Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week - barry-cotter https://metarabbit.wordpress.com/2017/07/07/no-research-does-not-say-that-you-produce-more-when-working-40-hours-per-week/?utm_content=buffer58356&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER2> TL;DR: you _can_ get more done if you work 60 hours instead of 40 hours in a week, but the work done in that extra 20 hours might be a small fraction of what gets done in 20 hours during a 40 hour week.

This is self-evidently true for many jobs. E.g., if you pick apples for 40 hours, then even if you only pick one apple per hour after that, you will still pick more apples working 50 hours than 40.

We software developers, though, have an additional consideration: creating software _bugs_ which can (easily) push the productivity of a given period of time into the negative, sometimes deeply.

In my apple-picker example above, this would be like the tired picker driving the loaded apple truck off a cliff, destroying all the apples picked in the first 59 hours of the 60 hour work week (along with the expensive truck).

That example is contrived and unconvincing for the apple picker case, though; nobody makes their tired apple pickers drive the apple trucks back via treacherous mountain roads after a hard day of work.

That's not the case for software development, however; looking at my own 20+ years of professional software development through the lens of an extremely rigorous scientific n=1 anecdatal analysis (which undoubtedly _thrills_ the OP hehe), in my own career probably 75% of the negative productivity caused by bugs I've created was the direct result of code I wrote while trying to work more hours than I should.

I suspect this holds true for other programmers as well.

<comment><USER3> I think you might be missing the author's last point which is that in a competitive field, even a small increase in output can lead to a large increase in payoff.

In his example of getting research funding, it's a step function: either you get funded (y=1) or you don't (y=0), and because you're competing with others, even a small output increase can take you from the 0 side to the 1 side.

<comment><USER4> i've never thought about how these two things relate to each other: asymptotic productivity of work, and winner take almost all nature of capitalism. seems like a very succinct way of explaining why people work so damned much. i'm actually kind of embarrassed i've never connected the two. it seems to make the argument against it more clear too- if marginal hours worked grow less productive, and marginal improvement to the product is negligible in every day terms, we ought to mitigate that somehow, unless its something people are doing because they love it.

<comment><USER5> Great insight! You can see this not only at the macro level (Google winning all of search by being marginally better than competitors), but at the micro level (top employee out of a team of 10 gets the bonus/promotion while everyone else gets nothing), and probably everywhere in between.

What I wonder is: Is this really an intrinsic quality of capitalism? What causes this "winner take most" reward system emerging in some areas of the economy but not others? In many industries, multiple competitors can exist with stability and split market share, and in others, having multiple competitors leads to a blood bath where only one can survive, winning it all.

<comment><USER6> > Is this really an intrinsic quality of capitalism?

Hardly. The history of capitalism shows that absent government intervention to prop up companies, they rise and fall. When I started out, everyone was a-feared that IBM would inevitably take over the world. Then Microsoft dethroned them, and Microsoft was going to take over the world. Then Apple dethroned Microsoft. And on it goes.

There was Sears that dominated retail. Then Walmart shoved them aside. Now Amazon stepped all over Walmart.

See "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Christensen for a book full of examples.

<comment><USER7> Isn't Christensen one of those thought leaders who are paid by megacorps to spread Gramscian false consciousness and make the masses think capitalism really isn't so bad?

<comment><USER8> Yes, facts don't matter, only the political pedigree of the person relating them.

<comment><USER6> I prefer to read books where the author tries to prove me wrong. Books that agree with me are boring :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love how things like the 40 hour work week with two days off get enshrined as some kind of natural phenomenon that has always been with us.

40 hours is an arbitrary number that came from trade unionists demanding fair hours and Robert Owen's slogan:

"Eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest."

I mean those two things: 8 hour work day and 8 hours of sleep have been considered to be the biological/natural requirements, when the research isn't there for it at all.

The reality is, some people can work for 100 hours while others can only work for 20 hours per week without without losing productivity.

This is why I'm sick of this stupid trope that nobody should be working 80 hour weeks. Guess what, I want to, that's how my body works, why are you trying to stop me from doing that? When I was in the military I would work 12 hour days every day and my co-workers would complain because I was "making them look bad" that they only worked 8-10. What? Go home if you want.

The kind of person you are should push you into those types of roles - not the other way around. A 20 hour a week capable person isn't going to last very long in a 100 hour a week job, and they shouldn't be going out for it.

I think the major contention though is that you can't realistically succeed and live comfortably anymore as just a 40 hour a week person, because all of those jobs are gone. So inevitably 20 hour a week people, get put into 60 hour a week jobs and then say the whole system is screwed up (maybe it is, I dunno).

<comment><USER10> It's actually flawed because there are other things that need to be done in a week besides work, recreation, and rest. For example:

\- eating: 12-15 hours/week

\- making food (or travelling to get food): 7-10 hours/week

\- showering, shaving, grooming: 4-7 hours/week

\- laundry, cleaning, house chores: 2-4 hours/week

\- commuting: 5-10 hours/week

\- waiting in line (checkout lines, customer service reps, Comcast/DMV/insurance, etc.): 2-3 hours/week

And that's for me, and I'm single. If I had children, add to that:

\- taking care of children: 15-20 hours/week

None of the above counts as work, rest, or recreation. If work stays at 8 hours, that leaves very little time for rest and recreation.

Cutting rest beyond that is physically unhealthy.

Cutting recreation beyond that is both mentally unhealthy AND physically unhealthy (I get all my exercise in my recreation time).

<comment><USER11> I believe those were accounted for in those times with the notion of a stay- at-home spouse (in reality, read: wife) who did most if not all of that non- job work; food purchase/prep, laundry, chores, children, etc.

<comment><USER12> Correct, which kind of begs the question, why have the work hours not gone down when society started employing both men and women?

<comment><USER13> Because households basically use all extra income to bid up the cost of real estate in neighborhoods with "better" schools. So if every household has both parents working, then no household is the better off for it. And single parent households are well and truly fucked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how they got this curve. A lot of things can be sustained for 1 week cannot be sustained in the long term. I'd say in the long term:

* 140-168 hours/week --> almost certain death.

* 100-140 hours/week --> at risk of cardiovascular disease and many other serious medical conditions. Possible early death.

* 80-100 hours/week --> still super-bad for your body. Forget raising children, dating, getting married, or even making friends. You won't have time for any of those. Expect clinical depression.

* 60-80 hours/week --> you might be able to have meals with friends but forget having a life, hobbies, or anything outside of work. Expect depression and overall culture of unhappiness.

* 50-60 hours/week --> sustainable but not really fun. You can't join family or friends for dinner. Expect talented employees to leave because they'll find something that they enjoy more than being in your company.

* 40-50 hours --> reasonable level for long-term sustainability and retention

<comment><USER14> If this is your perception of an hourly break down, that's fine. But just because you think working 100 hours a week results in "Possible early death" doesn't mean it's like that for other people.

For example, in your chart, I'm currently in the 60-80 hour a week range, split between a full time job and a side hustle. Personally, I've never been happier, I have a life outside of work, a beautiful girlfriend, time to meet with friends, etc.

It's just, I don't spend 5+ hours a day when i get home from work watching Netflix or fucking around on the weekends. Don't equate hustling with depression, unless you're just looking for an excuse to justify why you don't want to work harder.

<comment><USER15> Your side project does not count. You are working 40 hours a week, which makes your high horse comment about watching Netflix and not wanting to work harder sound pretty bad.

It's very easy to work on a side project, or side hustle, or whatever you want to call it. I don't doubt that you're happier. Making things yourself is fulfilling and fun. But that is your free time & your social life. That is your choice, not your day job. You are misunderstanding what the 40 hours per week concept is all about.

The parent comment is correct; working 100 hours a week for someone else, for extended periods, is possible early death. That's not an exaggeration, it will compromise a person's health if done for long periods of time. It is definitely like that for many, many people. Have you ever worked more than 40 for a single job? How about 60/80/100 for longer than a week? Do you know what 100 hours at one job feels like?

If you have a life outside of your job and 20-40 hrs/wk side project, with time to meet friends, you might be working less than you think. A real 80 hour week is hard to maintain without any social life, it's enough time for meals an maybe an hour of social or alone time per day, and not much else. 80 hours/week is 11.5 hours per day, 7 days a week, on average, sustained. Factor in eating, sleeping, bathing and travel to & from work, and you have _maybe_ 10 hours left. If you exercise, you're probably down to 5 hours of free time for the week. If you try to drive anywhere in those 5 hours, you'll run out of time before you get there, activities very close to home are the only sane option. At 100 hours a week, you only have time to work, eat, and sleep, there is physically no time left for anything else.

An employer of mine measured how many hours people worked during crunch, and found that almost everyone in the studio overestimated their own hours. I overestimated my own hours, and I've worked a real 80 hours a week multiple times before. It's not fun, and I did not have time for a social life. It's not maintainable for long periods, at 80 hours a week you're trading your entire life for your salary, it's not a good deal.

