If I was CEO of Posterous - <AUTHOR> http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/06/if-i-was-ceo-of-posterous/

<comment><USER2> And that is why TK isn't the CEO. The whole campaign is really smart and well executed.

On the PR front it is generating huge buzz. On the business side it makes perfect sense - expand the market from people who want to start a new blog to also include people who already have blogs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to be clear, I think the campaign is really smart as well. But, my article has nothing to do with that -- my article talks about what the bigger vision around Posterous is (i.e whether they should strive to be yet another blogging platform or try to take a different approach to revolutionize personal publishing)

// I made this clearer in the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Posterous is blogging that just f'n works. My mom uses it and it suits her great. Wordpress was just a bit much for her. The support is great too. I actually got a kick when she said: "That nice fella Gary helped me out". Wordpress rocks too, but they're different things. I feel like there are a lot of people out there using Wordpress that would love something simpler like what Posterous offers, but just don't know it's there. If I were CEO of Posterous, I would be doing the same exact thing.

<comment><USER4> This agrees with the OP. As I understand it, he's basically saying "don't go after people who have blogs and convert them, go after people who would start a blog if it wasn't so complicated".

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I strongly disagree with this opinion.

First, the reason that people make big money coming up with custom solutions for Wordpress is because its a lot of work to get things to the state of "exactly what the client wants". It would be a distraction and a waste of time to pursue the creation of many "starter" niches. I find it kind of ironic that the author suggests that they step back and take a look at the forest while suggesting they take a more myopic view of Posterous as a business. The reason Posterous isn't a blog consulting company is the same reason Facebook isn't a gaming company but is rather a platform for gaming companies (and many other things).

Second, it doesn't fit into the goal of Posterous as a company which from my external perspective appears to be making blogging stupidly easy and accessible for anyone.

Third, scale first. Its easy to attack verticals later once you already own the space (in this case blogging).

</comment><comment><USER6> It's "If I _were_ the CEO of Posterous."

Sorry to be the grammar pedant, but this one always bugs me.

<comment><USER7> Although this bugs me too, it's not incorrect. It's perfectly understandable in American English, and "correct" in other varieties of English.

<comment><USER8> They mean different things, no? If I were CEO, I'd do things differently. If I was CEO, I don't remember it.

<comment><USER9> I'd say you'd have a bright future as a copy editor waiting for you if you desired, but I don't think there are any bright futures left in publishing.

<comment><USER10> What about that big furnace up ahead? Seems pretty bright from here. It's getting nearer/brighter all the time, too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Considering how often we hear about WordPress sites getting hacked, this campaign may really hit home for a large number of bloggers.

</comment><comment><USER12> I can't believe that _all_ these companies don't make it easier to import. A really (but really) great Wordpress importer must surely make your service attractive to the millions of WP'ers out there? Writing importers for similar services is a great idea if you want to grow.

<comment><USER9> Actually they do. Most every blog service has both an import and and export, and even though the resulting XML isn't formatted identically, usually an export from any major service will import successfully into any other major service.

FWIW: I've done imports between blogspot, movable type, and wordpress a number of times with rarely a problem.

I suppose it's sort of diabolically evil of Posterous here. They're really just releasing a feature every other blogging service has had for years, but doing it in a way that's great PR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> John Mayer's said that Twitter's out and Tumblr's in. <http://www.geekosystem.com/john-mayer-twitter-tumblr/>

Ashton Kutcher's supposedly "directly responsible" for <http://nowmov.com> existing. (cross between Chatroulette interface and a Tweetmeme for YouTube videos.) [http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/07/yc-funded-nowmov-sit- back-r...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/07/yc-funded-nowmov-sit-back-relax- and-watch-an-endless-stream-of-youtube-videos/)

If I were Posterous, I'd create a Nowmov for Posterous posts, and then go find some high-profile feedback.

edit: the other thing I'd be interested in seeing on Posterous is an easy way to cross post to other people's group blogs, and some incentive to do so. For example, I created a group blog <http://hackerbra.in>, but there are no users to post to it. However, there are posts by hackers on Posterous that could be submitted to it; the question is how to make that worthwhile? Could it be automatically done, eg I choose some blogs and have the new blog fill up with posts automagically?

</comment><comment><USER14> I have always felt like Posterous was a solution in search of a problem. I don't have anything against them, I just prefer other platforms better.

Also, I'd love to see some numbers, but I would bet that a far larger number of people post via the web or other methods than do by email, despite that being its original purpose.

</comment><comment><USER15> Funny - this post and these comments brought me to import my family wordpress blog into posterous and pitch it to my wife. We'll see what she says.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm guessing they are not interested in selling to small businesses and professionals; they probably want to sell a high-priced "enterprise version" to corporates and keep it free for the masses. They may possibly make money off the free blogs with some ad network (perhaps they have something cooking there and that's why they don't allow google ads).

</speculation>

</comment><comment><USER17> What I find most useful about Posterous is how dead simple it is to share media from email for virtually painless hosting! The only way anyone could beat that is to use Dropbox!! <wishful thinking>Now, imagine if you could just post to your blog by putting something in your Dropbox folder. Hmmm, I hope you posterous guys are listening.</wishful thinking>

<comment><USER18> You can post photos to <http://ourdoings.com/> via dropbox. It's a blog-like photo sharing site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> That's like sailing on 10 boats and one will sink :)

10 industries is a lot of work. The idiosyncrasies will kill you. Be as generic as possible.

I say 'Go after Wordpress'

</comment><comment><USER20> Is this so different than say Apple's "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" advertisements? Posterous believes they have a system which has a lower barrier of entry for users of these other platforms. The only thing different is that they are taking a more direct advertising route than word of mouth, and are using tactics and advertising styles that you usually only see in much larger companies. Good on them for aiming high!</comment>


Ask HN: Does your startup have an online jukebox? - <AUTHOR>

A few startups in my area have built their own online collaborative jukebox that allows them all to collaborate on music/listen to the same thing using Grooveshark as a backend and allows for up/downvotes, but none of them have made theirs open source. Has anyone else come across anything like this and has anyone found anything that's open source? I'm hoping to spin one up at our company but don't want to reinvent the wheel if I don't have to. <comment><USER2> I think you would be interested in this [https://github.com/play/play](https://github.com/play/play)

</comment><comment><USER3> i'm guessing you could use a shoutcast stream with an auto dj in the cloud or possibly mixlr.

edit: since you want voting, i think mixlr.com is what you want, it's $10 per month or free. i know grooveshark has a radio station thing now too.</comment>


O'Reilly moves to a subscription model for eBooks - <AUTHOR> https://www.safaribooksonline.com <comment><USER2> ~$600 a year? Holy moly.</comment>


Natural language isn't just English [pdf] - happy-go-lucky http://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/papers/Bender-SDSS-2019.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Part of the problem seems to be logistical. English natural language training sets are probably just way more common than other languages. About the only language that has more training data is Chinese, and they seem to be doing fine in the NLP department.

Aren't modern transformer networks able to deal with multiple languages? Seems like models powerful enough to do that should be fairly language-agnostic, assuming you can pull together enough training data for that language.

<comment><USER2> My very limited understanding is that some interstitial language data is used to map between languages, but they are often somewhat "polluted" by the idioms or idiosyncrasies of whichever language you first start with to build it up.

I seem to recall, for example, google translate having difficulty with the word "plane" between two non-english languages, accidentally confusing the word with two meanings from English. This was, iirc, because the internal representation of the words were originally generated by an English dataset, and so airplane in one non-english language became to level wood with a planer in the other non-english language (or something to that effect).

Mandarin / Chinese has a comparatively simpler grammar (no verb conjugation) and no phonetic alphabet with arbitrarily varying phonetic rules, it is also chock full of idioms and homophobes. There is a lot that can be done, but the 80 / 20 rule is in full effect.

<comment><USER3> I can definitely attest for the English bias of Google translate, even if you're translating between pairs of languages that don't include English. In particular, as you point out, it's often confused by English homonyms (even if they're not homonyms in either the source or target language).

For instance attempting to translate Portuguese "o báculo" (the staff, the object) into French gives you "le personnel" (the staff, people working together). It's a completely wrong translation that, I'm guessing, is caused by the algorithm not managing to differentiate these two different meanings because they're homonyms in English: [https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=pt&t...](https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=pt&tl=fr&text=o%20b%C3%A1culo)

An other thing Google translate is terrible at is handling the various level of addressing. Many languages have the notion of polite vs informal "you" (you/thou) which have mostly disappeared from modern English. Google very often translates a formal/polite form of address into an informal one, or vice versa: [https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=fr&t...](https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=fr&tl=ru&text=vous%20allez%20bien%3F)

Here the polite French "how are you" is translated with the informal "ты" in Russian instead of "вы". Interestingly if I then translate in the other way around it correctly uses the "tu" form in French: [https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=ru&t...](https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=ru&tl=fr&text=%D1%82%D1%8B%20%D0%B2%20%D0%BF%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%8F%D0%B4%D0%BA%D0%B5%3F)

<comment><USER4> This is simply because Google Translate relies on language-language models trained on language-language pairs. Where training data is not available in quantity, the quality of translations is sufficiently low that going through English is preferred.

