Climate-Driven Megadrought Is Emerging in Western U.S., Says Study - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2020/04/16/climate-driven-megadrought-emerging-western-u-s/ <comment><USER2> I recently posted a link to Bill Mollison's "Introduction to Permaculture", which is available to borrow digitally on the archive.org [1]

One critical aspect of permaculture is water management. It's usually one of the first things you consider when designing a home, a farm, a town, a city — even a whole region.

The crazy thing is, despite all the drought, most of our land is engineered to "ditch" water — get it off the land as quickly as possible.

This is because too much water can cause it's own set of problems, and the flip side of drier summers can be flood-like rain in the wet months.

What permaculturists like to do is find ways to capture rain in a non- destructive way, through "swales" (winding excavations that slow the water as it moves through the land, distributing it from the valleys to the ridges, sometimes small ponds), and deep rooted perennial prairie grasses and trees that break up the hard pan souls and allow water to penetrate deeply. The overall aim is to recharge the underlying aquifer.

There's lots of secondary benefits to this kind of whole-system approach, but at minimum we should be re-engineering our landscape to make better use of what we're given every year.

1: [https://archive.org/details/introductiontope00moll/mode/2up](https://archive.org/details/introductiontope00moll/mode/2up)

<comment><USER3> I'd love to see more innovation in farming practices. I'm a huge fan of aquaponics. Uses around 10% of the water of current farming techniques. I've got my own setup in my backyard. Right now I'm working on getting it started, but I'm planning on experimenting with growing wheat, and if I ever get a large enough system, I want to try growing trees, like almonds, which are traditionally pretty water intensive. These aren't generally worth growing at a small scale, but I figure if it can be done then maybe it could scale up. I really want to try making a combine harvester for wheat that runs on rails along the aquaponics grow beds to help in the automation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Drought like this, driven by global warming, was predicted in the book _Six Degrees_ by Mark Lynas, published in 2007.

He read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change and summarized them, one chapter per degree, with extensive references. Massive drought in the western U.S. was in his chapter for one degree of warming, right where we're at now.

Given what's in his later chapters, I'm not too happy about seeing him accurate so far.

<comment><USER5> what's in his later chapters?

<comment><USER4> It's been several years since I read it, but up through two degrees, things were a terrible mess but life goes on. By three degrees, the South American rainforest burns to the ground, and some major agricultural regions dry up because they depends on dry-season melt from glaciers that don't exist anymore. Hundreds of millions of refugees.

After that it got bad. I forget the details but by four degrees it looked to me like modern civilization would have a hard time staying viable, and by six it was hard to imagine our species surviving.

<comment><USER6> EPICA core samples show fluctuations of 16 degrees over 100ky, but there is no evidence of ancient rainforests burning. I'm not denying anthropogenic climate change but it's difficult to take such predictions seriously.

And yes, I use throwaway accounts because the HN hivemind slaughters anyone that goes against the mainstream opinion. If you don't want to respond to me because of this, then don't. If moderators want to remove this comment, then by all means please do. But I don't know who it helps.

<comment><USER7> 16 degrees warmer or cooler?

<comment><USER8> I believe it's the range from hottest to coolest, over 100KY. Which of course is exactly like a 2-3C change over a couple of hundred years, so no big deal... right? /s

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Probably a more relevant point - war, famine, plague and chaos are still things that happen in 2020. It would be helpful if the population at large accepted that bad things happen in prosperous places and prepare for them.

The climate-driven thing is topical, but you don't need climate change to have a 1 in 1,000 year drought. JIT production would have doomed any society up until around 1800AD and it really hasn't been tested all that well in the last 70 years in wealthy and peaceful nations.

</comment><comment><USER10> A lot of the western US has been in drought nearly my entire life. They have been using the underground rivers nearly to depletion (Kansas) or importing water via massive pipelines from other states (California). It's been completely mismanaged even down to choice of crop (I.E. Almonds aren't drought friendly and should not be grown in places that have them).

I imagine if things get even slightly worse it could help lead to a collapse.

<comment><USER11> Are these repurposed oil pipelines? Or dedicated fresh water pipelines built specifically to replenish water supplies?

I'd imagine as oil declines, the pipelines from the gulf might be able to send desalinated water back inland.

Not sure how feasible this would be, thoughts?

<comment><USER12> The issue there is desalinating the water in an environmentally responsible way. It's hugely energy intensive.

<comment><USER11> There have been some encouraging results recently. For example:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22269115](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22269115)

In any case, the time frame we're talking about is 10-20 years from now. Lots of time for even more breakthroughs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hmmm, I would think the massive sucking dry of the aquifers by farms and cities using massive pumping schemes would be more to blame.

Once you pull the aquifer down far enough, the surface starts to dry up, plants stop holding the soil together, the microclimate changes, which reduces the water capture, etc, etc.

<comment><USER14> From the other end of the equation, if the aquifer is primarily surface fed and does not receive input from rainfall, the aquifer will drop regardless of the withdraw rate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What would be an example of a non-climate-driven drought? Drought is a variety of climate.

<comment><USER16> Drought is definitely not a variety of climate. Drought is a shortage of water supply, which can be caused by climate, or, for instance, a change in the flow of a river.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reading some of the comments on this thread, would like to ask if anyone knows the right term to research something that has long bothered me. There are of course people who disagree on science, data and facts. What I'm curious about is people who claim or are science and data-driven but believe that only certain scientific fields are engaged in organized collusion or mass delusion. For instance, a biologist I met who thought archeologists are covering up young Earth, an astronomer who thinks the NIST/ASCE 9/11 Study was complete fabulation (although they admitted they'd never read it), and engineers I know who insist climatologists are all just in it for the money.

While I understand why the general populace may hold such views, I'm curious as to if there have been studies concerning how a population of those who believe in scientific method can so strongly believe their peers in selective (usually other) fields are so differently motivated.

<comment><USER17> This one can be quite complicated, but I wonder how much of it is actually related to the quote that goes something like "science progresses one death at a time". Which is talking about a bigger problem in science, which is that tenured scientists have either too much invested in their careers or too much vested in their models to allow the spread of upstart scientists' ideas. There's often a generational aspect (though don't confuse this with age, since someone new to a field at 70 would be a younger generation) where newer scientists pick up on some thing that older scientists ignored and they start spreading it's importance, then 20 years later, once the last of the old guard leave the field, it's no longer downplayed and science can 'advance' (there is some risk that said thing wasn't actually important, but for hard sciences data tends to trump all else).

So then the question to your question becomes more, are these contrarians representative of some new wave? As a trained economist, I've been trained to be skeptical of entrenched establishments, usually people will fail to believe that which threatens their paychecks. So the other question is, are there big incentives to encourage the established field to continue believing what it believes?

I will say there are a lot of crackpots out there, and novices tend to be wrong a lot, so the way science is currently done isn't such a bad thing. But it would be wise to at least listen occasionally to cross discipline contrarians. They will often bring up arguments that are strong from their primary field, without being weighed down with baggage from the other field. You get an occasional Eli Whitney, or if you're really lucky a John Nash.

One last thought. Hard sciences are hard for a reason, reality keeps them in check. And experiments allow for falsifiable hypotheses. There are a lot of sciences that rely primarily on observation, with little to no experimentation. This makes falsifiability tricky. This also means you're going to see more general dissent associated with these fields (and if you don't see it within the field that might be a red flag).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Genuine question: Isn't global warming supposed to cause more rainfall?

<comment><USER19> It's a loaded term really. Global warming is umbrella term for 'Extreme Weather Conditions'.

You get mega droughts followed by mega flooding (depending on region).

Those are tied to global increase in mean temperature.

<comment><USER20> None of this is actually true. Rain patterns are driven by ocean currents. And oceans are driven my Multi-decadal oscillations. Shifts in rain patterns due to these oscillations have always occurred.

<comment><USER19> Not sure what you mean by that. The number and severeness of natural disasters is only increasing[0].

Shifts in rain patterns due to these oscillations have always occurred, what does this mean?

[0] [https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-natural- disaste...](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-natural-disaster- events)

<comment><USER20> It says number of "recorded" natural disasters. Do you really think there was only 6 natural disasters in 1920 in the whole world or is this data set a function of a time when the world was not: 1) interconnected by weather satellites and radios 2) globalized with regards to trade and 3) had open data and sharing between governments and standards for reporting on them

That means climate change is a natural function going back billions of years. See:

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary- sci...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary- sciences/atlantic-multidecadal-oscillation)

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary- sci...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary- sciences/pacific-decadal-oscillation)

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary- sci...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/el- nino)

Here's hurricane data in US going back to 1800s: [https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/All_U.S._Hurricanes.htm...](https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/All_U.S._Hurricanes.html)

(Note, we didn't have instrumentation for measuring exact strength of hurricanes prior to satellite era in the 1970s)

<comment><USER19> It feels like you care strongly about it.

So I am sorry chrisco, but I am not sure what you are alluding to?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sad but true. I live in the mountains of central Arizona. This year has been good (8 inches so far, our yearly average is 18 inches for the entire year). Last year was also good.

But, long term, the whole southwest is in a long term worrisome position.

</comment><comment><USER22> It'd be interesting to hear plans for viable ways forward, instead of one side saying there is no problem, and the other side saying there is a problem and the only solution is X (which is a tragedy of the commons type solution). It'd also be interesting to hear the potential upsides (along with the catastrophic downsides) with what is going on. And, if there are absolutely no upsides and everything is going to end horribly no matter what we do, then how can we make the best of our remaining time?

