Elements of Modern C++ Style - <AUTHOR> http://herbsutter.com/elements-of-modern-c-style/ <comment><USER2> We have just started using some C++11 features, and with new features come new traps and potential complexities, as you'd expect with C++.

A few examples:

1\. Implicit lambdas ("[=]") capture "this" pointer for data members, if you capture a shared pointer and let the lambda object leave the scope, the shared pointer won't be copied (<http://stackoverflow.com/q/7764564/23643>), which may create unpleasant results, like code blowing up in your face.

2\. Overuse of "auto" (not exclusive to C++) may make the code harder to read, especially if storing a result returned from a function. You can't tell if the return value is a smart pointer or a raw pointer, value or a reference, so you can't figure ownership semantics just by looking at the local code.

3\. Move constructors/assignment operators are a bit of a black magic, especially with regard to suppressing default implementation (<http://mmocny.wordpress.com/2010/12/09/implicit-move-wont-go>) and exception safety (<http://cpp-next.com/archive/2009/10/exceptionally-moving>). I would refrain from using it, until I fully understand it.

With that said, most of C++11 is a welcome change and makes C++ more pleasant to write, but, as always, you have to have your guard up and use new features judiciously.

<comment><USER3> C++ always seems to lead to traps. In point #2, you're obviously right about the micro-coding/readability point. But the premise is kind of scary: you're dealing with a code base where the ownership semantics of an object are captured only by a function return type? Yikes. That's a framework issue: if everyone working on the source isn't 100% sure what that return means, you're guaranteed to get bugs with or without auto. Non-trivial ownership/allocation/copy semantics (i.e. anything other than "on the stack" or "operator new") are deep C++ voodoo, not something you worry about in passing as a readability thing.

<comment><USER4> At least you _can_ express ownership semantics in C++ code, using constructs like `unique_ptr`, `scoped_ptr`, and `shared_ptr`. In a garbage collected language, _nothing_ expresses ownership, and so while you not be at risk of memory leaks, you're still vulnerable to all the other bugs that come with aliasing mutable objects.

The "framework issue" you describe is solved precisely by specifying ownership semantics in terms of smart pointer return values. The way everyone becomes "100% sure what that return means" is by whether it returns a `unique_ptr` or a `shared_ptr`. The OP is simply complaining that `auto` takes away that _local_ information on ownership.

`operator new()` is only trivial by virtue of _not specifying anything at all_ about ownership. `scoped_ptr` and `shared_ptr` and `unique_ptr` are each specifying different, more restricted, but still _trivial_ ownership semantics. They aren't "deep C++ voodoo" in the least. Your post smacks of someone who doesn't actually write C++ for a living.

<comment><USER5> I wish C++11 added syntactic sugar for the smart pointer classes like scoped_ptr, shared_ptr, and unique_ptr. I would rather see new operators (like Microsoft C++/CLI's _^_ and _%_ ) than even more templated code. Compare something like:

      int^ foo(int% bar);

versus:

      std::unique_ptr<int> foo(std::shared_ptr<int> bar);

Smart pointers have long been available in boost and are required for writing safe code, but they make code unreadable (even after typedefs).

<comment><USER6> I don't think introducing more syntax to the language for a feature that ultimately is a library solution, is a sustainable way to go.

But if you really need a compact notation for smart pointers, you'll get pretty close by using template aliases, e.g.

        template <typename T> using up = std::unique_ptr<T>;
        template <typename T> using sp = std::shared_ptr<T>;
        // ...
        up<int> foo(sp<int> bar) {
            return bar ? up<int>(new int(*bar)) : nullptr;
        }

<comment><USER7> Oh C++11 has template typedefs? Time to migrate my project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I read articles like this I think of a quote from Carmack.

"The Escalation programmers come from a completely different background, and the codebase is all STL this, boost that, fill-up-the-property list, dispatch the event, and delegate that. I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various "modern" C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion." ([http://www.bethblog.com/index.php/2010/10/29/john-carmack- di...](http://www.bethblog.com/index.php/2010/10/29/john-carmack-discusses- rage-on-iphoneipadipod-touch/))

The rage in the game dev community these days is all about highly cache aware Data Oriented Design (DOD) over OOP. Curiously there aren't a lot of DOD discussions or articles on HN.

<comment><USER9> > Curiously there aren't a lot of DOD discussions or articles on HN.

How much is there to say, really, once you've got the basic idea?

OOP has always emphasized single objects. Part of that emphasis is that data is grouped by object rather than by field.

For some applications, this style can work well. GUIs are the canonical example.

However, if speed really matters, a focus on individual objects is rarely helpful, because it doesn't support typical data access patterns where algorithms probably want to work with one field for many objects rather than many fields for the same object.

This doesn't just matter for games. If you're working on any kind of mathematical code using large matrices, something as simple as choosing row- major vs. column-major ordering appropriately can make a very noticeable difference to performance on modern hardware with several layers of cache.

One of the nicer things about C++ is that while it supports OOP (at least in the variation that has become most popular) it doesn't try to shoe-horn everything into being an object and is quite happy for you to worry about your own memory layouts if you want to.

Once you've understood that basic point, there isn't really much else to know about Data Oriented Design. It seems like one of those ideas that has been capitalised to make it seem more important than it really is. If no-one had popularised OOP, despite its fundamental flaws in this respect, perhaps we would have just called the DOD approach "common sense"...

<comment><USER8> I think the types of DOD being discussed in the great twitter wars are far more complex than common sense.

[http://macton.smugmug.com/gallery/8936708_T6zQX/1/593426709_...](http://macton.smugmug.com/gallery/8936708_T6zQX/1/593426709_ZX4pZ#593426709_ZX4pZ)

<comment><USER9> I remember when that first did the rounds a few years ago...

The thing is, while it's interesting seeing the potential trouble spots Acton highlighted, he didn't actually show a better way of doing any of it. As someone who has also done his fair share of low-level/high-performance programming in C++, I would take some convincing that the result isn't going to be somewhat faster but effectively write-only code. That might be OK if you know your target platforms well enough to count on those micro-optimisations not being premature _and_ you know no-one is going to care about maintaining your code for very long, which is not entirely unrealistic in the games industry but doesn't apply to much else.

However, I think a lot of the ideas on those "slides" go beyond Data Oriented Design as the term has come to be used, and into general low-level, architecture-specific optimisations. There's nothing wrong with exploring the latter, of course, but I'm not sure it's helpful to conflate very fine- grained, platform-specific, relatively localised adjustments with a high-level view of how to group multiple properties on a set of objects in memory, or with the more general principle of transforming your data in advance into some format that lends itself to the kind of processing you want to do.

(None of which is to say that articles on how to do that sort of low-level optimisation on popular platforms wouldn't be interesting. I'm just suggesting that they would probably have to go some way beyond what is commonly called DOD today before they were likely to get interesting.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been using a lot of these new features in XCode 4 and my code is already _much_ cleaner and more readable. Modern C++ really is a pleasure to use and I love writing code that's this high level but still smoking fast.

<comment><USER11> Are you kidding? The syntax is still inscrutable and the template system is shit. It's all slightly less shitty than it used to be:

binder2nd< greater<int> > x = bind2nd( greater<int>(), 42 );

but IMHO C++ jumped the shark in 1996 or so.

<comment><USER10> While people are ranting about C++'s warts I'm having a great time writing performant but clean DSP code _and_ getting paid for it. I don't give a shit if there's some imaginary pristine alternative.

<comment><USER11> I used to write high-performance embedded C++ code (and get paid for it). I'd still rather use a JVM language for the general logic and drop down to low- level C/assembler for the really performance-critical stuff.

The only thing I'd use C++ for these days is where it's minimal runtime support requirements come in handy (e.g. runtimes for other languages).

<comment><USER10> Sure. I'd use Scala if the situation allows. But these days I'm doing realtime DSP & OpenGL stuff and I'm very happy I don't have to do this in a language as low-level as C.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This c++ is very different from the c++ I remember. I'd like to learn more about modern c++ style and idioms. Can anyone recommend a good text?

<comment><USER13> i have asked here <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3114567> and here <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098298> \- so far, nothing wonderful.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately it's too new. If Scott Meyers updates effective c++ that will be the one to get.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That looks surprisingly good, and might even improve new projects which have to use C++. How long until compilers support all this?

<comment><USER2> I'd say by the middle of next year you should be able to use the a lot of the features portably.

GCC: <http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx0x.html>

Clang: <http://clang.llvm.org/cxx_status.html> (currently down)

MSVC: [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2011/09/12/10209291.a...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2011/09/12/10209291.aspx)

Notably lacking in current production versions:

1\. explicit overrides in GCC

2\. lambdas in Clang

3\. Variadic templates, range loop in MSVC

<comment><USER15> Sadly, vendor supplied toolchains for other systems are going to lag far behind. It is not always an option to use GCC/Clang on these boxes. Compilers like Oracle Studio CC, IBM xlC, and HP aCC, etc. So this is not really the definition of "portable" I'm used to. I know I can take any C++98 code and reliably build on any platform/toolchain. It will be a long time before I can say the same about C++11. Even C99 isn't truly "portable" because Microsoft refuses to add all C99 features to MSVC.