This is something that has been solved recently[1] by training 'massively multilingual' models. However, such models come with fairly stark compute costs, especially given the number of users Google Translate has, so it will take a while for these advances to roll out. Which ultimately points out how silly this article is: NLP is all the same in relevant matters, and (to first approximation) what works for English works for everything else too, as long as you can get enough training data.

[1] [https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/10/exploring-massively- multil...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/10/exploring-massively- multilingual.html)

<comment><USER5> > what works for English works for everything else too

…if they're similar to English. Which isn't good enough, there are many important languages that are quite different from English.

<comment><USER4> They're all similar to English. Languages have their syntactic ambiguities in different places, but they're all fundamentally _similar_. In every case the hard part is in understanding the semantics expressed, and the characters used to express it are a side-issue.

<comment><USER5> This is assuming the problems are similar between languages. But are they? An NLP system tested only on English might be useless on CJK languages, because they do not use spaces, so the system cannot rely on the almost-free segmentation you get from English. Another example is that if you try a heavily-inflected language, you suddenly have vastly more forms of the same word than in English, and your system needs to be robust to that in a way that's unnecessary for English.

<comment><USER4> An NLP model that can't even (implicitly) segment CJK languages is laughable. It's like saying 'sure, Magnus Carlsen is really good at chess, but in draughts you can take multiple moves in a row.' If you can handle the ambiguities in natural casual English, you can handle a little inflection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Indeed, one of the reasons why I usually don't bother with natural language processing tools, as I want to use my own native language, instead of English or Brazilian Portuguese (if I am lucky enough for it to be supported).

</comment><comment><USER7> It is correct, natural language isn't just English there is also many other kind too. But, the document is itself written in English, so we can guess that it is English. Still it doesn't help when you want to distinguish the natural language stuff dealing specifically English or in general (and if in general, you must be prepared to deal with stuff that is different from English, because they have their own features which are different from English).

</comment><comment><USER8> Pages 4 and 5 ( "Languages of the world" ) of the pdf are duplicates.

I agree that NL isn't just English, but the world of computer science, information processing, AI and even linguistics is heavily english-centric for a wide variety of reasons. And unless something drastic happens ( the end of pax americana and the fracturing of the world order ), everything will get even more english-centric. The internet is spreading all over the world. American culture is spreading all over the world. And so is american/english.

I do wish CS and programming would be less english-centric. It doesn't make sense to me that people in china, russia, europe, india, etc are writing code in english. Why not translate computer languages to their native language? Given the nature of programming languages, it's so simple to do. Wouldn't it be simpler to translate C or python or java to chinese and have chinese students/programmer code in the chinese language ( mandarin )? Rather than having chinese students learn english and then learn to code in english?

<comment><USER9> _> It doesn't make sense to me that people in china, russia, europe, india, etc are writing code in english. Why not translate computer languages to their native language?_

It doesn't make sense to you, because people are not writing code in English, they are writing code using a set of characters, only some of those characters and some keywords overlap with the English language, namely latin alphabet and those keywords have different distinct meanings, than what they mean in English. Furthermore, most of the characters, including the latin alphabet, already have a significant part in every education system in the world. People are taught latin alphabet, some keywords and most of the operators you see in programming languages at school in math and physics classes. So, how in the world would it benefit anyone to have programming languages with non-latin alphabets? It can only make things a) harder to learn, because there is no utilizing familiarity with other fields people already studied and b) harder to share code and knowledge, because other people in the world can't read and input your non-latin characters.

By the way, this is the same stupid idea that got people to allow unicode variable names in programming languages.

<comment><USER5> Programming languages _are_ in English though. The keywords are pulled from English, the names of functions are clearly made up of English words, the documentation is in English first and often only English, the untranslated error messages are in English, the filenames are in English. Already speaking English is a massive advantage in understanding and working with all of that.

<comment><USER9> Keywords, names, filenames don't retain their meanings from English, so it's not important where they came from. And error messages use the same few English words, but mostly all those keywords, names, filenames. Documentation available in local languages is the only important part here. But documentation and other reading materials is an issue for people who are already many years in programming and the deeper they go into the field, the more necessary it becomes to learn English.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This blog-post discusses the dangers of blindly applying English-optimized NLP models to other languages: [https://primer.ai/blog/Russian-Natural-Language- Processing/](https://primer.ai/blog/Russian-Natural-Language-Processing/)

<comment><USER4> If anything this post disagrees with the claim that 'English isn't generic for language'. It considers a naïve approach that fails for English, and shows that it fails for Russian in a similar way, and then compares it with an improvement also developed for English, which too helps Russian in a similar way.

It is true that when Facebook trained their model "blindly", this introduced meaningful bugs, so I agree with that claim from the post. It does not, however, give credence to the idea that techniques developed for English don't reliably work for other languages.

Unfortunately the specific comparisons they make are suspect given how different the training sets were.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It could be extremely useful to concentrate efforts on usage and details of one specific language rather than spread them over all different communication forms.

The opposite could also be true.

</comment><comment><USER12> Methods that work on English are an order of magnitude more important than others. There is a fair methodological point towards saying English=!natural language. But the economics of it simply make it the most important one to get right.

<comment><USER13> Fully agree on the economic merits of English here. I think the point is more than methodological though. It is one of equity and access.

Broad swaths of society don't have the same access to the technology. My mother tongue Malayalam in the 1960's redefined its script to be better suited for typewriters. It is still non-trivial to typeset correctly. Like my Chinese colleagues, there are all sorts of constraints on how text is input.

Machine translation beyond the "main" languages aren't too great. To see bias in action just try English->Turkish, a gender neutral language. "o multu. o mutsuz." translates to "he's happy. she is unhappy."

Things built for English don't readily transfer. Its worth raising awareness around this as Emily does.

<comment><USER12> I think people are aware, it's just that English is clearly the most important. That's just reality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A NLP researcher is supposed to describe how language is used, not insist on how it should be used.

<comment><USER15> Emily's point is that NLP researchers tend to describe only how English is used, not how other languages are used.

<comment><USER14> That's like criticizing a biologist for only studying nematodes. Research is specialized by its nature. She does say a bit about directing research to other languages. But mostly she complains about researchers not identifying their research as English, including threats to heckle speakers who don't identify it as such, i.e. who don't use the spoken language in the way she prefers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would jokingly say that English is halfway between natural languages and programming languages. I mean: English grammar is so simple and all sentences are so well structured that processing English is order of magnitude easier than, say, German.

<comment><USER17> English is in fact not particularly simple, especially not if your only comparison is German. Both English and German can be modeled at approximately the same level of difficulty, with only a few minor differences. There is case assignment, but that's simple compared to everything else (and English has deal with case too, if not to the same extent). The field of linguistics has been trying to fully model English syntax for the last 70 years and is still turning up new corner cases. And a lot of languages are in fact a lot simpler. To quote one of my bilingual friends after waking up from general anesthesia:

> [I] couldn't put English in order so I just switched to Russian since I knew > what syntactic roles I wanted, just not how to order words

Latin, a supposedly more complex language, is another example of a language with much less strict syntax than English. And Google Translate is horrible at Latin.

Mandarin, on the other hand, has a more complex grammar than English, but that doesn't mean that it is more or less easy for NLP. After all, Google Translate is horrible at Mandarin.</comment></comment>


Mandelbrot Beats Economics in Fathoming Markets - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-06/mandelbrot-beats-economics-in-fathoming-markets-mark-buchanan.html <comment><USER3> It staggers me that so much prevailing thought still leans towards the idea of complex, highly connected systems as inherently stable, with their natural state as equilibrium. It dates back to the victorians, with their "All things Bright and Beautiful" view of god's creation, which was shattered by darwin. How long it takes us to learn the important lessons.

This view was prevalent in the world of ecology for decades, and led to all that guff about "nature's balance" and "spaceship earth" that we had to put up with for so long. It turned out that these ideas were based on falsified studies.

Adam Curtis addressed these ideas and more in his recent series of films, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace. Specifically, the second episode: "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts." The other episodes cover Ayn Rand and her effect on US economic policy, and the Selfish Gene theory and its murky origins in the wartorn Congo. And a whole lot of other stuff.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_\(television_documentary_series\))

I highly recommend it, along with his other works, although you should be careful not to suspend your critical faculties in the headlights of his psychedelic filmmaking techniques.

<comment><USER4> I agree with your first 2 sentences but I think that Adam Curtis's 'films' should not be watched by anyone. Especially someone trying to think about something like stability and connected systems.

His train of thought narration and brilliant music is just opium for people who aren't concentrating.

<comment><USER5> I agree. I have watched almost all of his documentaries. In retrospect, everything looks like a con. He narrates history as if it was a big plan by the people in power but he forgets how utterly chaotic the world is. And yes, it is opium and I enjoyed watching his work.

<comment><USER6> Curtis basically falls for the animistic fallacy: that all events are caused by conscious agents. This is the same pathway that leads to both religion and conspiracy theorists.

<comment><USER3> I have always thought Curtis' overall theme (or one of them) was of powerful people drawing their grand plans, but always ultimately having them thwarted by external circumstances out of their control.

<comment><USER6> I personally felt that he

1\. Identifies baddies and eeeevil plaaaans

2\. Said plans go wrong because evil is dumb

3\. Smugness.

