SpaceX's Dragon ship set for station visit - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17732480

<comment><USER3> While Zuckerberg is busy buying vanity smartphone photo-filters for a billion bucks, Elon Musk is busy putting America back in space.

Impact. Matters.

<comment><USER4> Also, 95% of HN readers are doing work much closer to Zuckerberg's than to that at SpaceX.

<comment><USER5> Not a very accurate comparison.

The question is not, what would you do to make a living. The question is what would you do in your time if you had enough money not to go out and make a living. Many of us do what we do, because we need a monthly pay check to feed us, pay our bills and send our kids to school.

If you had 20 billion dollars, what would be your bigger priorities. Building and maintaining a Php site(which is important too, because that is what got the 20 billion dollars) or Space Travel?

<comment><USER6> _The question is not, what would you do to make a living. The question is what would you do in your time if you had enough money not to go out and make a living._

I think this is completely wrong. The question is exactly the same if you're deciding what to do with your career or what to do with your fortune. Action is difficult, fantasizing about what you'd do if you were rich is easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't believe that the launch is scheduled for April 30th; in my mind, commercial spaceflight was at least another year away. Either way, if all goes well, I think this marks the beginning of yet another era, and the milestone is, quite frankly, amazing.

<comment><USER8> I'm surprised at the rate of progress too. NASA used to be able to make rapid progress like that, but I feel like - from my layman's perspective - <USER2> couldn't do that now. It would cost billions more than it cost SpaceX to start from nothing (well, not exactly, they had help from NASA, but still) and take years longer.

<comment><USER9> I know people who work at SpaceX. They recruit pretty heavily from CMU (where I am now). From what I have heard, this is why they get things done so quickly: 1) Elon Musk knows about every detail of the rocket's design. 2) They make almost all the parts in house (literally in the same factory). 3) The work ethic/culture at SpaceX is very high. If something needs to get done, Elon will make sure it gets done fast. They somehow maintain a high rate of progress despite how huge the undertaking is.

<comment><USER8> So I guess Elon truly is Tony Stark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting tidbit from the announcement about this on SpaceX's website:

> _In fact, Dragon has so much interior volume, that we could place an entire > three-person Russian Soyuz capsule descent module inside Dragon's pressure > vessel._

That is just awesome.

<comment><USER11> "The SUV of space capsules!" (It was after all designed in America! ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> They mention returning items from ISS. Does anyone know if this is the old standard method of using a parachute and dropping into the ocean for recovery?

<comment><USER13> Previous Dragon Capsule recovery (and it was only once before) was parachute to ocean landing. [1] So presumably to limit the number of things being tested on this flight to a reasonable number they won't try to return it to land.

I am very hopeful that these guys succeed, and will be impressed as hell. Elon is not kidding when he says it is 'tricky.' Although I think the speed thing is over blown (17,000 MPH, wow! except you're both going about 17,000 MPH and you're both going the same direction, so relative speed is more interesting) But you do have to navigate there, rendezvous, and dock.

If successful they will have duplicated everything in Gemini and next up will be the Mercury program (first manned missions) :-)

[1] [http://news.discovery.com/space/spacexs-dragon-capsule- retur...](http://news.discovery.com/space/spacexs-dragon-capsule-returns- safely-to-earth.html)

<comment><USER14> I think the reason they're saying it's a bit more tricky than people realise is because, even when dealing solely in terms of relative speed, you're dealing with orbits.

If you try to accelerate, you'll actually end up in a higher orbit. It would be like putting down the gas to overtake someone on the highway and end up flying above them and even if you let off the gas, you will slowly drift further away as you're now dealing with a small amount less gravity.

It's tricky, because the common person doesn't have any clue how to relate to three dimensional movement in an orbit.

<comment><USER13> Actually, another funny story ...

One of the first programs I ever wrote was a BASIC game called 'orbit' which simulated docking with other space ships and satellites in orbit. No graphics other than things like closing speed and distance from target, sort of like the old Lunar program at the time.

One of the things that always got people thinking it was 'broken' was that you had to slow down to catch up, basically by slowing you moved to a lower orbit and moved faster relative to an object in a higher orbit, and then you went to a higher orbit to slow down (accelerating).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> While SpaceX is getting all the press, Orbital is working on the same thing.

<comment><USER16> I find your comment amusing in light of my particular frustration with the near anonymity of SpaceX in relation to its accomplishments, especially in addition to the nearly universally unfavorable press it gets over at AviationWeek.com. And never mind that Orbital is not "working on the same thing" by any reasonable understanding of the phrase.

Let's get one thing out of the way up front: SpaceX launched, orbited, reentered, and retrieved a fully reusable capsule, one with an ablative heat shield that can be used hundreds, if not thousands, of times over. Disregarding the reusable aspects of the design, they're in the company of 3 nations. Include the reusability aspect and they're in the company only of the United States and the former Soviet Union. I have a degree in engineering. I have engineering friends, some of whom work in aerospace companies. Until this recent PR push, I hadn't found one of them who'd even heard of SpaceX, to say nothing of their groundbreaking and historical flight and recovery of a capsule with private funds. If that's "all the press," then I have "all the press," too. Go ahead. Ask me how it feels to be so famous!

The little press that they do get within the ossified aerospace industry has been terrible. AvWeek recently ran a piece which was focused on how SpaceX had "lost some of its luster" (not a direct quote, but close) with the slip from February to April for the Space Station rendezvous launch, as if any government-run space technology was ever delivered on time. A while ago, they found some blow-hard "space policy expert" to opine about how space was hard and how it was absolutely obvious that SpaceX was over-promising and destined to radically under-deliver. They ran another piece about how congress was unhappy with COTS. Only recently did they have to give some ground with a piece about how commercial space was "already having benefits" now that the launch is so near, and I was overjoyed with schadenfreude when they had to provide neutral coverage of the uninteresting and everyday fact that Space Station astronauts were rehearsing for SpaceX's visit to the station. There's a reason, I'm sure, that SpaceX chose Muse's _Uprising_ as the theme song for their animation about their plans for full reusability. It fits.

Further, Orbital's offering is not even close. Orbital's vehicle is not reusable. It burns up on reentry, and therefore has no capacity to bring cargo back from ISS. And their price point is nowhere near Musk's. In case you're keeping track--and I mean the hypothetical "you", I'm not pissed at you, Metapony--that's less for more. Less than SpaceX for more money. Furthermore, the floor on Orbital's costs is the same trifecta that's always been around in aerospace: expendability, costs of disparate components, and integration costs. I'd love to see a viable competitor to SpaceX, but Orbital isn't even close.

Make no mistake, the battle is not between "government" vehicles and private industry. There are no "government" vehicles: Every vehicle gets built by private contractors. The battle is actually between the established aerospace industry, built around expendables and cost-plus contracting, and SpaceX, an innovative and disruptive aerospace company based around competition, reusables, and fixed-price contracts, with Orbital taking up the rear with the worst aspects of both models.

I know. I come across as a strident cheerleader. I hope that has less to do with any inherent fanboyism in my makeup than it does with my absolute perplexity at and frustration with the bare fact that SpaceX has done unprecedented, amazing, historic things, and hardly anyone knows about them at all.

<comment><USER17> I don't think SpaceX is really seeking attention. They don't depend on consumers or the aerospace industry at large. Musk certainly doesn't strike me as the kind of person who craves attention. The interview on the Daily Show was the first I had ever seen with him.

<comment><USER18> They definitely do some amount of PR - in addition to Must going on Jon Stewart he also did a great interview with 60 Minutes earlier this month.

Although they don't directly need consumer support, getting your name out there helps with recruiting the best engineers. I know several people who were tops in their field and heard about SpaceX, dropped what they were doing and applied.

It also helps them with public support. It's very possible that the majors will come in and try to use lobbying to crush SpaceX. Having the public on your side will help SpaceX beat that back later.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Terminology, Power and Offensive Language - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-knodel-terminology-01.html <comment><USER2> Reading that resulted in a lost 10 minutes I will never get back. Clearly these terms are, as the paper's introduction specifies, not intended to be socially offensive. These are technical terms only entirely detached from any social referendum. The only offensive thing in that paper is engineers wasting other peoples' time illogically convoluting two unrelated things for some sort of desperate attempt at appeal to sympathy.</comment>


Which language has brightest future in replacement of C between D, Go and Rust? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Which-language-has-the-brightest-future-in-replacement-of-C-between-D-Go-and-Rust-And-Why/answer/Andrei-Alexandrescu?share=1 <comment><USER2> Usually you have to use C when a large runtime (GC, rich standard library) is going to cause a problem. One common case of that is when you're making a least common denominator library that would be called by multiple higher-level languages. Other cases are embedded systems or when you need to micro- optimize.

That's why I think Rust is promising because "no GC" is often a reason to use C. You don't want two GC's that can see the same objects (unless you like leaks) so if you're writing code to be exported up into higher level languages, you don't want a language with GC.

</comment><comment><USER3> Where does Nim sit in all of this?</comment>


How many calories does it take to bring a calorie to the ISS? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.esa.int/atv/2013/01/25/ <comment><USER2> It's very interesting, but it's only the strictly minimal amount. It doesn't include the additional weight of the rocket and fuel.

Let's estimate that. [From: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5> ]

The total launch mass is ~800T and the payload to ES is ~20. All the energy calculations are linear in the mass, so we have a x40 factor.

