The U.S., Russia, and China Prepare for Satellite Warfare - <AUTHOR> https://edgylabs.com/2016/12/01/us-russia-china-satellite-warfare/ <comment><USER2> This started a long long time ago.

Positioning satellites are likely targets of a satellite war. There was a strong emphasis to have the European satellite positioning system (Galileo) to use different frequencies than GPS (e.g: so they could be jammed without side effects on each other). GPS jammers have been a thing for a while too.

Then, spy satellites get occasionally targeted by light beams so they cannot take pictures.

Then, both China and the US have destroyed decommissioned satellites with missiles. When China did it, they were denounced publicly for increasing the amount of space debris.

So naturally satellite-on-satellite fun was naturally going to be a thing.

A predicted satellite weapon system are rods of tungsten (or whatever) dropped from space as a mean of very powerful kinetic bombardment... something that has received the name of "rod of god". Can cause large damage without side effects (e.g: radiation, public outcry).

Rods of god however have a prohibitive cost due to the cost of lifting objects to orbit. Eventually the first superpower to get their hands in a space elevator will fill space with rods of god. Space elevators however would need some shielding to pass through the nasty Van Allen belt radiation, since space elevators are slower than rockets exposing the payload to radiation for longer periods of time.

<comment><USER3> The big problem with Rods of God isn't cost. We just spent $10bn on a carrier, after all. The real problem is it's destabilizing - potential adversaries have to consider the very short time frame of that kind of attack and adjust their defensive posture accordingly, i.e. shoot-on-warning.

<comment><USER4> The bigger problem with Rods of God is that they just wouldn't work.

There are several reasons, let's take them one by one.

1\. Kinetic energy is not that high compared to chemical energy, and is completely negligible compared to nuclear energy. For a kinetic(non-explosive) projectile to deliver the energy of its mass equivalent in TNT, it needs to travel at about 2.9km/s, or Mach 8.5. In other words, a rod weighing one ton hitting a target at 2.9km/s delivers a destructive energy equivalent to one ton of TNT. Since kinetic energy goes up with the square of the speed, such a rod traveling at the first orbital speed, 7km/s, would have a yield of about 5.8 tons TNT equivalent. For comparison, the largest non-nuclear bomb used in WW2 was the Grand Slam, with a yield of 6.5t TNT equiv, and the Hiroshima bomb had a yield of about 15000t TNT equiv.

2\. Losses due to atmospheric drag. An orbital body can't magically hit the ground with its full orbital speed. It will lose a lot of its energy to air drag. The wikipedia page on the "Rods of God" [1] mentions a 2003 US Air Force study where the terminal velocity of these rods was Mach 10. That's only slightly higher than the Mach 8.5 I mentioned above, so the final conclusion was a bit underwhelming: "the practical applications of such a system are limited to those situations where its other characteristics provide a clear and decisive advantage—a conventional bomb/warhead of similar weight to the tungsten rod, delivered by conventional means, provides similar destructive capability and is far more practical and cost effective."

3\. You can't simply drop something from orbit. A fun little experiment is this: you are a cosmonaut doing an EVA (extra-vehicular activity) and just for the fun of it you throw a small object towards Earth, at about 10m/s. What happens to the object? The cosmonaut's name was Leonov, who told the story to V.V. Beletskiy, who did the math, and the story is told beautifully by V.I. Arnold in [2]. The object goes initially towards Earth, but then starts turning, and does a full ellipse, and meets again the space station about 1.5 hour later, coming from above (well, technically it doesn't meet it, it has a deviation of a few dozen meters). The moral of this story is that you need some sort of launching mechanism to make the rod leave the satellite and go towards its target, maybe a rocket or some sort of a gun. If you want to deorbit something in the optimal way, you use a Hohmann transfer; I did a back of the envelope calculation and the propellant mass needed to deorbit is a bit less than 10% of the mass of the projectile. However, with a Hohmann transfer we are talking about more than an hour from the start of the strike to hitting the target. If you want to achieve minutes, you need to pay a price. I don't know how to do this calculation, maybe a KSP aficionado can help here, but it would not surprise me if the propellant ratio shot up to 30%. On top of that you need propellant to maintain the altitude of the satellite over the years. This adds mass and complexity to the satellite. Let's say you want to have a bundle of 20 Rods of Gods up there, 10t each. You get 200t, and then you add propellant, rocket engines, solar panels, etc, etc, I can't imagine you get away with less than 400t. For comparison the current mass of the ISS (the biggest satellite every built) is 370t and that cost so far $150BN.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment) [2] [https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Understanding-Nature- Phe...](https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Understanding-Nature-Phenomena- Mathematicians/dp/1470417014)

