<comment><USER21> The gut biome is self reinforcing. If you eat nothing but sugar (simplified example) the bacteria that thrive will be the ones that most resourcefully consume sugar. Other strains will wither away entirely or to a very insignificant state. Some, like yeast, actually kills 95% of the colony and the other 5% eat it, so it can take years to bring under control in people with immunocompromise (autoimmune disease, AIDS). If you eat nothing but fibrous vegetables (another simplified example) then your biome will be very different. And part of what makes you hungry is the nutrients the bacteria in your gut desire in order to maintain the colony. So you eat the right foods, then your body desires the right foods. You can re-program your biome to an extent by eating differently. And that goes for eating good or bad food. So I suspect (but cannot prove) that this is where the effect comes from.

<comment><USER10> An FMT jumpstarts that process, by introducing a bunch of colonists from a healthy microbiome all at once. Then you just need to nurture the new arrivals with proper diet, which you'll start to desire thanks to their influence. That's easier than changing your diet first (fighting what your microbiome wants) and hoping to pick up enough different bacteria for them to establish themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Give me any bacteria and I will keep the body fat low... you know, by just eating as much as my body needs?</comment>


TestFlight Beta Testing Goes Live for All iOS Developers - chris-at http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/23/testflight-beta-testing-goes-live-for-all-ios-developers/ <comment> chris-at Though having to do a Beta App Review makes this useless.</comment>


Boston Dynamics' Petman robot successfully wears clothes - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/05/boston-dynamics-petman-robot-successfully-wears-clothes-video/

<comment><USER2> It has been interesting to watch Dr. Raibert's ideas grow. A long time ago there was an interesting debate going on between subsumption architecture that Dr. Brooks was pushing and Dr. Raiberts work (both at MIT). As a robot guy I've been fascinated by both of them, but Raibert's work was hampered by the fact that his creations were only stable when constantly moving and Brook's creations were always stable. The argument went that dynamic stability was so energy inefficient it would not be a good fit for doing locomotion.

The advantage of dynamic stability is of course that your robot is constantly in danger of falling down, that is its natural state, so trying to knock it over doesn't really change what its doing a whole lot.

I did not think I would see dynamic stability in a humanoid shape though (power off condition is laying horizontal :-). Watching it is pretty unnerving. I'm impressed they have it working.

</comment><comment><USER3> Between this and their Big Dog project hurling concrete blocks around, I feel mildly worried...

[http://hackaday.com/2013/03/29/bigdog-throwing-cinder- blocks...](http://hackaday.com/2013/03/29/bigdog-throwing-cinder-blocks/)

<comment><USER4> Don't worry, Anonymous will hack them and keep us safe.

Certainly, the power divide between the government and people (inside or outside of its borders) continues to grow. The scary thing to me (in a distopian future) is that robots won't hesitate to do as they are programed. Soldiers sent in to "subdue" their own population might at least think twice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's only a matter of time now before robot nudity is a registerable sex offense...

Unfortunately, the announcement isn't that the robot has the dexterity to put on the clothes itself, but rather that its sensors and other functionality work through clothes, i.e., a hazmat suit.

<comment><USER6> Petman isn't doing any kind of active sensing (vision, radar/lidar, etc) in these videos. The clothing has nothing to obstruct other than movement, but it looks baggy enough such that it doesn't do this either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As someone who works from home, I get a similar response when I'm out of my bathrobe+pjs.

</comment><comment><USER8> Isn't it odd that they keep claiming the robot is being created to "test combat clothing for soldiers"?

</comment><comment><USER9> Is it completely free to walk on its own or do the cables assist with balance?

<comment><USER10> There is a video [1] of it walking on its own. I suspect they have the cables because it was leaning over, twisting, squatting, etc and they probably want to assist with balance.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mclbVTIYG8E>

<comment><USER11> They're probably fall-dampening cables with very light tension. These types of cables are like rate limiters for falling objects. It would prevent it from slamming down on the floor if balance was lost, but the tension is very light; just enough to take up slack. Because they're positioned only to the sides and the rear, their greatest effect would actually be to make balance _more_ difficult for a bipedal robot.

<comment><USER12> I'm pretty sure they are used to deliver power as well.

