Systemd developer asks tmux to add systemd specific code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/428 <comment><USER2> Salient comment: "Or somebody could go find the actual problem @keszybz saw here - systemd/systemd#3005 - which is: _In particular, for my gnome session, if I log out, without KillUserProcesses=yes I get some processes which are obviously mistakes. Even if I log in again, I 'm much better starting those again cleanly._ fix that, and stop trying to make systemd break the world because somebody's gnome session doesn't currently exit cleanly."

<comment><USER3> Wait are you saying we should rely on processes behaving nicely? That's not how you design a robust system. It's why we have pre-emptive multitasking, not co-operative. And why mobile OSes sandbox applications rather than trusting them to be good.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I understand, but it seems that systemd is correctly killing processes when the session ends. and that shell managers like screen and tmux had hacks to make them survive sessions ends in the past (remember when you had to use nohup screen?). they seem to simply have asked for tmux to add their flavor of nohup to the start up check too.

<comment><USER5> I would suggest you learn something about Unix before spousing such opinions, because I don't know where to even begin

nohup is _not a hack_

What systemd is offering has nothing to do with nohup, it's not "a flavour" of nohup it's a completely different thing

Systemd is not correctly killing processes, this was NEVER DONE LIKE THIS, they decided this out of a whim because apparently Gnome can't do the right thing (how surprising)

<comment><USER6> Heh--it's like nohup(/daemom), except you make a SOAP call through some middleware to beg some more middleware for mercy so you can do the thing your user asked you to do, because everyone's being punished for a few programs' poor use of the old, more portable API. (I exaggerate, slightly.)

I'm not looking forward to what comes next when Gnome breaks through the new system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why is this upsetting to so many people? This seems to me like a simple request to add platform-specific code, and in the end there was a decision to take a different approach to solve the problem.

Seems to me like yet another systemd two minute hate. It's getting quite tiresome to see.

<comment><USER8> I think it's pushback against what a lot of people see as systemd overreach/arrogance.

"Hey, can you implement and maintain new platform-specific code to work around this problem we're going to introduce by breaking behaviour of programs using a 21-year-old API?"

It feels especially egregious because, as commenters pointed out, implementing the PAM API is a better (and undoubtedly more portable) way to do this that the developers of systemd didn't seem to consider. Instead, they jumped straight to "implement a custom fix just for us so our breaking change doesn't break your app too".

<comment><USER9> If it's a reaction against perceived overreach/arrogance, then those people are just contributing noise to the whole process. People complain about software development in the corporate world being overinfluenced by interpersonal politics rather than pure engineering, but stuff like this is 100x worse than almost anything you'll find in the most toxic corporate environment.

Seriously, every single person who feels compelled to offer their opinion based on what is an emotional response to Lennart's (or anyone's) "overreach/arrogance" is contributing little more than noise to the whole process. It's far too easy for someone who doesn't interact face-to-face with someone else to fall in a trap of assuming the worst about another person when there's a technical disagreement; this is a form of cognitive bias that pollutes development in the corporate world all the time. I'm as guilty of it as anyone, and I've learned to be wary of the temptation to project bad qualities on other people who I disagree with but don't interact with directly.

In the open source world it's so much worse though- not only do almost all developers interact indirectly (i.e. not face-to-face), but there are potentially thousands of people who are basically just casual observers who want to jump in to give their 2 cents. That's great! But it's only great as long as those 2 cents aren't just people bikeshedding, or actively trying to make things personal rather than technical. Unfortunately, more often than not it is bikeshedding, and literally the only thing they have to bikeshed about is to try to make it personal. :(

<comment><USER10> IMHO this is the root cause: Systemd developers trying to use corporate environment persuading techniques in the open source community.

Instead they should take a step back and rethink their proposed solution every time they get strong feedback or face some resistance from the open source community.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A surprising and troubling comment in the github comments: "Honestly, I don't see why processes should be able to decide that they should run forever."

I actually let slip an f-bomb reading that. It shows a terrible understanding of longstanding unix philosophy, (and also straw-mans the argument).

Happily, it doesn't seem that was from a systemd developer as far as I can tell from their website. Still, it's a reminder that the userbase (and developer base) that engage with Unix/Linux/GNU is varied, and may not have grown up with the same sensibilities that people my age have about where the right line between user, system and sysadmin should lie.

<comment><USER12> > Still, it's a reminder that the userbase (and developer base) that engage > with Unix/Linux/GNU is varied, and may not have grown up with the same > sensibilities that people my age have about where the right line between > user, system and sysadmin should lie.

This is a very relevant remark and highlights the root of the entire discussion, I believe. There seems to be an ideological fault line here. And I think, it is between those who wish for some ideal, all encompassing design and those who have been burned by the short sightedness of such ideals. Grand engineering ideals cemented into closely knit structures are really great on paper. But some years down the line, you realize you have made too many commitments, optimizing for something not relevant anymore. And now you have to circumvent all those greatly engineered structures. It's a bit like looking at satellite cities, the visions behind them, and what has become of them.

The Unix philosophy is mostly about avoiding those pitfalls. But I guess, understanding this might only come with experience.

<comment><USER11> Totally, this is put better than I could have, but is exactly how I feel watching and experiencing the systemd thing play out. I'm old enough now that I (I'm such a nerd) don't really want my init system messed around with, but I do get there may be better ways in general.

In practice though, to me that would mean something that while looking pretty and being better automated would come with many fewer hidden parts and many fewer interactions between parts than sysvinit. That is, I'm looking for simplicity, composability, editability.

The implied technical debt of one system to rule them all is a lot over 20 years, and you will inevitably have to get into line with a dominant system as a developer downstream from it.

At any rate, happily this behaviour was publicised enough that I won't spend a day googling it when it happens to me. :)

<comment><USER12> > Totally, this is put better than I could have, but is exactly how I feel > watching and experiencing the systemd thing play out. I'm old enough now > that I (I'm such a nerd) don't really want my init system messed around > with, but I do get there may be better ways in general.

Thanks. I'm kind of in the same boat, age wise. I have the impression (and this comes from a number of comments online and a podcast with Poettering I listened to lately) that any criticism from the experienced crowd is seen as a sort of elitism of people entrenched in their abilities they honed over many years. This might be the case for many critics, and Poettering may be right to dismiss them. But I'm afraid that the very valid criticism regarding overall design goals is lost in all of this. The systemd team steams on, believing that all naysayers are just stuck in their ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Because a project should _never_ have platform specific code.

      justin@t420:/tmp$ git clone https://github.com/tmux/tmux.git
      justin@t420:/tmp$ cd tmux
      justin@t420:/tmp/tmux$ wc -l osdep*
         95 osdep-aix.c
         88 osdep-cygwin.c
         80 osdep-darwin.c
        133 osdep-dragonfly.c
        202 osdep-freebsd.c
         41 osdep-hpux.c
         98 osdep-linux.c
        137 osdep-netbsd.c
        157 osdep-openbsd.c
        101 osdep-sunos.c
         41 osdep-unknown.c
       1173 total

Apparently people have been trying to get tmux fixed for FIVE YEARS NOW

[http://tmux-users.narkive.com/LXp72CHV/pam-support-in-tmux](http://tmux- users.narkive.com/LXp72CHV/pam-support-in-tmux)

<comment><USER14> Didn't know linux also means systemd.

<comment><USER13> So it's fine to support FIVE different bsd systems (darwin, dragonfly, freebsd, netbsd, openbsd) but one needs to draw the line at better supporting the init system used by every major linux distribution.

Okay.

<comment><USER15> The BSD systems have had 20+ years of divergence. There are areas where they'll borrow from each other when one of the others has a tool that works better than the status quo, but the kernels are vastly different animals. When a BSD does make a world-breaking change, like pledge(), it owns it, and will patch software itself to handle it, not pester upstream to stop what they were working on to implement their special snowflake code, which is what the systemd developers want to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cast your mind back to when SIGHUP first started getting sent to processes on logout. Some programs had to start making an new API call to block SIGHUP killing them. nohup was invented. Some admins probably disabled SIGHUP for a while as it sorted out, and some probably called for these kids and their newfangled signals to get off their lawn. So it goes.

<comment><USER17> > _Cast your mind back to when SIGHUP first started getting sent to processes > on logout._

That would be before 1979. nohup was in 7th Edition. I haven't checked 6th.

Ironically, by pointing to the fact that one has to go back through _37 years_ of documentation, education, user experience, and scripts you are making other people's point for them. Especially by drawing attention to one of the major flaws in the "nohup was new once" argument, which is that in 1979 (or before) there wasn't a prior 37 years built up to contradict. (-:

<comment><USER13> I was curious what the oldest reference of it was,

[https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history- repo.git](https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo.git)

has different branches for various unix versions

Seems the earliest reference I could find in there was dated november 1973, but it is from a full import in 77:

commit c849507974bd2c0e2fd8c17e06f6f65b68075ca9 Author: Bill Joy <firstname.lastname@example.com> Date: Wed Nov 23 12:43:50 1977 -0800

        Start development on BSD 1
        Create reference copy of all prior development files

        Synthesized-from: 1bsd

Some of the earlier copies i can see were even just shell scripts:

      trap "" 1 15
      if test -t 2>&1  ; then
    	  echo "Sending output to 'nohup.out'"
    	  exec nice -5 $* >>nohup.out 2>&1
      else
      	exec nice -5 $* 2>&1
      fi

Research-V3-Snapshot-Development did not have nohup Research-V4-Snapshot- Development had the nohup man page but not nohup Research-V5-Snapshot- Development has nohup.c

commit 0281f55d1cf7aa94555d8522d8b37161b97791be Author: Ken Thompson <firstname.lastname@example.com> Date: Tue Nov 26 18:13:21 1974 -0500

        Research V5 development
        Work on file usr/source/s2/nohup.c

        Co-Authored-By: Dennis Ritchie <email@example.com>
        Synthesized-from: v5

Then later v7 reverted back to the shell version

commit 6144d5b3a973b515977eef01a828cdd82c480fe3 Author: Ken Thompson <email@example.com> Date: Wed Jan 10 15:25:04 1979 -0500

        Research V7 development
        Work on file bin/nohup

        Co-Authored-By: Dennis Ritchie <email@example.com>
        Synthesized-from: v7

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The title is fud. The developer mentions "systemd-run --scope --user tmux" will work just as well. tmux could add this in its default to make it run automatically.