Or something like that. Essentially his problem is mixing history with histrionics. He's not a documentarist, he's an entertainer. A music video director.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a good overview, though as one minor quibble, the critique of "rational agents" is separate from the critique of equilibrium models: _even if_ all economic actors are rational agents, that doesn't imply that everything converges instantly to nice equilibria with an absence of feedback loops, attractors, and the other typical nonlinear-dynamical-system pathologies. In fact most agent simulations in AI that use rational agent models still find all sorts of that weirdness going on.

<comment><USER8> "Rational agents" in the context of economics does not mean people make the best choices for maximizing capital preservation. It means that human behavior is inherently rational because only an individual knows if his choices were in his best interest.

<comment><USER9> I disagree completely. What about all inherent biases which make humans do things not in their best interest (they just think it is in their best interest, but many times they don't think, they panic) ?

See: \- Loss aversion <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion> \- Sunk cost effects: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost> \- Status quo bias: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias>

<comment><USER10> As a trained economist I can attest to the fact that most micro economist view these issues you raised as basically irrelevant. I understand that it is basically damning experimental evidence but it is completely disregarded.

<comment><USER7> I'm not very up on microeconomics, but isn't behavioral economics a hot field currently? Or are they still seen as outside the mainstream?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm surprised nobody has pointed out that the Euro is a tragedy of the commons.

"Pooling sovereign debt absolves the most irresponsible nations from confronting their unsustainable spending by forcing more responsible nations to pick up the tab. All of the incentives are weighted in favor of irresponsibility and none to responsibility. No pie-in-the-sky plan by the EU to dictate budgets to its members will ever work. The members will either ignore such interference or, as has already happened, cook the books to make it appear that they are doing so." – From Philipp Bagus' _The Tragedy of the Euro_

<comment><USER11> Unlike in the US, in europe the central bank can't lend to euro zone countries. Countries must borrow money from the banks and banks (like Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, etc) lend money to countries at highly speculative rates. If you had taken the time to inform yourself before opening your mouth you'd have known that countries like Portugal and Spain had relativley low deficits (much lower then the US) before the financial crisis. Please stop with this 'northern european countries superior monkey' narrative.

<comment><USER8> The ECB purchases member countries' debt. They move bad or weak assets off the balance sheets of the weak member banks into the balance sheets of the ECB. The stated purpose of the European Financial Stability Facility is to pool sovereign debt. The owners and shareholders of the european central bank are the central banks of member countries.

I didn't say anything about northern European countries being superior. It's a completely factual statement to say some countries are more solvent than others. It's not a value judgement.

<comment><USER11> The ECB buys souvereign debt incurred by countries that have no option but to borrow money from banks that demand very high interest rates - much higher than the interest rates the ECB charges comercial banks.

The purpose of the European Financial Stability Facility is to prevent german and french banks to go bankrupt in case any of the attacked countries default.

"It's a completely factual statement to say some countries are more solvent".

If by some countries you mean the northern countries, this is false: Spain had a superavit before the financial crisis - Germany did not.

Do not confuse opinions with facts.

<comment><USER8> I don't know what your trip is with "northern countries." I never brought up specific countries or mentioned Spain or Portugal.

I was simply pointing out a fact that the ECB pools sovereign debt, and because of that will suffer from the tragedy of the commons - <USER2> incentives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article is a straw man.

I don't think most economists would seriously suggest that the market lives, should live, or ideally would live in a static equilibrium. I _know_ that most economists wouldn't say they can predict the fluctuations of the market. The ones that think they can, of course, get disproportionate amounts of airtime on CNBC or wherever, so it's an understandable misapprehension.

<comment><USER13> I agree with you. I stopped reading at

"almost without exception, economists since Adam Smith have viewed economic systems as being in balance or equilibrium, and as having a natural tendency to return there after any disturbance. In this view, crises can be understood only as anomalies, the consequences of unusual outside shocks."

That quote shows a huge lack of contextual knowledge. A more accurate quote could be that since BEFORE Adam Smith Economists have disagreed on this point. (Menger/Walras, Rothbard/Schumpeter etc etc etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article is pretty idiotic and yet another another attempt by new economists to try to excuse the terrible financial policies of the last 10 years under the silly and completely wrong slogan "nobody could have possibly predicted it would all turn out this way." This of course was the same excuse used for the housing crisis (even though most of the country actually predicted it) and for the Iraq debacle.

Take this quote "Nothing in mainstream "neoclassical" finance theory explains these persistent crises." That may be true but if so it merely reflects a weakness of neoclassical finance theory and not of our knowledge of economics as a whole.

In fact Keneyesian theory explains the boom and bust cycle as well as the periodic crises very well and has a pretty good solution for dealing with them. In fact we did deal with them pretty well during the postwar period of expansion and prosperity. Then of course we started progressively departing from Keneysian theory under the tutelage of the Chicago school and the crises, as if by clockwork, started intensifying and the crashes started getting worse.

So the answer is obvious, the theory is well known. The problem is that the new economists do not want to admit it because (i) they do not want to admit they are wrong and (ii) they sure as hell do not want the correct medicine that Keynesian theory prescribes.

So they go on with this ridiculous farce where they pretend that the economics crises are some unexplained phenomenon.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm always perplexed by the notion of trying to "model" an economy. I don't understand how aggregate statistics about a market reveal any insight into how to create sustainable value. I feel like it's similar to knowing the past winning numbers on a Roulette table, because it provides no actionable insight to future winning numbers.

<comment><USER16> On the contrary. Taking your analogy further:

In economy, you find out that whenever "Gentleman Jim" bets, he tends to win 70% of the time, rather than the 49% everyone else gets. Now, depending on policy, you either:

a) forbid jim to play b) readjust jim's token-to-money conversion ratio so he is on par with other players c) invest your money with jim

Note, though, that this being a zero sum game, anything other than (a) will bankrupt the house....

<comment><USER17> Nassim Taleb addresses this sort of thinking. He calls it a "ludic fallacy", which is the over application of games to our down detriment. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For a little background on this debate: <http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~jdf/papers/farmer0606.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER19> Wait, did economists think at one point that the distribution of movements in a stock market followed a Gaussian pattern? I mean, amateur statisticians approximate things to Gaussian distributions all the time to make the math easier, but that's hardly a problem unique to economics.

As to the Omori distribution, have they actually succeeded in making forward looking predictions with it, or were they just fitting a model to past data? Even if it is a real phenomenon, I can think of a way to extract money from the market by making it go away off the top of my head, so I don't imagine it will last long now that it's been reported in public.

The parts about equilibrium models being taken too seriously are well taken, though.

<comment><USER20> When they say "fat end of the tail," a Gaussian distribution is not necessarily implied. They are simply saying that when you go to the extreme ends of any distribution, almost any statistical model will begin to fall apart. If you look normalized data and look at a Q-Q plot, you will no doubt see problems at the extremes of the distribution, making those predictions more difficult.

As for the Omori distribution, I do not know anything about it, but I have studies similar distributions for predicting future Olympic running records,tallest human alive, etc, and these types of distributions rarely produce practically feasible results. If this model works well, I will be thoroughly impressed.

The only field that I know which deals with extreme events is Ruin Theory, but it is currently a very limited field. It may be possible for someone to adapt the field to study Macroeconomics, but even that may not be very informative.

At humanities current understanding of economics, I would argue that Black Swan Theory is the only practical way to understand huge economic shifts. Perhaps we will understand economic markets well enough to develop more complicated models, but that seems far in the future.

Q-Q plot: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-Q_plot> Ruin Theory: <http://www.worldscibooks.com/etextbook/5943/5943_chap01.pdf>

<comment><USER21> Black swan theory is an interesting read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It is a fast oversimplification to say that economists lose and Mandelbrot wins. Eugene Fama (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Fama>) whose Phd thesis coined the concept of stock prices following a random walk simultaneously wrote about Mandelbrot distributions (<http://www.jstor.org/pss/2350971>).

</comment><comment><USER23> "The (Mis)behavior of Markets" is a great read on the subject, by Mr. Mandelbrot himself.

</comment><comment><USER24> "God doesn't play dice". And several decades later Mandelbrot discovered that God plays fractals.</comment>


Get started with KVM and Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://blog.alexellis.io/kvm-kubernetes-primer/ <comment><USER2> Kubernetes on KVM: `minikube start --vm-driver=kvm`

<comment><AUTHOR> That is useful too, but this is not Kubernetes on KVM blog post, it's getting started with KVM using Kubernetes as an example of a workload you can run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> As someone who mostly works with a few dozen KVM instances and who will soon have to consider something like Kubernetes to facilitate growth, this was a very good read.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just to clarify the purpose of this blog post as I can see a few people are getting a slightly different message to intended. It doesn't claim to be the preferred or only way to install Kubernetes.

It is primarily focused on my audience of Docker / container users. I want to show how it's possible to use KVM to set up VMs easily on Linux and relate that back to something they use often - i.e. Kubernetes.

> In this post I want to introduce KVM - Linux's native approach to > virtualization.

> This post is going to focus on how to create a cluster of Virtual Machines > (VMs) using KVM at home in the interests of promoting learning and > exploration.

If people want help picking the "right solution" for installing Kubernetes for production usage then checkout the documentation - [https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/pick-right- solution/](https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/pick-right-solution/)

</comment><comment><USER4> For a lightweight single-host deployment of Kubernetes, it's worth considering LXD and conjure-up [https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutorial/install-kubernetes- wit...](https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutorial/install-kubernetes-with-conjure- up)

<comment><USER5> How all this juju compares to `kubeadm init`?

