Why Airplane Boarding Got So Ridiculous - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/heres-why-airplane-boarding-got-so-ridiculous.html <comment><USER2> The airlines chose to turn a simple logistical procedure into a silly game of caste and cash. Passengers chose to play the game and try to win, beating their fellow passengers. Moving 100 people 100 feet takes 45 minutes and 5 crew members to organize. Instead of everybody working together to make it smooth, passengers compete against each other and the airlines. Passengers try and get the largest bag possible on the plane free of charge. They try to get on before other passengers so they can take up lots of overhead space and normally try to put their bags in bins closer to the front than their seats. Later passengers who sit up front then have to put their bags closer the the back of the plane and then fight to get back there when it is time to get off. They shove, squeeze and smash bags into the already filled bins rougher than any bag handler could dream of in a desperate attempt to avoid checking. The designers and players of the game all seem to work very hard in making the simple task of getting on a plane very difficult, slow and unpleasant.

The whole game is so bizarrely penalizing that passengers actually want to be first to get onto a cramped plane and sit down, where they will be cramped and sitting hours on end. While flight is a modern miracle, flying is like the Jerry Springer show- it is humans at their worst and is depressing to watch.

Why don't they just put seat numbers and dividers on the bins? Your luggage fits in your bin or it gets checked at $25.

Travelling for one week or less and all my luggage (clean underwear and toothbrush) fits into a small backpack that I still can't find room for when I board late. Being tall means under the seat does't work well since my feet are there. Anything less than ten hours drive is a road trip for me.

<comment><USER3> Southwest avoids most of these problems. Two free checked bags removes pressure from the overheads, no first class seats or extra legroom seats for extra money, no reserved seats (just a line up number system). Lots of direct flights and no real hub system. I try and fly them when I can.

<comment><USER4> I flew SW for the first time a few weeks ago (I live in France). The flight was great but I discovered something I have never seen elsewhere : the bus stop plane.

I flew from Phoenix to Oakland with a stop in Portland. The ticket was PHX- OAK, people got off the plane at Portland, some more got in. A bus stop in short. It took 2.5 + 1.5h for a nominally 1h40min flight.

<comment><USER5> Isn't that just a normal, non-direct flight with a layover?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Author is implying that he only fears whatever time he needs to wait for checked bag. I find it ridiculous - air travel is already an all day long enterprise even on short flights - get to the airport, then minimum 2 hours for all checks, then flight itself, then check on arrival (up to 1 hour), then baggage if any and then get out of the airport. Baggage wait time is usually a rounding error in all this. What is really important is that people usually carry fragile and expensive things in hand luggage and is forced to check it in there is a high probility of it breaking or theft. This is a real reason for fighting for overhead space. Also losing all your luggage (checked in and forced checked in) or even delaying it by few days is significantly more painful if only one item was lost/delayed, especially if it was a trip from home to another place (not reverse).

<comment><USER7> And if you're travelling into a country with painful immigration processes (e.g. USA), the time spent waiting for your baggage can be the difference between a 15mn cue at immigration and a 2h cue at customs EDIT: the big queue is at customs not immigration

<comment><USER8> Traveling to U.S.A. is a pretty unique experience, depending on your visa/status. And I don't mean it in a good way... With my E-2 visa crossing immigration at JFK is anywhere between 20 minutes (very lucky) and 1 hour. To be fair it has improved massively, it used to be 2+ hours. In any case my checked baggage will be waiting for me, not the other way around.

But check-in is far worse: nobody knows how to handle an E-2 visa. Last time I went to Japan it took 4 JAL employees 20 minutes to figure out which numbers to enter where on their system. Still two hours less than Air France that may or may not have someone to take care of passengers that cannot check in on their DIY terminals... Hence I try to avoid Air France when flying to US, even though otherwise I quite enjoy flying with them.

But really, there's no reason why waiting for checked luggage should be a thing. I'm always thoroughly impressed when flying domestic Japanese flights: get off the plane, walk to the luggage pick-up area, pick up luggage. No waiting time: checked bags are already there. I don't even know how they do that. Aéroport de Paris should send a team or two over there and study hard...

<comment><USER9> I used to fly semi-regularly on an E-3 visa. The online check-in and airport kiosks usually couldn't accept it, but the customer service staff never had a problem with it.

Arriving in the US was a whole other matter. They often weren't familiar with the E-3 rules for things like whether the 2 years starts when the visa was issued or date of first arrival. They also wrote the wrong visa type one time, which would have affected my employment authorization. Had to guide them thru it a few times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So the author argues that baggage handling is more efficient and trackable than before, but baggage fees are "a disincentive to check luggage"?

I accept that baggage fees are designed to mask a lower advertised fare and/or extract more pax revenue. And I don't understand the mad rush to skip baggage claim and get out of the airport 15 minutes quicker. Baggage tracking and recovery is indeed a lot quicker and I've never had a problem. And the lines at car rental desks and taxi pickups didn't magically get shorter in my recent observations. In fact they're longer.

I suppose that makes me an outlier, but the ~$25 is worth taking all the stress out of queueing at the gate and trying to get on as quickly as possible. Your time/value equation might be different.

<comment><USER11> * It costs money to check a bag. It costs nothing to carry it on.

* There is a non zero chance of a checked bag getting lost or damaged. The chances of that happening to a carry on are essentially 0.

* 15 minutes to get your checked bag may be the average. Sometimes the carosel has already started by the time I get there, but other times, I've waited nearly an hour (looking at you Salt Lake City).

So what your saying is that the cost + added risk + added time is worth it to you vs queueing at the gate to fight for overhead. I suggest you pay the $15 upgrade to get in the front of the queue instead of the $25 bag fee and just carry on.

<comment><USER10> _It costs money to check a bag. It costs nothing to carry it on_.

If I can spend an extra half hour in the lounge doing a little light work or relaxing before the flight instead of jostling in line, it definitely has value.

Like I said, the value of your time will probably differ from mine. For me, $25 is a bargain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Another interesting wrench I've noticed: People who've lost their checked bags at some point.

I know a few people who had their checked luggage lost by the airline, and the aftermath was so painful that they basically refuse to check luggage ever again.

I am curious whether the boarding process has gotten significantly longer over time, and whether that costs airlines more money than they receive in baggage fees. I'm sure the answer is "not by a longshot", but still curious nonetheless.

<comment><USER13> >the aftermath was so painful that they basically refuse to check luggage ever again.

I know this is why people don't check luggage, but knowing the possibility exists makes it possible to plan around. I don't often fly with more than a backpack, but when I do I always check.

Nothing I don't mind losing forever, nothing that can't be temporarily replaced. If bag gets delayed only have the airline deliver somewhere staffed to receive a package (like an office/hotel) and with plenty of time for the delivery to be made, or get it from the baggage office on the way out.

<comment><USER12> You can plan around it, but that doesn't make it any less stressful necessarily during an activity that's already of varying degrees of stressful (traveling).

If I lose all my clothes in my luggage that isn't really a huge deal (I can buy new clothes), but it certainly puts a major damper on the trip.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This author is just now figuring out that checking bags is over-demonized and that cloth duffles are dope?

This is some real rookie shit. So much so that I suspect flight tech has passed me by and the people at the front are sharing outdated metagame strategy with the masses.

<comment><USER15> I don't even get why everyone has these roller carry-ons. I have a soft-sided backpack designed specifically for air travel. It always fits in the bin and it's way faster to carry than something that rolls on the ground with wheels. And ditching all the hard sides and wheels makes everything weigh less.

<comment><USER16> do you also bring a "personal item"? for me the backpack is my personal item, so my carry on needs to be something convenient to carry while already wearing a backpack.

<comment><USER17> I've taken to traveling with this[1] bag from Osprey. I typically put my cameras and tablet in a separate small backpack, though for shorter trips all my stuff will fit in the Osprey (just in case I get really unlucky with overhead - I will not gate-check my electronics). For longer walks, I strap the small backpack to the Osprey. For short walks, I wear the Osprey normally and sling the other bag over a single shoulder.