<comment><USER16> Microsoft don't ship a C compiler

Adding C99 features to their C++ compiler would be nice be probably not cost effective for them

<comment><USER17> Sure they do, it's bundled with their C++ compiler. cl.exe will happily turn on C90 mode and compile files as C, not C++, if you supply the /TC option or your source files have the .c extension.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Auto everywhere is pretty dangerous despite what Mr. Sutter says. Many C++ libraries rely on type conversion (in high performance math it's very common however you can find it as close as the STL's vector<bool>). Whenever you use your own memory allocator and/or care about performance (and this is whenever you are writing high performance/high reliability code) library smart pointers are pretty useless too. Other things are not as controversial as these two, but don't really define the modern C++. Herb should have read his friend's, Anderi Alexandrescu's, book from ten years ago to get a hint of what modern C++ looks like :) (I know he has read it. I guess he is just trying to pimp C++ to Java/PHP/Python/etc developers).

<comment><USER19> He's not advocating "auto everywhere", he just said it will make the STL algorithms easier to use (which it will). The other benefit of auto is for generic code (code in templates) where you might not necessarily _know_ what the return type is, or at least where the return type is going to be very complicated to specify. (This last is the same reason C# added var at the same time as they added LINQ - the return types of LINQ expressions would be difficult to specify manually.)

<comment><USER18> He says "Use C++11 auto wherever possible." Nobody argues auto and decltype is necessary for generic code but this not what Sutter's writing about. In fact he does not have a single word like "generic" or "template" in his entire article. Which alone should be a good indication this has nothing to do with the modern C++ style unlike Alexandrescu's book with the similar name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> X-Istence The only issue I have ran into is that some of these newer features are not yet available in compilers that are shipping with OS's we are deploying on, so I HAVE to continue writing to C++98 since installing a new compiler/libraries is a no go (if it is not vendor supported, can't do it, thank you US gov't rules!).

It will take some time for the compilers and their libc++ libraries to move forward and have older versions of OS's replaced by ones that do support it.

That being said, wherever I can (in personal projects) I will slowly start adapting and using the new features...

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't know a lot of C++, but the examples that demonstrate how C++11 compares to C++98 look like a vast improvement. Until you come down to this monster:

        auto i = find_if( begin(v), end(v), [=](int i) { return i > x && i < y; } );

This is the _improved_ version by the way, but I'm not sure if a loop wouldn't be more readable for such a straight-forward problem. Plus I can't help but think that C++ will probably never win a beauty contest.

<comment><USER21> I don't see what the problem is here, this is very readable to me. You want to find between the beginning and end of a list called v, for a value between y < i < x. Admittedly the condition in the lambda could be better written, and the results should probably be called something other than i, but it's perfectly clear what's going on here.

Let's look at the equivalent C++98 loop:

       int i = -1;
       for(std::vector<int>::iterator iter = v.begin(); iter != v.end(); ++iter)
       {
          if(*iter > x && *iter < y)
          {
             i = *iter;
             break;
          }
       }

It's not only much more verbose, but the types need to be expressly written, and what's going on isn't immediately obvious from the function name.

No, C++ will never win a beauty contest (I'd vote for D or Haskell personally), but it's great for expressibility, and the new C++11 changes make things more concise.

<comment><USER20> Agree completely.

When you compare the new code to the C++98 one, it looks like a great improvement. But isn't that because C++98 simply sucked even more? As you say, when you compare it to languages like Haskell, even the new C++11 leaves something to be desired.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone have a recommendation for an intro book for experienced programmers (not C++ programmers) that teaches C++ using a "good" C++11 style?

<comment><USER23> Newer books likely have not been written yet. C++ is pretty standardized and has been for a while. I suggest "Accelerated C++" if you want to learn idiomatic C++, and then you'll understand (for the most part) how the new 2011 additions work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Best joke is at the end: "These features [...] make modern C++ the clean, and safe, and fast language that our industry will continue relying on heavily for years to come."

</comment><comment><USER25> Will C++ get properties some day (similar to C# properties)?</comment>


The Art of the Propagator (2009) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/44215/MIT-CSAIL-TR-2009-002.pdf <comment><USER2> This is also intimately connected with Ed Kmett's Guanxi project

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7rlJWc3474](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7rlJWc3474) [https://github.com/ekmett/guanxi](https://github.com/ekmett/guanxi)

My understanding is he is using ideas from propagators and other places to make a performant logic programming framework in Haskell.

</comment><comment><USER3> The section in SICP on circuit simulation has some similar ideas. I like to think that that was an early version of the propagator idea - [https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full- text/...](https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full- text/book/book-Z-H-22.html#%_sec_3.3.4)

<comment><USER4> The constraint language described in SICP (AFAIK began as a paper by Gerry Sussman and Richard Stallman, continued in the PhD thesis of Guy Steele) is indeed an inspiration / precursor to Alexey's dissertation on propagators.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, and with Alexey's work (if I've understood it) the propagators are allowed to hold multiple values(beliefs) based on more than one (possibly conflicting) set of constraints.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I won't be able to read the paper, but from the abstract it sounds a bit like a blackboard[0]

"a common knowledge base, the "blackboard", is iteratively updated by a diverse group of specialist knowledge sources, starting with a problem specification and ending with a solution. Each knowledge source updates the blackboard with a partial solution when its internal constraints match the blackboard state. In this way, the specialists work together to solve the problem"

I can't see the term Blackboard used in the paper. Probably irrelevant but just an observation.

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

</comment><comment><USER6> There is also miniadapton [https://github.com/fisherdj/miniAdapton](https://github.com/fisherdj/miniAdapton)

Unlike what is explained OP, the computation is one way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool. Found the paper: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.05337.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.05337.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice! I've been spending a lot of time with Radul's thesis, which is also on propagator networks, trying to follow along and implement a reactive framework using its teachings. Fun times

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! I just found out about it today. Is your project open-source?

Edit: found Radul's thesis: [https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/54635/6035432...](https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/54635/603543210-MIT.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> is Sussman still fond of this ? he was talking about it in meetups IIRC

<comment><AUTHOR> I've only just heard of it from a talk he gave a few years back [1]. Not sure whether he's continued working with it.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3tVctB_VSU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3tVctB_VSU)</comment></comment>


Handbook Sweden's feminist foreign policy [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.government.se/4a4752/contentassets/fc115607a4ad4bca913cd8d11c2339dc/handbook_swedens-feminist-foreign-policy.pdf <comment><USER2> From the foreword: "In October 2014, Sweden became the first country in the world to launch a feminist foreign policy. This means applying a systematic gender equality perspective throughout the whole foreign policy agenda."

"This handbook should be a resource for international work relating to gender equality and all women's and girls' full enjoyment of human rights." ....

"These analyses should have an intersectional perspective and should take into account the fact that women and girls, men and boys are not homogeneous groups but have different identities, needs, influence and living conditions."

Those make sense to me. I'm getting sick of the effect of foreign policies which prioritize business and trade.</comment>


Stripe Capital - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/en-nl/capital <comment><USER2> Makes sense. It's a very natural progression especially with Square offering the same to its customers. I'm actually surprised it took them this long.</comment>


US government mandates GPS location tracking added to all smartphones - <AUTHOR> http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/09/30/40208.htm

<comment><USER2> One other thing. It's coming fast now. Google wanting your birthday and recognizing your face and voice in the last week... this is complete BULLSHIT. Do they think people are dumb? I guess they have good reason to, since 90% of Americans are already walking around with these tracking d$&#*@ces. But I've never owned a smart phone for exactly this reason -- I have a GPS in my car, but I'd never get one that was hooked to the cell net, and I won't have a cell that I can't pull the battery out of.

This is a law targeting people like me. Not you, not the other 90% of Americans, not everybody on this site, because you all have smart phones. Admit it. You have one. You've been letting them track you for years, and by now they already know exactly how often you get laid, who you're sleeping with and how many drinks you have a night.

Not me, and not ever. What you gave up voluntarily, they're now going to take from me by force and fiat, and you won't lift a finger to defend me, will you? No, because you're smug with your iphone and your android and your blackberry. You're the problem if you have one of these. And I genuinely hope China blows the crap out of the US before this shit takes over the world, and gets the shit blown out of it in return, and we end up eating radishes and drinking out of each others skulls in total fucking blackness, and I will before I submit to this utter horseshit.

</comment><comment><USER2> Would this make it a crime to disable GPS on your phone? I was gonna say "pull the battery out" ...that worked pretty well back in '03 but you can't do it anymore, lol.

<comment><USER3> I don't follow. Do phones have backup batteries now, or are people too obsessed with texting and tweeting to actually do such a thing anymore?</comment></comment>


What's Behind the Ballooning Upper Middle Class? Education - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-14/what-s-behind-the-ballooning-upper-middle-class-education <comment><USER2> The definitions of middle and rich in the report are pretty close to made up. In the latter case, the study literally uses "people who identify as rich".

The study appears to define "middle" as 90% of respondents, which is laughable. Everyone thinks of themselves as middle, no matter how far from the actual middle they are.

The obvious definition would be percentiles of income, or wealth, or other measurable advantage. This would put a lot of readers in an upper class, as which people really don't like to think of themselves.

<comment><USER3> No, if you belong to the working class or the upper class, you most definitely don't think of yourself as middle class.