This is due to a larger discussion that most users don't expect lingering process after logout. [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/3382](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/3382) In these situations, screen/tmux must include changes that enforce this behavior. Today the operating system itself does not reap processes ... but systemd is not doing anything wrong. By adding this change, tmux/screen users will still get the behavior they expect and the rest of the world get a better behaving operating system.

<comment><USER5> > but systemd is not doing anything wrong

It's breaking historical behaviour

However making tmux try to use systemd-run is a much better solution than making it depend on libsystemd

<comment><USER19> the libsystemd dependency is the goal systemd is trying to achieve though, in every package.

<comment><USER20> [stupid discussion. deleted]

<comment><USER19> I'm sorry, but the list of packages out there with a libsystemd/libsystemd-* dependency is massive. I'm not just talking about this specific use case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It will be modular they said. It wont be invasive they said.

<comment><USER19> systemd has turned Linux into a tire fire.

I've spent 20 years with this platform and seriously worry about it being as useful the next 20.

<comment><USER22> How has systemd effected you?

<comment><USER19> It broke a few of my Arch installs. I had to learn a bunch of new tools which didn't improve my work in any way. The only things that it made easier were things that were already easy.

More importantly, I think that some of the systemd maintainers have a track record of not really knowing what they're doing, as exemplified by this tmux issue. I have serious worry about running their process as PID 1.

Other than that, totally positive effect: It deepened my interest in OS security and hastened my switch to OpenBSD which was probably happening anyway.

<comment><USER23> Arch is an interesting choice of distro if you value stability

<comment><USER19> For me, Arch very rarely delivered "omg nothing works" moments on upgrade for me. The only one that I can think of was the systemd upgrade. For every other breaking change, a fix was either easily apparent or well-documented on the wiki.

"Stability" in the sense that OpenBSD provides though is something that I valued more over time of running Arch and my experiences with other things on the side (mainly QNX).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's important to remember that it's not "those systemd guys" who are breaking everything. It's their backer, Redhat. Redhat is leveraging its strong position in the free software ecosystem to bend all Linux distributions to its way of doing things. I think they're mostly guided by a desire to keep Canonical penned-in and in a defensive position.

<comment><USER18> Redhat funds almost every kernel developer there - including several core libraries and security.

Canonical does not spend so much on employing core developers and feeds mostly on upstream.

That in itself is not a problem...but your presumption is wrong. If you track the systemd inclusion process in Debian, you will find that it was not subverted but was a free and open fight. Systemd won on its perceived superiority by people much smarter than me.

<comment><USER25> That's not quite it - it "won" because the Debian project only has the time and people to support one option, and they got railroaded.

<comment><USER26> I am not sure what is your definition of "won". There is only one option can be supported, and debian picked systemd over other options. It seems exactly fits the definition of "won".

<comment><USER25> Perhaps you should re-read your Thucydides, specifically the Melian Dialogue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I cannot believe how many people are arguing that they are 'fixing a problem' or 'adding new functionality' here. They do neither of those things; and I really hope none of the guys who argued that are writing code in their day job - sad enough those systemd guys that came up with this hack do!

The old state of affairs is dependent processes are killed by default on log- out, but there's an opt out method.

The new state of affairs: dependent processes are killed by default on log- out, but there's a _new_ opt out method.

The only difference is the old opt-out method is now ignored, in order to reap the misbehaving Gnome processes that use it - until of course those processes adapt to the new API or some other processes do something similar, and we can start the game anew, instead of ever fixing the misbehaving code...

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm sorry but this is reasonable. Systemd is fixing _real issues_ with Linux, and if apps rely on old _bad_ behaviour they should be changed to work the new better way.

<comment><USER28> The problem here, though, is that they're requesting programs which used to be able to persist via call foo() to call bar() instead if they want to persist on logout, only on Linux.

As someone in the linked issue remarked, this will end with everyone calling bar() if they want to persist (the same way they already called foo()), and we'll still have the same level of persistent process issues, but with a systemd dependency.

<comment><USER29> > but with a systemd dependency.

Worse, this isn't "the systemd developers have proposed a new common API for simplified persistent processes across platforms", but a hard dependency on this particular revision of the systemd dbus interface, or using the _systemd- run_ application to generate a user service file.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> They claim it is about security but as much as I try to think of a scenario where this would affect a cracker, I can't. It will only affect legitimate users, thus systemd is essentially DRM now.

Another issue with tmux, is that maybe you want to have your ssh-agent available in it. To do that in a user friendly way, you have to start the ssh- agent first, then start tmux from a shell where you've exported its variables. Good luck with this now...

Very dissapointed with RedHat.

</comment><comment><USER31> That's just insulting, it's making me want to remove systemd and use something else. As this statement might express: I'm not a systemd power-user, I just want my stuff to run as I'd expect it.

</comment><comment><USER32> It seems that every systemd-related discussion is bound to be filled with all kinds of arguments, but completely devoid of discussion about the actual problem being solved. I can see how the "take no prisioners" attitude from systemd developers encourages this, but it doesn't lead anywhere.

In this case, the management of user processes is a real problem. It's very easy to accumulate lots of forgotten processes on shared machines with long uptimes. Think ad-hoc scripting servers and jumpboxes here. Think nohup'ed perl scripts that hung waiting for something that'll never happen.

When you run "screen" or "tmux" you expect them to survive a broken session (i.e. you expect them to behave like an independent session). However, when you run something under "nohup" you mostly expect it to survive the controlling terminal going away (a particular screen window or SSH connection being killed). You may be okay with it being killed if you no longer have a session to the server. A user process running in the background without a controlling terminal isn't a service, and from my experience most users don't expect it to be. There is a subtle difference between a "session" and a "connection" that's not properly implemented without systemd (and can be argued not to be properly implemented _with_ systemd).

The thing is how to implement this without "screen" or "tmux" explicitly informing systemd that they want a new session. Touching any API that's used beyond terminal multiplexers defeats the whole purpose.

</comment><comment><USER33> It seems clear that the systemd devs are not playing well with others, though perhaps I am wrong about that ...

Why make such a change instead of just making it optional? What would be the impact in such a case?

Did they announce it well in advance and document this?

If not, then the question that springs to mind is "I don't want these guys in charge of helping me administer my systems."

Imagine updating via apt or yum, and having a bunch of important processes killed with no warning when you log out for the day.

</comment><comment><USER34> So programs that have no problems whatsoever (like tmux and screen) will have to add linux-specific code to support a systemd feature no one asked for.

Nice. (/s)

<comment><USER35> Not just Linux specific, systemd specific.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I am sure systemd will just write a replacement for tmux in the long run. After all they know what's good for everyone.

<comment><USER17> In theory, the systemd developers could resurrect systemd-consoled as a tmux replacement. It already had a DEC VT style terminal emulator, knowledge of these systemd abstractions, and Desktop Bus capability.

But as pointed out already on this page, that would be to miss the wood for the trees. There are _many_ programs that are hit by the fact that they call daemon() with the idea of escaping being killed at the end of the login session and yet are still (now, as of systemd version 230) killed by systemd at (final) logout. The systemd developers themselves mentioned screen and tmux. But others have already mentioned mosh-server and deluged (ironically in the bug report that supposedly drove this systemd change). It will almost certainly affect things like emacs --daemon as well. The list grows on and on.

* [http://askubuntu.com/questions/338135/](http://askubuntu.com/questions/338135/)

* [http://blog.refu.co/?p=1296#comment-61675](http://blog.refu.co/?p=1296#comment-61675)

Should the systemd developers fork emacs so that they have a logind-aware version of emacs --daemon?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This isn't really systemd's fault. It just happens to have an intrusive solution. Even the solution of using daemon(3) is incorrect (despite having existed for 30+ years).

A user_daemon() interface is the Right Way. Processes should not survive past the user session without some fancy footwork, not as a default matter of course. Applications will have to be reworked in some cases, but that's because linux has been subject to bad userspace practices all over the place for decades and after the big issues of drivers have been hashed out, time for a little objectivity in handling processes.

</comment><comment><USER38> Wouldn't this mean that on distributions with binary packages, they'd either have to give tmux a dependency on systemd or they'd have to make a separate, systemd-less tmux package?

<comment><USER39> It might depend on libdbus, but it wouldn't require systemd to be installed and running

<comment><USER40> What about systems that don't have or need libdubs. Tmux does not depend on dbus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I't just a suggestion, if not - tmux users will have issue with systemd services. Not a big deal. I think linux community just loves to overreact everything related to the systemd.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord My architectural critique is becoming more pertinent (although they've had the sense to since deprecate the useless snapshot units): [http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/10/11/0/](http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/10/11/0/)

Either way, dissent is futile. Jump to a niche distro or ditch GNU/Linux entirely if systemd bothers you.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Would be bikeshedding, but...

