DNSSEC explained: Why you might want to implement it on your domain - <AUTHOR> https://www.csoonline.com/article/3569277/dnssec-explained-why-you-might-want-to-implement-it-on-your-domain.html#tk.rss_all <comment><USER2> I'm a simple man. Website shows fullscreen popup that interrupts me and also scrolls the page to the top. I close the tab.

<comment><USER3> same.

<comment><USER4> Repeating same is probably pointless by now but same, too.

<comment><USER5> Not really, it helps to make a point.

Honestly, CSO folks. If you want my e-mail, try a bit harder than two paragraphs of text and a popup. Yes, I'm your target audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would be a worthwhile article to read if it wasn't pay walled.

</comment><comment><USER7> The article is behind a paywall, but more to the point: why wouldn't I want this?

It's opt-in at every registrar I've used, although it seems like a no-brainer to me? What am I missing?

As an aside, I like DoH, but dislike the fact that my web browsers then don't use /etc/hosts. Is there a way to provide it at the system level?

<comment><USER8> HN's resident DNSSEC critic, 'tptacek, has written extensively on this topic:

[https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against- dnssec/](https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against-dnssec/)

[https://sockpuppet.org/stuff/dnssec- qa.html](https://sockpuppet.org/stuff/dnssec-qa.html)

[https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2016/10/27/14-dns-nerds-dont- con...](https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2016/10/27/14-dns-nerds-dont-control-the- internet/)

<comment><USER9> I find most of these arguments to be pretty weak TBH. From the first article:

> All secure crypto on the Internet assumes that the DNS lookup from names to > IP addresses are insecure.

This isn't strictly true. It's true that TLS makes DNS spoofing ineffective against end-users, but CAs still have to rely on domain validation to decide who to issue TLS certs to in the first place, and domain validation, in turn, relies on DNS lookups being secure.

> And governments control the DNS.

This is true, but that's an argument for not securing DNS, it's an argument for replacing DNS entirely. Governments control DNS regardless of whether or not DNSSEC is deployed.

> DNSSEC is Cryptographically Weak

No it isn't. _Current implementations_ of DNSSEC are cryptographically weak, but DNSSEC itself is not. The solution to this is to deploy new, stronger keys (like Cloudflare is doing[1]), not to get rid of DNSSEC entirely.

> DNSSEC is Expensive To Adopt [..] DNSSEC is Expensive To Deploy

This is true of all security measure to some extent. TLS was expensive to adopt and deploy prior to the advent of free, automated CAs like Let's Encrypt. The solution to these problems is to build tools and systems which make DNSSEC easier to adopt and deploy, not to abandon it entirely.

-

The rest of the arguments on that page are reasonable criticisms of specific elements of DNSSEC's design (some of which could be improved by changes to DNSSEC's design or implementation), but I don't really see them as show- stoppers. If there were a better alternative to DNSSEC available I would find these arguments much more persuasive, but since the only alternative seems to be not securing DNS records at all any small design flaws seem pretty minor in comparison.

[1]: [https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/dnssec/ecdsa-and- dnssec/](https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/dnssec/ecdsa-and-dnssec/)

<comment><USER10> I love it when people bring up Cloud Flare's DNSSEC.

First, Cloud Flare's curve-based DNSSEC is itself already obsolete. New designs don't use the P-curves, which are difficult to implement safely, and they don't use DSA, which is also brittle and dangerous. For the last 10 years, the mainstream state of the art has been twist-secure curves like Curve25519 and Schnorr-type signature schemes like EdDSA.

But equally importantly: the overwhelming majority of new DNSSEC deployments today use RSA.

Modern cryptography is nowhere on the horizon for DNSSEC. A concerted industrywide effort to use a safer signature scheme wouldn't see widespread deployment before 2030.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can anyone put this on pastebin or something? Paywalled.</comment>


Why the Best Doesn't Always Win (1996) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/05/magazine/why-the-best-doesn-t-always-win.html <comment><USER2> It really depends on what your definition of 'best' is, doesn't it?

This article seems to suggest that Apple was the better computer in 1996 while Windows was dominating. But Windows was dominating _because_ it was the platform of choice for business users who had trained on it, built custom applications for it, and networked their offices with it. It was the best solution at the time for the customers who needed it.

Path dependence is not evidence of the market not working; just the opposite. It's evidence that products the author of this article likes better aren't necessarily as successful on the market as products most consumers know how to use.

The irony is, that Apple eventually triumphed because it invested in more intuitive design, using path dependence in its own favor. Hence their famous saying: "You already know how to use it"

<comment><USER3> It's hard to say which of two technologies is better when they're not substitutable. For example, you can't replace a gas-burning truck with a lot of carrying capacity and a long range with a small electric car with basically no carrying capacity and much shorter range. They don't do all of the same things.

You can argue that nobody _needs_ the truck, or at least that the person you're talking to doesn't need the truck, but that's a "you're holding it wrong" or, at the extreme, a "you're living wrong" argument, and it comes down to moral arguments in the extreme case.

> The irony is, that Apple eventually triumphed because it invested in more > intuitive design

The only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.

<comment><USER4> The line about the nipple should be qualified: it's currently thought that face detection is also innate.

(though, intriguingly, it's apparently unknown whether this is because recognizing faces is important specifically for babies, or because the human visual system is evolved to process that kind of thing. i.e. maybe there are other stimuli, not face-shaped, which would also intrigue babies because they push the visual system's buttons:

[http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...](http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00969/full) )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The idea of technologically superior products is a huge blind spot for engineers.

A lot of people whinge about why obviously better products fail when inferior products succeed. Technological superiority is nice, but what you should be looking for when building products is market superiority. The overall quality of a product is only a single factor when making a purchase. Useability, safety, convenience, education, price, flexibility, distribution, marketing, and network effects also contribute to the success or failure of a product.

Some common battles references of "superior" products failing are:

Betamax vs VHS:

Betamax had better image quality, but VHS had a longer runtime and was cheaper. Consumers wanted to watch movies without switching tapes and image quality was good enough on VHS, so it won.

High Speed Rail:

Who wouldn't want trains that travel over 250 mph? They are clearly superior to the regular trains that we are using so why not upgrade? High speed rail's biggest competitor is not a train, it is planes. Planes have disadvantages in terms of leaving you outside the center of a city, but they have several advantages over high speed rail. First they have lower operating costs. You need fewer people to operate a plane and planes fly at over 500 mph, so you need to pay less per mile per employee. Planes are safer and more flexible than high speed rail. You can re-route a plane to any destination in the world for no additional cost. High speed rail requires very expensive land acquisition and once the track is set it cannot be changed without additional capital. If you flex with the parameters there are conditions where high speed rail can be price competitive with planes but it requires highly dense cities relatively close to one another. The majority of the United States is not set up this way, so it is rational that we should not expect high speed rail.

I could go on and on, but I believe most people are rational when making purchases. You can't fool everyone forever, so if your product is flailing look inward talk to customers and figure out how to make a market superior product instead of a technologically superior product.

<comment><USER6> High speed rail pretty much only works in Japan and Europe for this very reason.

It does have the benefit of offering a rather relaxing travel experience compared to flying. Taking the Eurostar between Paris and London takes less than three hours, including security check and connect downtown to downtown. It sadly can't scale however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Betamax was not better than VHS or, at least, it wasn't that simple even from a technical perspective:

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/jan/25/comment.c...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/jan/25/comment.comment)

> Later I found out that Betamax had owned the market, but lost it because > Sony got one simple decision wrong. It chose to make smaller, neater tapes > that lasted for an hour, whereas the VHS manufacturers used basically the > same technology with a bulkier tape that lasted two hours. Instead of poring > over the sound and picture quality, reviewers could simply have taken the > systems home. Their spouses/children/grandparents and everybody else would > quickly have told them the truth. "We're going out tonight and I want to > record a movie. That Betamax tape is useless: it isn't long enough. Get rid > of it."

> Betamax was the first successful consumer video format, and at one time it > had close to 100% of the market. All of the video machines in use and all of > the pre-recorded movies were Betamax. It had a de facto monopoly, and an > element of lock-in (because of tape incompatibilities). It lost because, at > the time, it could not do what consumers wanted: record a whole movie > unattended. And although Betamax playing times were extended, they never > caught up with VHS.