<comment><USER3> A reasonable impact speed for a Rod would be more than mach 20. That's what we get out of ICBMs today. And that's including atmospheric drag.

As far as dropping something from orbit, the concept was each rod would have a tiny booster and be in its orbit. You'd put a few dozen (or a few hundred) in polar orbits, and that way you'd always have one lined up.

The equation you're looking for in your third point is this one:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vis- viva_equation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vis-viva_equation)

Exactly how long it would take for the Rod to arrive on target depends on how much control authority you have at hypersonic speeds. Not really sure what's possible there.

<comment><USER4> A Rod at Mach 20 only has four times the energy of a Rod at Mach 10. Not really a game changer (in my first point I used 7km/s which is Mach 20.6).

The vis-viva equation doesn't change what I was saying in my third point. I didn't know about it, thanks for pointing to it, but implicitly I applied it. I found a Hohmann calculator online, and I got that the delta v for going from a 400km orbit to a 100km orbit is about 175m/s. I plugged that in the rocket equation assuming a decent solid propellant (APCP used in the retrorockets of the descent stage of NASA's Curiosity and Spirit, for example, an application similar to the retrorocket needed here) and I got a propellant fraction of 6.7%. Now, at 400km you still have atmospheric drag, and you need a delta v of about 25m/s per year to maintain your orbit. If you want to go to 600km, you pay a price in the deorbiting delta v. At any rate, let's say the optimal poster that brings you down from space is between 5 and 10% of the mass of the Rod. We can agree to tall this "tiny". But this will need at least a revolution around the Earth (at 7km/s that's more than 95 min). The fact that you have plenty of Rods all over the place doesn't help you. A perfectly place Rod will still take 95 min to get from LEO to surface.

If you want to hit the atmosphere in minutes instead of 1.5 hours, you need to pay a price in delta v, but you don't have a problem with the control at hypersonic speeds - we are still in vacuum. Once you hit the atmosphere you need control to hit the target, not to get to the target faster.

Now let's see what happens if you put a few dozen or hundred in space. What can you do with a single Rod? Sure, you can destroy a civilian building, and that could be a skyscraper and you kill a few thousand civilians. I don't think either the US or Russia would adopt such a strategy (North Korea maybe). But in terms of military targets, what good are these? Remember, they are tiny in comparison with nuclear weapons. You can't destroy nuclear bunkers, you can't acquire mobile targets.

If someone could solve the mobile target acquisition problem, these would be really good at killing tanks and armored vehicles. This could be useful, but this is hardly the application the alarmists on the internet have in mind. The typical perceived threat is some type of decapitation strike (alluded by the comment I was answering to). This simply is far from realistic.

<comment><USER3> >If you want to hit the atmosphere in minutes instead of 1.5 hours, you need to pay a price in delta v, but you don't have a problem with the control at hypersonic speeds - we are still in vacuum. Once you hit the atmosphere you need control to hit the target, not to get to the target faster.

If you're in low orbit you'll drop into the atmosphere almost immediately when you burn retrograde. And you can hit your target faster by entering the atmosphere later than you otherwise would and steering _down_. The question is when you really have enough control to make that happen.