<comment><USER10> Agree with dahart. Among the things I typically do on nights and weekends:

\- Travel to national parks and state parks. Exercise during the day, do photography at sunrise, sunset, and at night

\- Build funny robots at home that don't do anything useful but I learn a lot from. Through that I have also gained some ideas for potentially useful robots that I might hack at later that are orthogonal to the robots I'm working on for work

\- About 4 software projects I have going, not intending to commercialize, but maybe release into FOSS if they materialize into something useful

\- Learn to cook new dishes, especially healthy ones, so I can eat less unhealthy crap outside. Visit farmer's markets to get better-quality ingredients and support local economy

\- Practice piano. Occasionally perform locally at meetups and things

\- Review things that I spent years learning during my undergrad and PhD that I wish to not forget, for the sake of my future (e.g. quantum mechanics, quantum computing, quantum communication, signal processing, CS). Occasionally re-take past final exams or homework assignments to make sure I don't lose my skills.

\- Learn new stuff online, watch lectures, read recent academic papers.

I don't have time for Netflix, and don't have too much time to socialize without purpose (although some of the above things I do with friends).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> We need to delineate manual, low-effort work from mental exercise. I can perform manual work virtually unendingly, but have a very finite ability to do mental exercises before mental exhaustion or simple boredom/distraction undermines the work. Individuals will differ, but data for manual work has no application to research, software development, etc.

Having said that, there is shockingly little research or proof for any position, and if there was it can never be generalized to all people.

<comment><USER17> Yes, I've thought the same thing. Wasn't 40 hours mainly about factories and coal mines --- though 40 hours in a mine would also be exhausting. But I think you meant something like a barista.

To my bosses and other non-programmers, I try to describe programming as doing math problems all day. I wonder what the history of hours is for clerks, architects, and other jobs more like ours.

I feel like I would be less tired if I just worked trouble tickets all day. Actually, writing a program too would be easier if that's all I did. Instead, I switch among writing a few different programs, working tickets, and the normal bureaucracy of emails, meetings, required training, etc.

<comment><USER18> Being a barista can be exhausting at fast-paced place. Not as hard or deadly as coal mining, of course.

I work with architects. They work as much as they want to but are paid salary. The minority walk out of the office after their 8 hours is up but many work late into the night and on weekends. They say it's their "industry standard" but, from my observations, it's a) lack of boundaries and b) poor project/time management.

Not to mention the amount of time studying to take their many exams to become licensed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > the point of productivity inflection is just about 40 hours per week

To me, that does seem to support the claim "research shows that 40 hours per week is the best". I don't know who's claiming that overall output goes down the minute you hit 40, that's obviously exaggerated, so why take it so seriously? There's strong evidence that productivity starts to decline somewhere around 40ish, and it obviously varies by individual and situation.

I think the more common, and more correct claim is that 40-ish is optimal, rather than anything above 40 is a negative return.

That bit of data he referenced is for munitions workers doing a low-skill monotonous job - easy to measure productivity. Who would expect to produce solid high quality thought output for 40 or 50 hours a week? I'd be surprised if most academics & programers managed more than 15 hours of conceptual work in a week, the rest we fill with coffee & lunch, browsing the web, talking to people, and loads of other stuff that doesn't require much thinking.

The author's completely right about many of his points; this just isn't clearly defined or unambiguously supported by data. There are obviously some people out there rationalizing and mis-presenting the evidence in favor of a 40 hour work week. As with all studies, there are people who summarize incorrectly and decide that weak evidence justifies a hard line decision. But why get twisted over the worst arguments? Let's discuss the strongest arguments instead.

Do we need data to support the idea that 8 hours is enough? Productivity is only a tiny part of the equation, so this debate is academic. Why are we obsessing over unmeasurable productivity and ignoring labor & poverty issues? Do you need data to prove that when you work 12 hours a day, you physically can't have much life outside of work? The idea of an 8 hour work day is meant to work for _everyone_. It's guaranteed to be conservative, because it has to be good enough for teenagers as well as people near retirement, for single people as well as parents, for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hogwash:

1\. Go read the linked article: [http://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf](http://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf)

2\. It's about munition line workers in 1920 UK during the war.

3\. The blog post claims generality based on this.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think the real problem is presentialism – people would likely contribute more if they are provided with the flexibility of working according to their body rhythms. Each human peaks at different hours of the day. And being in the knowledge economy, it makes more sense to access these spikes of output by providing flexibility.

40 or 50 or 60 hours, i believe that if we could just eliminate the presentialism from our work life, build more trust with each other about being honest with our work – i think the whole research into how many hours we need to work will not even pop up. Everyone would be happy contributing their share of work in return for a paycheck.

</comment><comment><USER21> This essay and most of the comments saying, "of course more work time yields more work completed" ignore the fact that there is no magic reset to full productivity Monday morning.

If you work every hour of week 1, your output of week 2 will be drastically reduced. There is therefore some optimal balance between work time and recovery time. It may be 40 hours, or 20, or 80. It probably varies between tasks and individuals and situations.

Just don't fall into the trap of thinking that spending more time working is necessarily going to be more effective.

Sometimes the best thing you can do to get the job done is to stop working on it for a while.

<comment><USER22> > Sometimes the best thing you can do to get the job done is to stop working > on it for a while.

This. I like to have several side projects at once so I can switch to another one when I'm stuck on the current one.

On the downside, this procedure made me question if I can actually work as a programmer professionally, where I don't have the liberty to just leave any task assigned to me lying around for a week (or a month). It worked out nicely, though, since I found that I can get my train of thought unstuck by discussing the problem with a colleague.

</comment></comment><comment> awinter-py Article is focused on the academic world so doesn't talk about interruptions, meetings, and quiet time.

If you work in an open-plan office the 10 hours you do at night, at home, and on the wkend can be the most productive.

I've had months where I put out more real fires on a kayak, on vacation, than at my desk; people bother you when you're at a desk but they can't get to you on the water.

<comment><USER23> All these things happen in academia. Nowadays, many people regularly work from home for the quiet (I do 1 day a week from home).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> We work a 9/80 flex schedule. 44 hours one week, ,then 36 hours the next with Friday off. So every other weekend we have a 3 day weekend, or 4 if there is a holiday on Monday. Works great, moral increases, productivity increases. Its a win, win.

</comment><comment><USER25> One point I'll agree with is that a lot of times, people use the argument that working 40 hours a week is actually the most efficient to mask their real argument, which is socially unacceptable in today's business climate (particulary tech):

People ought to have more to their lives than their jobs, and working 50, 60, or more hours a week makes that difficult.

Personally, even if people had inexhaustible energy, I still would think it would be wrong to spend more than a third of your day at work. It so happens that it makes sense from an efficiency standpoint to, but I want people working under me to be able to have hobbies, families, and something other than their career.

</comment><comment><USER26> Which says to me that the game development culture of "work 80 hours per week for months on end" is largely about incompetent management, and/or deliberate abuse. It's not about getting things done.

<comment><USER27> I think you may have misunderstood the article - if anything this is an argument for death marches.

<comment><USER28> I wonder if the author being a student pushing for a European PhD[1] warps his thinking about this. With a PhD all the reward is at the end. You either make or break. None of the work you do has any tangible results outside of the end goal.

Most work isn't like that. The rewards are continuous and ongoing. Meaning every task has captured value. If a loan officer closes 19 loans this month instead of 20, productivity is down 5%. BFD. Vs PhD student, complete 19 out of 20 required classes, no PhD. You totally wasted a couple of years of your life.

[1] Europeans historically are way more creditialist than Americans. Learning something isn't very helpful unless there is a credential to go along with it.

<comment><USER22> > None of the work you do has any tangible results outside of the end goal.

Depends on the field. From what I hear [citation needed], what you describe generally holds true in the humanities.

In contrast, I have two friends who're submitting their PhD theses around now, and they already have a ton of tangible results: They're required to publish papers during the research period for their thesis. They got to speak at conferences because of their published findings. They collaborated with other researchers whom they met at these conferences. And that, again, fed back into more papers and a better thesis. Even if they didn't get their PhD (which I'm sure they will), they still have made a name for themselves in their respective fields.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> During WW2, the government wanted to increase production, so did some studies. They found that a 60 hr week boosted production for a couple weeks, but then it fell below what was produced by a 40 hr week.

The solution to a sustained increase in output was to do 60 hr weeks in bursts, not continuously.

<comment><USER22> "In bursts" as in "40 hours with the occasional 60-hour week" or "60-hour weeks with weeks off in between"?

<comment><USER6> the former

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "If you are managing as a group, go for the average"

This is a point I strongly disagree with. Just the way some people need fewer hours of sleep than others OR some people can run further than others. I have found that people have vastly different ability to focus and personal drive.

Orienting around averages is a terrible way to develop a team and people. It also demotivates people that want to work harder and they end up leaving. Instead of setting an average, create an environment where people can push harder if they want to AND get incremental rewards.

<comment><USER23> OP here.

I agree and my phrasing may not have been exact. I meant that if you need to pick a number for a whole group of people, then you look at the average.

This can be in the context of industrial production where you have thousands of workers and are forced to have fixed shifts (because you cannot run the assembly line without all the stations filled).

Or, in more modern example, a public sector bureaucracy where you cannot be very flexible as these things are negotiated with a union as whole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> A bit surprised not to see a reference to Henry Ford. I thought he was the father of the 40 hour work week? He did include in his thinking the idea that more leisure time would allow workers more time to enjoy his cars, but IIRC the basis of the change was not social, but productivity, and based on his own studies.