> Other elements of the oft-repeated Betamax story are also wrong. For > example, while Sony was certainly slow to bring in other manufacturers, it > had tried to license it to rivals such as JVC before VHS was even launched. > Betamax was not generally more expensive: Sony had to slash its original > high prices but generally it was competitive. Indeed, after it had lost the > market, Betamax machines were often cheaper than VHS ones.

> And at the beginning, there was no comparative shortage of Betamax movies to > rent: actually, they were all Betamax. (Stan Liebowitz, Professor and > Associate Dean of the School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas, > has done most research on this, but see urbanlegends.com for a quick guide.)

And, the most surprising thing:

> Indeed, the main thing that didn't fit was the idea was that Betamax was > "technically superior". Standing in a shop at the time, there was absolutely > no visible difference in picture quality, and some reviews had found that > VHS's quality was superior.

<comment><USER7> So how did BluRay beat HDDVD and other standards?

I remember there was a Laserdisk standard and they made Episode 4, 5, 6 for Laserdisk that was the original cinema version before Lucas changed things to make it more family friendly, like Greedo shot first instead of Han Solo, etc. The VHS version got edited and so did the DVD versions. Laserdisk was so old it had the original released to cinemas but not the edits because they abandoned the Laserdisk format for DVD and VideoCD later on.

<comment><USER8> > So how did BluRay beat HDDVD and other standards?

BluRay won mostly nothing. But to the extent that it did win, it was mostly because it was cheaper, more reliable, and iterated faster than HDDVD.

When HDDVD disappeared people were still having problems producing the higher density disks. BluRay started as a low density format, and quickly evolved until it had more capacity than HDDVD had even even planned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's odd that the article mentions two or more examples for every topic (e.g. VHS vs. Betamax, English vs. Esperanto, Macintosh vs. Microsoft, gasoline vs. steam vs. electric car). But for keyboards, only QWERTY was mentioned, with an allusion to "half a dozen other keyboard layouts that are said to permit faster typing". So here are a few alternatives: Dvorak, Colemak, Arensito.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for that! Out of curiosity, do you use any of those alternative keyboard layouts?

<comment><USER11> I learned to touch-type Dvorak about 5 years ago and it's been fantastic. It takes a moderate amount of commitment to become proficient, but immediately more comfortable and natural.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A good article. There is way more to it than a Mac vs PC debate. Path dependence is something that is worth understanding, but seldom thought of.

To his examples, I'd add these:

\- The way modern computers and their operating systems are designed reflects 1960's hardware with different tiers of storage speeds for RAM and HDD. Cache and flash are now tacked on.

\- The width of cars and railways is determined by the fact that they needed to use existing roads, which are as wide as two horses.

\- The entire political, tax and legal system has evolved and is not optimal.

\- The human body is a hack of previous organisms, made with small incremental changes. Take the spine, which in humans is structurally a tower, but most animals use as a suspension bridge.

We have to put up with systems and things that are "good enough" and all their previous versions were also "good enough".

</comment><comment><USER13> Ease of use and a clear audience may be another reason for this. I mean, look at WordPress. It's certainly not what a lot of people would consider a great script, nor the 'best' CMS around.

However, it powers about 25% of the entire internet and 59% of all those sites using a CMS. Why?

Because it just offered what people wondered in a simple, easy to understand system rather than trying to be a super powerful jack of all trades that only tech geeks could understand. Joomla and Drupal offered more customisation options, but it was overwhelming for a lot of people, whereas WordPress just focused on being a blog and offered what was needed to run a blog straight out of the box.

And that same sort of 'simplicity sells' thing may also be part of why smartphones are doing so well recently (no messy configuration like with normal computers and very easy app installation features) as well as why games consoles still sell at a time when PCs can do everything as well or better.

</comment><comment><USER14> people who quote adam smith appear to have never read it - AS states that people prefer to have companies in their own country and not overseas 'as if an invisible hand' were guiding them. It's literally the opening line of the @#$@#$# paragraph and it's been twisted to mean "because markets! ammiright?"

</comment><comment><USER15> Leaving aside the content and focusing only on style, can't we agree that the internet made journalistic writing so much more dull? What an engaging piece.</comment>


Ask HN: C++17 vs. Rust for New Project - <AUTHOR> For a new project we're looking for the pro's and con's of either C++17 and Rust. The project will make use of some very common libraries like LevelDB, LLVM, v8 Engine, and depends heavily on network support. Most of those projects offer an native C++ binding. However Rust seems to be more clean, better compiler support, build system and not least a package manager. This could save much in terms of development time.<p>So far I have not found a good reason to choose one over the other. We do have C++ experience in house. Any advise? <comment><USER2> Who are the main developers who will be working on this project? If the developers are largely used to Node, or Ruby, the package management, and language features might make them more comfortable, and if they are not comfortable with C++ already, the Rust learning curve might be negligible compared to some of the oddities with C++.

If you have developers coming from languages like Java or C# which have a structural similarity to C++, or if you have developers already familiar with C++, I would say that there is no need to throw that experience away, and that experience would get you guys farther than trying the new language.

In my experience, the clang compiler is very developer friendly in terms of error reporting and features. The only people that I know that say that C++ is old and clunky were those using gcc and C++98. Make is pretty open ended as a scripting tool/build tool, and there are plenty of alternatives if you don't like make.

I would choose based on demographics of your team. If you have a bunch of young developers, or if you want to hire a bunch of young developers, Rust is pretty popular with that crowd, and has a lot of language features that will make them feel comfortable. That being said, I only recommend Rust if you have a developer that is very comfortable with it, and can guide you through the borrow checker, whether to use stable or nightly rust, and the foreign function interface. C++ will require more discipline because there is less constraints that prevent you from shooting yourself in the face with code readability and memory safety, but it is proven, and if you have the C++ developers on hand, have them decide on a style guide and review process that works for your team.

<comment><AUTHOR> The team has some experience with C# and Java which makes it easier to go with C++, an then there is a little knowledge of C++17. I think from this perspective its clear that C++ would be the better choice in our case.

I may be misinformed but from what I've seen so far is that Rust crates can be super beneficial and speedup development (where there is an obvious lack of a well-established package manager for C++), but neither Google nor any of the other major C++ shops do provide a Rust <-> C++ lib bridge. For example there does not seem to be official Google support for the v8 engine/leveldb under Rust forcing me to thrust a single Crates maintainer doing some porting in his free time.

<comment><USER3> The problem I've run into (YMMV) with C++ is that a lot of documentation/information is outdated (dangerously so).

C++ isn't a single language, it is three major revisions (98, 11, and 17) of a similar-ish language. If someone used C++ continuously throughout its evolution this is a non-problem. Because they were able to slowly adapt their knowledge, while still having the ability to mix and contextualize.

For new people entering the language "just use C++17" is largely a fiction. Because the first time you look at stackoverflow, a tutorial, or GitHub code all bets are off. And a lot of developers end up in interop hell because they're trying to get to C++98/11 structures to work with C++17 ideas.

I don't actually agree that C#/Java gives an advantage to C++17. In fact I think the reverse. The syntax is similar, but syntax is relatively minor in the grand scheme. Rust, once you get past syntax, is much more similar to high level language because you aren't wandering through the memory management minefield.

Just my 2c.

PS - I don't "hate" C++. But you cannot just jump straight to C++17 while pretending C++ 98/11 don't exist. You have to learn all three, and then learn not to use the first two, otherwise you wouldn't understand most of the information available to you (and most libraries you're interopping with are writing in a dialect you don't understand). Learning C++ for real is a huge under-taking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A few comments which are just my opinions. First, I'd argue both languages will solve similar problems fairly equally in terms of outcome & performance. But if you have C++ knowledge on the team already it should be the default unless there is proven reasons to move away. This isn't because I don't think teams should learn new things, but when the business is trying to make money or get started that is not the time to risk a project on learning a new language.

If you haven't already worked in Rust and haven't already done POC's in Rust now isn't the time to risk a project on experimenting. You could take a small portion of the project and do a test in both languages to see the pros and cons. I'd probably not put a ton of weight on the implementation time difference here (unless it is large) because Rust might take you slightly longer just to figure out the differences but that isn't a negative and would quickly pass. And when you pick the portion of project do not unfairly bias the test towards either language, that is easy to do to bias the outcome.

If this is a vital system where failure has negative consequences for the company I'd argue again you go with C++ which seems counterintuitive initially but makes sense. With Rust the team will be learning so the number of mistakes and rework will be higher initially. The team is already C++ experienced so they understand its worts and issues, and all languages have issues. So the first result will mean the C++ software will likely be more solid than the Rust version, not because of language capabilities but because of experience in the coders. If the system isn't vital, can accept more risk and is smaller I'd go with Rust, simply because that is the perfect time to experiment.