<comment><USER2> kubeadm only does single master deployments, so it's not useful for production, but minikube is much better IMO for development. (Minikube isn't just a VM wrapper, `minikube --vm-driver=none` works quite nicely for our dev setups).

kubeadm is turning into more of a building block: minikube and kubespray are using it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I used to think the same, but Weaveworks and Lucas (Kubeadm maintainer) both state kubeadm is production-ready and that K8s doesn't need HA to run in production.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was really hoping this was about running kvm _on_ k8s, not the other way round. Other than hand holding you through how to spin up some kvm machines I'm not sure what this offeres over the official docs on how to install k8s...

<comment><AUTHOR> This is about setting up KVM VMs - not about Kubernetes, it uses Kubernetes as an example application that you can run on your KVM VMs. See the blog post outline:

> This post is going to focus on how to create a cluster of Virtual Machines > (VMs) using KVM at home in the interests of promoting learning and > exploration.

<comment><USER6> Yes I am able to read, thanks. Not sure why you're replying though, given the title and the existence of projects to run kvm on k8s I think it's fairly obvious why I made my post:

> Get started with KVM and Kubernetes

>> I was really hoping this was about running kvm __on __k8s, not the other way round.

To fill in the blanks:

>> I was really hoping [given the title of this post] this was about running kvm __on __k8s [given there are projects to do just this], not the other way round. Other than hand holding you through how to spin up some kvm machines I 'm not sure what this offers over the official docs on how to install k8s...

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you looked at Kubevirt? [https://github.com/kubevirt/kubevirt](https://github.com/kubevirt/kubevirt)

Might be what you're after..

<comment><USER6> You have to be trolling now surely?

Of course I have (this being one of the projects alluded to in my last post), which is why I was interested in a blog post about it. Hence the disappointment stated in my first comment...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The US health care wait times myth - <AUTHOR> http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/enough-with-the-wait-times-already/ <comment><USER2> Data point: I live in the USA, and I've got Crohn's disease. I take medicine for the chronic condition, which keeps it in remission 99%+ of the time. But when it flares up, I need to see a doctor pretty quick -- not just because it hurts, but also because the pain is an indication of bad things happening to my intestines.

The thing is, I can't get an appointment to my GI doctor _right now_ , or even tomorrow. So I can't get a prescription for the heavy duty drugs necessary to bring it under control, not without a significant wait while I'm in pain and my ileum is turning into scar tissue.

My solution is that when I vacation in Mexico, I buy and bring back a personal supply of prednisone. The downside of this is that prednisone is nasty stuff that I don't _want_ to take, it's not as effective as the real treatments, and it's got much worse side effects. But I don't have a way to get the real stuff.

So I'm pointing the finger, at least in part, at the regulations here in the USA. By artificially controlling the number of doctors, and/or constraining our access to pharmaceuticals, we're creating the situation where I am unable to get the treatment I need. This has nothing to do with economics or even insurance company policies, really. It's all to do with nanny-state government.

<comment><USER3> _So I'm pointing the finger, at least in part, at the regulations here in the USA. By artificially controlling the number of doctors, and/or constraining our access to pharmaceuticals, we're creating the situation where I am unable to get the treatment I need. This has nothing to do with economics or even insurance company policies, really. It's all to do with nanny-state government._

I agree with you! Here's some data about how the supply of doctors is constrained by law:

[http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_otfwl2zc6Qc/S8p3XotZRpI/AAAAAAAANQ...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_otfwl2zc6Qc/S8p3XotZRpI/AAAAAAAANQ4/9Bn63-6lmgs/s1600/medschool.jpg)

(from [http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/04/medical-school-grads- hav...](http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/04/medical-school-grads-have-been- flat.html))

For the last 30 years, 16,000 new doctors are let through each year, and this is very carefully regulated to keep guild members rich. There's nothing wrong with that, but the problem is that the government is used as a tool to maintain this monopoly. (Unfortunately, it's been this way since the Middle Ages.) Does it have to be this way? Not if you decide that people should be free to choose for themselves which expert they should seek medical help from, and what qualifications they require. If you own your own body (and I say you do), this is your right to decide.

On top of that, new drugs cost somewhere around $1 billion to take to market. When only 300 people in the country have a rare condition, the FDA makes it so that nothing can be done for them because there is no way to recoup a billion dollars from _any_ small group of people.

<comment><USER4>
      For the last 30 years, 16,000 new doctors are let through each year,
      and this is very carefully regulated to keep guild members
      rich. There's nothing wrong with that, but the problem is
      that the government is used as a tool to maintain this
      monopoly.

What? If the AMA is restricting the number of doctors in order to make more money, then there absolutely _is_ something "wrong with that". You're stating as a premise that it is ok for doctors to act selfishly in a way that causes (or aggravates) harm. The sworn responsibility of an MD is to get us and keep us healthy.

Sure, it's also wrong if government is going against the public interest in restricting the number of doctors. But whether someone should be able to claim that they are a certified medical doctor _is_ something I want government to regulate, at least for now. AFAIK, these regulations were put in place in response to quackery (and the like).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author stumbled over one of the most important pieces of data - GP's per 100,000 people. The author notes we have the lowest doctor:population ratio, adding:

        "And that's after spending way, way, way more money than anyone else"

The problem is that we don't let the market decide on the right number of doctors - the training of new doctors is a function of the number of residencies, which is jointly controlled by congress and current physicians.

So we artificially restrict the supply of doctors, which inflates (and I would argue is _intended_ to inflate) the salaries of all doctors, while also shifting the market equilibrium to a lower quantity of medical services provided [1].

[1] here's a graphical example for people new to economics: [http://www.colorado.edu/Economics/courses/econ2020/section6/...](http://www.colorado.edu/Economics/courses/econ2020/section6/gifs/fig62.gif)

<comment><USER2> I agree with what you said, but there's another dimension as well (as I mention elsewhere in this thread, see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2263931>).

We also enforce MDs being the gatekeeper to various medical stuff. Many things we insist must be done by a doctor could be done without that degree. There are certainly a lot of things that someone with the knowledge of a LPN or Army medic could do just fine (say, checking for a broken bone).

And our obsession with (the war on) drugs makes MDs the gatekeeper to pharmaceuticals. Really, there's no reason why most drugs can't be widely available. I understand the logic behind some (like the overuse of antibiotics breeding resistant bacteria like MRSA), but MDs are doing a bad job of preventing that, and in any case, those could be the exception rather than the norm. There's really no reason I shouldn't be able to go to the store and pick up, say, my Asacol on my own initiative.

So the low population of MDs is one aspect, but the overloading of MDs with responsibilities for which their skills aren't needed is another.

<comment><USER6> Doctors being the gatekeepers to pharmaceuticals also means that when you seek care for an ailment or symptoms favored by pill tourists, the doctor will make a snap judgment based on your appearance and demeanor and possibly decide not to give you appropriate care. You might just be sent home with a follow-up appointment, or if you're in the emergency room, you might be left on a gurney in a hallway for hours while the nurses ignore you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My siblings and I take a pill 3x day for life for a genetic condition. The pill(colchicine) cost pennies in its generic form. It isn't a pill that was made in a lab after millions in research. So there were plenty of generic brands available and it'd cost us 5 bucks/mo from Walmart.

That was that.

Last year a company came in and got an exclusive on it on the premise that they spent millions in testing the pill for quality etc. Armed with the exclusive, they killed all generic brands and are selling the same pill for $5/ _pill_.

What cost me $5/mo previously now costs $450/mo.

There is something seriously flawed about some things in our healthcare system.

<comment><USER3> This is the FDA's fault.

Without the FDA, you would keep buying the generic you had been buying, and the company would keep making it for you. But with the FDA, a company can come in and essentially buy a monopoly on a market that would otherwise be free.

<comment><USER4> It sounds like you're saying "government is the problem". But nearly every other developed country _doesn't have this problem_.

Please, explain why government is the reason for why the US healthcare system is so much poorer than the healthcare system of countries in which there is _far more_ government involvement.

Other countries show us that solution to bad government isn't the elimination of government. The solution is to fix what we've got.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What I find interesting about the "We beat Canada" idea is how few Canadians move to the USA in search of better health care. Rich Canadians take advantage of the porous border by travelling to the US and paying for certain procedures, but generally when someone permanently moves from Canada to the US, it's always in search of economic improvement.

I would like to see statistics showing that Canadians would happily take a job with the same or worse pay just to get access to US health care. If the US system was superior in ways that mattered to people, we should be able to measure this effect by looking at immigration.

<comment><USER9> Public healthcare is a cornerstone of Canadian national identity, in part because we recognize how bad the American system is. There are always ideologues who are inspired to emulate the American system, but they never get any traction with the electorate because healthcare privatization is the third rail of Canadian politics.

If Canadians move to the US it's in spite of the American healthcare system. I've never heard of anyone emigrating because they thought it was an attraction.

<comment><USER4> In fairness, as a Canadian living in the US, if I were really rich I might move here because of the quality of healthcare I could get. This doesn't mean the system does the greatest good for the greatest number (by any stretch).

The US is easily the best country in the world in which to be rich.

<comment><USER9> Possibly. I have to believe that Donna Dubinsky is pretty well off, and she still had complaints about American healthcare.