1 - [https://www.osprey.com/us/en/product/farpoint-40-FARPNT40_52...](https://www.osprey.com/us/en/product/farpoint-40-FARPNT40_526.html)

<comment><USER18> Can you stash/remove the hip belt while still comfortably using the shoulder straps? The omnipresence of hip belts is one of the reasons I don't care for carry-on backpacks (that and the fact that I'm normally wearing a small backpack with laptop, headphones, snacks, anyway). I find the hip belt very useful if I'm actually backpacking and otherwise really annoying.

<comment><USER19> no, but they lie close enough to flush against my back

<comment><USER18> Ok, thanks. I might take a look at some of Osprey's other bags. They seem to have similar options without the hip belt in their "duffel" section.

<comment><USER17> Their duffels are nice, but be sure to check the dimensions. They tend to be longer and narrower - while they'll probably squish into an overhead, they aren't optimized for that usage.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for the heads up. I'll be careful about that.

<comment><USER17> Check out Timbuk2's Never Check Duffel and Never Check Overnight Briefcase. The duffel has backpack straps and looks like a good overhead bag. The briefcase looks like it will fit in most under-seat areas. If I did more business travel, I'd probably look closely at these, but right now, I'm only flying 2x/year for work and 2-3x for pleasure.

<comment><USER18> Appreciate the suggestions. Will definitely take a look. I don't fly a ton but have been considering a proper backpack or duffel carry-on for a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The causality is backwards. Larger hardcase roll-ons followed from checked luggage being a paid extra, not the other way around.

The first time I flew in the US I thought there was something wrong with my flight. It took 45 minutes to board and leave! But then it happened again. And again. And again. And slowly it dawned on me that this is just what folks here consider normal. Now we've gone from "you pay extra so you can board last" to "you pay extra so you can board first". It's nuts.

<comment><USER7> Well, the actual game is "you pay a bit extra to board first" or "you pay a lot extra to board last". If you're in business or first (on a plane big enough to have properly separated cabins of course), the big advantage of the upper cabin classes is that you have your own luggage bin

<comment><USER21> _> "you pay a lot extra to board last"_

In my experience, the first- and business- class folks _always_ take advantage of their ability to board first, because sitting in first class on the tarmac is more comfortable than sitting in the airport terminal.

<comment><USER7> I think it depends on the layout of the terminal. If the lounge is not too far from the gate, it's more comfortable to just roll up last minute

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If the airlines were smart, they'd consider doing away with the overhead bins altogether. Those bins create a tragedy of the commons.

Bring a small backpack to be put under your seat that can carry your passport, laptop, headphones, a book to read, etc., or nothing at all. Check the rest. If the airlines do away with the overhead bins, then the first checked bag should be free. If it takes too long to get the bags on a carousel one-by-one, consider taking a leaf from the shipping industry and figure out some kind of containerization system for passenger aircraft whereby suitcases are loaded into containers before the aircraft gets to the gate, and the containers are unloaded at the destination.

Caveat: I'm not a business traveler. But, if you travel for business so often that you have status, then your checked bags are priority-marked and they're the first ones on the carousel anyway. As a guy who most often travels internationally and thus gets a free checked bag, even without status I never seem to need to wait more than 5-10 minutes for my bag, even on international flights where most travelers are checking bags.

<comment><USER23> Since they started charging for checked bags, now everyone tries to carry on as much as they can which results in slow boarding and getting off.

They _should_ be charging for overhead bin use and make checked bags be free (along with small bags under the seat in front of you). This way most people would go back to checking bags and only the business people or people willing to pay would carry-on.

With planes being so overbooked these days I often carry my bag through security (which slows that down!) but then gate check it for free (so the airline is now losing the revenue).

<comment><USER22> The compromise position is probably to only have overhead bin space in premium cabins, then the price of overhead bin space is folded into the premium ticket.

Good point that carry-on bags probably also slows down security, and the amount that it slows security down is probably not negligible. Without carry- on suitcases, you could probably completely do away with the X-ray machines (hand-check people's purses and backpacks), which are (anecdotally) probably the biggest bottleneck at airport security.

<comment><USER24> Really? For me it's getting halfway undressed (no jacket, belt off, shoes on the conveyor, empty your pockets) that takes the most time.

<comment><USER25> Get TSA Precheck and that nonsense goes away. Only heavy jackets need to come off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My gripe is that there ought to be an assigned overhead compartment for every individual seat. I get really annoyed when there's not enough room for my carry-on and it becomes _my_ problem. It should be the airline's problem.

<comment><USER27> As a European all the complaints In this thread sound completely foreign. Whenever I fly, the stewards just help those who can't find space at their seat with their bags. It's never an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> * Captive market of people sitting in the airplane shopping mall for hours.

* Extra charges for everything.

Compare airplane boarding with simply boarding a train in Switzerland / Europe: You get on the train. If you miss the train, you get on the next one. Air travel was like this a long time ago, and still is for short-haul flights, and short-haul fleets are going all electric.

I think fast electric rail is here [in Europe and China/Japan/Korea] and is the future. Hopefully flying will be reduced, but for now, airplane boarding is ridiculous.

<comment><USER25> > short-haul fleets are going all electric.

There is literally not a single passenger service nor airline sized electric airplane in the world. "are going" is significantly premature at a minimum.

<comment><USER28> I am talking about short-haul flights where boarding is almost as easy as getting on the train.

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/scotlands- orkney...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/scotlands-orkney- islands-may-see-electric-plane-service-by-2021/)

[https://www.harbourair.com/harbour-air-and-magnix-partner- to...](https://www.harbourair.com/harbour-air-and-magnix-partner-to-build- worlds-first-all-electric-airline/)

[http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180814-norways-plan- for-a-...](http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180814-norways-plan-for-a-fleet- of-electric-planes)

<comment><USER25> In round numbers, how many of those ultra-short-haul passenger flights are flying electric today? I think the answer is a perfectly round number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Southwest seems to board fairly quickly with unassigned seating.

But my favorite experience has been when they occasionally open both the front and rear doors for fast exiting.

</comment><comment><USER30> CGP Grey did a video about this

[https://youtu.be/oAHbLRjF0vo](https://youtu.be/oAHbLRjF0vo)

</comment><comment><USER31> This is why the assumption that market forces and competition will be favorable to consumers is a sham. There is no counter to shameless greed which is now directly impacting consumers who are actually paying more than earlier but on a piecemeal basis.

</comment><comment><USER32> Still waiting for an airline to go 100% overhead bin free; something I think Southwest should try on an experimental route. Backing this up with free bags and adding an SLA for bag-to-claim (10m, depending on the airport) to give people predictability.</comment>


Wine Developers Concerned with Ubuntu Dropping 32-Bit Support - <AUTHOR> https://www.linuxuprising.com/2019/06/wine-developers-concerned-with-ubuntu.html <comment><USER3> I immediately wondered about macOS, which is dropping 32-bit support as well. One of the first links I found[1] seems to say that there is no 64-bit wine on macOS regardless of library issues, due to an ABI incompatibility. So on the surface it seems like the world is shifting under wine's feet, and they are going to need to do a second level of emulation eventually to keep 32-bit stuff running.

[1]: [https://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=23005](https://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=23005)

<comment><USER4> The change Ubuntu is proposing is far less harsh than what macOS is doing. Unlike macOS, Ubuntu will still run 32-bit processes, you just have to provide all of the userspace libraries. Applications like Steam for Linux already do this for binary compatibility reasons, so their usecase won't change much.

Wine's official Ubuntu packages currently rely on the OS to provide these userspace libraries. They would "only" need to change to also build and ship the rest of the libraries, instead of relying on the OS to provide them. Meanwhile on macOS, you can't even run 32-bit binaries, working around that is a much, much larger task.

<comment><USER5> I wonder why Wine doesn't have those libraries on standby. I can understand keeping installer/total install size and footprint down for any application but especially emulation which is already complex and going to push hardware. If Wine includes the right components, what performance hit may be suffered? Or maybe I have this wrong and it won't really matter.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, it doesn't really matter as wine would just have to load the 32 bit libraries from a different location (say, /usr/lib/wine/lib32 instead of /usr/lib32).

Also, Wine is not that kind of emulator. It provides windows-compatibile libraries but does not do CPU emulation so there's no real significant performance hit. [0]

[0]: [https://superuser.com/a/14600](https://superuser.com/a/14600)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> WINE needs 32 bit support. The bulk of windows programs that people still care about are from the 32 bit era, and as they point out many 64 bit apps use 32 bit installers. Maybe it's time for x86 box like DOSbox.