But obviously not all the rocket and fuel reach the ISS, so not all the initial mass should be lifted and accelerated. We have to make some kind of differential equation that depends on a lot of details that I don't know. But from similar calculations I guess that a x1/3 factor is not very far from the correct number. Let's be optimistic and pick x1/4.

So, if the minimal is 1.6 c.b., then my uninformed guess is that the total amount is 1.6x40x1/4 =~ 15 c.b..

I'd really like to see a estimation made from someone with more knowledge, or one based in the energy contained in the fuel.</comment>


Take care editing bash scripts (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2019/11/09/take-care-editing-bash-scripts.html <comment> photon-torpedo Whether this happens or not depends on how the file is edited, I think. From the strace output shown in TFA, it appears the file is not opened again between executing the lines. E.g. using vim as editor, the modified file is actually written as a new file under the same filename. In Linux, the bash process will keep the original file open so that the inodes are not reclaimed by the filesystem until the file is closed. Hence the bash process won't "see" the modified script file.

I've tested this, and indeed when editing the file with vim, I can't reproduce the "dangerous" behavior. To trigger this behavior, I'd have to _overwrite_ the script file, e.g. by

        1. create script run.sh with "sleep 30" etc
        2. create script run1.sh with "sleep 3" instead
        3. start run.sh
        4. overwrite script: cat run1.sh > run.sh
        5. after the sleep, the commented line does execute

Are there editors that actually overwrite the original file, instead of creating a new file? I thought the latter is the recommended approach as it can prevent data loss e.g. if there's a crash during writing the file.

P.S. If the script in question is on a network file system, things may be different even for vim. E.g. on NFS the file handle doesn't behave fully like a regular POSIX file handle, and the NFS server might actually reopen the file between reads, thus delivering the modified contents to the bash process.

<comment><USER2> > E.g. using vim as editor, the modified file is actually written as a new > file under the same filename.

I don't know much about the internal workings of vim, but I do know two things:

1) I use vim exclusively (on linux anyway).

2) I have been bitten by this exact problem.

I guess I can understand why bash works this way.. it means that it can handle arbitrarily long scripts without having to read the entire script into memory at once. But purely from an everyday usability perspective, this is a really bad design decision. Anyone know if there's a way to force it to read the whole script into memory on startup?

<comment><USER3> When writing a long script you should bundle everything into functions and then call one that kicks everything off at the end. This prevents the problem mentioned but also is helpful for keeping it organized.

<comment><USER4> I'm surprised that helps. Instead of the seeking behavior demonstrated in the `strace`, does it switch to another way of keeping state after a backward jump?

It would also have to buffer the whole file even though it's painstakingly executing it in a way that doesn't require a buffer.

<comment><USER5> I would imagine it's the same thing. It's going by top-level statement. The backward jump is just to keep track of which top-level statement it has read so far. It's not about being positioned on what it's currently running.

> painstakingly executing it in a way that doesn't require a buffer.

I don't understand why people keep saying that. There's a buffer of 64 bytes. You mean in a way that doesn't require slurping the file. It avoids slurping precisely by buffering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm glad someone finally wrote about this issue.

I have also stumbled upon this a few years ago, but I blamed myself (for using an editor that saves in place), and just applied the following "workaround" when needed: wrap the whole script in a function, and as the last line of the script just call it with `_main "${@}"`.

<comment><USER7> To expand on this, yes, you can force Bash to read more lines and keep them in memory before executing them by wrapping them in blocks. These blocks can be (), {}, functions, and maybe other structures.

In addition to this, you can make sure no appended code is ever executed by explicitly running "exit" at the end of your block. I actually used this trick in a self git-updating script (the updated version could contain more lines at the end).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> DOS/Windows Batch files behave same way. COMMAND.COM rereads whole batch file every time it executes one command line.

        PING localhost -n 10
        #echo nothing to see here
        echo finish

D:\123>PING localhost -n 10

Pinging ... [127.0.0.1] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64 ...

Ping statistics for 127.0.0.1: Packets: Sent = 10, Received = 10, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms

D:\123>#echo nothing to see here '#echo' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

D:\123>echo finish finish

now rerun it and edit first line to 'PING localhost -n 1' and suddenly

... Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms

D:\123>echo nothing to see here nothing to see here

D:\123>echo finish finish

<comment><USER9> This is why Rex Conn's add-on command interpreter for MS/PC/DR-DOS, 4DOS, had the concept of BTM scripts. BTM stands for "Batch To Memory" and 4DOS (and all of its successors through NDOS, 4NT, and 4OS2 to the current Take Command) reads the entirety of a BTM script before running it.

* [https://jpsoft.com/help/batchtype.htm](https://jpsoft.com/help/batchtype.htm)

The reason that this could not be simply turned on globally for BAT scripts is that various tools made use of the original behaviour, perhaps most notably "fancy change directory" scripts and similar programs, where a wrapped executable was called from a wrapper script, and the executable rewrote the next lines of the script on the fly to do the selected action.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've continuously observed the described problem, and have read about a workaround: when writing the "top level" lines of script, never write them alone, but inside of a { }

It looks like this in my case:

        somefunction()
        {
        }

        # main
        {
           ...
        }

Now whatever is inside of any of the functions or inside of the "main" braces will be read at once and it won't be replaced with some new lines if I edit the file while the execution still hasn't finished.

I would surely prefer having some global flag "reread the script" for those who need the old behavior and "sane" default for the most users (never reread). But general user friendliness and reasonable defaults was seldom a desired goal in the circles that decide about the development of these programs.

<comment><USER11> Hm I put all shell code in functions for other reasons, but it's interesting to know it solves another problem.

[http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/02/good-parts- sketch.html#...](http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/02/good-parts- sketch.html#the-0-dispatch-pattern-solves-three-important-problems)

To summarize:

1) saving many interactive snippets in a single file -- each one is a function

2) expose entire shell functions to tools like xargs and chroot

3) if $0 myfunc solves the "ignored errexit" problem

now

4) safely modify a bash script while it's executing

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> FWIW, the IBM mainframe world's partitioned dataset (PDS) addressed this issue 40+ years ago. Old processes continue to run with the version of the PDS member they started with, while new processes start with a newer version, if one exists. Similar to read consistency features of Oracle.

</comment><comment> yjftsjthsd-h Has this been reported as a bug? Because it strains credulity to think that this is really intended behavior.

<comment><USER13> I wouldn't predict this, but I don't find it terribly out of line.

Bash, and shells in general, are designed to be interactive command execution environments. The syntax easily allows multiple commands on a single line, and this is not uncommon in interactive or scripting use, in my experience. Many shells also favor permissive execution. What I mean by this is that they will keep running as far as they can. It is perfectly reasonable (at least based on the behavior of many shells) for a script to run several commands successfully and then fail later on when facing a syntax error or nonexistent command.

Many shells are also carrying design decisions from a much more resource- constrained era of computing.

It certainly makes sense in terms of preserving system resources to simply execute a command at a time, to full completion, before even reading forward. This minimizes the amount of parsing and the amount of script required to keep in memory. I am not saying that this is the best way to do things, but that it is an optimization along certain axes.

Separately, it is not unreasonable in terms of design and implementation of a shell to unify as much as possible the scripting environment and the interactive environment. Keeping this in mind, the way to think of a script is just as an interactive session. Each line is just a command entered at the prompt. This ensures that behavior in scripts is the same as the behavior the user sees every day. How to implement this, especially in the face of resource constraints, in another way? I am not saying that the implementation as it stands is correct or good, but just that this is not an unreasonable behavior.

<comment><USER6> Furthermore I would say this is actually a "feature", as some scripts might be too large to fit into limited memory, and also reading-and-executing one step at a time allows one to write "dynamic" scripts that are generated as they are executed.

Although I haven't written such "dynamic" scripts (yet), I'm sure a few exist that based on `expect` and `bash` work in a "feedback-loop" manner.

<comment><USER14> If you want to use a 'dynamic' script, why not pipe from stdin instead?

<comment><USER6> Yes, you are right, pipes are mandatory here.

When I was referring to a "dynamic" script I didn't mean "just append to a file", but instead I was referring to the fact that `bash` doesn't first try to load the whole script, parse and then execute it, but instead it "streams" through the script.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There used to be the "text file busy" error to prevent that from happening, where "text" refers to the code segment of an ELF binary, but I've seen the error for shell script "text" as well. Isn't there anymore?

<comment><USER16> That error only applies to executables that get mapped into memory while running -- which is to say, binary executables. Script executables have never had that behavior.

<comment><USER15> That makes sense, but I have faint memories of vi rejecting writes to running scripts. Maybe it was on Solaris or AIX.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It doesn't happen with the z-shell (zsh) as I just tested under Debian. Bash shows the described behaviour. Interesting, need to look at other shells too, later.

But it's definitely better to be careful and expect the bash ("classic"?) behaviour.

<comment><USER18> Bear in mind that bash is obviously restarting from the character position specifically but other shells might not handle this at all, meaning that they just use buffered stdin. For such a small script the whole thing has been read into the buffer but a longer script might fault at an otherwise unobvious point.

Unless you know that it is explicitly safe (ie the whole file has been cached before it starts) then you should really not modify any running file.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Oh wow! I had the feeling that something like this affected me a handful of times but I was never sure and I couldn't reproduce so I just ignored. That's quite crazy!