<comment><USER31> The 40-hour workweek was conceived of and fought for by many socialists and labor activists over many years. What can be said for Ford is that they instituted it without being forced to (by strike or law), but it was nearly 50 years after it had been instituted for federal employees (and 2 years after it was a part of FDR's platform.)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight- hour_day#United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight- hour_day#United_States)

<comment><USER30> I wonder which had the biggest effect on its widespread adoption, Ford on the unions. I'm sure I read that once Ford did it, it became almost _fasionable_ in the factory owning classes!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> As an interesting remark, I still find myself quite productive working 50 hours a week thanks to context switches from working in 2 different languages at my jobs (node and python), and in different areas (data engineering and backend)

</comment><comment><USER33> I think the key thing for me is that maybe I produce more one week, but working 60+ hours is going to make me useless the following week.

</comment><comment><USER34> When I read the title, I thought: if there's no evidence that people produce more when working 40 hours, why would we work 40 hours? Let's work less!

I didn't expect anyone to argue for working more than 40 hours. But then again, I don't live in the US.

</comment><comment><USER35> Ability to perform is in part a function of age which the article leaves out completely. 40h/week is doable for most but there are plenty of posts by more experienced developers here who have said they strictly limit hours or report that when they were younger they were able to perform longer.

There is also the question of sustainability. Not only health wise but also the social system around one gets impacted imho. somewhere beyond 45-50h. More work directed output may well be possible but at the cost of weakening the support system and with that increased risk in times of crisis.

I'm willing to discuss this more in depth with the author once he's got a few grey hairs.

</comment><comment><USER36> Does this include side projects? ie if you work 10 hours/week on a side project you shouldn't work more than 30 in your job.

Maybe employers should be able to ban side projects for this reason.

<comment><USER37> Given the source of employment law is the masters and servants act I think you might find that employers can veto outside work certainly getting permission for out side work is often required by contract.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The question is how long you can maintain a pace (hours worked) before that pace begins to impact performance. Usain Bolt can't run his 100m pace for the duration of a 400m race.

</comment><comment><USER39> The study I have seen claimed that 40-50 hours long term have same output and then it goes down.

The studies on game development teams found that crunch raise productivity of short (don't recall if 3 or 6 weeks) and productivity goes down only after.

This article does not seem to adress concrete studies nor their results - <AUTHOR> just generally theorise about what might be wrong about them without knowing what is on them.

<comment><USER23> OP here.

Do you have a citation? The post is mostly to address this constant claims that 40 hours is proven by science and no convincing citations are provided.

I am also writing in the context of self-managing knowledge workers who can manage their own time. I explicitly write that the flexibility we have may mitigate many of the downsides observed in mandated long hours. For example, I do work >40 hours, but I rarely have to wake up with an alarm clock. I can follow the occasional 16 hour day with a 10 hour sleep cycle and stroll into work at lunch time the next day feeling pretty relaxed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> What a strange article, his first issue: "I am happy to be contradicted with data, but too often I see this issue being discussed with links to web articles citing other web articles, finally citing studies which suffer from the issues listed below. Maximum output at work is traded off" while he him self does not cite a single scientific article

<comment><USER23> I do cite one study, but burden of proof of producing citations is on people claiming that "science shows". I never claim that.

In fact, I found few scientific articles on the subject and the few that I did find were not relevant (for some of the reasons in the text).

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Productivity is the greatest source of waste.

</comment><comment><USER42> At my last job I probably did 20 hours of work a week due to the awful environment. I started burning out from frustration. I'm not convinced the number of hours is as important as the suitability of the environment.

</comment><comment><USER43> No one seems to have mentioned the value of the work done. Like market value or impact. The quantity of work is kind of a distraction, and focusing on it implicitly says that presentalism is ok. Which is not true.

</comment><comment><USER44> I think we should be looking at efficiency. If we can find a way to maximize the tradeoff between productivity and hours worked it would greatly benefit employers and employees.

<comment><USER45> i think the author did a pretty good job at looking at the tradeoffs.

in a lot of ways, some businesses are already trying to take advantage of both options by using a mix of contractors/consultants and full time employees.

<comment><USER44> I guess my opinion is that we should all be working less and earning a living wage. I feel that's the trend that must happen with all the automation taking place. And welcome UBI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> 40 hours is good for me for "you must do work" but lots of times when I'm working on projects I find interesting I'm just inspired to work on the project.

</comment><comment><USER47> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4Pu_JuPILw&t=2m45s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4Pu_JuPILw&t=2m45s)

</comment><comment><USER48> On a phone so I can't really crunch the raw data, but looking at that chart example, Is the difference between 48 hours and 60 statistically significant?

</comment><comment><USER49> This title is very odd, I suggest an edit: Research is unable to prove that working more than 40 hours a week increases productivity.

<comment><USER50> Yes, coming from the UK, where my hours in academia were 37.5/week, I was surprised to learn (from my incorrect interpretation of the title) that those 2.5 hours/week I work here in the US were pointless.

<comment><USER37> I had one boss who had worked in the valley and the uk he said he got no more work out of the USA teams who worked longer hours and much less leave than he did in the UK where we where on civil service terms

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> 40 hours per week is detrimental to the health as well, especially if you don't take breaks where you exercise vigorously. I've seen research that showed a 4% reduction in lifespan for people that worked 45 hours versus 40. I'll look for it and be back with more details.</comment>


Show HN: BreakLock – A hybrid of Mastermind and the Android pattern lock - <AUTHOR> https://maxwellito.github.io/breaklock/ <comment><USER2> A fun little piece of the source:

 _<!--[if lte IE 6]>_

If you read this it's probably because the world has rebooted. I don't know how but you arrived here. I'm sorry you cannot enjoy this little game but you will be able to in the not too distant future. Browsers will become incredibly better. Just before the world turns into chaos due to Nutella production shortages. Scientists will realise too late that Nutella was to humans what pollen is to bees. Don't believe the hype, the end didn't (or won't) happen because the 'left-pad' package got removed from NPM. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a great puzzle game and a very impressive demo web app. However, I wish it was available from the various app stores for two reasons:

1\. I want to pay you for this.

2\. It will be ripped off a dozen ways, and I would rather see you make money rather instead of some horrible knockoff app-vendor.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, I know it's the risk, but this is why it will always be free and ad- free on GitHub. Like 2048.

On Android + Chrome, a banner will popup to install it as PWA on your phone and you won't see the difference. I believe you are on iOS? I wish Safari iOS was better at following the new web feature (like WebRTC...)

Thanks for your feedback, that's pretty cool!

<comment><USER5> how to make it work offline? i would appreciate APK as well

<comment><USER4> By default (with chrome) a service worker will cache the app for offline use. If Chrome didn't asked you, just add the page to your homescreen.

<comment><USER5> i am using Brave browser, there was no popup but it seem to work offline

<comment><USER4> Brave is based on Chromium. With a bit of chance, the service worker should be working as fine. That mean even offline you can access the page (by going to the URL as usual).

But I know, the UX sucks to access such a silly game :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Solved the first puzzle on "easy" in 53 attempts. The first 20 attempts were me figuring out that the 4 dots beneath each try are not in the same order as I drew the pattern, so I can't directly deduce if a single dot is correct or not. Then it took me another ~8 attempts to find the four correct dots and then a very long time to get the order right.

Fun game, interesting idea and nicely done! I'll probably play a few more rounds when I get home.

<comment><USER7> 52 attempts first here, then 25 then 20... exactly the same thought process.

<comment><USER8> gave up around 15 tries on my first attempt because I refreshed to review the instructions again but my 2nd try on easy I did it in 7

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I found the display of previous attempts a little hard to decipher (1-2-3-4 labelling would be much easier to parse, for me), but other than that great fun, and exceptionally polished presentation!

<comment><USER10> Conceptually i kept applying direction to success/failure. Eg, if one of them was correct, i kept fighting the assertion of the direction being correct, ie if 3 was correct i kept thinking 2 was related to 3's "correctness".

I imagine 1-2-3-4 would help my confusion a bit. It's weird though, i _know_ it doesn't work that way, but i kept thinking that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is some "overflow: scroll" that should be "overflow: auto" in CSS, IMHO.. So many empty scrollbars in firefox on osx...

<comment><USER4> I know... it was tricky to make Flexbox working everywhere. I ended up setting this property to make Safari looking fine. But you make me realise that it uglify everything on Firefox... I hope to find a good fix

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A very fun game, it feels like a more "computationally intense" minesweeper, though I guess I compare everything to minesweeper[1][2]!

It seems the optimal strategy is to initially try to ferret out which dots are in the solution set and which are not in the solution set via broad non- overlapping sweeps followed by slight pattern deviations to determine membership of particular dots. Depending on luck and your errors, this might take a half dozen moves, it might take two dozen.

Once you know which dots are in the solution set and which are outside, I find it takes less than 5 additional moves to determine order. For this part, a pencil and paper for tracking the elimination of certain dots from certain orders made this phase consistently quick.

Is very fun, I was ultimately able to beat the medium difficulty setting in an average of 15 attempts per game.

[1] - [https://github.com/lelandbatey/defuse_division](https://github.com/lelandbatey/defuse_division)

[2] - [https://github.com/lelandbatey/minesweeper- solver](https://github.com/lelandbatey/minesweeper-solver)

</comment><comment><USER13> Maxwell, you have a spelling mistake on the Success page.