<comment><USER8> What's interesting about this is... doesn't WINE also support Win16 applications? My understanding was that it does, yet it doesn't seem to require 16 bit libraries from the host OS...

<comment><USER9> Windows doesn't even support 16-bit applications (unless you use 32-bit Windows with NTVDM enabled).

There was another post on here a few months back about someone getting Win16 apps working on modern 64-bit Windows machines:

[https://hackernoon.com/win3mu-part-1-why-im- writing-a-16-bit...](https://hackernoon.com/win3mu-part-1-why-im- writing-a-16-bit-windows-emulator-2eae946c935d)

<comment><USER10> If I'm not mistaken such emulation already exists with winevdm:

[https://github.com/otya128/winevdm](https://github.com/otya128/winevdm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm curious about Wine's usage and relevance at this point in the Linux desktop story. My assumption is that Linux users(myself included) that use Windows applications(not games), tend to just run a VM in seamless mode for Windows functionality.

I would be curious if others had any insight(anecdotal or otherwise) about Wine usage these days.

<comment><USER12> I used to run foobar2000 in wine, because no other linux media player scratched some of the itches foobar covered. There is even a foobar2000 package in the arch aur so it simply installs like any other pacman managed program.

However, once I learned of the wine interface that is available on flathub (for flatpak) I immediately removed wine and its 32 bit components from my system- now that untidyness is neatly contained within flatpak dependencies.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't flatpak'd wine solve this issue?

<comment><USER13> Yes, fb2k is the one Windows-only app I just can't let go. The library management, plugins, UI, extensibility, and configurability are just simply unmatched by anything else out there. I likes my music the way I likes it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I had assumed that because 64-bit wine did the "Program Files (x86)" thing, it ran 32-bit Windows apps in a 64-bit process. But now that I think about it, that doesn't make sense.

WINE needs kernel and userland support for running 32-bit x86 code unless it adds an emulator, because WINE actually loads the Windows executable's binary code into the current process (I assume exec() is a good comparison?) together with OS shared libraries. Maybe relevant for understanding this: [https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_Developer%27s_Guide/Kernel_modu...](https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_Developer%27s_Guide/Kernel_modules#The_Wine_initialization_process)

</comment><comment><USER15> This will make me more likely to spin up a ReactOS VM if I really want to run any Windows only software, since running Windows in a VM is very resource consuming.

I was looking at computers at Walmart with only 4GB of RAM, the task manager said 3 GB out of 4 GB were being used, and it was just on standby. I don't know what happened around Windows 8 to 10 but having 8 GB of RAM is too little for Windows, the OS takes up half of it out of the box whilst idle.

<comment><USER16> Yep

That, and it's also almost impossible to run Windows 8 or 10 with a HDD drive, even for basic stuff like internet browsing, etc.

SSD is basically required now.

Sad, because Linux is still pretty fast with HDD for basic usage.

<comment><USER17> Can confirm, had a huge "WTF?" on installing Win8 on an HDD and seeing the friggin' OS UI pause constantly for no obvious reason. It was like running Win98 on a 75Mhz Pentium with 16MB of RAM. On my beefy quad-core Intel with 16GB of RAM. Added an SSD, problem went away. They're relying on the SSD to make up for some really lazy crap in their code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This actually seems like a GREAT thing to untangle all the otherwise useless? 32bit support from the underlying filesystem.

Why have windows apps accessing your 32 bit libraries in /usr (which only the Windows apps need at this point) and instead just a flatpak library of sandboxed 32 libraries?

My steam install is already flatpaked, I'd be much happier if the community just moved this way -

[https://winepak.org/](https://winepak.org/)

Seems like much closer to what I would want when running ANY Windows app in my otherwise completely open source desktop in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER19> Lots of people in my company use Ubuntu and Wine...

Those news indeed are concerning, specially because a lot of "bureacracy" related software is win32 only for stupid reasons (there is even one company that purchases from us, that only negotiate the actual deals using a online platform that only runs on IE6 and needs some Win32 plugins...)

</comment><comment><USER20> I use Ubuntu, but should I switch to Debian or something else? What do I get with Ubuntu that I don't get with Debian? The ability to run Windows binaries is important to me.

<comment><USER11> The biggest difference is probably the desktop UI. After that Ubuntu has a bit more of a unified experience. Part of that is because Ubuntu tends to make a lot more decisions for you, whereas Debian gives you more options upfront. There is a nice integrated GUI(I know Debian has one but its less integrated) for installing packages. Online resources tend to discuss Ubuntu specifically due to its larger market share on the desktop. There is the Ubuntu PPA(Personal Packaged Archives) which don't always work easily in Debian.

They are both fairly similar internally. I have been a long term Debian user(decades), and I never feel out of place working with Ubuntu. That is not always the case when I'm working with Red Hat or Arch or some other distributions. Debian probably requires a bit more fiddling and a bit more general Linux and computing knowledge, but if you have been using Linux for a bit, I think you would be just fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Presumably, the kernel will continue to support 32-bit, it's just that Ubuntu won't package various 32-bit libraries anymore. But, can't Wine just bundle any library dependencies itself?

<comment><USER4> > But, can't Wine just bundle any library dependencies itself?

Yes. Any volunteers? :)

<comment><USER22> Sure. You'll find them here: [https://www.winepak.org/](https://www.winepak.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> But why not just do a translation — 32bit x86 to 64bit x86 doesn't meaningfully restrict available instructions, then just* plant a bunch trampolines in the low 4gig to the real implementations in the 64bit adds space.

* I know this isn't a trivial "just" but it seems like a plausibly achievable approach to me

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h I wonder if it'd be easier to use qemu's binary compatibility features? Granted, I've only seen that used in Linux, but it's an existing layer that supports running code for another processor as if it were native.

<comment><USER24> That qemu mode requires a full set of libraries compiled for the processor the code you want to run executes on, so it doesn't help here - if you've got that you can just use the Linux kernel's built-in 32 bit compatibility layer which isn't going away any time soon and get better performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It seems to me, we'll probably wind up with a base linux container for 32-bit wine support... now, what that is based on, and how well it's maintained is another issue entirely.

By comparison there's DosEMU, DosBox and others for DOS, but Windows/Wine is a much larger surface. I can only hope there's enough community to create effectively a "virtual distro base" that's 32-bit so that said apps can continue to run.

Should be fairly similar to the effort on windows for WSL2 ... Would be interesting to see MS take a similar approach for DOS/Win32 support. Given the changes in MS, would actually be _VERY_ interesting to see MS support Wine32 under WSL2 so that they could remove the 32bit support from windows as well. Unlikely, but one can dream.

<comment><USER26> I agree that a virtual 32 bit distro is probably the only way this makes sense. I can't imagine that a project like wine has any capacity to do all the security updates and dealing with all of multi distro complexities to work around the fact that they could have wildly different library sets to stand on. It could potentially be done as part of a distro package for Ubuntu but it would be a single person replicating the effort of the core libs for ubuntu over again, just for this one corner project.

Either that or someone's going to have to rebuild WOW64 on top of wine? I guess that could happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Alot of non-technical people use (mostly closed source) 32bit windows apps/games through wine on Ubuntu(the most popular desktop linux) - <USER2> without equivalents/alternatives. The only result of this is ubuntu usage share dropping - people run Operating Systems for Apps/Games/Software, not the other way around.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'll admit I'm a very fringe case, but I loved the ability to play the original Microsoft Entertainment Packs on my Mac using WINE. There's just something about how simple and clean those games are, and people actually like to see them when I have a paused game of rodent's revenge on one of my screens.

I really don't want to lose that!

</comment><comment><USER29> I think you can just use 32-bit libraries from Debian for the most part (I assume Debian is going to maintain i386 forever).

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h I would be concerned about the stability of mixing distros like that, even within a family. If nothing else, those packages are built against different versions of libraries.

<comment><USER8> Which is one of the many reasons I think package managers are awful. If we lived in a sane world this sort of thing would be a simple matter for any and all distros. In fact, you wouldn't even need distros because you could trivially mix and match the software you wanted without concern for this garbage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I took Ubuntu's dropping of 32-bit support to only apply to the machine itself, like how openSUSE Leap only supports running on 64-bit hardware but still supports 32-bit libraries[1]. Sounds like Ubuntu's taking it to an even greater extreme.