<comment><USER20> Stylistically it's outside the scope.

Bash is a classic style tool, if you hammer your thumb instead of a nail, that doesn't mean the design of hammers need to be fixed. It's meant to be useful, not smart.

This attitude is why the core utils have remained so damn useful for 50 years and haven't devolved into dysfunctional messes.

choosing what not to do is important

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> IIRC, older versions of Python would run with a (writable) fd open to the initial script. If you weren't paying attention, it was possible to accidentally modify that script.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's weird, I've been using bash for over ten years now, and just started noticing this behavior a couple weeks ago. It probably has to do with the nature of the scripts I'm running these days (bash scripts that call docker commands to build complicated images and then do other stuff). I could tell that bash wasn't reading the whole script before executing, but I didn't spend the time to figure out exactly what the real behavior was. Thanks to the author for this analysis!

<comment><USER23> I have noticed this behavior on Ubuntu in 13.13. On the other hand, I kept the habit of expecting a script to fail when modifying it (most of the time, starting a command in the middle makes it fail) but it never seems to occur on macOS's bash.

<comment><USER24> Was that the Ubuntu released in the 13th month of 2013, Fictional Ferret?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yikes,

        $ cat rewrite_me
        #!/bin/bash
        C=$(sed -r 's,^(C.+sed.+)#$,\1,g' ./$0); echo "$C" > $0  #####
        # date

        $ ./rewrite_me
        Fri 08 May 2020 11:41:52 PM CEST

</comment><comment><USER26> This isn't specific to bash scripts, this can happen to pretty much any file. What we really need is a way for a process to atomically "check out" a copy of a file to read from that won't change.

<comment><USER27> An atomic read fork isn't sufficient. The file could be inconsistent if another process is currently writing to the file at the moment of the snapshot. What you need is an atomic write, which is already provided by rename(2).

I've always found it odd that binaries and scripts are often installed 755, including in /bin and /sbin.[1] Perhaps it's because install scripts don't bother changing the read-write permissions, so executable end up with 755 because the default umask is 022.

Anyhow, I've taken to removing all write permissions from most of my files, not just executables. I haven't yet experimented with changing my umask to 222, but I suspect it would cause many programs, especially editors, to fail.

[1] At least on Linux. I just checked OpenBSD and they're 555. But even on OpenBSD most files in /usr/local/{bin,sbin}, installed by third-party packages, are 755.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Title should be: Take Care Editing _Running_ BASH Scripts.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I was just thinking about how this could only happen when editing scripts while they're running. It doesn't make sense to do that with regular, non-interactive CLI scripts, but I guess it does with interactive ones that display a TUI or prompt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Batch files on Windows do the same thing. That's caught me out far more often, because I make errors in my batch files much more often than I do with shell scripts.

<comment><USER30> I was just going to comment on this. I believe batch files buffer on line, but can't confirm.

<comment><USER31> They do.

Can be used it to interact with the execution of the current program. It is simple as appending further code with a label and jumping to it using goto. I first noticed it in 2007 started using it in production.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I can reproduce this in bash but not in fish or zsh. This seems to be a uniquely bad feature of bash.

<comment><USER33> yep, i've also checked bourne shell and csh/tcsh, cannot reproduce too. only in bash

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've noticed this behaviour in the past. I remember a sun solaris server at work back around 2009 getting taken down by someone editing a script while it was running. The scripts always had a rm -rf as part of cleanup of working files.

</comment><comment><USER35> I wonder if folks using Chef to ensure a file is present used a "clobber- always" mode and had it behave correctly. I would imagine so since Chef should make a new file. Anyway, a problem for an older age.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is why my directories with shell scripts have a "make install" target. For execution they are copied to a place where they are unlinked before written new.

<comment><USER9> As M. Ahern points out at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098813](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098813) , that's only part of the job.

Assuming that you actually use rename() to do the unlinking and atomic updating, the "make install" should _also_ ensure that write permission is removed from the new files.

* [https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/79b1c0aab9834a09a59e15d47...](https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/79b1c0aab9834a09a59e15d47710f355c5c0417a/package/makeinstall#L30)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have seen this years ago when I was running a script and then thought of a change and edit it while it was still running. The odd execution thereafter gave it away.

</comment><comment><USER38> I had always assumed that bash first read the whole script into memory (unless it was huge), then parsed and interpreted it. Guess I was wrong. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER39> I may be missing something here, but why are things like this not repotrted as a bug ?

<comment><USER40> It is not really a bug, just counter intuitive behavior. Their example is somewhat contrived, usually this will just manifest in something being broken.

If you use an editor with safe saves this might not even happen because that works by saving to a temp file and doing an atomic swap, and unlinking the old file. In that case, I believe the script should continue as written, because the fd should point to the unlinked file. I believe vim does this by default, for example.

<comment><USER41> Using rename() does this for you. It's actually guaranteed to preserve the contents of the old file for any process still having it open while atomically letting any future process only see the new file.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Windows .bat files are notorious for this behaviour; disappointing to see it in bash.

</comment><comment><USER43> Hot patching is dangerous in all execution environments.

This is software engineering... Separate your dev environment from production and do a controlled deployment.

<comment><USER44> Every binary executable on a Linux system can be deleted and replaced while the running program is unaffected. Every Python script can be edited while it's running with no effect.

It comes as a surprise the first time you experience it that this rule doesn't follow with bash scripts.

<comment><USER45> > Every binary executable on a Linux system can be deleted and replaced while > the running program is unaffected.

Delete and replace is different than edit in place. I don't know about Linux, but you can edit a binary on FreeBSD which is running, and it affects running copies (it's all memory mapped from the file), and that's why i use install instead of cp to update binaries (including shared libraries)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> If you put such dangerous commands on your website, then please make them not user-selectable.

<comment><USER47> Oh lord... Are there any further baby-proofing you'd like to see?

<comment><USER48> No one post any fork bombs...

<comment><USER49> Such as this?

      eval $(echo "I<RA('1E<W3t`rYWdl&r()(Y29j&r{,3Rl7Ig}&r{,T31wo});r`26<F]F;==" | uudecode)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bug 344724 – [Undo] Ctrl-Z deletes a copied project with no way to recover it - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=344724

<comment><USER2> Every year or so I stumble about some really nasty bug in Eclipse.

At first it doesn't look like a bug, but like something I'm doing wrong. After thirty minutes of trying things and googling I finally find a bug report about this exact issue.

The bug report is always older than five years. Usually closer to ten years.

Sometimes a patch is buried in the comments somewhere, but the patch has never been applied to the general distribution.

I can't remember all those bugs, but the last one was that Eclipse has a settings window for Indexer settings in the project settings.

Most of your choices there are saved to the project configuration file. Some aren't. Without any indication. They are active for as long as you have the project open, they never get saved, and on re-opening the project, global settings are in effect again.

</comment><comment><USER3> Speaking of CTRL-Z doing mean things -- VMware Workstation. Accidentally have the VM window focused instead of something inside the VM? Suspends the VM. So many times I've done this in the middle of a remote debugging session...</comment>


Ask HN: Do you buy things from online ads? - <AUTHOR> I have never, in my recollection, been persuaded to investigate an item or service for sale by an online, ad at Google, Facebook, or on a blog. Have you? If not, how in the world is this a profitable ecosystem? <comment><USER2> I read a bunch of webcomics, and some of them I discovered through the ads they bought on the sites of other webcomics. Then I ended up contributing to Kickstarters and Patreons, which hopefully offset the cost of the ad.

However, creators buying ads on each other's websites to attract visitors who will then spend more time seeing ads ... seems kind of circular. It might be that part of the ad ecosystem in that space is fueled by hopeful artists who make a loss trying to promote their work.

As far as physical goods are concerned, I don't really buy anything except to replace something else, and then I just go to whichever place is most convenient and buy what they have, so there isn't much room for ads to influence me.

</comment><comment><USER3> You don't have to buy stuff directly, or even interact with the ad, you just need to see it; be influenced by it. You'll buy stuff later. When you see an ad for a package holiday you don't have to click it for the ad to be effective (although some people do click them), you may just as well decide to visit the operator's website the next day to browse their options. If their ad didn't bother you, chances are it was a good investment (probably).

People who do get bothered by ads and their continuous manipulation use an ad blocker of course.

</comment><comment><USER4> Everyone is influenced by ads

3 white stripes? Adidas Swoosh? Nike Golden Arches? McDonalds

Everyone clicks, buys and is influenced by ads. Dont be arrogant and mindlessly believe "it doesnt impact me"</comment>


US Robotics still selling 56k modem for $90 - <AUTHOR> http://www.usr.com/products/modem/modem-product.asp?sku=USR5686G&adv=homepage

<comment><USER2> Don't assume modem = Internet. If you want to make your computer send & receive fax, you need to have one.

</comment><comment><USER3> These things are still used in legacy systems on farms and such.

</comment><comment><USER4> And the Courier is $265 (but it's still being made).

</comment><comment><USER5> Ah, USR. Fond memories of v.92.</comment>


Try a $15 Minimum Wage and See Those Jobs Get Automated Out of Existence - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/03/19/carls-jr-ceo-try-a-15-minimum-wage-and-see-those-jobs-get-automated-out-of-existence/#584403fcf0e9 <comment><USER2> Good luck staying in business when you automate your entire customer base out of work.