"Lock found in 20 attemps. You must hate this game by now."

<comment><USER4> Dammit! Good catch! I'll fix it tonight, once at home. Thank you!

PS: Pull requests are welcome ;-) [https://github.com/maxwellito/breaklock](https://github.com/maxwellito/breaklock)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I saw this game (Mastermind or originally called Moo or Bulls and Cows) in an article in Software Practice and Experience[1] in the 70's. A couple of years later I saw a very clear explanation of how to write an effective software opponent, written by Knuth[2]. It was a lot of fun to implement back in those days (first in Fortran and then in Pascal). I recommend the easy paper by Knuth.

It's surprising how effective Knuth's algorithm is. If I recall 4 or 5 guesses to solve 4 digit mastermind.

[1] Computer Recreations, Software – Practice & Experience 1.2, 201-204 (Apr- Jun 1971) [2] D.E. Knuth, The Computer as Master Mind, J. Recreational Mathematics Vol. 9 (1976/7)

<comment><USER15> This is harder than Mastermind because you're not allowed to repeat colours/numbers in your entries.

Interestingly, I find I'm using some similar logic to what I use playing Minesweeper. "Three of this quartet are in the pattern, one of this quartet is in the pattern, they overlap in two places, therefore the two non-overlapped points in the three-scoring quartet must be in the pattern."

First try took 19 attempts, second try took 13 and I think I can do better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pretty neat. Is there some kind of "strategy guide" for mastermind-like games? I feel that I'm operating at close-to-brute-force levels (I spent 22 attempts at a 4-lock) and I'd love to get better

<comment><USER17> I wrote a program and I'm getting sub 6 for every easy game. Think of the board as a grid of numbers.

0 1 2

3 4 5

6 7 8

Then an L shaped pattern would be the string 0367.

The main idea is that you first build a list of every possible combination of legal moves. Then you take a random guess from that list and you will get back the number of white and black dots.

Now, since you know your random guess and the right answer produces X white dots and Y black dots, you can remove from the list of possible combinations every combination that has: dots(myGuess, combinations[i]) != (X, Y)

you can keep taking random guesses from this list and filtering after each attempt until you get the right answer, I'm not sure of the math but I think worst case It'll be 6-7 moves to find the right answer.

<comment><USER18> Reminds me of a program I had to write earlier in school to implement an AI that would create hangman puzzles and then cheat on them by lying to the person playing, but in a way that they wouldn't contradict themselves and would have a valid word that matches what they've said so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great time waster, worth making lots of guesses just to see the performance reports. My first go took 65 guesses which included working out the use of the 4 dots, the game appreciated my determination. my second go was 3 guesses but I admit I got very lucky there.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's interesting how straight forward the game becomes after you recognize the pattern. Fortunately android lock screens don't inform the users about how many correct points they choose in the pattern!

</comment><comment><USER21> What is the algorithm to solve this in the shortest number of moves. I have got it down to 7, but there might be something faster.

</comment><comment><USER22> Yay, break the hard mode in 9 attempts! Kinda like Sudoku but more flexible.

</comment><comment><USER18> Reminds me of another phone game I've played, 0h n0. Quite fun.

</comment><comment><USER23> I beat it in two moves out of sheer luck.

</comment><comment><USER24> Lucky to do in 10 attempts only

<comment><USER25> I got really lucky and managed to guess it in 3 attempts. It was rather easy since I got two dots right in my first attempt.

[http://imgur.com/tPdBU9O](http://imgur.com/tPdBU9O)</comment></comment>


UTorrent Serves Over 5 Billion Ads Per Month - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/utorrent-serves-over-5-billion-ads-per-month-130521/ <comment><USER2> Wait, what? You can turn the ads off? I didn't even know they added in the option, this whole time I've had to deal with ads in uTorrent when I have the option to disable them, my eyes have been opened. 5 billion impressions per month is a rather impressive figure. They really need to improve the advertisement quality though, the poker ads are very annoying amongst the other suspicious ads you occasionally see.</comment>


Doctor dons Ebola protection suit to protest 'asleep at the wheel' CDC - <AUTHOR> http://www.ajc.com/news/news/doctor-boards-flight-in-ebola-protection-suit-to-p/nhZk8/

<comment><AUTHOR> tl:dr

Mobley, a Medical College of Georgia graduate who had an overnight layover after flying to Atlanta from Guatemala on Wednesday, said that he feels that the CDC is "asleep at the wheel" when it comes to screening passengers arriving in the United States from other countries.

"Yesterday, I came through international customs at the Atlanta airport," the doctor told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "The only question they asked arriving passengers is if they had tobacco or alcohol."</comment>


Wyoming's War on Wolves - <AUTHOR> https://daily.jstor.org/wyomings-war-on-wolves <comment><USER2> I know from firsthand experience how the elk and deer herds have been decimated in that region of the country, and in fact have been cut by more than 50% in the region I've hunted over the past decade. This dramatically shortens the season for us and also means we haven't been able to take any females for years now. We've also been tracked and surrounded by them on a few occasions, and I challenge anyone who enjoys watching them on YouTube to feel the same way after you've heard their chorus of howls completely surrounding you in dark timber. I'm talking about deep instinctual fear . . . it's sobering.

I think the article does a poor job of describing the hunting process, it's not like you just kill wolves and tell Fish & Game about it later. You have to hunt in season using certain weapons or traps and you have to apply for tags beforehand. The success rate is extremely low, I know the first year it was open in Idaho the projected rate was 20% but the actual rate was 0.3%. Turns out wolves are extremely hard to hunt.

Having them off the list is a huge improvement though because the ranchers and hunters are working in cooperation instead of opposition to the authorities. There used to be a real S.S.S. attitude among the old timers (Shoot, Shovel, Shut up), now they are going to be giving good data back to the authorities who will be better able to adjust the numbers in favor of all the species that share the ecosystem.

For context, the first wolf killed during the legal season in my area was stuffed and mounted in the local sporting goods store . . . 7 feet nose to tail and probably north of 140#. Not what you want to meet in the woods, and especially not when there are two dozen of them.

<comment><USER3> >I'm talking about deep instinctual fear

With a 30-30 or 30-06, I'm not sure what there is to be scared of (not mentioning a probable .45 side-arm)? Guns are scarier than teeth.

<comment><USER4> These aren't packs of feral chihuahuas we're talking about, the adult (american) grey wolf mean weight is 88 Lbs, they can weigh up to 180. Imagine an animal almost as large as you, who's very purpose for existence is to predate mammals much larger than itself. Now imagine being surrounded by 20 of them and aware of the fact they have evolved to hunt cooperatively, to take down ungulates that can weight 5-10 times what they do. You are going to _maybe_ get 1, 2 (if god himself intervenes) shots off with your bolt action 30-06 before they swarm you and literally tear you to pieces. If you had your back to a cliff and a M134 Minigun, you might have a chance. Luckily they mostly choose not to hunt humans, but it ain't because they wouldn't be successful. They just have easier prey most of the time.

<comment><USER5> I have hunted and been an outdoors man all my life.

This is total nonsense, one shot and they would all be running. Wolves are deathly afraid of guns, and what predators fear is confrontation. Its easier to run away and go after something that isn't going to result in you dying.

They are animals, with a strong desire for self preservation, not a mindless army of killing machines out for human blood.

If it was truly this dangerous hundreds of people would be dying a year.

Your hyperbole adds nothing but disinformation to the conversation.

<comment><USER2> Not an example of using a gun, but this wolf did not seem deterred by confrontation and repeated shots of bear spray to the face:

[http://www.montanaoutdoor.com/2013/07/wolf-attacks- bicyclist...](http://www.montanaoutdoor.com/2013/07/wolf-attacks-bicyclist-in- idaho/)

<comment><USER5> Its a one off situation, any number of things could have been at play, the pepper spray could have been a dud, he could have missed in a panic or been too far away, etc.

People going into environments like that need to carry guns, and they need to understand that running away, especially in a panicked manner makes things worse. I'm not saying they aren't dangerous animals, they clearly are. That's why people need to understand how to handle them, its no different from being prepared to climb a mountain.

But hyperbole about needing a mini-gun or you are surely going to die to a pack of wolves is just utter, complete bullshit.

<comment><USER3> This is what I was talking about elsewhere in this discussion about city people ready to believe there are packs of wolves out hunting humans. 95% of the time in the back country (over 25 years in the rockies) when encountering these large predators, I only see their backside as they run away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm sympathetic to the ranchers as its costly to lose animals, but in a lot of ways I still think a simple economic solution would have kept this from getting that far. If the wolves are technically owned by the federal government, then they could have paid for each animal the wolves eat (at final market price). Frankly, a Fish & Wildlife person driving out with a check would have solved quite a lot of this at a much cheaper price.

The North American wolves are not their European brethren in body count (far from it).

<comment><USER7> That kind of solution could create a Cobra Effect ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect)) where ranchers feed wolves with their stock.

I'm surprised that livestock guarding dogs were not mentioned in the article. Some breeds are known to prevent attacks by merely displaying aggressive behavior toward predators without actually harming neither the wolves nor themselves.