TL;DR; don't bet a non-trivial project the company is needing to help grow or profit on a new language when the team hasn't already proven competency on smaller test projects in the language.</comment>


Flying for Thanksgiving - <AUTHOR> https://bert.org/2018/11/18/flying-for-thanksgiving/ <comment><USER2> Flying on Thanksgiving Day is a joy. I've done it twice now. The ATL concourses are practically empty. It is a bit strange to see the flight boards almost empty on a Thursday morning.

I do bring $5 Starbucks gift cards for the entire crew of every flight I'm on to thank them for having to work on a day when most of the country is with family. It's not much, but it's something. The folks flying on holidays are low on the seniority list, so they're generally working that day because they have to, not because they want to.

<comment><USER3> Why $5 Starbucks gift cards and not $5 cash?

<comment><USER4> I hate gift cards. "Here, rather than crassly giving you actual money, I've spent that money on this company scrip that you can only use in one place. Aren't you excited?" Great idea, just brilliant. I'll add it to the stack of worthless iTunes cards and cards for restaurants that don't have a franchise within 500 miles...

<comment><USER5> totally agree with you. And some visa gift cards charge you monthly fee after activating them!! I had few cards that I forgot to use, and their value became $0 after a year. And I am also concerned about the environmental damage caused by millions of plastic gift cards.. all the way from sourcing, manufacturing, transporting and disposing them. And to certain extent, it forces over- consumption behavior. I got 2 kids, and always got too many BabysRus/ToysRus gift cards. I am either forced to use them or re-gift/exchange them with others. In the end, the cards always get used by either myself or the others. If unavoidable, then you can at least print/send an e-gift card.

If it's plain cash, I can just deposit them without buying anything. For these reasons, I always wrap cash in an envelope with a personal hand-written note. Have been gifting this way to teachers, postmen, home-cleaners and no one has complained so far. When my friends/colleagues try to gift for any occasion, I always encourage them to gift cash.

<comment><USER6> > to certain extent, it forces over-consumption behavior

isn't gift giving itself over-consumption? at least among peers, the other person would have just gotten the item themselves if they actually needed it.

> When my friends/colleagues try to gift for any occasion, I always encourage > them to gift cash.

presumably you exchange gifts with these people on some sort of regular basis. if so, isn't this just a net zero transfer? may as well just not give gifts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I discovered this about three years back as well. India has quite a few holidays when you are required to travel to your home with two major festivals - Diwali(Oct/Nov) and Holi (March). Since, it is important for people to be at home for these festivals, they would book early, or take costly flights, or alternate flights. With my parents being flexible, and understanding about how I love them even when I am a day late to be at home, I ended up booking the flight on the festival day, rather than before.

Cue and Behold. An empty airplane, with a total of 30-40 people in an Airbus 320. I got upgraded to business class for free. There were no lines for boarding. The plane took off on time, landed on time, and all of us could sleep in peace (or do whatever it is people do on planes).

From that time, if I am going home for a festival, it will be the day of the festival.

<comment><USER8> Sry to be pedantic, and I do agree with your insight on travelling on Holidays. But I just want to say India is a pretty diverse country, so Holi/Diwali aren't necessarily the major holidays in many parts/sections of the country/population.

<comment><USER7> That is true. And I am in no way generalizing my experience with whole of India. But, in my experience, I have seen less crowds on Holi and Diwali. And taking flight has not failed me till now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Growing up, my Chinese family didn't really celebrate Christmas. Consequently, we would always travel for family vacations on Christmas day. Christmas day flights were generally slightly cheaper than non-Christmas day flights, which was nice.

\---

I also like how the writer asked for the daily number of unique users but got bandwidth usage instead.

<comment><USER10> If it wasn't for your people, my people would starve on Christmas.

[https://www.npr.org/2017/12/25/573415894/why-do-jewish- peopl...](https://www.npr.org/2017/12/25/573415894/why-do-jewish-people-eat- chinese-food-on-christmas)

:-)

<comment><USER11> Believe it or not, this topic of "where do Jews eat on Christmas" actually came up in a light-hearted way during a Supreme Court nominee hearing: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tku61sKhPGo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tku61sKhPGo)

<comment><USER12> I wouldn't believe it if you had told me before but thanks for sharing that tidbit! Having worked a few Christmas and Christmas Eve nights at Chinese restaurants in the past, I appreciated it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone else struck by the promptness of the Dept. of Technology here? Always nice to see things just like this working.

<comment><USER14> It's 20 days in the UK. [https://www.gov.uk/make-a-freedom-of-information- request/how...](https://www.gov.uk/make-a-freedom-of-information-request/how- to-make-an-foi-request)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _The SSID for the WiFi at SFO is called "#SFO FREE WIFI". It's named as if someone has a wireless hotspot in their backpack running on a battery pack trying to steal the login information for your bank._

I had the same reaction the first time I saw the WiFi SSID at SFO. "Surely that can't actually be the name of the official WiFi here. Let's let it keep looking for networks..."

<comment><USER16> I've seen lots of airports etc use this pattern. I've always assumed it's because # sorts before most everything else according to the ASCII code, so their SSID will show at the top of the list.

<comment><USER17> I thought it was a case of hashtag-itis.

<comment><USER18> Nah, pretty sure I remember seeing that airport WiFi ssid at sfo long before hash tags were a thing...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> 15 TB of data went through SFOs WiFi on Nov 26, 2017. To me that is the biggest takeaway. That is a lot of data, even for there being a ton of people flying through.

<comment><USER20> Assuming a podcast is 50MB, that would be 300k podcasts. If I'm about to jump on a flight, I may download 4-5, which would put that at about 60k people. I just found an article saying 53 million people flew through SFO in 2016. If we distribute those evenly (unreasonable, but ballparks it), we get just under 145k passengers / day.

Obviously web pages and mp3s are much lighter than a typical podcast, so this isn't the best methodology. 15TB is a lot, for sure, but on the busiest travel day of the year, I can rationalize it.

<comment><USER21> I see extremely few people listening to anything that's not in-flight entertainment on flights.

I bet it's mostly kids watching youtube videos.

<comment><USER22> That's funny - I almost never see anyone using inflight entertainment screens any more. People are always watching Netflix or listening to something instead. And I think my view is supported by airlines starting to remove those screens because they're not being used.

<comment><USER23> Depends on the airline and the plane. If anything, I would have said there was a trend toward in-flight on-demand programming at no charge. It's increasingly delivered over WiFi but, in my experience, there's usually a screen as well. Admittedly, my experience is mostly limited to United (trending toward on- demand) and JetBlue (just free DirectTV AFAIK).

<comment><USER22> > toward in-flight on-demand programming at no charge

Huh? I've never ever seen a charge for inflight entertainment, and I fly United all the time. Maybe different routes, then.

<comment><USER23> United charges for DirectTV [https://www.united.com/CMS/en- US/travel/Pages/DIRECTV.aspx](https://www.united.com/CMS/en- US/travel/Pages/DIRECTV.aspx)

On the planes where there's on-demand programming (on your tablet or the seatback), that's free. I mostly bring my own and have never paid but I assume they're phasing out the paid option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I feel like Google flights would have given you the same data by showing that flying on the day of Thanksgiving is way cheaper. Just a guess, though.

<comment><USER25> Cheaper doesn't always tell you "least busy", especially when planning ahead. I'll have the misery of flying the day before Christmas this year and the flight itself was peanuts but I'm not looking forward to the airport situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Given that Thanksgiving 2016's bandwidth is unremarkable, maybe Thanksgiving Sunday of 2017 had some sort of external factor, like weather-related flight delays? Though I didn't find any news specifically calling out flight delays, this was the closest and pretty vague:

[https://abcnews.go.com/US/sunshine-us-fog-flight-delays- west...](https://abcnews.go.com/US/sunshine-us-fog-flight-delays-west- coast/story?id=51388432)

<comment><USER27> Agreed, just looking at a single year at a single airport could be showing some kind of external factor, like weather, operating system updates just released, etc. Would need to repeat for multiple airports and years to get a robust conclusion.