</comment><comment><USER3> It is happening gradually, but Oregon is already doing this: [http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/03/its_off...](http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/03/its_official_kate_brown_signs.html)

I think it's great that an "experiment" like this is taking place in a single state. It gives the rest of the country the opportunity to observe, to learn from the experiences of others.

</comment><comment><USER4> What about the Automat? It's been proven again and again that people don't want to deal with poor vending machine food, and fast food has been on the decline for almost a decade now.

Consumers have already made the choice, and Carls Jr is not it. Automation won't change that.

</comment><comment><USER5> Mandating a higher wage through law won't work in the long-run. Inflation will catch up in a few years and a person making $15/hour will no longer have the increased spending power they once had when they first got the boost in pay.

<comment><USER4> There are several problems with this simplified view of the economy. Namely that the inflation rate is not realistically tied to minimum wage in any way.

In your view, why do we even have a minimum wage at all? Obviously if the job is so inefficient at creating wealth that it isn't worth paying minimum wage to do the work, that work needs not be done at all.

<comment><USER6> Inflation has averaged about 2.5% annually since 2000. In 20 years, the spending power of a 100% bump in minimum wage (from ~$7.5 to $15) would be destroyed. This conservatively assumes that business owners just don't automatically increase the price point of their goods more rapidly than the average. His viewpoint isn't simple, it's realistic.

Often times there are jobs that provide value at an hourly rate greater than $0.00 and less than whatever the minimum wage is at. The job could be done, and provide meaningful value, so just because it isn't worth paying a minimum wage doesn't mean the job shouldn't be done at all. It's a difficult situation because the employer wants to pay the worker a fair value for the job, but the government forces them to pay more than the fair value of their work. That's a poor moral and financial situation, and so businesses look for people in other countries, or technology to automate the job completely.

The trouble with increasing a minimum wage is that it increases the reward for whichever entrepreneur is able to automate that job function, which would further income inequality in the long run by causing job loss of all those workers.

One question I have is why do we care so much about protecting minimum wage jobs? If no one had the safety net of a minimum wage job, they would be forced to innovate and pursue groundbreaking research in other fields - such as medicine or technology. Imagine if the rate of innovate was exponentially increased - think of the thousands of lives we could save or the decrease in costs of healthcare if we said "no one can work at Starbucks - you have to be a doctor."

source: [http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/Long_Term_...](http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/Long_Term_Inflation.asp)

<comment><USER4> "Often times there are jobs that provide value at an hourly rate greater than $0.00 and less than whatever the minimum wage is at. The job could be done, and provide meaningful value, so just because it isn't worth paying a minimum wage doesn't mean the job shouldn't be done at all. It's a difficult situation because the employer wants to pay the worker a fair value for the job, but the government forces them to pay more than the fair value of their work. That's a poor moral and financial situation, and so businesses look for people in other countries, or technology to automate the job completely."

This is an idea I reject with enthusiasm! You need to take the emotion out of it; this has nothing to do with fairness. If a job isn't worth paying some minimum level, it simply is not efficiently creating wealth. It is the government's duty to discourage and eliminate this wasted productivity.

Continued off-shoring and automation are good things. Off-shoring in particular is just arbitrage of the labor market. Every dollar we ship out, the more we elevate the standard of living of those folks. This implies (demonstratively) that this will not last for ever. In the mean time it is a profitable manoeuvre for the economy as a whole.

Automation just goes to further eliminate jobs that shouldn't be done so those resources can be better spent in another areas. As always, the labor _market_ determines quite efficiently the best distribution of this limited resource.

"One question I have is why do we care so much about protecting minimum wage jobs? If no one had the safety net of a minimum wage job, they would be forced to innovate and pursue groundbreaking research in other fields - such as medicine or technology. Imagine if the rate of innovate was exponentially increased - think of the thousands of lives we could save or the decrease in costs of healthcare if we said "no one can work at Starbucks - you have to be a doctor."

I think what you fail to grasp is the minimum wage is the exact knob the government has to destroy unproductive employment. As you say, these minds could be pushed into medicine or technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh please, if those jobs could have been automated already, then they would have. It's cheaper technology that will eliminate those jobs, not a $15 minimum wage.

<comment><USER6> That's not necessarily true. A $15 minimum wage is a doubling of the wage rate in most states, and as a result, doubles the incentives for someone who automates the minimum wage jobs out of existence.

It's all relative. If we assume entrepreneurs want to deliver a million dollars worth of value and the minimum wage was $8, they would have to automate 125,000 jobs out of existence in order to achieve $1,000,000 worth of value-added. With a $15 minimum wage, they now only need to automate ~67,000. That's almost half the work they'll need to do now for the same result.

<comment><USER7> The limitations of things like self checkout have been largely customer driven, the expense of equipment (installation, repairs, etc...), and the logistics of such a transformation. I think there are many more hard limits on the ability to replace on site service workers with technology than most people realize. The barriers are far greater than a few dollars an hour per employee. If they weren't the low wage service workers would have already been replaced. This is also not an area that drives technological innovation, but rather benefits from advances made by other industries, so I do not believe that raising the minimum wage would escalate this process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Won't let me view article with 1blocker installed on iOS. Oh well.</comment>


Automatically populating .ssh/known_hosts - <AUTHOR> http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-01-16-automatically-populating-ssh-known-hosts.html <comment> mike-cardwell Alternatively, stick "VerifyHostKeyDNS yes" in your OpenSSH client configuration, then add SSHFP DNS records to your domain, and configure up DNSSEC.

That way, OpenSSH will automate fingerprint verification by looking it up in the DNS.

If you have DNSSEC set up and you run the following command:

      ssh -o "VerifyHostKeyDNS yes" grepular.com

You'll notice that it doesn't ask you to verify the fingerprint.

      mike@alfa:~$ dig +short sshfp grepular.com
      2 1 D027033D70738EEF8F2D30ED4B0D507C99D35BB1
      1 1 4BDBAB48F0CE98D51FCA81AC7C915B00B20993BF
      mike@alfa:~$

<comment><AUTHOR> That works well for long-lived hosts, but it doesn't solve the VM problem, since you need to get the fingerprints into DNS in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> If you use a system integration framework like chef or puppet there are some really neat ways of configuring your known-hosts files during convergence. For example, the ssh_known_hosts cookbook from opscode will automatically populate the ssh_known_hosts file with the information for all nodes in a particular environment (<https://github.com/cookbooks/ssh_known_hosts>). Of course this is only relevant if you are using one of those tools ...

</comment><comment><USER3> What I really want is decent PKI for ssh host keys so I can verify a key once, sign it, and have it respected by all other users/machines without further intervention.

I may try out MonkeySphere, anybody already use it?

Edit to add: MonkeySphere doesn't support options in authorized_keys, which is a bummer.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been wrestling with this this week. I like the console-output idea, but doesn't console output take a good 5-10 minutes to show up?

<comment><AUTHOR> 3-4 minutes, but yes, it's rather annoying.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Saent – A small button to block out distractions and be more productive - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/saent-be-less-distracted#/story

<comment><USER2> Hey HN. Here's a little more background on the science behind Saent: [https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-procrastination- equ...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-procrastination- equation/201507/living-in-the-candy-store)

Happy to answer any questions!</comment>


How we get high availability with Elasticsearch and Ruby on Rails - <AUTHOR> https://18f.gsa.gov/2016/04/08/how-we-get-high-availability-with-elasticsearch-and-ruby-on-rails/ <comment><USER2> I have no idea why the phrase "high availability" is in this post.

<comment><USER3> >We call these extensions "high availability" because this approach means that re-indexing a production system can happen much faster, reducing downtime for our users.

Agree with their use of the term or not, they give you their reasoning at the end of the article.

<comment><USER2> That's crazy misleading. This is just a post saying, "hey, this is a way to sync data faster." Awesome! Much kudos.

But stale data isn't "downtime." This is tech marketing at like, MongoDB level.

<comment><USER4> Except it's not marketing from the vendor in question. This is a page by the US government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "27 reports per second" what?

I use bulk api with .net Nest client.

I can easily put 1000 documents per second (which also include 3-10 nested documents) with 4core i5 machine. Serialization is the cheapest operation in my case. I would blame ruby in your workflow.

<comment><USER6> Seriously depends on the structure of the documents and your analyzer setup. I agree that it should be in hundreds recs per sec though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Elasticsearch is awesome. It may be a good idea to use the bulk API that is built into elasticsearch, use some joins in your SQL query, and index more than just one record at a time. In the implementation I have, I batched my query to 50,000 records at a time that then index into elasticsearch. For the 2.7 million records I indexed this week, it took a total of 54 queries to the database (50,000 records returned at a time). Just one more idea to streamline your indexing without slamming your DB quite so hard.

<comment><USER8> I started using elasticsearch recently and I was wondering, does the indexing happen in real time during the index request? How do you know how long the indexing process takes?

<comment><USER9> There's an index.refresh_interval setting. It defaults to 1s, so by default your data will be available for querying within one second after being indexed.