>Now let's see what happens if you put a few dozen or hundred in space. What can you do with a single Rod?

The earth turns. Within 24 hours all your rods will have been in a position to hit any target on the surface.

>But in terms of military targets, what good are these? Remember, they are tiny in comparison with nuclear weapons. You can't destroy nuclear bunkers, you can't acquire mobile targets.

You could most certainly destroy missile bunkers if your targeting was accurate enough even with a relatively small rod. But there's no reason to assume the rods are small - 50 tons is a nice round number. Assuming you can't get volume pricing SpaceX will loft 100 of them for about the price of a carrier.

And I don't see why you think you couldn't hit a moving target (assuming there exists a moving target worth destroying that way). The MRBM missile the Chinese have developed to destroy carriers can hit a moving target, and that's substantially the same bit of engineering.

>If someone could solve the mobile target acquisition problem, these would be really good at killing tanks and armored vehicles.

As I pointed out, this is already a solved problem. That said, it would be pointless to use something that expensive to destroy a tank. There are all sorts of ways to kill tanks and armored vehicles for a tiny, tiny, tiny (and that's not really enough "tinys") fraction of the cost. You're already a sitting duck in a tank.

No, the role for the Rods would be strategic - bunkers, ports, airfields.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It boils down to your definition of "patriotism" vs "terrorism". "good" vs "evil". When China does it, it's bad, right? And the same done by the U.S. good? Or is it the other way around?

I think SpaceX's revenue is inevitably going to be tainted with money derived from major military purchases.

Would love to know Musk's views.

<comment><USER6> > When China does it, it's bad, right? And the same done by the U.S. good? Or > is it the other way around?

Neither.

Instead of flashing an applause light (on HN, that would be "The United States Government is evil!" but, to be fair, in lots of other places it would be yelling about the evil Chinese) we can look at the situation as it develops and why. It would depend on how the war came about, it would depend on the different actors' behaviors and motives. It would require thinking, and honesty.

That whole world-weary "well, who knows what the distinction is between patriotism and terrorism really?" is quite foolish in general, and an excuse to avoid making hard moral choices or, worse, to avoid siding with people who are unpopular in one's social milieu. Yes, there are gray areas. There are also areas which are quite black and white. Should satellite warfare ever happen, something we should all hope is not the case, there's every chance will be able to figure out who was right and who was wrong.

<comment><USER7> Neither side will make a move without a decade of preparation, and every act during that decade needs to be judged against a common moral standard.

Also we need orbital brooms, even second-class powers these days can trigger a Kessler syndrome. Several powerful laser installations, maybe on ships, will do fine.

<comment><USER6> Hmm, I've never heard that proposal before. Is anyone seriously investigating the use of ground-based lasers to clear orbiting debris? It's plausible that a powerful and well-controlled laser could damage large satellites, but could that be done carefully enough to safely deorbit them instead of breaking them apart? And would the lasers be capable of clearing smaller pieces of debris?

<comment><USER8> Apparently, yes. [0]

Lasers would not be used to destroy the debris. Instead, they would be used to burn off particles from the space debris causing them to prematurely de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.

[0] www.space.com/29271-space-station-laser-cannon-orbital-debris.html

<comment><USER6> That's fantastic, thank you. Obviously the researchers are going to be optimistic about their own project but if it's even a tenth as good as they claim, this could genuinely solve the problem.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google rescinds candidate verbal offer due to low GPA - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/a1xqeo/verbal_offer_rescinded_due_to_gpa/ <comment><AUTHOR> I just read this post and thought it was a really shitty move on Google's part. For those that don't know, as part of Google's initial application you have to submit an "unofficial" transcript. This means that Google had this person's transcript through the entirety of the interview process from beginning to end, but only after extending them a verbal offer did they decide to inform them they can't hire because of their low GPA.

The coding challenges and whiteboard interviews are ridiculous enough as is. It makes me sad to see such a lack of courtesy, though. If the GPA was going to be the barrier they should have just rejected the candidate outright from the beginning and not wasted their time.

