Ask HN: How to stop overthinking everything in my life? - <AUTHOR> I am a mid 20s white male who has been afforded immense privilege in life. I am outwardly extremely confident and able to get what I want. I have dozens of opportunities in front of me, more than 99% of people. Yet instead of being grateful for these opportunities, I feel like I do not deserve them. As a result, I frequently begin an endeavor, see some initial success, but then self destruct just prior to an inflection point, thus destroying any chance of future success.
This happens everywhere. School, athletics, relationships, businesses. Because I feel I do not deserve what I have, I self-destruct before I can take anything to the next level.  It seems to be a subconscious attempt at equalizing my reality with what I feel I deserve.
I believe the cause of this is overthinking everything. I am analytical and often overzealous in my choice of analysis. I feel like I am observing myself from the third person. What I see, I don't like.
How do I get over this self-loathing? Do I need to stop overthinking? Is that even possible? Do I just need to accept this state of mind and seize control of it? <comment><USER2> I went through something like this.

What your emotions are getting conflicted on is the idea of learning your _real_ limitations. Because, despite appearances of competence and opportunity, you've surely got flaws that would prevent you from doing something someone else would find easy. One of them is manifest right now, in that you're bailing before the commitments get too intense. This happens within youth fairly often, even when no graceful exit is possible and it's the rationally correct decision to stick with a commitment. Other people, already people younger than you, even, have gone and made hugely consequential decisions without thinking twice. Some of them are dead, so maybe you're doing all right.

What an older person tends to figure out is that they are only getting more limited and closer to an end as time goes on, which makes them more motivated to focus on relative strengths and weaknesses. They will exit the situation when it plays to their weaknesses and saps their energy, and stay in and struggle when it fits their strengths and motivations.

It's hard to see, though, what you are doing when you're living it every day. Somehow you ended up on HN. But why HN, and not anywhere else? Do you know how you got here, or why you stay here?

These are things you can pick apart by journaling, collecting data, and trying to challenge your internal narratives. The "why" of what you do never really gets answered(because it's philosophical, hence it never reaches an end), but if you're occupying your time with struggles that you feel are worthwhile to you personally, and not just escaping forever, that's probably a good life.

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to be a victim of this myself. My solution to this problem (which works very well) is to lead a life of strict routine, where every hour is allotted for doing something specific. As I stuck to the routine, this whole overthinking thing magically disappeared as I simply didn't have the time to overthink. Everything is also progressing 10 times faster as well. I can't guarantee that it will work for you too but it's worth a try.

<comment><USER4> What kind of tooling are you using to track the routine?

<comment><USER3> Just a text file in the beginning to write down the routine. It's a weekly routine which never changes. So after a few weeks, I memorized it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am a 30 year old, "first generation Mexican-American" who has had to work incredibly hard... from manual farm labor to today's creative tech/entrepreneurial world... for my current immense privileges in life. I have been analytical and overthinking; to the point of pausing and deciding daily whether the over-priced almond chai latte barista will mangle my full name or I should shorten and anglicize it.

I'm not outwardly extremely confident, but have been able to mostly get what I want. I've started a lot of things and messed up my fair share. It's past 2am, I'm in my workspace/studio jamming on personally fulfilling work with an amazing 40-week pregnant wife and four year old sleeping two floors above me.

What does self-destruct mean to you? Self loathing? I am genuinely wondering if lack of clarity, doubt and direction in your life are the real issues. If so, I'd like to say that every year since my 20s I've felt the same... and, I'm inwardly extremely confident about where I am in life. Time heals, maybe it's clarity through maturity. Perhaps a mentor would have been useful. If, like myself, you haven't had the fortune of one then seeking someone to talk to, a friend / colleague / professional, would be beneficial.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been working with youth including teenagers and individuals in their early to mid 20s for the past decade. What you're experiencing is incredibly common, especially for wealthier white Americans.

What I have found to be the difference between individuals who are able to get out of this state and those who continue to struggle is an incredibly strong sense of self identity. Having a personal anecdote that is unique, filled with novel experiences, and ultimately ends with a call to action for accomplishing social good is key.

My suggestions:

1\. Travel and live with communities that have very little. Experience their traditions, families, frustrations, and joys.

2\. Think deeply about your purpose and whether American individualism can really continue to provide you with the life you want to live. It very well may, but it is an important question to ask.

3\. Go for walks by yourself and narrate your personal story under your breath. Imagine the good you want to accomplish and pretend you're being asked why you do what you do. The more experiences you have the more cohesive your story will be and the more confidently you will be able to take charge of your purpose/destiny/life. Also, journal.

4\. Always find ways to give back. Give your last dollar to the person on the street. If you volunteer do it with kids, perhaps at a refugee center. Cook dinner for your parents and siblings when you're home, or wake up early to surprise them with breakfast.

5\. Surround yourself with people who are deeply passionate about what they do and haven't become lost themselves. I live in SF for a few months every year and have found these individuals nearly impossible to find in the city. Search elsewhere.

Good luck. You're thinking about these things and are clearly on the right path. Much love!

<comment><USER7> I 100% agree with this. I'm in my overpriviledged early 20s and have recently decided to do just this. I think doing these things does not help us youngsters get the answers to "What is life?" or "What am I supposed to do?" but you can't do these things listed whithout "knowing" and "feeling" that they are the right thing to do in that moment. I especially like the 5th one because for me the hardest/most "boring" things in life have been really easy when doing it with my friends and people who I can see are enjoying doing it and are passionate about it so I feel motivated just by being near them.

I always find it sad that the most popular "influencers" have advocated for things I dont personally care about (sports and music careers, all kinds of "reality" shows) while there are so few popular charismatic matematicans, physicists, programmers, biologists, doctors when I personally know many people who are very passionate and motivating in these fields.

<comment><USER8> As was already suggested in this thread, dr. Jordan Peterson is a great example of an academic who is genuinely passionate about his work and truly believes in the importance of it (and is rising in popularity for that reason). I also believe that his work (more specifically, his lecture series on YouTube) could aid you in your search for a sense of direction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been through something like this – up until I've hit ~25 years. I was fairly "disorganized". Issues w/ all forms of "authorities", trouble w/ my personal finances, not taking care of my mental (taking rest and time off) and physical (sleep, nutrition, exercise) health, never sucking it up striving towards overcoming adversities (however minor they might be). Most of all, starting many things, but never finishing anyth, which really invoked constant background anxiety.

Chaos and disorder.

Not sure what happened exactly, but there was one point where I couldn't anymore.

Looking back, I think what really was a breakthrough for me was journaling. First thing in the morning and right after opening my eyes, in free form w/o correcting my self. Just letting it out.

With time your thought becomes more precise and there comes clarity. I've started picking patterns in my way of thinking, my habits and behaviors – pretty much in all aspects of my life. I've started tracking other aspects of my life, which led to other insights and finding in a very quantified way what works and does not works for me.

Still, you're here on HN. I'm pretty sure that despite everything you go through now, there is something internally which does keeps you on the right track in the grand scheme of the things. There is exploration and exploitation. The time will show.

I would also highly recommend you checking Dr. Jordan Peterson's lectures "Maps of Meaning" on YouTube and his "Self Authoring" program.

</comment><comment><USER10> Seek professional help. You've identified a symptom, now the best thing you can do is get the right person to help you explore the cause and fix it. Whether that is a personal coach, or a licenced psychiatrist, I leave at your discretion.

Just do it, it's a google search away from you.

<comment><USER11> He says the problem is too much introspection. Unless he's suicidal, booking time every week to engage in further introspection sounds like a bad idea.

If I were the OP, I would tackle the problem by scheduling more time every week being active, and being social. Fortunately, it sounds like he has plenty of opportunities to do so, so it's just a matter of consciously spending less time alone.

It's difficult to have a "dark night of the soul" while you're chatting with somebody in a steakhouse, or tossing a frisbee around.

<comment><USER12> Modern evidence based therapies such as CBT are a way to avoid problematic repetitive thinking and too much introspection, and are a way to focus concentration on more positive thinking.

Current NHS figures suggest about 60% success rate, and that's on a bare- knuckle minimum provision model.

<comment><USER11> Cheers. Just read the Wikipedia article on CBT, and it seems much more reasonable than what I assumed therapy would be like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nobody else is saying it so I will: it sounds like you have been brainwashed into guilt and victimization by modern media/propaganda.

Break the chains and own your life. Do good for the world and it doesn't matter your background.

You need to grow a small IDGAF portion in your brain as well and do what you want to do, not what others want you to do.

You seem like a good person so I'm confident you will do net-positive things, so cast the BS guilt aside, own it, and go make things happen.

</comment><comment><USER14> Hey dude, I'm in pretty much the same position: mid twenties, white male, working tech industry etc but with a twist - I live in South Africa where inequality is a dinner table topic.

So, how do I deal with shit? Mostly I don't, to be honest. But whats been keeping me sane is this:

1 )Work towards a goal that you know will enable you to give back. If it's donating to charity or volunteering work, its this crazy thing that happens when you start really thinking of giving back to people with less with no expectation of getting anything in return.

And:

2) Meditation. Being able to view your thoughts as thoughts and nothing more. Learning to become mindful of whats currently around you and how to appreciate it, especially yourself.

Hope this helps. More than keen to chat about it if you want.

</comment><comment><USER15> Everyone has these problems dude. It's perfectly normal and as you get older you stop beating yourself up (to some degree) and focus on the things you do well and slowly you realise maybe you aren't the best, but that you are a high quality person, in different and interesting ways from everyone else.