<comment><USER10> In general, yes. But keep in mind that the Elasticsearch JVM GC could fire up right after the document is indexed and possibly run for a few seconds if there is a lot of memory pressure. When the GC is done Elasticsearch will continue to process queries but it may be the indexed data hasn't been refreshed yet. So, a query run "1 second" after the index operation may not in fact return the document. However, this would be a very rare case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've indexed ~ 1 million docs a second, but with proper routing, can probably even 5x that. Total cluster size was 50 terabytes, at the end.

<comment><USER12> How many machines did you have on the cluster?

<comment><USER11> 100 data nodes

basically if you want fast ingress, keep shards small, once they get past ~5-10gb , ingress significantly slows down. Also this was on ES 1.5 , have not tested latest 2.0+ builds

<comment><USER13> I assume you are also replicating your nodes...how does replication impact ingress? What happens when nodes exceed 10 GB? Do you split them?

<comment><USER11> if you want the fastest ingress, disable replica until your ingress is done, its faster to create replica at the end of ETL for that given index. Also, you want to disable auto allocation as well, this will disable shard movement during ingress, re-enable it afterwards.

on a 100 node cluster i had roughly 500GB on each node. this was not a single index, multiple indexes, with roughly 8 shards per index per node. Shard count is pretty important to get correct.

I did not manually control document routing (it was hard based on the type of data i was ingressing), so it was set to auto and during the load i observed hotspots in the cluster (you have to look at BULK thread/queue length), some nodes were getting burst of docs while others were idle, roughly 40-50% of the nodes in the cluster were under utilized, and maybe 5-10% had hot spots from time to time.

Also, depending what you use to push data in, (I used ES hadoop plugin) , you have to account for shard segment merges, which literally pause ingress for a brief moment and merge segments in a given shard. You have to set retry to -1 (infinite) and retry delay to something like a second or two, otherwise you will end up with dropped documents.

<comment><USER13> this is brilliant ! if you had your ES and hadoop config somewhere it would be awesome

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is this sort of parallelism also doable with Solr as well?

<comment><USER15> I don't see why it wouldn't be. The main differentiator between Solr and Elastic Search is that ES handles constant incoming data more consistently, so it's a much better fit for realtime scenarios.

Just batch loading the data one time shouldn't create much of a problem for Solr either.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: New MacBook for iOS development - <AUTHOR>

I think the new MacBook is a super beautiful computer and would love to get one. My only tradeoff is if its good for running Xcode. <comment><USER2> I have been wondering the same. I went to the Apple store and none of the employees had heard of Xcode...</comment>


Bedside Cancer Detector - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/diagnostics/bedside-cancer-detector/

<comment><USER2> This headline is quite misleading. The article is about a new, less invasive way of diagnosing cancer, the prototype of which happens to have been implemented as a smartphone peripheral.

<comment><USER3> Exactly my thoughts.

We can't deny how versatile smart phones have become, but cutting edge in this case is not iPhone/any other smart phone, but TB Detector.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Phones have nothing to do with this. The advance was making an NMR small enough to be useful at the point-of-care.

</comment><comment><USER5> The article doesn't mention iPhone or Android, except for the picture. In any case, I always wonder in general how these types of apps can be distributed for iPhones since it wouldn't qualify for the app store or for the enterprise developer program.

</comment><comment><USER6> There's some great innovation over the last decade in diagnostic and treatment technology. It makes me wonder why health insurance premiums continue to rise at many times the rate of inflation.

<comment><USER7> The government mandates various coverages, restricts competition, taxes health care extra if purchased by individuals, restricts the number of doctors, and gives trial layers free run of the place.

<comment><USER6> True, but corruption's a two-way street - the people who write the checks are as bad as the people who cash them. Healthcare is a market that just doesn't seem to clear properly and the corruption is a symptom of market failure rather than the cause.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this really possible right now? For me it sounds like science fiction. Next we have a tricorder.</comment>


iOS app to help you memorize better - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/egg-yolk/id923871437?mt=8

<comment><AUTHOR> I came across this app which seems to be a good replacement for generic flashcard with spaced repetition. After I downloaded it and before I know it, I'm tracking close to 1000 words in learning my new 2nd language. Now I use it everyday and really enjoy its simplistic, quick and easy UI.</comment>


Ask HN: We are looking to rethink discussion platforms. Your suggestions? - <AUTHOR> We are working to re-think discussion platform.<p>What are the improvements you would like in Hacker News or Reddit, etc? What is your fav discussion platform? Why? <comment><USER2> Don't use the Web, don't build a "platform", build a peer to peer system, support threading, use local storage of both postings and read status information, use a native interface for fast and efficient navigation.

Or in other words: Re-invent NNTP.

Yes, NNTP has its problems, too, and could possibly use some additional features, but it's silly when you look at how easily you could/can follow huge discussions using slrn, and how badly current online discussion technology stacks up against that. It's all shinier now, but the usability is absolute crap for the most part.

<comment><USER2> I guess I should spell this out explicitly: Don't integrate data model and UI. That's the most silly thing about the web nowadays: Every instance of the same kind of content comes with a different UI, but without an API, even though it is all computer-readable data in principle. That is completely braindead, as far as the possibilities of information technology go. Wherever there is a discussion offered, I should be able to add it to the discussion software of my choice, so that (a) I have all the discussions in one place and with a consistent UI, which then can reasonably be powerful, as it's reasonable to, say, learn key bindings, for your one discussion client, as opposed to learning keybindings for every web forum out there, and (b) if you don't like the UI I am using, you can use a different UI that you like, and still participate in the same discussion. And in any case, native software is just so much more responsive than any of this web stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have the exact same views.

In one of the discussion on building the structure, I was amazed to find that people do not think in terms of API.

As for me, I have always thought of having 3 different layers/servers independent of each other. Front-end, Back-end and Database

<comment><USER2> It may be that we mean slightly different things here. I am not talking so much about the software architecture, but about the fact that the API between "front-end" and "back-end" should be the public interface. That does require a certain software architecture, though, of course ...

<comment><USER3> Just build your private API as a public API. That's what we've been doing and so far its turning out great

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes ... But if the software arch does not decouple the front-end and back-end, then there are essentially no APIs.

An API approach is the best approach. Later it can always be opened to public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reinvent Slashdot's meta-moderation. [http://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml](http://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml)

Don't treat users like their contributions are equal. Some users make better decisions than others. Reward them.

I think the Slashdot FAQ should be required reading before developing a comment system. There are a lot of lessons they learned ahead of the rest of the internet, problems others still have not solved. Something history, doomed to repeat.

[http://slashdot.org/faq/](http://slashdot.org/faq/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

Community moderation is quite a nice concept. Slashdot has indeed implemented it quite intelligently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You should take a look at discourse: [https://github.com/discourse/discourse](https://github.com/discourse/discourse).

They have rethought it and implemented it quite well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we like discourse to a great extent ...

however, one problem which we always face is following thru the comments on HN or reddit .. once the comments cross 100 ... or even 50

Discourse does not solve that either ... Is that a problem for others?

<comment><USER6> Personally, i Hate reddit's UI. I am not sure why, but i just do. Comparatively, 4chan is a breeze. Sure, it doesn't have the tree structure, but it doesn't look DAUNTING. It's relatively simple. And it does allow you to follow a chain of posts (forward and backward mentions). In fact, if you think about it, 4chan actually supports GRAPH structure for comments instead of the traditional tree, as the same comment maybe replying to multiple posts.

I may be contradicting myself here, but somehow i do like HN's UI too. It has a tree, but pretty neat. Though the levels can be a little ambiguous at times.

So what solutions are you guys thinking of? Or is this just one of those "Hey! let's make a discussion platform! I wonder what's wrong with the current ones... let's ask!"

<comment><AUTHOR> Have not really liked 4chan, but I will give it a re-look now.

We are having a few things in mind. One of them being applying categories or tags to comments, along with the nested comments.

We believe, each discussion essentially has multiple parallel threads running, and each thread should have its own structure.

The other thought is about users able to post as anonymous, but with certain restrictions.

<comment><USER6> For the anonymity thing, look at my other comment[1]

Tags/categories may seem like a fair idea, but what i don't like in UI's is information overload. So keeping info on a discussion would be pretty cool, but make sure i don't see it if i don't WANT to see it. it should be available, but not "in-my-face".

Also, what do you think people will react to having to type tags or subjects for their posts?

You know what would be super amazing? A discussion visualization/organizing tool. That could perform an analysis on the comments and perhaps group them together by relevance/chaining/sentiment. Would be cool if i open a 200+ comment page on HN or anywhere an immediately see a visual representation of what's going on. What aspects are being discussed and in what sentiment. Like someone posts a Product Landing page. I open the comments and see a lot of discussion about "UI" or "security" or "usability" or "heath risk" or "privacy" , each marked with +ve or -ve sentiments. Now THAT is something worth working on.

EDIT: the tool could do something as simple as marking keywords and giving posts a red or green BG with varying shades based on the sentiment...

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6933982](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6933982)

<comment><AUTHOR> Point taken.

We are already having thoughts on the automation of tagging, grouping or categorization of comments. However, before we start working on it, we are validating on how important or necessary this feature would be.

What if, we spend a few days making an awesome automation to do what you mentioned, but no one really gives a s __t about it. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's wrong with [http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/](http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/) ?

It's encrypted, distributed, open-source. It has chat, messaging, file sharing, forums, etc.

What more do you want? If anything, why not just write a plug-in for it or otherwise contribute?