Regardless, I can think of a couple ways around this:

\- Build the 32-bit versions of the relevant libraries and ship them in a third-party PPA (or - ideally - convince Canonical to do this for Ubuntu, thus doing what openSUSE Leap is doing)

\- Ship Wine in a snap or AppImage or flatpak or what have you with the relevant 32-bit (and 64-bit) libraries

[1]: [https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/b...](https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book.opensuse.reference/cha.64bit.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> Debian will keep 32 bit support for a while... No problem here.

</comment><comment><USER32> Does the Microsoft Office executable file even come in a 64bit package? It's not Ubuntu's or Wine's fault

<comment><USER33> Office has been 64bit for 9 years. And this year it's the default.

<comment><USER4> Almost all Windows installers are 32-bit, even if the application installed is 64-bit. This is so the installer can do something elegant when run on a 32-bit-only system. While this might be changing, 32-bit support is effectively required for almost every Windows application ever released.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've used Wine to run a number of instrument specific pieces of software via Ubuntu and all of them were 32 bit.

</comment><comment><USER35> There's ecen an Ubuntu dev urging for more testing before implementing this: [https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/results-of-testing-games- on-6...](https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/results-of-testing-games-on-64-bit- only-eoan-19-10/11353)

</comment><comment><USER36> Can't you still setup a 32bit chroot in 64bit Ubuntu (or any other distro for that matter)?

<comment><USER37> But the 32 bit code physically won't be part of the distribution. What do you imagine you'd be running?

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h 32-bit Debian chroot on 64-bit Ubuntu? Works, mostly conforms to user expectations, seems decent?

<comment><USER37> Well yes if you're going to run another distro that's fine. This issue is about that people can't run new Ubuntu. You can't run new Ubuntu in 32-bit.

<comment><USER38> So presumably they'd run old-Ubuntu 32-bit chroot in new-Ubuntu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> How hard is it to statically convert a 32 bit process into a 64 bit one? And why?

</comment><comment><USER40> What would it take for wine to run in 64 bit mode and emulate Win32?

</comment><comment><USER41> How different is the 32-bit Windows application environment from the 64-bit Linux application environment on x64 systems, as far as how system calls are invoked goes, and how memory is accessed?

We had a somewhat similar issue of wanting to run code from a different, narrower, system, although the systems involved were not anywhere near as different as Windows and Linux, back in the mid '80s at ISC. We were doing the 386 port of System V Release 3 under contract from AT&T. Part of the contract required that we add the ability to run binaries from the 286 ports of System V Release 2 and System V Release 3 [1].

The approach was similar to what Wine does, if my limited understanding of Wine is correct. We wrote a program, i286emul, which could be pointed at a 286 program. It would allocate memory for the 286 program and load the program into that memory.

386 Unix was using a simple paging memory model. The 386 still used the selector/offset system even when using paging, but the selectors were loaded once when a program started and not touched again. I think it was using what, in 16-bit land, would be called "small model" (one code segment, one data/stack segment), but with all the segments set to 4 GB, and the real memory management done via that paging system that operated below the output of the selector/offset system.

We had to add a system call (or maybe it was a new command added to an existing ioctl...I don't remember for sure) that allowed i286emul to ask the kernel to set up some 16-bit selectors referencing the parts of the i286emul 32-bit address space at which it had loaded the 16-bit program, or at which it had allocated memory for the 16-bit program's data and stack.

That let i286emul load a 16-bit program into i286emul's address space, get the selectors set up, and then it could load the selectors and jump into the 16-bit program.

Eventually, the 16-bit program would try to do a system call. Fortunately, 16-bit 286 Unix and 32-bit 386 Unix happened to use different mechanisms for invoking system calls, so that when 16-bit tried to do a 286 Unix system call it would be an illegal instruction or a segfault or something like that (I don't remember the exact mechanism it used), instead of something that would try to invoke a 386 Unix system call. (As far as I know, this was pure luck that the people who decided on the 386 system call interface mechanism picked something different from the 286 system call interface mechanism).

So, to handle system calls we just had to have i286emul handle the fault, recognize that it was caused by the 286 program trying to do a system call, and emulate that call. I don't remember if that was as simple as installing a signal handler for the fault, or if we needed some kernel help.

The only other kernel change I remember was making exec recognize 286 binaries, and turn the exec into an i286emul exec, with the path to the 286 program passed as an additional argument.

Later, when AT&T and Microsoft made a deal to add Xenix binary compatibility to 386 Unix, we got the contract for that, leading to x286emul, which was very similar to i286emul. There were a couple of minor areas in which Xenix and Unix differed that we could not take care of in user mode, so had to add a kernel flag [2] to have it slightly change some behavior for x286emul.

How hard would it be to take a similar approach with 32-bit Windows on 64-bit Linux? That is, make it so that a Linux process can reasonably mix 32-bit and 64-code, and give it some control over how 32-bit code sees the processes address space, and then implement a version of Wine that can handle 32-bit Windows programs translating their system calls to 64-bit Linux calls? The issues I can see include:

1\. What is actually different between 32-bit code execution and 64-code execution as far as the kernel goes? Is there some flag that marks 32-bit/64-bit, or is it mostly that 32-bit code is simply going to use addressing mode that refer to the double word registers instead of the quad word registers?

2\. We greatly benefited on i286emul/x286emul by the very different memory models of the two systems. I'd expect 32-bit Windows and 64-bit Unix to have very similar models which could be a problem...but I'd expect 32-bit Windows and 32-bit Linux to be even closer, and Wine dealt with that, so I'm not sure 32-bit/64-bit would add much difficulty.

3\. We also benefited from 286 Unix and Xenix being similar to 386 Unix, so mostly 286 system calls mapped directly to corresponding 386 system calls, with just a little translation of arguments and return codes. Windows and Linux are very different. But Wine is already dealing with that, so as with memory model it is not obvious that 32-bit vs. 64-bit makes much difference.

[1] ...not that there were actually any System V Release 3 on the 286 programs anyone cared about, because as far as I know that port was never completed. We were doing that one for AT&T, too, but there were too many assumptions about memory management baked into the 3B2 source that were not right for the very different memory environment of the 286, and maybe halfway through the port AT&T realized that Release 3 on the 286 was going to suck unless we did some major rewriting rather than just porting, and the 386 was so much better than on one was going to give a damn about running Release 3 on a 286 even if it did not suck, and dropped the port.

[2] That stupid flag led to the most annoying meeting I have ever attended. For x286emul, we were just doing the user mode code. Microsoft was doing any kernel changes we needed. They said an issue arose with our request for this flag that could not be resolved by email or phone. Me and the other guy who were writing x286emul had to fly from LAX to SEATAC, go all the way over to Redmond, to resolve this thing in person.

We got to the meeting, and they presented the issue: should controlling the flag be via a new system call, or via a flag on the system call (or ioctl...I never can remember which it was) that is used for some of the other 286 emulation control? We gave out preference on that, and were sent home. How the heck could that not have been handled by email or phone?

</comment><comment><USER42> I do use Wine (and Steam with it's various levels of Windows API calling), and I am happy about this.

Sure, it will create some issues during the first stages of this migration, but, more than once, I botched my system in the past with the needed i386 libraries (it didn't happen lately, can't tell if because I finally got my head around it of because they improved the tooling).

Still, in the end, we will all have a "cleaner" system. Either because they migrate parts of the Windows calling to 64bit or because they will keep everything neatly in containers, or, probably, due to a mix of both. But it's high time we improve the current state of these tools.

P.S.: Still trying to get WINASIO to work properly with Wine using one of the latest versions (I am trying to run Ableton in Wine, but the latency is just too high). If anyone has experience doing this, any tips would be apreciated.

<comment><USER43> I think even if you got the drivers working you'd have too much latency. You need the PREEMPT_RT kernel patch to get reliably low latency.

You can also try Bitwig, it has native Ubuntu support and most feature parity with Ableton.

<comment> james-mcelwain I'm so happy that Bitwig is supporting Linux as a first class platform, but it's still unstable enough on Linux that I would never consider using Bitwig on Linux for, e.g., a live performance.