It's no bad thing to experience some bad times and feel these feelings from time to time - what I've found with myself is when I get to this point I have an automatic "fuck this shit" response where I, for example, move to Japan to work full time on startup ideas. Sometimes when stuck in a rut there is no harm at that point saying "fuck it" I'm just going to make a big exciting change and see what happens.

Another example; I can't even swim really (more flailing, should probably learn) and I was in the Andaman Islands on holiday and everyone was diving and I basically panicking when I put my head in the water with a snorkel on, _what was I thinking_ signing up for Discover Scuba. So after managing to get over that initial fear, I ended up signing up for the full PADI and then did my advanced on the same trip because I loved it so much. I cleared my mask and swam sharing oxygen at 25 meters (while looking at the under water equivalent of Avatar). That fear turned into pure excitement for life.

So if you want to be less in your analysis mode - my advice - get out of what you are doing now and make a big change, whatever is (and even if it doesn't work out) while you are trying life will taste a bit sweeter.

<comment><USER16> agreed. but do see a doctor if you are tasting sweaters, it might be due to a stroke.

<comment><USER15> Ha, I have zero chance with Japanese if I can't even eat the right words. Edited.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The choices you make today will determine your future. What you are experiencing is 'the paradox of choice': Presented with many options, you choose nothing.

In this world we don't get what we deserve, we get what we take. People don't deserve divorce, traffic accidents, diseases yet it happens all the time. While you are overthinking, your life is ticking away. Think about the things that matter. Think different.

</comment><comment><USER7> Every now and then when a weekend comes and Im alone and not sure what to do I start singing "I dont know what to do with my life" over and over again. Im pretty sure those moments are because I have all the material things I need and all the things I think I want I dont actually want enough to invest the effort needed to get them.

Sometimes I go to [http://syria.liveuamap.com](http://syria.liveuamap.com) wondering when will it end and will it ever. I suppose that as long as there are these redpill people who found an excuse to only care about themselves that we will be stuck in this situation.

I think the problem is that since most of us are finding out life has no inherent meaning (unless you consider endless reproduction a meaning) we are stuggling to find a reason to do anything. If you are underpriviledged you are still struggling to survive so you have that to think about and spend most of your time on but we who are in countries where 5% need to work to feed the other 95% and who arent the unluckiest ones in those countries are having issues finding "meaning" in things we are doing.

I'm pretty sure our brains aren't meant to work in these conditions so I hope machines remove as ASAP and continue doing their own thing. I always remember the "transcendence" outer layer of Vernor Vinges universe where life evolves so far as to either destroy itself or reach some state of thought unimaginable to us right now.

I thing the best thing ever is that we will eventually all die and all will stop mattering. I really hope theres no heaven and hell and all that shabang with the Flying Spaghetti Monster and all so that actually we have to exist forever and bother ourselves with these useless questions.

</comment><comment><USER18> Trite answer here - try meditation. Force yourself to take a regular (daily) space in your life where you sit down specifically to empty your mind of all thoughts. By doing this you may find that your mind starts to respond to the stimulus (lack of stimulus?) and forge new pathways to stop your pattern of destructive thinking. It's worked for me, and may well do the trick for you.

<comment><USER19> I second this advice, but I want to offer a different interpretation of what's going on when you meditate. For one thing, your concentration improves. The mind rests, and it seems to work on more important things subconsciously. You give the mind the opportunity to learn about itself. You see that thoughts come and go and you slowly unlearn the habit of doing something about them because you see it's not necessary or helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I live by a philosophy: Don't get greedy. Do your best.

In my 20s.. I thought too much. So much I'd get lost in there. So much I'd have entire relationships with women before even knowing their name. SO much that I would create scenarios and play out the entire thing in my head before it happened. So much that I barely slept and when I did, it was the only peace I had.

I was in college and felt like a "grownup" yet not. I had to work, I had to go to class. There were things I just had to do, but what constitutes being "an adult"? I wrote about it here: [http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/children- pretendi...](http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/children-pretending- adults/)

Anyways, you are in your 20s. I am now in my 30s and I wish someone would have given me advice that I could've understood then. But this might be something of what I would have told myself:

You are still exploring life and it is perfectly okay to make mistakes -- so long as you do no serious harm to anyone or yourself. You get this life to live. That's it. There are many other people who won't make it past their 20s. I hate to say it, but it could be your close friends. Mortality is all too common and all of us can and will die.

Do not take any moment for granted and just teach yourself to be aware of your surrounding and other people. Don't always talk about yourself. Listen to what others have to say. Travel. Learn how to take care of yourself (some exercise and good eating required) because you get one body to live in. Don't think about it. Just do it. Know that you will fail at a lot, but you will also learn a lot. You will have successes in many of the things you do as well.

Try to call your parents at least two or three times a week. Try to keep in touch with your siblings at least two or three times a week. Go visit if you can. Go explore. Volunteer for a few months and do some good in a community. Go live in another country if you can. Teach English. Get a degree in something. Study something you want to know more about. Don't be afraid to ask any girl you want out. What's the worst she is going to do? Tell you no. She's doing you a favor. When looking to be with someone, it is not all about sex. Find someone who makes you happy and who is pleasant to be around. Find your best friend. Here is the worst part of the advice: Don't look for it. Don't look for her. Just be aware that a girl you like could be _her_. Just enjoy your life. She'll come eventually. Go on a few dates and don't be afraid of letting her know what you are looking for. You need to experience the opposite sex to know what you like and what you don't like. To do this, you need to learn how to become comfortable with yourself and develop a sense of humor and you need to become comfortable with being around people, especially the opposite sex.

Make sure you pick up skills that are valuable for the next decade or two. College only helps you get so far, but you're going to find out that you aren't special when you and everyone else have a degree in Liberal Arts or English. Sure, you'll get a job, but it'll probably be a job you don't like. So pick up a hobby and learn about something you like and start thinking about what you could do to help others that will also help pay the bills. Learn how to talk to people. Learn how to interview. Learn the difference between telling people something and telling them what they want to hear.

Coming back to the point about don't get greedy and do your best: be fair with pricing, if you decide to ever charge people, be fair with people. It is also okay to donate to charity or help out a homeless person or people who are struggling. Don't do it to the point where you become homeless yourself or forget to take care of yourself, but go talk to a person who is "down and out" and understand what happened. Everyone has a story to tell. You'll be amazed at just how human that person is.

You are going to go through a bunch of jobs you don't like, but learn how to deal with them. Don't get comfortable though, because you won't be staying. You are learning to deal with and tolerate bullshit. Keep moving on until you find a job you love, but aim to be your own boss.

Most of all: stop overthinking. It doesn't change anything. You need to find a balance between thinking and doing. Go for a long walk. Go for a hike. Learn how to meditate. Calm your mind. It does not always need to be thinking about something. Definitely know that you aren't the only one going through it. If you ask your friends, they will likely agree they do it too.

Always be ambitious and trying to aim to do something good with your life that will help not only yourself, but others. We're all trying to "progress to that next level" but really, there is no levels. We all pretty much just keep going and maybe even pretending that we know what we're doing. We really don't. But as long as we keep trying, we'll be alright.

Everything is going to be alright.

Finally, I listen to a lot of music, and while I love Pink Floyd and it has gotten me through the toughest times of my life.

There are three songs that truly helped me understand life's philosophy:

You can't always get what you want (but if you try sometimes, you get what you need).

If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with.

Don't worry, be happy.

This is all part of life. Everything you are experiencing. You may have anxiety or depression or feel insane... and to live in our world, you need to have those. Accept your flaws and use them to get to the next day, to each and every day, for the rest of your life. From every moment that seems like a failure to every moment that is a success. Keep going. I've lost friends and best friends who never made it out of their 20s. My mission is to keep on going to experience what life is like, what it could be like, and what it is. I don't just do it for myself, but I do it to live a full life for them, because they will never get to have that chance ever again, at least as themselves.

Life is too precious. We shouldn't be alive. We are rare to live on Earth at this time in the exact spot that we do that supports our lives. We are all going to be dead for way longer than we are alive, so we need to be appreciative and enjoy the life that we were given. You will only be you once. Never again. Whether we talk of heaven, hell, or rebirth: you will get to be you once. Make the best of being you.

<comment><USER21> This is great - one thing I'd clarify is the bit on bullshit.

Learn what bullshit is. Bullshit is something anything or anyone that is working against your goals or general happiness.

Once you see some bullshit DON'T tolerate it. Remove it from your life as much as possible. You only have the ability to have one thought or feeling at a time. Do you really want that thought to be on bullshit?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Speaking as someone twice your age who has felt similarly I'd say the best advice on this thread is to time schedule everything and have a clear output for anything. Force yourself only to think a couple of weeks ahead for the next 6 months and nail that habit, then your tendency to project everything forward ad infinitum may become a useful tool rather than persistent curse.

</comment><comment><USER23> If this is a good example of the impostors syndrome you'll be happy to read about it and start feeling better. There is probably no unique answer but this might help [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome)

</comment><comment><USER24> Food for thought...

> the self is despised for one reason or another that varies from person to > person and usually or always smacks of hidden perfectionism. > > [https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/feeling-our- > way/201512/...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/feeling-our- > way/201512/four-kinds-depression-and-self-hate)

I know someone similarly described (priveledged background)-- who volunteered for military service, the experience stretched him both mentally & physically. His enlistment became a time of truly transformative personal growth.

</comment><comment><USER25> Your parents and grandparents worked hard to put you in the situation you are in now. If anything the expectations for you are much higher than everyone else.

Are you sure you're not self-sabotaging because you're subconsciously afraid of failure and by not trying you always have a good excuse when things don't go well?

You have to stop with the guilt. You're the carrier of your family legacy; take responsibility and apply yourself.