The minute number of people who are able to chance paying seven-figure medical bills out of pocket might enjoy the US system, but I doubt that group encompasses even a majority of 'rich' Americans, by any reasonable definition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yeah, I mean I can understand the philosophical place that one could come from that would make one skeptical of government-run anything.

But _every other industrial nation_ beats the crap out of us both in results and in results per $$, while spending far less money. This isn't a theoretical argument -- we could just copy one of those systems wholesale and get way better results than we're getting.

At one point does the engineering principle of "if it works, it works" kick in?

If you saw a better technique for doing something at your business, and didn't do it because "i don't like to see problems solved in that fashion, regardless of what the metrics tell me", you'd be an idiot, right?

<comment><USER11> _But every other industrial nation beats the crap out of us both in results and in results per $$..._

What results? Please be specific. In particular, if you want to compare health outcomes, please make sure you controlling for factors like demographics, lifestyle, pollution, food quality, etc.

Also, how do you propose to pay US doctors the same salaries paid to doctors in poorer countries? Some numbers: the top 5% of income earners in Canada earn 40% less than the top 5% of the US. Are you proposing to knock doctors a few rungs down the income ladder?

[http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/75-001-x/2007109/article/409688...](http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/75-001-x/2007109/article/4096885-eng.htm)

<comment><USER10> A) Call it even for health outcomes if you'd like, we could argue the numbers regarding demographics, lifestyle and all that until the cows come home, but health in Canada/UK/France/Japan definitely isn't materially worse. So for the sake of argument let's just call it even, except we're spending several times as much. (we actually spend more gov't money on healthcare per capita than many companies with socialized medicine, in addition to private sector spending -- that's how broken our system is).

B) Regarding doctors wages, I'm not really talking about "poorer" countries unless you'd call western europe, canada, japan "poorer". If they make significantly less in those countries than here.. sure, fine. Given that we don't offer cheap schooling like those countries there might be a limit to how low we can go, though.

C) Top 5% of income != doctors, necessarily. And the money we're wasting, a _tiny_ percentage of that is going into doctors' pockets. Most of it is just plain pissed away, and a lot goes to insurance company profits. Doctor salaries are pretty far down on that list, so I don't think I was proposing drastically lowering their salaries, no.

<comment><USER11> Ok, fine. So we are in agreement that health outcomes are roughly even.

Insurance companies don't make much in the way of profits. Those greedy pigs have profit margins roughly the same as home improvement stores, textile- apparel clothing and slightly less than packaging and containers. (And keep in mind, this was a good year for them. They all raised prices significantly in anticipation of Obamacare.)

<http://biz.yahoo.com/p/sum_qpmd.html>

You simply won't get much money by soaking insurance companies.

The main thing you need to do to reduce spending is to get people to consume less medicine. That was the conclusion of another (very good) series of articles on the same blog - we spend more on health care because we consume more (in particular, outpatient care).

[http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/what-makes- the-u...](http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/what-makes-the-us- health-care-system-so-expensive-%E2%80%93-conclusion/)

<comment><USER10> >Those greedy pigs have profit margins roughly the same as home improvement stores, textile-apparel clothing and slightly less than packaging and containers.

Except all of those things involve _moving stuff around_. Insurance is just bit flipping in the banks when you get down to it, paperwork at the absolute worst. They should be able to manage way lower margins, they're moving money on paper instead of goods. But they don't, because they're an entrenched industry which puts less competitive pressure on them.

However you're right in that soaking the insurance companies won't make up the gap. We need to get smarter and be more efficient. As a first step, why don't we just the other 6 members of the G7, since they deliver equivalent outcomes for much cheaper? I'm not a healthcare expert but the topline numbers say it all. Healthcare's killing us on all aspects of everyone's budget. There could still be a role for insurance companies, there is in europe.. let's just do what works.

<comment><USER11> Profit margins are not generally dependent on the weight of the stuff you are moving around. It is mostly based on risk and competitiveness. Risk increases profit margin (see: software companies, drug companies), while competitiveness reduces it (see: retail).

If there were no competitive pressure, why didn't insurance companies raise prices a lot higher? That's what ISPs did, resulting in a profit margin of 28%.

As for copying the G7, which of the other 6 members of the G7 do you propose copying? And how will imposing their system in the US prevent the overuse of medical services?

Do you think that Americans will say "our health care system is now just like France, maybe I better act like a Frenchman and not run to the doctor because I have the sniffles?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That first graph is interesting. I would like to see their definition of "wait time when sick". Since the article separately mentions waiting to see specialists, and elective surgery, I'm going to assume wait times in the graph do not include these.

When we talk about wait times in Canada, most people mean the amount of time they have to wait when they walk in to a hospital or clinic, without an appointment. In other words, how long do you have to wait to see a doctor _now_. Not how long do you have to wait for an appointment with your GP. And that time is typically measured in hours, not days.

Frankly, I'm surprised to see that anyone in any of those countries has to wait 6 days to see a doctor when they are sick.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, I can't believe that more people above aren't asking this question.

From my experience in the Canadian system, if you're really sick (ie badly injured, have cancer, whatever) you actually get pretty quick service. Sure, if you walk into the ER with your kid that has a flu, you might have to wait a couple hours while they deal with the people that just got in a car accident, but I can live with that. And really, if you're chronically sick enough to still be sick in 6 days (and could wait that long, ie you didnt need to go to the ER) then the 6 day wait to see a GP is likely not going to make a big difference. (Must be noted, I've never had to wait 6 days to see my doctor when I was sick, more like 1-2, and could always just walk in if I needed to)

It really comes down to this: If you _need_ help _now_ you'll get help, free, right now. No questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting article, but can I nominate that last line chart for a worst- graph-colors-of-the-year award? Even after finding out that they are, in fact, different colors it's hard to find any country in it, much less with confidence.

<comment><USER15> I imagine the colors were chosen so that the US sticks out. It's not a general information chart. It's a god-look-how-terrible-the-US-is chart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The final figure claims less than 0.3 general practitioners per 100,000. That would amount to around 1000 general practitioners in the country which is at least two orders of magnitude low.

<comment><USER17> > at least two orders of magnitude low.

You're saying there are 100,000 general practitioners in the US? Even that number may be low, as this WSJ article says the US has "352,908 primary-care doctors". The article also says there are around 954,000 total doctors in the US.

<comment><USER16> I said "at least" instead of giving a more precise number exactly because the WSJ's "primary-care" statistic included "general practitioners, internists, family physicians and pediatricians" and I remembered seeing an older statistic claiming only a bit more than 100k general practitioners.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The U.S. health care insurance system is term insurance at whole (i.e. life) insurance prices.

The resulting marketplace, including availability of treatment, is correspondingly skewed. We pay for crisis management, not health management.</comment>


The closest thing to an alien parasite [ES] - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.20minutos.es/ciencias-mixtas/2015/05/10/pasen-y-vean-lo-mas-parecido-a-un-parasito-alienigena/ <comment><AUTHOR> The article is in spanish, but even only looking at the video is worth looking at. impressive!</comment>


Root cause analysis on the Notre Dame fire - <AUTHOR> https://www.sologic.com/en-us/resources/example-problems/notre-dame-fire <comment><USER2> Everything you need to know-

> This fire alert system worked exactly like it was supposed to work. A fire > alarm was activated and a guard was sent to check it out. However, he was > sent to the wrong location. This was because the alarm message was not > correctly interpreted by the employee monitoring the system. He was very new > to the job – it was his third day. Also, he had already worked an eight-hour > shift but was staying on for an additional shift after his relief did not > show up for work. And the system itself was difficult to interpret. The > messaging provided was not intuitive. This resulted in a delay of nearly 30 > minutes. In that time, the fire rapidly spread uncontrollably through the > attic.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand why the response to the alarm was to send a guard to check it first, instead of sending the local fire department to check it. Supposing there was a fire and the guard discovered it, he'd have to call the fire department anyway. Wouldn't it be better to call the fire department automatically for every alarm so they can save a few minutes getting there?

I know false alarms are a thing, but I've been in buildings with false fire alarms before and the firefighters still showed up to check it out.

<comment><USER4> This is another cause to the issue, I think. Even if the guard was efficient into going to the correct location, the guard placed themselves and others in danger: they headed towards an enclosed spaces where a fire alarm indicated evidence of a fire (smoke(CO2 etc), heat).

The guard could 1) mis-assess the situation (that is false-negative or incorrectly 'extinguished it' without realizing the extend and real source of the fire) 2) endangered themselves (enclosed space with improper oxygen concentration plus various toxic gases (numerous accidents of people trying to enter tanks are known (septic/containers) and passing out in seconds and dying) 3) become trapped -- this is a game changer for firefighters that now have to risk their lives and prioritize into saving the guard.

I am not sure how many false alarms Notre Dame had, this however seems a flawed protocol to me -- not an expert however, thus there might have been some reasoning??

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This New York Times article covers the same information and much more, including nifty animations and a detailed timeline of the events: [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/16/world/europe/...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/16/world/europe/notre- dame.html)

I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning about this disaster, it's a much better article than the Sologic analysis linked here, which sounds kind of like a sales pitch (in my opinion).

</comment><comment><USER6> > Have you ever tried to burn a chunk of concrete (good luck)?