<comment><USER23> > other side saying there is a problem and the only solution is X (which is a > tragedy of the commons type solution).

You may want to broaden your sources, I can't imagine how you got the impression of "only solution is X."

There are all sorts of mitigation plans, all sorts of energy transition plans. Nobody know what will work in the end, what new unforeseen technologies will be developed, and how the costs will change as industry scales technologies, so there's a huge variety.

If your X == "stop emitting greenhouse gasses," well, there's tons of ways to do that. Many of which will massively increase economic productivity.

There are occasional large reports that spell out various routes to stop emitting GHG. There are resources like Project Drawdown that investigate these potential of a hundred different climate interventions. There are focused news media like GreenTech Media that focus on technology interventions. There are an abundance of governmental reports on ways to meet our climate goals, on all sorts of particulars, for example I was reading a great one last night about electricity of buildings in California or using renewable natural gas [1].

There's soooo many books, forums, advocacy groups, policy wonks, podcasts, news outlets, etc. focused on exploring what you say you want to hear. So many that it's hard to even suggest a starting point. Imagine if somebody said "I'd be interested in hearing more about computers and the internet," how would you start pointing them to the general resources for something so broad?

[1] [https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/2019publications/CEC-500-2019-055/...](https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/2019publications/CEC-500-2019-055/CEC-500-2019-055-F.pdf)

<comment><USER22> That's great to hear. Unfortunately, such perspectives don't seem to make their way to the news sources I generally consume (i.e. TV ads, news.google.com, etc.). The level of exposure I get tends to come across more as doom and gloom: all the icecaps are melting, climate catastrophes everywhere, etc. and so we must force these unwieldy CO2 based policies on the population (and maybe drastically reduce the population and economy). So, I think part of the strategy should be a better PR on the issue. But, maybe the non doom and gloom perspective doesn't sell as well?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Aka human driven.

<comment><USER25> Overpopulation: who can understand it?

I was at Mesa Verde a decade ago and asked the Park Service person explaining the cliff dwellings what the ancient population of the Southwest was.

One estimate, I was told, put it at 30k.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I always wondered, if there is a way to geoengineer clouds to refill those aquifiers. Find out the main windband going there, go over the ocean, create a artifical thermic (via solar) and produce lots of moisture (ultrasonic foggers driven by solar?), creating rainclouds in a synethetic way.

<comment><USER27> Ultrasonic foggers would also increase the amount of salt in the air, so you'd have to run them far out in the sea.

Instead, flood Death Valley with ocean water:

1\. Massive evaporative potential. 2\. Moisture trapped by tall mountains replenishing the aquifer and making lush surroundings. 3\. Massive hydro potential 4\. Displaced species not seriously harmed since the moisture gradient would be large (are P. 2) 5\. You could harvest the salt prolonging the suitability of the project (anyway measured in centuries if not millennia)

Basically you'd have the lushness of the surroundings of Salt Lake City (compared to the desert anyway). Except there would be a lot more moisture (lower salinity wrt it Salt Lake, moisture better trapped)

You could do the same thing in Egypt at the Qatara depression, except with potentially global benefits. Here the half of the Sahara could be turned into productive farm land.

<comment><USER28> Sigh. Let's destroy a vast ecosystem and fundamentally change the atmosphere of a hugely important agricultural region. Let's not solve one problem by creating 10.

<comment><USER27> What are these problems? I've asked (many) geologists and the best answer they come up with is salt seepage into the aquifer if it's not done right, and a temporary increase of seismic activity due to relaxation from the added weight.

Look, the Three Gorges damn is much larger than this and much much more destructive. Entire cities disappeared.

But it also generates 22 GW of power.That's an _insane_ amount of coal that wasn't burned.

So choose: burn coal. Burn U235. Flood valleys. Sashimi the birds. Carpet the desert with glass. Or massively decrease your standard of living.

For the record, I'm actually in favor of the last option.

<comment><USER28> Why do you think geologists are the right specialists for this question? I would imagine geological concerns would indeed be mild, but meteorological effects could be monstrous as the weather created by this new sea would massively impact local climates, which could have far-reaching downstream impact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The era of fossil fuels will go down in history, if any history is preserved, as the point where human ignorance was no longer held back by lack of capacity. We are so doped up on carbon-based fuel that we are completely oblivious to the total dependency our way of life has on it. A simple thought experiment by the way of "what does it take to produce a pencil"[1] will give anyone insight in this. Sometimes I feel like we just don't have the collective mental capacity to handle mega-issues like these. And in the end, just like an addict, unless we kick the habit we are collectively, as a species, going to walk hand in hand into oblivion.

[1]: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2153998.I_Pencil](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2153998.I_Pencil)

<comment><USER30> I'm a small c conservative, and as part of this I care about the environment, and from my perspective there are a number of ways that the environmental movement don't do themselves any favours. Firstly there are those amongst them that come across far too preachy, in a way that can be a turn-off. Nobody constantly wants to hear bad news and moralising and be told they are personally responsible for all these problems, when most are just trying to get by in a system they didn't create, and have little real influence over. Secondly some of them oppose even the suggestion of technical solutions, preferring instead to emphasise that a kind of hair-shirt existence of drastically poorer lifestyles is all we have the right to expect, as if we've committed some kind of moral crime and only penance will suffice. Thirdly and related to both of the first two points, some (most?) of them are tightly bound to leftist political movements - sometimes tending to the extreme - which both immediately alienates people like me, and makes me suspicious that they are merely using the green movement as a vehicle for ulterior concerns, and indeed some of them are actually completely open about this:

'I'm here to say that XR isn't about the climate. You see, the climate's breakdown is a symptom of a toxic system of that has infected the ways we relate to each other as humans and to all life. This was exacerbated when European 'civilisation' was spread around the globe through cruelty and violence (especially) over the last 600 years of colonialism, although the roots of the infections go much further back.'

[https://medium.com/extinction-rebellion/extinction- rebellion...](https://medium.com/extinction-rebellion/extinction-rebellion- isnt-about-the-climate-42a0a73d9d49)

'Greta Thunberg: Climate crisis "not just about environment," but also "colonial, racist, patriarchal systems of oppression"'

[https://disrn.com/news/greta-thunberg-climate-crisis-not- jus...](https://disrn.com/news/greta-thunberg-climate-crisis-not-just-about- environment-but-also-colonial-racist-patriarchal-systems-of-oppression)

I could go on to point out the myriad inconsistencies in the positions of these groups e.g. pro-environment/pro-migration, pro-environment/anti population control, but I'll leave it there. If I think about it for too long it makes me angry because I think these groups are doing more harm than good, and I question whether they really care about the environment at all.

<comment><USER31> Not sure how you can care about protecting the environment while explicitly ignoring investigation into what's harming the environment? Unless you believe human activity is not driving climate change, then of course environmentalism is linked to anti-globalization sentiment.

<comment><USER30> > Not sure how you can care about protecting the environment while explicitly > ignoring investigation into what's harming the environment?

Can you point to where I advocated for this? I was just pointing out that the groups that have chosen to attempt to monopolise environmental issues for themselves might deserve scrutiny. Remove these groups with ulterior motives - who in any case have proven themselves not particularly effective - and we might get closer to a more grown up debate. Isn't it funny how they choose to hammer rich, liberal democracies that are doing the most for climate change, whilst conveniently avoiding protest in countries where they might get beaten up/thrown in jail?

> Unless you believe human activity is not driving climate change, then of > course environmentalism is linked to anti-globalization sentiment.

Well there's another contradiction for you then: anti-globalization/pro migration.

<comment><USER32> > Isn't it funny how they choose to hammer rich, liberal democracies that are > doing the most for climate change, whilst conveniently avoiding protest in > countries where they might get beaten up/thrown in jail?

Rich countries emit the most carbon per capita and are responsible for the lion's share of past emissions. So the first part of that sentence is rank BS.

Activists are obviously gonna activize in their own countries, most of which happen to be rich, liberal democracies. In case you care, even poor democracies have their domestic climate and environmental movements. Non- democracies usually don't have open political movements of any sort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is all wonderful but could someone explain why scientists, who claim they can predict when (and if) a drought would start, at the same time can't predict when (and if) it would end? Case in point: nobody predicted that CA drought would end, yet it did.

<comment><USER34> I don't like seeing the kind of belligerent ignorance you're peddling going unchallenged.

The claim, in the first paragraph of the article, is:

"a megadrought as bad or worse than anything even from known prehistory is very likely in progress"

Note it is "very likely". This is not the same as being certain. Note the drought has already started (quoting Science Mag: "the period from 2000 to 2018 was the driest 19-year span since the late 1500s and the second driest since 800 CE").