</comment><comment><USER8> My favorite discussion platform must involve food. Something special happens when people gather around food. And some type of structured moderation that becomes culture.

<comment><AUTHOR> Food is an absolute must. Unfortunately, HN does not have that. :(

BTW, what do you generally like in food discussions? Is it good pics of food dishes, or recipes or something else?

<comment><USER6> He meant ACTUAL FOOD :P as in physically gather around food and discuss while eating.

<comment><USER8> Indeed. Trying to think outside of the box. Why not start a discussion startup with real-life discussions?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> How important is meeting new people on a discussion platform?

How often do you like to follow/friend/private message interesting people you may find on a particular discussion?

</comment><comment><USER9> My favorite discussion forum is WordPress, Tumbr. Effective UI, easy to navigate buttons, Accessibility options, ease of app use on mobiles are the features I look at.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> While going through this discussion, I realized HN does not have any form of notification system.

How important is notification for an effective discussion platform?

<comment><USER6> HN notify is kind of an external plugin... But considering that i did apply to means that yes, notification is important. But over-bombardment of notifications can be annoying

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Another feature which is tough to design, such that it is not over annoying and yet solves the purpose. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What do you feel about anonymous user handle? Is it a must? Or discussion platform should not have anonymous users, as it leads to trolling.

<comment><USER6> I like how HN handles that problem. Users are associated with an "account" so their posts etc on THIS site are linked together. And it helps identify trolls and throwaway accounts easy.

But it also gives you a sense of optional anonymity as your HN account doesn't have to necessarily link with the rest of your web presence. No one can find you in the real world just from you HN account if you don't want them too. And still, the option to provide further information gives you the OPTION to present your credentials and connect "who you are" with the HN account.

I find it really interesting how sometimes VERY simple features are solving relatively complex problems

<comment><USER10> I think Quora handles this better than HN. It gives you the option to be completely anonymous on a case by case basis, reap the benefits/upvotes even when you are anonymous. Most people on HN/Reddit resort to throwaway accounts when they want to be completely anonymous and not tarnish their username, even though that username has no connection to a real world ID.

People/usernames are brands in online discussion, so the way we generally weigh people's opinion is affected by those brands, which is kind of a function of their comment history and any IRL connections. Say, if the username is 'pg', even if it's a hit-and-run comment with not much thought put into it, you view it differently.

<comment><AUTHOR> As said earlier, identities is quite important to many users. Quora has done it quite well.

However, with the anonymous feature to ask question, I have seen a rapid degradation of the quality of questions coming on Quora. I am not the only one who has felt this way. We can find a lot of people complaining about the quality of questions of late.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Take a look at [http://telesc.pe/](http://telesc.pe/) \- built with meteor, pretty sweet!

</comment><comment><USER12> An idea:

A dialectic platform - when two users disagree someone should write a third post that both agree with.

<comment><USER6> This seems like a good usecase for that "replies to multiple posts" feature i was telling you about in my other comment (would't it be nice if a mention of my other post was a click away? Unfortunately, the process for that is comparatively cumbersome in HN and i am not gonna post the link just to annoy you and make you realize the feature's importance)

4chan maybe a ton of bad things, but what it truly nails, is a simple-to-use and effective UI.

(Legend has it that whenever you speak of 4chan, moot makes an appearance. Wonder if it'll happen this time)

<comment><AUTHOR> Helpful points here.. \- Replies to multiple posts \- Easy linking to last comment/post

As about moot, lets see if that happens?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> LinkedIn and Facebook Groups can re-think about having a better way of engaging people!

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely.

The original idea for a better discussion platform came after using fb group for 2.5 years and feeling the pain. We had started the Bangalore Startups group ([https://www.facebook.com/groups/blrstartups/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/blrstartups/))...

Although we keep getting new users fairly well, control and structuring discussions is completely missing..

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> End to the passive-aggressive hellbans and service degradations (e.g. slowban, rankban) for obviously non-spamming users.

Re-show comment karma in order to restore trust, in the wake of awareness of rankbanning, since that will provide transparency in comment placement.

Hacker News still has a community advantage. (I'll take HN's irritating-- but at least book-smart-- libertarian naifs over the actual idiots of most forums any day). The moderation could use some work, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Effective moderation is always a pain. The biggest curse of moderation is the inability to keep everyone happy. However, it is a necessary evil, which can not be avoided as well.

This point does give me an idea on how to handle the moderation a bit better though. Let me polish the idea, before telling more about it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Employers, do you use dark web databases in background checks? - <AUTHOR> Now that lists of accounts are stolen from websites regularly and published on the dark web I've wondered to what extent the victims need to worry about site memberships showing up in background checks. <comment><USER2> I've never heard of an employer doing that and doubt any reputable employer would. In the U.S. I would think it could be a very narrow edge they put themselves on, one which could be very costly but not necessarily because of a lost job for a candidate. IANAL but I don't think any employment laws would prevent it directly (but some may indirectly). The fact that they are accessing a stolen asset however, means they could be sued over the use of the data pretty easily. Either way, any company with any ethics would avoid it as accessing the data itself is a quagmire.</comment>


Greenland's ice sheets are disappearing faster than anyone predicted - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/greenland-melting <comment><USER4> First time since I'm on the web (and that's since around IE4) I almost missed the content below the fold.

I thought it was a myth that people might not know that they should scroll a bit.

But this page? Flashy animation, logo, social icons. First thought "Maybe that's all? Seems sufficient for 2013", but the title on HN suggested that this page contains some content. Second though "I guess it's broken. I'm on linux. Sometimes server don't respond fully. Possible."

"Maybe I hover over some things? But the animation has no distinct features. Maybe I click around. Maybe touch mouse wheel. Wow! Whoever approved this design was an idiot."

<comment><USER5> It doesn't feel right to take a story about perhaps the most important crisis we are currently facing as a planet and make it difficult to read.

<comment><USER6> Why not? If you want to see a message delivered you can criticize the way it's poorly done. That does not undermine the message itself.

<comment><USER5> Well. Global warming is an important issue, but the janky scrolling on that site caused me to shoot past important info, get a little frustrated, and close the article.

On second thought: But I think you and I agree on the same issue, we're just misunderstanding each other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Page size: 22MB

Requests: 148

It choked my Mac mini. Tens of thousands of CPU's around the world are roaring to this web page, causing enough global warming to melt buckets of ice. BUCKETS, I TELL YOU!!

<comment><USER8> Props to them for capturing the feeling of a beautiful magazine on a web page. I wish my favourite newspaper websites would pull that off in their larger pieces.

<comment><USER9> It's terrible. Scrolling is super slow and jerky, and I'm afraid to zoom/resize to a comfortable reading view because of it.

I don't see why this is necessary for a "beautiful magazine feeling"? Couldn't they just used big pictures, a nice font and great layout, but in _plain HTML+CSS_ it would give me the exact same experience, except of course 1000x better.

A while ago I came across a similar article (maybe it was Rollingstone as well) about Daft Punk's new album. I really wanted to read about Daft Punk so I suffered through that experience. The photos were very pretty but still I really wonder what sort of computer such pages are optimized for? My laptop is not super powerful but also just 1.5 years old. I used the latest Chrome on Win7, that should put me in their target audience for optimizing website experience right?

(of course that's assuming my experience is not the intended one and it's more pleasant for people on more powerful computers?)

But for this article, from the title I pretty much just wanted to know what's up with the ice in Greenland and what this means. So I didn't persevere and instead came looking to the comments here to see if the article is even any good.

<comment><USER10> Really, It was super slick on my Retina Mac Pro with 8 gig of RAM. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Whenever I see an article with a headline like this, I always wonder... was it actually faster than _anyone ever_ predicted? Was there really not at least one crazy guy in the 70's who said "Man, Greenland's ice sheets are going to be completely gone by the year 2000".

Or at least a more aggressive model from somebody. Seems a bit unbelievable not a single scientist got the current melting within the range of one of their models.

<comment><USER12> In the 1970s we were worried about "global cooling" and a possible coming ice age.

<comment><USER11> I hadn't heard about that before, but I googled it and this interesting link came up.

[http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions- in-1970s...](http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm)

TL;DR

 _The small number of predictions of an ice age appeared to be much more interesting than those of global warming, so it was those sensational 'Ice Age' stories in the press that so many people tend to remember._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What about this: [http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/25/oh-what-a- difference-a...](http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/25/oh-what-a-difference-a- year-makes-in-greenland-melting/)

<comment><USER14> Look at the last chart there

[http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/clip_imag...](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/clip_image019_thumb.png?w=600&h=400)

Through the last years the trend is to less and less ice in the Summer. 2005 and 2006 -- more ice, all other years less and less, 2012 lowest points in the chart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why would I even read a science article from 'The Rolling Stone' and presume there is any validity to it?

That isn't to say it isn't true, it may well be, but seriously, find a better source.

<comment><USER15> The response to this is a great example of how far Hacker News has fallen. The readership here appears to be in a state of believing what The Rolling Stone says in place of actual scientific research.

If you want an example of how intellectual forums die, this thread is it.

<comment><USER16> It's a magazine article about a science topic, a.k.a. the most normal thing in the world. Only in bizarro-HN-world would that even begin to raise any eyebrows.

Yes, journalists are in fact _allowed_ to write about science topics and there is nothing wrong with that in itself. No, not everything that's written about science has to have been published in a peer-reviewed science journal. Good science journalism is awesome and there should be much more of it.