<comment><USER2> Yup. I have a horrible GPA due to a bunch of personal and disability stuff but they never look at it due to experience. If they did, I wouldn't want to work somewhere that favors GPA and/or nonsense certifications. In fact when I hire, I measure candidates inversely proportionate to their list of certs.

<comment><USER3> That's an equally bad heuristic for rejecting someone.

<comment><USER4> An "inversely" bad heuristic lol

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think we're missing a big part of the story here.

>[I] was asked to write a statement justifying my lower than usual gpa (2.6) and a week later i was informed that the offer committee was unable to give me an offer.

What if it wasn't the gpa that turned them off, but the statement he wrote? I'm imagining something along the lines of "Well my GPA was bad because my professors weren't very good and I also partied too hard, but I've come to know better now.". It sounds like they really wanted to give him a chance, but he blew that statement.

<comment><AUTHOR> > "Was adjusting moving across the continent for school in fields I were not > familiar with in highschool. Balancing real life responsibilities and > focused on a lot of extra curriculars. Grades within my major were good and > it has been upward trending."

> "I have rarely gotten Cs actually for some reason, especially not my major > classes. Either way, i don't see how this disqualifies me from the job as it > was not in the job description to have a high GPA, and I passed my > interviews reasonably well."

Of course it's possible that the OP isn't telling the complete truth, but he's been a regular poster in that sub throughout the process so I doubt he's making much up. Also, if it really is based on your explanation that's just encouraging dishonesty and is a shitty hiring metric. If you're going to hire on something as arbitrary as GPA then the reason behind the number shouldn't be a factor. "We're sorry, we only accept candidates with low GPA if _both_ parents died, but as only one of yours did during your undergrad we can't move on with your app."

<comment><USER6> If someone has a 2.6 gpa then can it be actually be that C's were rare? It seems like he'd likely have ~40% of his grades be C's right?

<comment><USER7> Mostly A's and B's with a few scattered F's can really drag a GPA down. At some universities, the cutoff for deciding to drop a course can happen only a few weeks into the semester... sometimes F's happen :(

<comment><USER8> Mine the cutoff was 2 class days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ummm?

"Google doesn't even ask for GPA or test scores from candidates anymore, unless someone's a year or two out of school, because they don't correlate at all with success at the company. Even for new grads, the correlation is slight, the company has found."

[https://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires- people-2013...](https://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires- people-2013-6)

<comment><USER10> I've repeatedly heard statements from people at Google contradicting what Bock says about the process. Here's one public response from Gayle Laakmann McDowell (author of Cracking the Coding interview): [https://www.quora.com/Why-doesn%E2%80%99t-Google-care- about-...](https://www.quora.com/Why-doesn%E2%80%99t-Google-care-about-hiring- top-college-graduates)

<comment><USER11> Also Eric Schmidt said as much in a recent Conversations With Tyler [1]:

> The recruiting started off as informal, but it ultimately became very, very > structured. We were famously focused on the school you went to and your GPA > and not your experience.

[1] [https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/eric-schmidt- tyl...](https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/eric-schmidt-tyler-cowen- google-ec33aa3e6dae)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I also made it all the way through "hiring committee" at Google but failed at "final hiring committee" ostensibly due to my low GPA (well in my case, decent overall GPA but a couple of shockingly low grades).

Main difference in my case is no verbal offer. My recruiter made it clear that the team wanted to hire me, but that I had to be approved by "final hiring committee" as the last step.

For this Reddit poster, it seems like the recruiter really messed up / broke protocol by making a verbal offer. (That, or the protocol has changed; my experience was 7 years ago).

