How to Pick Your Life Partner (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner.html?utm_source=Main+List&utm_campaign=a28c8308c6-&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5b568bad0b-a28c8308c6-54155229&mc_cid=a28c8308c6&mc_eid=507e56c683 <comment><USER3> You should also read part 2 of the article.

After some relationships from 18-28 that all ended unhappy, I decided to screen my next partner in a very rational way. Of course I wanted romance and some attractiveness out of my next girlfriend, but I primarily wanted a friend that I could talk to when we were 95 and sitting in wheelchairs next to each other, unable to do much else. Destiny called and the girl I then met and found worthwhile to date further became my wife and mother of two children.

Why I reference the second part of the article: we just talked about it and totally agreed that our marriage was more or less how it should be (as described in part 2) and felt not at all touched by part 1.

While we are for sure people that are different, we usually find new stuff we absolutely want to do together. Last year we did boat- and radio licenses (5 so far...), this year we began pistol shooting in a sports club, we travel to many places, have tons of family meetings (I think being in a supportive family helps a lot, too)... yes we also have the occasional fight, but there has been exactly no occurence where it had not been completely resolved before sleeping.

So being rational about your partner does not mean to stop the fun, stop the romance, but means you know exactly what you get into and care for the happiness for you own life.

Remember: a divorce is often the complete destruction of your life dreams. You can destroy yourself and/or your partner. Your partner REALLY gives the single life he/she has in your hands and hopes, like you do, that everything will go right. Don't be a fool when given such a treasure.

<comment><USER4> What where the rational ways that worked for you. What did you screen?

<comment><USER3> Can I talk with her for long periods of time? And if we don't talk, is it awkward? Do we have the similar goals? Do we have the same family values? Do we have an understanding for each others hobbies? Do I like the family I marry into (which was a bit complicated by the fact that her family lives in Iran, I first had to go there visit them)? Do we both want to develop or does she want to stand still? Do we share a similar interest for the world? Can I stand our differences (our main difference is that I definitively like to socialize more with people I don't know while she is rather introvert)? Can I be honest? Don't I want to have an affair? Can we resolve conflicts fast (in a former relationship it took a week, which killed me)? Do we like to eat similar stuff (imagine a vegan and a fast food junkie glued together...)? Can I stand her voice? (I actually first fell in love with her voice which surprising as I am very much guided by hearing sense)

Many of those thoughts I had. Quite simple stuff at times. I had two years two think it all through, see how she behaves in everday life. So at the day of the wedding, I knew I got the best I can get.

There is always a partner to find that can be more attractive, more intelligent, better at XYZ. But when you've done your due dilligence, all the boxes are ticked in a way you are ok with it, you have found the partner you really need.

<comment><USER5> > Do I like the family I marry into (which was a bit complicated by the fact > that her family lives in Iran, I first had to go there visit them)?

Curious about this one, esp given the distance. My family lives in multiple states, and I estimate at best 5-6 days with a 50% chance of seeing some of them in a year. And if I was married and had kids, I'd drop that guess to about 25%.

There has been a related post realizing the relatively small amount of time we have with our parents.

It seems, that particularly with parents living in a different region of the world, that your need to like the family is limited.

<comment><USER6> If the family is accessible I've found this to be a wonderful proxy for compatibility. Is their family structure how you'd like yours? Do you get along with and easily make friends with other family members?

It's a good sign if your personality is compatible with the family and their way of life is what you're looking for.

It's of my top indicators, I've rarely found people that strayed very far from their family in personality, hobbies, and life outlook.

<comment><USER7> > I've rarely found people that strayed very far from their family in > personality, hobbies, and life outlook.

In my experience, that's generally true except for people who moved to a different country at a relatively young age (or just after high school) and stayed in that country. So in the case of OP, if her family lives in Iran and she's in the US, it's likely she has a very different life outlook and cultural view than her family.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 1\. I have always hated the notion that having a happy marriage is about filtering through many candidates to find the one perfect partner. Although I do think it's reasonable to try to learn early on what you're looking for, this idea that we should all be dramatically expanding our dating pool to find the perfect person is abominable.

Look at a city with a massive population of eligible young people, like say NYC.. and then listen to what people in NYC say about the dating scene there. It's not pretty. Having such a huge pool of potential mates _discourages_ people from committing. In other words, it makes it _harder_ to find a long term mate, and it makes you less satisfied with whoever you're seeing.

2\. Biology isn't the only reason a person might want to get married before 40. There's something to be said for sharing your early adulthood with a person. Meeting your life partner at 37 will be a very different experience from meeting your life partner at 22. Not necessarily a _bad_ experience, but not what everyone is looking for.

<comment><USER9> To put it in terms that might be more familiar around here, obsessing over finding the right partner is like believing that a successful startup is mostly about finding the right idea. (And from there, it will just work out on its own...) Sure, some ideas are more likely to work out a priori, but your success is going to be dramatically influenced by the amount of work you're willing to put into it, your willingness to learn, change, and grow along the way. I'm inclined to believe that there are tons of people with whom most of us could be compatible, and each would open onto a different future and a different version of you. If you want a long-term partner, choose someone who feels promising, bring all you've got--intellect, emotions, empathy, humility --to the relationship, and stick with it.

<comment><USER10> Yes! It is all about the amount of effort and commitment that the parties (plural) are willing to put into it.

Bear in mind that each part of the married couple will have decades of their own personal evolution occurring underneath the current of regular life. Opinions, beliefs, or attitudes that are strongly held at the time of marriage _will_ change. Even if you meet the Perfect Mate (TM), no one stays static for long.

Marriage, like all family living, requires a great deal of mutual toleration and patience, and a considerable amount of individual flexibility and adaptation.

The Perfect Couple will fall apart in short order if they are not willing to dedicate serious effort to their relationship on a perpetual basis. Marital success has little to do with the starting material.

\---

For these reasons among others, I like the cultural ideal of arranged marriages. They make it clear that marriage is about the commitment itself more than it's about the personality on either side of the equation.

I also believe that most of the parents or grandparents in a position to make the arrangements would have better character judgment than the much-younger people trying to select a good spousal candidate on their own (as above, "good spousal candidate" is someone eager and happy to work for a strong marriage).

In some sense, it is irresponsible of the older and wiser generations to offload this duty into the hands of those who have great difficulty wielding it. And while I don't believe these arrangements should be compulsory, I think we'd all be better off if this was the common practice.

<comment><USER11> In spite of what religious leaders (career term bureaucrats who actually don't know any better at all) may tell us, that's hardly the way to find maximum fulfillment in relationships. "Cultural harmony" aside. Lot of quite desperation and Prozac eating. And that's no way to go through life. Maybe being a homeless junkie is slightly worse. Maybe. Ya, man and women are together for sake of kids. Miserable and crazy. Which.. produces bad effects on kids. Probably more than at peace separated parents in fulfilled relationships. Like I say, God isn't talking at all to those old men. Nor are they wise. They are mostly full of bias and baloney.

The idea of arranged marriages is abhorrent, very close to slavery in denying individual worth and choice.

But ideally there should be some flexibility and commitment, particularly if children are involved, yes.

How to find your ideal mate for lots of men? She'll have me!

<comment><USER10> >In spite of what religious leaders (career term bureaucrats who actually don't know any better at all) may tell us, that's hardly the way to find maximum fulfillment in relationships. [...] Like I say, God isn't talking at all to those old men. Nor are they wise. They are mostly full of bias and baloney.

I don't know what you're talking about. I said nothing about religion, and this whole paragraph is all over the map. I doubt that very many couplings, including obviously bad ones, result in desperation nearing that of "a homeless junkie" as a virtue of themselves.

>The idea of arranged marriages is abhorrent, very close to slavery in denying individual worth and choice.

I disagree. Please note I said the arrangement should not be compulsory. We have many social obligations that are enforced culturally (at this point, marriage itself could almost be considered among these); such customs _can_ be flaunted at will, but there is social pressure not to do so.

Progenitors are strongly motivated to make good choices on behalf of their offspring because their offspring's interest is simultaneously their own self- interest. Parents and grandparents are much more experienced than your average 20-something and generally much better equipped to make reasonable choices in mate selection, themselves typically having had some experience in the matter.

>How to find your ideal mate for lots of men? She'll have me!

I agree, and how does this not support what I'm saying?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article attempts to presents a framework for making this decision rationally, but ultimately, it's the heart that chooses between FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

<comment><USER13> Nah, the heart chooses OpenBSD, but you stick with FreeBSD out of convenience.

The real tragedy is NetBSD being forever alone.

<comment><USER14> Or you can be unfaithful like me: run FreeBSD bare-metal and OpenBSD under bhyve! And in a few years I'll switch it around and try runing OpenBSD bare- metal and FreeBSD under vmm. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What I always tell people who are dating, and only half joking, is you need to find someone you can be bored with.

When you're young and just done with education, starting work, things are changing quickly. You're getting a lot of new experiences and meeting new people. It can be very exciting.

Unfortunately, it's unlikely to continue like that. You can't always be travelling, changing jobs, or even go out on the town. This is primarily if you're going to have kids. They need a routine, which means you need a routine.