<comment><USER8> It wouldn't really be a Cobra Effect. In the Cobra Effect, the net number of Cobras (which were trying to be eliminated) was increased instead of decreased. If farmers start breeding livestock intentionally to be eaten by wolves, it's hard to see how this would have a net negative effect on the wolf population.

Maybe you're suggesting the wolves would forget how to hunt because they are constantly being fed by ranchers? This might be possible.

Either way, the key to implementing a policy like this would be testing it out with a small subset of Wyoming and measuring it's effects. Also, one should be careful not to over incentivize ranchers towards feeding wolves, but compensate them justly.

<comment><USER6> The other difference from the Cobra effect is that feeding wolves would result in a whole lot of problems for the rancher (as in life and limb to family). Those problems are enough of an incentive not to do those things. You really, really don't want a predator to learn free meals are on your land. You already have to manage the land use when ranching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://www.eastidahonews.com/2017/03/boy-sprayed-cyanide- ex...](https://www.eastidahonews.com/2017/03/boy-sprayed-cyanide-explosive- grace-god-im-still-alive/)

POCATELLO — The family of a teenage boy sprayed by a cyanide explosive that killed their dog is outraged they weren't told the device was planted near their home.

M-44s are spring-activated devices that release cyanide when they are activated through upward pressure or pulling. The US Department of Agriculture uses the devices to control coyotes and other predators.

</comment><comment><USER10> If this bothers you, one thing you could try is searching "great lakes wolf patrol" and send some of your developer salary their way.

</comment><comment><USER11> _Multiple scientists have also challenged ideas about wolves' positive impact on Wyoming ecosystems. In a 2009 study, the ecologists Scott Creel and David Christianson contend that elk's reduced consumption of willow trees "was more strongly affected by snow conditions than by the presence of wolves." The scientists Matthew Kauffman, Jedediah Brodie, and Erik Jules also refute the notion that wolves played a central role in helping Yellowstone aspen trees to recover in their 2010 article. That study also concludes that "aspen are not currently recovering in Yellowstone, even in the presence of a large wolf population." (Other scientists have gone on to disagree with Kauffman, Brodie, and Jules's findings, publishing scholarly refutations of that study.)_

Science: A more civil version of the internet refutation "That's just your opinion, man!"

</comment><comment><USER9> Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West

[http://www.publiclandsranching.org/book.htm](http://www.publiclandsranching.org/book.htm)

</comment><comment><USER12> Born and raised in Idaho. Dunno if anyone will read this, but many of us here are against the hunting of wolves (or any other large predator like mountain lions etc).

The reason is very simple at its core - do humans know better than the natural world? The answer is clearly no, so there must be unintended consequences to hunting animals purely for sport or human constructs like competition. Without wolves, herds grow too large and overgraze streams and generally wreck ecosystems.

I recognize that hunters want to succeed at finding game but humans are the top predator. We already have full control, so I find arguments that we are competing with wolves to be rather sophomoric. People just want that feeling of having total control, which is at odds with the natural world. It's a macho thing, not a pragmatic thing.

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning- mix/wp/2016/08/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning- mix/wp/2016/08/09/storied-alaska-wolf-pack-beloved-for-decades-has-vanished- thanks-to-hunting/?utm_term=.972849386b62)

Storied Alaska wolf pack beloved for decades has vanished, thanks to hunting

 __*

FYI: if you went to Denali NP, your chances of seeing a wolf used to be 50% or so. Now... the Park says 2-3%.

</comment><comment><USER13> Highly recommend life below zero on Netflix. If my family ever ends up living off land I will now know how to do it a little bit better than I knew before watching. The best hunter, 5ft lady, chased down a running wolf and shot it from long distance. Great show! Alaska is amazing.

</comment><comment><USER14> In the absence of wolves, you get coyotes and coy-dogs, which are as bad, if not worse than wolves, filling that niche. Nasty creatures.

<comment><USER5> If you truly think that coyotes and coy-dogs are "as bad or worse" than wolves, in terms of being dangerous to humans, you don't have a clue sorry.

<comment><USER14> Not humans, but they eat every other animal out, decimating the deer, rabbits, turkeys, about anything smaller than moose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't know the particulars of the Wyoming project, but I can speak about this issue in depth from a firsthand perspective regarding the gray wolf reintroduction program that started in my tiny mountain town in Arizona in 98.

First, I have to say I generally understand people wanting to preserve a species and help an ecosystem. I really do. I have seen very little good science to back up the purported reasons for the reintroduction program though. Supposed benefits, ignoring the "tourist economy", such as elk and deer grazing habit changes for waterways, have not held up, and even if they did, were miniscule benefits that could be handled in other ways. (For example, instead of hoping wolves will hunt beaver which cause damage (but also help in ways), they could increase beaver tags. Right now the White Mountain Apache reservation is having a wild horse problem. The wolves aren't nearly numerous enough to even put a dent in it.

I have witnessed firsthand the kind of destruction that results in freshly minted PHD's showing up in a forest they've never been to and insisting they know better than the families that have lived on that land for 100+ years. The primary example of this for me was the large forest fires in the area. The old timer loggers were saying they should be allowed to thin the forests out, and that they should be allowing natural burns to go longer and be doing more control burns. The PHD's at the forest service insisted against this, and then the pine beetle infestation hit, and then a flame and poof... twice, more than 400k acres up in flames. This has created distrust in the locals.

I also question some of the shock value statistics being thrown around to villify or negate ranchers concerns. I've heard from people that they are increasingly restricting and disallowing public grazing... so how can decreases of livestock attacks really be trusted when there aren't nearly the same amount of livestock in the first place?

I haven't even mentioned how badly the actual reintroduction program was handled. They started by cage feeding pairs and releasing them as a pair. The wolves were way to reliant on being fed and way too unafraid of humans. Now they are trying to put cage born/fed pups into already wild packs...

My family jokes I'm half-Apache because I spent so much time in the forest when I was younger, but now we don't let friends or family go out to half our little _secret spots_ without being armed. It's easy to say "wolves are more afraid of you" and spout all the things that PHD told you because he read them in a book, but when you are in the forest and hear a pack across the ridge at night... it has vastly changed the atmosphere of the mountains. Before the reintro program we really only had to worry about mountain lions and the occasional bear... both of which were much more scared of humans than any gray wolf is, especially in a pack. That being said though, I knew ranchers who have had more losses from the mountain lions than from the wolves, which is one of the reasons a mountain lion hunt is tradition in the area.

In the local population, this has created massive blowback, to the point that I openly hear people spreading the three S's when it comes to wolves. Shoot, shovel, and shhhhhhh. I never heard of anyone actually doing it, because the forest service put out a 50k reward for reporting such an action!

The bottom line is that at every turn I have seen phd environmentalists assume they know best and end up causing blowback that bites locals in the ass, while the forest service/blm will just move that person somewhere else and they never have to deal with the consequences of their actions. The locals are tired of this kind of federal over-reach.

New Mexico as I understand it currently has an injunction against the reintro program for just this reasons. I say good for them.

In all my years in the forest though, I only saw one up close and personal in the wild once. It was huge, beautiful, and majestic, and I'm glad I was in a vehicle. I simply don't see the real value of their reintroduction other than to make what my grandpa would call the "hippy tree huggers" feel good. In 20 years, they barely have the pop above 100.

edit: seeing lots of hate for ranchers. I honestly don't think people understand how important rachers are to the ecosystems, a thousand times more important than wolves. As for hunters, I generally have a lot of disdain for them. Locals bag one elk and share it. City-boy hunters who think they are country put on camo, sit in a stand all day and bag something mostly for the picture and the trophy, and that bothers me greatly. They also tend to have a lack of respect for the forest. Just saying, don't equate hunters or illegal hunters with the ranchers.

<comment><USER9> "I honestly don't think people understand how important rachers are to the ecosystems, a thousand times more important than wolves."

All right I'll bite. Where in Arizona? Mogollon Rim? Arizona Strip? The Kaibab?

Aside from these above Arizona is desert. The desert is fragile. The cows destroy the desert. The American West (deserts) are mountains of cow shit. Every stream, every spring, every alcove is fouled if the cows can get in. The cows are the biggest destructive force in the desert I have ever seen.

The saddest part is that the open range ranching in desert Southwest is not even profitable without large subsidies and support by the taxpayer. These ranches are "pretend cowboys" making a living by other means. A handful of cows they own does not really help anyone and the costs of us all are huge.

Now, to the forested parts of Arizona. The Kaibab and the Arizona Strip are essentially a park land. If not for cows, it would be a pristine wilderness. This is all federal land. We do not need cows there either. 6 months ago I went on foot from Bryce to Nankoweap. The cows on Kaibab wreck havoc just like everywhere else. The Kaibab is dotted by swaths of open areas made by ranchers years ago for grazing, still nothing grows.

What is really important for any ecosystem I am aware of, is to NOT have cows and ranching. We have enough developed and rich land in other places. Please leave the West alone! Please go to Texas where all land is private and raise your livestock there.

This said, fewer cows and higher beef prices would help in general as well.

<comment><USER15> Mogollon Rim is awfully big, but yeah. More specifically Apache- Sitgreaves/Gila national forest. I'm not talking about and don't know about the desert so those points are moot as are the ones about the strip and kaibab.

That's not to say you are wrong about them in particular, but our particular ecosystem it's different. However, the grazing on public land isn't all good. In chokepoints sometimes land destruction happens, for example.