<comment><USER13> Verbal offer could meany anything. For all we know he got a "it looks very likely we'll move forward" and got way too excited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's college. You're a kid. You do stupid crap. Then you get to the real world and you realize life isn't college and you have to hustle. You get a GitHub account and you self teach. You get internships or junior positions. You give everything. You build up a good network and a body of work that is compelling. The FANG companies even relax the requirements for college degrees if one has a lot of experience and drive — and then the this. Goes to show some companies are very willing to miss out on great candidates in order to be extra careful not to hire the one slacker. What a shame.

</comment><comment><USER15> I recently went through the hiring process at google and after the two pre- interview calls with HR, one full day of interviews and 4 follow up calls for team matching (matched with a team) as well as additional calls with hr to discuss compensation (where I was pressured to divulge competing offers) I didn't pass the hiring committee. I think their process in general is not very considerate. Most of my interviewers barely introduced themselves, talked about what they do, or asked me anything about my experience. I also found out the day of my interview I was being considered for "l3" which is entry-level despite my 4 years of industry experience and was told it's too late to change that and to be considered for a higher level I'd need to re-interview.

<comment><USER16> FWIW, I had a very similar interview process with google. First time I interviewed I didn't make it through committee. They called me back a year later and said that it was because all of the positions had filled (which seems suspect to me).

In general, no one that I interacted with is someone who I would have wanted to work with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was talking to a Facebook rep at my schools career fair recently. He told me that they will interview anyone with a GPA over 2 provided that think the person will pass the difficult interviews. I'm not keen to work at Facebook, but it was a nice attitude to hear.

</comment><comment><USER18> Thought experiment:

1\. Candidate interviews and gets to the final rung of the ladder.

2\. Name of candidate gets input into Google's "Final Rung" algorithm.

3\. The "Final Rung" algorithm cross checks the candidate's name against all of that candidate's data from the Googleverse.

4\. What the algorithm checks for is a black box to the hiring team. Only "1" or "0" is output.

5\. Google then either accepts the candidate or goes back through the application looking for "clues" for why the algo output a "0".

What is the argument for Google _not_ doing what I just described above?

<comment><USER19> The argument is Google should put said "Final Rung" algorithm up at step 0 (which would be entirely possible for a GPA issue). Alternatively, Google should not give a verbal offer until the "Final Rung" algorithm returns a 1.

<comment><USER20> Initial rung would be too noticeable.

<comment><USER19> You don't have to point out that it's about GPA. You ask for resume + references + transcript and just reject the initial application. The resume screen stage is extremely noisy, it wouldn't be obvious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Reading this, it sounds like they got shot down by SVP (passed HC, got match). Of course, I have no idea of that was the case here for sure. But it does happen.

Recruiter should not have given verbal offer before there was actually a contract sent though, that is a really bad look.

</comment><comment><USER22> Verbal offer is worth the paper it's written on.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Is it? I was given to understated that, legally, contracts can be binding with only verbal agreement.

<comment><USER23> They are (with caveats), the problem is proving it.

<comment><USER20> Two witnesses agreeing each other are usual standard for verbal contract disputes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Yall remember this from less than a month ago? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18374938](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18374938)

<comment><USER25> That article struck me (and the Googlers I sent it to) be incredibly naive and condescending, fwiw.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If I was going to invest $$$$$ in someone, I'd like an explanation for a poor GPA. For example, these are all good:

1\. had a health crisis

2\. the grades started out poor, but steadily rose and was getting A's by senior year

3\. took the toughest classes in the school, not the easy A's

4\. had a full time job to pay the tuition

Some not so good answers:

1\. whatever, dunno

2\. trust me, I'm good

I wouldn't want to invest in someone who would pay about as much attention to their work as they did to their grades.

After all, if it was your money, would you?

<comment><USER27> I think this slightly misses the point though. It's not really that they check GPA, it's that they really messed this guys plans by taking his transcript at the beginning but not checking it until after giving him a verbal offer.