<comment><USER11> The cables at the top are all for fall protection. The tether (power and control) goes through its ankle or hip area, depending on the video. The one video where you see multiple strands hanging down directly from the top are connected to a block and tackle pulley system. If you watch the one shot from behind you can see the hoist hook in the center of its shoulders up high. You can also see the tether at the hip area in the same shot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great, now I'm going to have nightmares for weeks.

</comment><comment><USER14> The cables definitely look like training wheels. Even a very slight bit of tension could assist with balance. Of course that assumes the robot has some sort of kinesthetic sense.

<comment><USER15> I'd assume it's probably easier to iterate and test without worrying if your ridiculously expensive robot is going to fall on it's face. Even something small like friction with the clothes or binding of cloth in a servo/joint could cause it to fall, I suppose.

I'm sure they wanted their proof of concept out just to be the first robot with clothes, but just didn't want to risk damage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pick up that can.</comment>


The New Ruby Inside: I've Gone All Daring Fireball on You - <AUTHOR> http://www.rubyinside.com/new-ruby-inside-3270.html

<comment><USER2> Like catch404 mentioned, I'm not seeing the connection to Daring Fireball. The website is rather chaotic-looking with banner ads, embedded videos and columns everywhere.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I love the new design. Peter Cooper's writing is still great.

</comment><comment><USER3> I struggle to see the daring fireball influence?</comment>


DeCSS Haiku - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS_haiku <comment><USER2> The haiku itself:

[https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/decss- haiku.txt](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/decss-haiku.txt)

</comment><comment><USER3> Also related is the idea of an Illegal Prime number[1], the binary representation of which is a compressed version of the DeCSS source code while also being sufficiently large to be published on the list of largest prime numbers at the time.

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

</comment><comment><USER4> See also descramble.mp3 - [http://audio.textfiles.com/music/descramble.mp3](http://audio.textfiles.com/music/descramble.mp3)

</comment><comment><USER5> A lot of us may espouse the view that "code is poetry" and may even have the sticker to show for it on our laptops -- but how many of us have actually written a code poem in this fashion?

In their infinite wisdom our technological ancestors created high level languages to help us on our way and this article reminds me that code is language, it tells a story.

Code is meant to be human readable and it's meant to be the ultimate design document. Code is in its very nature self-documenting however we must attain a level of mastery before we can write code others can actually read.

I'd say the disparity between people who can write any old code and people who can efficiently write readable code is the greatest challenge to our industry and will likely always be.

Code is at the nexus of mathematics and poetry and sure we can choose convenient notations to make the output more elegant but without input from the author's hand it'll only ever be machine readable.

<comment><USER6> > how many of us have actually written a code poem in this fashion?

Does it have to be written in this fashion? The PGP community defeated US export restrictions in the past by literally printing books filled with source code. Books are protected free speech in the US.

<comment><USER7> Funny anecdote, from an article about the novel Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson:

> One of the noteworthy features of the novel CRYPTONOMICON is that it > contains a new cryptosystem invented by Bruce Schneier, called Solitaire. > [...] Since Solitaire is strong enough to be subject to U.S. laws governing > export of crypto technology, this means that when the text of the novel is > rendered in electronic form it becomes an export-controlled good.

They relaxed that restriction shortly afterward, so Neal got to have his cake (having his ebook classified as weapons-grade), and eat it too (sell it anyway).</comment></comment></comment>


Rewrites of the STM core model – again - <AUTHOR> http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2014/02/rewrites-of-stm-core-model-again.html

<comment><USER2> I'm going to try to write up an explanation of this -- mostly to get it straight in my own head, and partly in hopes that if I get pieces wrong someone more knowledgeable will write in to correct me. (Armin Rigo, do you read Hacker News?) Most of this is based on my reading of [https://bitbucket.org/pypy/stmgc/raw/c7/c7/README.txt](https://bitbucket.org/pypy/stmgc/raw/c7/c7/README.txt).

So this is all based on two core features at the C(/assembly ?) level. One is the ability to apply a per-thread offset to all memory access (using "%gs:", whatever that is); the other is a (Linux-only) way to move where a memory- mapped page of memory points (remap_file_pages()).