I'm sure they consider crashes on Linux real bugs, so hopefully it's just a few more years of work to have a rock solid DAW on Linux. Super excited about the future of Bitwig.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> There are thousands and thousands of applications available for Linux, and even more being developed as you read this. As much as I love Linux and Open Source, sometimes you happen to love a Windows application so much that you wonder if only this was available on Linux I would completely switch

</comment><comment><USER45> I have a sneaking suspicion that Microsoft will release their own Wine-a-like subsystem some time soon.

It's the missing link, and I can't see them ignoring it given how their direction has changed over the last few years.

<comment><USER46> I doubt that's the case. Everything they've been doing with WSL is precisely to keep you _inside_ the Windows OS. It doesn't make sense to go the other way and give you a reason to use Linux instead.

<comment><USER47> > It doesn't make sense to go the other way and give you a reason to use Linux > instead.

It makes sense for every business unit _except_ Windows to make it easier to run their software on Linux/MacOS (for desktop software, more the latter, for server software, more the former.) A common shim that lets you so that with the same codebase rather than maintaining separate Linux and MacOS versions or porting the whole existsling software to a cross-platform base rather than a Windows base makes some sense.

Of course it doesn't make sense for the Windows unit to promote Linux, but Windows isn't all of Microsoft.

<comment><USER46> I could be wrong, but I think the overlap of people who use Linux but would also pay for Microsoft software like Office is small enough to not justify the engineering effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Well, the best solution would be to fix Wine for 64 bit platforms and applications. And use docker + wine for 32 bits ones.

<comment><USER49> The very first paragraph in the article explains why this does not work...

Unless you mean building a 32bit emulation layer into Wine itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> In the current state of technology, wine doesn't make sense anymore.

20-ish years ago was impossible to have an interchangeable application between two OS, without a huge effort on porting and adaptations trade off. Now we have the web applications running in a handful of different systems. We're also watching the people theorizing supporting webassembly binaries directly in the kernel. If you don't want to run a webapp you have virtualization to rescue you.

My last straw with Wine was when I bought navicat for Linux and they shipped a wine wrapped windows app. Really, some tech should just retire.

<comment><USER51> First off, there are plenty of older Windows applications that currently exist that aren't going to get a port to a modern web app any time soon that work perfectly fine with Wine; even Microsoft doesn't support running Windows 3.1 programs anymore. You could argue that nothing from that era is worth preserving, but are you saying that applications like DOSBox, Snes9X, or UAE aren't useful?

Second, while I definitely support the push to web technology, I'd still rather have _something_ on Linux or Mac than nothing, and often times Wine is the only realistic way of doing that. I agree it's a little annoying when you buy a "Linux" app, and it's just a wine wrapper, but at the same time, at least it's officially supported and works. I didn't get upset with SEGA when I bought the Sega Genesis collection and it used emulation instead of native ports.</comment></comment>


How We Ruined Airline Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/business/metropolis/2017/09/how_we_ruined_airline_jobs.html <comment><USER2> Is there anything here to be debated? The article quotes starting salaries that appear to be lower than for a bus driver (1) which to my view is a similar job; albeit probably with lower training requirements.

It doesn't seem surprising that there is a pilot shortage. Possibly employers need to pay more and train more pilots.

[1] [https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/bus- driver/salary](https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/bus-driver/salary)

<comment><USER3> The contracts that pilots unions have negotiated with their airlines are pretty fucked up. Newbies (after several years of education, and a few more years of doing flight instruction to get enough hours) are basically stuck working as a first officer (i.e. copilot) for either UPS/FedEx or a regional airline, with salaries around $30,000/year. Your career progression depends on being promoted to captain, which is entirely based on seniority. If you're lucky enough to have enough spots open up via retirement or expansion, you then have a hope of being accepted by a major/legacy airline, and make $50-70k/year, scaling up to 150-300k, depending on the airline. Once you join, due to the seniority-based payscale/captain waitlist, you're pretty much locked in, except for maybe a one time upgrade from a major airline to a legacy one.

Example payscales:

Envoy Air, a regional airline that's a feeder for American Airlines: [http://www.airlinepilotcentral.com/airlines/regional/envoy_a...](http://www.airlinepilotcentral.com/airlines/regional/envoy_air)

JetBlue, a major airline: [http://www.airlinepilotcentral.com/airlines/major- national-l...](http://www.airlinepilotcentral.com/airlines/major-national- lcc/jetblue_airways)

American Airlines, a legacy airline: [http://www.airlinepilotcentral.com/airlines/legacy/american_...](http://www.airlinepilotcentral.com/airlines/legacy/american_airlines)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used to fly a lot when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. Air travel was always awful. I usually flew with and especially hated United Airlines, because the service was _so_ spectacularly awful.

Then, I moved to Russia. Now, I fly on Aeroflot, S7 and Ural Airlines a lot. It's _always_ awful. _Really_ awful. It makes me pine for the good 'ol days when I had to fly on United. The incompetence, apathy and downright idiocy of these people who work for the Russian airline comes never ceases to shock me.

I'm so happy now when I come back to the United States and fly United. Finally, I get to fly on an airline with staff who are comparatively friendly, helpful and competent.

<comment><USER5> Can you give a concrete example of your bad experience with Russian airlines? I'd like to share in your newfound perspective on U.S. airlines.

<comment><USER6> My friend flew to London from Japan with Aeroflot. It was a connection flight and he had 4 flights in total (round trip included), and 3 of 4 flights were delayed for 3+ hours each.

I also experienced a 5 hour delay. The worst thing was not the length of the delay, but how they handled it... they gave us nearly zero information and most passengers were frustrated by the "expected departure time" on the screen constantly being updated with no explanation.

<comment><USER7> The same thing happened to me in Calgary last year: what we were told after 6 hours of "boarding will start in approximately 15 minutes" was that there was a security breach at the airport where someone had accidentally left a door open, which required them to go through a long procedure of re-securing the affected areas and the aircraft. If that is true, however, they could have told everyone at the gate right from the start: look, we're really sorry, we screwed up and this is going to take a while. A long while. So why don't you make yourselves comfortable, go get some lunch or drinks and be back in six hours?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While the carriers are responsible for a lot of shit, the people most responsible for making the job of piloting suck is pilots. The contracts negotiated by pilot unions are the ultimate expression of "fuck you, I got mine".

Not only is pay determined seniority, so is getting first pick of flights and a bunch of other quality of life factors that make junior piloting a living hell.

Airlines would love to pay their junior pilots more as they correctly realize the economic damage of a shriveling pipeline but they can't do it without senior pilots demanding their vig.

</comment><comment><USER9> I can't find a villian in this story. Airlines aren't hugely profitable according to the story especially regional airlines. If they raise their prices on regional flights, people will just drive or take a shuttle service to the nearest hub.

It seems like the hub system is the most efficient. But then again, that's easy for me to say since I don't live far away from a major hub where I've been able to get direct flights to any major city in t in the country.

</comment><comment><USER10> The article seems confused. It talks about "soaring", "huge" profits, while also talking about "unprecedented" losses, "struggling" through bankruptcies, and the "perennially insolvent airline industry".

<comment><USER11> The airline industry is on the whole a zero sum industry, but there's a huge difference in profits/losses between the many airlines worldwide. So some do make huge profits while most struggle constantly.</comment></comment>


Building a sit-stand desk for less than $200  - <AUTHOR> http://planiverse.wordpress.com/2014/01/10/building-a-sit-stand-desk-for-less-than-200/

<comment><USER2> I'm starting to wonder how difficult it would be to build a completely floating desk. Basically, if there was just a tray attached to the monitor arm, and the arm locked in place and was stable enough, you could just raise and lower the arm, and not worry about the desk surface.

I'm thinking one of those floor-to-ceiling bike racks may be strong enough to carry the weight, and sturdy enough not to shake.

Anybody seen a desk like this?