Not that I think the conclusion is wrong - it just isn't robust.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> That is a lot of effort and nice analysis, but concluding the story based on the WiFi data usage is a weak support because 1\. Flights get often delayed most, during the long weekend days 2\. Because it is a holiday season, people like me assume the security clearance line gets busier than the regular days and reach the airport 90 minutes earlier (45 minutes earlier on a non-holiday trip) 3\. November it is, places might have covered with snow or fog (SFO might be an exemption)

I think it would have been a great support to your analysis if the peak is measured on passenger count or unique devices connected to the wifi.

</comment><comment><USER24> I had the joy this year of flying across Europe on New Years Eve. NYE fireworks across Germany (I think it was Germany) were truly spectacular from the air.

<comment><USER29> Really ? I remember seeing the big 14th July fireworks in Cannes from an aircraft on the Nice landing approach - I found it disappointingly small...

<comment><USER24> You don't really see individual fireworks so much as the entire landscape ripples with light

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Begging the question has nothing to do with raising a question, it's a type of logical fallacy. And it's also annoying to see misused. /Pedantry

<comment><USER31> I could also just be a phrase which means just what it seems to mean. Maybe you could point me to the book of allowable phrases. If he used it to describe another logical fallacy, that would be wrong, but in this case it's just a couple words that make sense and also have some other meaning in some other context.

<comment><USER12> The words only make sense because he's likely heard it in the context of the logical fallacy. The words don't "make sense" without that. The couple of words that he'd be looking for would be "begging me to question" or "raises the question."

<comment><USER32> Try "begs for the question".

Then remember that the word "for" is _often_ omitted after the word "beg". "beg your pardon". "beg forgiveness".

Taking the phrase as written, outside the idiom for a logical fallacy, the grammar is perfectly adequate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I sort of discovered this myself when looking for flight prices about 4 months back around this week (flying from the US). I happen to have the whole week of Thanksgiving off from work due to it shutting down that week every year (supposedly not guaranteed but has been given every year since instituted), so I was looking to take advantage of it to travel - I settled on the UK, but picking good days/times to fly was a challenge. I knew that generally early morning/late night flights were cheaper if I could get them in general, but one thing I noticed was flights were expensive the Saturday before to fly out, and expensive the Saturday and Sunday after Thanksgiving to fly back.

I settled on flying out the Friday before Thanksgiving, and flying back on Black Friday for a savings of about $200-300. My flight to the UK though was completely full, in part owing that SFO is a major United hub whose employees take advantage of flying standby whenever they can. I'll be a little surprised if it is full going back though.

</comment><comment><USER34> Oh man, how I love data! Good work on this post.

<comment><USER35> Very cool approach indeed, but there's also this ;)

[https://www.flysfo.com/media/facts-statistics/air-traffic- st...](https://www.flysfo.com/media/facts-statistics/air-traffic- statistics/2018)

<comment><USER36> That data is only monthly

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I planned a holiday to the USA last year with my wife. Intentionally planned our trip to Disneyland (1 of 3.5 weeks) to avoid school holidays etc.

Accidentally planned to attend the week of thanksgiving. Fortunately realised before my flights were booked and changed it to the week after.

Near miss :) apparently it's one of the busiest weeks for Disneyland. And many families end up taking the entire week off not just thanksgiving? I had no idea and found that crazy but there you go :)

<comment><USER23> Although not universal, a lot of companies give the day after Thanksgiving off as well as Thanksgiving itself. (And, typically, not a lot gets done on at least the Wednesday afternoon as well.) So it's a pretty common week for families (and others) to take off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The weird thing to me about flying on Thanksgiving (I don't observe it) is how sorry the air staff is for me "of you have to miss out on fly on thanksgiving"). While they have to _work_ on that day and apparently it matters to them!

Since it matters to them I thank them for their concern. But it's really simply an easy day to travel if I have a reason to.

</comment><comment><USER39> Friends and I, for years, used to go to Vegas for thanksgiving -- late 90s until mid 2000s. The change in travel patterns and when people flew was interesting.

The reason for vegas - multiple people from different areas that mostly had direct flights to Vegas.

These days, I tend to pick areas that are quiet and relatively easy to get to -- a lot of those have been exploring the Sierra or remote parts of the coast.

</comment><comment><USER40> This reminds me: I procrastinated and haven't booked my Christmas ticket yet... Bay Area to Atlanta — anyone got any tips? I think Google Flights is the best way to find the cheapest ticket, but if there's something else out there I'd be glad to know!

<comment><USER41> Anecdotally, use the brave browser to look for hotels and flights. Since it blocks tracking I've heard you will see lower cost flights (I've also heard the converse that searching with iPhone/safari may result in higher prices.) [https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/9gkcow/brave_br...](https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/9gkcow/brave_browser_is_best_for_booking_flights/)

<comment><USER42> This is quite an ancient myth of flight pricing, and I'd love to see it die, but alas it will not. Your cookies and/or browser fingerprint has basically no effect on flight prices.

In addition, the "proof" provided on that subreddit has quite a few problems:

A) That route is priced ridiculously anyway, and they are looking at Delta, who always price ridiculously. Delta doesn't care about price-conscious shoppers, so they have virtually no incentive to try and segment fares based on browsing history, etc.

B) They're looking at a third party flight aggregator. These are the WORST ways of buying flight tickets. They're decent for _finding_ deals, but 9/10 times, the airline's website sells it cheaper, and the airline's website gives you more benefits anyway (as you're the buyer and/or owner, not the online travel agent).

C) Furthermore, these online travel agents cache flight lookups _very_ heavily. My guess is that the search with TOR routes to a different edge server with a different cache. API calls to the airlines are extremely costly.

The best way of getting a cheaper flight has nothing to do with your browser, so don't worry about it. The best ways of saving money are based on _when_ you buy, and of course what airline. Don't buy on a weekend, and try not to fly on one either. Holidays are similar, except it's not a bad idea to actually fly ON a holiday, but not around one.

<comment><USER41> What about using a vpn to change your geo to try and get geo-based deals? This website appears to have some proof of this approach working: [https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2018/07/how-to- ge...](https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2018/07/how-to-get-cheaper- flights-by-using-a-vpn/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Never attempted travel at Thankgiving, but for about 15 years running we would fly home on Christmas day after visiting family in Portland Oregon. We would leave in the evening, after a full day of festivities. The airport was like a ghost town. It was awesome.

<comment><USER44> Pdx is like a ghost town most days depending on the time. I think it's what makes the airport so nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> > I don't know the backstory of why most FOIA requests end up with data being > formatted in the worst way possible

It's malicious compliance. They're required to give you the info, but they aren't required to make your life easier.

<comment><USER46> I assumed they used PDF because it's a more stable format that is harder to accidentally modify on receipt. They may also need to store it on their end in case they need to prove what they provided, and provide some level of forgery prevention or detection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> As someone that is working in an airport on Thanksgiving, this is accurate.

and SFO's free wifi ssid really is kind of creepy.

i'm also amazed still at just how slow and awful a lot of AT&T wifi still is. They should be ashamed of how slow it is.

</comment><comment><USER48> Great post. Is there any resource out there to help non-technical journalists process poorly-formatted FOIA data dumps? (Either a how-to guide, or by directly helping out with ETL pro bono)?

</comment><comment><USER14> TIL about ghostscript's txtwrite function. A dawn of a new era!

</comment><comment><USER25> I like to fly international on the afternoon of Christmas day - I get to have breakfast with my family then arrive in another continent to look forward to a stress-free New Years.

</comment><comment><USER49> Thanksgiving and Christmas - best days to fly. Especially if you are not seeing family either of those days.

</comment><comment><USER50> Really enjoyed reading this, thanks for the post!

</comment><comment><USER51> so many numbers !!!!!</comment>


Why is learning a language so darn hard - <AUTHOR> http://gameswithwords.fieldofscience.com/2010/08/why-is-learning-language-so-darn-hard.html <comment><USER2> The author wants to know why toddlers who are surrounded by a language and can never speak to anyone about anything as long as they live unless they learn it outperform high school students who don't need it to communicate with their friends and spend one class period learning about it (and that instruction not necessarily even given in the target language)? Well, I have a theory on that.

Also, the previous post the author links to claims that it is remarkable that children learn language at a rate of 1 word every two hours? Seriously? I just learned a word of Greek in under two minutes. Kalimera!

Really, Khatzumoto of All Japanese All The Time says it best:

"It is a poisonous combination of ignorance, arrogance and innumeracy to expect to have even passable Japanese WITH AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE LESS EFFORT than even a typical Japanese toddler has put in."