If that doesn't work, hurry up and get married and have kids. You may not have a problem sabotaging yourself but surely you wouldn't do that if you were responsible for children.

</comment><comment><USER26> Perhaps you like thinking and that's the only thing you presently want to do. If not agree, is that you think that you propely want something specific, but if that were the case these problems you refer to would not be appearing, your will would hush them away automatically and focus you on the external blockers.

</comment><comment><USER27> Realize that your self-destruction may reduce inequality in some minuscule way, but that it doesn't actually do anyone any good.

Far better to succeed, be happy, and give back in some way than to never achieve or never be happy out of some (IMO) mis-guided Stoicism.

Society doesn't advance by having all the fed people voluntarily starve.

</comment><comment><USER28> "I have dozens of opportunities in front of me, more than 99% of people"

Who put that idea in your head?

</comment><comment><USER29> Read about "imposter syndrome". I only really started getting over it in my early 40s.

</comment><comment><USER30> What was the immediate trigger for this post?

</comment><comment><USER31> I used to have similar feelings. Afraid of success/change may be in play here. Trip over destination

</comment><comment><USER32> 1) Read No more Mr. Nice Guy by Robert A. Glover

2) Think about what your goal is in life.

3) Persue this goal with all of your might.

Bonus: Start improve your body. It's hard but you see progress that you earned. (NO team sport, something you will achieve out of your own strength and willpower not relying on anybody else)

</comment><comment><USER33> Just curious. How do you define "deserving" when you are literally born into it? Do you have memories of your past lives upon which you have judged yourself to be unworthy of your current privileged state?

</comment><comment><USER34> Thinking is an action, so you most definitely have control over it. But it's like youtube or facebook. They have us addicted to "wanting to check it" and we can't stop, not because we physically cannot stop, but because somewhere we're defeated and underplay it's harm even for a moment, just for that quick fix. But drawn out, it's clearly doing harm, and the behavior pattern is clearly that of addiction.

Self loathing is just another one of those problems. Someone depressed is also that way. Like a cigarette that they cannot ignore, of all the things they could be doing, they choose this -- the one thing that is expensive and that can kill you and that will even get you dirty looks nowadays.

> I am outwardly extremely confident

Why did you put "outwardly"? Because you're not confident. So you are being honest with yourself, in that you're not writing lies. Except, why would "outwardly" matter? You're trying to make excuses as to why you shouldn't be feeling the way you feel. But that's the problem. Emotions defy logic, because they precede them. And an excuse is something that deflects blame but otherwise does nothing. It's a reason for inaction.

> overthinking everything

This is not related. It's your self-loathing that's got you down. Maybe you even have mild depression. Either way, that's the problem, and not anything else.

The simplest answer to your problem is love. You need to learn to love yourself. Culturally Eastern culture can be especially undermining of an individuals healthy mental image of themselves. The burdens of society and of parental expectations weighs heavy, and the environment is that of anxiety and judgementalism, and not that of love and forgiveness. But this pattern exists in the West also. I'm guessing you had strict parents?

As gh1 here has mentioned, having a routine or creating ways of taking your mind off yourself is one way to deal with self-loathing. Being immersed in a passion project can do it also, like a startup. If you're too busy, you have no time for hating, even yourself. It's also what people do after bad breakups.

But you won't have time for love either, and maybe that's what you need. Some don't waste any time after breakups, and choose to quickly move on.

I used to self-loath. But now I couldn't be happier with myself. And it really boils down to the realization that there is absolutely nothing wrong with me. All my imperfections are common. I am just like everyone else. My problems are boring. And it's like you said. I can get what I want. Then what's the problem? The only thing that got in my way, and that is getting in your way, is that self image. It's how you think of yourself that alters what you do with yourself. That's the only thing getting in your way. And THAT TOO is an incredibly common and boring problem! It might be personal and in your face, but objectively speaking, tons of people have similar issues and you are not flawed or hate-worthy in any unique or special way. You just have low self esteem.

It also helped to understand why I was that way. Turns out, there were self loathing people around me. Japanese society didn't help either. But seeing those influences as what they were helped protect myself. Thinking is done with cues. Much like writing prompts, there are things that get us going (like this post on HN does for me). So understanding and counteracting those loathing cues is also what it's about. What makes you hate yourself?

But overthinking is not going to help. Any thinking is not going to help. It's a symptom of the problem. Like wanting that cigarette or wanting to gamble or wanting to drink. You're wanting to think so you can loath.

The cure is with maintaining your emotional health and making that a priority. You may need a change in environment, a change in acquaintances, and even a change in diet. But what you need to do is stop hating yourself, and start treating yourself. What do you enjoy? I love cold brew coffee and mindlessly shooting hoops. I love playing with my kid. I love surprising my wife by cleaning the dishes before she wakes up in the morning. Treating yourself is an act, and it's the act of loving yourself. It takes knowing someone to know how to make them feel better. And for that, you should introspect and analyze. But all you really have to do is remember. You need to remember those times and those feeling you'd rather be feeling now, and figure out how to get back there. From then on, it's all action.

In parting, here is an exert from the movie The Beautiful Mind, just to illustrate my point about logic is not in anyway unique:

Nash: [Making an acceptance speech in front of the Nobel prize audience during the ceremony] I've always believed in numbers, in equations, in logic and reason.But after a lifetime of such pursuits: I ask What truly is logic? Who decides reason? My quest has taken me to the physical, the metaphysical, the delusional, and back. I have made the most important discovery of my career - the most important discovery of my life. It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic or reasons can be found. I am only here tonight because of you

Nash: [looking at and speaking to Alicia]

Nash: You are the only reason I am. You are all my reasons. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER35> Xanax</comment>


SoundCloud: Send & receive music like never before - <AUTHOR> http://soundcloud.com/

<comment><USER2> Anyone has an invite? I'd like one :) email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER3> i've been playing about with this, it's very slickly implemented. love the in track comments.</comment>


How a handful of geeks defied the USSR - <AUTHOR> http://owni.fr/2011/03/13/how-a-handful-of-geeks-defied-the-ussr/ <comment><USER2> I was a kid at the time and we had a Taiwanese IBM PC AT (12MHz 286) clone at home in Moscow which my dad who is a research scientist used for work. He bought it unofficially and it cost more than an apartment. I remember making a very simple space shooter in Turbo Basic on it.

For three days during the putsch the computer would not turn on. We still don't know why. Amazingly, the computer still works.

</comment><comment><USER3> How can Usenet work without the Internet? Simple: Usenet sites can also communicate using uucp, the Unix-to-Unix Copy Protocol, which copied email and netnews from one system to another over dialup links.

For those of us who are slightly younger, think of FidoNET and you'll have the right general idea.

</comment><comment><USER4> I ran one of the Relcom nodes at the time. It was a major pain to setup but once we got going the service was very reliable. Our setup wasn't UNIX based though, it was a home grown UUCP peer-to-peer client running on DOS, I think it was called UUPC if I am not mistaken.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sigh. Usenet wasn't a chat room. Message board is a better analogy.

</comment><comment><USER6> Some technical details about Usenet during the coup: [http://groups.google.com/group/talk.politics.soviet/browse_t...](http://groups.google.com/group/talk.politics.soviet/browse_thread/thread/ca0ded2bd9bdbf5c)

<comment><USER7> Nice tidbit: "Relcom now boasts about 100 nodes and as much as half a gigabyte of traffic each day".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _Thus the first cyber-activists were able to use this decentralized > architecture and Usenet (developed in the USSR in 1982)_

...what? Newsgroups[1] were developed in the US, in 1980.

[1] Not all newsgroups are Usenet; Usenet is the set of newsgroups administered via news.admin.

</comment><comment><USER9> Wired has produced a good article how little connected Russians actually were at this time.

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.04/russnet_pr.html>

</comment><comment><USER10> This'd probably make a good movie. It's like Wargames meets Real Genius. Haha

</comment><comment><USER11> Is the cup concrete? I'm having an discussion with #sthatipamala and #ericz - I'm pretty sure it's fake, as it looks like the guys fingers are depressing into the foam.

<comment><USER11> Sorry posted on the wrong thread (damn you iPhone)...</comment></comment>


India's first RISC-V based Chip is Here: Linux boots on Shakti processor - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekdave.in/2018/07/indias-first-risc-v-is-here-linux-boots.html <comment><USER2> Annoyingly this chip lacks the Compressed (RVC) extension, making it incompatible with all existing Linux distros. These will either have to be recompiled without any Compressed instructions (which increases I-cache pressure on other CPUs that do support it), or we'll need to ship two versions of everything. From discussions I believe they've been recompiling Fedora & Debian from sources without RVC.

<comment><USER3> Is this really such a big issue? Currently there are already multiple arm builds from some distros to deal with similar problems: [https://archlinuxarm.org/about/downloads](https://archlinuxarm.org/about/downloads)

<comment><USER2> It's exactly the fragmentation of ARM that I'd like to avoid. Same story goes for bootloaders, kernels, out-of-tree drivers etc.

You might find my 15 minute talk at the RISC-V workshop interesting on this subject: [https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/05/21/my-talk-from-the- risc-...](https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/05/21/my-talk-from-the-risc-v- workshop-in-barcelona/)

The bit about RISC-V on servers starts around 5 mins in.

<comment><USER4> >> It's exactly the fragmentation of ARM that I'd like to avoid.

RISC-V has an extensible ISA so it's likely to be a mess by design. I'm huge fan of risc-v so I really feel bad saying this. It's telling that RV-IMAFDC is the base for unix systems. It was originally IMAFD = G, but now GC is the standard. Then there's the V extension which I think will be very important and it already sounds like it may be fragmented (graphics and AI may be extra beyond vectors). But then there is space in the instruction encodings explicitly for custom extensions.