I think there is _some_ good intent in systemd's change. But they should have approached tmux/screen/community _before_ making the change and a release which broke things. They should have asked for feedback and such and see if tmux is willing to do what they propose. Simply hammering over things as if you hold powers over other's codebases doesn't come off as very positive.

But oh well...

<comment><USER42> Some of the other comments in this thread indicate that tmux not confirming to the specification is a known issue that people have been trying to get fixed for a few years. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know how correct this is, but it appears that it's not an entirely one-sided argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Playing around with freebsd as the clown operation called systemd continues to unfold.

</comment><comment><USER44> Looks like stepping away from Unix philosophy of tools with clear boundaries.

</comment><comment><USER45> what about tmux users on systemd free machines? Do they expect, that everyone have to run systemd now?

</comment><comment><USER46> Just a note. Slackware is going to do its next release (14.2) some time soon.

It's nice, no drama, things are where you expect them to be.

</comment><comment><USER47> So what? Is this that different from, for example, inhibiting a screen saver during video playback?

</comment><comment><USER48> Worst is that since systemd you have less choices. I've been doing my personal research and while you have a dozen of interesting projects for the desktop there is not that much options for the server specially if your production environment is cloud based.

</comment><comment><USER49> It's fascinating to see the Github emoji responses.

</comment><comment><USER50> Systemd is destroying Linux. I switched to FreeBSD.

</comment><comment><USER51> once again we see a comment like: "at this point it might be better stopping people (you know, users) commenting on this in how it affects their day-to-day use of the software"

Am I alone in thinking such comments are ostensibly helpful but in fact passive aggressive, because they stifle the user community's only relevant channel of complaint?

</comment><comment><USER52> fly-tipping in userspace

</comment><comment><USER53> "tmux is not going to use dbus"

And that is why I use tmux.

As a BSD user I started using tmux as soon as I saw it imported into pkgsrc in 2009. What a pleasant surprise it was, I remember well. I live in textmode and everything about this program's design was appealing to me immediately. I am very fussy about software and that is rare. I was so excited I even emailed the developer with a dumb question, which is not something I do very often. He's an OpenBSD committer. Surprise.

At that time there was virtually no online discussion of tmux that I had seen.

In the graphics dominated world we live in, I am amazed at how popular tmux has become.

<comment><USER54> Its because even though most personal computers have a GUI, most of the development and configuration of the internet happens via text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> It is a useful feature, and it was already there prior to this version. It could be turned on before, and looking at it, Arch and Debian are going to ignore upstream here (which is unusual for ARch, showing how dumb they think this is) and keep it off by default.

All that happened in v230 is that a default of off was flipped to on, nothing more.

What people criticize is that a default was change breaking behaviour and biting people who don't expect it. The feature is useful for system administrators who want it of course

</comment><comment><USER22> Am I the only person who likes the idea of being able to logout and log back in again and have all my processes still running and arranged the way I had them? Maybe we just need a "hard logout" option for people who want everything killed.

Usually log outs are already instant so I'm not sure what problem this fixes.

<comment><USER56> If you want your processes to be running the way it is, then just lock your screen or switch user instead of log out. A log out, in my opinion is like a shutdown of the user session. So all user processes should stop running.

<comment><USER57> So I should loose my state when I disconnect from my SSH session because my train went through a tunnel? This attitude might make sense on a desktop GUI machine, but in the real world far more developers use Linux remotely over SSH, which is where tmux really shines. I use it to leave my "IDE" (vim and friends) running on my server, so I can resume work remotely from any computer.

<comment><USER58> That post is confusing problem with solution. When you lose your ssh connection you are not logging out on purpose. Even ssh can help you there, though. You can configure ssh clients (and also servers I believe) to survive a session to be gone for minutes, even hours if you desire.

So your problem is that you haven't spent enough time learning to configure your ssh according to your needs. The cool thing is that ssh configs can be done for a specific session (if it happens just once in a while or you experiment about the right configuration), it can be done per target (in case you want to react differently on your personal blog and your company development host), and globally (to apply always). Have fun reading. You may find that ssh can solve a lot of problems and in some people's mind even solves problems like other tools but more elegant (I personally prefer it over http-proxys and VPNs as well).

<comment><USER59> No. I often purposefully log out of an SSH session and expect to come back later and have my tmux session still the same. Sometimes I log out of my desktop at home that I'm physically at, get to someplace else, log in via SSH, and reconnect to the same tmux session I had running when I was at home. This is one of the primary features of tmux. It's not about misconfigured SSH sessions.

<comment><USER58> Yes you are right. In that case you have tmux to keep your session. If it doesn't do it, it's pretty much tmux's fault. I understood the previous message as if losing the connection on a train ride would be the main issue.

<comment><USER59> How is it tmux's fault when it is systemd that is killing processes? Tmux uses the standard mechanism to inform the system that it should live on, systemd no longer respects that mechanism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I a unrelated story tmux developers ask systemd developers if systemd can "make me a sandwich" .</comment>


Ask HN: Favorite frameworks for web development? - <AUTHOR> I've done projects in both Rails and Django and now I'm currently working with Flask and I like it a lot more. Interested to see people's thoughts... <comment><USER2> Since I am developing on a daily basis with React, it is obviously my favorite choice. It is not a framework, but a view layer library. However, by only using the view layer you can already build frontend applications.

The ecosystem around React is huge. But you don't have to use anything to build an application with React. [0] For instance, most people try too early to use a state management library. But you don't have to use it from the start [1], because React comes with its own internal state management. It makes sense to learn the React fundamentals first and build your own application with it [2] before you dive deeper into the ecosystem [3].

\- [0] [https://www.robinwieruch.de/reasons-why-i-moved-from- angular...](https://www.robinwieruch.de/reasons-why-i-moved-from-angular-to- react/)

\- [1] [https://medium.com/@dan_abramov/you-might-not-need-redux- be4...](https://medium.com/@dan_abramov/you-might-not-need-redux-be46360cf367)

\- [2] [https://www.robinwieruch.de/the-road-to-learn- react/](https://www.robinwieruch.de/the-road-to-learn-react/)

\- [3] [https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux- links](https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links)

</comment><comment><USER3> I personally still love Rails. Especially with Rails 5.1 I find it has what I need. I haven't had any of the scaling and performance issues some people mention in other threads. It's a fantastic environment for a developer.

<comment><USER4> The same for me. I do different freelancing projects. Most of them in the direction of culture transformation for technical teams and I still use Rails as the go-to framework for any tool that I need in those projects.

Reasons: \- I already know Rails so there is no learning curve

\- It takes care (alone or with gems) of security, user management, routing ... with very few configuration details

\- I can still deploy it quickly on one single droplet with capistrano

Recently I started to learn Vue.js and I think - for me - they will make a great combination for the web apps that I need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think Rails is complete web framework, you don't need front end framework if you are using turbolink also with introduction of action cable you don't need 3rd party libraries for streaming features i.e. notifications, chats, etc. For me the biggest plus of working in rails is its community huge and powerful.

I have worked in Django (6 months) as well but not as much as I have worked in rails (3 years)

Thanks

</comment><comment><USER6> I like working with Laravel. It takes a more Rails-like approach to PHP and I think it's a good step forward in advancing the proper use of PHP. An added bonus is that it's much easier finding people who know PHP than it is finding Ruby-people, at least here in The Netherlands.

</comment><comment><USER7> Mithril ([https://mithril.js.org](https://mithril.js.org)) is my choice. It's React-like but very simple (10 minutes to learn about components, routing and XHR) and has a smaller footprint.

<comment><USER8> Seconded. I actually like Mithril streams better than Flux for loose coupling of components. [http://brlewis.github.io/2017/brlewis- rollup/](http://brlewis.github.io/2017/brlewis-rollup/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm working through a vue.js course on udemy and I'm really enjoying it so far. I've worked with Django, flask, and spring boot in the past. I can't say for sure yet if Vue is my favorite, but I have good feelings about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good stuff. Never used Vue and I didn't know Udacity had a course on it. I'll have to look into that. Was going to try Node.Js as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> * Udemy

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Django, because it does the job very well, has plenty of libraries/plugins to do what I would need, I could reuse all the scaffolding knowledge from using django in previous projects and focus on what's important. It is fast enough for my usecases.

For others, it could be rails, phoenix, flask etc. In case of a shippable product, time to market is very important, both to validate your product and boost your own morale and confidence.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great points! I preferred Django over Rails honestly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's an unpopular one in most circles, but I'm still a huge fan of ASP.NET MVC. C# is a fantastic language, and the .NET framework allows me to do nearly everything I wish to do.

I also quite like Django, but I am tempted to pick up Flask at some point and use it in anger, as I've only toyed with it in the past.

</comment><comment><USER12> I work with Flask and Django mostly, and help with a bunch of PHP frameworks. I like Flask for most projects.

Django has cool libraries like django-rest-framework but, after reading the source, I just get a better feeling from Flask.

I haven't hit many bugs in either, so from an in-practice perspective both should be fine.</comment>


The Joy of Sexagesimal Floating-Point Arithmetic - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/the-joy-of-sexagesimal-floating-point-arithmetic/ <comment><USER2> I think the basic idea is that highly composite numbers [1] make good bases. It's a trade off between the number of divisors of the base and the number of digits we want to learn.

Note that both 12 and 60 are such numbers.

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

Also it looks like the Babylonian is a composite system, where the 'digits' are represented in base 10 (the 10s use a different digit, but it doesn't matter). They could alternatively use base 12 for this digit.

<comment><USER3> Firefox and Servo use 1/60 as the smallest layout unit for the same reason.