[http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/cute-girls- mathema...](http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/cute-girls-mathematics- language)</comment>


Puppet switches GPL license to Apache - <AUTHOR> http://m.zdnet.com/blog/virtualization/puppet-labs-delivers-the-faces-api-and-changes-to-apache-20-licensing/3014

<comment><USER2> Here's what they say on the Puppet blog about this: [http://www.puppetlabs.com/blog/relicensing-puppet-to- apache-...](http://www.puppetlabs.com/blog/relicensing-puppet-to-apache-2-0/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is probably a good thing for Puppet. If the want to drive adoption of their software in the enterprise, it's better to switch to a more permissive license than the somewhat Idealistic GPL. It will make corporate legal departments more comfortable with the idea of using Puppet.

</comment><comment><USER4> What a crappy article. The author clearly didn't do the homework - and instead resorts to a bunch of conjectures.

</comment><comment><USER5> I am amazed that something as far reaching as a license change is based on "I heard this, I heard that" logic.

<comment><USER6> Presumably you're customers will be using similar logic so it's not completely invalid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> you should work on your about page. Do a five minute usability test and ask five random people what puppet does. Hint: The only clue is hidden in the book ad at the very end of the page.

</comment><comment><USER8> I keep wanting to try Puppet, but they have _very_ effectively hidden the OSS version. Where the hell is it?

<comment><USER9> <http://www.puppetlabs.com/misc/download-options/>

What the hell are you talking about, that was linked right off their homepage as "Download". Can't really be any less hidden than that.

<comment><USER10> Is it? "Download" links here:

<http://info.puppetlabs.com/download>

Then I have to click a link at the bottom to here:

<http://info.puppetlabs.com/register-download>

Then I have to scroll to the bottom to skip registration and get to the page you linked.

<comment><USER9> I only see the register page when I go there, which doesn't seem unreasonable to me.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Racism: Are Children Color-Blind? - <AUTHOR> http://cnn.com/video/?/video/bestoftv/2010/05/17/ac360.doll.study.cnn

<comment><USER2> At least two previous submissions here on HN, of which

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1348123>

is the earlier.</comment>


Racial-profiling software shows how AI can be dangerous - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1286533/a-startup-selling-racial-profiling-software-shows-how-ai-can-be-dangerous-way-before-any-robot-apocalypse/ <comment><USER2> It's not about intent at all, frequently in cases along the lines of "AI did racial profiling" the effect was entirely unintentional, it was the expression of a bias in the data, or an unintended bias from the point of view of the developers.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. I wrote a relevant comment[1] on a different thread a while ago, which I'll reproduce here for convenience:

The other day out of curiosity I was searching for basic words on ImageNet: cat, dog, man, woman.

Here is the page for "woman" [http://image- net.org/search?q=woman](http://image-net.org/search?q=woman)

I was surprised to notice a couple of things:

\- There are categorizations for "mistress", "slut", and "adultress". The closest analogs for "man" appear to be "playboy", "stud", and "pimp". There is also a "foolish woman" and doesn't appear to be an analog for man.

\- Look at the pictures for "mistress". Many if not most of them are just women in their bathing suits or doing other normal things, like laying in a bed with a man. The same is true for "slut". Does this mean AIs using ImageNet could look at a woman on a beach and categorize her as a "slut"?

\- There is a category for "honest woman", which appears to be three pictures of a woman standing next to a man.

I'm not saying anybody is at fault or that the people who put ImageNet together did this intentionally. After all, it does reflect the (unfortunate) reality of how our society often perceives images of women.

But before I poked through that dataset, it wouldn't have occurred to me how important it is that we focus on equality and non-discrimination when it comes to AI. This declaration[2] seems like an interesting step.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103921](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103921)

[2] [https://www.accessnow.org/the-toronto-declaration- protecting...](https://www.accessnow.org/the-toronto-declaration-protecting- the-rights-to-equality-and-non-discrimination-in-machine-learning-systems/)

<comment><USER4> I don't know how much stock I would put in this being indicative of our society's views on gender. Notably, you point out that there is no male analog for "foolish woman", but we're all familiar with the foolish man trope (Joey from friends, Phil from Modern Family, Tim from Home Improvement, Ron Burgundy from Anchror Man, etc etc).

Note: I shouldn't have to point out that I'm _not_ saying our society is fair and just with respect to gender, but I know a lot of people will try and twist my words, so hopefully this disclaimer heads off a lot of unnecessary tangents.

<comment> crooked-v It makes me think less "failure in image classification", and more "implicit bias in the WordNet database and/or failure to represent concepts that can't be described succintly in English".

<comment><USER4> It could also be "failure to pick words that mean the thing the image classifier learned". Also, implicit bias in the WordNet database could be _a different implicit bias than exists in society_. Simply, we don't know and we should avoid pat explanations and guard ourselves against our own confirmation biases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "Ultimately, it's about intent and we have a lot of faith in humanity," > [Zeiler] wrote. "It's not our business to limit what developers create and > we choose to believe that most people will use our Demographics for good"

It would be less insulting to the reader's intelligence if he outright said that racial profiling is just too lucrative of a market to pass up.

</comment><comment><USER6> > Privacy advocates like the American Civil Liberties Union already decry the > use of facial-recognition AI in most cases, making the case that widespread > adoption of the technology would mean we would live under constant > surveillance by police or large tech companies. Ethnicity recognition is a > step even further past the ACLU's line in the sand.</comment>


A Decade of Degrees - <AUTHOR> http://apps.northbynorthwestern.com/majors/

<comment><USER2> I find this interesting. Looking at Computer Science, it dropped off sharply after 2005 and I'm struggling for an explanation. My first idea was that there was an influx of CS majors from the 2001 period who started prior to the bubble, than just stayed to complete their degree.

<comment><USER3> CS prof since 2000 here. We saw similar numbers at my school. I imagine the explanation is something like what you suggest.

Note, by the way, that we might be a bit less pessimistic than your "just stayed to complete their degree". The bubble drove a great deal of publicity concerning computer programming; the result was an increased interest. And that interest remained even after the bubble popped.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, that was a very pessimistic way to phrase it, but you got what I meant. I didn't mean for it to be so pessimistic.</comment></comment></comment>


If the heart is a muscle, why doesn't it ever get tired? - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fm2z8x/if_a_heart_is_a_muscle_why_doesnt_it_ever_get/ <comment><USER2> I don't think any of the top answers are good at all. I suspect part of the reason is how poorly we understand muscle fatigue.

Many answers talk about lactate and how it builds up in muscles but not the heart. However they don't say anything about how lactate is related to fatigue.

A lot of the answers talk about the high mitochondria concentration in the heart. This allows it to use more oxygen and produce more ATP. That's fine, but again, what is the connection between mitochondria and fatigue?

One example to show these answers are inadequate: You can walk or jog at an easy effort for a long time and eventually your muscles will get tired and sore, without ever going anaerobic or lactic -- i.e. without your leg muscles ever needing more energy than your mitochondria can provide or ever producing more lactic acid than your bloodstream can clear away immediately.

So mitochondria and lactic acid can't be the full story.

I don't know the true answer and I'm not a biologist, but I suspect the heart has evolved to never be the weakest link. Maybe exercise always strengthens the heart at a higher rate than the other muscles. Or maybe part of the answer is that we don't have nerves to feel soreness/tiredness in the heart? (I have seen research that the heart does experience temporary damage from e.g. marathons, so it does get tired in some sense. Of course then it gets stronger.)

<comment><USER3> Another part of the answer is that fatigue is largely in our heads. Your body wants you to minimize energy spending, probably because in cavemen days food was so hard to obtain. You will feel tired long before you hit real physical limits. If you've ever taken amphetamines, it becomes obvious. Suddenly, you can spend all night dancing more energetically than you ever did without feeling tired, work longer than ever, etc. Not suggesting that this is in any way sustainable long-term, it isn't, but for me, it really highlighted how my body is physically able to go several times beyond the point where I feel tired and uncomfortable. It's just that some core instincts really don't want me to spend energy liberally.

<comment><USER4> > Another part of the answer is that fatigue is largely in our heads.

Not in our heads, but in our nervous system. Some types of fatigue are due to feedback into our central nervous system that reduces muscle activation signals from your brain in order to avoid damaging the muscle. But if you're untrained, your body doesn't actually know where this point really is.

Most strength and endurance gains when you first start training are neurological, where the effect of this feedback loop is pushed back as your body learns the true threshold for muscular damage.