The trick is for all data structures to be allocated in shared-memory pages unique to each thread, then re-map them so they're overlapping. Now we have all threads sharing all heap memory structures (just as you would in a traditional threading model), and zero overhead to read or write to a data value.

In a traditional threading model, you would then put in code that checks for a lock before accessing (read OR write) any data field that might be shared (and ever modified). Threads would block until a field was free before acquiring a lock and reading from or writing to it. That's a price paid for each and every access -- and if conflicts between threads are rare it's a high price to pay.

In STM we instead allow threads to modify data in (short) "transactions", then "commit" these transactions at the end; rolling back one or the other when two threads conflict. In Armin's new approach here's how this gets done:

Reading shared data is fine... go ahead and read to your heart's content. When you need to WRITE to a field inside a transaction, you first clone the entire memory page (that's an expensive operation). Then you adjust the per-thread offset so it's pointing to your own memory page and you continue reading and writing freely -- the only overhead is keeping a list of fields modified and read during the transaction.

At the end of the transaction, you pay again. First, you check whether someone changed data you had read: if so then all the work of the transaction needs to be abandoned and you can start over. Then you copy the modified values back to the "shared" location (if another thread was using them then IT may later discover that it needs to start over).

The theory of STM is that when conflicts are rare there will be few rollbacks so you'll mostly just pay the cost of cloning memory, tracking reads and modifications, and copying the values back. This will (hopefully) be less overhead than having to check for a lock before reading or writing any value, so an STM approach will be better than a traditional threads-and-locks approach. The innovation here is using the memory-mapped page and per-thread offset to allow normal access to memory for reads/writes instead of the traditional approach to STM which requires adding extra indirection logic to each and every memory read or write.

So, smart people of Hacker News... how accurate is my summary?

<comment><USER3> One thing to add is that while it's worth optimizing the expense of all of these operations, that's not the point. It may very well be that locked algorithms will always outperform STM.

Instead, the advantage lies in STM providing a much nicer userland experience. It's downright trivial to write some hard concurrency programs using STM.

You do have to worry about contention causing too many rollbacks, but by-and- large STM is a drop-in "make concurrency make sense" module.

For many examples see Simon Marlow's Concurrency in Haskell book.

<comment><USER4> As I understand it, which may be wrong, this is a PyPy level innovation, used by the VM, and among the intentions _is_ simply speeding up Python to work effectively with multiple threads and no GIL. It is unclear how to directly offer it to end-users without making what the end-users are using something fundamentally Not Python.

<comment><USER5> You are half correct and half wrong. We want to also speed up programs that handle largely independent events without using threads, which is a much bigger "market" in Python than allowing existing multithreaded programs to run faster. The idea is to create threads under the hood, and have each one run a complete event in a transaction -- basically, in standard Python terms, forcing the "GIL release" to not occur randomly. This means adding threads and then controlling the transaction boundaries with a new built-in function. This is a change that can be done in the core of the event system only (Twisted, etc.) without affecting the user programs at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Putting "PyPy" somewhere in title would improve it several orders of magnitude.

<comment><USER7> To be fair, this is to some extent what we have domain display for. I glanced at the title and then at the domain and knew what to expect.

<comment><USER6> Huh, I never ever look there. When I went back to check I saw "blogspot.com". On third check I finally saw what you meant, "morepypy". I accept that helps but not all humans / tools (search/alt readers) are going to be looking at domain. We're lucky in this case domain gave a clue. Posters should not rely on this, they should be mindful of how their submitted title will be read/interpreted in context. They only get to post it once, we have to read it many times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Good results means we brough down the slow-downs from 60-80% (previous > version) to around 15% (current version).

That is good results! Great work Armin and team.

</comment><comment><USER9> So, in best-case scenario we can run one-process-multicore-gevent-app?

<comment><USER10> STM is about parallelism of your computations, not about concurrency (or any kind of IO). You mess these two. If you want genent on multiple cores -- just pre-fork N gevent workers.

<comment><USER8> Concurrency:

* A property of your algorithm and your problem space. Some frameworks / libraries have multiple ways of handling concurrency. Callback chains, threads, waiting on events, etc. This says nothing at all about whether you'll get a speed-up at runtime or not.

* Concurrency is usually split into CPU and IO.