[http://searchfox.org/mozilla- central/source/gfx/src/AppUnits...](http://searchfox.org/mozilla- central/source/gfx/src/AppUnits.h)

[http://doc.servo.org/app_units/](http://doc.servo.org/app_units/)

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=177805](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=177805)

<comment><USER4> It's cool and all, but keeping that decision has led to some pretty annoying bugs in SVG (and other) transforms.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=844258](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=844258)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Below is a slightly-modified comment I wrote 59 days ago on benefits of Duodecimal (Base-12) over Decimal and Hexadecimal.

Sexagesimal takes the benefits of Duodecimal further by introducing a nice factor of five into the mix, though at the expense of 48 extra digits.

Base-12 is a nice sweet spot for having high number of divisors vs the number of digits in the base.

\-----

I was about to post that in my opinion base-12 is superior to base-10. But someone beat me to it. In a sci-fi novel I'm writing, an advanced alien civilisation uses base-12.

As to your question specifically regarding base-16 instead of base-12, it depends.

Decimal itself is just a bizarre choice, most likely due to humans having literally ten digits. In decimal we can represent exact fractions of 1/2, 1/5, and 1/10 (without repeated decimals like 0.33333 for 1/3). Counting by fives (and twos) is very easy. But choosing prime factors of 2 and 5 is a strange choice in itself. Why skip 3? Why is it more useful to easily represent fraction 1/5th as 0.2 instead of 1/3rd? How often do we use fifths?

Hexadecimal in one sense is easier, all prime factors are two. So we can represent 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, and 1/16 exactly.

Duodecimal (Base 12) is very convenient for having a high proportion of exact fractions. Eg - 1/12, 1/6, 1/4, 1/3, and 1/2 can all be represented exactly. I'd argue in everyday use we're more likely to consider 1/3rd of something than 1/5th.

Counting by twos, threes, fours, and sixes is easy. Watch, let's count to 20 (24 in decimal) by different amounts.

By 2's : 2, 4, 6, 8, A, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 1A, 20.

By 3's : 3, 6, 9, 10, 13, 16, 19, 20.

By 4's : 4, 8, 10, 14, 18, 20.

By 6's : 6, 10, 16, 20.

And conversely counting to 1 exactly by different fractions.

By 1/6th : 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, 0.A, 1.0

By 1/4th : 0.3, 0.6, 0.9, 1.0

By 1/3rd : 0.4, 0.8, 1.0

By 1/2th : 0.6, 1.0

Base-12 offers four handy subdivisions (excluding 1) instead of two for decimal or three for hexadecimal. That beats hexadecimal using fewer unique digits. It beats decimal by two using only two extra unique digits.

And I think it's these reasons it was chosen for various historical subdivisional units (inches per foot, pence per shilling).

The other item to consider is the relative number of unique values per digit. I'm not sure of the utility of having 10, 12, or 16 here.

At one extreme, while binary is useful for discretising signals in digital logic, using only zeroes and ones becomes cumbersome for daily use at higher numbers. Once we're at base 10 and higher, I'm not sure how much here extra digits help or hurt.

<comment><USER6> What are the advantages of duodecimal over heximal/base-6. Since they have the same prime factors, the same fractions are representable as terminating decimals, right? With larger numbers you would use fewer digits. Anything else?

<comment><USER7> Ease of division by 4 mostly. Quarters are commonly used factors. This is probably also why Babylonians used 60 instead of 30.

<comment><USER8> I always thought this partially had to do with how many oars a Babylonian boat had, but I can't find any reference to that now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A bit of topic, but I'd like to see how practical continued fractions could be used in day to day calculations. It's mainly a matter of having decent arithmetic algorithms.

Continued fractions have a lot of cool properties that positional notation doesn't:

* Terminating expressions are exactly the rational numbers, * All (eventually) repeating expressions are precisely the roots of some quadratic polynomial (e.g. √2 = [1;2,2,2,...]), * Truncated expressions of irrationals give best approximations to their irrationals

Also, some famous irrationals have easy to remember patterns in their continued fraction representation:

e = [2;1,2,1,1,4,1,1,6,1,1,8,…] Φ = [1;1,1,1,...] (the golden ratio) Bessel(1,2)/Bessel(0,2) = [0;1,2,3,4,5,...]

</comment><comment><USER7> Might be simpler to explain if you keep using single symbols for digits, like modern base 36 or 64, instead of mixing positional and nonpositional numerals.

<comment><USER10> Did you genuinely find it difficult to parse the comma delimited representation near the bottom of the article? Just curious. It seemed very natural to me, a minor variation on British style thousand separators.

<comment><USER2> Maybe ':' would be a more familiar separator because of hours, minutes and seconds (yeah, hours don't go up to 60, but whatever).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been using reciprocal pairs for mental division for as long as I can remember and now I have a name for the process. I especially find myself using them while calculating distances while running or driving with little interruptions and wanting to avoid the mental load of long division.

</comment><comment><USER12> The article is completely irrelevant to floating-point math. I guess even Scientific American has to attract clicks.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm not sure why the author included 'floating point' in the title (probably to hint that the Babylonians did not use a symbol for zero, and had the point floating in blank space). To technical-minded people, floating point is synonymous with hardware that computes using a floating point representation, so this is a bit deceiving.

<comment><USER14> The ancient Mesopotamian (Sumerian/Akkadian) system was floating point. The exponent was implied rather than explicitly written though. So 1/120, 1/2, 30, and 1800 were all written the same way.

Modern 'scientific notation' is also floating point.

<comment><USER15> For a century up to the 1970s most engineering calculations were done to three decimal digits with implied-exponent floating point hardware¹.

¹ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule)</comment></comment></comment>


Bringing back the dictaphone - <AUTHOR> http://www.shubhro.com/2015/02/06/bringing-back-dictaphone/

<comment><USER2> Bringing back? The dictaphone became smaller, pocekt sized, so you could take it anywhere, decades ago. After that it went digital, so no more tapes to fiddle with. Then it just merged with your phone. If people stopped using it, it's probably because they got easier ways to type stuff on, though the journalists I've been seeing since ages ago never stopped using them.</comment>


How to avoid biggest mistake you can make as a new software engineer - <AUTHOR> http://www.theeffectiveengineer.com/blog/new-software-engineer-mistakes <comment><USER2> TL;DR: Keep learning.</comment>


GDPR and Apps - <AUTHOR> I got a ton of emails these days from websites I use. They seem to be panicking to violate the GDPR. Seemingly they tried to comply by sending out emails which is probably complete nonsense.
Anyhow, what I find strange is that I got zero of these emails/messages regarding the apps I use. I'm sure apps are covered by the GDPR just like websites.
Why didn't the authors of apps take similar steps? They probably cannot email me because they do not have my email. But couldn't they pop up a dialog or remove their app from the app store or block european users just like some websites did? Why do app authors behave so different?
Or is it because apps are not phoning home so much / don't have as many embedded 3rd party code that phones home to 3rd parties? <comment><USER2> Same here, only one app, Anki, took the time to inform me they had changed their privacy policy (although they didn't block my account before I accepted the changes).

I don't think they have less trackers. I think it's even easier to unintentionnaly add a tracker to an app because some of them come with dependencies when you're not careful. See [https://reports.exodus- privacy.eu.org/reports/](https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/reports/) for some reports on what tracker typical apps use.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it's because it's harder to update an app... and publisher don't really care: they see apps limited to the phone even when they display ads... Moreover, mobile ads publisher may not have already updated their sdk. Deleting the apps from the appstore wouldn't be a real solution since the datas are already out of the phone... So, basically, it seems to me that phone apps are less GDPR compliant, that's all</comment>


11 Years of Cassini Saturn Photos - <AUTHOR> http://graphics.wsj.com/saturn/ <comment><USER2> At 1:23 into the video, is that the DEATH STAR moving right to left?!</comment>


The throw-away society - <AUTHOR> http://ludens.cl/philo/throwaway/throwaway.html <comment><USER2> When I saw the photo of the replacement fan, I was convinced the story would turn out to be about how, using the broken fan as a template, the guy was able to get a replacement fan printed from a local 3d printer.

Alas, (spoiler alert) that was not the case, but hopefully that will be a great use of 3d printers in the future.

I hope we can say goodbye to planned obsolescence.</comment>


First Day With Google Glass – I need new habits - <AUTHOR> http://glass-apps.org/first-day-with-google-glasses <comment><AUTHOR> "You type in the wifi SSID and password and myglass presents you with a QR code that you scan in with Glass."

There will be so many use cases for QR codes I bet!

</comment><comment><USER2> People nearby can hear the bone conducting speaker? Wasn't the whole purpose of the speaker for that not to happen?

I'm hoping they can fix that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your head works as a sounding body and a speaker box. I guess it also get's louder when you open your mouth ...</comment></comment>


A Google Gentrification Fight That Doesn't Involve San Francisco - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/a-google-gentrification-fight-that-doesnt-involve-san-francisco/?ref=technology <comment><USER2> Boulder was like this when I was in college there, well before Google existed. They always capped growth at a ridiculously low percentage because of all the NIMBY behavior.

Housing in the surrounding suburbs of Denver would easily be less than 1/4 the price. Most people who worked in Boulder commuted from a nearby suburb even back then. Thankfully it was the only the city in the area to pick up on NIMBYism, unlike the Bay Area.

<comment><USER3> But how do you know that Boulder real estate won't get more expensive if Google moves in? Seems like they'd be adding at least a couple percentage points to the higher income working population, which would have that effect.

<comment><USER4> Let's say they say No, and Google moves a town over. What happens then?

<comment><USER2> Google moving a town over would be the same as choosing a town like Longmont or Broomfield. Which is likely to be just fine, and provides just as many jobs for graduates in the area, without getting mired in Boulder politics.