It's this honestly bizarre cynical and twisted worldview that's wrong with HN, most certainly not that someone posted this article.

<comment><USER15> I don't honestly know how I could disagree with you more. Your definition of a 'bizarre' world equates to my version of an ideal world.

How dare people question media?

How dare people think for themselves instead of accepting what media tells them?

How dare they?

You have vilified everything that goes wrong with a democratic society.

Your mentality is the problem.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, that's great, but for fuck's sake, you don't "question media" by simply launching into an _ad-hominem_ attack against the Rolling Stone. Stop trying to defend your little tantrum up above by having another little tantrum.

<comment><USER18> His tantrum is so childish it is embarrassing. He responds _to himself_ complaining about the response his whiny ad hominem comment received. The ironic icing on the cake is that he is complaining about how far HN has fallen!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd like a TL;DR. The global warming is sufficiently alarming that we shouldn't care about how its too much javascript, or fonts are not easy to read.

I read through most of the article and it doesn't seem to actually give the explanations for the phenomenon, how it exactly works, and how to make accurate predictions.

<comment><USER14> TL DR is that it's about the scientist Jason Box who even moved to Denmark as he believes the future warming won't bring much good for most of the people who are going to inherit the Earth. He worries about the future his kids are going to have. He knows that the warming is real.

And he does research for darksnowproject.org, which is financed thru crowdsourcing:

 _"It's a sad commentary on the state of science funding in America when legitimate projects from respected scientists like Jason Box can't get funded through the normal channels," says Penn State's Mann._

Box also makes a pledge:

 _He talked about his dream of forming a Climate Delta Force, funded by philanthropists, which could be dispatched to study climate catastrophes in real time. "Give me two and a half million dollars," he told me, "and I could change the world."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So Arctic albedo causes the new scary feedback in the climate system? What happens when the old scary feedback mechanism (water vapor) condenses into opaque white clouds?

Neat design though.

<comment><USER21> Warmer air holds more vapour than colder air, so there's less condensation to be had. I can't say what the extent of that is, but there is a form of feedback there.

<comment><USER20> It sounds like you're putting the cart before the horse. Why would the atmosphere be significantly warmer if condensed clouds are reflecting solar energy into space?

Furthermore, if there is a robust model suggesting that extra water vapor in warm air negates the effect of cloud albedo, wouldn't that hypothesis be supported by the tropospheric temperature record?

<comment><USER21> No cart before the horse. It's just a potential feedback mechanism - <USER2> something else is causing warming, this may help accelerate it. It's not an isolated factor.

My weather science is weak - which is why I can't say what the extent of this is - it's just that shiny snow moved into the atmosphere does not necessarily cause an equal amount of shiny clouds. It may even create _more_ clouds - <USER3> same amount of water makes more cloud than ice - but it's a complex picture, and warm air can hold a hell of a lot of water in invisible vapour form.

<comment><USER20> > it's a complex picture

We can certainly agree on that point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I know everyone turns to Rolling Stone for the latest research on climate science but don't miss all the articles on JavaScript:

[http://www.rollingstone.com/search?q=Javascript](http://www.rollingstone.com/search?q=Javascript)

</comment><comment><USER23> Well, the good news is that we'll get a whole lot of land to colonize soon...

<comment><USER7> "Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to grow bananas in our own back yard" \- Sarah Palin, Alaska.

<comment><USER24> What's your source? A quick Google search indicates that someone made up that supposed quote.

Pop Quiz! Who said, "I can see Russia from my house"?

Answer: Not Sarah Palin, it was Tina Fey.

<comment><USER7> I made it up of course... I was trying to be funny.

I suppose she's nutty enough to actually say something like that, and so isn't really a good joke eh? People might actually pass on the quote.

This was her a few weeks ago:

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/20/sarah-palin- global-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/20/sarah-palin-global- warming_n_3306867.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Err, so buy land in Greenland and expect frontier towns to spring up?

Climate change is de facto happening. We need to mitigate not hope we can stop the ball rolling.

<comment><USER26> "The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote." \- Ambassador Kosh, Babylon 5

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I love this new way of storytelling, but not sure if this kind of content creation process is scalable (or if the scalability does matter at all).

</comment><comment><USER28> On Arctic albedo affected by Box's wildfire hypothesis, I'm wondering if those earlier deep core samples correlate with historic big blasts like Santorini, Krakatoa's red sky for a year, and...is that Yellowstone super blow up recent enough?

</comment><comment><USER29> This might be true. But let's face it nobody cares until it impacts everyday life.

</comment><comment><USER30> Can we have a discussion about the content rather than the appearance or how quickly the page loaded?

</comment><comment><USER31> So... There will be more inhabitable land? There is always an upside.</comment>


Friedrich Miescher discovered DNA in 1869, a century before Watson and Crick - <AUTHOR> https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32487691/ <comment> radford-neal The title of the linked article is "Before Watson and Crick in 1953 Came Friedrich Miescher in 1869". This is technically correct, though misleading - Miescher did in fact chronologically precede Watson and Crick.

The title of this HN post is "Friedrich Miescher discovered DNA in 1869, a century before Watson and Crick". The difference turns this title into one that is definitely false, since it clearly implies that Miescher did what Watson and Crick did, long before they did it. That's not true.

Watson and Crick did not discover the existence of DNA. They discovered the structure of DNA. The existence of DNA was already well known, and other groups were also trying to discover its structure.

<comment><USER2> The issue is mainly that in many people's minds, W&C "discovered DNA".

I studied DNA extensively in my PhD program and didn't even know about Miescher until I read [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Growth_of_Biological_Thoug...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Growth_of_Biological_Thought) and even then it's just sort of a little chapter at the end of the book.

<comment><USER3> The problem here is that the HN title is clickbaity and inaccurate where the NIH title is correct. On HN we try to avoid this kind of thing and I'm betting Dang will come in and change the title.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Watson and Crick did not get the noble prize for discovering the chemical nature of DNA, nor for being the first to suggest it might be the material of heredity, nor for identifying it as a double helix...

They got it for showing how DNA arranged as an anti-parallel two stranded base-paired helix could be copied from generation to generation, thus showing how it could be the material of heredity. Their original paper contains just one drawing of such a helix, and no experimental data.

<comment> radford-neal "...nor for identifying it as a double helix..."

I think you're wrong about this part. Maybe someone else had speculated that it might be a double helix (I don't know), but to take such a speculation seriously one has to work out the details, and see that they are compatible with the X-ray crystallography data.

<comment><USER4> Rosalind Franklin and Ray Gosling figured out it was a double helix. Pauling was speculating it was a triple helix. They published their finding _in the same edition_ of Nature as Watson and Crick published their model.

<comment> radford-neal Watson and Crick's paper contains the sentence "The novel feature of the structure is the manner in which the two chains are held together by the purine and pyrimidine bases."

Perhaps this claim to novelty is incorrect - I certainly don't know enough about the history to have an independent opinion - but I think one must take the conventional view to be that Watson and Crick did indeed discover the structure of DNA.

<comment><USER4> The conventional view is unfortunately incorrect. They _proposed_ an (almost) correct view of how the nucleotides were arranged into a helix. Their proposal included the feature that each strand of the double helix was in fact a "mirror image" of the other, thus could be divided and copied to yield two identical copies for inheritance by two cells.

The actual atomic structure of DNA was not experimentally determined until much later.

<comment><USER2> I don't think they ever said that it was a true mirror image, just that it was two antiparallel strands.

The original Watson and Crick model was almost perfecftly correct even without the need for explicit 3D crystal structure, the major problem being that the water content of the fiber used in the study was wrong, so they made a model of A-DNA structure, rather than B-DNA structure. If you look down the axis of the double helix in the W&C structure, there is significant free space in the interior because of the way the bases have moved, where in B-DNA, the itnerior is packed with tightly stacked bases.

[edit: I had forgotten that the original W&C paper says there are only two H-bonds between G and C rather than 3, which is another detail of the structure which was not completely correct.]

<comment><USER4> The original W&C model did not postulate three H-bonds between G and C, but two, which is one of the reasons why it is only "almost" correct.

<comment><USER2> Good point, I updated my comment to reflect that. Here's a nice writeup: [https://www.nature.com/articles/439539a](https://www.nature.com/articles/439539a)

<comment><USER4> Thanks! That was interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great article. A snippet from the conclusion that I found particularly interesting: "History of science all too often highlights "superstar" scientists who have illustrious careers, overcoming great obstacles and resistance to new ideas, leading to a public vindication, sometimes followed by a Nobel Prize. Miescher's story is different. There was no immediate recognition nor ultimate vindication in his case, yet his discovery proved fundamental for the whole of modern biology. Excavating stories such as his from the past, and incorporating them into the history of genetics, helps us portray the process of science more realistically."

<comment><USER6> The problem is now the superstardom narrative has grown in importance in academics, regardless of validity. It's not just something we project into the past anymore, it's something that is needed to project into the future, to survive at the most basic levels. Everyone is the next W&C (ignoring the complexity of the truth around _that_ narrative), until they have tenure or are pushed out altogether. In this way false narratives about the past become impossible goals for the future, which leads to false claims in the present.