Wealth and income aren't very good markers for class, there are plenty of working class members who make more money than many middle class members.

<comment><USER4> Are you from outside the US? I've never heard this attitude in the US, but have heard it multiple times from people from other countries (often the UK).

Here in the US I've heard families earning from $30k to $200k, working jobs from manual labor to white collar, call themselves "middle class."

<comment><USER3> Yes, I'm not from the US, and yes, I'm always astounded by americans who think that your income bracket defines your class.

> Here in the US I've heard families earning from $30k to $200k, working jobs > from manual labor to white collar, call themselves "middle class."

Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Where I'm from, the most important marker for middle class is that you value education very highly, and that you don't value physical labour above any kind of work.

Obviously, the people in your example at the low end of the pay scale would most likely be lower middle class, and those at the upper would be upper middle class. The major distinctions between those would be how to perform social interactions and the size of their social networks, but they all agree that life's goal is to send your kids through college.

(As opposed to being working class which means you do not value education highly, and you value physical labour ("real work!") higher than any other kind of work.)

<comment><USER5> The american definition of middle class is "there shows on TV that are about people like me."

<comment><USER6> That's impossible. Almost everyone in TV shows is far richer than the overwhelming majority of Americans can ever become. Like, _Friends_ is so famously about a group of people who live in large, expensive, well-furnished apartments without ever having to do commensurate work that TVTropes coined "Friends Rent-Control" to describe it. _The Simpsons_ is about a man who can always support a family of five people and two pets on a blue-collar worker's income even though he quits his job to pursue a non-remunerative life-dream in one third of all the episode plots. And then he always gets the same job back!

TV labor-economics is a special category composed exclusively of hand-waving that lets the writers portray cool stuff without having to actually use nothing but the idle rich as characters.

<comment><USER7> > The Simpsons is about a man who can always support a family of five people > and two pets on a blue-collar worker's income

He's a nuclear safety inspector; does that count as blue-collar? I don't really know much about the job frankly. I don't think it's implausible that it may be quite enough to support a family, especially in a small town.

Not to defend the realism of the Simpsons wrt his job, but I'm pretty sure the joke is that he manages to keep his well-paid, relatively important job.

<comment><USER8> The actual real-life job might not be blue-collar, but as portrayed in _The Simpsons_ , he walks into an interview having graduated high school and gets the job, so is pretty solidly blue-collar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also worth read is the Economist's article "An hereditary meritocracy":

[http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21640316-children- ric...](http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21640316-children-rich-and- powerful-are-increasingly-well-suited-earning-wealth-and-power)

"Not only do graduate couples tend to value education; they also tend to have money to spend on it. And though the best predictor of an American child's success in school has long been the parents' educational level—a factor which graduates are already ahead on, by definition—money is an increasingly important factor. According to Sean Reardon of Stanford the past decades have seen a growing correlation between parental income and children's test scores. Sort the students who took the SAT, a test for college applicants, in 2014 by parental income and the results get steadily better the further up the ladder you climb."

"And on top of spending on school, there is spending outside it: the gap between what rich and poor parents shell out for museum trips, music lessons, books and so on has been widening (see chart 2). In a world where lots of people do well on SATs, cultivating extra skills matters.

The opportunities for parental investment continue in higher education, which is ever more costly (see chart 3) but offers ever greater returns. Between 1979 and 2012 the income gap between the median family with college-educated parents and one with high-school educated parents grew four times greater than the headline-grabbing income gap between the top 1% of earners and the rest, according to David Autor of MIT, rising from $30,000 to $58,000."

</comment><comment><USER10> Education doesn't help fix poverty or move people from lower middle class to upper middle class.

[http://www.demos.org/blog/12/2/15/why-education-does-not- fix...](http://www.demos.org/blog/12/2/15/why-education-does-not-fix-poverty)

Edit: However, it will increase wages in absolute terms:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/upshot/why-more- education-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/upshot/why-more-education- wont-fix-economic-inequality.html?_r=0)

</comment><comment><USER11> I see this a little bit different. There are always booming industries precisely because they aren't regulated a lot by the government which open up a venue for all kinds of people with all kinds of backgrounds to make their way to the top without a college education.

Then after some time governments start regulating that industry until only the ones with connections and degrees from good colleges have the chance to enter the industry.

This is the moment when this industry ceases to enable people based on merit (smart, working hard) to move up the social ladder.

Eventually this industry dies because of this process, because now it is not the strong willed, smartest and hardest working that make it to the top but instead it's a bunch of drones from colleges that all have the same thinking, manners and world views.

I believe this has already happened in the financial industry and I feel that in the next 1 or 2 decades this will also happen in the IT industry, which currently isn't heavily regulated.

I myself (immigrating from a Socialist country) made it in one of the richer EU countries to the top 0,5% of society without a college education (I dropped out) in the IT sector and I'm quite sure that I wouldn't have made it if this industry was heavily regulated.

I equate regulation to an entry cost to do business in some area. While regulation in itself isn't bad too many regulations can over time create an environment where only the ones that already have money can enter the playing field.

It's kind of like the rich and powerful see that there's an industry where a lot of profit can be made and the first thing they do is to immediately create entry barriers with regulations so only their own offspring can claim future profits in this industry.

<comment><USER12> This is actually too broad a generalization to be useful at all. Regulations do hamper and get in the way of business by usually increasing costs. But there is usually a good reason for those regulations (e.g. we have mandatory airbags because they were deemed necessary for people's safety, despite adding to the cost of the vehicle).

I can see why you would have such a viewpoint though. What you describe is exactly what happens in many countries where corruption is more prevalent (e.g. India, Russia etc) with regulations being created precisely to keep out others.

<comment><USER11> I mean different types of regulations many of which do not even exist in the US/UK but only in the EU.

Regulations that allow only persons with certain college degrees to create a business in some fields.

What would you say if in 10 years from now you can't create a small web business that provides you passive income if you don't have some certificate from your government that is only provided to those with a Master or PHD? (or whatever additional barriers they come up with)

For many this is a way to rise on the social ladder and I know that in the EU country I live in there are right now talks within the government of creating barriers for creating new businesses in the IT sector. (but I just know it because I know people that are directly involved in politics)

If this happens it would be especially sad because in the IT sector you generally don't need a lot of money to buy production factors. You only need to be smart and own a laptop. And this is especially great for poor people that nonetheless have the energy to go out and build something.

Who would profit from this? Big corporations like Siemens because then everyone that is interested in IT must go and work there as an employee and people who can afford to go to college for 4-6 years. Of course the people that could afford to get the degree would then be the bosses of all the others by default.

<comment><USER13> > I mean different types of regulations many of which do not even exist in the > US/UK but only in the EU.

Occupational licensing is actually more prevalent in the US than in EU.

> This regulatory practice is known as "occupational licensing," and it has > spread to cover around 30 percent of the U.S. workforce, up from just 5 > percent in the 1950s.

[http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up- front/posts/2015/01/26-tim...](http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up- front/posts/2015/01/26-time-to-examine-occupational-licensing-practices- kearney-hershbein-boddy)

There is an explicit comparison made in the full report:

> Occupational licensing is not unique to the United States. Based on > information gathered in 2012 from the then twentyseven nations in the > European Union (EU), between 9 and 24 percent of European workers are > subject to occupational licensing, which translates to between 19 million > and 51 million individuals. These estimates of the share of the workforce > that is licensed, even at the higher end, are still lower than the estimated > share in the United States, which is slightly under 30 percent (Koumenta et > al. 2014).

> Similar to U.S. states, the extent of occupational licensing varies widely > across countries in the EU: Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, France, Ireland, > Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Romania, and Sweden all have less > than 15 percent of their workers covered by occupational licensing (Koumenta > et al. 2014). Regulation is much more prevalent in other countries, however: > at least 25 percent of the workforce in Denmark and Germany, for example, is > regulated, and rates are also high in Italy and Spain.

[http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2015/...](http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2015/03/11-hamilton- project-expanding-jobs/thp_kleinerdiscpaper_final.pdf)

<comment><USER11> I mostly talk about creating businesses (your own web service for passive income), not getting a job, which isn't really a good way to move upwards to the highest levels in our societies.

But yes, occupational licensing is a barrier too.

Thanks for the data/links!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I always assumed it was a cross between the newish tech industry, usual finance industry salaries, fracking, and the ever expanding defense contractor industry that has been generating thousands of millionaires [1].

All of these require an education and most importantly living in the right places. These industries while booming are better at generating upper middle class with a lot of low wage jobs in between, rather than the healthy middle classes common in older industries like steel, mining, and other union jobs that fueled the 1950-70s middle class boom.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-enclaves-reap- reward...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-enclaves-reap-rewards-of- contracting-boom-as-federal-dollars-fuel- wealth/2011/06/27/gIQAWQC5HJ_story.html)

<comment><USER15> I'd throw real estate in the mix (probably ahead of others), and think education has the least to do with it.

<comment><USER14> Good point, I'd also rank that #1 for upper middle class upward mobility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> white-flame Education is not "behind" it, as in causation. It's correlated. If you're "upper middle class", you can afford to send your kids to your/their pick of school, get them the right connections, raise them with financial and social sensibilities that will serve them well, distance yourself from negative influences, etc etc etc.