As for the CA drought ending, the state is currently 35% in drought ([https://www.drought.gov/drought/states/california](https://www.drought.gov/drought/states/california)). The rain that ended the drought seems like it was fairly inconsequential against the long term trend.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, I think I'm done believing models where the authors reputation is not on the line if the model turns out to be dead wrong. You can call it "ignorance", I call it "common sense".</comment></comment></comment>


Politics is a Business. A Big, Broken One. Let's Fix it. - <AUTHOR> http://dashes.com/anil/2012/02/politics-is-a-business-a-big-broken-one.html

<comment><USER2> The only way to restrain abuse is to restrain the underlying power. Social networks may be used to organize more effectively, but ordinary people have a limited budget of attention and time. This means the lobbyists have to wait just long enough for things to blow over. A system rigged, like a ratchet, to increase its own scope is not going to he held back by periodic bouts of publicity.</comment>


TrafficRobot – API to your telegram, disposable emails, Browser extension - <AUTHOR> Hi all! Bot link: https://telegram.me/trafficRobot Website: https://trafficrobot.tk Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/trafficrobot/gkbdhnoehcfblkinihgaiiiemfdjncpc
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PS. To those who know it, its basically a free version of ThrottleHQ.com PPS. Feedback welcome <comment><USER2> I hate getting my contact forms spammed with fake emails.</comment>


Myst Almost Couldn't Run on CD-ROM [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWX5B6cD4_4 <comment><USER2> I'm loving this series from ARS, another great one about Crash Bandicoot where apparently they needed extra RAM so selectively overwrote the sony libraries in RAM with their own data, by experimenting which areas were needed on whether it crashed or not.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o)

<comment><USER3> Wow, that's so crazy and wonderful. And yet very okay, since it wasn't like there would be any other application running. :)

If I recall correctly, (original) XBOX games would often go the the next level of whatever game by just loading a new EXE and start over from scratch, rather than bothering with some kind of "level loading and init" code.

<comment><USER4> guess that could make sense in a way. Dump all 'state' to disk, start new exe that begins by reading that state, and go from there.

<comment><USER5> Reminds me of how Emacs is built, with a `temacs` executable whose state is dumped to generate `emacs` which boots faster... [https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Bu...](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Building- Emacs.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hearing about Myst and CD-ROMs reminds me of my trouble with the sequel, Riven:

Riven came on multiple CDs. When you moved from area to area you had to swap the discs in your PC. I got part way through the game and it said "Please insert disc 5". I couldn't see any disc 5 and wondered if this was some kind of clever, 4th wall breaking puzzle.

Well, turns out the jewel case would open up an extra door and the 5th disc was there. It wasn't supposed to be a puzzle, it was just unexpected...

<comment><USER7> The shift from Myst to Riven and the following sequels is really interesting. Myst really clicked with me, while I was never able to get into the later titles, Riven included. I know the dev team had major changes between every title, so I suppose it's not surprising that they don't gel together very well. I wonder if anyone's done a deep dive comparing the first two titles' gameplay philosophies and technical and development differences.

Certainly the 5 CD release was itself a stumbling block. It penalized exploring the island freely, which has some bad gameplay effects. When you're stuck on a puzzle in a Disc 2 area, should you keep exploring that area, or is it possible the clue you need is on some other disc? Which one? Are you willing to put up with the hassle? It wouldn't be so bad if each area was obviously self-contained, as they were in Myst, but in Riven they tried to change from a collection of puzzle boxes into a real world where the "puzzles" were diegetic. So there aren't really discrete "areas" anymore, or even puzzle themes restricted to an area. The clue you need may well be anywhere, which in combination with the disc swapping, makes finding clues into a huge chore instead of a delightful exploration.

And the biggest shame is it was built on very crappy technology (Quicktime) that even back in the day was held together with spit and string. For the better part of two decades, it was basically unplayable on any modern PC without major effort. So I haven't gone back to replay it since the original 5-disc release in the 90s. They did a re-release a year or two ago, which I guess is probably worth a shot, but my memories of Riven are just so soured by my experience. Meanwhile Myst holds a special place as a fun, quick little puzzle game.

<comment><USER8> I remember working around Riven's disk swapping problem by mounting all of the disks at once in five virtual CD-ROMs. To prevent audio and video crashes, the entire game had to run on one single CPU core. Finally, there was a part when some buttons had to be clicked, but the game only occasionally captured the mouse presses. So I made a button mashing script to work around that.

Nowadays, though, the game runs fine in ScummVM. It's amazing how many games they've saved over the years. Myst III runs in a similar project called ResidualVM.

<comment><USER9> I wasn't aware you could play Myst and Riven today in a VM! Would you happen to have a link you'd recommend?

<comment><USER10> [https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Myst_series](https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Myst_series)

[https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=User_Manual/Quick_S...](https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=User_Manual/Quick_Start#2.2_Installing_ScummVM)

<comment><USER11> Also, I believe if your copies of Myst or Riven are up-to-date from Steam or GOG (or the recent collector's edition that was the referenced Kickstarter upthread), they'll use the ScummVM engine under the hood rather than the original engine today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Transcript: [https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp- content/uploads/2020/01/Myst_...](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp- content/uploads/2020/01/Myst_Transcript.txt)

Much longer (1 hour 47 minutes) cut of this interview: [https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/an-extended- interview...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/an-extended-interview- with-atrus-himself-myst-creator-rand-miller/)

<comment><USER13> Weird, that transcript link gives a "Cannot decode raw data" error in Safari, and just doesn't load in Chromium. Well, `curl` it is!

<comment><USER14> Weird. It's just a plain .txt file. There isn't a HTTP Content-Type though, which might be what's tripping some browsers up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Coincidental timing - a bunch of people online just did a weekend game jam using HyperCard (the same product used to create Myst and other Cyan games): [https://cancel.fm/hyperjam/](https://cancel.fm/hyperjam/)

I didn't get a chance to participate myself, but you can see all the stacks everyone made at [https://itch.io/jam/merveilles- hyperjam](https://itch.io/jam/merveilles-hyperjam)

</comment><comment><USER16> I've really enjoyed this series. I do wish they just told stories about developing their games without the contrived framing of every one as a "near death" story. It's just unnecessary and rings pretty false in most cases. It feels a bit like tricking non-technical people as well.

Despite that flaw, I do like it. I hope they keep em coming.

<comment><USER17> "I do wish they just told stories about developing their games without the contrived framing of every one as a "near death" story."

Unfortunately, the gaming industry really _does_ seem to work on a model where darned near every major game is a near-death experience for the company in question. It remains fairly common even today for relatively large companies to essentially be brought down by one bad release, resulting in them getting acquired by EA. If you look out at the studio landscape over history, it is still very, very frothy. There aren't really that many studios that have been around for even five or ten years; most of the names that will leap to mind are now actually particular name brands of conglomerates.

I think it's a real thing to a large degree, not a contrived framing.

(I would credit this to the way that games have been getting exponentially more expensive over time; in such an environment, the next game is going to naturally take most of your money, even if your previous game was a wild success. I think we're now about in the middle of that no longer being true. We're not done yet; AAA games are still trying to slug it out on the exponential curve, but more and more we're seeing successful games made at an earlier plateau of cost, including the entire output of companies like Nintendo.)

<comment><USER18> This makes sense, old school game development required paying (relatively high) salaries for years before maybe getting a payday. It would be difficult/impossible for any company to keep 5 years of salaries in savings to mitigate the risk of your next title failing.

Yeah, this ignores the role publishers play, but I doubt a publisher is going to give a relatively new studio too many opportunity. You're game needs to make money if you want another shot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is a fun review of the game from Computing Gaming World 1993 here: [http://cgwmuseum.org/galleries/issues/cgw_113.pdf](http://cgwmuseum.org/galleries/issues/cgw_113.pdf)

I never completed Myst, it was such a frustrating game. Granted I must have been 10 or 11 when I played it, I've thought a few times about going and playing it as an adult but I still have PTSD from the frustration it caused me.

<comment><USER20> The reward for (let's be honest) suffering through Myst is that you get to play the absolute joy of a game that is Riven, possibly the finest exploration/discovery/puzzle game ever created by humans. I love it really quite a lot.

<comment><USER21> I didn't get very far with Myst.

I really enjoyed Riven, however. Fantastic game. Right up until the penultimate puzzle, and it's a doozy that basically requires you to have paid careful attention to things along the way (my notes were mostly sufficient), and to not be red-green colorblind (wups, I am genetically screwed).

I wrote in to support, and actually got a refund on the game.

<comment><USER22> -I had the same issue, after cursing my bad luck I eventually got around to using a couple of coloured cellofan candy wrappers as colour filters. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is part of a great series of interviews with the developers of some of the most influential games in history.

Two of my favorites are Andy Gavin on Crash Bandicoot:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o)

and Sid Meier on Civilization:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwUM33VJRbY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwUM33VJRbY)

<comment><USER24> A new one released today on Homeworld.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q38556KTTR0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q38556KTTR0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> He mentions Lunar Lander as one of the things that got him into computer games. There's a lot of interesting information from the creator of Lunar Lander here:

[https://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~storer/LunarLander/LunarLander....](https://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~storer/LunarLander/LunarLander.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> I thought what he refer to might be called sub-second response time which is impossible to do for wide area network under cics.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Offer HN Dead? - <AUTHOR>

So news.ycombinator.com/offers is dead, and I haven't seen any Offer HN threads anywhere recently.<p>Was Offer HN just an extremely short-lived HN meme, or has it simply changed or moved elsewhere? <comment><USER2> I'm still following up on all of the people who replied to my first offer :).

I offered free front-end development. I received ~50 or so requests for help. I replied to the 35 or so of them that were written in a form of English I could understand. Probably 20 of those replied back. I'm actively undertaking work for five or so of them right now.

</comment><comment><USER3> I also was helping someone do UX modeling. If anyone needs help - feel free to let me know.

firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


The 1% fallacy - <AUTHOR> http://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-fallacy/ <comment><USER3> Good article. In fact, I'd go a step further and say that _any_ percent is a fallacy. Most business plans and pitch decks include the requisite section on market size, but who cares? The only thing that matters is how many customers are you going to have. That cannot reliably be determined from a top-down assessment. You don't look at a pie and just say, "I'll take 1% of that".