<comment><USER5> being in academia myself, this hits home so hard :/ the field picks some rockstars, which imv is to a good extent based on charisma, and then goes with that.

one of 'our' rockstars has pushed a certain hypothesis for more than 10 years. it is plausible on a conceptual level, but I have yet to see systematic, large-scale evidence for it. it would not be entirely trivial, but also not that hard to test.

here is what happened: that person has fallen from grace due to some troublesome accusations. those accusations did not stick up in court btw. the case was made public 2017, the court case was closed this year. still that person's reputation is tarnished, so is their rockstar aura.

here comes the kicker: just this year, the first study comes out, presenting results that that hypothesis does not hold up, certainly in some contexts. i know for a fact that at least one more team has had similar results a few years ago - but when they first presented the results informally, they felt pressured to shelf the project.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure how much my cynicism is just me or my immediate experiences over the years, but I don't really trust the academic system anymore in terms of credit or even as much in terms of validity. Or rather I do, but in some abstract sense, in that if I see a meta-analysis with some mechanism of dealing with publication bias (formal modeling of bias, or preregistration) I might believe something, but I don't attach any credit to the body of work beyond those who as a group in toto were involved in it.

Too much credit is given to trappings of progress or something of that sort; conversely, people are punished too much for things that are irrelevant, and both seem to be weighted capriciously.

I see similar viewpoints expressed repeatedly in various outlets, but little seems to change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Shows the importance of communication.

If you discover something, but only you know, and you never tell anyone, is it really a discovery for society? (no)

We celebrate society-wide discoveries, because it's impossible to keep track of hidden discoveries. (e.g. Columbus, Edison, etc.)</comment>


Ask HN: how do you keep up with your inbox? - <AUTHOR>

I saw a comment just now that said Google Wave might be tough for people who already have trouble keeping up with their inbox.  I never really considered the idea that I might not be the only person who is having trouble staying on top of email.  This seems absurd, but most people I know don't seem to have this problem, although I don't think they get as many emails as I do.
I estimate I get approximately 100 emails per day, many of which don't just require a reply, they also require me to do something (I'm a web developer and project manager).  I'm sure others get more emails than this (and perhaps manage it fine), but I'm finding it increasingly difficult to read and respond to emails in a timely fashion.  I'm also finding that email has become disruptive to my ability to get other things done.  I often have to open my email to either send emails or to retrieve information, which means I always see all the mail and feel compelled to deal with it.
At this point I'm feeling like various technological solutions (labels, stars, etc.) just aren't cutting it.  I am tempted to just start letting certain emails slide, which bothers me from a customer service point of view.  What have you found helps you manage the constant barrage of emails?  Is there a solution or are we just stuck dealing with this incessant flood of email? <comment><USER2> \- check mail at most once an hour when programming

\- keep your mail unread if it requires an action, don't look back at read mails in your inbox (send old inbox mails to some other folder once a week for example)

\- try not to keep old mails without actions for too much time... if a mail will have to wait, send it to another folder so that your inbox is always small and easy to check (around 10 unread mails at the end of each day)

\- send mails that require an action to a todo folder; reply mails that require an answer immediately before you forget them

works for me

<comment><USER3> _\- check mail at most once an hour when programming_

And you will get _nothing_ done. Programming should run at negative nice. Nothing should interrupt it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735623430/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735623430/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo- top- stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0735620407&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1NSNDCQVNN0RE2DTC1JQ)</comment>


Ask HN: what new market opportunities do you see for the iPad? - <AUTHOR>

Excluding those that already exist and will be dominated by existing institutional players (3d gaming) by porting.
One big one I see is repackaging content and adding interactivity.  Its a new form factor, will and can be used in certain situations where a laptop is not appropriate, and an iPhone is a bit small and annoying.  No flash means existing niche websites with rich content will not work.
Some examples:
in the kitchen - a cooking database / assistant with interactive cooking videos
yoga/pilates/excercise video instructors <comment><USER2> Vertical stuff mostly, insurance guys, realtors.

Basically anybody filling out forms on the hoof.

</comment><comment><USER3> It opens up a new market for the JooJoo tablet as a web-enabled sushi platter.</comment>


The Continuous Evolution of the Top 30 E-commerce Stores (Part 1) - <AUTHOR> http://www.experimentengine.com/blog/ecommerce-evolution-part-1/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing this one Ray, it's incredible looking back at 15 years of history on the web! So much has changed..</comment>


Writing more legible SQL - <AUTHOR> http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2016/01/08/writing-better-sql/ <comment><USER2> I'll admit to giving little thought to the legibility of my SQL - this is a quick read, with some solid tips.

Do you do anything in particular to make your queries more digestible?

<comment><USER3> Craig mentions this in the piece, but I'll second it:

I fucking love CTE's for breaking apart ugly looking queries. They make everything significantly easy to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, this is essentially the biggest piece. Using CTEs and having building blocks that are easy to logically follow is the single biggest thing you could do.</comment></comment></comment>


Moving to a Profile per Install Architecture - <AUTHOR> https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2019/01/14/moving-to-a-profile-per-install-architecture/ <comment><USER2> The announcement begins by referring to different versions (nightly, beta, stable, etc.) of Firefox as "installations", and then switches to "versions" halfway through. I was momentarily confused because it seems to suggest that every time Firefox updates itself, e.g. from 67 to 68, it will use a different profile.

Which it most likely won't, but one cannot be entirely sure about that assumption in a world where software updates frequently reset user settings to vendor-preferred defaults without asking.

The fact that nightly, beta, and stable really are different "versions" of Firefox (current beta becomes the next stable) makes the terminology even more confusing :(

<comment><USER3> Is this the worst-written announcement ever, or am I going to lose my settings when FF goes to version 68?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I thought this was the default? I've been running firefox and firefox developer for a while now and they have never interfered with each other, maintaining separate things such as remembered passwords and histories.

<comment><USER5> Previously, some editions had different profile folders while others shared the same.

i.e. Firefox Developer had its own profile, but Nightly and Firefox shared the same, which was a PITA for the latter case.

Now all editions (thankfully) will have their own respective folders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems like a way to force users into using Sync. I refuse to use that for privacy reasons. Do not want.

<comment><USER7> You can run your own Sync server if you want [0]

[0] [https://mozilla- services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run...](https://mozilla- services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run-sync-1.5.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> OMG it's finally happening! I've been waiting for this for sooo long. I'm excited! :D

</comment><comment><USER9> Does this mean if you want to keep your profile when upgrading Firefox to a new version you will have to have a Firefox Account to sync your settings? I do not think that Sync carries over extension settings (e.g. all the custom site settings for µBlock).

<comment><USER2> Most likely not, but I understand that the terminology is confusing. (See my other comment in this thread.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Will this allow you to run several profiles side by side using the same version of the browser, like with Chrome?

<comment><USER11> I think you can already do that?

<comment><USER12> Yeah, just start the profile manager (firefox --ProfileManager), create a new profile, and then run the "other instance" with --profile NAME. Sometimes --no-remote is also helpful, so clicking on some links will not open them in this other profile.

<comment><USER13> This can also be done from within the browser: navigate to about:profiles.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Lie With Statistics (in the Age of Big Data) - <AUTHOR> http://mathbabe.org/2014/02/03/how-to-lie-with-statistics-in-the-age-of-big-data/

<comment><AUTHOR> Note: The article contains a link to a PDF version of the classic book _How to Lie With Statistics_ :

[https://archive.org/details/HowToLieWithStatistics](https://archive.org/details/HowToLieWithStatistics)</comment>


If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys - <AUTHOR>

Hi there!
Where do I find "good" programmers in the Valley? Is there a newspaper, a forum, blog, cafeteria, event, etc get in contact with good programmers?
I will hopefully move soon to the Valley to found a company. I'm a programmer myself, but I will need some help. 1 or 2 good programmers that I can trust will do. They will obviously get a portion of the company! Motivation is everything, and unfortunately salary won't be high at the beginning.
The problem is that I live abroad and I don't know too much people there. I know a lot of "good" programmers but they all live abroad. I guess they won't be able to come to the US due to the green card!
So how do I get in touch with "good" programmers in the Valley?
Thanks in advanced! <comment><USER2> 1\. Skills are subjective to whomever is interviewing and just because they got the coding chops does not mean they're a good fit for you or your company. This is something you must do in person. Online chats can only take you so far. People here have a hard enough time finding solid coders in person, if you think you'll luck out by finding someone you can work well after a few online chats, you're walking a thin line.

2\. The best source for recruiting people are face to face interactions and personal recommendations from people you actually know. Outside of this, you're taking a wild stab in the dark.

3\. I don't see any solid value proposition that you're providing that any other given person seeking a cofounder hasn't already provided aka low wage + equity. What's new?! Worse, you're not even a US Citizen and the Startup VISA movement hasn't actually happened so in order for you to get your green card status, you may need to come here to work on a sponsorship first. That leaves a lot of iffy rooms for anyone wanting to jump on board.

I'm sure I left out a bunch of other stuff I could be ranting about but if you want to find talented people, get your butt overhere and do it in person.</comment>


Former Naval Officer Retired at 41, After 2 Recessions His Portfolio Triples - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanderousseau/2019/09/09/this-former-naval-officer-retired-at-41-and-despite-two-recessions-has-seen-his-portfolio-triple-over-17-years <comment><AUTHOR> This guy volunteers time to help military vets at Bogleheads.org, too.</comment>