That special piece of paper is simply one of the common trinkets of that lifestyle. Stop assigning magic powers to it.

<comment><USER16> It goes beyond money though.

My parents technically earn below the federal poverty level. They _definitely_ could not have afforded the expensive private education I received.

Yet from a young age it was always expected that I would attend college and a huge emphasis was put on education. Educational values endure across generations more effectively than wealth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not all education is the same. If memory serves a recent Chronicle of Higher Ed study had gender studies bachelors making $14/hour with software engineers making $100k/year.

So maybe education is the most important factor if you only count in demand fields.

<comment><USER18> What job can you get from "Gender Studies" beside teaching it ?

<comment><USER19> There are scores of jobs in areas such as retail management that don't care what your degree was in, only that you have a degree from somewhere in something. In some, you'll get hired in as a fast-tracker to management with training and such, others you'll find opportunity with just a bit of retail experience (having a job through college can be enough). Sometimes the same is true for secretarial positions, and I'm guessing these sorts of qualifiers are everywhere.

<comment><USER20> The existence of such jobs is a smell of "class solidarity" amongs some kind of upper-middle. "We don't care what you learned, as long as you went through the right social initiation programme".

By contrast, in software there is at least he _potential_ to do things differently. On Friday I was on the interview commitee for a candidate who we accepted. Now I realize that I have _no idea_ what degree she has (if any). Her CV was so full of past projects that I never got around to looking at her education.

It would be different for a fresh graduate, but if such a CV mentioned a vocational school or an online course, then that would be neither better nor worse than a CS degree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Given "uses absolute income thresholds adjusted for inflation", the result is not surprising. You would expect this result as long as you had real GDP growth (i.e., growth above inflation).

What this doesn't tell you is what percentage of that real GDP growth did the middle class get to participate in. And this is where the growing economic disparity is coming from.

</comment><comment><USER22> Clicking through to the full report, I find:

"Between 1979 and 2014 ... there were sizable declines in each of the lower three groups, with the poor and near-poor falling from 24.3 to 19.8 percent, the lower middle class from 23.9 to 17.1 percent, and the middle class from 38.8 to 32.0 percent."

My read of that is that since 1979, there has been a shift up for all income groups. There are fewer poor and near-poor, fewer middle class, and substantially more in the upper middle class.

Isn't this good news? Doesn't it fly in the face of the 'growing income divide'?

Something is not adding up...

<comment><USER23> Maybe it's thresholds that are not adding up. Or maybe not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Expanding the definition of what is Upper Middle Class is ballooning the Upper Middle Class.

<comment><USER25> So it's like autism epidemic?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Yeah, if your parents are able to invest nearly a half-mil so you would have that paper which tells HR guys that your parents have invested neay a half-mil in you...

It is about pay-walled system of elite degrees - a status symbol brought by family money in the most cases.

BTW, there are many great teachers and courses in these elite schools (I personally love MIT and Yale online courses), so yes, there is also knowledge component in elite education.) But it is paper which makes the difference.

</comment><comment><USER27> An arguably better treatment of this topic from the WSJ a few weeks ago: [http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/06/21/not-just- the-1-the...](http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/06/21/not-just-the-1-the- upper-middle-class-is-larger-and-richer-than-ever/) (The key finding is that most of the people who have "left" the middle class have gone up, not down.)

</comment><comment><USER6> It mostly just sounds like the income-to-population curve is shifting from a Gaussian to a power-law curve. The power-law curve is gonna have a longer tail, with the "upper-middle class" making up more of the population (integral of the probability density function), even while the density at any given point along that tail is much lower than the density used to be for the right one-to-two sigmas of the Gaussian.

</comment><comment><USER16> This definitely matches my experience.

My great grandparents were solidly upper class (they owned a large paper company). Since then, there has of course been wide variation in outcomes, from my mother making $10k/year to my aunt who owns a highly successful architecture firm.

Yet absolutely everyone in my extended family went to college. Values and norms persist longer than money.

</comment><comment><USER28> The interesting point about measuring anything in many reports is less associated but more practical dimensions are often picked for writers to tell more engaging stories. Well, someone is able to have one model and different report APIs targeting different audience then.

</comment><comment><USER29> > Even with the degree, students from low-income backgrounds get less of an > income bump throughout their lives than those from wealthier backgrounds

Could this be because of the university attended?

</comment><comment><USER30> I believe that is referring to share of total income, which means the rich are getting a bigger piece of the pie while the middle and lower classes are getting poorer or stagnating. In other words, inequality is increasing.

The article doesn't mention anything about How the classes are defined however.

<comment><USER31> The article does talk about that but it's primarily addressing the growth in the upper middle class as a percent of the total population. From 13% to 30% in the last 40 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> If everyone becomes 'upper middle' then it's no longer middle. Statistically, there will always be a lower, a middle, and an upper quartile.

<comment><USER33> Only if the class system is based on statistics. It isn't. What class someone is in is defined by their values, beliefs, assets, etc. It's possible for everyone to be in one class.

Note that "lower class" isn't a thing. It's called "working class". That doesn't fit in your model.

<comment><USER34> There's also a sub-working class, that is lower class, but doesn't or isn't able to work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> A job in WallStreet?</comment>


Does hacker news have a search facility or filters for finding/sorting threads. - <AUTHOR>

Doesn't hacker news have any search facilities or filters for finding/sorting threads.
OK, I may be missing the obvious but cannot seem them. I especially want to sort threads that are posts to external material and those that are disccusions on the site.
Any enlightenment is appreciated. <comment><USER2> See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184707> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182374> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=183706> for command line search and current data.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.searchyc.com/>

Not internal, but excellent.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> OK just saw it was a highly requested feature yet to be done. Answered my own question :)</comment>


Obama announces Cuba trip - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/us/politics/new-talks-begin-with-cuba-on-expanding-business-ties.html <comment><USER2> Here's what I (as a relatively poorly informed AU citizen who's 'travelled a bit') don't understand about the reaction to this news.

It's clearly not the ideal end-game state. But, it seems to be a marked improvement on the previous (half-century-long) situation. And in order to get from current to ideal, there'll be some intermediary stuff. In tech this is a common and well understood progression - ideally it's short, well managed, not-too-painful, etc. But basically unavoidable.

So why is this announcement being judged in terms of 'This isn't perfect'?

<comment><USER3> There's a vocal minority of Americans who oppose any softening of policy towards a Castro Cuba. Many (most?) of these have ties to men and women who fled Castro decades ago and who lost a lot to the Castro regime.

<comment><USER4> There also seems to be an incredible effort to prevent Obama from achieving almost anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm always confused about the duality of our pro-China but anti-Cuba attitude.

The idea of saturating Cuba with Americans to try something different to awaken the people to alternatives is a good idea, at least better than what we've done for the past half century.

And the scale of the evil the Castros have done is nothing compared to China. Cuba doesn't kidnap people from other countries and have them suddenly appear on Cuba TV confessing to crimes.

<comment><USER6> The CIA had spent a lot of time and money installing and arming the Batista regime, a murderous, brutal but pliant Mafia-backed kleptocracy in Cuba, and were absolutely furious when it was suddenly taken away from them.

The US has basically been sulking ever since.

<comment><USER7> And to add to that, the Cubans who fled during and right after the revolution started a Cuban-American Lobby that has been able to continually influence the hard stance our government has taken on them.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban- American_lobby](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban-American_lobby)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Trade, Not Trust;

</comment><comment><USER9> Incidentally- "The United States will come talk to us when it has a black president and the world has a Latin American pope,"

\-- Fidel Castro, 1973

Edit: flanbiscuit pointed out that there is no official record of this statement. Letting it stay, as a mythbuster.

<comment><USER7> I don't think that he actually said that

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/19/fidel-castro- pr...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/19/fidel-castro-prophet- debunking-pope-and-obama-urban-legend)

[http://www.snopes.com/fidel-castro-prophecy- quote/](http://www.snopes.com/fidel-castro-prophecy-quote/)</comment></comment>


ForceRank - simpler team decision-making - <AUTHOR> http://blog.forcerank.it/introducing-forcerank

<comment><USER2> Irrational but honest feedback: There's something about the name that really doesn't mesh with me. I read the headline and had an immediate negative emotional response. ForceRank, to me, just sounds very negative, rigid, and well...forceful, ha. And, to me, at least, it doesn't seem in line with the purpose of the project.

That said, I may very well be the only one that felt that way. I don't mean this as criticism of the product itself, as it looks nice. I would just hate for people to pass it up because they're having a negative subconcious response to the name.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is great.

Currently my team uses google docs to survey our customers. This works really well because we don't have to organize temporary users or share the results publicly.

Am I able to do something similar with ForceRank?

<comment><USER4> That would definitely work. For v1, your customers would be able to see each others results. Would that work for you?

<comment><USER3> Yeah! I'm sure we can figure out a way. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "You can't put a price on good decisions - But we tried anyway" \-- nice plans & pricing intro :)

</comment><comment><USER6> I thought about something similar, like a combination of wiki and upvoting (like on Hacker News or Stack Overflow). Would be useful to create collaborative priority lists of things. Maybe someone will write something like that.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is there a weighting to how points are assigned?