That being said, the idea of leaving _pristine wilderness_ that way for the sake of it fails the understand the bigger picture I am talking about here. For example, if we were to leave the _pristine wilderness_ to do it's thing, we should let natural burns just do their thing. That's part of my original statement. The forest service was interfering with the natural process of burns in the forest and in the end caused more damage than benefit.

The livestock have helped keep underbrush down, and since the fires have helped to spread plant life and reinvograte the forest. The ranchers in tending the stock have also performed many of the duties that the forest service otherwise would do, and often don't have the time, manpower, or funding to get done. Honestly though I just happen to be a geek from the area, I don't know that much about the grazing system and I would have to ask the people who do know about it.

So to summarize, my list of good things are: reduced wildfire risk, increased plant diversity, invasive plant control, and reduction of public funds needed for land management (I've seen estimates at over $750m saved per year by public grazing programs nationally).

I have to say a response like yours is exactly what I'm talking about. The kind of knee-jerk "save the land" response without considering the pragmatic reality of the situation. Ranchers alone, if done properly, could keep the pristine wilderness more pristine than if it was all just walled off and no- one ever went there.

<comment><USER9> Ah, Gila!

Everything that I have seen on the ground makes me think that livestock can't be beneficial for an ecosystem, be it a desert or a forest. All I have seen from cows in the west is damage. The times have changed. The economy is different. The priorities of the country and people's attitudes have changed (conservation). It is time to get cows off public lands where it makes little economical sense.

BTW, in your case it is not grey wolf, but even a more endangered mexican wolf, correct? These are critically endangered, if I remember correctly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Supply Chain info must be on record somewhere - people could just boycott beef from these ranches.

<comment><USER17> Shame on you, the well-being of humans should be more important than an animal.

<comment><USER18> Funny, HN is all about capitalism while it works against labor.

Suddenly, when it works against capital, HN gets very upset.

<comment><USER19> That would not have been my first thought after reading "the well-being of humans should be more important than an animal" \- I'd've thought "oh shit, they just triggered all the urban dwelling armchair economists".

On the other hand, I suspect the trend you describe at least somewhat exists, and you're suffering from the human brain being an overactive pattern matcher in any given specific case rather than being entirely wrong about the general case.

<comment><USER17> Urban dwelling? I live in rural Romania.

<comment><USER19> I gave my guess as to who was downvoting and/or angrily replying to your post, as a counterpoint to bsder's guess as to who said people are.

I also meant to type "armchair environmentalists" but too much marginal revolution and too little coffee apparently made me braino.

Rural romanian sensibilities versus US urban dwelling archair environmentalist would totally explain the attacks on you to me - and now seems even more plausible than "labour versus capital" as the underlying cause.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Personally I have no opinion on wolves, but I'm a city boy.

The notion that "city folk" have any idea how to manage anything out in the wild probably contributes as much to how people in WY and elsewhere perceive the wolf as any damage wolves may cause.

<comment><USER21> I don't understand - where in the article does it indicate to you that "city folk" are managing wolf populations?

And furthermore, if the people managing wolf populations are defined as "city folk," what about this definition makes them ineligible to manage wolf populations?

<comment><USER3> When I lived in Idaho, my neighbor found his dead dog draped over his mailbox because it wondered onto another neighbors land that had cattle. The law is on their side, and this issue goes back over 100 years, though the details differ.

<comment><USER21> That's an interesting story, but can you clarify why you mentioned it? I don't understand the relation to my question.

<comment><USER3> It's the type of story that city people (who spend 0.01% of their time in rural areas) seem to be astonished by because their lifestyles are so different. Trying to impose your will on people in an area you've barely lived seems quite arrogant to those that live there 100% of the time.

<comment><USER21> Oh. I hadn't found the story astonishing, sorry. To be honest, I feel like you're the one coming off as arrogant, to suggest that there's some impassible divide between those that live in rural communities, and those that live in cities. I don't believe this is the case.

<comment><USER3> It's not an impassible divide, just a mentality difference. I'm not sure where you live, but my county has ~60k people (well, year round residents).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Six-legged robots faster than nature-inspired gait - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/10550.html <comment><USER2> Given "when adhesive leg structures in real Drosophila are covered, animals exhibit atypical [and faster] bipod-like leg coordination," I wondered why those insects still preferred tripod gait.

The answer, from the paper's abstract:

" _We propose that the requirement to climb vertical terrain may drive the prevalence of the tripod gait over faster alternative gaits with minimal ground contact._ "

[http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14494](http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14494)</comment>


Ask HN: Where to find designers for low-budget startup? - <AUTHOR>

So this week I was looking to get a logo made for my startup before launch. I had the budget of $800 set aside (primarily sever costs) for 1 year, I was willing to spend upto $180 for a logo. I went on Dribble and e-mailed various designers who I though had enough experience with logos similar to what I wanted. The lowest offer I got for a logo was $450. Now, maybe its just me thinking that is a bit too much. I mean, even at $100 per hour would a designer really spend 4+ hours on a logo? Perhaps using Dribbble was a mistake or maybe I've been severely misinformed about how much effort goes into design. So here is my question: What are some websites with designers who accommodate to low-budget startups and are willing to create a logo for >$200? <comment><USER2> Logo design can cost thousands if you hire a specialist. And they would spend a lot more than 4 hours on your logo (closer to 40-50 hours).

I am a web designer primarily, but I could probably help you out. Email me at email@example.com

My portfolio is at madebyargon.com, but again it only showcases my website and UI design work.

</comment><comment><USER3> Every designer has its own design process, specially when it comes to branding design. The price will vary depending on the work required, if you need business cards, branding applications (tshirts, flags, stationary, etc).

Charging you $600 for a 4-5 hour work, its just symbolic. The amount of work put on a logo easily takes a couple days if not weeks to come up with the final design.

For instance, Comedy Central was charged $1MM for their logo redesign and the agency charged them for just "1 hour" of work. This doesnt mean they normally charge $1MM per hour.

</comment><comment><USER4> Just searching $100 logo gave me a bunch of hits, like these guys:

<http://www.100dollarlogo.com/>

Designing a logo is one of those things, like naming, where lots of effort may be spent on seemingly small outcomes. That's because a good designer will generate a ton of options and spend a long time thinking about what message your logo needs to convey.

</comment><comment><USER5> A designer could easily spend a few days of not weeks doing concepts and tweaking your design. You could look for a designer to join yourself as a co- founder. I'm sure there will be more than just a logo they'd provide great input into. "Build it with Me" (<http://www.builditwith.me>) is a great place to find designers with or without ideas for projects.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you've got a solid idea of what you like and perhaps how you'd like your logo to look, try elance.com

You usually get pretty reasonable bids on there, plus you can check out individuals portfolio and see if they have done anything similar before.

</comment><comment><USER7> This isn't what you wanted to hear but, with an $800 budget, put design on the backburner. Read <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839022> for some DIY visual design help.</comment>


Getting started with PeerTube - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/we-distribute/getting-started-with-peertube-ec5dbf007058 <comment><USER2> Sadly all of those decentralized / federated app all have this same accessibility issue.

Maybe there is some sort of business case, or at least some preliminary solution to get there, that offers a middle ground between "you're only the customer of our SaaS" and "you have to be your own IT department"? something like a standardized cloud-ready deployment, where instead of only d/l the server side app, the site also points you to the cloud providers that also support that app (or this standard) so that you're just 3 clicks away from running your own instance.

That'd be nice, not sure it would pay for the team developing that standard though.

<comment><USER3> I can't think of any projects that use it off the top of my head, but i'm pretty sure i've seen "one click setup" buttons for heroku and digital ocean

binder is kinda similar for python jupyter notebooks

[https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click- apps/](https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/)

[https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-button](https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-button)

[https://mybinder.org/](https://mybinder.org/)

edit: after looking at the github, they actually have this with YunoHost (whatever that is): [https://install- app.yunohost.org/?app=peertube](https://install- app.yunohost.org/?app=peertube)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I doubt YouTube would ever have been successful if it had required this level of explanation.

<comment><USER5> Or the lack of anyway to monetize your content other than link to a method for accepting donations.

<comment><USER6> Content creators on PeerTube could do in-video product endorsements.. that's already a fairly standard practice on YouTube, which does support monetization.

<comment><USER7> It's a bit of chicken and egg problem though. To get in video endorsements, you need to get very popular. To get very popular, you need a more popular platform than peertube.

<comment><USER8> It depends. You obviously need a millions of subscribers to promote the 'appetite suppressant' lollipops - and you need a TV to promote the new life insurance brand. But to triple the sales of HackRF, a couple of thousands niche auditory is enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This feels like a guide for an early podcast player, the way you connect to different instances and their channels using urls. Kinda refreshing actually.

</comment><comment><USER10> peertube worked fine the few times I tried it, it's not in my mind when I want to see videos but I have to say it never felt a disappointment.. pretty neat for such an effort

</comment><comment><USER11> My guess is that none of these things (including things like Mastadon) will become very popular. Then, one day, Amazon will create an AWS instance for it, and popularity will skyrocket.

And no, I'm not being sarcastic. I love the idea, but can't for the life of me think what it will take to make something like this truly popular. (Though I wish I could!)