These variations are important, and the ability to customize in a standard way is too. I think it's going to be an amazing decade or two in the CPU space because of risc-v but it's also going to be a lot of churn IMHO.

Once open designs catch up to the state of the art and a real base ISA solidifies I hope a RISC-6 comes along with a more optimal encoding and things become really stable for a long time. But that's just my optimism getting out of hand.

<comment><USER5> Why do you talk about 'the real base ISA' solidifies? The 'real base ISA' is solidified and its designed to let you run a lot of software at minimal complexity.

The problem is that there is NEVER one optimal ISA for all applications. It makes absolutely no sense to have V, T, J extensions in the new 'real base' because there are tons of systems that don't ever need it and it would be a waste.

That's why the RISC-V foundation defines profiles for certain application domains. RV64GC is the logic one for Linux for the moment.

Also you ignore that very often an ISA is not used as a mass market product, but rather in a smaller more specialized space. The costume extensions are very important for people like that. In other cases, the potential AI extensions for vector for example, will probably never gone show up in standard profile for Linux.

I think what we are like gone see is that RV64GC will remain the base level for the Linux profile and eventually more advanced profile with V and potentially others will emerge.

The whole point is that no long build everything around ISAs that is never optimal but rather around profiles.

<comment><USER4> >> Why do you talk about 'the real base ISA' solidifies? The 'real base ISA' is solidified and its designed to let you run a lot of software at minimal complexity.

The "real base ISA" will be whatever set of options becomes widespread 10-15 years from now. In my mind it's entirely feasible (though not as likely) that the approach of using hundreds of minion cores (see Esperanto) to do graphics will become a common thing (since there is no free GPU and none around the corner). If that is the case, the V extension will become part of the "real base ISA" because everyone will want it. So far the A and C extension went from optional to necessary - it would be naive to think it will stop there. Also, as implementations improve someone may come up with a low cost (low area) way to implement DSP instructions. Maybe that becomes common because the low additional cost is a "why not?". That's part of my point too, the flexibility will bring innovation and that may lead to certain things naturally becoming part of most peoples expectations.

It looks like OpenGL has done something similar. They had a few specifications (ES in particular) for different classes of hardware, but as it became clear that certain features could be handled by the lesser hardware variants those became part of the standard.

<comment><USER5> Again, I don't see how even in that case, the V extension would be part of 'the real base ISA'.

You seem to again ignore that there are many, many applications that don't need or want a graphics card or SIMD of any kind.

What you are talking about is not the 'real base ISA' but the 'real os application profile'. By not hard coding these choices into the ISA you have much more freedom to create new profiles for future needs without changing anything about the ISA.

> So far the A and C extension went from optional to necessary

That is not the case. Its simple false. There are tons of RISC-V chips that don't have either, some of them are even in production.

Before the Linux RV64GC profile was released there simply was no defined official standard for OS application like Linux.

> Also, as implementations improve someone may come up with a low cost (low > area) way to implement DSP instructions

That already exists, its the P working group.

> That's part of my point too, the flexibility will bring innovation and that > may lead to certain things naturally becoming part of most peoples > expectations.

What you are missing is that 'most people expectations' are limited to a specific program domain. Nobody will ever expect graphics on a IoT edge processor. So the default profile for IoT will not include that.

<comment><USER4> I guess I'm talking about the base ISA for unix systems. This whole discussion started because someone designed a processor without the C extension and now they have to rebuild every Linux package without that. The base ISA for unix like systems was originally G (IMAFD) without C and it changed. So the base for unix systems will be whatever the major distributions decide it will be regardless of what the RISC-V foundation says. So far they are in alignment. If the P extension ends up costing little area beyond GC and a bunch of developers want it because of audio/video applications they're going to want to rebuild everything with it by default - because server chips should just include it anyway.

I'm not saying this exact scenario or the V on will come to pass, just that I expect the standard set of options widely in use will continue to change like it _already has_.

<comment><USER5> G was just a shortform to bundle commen extentions, it was never defined by the foundation as 'the base ISA for linux'. That was just what the first released version of RISC-V spec had in it.

I would assume that the V,B,J and possibly P extentions will all end up in the most used linux profile.

However I think the RV64GC will still be the relevant fallback that most distros will over to cover a very large range of chips.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Project page: [http://rise.cse.iitm.ac.in/shakti.html](http://rise.cse.iitm.ac.in/shakti.html)

<comment><USER7> Another ppt from team. [https://content.riscv.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/07/1100-19...](https://content.riscv.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/07/1100-19.07.18-Vinod-Ganesan-Gopinathan-Muthuswamy-IIT- Madras.pdf)

Project lead looks to be running a semiconductor company, and they say they have NDA with the fab company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Few things excite me as RISC-V. Hardware is in dire need of major disruption and it's starting to happen, a bit by bit. Hardware manufacturing as well needs disruption, but that's an ultra hard mountain to climb, for now.

</comment><comment><USER9> If others are curious what Shakti means, as I was, here's the Wikipedia summary

> Shakti is the concept or personification of divine feminine creative power, > sometimes referred to as "The Great Divine Mother" in Hinduism. As a mother, > she is known as "Adi Shakti" or "Adi Parashakti". On the earthly plane, > Shakti most actively manifests through female embodiment and > creativity/fertility, though it is also present in males in its potential, > unmanifest form.[3] Hindus believe that Shakti is both responsible for > creation and the agent of all change. Shakti is cosmic existence as well as > liberation, its most significant form being the Kundalini Shakti, a > mysterious psychospiritual force.[4][5]

> In Shaktism, Shakti is worshipped as the Supreme Being. Shakti embodies the > active feminine energy of Shiva and is synonymously identified with Tripura > Sundari or Parvati.

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

<comment><USER10> In everyday speech, it generally means power/strength.

<comment><USER5> They called it POWER because initially they wanted to us the POWER ISA rather then RISC-V. Luckily they switched over.

<comment><USER11> Why luckily? Whats wrong with POWER?

<comment><USER5> Because RISC-V is an open ISA. POWER would have been made in India in terms of 'you patents are not valid here' and not have been usable outside of India.

RISC-V also is becoming the standard for research and the open-hardware community.

Now the Indians can share and collaborate with the open-hardware community.

<comment><USER12> Isn't it the case that RISC-V is only open for non-commercial use, and that for commercial products it still has licensing requirements attached to it?

<comment><USER13> No. I'm sure there'll be some cores with that license (if there aren't already), but the ISA itself is BSD licensed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> People should really look at the Shakti program. It is really quite cool and because it releases everything in open-source we have a real shot at getting all kinds advanced processors and other free IPs.

There was a workshop at Chennai:

[https://riscv.org/2018/07/risc-v-workshop-in-chennai- proceed...](https://riscv.org/2018/07/risc-v-workshop-in-chennai-proceedings/)

Also, this is an old video but gives the basic information for the project: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoxOzvf78uQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoxOzvf78uQ)

This is one of the leads: [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gsmadhusudan](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gsmadhusudan)

I think I will repost his comment on Shakti, more people should see it, it was an answer in a thread about Shakti being an 'ARM killer':

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

As the lead architect of Shakti and the guy who helped kick-start the project, I figure I am owed my 2 cents !

1\. We never positioned it as an ARM killer ! That was the imagination of the reporter who wrote the article.

2\. Shakti is not a state only project. Parts of Shakti are funded by the govt, these relate to cores and SoCs needed by the Govt. The defense and strategic sector procurement is huge, runs in the 10s of billions of USD.There is significant funding in terms of manpower, tools and free foundry shuttles provided by the private sector. In fact Shakti has more traction with the private sector than the govt sector in terms of immediate deployments.

3\. The CPU eco-system including ARM's is a bit sclerotic. It is not the lic cost that is the problem, it is the inherent lack of flexibility in the model.

4\. Shakti is not only a CPU. Other components include a new interconnect based on SRIO, GenZ with our extensions accompanied by open source silicon, a new NVMe+ based storage standard again based on open source SSD controller silicon (using Shakti cores of course), open source Rust based MK OS for supporting tagged ISAs for secure Shakti variants, fault tolerant variants for aerospace and ADAS applications, ML/AI accelerators based on our AI research (we are one of the top RL ML labs around). 4. the Shakti program will also deliver a whole host of IPs including the smaller trivial ones and also as needed bigger blocks like SRIO, PCIe and DDR4. All open source of course. 5. We are also doing our own 10G and 25G PHYs 6. A few startups will come out of this but that can wait till we have a good open source base. 7. The standard cores coming out of IIT will be production grade and not research chips.

And building a processor is still tough these days. Try building a 16 core, quad wide server monster with 4 DDR4 channels, 4x25G I/O ports, 2 ports for multi-socket support. All connected via a power optimized mesh fabric. Of course you have to develop the on-chip and off-chip cache coherency stuff too ! 8. And yes we are in talks with AMD for using the EPYC socket. But don't think they will bite.

Just ignore the India bit and look at what Shakti aims to achieve, then you will get a better picture. I have no idea how successful we will be and I frankly do not care. What we will achieve (and have to some extent already) is - create a critical mass of CPU architects in India - create a concept to fab eco-system ind India for designing any class of CPUs - add a good dose of practical CPU design knowhow into the engineering curriculum - become one of the top 5 CPU arch labs around

Shakti is already going into production. The first design is actually in the control system of an experimental civilian nuclear reactor. IIT is within the fallout zone so you can be sure we will get the design right. If you want any further info, mail me. My email is on the Shakti site. G S Madhusudan

<comment><USER14> Very different things are in Indian semiconductor industry in comparison to China:

1\. Availability of professionals

India: makes tons of electronics engineers and semi specialists, but very very few of them find employment in the country.