Try chlorine trifluoride :)

 _Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants_ by John D. Clark (1972)

[https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...](https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Yes concrete is "flammable" in the context of fluorine (most things are though). Chlorine trifuoride is extremely notorious for that. Silicon dioxide can be oxidized by fluorine (which is a stronger oxidizing agent than oxygen, so...)

P.S. This is a fun video to watch [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckSoDW2-wrc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckSoDW2-wrc) for "exciting" chemicals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some of the article is sales-pitchy, but this part of it is spot on: "Complexity on its own makes a system less reliable" They were writing about the fire alert system, but it is relevant to pretty much any software/hardware system you care to think about.

I do not think that the bundle of technologies we call the "internet", has gotten less complex or easier to interpret, in the last decade. On the other hand, there are a lot more critical systems that depend on it. Sort of like the presence of fuel and oxygen; a spark is guaranteed eventually.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for all the thoughtful comments. The intention of these examples is to show how root cause analysis breaks problems down in a way that's easier to understand than a standard narrative. This is typically done with a cause and effect chart. Yes, the analysis is gated, but I've listed the links here:

Cause & Effect Chart: [https://www.sologic.com/getmedia/fa530279-f746-4032-a803-26f...](https://www.sologic.com/getmedia/fa530279-f746-4032-a803-26f5d3f7f07a/Example- RCA-Notre-Dame-Fire-chart.aspx)

Incident Timeline: [https://www.sologic.com/getmedia/87441f21-d2ad-421c-b1f1-2d1...](https://www.sologic.com/getmedia/87441f21-d2ad-421c-b1f1-2d1fec7f76f4/Example- RCA-Notre-Dame-Fire-timeline.aspx)

Full Report: [https://www.sologic.com/getmedia/b533da72-7e33-45ae-a672-4d4...](https://www.sologic.com/getmedia/b533da72-7e33-45ae-a672-4d40b9515fd2/Example- RCA-Notre-Dame-Fire-full.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER8> There might be something interesting here, but I'll never know.

The real content is gated, and the blog/abstract rolls up to a sales pitch.

<comment><USER9> It's... barely gated. They don't do anything to verify the info you submit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> this "root" cause analyze everything but how the fire started. was it not there an investigation to find out the ignition source? even if the source wasn't found, why isn't there an investigation report about that?

root cause cannot be "a confusing panel light" simply because without ignition that alone would not have caused the incident to happen, so I'm not sure if this is trying to take us reader as stupid or it's conflating root and aggravating on purpose.

<comment><USER11> > _even if the source wasn 't found, why isn't there an investigation report > about that?_

Because they're afraid of what is believed to be a likely source of ignition. Coincidentally, there happen to be numerous church arsons in and around France lately.

> _I 'm not sure if this is trying to take us reader as stupid_

They know you have to play dumb, even if anyone with an IQ above 95 is going to notice what's missing here.

<comment><USER12> Are you saying the investigators think it was arson? Wikipedia says the "Paris prosecutor" has said they _don 't_ believe it was a deliberate act, but I'm curious what you're referring to.

<comment><USER13> You can agree or disagree that it's almost certain that there is evidence that has not been made public, that a statement from a prosecutor might look the same if they knew it was arson or really didn't think it was, you can fully argue the difference in reasons for why that might be the case.

But... do you really not know or are you being obtuse to pretend you don't know what he is saying? If you are pretending, don't.

He's already being downvoted for implying it (this site and it's bubble mechanics; chilling effect, better not say anything that the hive will disagree with) so i wouldn't expect him to explicitly say what we all know he said - again - agree or disagree if he's right or not.

<comment><USER12> I really don't know. What are you two talking about?

<comment><USER14> I think they're hinting it's arson by people who hate Christianity (i.e. Islamic extremists), but authorities are covering it up because publishing that "truth" would cause a religious civil war (national security danger), and they also can't write that "truth" here because they'll be downvoted (oh the horrors, downvotes!!).

It's fucking disgusting how cowardly these couple of commenters are, but also how many seems to have showed up on this thread.

<comment><USER11> Not saying I can't say that here. Just keeping with the style of the report here. I mean, I don't think I'm obscuring anything, literally mentioning arson in the next breath.

I just had the one comment, I don't spend my lonely hours refreshing the _threads_ page on HN, waiting for people to complain about the way something is said rather than addressing it.

Who cares who is "cowardly" for not writing everything purely literally? Given that the incentives are there, and the most important part of a root cause analysis, the root cause, is missing, what makes you think it isn't the one thing they have an interest in obscuring?

I mean, I basically yelled _arson_ , how much am I obscuring?

> _(i.e. Islamic extremists)_

The French media I've seen have also relayed concern about radical feminisim, generic black bloc communism, or other ideologies with extreme elements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I dislike this style of writing. There is too much unnecessary build up by a company which boasts about root cause analysis.</comment>


Ask HN: How and when do you log your food? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
I'm a quantified self geek. I have been logging my food for 7 months now (almost daily), and I would like to hear more about your experience doing that.
How are you logging the food? When do you log your food? How do you manage through weekends or vacations? What about estimating the quantity of food? <comment><USER2> I'd use cronometer.com everyday and try to always get the calorie counts right (didn't care so much about other metrics). My margin of error was around 50 calories/day (figured out by comparing with expected weight loss). The thing is after around 2 months I developed a fairly good intuition and just didn't need to use the software anymore.

<comment><AUTHOR> I personally use MyFitnessPal + some techniques to do food logging and get the calories burned from BodyMedia. How do you get your own calories burned?

<comment><USER2> I don't exercise, slightly adjusted BMR x 1.2 pretty much worked.

<comment><AUTHOR> So you prefer not to exercise to eating more and exercising?

<comment><USER2> It's kind of hard (if you're not into exercise) to burn more than 400 daily. So given that I burn ~1580/day by default an extra 300 is not such a big incentive to exercise. It's just an extra small meal/snack.

<comment><AUTHOR> Using [http://www.myfitnesspal.com/tools/bmr- calculator](http://www.myfitnesspal.com/tools/bmr-calculator), it seems that "by default I burn around" 1.9kcal per day. However I've found it quite easy to hack 700 of them into a day just by exercising for 10 minutes and having more walking meetings. In your case, do you consider walking exercising?

<comment><USER2> So you burn a total of 2600 kcal day and 700 is from the 10 minute exercise and walking meetings? Sounds like the exercise has to be super intense? Or tons of walking. Well I consider all non-bmr' burn exercise. I rarely even leave my house and when I do it's usually 3 blocks away, so under 20kcal. Fidgeting would probably contribute more lol.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually burn more than that (I average somewhere above 3000kcal), but the 2600 that I mentioned is from mostly passive activities. Did you know that Nelson Mandela walked 7 miles in his cell every day? I don't think working at home should stop us from being more active.

<comment><USER2> The thing with me is that I'm not so bullish on health (or other) benefits inherent to exercise. So if I was to go out of my way and exercise i'd only do it to eat more. And yea walking around a room is fun, especially if you're locked up in a cell :-D I do that once in a while when I get excited about a new concept.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I use myfitnesspal to log food.

Lately I haven't been logging as much since I just eat between the same 2-3 things everyday.

I usually log my day again if I eat something new.

For estimating food I weighed things out in the beginning and how I just eyeball it to be the same amount.

<comment><AUTHOR> Which moment of the day do you use to log your food(s)? How did you learn to eyeball your food?

<comment><USER3> When I log, I log before/during cooking of the meal. I'll usually plan my meal on myfitnesspal so I know what all to make so that it fits my macros.

And for eyeballing after making the same things over and over and weighing them out, you start to get a feel for how much it is you need. Every once and awhile I'll weigh out what I eyeballed to make sure I'm not going too low or high.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My Samsung phone came with some "S Health" software preinstalled. Has a pedometer, an exercise tracker and a food log. Not the most complete food database, but seems to work fine.

I used to use mypyramidtracker but I'm not sure if that exists anymore.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently that one was replaced by [https://www.supertracker.usda.gov/default.aspx](https://www.supertracker.usda.gov/default.aspx). So what is your daily routine around that? When do you log your food?

<comment><USER4> As far as routine: When I was serious about calorie counting I carried a small notepad (about the size of an index card) and pen in my back pocket at all times. I'd jot down every single thing I ate, right when I ate it (or else I'd forget).

When I'd get home for the day, after I had my last meal I'd pull out my notepad, go to the tracker and tediously enter everything. Just once a day. This worked for me because I snacked a lot, and pulling out the laptop/phone for every single snack just seemed ridiculous. But the notepad was easy and nobody seemed to notice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting! I've noticed that some people can just "keep it in their head" (including snacks) for 1-2 days. I guess their memory is much better than ours, heh! I enter it immediately after eating as well. But I use the mobile phone since I don't snack that much.

Why did you care about other people noticing the notebook?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I pick a macro plan (protein/fat/carbs), then eat according to my macros for each meal. So I set them prior, then just count them via the labels.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you do when labels are not available? (e.g. eating out)</comment></comment>


Windows10 Insider Preview Build 17035 Supports UTF-8 as ANSI - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/matarillo/status/931050853347110912 <comment><USER2> There is a new checkbox in the legacy control panel under Region / Administrative / Change system locale which says something like: "Beta: use UTF-8 to support global languages" (I have the German version so I'm not sure what the English label is.)