So the challenge is to do the exciting dating thing while looking for someone who will be happy with something much more monotonous. I met at least a couple of women who seemed likeable but just didn't act like they were going to be happy on the long straight.

<comment><USER16> True b/c you don't want a significant other who creates drama.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like the way this article flips the commonplace 'What are the criteria for selecting my perfect mate?' to 'What are my motivations for getting married?'.

However, it needs to be said that if and when children arrive on the scene, _everything changes_. So really, in my opinion, the predominant issue is 'Do I want to have children and how do I want them to be raised?'

<comment><USER18>
       And when you choose a life partner, you're choosing a lot of things, including your parenting partner and someone who will deeply influence your children...

It actually really bugged me how having children was a forgone conclusion in this article.

<comment><USER19> Unfortunately most people are still stuck in the mindset that everyone who isn't broken inside wants children. I've never wanted children at any point in my life, but I'm wrong apparently.

<comment><USER20> But from a biological/evolutionary/whatever perspective, isn't not wanting children definitely "wrong"?

<comment><USER21> Well so is eating meat everyday or looking at a screen 30cm away most of the day or not dying from an infection or having hot showers...

Who cares at this point, just live your life, you owe nothing to "evolution".

<comment><USER22> Evolution is just a methodology, not living entity with desires and goals. If your genes allow you at the age of 20, to look so stunning that you have 10 children before you sadly die from the effort expended to look so swimmingly handsome, then your genes will soon proliferate to every corner of the globe. We'll call that successful 'evolution', even though most people today would be horrified that you only lived 20 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Marriage, monogamy, and (romantic) love are conservative notions that are close to being (or should be) marginalized in my opinion.

Romantic love, especially, is an extremely superficial and hollow idea exalted to high heavens by the group-think of the masses. I gave up religion, and over the years realized that love is the second, way more sneaky and no less damaging, delusion that humanity indulges in. It has to go the way of the religion.

I hope most of you would agree that at least 70%-90% of being in love has something to do with the appearance of your person-of-interest (most of it visual). No matter how you cut it, no matter how much of an intellectual you are and how much you prefer to connect deeply with a person, in the end, given two individuals, you fall in love with the one that is more visually attractive. What a coincidence!

And what is visual attraction? In other words why do we find some people more beautiful than others? Because we have a biologically ingrained form of discrimination based on looks. It's lookism plain and simple.

Note that I do not buy the silly notion that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder' and that 'I don't find that person attractive but I'm sure someone else will'. This is somewhat backed by data (e.g., the OKCupid survey), but I have developed this belief on my own. Humans of all races have a built-in instinct to find some visuals more appealing and attractive than others. It is sad but true. To take it to an extreme, if we find some visuals disgusting (e.g., spilled guts, slimy things) we don't all of a sudden go "I'm disgusted by slimy spilled guts of animals, but that's just me, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who have the exact opposite reaction, that they love to look at slimy spilled guts".

What I'm trying to say is that standards of visual attraction, while not physically objective, are largely biology objective, and yet, it's a bad thing, because it's a symptom of biological imperfection. It's a genetic defect in our biology and 99.99% of humans are afflicted by it.

I personally think social individualism is a concept that needs to gain traction in modern society. It is the 'atheism of love'.

<comment><USER24> Respectfully, your argument doesn't hold water because it doesn't look like you understand what being/falling in love is. _Sexual attraction_ is 70%-90% visual appearances and mostly biological, but falling in love is not about sexual urges, it's about happiness. We fall in love with the person that brings happiness and joy to our life by merely spending time together, not necessarily the one we want to ram our genitals into.

Most people pursue partners based on sexual urges, sure. But falling in love is a whole other game, and they don't go hand in hand.

<comment><USER23> > We fall in love with the person that brings happiness and joy to our life by > merely spending time together.

If you need to spend time with someone in order to have happiness and joy in your life, you have a problem to solve before you even think about love and dating.

<comment><USER25> Many people do have a need to be loved, you can't argue it away.

<comment><USER23> Most people have plenty of issues growing up, like low self-esteem, need for validation, etc. A combination of training, therapy, meditation, sense-of- purpose, etc can work wonders.

<comment><USER25> One such issue is nihilism, the kind you're showing here. Growing out of it often makes people happier, unlike growing out of love.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I very much enjoyed Part 2 of this article. It puts forward a much more complete framework for success than part one, which mostly just talks about the flaws in many standard approaches.

The notion that you are going to find the perfect person for the rest of your life at any given moment in time is ridiculous - you are going to change, they are going to change, your relationship is going to change both of you. The sense of friendship, being at home with one another, and the mindset that a marriage takes work have all been instrumental in my own marriage so far.

My wife and I met in our early 20s. The things we wanted out of life - <USER2> individually and as a couple - have changed significantly over the past decade. It is likely that if either of us had known where we would end up we might not have chosen our past selves to be together with our future selves. However, we've been a part of every individual and collective change and have worked to build a strong relationship through the changes. There is something amazing about walking through adulthood together and staying committed through all of the ups and downs.

</comment><comment><USER27> Sounds great if you have lots of options. Some of us are getting older and haven't made it past anyone else's filter. At some point your will to just try and make it work regardless of the match.

<comment><USER28> The only place I think that really applies is if you're in a small town. If you can't get past the first few dates after trying with 10-20 candidates in a big city (requiring 100-200 solicitations), you're probably facing one of a few very solvable problems, off the top of my head:

\- fails at basic hygiene (solved by showers, haircuts, clothes, cleaning your room, home improvement projects, eating vegetables, etc)

\- fails at basic rapport (solved by practicing with non-romantic partners)

\- underlying mental health issues (solved by your therapist/psychiatrist)

\- fails at having an appealing life to join (solved by identifying personal goals and practicing working towards them)

There are exceptions, of people who are extremely physically unattractive, or who have truly insoluble mental health issues. But it's a really tiny percentage of people. I'm talking you literally make babies cry with your appearance, or you have a history of torturing animals, or something like that.

Most people have just a couple of actual dealbreaking items on their filter, so out of 20 candidates there should be one or two whose filters are on things you accidentally do right.

And I'm not saying those four things I listed above are quick to solve. They take time. It might take 2 years of daily effort. I'm just saying they're easy to solve: there's no trick. Anyone who can bake a cake can do the steps necessary to solve them.

<comment><USER29> I've been in Cleveland 2 years and I have only went on dates with 2 people.

At my most recent workplace there was only ever one woman around my age. We went to lunch together and talked a ton so I think she liked me but I didn't want to date a coworker at the time. Other than her though, dating through work is apparently not an option.

But as for dating apps/sites and stuff I never get any matches.

So based on all that I don't understand how it's so commonplace for people to go on 10-20 dates. My whole life I've always just dated the first person that liked me, usually with years between girlfriends. Luckily they have all turned out to be great people but that's not something I can count on.

>I'm talking you literally make babies cry with your appearance, or you have a history of torturing animals, or something like that.

I'm apparently attractive enough that even straight men will tell me so unsolicited. As for mental health, the only thing there is ADD, most people who talk to me seem to think I'm really interesting and easygoing. I have a hard time reconciling all my feedback with the notion that I'm part of some exceedingly rare group that is undatable.

I don't know why I made this comment. There's not really anything for you to say in return. I'm just confused and it's got me down.

<comment><USER28> I don't recommend dating coworkers, I recommend befriending coworkers and cautiously dating their friends.

Dating apps work OK if you're average to above average in attractiveness, writing skills, and flirting, and you can keep your anxiety in check.

If you're below average in some of those areas, you need to be in non-romantic group settings so that people can observe you move confidently in space and become attracted to you. That means hobbies.

> I don't understand how it's so commonplace for people to go on 10-20 dates

Yeah, I guess I was thinking about online dating. The in person stuff is slightly different. If you volunteer for environmental restoration every weekend, you will go on 10-20 "dates" over the course of 50 weekends, while pulling up invasive species next to someone who is a little bored. That will be your first date. If you like each other, you just have to say yes to more opportunities to be with them, and they'll be doing the same, and you'll eventually get to a "real" date.

Do your best to look cute before you show up to these events, and get your mental health in order beforehand. Events with physical activity help with both of those things.

> I have a hard time reconciling all my feedback with the notion that I'm part > of some exceedingly rare group that is undatable.

Yeah, no, doesn't sound like you're in that category. From what you're saying it sounds like you're just missing the 10-20 first dates thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This was a very insightful read for me, where I introspected and identified a lot of things I had done wrong myself in relationships. That said, it was also kind of depressing. It seems that one of the greatest unsolved challenges of life is efficient matchmaking, and despite all the technology poured into it we are nowhere close to having a good solution.

Swipe-apps (latest generation of matchmaking) are completely shallow and almost entirely based on appearance and no other factors which leads them to be used for either hookups or entertainment.

Profile-based apps lead to box-checking behaviors, incentivizing people to look for "scan-tron partners" as the article calls its.

Personalized matchmaking services are expensive, time-consuming, and are limited to the pool of people willing to invest that amount of time and spend that amount of money, which is not that many folks.

This is one problem area I'd love to see some new startups address in a serious manner.