That's exactly what Sun and every other big tech company did in the 1990s when they had a footprint in Colorado.

<comment><USER4> Being the Devil's advocate - does it still push up Boulder's home prices?

<comment><USER5> And also, for people who purport to care about urban sprawl, is pushing things farther out and increasing commutes a good answer?

<comment><USER2> The only way to decrease sprawl would be to increase density, and frankly few Coloradoans would go for that. Few cities outside of Denver have tall buildings because people don't like their mountain views obstructed. And public transportation is pretty limited. Many people live in Colorado to enjoy the outdoors, and to do so, you need your own transportation. Once you have your own transportation, there's very little incentive to take a bus or train on a regular basis.

<comment><USER5> Ok, but Boulder is supposed to be fairly liberal, environmentally conscious and so on. They seem a bit out of touch with reality: they don't want to increase housing stock, but they don't want higher prices either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Brad Feld wrote a pretty scathing response to this piece, and as someone who lived in the Denver / Boulder area growing up, I have to agree with him.

[http://www.feld.com/archives/2014/12/endless-struggle- boulde...](http://www.feld.com/archives/2014/12/endless-struggle-boulder.html)

<comment><USER7> Nice post. But I left this as a comment:

I'm perplexed that in the midst of a piece about rising housing prices, no one mentions housing supply. The tools necessary to increase housing supply in the face of rising demand have been available since the early 1900s—as discussed extensively here, in _The Rent is Too Damn High_ ([http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO)—and](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO\)—and) yet this endless series of articles doesn't mention the obvious.

The solution to rising prices is to increase the supply of the good in question. Yet reporters rarely seem to mention this, and they treat rising housing prices as some kind of law of nature.

<comment><USER4> The strange thing is that the same things that people use to fight rent increases (rent control, etc) wind up creating perverse incentives that reduce the quality and quantity of the housing stock. If you want cheap rent, encourage people to build houses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why do they always locate in places that have these screwed-up housing markets. There are many, many urban centres in North America with ample university grads pouring out of local institutions, a plethora of amenities, and cheap housing. Any former-industrial city fits the template just fine and would be ecstatic to have a gentrification "problem".

<comment><USER9> _Why do they always locate in places that have these screwed-up housing markets._

Large corporations don't care about housing market issues, and the prestige of locating in a brand-name city is worth the (slightly) higher salaries that they have to pay.

That said, I've heard good things about Boulder, and it seems like an excellent place to live, but it's not exactly a brand-name city (and I sure as hell can't see why it would be so expensive to live in a place that's not land-constrained like Manhattan.) It's not Manhattan or DC or Boston or Chicago. It's not even San Francisco (in terms of brand-name; I am sure it's a better place to live than SF).

<comment><USER10> It's land constrained on the west by the mountains. The farther east you go, the cheaper the housing is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Boulder has always been quite expensive because of the abundance of nature that it basks in. This might add to high real estate prices, but certainly would not be the root cause of it.

It's actually traditionally been quite an educated and engineering-focused city, so it's really nothing other than NIMBYism for current residents to oppose this. Does it really matter if some of the new residents are software rather than petroleum engineers?

</comment><comment><USER12> More of the "I'm in; close the gate!" mentality.

"People who arrived after me are ruining Boulder!"

</comment><comment><USER13> What a luxury these people have to complain and be worried about high income jobs coming to their town. The town I live in would fall all over itself to have Google build a campus here.

</comment><comment><USER14> Brad Feld commented on this article here: [http://www.feld.com/archives/2014/12/endless-struggle- boulde...](http://www.feld.com/archives/2014/12/endless-struggle-boulder.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone who describes Boulder as undergoing gentrification has clearly never been here. Upper class whites have been pushing out middle class whites for 15 years now. Comparing this to the situation in SF seems irrelevant.

Edit: I've split time between Boulder and SF for the past few years and have experienced both.

</comment><comment><USER16> While cost in certainly an interesting -and perhaps dire- discussion, I'm equally curious about what this will do to the work environment in Boulder.

A have a good deal of my friends in tech here in Boulder, many of who work for big names such at Twitter and Google. However, nearly all of them agree- they wouldn't work at those places if they had to work Silicon Valley Hours.

Boulder has long had a culture of not working 80 hours weeks like the Valley. But if Google massively increases their presence in Boulder, I wonder if that will change the normal work habits here? Or perhaps they will lose the workers that refuse to prioritize work over lifestyle?

I really don't know which way that will go, although I personally hope the latter.

<comment><USER17> I would like to think that 1100 people isn't enough of a critical mass for other companies in Boulder to start "requesting" the devotion of 80 hour weeks. As long as it's only one(Google) then employees who move to Google Boulder with the hopes of a non-Silicon Valley lifestyle can find hopefully equally gainful employees at one of the other companies.

If the general world culture here were to become more similar to that of the Valley then I'd leave. Part of the reason I live in Boulder is because of the lifestyle perks (being able to go skiing in 90 minutes). As soon as I don't have time to enjoy that there's much less reason to stay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting; I'm considering moving to that area. Sad to see this kind of thing, especially considering that Boulder has plenty of room both vertically, and to the east, in which to add housing stock so as to lower prices.

<comment><USER18> No, it doesn't. Much of the area to the east is protected under open-space laws. Also, there have been limits imposed on the vertical height of buildings intended to control the atmosphere of the town.

<comment><USER19> What's more important, the atmosphere of the town, or the affordability of the town?

<comment><USER16> Unfortunately, the upper class of the town think the former.

I know a prominent member of the local government personally, and we've discussed this problem at some length. The fundamental trouble- and hypocrisy IMO- is that many of the people in the town bitch and moan when prices go up and interesting local businesses/artists/features have to leave. But these same people refuse to allow greater density and constantly try to also push the students out.

I'm fine with Google moving in to town if we can get smaller, more affordable units in greater number. However, due to the planning decisions being pushed by various groups, there aren't any studio sized apartments being allow to develop in the city, and the affordable neighborhoods are often 'historic', turning into student ghettos.

Most of my friends are high payed tech folk and don't have trouble with rent. But many others, like myself, are designers, photographers, writers and so forth. We don't have the money to rent a 2 bedroom apartment for ourselves, or buy a condo to sublet. The only other option at this point is to live with 3-5 roommates in a house, for 600+ a month.

I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to have an reasonable, clean, modern 1 bedroom studio like I had in Copenhagen. But that just doesn't exist in Boulder, and most attempts to make such things are blocked.

In the end, I think Boulder could address the housing and cultural concerns while still preserving the Open Space around the town. But we'll HAVE to accept greater density, better transit (which needs density) and the fact that sometimes in a city you'll see things you dislike. Without change on these fronts, I suspect we'll quickly go the unfortunate way of Silicon Valley...

<comment><USER20> I remember living in Boulder (now in SF) in the late 80's. They had laws banning more than 2 unrelated people living together - making roommates kind of impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm surprised nobody just puts together a new little tech town on the front range where there isn't anything, say just south of Pueblo or north of Ft. Collins. Plenty of foothills to go around.

<comment><USER22> Why would anybody want to live there.

<comment><USER5> The mountains to the west, mostly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Change the tax code to a "Colonizer's Locked In Rate" so that people who originally started or live in a town pay the same property tax as long as they stay in that town / city / zip code / within _ mile radius of their original home.

● That way original residents are not forced out.

● Low income residents can afford to stay without further special subsidies. Tax payers don't have to pay for low income housing.

● Residents will have the incentive to improve their communities without fear of it raising their taxes.

<comment><USER24> They're not afraid of taxes, they're afraid of rents. Locking property tax rates is exactly what California does and it only makes housing supply worse by giving a very strong incentive for incumbents not to leave.

<comment><USER23> I stand corrected. What's a realistic solution then? Acceptance that times change, cities change and nothing is permanent and any attempt to create permanency almost always comes with some kind of consequence?

<comment><USER25> Yes. Times change, communities change and if a middle class area or even a slum becomes a wealthy neighborhood that's not such a bad thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Real estate has always cost more in Boulder than neighboring towns. There's a height restriction on building, and the local government (I've forgotten if it was the county or city) bought a lot of open space from private landowners.

Supply and demand...people want to live in Boulder because it's nice because there is open space. Google builds in places where people want to live.</comment>


F1 Engine Power Secrets (2000) - <AUTHOR> http://www.pureluckdesign.com/ferrari/f1engine/index.htm <comment><USER2> > Turbochargers have come and gone and there hasn't been a switch to two- > stroke or rotary, scotch yoke engines

This is tangential to the article but these things are not in F1 because they are bad but because several of the configurations are too good. Most of the above are _banned._ Today only 4-Stroke engines with reciprocating pistons are permitted in F1. See page 12:

[http://argent.fia.com/web/fia- public.nsf/C5F0793AC322A70CC12...](http://argent.fia.com/web/fia- public.nsf/C5F0793AC322A70CC125732900339466/$FILE/04F1_TECHNICAL_REGULATIONS.pdf)

The FIA also banned Rotary engines in Le Mans after the 787B won, enforcing all participants afterwards to use 3.5L F1 engines (correct me if I'm wrong there, might have changed since 1991?)

It kind of saddens me because racing platforms (esp. Rally) are big drivers of car innovation (suspension, safety, power). Arbitrarily banning things like rotary engines has - in a way - killed an immeasurable amount of research money that might have gone towards the topic.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but FIA also has a mandate to keep the race safe. So it tries to restrict maximum speed and power, without killing the sport. For example, air inlets have a maximum area limit. This clearly restricts air intake.