I really wonder what that does. This can't affect the Win32 wide API e.g. GetWindowTextW will still return wide characters (UTF-16 / sometimes UCS-2). Probably this sets the system codepage by default to 65001, so that if you request a string "in codepage format" it will return UTF-8.

<comment><USER3> I hope that this means that Microsoft finally made A functions (like GetWindowTextA) be able to work directly with UTF-8. If this is the case and it is possible for a process to say "give me UTF-8 regardless of global codepage settings" then this can help a lot with portability since every other C/C++ GUI uses UTF-8.

It is kind of way too late, but better late than never i suppose.

<comment><USER4> > every other C/C++ GUI uses UTF-8

Qt uses UTF-16, too, AFAIK.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _The return value of GetACP() is also 65001_

Wow. I think that implies all the ANSI Windows APIs will be able to use UTF-8 as well. Native UTF-8 support is something that Windows developers have wanted for years. I thought it was impossible because of some API limitation where it assumed multibyte characters could only be three bytes long, but maybe this assumption has been removed.

EDIT: So I just tested this. It does seem to affect the ANSI Windows APIs: [https://0x0.st/siCS.png](https://0x0.st/siCS.png)

Unfortunately, this doesn't mean the average Win32 program will be able to start using UTF-8 internally, since the ANSI codepage is a system-wide setting, so you won't be able to opt-in to UTF-8 per-process (at least, I don't think this is possible.)

</comment><comment><USER6> Will notepad.exe now also support unix line endings?

<comment><USER7> This would be really neat. Thing is, as far as I remember, notepad.exe uses a standard Windows control to display text, so that change would have to be system-wide as well, which could break backwards compatibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This looks like just Notepad.exe supporting UTF-8 without having a byte order mark at the start of the file.

<comment><USER5> It should affect more than just Notepad. One of the replies links to more juicy details: [https://srad.jp/story/17/11/14/0640253/](https://srad.jp/story/17/11/14/0640253/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> so will things like SQL Server output logs in UTF-8 instead of UTF-16 and UTF-16LE?

<comment><USER4> Probably not. It might just make applications that never bothered to use the Unicode Windows APIs to support Unicode. And there's still a lot of them. In the past you could use CP65001 in some places to get sort-of UTF-8 support, e.g. in batch files. However, there have been quite a few problems and bus with that approach. Maybe they've just fixed those and added an option to use CP65001 ad the legacy codepage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Of course, this will probably break VB6 apps for example and maybe even VBA. Ideally this should have been done when NT 3.5 was released in 1994, but then it might have been limited to 3 byte UTF-8.</comment>


Way to build employee morale, Zynga - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/software/223167/way-build-employee-morale-zynga

<comment><USER2> Pincus is attempting to make it sound as if he wants to claw back equity from employees who don't do their jobs. But if they aren't doing their jobs, why not fire them?

No, it seems to me that Pincus is looking at some people, perhaps they're middle-level employees, and saying, "you know, that guy might be doing his job, but he isn't worth $50 million."

Yeah, no shit he's not worth $50M. Few people are. But that's how the fucking game works. The fact that a Google chef got $20M -- why is that bad? It's not bad; it's cool. How many Microsoft stories are there about secretaries that made off with $10 million? Those aren't _bad_ stories; those are good stories.

I'm sorry that Pincus fails to see things that way. And I'm sorry that he's decided to shit on a paradigm that's helped build Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER3> The truth is that that middle manager _really isn't_ worth that $50mil. Its not about what he's actually worth. Its the back side of the fact that when he came to work at Zynga, _it wasn't worth working for_.

Its like the gas station attendant who sold you your lottery ticket showing up on your front lawn demanding it back once it turned out that it was a winner.

<comment><USER4> You can say hypothetical middle manager got lucky, but it isn't. We will never know whether Zynga would have succeeded without hypothetical middle manager or the other 'undeserving employees'.

This is just dickish behavior from Pincus. Given his past record, no one should be surprised. What you are saying here is just part of the process known as 'rationalization' and then 'accepting' this behaviour. You can stop - wildly successful entrepreneurs are not saints. I think Steve Jobs is an even clearer example of this.

And I am glad to see the employees affected taking legal action. There's no point in reinforcing dickish behavior by quietly accepting it.

<comment><USER5> >> _You can stop - wildly successful entrepreneurs are not saints. I think Steve Jobs is an even clearer example of this._

This is a very valid point. In fact there is a statement from Steve Jobs's biography, that he wasn't too much for loyalty in fact more like he was anti loyalty. There is nothing great about this thing.

Screwing people just because they can, for absolutely no mistake of theirs has often been the quality of a lot of people with power. This sort of a attitude comes because they think they are invincible, powerful and can do anything they can and get away with it.

And we are responsible for some extent too. We keep idolizing bad boys so much. Ultimately being bad begins to look cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This. And yet, every week here we're regaled with pitiful cries from founders that "we can't recruit and hire enough talent!"

Once faith in the offering of early shares against under-market salaries erodes, good luck in hiring those "rock star" engineers you'll need to put your company over the hump for less than market rates.

<comment><USER7> Reminds me of what PG wrote in his 2004 essay: (snippet)

\---- FROM: <http://www.paulgraham.com/bubble.html>

"What makes the nerds rich, usually, is stock options. Now there are moves afoot to make it harder for companies to grant options. To the extent there's some genuine accounting abuse going on, by all means correct it. But don't kill the golden goose. Equity is the fuel that drives technical innovation.

Options are a good idea because (a) they're fair, and (b) they work. Someone who goes to work for a company is (one hopes) adding to its value, and it's only fair to give them a share of it. And as a purely practical measure, people work a lot harder when they have options. I've seen that first hand."

The rest of the section is fantastic, go read it.

\----

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Whether or not you think this is ethical or legal (I'm not sure it's either), the most amazing thing about this is the timing. I mean, with all the anti- corporate sentiment in the wind, how on earth did they think this would fly? I can see them getting crushed, not in the legal sense, but in the PR sense.

Can people possibly dislike Zynga, as a company, more then they already do? Between this and Groupon, I'm getting fat from plowing popcorn.

<comment><USER9> Occupy FarmVille?

<comment><USER10> Oh, and Occupy Cityville

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you're not willing to actually grant equity, then don't pretend to grant equity.

Grant "up to $5M of go-public bonus cash" or something. If they had capped the upside up front, this wouldn't be a story.

<comment><USER12> Bingo. It sounds like what they did is just hand out stock options way too liberally in the early days in order to attract talent (probably when they planned to flip the company on a timeframe before those shares could vest), and now that those shares turn out to be worth something, they want that talent, the product that talent has created, plus the compensation that they promised to pay returned to them.

If you can't stomach the idea of a hire getting a big payday out of an IPO if your company goes big, you _shouldn't be giving them equity_. Using it as hiring bait and then switching it out from underneath them is deplorable.

<comment><USER13> If only _unvested_ shares are being asked for... someone who has been there since the "early days" would have already vested most of them, assuming a standard 4-year vesting schedule

<comment><USER14> Zynga was founded in July 2007 making it 4 years and 3 months old. It's likely that almost no one has fully vested yet unless they hired a _lot_ in their first month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The problem is Pincus wants to pretend that options-based compensation is in any way related to performance. If they wanted a performance-based comp structure, they should have set one up in the beginning. Options are pure seniority-based compensation and everyone in the industry knows (or should know) that, whether or not they want to admit it.

</comment><comment><USER16> I never thought I'd see a dumber set of PR moves than the ones that Netflix made a month ago.

I was wrong.

<comment><USER17> I don't think this is as bad. I doubt people will stop playing Farmville because of this.

<comment><USER18> I'm sure people thinking about applying to Zynga will consider this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In all honesty, I'm surprised people are surprised by these actions. Its routine that when companies like Google acquire smallcompanies, tons of people in the smaller company are fired. I know for a fact that this happened in the Admob acquisition, for example. This is really no different.

The valley is sleazy and management treats engineers like expendable resources. Get over it. The only consolation is that engineering is the worst possible job except for all the others.

</comment><comment><USER20> Thy're shooting themselves in the foot: I know _I_ will never go work for Zynga without the base being high enough that I can value options or RSU's received at 0. And neither would I consider joining another startup started by these people in the future without similarly pricing the value of any equity at 0.

They're driving up their cost of hiring.

</comment><comment><USER10> Another reason if I was an employer I'd have lawyers involved right now:

No company wants to be going into an IPO with SEC paperwork that says "we are being sued by our employees over compensation." There is very little doubt in my mind Zynga would back off rather than fight.

</comment><comment><USER21> If I worked for Zynga and I saw co-workers who were under performing heavily rewarded I'd find that pretty de-motivating. It seems to me this has been misreported, if your not performing in your role and you get fired you'd lose the unvested stock anyway so by offering a new position and cutting your stock you are given a second chance.

Without knowing how the performance is being judged and what the communication with the staff is like its impossible to really pass comment, do we really think that employees are given no prior warning and suddenly they are re- housed and their stock cut? Seems a little far fetched to me, especially before an IPO where the press are going to be hot for you anyway.

<comment><USER22> You must not be aware of Pincus' history. Then again, people working for him must not have been either.