<comment><USER31> I haven't done it, but speed dating seems like the best approach. It puts you right in front of a person and, imo, you're less likely to dismiss him/her outright than you would be on the mentioned apps.

<comment><USER32> Back in my day, people met their partners in the course of normal social interaction. Weird, right? Like, you'd meet a friend of a friend, or be someplace fun and meet other people having fun. Super weird. Sure, online dating casts a much wider net, and there's something to be said for moving your thumb to make attractive strangers appear at your door, but the old way was _efficient_. More information up front meant fewer false starts and less time wasted. It was essentially speed-dating without the handholding. It wasn't that hard; you just had to get out and go somewhere, and you know, socialize.

Now with a whole new generation too averse to even talking on their phone over texting, it's probably becoming another lost art. We have managed to hack a process evolved over human civilization, only to replace it with a mildly less inconvenient but overall poorer and addictive substitute.

<comment><USER31> I completely agree with you. I'm in my early 20s and I'd much rather meet someone during my daily interactions than through an app (on which men are typically at a disadvantage). That concept felt a lot more feasible while in school, though, and much more challenging now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Finding the right life partner requires a series of filters. For me, those filters were: 1) quality of conversation; 2) ability to share work; 3) trust and reliability; 4) physical attraction. Not necessarily in that order, but long-term, the conversation and ability to collaborate with someone on the joint project of a household or family are way up there in what to look for. You definitely talk and work with each other a lot more than you moon and snuggle, so you should find someone you like to talk and work with if you want to like your life. It's really hard, though, because when you're attracted to someone physically or just desperate for sex it's a lot easier to fool yourself into thinking that their conversation is really interesting, when in fact you're just high on pheromones.

</comment><comment><USER34> What I saw in my own romantic relationships and those of others was a simple, blunt point: Do both of the people actually want to follow the first part of the standard marriage ceremony?

"We gather together to join this man and this woman with the bonds of holy matrimony."

Instead, one or the other didn't really want to "join" or "bond" and, instead, was just using, exploiting the marriage and spouse for some selfish aims.

For women, the main use was money -- she wanted to be supported. That was as far as she thought. Later one had one child, retired to a back bedroom, lived on chocolates, gained 150 pounds, and vegetated. Another had one daughter and later one by accident, retired to a back bedroom and lived on cigarettes and beer. One decided to become really good BFFs with Jim Beam and Jack Daniels. One really wanted just to do social climbing at the most expensive country club in town. Another wife wanted the spouse's wealthy family to fund a retail startup. When the startup failed, she went to college, then art school, then became a leading horse woman, all with no interest in her husband, and finally just moved out. She was very pretty, moved to NYC, apparently to try to make a big splash in media. Never heard from her again!

One husband liked sex with men as much or more than with his wife (at least two cases of that, with both of the wives very desirable); the wives didn't like that situation.

Another wife just wanted her husband to put her through law school at which time she planned to leave the marriage. Another wife just wanted her husband to put her through graduate school, at which time she planned to leave. Another wife wanted to use the marriage as a home base for various projects, around the world, to save the world.

I saw a lot of such problems: It was simple: One or both of the spouses failed right at the first sentence of the marriage ceremony -- they just didn't want to join or bond. Just didn't. To them the marriage ceremony was just a costume party with nothing serious and no connection with reality, and they wanted the marriage not to join or bond with their spouse but just to exploit them.

So, from this theme and these examples, what is in the OP is too complicated and misses the point: The point is, both spouses have to be serious all the way through the marriage vows, and failing right at the first sentence is really simple, much simpler than the OP, way too common, and a guaranteed disaster.

</comment><comment><USER35> >everyone looking for a life partner should be doing a lot of online dating, speed dating, and other systems created to broaden the candidate pool in an intelligent way.

Anyone ever heard of the paradox of choice?

All of the research I've read hints at relationships that start with a dating website being being much more fragile than relationships that have met more traditional ways and much more likely to end with a bad outcome.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/15/the-science- of...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/15/the-science-of-dating- why-we-should-stop-dating-online/)

[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/06/is- onli...](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/06/is-online- dating-destroying-love)

One may argue this is good that we are ending "bad" or "not perfect" relationships... the other side of the coin is online dating may not be leading us astray from actually meeting someone we are compatible with and is just a distraction or worse, it may be making us bad at relationships once we met someone.

</comment><comment><USER36> It was surprisingly hard to figure out the problem with these two articles.I mean it all makes sense, I couldn't stop nodding. And dont get me started with the picture from the stairs where the fighting couple stands below the lamentable single person. I mean: yes! And if that is not enough, our reading efforts are rewarded with a handy checklist for choosing the right partner.

I know the author might not happy about this, but I have an odd _feeling_ (ha, shoot me). And the intensions they where, as they always are , the intentions where good. Nobody was hurt, no potential was spoiled, no time was lost. Everyone is happy. Sure there are conflicts and stumbling blocks, but with solid work and communication you disolve them into harmless bumps while sailing away on your Loveboat. Ready for the next chapture. Buying a house. Having kids. Growing older together. Die with a smile on your face surrounded by caring people.

If anything is overly romantic, than this. Completely ignoring the context you live in and reduce everything to a handfull of personal traits and skills is overly simplicistic (stupid) and naive, because:

\- you cannot create love by communication, or transform friendship or nice feeling into love

\- It is reasonable if you seek for true love and believe in fate (But only until you're 30)

\- If you have been hurt, betrayed, used and left, take it as a sign to loath yourself less (and not others more)

\- Life can be bitter. Love can vanish. Dreams can be shattered.

There is this song "Hello" from Adele, which is fairly popular. It describes somehow a state of love and connection after it is long gone. Something I'm not sure this author would even understand.

</comment><comment><USER29> In order to pick someone you've got to have choices...

</comment><comment><USER37> The 37% rule has been the most beneficial heuristic that I've applied to dating.

[https://plus.maths.org/content/mathematical- dating](https://plus.maths.org/content/mathematical-dating)

<comment><USER29> .37*0 = 0

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I've learned to only get marriage or relationship advice from people who are in generally happy, healthy marriages and relationships.

Getting business advice from a bad business person wouldn't make sense.

</comment><comment><USER39> im in the honeymoon phase right now. sometimes i get sad thinking about the transience of this phase of the relationship. obviously i shouldn't fixate on that, but it's like this creeping twilight that i wish i could just stave off forever. anyone have tips on doing this?

<comment><USER40> When it fades, what do you do? Do you say, "That was nice while it lasted, too bad it's gone"? Or do you say, "I want that back, and I'll work to get it"?

In my own marriage, every year to year-and-a-half, I've looked around and realized that we weren't as close as we used to be. We've had to rebuild the relationship, which takes work. It's been worth it, though - still being in the honeymoon phase at our 20th anniversary was pretty cool.

I mean, yes, the relationship _also_ deepens and grows. The head-over-heels- in-love can last for a long time even while the relationship deepens, though...

<comment><USER40> Also, read "Passages of a Marriage" by Minnerth, Meyer, and Hemfelt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Exploration versus Exploitation: Deciding When to Get Married - [http://www.inference.vc/my_big_fat_data_driven_wedding_how_t...](http://www.inference.vc/my_big_fat_data_driven_wedding_how_to_decide_when_to_get_married/)

</comment><comment><USER42> > But good old society frowns upon that, and people are often still timid to > say they met their spouse on a dating site. The respectable way to meet a > life partner is by dumb luck, by bumping into them randomly or being > introduced to them from within your little pool.

Well, yeah. This is how social networks work: similar people group together, people socialize within that group, and they match with people who they are similar to or find ideal. They don't need to search for a partner because their ideal partner is already somewhere within their social network.

People with poor social networking skills will not "bump into" potential partners because their network is poor. It's like expecting to find an investor for your startup if all you do is post to "Show HN". You might have to actually leave your forum, or computer.

And so, after eliminating all choices from one's existing in-person social network, people with bad social networking skills look for dates on the internet. This is an uncomfortable yet common-sense truth: much like marrying your cousin, there is a stigma for a reason.

There is currently _no online service_ that can correctly predict if someone will enjoy your physical presence. You can check however many boxes you like and you will still end up being weird. This is perhaps one of the biggest reasons that there is a stigma against online dating: usually it does not work out. If online dating really worked you would only have to go on three dates before you met a perfect partner [that was also geographically and socially convenient to date]. But it turns out that online services are just another poor social network.

\--

Aside from that probably-going-to-get-me-downvoted-to-hell-unpopular opinion: the author presents _one view_ of how to pick your life partner, from _one way of life_. Depending on where you live, your personal values, your preferences, your goals, etc your ideal partner may look quite a bit different than the author describes.

Humans change over time. Your ideal partner right now may end up being a completely different person in 10 years. You can either accept this, or accept that your life partner is simply a "current partner" and that, similar to all other kinds of partnerships, it may not last forever.

The author is also conflating life partnership with marriage. Traditional marriage is a generally horrible custom that developed around the idea that one partner didn't have as much agency as another, and that the partnership is necessary so that the oppressed individual can retain some form of protection, usually in exchange for sexual or other reciprocation, and the relationship is almost always exclusive (for the oppressed partner).