It seems most monitor arms have a weight restriction that is too low for my needs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ergotron sells several variations on this setup, e.g. [http://www.ergotron.com/ProductsDetails/tabid/65/PRDID/736/l...](http://www.ergotron.com/ProductsDetails/tabid/65/PRDID/736/language/en- US/Default.aspx) or [http://www.ergotron.com/ProductsDetails/tabid/65/PRDID/736/l...](http://www.ergotron.com/ProductsDetails/tabid/65/PRDID/736/language/en- US/Default.aspx)

<comment><USER2> Yeah, but the 25lbs weight capacity seems pretty low (though I have no idea how much my monitor actually weighs.</comment></comment></comment>


Careers Start by Peeling Potatoes - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2012/11/23/careers-start-by-peeling-potatoes/

<comment><USER2> Sometimes I feel that people don't seem to want to peel potatoes anymore. Everyone wants to have the highest paying position, but few are willing to put in the hours learning how to do it. People sometimes ask me why, as a freelancer, I take some jobs that others don't want to do. Things like working with old clunky code, technical documentation, and boring CRUD apps. I do it because thats the way for me to keep getting better. My skills don't improve by working with perfect code. They improve by working with stinky code that no one will touch. I learn how stuff works by writing documentation for it. So far, I've managed to write some pretty nice manuals for some pretty ugly code. Every time I've come out with a better understanding of desgin patterns. One thing is to read about good design patterns, another is to work with bad design patterns and see how bad the code turns out to be. This helps me recognize when I'm applying such bad patterns to my own code and keeps my work nicer overall.

As someone who really interviews horribly, peeling potatoes would have been something I would had happily done at any company. Hell, you want me to test how your HTML renders in all browsers? No problem. A lot of the programmers I talk to would be insulted (!) by such thing. Seems their precious skills are not to be wasted doing such menial work. But they dont realize one thing: If the UI that represents your _perfect_ code does not render correctly, then all of the beautiful models and abstractions that you built on your nice Mac Air wont be worth shit. The end user will not be able to use the application. No matter how nice your code might be. I had to stop interviewing and start getting freelance contracts due to how nervous interviews make me. Though Im not complaining, people appreciate a hard worker. Plus they got potatoes to peel, and I got a sharp potato peeler.

One of my latest projects was built using Joomla. I had never used it much, but knew it was a huge ball of PHP spaghetti. I struggled and strugled for about 2 weeks, until I finally saw the light. Then all just made sense. I went from _what the !@$#_ to _this is not so bad_. Sure, Joomla is still not the best written project ever, but I learned a lot from it. The project had gone through the hands of some other programmers, none of which could figure it out (or maybe they didn't want to). To me, they didn't want to peel the Joomla potato. But I shipped that thing, and its now live. What an incredible feeling. Like peeling a potato with my own hands, cutting it into pieces, frying the pieces and giving them to a person to eat as part of their hard earned lunch. I don't know if I will ever stop peeling potatoes. But if that never happens, I will happily go from kitchen to kitchen peeling potatoes. There is no shame in honest work. Whether its being the CEO of $Megacorp or the guy who makes sure all the HTML renders correctly.

tl;dr: Will peel potatoes. Email in profile. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hit the nail on the head.

An entrepreneur's job is to not only create but to constantly optimize their system or process. And you can't do that without getting your hands dirty. Workers are there to do their job, not optimize and save your company money. That's your job. So the whole benefit of "peeling potatoes" isn't to waste your time or get in touch with your employees but to find weaknesses in your business and find better ways to do something.

Just recently I've launched 2 products, "ToDoCal 17x26 Calendar" and "Bic Magnet Pens" which I'm selling on ebay (links below btw). The Magnet Pens I make myself by hand. I take all the pen caps off, boil them in water to soften the plastic, and one by one insert magnets into each pen cap before the plastic cools. By doing all the work manually, packaging everything, and handling fulfillment. I get to refine my process and make some very clever changes to save time later down the road.

I've already made numerous changes to the packaging for ToDoCal to get costs down and streamline my process as well as build custom tools for my MagnetPens to insert the magnets faster.

And those changes never would have happened If I had hired an employee (my little brother) to just do it all for me.

[ToDoCal] [http://www.ebay.com/itm/LARGE-17-x-26-2013-Wall- Calendar-12-...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/LARGE-17-x-26-2013-Wall- Calendar-12-month-ToDoCal-Big-Minimal-Creative-/330829651471)

[Magnet Pens] [http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=33075...](http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=330752750836)

</comment><comment><USER4> One of the problems is that a significant fraction of today's "leadership" views one's willingly "peeling potatoes" as one's self-identifying as a "loser". They then treat those people accordingly. [I'll include or even call out particularly the "potato peeler's" middle-management, here, who are often effectively his or her leadership.]

"Peeling potatoes" is, effectively, a collaboration. When one side doesn't hold up their end of the bargain, the other eventually learns that "peeling potatos" is a road to nowhere.

It can also be a matter of your socio-economic group. For an ambitious immigrant, "peeling potatoes" is perceived as a fine endeavor. For one coming out of a position assumed to confer entitlement, "peeling potatos" can be perceived as a failing.

TL;DR: Always be aware of the -- and your -- context.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some cool Open Source projects that could use a hand? - <AUTHOR>

I want to help on any kind of Open Source projects that are innovative and have to much to do, but not enough people. I've never contributed to any Open Source projects, but this community has given me so much that I need to give something back! Please, suggest me where to start.
UPDATE: My skills:
- PHP; OOP
- mySQL
- Advanced Javascript
- iOS
- HTMl5, CSS3
Those are a few skills that I use on daily basis and I've worked with on most of the projects. But I am also willing to learn new skills to help and expand my horizons. <comment><USER2> Perhaps you could start by telling us

\- areas you are interested in

\- technology / skills you possess

\- your experience level

... otherwise I'm not sure what you're expecting people to conjure up! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> You are absolutely right. I've made some small update.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm also looking for open source projects that could use a hand. I have a years experience in Ruby and am interested in Clojure, going into fourth year as a CS major.

</comment><comment><USER4> RubyJS has currently some beginner to advanced level things to get done. If you're interested in Ruby, JS this project gives you an excellent understanding of both.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've seen several of these posts... is there a cross project website that connects developers to open source projects?

<comment><USER6> check out [http://openhatch.org/](http://openhatch.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Any recommendations for someone who is well-versed with C++ and Networking?</comment>


C++ Function tracing with LTTNG - <AUTHOR> http://concord.io/posts/function_tracing <comment><USER2> Super neat. How closely does this mirror Zipkin/Dapper?

<comment><USER3> Zipkin/Dapper is more for RPC tracing, not for low overhead function level tracing.

We actually output zipkin traces to a kafka topic of your choice for network level tracing as well.

This is more for debugging the c++ core.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great post seems pretty useful.</comment>


What a debate about p-values shows about science - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/7/31/16021654/p-values-statistical-significance-redefine-0005 <comment><USER2> > Ideally, Lakens says, the level of statistical significance needed to prove > a hypothesis depends on how outlandish the hypothesis is.

> Yes, you'd want a very low p-value in a study that claims mental telepathy > is possible. But do you need such stringent criteria for a well-worn idea? > The high standards could impede young PhDs with low budgets.

Watching someone try to be Bayesian without using Bayesian techniques is painful.

> There are also new, advanced statistical techniques — like Bayesian analysis > — that, in some ways, more directly evaluate a study's outcome.

Almost as painful as watching Bayesian analysis described as "new."

<comment><USER3> Naive question: Is there a good technique for a bot that detects factually wrong statements?

<comment><USER4> Sure, just give me definition of factually wrong and I'build it for you:)

Less snarky: not really

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Right at the end is a key thing: reward failure better.

Publish negative results.

I'm kinda embarrassed by my negative results, such as they are, but I'm clear in this latest case that I wanted the method reviewed most, since others then may be able to use it.

(Warning: not a real scientist, but being validated by real scientists in the case in question.)

<comment><USER6> Many have discussed this, but like writing bad/buggy code, there are just too many (combinatorial) ways to get a negative result, and most of them are frankly boring, distracting, or worse than useless. You would need a review paper of all the most common failures, screwups, and anti-patterns to be particularly useful... preferably with a good write-up of proper procedure. Some labs publish good protocols, but many (academics!) consider them to be secrets to used for advantage over other labs.

Of course, based on the current p-hacking, publish at all costs environment, it's not clear you need to be particularly useful to be published. I like the idea that has been promoted of requiring a certain number of novel replications in a tenure application as one way forward... at least as a goal or professional shaming tool.

<comment><USER7> Er, the type of the result(positive/negative) should be orthogonal to the methodology, from the point of the reviewer. Reviewers should be checking for all these many combinatorial ways to get an _incorrect_ result, whether it's positive or negative.