China: there is a somewhat ok amount of undergraduate cadres, but for anything above this, you have to attract people from abroad. And yes, Chinese fabless were hiring from abroad since the very beginning. In fact, people who make SoCs at Allwinner, Rockchip and etc are around 50% undergrad and 50% masters level people. In their early days they were eager to hire random college grads and teach them verilog on site.

2\. Goals

India: a research program, all work in the past few decades was about delivering some kind of proof of concept level "national chip"

China: make money quick - 9 out of 10 Chinese fabless start with bog down standard, off the shelf "solutions" from ARM, and add some flavour: here you have 4 channel camera controller, here eDP on chip, and here 10G Ethernet for pennies.

3\. Markets

India: with all respect, the truth is there are none. And from many people I hear the same criticism - even if the 10th in a row state backed effort to make the "national chip" will succeed, there will be no chances of it ever sustaining it with microscopic domestic market as demanded by political mandate.

China: _foreign_ markets - even 15 years ago, Chinese fabless well understood that their value proposition is actually lesser in domestic market than for the export manufacturing. Most Chinese buying a PC 20 years ago were not deliberating whether their PC has Sigmatel audio codec or some cheaper domestic analogue, but for somebody making stuff for export, every penny saved on expensive imported chip mattered a lot. Even today, the pattern holds: Chines domestic market smartphone models have high-end Qualcomm or Samsung flagship class chips in their majority, and for export they do Mediatek, Allwinner, and Spreadtrum

<comment><USER5> I think the difference could be that now they are playing in the RISC-V space that is developing in a global movement.

Now the Indian national program is developing and working together on the same stuff that many silicon valley start ups and western university do.

We are seeing something really exiting in the works and many companies in China also see the potential.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is excellent news.

I wonder how long it will be until we can buy a full raspi-like platform that has no proprietary chips or firmware.

<comment><USER16> Current RISC-V chips are still proprietary, it's only the ISA that is free.

As for firmware, that's already pretty open with ARM.

You can boot a Tegra X1 (Google Pixel C, Nintendo Switch) without any blobs with coreboot. (You still want one tiny blob — DDR4 training stuff — if you want your RAM not to be super slow.)

Allwinner and Rockchip platforms also tend to not have blobs, at least not user visible/modifiable ones.

You can even boot a Raspberry Pi without blobs [https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open- firmware](https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware) (but without usb/ethernet/etc.)

<comment><USER5> > Current RISC-V chips are still proprietary

Whenever people make statements like 'RISC-V chips' you know its wrong because their is a broad range of chips from many different people.

<comment><USER17> So then I'm sure you can name a counter example? What fully open chip can I buy?

<comment><USER2> What fully open integrated circuit of any kind can you buy? Maybe there exist simple 74xx chips with completely open designs, taped out using open source tools, manufactured using completely transparent processes, and then independently verified to prevent backdoors? I'm not aware of any, but I suppose the military have something like this.

Anyway depending on your level of trust at the moment you could:

* Download rocketchip (BSD licensed) and run it on an FPGA. You'd have to trust the FPGA vendor and their proprietary tools like Vivado. This lets you run Linux, at a speed of about 50 MHz.

* Run PicoRV32 on the reverse-engineered Lattice 8K FPGA using the open source toolchain. You cannot run Linux on this, but you can run short C programs without libc, and given that Clifford has done a very good job fully understanding the FPGA we can be reasonably sure there are no backdoors. My experiments with this are here: [https://rwmj.wordpress.com/tag/icestorm/](https://rwmj.wordpress.com/tag/icestorm/)

<comment><USER18> Of any kind... I think the uA741 is about as open as any IC design can possibly be at this point.

Still available from many places. Here is one. [http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/ua741.pdf](http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/ua741.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Previous discussion, about 8 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15684225](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15684225)

<comment><AUTHOR> sorry, but this is not the _same_ _discussion_ article you have referred to, was an introduction to the shakti project, but now linux is booting on the cpu.

two, _very_ different things.

<comment><USER20> I do not take these links to mean, "why are you posting this, we have already discussed this", but as "here's related conversation that you might find interesting and relevant".

Such crosslinking is a true service.

<comment><AUTHOR> ah, i was inadvertently conflating that with this. thanks for your clarification, and as you have pointed out, it most definitely is quite valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The article misspells it as 'Shakrti' in the body. Posting here because there is no comment section on the blog.

</comment><comment><USER22> So it appears that this is taped out using Intel's 22nm FinFET process.

[https://twitter.com/ShaktiProcessor/status/10232743804309217...](https://twitter.com/ShaktiProcessor/status/1023274380430921728?s=20)

</comment><comment><USER23> What's the price point of one of these processors? The article doesn't seem to be clear on this.

<comment><USER24> From what I can gather, this is only in the test stage and has not yet been fabricated yet. They are testing this using FPGA

<comment><USER25> No, it's a test chip manufactured using Intel's 22 nm process:

[https://twitter.com/ShaktiProcessor/status/10232743804309217...](https://twitter.com/ShaktiProcessor/status/1023274380430921728)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> this is the best news i ahve seen so far</comment>


The Sejm of Poland adopted a new anti-terrorism law - <AUTHOR> http://visitwinchestervirginia.com/the-sejm-of-poland-adopted-a-new-anti-terrorism-law/ <comment><AUTHOR> Over the past year, our government received far more power than they could dream of. For one, a couple months ago a bill passed that allows Police to tap on any internet traffic with no warrant. Now we also have phone surveillance and to make sure that nobody slips by, all pre-paid SIM cards need to be registered. And it's only since November since the elections...

Many say that PiS, the current party that got the majority of votes in the parliament is the hardest-working one since Poland regained its independence from Russia. What a pity that they're working towards this populist, overarching surveillance state...</comment>


Why so many coding schools/bootcamps recently? - <AUTHOR>

why have coding schools proliferated recently?<p>Does it signify higher industry demand for entry level trainees or higher worker demand for training? <comment><USER2> Money comes in, credentials go out. That's just another iteration of the education industry.

<comment><AUTHOR> sure, but i'm wondering how it ties in with supply and demand in the IT labour market.

PS how do i get this post to show ib Ask HN rather than on the news page?

<comment><USER2> You must prefix it with "Ask HN:"

I really don't expect companies to hire people right out of a course that taught basic HTML,Javascript, PHP, Python or RoR. There were already lots of qualified people out there without a job before that fad caught on (the fad that a single course over a few months would turn people into geniuses.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll repost this in Ask HN. apologies for the double post</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Yo-yo.js – replacing react with 2 lines of code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/maxogden/yo-yo <comment><USER2> I can also replace react with 2 lines of code:

      module.exports = require('react');
      module.exports.DOM = require('react-dom');

</comment><comment><USER3> What sort of performance difference is there between this and react?</comment>


The Race to Relearn Hemp Farming - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-race-to-re-learn-hemp-farming/ <comment><USER2> What's the interest in hemp other than for marijuana? It's the least useful of the bast fibers. Sisal, jute, and manila all have big markets. Hemp and kenaf are niche products. The EU has allowed hemp production for years and it's still a tiny business.

<comment><USER3> Hulled hemp seed sells for about £10 for 200g in my local organic shop. Then there's oil which by many measures is healthier than olive oil.

Apart from food and CBD, hemp is generally more environmentally friendly than cotton and grows in a far wider range of climates and is softer than the fibres you mentioned.

Then there are cosmetics, hempcrete, animal feed, bioplastics, etc...

<comment><USER4> > Then there's oil which by many measures is healthier than olive oil.

I found this statement hard to believe, so I checked. I can confirm you are right, and by a large margin. Wikipedia has a comparison of vegetable oils [1]. Hemp oil has the most polyunsaturated fatty acids, at 82%. However, it has a low burning point, so I guess it's best to use it in salads, rather than for frying.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp_oil#Comparison_to_other_v...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp_oil#Comparison_to_other_vegetable_oils)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The hemp flowers are good, cbd is interesting. We did a small experiment using hemp as replacement for tobacco. There is very little psychoactive components. The difference is that it smokes like a dream. When the user runs out though, tobacco cravings come back full swing. It could become a good harm reduction technique for tobacco/vaping users. Still the production is just starting in my state, so it's rare and expensive.

<comment><USER6> Breathing a different kind of smoke and hoping it will reduce harm seems a bit bizarre. Smoke particles are dangerous whatever you burned to get them, right?

I guess it wouldn't have the addictive qualities of nicotine, but addiction means people wouldn't switch away in the first place.

<comment><USER7> There is at least some preliminary evidence that smoke from the cannabis/hemp flower is less toxic than commercial tobacco smoke (much of which may be due to the fact that people usually smoke far less mass of the former)-- heavy marijuana users do not seem to have the same sort of cancer risk spike as heavy cigarette smokers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There was still wild hemp growing from when farmers grew in So Wisconsin & No Illinois when I was growing up there in the `60 & `70s. My grandfather used to point it out as we drove on the rural farm roads.

Nobody really paid any attention to it until guys started coming home from Vietnam and they'd point it out.

When I was around 11-12 some friends and I got our hands on a paper grocery sack full of plants someone had found. No buds on them, just leaves and stalks. We probably smoked about half of it up before someone older told us it was "hemp" and wouldn't get us buzzed. It was about a week after that most everyone I knew had heard about us. Kids were getting "grounded" all over town just for knowing us.

Soon after the local Ag Dept guys started campaigns to eradicate it and did a pretty good job of it. Probably sprayed tons of pesticides along miles and miles of those old farm roads to do it.