Can this be adjusted? It'd be cool if I could say that the #1 votes get 2X the points as the #2 votes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet, although that is something we've heard from at least 1 other person who uses a similar system (that they manually do in Excel)

<comment><USER7> This will be especially helpful if I want a certain outcome (tweak weightings, recompile, rinse, repeat).. :)

<comment><USER4> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system) is a great read. We're basically doing a Borda count.

Kemeny-Young technique as an upgrade feature? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, how does it aggregate rankings? Arrow's theorem says there is basically no good way to do it ;)

</comment><comment><USER9> The pricing plans are LOL.</comment>


Milestone-Based Vesting for Startup Founders - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/09/milestone-based-vesting-for-startup-founders/ <comment><AUTHOR> Fair or another attempt to squeeze founders?

As the saying goes, in an egg and bacon breakfast, chicken is involved whereas the pig is committed. In a startup, founders are committed. Investors are merely involved :-)</comment>


According to Annual InvestScape Report 2017 – $8.8B Invested in MarTech - <AUTHOR> https://www.martechadvisor.com/annual_investscape_2017.php?utm_source=sm&utm_medium=voat&utm_campaign=mta_27022018_cm&utm_term=aymu&utm_content=mtalab <comment><AUTHOR> This Annual MTA InvestScape includes 3 sections that take you through the annual and quarterly stats, as well as the investors views on investment trends you can expect in 2018.</comment>


Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134672-harvard-cracks-dna-storage-crams-700-terabytes-of-data-into-a-single-gram <comment><USER2> I'm an author of the paper. The title of this article is misleading; first, we encoded 650kB and made 70 billion copies... second, those 70 billion copies weigh 1 milligram... third, it's really only meant for archival purposes as it's immutable and not random access... fourth, it's expensive right now (at least this might be a solvable problem).

<comment><USER3> Nice work, and thanks for replying to all the questions here. I didn't read the paper, maybe it is addressed in there, but how much did it cost to synthesize that much DNA? Also, it could be random access if you PCR amplified the fragments you need based on the barcodes - you could even make a FAT (file allocation TUBE) which has all the file names and their barcodes.

<comment><USER2> approximately a couple of thousand dollars.

while that's true (re: scalability), it's not what we did, and would be hard to scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really liked their paper. Its a bit less over the top than the extremetech guys but hey, that is the difference between pop journalism and science.

Clearly with some form of fountain code or LDPC codes you will be able to get the data back, but what struck me is that I always thought of DNA as relatively unstable, in the sense that cells decay/die etc, but the fact that just sitting there, DNA which isn't expressing various proteins under the influence of other cellular mechanisms, well it just sits there. That was new for me.

When I showed it to my wife she pointed out that the sourdough starter she has been using since we were married was from her grandmother, I joked that the next megaupload type raid would have to sequence all the DNA the found in a place to figure out if Shrek3 was encoded in it somewhere. That would be painfully funny I think.

<comment><USER5> do you have a link to their paper?

<comment><USER2> I posted our paper on dropbox (until i get into too much trouble over it): paper <http://db.tt/ZDoDJZeD> supplement <http://db.tt/elIqsy72>

<comment> brown9-2 thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you store data onto 50 DNA strands, can you always read back all the data from all 50 strands, or does one need to store multiple copies of each in case the sequencer can't "find" a particular strand?

If one does need multiple copies, it would seem that this method suffers from the coupon collector's problem [1] (i.e. to collect all 50 strands requires collecting 225 random strands on average), and that the retrieval rate could be improved by using a fountain code [2], which allows each strand to simultaneously encode data at multiple addresses, which would decrease the number of strands required to be sampled to only slightly more than the number of strands worth of data requested.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupon_collectors_problem> [2] [http://blog.notdot.net/2012/01/Damn-Cool-Algorithms- Fountain...](http://blog.notdot.net/2012/01/Damn-Cool-Algorithms-Fountain- Codes)

<comment><USER7> HN formatting breaks the first Wikipedia link by removing the apostrophe. I ran it through a link shortener as a workaround.

<http://cl.ly/1r153b103k2P>

<comment><USER8> One could also replace the apostrophe with %27

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupon_collector%27s_problem>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anybody know how to escape their horrible "mobile" version that they force onto ipad users? It can't even be zoomed :-(

More and more often I find myself not reading articles because someone thought it would be a great idea to create a non-scrolling, non-obvious, paginated "iPad format" with additional misleading and unintuitive buttons looking like native ones but doing something different.

Sorry for the rant.

EDIT: so you might as well access the original at <http://hms.harvard.edu/content/writing-book-dna> instead of the ad-ridden regurgitation.

<comment><USER10> I'm considering buying an iPad, and I have a question: is there no browser on the iPad that allows you to choose whether you want to the mobile version or the regular version? If not, that's almost a deal breaker.

<comment><USER11> Yes those browsers are available. Chrome has a "request desktop site" option and my personal favourite, iCab Mobile, has an extensive list of agent strings (custom ones can be added as well) that can be set.

<comment><USER10> Phew, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> And, of course, this brings us to the question: Do we already have messages in our DNA? Here's a post (from 2007) on this: [http://blog.sciencefictionbiology.com/2007/07/messages-in- ou...](http://blog.sciencefictionbiology.com/2007/07/messages-in-our- dna.html). Actually, if it's from the aliens who seeded life on Earth, it would probably be in a prokaryotic DNA perhaps?

<comment><USER13> Probably not... If we were seeded by aliens, then the message would have had to have been in a very primitive form, so it would necessarily be seen in all living things, including prokaryotes. Unfortunately bacterial genomes are much, much, smaller than humans, so there isn't much room to waste for hidden alien messages. Additionally, presumably, these messages wouldn't be functional, so they would be under any sort of evolutionary pressure. This means that they would likely be mutated or lost to natural selection.

That's not to say that we weren't seeded, just that if we were, any message would likely have been lost. Unless... maybe they seeded mitochondria intact, which are in all (ok, most) eukaryotes. Maybe that might work... :)

Unfortunately, chrM is pretty small too... so no hidden messages there either :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article is incredibly misleading. First of all there is an inconsistency. The headline says they stored 700 terrabytes (4.4 petabytes). It then later says that they actually stored 700 kilobytes (Their book) and that they did made 70 billion copies (44 petabytes?). The main thing is that storing 700 kilobytes and then making 700 billion copies is considerably less useful than storing 70 billion terabytes outright. Aside from that though, this is awesome, and a huge step forward into promising and uncharted territory.

<comment><USER15> It says they stored 44 petabytes total (70 billion * 700 kilobytes), and 700 terabytes in a single gram (which is 5.5 petabits, not 4.4 petabytes).

<comment><USER2> in the paper, we say 1.5mg per petabyte at large scales. we only encode 650kB or so. this seems a little sensationalistic. we are far away from being able to do 1 petabyte of arbitrary information.

<comment><USER15> Wait, 1.5mg per petabyte at large scales? Wouldn't that mean a gram could hold (1000/1.5) 667 petabytes and presumably scalable to many grams (eventually)? I understand it's only 650kB right now, but the density is obviously still incredible.

<comment><USER2> yes. density is astounding. that's why it's in science i presume. mostly because people forget how dense dna information really is.

<comment><USER16> > i presume

you are either the most humble senior author ever or jerking all our chains. possibly both. congratulations either way.

<comment><USER2> this is my first senior author paper; i imagine i'll be more haughty after I start teaching a few classes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> First thing that came to mind was Stross' "Memory Diamond" - [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2007/05/shaping_...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2007/05/shaping_the_future.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow. For scale, the Internet Archive had 5.8 petabytes of data in December 2010 [1] - so, about 9 grams' worth. How much did this cost?

[1] <http://archive.org/web/petabox.php>

<comment><USER2> i think you have the numbers wrong. at least in the supplement of our paper we say a petabyte would weigh ~1.5 milligram. It would be far too expensive to do that though; about 6-8 orders of magnitude increase in scale is necessary from current technologies. that said, we've seen that kind of drop over the last decade or so; here's to keeping it going.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> They're using T and G for a 1, and A and C for a 0; why not double the density and get two bits from each letter?

      T = 00
      G = 01
      A = 10
      C = 11

for example.

<comment><USER2> we didn't because we wanted to avoid particular sequence features that are difficult to synthesize and sequence. we probably could have gotten away with something like 1.8 bits per base, but we were already doing fine on density, so we thought a 2x hit wouldn't be that bad.

<comment><USER2> i should clarify, because of extra sequence and the address barcode, we are technically only 0.6 bits/base

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I notice that the article fails to mention how long it would take to extract all 700 terabytes of data...

Assuming 5.5 petabits stored with 1 base pair representing 1 bit, we can extrapolate the time required to extract the data based off the time taken to sequence the human genome (3 billion base pairs).

5.5 petabits / 3 billion bits ~= 2 million, so theoretically it should take 2 million times longer to sequence the original.

3 years ago, there was an Ars Technica article about how it now only takes 1 month to sequence a human genome[1]; the article now claims that microfluidic chips can perform the same task in hours.

Assuming 2 hours (low end) to sequence the human genome:

2 hours * 2 million = 4 million hours = 456 years, give or take a few years.

So, maybe not so great for storing enormous amounts of data. But if you want to store 1 GB, it would only take ~6 hours. Not too bad.