I myself have had negative experiences with the Google recruiting and offer process. I have friends and know people who have had Google recruiting horror stories. Everything from recruiters being over 30 mins late for final interview rounds (which throws off everything), to people being promised one office location but actually be given another after they sign, to the pressure "interns" with non-guaranteed host-matching offers go through. That host- matching system in which students might get a Google internship offer "but not really, cause we'll see if there's a team for you" is honestly not only demeaning, but outright cruel to college students who have to turn down other offers and add that huge weight into the already excruciating stress of school.

Overall I got the sense that Google simply knows it has the leverage and the desirability-- which is true for a lot of SV companies-- but they actually leverage that in their favour by playing the candidate in the way that best suits their needs.

I honestly hope any Google employees reading this raise the issue internally. Once you're out of college it's easy to forget, but stuff like this is very stressing and a huge downer for college kids. And it can be better-- I honestly haven't heard of a company that has so many "recruiting errors" as Google.

<comment><USER26> I'm neither defending nor criticizing Google's procedures, just what I'd do if evaluating with a candidate with a marginal GPA, and it was my money on the line.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Did they say it was GPA related or was that purely speculation? There's a bunch of stuff that can sink an offer and nowhere that I've done interviews has GPA been the reason that late

<comment><AUTHOR> 100% GPA related.

> Repost from yesterday's daily chat thread.

> Hi guys, kinda a big issue rnow.

> Got matched with a host for SWE Internship with Big G this summer. Had the > match interview and it was a match, recruiter told me last monday that i > should receive my offer within 2 days.

> Didn't hear anything until yesterday, when she emailed me asking me to write > a statement justifying my lower than usual GPA. (2.6)

> I am pretty nervous about this. I turned down two jobs this summer because I > thought I had already been matched. I can't find much online abotu this > situation. What happens now?

[https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/a13waz/b...](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/a13waz/big_4_discussion_november_28_2018/ean3kzg/)

<comment><USER29> Wait wait wait a moment.

This isn't for a job, this is for an internship. These are different things and internships are clearly scholastically linked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> what if this person was 4.0 on all the tech topics, a brilliant person indeed, but has no patience or interest in history, religious studdies, English etc etc. This sounds like what Oracle would do. You dodged a bullet, onwards and upwards...

<comment><USER31> As a googler I agree that passing on a "4.0 on all the tech topics, a brilliant person indeed, but has no patience or interest in history, religious studdies, English etc etc." is indeed google dodging a bullet.

<comment><USER30> Ah, liberal arts, consume - not create - fits. These tech people come later to the arts, they are the heart of our engineering and scientific achievements - the Teslas. It is all well and good to create well socialized kids who grow up into rounders but these people create little except harmony - bees or ants fits...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Dick move.

Don't be evil is definitely dead and buried at google

</comment><comment><USER33> "My gpa was high for two years, then I fell in love and realized that I was young and missing out on life too much. I'm very good at prioritizing the essentials and following through on my promises."

</comment><comment><USER34> Very similar thing happened to me.

This was about 15 years ago, and I had joined a startup while I was in college. I had started off with a 3.7 GPA my first 2 years, but eventually work became more important to me than school, so I did everything I could to just get a diploma as quickly as I could. I took a bunch of classes pass/fail, got my advisor to help push forward credit for "independent studies," and eked by with some Cs. (I graduated a 4 year program in 3 years.)

Despite the GPA slip, the Ivy League school I went to was quite happy with my story and sent a reporter out to interview me for the graduation edition of the paper calling me "one of their best and brightest" \-- I was grouped in with about 10 other students in a class of 4k+. They cited the fact that I paid my own way through school by working for a startup as something they felt was impressive.

Fast forward a year. We sold the company, and I applied for a job at Google. Did a few rounds, they went well, and people liked my story about working while in school. I got flown out for interviews, they well -- got through the questions about how many ping-pong balls would fit in an oil tanker, how to divide loot on a pirate ship, and how many times a day do clock hands overlap... And I got a verbal offer! The job was a little entry-level for me, but I was pretty happy. I told the other places I was applying to that I was going to Google.