Instead you spell out through which methods you will gain and keep customers and how many you will gain via those methods. For SaaS, that could look like "We have x visitors to our website. We have shown with previous products and experiments a y percent conversion rate. From this, we estimate x * y customers at $d/month. With your funding, we should be able to increase the number of visitors to the product site by z% while maintaining or improving our conversion rate."

These numbers are not a factor of market size.

p.s. The only thing market size can tell you is what the upper bounds are for a product niche. But unless it's a very, very small niche; why does it matter what the upper bound is. If you hit that, you've got a good problem on your hands.

<comment><USER4> > You don't look at a pie and just say, "I'll take 1% of that".

Exactly. Pretty much sums up everything that is there to say about the article.

<comment><USER5> 100% wrong. Most products are launched into existing markets and estimating a likely market share is essential.

<comment><USER4> Essential for what? You can get an idea of what the ceiling of your market looks like, but that's it. Unless you can strongly and credibly argument how, saying you'll get 1% of the market is equivalent of saying nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "He forgot there was a number lower than one percent."

<http://sivers.org/1pct>

<comment><USER7> Interesting... my reaction to the OP was "Duh, everyone knows that!" But my reaction to your sivers.org link was "Great story!" Not sure if that says something about me or about the relative writing skills of the two posts.

<comment><USER8> > "Duh, everyone knows that!"

I wish. I still hear it a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I agree that you should never go into a market thinking, "If I can ply capture X%, we'll be hugely successful." It's putting the cart before the horse.

You go into a market by finding a pain that you solve. You can go into the CRM market if you have a method that, for even just a few companies, solves some significant pain they have. Then, over time, you analgesic grows to soothe more companies' pains. Then you find you captured some percentage of the market. The capture is the result, not the plan.

<comment><USER10> I've been taught that your pitch deck should have a slide on TAM, SAM, SOM [1]. The idea here is that we show that the general market for this product domain is huge and then we drill down to the niche in that market who's pains our initial product addresses. It makes the opportunity much more attractive when there's a huge market that you could potentially become the Salesforce of, even if you're just addressing pains of flower shops right now.

[1]: [http://upandrunning.bplans.com/2012/06/22/tam-sam-and-som- hu...](http://upandrunning.bplans.com/2012/06/22/tam-sam-and-som-huh/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't disagree with the OP's basic point about not making "get 1% of huge market" your strategy. As SoftwareMaven points out above, getting 1% of a market is not a strategy at all, it's a result, and it's not going to happen just because the number sounds small. But I do want to oppose the more general notion that you shouldn't enter crowded markets.

A market like CRM is not one big homogenous thing; it's got tons of nooks and crannies in it. Maybe you want to be CRM for bakeries, who, let's just say, are largely not using CRMs yet. You'll end up with a different product, but more importantly, you'll have different sales channels and marketing strategies. You go after an untapped niche with special requirements, maybe even one that's too small for giant CRM firms to target. You compete with all of those giant CRM companies by not competing with them.

Will that add up to 1% of the market? Seems doubtful, but ask yourself what percent of $18 billion you can run a company on. It's a lot less than 1%.

<comment><USER12> It would probably be best to target niches with relatively large companies who have very specific requirements.

Over the years I have built about 6 mini CRM systems for small companies. Usually these start off as contact form on a webpage and evolve into something that outputs excel spreadsheets.

Over time though, these things tend to get replaced by mass market packaged or SaaS CRM systems simply because even though they are not bespoke to that business they do the job well enough for the price.

The answer is probably not to make "A CRM for bakeries" but to make a "system to help with the unique problems of large bakeries that might happen to have CRM-like components"

If you want to build a product for a market as opposed to selling consulting by building a system for one specific bakery then the sweet spot is likely to be a very small target area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love his closing comment, "Whatever you do, don't stand in front of investors and pitch them the 1% fallacy. It makes you look an idiot. I should know, because I've done it."

</comment><comment><USER14> The flip side of that argument is that two of the five biggest CRM vendors had single digit market share (2008; Gartner via Wikipedia) and ~40% of the market uses vendors outside the big five. It has high margins, few economies of scale and sales that are more relationship than reputation-based - in other words one of the markets you genuinely could get very rich off being a smaller player with a good sales strategy and a generic solution, power laws be damned.

You won't get anywhere near that mythical 1% without a well-costed and planned strategy, but the same applies to trying to capture a huge chunk of a tiny niche market like bingo card creation. Once you've stopped worrying about phoney percentages, you can afford a lot more false starts in the huge addressable market than with a misjudged niche product.

</comment><comment><USER15> The biggest issue I have with this 1% fallacy (which is a huge pet peeve of mine) is that it shows completely the wrong mindset needed for success in my opinion. To me it is saying we don't have confidence in our ability so we're going to target such a large market that if we even have a small amount of success we'll still make a lot of money.

Your aim should always be 100% market share. If you don't think that is is possible to create a product that would be appealing enough that everyone in that market should want to use it then narrow that market into a smaller subset and aim to get 100% of that. You should never be ok with only 1% of target users using your product.

<comment><USER16> I agree with this, if only to create the correct mindset from the beginning. Never settle or be prepared to show weakness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The most interesting part of this..

 _"Whatever you do, don't stand in front of investors and pitch them the 1% fallacy. It makes you look an idiot. I should know, because I've done it."_

was the end, and not elaborated on... I for one would love to hear the story of how that turned out, with specifics!

<comment><USER18> I am the author. As I remember it the pitch (for a .com company I worked for) was going ok until I said "...and if only we can get 1% of this market...". They flinched. I didn't really appreciate what I had said wrong at the time. It was only when I had more experience in marketing and running my own small company that I realized how naive this argument was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> When the next person tells you she will get 1% of any market then ask her to identify her top x customer prospects by name, describe how she will reach those customers and why those customers will buy her software instead of her competitors.

<comment><USER20> That's pretty sexist! There's no reason to think that women are worse than men at evaluating market opportunities.

<comment><USER21> I think it is just someone using female for the generic pronoun. Of course maybe you realize and are poking fun, whatever.

<comment><USER20> If you decide to abstain from the normal generic pronoun "because women feel that you aren't referring to them when you use he," then that very logic means that you aren't referring to men when you use "she" to talk about stupid individuals as above.

Hopefully, our friend above did mean the message in a sexist manner. I find the modes of failure present in the other alternative too sad to contemplate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting, I may be wrong but I don't think its a 'fallacy' (after all if you got 1% you would be successful) so much as a 'unsupported argument' which is where you don't say "how" you get that 1%. The Derek Sivers link is also good in this regard.

The mistake is believing that people will randomly try your product. That is true if the threshold for their trying it is below their "don't care" point, but if it's going to cost them more than their "don't Care" point cost they won't try it unless sold on it.

Its perfectly reasonable (in my opinion) to go in with "The market leader here has an $X billion market, with Y customers. _All_ of those customers have pain foo which our product version solves. We're going to reach those customers through the following channels with the goal of converting 1% of them to our product which is functionally identical and less painful."

That is a 'go to market' strategy that, if you are right about the pain, can turn your product into a going concern. But again, it solves a problem you know exists.

However having an identical product, especially one where you don't differentiate, means you have to get out ahead of the market leader in acquiring new customers and that is expensive and difficult. Not a good strategy over all.

<comment><USER18> It is a fallacy because it is based on the incorrect premise that getting a 1% penetration in a large market is relatively easy. It is quite widespread - over the years I have heard plenty of people come out with it.

<comment><USER22> Your probably right, it would be clearer if they said "We can easily get 1% of that market." That would certainly sound fallacious.

I have seen folks actually use 1% as a goal in a reasonable pitch, one where the challenges were laid out and the tactics for mitigating those challenges identified. I guess it just struck a nerve, like people who say "I hate generalizations." :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Awesome article. Puts some classic and well established theories to good application. The age-old advice comes through again: focus on a niche.

</comment><comment><USER24> Nice explanation and good numbers. Also bonus I'm in a wedding soon and will probably need your software, but this is the first I've heard about it :)

</comment><comment><USER25> This is also known as failure to segment the market on the old-school list of entrepreneur mistakes.

Maybe there is a $100 B of revenue out there. But 40% of it is locked up in internal markets, and 40% of what's left is locked up in long-term contracts, and 40% of what's left is held in government contracts you can't get, etc etc etc and pretty soon you need to grab something like 25% of the market just to break in.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've heard this described as a top-down versus bottom-up approach. The problem with the top-down approach (i.e. I will capture 1% of the market) is that is doesn't tell us much about _how_ you'll capture this 1%. By going from the bottom-up we can clearly see how you are going to iterate and build your userbase.

</comment><comment><USER27> Great reality check for you and your business...but it may or may not translate to better luck with VCs. Plenty of them buy into this innanity, and plenty more don't care about market size at all and will decided to invest in whatever other VCs are investing in.

</comment><comment><USER28> Reminds me of PG's "Deep Well" concept.

</comment><comment><USER29> Imagine if Steve Jobs would have thought like that, world was not going to experience iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER30> This seems to be 37 Signal's model case and point. It's been doing pretty well for them.

</comment><comment><USER31> Bollocks. 1% is not a fallacy. It's just a way of mentioning a low-risk target without specifying the strategy.

You don't know the specifics of the strategy because you're a startup - <USER2> quote Clayton Christiansen, the needed market research costs much more than making the product, so you can't afford to do it - and to quote Steve Blank, you may need to pivot if you get your hypothesis wrong.