<comment><USER8> Trading microscopic amounts of chemicals that feel good with massive amount of chemicals that give you cancer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isn't there lots of... crossover knowledge between hemp and the psychoactive cultivars?

<comment><USER10> Hemp is big ag, cannabis is smaller scale horticulture. You treat your trees way different

<comment><USER11> There have been pretty strong Cannabis planted in big scale farms for many decades in South America. There are those not so strong too, but there are tons of good stuff in big operations. Paraguay, for example, have skilled big plantation farmers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting that KY and NC seemed to have had more success investigating hemp than the much more progressive VT.

<comment><USER13> KY was one of the major producers early on. Deep history there.

> Historically, hemp production had made up a significant portion of > antebellum Kentucky's economy. Before the American Civil War, many slaves > worked on plantations producing hemp.

> Hemp was used extensively by the United States during World War II to make > uniforms, canvas, and rope. Much of the hemp used was cultivated in Kentucky > and the Midwest.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp#United_States_2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp#United_States_2)

<comment><USER14> Additionally, one of the big cash crops of KY has been Tobacco, at least until the Fed started heavily subsidizing corn and penalizing farmers who grow too much tobacco.

Tobacco looks very similar to marijuana and many farmers would have small bits of marijuana dispersed amongst several hundred acres of Tobacco.

Source: born and raised in KY. Left to join the US Army and then work in LA and Chicago as a software engineer.

<comment><USER15> Does not look similar other than they are both plants with green leaves.

<comment><USER11> that was my same thought too, if you ever saw a tobacco leaf and a Marijuana leaf. Even the green shade is pretty different. Now, the Castor Oil Plant[1], which is planted for it's oil, can be confused with marijuana from distance to the untrained eye.

1- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricinus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricinus)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Preinstalled malware on low-cost phones stealing data and money from poor people - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/cheap-chinese-smartphones-malware <comment><USER2> Premium brands aren't helping by normalising this, maybe not to the same degree but every Android experience seems to come with vendor botnet stuff built in.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some slightly dystopian vibes in that first image.

<comment><USER4> Ever been to Nigeria? Outside the big cities, that is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > called the idea of Chinese-made phones extracting data and money from people > living in poverty "digital colonialism."

How do I leave this timeline?

> blaming an unidentified "vendor in the supply chain process."

I think at this stage it would be reasonable to assume it might be an Africa vendor. Would they not have some localisation? We can't jump to Chinese hate yet :(

<comment><USER6> One link in the article shows the problem also exists in phones sold in Brazil and Myanmar: [https://www.upstreamsystems.com/pre-installed-malware- androi...](https://www.upstreamsystems.com/pre-installed-malware-android- smartphones/) . I'd look at the source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the fact that these phones are Chinese-made is irrelevant, and calling this out in the title is linkbait that plays to our natural xenophobia. I would simply replace "Chinese-made" with "Cheap". I think that would better convey the most important point, that the reason these phones are cheap is that they're subsidized in a way that will ultimately be costly to their users.

<comment><USER8> Are any known similar situations where non-chinese phones are involved?

<comment><USER7> That's beside the point. The reason these phones do what they do isn't because they're Chinese-made; it's because they're advertised as cheap but there's a catch. The title distracts from the more important point and instead panders to our natural xenophobia, which is one of our greatest weaknesses. We should all be working to overcome that weakness, not stirring it up.

<comment><USER9> They're cheap because China can afford to dump, which is a CCP strategy. All Chinese manufacturers are state-bound, and the article is not to blame if the CCP long term goal of erasing the citizen and conflating party, state, and country has been largely successful. It is absolutely relevant they're coming from China if no other manufacturing country is doing the same. It has nothing to do with race, but the insistence is telling.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A function to get the Google+ share count of a URL - <AUTHOR> http://www.strategyinternetmarketing.co.uk/get-a-url-google-count-via-php/

<comment><AUTHOR> Just thought you all might find this useful</comment>


Reactions to the Java EE Productivity Report 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://www.zeroturnaround.com/blog/opinions-on-java-ee-productivity-report-2011/ <comment><USER2> The Play Framework is not in the list. May be it's too new. It's interesting to see deployment frequency and duration in the survey. Play sort of renders those questions obsolete.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the most clever web caching strategy your company is using? - <AUTHOR> It seems nowadays everyone is using static assets which are cached forever by the CDN, and changes are pushed to the users by adding some sort of content hash into the filename. You benefit from the browser keeping all files in the cache forever, and yet you can deploy changes very easily by simply using a different filename for the updated assets.
Yesterday I became aware of a different technique, for which I couldn't find extensive documentation yet: We're building a social network type website and I found out that you can (and should) mix Etag-based caching and the traditional "Cache-Policy: private, max-age=XXX, must-revalidate" on the same route, depending on which user is requesting the data.
This approach solves the issue that you want to cache all your api route responses at the client, but if the user wants to change some of their own data (which can be changed by the user but is also fetched through the same API) you can reply to the user's own objects with the dynamic Etag instead of the forever-lasting "Cache-Policy".
It is a pretty simple concept to address caching not only on a per-route, but also on a per-user-per-route level.
In the end, it left me wondering what other things in terms of web caching I have been overlooking in the past few years. I'd appreciate if you could share your stories. <comment><USER2> I have yet to see a `Cache-Policy` header; assuming `Cache-Control`.

Now: do you have a good reason for must-revalidate, or is it just "it was on SO, stick it in there"? Without further headers, this does nothing and wastes 16 bytes per request ;)

Conditional requests can indeed be mixed with expiration; consider looking at Last-Modified while at it.

For largish data, byte-serving is not quite caching, but still comes in handy.

Last but not least, Cache-Control: immutable and/or content hash are still viable - but especially for content you _do_ expect to be around Forever(tm).

Check also the Age header, and Expires - but that's been mostly superseded by clever tricks with 304s and Cache-Control.</comment>


This is a news website article about a scientific paper (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep/24/1

<comment><USER2> This is a comment in the HN comments section on a news website article about a scientific paper.

In this paragraph I will mention a link to a Wikipedia article that may or may not be related to the article in question [0], accompanied by some personal thoughts that may or may not add to the discussion (if there is one).

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solway_Firth_Spaceman](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solway_Firth_Spaceman)</comment>


One year of DANE – tales and lessons learned [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://ripe70.ripe.net/presentations/183-dane-ripe.pdf

<comment><USER2> Doesn't this simply move the issue of trust up to the DNSSEC certificate holders? What is to stop them from creating the same abuses of identity which affect TLS as presented early in the slides?

<comment><USER3> But it takes someone "up the tree" from your domain to be compromised/evil, vs with CAs any generally trusted CA can create a cert for your domain. While it doesn't help against everything, it still improves things.

(OT: does anyone know a good German/European domain registrar/DNS provider that offers DNSSEC without jumping through too many hoops?)

<comment><USER4> Gandi does (France)

Maybe Joker if you want German

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell If anyone wants to test DANE with SMTP, I have it set up on grepular.com. Feel free to email me. Details in my profile.</comment>


Tips and Tricks to avoid memory leaks in writing C - <AUTHOR> When I write C I used to prototype the model first, then fix the memory leaks. I think its OK for throw code. I find that these leaks are mostly due to patterns of code that one avoids.
Like,
1. not assigning null to a pointer after freeing it
2. not allocating enough memory for string processing
Please throw in your tips and tricks to avoid memory leaks and memory related problems. <comment><USER2> A common issue for people coming from garbage-collected languages is to be _very_ aware of what happens when you malloc() inside a function and return a pointer. Someone is going to have to free it! One common pattern is to have this malloc()ing be restricted to an obviously named foo_init() function, and then pair it with a foo_free() function that gets passed the relevant data structure, and frees anything that the _init() function malloc()ed. You then keep the _init() and _free() functions together and update them in parallel, so all the malloc()s in one are paired with a corresponding free() in the other.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Exceptions" can be useful: lots of my code looks like

        int fd = -1;
        char *buf = NULL
        if ((fd = open("/foo", O_RDONLY, 0)) == -1)
            goto err;
        if ((buf = malloc(1024)) == NULL)
            goto err;
        ...
        return 0;
        err:
        if (fd =! -1)
            close(fd);
        free(buf);
        return -1;

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice idea, but people would scream seeing those goto's. I used to do those in a macro/function like,

#define memalloc(x,y) { x=0;if(x=malloc(y)){}else{printf("error:no mem");} }

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> a simple and efficient method for finding memory leaks is replacing malloc/free with house-keeping macros when debugging:

      #include <stdlib.h>
      #include <stdio.h>

      void *(*_malloc_old) (size_t size) = malloc;
      void (*_free_old) (void *ptr) = free;

      #define malloc(size) _malloc_new (size, __FUNCTION__, __LINE__)
      #define free(ptr) _free_new (ptr)

      struct alloc
      {
            const char *function;
            int line;
            void *ptr;
            struct alloc *next;
      };
      struct alloc *list = NULL;

      void *_malloc_new (size_t size, const char *function, int line)
      {
            struct alloc *e = _malloc_old (sizeof *e);
            void *ptr = _malloc_old (size);

            e->function = function;
            e->line = line;
            e->ptr = ptr;

            e->next = list;
            list = e;

            return (ptr);
      }
      void *_free_new (void *ptr)
      {
            struct alloc *prev = NULL, *e = list;
            while (e) {
                    if (e->ptr == ptr) {
                            break;
                    }
                    prev = e;
                    e = e->next;
            }
            if (e) {
                    if (e == list) {
                            list = NULL;
                    }
                    if (prev) {
                            prev->next = e->next;
                    }
                    _free_old (e);
            }
            _free_old (ptr);
      }
      void pallocs (FILE *f)
      {
            struct alloc *e = list;
            while (e) {
                    fprintf (f, "%s:%d\t0x%x\n", e->function, e->line, (size_t)e->ptr);
                    e = e->next;
            }