F1 is not the only sport with such restriction. The Tour de France has imposed minimum bike weights and the actual 2 wheel upright bike configuration, which is far from optimal. All other cycling competitions have followed. Recumbent bikes allow the racer to better use his legs and are more aerodynamic, thus faster. You can also buy bikes that are lighter than Tour de France bikes. It's just that they're really expensive, of course.

<comment><USER4> If the need is to limit power, then why not directly limit power: make a rule stating "no more than 600bhp" or something like that?

Improved technologies could still flourish. If a new approach _could_ deliver more than the power limit, it might instead be re-tuned to provide better durability or better fuel efficiency or lighter weight.

But the FIA has interfered with any of these possible paths of innovation, because it's thinking more like a government and less like a group whose very purpose is to compete.

<comment><USER5> There is a lot that goes into engine performance rather than just raw power. This is why the rules become so intricate and convoluted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> F1 anorak - that article is _years_ out of date. You can tell that anyway from the tech but when it starts talking about the new ruling for 2001....

Much of the core technology isn't that different, significantly because they first restricted and then effectively froze development a few years ago, but the engines aren't 3l V10s any more but 2.4l V8s.

In the time of the 3l V10s, from memory they peaked at over 900bhp. For a while they were revving to about 19,000, but as the materials science for this got increasingly complex they restricted it to about 17,000 on cost grounds - after all there's no real sporting value to everyone spending an extra $50m to get to exactly the same relative performances with little noticeable difference in outcomes.

The 2.4l V8s were about 750ish from memory when they came in; I've not heard more recent figures but due to development restrictions I doubt they're much different. The other interesting technology now is the extra hybrid power source and the large kick that can offer; interestingly it was very nearly raced (in a different form) by McLaren in 1998, though a late rule change that was suspected to be at the behest of another team banned it.

Otherwise - the core reason the engines are recognisable is that they're required in the rules to be so. Turbos were restricted then banned in 1998 after, at the design peak in 1986, reaching 1500bhp from 1.5l engines. They're quite likely to be back in a few years though, albeit in a very different form to their mid-80s incarnation. Turbines - what I suspect we'd actually be running otherwise, although indirectly as electric generators for capacitor packs - were banned even earlier. I don't think Wankel engines have ever been legal in F1. Diesel definitely isn't.

When we say recognisable though, I'm not sure people realise just how alien these engines are within the limits of a piston engine. They barely do anything below what would be red-line revs for a road car and generate almost no power until they're past 12-13,000RPM. Piston speeds are firmly supersonic and the elasticity of the metal needs to be factored in, yet I read once that the pistons were getting so close to the tops of the cylinder heads in combustion that there was a visible ring of clear metal in the combustion deposits because there wasn't space there for the deposits to form. The real shock though is the noise; we're all used to what a road performance engine sounds like, but a 17,000RPM V8 (and even more so a 19,000RPM V10) howls and screams like no road engine you'll ever hear, bike included. Animalistic, harsh, edgy and the sort of sound that lives with you; TV doesn't come close to capturing it.

<comment><USER4> _The real shock though is the noise;_

I've been to one F1 race, sitting at turn 1 in Shanghai. There was a TV helicopter maybe 50 meters over our heads -- and its noise was completely drowned out by the cars' engines.

<comment><USER7> Indeed. At the French Grand Prix (Magny-Cours) in 2002... I was 10th row off of the front straight. I was trying to shove napkins in my ears.

Any F1 fans should download the UK Top Gear season 15 episode 5 and watch the last 15 minutes - a short tribute to Ayrton Senna. It's tremendous.

<comment><USER8> Series 10 episode 8 is also a good one. Richard Hammond gets to drive a Renault R25, circa 2005. He had a hell of a time even getting the thing onto the track. The pit crew actually had to tow the car back to the garage to warm it back up; the tolerances on those motors are so tight that, when cold, they are effectively seized.

<comment><USER6> Thinking Renault engines...

Around that period they had the central display at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. Clearly their engine management shop had been bored one day, because they'd written a test programme which enabled them to play tunes on the engine just by revving it, and were showing off for the assembled crowds. It's honestly that fast revving and high pitched that it could do a pretty decent job.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XR7OpM2Ufk>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aArSn4IhHI>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One thing to keep in mind.. this article about 10 years old. The current engine configuration is a 90-deg 2.4L V8, rev-limited to 18,000 RPM. Typical peak power output is around 700bhp. Additionally, a team is allowed to use a maximum of 8 engines per season without penalty, which forces teams to run the engine more conservatively. This specification is frozen until the 2013 season.

Over the years, teams come up with creative ways to increase power output while still complying with the F1 rulebook. Then the FIA tends to ban the new methods or otherwise limit the engines in order to keep power output down. Power peaked in the early-mid 2000's with the 3.0L V10 format, with some engines producing as much as 950bhp at nearly 20,000 RPM.

The primary reasons for managing engine output are driver safety and development cost. In the early 2000's, Ferrari spent an average of $300M/year on their Formula 1 efforts. The cost to be competitive in F1 led to some manufacturers pulling out of the sport. Limiting engine specifications and the number of engines a team can use in a season has helped bring down the costs, and the sport now has a full grid of teams participating.

<comment><USER10> You need to go back to the 80s to see when power really peaked. There were 1.5L engines in the mid 80s that produced in excess of 1,500HP in race trim. There is one on display at the BMW factory in SC that overran the dyno in qualifying trim. It's a tiny little thing surrounded by two giant turbos and intercoolers.

<comment><USER9> Of course you're right about this.. the turbocharged era produced incredible engine output. I worded my comment poorly.. I meant to convey that the power output of the 3.0L V10 format peaked in the mid-2000s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's a cool comparison video of Porsche GT3 versus F1 on the same track/corner:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex5dhhpSHCw>

F1 makes some of the fastest street-legal cars look downright slow.

<comment><USER12> I knew they were about twice as fast, but seeing it like that...holy cow!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You don't even have to get exotic to see it's all about how much you want to spend in technology to get something out of an engine.

Ford makes a 65mpg engine with good performance in Europe.

They refuse to sell it in the USA because it would not be as profitable for them, even when it's made in Mexico.

[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_37/b40990604...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_37/b4099060491065.htm)

So basically we still drive 30mpg cars.

Maybe when gas hits $5/gallon that will change.

</comment><comment><USER14> The magic of F1 cars in the last years was for that although the power output of the engines has decreased and so is the downforce due to regulations lap times have stayed consistent. Its fascinating to see how people like Adrian Newey keep on pushing the envelope to produce brilliant cars with tough regulations.

BTW A short poll how many HN readers are into F1?

<comment><USER15> Yes. I used to live a few hundred metres from the track. The noise is incredible, you can hear several kilometres away.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: In NYC for two days. Developed a mobile workforce application - <AUTHOR>

Hi All,
In NYC from the 1st Aug - 3rd Aug. Developed a mobile workforce application used by some national companies in the UK.
Interested in seeing if anyone wants to meet up for a coffee? <comment><AUTHOR> Anyone?</comment>


Don't Hit It Big Unless You're Ready For It… - <AUTHOR> http://www.dragosroua.com/dont-hit-big-unless-youre-ready-for-it/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand when people go crazy with their servers after getting mentioned on the social web because of the load. It's short lived, no need to panic, just make the page static.

        wget http://www.mysite.com/page-being-hit-all-the-time -O /var/www/static.html

and add a rule to your webserver

        location /page-being-hit-all-the-time {
            return /var/www/static.html;
        }

<comment><AUTHOR> that's one elegant and simple solution, I agree :-) But in this case the load wasn't so targeted, it was spread on 3-4 pages. But you're right, I could have made them all 3 static.

Thanks for the info, really appreciated :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I gotta disagree with the whole "make sure you're ready" idea here. It goes against the launch-and-iterate mantra that I live by.

Always remember, the vast majority of sites don't scale...because they don't have to. Just don't do anything really stupid when you're setting things up at first, and be ready to make changes when (more like _if_ ) you ever get popular.

Still, I do agree with not shooting from the hip in the middle of a huge traffic load. Installing new plugins or tweaking code at these times is an awful idea. Much better to call your host and ask to be bumped to a beefier machine. Throw money at the problem and hope it helps.

</comment><comment><USER4> Gah, wordpress. I serve static pages off of a PII-500mhz with 256MB RAM, and 50 concurrent users look about the same as 1. MySQL is not your friend. I'm using blogger specifically because it pushes static files, but I want to check out <http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll> (Ruby) or <http://github.com/lakshmivyas/hyde> (Python).

</comment><comment><USER5> how does one test this? write a script that uses threads to access pages in parallel? see what happens...temporarily pay for more hardware (i have a virtual machine with linode), gain some understanding, ..., profit

any particular services, snippets or frameworks people use to test this?

<comment><USER6> Apachebench ships with Apache and can be used for simple testing.

<http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/programs/ab.html>

For more realistic mutli-page tests Selenium works well - spin up a few EC2 or similar machines, run Selenium Grid and you can get a decent idea of how your site will cope.

For a simple Wordpress blog Apachebench should suffice though.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Graph Classification Using Structural Attention, KDD 2018 (PyTorch) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/benedekrozemberczki/GAM <comment><AUTHOR> This is a KDD '18 paper that I implemented for benchmarking my own graph classification models. The reasons for which I decided to implement this are as follows:

0\. The paper had no publicly available implementation.

1\. Reinforcement learning based formulation of graph classification.

2\. Featureless setting.

3\. Very different from current approaches (kernels, deep learning and spectral signatures).