[1][http://arstechnica.com/science/2009/08/human-genome- complete...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2009/08/human-genome-completed- using-one-machine-for-four-weeks/)

<comment><USER21> Hmm. DNA is fairly easy to duplicate though, right? Wouldn't that allow an exponential speedup?

<comment><USER20> I assumed that the microfluidic chip speed listed would include parallel processing.

Even if it doesn't, you'd still need something like 5,000 experiments in parallel for it to take less than a month...

<comment><USER22> Yes, the microfluidics used today make use of this for reading large numbers of small segments of DNA in parallel. The current "gold standard" for DNA sequencing (manufactured by Illumina) uses millions of tiny fragments of DNA which are read optically as DNA sequence is extended.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> They're teaching us this in ComputerScience and I wonder if this is total crap or not. Can you please shed light into this?

"In humans, the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA, Germ. DNS) is the carrier of genetic information, and the main constituent of the chromosomes.

DNA is a chain-like polymer of nucleotides, which differ in their nitrogen bases (Thymin/Cytosin bzw. Adenin/Guanin,) The alphabet of the code is therefore: {Thymin, Cytosin, Adenin, Guanin,} or also { T, C, A, G } Three consecutive bases form a word So there are 43 = 64 combinations per word so the word length is ld (64) bits = 6 bits A gene contains about 200 words A chromosome contains about 104 to 105 genes The number of chromosomes per cell nucleus is 46 in humans The stored data per nucleus have, a volume of 6 bit * 200 * 10^5 * 46 = 55200 bit * 10^5 * 5 * 10^9 bit * * 10^9 Byte = 1 GByte"

<comment><USER24> You aren't far off, but there are some errors. Excuse in advance any errors below, it's been a while since I did this stuff daily.

Human genome is 23 chromosomes, 2 copies of each (46). They are not mirror copies like RAID1, but rather alleles (different versions of same gene). So you might have a different version of a gene on each half of the chromosome. This is the basis for sexual selection and why sexual organisms can evolve (esp at the population level) so much faster than asexual ones. The two alleles can be the same as well. It's called homozygous or heterozygous. This is basic Mendelian genetics. Most genes work this way, though many are more complex.

ATGC is correct, so each "bit" is base 4.

Genes encode proteins; every 3 base pairs is a codon which specifies which Amino Acid to use. While there could be 4^3=64 in practice there are only 20 amino acids used in nature to make functional proteins. Genes vary greatly in length, not sure where you got ~200 codons/gene but that's terribly wrong. Maybe close to average, but the range is large. In any case, for data storage, anything relating to codons and proteins would be irrelevant.

Also in practice not all of a chromosome encodes proteins. There is often lots of buffer region between genes, not to mention a lot of control flow sequences that help control expression of genes. Beyond that, the ends of chromosomes don't have many genes, they just contain pseudo-random information and are still being explored (junk dna, telomeres, etc).

<comment><USER23> >> And how much data did they fit into one DNA pair?

Info: According to Quora the avg. weight of the Human DNA is 60g, that means a Human could carry 700TB * 60g = 42000 TB Note: 700TB = 7.69658139 × 10^14 bytes

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> >To store the same kind of data on hard drives — the densest storage medium in use today — you'd need 233 3TB drives, weighing a total of 151 kilos.

But hard drives aren't the densest storage medium in use today. A microSD card can hold up to 64 gigabytes and is 0.5 grams. 700 terabytes would be only 5.6 kilograms.

</comment><comment><USER26> What's the latency/throughput on reading the data back?

</comment><comment><USER27> Can we encode all of human knowledge into the DNA of some organism? How can organisms access data stored in their DNA? Imagine being born with knowledge of every Wikipedia article, or even every website. What would that be like?

<comment><USER28> Education would no longer be necessary or valued.

Experience and creativity would be what everyone garners to get a job.

<comment><USER29> I think we'd be past "jobs" if it were possible to store and read memory in DNA with the human brain.

<comment><USER30> Then who would be in charge of creating new knowledge, and who would put it into our brains or DNA? Knowing everything humans have discovered so far would only change the type of jobs we would have, we would still need to have jobs though.

<comment><USER29> Hence the quotations, we'd be past the traditional 9 to 5 and in pursuit of loftier ambitions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't understand how this density could be so much better than something like flash drives. Aren't they also on the same scale of nanometers?

<comment><USER6> DNA is 3D. Flash drives are 2D.

<comment><USER32> Flash drives also have all of the necessary equipment for it to be read. I wonder how much data per gram the actual storage part of the flash drive actually is. I doubt it's better than DNA, but I think it might be disingenuous for the article to be offering the analogy to hard drives without taking into account the extra read/write hardware.

<comment><USER2> agreed, it should be comparied to other arhival media like tape drives; but it's still pretty similar; we compare in our paper a hard drive platter rather than a drive itself. even then we are approximately ~million fold more dense

<comment><USER32> Thanks for the response. That is a truly impressive figure. Great accomplishment!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The paper is exciting, in the calm measured way that scientists are. I look forward to seeing huge data storage on DNA in the future.

I'm gently concerned about what'll happen to information if it's not available to the future people. Is anyone taking the most important documents of our civilisation and encoding them onto clay tablets, or some such?

</comment><comment><USER34> Why binary if DNA naturally has 4 bits?

<comment><USER35> Bases can only pair with one other base. Adenine can only pair with thymine. Guanine can only pair with cytosine. Knowing one base implies the other, so there are only two possible pairs.

<comment><USER36> But there are two strands, and each half-pair is fixed on one side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The next big hurdle is to how to develop a household DNA sequence reader under $50 that will read your storage. I mean if I want to store my data onto a DNA strand, then one day I'd be in need of reading that data at my home with the help of a sequence reader.Right?

</comment><comment><USER31> To read the data out are they basically doing de novo assembly on the sequenced reads? How are they handling all of the errors in gene sequencing? How about assembly errors? Long repeats?

<comment><USER38> If your strand length is less than or equal to the read length of your sequencer, and you have the address blocks at the start of every sequence, you don't really need to worry about assembly. Read depth and/or a checksum of some kind will take care of errors in sequencing, and with short strands or compression of some kind, long repeats aren't much of a problem either.

<comment><USER31> Thanks, that makes sense. But how to you get the address block at the start of each sequence?

<comment><USER2> it's at the start of the first read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I always have to wonder with these ExtremeTech links:

How much is this news true and how much is it the usual ExtremeTech editorialism?

For instance does DNA _really_ last forever?

</comment><comment><USER40> Is this storage method only good for read-only data, or can it survive multiple re-writes?

</comment><comment><USER41> Great link. Makes one anxious to see what's next.

</comment><comment><USER42> Why do I get a feeling I am living in a Matrix as a data storage device?

</comment><comment><USER43> This. Is. Awesome.

</comment><comment><USER44> Article says they made 70billion copies of 500KB, which is quite different. Can they encode 700TB of unique data in this system?

</comment><comment><USER45> It is incredibly stable? We better don't tell evolution.

<comment><USER46> Error correction redundancy to any level of reliability you want takes log(N) extra storage. My question would be what the access speeds are. If you have to read it by running it through a trillion PCR test tubes, this isn't exactly practical.

<comment><USER47> Microfluidics or lab-on-a-chip are the latest advances: [http://www.extremetech.com/computing/84340-new-silicon- chip-...](http://www.extremetech.com/computing/84340-new-silicon-chip- sequences-complete-genome-in-three-hours)

The progress in this field has been far better than Moore's Law [1] so it could be very practical.

[1] Excellent TED talk on it too by Richard Resnick: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8bsCiq6hvM>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Gel Packs! Cool! <http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Bio-neural_gel_pack>

(How nobody has reference this?)</comment>


Role of chance in scientific discoveries - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_of_chance_in_scientific_discoveries

<comment><USER2> > Louis Pasteur's famous saying "Luck favours the prepared mind" suggests that > luck can be harnessed to make more discoveries ...

No, Pasteur's remark was meant to convey that there's no such thing as luck. Chance and luck aren't the same thing, and chance events are better exploited by someone intellectually prepared for them.

As to the linked article, I hadn't realized that Wikipedia was allowing personal-opinion essays to be posted as though they were encyclopedia entries.

> Kevin Dunbar and Jonathan Fugelsang say that somewhere between 33% and 50% > of all scientific discoveries are unexpected.

Oh, great, psychologists offer a handwaving explanation of the scientific method, but without bothering to use the scientific method themselves.</comment>


Ask HN: Which Angels/VC's Have Given The Best Feedback To You? - <AUTHOR>

So, I just got finished with a pitch to a VC I've known for a long time. Normally I can pretty much nail any pitch but it caught me off-guard; it may have gone well but I could have done better.
That said, I want to ask funded HN startups this question:
- While you were raising money, which VC's or angels gave you the best feedback? - What feedback did you discard and what did you use? - What was the most valuable thing a VC/angel said to you that affected the success of your company?
I'm asking this because while I've been involved in fundraising, this is the first time it is my company (instead of my consulting for the fund). My experience with VC's and angels is limited, so these are questions that are important to me.
Cheers :) <comment><USER2> What's your email? It's not listed in your profile. Let's connect</comment>


UK Court Blocks Mass Legal Action Over Google's Alleged Tracking of Safari Users - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2018/10/08/uk-court-blocks-lawsuit-google-track-safari-users/ <comment><USER2> The Reuter's article [0] this points to gives more info. Basically the judge felt the plaintiff was unrepresentative of the claimed class and any benefit would accrue to plaintiff and their lawyers while also finding Google's action wrongful.