It may be true that positive results are more useful than negative ones, but that doesn't mean we should put zero value in negative results. I think that's what parent was trying to point out.

<comment><USER8> Agreed, a negative result should not be confused with shoddily executed science. A solid methodology that produces a negative result could save other researchers from going down the same rabbit hole to come to the same conclusion. We should record these conclusions. Perhaps maybe part of the problem would be the increase in number of publishable results overloading editors and reviewers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pretty good take on this for a general-purpose audience. I was ready to complain about this line for implying P(H|D) (rather than P(D|H_0), as actually occurs):

> The researcher basically asks: How ridiculous would it be to believe the > null hypothesis is the true answer, given the results we're seeing?

but I think they (indirectly) correct it pretty well in the next section.

It isn't published yet, but Gelman and co's recent piece on this seems like an important contribution to the debate [1]. Short version: take the p-value down from it's pedestal, abandon the dichotomous view of is/isn't significant, and consider it with all the other evidence and data.

[1]: [http://andrewgelman.com/2017/09/26/abandon-statistical- signi...](http://andrewgelman.com/2017/09/26/abandon-statistical- significance/)

<comment><USER10> I really like Gelman's response. We should be using likelihoods, information and and intervals to describe parameters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> P-value is such a stupid metrics. Never understood why people still use it and conjure 0.05 magic number as the one that "proves" something. It should be considered a joke, but well, there is economics and a bunch of other "sciences" that are considered "reputable", and people there are daily making living off dubious theories, so nothing will change.

</comment><comment><USER12> > The case against p<.05

> The case against p<.005

> The real problem isn't with statistical significance; it's with the culture > of science

Right. The substance happens in the last 10% of the article.

...and there isn't any solution or recommendation.

Unfortunately, I think this article is really long way of saying, "There exists p-hacking". I was hoping for more :(

</comment><comment><USER13> 538 actually has a good model and discussion about p-hacking. Allows you to play around with values.

[https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt- broken/#pa...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt- broken/#part1)

</comment><comment><USER14> Why not just be more clear and instead of writing the "p-value < 0.05", write: The probability that the difference between these two groups is by chance is less than 5%. Then everybody knows that if you do this a bit more than 20 times this results is achieved by chance alone. Then, just show the damn plots and let me see how much distributions overlap. I have seen insanely small P-values with completely overlapping distributions just because of large amounts of data. I find the P-value near useless.

Personally I much prefer ROC curves, they are much better at showing the difference between distributions. Still, nothing beats the raw data and healthy skepticism.

<comment><USER15> > The probability that the difference between these two groups is by chance is > less than 5%.

That's a common misunderstanding of the p-value, but that's not what it means. (It means: assuming there is no difference, the probability that we'd nevertheless see a difference as big as we are seeing or even bigger is less than 5%).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I co-authored a paper into IMC discussing stats and network questions with a statistician. We got bounced for being too polemical and teaching-mode instead of classical science. the whole point of the paper, was to try and argue for a more mature outlook into statistical methods applied to network operations!

My motivation to co-write was strongly influenced by being called out for p-jacking. Its remarkably easy to fall from grace. I did. walking back is very hard, when peer review doesn't want to have a polemical discussion.

</comment><comment><USER17> When I looked at the authors list I got the impression that it was mostly sociologists, public health researchers etc, but not very many well known statisticians, or people from the traditional physical and biological sciences. It seems like it would have been better to have more authors from the latter groups to make such a broad suggestion; their absence suggests that the proposal doesn't have much support among those fields.

</comment><comment><USER18> A rebuttal to p< .005 proposal: [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319880949_Justify_y...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319880949_Justify_your_alpha_a_response_to_Redefine_statistical_significance/figures?lo=1)

</comment><comment><USER19> Along with grit, growth mindset, power posing, priming, and stereotype threat. A lot of non replicating trash in psychology right now.

</comment><comment><USER20> Only badly designed experiments overrely on p-values.

A robustly designed experiment should produce repeatable, intuitive results. Anyone looking at the presented data should be able to reason the result without needing to conduct a statistical test.

Obviously, these tests are important, but people focus too much on the p-value rather than designing an experiment which will produce a meaningful result (regardless of whether the result is positive or negative).

Proper experimental design is like a cake, and p-values are the frosting. Everybody wants cake, most often with frosting. Nobody wants frosting without the cake, or at least those that do have questionable taste.

<comment><USER21> Not all phenomena are strong enough to allow such experiments. Some make only a small difference to an inherently noisy process. These can only be discovered with statistical tests on substantial samples.

<comment><USER22> Certainly, but a well-designed experiment can identify the wedges that differentiate hypothesis A from hypothesis B without requiring a statistical analysis of noisy data.

And true, there are certain kinds of experiments that can only be done statistically. However, depending on the field, it can just be easier to do, and really should just be considered lazy science - again the details matter.

In my field (biochemistry/genetics) there really is a very real effort to design experiments that do not require statistics to verify the result. And that effort in design is rewarded amply when the result of the experiment becomes quite clearly binary in nature, from multiple angles, rather that a statistical "probably".

<comment><USER21> Are there many real examples of studies where statistical tests are needed to see the effect, but a different experiment could demonstrate the same effect without any statistics? I haven't been able to think of one in the fields I know well.

<comment><USER22> In my field it often comes down to 'mechanism'. If you see an effect of part X on part Y, via statistics, you could write a paper, and do good science.

However, if you have an experiment that pulls X from the system, watches Y fail, then readds X in a new way to recreate the system, you can be much more certain that X influences Y. That becomes a much desired, "elegant" experiment.

The later experiment is often harder, and might not even be proposable until you've seen some statistical effect. However the scientific results from that experiment really don't hinge on statistical signifigances. The results are either binary in result, or better yet, contradictory - elucidating hitherto unknown variables (something a purely statistical result won't help with). And if mechanism is shown in multiple systems, with multiple techniques, the results can very quickly become near-definitive.

<comment><USER23> > However, if you have an experiment that pulls X from the system, watches Y > fail, then readds X in a new way to recreate the system, you can be much > more certain that X influences Y. That becomes a much desired, "elegant" > experiment.

Yeah, in molecular biology this always seemed to be the most convincing evidence. Deleting a gene and then adding it back. Sometimes going a step further and overexpressing the gene. You can generally publish that data without any statistical analysis.

> The later experiment is often harder, and might not even be proposable until > you've seen some statistical effect.

I think the better journals/reviewers can push back at this step, though: If you don't have a demonstrable mechanism, you can't publish. Don't let people stop at "...this gene is important (p < 0.005)." (I know not all things are as simple as gene deletion and complementation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> They should change the nomenclature "significant", which in normal language tends to imply a large size to statistically "detectable" or "discernible".

P=0.05 is best interpreted as "There is a 95% chance that this data isn't pure noise".

Then researchers should always put more emphasis on confidence intervals. Readers of papers can then see if the size is enough to make the results relevant and not likely caused by experimental accident. Plus given the perverse incentives researchers are subject to, maybe assume that the real effect size is probably closer to the lower bound of the interval.

Null hypotheses have limited usefulness even at p=0.005. A tiny systematic bias in the experiment can make it cross that threshold and there are _always_ at least small biases. These can be caused by not exactly calibrated instruments or small differences in the way tests are performed by different researchers on the team etc. Inherent in null hypothesis testing is this ridiculous assumption that there are no systematic biases. This is its fatal flaw.

The null hypothesis test never tells you that the effect is zero or that it is any other value, it only gives you an hint about whether or not the data is too noisy to say anything at all.

<comment><USER25> >P=0.05 is best interpreted as "There is a 95% chance that this data isn't pure noise".

No, that's not what P=0.05 means. This misconception is exactly why p values are so problematic. The question we want to answer is unanswerable, so instead we subtly substitute a different question in its place and don't even realize we've swapped concepts.

<comment><USER24> When I say that "There is a 95% chance that this data isn't pure noise" I'm being slightly indirect. More directly it would be something like "There is 5% chance that pure noise generator you would give you this result" but since I want to reason about the actual world that the experiment is trying to study, I think it is legitimate to do the Bayesian flip and infer the more useful first statement that the world is likely too noisy to detect an effect using this experiment.