It's called a "fallacy" because idiot VCs don't bother to note these facts, and just want a sure fire winner business plan handed to them so they can fire the founders from their own company.

Similarly, idiot VCs don't get why you'd want a hockey-stick graph or to say "these figures are conservative", for much the same reasons. So these become infamous "fallacies" too.

If you play by the rules of these idiot VCs, you will find that it's impossible to make a business plan that meets their expectations and isn't fraudulent. It's better to walk away than to play their game.

If by any chance you meet a sane VC, they're likely to tell you something useful. Instead of banging on about 1% being a fallacy, they'll say something like "at _your_ stage you need to have a working prototype before seeking investment" or "at _your_ stage you need a more aggressive advertizing plan".

You know, something with content.

<comment><USER15> But if the whole point is saying there is a lot of money in this space so it's less of a risk then why mention 1%? Mentioning the market size and opportunity is important but I think the issue people (such as myself) have with this specific framing is:

1) It makes it seem like you believe there is no way you could get less then 1% market share. Because 1% is so small that it must be easy to get. 2) It often de-emphasizes why people would choose your product over any others because you only need such a small percentage to be successful 3) It makes it seem like you aiming low. Aiming to get only 1% of a market to me means you ether don't have huge faith in your product.

<comment><USER31> _Aiming to get only 1% of a market to me means you ether don't have huge faith in your product._

You forget the question of _time_. Maybe the product is good enough to get 100% _eventually_. But maybe you'll go bust in the meantime if you have a ridiculous burn rate. "Aiming" for 1% means making your _burn rate sustainable on 1%_ so can live to fight for the 100%. Microsoft wasn't built in a day.

 _It often de-emphasizes why people would choose your product_

No because that's covered in another part of your pitch, which deals with your product characteristics. The 1% part of your pitch deals with your strategy.

By the way, you are not supposed to have _faith_ in your product, you are supposed to have a willingness to deliver whatever product the customer wants. That's what pivots are for. Business is supposed to be a rational process, not based on faith.

<comment><USER15> When you are talking about large markets 1% is not a short term goal. It is important to specify how you plan to keep your company running as you grow, but I don't see how saying if we reach 1% market share we will make a lot of money does that.

Also I'm not saying that using 1% and explaining what makes your product good are mutually exclusive. Just that more often then not people who use a 1% pitch tend to focus less heavily on the why it is a competitive product. This is just the trend I see, although I may be wrong and if there is any hard data on this I would be interested in seeing it.

Maybe "faith" was a bad word to use. What I ment was that by using 1% it seems like you don't have confidence in your team to produce a competitive product.

When it comes down to it 1% is often used as a place holder for arbitrary small number, and in this case it is a complete fallacy. 1% of a large market is hard to get, and if you can get it then why can't you get more? Basing your math for a pitch based on this arbitrary number kind of renders the rest of the pitch worthless.

Finally 1% is never a good metric to aim for. If you wouldn't accept it for retention rate, conversion rate, profit margin etc why is it ok for market share? My point is you should always be aiming higher then 1% so why use it in a pitch?

<comment><USER31> _When you are talking about large markets 1% is not a short term goal_

This is where you are precisely wrong. A VC wants to cash out within 3 years.

 _Finally 1% is never a good metric to aim for. If you wouldn't accept it for retention rate, conversion rate, profit margin etc why is it ok for market share?_

Because your short term market share goal is in this context a proxy for your ambitions for your burn rate. So it is the exact opposite. You want your conversion rate to go _up_ while you want to keep your burn rate _down_. 1% is an excellent number in this context.

 _Basing your math for a pitch based on this arbitrary number kind of renders the rest of the pitch worthless._

You will find that whatever numbers you target in your pitch are arbitrary, absent a crystal ball that can actually tell you the future. The comical term for this is Scientific Wild-Ass Guess.

<comment><USER15> _This is where you are precisely wrong. A VC wants to cash out within 3 years._

I think we may have different definitions of "short term". When I say short term I mean that you are in the process of proving a concept as viable and at the point that pivots are not very costly. If you've reach 1% penetration in a large market then you are past this point.

 _1% is an excellent number in this context._

I would definitely agree that it is a good target to hit. I'm just saying that it should not be your golden standard. There is a difference between saying "this is how we plan on securing a foothold in the market", and saying "If we can get only 1% of the market then we will be successful."

 _The comical term for this is Scientific Wild-Ass Guess_

I completely agree. Thats why i actually disagree with stating a target marketshare in a pitch. Personally I think that stating total market size, an underserved aspect of that market/competitive advantage and how you plan to try and break into that market should be enough. I don't think making wild guesses at market share is really worth while at all.

<comment><USER31> _I don't think making wild guesses_

The problem is that the Scenarios section in any business plan is typically full of this kind of bullshit.

In business schools they teach the MBAs to layer it on by the _ton_.

The 1% thing I find frankly the _least_ offensive.

<comment><USER15> If the 1% is the least offensive, I'd hate to see the rest of it. I guess I'm glad that I'm on the technical side of things :P</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Intel's Sandy Bridge processors have a remote kill switch - <AUTHOR> http://www.techspot.com/news/41643-intels-sandy-bridge-processors-have-a-remote-kill-switch.html

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion on the same topic (different article): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018351></comment>


Being #2 on the Hacker News front page - HackerThings Launch Week - <AUTHOR> http://hackerthings.com/blog/launch-week-from-48-hour-project-through-the-first-7-days-online-100

<comment><USER3> I'm one of the 114 RSS subscribers, and I've been checking the feed every day - congratulations on your rapid success.

I really like the idea of full comment threads attached to each product - <USER2> best, other sites have heavily-edited reviews pages.

But please consider using something other than Facebook for commenting. I didn't even _see_ the comment threads when I visited with my main browser, because I have Facebook's domains blocked for non-Facebook sites. Considering your target audience, I doubt I'm alone in this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to have you as a subscriber!

I understand that some people don't jibe with Facebook and want me to move away from FB comments (I've received several requests). If I do that then I'll have to write an auth system. Not difficult to do but I'd rather focus my time on content right now. Eventually I plan on implementing an auth system and including Twitter and Facebook logins. Once I have that I'll probably move to an in-house commenting system. I can always export the comment data using Facebook's API later to keep the existing comments.

As far as the audience goes, I know you're not alone in this but the people who have boycotted Facebook aren't the majority of users (even HN users). They're just a rather vocal group. ;)

For now I think I've got most users covered for their commenting needs.

<comment><USER3> Why not use Disqus? It supports Facebook logins, but also Google, Twitter, and generic OpenID.

<comment><AUTHOR> Disqus is fine I suppose. I've used it in the past but didn't feel the urge to use them again. One thing I really like about the Facebook comment system is when someone posts a comment to a product or in the blog it posts that comment on their wall with a link back to the page. It has helped with generating traffic. Certainly a feature I will try to add for the in-house comments (of course though, that would require extra permissions).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What do people think of deleting an ignored HN submission and re-submitting in the hopes of triggering lots of voting the second (or third) time around?

I've thought of doing it once or twice but came to the conclusion that it would be kinda unethical. Is it standard practice?

I don't mean to specifically bash coderdude but he mentioned it in his blog post so it made me think to ask.

<comment><AUTHOR> Bash away. ;)

It certainly shows that the right people on HN at the right time will make or break a submission. It's almost entirely the luck of the draw. With that in mind I didn't feel bad about deleting a failed submission after 30 minutes of no attention and trying again at a later time in the day.

<comment><USER5> Don't feel bad even if it was unethical. It worked. End of story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great stuff, I think it's a solid niche.

Won't it get tough for you eventually to continually source new products though? I would definitely explore a Pinterest / TheFancy crowdsourced curation model. Even if you only let in an exclusive set of curators...maybe you require they have > 10000 HN points or something...

We've built a bookmarklet for our product and it's great for letting people source content from around the web for you.

Anyways, kudos and thanks for the intro to StumbleUpon Paid Discovery, I plan on checking it out right now.

<comment><AUTHOR> It may become too much for me but that'll be a problem I hope to have. I'm planning on adding user accounts so user submissions isn't much of a stretch from there. I think keeping up with price changes and availability is the only real growing pain.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I'm just saying if you get into the hardcore community, you can probably identify people who would be happy to curate the list for you, even if just to have their names be the chosen few on an about page.

Just build them a bookmarklet tool, or give them admin auth to the creation page. I think the cool thing that you have going for you is the concentration of cool shit you've found. You definitely want to keep products somewhat scarce so that they're still compelling once you've discovered them for users.

There's probably an efficient number here...maybe people only expect 1 new product a day / every 2 days. Your challenge will become hitting enough niche sites to find the coolest stuff, but you dont want too much crap so I think opening it up publicly might be a mistake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was more interested in how much money did he make, but he wasn't talking about it after all in the blog.

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't made any money from it. Haven't even tried to. The project started as just something fun to work on and grow.

<comment><USER8> Wow... what a pity though. It would be well earned money. On the flip side, if you actually had to find deals with resellers before launching, it would for sure have taken much much longer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Release early and often, so they say. There will always be time to make money. If the site gets big then I will have ample opportunity to make some money. If the site were to die out then I wouldn't care if I only made a little money on the side. It wouldn't make much of a difference in the long run. So for now I'm focusing on what will get the site to that next level.

<comment><USER8> Indeed... good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A question for coderdude: how well did the traffic from StumbleUpon perform? Did it almost entirely bounce straight away, or was there a lot of clicking through to other pages?