      }
      int main ()
      {
            void *ptr = malloc (1024);
            void *leak = malloc (1024);
            void *leak2 = malloc (1024);

            printf ("before free:\n");
            pallocs (stdout);

            printf ("after free:\n");
            free (ptr);

            pallocs (stdout);
      }

outputs:

      before free:
      main:67 0x9dab860
      main:66 0x9dab440
      main:65 0x9dab020
      after free:
      main:67 0x9dab860
      main:66 0x9dab440</comment>


Show HN: Problem Pad – Discover Problems That Need Solving - <AUTHOR> I'm Harbind, creator of Problem Pad, a community to discover, share and discuss problems being faced by creators, businesses or consumers and riff on ideas to try and solve them.  (https://www.problempad.com)
It's an open blog-style platform where anyone can submit problems they're facing or have observed and build on ideas in the comments.
My main motivation for creating this was to force myself to find problems being faced by real people in order to come up with creative ideas that actually solve a problem.
As a developer I've been guilty of SISP (solution in search of a problem) where I build out an idea but it was never actually serving a real problem so it would just end up getting scrapped.
With this project I hope to prevent myself and others from falling into that trap by focusing on finding and solving problems that people are actually facing.
My hope is that Problem Pad gives some ideas and inspiration to others who are looking to create.
Please let me know what you think about the project and if you feel you could get value out of it please sign up or subscribe to the newsletter!
Thank you! <comment><USER2> [https://problempad.com/](https://problempad.com/)

I like the idea. There's definitely a yearning for ready-for-you ideas in the market.

I could see this becoming viable if it became a newsletter that delivered the problems / ideas to that person's inbox rather than a social network that relied on user-generated submissions. Or, if it became a StartStory/IndieHackers-style interview site that interviewed founders on how they originally landed on the problem for their business. Thee only question is, how do you monetize?

There's Trends by Hustle. You could charge for insider information on industries and that could be gotten if it was an interview style website and continually kept in touch with founders. E.g. patreon style videos that went out to subscribers two weeks earlier for information on an industry.

Either way, this looks great, and I wish you the best of luck in building this out further.

Cheers, Derick</comment>


Microsoft .Net Core telemetry is not opt-in - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dotnet/cli/issues/3093#issuecomment-392663561 <comment><USER2> It boggles the mind that a bunch of very smart people at Microsoft thought this was a good idea. Say what you will about Oracle but Java has never been malware that continuously spies on users. Unfortunately the GDPR explicitly allows this kind of IoT-style ubiquitous anonymized monitoring: as long as the information cannot be tied back to an individual person (meaning no IP addresses but GUIDs are fine) and the business can claim a legitimate business interest they're likely to get away with it. This sort of ubiquitous monitoring is only going to get more popular. In Hong Kong we're seeing new Condo apartments that have full-fledged "internal sensor grids" a la Star Trek (as it was described to me). In theory though the data collection firm (which is not the same firm that owns the building) has no way of correlating it back to a specific person/apartment number.

<comment><USER3> Like all things, there must be a sense of context and proportionality. This issue is specifically about the .NET Core SDK command line tools.

Getting data about which commands are used most, if they're successful or throwing errors, possible typos, unclear command flags, etc, are useful when shipping software frameworks used by 10s of millions to build products that run the entire Fortune 500 and thousands of other businesses.

This is not ubiquitous spyware, and is about as generic as it gets while still remaining useful. Every software company (many of which are featured here on HN) does the same analytical tracking to figure out how their products are being used and it results in better features. What exactly is the danger here, especially with the lack of personal info and an opt-out method?

They even make the data public along with insights into how it helped: [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/07/21/what- weve...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/07/21/what-weve-learned- from-net-core-sdk-telemetry/)

<comment><USER4> Collecting command line arguments is a HUGE invasion of privacy.

Imagine I ran a command "make.exe my-secret-project-name" or "make.exe process_gdrp_removal_request SOME_SSN".

And as the linked page admits, they really do collect all command line arguments, not just a white list of valid commands. Perhaps someone accidentally pastes an AWS API Secret into the wrong terminal window and it ended up as "dotnet.exe MY_AWS_SECRET". ( _" You will notice misspellings, like "bulid". That's what the user typed. It's information"_).

<comment><USER5> They don't collect command line arguments according to the github issue.

<comment><USER4> They do collect at least the first argument, how else do they end up with "bulid"? Accidents happen and someone could paste or tab-complete a confidential thing in that spot...

<comment><USER6> So if you push your api key to github by accident is github responsible?

<comment><USER4> Invalid comparison, in my humble opinion.

Pushing a secret API key to github, even accidentally, does not happen covertly or as an unexpected side effect of some other tool written by github, and you'll soon realize what happens because you'll see your key sitting there. You also have a general idea of what you are playing with when you start using github, whether it's private repos or public repos.

Having a local CLI tool submit your secret API key as part of telemetry collecting command line arguments is totally unexpected and invisible for the user, and you won't even see it has happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have been contacted twice in the past year by Microsoft rep's who both told me that one of my products is among the top installed add-ins for Excel (they didn't say top "X", just "top" \- but I'll take it). I assume they collect this data via telemetry.

What bothered me is that when I asked questions back, I would get no reply. If they are going to collect this data, the least they could do is help developers out with some aggregate data. I've been selling this product for 10+ years, and to this day, I still vacillate on which version of the .NET framework to target.

<comment><USER8> I've always gladly submitted bug reports and begrudgingly accepted some telemetry in the belief that it helps the developers fix bugs and build a better product. But apparently this data isn't even passed back to developers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> .NET Core does not "violate" GDPR any more than Google Analytics does, or any other system that receives data. It's up to the data controller to ensure that no personal data is sent, which is done by setting the environment variable DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT.

There are fair arguments against the nature of opt-in telemetry, but saying "they violate GDPR" is just hyperbole, imo.

<comment><USER8> It violates GDPR because it defaults to enabled. GDPR states that data collection should be opt-in.

<comment><USER5> The data is neither personal or sensitive. So which data collection needs to be opt-in?

<comment><USER10> Of course all metadata is subjectively speaking personally identifiable information. But which data are you claiming isn't?

<comment><USER5> All the data they collect. Atleast based on the GDPR training thing I had to do yesterday for work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> From their perspective, they claim that it is not personal info since it's anonymised. On that, they're right.

But it still makes a shitty user experience to do something that is counter to what your users expect and want.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe, maybe not. They record 3 octets of your IP address and the experience is opt-out rather than opt-in. ECJ ruled that IP addresses are PII but did not specify if using a partial address is OK. On the basis it is the 3 most significant octets, then this could be used to identify a company or a pool of users or a unique user on an unpopulated network.

Edit: also from [1]: _" Hashed MAC address — Determine a cryptographically (SHA256) anonymous and unique ID for a machine. Useful to determine the aggregate number of machines that use .NET Core. This data will not be shared in the public data releases."_

I think a machine could be a user in this circumstance? Also a hash isn't anonymous if it's idempotent based on the IP address alone as it's merely a derived value.

[1] [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/07/21/what- weve...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/07/21/what-weve-learned- from-net-core-sdk-telemetry/)

<comment><USER12> Atleast per german court rulings, which at that time largely covered what is defined as PII under GDPR, say that the full IP is PII but the first three octets is not.

<comment><USER13> The last three octets absolutely could be in conjunction with some other pieces of data, though.

<comment><USER12> Of course, yes. Once you can identify a unique person it's personal data, even if you cut of octets. If you only log the IP for example for detecting duplicate accounts, it should be good enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Telemetry can be opt-OUT just as long as it displays very clearly to the user what is going on.

I'd prefer opt-IN but I fully understand if microsoft don't.

Having something be opt-OUT and _not_ displayed to the user (meaning they are in no position to opt out because they aren't aware they even need to) is of course entirely unacceptable no matter which way you turn it. It can't be in fine print it needs to be in big bold letters on first run, install, etc.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why can't they just make it opt-in?

When one of my kids ask for something and I say no, they might ask again. But the more they continue to ask, the more determined I am to say no. The difference between me and Microsoft (in this context), is I'm trying to bring up respectful children.

This is just what Microsoft are doing - judging by the +1's, there's a huge majority of users who just don't want this. Instead of giving their customers what they're asking for, they just dig their heels in further. This is one of the main reasons I started the transition away from Windows since the 8 preview.

They said that making it opt-in would mean less data. Well, doesn't that tell them something?

I'm sure the .NET team would have got the same answers if this where opt-in - and let's face it, the discoveries aren't exactly ground breaking.

If you _ask_ me, I probably would have opted in. I'm sure other people would do the same (if they could). But it's not, so I jumped through the hoops to disable it (added it to /etc/environment). You don't ask, you don't get.

And another thing, why not disable it using the registry when running on Windows? Personal experience tells me that only a minority of Windows devs even know what an environment variable is, let alone know how to set to globally and persistent.

It's arguable whether or not this is personally identifiable. Even if it's not, it still leaves a bad taste as it's still classed as "spying" \- they're sneaking the data out by making people take effort to disable it; it's beyond a simple Y/N, people have to actually learn how to do something. And it's also giving people the impression that their own apps will be contaminated.

It's a command-line tool I'm running on my local computer for professional use, not a click-bait website or social media platform.

</comment><comment><USER16> Joy [1] also does this, with no obvious warning, and no way to opt out. I reported it and the contributors said they had no problem with it, and if I didn't like it I could build from source, because correcting my activities would be useful to them.