You may want a life partner, but don't want to get married. This is increasingly the norm in modern western society (whereas before it might have landed you in jail or dead). You may want more than one partner, or your partner does. Non-monogamous relationships are becoming more common and better understood by the general public.

I'm not an expert, so I can't tell anyone how to pick a life partner. All I know is that to understand what you want in someone else, first you have to know what you like and don't like, for yourself as well as in others. Then you need to be able to express that coherently and immediately, without shame, regret, or miscommunication. Knowing how to do that will help you to search for and identify a potential life partner. But remember that it may not fall within the normal accepted standards of society, and you have to accept that, or you may indeed fall into the same trap that so many others have when they rely on a universal measuring stick to find the right fit. And above all, I think that if you can't find what you're looking for in your social network, you need to expand your social network - and _not_ just via dating sites.

<comment><USER43> Most peoples "social circle" is very, very small. Think about the number of eligible women (or men) within your circle - it can probably be counted on 2 hands. Are you sure you want to limit your selection of something as important as a forever partner?

<comment><USER42> Network, not circle. The term 'social circle' isn't really well defined, so I'll define it as "people with whom you have social interaction with on a regular or semi-regular basis". A social network is anyone they are connected to, and them to them, etc. Your social network is much larger than a social circle. Think six degrees of kevin bacon.

In order to dramatically grow a social network you might only need to make friends with 1 person who is outside your normal social network. For example, if you joined a gym and made friends with one person whom you then played squash with every week, and that person is otherwise unconnected to anyone else you know, now there is at least a plausible chance to meet any of the people in _their_ social network. I'm no expert here, but surely someone at Facebook can give an example of how adding a new friend who isn't in your normal group of friends can drastically increase your connections.

If you can use this social network effectively, you have (I think) a much better chance of finding a lifetime partner than using a dating site, both because of how difficult it is to identify an appealing personality online, and because social network connections are (I think) much better paths to a potential match.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> baby don't hurt me.

<comment><USER45> no more.

<comment><USER46> Baow baow baowbaow babaow baow baowbaow babaow baow baowbaow babaow baow baowbaow...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> im married and i read this

what a bunch of nonsense.

<comment><USER47> i didnt "choose"

i fell in love, fate happened.

that's why it's nonsense. sorry there's not a more logical answer.

<comment><USER48> What is love?

<comment><USER49> This isn't Jeopardy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why are all new Open Source DB's being written in Golang? - <AUTHOR> Rust seems like a better option as you can eke out more performance and ensure that there are no weird bugs influenced by Data Races & Memory issues.
I work on the Oracle RDBMS which is written in C and these always seem to be difficult issues to solve on a Database product, not to mention the potential for data corruption.
Rust just seems like the best Systems programming language out there. But most of the new Trending Open Source DB's seem to be built using Go : Cockroach DB, InfluxDB, TiDB, etc.
Is this just because of the shorter development time that Go offers.?
I haven't used the Go race detector, but can it really ensure that you ship code without any data races?
I do know that TiKV is built entirely in Rust, but there doesn't appear to be any other popular DB/Storage system being written in Rust though.
Personally, the FFI overhead of Golang and the lack of intrinsic support are a deal breaker for choosing it to write something as complicated as a DB. <comment><USER2> Rust is definitive the best systems programming __language __out there.

But other things than the language iteself matter even more. Matureness, ecosystem and efficiency in writing correct code.

I was a big Rust fan, but must admit I'm now tired of the overpromotion and hype. Ok, deep inside I'm waiting and wanting Rust to be ready for prime time. I mean real prime time, not Hackernews or Reddit anecdotes("Hey, we migrated this 1000 LOC webservice from Node to Rust and now it runs faster with less memory ... and Java was not an option because we can't manage a JVM on our server").

The problem of Rust is that it keeps inventing instead of stabilizing. Incredible smart people write great libs ... version 0.12 ...

This is really frustrating.

Rust is from and for language enthusiats. If this doesn't change, Rust will always be the most wanted, most loved but least used language, as in the Stackoverflow survey.

I was forced to learn Go at the beginning of the year and must say: The Go folks understood productivity needs. Go is for getting stuff done. It starts with the standard lib. For example, you want to build a product, and in Rust land the de facto http lib (hyper) is at version v0.13.7? In Go you just use the standard lib. And for so many, many other things the standard lib is good enough.

Apart from that, Go allows quite some control over memory allocation. You can make critical paths of your app very efficient and free of garbage collection.

Coming from Java, Kotlin, C#, Python I first thouhgt Go was a bad joke (language feature wise). How wrong I was. Generics don't matter. Algebraic types don't matter. If you need to understand your code down to the memory layout level and get the stuff done, Go has more than enough to offer.

Let's be honest with ourselves, when fixing an urgend bug in some code we've written 4 month ago: Do we want to read a simple loop or a reduce function?

If I was to chose a language for a DB, my heart and enthusiasm would choose Rust, but my head and experience would choose Go.

<comment><AUTHOR> >The problem of Rust is that it keeps inventing instead of stabilizing. Incredible smart people write great libs ... version 0.12 ...

Thanks for sharing this, Stability of Rust never crossed my mind and I think you make a valid point.

I would love to hear what other Rust dev's think about this. The main motto behind the nightly builds seems to be "Stability Without Stagnation".

But is stability actually taking a hit because of this model.?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The databases you mention started development years ago when Rust wasn't as mature as it is now. We're starting to see Rust databases and I think we'll see more in the future: [https://materialize.io/](https://materialize.io/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing this, I took a look and Materialize seems to be really good.!</comment></comment>


Timeline of the Far Future - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

<comment><USER2> Concerning Niagara Falls, from footnote 9:

"The Niagara Peninsula became free of the ice about 12,500 years ago. As the ice retreated northward, its melt waters began to flow down through what became Lake Erie, the Niagara River and Lake Ontario, down to the St. Lawrence River and on to the Atlantic Ocean. There were originally five spillways from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. Eventually, these were reduced to one, the original Niagara Falls, at the escarpment at Queenston-Lewiston. From here, the falls began its steady erosion through the bedrock."

Crazy to think that it's gone all that way (a little over 10km) in just 12,500 years.</comment>


Larry Ellison to Unveil Oracle + Sun Strategy at Company Event on January 27th - <AUTHOR> http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/043821

<comment><AUTHOR> Just as well that no other hardware manufacturer is having an event on that day.</comment>


Frontpile – A new social network forum - <AUTHOR> https://www.frontpile.com <comment><USER2> Y'know... look, I get the idea and all, but if you wanna take a crack at a new social network, you should understand off the bat that the bar for UI is set very high, and a Bootstrap-lookin' crazy font sized UI just makes me wanna close the tab without digging further.

This is before I'd even comment about how it seems like it's just an attempt at a grab-bag of social network functionality.

<comment><AUTHOR> The main reason I chose this UI approach because of time (I'm a student with so many exams), so the time for making the basics would take longer. But I do have plans of making the UI better and unique in the nearby future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I will let these screenshots speak for themselves:

[https://image.ibb.co/fAp2QS/Screenshot_20180326_004056.jpg](https://image.ibb.co/fAp2QS/Screenshot_20180326_004056.jpg) [https://image.ibb.co/h7aWKn/Screenshot_20180326_003737.jpg](https://image.ibb.co/h7aWKn/Screenshot_20180326_003737.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER4> > Register with us!

> Be part of Frontpile

But why? I can't see anything on the page except a sign up form for something I don't know anything about! In this time especially of weariness around social media, you should explain to the user what the site is.

This might be because the site's layout is somewhat broken. Things are all squished into small columns.

Chrome, Android 8.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea of Frontpile is to avoid people having an issue adding content to specific place or topic. This platform solves this issues by submitting several kinds of content (e.g news, questions, vibe content etc) in one place. Furthermore, users can add more topics (called as tags) if a topic don't exist (a simple form), there is no restrictions. It also consists a poll system if people like voting content.

The whole point of this service is collaborating all content in one place and avoiding people. I want to avoid people doing to many clicks for submitting content. You can see many additional feature involved this software. It's just not another website. I describe it as a combination of social media and forum. I have further feature to integrate in the future (big list on my desk).

Thank you for your feedback and will repair them ASAP. Perhaps I will add something similar on the website. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Coming off the Facebook scandal, I think most people want transparency when it comes to social media. 'admin' running the site doesn't scream transparency.

Not to mention the odd text formatting, site design (Tempus Dominus, nothing original) and the lack of activity (you seem to have replied to your own post on there). If you put a bit more effort in rather than jumping the gun hoping to capture attention, you could get somewhere.

But 'admin' with no profile picture or any profile data isn't a good sign, how do you expect me to sign up, share my personal data and add a photo of myself when the owner of the site doesn't even do that?

</comment><comment><USER6> Of you need help with your UI (and you do...) check out: [http://fairpixels.pro](http://fairpixels.pro)

It's not about making just look nicer. But the product needs to be at the very least understandable. Simplicity is hard, but core to succeed.