<comment><USER12> I keep reading Mastadon in HN, but the real name is Mastodon. Where did you get "Mastadon" from ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > I have a lot to say because I have a lot to think about.

Oh boy.

<comment><USER14> Oof. I forgot my description said that.

Thanks for the dose of humility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> OK. So PeerTube doesn't actually host anything, right? You need a streaming server to publish. Maybe someone will let you have space and bandwidth on theirs. PeerTube is just the lookup system. Is that right?

<comment><USER16> Nope.

Peertube is just the software. The linked has no lookup system, it's just a site telling you about the software, linking to sourcecode & documentation, and linking to other sites that host that software.

The primary instance references on the site (i.e. the streaming server that they embed their own videos from) is [https://framatube.org/](https://framatube.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> PeerTube is very exciting and I've been thinking about running an instance. Only showstopper for me atm is lack of live streaming support, which admittedly is difficult to figure out.

</comment><comment><USER18> I honestly think that article 11 and 13 will grow more decentralized options. Peertube is only federated, so it won't benefit as much as it could, but it will still help. If the platform is responsible for copyright, then it will definitely be easier to just burn that server and then spin up a new one. Just my 2 cents

<comment><USER17> Small platforms (ie business under 50 empl, or 10mil € ATO) don't have to adhere the copyright filter at all and are under the previous Notice&Takedown protection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> [https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube](https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube)

License is AGPL v3.0...

tldrlegal shows us this

[https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-affero-general-public- lice...](https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-affero-general-public- license-v3-\(agpl-3.0\))</comment>


PHP Jobs, Articles and more on this weeks PHPWeekly (12th September 2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.phpweekly.com/archive/2013-09-12.html

<comment><USER2> Good job. I always find something useful in this newsletter! Thank you

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We're always looking for suggestions, so feel free to let us know anything you would like to see in here

</comment><comment><USER3> Once again, nice roundup of articles!</comment>


Freeciv WebGL 3D Development Status Update - <AUTHOR> http://play.freeciv.org/blog/2017/03/freeciv-webgl-3d-development-status/ <comment><USER2> Aside, passwords don't seem secure:

[https://github.com/freeciv/freeciv- web/blob/develop/freeciv-...](https://github.com/freeciv/freeciv- web/blob/develop/freeciv- web/src/main/java/org/freeciv/servlet/LoginUser.java#L44)

[https://github.com/freeciv/freeciv- web/blob/6c86bceeb4f79b2a...](https://github.com/freeciv/freeciv- web/blob/6c86bceeb4f79b2afc641e7ce994c594d8facfb2/freeciv- web/src/main/java/org/freeciv/servlet/NewPBEMUser.java#L71)

[https://github.com/freeciv/freeciv- web/blob/fd99d083e496d58a...](https://github.com/freeciv/freeciv- web/blob/fd99d083e496d58ad98eb84f9e5dc1f1260503b3/freeciv- web/src/main/webapp/javascript/pregame.js#L971)

Last link showing that passwords are only MD5 hashed

<comment><USER3> When is this code from?!

I haven't seen someone use the Java servlet API "raw" (outside of examples) in nearly 20 years.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi! What do you think of the new version of Freeciv WebGL 3D? I'm always interested in feedback to improve the game. Thanks!

<comment><USER4> You should try to get some UX designers involved with the game's UI and controls. It's very confusing, nothing works like you'd expect from a Civilization-like game (left click to select a unit, right click to move? nope).

Also, the camera kind of got into "drunk mode" (slowly pivoting and rotating in arbitrary directions). It should be fixed at a constant angle, with the possibility to translate the camera with arrow keys (like in Sid Meier's Civilization).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it even useful for gameplay to have a low-angle perspective as shown in the screenshot? It seems more useful to have the usual Civ perspective, mostly from the top, and isometric.

<comment><USER6> I don't see the need for 3D at all. Civ is "naturally" a 2D game; the shift to 3D added nothing and IMO removed a lot. I racked up hundreds of hours in Civ 2; I'm not sure I bothered to finish more than one game in Civ 3, or even one in any of its successors.

The key graphical challenge a Civ-type game faces is conveying a lot of information quickly and clearly. 2D bitmaps are ideal for that, because sprites, tiles etc can be optimised for legibility and distinctiveness, and the fact that things are always seen from the same angle makes them consistent. All of those benefits are lost in 3D.

<comment><USER7> Civilization III was 2D as well. I agree with you though, there was something lost in the transition to 3D. Performance reasons alone is compelling argument to stick with 2D (turn wait times in Civ 5 were ridiculous). Not to mention that it's easier to create 2D art, so any mods that people created were of higher quality. There were some pretty good terrain packs for Civ 3 (for instance, [http://www.civfanatics.net/downloads/civ3/modpack/Womoks_Gre...](http://www.civfanatics.net/downloads/civ3/modpack/Womoks_Greener_sm.jpg))

<comment><USER8> I think the civ5 wait times were more about AI than graphics.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why not discard top level domains (TLD)? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pedro.si/why-not-forget-about-top-level-domains-tld

<comment><USER2> There's a lot wrong here.

First, there's no such thing as an "abstract TLD". The closest analog would be _generic_ TLDs. The author actually manages to get this completely backwards since the gTLDs are .com, .net, .org and their brethren. The TLDs the author calls "abstract" are all actually country-code TLDs (ccTLDs), and they all have a proper meaning. .ly is Libya, .st is São Tomé and Príncipe, and .ng is Nigeria.

Just because these governments don't traditionally care too much about who uses them doesn't mean they don't have a meaning. They aren't abstract.

 _The address bar in Firefox will actually redirect you to google.com if you type just google, however what I am proposing is to actually get rid of the TLD for some websites._

This is pure fiction. What actually happens is if Firefox can't resolve the address, it assumes it's a search term and passes the term into a preset URL (defined by the keyword.URL setting).

Back before version 3.0 (I think; don't quote me on that), this preset passed the "I'm Feeling Lucky" flag to the Google search URL. As a result, if you typed "Google" into the address bar, with no TLD, Firefox would effectively search Google for the term "Google" and the "I'm feeling lucky" feature would redirect you to the first result, which is obviously Google.com.

Since 3.0, the preset doesn't have the "I'm feeling lucky" parameter, so if you type "google" into the address bar, you'll actually get a page of google results for the term "google". I, and I'm sure many others, have since tweaked the keyword.URL setting to again use the lucky flag, but on a vanilla install, the author is just plain wrong in his assumption.

One final nitpick:

* After this recent surge of custom TLDs, I am beginning to think, that they are not a limitation, but that we can change them, almost freely, presumed we have the knowledge to do it (Please, correct me if I am wrong, and forgive my ignorance).*

Perhaps English isn't the authors first language, and if that's true then I apologize, but I simply was unable to parse that paragraph. Commas just don't work that way.

<comment><USER3> It isn't, he's from Slovenia. :)

<comment><USER4> And he didn't know that the TLD for his own country is .si and he never heard anything about any of his European neighboring counties TLD's? Some people simply should not blog...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Abstract TLDs? They're all country codes (e.g. .ly = Libya, .st = Sao Tome). TLDs aren't just there to categorise US domain names - they're the namespaces of individual countries.

<comment><USER6> Particularly ironic since he uses a .si domain!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have the impression the author does not understand a lot about TLD, so his proposal isn't well thought through either.

First, TLD cannot be changed freely but are fixed, mostly assigned to countries.

Second, we now _do_ have TLDs and I don't see a way how we could get rid of them. 'kinder.com' may be a US website promoting friendly neighborhoods, but 'kinder.de' may be a German website about children. What should 'kinder' be?

The only change I would encourage but which I don't see happening is having the TLD at the front: <http://com.ycombinator.news> just makes more sense (at least to me).

<comment><USER8> The predecessor to the Internet in the UK in the 1980s - JANET - worked like this:

 _For example, the University of Cambridge had the NRS name UK.AC.CAM, whereas its DNS domain is cam.ac.uk. All NRS names had both a standard (long) and abbreviated (up to 18 characters) form. For example, UK.AC.CAMBRIDGE was the less widely used standard equivalent of the abbreviated name UK.AC.CAM._

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET_NRS>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9>
        I've noticed an increase in the use of customized and
        abstract top level domain (TLD) names, such as bit.ly,
        bu.mp,   babyli.st, etc. Even Microsoft recently
        registered bi.ng

This is especially funny when you notice that his TLD is .si, pedro.si

</comment><comment><USER10> Should we get rid of namespaces and packages, while we're at it?

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm interested to understand why you would propose removing the ".com" before first proposing the removal of "www."? From my perspective the "more superfluous of the two" is the "www." in this example.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you haven't noticed, many website urls don't include the www.

<comment><USER11> I agree with you. My point was that in [http://blog.pedro.si/why-not-forget- about-top-level-domains-...](http://blog.pedro.si/why-not-forget-about-top- level-domains-tld) the "www" is present in the example, yet the focus is on the "com". I am curious to understand the though process that directed focus to eliminating "com" before "www"

<comment><AUTHOR> It's simply because with most urls, when you type them without www they will work and send you to the page you are looking for, even if the url includes www. Therefore www presents no additional typing for the user. However the TLD does.

<comment><USER11> The observation you make depends on the DNS configuration for any particular domain, but ok, lets not worry further about that.