\+ CPU concurrency means your code computes things that are largely independent on each other (you divide an image into sub-blocks and compute some function all of them and those functions are concurrent while they run).

\+ IO concurrency means your code does input output operations that are independent. You might handle multiple client connections. A connection from one client is not in large, dependent on connections from another client.

Parallelism:

* Parallelism is a property of your runtime system, the particular library, language, framework, hardware, motherboard, that helps you run multiple concurrency units at the same time.

* You would often want to map your concurrency units to run on the parallel execution resources your platform provides as well as possible.

* Could also split into CPU and IO parallelism:

\+ CPU : Can execute multiple compute concurrency units at a time. Think of threads, multiple processes, multiple compute nodes. You actually spawn a thread for each of those sub-image blocks and run computations at the same time.

\+ IO : You can spawn a thread or process for each client connection and then reads and writes to sockets will effectively execute in parallel. Now, you only have one motherboard, one kernel, and maybe one network card. So deep down they are not 100% and completely parallel. A large transfer from on thread could clog the network buffers or the switch downstream, but it is as good it gets sometimes. Or you could use a select/epoll/kqueue kernel and syscall facility to execute multiple IO concurrency in parallel.

This means:

* You could have IO concurrency but no IO parallelism. In your code you actually read from client 1 socket , then client 2 socket, then when a 3rd client, from client 3 socket, in a sequence in some for loop. Terribly inefficient.

* You could have IO concurrency and IO parallelism. You can spawn a thread (yes even in Python this works great). You can spawn a green thread (something based on eventlet, gevent). You can start a callback chain. Underneath of a lot of this is quite often that epoll/select/kqueue mechanism just disguised with goodies on top (green threads, promises, callbacks, errbacks, actors etc).

* You could have CPU concurrency and CPU parallelism. You managed to map your 100 image sub-blocks to 100 threads. If you have 4 cores, maybe 4 of those will run at a time and you let the kernel distribute those. Or you can hand spawn 4 execution queues with 4 threads, pin them to each CPU core and map 100 sub-block to 4 worker threads.

* You could have CPU concurrency but no CPU parallelism. This is if say you use Python's threads to compute those sub-blocks, underneath it has a GIL lock and will only run one of those units at a time. You could spawn a callback-chain in Node.js and to compute each of those 100 sub-blocks and you will also run only one a time and they might even get confused with each because they'll block each other in a non-obvious way.

<comment><USER11> You can also have parallelism without concurrency actually. For example if you use SIMD instructions you're using parallelism with no concurrency.

<comment><USER12> GPGPU as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


AXR: Arbitrary XML Rendering - <AUTHOR> http://axr.vg <comment><USER2> This absolutely will not go anywhere if it requires either a browser plugin or buy-in from browser vendors. I'd suggest creating a JavaScript library that can read the XML/HSS format and render them as HTML/CSS/SVG.

<comment><USER3> Even better: Why not build on and extend the work that SASS/LESS have already started?

<comment><USER4> Well, SASS/LESS are just supersets of CSS. They aren't designed to do anything else but what is compilable into actual CSS. I'm not sure how a feature like filters or event triggers would actually work in this language.

We will definetely have a look at those.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'll probably get flamed for this, but I often fall into wishing there was xml ontologies + formatting rules. Skipping the HTML layer entirely. Be model- centric instead of html centric.

      "model"                            presentation
      </comment><comment>-                            </comment><comment></comment><comment>

                .order { .. }

...
       .agent { .. }

      here your model has turned into html, yet has to be
      re-expressed as presentation rules. your model is
      presentation. WAT.

      =>
      <order>                            order { render: box }
        <agent>                          agent { font: ... }

I'm sure it's been done many times before but I've never read about why it failed.

<comment><USER4> That's exactly what we have in mind. The thing is
 and
 are just presentation tags, when, in fact, you are styling them with css too.