<comment><AUTHOR> Out of 132,000 Stumblers the average pages viewed was 1.42 and the average time on the site was 46 seconds. The bounce rate was 80.93% but it's hard to tell how GA is calculating that since I have so many off-site links. All in all I wouldn't call SU traffic very "sticky" but some of it did convert well (became subscribers or shared the site in other channels).

<comment><USER10> I didn't know about paid SU... i'm going to give it a try with one of my projects, www.plansharing.com. I've tried Facebook ads and Google AdWords. Neither of which has been very good. Facebook REALY doesn't want to send you off site, and mostly the google ads were run on spam trap websites in my experience.

If SU leads to organic traffic too, that's an interesting alternative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Congrats man! Glad you persisted with the submissions and made it fly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is your stack like? How many servers, what back-end technology, amount of memory, processor, etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1 server, shared hosting, Apache + mod_wsgi + web.py, MySQL. 160mb of RAM. Not sure about the other system specs on that host. It held up because I used a CDN for all the assets and because I generated static pages. I did have to monitor it though and increase the RAM at one point.

<comment><USER12> What CDN did you use? CloudFlare?

<comment><AUTHOR> Amazon S3 (which ended up costing me more than my hosting, by the way).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Introducing OpenSWR: High performance software rasterizer - <AUTHOR> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2015-October/097816.html <comment><USER2> I had a chance to work on the Larrabee software rasterizer, and felt that the solution space for the core "picker" function was pretty well buttoned up. However, a buddy of mine (a performance guy) really wanted to implement a rasterizer. I'd always been told (while working on Larrabee) that a software texture sampler would be way too slow.

Over the winter, my buddy wrote a rasterizer, and I wrote a texture unit. A third friend of ours wanted to implement a threading model for an immediate mode binning rasterizer. (The OpenSWR variant of the project mistakenly refers to SWR as a tiled-rasterizer.) We combined all three projects and out popped SWR.

When we starting getting really good numbers, i.e., being able to play large- scale Quake III with decent numbers etc., the project sort of took on a life of its own.

Looking at the code (a couple of years after I left Intel), I can see they've had to scrub a lot of the implementation for release.</comment>


Ask HN: Custom logging for web applications - <AUTHOR>

I have an application (written in Django) that needs to log lots of data (visitor stats from a Flash app, a url is pinged whenever users do certain things). I've rolled by own logging system along with a library for extracting statistics from the logged data based on the map/reduce pattern. However, I'm having performance problems with my initial quick and dirty implementation (in the stats generation, not in the logging bit yet). This seems like a problem that must have been solved plenty of times before. What do people use for this sort of stuff? <comment><USER2> A few months ago we actually created a system that does exactly this, plugging into the Ganglia data visualization system many sites use. We have bindings for Perl and Python. Your app code just emits non-blocking UDP packets to a local collector daemon and goes on with its business. GPLv3 code here: <https://spideroak.com/code> (StatGrabber)

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."

It's really nice to see graphs of the business or application specific stuff (signups, connected users, revenue, anything that's event driven) in parallel with the regular system graphs of things like bandwidth, memory, and so on. When you look at the weekly or monthly graphs usage trends and bottlenecks become forehead-smacking obvious.

Ganglia demo: <http://monitor.millennium.berkeley.edu/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd suggest you send all your custom stuff to syslog so that you can easily consolidate events however you like and then work with your admin to deploy whatever variant of syslog best fits your requirements. Personally I think nsyslog is good. Some others are listed here:

[http://www.loganalysis.org/sections/syslog/syslog- replacemen...](http://www.loganalysis.org/sections/syslog/syslog-replacements)</comment>


How to speed up the Rust compiler in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2020/04/24/how-to-speed-up-the-rust-compiler-in-2020/ <comment><USER3> > ...giving incremental compilation speed-ups of up to 13% across many > benchmarks. It also added a lot more comments to explain what is going on in > that code, and __removed multiple uses of unsafe __.

I wanted to emphasize that last point because there's sometimes a misconception that using `unsafe` always means speeding up the code. In truth you can have speed and safety. Where unsafe is needed is when it's necessary to break from Rust's memory model or to otherwise write code that Rust cannot reason about.

I mention this because I've noticed even people familiar with Rust who sometimes imply `safe == slow` and `unsafe == fast`. At the extreme end you get some new users who think merely adding an `unsafe` block around code will provide a speed boost. It will not. In fact `unsafe` doesn't do anything itself. It simply allows calling some functions and performing a few other operations that would otherwise be forbidden. Sometimes this is indeed necessary but often it isn't.

<comment><USER4> So why is `unsafe` even in the language, then? It would seem to me that it simultaneously undermines safety guarantees, and it can't even ensure performance improvements.

<comment><USER5> Because performance improvements are not why `unsafe` exists. It exists to disable various conservative compile-time checks in order to let you write code that the compiler is unable to prove correctness properties about.

One reason to do this _might_ be performance. An example: if you can prove lifetime properties but the compiler can't, you might be able to just use raw pointers without the borrow checker, which is unsafe. This can let you avoid the performance penalty of smart pointers or cloning.

But there are other reasons to do it, too. Some things simply can't be reasoned about by the compiler, like calling external C code, so they always need `unsafe`.

<comment><USER6> > It exists to disable various conservative compile-time checks

There is a subtle but important distinction here. Unsafe does not disable _any_ compile time checks. It adds additional constructs which are not checked.

<comment><USER5> Thank you, you are right. It enables certain constructs, e.g. dereferencing raw pointers, which have fewer compile-time checks than safe constructs, e.g. references.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "The size of rlibs on disk has also shrunk by roughly 15-20%."

This is very welcome! The size of building a few rust projects on a laptop disk is fairly incredible sometimes. I guess cargo needs to learn clean up prior-to-latest deps directories too.

<comment><USER8> A 'cargo clean' every once in a while helps

<comment><USER7> Yeah, but then you have to wait 5 minutes to build the deps again. If it cleared the stale ones it'd be fine.

<comment><USER9> You might be interested in [https://github.com/holmgr/cargo- sweep](https://github.com/holmgr/cargo-sweep)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love that they include a "Failures" section. It is most interesting to learn from.

<comment><USER11> Can you share the link of Failures section, couldn't find in articles website.

<comment><USER12> It's at the bottom of the post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have a question about LEB128. I use a similar format in my code, but with two changes:

1\. It's big endian.

2\. The "last byte" bit is inverted (so it's 00001 instead of 11110).

I changed the last byte flag so that it is easy to count the number of values in an array - you just do this:

      let mut count = 0;
      for byte in bytes {
        count += byte >> 7;
      }

And the reason I used big endian is because it makes decoding simpler. Encoding is more difficult but data is only ever encoded once, and is commonly decoded multiple times.

      let mut value = 0;
      for byte in bytes {
        value = (value << 7) | (byte & 0x7F);
        if value & 0x80 != 0 {
           return value;
        }
      }

Vs the original implementation which has do to this basically:

      let mut value = 0;
      let mut shift = 0;
      for byte in bytes {
        value |= (byte & 0x7F) << shift;
        if value & 0x80 != 0 {
          return value;
        }
      }

Here is the generated assembly in both cases: [https://godbolt.org/z/6FbX_E](https://godbolt.org/z/6FbX_E)

No idea if it would be faster than the new code but surely it is faster than the old code?

<comment><USER14> You should put all of those "has another byte" bits together, so you can look at just the first two bytes to figure out what to do, and then perform your load. In your most common case, you can perform an 8-bite MOVBE, an LZCNT/BSR, and if the number of leading 0s/1s < 8, just shift and mask to get your value.

Have a look at how UTF-8 is encoded for a similar scheme. The space taken is exactly the same as LEB128, but your code is less branchy and needs fewer masks and shifts.

<comment><USER13> > The space taken is exactly the same as LEB128

No because values under 128 (very common in my data) take 2 bytes instead of 1. Unless I'm misunderstanding you.

<comment><USER14> You are misunderstanding me. Values less than 128 take only one byte.

The obvious implementation fast path is:

1\. Check that the current position is at least a 8 bytes from the end of the buffer. Otherwise, go to the short buffer slow path.

2\. Count the number of leading 1s (or 0s) using BSR/LZCNT.

3\. If the number of leading 1s (or 0s) indicates more than 8 bytes are necessary, use the multi-word slow path.

4\. Shift and mask out your value.

5\. Increment your position pointer by the length of your varint.

Values less than 128 will have no leading 1s (or no leading zeros, if your scheme uses leading zeroes instead). The shift value is 56 bits. Unless you have a 1-byte optimized path, your calculated mask value is (((uint64_t)-1LL) >> 57). The position pointer is incremented by one byte at the end of the decode.

<comment><USER14> Now that I think about it, for the uint126_t encoding case, you actually need to inspect up to the first 3 bytes. I've only implemented this for encoding/decoding uint64_ts, in which case there's a little trick that saves one byte, but the trick only works because 64 % 7 == 1.

Maybe it's most clear if I spell out the 19 cases necessary to encode any uint128_t (system using BSR (leading 1s) insteod of LZCNT (leading 0s)).