4\. The agent-based setting described in the paper can be used with other models used for traversing the graph.</comment>


Ask HN: How is your income split? - <AUTHOR>

I'm curious to know how you guys allocate your income (e.g. 30% towards housing, 20% savings, 20% investments, etc).<p>I suspect allocations will differ depending on where you live, if you have a family or not, if you're newly graduated, etc. <comment><USER2> I make the money, she spends it and pays the bills. I hide in app purchases as music purchases (she sees the bank transaction, but not the iTunes receipt). Sometimes, if I get a big project, I keep a portion of it and buy myself something expensive without a coupon!

Seriously, though - shared bank account. Bills come first, then home improvement, then vacations / toys, etc...</comment>


Genetically modified crops pass benefits to weeds - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/genetically-modified-crops-pass-benefits-to-weeds-1.13517

<comment><USER2> Here's a comment I also left at the website:

I read the original article, and Wang et al. measure fitness by (i) measuring photosynthesis in glasshouse-grown plants (ii) measuring seed germination on wet paper in petri dishes and (iii) growing plants in garden (grown 20 cm apart, fertilized, hand-weeding and insecticides applied).

We probably can assume that the extra copies of EPSP synthase genes increase the metabolic throughput (by boosting some of the protein synthesis pathways) of the plants, and when grown in abundant light (20 cm apart, no shadowing and competition from neighbouring plants), water and nitrogen (grown in garden conditions, fertilized), it is plausible that these individual grow faster and larger. This is all that Wang et al. did and all that their article claims.

The higher throughput capacity only comes into use if supplies of energy or raw materials are not bottlenecks.

But the Nature News conclusions "effects of such modification have the potential to extend beyond farms and into the wild" and "genetic diversity [of wild rice], which is really important to conserve, could be threatened because the genotype with the transgene would outcompete the normal species" are very much unsupported by the results of Wang et al.

In the wild, seeds may need to germinate in more challenging conditions that wet paper on a petri dish, there may not be abundant light, nitrogen or water.

So the EPSP synthase -boosted plants grow better in the garden. But maybe there is a good reason why the EPSP synthase levels are lower in the plants from the wild. Maybe something else is more valuable to them, something that helps in e.g. low-light photosynthesis, nutrient or water uptake in scarce conditions, or defence against insects. Maybe the wild EPSP levels are just optimal for growing in wild conditions and the plants with boosted EPSP synthase levels would have lower fitness in wild conditions. (I assume that the higher levels of the synthase don't come for free, but have a related metabolic cost that cannot then be used elsewhere).

As Wang et al. only measured fitness in garden, not in the wild, the Nature News conclusions are unwarranted.

<comment><AUTHOR> And Nature News have replied: As far as I can see, we have not reached any definitive conclusions about what will happen in the wild. The article warns what -could- happen and the -possible- consequences of such transgene spread. The sentence that you cite is a direct quote from Brian Ford-Lloyd, a plant geneticist at the University of Birmingham, UK (as the article clearly notes), who was unoconnected with the current study. He goes on to say: "This is one of the most clear examples of extremely plausible damaging effects [of GM crops] on the environment." If you take issue with -his- conclusions, why not contact him? One of the key findings here is that, contrary to what many have argued, transgenes -may- confer some value/advantages to wild species. At least, this is no longer something that can be ruled out.

<comment><USER2> Yes I went there and replied to that, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The authors of the study assume that the changes they found in their modified crop are beneficial, but that's purely an assumption on their part. On the face of it higher rates of photosynthesis, more shoots, etc sound great but in practice there could be all kinds of selective pressures on wild crops that would make these adaptations undesirable.

In poor soil, adverse weather, etc these adaptations might make the plant burn itself out too quickly like a sprinter in a marathon race. The emphasis on growth might weaken it's immune system, or make it more susceptible to disease in other ways.

I'm always interested in these studies on how engineered changes interact with the wider ecosystem and make their way into other organisms. I'm not dissing the research, it sounds like a valuable study, but finding potentially advantageous changes in the lab and finding those changes actually confer an advantage in the wild are two wholly different things.

<comment><USER2> _" On the face of it higher rates of photosynthesis, more shoots, etc sound great but in practice there could be all kinds of selective pressures on wild crops that would make these adaptations undesirable._"

Thank you for a very valuable comment. It's nice to see understanding of plant ecophysiology in Hacker News.

So, I went to the original article [1] and this is about how they measure fitness:

 _" Measurement of photosynthetic rates [...] We used glasshouse-grown GE and non-GE F3 plants"_

 _" Seed germination experiment [...] Seeds were germinated on wet filter paper in Petri dishes."_

 _" Field experiments [...] Common garden experiments were conducted [...] 36 plants were planted in a 6x6 grid with 20 cm between plants [...] weeds were removed by hand-weeding [...] urea (nitrogen) per 100 m2 was applied [...] Insecticides that are commonly used in rice fields were applied"_

So, fitness is measured in (i) glasshouse (ii) on wet filter paper in laboratory and (iii) in garden conditions, with fertilizers and insecticides applied.

Now, the original article doesn't claim anything beyond that, and a case can be made that the natural environment of a weed is _in_ in the rice field (with fertilizers and insecticides), but the Nature article says _" effects of such modification have the potential to extend beyond farms and into the wild"_ and like you said, measuring fitness in glasshouse/lab/garden conditions tells pretty much nothing about fitness in the wild beyond farms.

[1] [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12428/abstrac...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12428/abstract)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems peculiar. I can't understand why, if this relatively straightforward modification in the production of EPSP conferred such a major advantage to the organism, that it didn't develop as a result of natural selection.

There has to be a downside that this study didn't pick up. Perhaps the change makes the plant more attractive to pests?

<comment><USER5> A simple reason could be that the gene just never happened to appear in the DNA; natural selection cannot "develop" new genes, in can only "select" which of the existing (combination of) genes are better.

<comment> guard-of-terra There are several ways how a part of genome can suddently be duplicated with all its genes. That's how every species have different number of chromosomes.

I might guess that competitive advantage only apply where weeds are bad: in fields. Before fields there were no advantage to this.

<comment><USER6> Right, but that's not natural selection, that's mutation. Natural selection can pick up on the changes after they've taken place.

e.g., There's presumably a gene out there that makes humans twice as intelligent at absolutely zero expense, and although if it were to appear it would be selected for, it it clearly hasn't happened yet. Natural selection can't drive that to occur.

<comment> guard-of-terra Is there a gene already in human DNA which would make humans two times smarter if repeated / made more active? That's what happens with weed rice.

Btw the answer can be yes. We are no longer constrained by food concerns but our genome does not account for that yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The implication of cross-pollination on genetic patents is quite far reaching. Sooner or later, more lawsuits will pop up, and the Supreme Court is going to have to decide again. The narrow scope of Bowman v. Monsanto Co. is unlikely to be enough if farmers use plants of different species.

I wonder slightly at what point an plant still inhabits the "invention". 99% genetic similarity to the patent? 10%? 1%? At what point does it losses the attribute of being the property of Monsanto?

</comment><comment><USER8> This is not a "benefit". I want roundup to kill crops, as it should.

And I want roundup away from my plants and my environment. Thanks.

I love how PR could twist a bad to make it a good. Hey, we don't have a way to control our GM crops contaminating other crops!! How great is that! By the way,pay me for using my intellectual property that is in your crops even when you don't want it, as it is a benefit for you.

<comment><USER9> it's "benefit" as in "benefit for the plant". What's good for the weed is not always good for the farmer though. This is not a PR piece trying to spin a bad thing into a good thing but an article pointing out a real problem with gm crops.

<comment><USER10> "Good" for the weed would be if RoundUp weren't used in the first place. Then there would be no benefit whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In a way I find it rather unfortunate that gmo's lack of self termination is being given a beneficial spin of sorts, maybe because we are now balls out with this "hey, it's a conjoin real world test either you like it or not" approach from PR. Reading through it actually sobers up the title effect.

</comment><comment><USER12> No real secret that this is happening. I've heard/seen the evidence from USDA- ARS and top agronomists from industry.

The reality is quite simple: our soils are going to end up looking a lot more like they did in the past (doused with nasty chemicals; stuff that will make environmentalists miss Roundup).

Despite the flaws of GMO crops, our soils in the Midwest are about as clean (in terms of pesticide/herbicide) as they've ever been during industrial agriculture. (Yes, yes, I realize the fertilizer situation is dire -- that is a separate problem and a massive area for research & innovation)

Agriculture is and always has been about chemical warfare. Plant and insects evolve over _seasons_. The only difference is that now humans are helping plants along. And yes, I emphasize "helping" because I see _zero_ potential in non-GMO crops feeding humanity in the long run. It is one thing to grow tasty heirloom tomatoes in your yard and quite another to produce commodity grain at scale sufficient enough to meet global demand. I hear so many armchair environmentalists equate the two; very frustrating.

<comment><USER13> I don't know a few victory gardens and vertical farms could stretch things out for quite a ways before we need to fully switch to GMO in order to survive.

<comment><USER12> For veg, sure. I'm all for it. Great way to teach and learn, as well. For example, squirrels aren't so cute after they destroy you entire tomato crop... lil' fuckers.

But grain is such a process and such an _amazing_ supply chain. I don't see that being replicated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Apparently whether transgenes spread from GM crops to wild species remains controversial - though there have been some reports of this happening in the past. [http://www.nature.com/news/case-studies-a-hard-look-at-gm- cr...](http://www.nature.com/news/case-studies-a-hard-look-at-gm- crops-1.12907) >>In 2003, Snow and her colleagues showed that when Bt sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) were bred with their wild counterparts, transgenic offspring still required the same kind of close care as its cultivated parent but were less vulnerable to insects and produced more seeds than non-transgenic plants. Few similar studies have been conducted, says Snow, because the companies that own the rights to the technology are generally unwilling to let academic researchers perform the experiments.<<

<comment><USER14> In this case, weedy rice (Oryza sativa f. spontanea) is actually just the same species as cultivated rice (O. sativa), and the two do interbreed freely (as per definition of species in plants).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've gotten into so many flame wars over GMO by taking a side that is sympathetic to anti-GMO activists.