<comment><USER26> If you see clouds how likely is rain? If you see rain how likely is it there are clouds? Are the answers to these at all the same? No.

There is absolutely nothing valid about your "flip" (called transposing the conditional) and the damage done to the human species by people doing the "flip" is too huge for most to comprehend. Sorry, but I really cannot overstate the problems with this "flip".

Perhaps people who get paid by grants should get three chances regarding this flip. If they strike out they are banned from ever being funded by NIH, etc for life. The result (either 99+% of current researchers would be culled, or p-values would become appropriately rare) would do more to advance science than any other idea I have seen.

<comment><USER24> If you want your science to be about the real world and not about some hypothetical scenarios that don't exist you have no choice but to do the transposition. Experiments are useless otherwise. There is a reason humans naturally and instinctively do it when they talk about experiments. This is how you describe things in real world human language.

Sure there are debates about priors. These are unavoidable. The hidden assumption in my example is a 50/50 prior on too noisy, not too noisy hypotheses. IMO a reasonable uniform (maximum entropy) prior to start a discussion from. Of course, one should be more precise when doing this type of analysis in a paper. The reason a good prior is hard to define here is not because you shouldn't do the flip, it is because the question that the t-test is trying to answer doesn't make much sense.

<comment><USER26> >"If you want your science to be about the real world and not about some hypothetical scenarios that don't exist you have no choice but to do the transposition."

How can saying false things make your science "about the the real world"? The only thing I can think of is that by "real world" you are referring to using the publication of massive amounts of incorrect/questionable information as a metric for success. Yes, that is indeed the sham going on.

>"There is a reason humans naturally and instinctively do it when they talk about experiments. This is how you describe things in real world human language."

I have no problem talking about data without transposing the conditional, if you do that is some issue with your training.

>"Sure there are debates about priors."

The error you advocate (of transposing the conditional) has nothing to do with priors.

<comment><USER24> There is no point in talking about the data if it doesn't tell you useful things about the population or type of thing you are studying, if it's not for building a predictive model of the subjects. This is the entire reason for research.

Also P(A|B) = P(B|A) if the prior probabilities are equal, often a reasonable prior.

<comment><USER26> >"There is no point in talking about the data if it doesn't tell you useful things about the population or type of thing you are studying"

Ok, but I fail to see the relevance of this to anything.

>"Also P(A|B) = P(B|A) if the prior probabilities are equal, often a reasonable prior."

Here, A = Hypothesis and B = data (or vice versa). You are claiming that the "probability of seeing your data whether or not the hypothesis is correct", is often near the "probability the hypothesis is correct independent of your data"?

Based on what? What principle leads you to think these two probabilities should be near each other? BTW, if you actually have one this is like the holy grail of statistics.

<comment><USER27> > You are claiming that the "probability of seeing your data whether or not > the hypothesis is correct", is often near the "probability the hypothesis is > correct independent of your data"?

Shouldn't that be "the probability of seeing the data, _given_ that the hypothesis is correct" and "the probability of the hypothesis being correct, _given_ that the data has been observed"?

<comment><USER26> No, the other poster is referring to Bayes' rule P(A|B) = P(A)*P(B|A)/P(B).

The claim is that it is reasonable to assume P(A) ~ P(B), so that P(A|B) ~ P(B|A). I am referring to P(A) and P(B) in the equation.

<comment><USER27> Ah, OK, got it.

<comment><USER26> Its hard to tell over the internet, but if you are being sarcastic please let me know. I have no problem with clarifying further.

<comment><USER27> No sarcasm! I believe I understand what you were saying now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I personally find NHST suspicious, even if the p-value is less than 0.005. It means that, ASSUMING that the null hypothesis is correct, the probability of observing the data is less than 0.5%. That's still not zero, though. For example, if I try to decide that native Hawaiians are US citizens, and the null hypothesis is that they are, but since only ~0.2% of total US population is native Hawaiian, NHST would conclude that native Hawaiians aren't US citizens. Conversely, the p-value being high isn't really meaningful either. For example, if I try to decide if a white person is from South Africa, and the null hypothesis is that they are, and since ~9% of the population in South Africa is white, I would fail to reject the null hypothesis, even if the person's actually from Europe or literally any other country in the world. p-values are dependent on the sample size, too, and become more and more sensitive to smaller differences in the ASSUMED population distribution(s), when the effect size can in fact be small. NSHT seems highly dependent on quality null hypothesis that's correct, which you can't really establish since that's what you're trying to find out. So the approach doesn't really conclude anything either way, and just really seems weak as an approach to scientific testing overall.

<comment><USER29> I don't really follow. Your examples seem like weird or poorly thought out experiments (well, surveys, not experiments), not anything to do with significance testing.

If I wanted to see if native Hawaiians are citizens and didn't have access to law, real data, anything like that, I'd sample from the population of Hawaiians, not citizens as a whole, and then regardless of the null hypothesis being "are citizens" or "aren't citizens" I think the results would be overwhelmingly one-sided enough to work out. And the South Africa example is asking about 1 single person? That not a question of science, then, just a question?

<comment><USER28> Maybe my example was contrived, but my main argument was that p-values represent P(D|H), or probability seeing your data conditioned on assuming that the hypothesis is correct, and that approach seems inherently flawed to me. If you're doing an experiment, p-values don't say anything about if the hypothesis is true or false, in fact the approach can't theoretically give that information. If you're doing a basic t-test, it goes something like this:

1\. You have a null hypothesis you assume to be true

2\. Based on this null hypothesis and the central limit theorem, if you theoretically conduct many experiments you expect some summary statistic to have a specific distribution around the 'true' population summary statistic and 'true' population variance, which you don't have so you assume it to be the null hypothesis

3\. You compare your experiment's summary statistic to the hypothesized distribution. If the probability of seeing your summary statistic is below some threshold, you say it's unlikely to see this summary statistic again.

But the probability of seeing that summary statistic again actually depends on P(H), which NHST doesn't provide any information on. My examples were meant to highlight the nature of conditional probabilities, rather than how real life experiments are conducted.

<comment><USER30> Your examples weren't so much contrived as incoherent, to the point where I begin to suspect you don't really understand NHST.

"if I try to decide that native Hawaiians are US citizens, and the null hypothesis is that they are, but since only ~0.2% of total US population is native Hawaiian, NHST would conclude that native Hawaiians aren't US citizens."

So what is the _observation_ in this case, and what would the corresponding prediction from the null hypothesis be? The observation that "0.2% of the US population is native Hawaiian" has no relation to your claimed null hypothesis at all.

The rest of your objection seems like one of those confused arguments trying to rule out basic reductio ad absurdam ("but if X really isn't true, then your arguments about seeing or not seeing the consequences of X have no basis!").

(And the central limit theorem has nothing to do with null hypothesis testing: you can do NHST with completely non-Gaussian statistics.)

<comment><USER28> Yes, you can conduct NHST without the central limit theorem. However, it's used very widely in NHST. Was there anything wrong with what I said about what a typical t-test usually looked like? My lab would use that approach to do molecular biology.

You don't seem to understand my argument, so let me rephrase: The example about Native Hawaiians was meant to highlight the nature of conditional probabilities, and p-values are conditional probabilities. Just because p-values are below some threshold doesn't necessarily mean that the null hypothesis is incorrect and therefore should be rejected. Just because p-values values are high doesn't mean that the null hypothesis should fail to be rejected. P-values do not theoretically give that information. It doesn't even represent the probability of observing that value, since it's a conditional probability - as in, the probability of observing that value given that the null hypothesis is true, not the probability of observing that value. If the p-value is below 0.005, can you scientifically, theoretically conclude that the null hypothesis should be rejected? The probability of seeing a Native Hawaiian person given that the person is a US citizen is below the threshold of 0.005, but does that mean the conditioned part (the US citizen thing) should be rejected? Granted, it's hard to relate that example to actual experiments, but my argument is that p-values don't theoretically give any conclusions either way, and trying to make it "scientific" to draw conclusions by introducing thresholds to a conditional probability, no matter how strict, seems inherently flawed. Using it as a single metric among many, to use it as a tool for exploration makes sense to me. Even to make strong suggestions, sure, especially with all the controls RCTs put in. But to make hard conclusions, as in NHST? The approach itself doesn't have the theoretical power to do so.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>