      0 xxxxxxx -> 0 to 127
      10 xxxxxx yyyyyyyy -> 128 to 2**14 - <USER2>
      110 xxxxx yyyyyyyy zzzzzzzz -> 2**14 to 2**21-1
      1110 xxxx yyyyyyyy zzzzzzzz aaaaaaaa -> 2**21 to 2**28-1
      11110 xxx yyyyyyyy zzzzzzzz ... 2 more bytes -> 2**28 to 2**35-1
      111110 xx yyyyyyyy zzzzzzzz ... 3 more bytes -> 2**35 to 2**42-1
      1111110 x yyyyyyyy zzzzzzzz ... 4 more bytes -> 2**42 to 2**49-1
      11111110  yyyyyyyy zzzzzzzz ... 5 more bytes -> 2**49 to 2**56-1
      11111111 0 yyyyyyy zzzzzzzz ... 6 more bytes -> 2**56 to 2**63-1
      11111111 10 yyyyyy zzzzzzzz ... 7 more bytes -> 2**63 to 2**70-1
      11111111 110 yyyyy zzzzzzzz ... 8 more bytes -> 2**70 to 2**77-1
      11111111 1110 yyyy zzzzzzzz ... 9 more bytes -> 2**77 to 2**84-1
      11111111 11110 yyy zzzzzzzz ... 10 more bytes -> 2**84 to 2**91-1
      11111111 111110 yy zzzzzzzz ... 11 more bytes -> 2**91 to 2**98-1
      11111111 1111110 y zzzzzzzz ... 12 more bytes -> 2**98 to 2**105-1
      11111111 1111111 0 zzzzzzzz ... 13 more bytes -> 2**105 to 2**112-1
      11111111 11111111 0zzzzzzz ... 14 more bytes -> 2**112 to 2**119-1
      11111111 11111111 10zzzzzz ... 15 more bytes -> 2**119 to 2**126-1
      11111111 11111111 110zzzzz ... 16 more bytes -> 2**126 to 2**133-1

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Stupid question but could Rust skip monomorphization during development builds and use dynamic dispatch? I heard generics were often to blame for slow builds.

<comment><USER16> It's a tradeoff. Do you want your code to run as if it was written by hand (i.e. duplicated by hand)? Then monomorphization is best.

For Rust, it makes a lot of sense to pay for some compile speed penalty to not have any performance penalty.

<comment><USER17> > during development builds

That's the key phrase in his statement.

I'm not familiar with Rust, but if compilation speed is a major issue, and there are aspects of the compilation that are avoidable to trade-off for runtime performance, it seems to be a good idea to make those configurable per-build-type. Does Rust not offer this?

<comment><USER18> I've written an image processing tool in Rust, where running a large image downscaling test with a release build takes 2.0 seconds, and with a debug build it takes 18.7 seconds. So most of the time during development I compiled in release mode, because it was actually faster overall.

For many applications debug builds are fast enough, but their runtime performance is already so slow, that I hope they don't get even slower.

<comment><USER19> It could certainly be a config flag on the profile that can be optionally enabled, and wouldn't need to be enabled by default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> when all of those changes will be in stable? will it be 1.44 or more likely 1.45?

<comment><USER6> Depends on the change. The earliest one looks to be in 1.41, the latest one landed two days ago, so should be 1.45.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> How much slower is rust as opposed to C or C++ for production sized builds?

Traditionally people have thrown more hardware at these kinds of problems. As someone who has yet to use rust for anything more than small hobby sized projects, I am naive about rustic in terms of speed

<comment><USER22> I had a quick search, but finding examples where the same project has been implemented in C++ and Rust with reported compile times seems to be rare...

There is a benchmark from way back in 2016 here: [https://users.rust- lang.org/t/are-there-any-compilation-time...](https://users.rust- lang.org/t/are-there-any-compilation-time-benchmarks-of-rust-vs-g-vs- clang/4895/14)

Dev build was 2.91s for Rust vs 8.48s for C++, release build was 5.97s for Rust vs 9.79s for C++.

Would need to find much more recent examples for the comparison to be worthwhile.

<comment><USER23> That's a somewhat misleading comparison even for the time. All his C++ files could be compiled in parallel and recompiled incrementally, and his need for -flto to get good performance is really just due to how he structured his program. He seems to regard cpp files as the default location for functions and inlining as an optimization, but IMO it's the opposite. An empty function goes in the header, and every function starts off empty. You move it to a cpp file once it requires including a header. Moving a heavy function from a header to a cpp file is an action to optimize the compile time of your program.

On the other hand, it could be worse. There are some monstrously slow template libraries out there, and he's not using any of them. His code isn't very optimized, but it's sane.</comment></comment></comment>


Lance Howarth has joined Raspberry Pi as Foundation CEO - <AUTHOR> http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/4907

<comment><USER2> _At time of writing, the submission title is: "Raspberry Pi is no longer non- profit organization"_

This is not true. As stated in the post, Raspberry Pi Foundation has a for- profit subsidiary. The Foundation now has a new CEO.

Edit: Submission title better reflects the OP now.

</comment><comment><USER3> Raspberry Pi probably wouldn't exist if it wasn't a nonprofit. It will be interesting to see what changes. Putting your pocketbook ahead of doing the world a favor often leads to a minimization of innovation and a maximization of profit.

<comment><USER4> I would take issue with this as the commercial success of Raspberry Pi has enabled them to do so much more than they would have otherwise. Look at it as a nominal vs real problem. In your version, success leads them to focus more on trading, clearly to the detriment of "doing the world a favor". In my version, commercial success a) provides previously unimaginable levels of funding for the foundation, and b) puts more Raspberry Pi into the world, which in its own right furthers the goal of increasing child computer education simply by making them more accessible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the blog post it looks like the non-profit will be "recommending" the Raspberry Pi for children while the commercial arm reaps the rewards. This is no different from Microsoft pushing its products in schools.

What if a better and cheaper device appears on the scene? Will the Raspberry Pi Foundation recommend it to schools? Probably not. It will never be truly independent from the commercial arm.

I was quite interested in buying a Raspberry Pi but will now examine all the competing devices and make a purchase purely based on the hardware. I appreciate everything they've done but I think we can all put aside the notion that supporting the Raspberry Pi will be doing "good".</comment>


"Google can lock your account, forcing you to abandon purchases and credit card" - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/5dif8j/psa_google_can_lock_your_account_forcing_you_to/ <comment><USER2> This is why Microsoft has at least one significant long-term strategic advantage over Google - they understand how to deliver some form of end-user customer service, whereas Google rates an absolute zero in that department.

</comment><comment><USER3> The cost of the convenience is clearly entry in a reverse-lottery. You just hope it doesn't happen to you. The rarity of the event saps most people of the effort required to implement a backup solution that would alleviate the main pain points (lost contacts, lost google docs/photos/files).

</comment><comment> j-pb Why do all these "google murders customers digital existence" revelation only come up AFTER I bought a Pixel XL. Should have stayed with my iPhone, at least apple service reps are really trying their best to be helpful.

<comment><USER4> Use Fastmail for your mail, contacts, calendars. A proper company with proper support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So apparently google reached out to this customer after he made his way around social media.

Customer support in 2016 folks. I remember calling the tax office in Denmark because they really did a number on a parsel they inspected (It was a 3d printer kit and they basicly destroyed it, cut open printed parts, bend 6mm steel steel sheet parts etc). I called first and was basicly told that there was nothing they could do for me and that it was my fault anyways. Then I tweeted SKAT (tax office) with a picture of my banged up parsel and 15 minutes later I had a ticket in their system for financial compensation of the destroyed parcel...

</comment><comment><USER6> In new world order you have one bank and one news source. If you dare think otherwise about they agenda, you do not exist anymore long. These corporations will try to destroy anybody who think otherwise. Please dont let Google or Facebook choose wich news are fake or real.

<comment><USER7> Google and/or Facebook aren't setting the agenda, they're just in a position to sell that power to the highest bidder - and profit handsomely in the process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why is google and facebook trying to ensuring people, that they are not evil ? Why do people trust these companies ? Why people are so easy to be lied?</comment>


Illumio, The Stealthy Security Startup - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/20/illumio-the-stealthy-security-startup-for-the-anywhere-app-universe/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm... Illumio might just be searching for business model.

CloudVolumes is a product that exists now: opaque overlay volumes, fs magic and infrastructure that talks to AD & hypervisor/s. It's what AppV / Softricity always wanted to be.

The gist is that it's easier to audit known good images and have each living vm be a thin layer on top of common stack of images. No more looong install- fests or library of golden images, just mount whichever components are needed.

Boom.

The meta is that enterprise-scale VM volume manageability cuts all kinds of problems (including de-dupe, security).

Sorry Illumio, but CV is just way better in so many ways.

Check it out: [http://cloudvolumes.com/technology/](http://cloudvolumes.com/technology/)</comment>


Scrapingworld.com – Scraping Directory: components, providers, knowledge base - <AUTHOR> https://www.scrapingworld.com <comment><USER2> Interesting collection of resources.

I found the residential IP proxy services a bit eyebrow raising. This one, [https://luminati.io/ethical](https://luminati.io/ethical), apparently gets their residential IPs by having app developers embed the Luminati SDK. So when you use their proxy network, your request will be routed through some oblivious person's phone or laptop. I assume that the requests can't be end to end encrypted and that whatever user whose device is making the request will be able to see it.

While there's certainly some legitimate and even noble uses of residential IP proxies, I can think of plenty nefarious ones too. Must be a constant challenge for this company to combat that. If they do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for sharing your insights - indeed. If residential proxies are needed for scraping, we shall keep your insights in mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you're going to start a directory, why wouldn't you do the research to seed it with elementary content? Your only info link is a wikipedia link about scraping and you're hoping people email you with more links.