Assuming that we wish to start again with a flat name space, I'd be interested to understand:

What rules would be put in place to govern the names that would be allowed? Do you believe you should still be entitled to the domain "pedro"? Or are you willing to accept Pedro-Kostelelec-DateOfBirth ? Or some other (likely more complex combination) that is a unique distinguish-er for you globally?

Do you believe there should only be one company globally with any given name? Or is it acceptable to have a "BurgerKing" company in one country that operates restaurants, and another "BurgerKing" in the same / different country that makes BBQ's? How do you allow for those to coexist, noting the rules we already decided on in the previous question?

Personally I don't believe having a flat or hierarchical domain name space makes any difference to the underlying challenge: users need to enter the exact domain name of the business they wish to visit, if they fail to do this the result may not be what they expect. The fact that so many people choose to type some arbitrary text into a search engine and visit what ever site is returned, is fundamentally an error of understanding that should be corrected. I don't believe working around this misunderstanding by modifying the name space used serves any useful purpose in the long run.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> no.

<comment><USER12> I kind of get the feeling this proposal is as well thought out as when people wanted to get rid of hierarchical file systems in the early 00s.

The top level domains provide some organization behind domains. it also lends some authority to the system as a whole. would it even be posible to have dnssec without a tld to be signed? how would you know who to ask for information about the domain at all?

It'd be like telling all the national registrars they didn't matter anymore. especially if there's a new nation and they can't have a domain because squatters have taken over all two letter domains.

I'm sure there are a lot of other reasons why this is a bad idea, but i'm not versed enough in dns to come up with more specifics.

I feel like a jerk being this negative. but please don't start throwing out ideas for major changes in such vital infrastructure without a solid background working with it. you could get people started on some crusade that does more irreparable damage than good

<comment><USER13> Say you have a company FOO and you register foo.com. Nothing stops people in other people from registering foo.de, foo.fr, foo.tv, foo.biz, foo.info and so on, so you have to control all of these domains to protect you from domain squatters.

My proposal is to to get rid of every TLD except for .com (or something shorter) for all "normal" sites with little regulation and keep .mil, .gov, .edu and national TLDs under governmental authority.

<comment><USER14>
          Nothing stops people in other people from registering foo.de, foo.fr ...

And that's a bad thing because?

<comment><USER13> For example, it makes the internet less safe - people remember just the company name foo, foo.x is the real site, somebody enters foo.y and lands on a scam site

<comment><USER12> and this is a problem why? i can see taking issue with allowing unicode tlds. where some russian characters are almost identical to a latin based char-set for instance, but if you can't tell the difference between bankofamerica.com and bankofamerica.cn, you probably also fall for a lot of other scams offline too.

<comment><USER13> What about multinational companies like paypal?

Would you recommend a non-internet-savvy user from china to rather go to paypal.cn or to paypal.com/cn ?

What would a non-savvy user normally do?

In this case paypal.cn redirects to paypal.com/cn, but would you have known?

Another example: Python.com redirected to a hardcore porn site for years. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but I think both sites and their respective audiences would have been better off if there wasn't .com, .net and .org

<comment><USER14>
          Python.com redirected to a hardcore porn site for years

It could have redirected to an online store selling snake aquariums.

And which would have been more "legit" in the eyes of the public?

The homepage of an obscure tool related to software developers, or something actually related to pythons?

<comment><USER13> I think there isn't going to be a system where the domain name points to the site that is more "legit" or "relevant", that is the job of search engines. Laypersons already use google instead of dns and enter "facebook" or "facebook.com" because they 1) don't have to remember the TLD and 2) get to facebook even when they made a typo.

So a domain name should probably still belong to whomever registered it first. I'm not a DNS wizard but using whois I figure python.com was registered one year before python.org, which would have become python-lang.com or something more descriptive if there weren't these other suffixes.

<comment><USER14> Except _python.org_ is so much better than _python-lang.com_ that isn't even funny.

Case in point ... I searched for "ruby language" dozens of times before learning "ruby-lang.org". And the ".org" suffix was the easy part because my brain associates those domains with non-profit stuff.

I also find TLDs to be useful for figuring out the target of a website. E.g. ".co.uk" / ".de" / ".eu" are usually companies with headquarters in the European Union.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Erm, is this a troll, a linkbait or simply ignorance? Those "abstract" TLDs belong to real countries. (Well except your .42 - which is a custom TLD that's not accessible through the "official" DNS system.)</comment>


Clarity - an open source web interface to grep and tail  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.leetsoft.com/2009/12/6/clarity-in-log-files

<comment><USER2> It's MIT-licensed, which is great. I don't so much need a web interface to grep on my own servers, but would very much like to embed something like this into my product.

I can imagine it would be extremely useful to an ops team; my whole life is driven off my browser bookmark bar, and this presumably lets people bookmark server logs.

Under the hood, this is single-threaded EventMachine, using EventMachine::popen to relay output from processes to the client, and HTTP chunked encoding to push results to the browser. It's HTTP Basic Auth only, and it runs Actual Unix Commands, so make that password good.

Nicely done!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea that's a good point. You really don't want to have someone else access your clarity installation. This takes URL parameters and runs them on the command line. Probably the most insecure thing invented by man. Hide it will.

<comment><USER2> No, the most insecure things invented by people take URL parameters from _unauthenticated_ requests and run them on the command line.

I didn't audit the code or anything, but all the request processing is gated by a function that requires HTTP basic-auth, which is at least hard to screw up. To accidentally add a function that bypasses auth, they'd have to write an entire new request handler chain.

That said, I noticed the same thing (popen), and if I was going to integrate this with our product, I'd hardcode the command line.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a great open source tool. Very useful.

</comment><comment><USER4> Very creative and useful!

</comment><comment><USER5> any idea how to port this line of code to work on a MS Windows ruby platform?

        %[sh -c '#{results.join(" | ")}']

~ I've tried a few things but keep getting this: Running: sh -c 'grep -e hello access.log'

This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way. Please contact the application's support team for more information.

<comment><USER5> Actually that error is being thrown when the shell command hits EventMachine::popen

hmm...</comment></comment>


What tools (languages, databases etc.) do you use for web development? - <AUTHOR> http://hall.com/backend_languages

<comment><USER2> Zero content whatsoever.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean? Go to the link(<http://hall.com/backend_languages>). This is not a poll directly on HN, but on Hall.com</comment></comment>


My best commit, ever. - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/v6XWonk

<comment><USER2>
      My math does the same as the guy's before...

No it doesn't. It returned 0.0 for 69.0 before, now it returns 6900.0.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. We used to handle that in an exception in which the function ran. So my math is theoretically better!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> From your comment at reddit, I can't tell if you're joking or serious. Which one is it? (serious question)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm joking in the sense this commit is funny, it's just ridiculous how complicated the previous code was. So complicated that people had left it there refusing to touch it!

<comment><USER3> Are you aware that your code fails to produce the correct value for any note? [http://www.tonalsoft.com/pub/news/pitch- bend.aspx](http://www.tonalsoft.com/pub/news/pitch-bend.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hahahahahaha!!! I can't stop laughing! My sides hurt so bad! I'm crying, it's so funny!

<comment><AUTHOR> ahaha yeah in the office we were rolling on the floor too :}</comment></comment>


Incremental – Library for incremental computations - <AUTHOR> https://opensource.janestreet.com/incremental/ <comment><USER2> verg related: check out Adapton: [http://adapton.org/](http://adapton.org/), specifically, the May 2017 video in the videos section.

There's a comment in the initial Incremental blog post about it: [https://blog.janestreet.com/introducing- incremental/?utm_sou...](https://blog.janestreet.com/introducing- incremental/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=introducing- incremental#isso-608)

<comment><USER3> Latest versions of Adapton are written in Rust by the way.

<comment><USER2> Yep! The video explains why at the end. These models are often very GC- unfriendly unless you know what you're going & have reasonably good hooks into the GC. Jane Street talks about this aspect here too: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6a5G5i4gQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6a5G5i4gQU)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The author just gave a talk at Strange Loop [0] that provides a better conceptual overview than the talk linked in the docs. Pretty interesting stuff.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3xX37RGJKE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3xX37RGJKE)

</comment><comment><USER5> Discussed in 2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9908044](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9908044)

</comment><comment><USER6> The ideas in Incremental are really intriguing if you are trying to build high performance systems.

Here is a partial port to .NET, if anyone is interested:

[https://github.com/isaksky/Incremental.NET](https://github.com/isaksky/Incremental.NET)

<comment><USER7> Thanks! What's missing from the port? Are you planning to continue working on it?

<comment><USER6> It is missing Signal.bind, which is a way to allow dynamic signal graphs (a pretty advanced feature). There is also work to be done in optimizing the order of re-computations. I'm not sure about further work yet, depends on if we end up using it at work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is anyone using it in production apart from Jane Street?

<comment><AUTHOR> I doubt it. It was open-sourced a few months ago and take some time to wrap your head around, at least for me.

edit: In fact, it is much older than that as dang pointed out.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What Do You Need Someone to Build for You? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> A service that basically refills Digital Ocean Droplets based on a amount in a wallet that can be refilled with Bitcoins (the service could do automatic conversation to pay DO). Having it require ID for setting up would be fine, as long as it can continue to run a DO droplet until the wallet is empty.</comment>