[0] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-google- court/lond...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-google-court/london- court-blocks-google-mass-legal-action-over-iphone-data-collection- idUSKCN1MI0SO)</comment>


MailChimp Acquires TinyLetter (ask me anything) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mailchimp.com/mailchimp-acquires-tinyletter/?

<comment><USER2> This is basically the refutation of many of the negative comments in yesterday's post _. You go, dude.

_ <http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2942129>

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats. I recalled when you posted this project launch on HN <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1829101>

Not bad for a "lazy Sunday afternoon" worth of work.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was the first time I showed anyone. Couldn't have done it without HN and everyone's feedback. So, thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When you came up with tiny letter did you do it to serve a personal need and did you ever have any intent to sell it so quickly?

<comment><AUTHOR> I used to run a popular blog in 2000. The thing I didn't like about blogging, was that if I shut down my blog (which I eventually did), I would lose my entire audience.

So I started letting people sign up for email newsletters back then, just to kind of "own" the contact info of my readers, so I could continue communicating with them, even if I shut down my blog.

Today everyone is a publisher. And with the proliferation of social media, RSS and eventually Twitter came to solve that problem -- even if I don't tweet for a year, I'll still have my followers (assuming people are still using Twitter then, which I think they will be).

However, having the email addresses of your followers & fans still seems a bit more durable, not relying on Twitter or any other service.

So... that's why I built it. Did I think I would sell it so quickly? Originally, no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> PUD WHY U NO... err, you pretty much did everything right.

Good job and congrats.

</comment><comment><USER6> Congratulations! Did they offer you more because it was coded in CFML and they didn't laugh at your back end?

Maybe more time for you to recreate F'd Company now?

<comment><AUTHOR> What's funny is that right after I posted that blog post about how I use an unusual stack[1], MailChimps CEO sent me this eerily similar blog post about their stack: <http://blog.mailchimp.com/ewww-you-use-php/>

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2942129>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems like you were a single founder in this one - what if anything allowed you to overcome the known difficulties of being a single founder?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't personally buy into the "being a single founder is harder" thing. True, if you don't know how to program (or design, or sell, etc) then yeah, it's gonna be easier if you have a co-founder who does. But if you're able to get it done yourself, having other founders around seems like a burden. That said, I've had success and enjoyed working with co-founders on bigger projects. But TinyLetter is simple enough that I didn't need anyone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congrats on the acquisition. You're quite prolific when it comes to churning out the various web apps you produce.

Could you give us some insight into how you come up with the ideas for your apps? What's your thought process for determining whether an idea is worth pursuing or not?

Congrats again. Your success has always been an inspiration to me and is very well deserved.

<comment><AUTHOR> Every time an idea pops into my head, no matter how silly, I write it down. Then when I think of (or read) something cool that applies to one of my ideas, such as a clever way to market it, I write that down with it.

Do that long enough (I've been at it 15 years -- I'm 35 now) and you'll have pages of notes.

As for which ideas I pursue- the ones I think I can pull off. Simple web apps, for example, versus a plastic stencil-like guide for cutting the hair on the back of your neck (idea #178).

As for doing it solo vs raising money & hiring a big team -- again, whatever way it will have the most success (for the product, and for my happiness).

<comment><USER9> This is an even sillier question, but how exactly do you keep track of all your ideas? A special notebook? Spreadsheet? What have you found is the best way to keep track of all your ideas on the go, while never losing track of them, etc?

Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Evernote, these days. Which reminds me, I should save a backup right now.

Used to be a little spiral bound notebook that I was scared to death of losing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well, I can't help but be curious, what was the acquisition price?

<comment><AUTHOR> We decided not to disclose acquisition price. I don't remember why we decided that.

I guess it's like telling people your salary -- just a thing people generally don't do. I think that'll change one day tho as stuff becomes more public.

<comment><USER11> But you said "ask you anything" :P

Can you at least say how many 0's?

<comment><USER12> He didn't say he would answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ask you anything eh? How's blippy?

<comment><AUTHOR> Blippy (a company I co-founded, invested in, and remain an advisor to) didn't find massive success with our first product, though it has fans.

However, the company's follow-up product, Heartsy.me, is doing very well. Techcrunch covered it here: [http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/05/blippys-new- direction-daily...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/05/blippys-new-direction- daily-deals-for-artisanal-goods-at-heartsy-me/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Congrats, never heard or used TinyLetter before but I enjoyed your piece yesterday, and I'm a MailChimp user so I guess I'll be seeing it soon.

</comment><comment> mkr-hn This is exactly what was missing from MailChimp. I set up a TinyLetter newsletter for my personal site.

<comment><USER15> Same. I find MailChimp to be an overdone pain in the butt more often than not and have quickly signed up at TinyLetter to give it a shot.

Well done Pud - was a frequent reader of FC back in the day and I also use CFML!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just out of curiosity (since you said ask me anything) -- How much did you sell TinyLetter for, and will you be joining Mailchimp? (What did the terms of the deal look like for this sort of acquisition?)

</comment><comment><USER17> How much for? (ballpark?)

</comment><comment><USER18> That's great for the founder! I love TinyLetter. Hopefully the quality won't deteriorate with the acquisition!

<comment><USER18> p.s. Pud, you're an inspiration, in a sense that making small things pays off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What kinds of publishers have been using TinyLetter, and how did you find acquire them?

<comment><AUTHOR> TinyLetter publishers are similar to bloggers -- mostly individuals, sometimes with an agenda, sometimes not. Here are two examples of popular ones.

Kevin Rose: <http://tinyletter.com/foundation>

Green Day fan: <http://tinyletter.com/Green-Day-Authority>

As for finding users, everyone who subscribes to a newsletter (~500k) goes through the TinyLetter flow, so that's the best advertising. Just took a couple people to say (tweet, etc), "join my newsletter!" with a link, and the viral-ish loop started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> That's pretty cool. Good move, MailChimp. Any word on the acquisition price?

</comment><comment><USER21> Congrats, you getting a miniature pet giraffe out of the deal?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, but I did get a MailChimp cat hat: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/freddievonchimp/sets/7215762650...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/freddievonchimp/sets/72157626505122242/)

<comment><USER21> Hilarious! Post that on Instagram and it will be a mega-hit. IG'ers love cats.

But seriously, congrats. Having followed you since FC, I really like how transparent you are with so much of your work stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> great stuff, Phil! what's the next endeavor!?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm working on something music related, at <http://fandalism.com>

<comment><USER13> but on your site under dead it says:

> Fandalism - Like Soundcloud, but not as good

make up your mind! unless I missed a joke.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah. Good point. There was something else that I launched 100 years ago at that domain. Gotta update pud.com with the new infos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> how much?</comment>


Root Canal or Speech from Non-Technical CEO? - <AUTHOR> http://www.winrumors.com/microsoft-employees-allegedly-left-in-droves-during-ballmers-company-meeting-speech/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not surprised. When I worked at webMethods we had to endure some of these corporate "pep-rally" speeches given by a non-technical salesy-type CEO. For a hacker, this was very very painful. I can only imagine how painful it'd be to hear SBallmer give one of these. Root canal anyone?</comment>


DHL Global Forwarding Failed on Software, and That's Why It's Being Sold Cheaply - <AUTHOR> https://www.flexport.com/blog/dhl-global-forwarding-sale-software/ <comment><USER2> Slightly OT but the history of DHL co-founder Larry Hillblom[1] makes for some interesting reading.

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

<comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing that!

<comment><USER4> [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/business/king-larry-the- bi...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/business/king-larry-the-bizarre-road- of-a-billionaire-review.html) is also entertaining

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ryan Petersen here, author of this article. I should clarify one thing: I don't believe the rumored sales price of $4B. It's just too cheap. If any PE guys (or Google/Amazon/Alibaba people) out there is reading this and wants to back me in buying the business and giving it another go, I am game.

<comment><USER6> Pretty mind boggling. How does one spend $1 billion on software and fail? I guess this is a somewhat misleading accounting statement based around maintaining the existing software orgs of the merged companies, not building new software.

It makes me wonder though, with an unlimited budget and willingness to pay a lot, what could one achieve in one year? If you offered 200k base, 100k signing, and 1 mil bonus for completion of goals within 1 year, that should give you access to pretty much all the top tier programmers in the world. Hire 50 of those guys and you're only at 65 mil. Maybe you need a really incredible guy running it so you offer him a 30 mil bonus. Now you let those guys attack the problem and it's hard to imagine they couldn't fix things up at DHL within 1 year.

Any known examples of orgs trying this approach?

<comment><USER7> "How does one spend $1 billion on software and fail?"

Just look at most UK Government IT projects. They've got it down to a fine art, blowing billions and being left with nothing useful.

Several major international government consultancy firms got their break on supposed small UK Gov IT projects, and were able to keep billing $1,000's/hour for years (while delivering nothing useful) and became big IT consultancies in the process. The failure didn't harm them one little bit - it let them claim the have _experience_ and that got them way more work.