Seems a bit bizarre to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right - we just wanted to kickstart and will work on our own for sure to add more content. What are your top links with respect to scraping?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Chrome Extension: [https://www.webscraper.io/](https://www.webscraper.io/)

<comment><AUTHOR> added

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Do you know of any site-specific scraping services, e.g. eBay, Google, ... ?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you miss functionality - not content - on scrapingworld.com, please comment here.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you miss best in class links for \- providers \- knowledge posts \- components

please comment here - we will add them on scrapingworld.com

</comment><comment><USER5> Check out proxyland.io!

<comment><AUTHOR> added

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> nice thanks for sharing us</comment>


App Store Realities – Six Years as an Indy Mobile App Developer - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/7b54af3f574e

<comment><USER2> I'm curious how many others here on HN are doing something similar? I.e. Making a living on their own as an indie/contractor at a rate that allows a comfortable lifestyle vs what seems more talked about/pursued in getting a large cash out.

</comment><comment><USER3> Brilliant and inspiring story in this time of "abandon the App Store Ship"</comment>


The Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics - <AUTHOR> http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10592.html <comment><USER2> This is always a good topic with numerous HN submissions and comments:

Just from a search, there are some great results:

1\. _Mathematics for Computer Science_ \- HN Submissions: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9311752](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9311752), [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3694448](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3694448)

2\. _How to Read Mathematics_ \- HN Submissions: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4030812](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4030812), [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1576969](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1576969)

__

Here are some other excellent mathematics books:

1\. _Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning_

Containing the thoughts and direction of numerous mathematicians including Kolmogorov, this is a great survey of the field of mathematics. It touches upon Analysis, Analytic Geometry, Probability, Linear Algebra, Topology, and more. [1.]

2\. _Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science_

Containing the thoughts and direction of mathematician and computer scientists such as Donald Knuth, this is a great reference for computer science related mathematical concepts focusing on continuous and discrete concepts. [2.]

__

[1.] [http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Content-Methods-Meaning- Do...](http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Content-Methods-Meaning- Dover/dp/0486409163)

[2.] [http://www.amazon.com/Concrete-Mathematics-Foundation- Comput...](http://www.amazon.com/Concrete-Mathematics-Foundation-Computer- Science/dp/0201558025)

<comment><USER3> Any HN recommendations for a good thorough book on Lambda Calculus? Preferably creative commons if such a text exists.

<comment><USER2> Have you seen this post on StackExchange/Mathematics? This may be a good start. I can't personally recommend any. Of course, good luck learning!

[http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/967/learning- lambda-...](http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/967/learning-lambda- calculus)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice! This book is modeled after the The Princeton Companion to Mathematics [1] which is simply awesome in every sense of the word, and extremely recommended for any person who is interested in mathematics.

I'm very glad to see more books being modeled after it, and I hope this trend will continue with things beyond math. My only hope is that those new books will match the quality of the original.

[1] - [http://www.amazon.com/Princeton-Companion-Mathematics- Timoth...](http://www.amazon.com/Princeton-Companion-Mathematics-Timothy- Gowers/dp/0691118809)

<comment><USER5> Here is the Princeton Press link: [http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8350.html](http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8350.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow this book covers a lot of topics. Given the breadth of topics, I doubt each topic is covered in much detail. Still cool though, as it would take years to learn about this stuff from different books.

Speaking of math books, I wrote a math/phys text for adults called the _No bullshit guide to math and physics_ [http://noBSgui.de/to/MATHandPHYSICS/](http://noBSgui.de/to/MATHandPHYSICS/) It covers a lot of topics, starting from high school, going to first year calculus and mechanics. Worth checking out for anyone interested in the exact sciences and modelling in general.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'll be purchasing this. I like how the other book looked and it sits proudly on my desk at my co-working spot.

<comment><USER8> I suspect it is kind of like Knuth's TAOCP, in that it sits proudly on bookshelves more than it gets read.

<comment><USER9> The companion is fun to read, more like Wikipedia than TAOCP.

<comment><USER8> That's good to know. I'm more interested in topics of the new volume.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The sequence of topics in the table of contents freaked me out a little:

      III.1 Benford's Law 135
      III.2 Bessel Functions 137
      III.3 The Black–Scholes Equation 137
      III.4 The Burgers Equation 138
      III.5 The Cahn–Hilliard Equation 138
      III.6 The Cauchy–Riemann Equations 139
      III.7 The Delta Function and Generalized Functions 139
      III.8 The Diffusion Equation 142
      III.9 The Dirac Equation 142
      III.10 Einstein's Field Equations 144
      III.11 The Euler Equations 146
      III.12 The Euler–Lagrange Equations 147
      III.13 The Gamma Function 148

Benford's law, and then Bessel functions, and then Black-Scholes? The reason is that some sections are in alphabetical order, encyclopedia-style.

But the pace is blistering. About a half page on the Diffusion Equation.

</comment><comment><USER11> Perhaps some sections of interest to readers here would be (from the preface): _Part VII, "Application Areas," comprises articles on connections between applied mathematics and other disciplines, including such diverse topics as integrated circuit (chip) design, medical imaging, and the screening of luggage in airports._

Application areas of Applied Math sounds funny though :)</comment>


Ask HN: IT Topic Checklist for Startups? - <AUTHOR>
 I'm curious to know what kind of IT topic "checklists" are out there for a new startup. The startup is in the service industry consolidation space (think purchasing independent hotels and consolidating backend systems / rebranding) An example list of topics that may need to be thought through and decisions made on: Compliance: PCI, GDPR, CCPA, etc. Data: Extract out of hotel/property management software, warehousing, transformation, bi and analytics.
Engineering/Development: Cloud platforms vs colo, AWS/Azure/GCP, architectures, databases
Enterprise systems: HR management, payroll, ERP, CRM, Intranet, Office 365
Endpoint management / networking: AzureAD vs on prem, SSCM vs intune vs other, zero trust / vpns
What other general / specific things need to be considered? I'd welcome good comparisons of the solutions in these categories, but really just looking to see if there are any comprehensive handbooks or lists out there.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I remember [https://gdprchecklist.io/](https://gdprchecklist.io/) and I think they (or somebody forked) one for Corona preparation.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing!

We also created the [https://ccpacompliancechecklist.com/](https://ccpacompliancechecklist.com/) and Sqreen created the [https://www.sqreen.com/checklists/saas-cto-security- checklis...](https://www.sqreen.com/checklists/saas-cto-security-checklist)</comment></comment>


Many timezones, one team – how do you stand up? - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.freeagent.com/2016/01/06/many-timezones-one-team/ <comment><USER2> He tripped and fell into the solution-- and then didn't recognize it.

Everything conveyed in a standup is covered by your project tracker (what you did, what you're working on, and where you're stuck) and discussion can happen in your team chat.

Async development is the way to go. If you're having a standup, you're wasting time. And it doesn't work if you're distributed.

The issue tracking really shows what the status si. IF you're stuck, you assign the issue to someone to help you fix it, or you ask in the team chat room.

Keeping abreast of what's going on in the chat room keeps you abreast of the status of the team. The kanban board records it.

</comment><comment><USER3> We used to work in +6 and -5 (or -4) timezone. Given no overlapping work hours, it was pretty difficult to do it. So one person from either team volunteered and proxy the team during odd hours standup (and we rotated each week which side will join at odd hours). However, later we've converted to collocated teams which is working greatly.

There is still someone (now specifically product owners) who bridges between both sides but both team now feel better sense of ownership as they their separate responsibilities in same product.

</comment><comment><USER4> While the question is interesting, unfortunately the article didn't really present a good solution. At least I would have liked to see the results of more than one approach rather than just the one presented (which isn't really a solution IMHO).

</comment><comment><USER5> we have teams in UK (-1), Hungary and China(+6), so basically the same setup.

We do standups in UK morning so EU members have a morning standup and China members have a 'day closing' standup: "today i did..., tomorrow i will begin with ...".

works like a charm.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds like a great solution, and isn't something we've tried yet. What's the team spread like? Are you folk fairly cross-functional? As in do you have members of the same team in each of the countries? And if you do, is the split fairly even (2 from each for example)?

I might suggest we trial what you're doing on Monday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not sure if it will fit your use case, but this was on HN a little while ago:

[https://www.standupmail.com/](https://www.standupmail.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh that's interesting. It looks like it would cover some of requirements (ie by presenting everyone with a list of stand up notes). I wonder if you can schedule when your 'day' starts with stand up mail on a team member by team member basis, since that's one of the problems we were trying to solve. I'll dig into it, thank you!

Since the events of the blog post we've been experimenting with some similar steps, which have been working quite well. I hope to write them up soon.</comment></comment>


Maternal Fluoride Consumption During Pregnancy May Lower Children's Intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/08/19/752376080/can-maternal-fluoride-consumption-during-pregnancy-lower-childrens-intelligence <comment><USER2> From the research article:

> _A 1-mg /L increase in MUFSG was associated with a 4.49-point lower IQ score > (95% CI, −8.38 to −0.60) in boys,_

> _but there was no statistically significant association with IQ scores in > girls (B = 2.40; 95% CI, −2.53 to 7.33)._

> _A 1-mg higher daily intake of fluoride among pregnant women was associated > with a 3.66 lower IQ score (95% CI, −7.16 to −0.14) in boys and girls._

I'm not sure about the notation, but the results look pretty close to include the null hypothesis, where the change is 0.</comment>