[1] [https://github.com/matthewmueller/joy/issues/79](https://github.com/matthewmueller/joy/issues/79)

</comment><comment><USER17> I believe it's the same with VSCode. All "telemetry.enableCrashReporter", "telemetry.enableTelemetry" and "workbench.settings.enableNaturalLanguageSearch" from user settings default to true.

</comment><comment><USER18> Imho people can spend all the time they want discussing this.

The only way to sort this out is someone suing Microsoft and then let a judge declare whether telemetry not being opt-in is a GDPR violation or not.

</comment><comment><USER19> This has been covered here many times, but consent is not the only basis for lawful processing under GDPR.

</comment><comment><USER20> This title reads like .NET Core is forcefully replacing all other .NET frameworks on your system.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is. Future versions of powershell will ship with .Net core only.

<comment><USER20> PowerShell is an extremely small part of the .NET ecosystem. It's more like a REPL for a programming language than a shell. And regardless, that a future version of a piece of software would be implemented in the latest version of the framework is not at all the same thing as what I'm talking about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I read 'not' as 'now'. For a second there I thought the world was a slightly better place today :/

I'm all for continuing the fight, but I'm suprised this very old news is on the front page again.

</comment><comment><USER22> I bet we'll see research articles about how people use companies public data to pinpoint individuals in different ways. I'd think we all are going to be surprised what you can find from that data.

</comment><comment><USER23> Note that recovering the plain MAC address from SHA256(MAC) costs a single GPU day on a 1080.

</comment><comment><USER24> Oh this will get exciting

</comment><comment><USER25> Can I suggest to change the title. It is misleading at the current state.

PS: this should be opt-in due to community request and not by some philosophy or law

<comment><USER26> Sure thing, we've added the missing "telemetry". Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This should link to the entire github issue, not a single person's recent comment in a 2 year old thread. Also the title should be changed to clarify "telemetry".

</comment><comment><USER27> Please change the title to include "telemetry".

</comment><comment><USER28> This has been an issue for 2 years now, so what is it they've done with this oh so valuable data? What improvements have been made as a result of the data collected?

I suspect the answer is that no concrete improvements have been made and all it's accomplished is to make them look bad.

<comment><USER29> [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/07/21/what- weve...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/07/21/what-weve-learned- from-net-core-sdk-telemetry/)

<comment><AUTHOR> And there's the money shot:

 _" Hashed MAC address — Determine a cryptographically (SHA256) anonymous and unique ID for a machine. Useful to determine the aggregate number of machines that use .NET Core. This data will not be shared in the public data releases."_

<comment><USER30> Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but (2^48 possible MAC addresses) / (60000MH/s) / (3600 s/h) = 1.3 h to calculate the SHA256 sum of every MAC address in an AWS p3.16xlarge instance (~$50)

[https://medium.com/@iraklis/running-hashcat-v4-0-0-in- amazon...](https://medium.com/@iraklis/running-hashcat-v4-0-0-in-amazons-aws- new-p3-16xlarge-instance-e8fab4541e9b)

<comment><USER31> You may be right. But it may not be a straight sha256. It could be a multi- round hash based on sha2. In the same way shadow hashes are default called sha512, but in reality it's a 5000 round version, so your price could be $250000 instead. (Or less/more)

<comment><USER32> You could cut down the search space a lot by only enumerating the MAC addresses of known vendors ([https://gist.github.com/aallan/b4bb86db86079509e6159810ae9bd...](https://gist.github.com/aallan/b4bb86db86079509e6159810ae9bd3e4)).

That cuts the search space down to 23000 vendors * 0xFFFFFF = 385875945000. With a hashrate of 60000MHs, you could SHA256 hash that entire space in 6.5 seconds. If you have an NVidia GTX 1080, you can do it in ~2 minutes 16 seconds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Does that mean that every .Net application has a built-in botnet unless disabled by developers? Can I disable is a as user?

<comment><USER3> This has nothing to do with your application or code. This is the .NET Core command line tools that send generic telemetry on which commands are used most, timings, and SDK versions. It shows a message when you first use the tools and can be disabled, check the docs: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnet/core/tools/telemetry](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnet/core/tools/telemetry)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> What do you need to stop trusting Microsoft?

They haven't changed a lot. They're still patent trolls, and if they still exist is mostly because they're still living off the momentum of their 90s monopoly.

This is the type of BS that comes out of the great minds at Microsoft: [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hiybbprqag-how-google- tripped-u...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hiybbprqag-how-google-tripped-up- microsoft/) <\- a great example of how your analytics data might be used.</comment>


Dutch city redraws its layout to prepare for global heating effects - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/29/dutch-city-arnhem-redraws-layout-prepare-global-heating-effects <comment><USER2> Trees work like natural airconditioners. Ie trees absorb water and emit cooled water moistuire. Thus trees cool air not only by shade but also by a natural form of evaporative cooling.

Evaporative cooling effect of trees. [https://climate- woodlands.extension.org/trees-and-local-temp...](https://climate- woodlands.extension.org/trees-and-local-temperature/)

Plus trees and plants clean the air from air pollution. [https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/units/urban/local- resources/downlo...](https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/units/urban/local- resources/downloads/Tree_Air_Qual.pdf)

Plus trees and parks increase housing value of nearby properties.

<comment><USER3> One more dynamic to factor in: the tree canopy will also block long-wave radiation emitted from the ground, which will increase urban temperatures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It should be noted that all Dutch municipalities were asked to draw up a plan to deal with climate change, and there isn't really anything drastic in this one.

Also much of the Netherlands is below sea level, but Arnhem is not.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you have a house there, what modifications would you make?

<comment><USER4> I do have a house there, and my street's WhatsApp group is currently discussing ideas to see if we can get some of that subsidy. Mostly focusing on removing the pavement on our square and replacing it with grass and trees so far.

Modifications are rather hard, actually. My house is from 1903. We have the lower part (two floors, the lowest is a sort of half-basement), and my upstairs neighbours have the upper part (also two floors). The walls are single (no insulation inside), but quite thick, brickwork. The bottom floor is just cement on top of the sand the house is built on. Inner floors are made of wood with thatch and plaster ceilings.

Our main problem is that once the house is hot inside, it's almost impossible to cool down again. So perhaps adding isolation to prevent that, but it means putting a thick layer of insulation on the inside of existing walls.

The other thing is that heating is done with natural gas (as in most Dutch houses), and we are supposed to switch to all-electric somewhere in the next decades. No idea how yet.

Rainfall from the roof is still led to the sewer system. I guess we could change that so it goes into the garden we have in the back, but it'd be quite a large operation.

<comment><USER3> Ah you are about to face one of my favorite problems. A high-performing building is air-tight, and well-insulated, but old masonry/brick buildings rely on leaky envelopes with no insulation to maintain a dry enclosure.

Basically, the lack of insulation in these old buildings means that the heat emitted through your walls is likely drying your walls during the winter. Once you add insulation on the inside, any vapour from the outside (rain-driven, or drawn through material pores through capillary action) is going to hit the cold/exterior side of the insulation and condense inside your wall (which then causes mold, conducts heat). You can calculate this by assuming steady-state heat flow across your wall during cold/moist conditions and see if the temperature drop across the wall hits the dewpoint (point where air vapour saturates into liquid).

That's why it's better to have the insulation on the outside, with a vapour barrier underneath it to protect your structure. With these kind of old building retrofits, that's not possible. However, you can solve it, basically by calculating the moisture and heat flow through your wall, and identifying the maximum insulation that doesn't cause condensation long enough to grow mold (this is called hygrothermal analysis). There's also various coats you can add to the exterior that have some success in control moisture drive, but if they backfire, you are basically sealing up the moisture inside, so that's always a back-up solution.

Source: I've worked on retrofitting the envelopes of a lot of old masonry/brick buildings.</comment></comment></comment>


Status Update on Google Wave Federation Effort - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/wave-protocol/browse_thread/thread/4da603d9e1e373f3?hl=en

<comment><USER2> Not completeley related to the article, but the recent surge of people giving away their e-mail addresses everywhere on the internet hoping that someone with a spare Google Wave invite might give it to them made me wonder: how far would a fake-invite fraud could go? How many credit card details could be harvested? I'm surprized noone tried to do that.

<comment><USER3> There's much lower hanging fruit than that. Just think of all the people who are conditioned by Facebook et al into believing that entering your gmail address _and password_ to "invite all your friends" was a normal thing to do...

Without a doubt many of the same people will happily tack their CC-info into any form within any half-plausible context ("we must verify your age before we can use your gmail password to invite all your friends").</comment></comment>


NYC Reinvent Payphones: Prototype Hack Day - <AUTHOR> http://reinventpayphones.prototypehackday.com/

<comment> jack-r-abbit Interesting. I think it would be nice to see every payphone turned into a wifi hotspot wired into a city wide network. This serves two things: 1) City wide wifi (Don't we all want that?) 2)Payphones are then just VOIP handsets with a payment machine attached. Win-Win

Payphone fees could probably be reduced but maybe not. Maybe the money collected from the payphones is used to (partially?) offset the costs of running the city wide network.

</comment><comment><USER2> In case you didn't see the funny skit introducing this at this month's NY Tech Meetup: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJx91LDXREk>

</comment><comment><USER3> A great payphone hack would be to make it a dead-drop. Ie: put in a hard drive and a usb port and small controller. Then plug in your usb key, dial a number, it gets copied to the HD. Next person to insert his key and dial your number gets the data you copied.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's great seeing innovation challenges such as these; they're a win-win for everyone involved.

</comment><comment><USER5> reminds me of this <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRaWnd3LJfs></comment>