The heart does get fatigued though. You can run a horse into dying from a heart attack, for instance. Most people simply aren't fit enough to push it that far, as their other muscles would give out first.

<comment><USER5> My guess is that the heart rests between each beat.

<comment><USER6> Like a jazz musician.

<comment><USER7> like a serverless function

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As we were told during high school biology: cardiovascular muscle contains vast amounts of mitochondria as compared to other muscle types. Mitochondria are good. Therefore, more and stronger mitochondria = more efficient working muscle tissue.

One of my favorite professors holds a PhD in kinesiology (exercise physiology concentration) and wrote his dissertation on the mitochondria. As he stated many times in class: if you want to have a superhuman composition, acquire more mitochondria. he was always willing to bet his kids entire college tuition funds if you could show him a pill that would produce more mitochondria.

<comment><USER9> Then I guess the obvious question a non-physiologist would ask is, why don't all our muscles already have vast amounts of mitochondria? If it's that beneficial with no major downsides then surely evolution would have stumbled on that configuration already?

<comment><USER10> Mitochondria do produce a lot of free radicals. Probably energy expensive to maintain cells like that.

<comment><USER11> not only energy expensive but free radicals do genetic damage, and a this requires the second budget for a set of enzymes to counteract the damages and scrub out FR's

<comment><USER12> Why isn't Heart Cancer more common if it's producing so many free radicals? Are there other mechanisms blocking genetic damage?

<comment><USER13> Muscle cells don't replicate past early childhood development, they just get bigger and add more nuclei. So muscle cancers are extremely rare compared to cancers of other tissues.

<comment><USER11> each nucleus contains a full genomic content. muscles are more of a "myosynsynctium" than a group of cells. there are cohorts of cells that are more prone to becoming cancer due to thier developmental origins and the complement of developmental mechanisms that can be reactivated.

things such as cell adhesion, and cell migration through tissue dermal cells are good at this as they do these things over the course of development.

muscles are built where they will live so these features are inhibited somewhat more completely and harder to "switch on or off"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's three types of muscles: smooth, skeletal, and cardiac. They share a lot in common but are very distinct to each other. Might not be an apples to apples comparison because fatigue is a notion taken from our experience of skeletal muscles which is not cardiac muscle. It would be interesting to compare the energy spend of each, or rather the power each is capable of. As enduring as the heart is its likely limited in its power output because its just circulating fluid against resistance and gravity. I don't know how much energy is required for that. Bench pressing a hundred pounds, what's the power in that and how many heart beats would equal that work?

<comment><USER15> Someone with more maths chops than me should be able to tell you how much energy it takes to lift 50kg 50cm over 5 seconds at Earth's surface.

I'd imagine it's at least a magnitude of more than the heart would expend in 5 seconds.

<comment><USER16> 50 kg * 50 cm * 9.8 (m/s^2)

PE = M g h

<comment><USER17> 245 joules

<comment><USER18> 245J/5s == 49W

This website [1] shows several sources. The range of estimated power outputs is between 1W and 5W.

[https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/IradaMuslumova.shtml](https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/IradaMuslumova.shtml)

OP hypothesis seems to be correct.

<comment><USER19> yes, but the original question was "how many heartbeats". First source in the link says 75bpm and 2w, 245J/2w = 122.5 seconds or ~2 minutes of 75bpm, 150 beats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It doesn't because it can't. Any hearts that got tired died, and their owners did not reproduce.

It's like being Atlas--you're holding up the world. It's not a virtue, a flaw, a conceit, nor anything at all. It is because it must be.

<comment><USER4> > It doesn't because it can't. Any hearts that got tired died, and their > owners did not reproduce.

They're asking why the heart can't get tired. You answered why we evolved such that the heart can't get tired, which is not the same question.

<comment><USER20> True. My answer was more of a _cri de coeur_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Missed from that first comment is that... the heart not getting tired is a problem.

You can overwork your heart which can lead to lesions. Endurance athletes who exercise excessively can have heart problems.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3538475/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3538475/)

That muscles get tired and sore is a feature because it prevents damage.

<comment><USER22> Atrial fib is no joke. I don't know who needs to hear this, but if you are considering becoming an endurance athlete, and especially if you are considering transitioning to ultra-endurance, go see a fucking doctor before, after and during.

Source: father had a stroke 20 years later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Everybody always wonders about the heart and never about the intestines.

Shit in shit out, day after day after day. If not for you guts never tiring, your heart wouldn't get any fuel, you'd get a fistula and die of sepsis, you'd back up like a lot of people's pipes this week because they're flushing unflushable wipes.

So here's to the real unsung smooth muscles of the body. We salute you.

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow. Incredibly reasonable question that I've never given much thought to. Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER25> [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29798816/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29798816/)

<comment><USER26> Yes. Also this:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5215277/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5215277/)

It may be that the heart is multi-functional. It may serve as a regulator, a pump, or some combination of the two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Isn't it funny how many meanings the word "why" has?

My first explanation, on hearing the question, was: because, evolutionarily speaking, no organism would have relied so heavily on the heart if it got tired easily.

Or looking on it another way, if the heart was easily fatigued, we'd be all dead, or be very different.

<comment><USER22> There have been a few astrophysics shows where they talked about 'why are we here?', with varying definitions of 'why' or special emphasis on _here_ (as opposed to elsewhere).

In most of them, someone says words to the effect of "well if we weren't here, we wouldn't be having this conversation". Survivor bias, in a very literal sense.

<comment><USER27> ... also know as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The heart does get tired eventually. Poor blood circulation will do terrible things.

This is a pretty cool technology.

[https://billionsinchange.in/en/solutions/renew/](https://billionsinchange.in/en/solutions/renew/)

It squeezes the legs to help the heart pump blood.

<comment><USER29> Wouldn't that increase mean arterial pressure? Would the heart reduce its output as a response to the external pressure? And what's with their claims of it clearing "trash" from your brain?

<comment><USER28> I honestly have no idea. The marketing material suggests old people show health improvements. I'm no expert but so far it seems officially it doesn't do anything but looks promising.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3021100/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3021100/)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC385349/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC385349/)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3383356/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3383356/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Doesn't it though?As we grow older, the heart rate usually slows down.And since it is a muscle, it shows that working out can improve heart rate and other vascular conditions.

"Tired" not as in the other muscles, but you can't function at 100% for long period of times.

</comment><comment><USER26> I hate to spread a wacky idea, but I ran across something on Facebook the other day that I initially wanted to disprove but then started to seem plausible. The general consensus is that the heart is a pump and generally the sole driver of circulation in mammals. There is an alternative theory, which seems easy to disprove, that the heart is more of a regulator and operates more like a hydraulic ram. I can post more links later. Curious if anyone has heard of that and if there is a rebuttal to the idea.

Edit: The paper I was thinking of, if anyone is interested, is here [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5215277/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5215277/)

Edit #2, from the paper: "Gladwin et al. estimated that 25% to 30% of basal human blood flow can be attributed to red blood cell-induced production of nitric oxide by vascular endothelium."

<comment><USER31> > The general consensus is that the heart is a pump and generally the sole > driver of circulation in mammals.

It's certainly not the general consensus that the heart is the sole driver of circulation in mammals. Your heart drives the flow of blood out through your arteries; it's much less effective at driving blood back through your veins.

<comment><USER15> Veins contain one-way valves, so veinous return is aided by movement and muscle contraction.

The lymphatic system doesn't have a pump at all and is entirely driven by movement + muscle contraction + fluid pressure as a result of tissue integrity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Oh hey, this reminds me of one of my favourite songs [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5OpvDdVtYU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5OpvDdVtYU)

</comment><comment><USER33> Any runner or cyclist knows your heart gets tired.

A beat is not guaranteed volume, a rested heart can move more blood at the same heartrate than a tired one.

</comment><comment><USER34> It does. Try riding a bike above FTP at altitude for as long as you can. Then describe how your heart feels for the reminder of that day.

</comment><comment><USER35> Also, why heart doesn't get bigger/thicker walls through cardio? Like we can do enough reps and sets to achieve hypertrophy?

<comment><USER36> The heart _does_ experience hypertrophy from exercise.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Isn't a heart attack basically the heart muscle getting too fatigued to keep going?

It doesn't seem to ben the only muscle that doesn't get tired - e.g. if it weren't for sleeping I suspect the neck muscles could hold up the head indefinitely. The diaphragm obviously never gets tired either, unless you have asthma.