</comment><comment><USER7> We are part of a team consisting of highly efficient developers and hackers. Upgrade University Grades Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Whatsapp, Line, Skype Hack Delete unwanted online Pictures and Videos on any website Remove Criminal Records Hack bank accounts Apps hacking MasterCard, Paypal, Bitcoin, WU, Money Gram with untraceable credit on it etc. We also develop hacked facebook, twitter, instagram, yahoo, gmail passwords etc. We do custom software and web development in php, java, asp.net etc. We have 100% records from our client as well as highest repeat hire rate. our work speak for ourselves, we provide a perfect software solution to all clients. We believe in mutual growing with client and hence we work as a technology partner and consultant for our clients. Contact us email@example.com ICQ: 703132619 or WhatsApp:+14696660879or Skype: email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER8> The front page with the leaderboard and scores really puts me off. I don't mind scores as a form of soft moderation (HN). But I don't enjoy it as a key part of the incentive structure of a community.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. People log on to social media communities to get away from the hierarchical structure of life (to a degree). I don't feel encourages to contribute more if my name is in shining lights on the homepage.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback and I will improve the service using this feedback.

I've never experienced something this before, so I'm glad I've done this. I learnt a lot from this occasion.

</comment><comment><USER9> IDK about this service, but I can see a service like WeMe gaining traction after the whole Facebook fiasco considering they do end-to-end encryption.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just started this platform off and like to get an audience for it and get feedback. I do have hopes of adding more features to it (I got a huge list of new features to add in the nearby future).

I never heard of WeMe but I'll have a look.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sorry for my french but it looks like arse on firefox mobile, being spammed me with a register box covering the screen was the cherry on top.

I'll pass

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I see there is an issue with small devices and will repair them ASAP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's unusable on mobile and the layout is broken.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm not seeing anything right away that distinguishes it from Reddit or any other link-sharing site.

What's the value here over other sites?

<comment><AUTHOR> I sort of explained this in another post but it does consists more features than Reddit (or similar). It consists a poll system, people can add more topic (if not existed), people can like topics (tags) and users. Users can view their liked users on their page view.

There are many more feature added into that I haven't mentioned. I also got more features waiting to be integrating in the nearby future.

Perhaps, I might focus more detailing information on it, so people can have a better idea of what's going on...

Thank you for your response.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: why are my 'show HN' posts ignored every single time? - <AUTHOR> I've been working hard on a really cool Google Analytics app (http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/app/googalytics/34a0d886-d541-4362-80b6-62f61733f0a9) for Windows 8 and I'm really proud of it. It's ranked as #1 top paid Business app in the Windows Store, and it received some nice press coverage. WPCentral posted about it for example: http://www.wpcentral.com/googalytics-windows-8-simple-way-access-your-analytic-data. We also got Google to retweet it: https://twitter.com/googleanalytics/status/390141635826159616.<p>I posted it here on HN multiple times, but it just keeps being ignored by everyone, and floating off the 'new' page. Meanwhile, people who built something far more simple and/or spent less time on it keep reaching the frontpage with their 'show HN' posts. I know most people here run Apple, but isn't it fair to just appreciate the effort someone else put in his project even though you won't/can't use it? I always vote up 'shown HN' posts when I see someone has built something nice, even though it's for a different platform, or I'm simply not interested in their product. <comment><USER2> The HN audience values hack values[0]. Often things are done for the sake of novelty. Show HNs that reach the front page often demonstrate hack values or novelty or utility to the audience. You know, the "it's cool!" or "that's a great hack" feeling when you see it.

I've actually seen your app (and your submissions). It feels a bit run-of the mill. It's honestly just...is. There is no further narrative (well, you did mention that you had no decent option so you built your own). There is no further elaboration of the hacker spirit that many on HN seem to cherish.

Hack values can be signaled in the title of your submission. Your titles seem a bit weak, tbh. I can't tell what clever hacks were made (with the one exception where you said you didn't have better options)

If you don't want to signal hack values, signal utility to the HN audience, and people will respond. Of course the proportion of HN audience that uses WP8 as a platform is probably very small. Out of that small group, the utility brought about by your Show HN is not necessarily shared by everyone. It's probably shared by only a tiny proportion of that small group. Combined with the European time zone that you're in, your chances of reaching the front page is quite small

just my 2cents

Footnotes:

[0] Ouch. My head hurts parsing that sentence

<comment><USER3> I'd simplify it further. HN likes things that are new, interesting and novel. Not even necessarily things that encompass "hack values".

You could submit a Show post that has an excellent idea that would make you rich, but it would get ignored and passed over if it were a B2B app written in Java for a niche market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This may be a case where a good story told in your blog would create more interest. What was done to achieve success is more interesting than status as the number one paid business app for Windows Phone among all companies with their headquarters east of the Mississippi River and a founder whose first name contains two or more vowels...so to.speak.

Entertain us.

</comment><comment><USER5> HN has a bias towards what's currently _in_. Windows 8 is not really cool to the startup crowd, so it gets ignored. I saw the app and it looks nice. So, good job! If you want to get HNs attention, you must use node.js with Mongo and write blog post full with buzzwords. Then title it something like: "Show HN: Google Analtics app in Node.js/MongoDB"

<comment> atom-morgan I agree. I saw the original Show HN, checked out the app in the store and thought it looked great. But at the end of the day, it's a Windows 8 app. I don't even know anybody who has Windows 8.

<comment><USER6> Yeah. It's like trying to sell venison at a vegan retreat

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I mean, take any successful product X and go "Hey everyone check this thing out", and they'll go "meh, yeah, it looks good at it's job". I always look to HN for some really new use of tech, or the rough product of someones hack- weekend. If you talk about something cool your product does in an interesting way you might have better luck, or perhaps tell your story.

</comment><comment><USER8> Well..the same thing happened to my app one time. It only got like 4 up votes or something but somehow a TechCrunch writer saw it and decided to write a post about it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Anecdote: I tried to submit my side project multiple times, it never got a single upvote.

Then, a day after I gave up, someone else submitted it and it made it to the frontpage: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6622285](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6622285)

After that, I came to the conclusion that HN's ranking system was highly sub- optimal (given that you can get wildly divergent behavior for the same content).

</comment><comment><USER10> Don't take it personally. Besides, the hacker news crowd probably isn't the target audience for your product. So it's all about feeding your ego anyway. Keep building and improving your product, and pitch it to the right community: ala Inbound.org, Moz, SEO forums, etc.

</comment><comment><USER11> Well you made it to the top of "Ask" this time. Congrats. ;)

Looks nice and clean. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER12> A lot of show HN's seem to slide quickly without getting the critical momentum to draw more attention. Have you checked out how to time yours optimally in order to have a better shot? (~9AM on weekdays from what I remember)

</comment><comment><USER13> There is no "why," it's just the way it is.

<comment><USER14> Worst. Answer. Ever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Don't worry, mine are too ;)</comment>


$99 ARM-based PC runs either Ubuntu or Android - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/99-arm-based-pc-runs-either-ubuntu-or-android/ <comment><USER2> This is an excellent price point for this capability. I've been playing around with a lot of different ARM implementations from Atmel to Nvidia and many places in between. What struck me is how spoiled I had become to x86 machines all having esssentiall the same set of "features" just at different service levels. I find myself wanting a Marvell CPU (good at networking) and an nVidia GPU (great at throwing pixels around) with an Atmel floorplan (easy to layout). I'm not complaining, it is a lot more fun exploring the choices people have made putting together their ARM SoCs than it is exploring the differences between an Intel Core i3 and a Core i5.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dual gigabit, wi-fi and the ability to run Ubuntu makes this very interesting for a "home router / hub" type device. Video output makes it interesting for a media player device. Putting both in one low-powered box is awesome...

<comment><USER4> > Dual gigabit, wi-fi and the ability to run Ubuntu makes this very > interesting for a "home router / hub" type device.

For that type of _appliance_ , I'd rather have OpenWRT than Ubuntu. Comes pre- fit to the job at hand. And with a reasonable secure configuration by default, as opposed to whatever the thing you've hacked together yourself accidentally leaves open.

That said: Having medium-powered, cheap, compact and appliance-like general purpose computing available is certainly a nice change.

Big computers with lots of cores and gigahertz gets boring pretty quickly. These kinds of things sort of takes computing a bit more back to its roots.

<comment><USER5> No thanks, OpenWRT package management is awful. None of the advantages of OpenWRT apply to a machine that has enough resources to run a typical distribution.

<comment><USER6> What exactly makes `opkg` awful?

Sure, it's no aptitude or pacman, but you have to remember that OpenWRT is a full fledged distribution (package manager and all) that fits on an image of less than 4MB!

<comment><USER7> I ran 'opkg upgrade' once and it deleted itself.

I've run into lots of other annoyances with it (e.g. its database is rather slow), but that's the one that sticks in my memory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It was noted on reddit that prices _start_ at $99. However you can get a quad- core android "pc" now for under $100 easy:

[http://www.aliexpress.com/item/CS918-Cortex-A9-Mini-PC- Andro...](http://www.aliexpress.com/item/CS918-Cortex-A9-Mini-PC-Android-TV- box-4-2-Smart-tv-stick-1-8-GHz/1023696089.html)

<comment><USER9> Sadly the rk3188 on-chip controller is only capable of 100mbit. There's a few more (particularly Freescale) units with gigabit, but generally more expensive. Gigabit or USB3 is when these things start to look insanely attractive IMHO (as possibilities to attach e.g. storage to the external bus exist)

<comment><USER10> The imx6 onboard Ethernet can't really do gigabit but the second Ethernet on this new machine is apparently a PCIe connected Intel chip which is more promising.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Oh hell, _another_ one!? I'm running out of room in my lab for all of these cheap single board computers that I simply can't resist buying! Please make it stop!

</comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know if the "two RS232 serial ports" is a typo?

If they are real serial ports it sounds too good to be true. They would make great S1 ntp boxes with GPSDOs. I have a sneaking suspicion that line is a typo and/or they have some whacky interdependence on USB and the lines will be riddled with jitter.

<comment><USER13> From the diagram on the company's website, it looks like it does indeed have two RS232 ports - although they both have the "ultra mini connector". See [http://utilite-computer.com/web/home](http://utilite-computer.com/web/home) for a picture.

<comment><USER12> I am not convinced that it is not rs232 over USB. I can get a DB9 to USB adapter and plug a GPS into any computer. The PPS will come in over the USB port but the jitter will make the signal useless for timing applications.

<comment><USER14> They're real. Freescale has the drivers in the Linux kernel at drivers/serial/mxc_uart.c if you want to see for yourself.

The iMX UARTs are internal to the SoC, all you need is a line driver to bring them out of the board.

<comment><USER12> Can you talk about what you used the serial ports for? Was the board you used the mxc on cheaper than this one?

<comment><USER14> I'm working on a project where a customer wants to update an old 16-bit control panel and make it run with a touchscreen, ethernet, and H.264 A/V playback. The control panel talked over RS-485 to a motor control board that sat somewhere else in the machine.

So I took the original code, recompiled it to arm-eabi, and stuck it into an NDK library on Android 4.04. So now I have an Android UI in the foreground talking over JNI to the orignal (unmodified) control panel code in the background. All I needed to do was switch the serial driver code a bit to handle the iMX's UART setup and pthread up the old UI event loop to let it run free underneath Android.

The board I'm using is a custom-designed PCB with an iMX6 Solo (single A9 core), but we used the SABRE-SD reference design from Freescale as our starting point. For proof of concept I used a Boundary SabreLite (now called BD-SL-i.MX6) for $199. That comes with two RS232 ports with DB-9 breakout connectors.

I don't think you'll find a cheaper design than this Utilite, although they really don't have full pricing online yet. I'm guessing the $99 is for the Solo or even SoloLite and the multiple core units will be significantly more than this.

They also don't say how much RAM is on the $99 unit. "Up to 4GB" says nothing about the specs on the cheapest one. I've found I need at least 256MB to run the FSL AOSP build in a minimal form.

You seem concerned about GPS as well, this Android build from Freescale contains a driver for the Atheros Orion GPS chipset over UART. So I think they have a lot you can work with out of the box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Too bad there's no connectors for fast external storage, like eSATA or USB 3.

<comment> j-kidd For general computing purpose (e.g. HTPC + bittorrent + samba), there are always something missing with these small ARM computers. I am holding on to my AMD E-350, especially with the rapid improvement in the radeon driver lately.

Gigabyte Brix with AMD Kabini is going to be interesting, and possibly very competitive in pricing without sacrificing performance:

[http://liliputing.com/2013/06/gigabyte-brix-mini-computer- to...](http://liliputing.com/2013/06/gigabyte-brix-mini-computer-to-come-in- amd-kabini-intel-haswell-flavors.html)

<comment><USER16> Exactly.

What I'm looking for is a board with a reasonably fast CPU (preferably dual core), SATA and a a PCI-E or USB3 port for a fast 802.11n/ac wifi adapter. PogoPlug v4 is almost there, but the CPU is too slow to sustain more than ~40MB/s of I/O.

<comment><USER17> I preordered this, gigabit lan and sata, [http://shop.udoo.org/pre-order/udoo- quad.html](http://shop.udoo.org/pre-order/udoo-quad.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Last month I had a chat with Raspberry Pi's founder Eben, I asked him between or beyond Raspberry Pi and Arduino, did he think there's a chance to birth other new platform? If so, what characteristics this new platform should have?

And he said "There's scope for something very powerful (almost PC-like) in the $70 price range. If I was starting a new venture today, this is where I'd aim."

</comment><comment><USER19> I really do hope for a world where (if we accept DRM as a given) DRM is more universally accessible. I'd love to get one of these machines to use a media center PC, but I can't do things like watch Netflix/Amazon Prime on them.

(I know I can get a Roku box or similar, but I'm yet to find something that can replicate all the functions I want. An Android machine would be perfect)

<comment><AUTHOR> This runs ubuntu AND android. I have a netflix app on my android tablet and phone. This should hypothetically support all streaming video services.

<comment><USER19> Is it possible to install Netflix without Google Play support? Because I imagine these devices might not have Google apps.

<comment><USER20> I can't say for sure it works on _this_ device, but sideloading APKs (including Netflix) in Android is easy on most devices, even non-rooted ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> On a side note, if anyone is looking to build something like this, please consider building a low-end device (running on Linux) with 16 or 32 RS-232 ports that I can SSH to...

Other than that, give it two USB ports so that the end user can connect a wireless USB NIC and/or a 3G/cellular card if they need to. Two (at most) 10/100 or 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports would be perfect. Video (VGA/HDMI/whatever) wouldn't be necessary, nor would sound.

Keep it under $200 and I imagine the networking industry will be happy to take them off your hands real quick.

<comment><USER21> Why the need for so many RS-232 ports?

<comment><USER11> Serial consoles on network gear (routers, switches, firewalls, etc.).

When everything is working properly, you almost never need them... but when SHTF, they can be invaluable and save lots of time and money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The design of that box takes me back to '99 and testing Linux on the StrongARM based Corel Netwinder...

<comment><USER23> I was trying to remember the name of that one. I've had something of an unfortunate predilection toward small, low-power, general purpose Linux boxen. As a general rule, if I think something looks like a good idea, it is doomed to failure. I really like the looks of this one!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I looked at this market last week and settled on ~$150 x86 FoxConn NanoPCs instead. Why? Mostly time saving worrying about driver support and cross- compiling non-x86 kernels. Also, they can be stuck on the back of a monitor to stay out of sight. Google ChromeOS devices were also suggested for consideration but written off due a combination of cost and the perceived risk of rapid deprecation.

<comment><USER25> Thanks. some of Foxconn's NanoPCs are the first Mac-mini-like things I have seen that beat Apple on price, specifically [http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856119...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856119085)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Link to the actual site submitted here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6046604](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6046604)

However, currently the site isn't responding - I suspected it's died under the load.

Direct link: [http://www.utilite-computer.com/](http://www.utilite- computer.com/)

</comment><comment><USER27> I do R&D for laboratory machines. We're trying to break away from the clunky old components (which also almost always use Windows). I started with the Pi but it was too underpowered. Now I'm using hardkernel's odroid u2, which has been a decent experience. But Hardkernel's support is spotty, site is shady, and shipping takes forever. Plus the dual ethernet and SSD are exactly what I was looking for (using usb replacements now which aren't as good). I used an Atom but had trouble with video drivers in Debian. Crossing my fingers on this one. Will pre-order if they offer. I'd love it if someone could offer touchscreens that would easily plug into it, as this has been tough for me.

<comment><USER9> Also check out e.g. [http://boundarydevices.com/products/sabre-lite- imx6-sbc/](http://boundarydevices.com/products/sabre-lite-imx6-sbc/) for sterling "real" Linux support, GigE and PCIe

<comment><USER27> Wow thanks. I can't believe this slipped by me. You are awesome.

<comment><USER9> You might find a few hours flicking through the past year of [http://www.cnx- software.com/](http://www.cnx-software.com/) archives useful

<comment><USER28> Could you be more specific how would those archives help?

Btw, thank you for the boundary devices link. The only weakness against Utilite is one Ethernet nic vs two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> the wandboard quad is not much more expensive at 129usd and sports 2gb ram, gigabit and sata. [http://www.wandboard.org/index.php/details](http://www.wandboard.org/index.php/details)

<comment><USER30> This is great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Looking at the back of this unit some of the ports seem awfully close together. With that many it might have been better to stack some of them vertically vs. trying to lay them all out side by side?

</comment><comment><USER32> How exactly it will manage to squeeze ssd into this price tag? Something don't add up. Otherwise a welcome evolution that is even developer station ready at the higher end.

<comment><USER33> Since the price is "starting from $99" then i assume the base model will be without SSD, and either allow you to add your own or use microSD card / USB to boot.

<comment><USER34> I suspect it's based upon this SBC (given it's from the same company and this SBC is marked as a new product): [http://compulab.co.il/products/computer-on- modules/cm-fx6/#o...](http://compulab.co.il/products/computer-on-modules/cm- fx6/#ordering)

This should give some rough indication of the options available and the price increments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I don't see any mention of IR input. No way it will work as a TV device without remote control support.