I have a degree in biology. I'm sympathetic to the activists even though I do not agree _scientifically_ with many of their claims. Thing is that I can see why they are skeptical of GMOs and why they do not trust the companies making them, and I don't think their reaction is especially irrational.

And I've always been skeptical of GMOs for different reasons. I studied evolutionary biology a lot, and the set-up that you get with GMOs always struck me as similar to the set-up you get when you over-use one single antibiotic. At first it works beautifully, but then the bugs adapt. In this case the entire ecosystem adapts.

Transgenes are natural. Horizontal gene transfer happens all the time. This destroys a lot of the BS claims of the activists, but it is _also_ a problem for the supposed benefits of GMO crops... as we see here.

I also think the issue of patents and self-reproducing organisms is a legal hell-hole.

<comment><USER2> _" And I've always been skeptical of GMOs for different reasons."_

In a way, this is nothing new. When Norman Borlaug was working to save the couple of billion lives with his green revolution, also his plant breeding methods (which we now see as traditional, totally natural and acceptable) were often seen a unnatural and potentially dangerous:

"Throughout his years of research, Borlaug's programs often faced opposition by people who consider genetic crossbreeding to be unnatural or to have negative effects."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug#Criticisms_and_h...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug#Criticisms_and_his_view_of_critics)

 _" I also think the issue of patents and self-reproducing organisms is a legal hell-hole."_

There actually exists plant breeder's rights for traditional (non-GMO) varieties, so the situation with patents may not be so much different:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_breeders%27_rights](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_breeders%27_rights)

<comment><USER15> Borlaug's rebuttal definitely applies to some anti-GMO activists, who can easily be described as privileged Western elites engaging in fashionable protest.

At the same time, there are some long-term criticisms that are not mentioned here. Borlaug's methods are almost entirely reliant on fossil fuels for example, so there has long been a criticism that he simply delayed the inevitable. When the fossil fuels run out, modern agriculture will collapse.

 _Right now_ that is definitely true. It would be possible to evolve technologically to the point that it isn't, but so far that's been a slow slog.

There is a similar criticism to be made about present-day GMO tactics, and I allude to it in my OP: they buy temporary wins but are not sustainable due to selection effects and horizontal gene transfer diluting them over time. A lot of the ecological/sustainability crowd are basically arguing that we have to look for permanent solutions, not temporary gains, and that temporary gains have a way of degrading the environment in ways that make permanent solutions more difficult.

What it _really_ boils down to is this:

[http://citizenactionmonitor.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/worl...](http://citizenactionmonitor.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/world- pop-time.jpg)

If that graph doesn't scare the living shit out of you, you aren't thinking about it very deeply.

Is this a permanent shift, or is it a bubble? If it is a bubble, its collapse will result in suffering beyond our capacity to even imagine.

<comment><USER2> _" When the fossil fuels run out, modern agriculture will collapse."_

We fertilize crops, especially with nitrogen, because the triple bond in atmospheric N≡N is a tough nut to break. We use chemical engineering (in this case, high pressure and heat, google Haber-Bosch process) to fix the nitrogen from the air on behalf of the plants.

This requires energy, but any cheap energy would do, it doesn't need to be from fossil fuels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are so many things wrong with this article!

(1) The researchers did _NOT_ observer genes crossing over from the GMO to the wild, weedy form of the rice in a Natural setting.

(2) The authors argue that the new genetic material, if it were to escape into the wild, would reduce genetic diversity and that this would be harmful. But by the very nature adding a new gene, genetic diversity has actually been increased.

<comment><USER2> _" The researchers did NOT observer genes crossing over from the GMO to the wild, weedy form of the rice in a Natural setting."_

What you say is true, they didn't observe than. But weedy rice (Oryza sativa f. spontanea) is the same species as rice (Oryza sativa), so gene crossing is not far-fetched, it's to be expected in any case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sort of like antibiotics resulting in more resistant bacteria...

</comment><comment><USER18> ...and regular corn does too. Is this news?

</comment><comment><USER19> plot twist: it's Monsanto which is the real weed

</comment><comment><USER20> "Weed" has no botanical meaning. That's a clue that there's something other than straight up science occurring in the article.

<comment><USER21> And water has no chemical meaning. But you see it in chemistry papers all the time...

<comment><USER22> Unless the meaning of "water" has changed sometime in the past second, water is the liquid form of the chemical substance dihydogen oxide (i.e., H2O). This is the same meaning its had since the atomic components of water were first determined...

<comment><USER21> > _Unless the meaning of "water" has changed sometime in the past second, > water is the liquid form of the chemical substance dihydogen oxide (i.e., > H2O)_

That's "pure water".

In 99.999% of the cases the term "water" is used as the impure mixture of H20 with tons of added substances, from fluoride to sodium, magnesium etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Austin Was Destined to Replace Silicon Valley. Then the Pandemic Hit - <AUTHOR> https://marker.medium.com/austin-was-destined-to-replace-silicon-valley-then-the-pandemic-hit-6d5f5a332e04 <comment><AUTHOR> Y'all, it would be great if we could avoid the "actually, Austin would never be able to replace Silicon Valley" takes because they are rarely interesting or original.</comment>


Man begins second week trapped 3000 feet underground in cave - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/10900044/Most-expensive-rescue-in-German-history-as-man-begins-second-week-trapped-3000-feet-underground-in-cave.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The original headline is more than 80 characters and is _Most expensive rescue in German history as man begins second week trapped 3000 feet underground in cave_. The man who is injured is a researcher who was researching drainage systems in these caves. He is also one of the people who originally discovered this complex of caves.

Excerpt:

 _So arduous is the journey ahead that different teams of rescuers will work in relay stages to bring the victim to the surface.

Cave rescue is highly specialised, and teams have converged across the Alps from Switzerland, Austria and Italy to help._</comment>


How to Monetize Your API - <AUTHOR> http://nordicapis.com/how-to-monotize-your-api/

<comment><USER2> Very powerful post! Good job Bruno Pedro.</comment>


Visa to Launch Contactless Mobile Payments for iPhone  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2010/05/06/06readwriteweb-visa-to-launch-contactless-mobile-payments-85626.html

<comment><USER2> "the new Apple-certifed technology combines a protective iPhone case with a secure memory card that will host Visa's contactless payment application, Visa payWave."

So, it's exactly like the payWave technology already integrated in my Visa card, except I have to put a stupid case around my iPhone.

Sounds like buzzword-itis.

I've had payWave in my card for over a year, and I've never even seen an opportunity to use it. The social interaction with the cashier is just too weird. It's already bad enough with debit cards ("do I swipe? do you swipe? do you take the card from me and swipe it for me, making me feel like an idiot?")

<comment><USER3> My chase card has Blink (which I think is compatible). I didn't even know it was there until I went to swipe my card at McDonald's and the terminal said ACCEPTED as my card got near the swipe slot.

It seems you use it where a debit pad is already on the counter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem with NFC is that it offers no real additional benefit. The card industry thinks that it's more convenient, but swiping a card through a card reader really isn't all that difficult to start with.

We're working on this:

<http://www.facecash.com>

No extra hardware for your phone required, it's cheaper for merchants, it offers more information than cards, and it will work on Android and BlackBerry in addition to iPhone.

<comment><USER5> I'm with you that NFC isn't necessarily a big improvement here, but the nice thing about it generally is that over time, replacing physical actions/keys becomes just a matter of writing software. (You can imagine it replacing stuff like Metrocards, car keys, house keys, etc. It already has in some places, as you probably know.)

Re FaceCash, it looks really interesting but the thing that kept me from paying $3 to sign up with my GMail account is that the site's missing a "how it works" blurb. How exactly do I get my money into the merchant's hands?

<comment><USER4> The sign up process guides you through linking your bank account and making an initial deposit. We actually encourage people not to use GMail as we can't verify free e-mail accounts.

We've updated the general questions page to address your concerns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Want to pay for purchases by waving your iPhone in front of a payment terminal at checkout?_

Want to advertise that you own an expensive gadget which is also primed with cash, instead of using a plastic card? No, of course I don't, what a silly question.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't think the iPhone can launch apps. Visa may be able to. Well actually, I guess the iPhone technically launches the app after Visa has introduced it. </pedantic></comment>


Super Mario Bros. is easy with lexicographic orderings and time travel - <AUTHOR> http://swizec.com/blog/week-2-level-1-of-super-mario-bros-is-easy-with-lexicographic-orderings-and/swizec/6392

<comment><USER2> I dont know why this isn't upvoted more.Its actually a beautiful visual illustration of the problems and challenges of machine learning. And i dont even like platform games.</comment>


Russian media group Rambler attempting to hold Nginx hostage - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/12/russian-media-group-rambler-attempting-to-hold-nginx-hostage/ <comment><USER2> Surprised at the lack of discussion here. This is a huge story. Hopefully this won't go anywhere. I guess it entirely depends on the employee contract they signed whilst at Rambler?

<comment> bjelkeman-again I was surprised too. I wonder why this did not catch the attention?

<comment><USER3> I would rather bet that there are some people interested in making this story not reach the frontpage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > This would, in turn, open up effectively the entire developed world's tech > industry to shakedowns for licensing fees—both for continued operation, and > in theory, retroactively for more than a decade of "unlicensed" usage.

Even I'd they change the license now why would it apply retroactively? Previous usage was under a permissive license.</comment>