I can also type pretty much indefinitely without feeling muscle fatigue in my fingers. climbing on the other hand will exert them enough to quickly fatigue them.

<comment><USER26> A heart attack is caused by an interruption in the supply of blood to the heart muscle(or by an electrical problem, i.e. arrhythmia).

<comment><USER37> Ah, TIL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The heart does get tired, it can operate at very high levels but only for a short period of time.

It also has a pretty good blood supply.

</comment><comment><USER39> It does can get tired. This tiredness is just experienced differently from tiredness of other muscles.

</comment><comment><USER39> Hasn't anyone here ever heard of a broken heart? A broken heart is a tired heart.

</comment><comment><USER40> Yogis would posit it's prana shakti.

<comment><USER41> Aye. The heart is not really a pump for blood. There's a kind of signal that comes in from above through the Sun to the Earth and then up into each beings heart. The organ is more of a resonator or tuned waveform guide for this pulse, which then flows through the body moving the blood.

There's a kind of meditation you can do that involves becoming aware of the pulse throughout your body. The subjective experience is very powerful, so much so that I've personally have not gone "all the way" as I fear it would dissolve me. Metaphorically, direct awareness of the blood pulse is like looking into the sun, it's too potent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> It does rest after every beat

</comment><comment><USER43> Because all known multicellular organisms, with the exception of a few (<10 out of millions) microscopic species, use the electron transport chain to produce ATP and the animals whose primary organ responsible for supplying the entire body's metabolism suddenly stopped all died on the spot.

Now, _how_ those animals survived is a much more interesting question.

</comment><comment><USER44> This isn't suuuuper relevant, but the title instantly made me think of one of my favorite folk-punk songs by Ramshackle Glory called "Your heart is a muscle the size of your fist". The album version is really good[0], but I do vastly prefer the energy of this phone-recorded live version[1].

      [0] https://youtu.be/pC3IrqUpm9U
      [1] https://youtu.be/ubX9JaaqBXo

<comment><USER45> Not: Your Heart Is a Muscle by Carly Rae Jepsen?</comment></comment>


Signs point to Apple abandoning OS X branding in favor of "MacOS" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/04/signs-point-to-apple-abandoning-os-x-branding-in-favor-of-macos/ <comment><USER2> So soon we might be able to say MacOS goes to 11?</comment>


Ask HN: Trial Freelancing?  - <AUTHOR>

My business partner and I have been looking for a web developer to help us build a first version of our website. Rather than hire a freelancer outright, we would like to find someone who is interested in doing a "Trial Freelance" period where the developer would get paid to build out an MVP. Upon finishing this initial product and assuming it's satisfactory, both the developer and ourselves can assess if we enjoyed the process / working with each other and perhaps continue on together as our startup evolves.
The Trial Freelance would be a complete standalone deal. If either side didn't enjoy working w/ the other or decided to go another direction for any reason, there would be no pressure to continue working together. A test run of sorts.
We have found that services like Odesk often yield diluted results and set a precedent towards pure freelancing, while headhunting services often pair us with development companies who are only interested in getting us to pay as much as possible for as much as possible. We are trying to find a happy medium.
We have mock-ups, a business plan, and expansion strategy. We both have experience at prestigious companies and are ready to do our own thing with the best of intentions, but have found that many programmers in the freelancing field are weary of starry-eyed MBA grads and wannabe millionaires who have not done their homework. Starting a company is hard enough without delusions of grandeur!
TL;DR: Trial Freelancing is standalone deal where a developer builds an MVP with an eye towards potentially continuing to work with the business (s)he is freelancing for.
Does the idea of Trial Freelancing sound appealing? <comment><USER2> This would sound interesting only for a service provider who is willing to build a long term relationship with you. So if you could find someone like that, it would be a definite win for you and him/her as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> My thought was that by utilizing a trial period there would be limited downside (if any at all) with tremendous upside in success.

After all, if the developer enjoyed the process and did an amazing job, why would either side want to cease working together?

<comment><USER2> Agree, it is all about the getting to know and that probationary time period builds the confidence on both parties about each other. I'm interested about this approach and like to give it a go. Please contact me carcruz1976 [at] gmail.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> just emailed you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm interested in discussing this opportunity. Email me at: scott at underwood dot co</comment>


Bitcoins for Good - <AUTHOR> http://www.namingthingsishard.com/2011/05/31/bitcoins-for-good.html

<comment><USER2> This would be a significantly better project than bitcoin, and it would be possible, it just wouldn't serve the same purpose. What it would do is value time and effort; what it wouldn't do is waste pointless cycles and energy to make hidden currency. This currency would be valuable because someone put energy toward social good. In contrast, bitcoins are valuable because there's a limited quantity of them and their usage can be hidden. Hence, limitless "bitcoins for good" could be created, in a vibrant and dynamic economy, while highly deflationary bitcoins will simply sit in a miser's coffee can buried in the backyard.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is bitcoin one of the most strenuous tests of the SHA-256 algorithm ever run? Besides the obvious benefit to the bitcoin ecosystem, this systematic hashing could provide useful data to a cryptographer. If there is ever a flaw in the algorithm discovered, I bet that bitcoin will play some part in it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm sure this was considered when BitCoin was being created. It's easy to -say-, but quite a lot harder to do.

<comment><USER5> The author is fundamentally flawed in his approach. He thinks bitcoin mining is just mindless churning on your GPU.

But in reality, it's cryptographically checking the validity of bitcoin transactions. So the system churns for the benefit of the system itself, instead of churning for the benefit of some external goal.

<comment><USER6> No, I think everyone is on the same page. It's just semantics: mining _is_ a mindless task, it just happens that bitcoin requires verifiable but otherwise pointless tasks in order to operate.

And I don't think you should dismiss this criticism so easily. I personally have very little confidence in bitcoin as a currency. But if the system also contributed to science by folding proteins or finding Mersenne primes or doing anything else that is externally useful, I would consider participating.

<comment><USER5> Am I completely missing a key part of bitcoin, then? My understanding was the 'pointless tasks' were actually the verifications of previous transactions. And to make such a system verifiable, several nodes in the network must hash out the same blocks the same way.

<comment><USER6> Yes, that's my understanding. But it doesn't require that the tasks are "pointless" -- just that they are hard to compute, but relatively easy to verify.

There are lots of problems in bioinformatics and physics that are hard to compute and easily divided into chunks. Find one that also has easily verifiable results and you've got a pretty good candidate.

<comment><USER5> But the problems being chunked up in bitcoins are the actual bitcoin transactions, thus churning them is not pointless. It strengthens the system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is not practical. If bitcoins related to some sort of market value for computation, there would be inflation of 40% / year.

Look at how mining for bitcoins compares to mining for real gold. Our species spends all this energy to dig gold up out of the ground, purify it, just to stick it back into the ground in vaults and then we pay someone to stand watching over it.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, I don't follow. Where does 40% come from?

And to state the obvious, not all gold goes in vaults. Both the supply and demand for gold is affected by its fashion and industrial uses.

<comment><USER8> Actually the largest price driver of gold now is 'fear'.

Since many countries price their currencies to the USD, the USD has become a defacto currency. This means that inflationary pressure on the USD affects the whole world.

Gold prices are up as people are speculating that some countries will price their currency against gold. If countries don't do this, or if people stop believing that countries will do this, gold will go down in value.

Ironically large company stocks are probably the largest most stable and fluid currencies left. I think the term is fungible.

So if you buy stock in say a microsoft or a google, the changes are that those large company stocks will trade well if your home country's currency is inflating. The reason is that large companies diversify their holdings and optimize those holdings for profit. This is something that governments rarely do well.

I have started to wonder if investing in a sort of International Dow Jones as a currency base makes sense. I don't know how it would work, but it would be better than using gift cards as part of a currency as suggested by a few.

As for bitcoin as a currency, it seems to be based off of the cost of energy/ computing efficiency, however the currency does not seem to have been designed to match the USD, but rather make use of a set of tech features that were convenient to demonstrate it's proof.

It seems clear to me that Bit Coin Miner's will find the largest profits in using FPGA's, and that is unlikely to create a cloud structure that is useful for other things. How can you virtualize an FPGA?

All currencies are imperfect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Killing two birds with one stone is laudable; but a fair, decentralized currency with a bird worth a stone by itself.</comment>


WalmartLabs opensources its tool for bringing React Native to mobile apps - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/29/walmart-labs-open-sources-its-tool-for-bringing-react-native-to-existing-mobile-apps/ <comment><USER2> If their Lacinia GraphQL library for Clojure [1] is any indication of code quality, this should be very useful. I'm very impressed with the former, and I'll be sure to look this new one over.