<comment><USER36> I already prefer a remote smartphone app for my TV

<comment><USER37> What? Dedicated, tactile buttons to feel around in the dark, vs fidgeting with phone.

<comment><USER36> Something adaptive that you'll probably fidget with anyway vs something that is hiding behind a sofa cushion most of the time and needs direct line of sight to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> $99 is quite expensive. Go on ebay and get an A10/A10s-based mk802 for $40-50. Supported in Fedora and Android:

[http://osdir.com/ml/fedora-devel- list/2013-07/msg00754.html](http://osdir.com/ml/fedora-devel- list/2013-07/msg00754.html)

<comment><USER39> While it's more expensive the native gigabit ethernet ports are nice to have. I use my RPi as a dev server/file server and I sometimes have problems with the USB based ethernet going brain dead and needing a USB bus reset (I keep a USB wifi adapter plugged in so I can still SSH in). I don't really fault the RPi since I'm not using it for what its designed for (hell, the ARM CPU is actually the coprocessor to the GPU[1]).

I think I'll pick one up. It will make for a much better dev server/Time Capsule clone/AirPlay server clone/router than my PI, and then I'll have a free RPi to use as a micro-controller.

[1][http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/7122/level- of...](http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/7122/level-of- hackability-of-raspberry-pi)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I wonder why CompuLab chose an ARM SoC over a recent Atom-based one. The Atom- based Clover Trail SoC, for example, is competitive with the Tegra 3 in terms of power consumption and performance. And of course an x86-based system can run a lot more software out of the box.

<comment><USER25> There are no Linux drivers for the graphics engine in Clover Trail.

(And of course licensing Windows would have increased the price by a large factor.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This sounds pretty handy as a replacement for an old tower I have hooked up to my tv. The one thing that the RPi offers that I would love to see on this is gpio access. Arduino tethering is fine but I love having really easy access for quickly hacking.

</comment><comment><USER42> _Graphics Processing Unit supporting OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0, OpenVG 1.1, and OpenCL EP_

I'm curious about what level of output this GPU can do -- are we looking at an OUYA competitor or bitcoin-miner, or is it only powerful enough for basic desktop acceleration?

<comment><USER43> Do any of the Arm chips that have GPUs that are OpenCL capable have the appropriate support software to enable you to actually use OpenCL in programs?

<comment><USER44> Yes. You can actually use OpenCL on the i.mx6. It's pretty cool. That said, there is still quite some room for improvement in the drivers (see my other post above). It is also more limited than desktop-class GPUs (CL embedded profile), so don't expect to be able to run all current OpenCL code unmodified.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> One of the many we've seen over the past 12 months. the iMX6 (NDA-free hardware reference) and dual gigabit make it stand out, but it's hardly revolutionary.

</comment><comment><USER46> Feels similar to Tonido, but fancier looking. Having been using the Tonido for a few weeks as a development web-server and it has been pretty good so far.

</comment><comment><USER47> I feel like with the rash of computers* at this price point, I'm waiting for something at $9.99 before I get excited.

*for some value of computer

</comment><comment><USER48> I'd love to see if anyone could hack Windows RT into one of these. Could make quite the little desktop machine.

</comment><comment><USER49> This looks very nice. I've been looking for a decent replacement for my sheevaplug for a while now.

</comment><comment><USER50> Is this the official launch price? The same company makes an atom box for $1,700.00

...just saying.

</comment><comment><USER51> anyone know what the 99 USD configuration includes, ram/flash wise?

<comment><AUTHOR> The $99 model will be _bare-bones_ for sure.

[http://utilite-computer.com/web/utilite-specifications](http://utilite- computer.com/web/utilite-specifications)</comment></comment>


Blu-Ray: the HDCD (or is it DVD-Audio?) of video - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/blu-ray-the-future-has-been-delayed/

<comment><AUTHOR> I note with amusement that Blu-Ray is meeting all my expectations: It's cruising toward market failure, because consumers value convenience and selection over picture quality.

The audiophiles have been waiting for this to happen.

I would note, for the record, that I own some very nice HDCD disks and one DVD-Audio disk. They sounded great, back when I could play them. Unfortunately my expensive high-quality CD/DVD player bit the dust and, with all of my other music being stored on a server in FLAC format (and the original CDs in boxes in the basement) I just couldn't bring myself to spend hundreds of dollars on a disk player just to play back a handful of annoying _physical disks_ at _slightly_ higher quality...</comment>


Things You'll Never See, Hear or Use - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/things-you-will-never-see

<comment><USER2> Heh. In the last month I've used/seen/heard or heard all of:

* tape salad (been unpacking some old boxes recently)

* a pump screwdriver (I like things that work without batteries)

* record needles (we've got about... four? five? record player in the house and own about 16 foot of records)

* CD's (burnt one last week - did feel rather retro doing so though :-)

* anything using film (again - digging out some stuff from the garage last week)

* A phone booth (used one last night since I managed to leave my iPhone at home)

* A letter handwritten just for you or by you (still get 'em. still write 'em)

* Trying to re-fold a map (a few weeks back at a conference)

* Steam trains (we have <http://www.swanagerailway.co.uk/> nearby and fairly regularly see steam trains in the area)

* a type writer (still got my grandfathers portable. still works too.)

* tipp-ex (is in the desk for when we need it)

<comment><USER3> The article said "if you're born today". So in other words it's a list of stuff that will be gone from the mainstream 2020 or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A clear sky is still visible over most of the earth. Its just that people cluster in bright cities, so per-capita, yes most folks don't see one.

I see it every night when I drive in my driveway and get out and look up. Every constellation, the milky way spilled across most of the sky, blue-white Rigel at Orion's foot. A full Moon illuminating the countryside like a floodlight!

Its only a 10-minute drive from town, out there where me and a handful of other people live. I wonder sometimes, if our rural areas are doomed to become a ghost town.

</comment><comment><USER5> It boggles my mind that some kids will probably never get to see a clear, starry sky at night.

I still remember the first time I saw a constellation. Back when I was a kid, I managed to make out Orion and his famous belt. Made me wonder whether there will be aliens in Orion's belt millions of years from now, staring back at us.

Unfortunately, that was all too long ago.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is like that question on Stack Overflow asking what the a: drive was for.

One thing I (fondly?) remember from when I started out doing IT Support for 1-2-3 for DOS at Lotus - memory managers. Messing about with EMM386 etc to be able to fit things into memory. That and other general messing about with config.sys and autoexec.bat.

GREAT DAYS! (not)

<comment><USER5> Damn, I can even remember what the B: drive is for!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> We have a rotary phone. Until the most recent change on our RCN connection, it would have worked when the power was out.

</comment><comment><USER8> In secured spaces you still see a lot of pagers, because two-way communicators (e.g. cellphones) are forbidden.</comment>


Jerry Seinfeld Dumps Microsoft, Goes Back To Mac - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/03/jerry-seinfeld-dumps-micr_n_343528.html <comment><USER2> Probably just an oversight on the set, & possibly a violation of his contract with MS??</comment>


Hawaii telescope protest shuts down 13 observatories on Mauna Kea - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02222-2 <comment><USER2> I worked at the observatories on Mauna Kea for 30+ years. I would very much like to see the Thirty Meter Telescope built there. But I've made a lot of bets with other people that it won't get built in Hawaii.

You can make an argument for building the TMT. You can make an argument for not building it. But there's no argument I can think of to support what the state is doing. The first time that the TMT tried to start construction, back in 2015, a fairly small group of protestors was able to halt construction by standing in the road and blocking vehicles. The police would come up the mountain, stand around for about 5 hours waiting for instructions from sea level, arrest perhaps 5 percent of the protestors, which did not allow the contruction vehicles to pass, and then everyone would drive down the hill again. The protestors built a small, unpermitted building (illegally) near the point where they wanted to block the road, and the state made no effort to prevent them from doing so. The protestors would pile stones in the access road to the TMT site, and then claim the pile of stones was a sacred alter. The state would remove the alters after a very long period of dithering. So the protestors could build, in a few hours, a physical obstruction that the state would take days or weeks to move. In general, the state made about 1% of the effort that would have been required to allow the TMT construction vehicles to reach the site.

This time, the group of protestors is far larger. They have camped out at a place that is more convenient for them, logistically. Unlike the situation in 2015, they have shut down all of the observatories on Mauna Kea. If the state made 1% of the required effort to open the road in 2015, this year they are making 0.01% of the required effort. The police drive up, hug the various protestors for a few hours, join the protestors in prayer. Then drive back down the mountain after having no effect at all. Yesterday, they made some token "arrests" which involved issuing misdemeanor citations. Some of the persons who had been escorted away from the road blockage immediately returned to block the road after the citation was issued.

This is a wonderful example of asymmetric warfare. At first glance it looks like the state is the powerful entity, but the protestors have all sorts of levers they really haven't started using yet. How long will the University of California remain a member of the TMT collaboration once UC students start having sit ins? The University of Hawaii's Hawaiian Studies Program (most of the members of which oppose the TMT) is far stronger politically than its Astronomy Department - how long will it be before student protestors force the University of Hawaii to drop out of the project? How long until protestors on other Hawaiian islands start blocking state facilities?