In hss object model, everything is a box. How it is styled and how it behaves it's up to you. There will be an HSS framework, which will provide basic capabilities like heading, dropdown, radio. We are proposing a syntax like order { isA: heading }

<comment><USER5> Maybe in the future the box model will be one `dsl` in a larger rendering system that borrows from stack based 2d, matrix based 3d. So you can use what fits best when it fits best.

edit : Traces of this are in place, js based advanced layouts , webgl, canvas. It's just non composable right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> CSS and HTML have quite a few baked in flaws that are unlikely to get fixed anytime soon, but there are workarounds. Most of the benefits of AXR seem to be similar to using XML, XSL, and LESS, which has the extra huge advantage of running in every major browser today. I think writing a good XML, XSL, LESS tool chain would be more practical, but I admire your spunk.

<comment><USER7> _CSS and HTML have quite a few baked in flaws that are unlikely to get fixed anytime soon, but there are workarounds._

That's the problem. 90% of modern web design is all about workarounds. Those workarounds became more important than core technologies, because the latter no longer capture typical use cases of the web.

<comment><USER6> Actually a lot of modern web design is about working around the virtues of HTML, such as users controlling presentation and intentional markup.

My point is that there's no workaround for "doesn't work in your browser".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm sorry to be skeptical, but this seems both redundant and pie-in-the-sky.

In the presentation they say they're looking for "Computer Science Engineers" make me think this is a bunch of aggravated designers. On the other hand, there _is_ code on GitHub. But it's C++, which makes it feel like this is a bunch of aggravated developers who can't stand having to do HTML or CSS and want to do "real engineering" (usually defined as non-webapps). This seems to pop up every other month. All the while people keep making awesome web sites, applications and libraries with the stack we have today.

A small group of people is usually all it takes to change something, on the other hand, I don't think is change people want or need.

That said, I wish them all the best.

<comment><USER4> Fortunately, our team is made up of both designers and programmers. In fact, our lead programmer is also our lead designer (small team).

It is true, you can make really awesome apps with HTML5/CSS. We, ourselves, are doing the same thing.

We are bringing to attention some new concepts that we think have not been taken into acount into HTML simply because HTML features have just been stacked together and it HTML simply evolved into something it was not intended to.

On the other hand, the HTML5 completion date has been announced as 2020. Do you really think HTML5 will still suit the needs of the web then? It should probably be HTML7.

<comment><USER9> > HTML5 completion date has been announced as 2020

CSS2.1 became a W3C Recommendation on 7 June 2011. People have been using the HTML5 doctype for years now, never mind quite a few of the features. Arguing that the W3C is slow to standardise things is preaching to the choir, but CSS3 or HTML5 not being standards has had no impact on the ecosystem that's been using -moz-border-radius since Firefox 1.0. (that's 8 years ago. There are web designers that aren't twice that age out there).

Also, sorry to be that person, but isn't SASS/SCSS (edit: and calc()) "good enough"™. The problem with XML files not rendering nicely in the browser is not anywhere near as important to developers as XML not supporting a way of plugging in JavaScript as HTML does with


How News Aggregators Help Development Communities Shape and Share Knowledge [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://ctreude.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/icse18.pdf <comment><USER2> Respectfully, and I am not an academic, but from my perspective, it appears that it took 7 researchers to interview 22 people on /r/programming, and then write 12 pages about it with the conclusion that if you want to write software, /r/programming has some good news, and that people that use reddit are comfortable in upvoting and downvoting posts?

And you have 49 citations - is this some sort of comedy journal like the onion that I am missing, or did these people just need to do this for homework? And you are sharing this at a programming conference? yikes.

<comment><USER3> It's more about trying to formalize that knowledge into evidence-supported statements.

Kinda like they mentioned in article, there's tacit knowledge and externalized knowledge. They are trying to condense tacit knowledge in this area into externalized, or formalized, knowledge.

This formalizing of knowledge makes it easier to build on top of it and work with. So while it may seem silly to survey something that is tacitly known, it's also good to formalize this knowledge into something a bit more trustworthy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A scientific abstract exists to _summarize_ the results of a study not to _promise_ the results. This abstract is poor professional practice.

</comment><comment><USER5> _This_ is why a qualified peer review process matters in research</comment>


Evolving Wind Turbine Blades using a Genetic Algorithm - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZUNRmwoijw <comment><USER2> It looks like it gets stuck in a local maximum. Too bad it takes such a long time to test each turbine. I wonder if it can be GPU accelerated.

Seriously, I've never wasted my CPU time on Folding@Home ot SETI@Home, but I would give it for something like this.</comment>