1: [https://github.com/walmartlabs/lacinia](https://github.com/walmartlabs/lacinia)

</comment><comment><USER3> Are these discards from the jet.com acquisition or actual critical path libraries?

<comment><USER4> Walmart acquired a company called Kosmix in 2011 and spun it out as a research division called @WalmartLabs [1].

Walmart acquired the online retailer, Jet.com in late 2016 which still has their own engineering team (using a lot of F#)

Stuff coming from @WalmartLabs is almost always real stuff that Walmart is using in production (website, apps, etc.)

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

<comment><USER5> Yup! A portion of Electrode is being used inside of the Walmart.com app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> it's interesting to see the react-native detractors in this thread vs an Ask HN thread we had about react-native a couple of weeks ago. I wonder how many people could really determine an app's usage of RN in a blind taste test. could the disdain for js the language and bad memories of wrapped webviews be bleeding over? in our experience RN has offered a ton of leverage for a small team, and js makes a fine target to transpile to (we use cljs).

<comment><USER7> We are in the process of rebuilding our app in react native. As a test, we created a portion of it in react native and did a side by side.

Our app is your basic slide out navigation with pages and forms and some animation. There is literally no detectable difference.

The only thing that I am still not sure of is performance on older devices. But on iPhone 6 and Galaxy S7... I wish we had started with react native from the beginning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why a company the size of Walmart does this cross platform crap is beyond me. Do they not have the resources to actually write real native apps in actual Swift? Why is it desirable to code to the the worst common denominators for devices? Cross platform is just lazy. And React "Native" is inferior to actual native.

<comment><USER9> Ultimately the declarative way of writing apps is objectively better and more predictable than the old mutable way :)

Now that said, I agree on the performance costs, and too wonder why Walmart is hellbent on this strategy, given the endless resources they have.

But at the end of the day, they have a head of engineering and need to make their lives simpler just like everyone else. If you know how to squeeze the performance out of RN/React, developing apps in the semi-FP declarative sate- driven way is a dream compared to all the old ways of client app development. People who's views are so against React/ReactNative usually haven't experienced it for themselves. I suggest really giving it try before making these comments which usually serve just to validate decisions already made. I.e. to make one's self feel better about sticking to the old ways. However, I totally understand what it feels like for new tools to pop up that put into question old ways I've invested a lot into. That said, don't you think you'd be better off fully exploring these ways before shooting them down? Don't tell me you have--zero people that have grokked the effectiveness of declarative state-driven programming make these remarks. They usually leave some hint at their experience with React. In short, it's only you left in the dust :)

Give the tools a try, which I know will likely be hard for you because you are likely coming from the Native world. I will say this: it's a lot more than just one language to make hybrid apps (i.e. like past tools such as Titanium). And, of course perf will be a challenge. That said, the perf is amazing given what it is. But more importantly, the style of development is what it's all about. It's so different and so much more predictable/debuggable than the old mutable ways. To me, it matters not that it's in JS. What matters is the declarative state driven way of development. If you can do that in native code, you're basically doing the most important aspect--and basically there's no argument from me there. There are some libraries that allow for that, but it's nowhere near the extent of what you can do in React/JS, given its ecosystem. I lot of work is being put in here to make this the best of breed future of application development. If you can't see it, you're missing out. Do your homework on React once and for all. You can thank me later.

Last point: Walmart's tool here is specifically meant for making apps where some of it you want in "actual native" and other parts in "react native." Without a doubt coding the React style is the best DX for UI development. AND without a doubt, "actual native" performs far FAR better. So what they have here is a toolbox for those with an "engineering mindset" to pick the best tool for the job. Everything that's happening is just getting better and better for all parties involved, no matter where your experience lies.

<comment><USER10> I've done both native (Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, Gtk+, Tizen) and React.

Your post comes off as condescending fanboy hype. I understand you want to promote React, but this approach does more damage than good.

My personal experience is that "declarative" in this industry is a perennial silver bullet. What often goes unnoticed is that declarative languages are not very future-proof, as extensions are constrained by the originally chosen primitives. Pathological examples are enterprise Java+XML and CSS — both of these were hailed as declarative breakthroughs originally, and today they are the stuff of "TheDailyWTF" nightmares.

Surely that will not happen to React, you say, because it gets so many things right? Well, as a thought exercise, imagine what things could be like in 2027 and then imagine you're stuck working in a 15-year-old patched up JavaScript/HTML hybrid. That is the endgame. I like React, but it's subject to the same market forces as every other technology in this space.

<comment><USER11> > Java+XML and CSS — both of these were hailed as declarative breakthroughs > originally, and today they are the stuff of "TheDailyWTF" nightmares.

Java+XML isn't declarative, XSLT was. XSLT declined when XML declined. CSS works quite well even today and is still widely used.

Declarative coding style is in many ways resistant to obsolescence since you're just declaring what you want than how to do it. The best example is SQL; mostly unchanged in decades.

<comment><USER10> XML is certainly declarative.

As far as CSS goes — ask any front-end web developer if they would like all programming to be more like CSS...? It is a collection of thousands of properties, often overlapping or contradictory, some with their own sublanguages for further specification, and many features are defined as hidden side effects of one property when nested inside another. A total mess.

You can only declare what you want if the language lets you say it. (Think of Wittgenstein's famous maxim.) SQL was a great design informed by decades of research. Most software designs are not like that, unfortunately.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Start Hacking – Be The H.A.C.R. – Ep – 01 - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkLLBy-Sk3I <comment><AUTHOR> Just started with my YouTube channel : HackingSimplified Hope to get some feedback here. P.S. There's a feedback link in the end ( as well as in the description ).

A few improvements I got in early feedback :

1\. Improve on video quality ( doesn't look 1080p )

2\. Improve on sound quality

3\. Please please decrease jump cuts or at least make them smooth

4\. Decrease your screen time : Don't want to see you so much -_-

Have started working on next video, current setup has serious hardware constraints ( recording audio and video from phone ) and lockdown has increased difficulty getting better hardware.

Nevertheless would love to hear your opinions on this. Also let me know what all needs to be improved on technical aspects.</comment>


Microsoft Plants Security Scare As IE Plunges To 40% Market Share - <AUTHOR> http://www.conceivablytech.com/9622/business/microsoft-plants-security-scare-as-ie-plunges-to-40-market-share

<comment><USER2> Is it in Microsoft's culture to do stuff like this? I'm sure others do it too from time to time, but Microsoft seems to be trying to _strongly_ manipulate perceptions (read: mislead) a lot more than others.</comment>


Ask HN: How to leave a company on friendly terms - <AUTHOR>

I'm getting ready to leave a small company I've been with for three years, and I want to go without leaving any bitterness, as I'm friendly with the CEO and MD (it's a small ~15 person company - my other colleagues won't take my leaving personally).
The problem is that they won't be happy to just let me go, they'll want to hear my logic, which I'd rather avoid giving - while giving negative feedback might help them improve, in this case it's unlikely to, and will just come across as criticism.
What's the best way to either avoiding giving any negative feedback or to make it come across OK, and any other advice on leaving a very friendly company?
side note: no new job lined up, so can't use that as the reason <comment><USER2> Just say personal reasons, and that you don't want to stuck in the same routine for rest of your life, thus you want to tryout something new.

If you really like the team, tell them about it, but you can't be sacrificing your life for something you don't really want or enjoy doing. If you want to provide feedbacks, tell them you have a few suggestions you can give, and they might be a little offensive, and ask for their permission to say it before you do it. If they don't want to hear it, then don't bother. If they do, just provide the sincere feedbacks that you would like to give.

<comment><USER3> Another thing that might augment your "no harm intended" message is taking steps to maintain the connection after you leave. Say you're leaving for personal reasons, and a month or so after you do, you might call up a colleague or two and see if they want to grab lunch or drinks. It can show that you still value them as people while still letting you get out of a situation you no longer want to be a part of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You could say your planning to start your own company. Of course it would help if you were, in fact, planning to start one. If your not going to be seeing them on a regular basis after leaving the company then it might work, even if you aren't starting one :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not really in a startup area, so starting my own company would be seen as far more negative than giving criticism :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "I want to take a break before I figure out what I want to do next."

Don't worry about it so much. This is pretty much how everyone leaves on good terms.</comment>