There were at least 1000 protestors involved with blocking the road yesterday; some estimates put the number at 2000. There is no facility on the island of Hawaii where that many people could be incarcerated. And there is no indication that the state is willing to incarcerate _anyone_ who is blocking the road. If the state actually makes a serious effort to open the road for the construction vehicles, there will be many consecutive days where the television coverage will show weeping, elderly ladies in mumus being hauled away to sea level. Day after day after day. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the state is willing to do that, and recent history shows that they will not. Even if the state had the nerve to forcefully open the road, for how many weeks could that go on before some member of the TMT collaboration decided that TMT is not worth the black eye Astronomy is getting in the court of public opinion?

In addition to blocking the road, the anti-TMT protestors are still filing frivolous lawsuits to stop construction. I think they would be wiser to drop their legal efforts and just let the current sutuation play out. If they get a court order to stop construction (as they did in 2015), the state could still pretend that it would have eventually cleared the road and allowed construction to begin. The TMT management might be deluded enough to think they could still build on Mauna Kea. But if the protestors drop the lawsuits, and just allow it to become crystal clear that the state won't clear the road and get the construction equipment to the site, then everyone will finally know that the TMT won't get built on Mauna Kea.

As I said, I'm a TMT supporter. But sometimes you have to admit defeat and go on to plan B.

<comment><USER3> Compare the current situation with how the Occupy Wall Street protestors were treated.

What you are describing is the state siding with the supporters. They're doing the nominal minimum to enforce the law and they know that's not enough. If the state wanted to side with the TMT people then the protestors would be arrested whether there's facilities for them or not. You're right it won't be built in Hawaii. The state has sided with the opposition.

<comment><USER2> But I think it's worse than that. The state is still claiming (as of yesterday) that they will ensure that the TMT equipment can get to the summit. The Governor declared a state of emergency yesterday, to give the police more power. He has activated the National Guard. Additional police have been brought in from Oahu. But in reality, the state is not doing anything effective. So you might be right that the state has effectively sided with the protestors, but it makes no sense for the state to behave as it is. The state is just looking impotent and ridiculous.

<comment><USER4> Take the issue off the table. I'm a huge TMT supporter, but I don't know where it should go. Instead look at the drivers from the political level. Remember that political systems exist for political reasons.

Group X wants something done. Group Y doesn't want it done. There is a political street-level fight. Group X continues to support you as long as you say the right thing. Group Y not only supports you, it draws in major national and international news coverage. As the fight drags on, then, you get more and more support.

So why should it be any other way than the way it is? From a political marketing standpoint, this is a buzz generator. If you play your cards right, you can actually appear to be on both sides of this issue at the same time. The longer it drags on the more support you get, the more you energize the base.

I don't see this resolving any time soon, and I completely agree that it's unconscionable what's going on here. But whatever is going on, it's going on for logical reasons for those allowing it to be this way. There may be corruption in the way decisions are made, but there's no incompetence here that I can see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I visited some telescopes there 2 months ago. The researchers are doing a fantastic job. The place has no life on it, it's barren due to the altitude and the lack of oxygen. No animal, plant or human ever ever lived up there. Those observatories are mostly remote-controlled and only 4 researchers were up there to monitor the 13 observatories the day we went. Ironically, the largest traffic going up there are actually people going there to take instagram pictures about the sacred mountain.

So sad that a very unique scientific spot, with very high altitude in the middle of an ocean is getting in trouble for religious motives.

<comment><USER6> There is an incredible land pressure on Hawaii. People that have lived there for generations have been pushed to the margins. Homelessness is all-time high, and it impacts native Hawaiians disproportionately[1]. This isn't just about "religious motives" it is about land rights. What is reserved for the indigenous people and what can be appropriated given the "right" motivations.

1\. [https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge- research-072...](https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge- research-072417.html)

<comment><USER7> Homelessness isn't really a relevant response given that OP states this land is not suitable for habitation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is what happens with religion: it impedes progress, and makes people behave completely irrationally.

These observatories aren't causing environmental problems (AFAIK); they're great tools for humanity to understand our universe. There aren't many locations on Earth that have the advantages this location has, yet these people want to stop this for what? Irrational superstitions? If this were some corporation trying to do mountaintop removal mining (like they do in West Virginia), it would be perfectly rational to oppose that: that's an environmental catastrophe. But this is not, this is one of the most benign things humans can do.

<comment><USER9> make widening our understanding of the universe into religion, problem solved. (i thought about making the scientific method into a religion, but it doesn't make any sense :))

<comment><USER10> Everyone takes things on faith. For instance most could quite trivially prove PV=nRT, but most just take someone else's word on faith.

In a universe where you can never really know something unless you've proven it yourself, you take nearly everything on faith from someone else who claims to have proven it.

<comment><USER11> I don't think 'faith' covers both things. Yes, a lot of people accept lots of things as being true on the authority of others, but there's lots of other evidence that those authorities are trustworthy. The details, i.e. the specific differences, of religious claims aren't correlated with any other evidence, or even possible evidence, which is why it's so much easier for so many different creeds to exist even given that they make different, and often contradictory claims.

As an example, most people haven't directly carried out all of the relevant experiments needed to discover the laws and theories of electromagnetism, but the evidence of TV, radio, telegraphs are easy enough to perceive and thereof trust. There doesn't seem to be nearly anything similar for religious beliefs, that would make any _specific_ religion more likely than any other. Most of the evidence that _does_ exist for religions seems to be common to any or all of them, e.g. the benefits of group cohesion, common morality, etc..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "The past is never dead. It's not even past." This argument is about sovereignty. Hawai'i was overthrown 125 years ago, and today's zeitgeist calls that injustice. Of course, the overthrow was not something that happened once, then ended. We choose daily whether to reaffirm the ethos of overthrow, or how to reject it.

When Akaka convened the working group described in the article, that is one way to grapple with the question of sovereignty. When people talk about whether Native Hawaiians support the telescope, that is another way to do it.

In this thread, I see a lot of comments that don't seem aware of the undercurrent. To describe the opposition as superstitious makes sense if you're dismissing some weird part of your own polity. If you were talking about opposition to a cow science facility in India, you probably wouldn't describe the opposition as superstitious. (Not because they aren't, but because sovereign people are entitled to their beliefs.) People are welcome to dismiss the sovereignty of Hawaiians on a message board, but I thought I'd write this comment for anyone that doesn't get what the conversation is about.

Similarly, to say that the opposition is "small but vocal" fails to comprehend why the state does not simply remove them. It's because the public (while conflicted) does not love the ethos of overthrow, and the state cannot cart away the protestors without reaffirming that ethos in a very public way.

</comment><comment><USER13> Some context for the protests: [https://medium.com/@akkagawa/maunakea- redirecting-the-lens-o...](https://medium.com/@akkagawa/maunakea-redirecting- the-lens-onto-the-culture-of-mainstream-science-5d3a5a12376a)

<comment><USER14> From what I can tell, this doesn't actually provide any context on the protests. There's precious little information on who is protesting (I gather from context native Hawaiians), no information on why they're protesting, and a lot of talk about how this set of protests is actually a battle for the heart of mainstream science.

This article [1], linked from the original article, seems to actually have some context for the protests.

[1] [https://www.nature.com/news/the-mountain-top-battle-over- the...](https://www.nature.com/news/the-mountain-top-battle-over-the-thirty- meter-telescope-1.18446)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting how differently this is unfolding compared to the Keystone XL pipeline.

<comment><USER16> Turns out local government matters.

<comment><USER15> Turns out money matters. There's less profit in telescopes than oil pipelines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When are telescopes going to be built on the moon or mars?

<comment><USER18> When it's cheap enough to feasibly do it better than elsewhere. L2 is a better though and we have some there already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I sincerely hope the TMT gets built regardless and in spite of this opposition. It would be an absolute shame to allow a special interest group to use superstition to stop a project that would contribute such a tremendous amount to the advancement of humanities understanding of the cosmos.

It also genuinely makes my blood boil that as a society we've come to a point where we allow superstitions and fairy tales so much space in public discourse, as it legitimizes fundamentally irrational viewpoints and places them on equal footing with rationally based systems of knowledge, which is frankly a death knell for progress.</comment>


Musk: We must colonize Mars to preserve species in WW3 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/11/elon-musk-colonise-mars-third-world-war?CMP=fb_gu <comment><USER2> A species that destroys itself should probably take a sick day at home and get better before infecting the rest of the universe.

If there was an alternative to living on Earth, the "life boats" would invariably go to just the ultra wealthy. If you think large wealth disparity is harmful now, imagine how unconcerned the ultra wealthy will be about the Earth's fate when they didn't have to share it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Or you know, maybe not have a WW3.

If we're still so behind as a species (a species which is supposed to be the most intelligent btw) that we're still fighting from behind our divisions (Geography, religion, ethnicity and so on) why do we even merit a do-over?

And yes, I'm being serious. Generation after generation we still live our lives buffeted about by "the way things are", led by saber-rattlers in a biggest nuke contest. If we all collectively can't get it together given all of the knowledge we have at our fingertips I think we might be done.

<comment><USER4> Totally agree with you</comment></comment>