IT project failure in large and complex organizations is practically guaranteed.

Now, if they did that small-ish team, paid well, it could well work. But your board is not going to approve some pizza munching, jolt cola drinking geeks as your wonder IT team. Don't worry what the team is really like, the consultants asked by the board to review them as part of the process will make sure they're described as the aforementioned pizza and cola weirdos. And recommend using the consultants team instead. Been there. Done that.

<comment><USER8> There's no board for UK government IT projects.

The process starts with lobbyists (from the likes of Fujitsu, CSC etc) offering fancy dinners, a few trips to the opera, family holiday in Barbados, and crucially a revolving door, behind which is a future lucrative senior position should they decide to engage the services of said company. Lucrative senior position will in part involve lobbying former government friends and colleagues.

And so the cycle continues...

<comment><USER9> NHS Connecting for Health literally _was_ that board.

Also, never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity -- or, in this case, incompetence. If you're telling yourself that the difference between billion-pound boondoggles and small, competent and motivated teams working to agile principles is a bit of low-level corruption (so lightweight that none of it could be discovered and prosecuted under the Bribery Act), you're looking in the wrong place (and you'll also struggle to explain how and why the Government Digital Service was set up, and why they're succeeding).

<comment><USER8> Yeah, you're right. I am generalising and cynically caricaturing; though a fair bit of that stuff does go on. The current system of self-regulation is sorely in need of reform and legislation, but those tasked with legislating are the ones who benefit from the current system.

I have a lot of respect for the lads and ladies at the GDS. They're doing some sterling work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "The company then spent another $1 billion in a failed attempt to build a unified IT backbone to tie together the acquisitions. Late last year the company killed the project, known as New Forwarding Environment, deciding to stick with its legacy systems."

A similar thing happened when DHL acquired Airborne.

[http://www.informationweek.com/dhl-airborne-didnt-take- the-e...](http://www.informationweek.com/dhl-airborne-didnt-take-the-easy- road-to-post-merger-it-integration/d/d-id/1044574)

After the smoke cleared, Infosys had the most understanding of the systems (along with solution support) but domain knowledge and software expertise slipped away. If I had to describe the atmosphere, it could be summed up by Nicholas Carr's article "IT doesn't matter"

[https://hbr.org/2003/05/it-doesnt-matter](https://hbr.org/2003/05/it-doesnt- matter)

Eventually, DHL terminated US domestic shipping

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-04-14/dhl- reboot...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-04-14/dhl-reboots-in-u- s-after-9-6-billion-bleed-freight-markets)

</comment><comment><USER11> _The company then spent another $1 billion in a failed attempt to build a unified IT backbone to tie together the acquisitions. Late last year the company killed the project, known as New Forwarding Environment, deciding to stick with its legacy systems. In an object lesson on the risks entailed in roll-up strategies dependent on massive IT integrations, Deutsche Post now appears ready to cut its losses and sell the division at a huge discount.

Consider that DHL Global Forwarding generated more than $16.5 billion in revenue in 2014. At a purchase price of $4 billion, that's a sales multiple of just 0.24X. Expeditors, its strongest rival in the U.S. market, currently trades at 1.3X revenue. If DHL Global Forwarding could be priced at Expeditors' revenue multiple, its price would exceed $21 billion._

Worth noting that Expeditors (my former employer) has the complete opposite strategy compared to DHL, in both business (organic growth with no major acquisitions) and IT (homegrown systems with no major COTS purchases).

Basically, in the build vs. buy debate, Expeditors has been on the side of "build" while DHL has been on the side of "buy." This is far from the only difference between the two companies, but I think it's been a major factor in their fates.

</comment><comment><USER12> Seems like a really blatant ad to me. The author's best guess on why DHL failed happens to be exactly what the author's key selling point is.

<comment><USER5> All journalism is content marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I always found DHL Global Forwarding a pleasure to work with, because it was so personal. People answer your calls. I'm sure that's not great for profits or high volume customers.

</comment><comment><USER14> Was Accenture[1] somehow involved in this backbone?

[1]: [https://www.accenture.com/t20150523T030128__w__/us- en/_acnme...](https://www.accenture.com/t20150523T030128__w__/us- en/_acnmedia/Accenture/Conversion- Assets/DotCom/Documents/Global/PDF/Dualpub_4/Accenture-Digital-Future-For- LSPs.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER15> integration architecture for old big systems is so difficult people make a very good living if they´re any good at this. Software architects in that field can make up to five times as much as a regular senior developer. I guess this article shows why.</comment>


Node v4.1.1 (Stable) released - <AUTHOR> https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v4.1.1/ <comment><USER2> Well, I think the title should be changed to "Node v4.1.1 (Stable _channel /branch_) released", just like what Google Chrome does without misleading.

<comment><AUTHOR> According to [https://nodejs.org/en/blog/](https://nodejs.org/en/blog/) they differentiate releases by stable, unstable and maintenance. So I think it a deal of terminology.</comment></comment>


Where Have The Good Men Gone? - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704409004576146321725889448.html

<comment><USER2> What is the definition of a 'good man' according to this article? I couldn't find it. Is it a man willing to both marry and have children?</comment>


Open Source Open World - <AUTHOR> http://www.focus.com/fyi/information-technology/open-source-open-world/

<comment><USER2> Anyone know what is going on in Cuba? Do they get all of our recycled/broken boxes down there and need help fixing them?</comment>


Ask HN: What concepts, if popularly understood, would most improve the world? - <AUTHOR> A personal list would start with an understanding of cognitive biases -- how they can be formed, how to recognize them, and how to work with and around them. <comment><USER2> That your thoughts are not generated by your own will and you have no control over what you think, unless you explicitly train yourself to filter and focus on thoughts you need. Most people live in the assumption that what they think is coming from within the I-self, their thoughts are unique creation of themselves and that they should consider all thoughts as equally valid due being of same source. Science is now fully considering that "conscious" thoughts are actually prepared by unconscious processes. [https://www.medicaldaily.com/new-theory-suggests-all- conscio...](https://www.medicaldaily.com/new-theory-suggests-all-conscious- thoughts-and-decisions-are-actually-made-your-340238)

<comment><USER3> How much of your thoughts are generated by how you live your life? And how much of the way you live your life is generated by your thoughts?

<comment><USER4> That's a very interesting question. When I feel sad I try to make myself go eat a piece of fruit and drink some water.

I have noticed my mood is tightly tied to my diet and living conditions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> the danger of climate change

</comment><comment><USER6> Compound interest

</comment><comment><USER7> Related and of interest: What Developmental Milestones are you Missing? [http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/03/what-developmental- mile...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/03/what-developmental-milestones- are-you-missing/)

But a real answer might be a set of concepts around self-management, that you'd find in a Christian self-help book, or stoicism, or Buddhism, or the rules of St. Benedict, something in that category. But if you look at the uselessness of "mindfulness," maybe not.

<comment><USER8> >for example, the person who thinks that someone with depression is just "being lazy" or needs to "snap out of it".

I do this internally (not quite to that extent, but along a similar line of reasoning) all the time and feel a little bad about it, yet even as I type this I can't help but feel it's true in many cases. I have a low tolerance for people that abuse medical diagnosis as a certified scapegoat (a static, unchanging one at that), and most of the depressed people I've known don't eat well, exercise regularly, _try_ to sleep better (get off your phone/laptop at least an hour before bed, for example), or perform any other anti- depression-101 tactics. I have pretty severe bouts of apathy at times, and I feel that depression is often a case of simply indulging this apathy a little excessively, while postponing the work involved in constructively and pragmatically working one's self out of it.

On the flipside, I tend to agree with the idea that our current model of society and the direction it's going is incompatible with a happy life for a lot of people, and it's perhaps no more fair to blame them for this then it is to blame a square for not fitting into a circular hole. But, if you dull your corners enough, you may just fit right in.

At any rate, this was largely tangential and irrevelant, I'm not intending to dispute milestone #2 in a general sense and thanks for the link - it's a good read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That nothing is free.

<comment><USER10> That. There's no free lunch.

<comment><USER11> But there is lunch that would otherwise go to waste. I used to work at a bagel shop.

My mother-in-law used to work full-time for a hospital calling insurance companies to get them to actually pay for claims.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thoughts are real; they do actualize.

</comment><comment><USER13> It wouldn't improve the world in the short term but it certainly wouldn't hurt if more people knew about the dangers and benefits of AGI or super- intelligence for that matter.

</comment><comment><USER14> Incentives.

</comment><comment><USER15> just world fallacy.

</comment><comment><USER16> How about the opposite, nihilism and moral relativism?

</comment><comment><USER17> Correlation does not imply causation

</comment><comment><USER18> Bayesian updates to beliefs

</comment><comment><USER19> Life is a zero sum game

<comment><USER20> In what way?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Climate Engineering

</comment><comment><USER22> capitalism

<comment><USER23> Georgism

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> recycling</comment>


VMware Engineer Confirms macOS Catalina Bug Causes Crashes with Virtualization - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2020/07/27/vmware-confirms-macos-virtualization-bug-causes-crashes/ <comment><USER2> Earlier bug existed in Catalina that also resulted in instability & crashes. For me the resolution was to remove 2 VMware related agents from startup. Vmware accelerated gfx still functioned correctly.</comment>