<comment><USER21> This is true, I accept that its very hard to comment without knowing a little more. It seems as thought there is a very quick judgement passed before we really know exactly how its being played out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This came up on Quora yesterday: [http://www.quora.com/How-legal-or-illegal- are-Zyngas-actions...](http://www.quora.com/How-legal-or-illegal-are-Zyngas- actions-in-clawing-back-equity-from-employees-before-its-forthcoming-IPO)

My gut instinct was that was a jerk move, but after thinking about it I'm not so sure. Here's my answer from Quora... I'd love to know what others think.

(On a side note, the article cited on Quora mentions that employees were asked to give up some unvested options, but that their vested options are not affected.)

</comment><comment></comment><comment>==

This is a slight oversimplification, but a typical stock option grant of, say, .4% of a company is akin to the CEO telling you, "for every year that you work for us, I will give you .1% of the company." For early startup employees who typically take below market salaries, this kind of stock grant is one of the things that makes working at a startup more worthwhile (financially speaking).

It's exceedingly rare that a startup grows to a billion dollar valuation within a few years of founding, but when that happens, it makes sense for the company to re-evaluate whether it's worth giving someone an extra .1% for one more year of work. When a company is young and not worth much, giving someone $10k in paper value as a loyalty bonus is a no-brainer; when a company is worth billions, giving the same person a 50 million dollar loyalty bonus requires a lot more thought. It might still make sense if they're the COO or CFO or something like that, but does it make sense if they are a "Lead Software Engineer" or "Senior Product Manager"? How many "Lead Software Engineers" could you hire with 50 million dollars of stock? Put this way, I think it's reasonable that Zynga wants to let some early people go at their current compensation rates (and California has at-will employment, so you can quit or be let go without reason at any time. _)

Note #1: I think this sucks for the early employees, and I certainly would not want to work for a company whose founders have a history of these kinds of practices, but that doesn't make the practices unethical.

Note #2: My answer would be very different if Zynga were trying to take back options that had already vested.

_ I am not a laywer, so my assumptions about how at-will employment works might not be 100% correct.Edit

<comment><USER24> You're forgetting that when employees took their compensation packages, it was based on factoring in some probability of hitting a mega upside.

By capping that upside, any vesting option package is worth less in expectation, so employees would have demanded higher base salaries knowing that they wouldn't fully participate in a huge win.

<comment><USER23> The employees already have a huge win... the article talks about employees being worth $200 million once they are fully vested. If they're halfway to vesting, they might be worth $100 million, and it seems like Zynga is saying that it's not worth $100 more million to keep the employee for two more years.

It's a weird problem that I think is only there because Zynga grew _so freaking fast_. Normally an early employee's 4 years are up way before a company is worth billions of dollars. Even in the last year or two of a 4-year option plan, the employer's implicit choice is "is it worth another .1% for me to keep this person for one more year?", and .1% might be worth 20k or even 50k, and so the employer doesn't even consider ways of reducing that cost because it's tiny compared to the early employee's value. But when the cost is $10m or $25m or $50m a year, it's definitely something to think about. And only the hyper-grown companies that popped up recently (Twitter, Zynga, Groupon) have had to face this problem.

<comment><USER25> _it seems like Zynga is saying that it's not worth $100 more million to keep the employee for two more years._

It's not Zynga's money. Zynga wants it to be, but it isn't.

<comment><USER26> Slight correction in wording: "Zynga" doesn't really want it to be.

The 2-5 or so guys at the very top of Zynga want it to be, because they think Zynga should create a few more billionaires, instead of several dozen more millionaires. To wit, they think THEY should be made into billionaires rather than paying the folks who created the value of the company.

Hard to be shocked by this, since this has been the direction American business has been traveling in for a few decades now, but usually the PR side of it is handled better.

<comment><USER25> Maybe it's how he enjoys so much support in the business community: he's the canary in the coalmine who sacrifices his image to provide cover for other companies in the future to claw back and/or establish variable equity commitments. To us he's a useful idiot, to C-levels he's a valuable mercenary.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook Shuts Down Facebook Lite - <AUTHOR> http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/04/facebook-lite-killed/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+allfacebook+%28Facebook+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> I really liked the idea of Facebook Lite, but it always felt significantly slower, and content was often quite stale, rendering a product that seemed awkward to use and possibly even incomplete.

This eventually drove me back to regular Facebook. Guess it's time to stop hoping for improvements so I can switch back.

</comment><comment><USER3> This was the only way I found Facebook tolerable and they shut it down. _sigh_ Like Apple, Facebook somehow manages to regularly insult their users without suffering the slightest damage for it.

Perhaps I can cobble together a facsimile for myself with Yahoo Pipes...

<comment><USER4> Here's a little hint that I've been preaching to everyone who complains that fb is unusable (I suspect due to all the farmwars and mafiaville junk): if you click the "hide" button next to the post you can choose to ban the application rather than the person. And this blocks all posts from that application from any friend. You do it once to block out every annoying app you don't care to see and then you only have to add a new one once every couple of weeks as they come out. As a result, my vanilla fb feed is as readable as the lite.fb version.

<comment><USER5> hiding an app with the fb "hide" button only hides it from your feed, it doesnt stop that app getting your private info or sending you invitations to add the app.

blocking applications is the best way of halting the tidal wave of these annoying apps, Facebook Purity <http://www.fbpurity.com> adds a "block app" button which makes it a much quicker process to block the applications. ever wonder why facebook dont provide a "block app" button, because the application developers still want to access all your data and be able to send you invitations to add your app, and they and facebook dont want to give you the option because it helps the apps spread virally, and the constant updates/invites etc from apps are one factor that makes fb "sticky" or in other words keeps people on the site refreshing the page, and increasing ad impressions.

<comment><USER4> is this still necessary if you've never opted into the app? I've never played farmville or allowed it to see any of my data, but lots of my friends have. does this mean that farmville can see privileged information?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> this might help a little: <http://www.fbpurity.com/>

</comment><comment><USER7> So weak.</comment>


Of Aviation Crashes and Software Bugs (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/of-aviation-crashes-and-software-bugs/ <comment><USER2> The linked Daniel J. Bernstein paper [0] is interesting. I note with some satisfaction that section 3.2 echoes a comment I made last week [1] that wound up at -1 (after some bouncing around). Arbitrary-precision integers should be the default in all new languages, with very few exceptions (and should clearly have been the default in Java).

Rust is an interesting case. It's intended as a systems programming language, so performance is considered important. I guess I can't say flatly that it should have arbitrary-precision integers by default, though maybe it could. But at least it reminds you, every time you write an integer type, that it's bounded, the length being right there in the type name ("i32", "u64", etc.)

[0] [http://cr.yp.to/qmail/qmailsec-20071101.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/qmail/qmailsec-20071101.pdf)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14906755](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14906755)

<comment><USER3> The problem is not at all with the precision, but rather with the undefined behavior in certain circumstances.

If that can be avoided it makes no sense to use the slow and wasteful bigints.

<comment><USER2> Arbitrary-precision integers are not that slow if they're implemented the way most Lisp implementations do it. For a strongly-typed language, you would need only one tag bit: if the low-order bit is 0, then the remaining bits of a pointer-sized word, shifted right 1 bit, are the value; no heap storage or indirection is required, and addition and subtraction require no fixup afterwards as long as there was no overflow. Only if the low-order bit of an operand is 1, or if there's overflow, do you have to trap out to the general case which handles heap allocation.

Yes, this is slower than ordinary fixed-width integer arithmetic, as a couple of conditional branches are required, but it's nowhere near the price of heap- allocating every integer.

<comment><USER4> And the overflow check is now finally cheap in portable C. Before you had to use inline assembly for this trivial ex:

        add %rax, %rbx
        jo +4

Now you have the new gcc and clang overflow intrinsics (gcc-5, clang-3.4), which made it cheap and easy to use proper and precise int arithmetic, promoting int to bigint's only on overflow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Civil aviation aircraft still fly 1930's engine designs in 1950's airframes, and the costs are prohibitive. Sure sounds like a great model for software... For example, a typical ~200HP aviation engine costs on the order of $30,000 and has no modern engine management systems.

This article makes a false comparison. When software is part of safety, such as in aircraft, it gets the same level of scrutiny.

<comment><USER6> > When software is part of safety, such as in aircraft, it gets the same level > of scrutiny.

Safety? For the most part, yes. Security? Not so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Idiotic to compare systems on which human lives depend to everything else.

There's no one-size fits all. Speed and accuracy tend to have an inverse correlation.

<comment><USER3> You're missing the point. It's not about the system type, but rather the approaches taken to analyse system failures and the subsequent corrective actions.

His criticism still applies to today's projects: recently I've seen fixes in imagemagick done as minimal "patches".

<comment><USER8> I've seen patches in production code that amount to 20 if else's to handle specific inputs rather than the correct input.

I just inherited a system that uses trim _everywhere_ on everything because originally they didn't sanitise the inputs.

Rather than hunt down all the inputs they just did trim(foo) == trim(bar) making it worse is that it's PHP and so not only do they trim things but they type-coerce them, good luck trying to reason about that 7 layers deep :|

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the plane crash that killed Colbert's father the pilots were arguing about politics. If thats not ironic I don't know why is.

</comment><comment><USER10> The choice of language for a project is the least problematic thing in this industry. Egotistical programmers, the categorical error of equating CS fundamentals with engineering, rapid product development and iteration, and producing as cheaply as possible all are more serious problems in this industry than a choice of language to program in.

<comment><USER11> It's related because the languages and toolchains come from that industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article is far too long winded for my taste.</comment>