Then I got a random call from someone who said, "Hey can you send us your official transcript?" Since they had my unofficial transcript, and I had already gotten the verbal offer, I didn't see what the harm was... figured it was just a formality -- mostly because they said it was just a formality and not to worry about it.

Anyway a week later I get an email, "We're sorry but we are passing on you... blah blah." I called the guy who gave me the verbal offer... and was told, "We can't hire anyone who has a sub-3.0 GPA." I had a 2.9 GPA.

So 15 years+ later, I'm still a bit bitter about that. Look, companies can hire whomever they want, but as I get older I see very clearly that GPA is just a conformity metric. It doesn't tell you how smart someone is, or how talented or driven they are. A high GPA just tells you that someone knows how to submit to authority, and put academics ahead of networking. (And a good school typically just means a kid had wealthy parents.)

I think I'm doing OK without Google, but yeah... sucks that in a place that prides itself on being amazingly intelligent that they still have red-tape around what metrics can be used to define intelligence. Bezos said it well, paraphrased: smart minds are flexible minds. Shame Google is still being rigid on this sort of methodology.

* There's one clear sign Jeff Bezos looks for to gauge how smart people are | Business Insider || [https://www.businessinsider.com.au/jeff-bezos-sign-of-intell...](https://www.businessinsider.com.au/jeff-bezos-sign-of-intelligence-2018-10?r=US&IR=T)

</comment><comment><USER13> Someone jumped the gun and thought a verbal offer meant something. Is this really worth discussing? Its not like we'll get the truth of what actually happened or why.

</comment><comment><USER25> If I were to guess it's because this was for Google EP, which focuses more on academics as a part of the interview process than the algorithm portion.

</comment><comment><USER35> This same thing happened to me from a large financial company on the east coast, except I had received a written offer via email.

</comment><comment><USER36> Google doesn't want the guy in their "cool kids" club because he doesn't have the right number.

</comment><comment><USER37> Weren't they boasting about not looking at GPAs anymore?

</comment><comment><USER38> I see what he's saying, but come on 2.6?!?

<comment><USER39> You realize GPA is a relative, not absolute, metric, right (i.e., a 2.6 is considered ok for engineering students at top universities)?

<comment><USER25> > 2.6 is considered ok for engineering students at top universities

I don't know anywhere this is considered "ok". At my school my GPA was considered just "Ok" at 3.9+.

<comment><USER40> Grade inflation, look it up. If 3.9 is "OK" your class's grades have compressed to the point of meaninglessness.

<comment><USER25> I think we had ~150 CS grads, and about 15 valedictorians with perfect 4.0's.

<comment><USER41> Either your promotion is made of geniuses or as @sk5t said your GPA is indeed meaningless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> "Don't Be Evil"</comment>


Soviet Armored Military Vehicles for Sale - <AUTHOR> http://www.sovietarmor.com/for_sale.html

<comment><USER2> I'm saving up for a U.S. Coast Guard cutter. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USCGC_Hamilton_(WHEC-715)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USCGC_Hamilton_\(WHEC-715\))

If the Philippines can buy them for a few million I think a U.S. citizen should be able to. Never liked Yachts but I need an armored boat in my life. Mostly for trips to Japan.

<comment><USER3> They had something very similar to that moored on the Thames estuary near London (UK) and it was about £400,000. Less than a decent house around here!

I genuine considered it for a bit but the wife wasn't impressed when I told her the fuel tank took £22,000 to fill up :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.sovietarmor.com/catalog/armored/mi_24.html](http://www.sovietarmor.com/catalog/armored/mi_24.html)

If only...

<comment><USER5> Yeah I went there straight away too...I don't know why, I have a thing for that helicopter even though I'm not into militaria. I'm fighting off the temptation to purchase a large remote control kit now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Note the pictures of the real products for sale don't always look like the flashy ones at the top:

[http://www.sovietarmor.com/catalog/armored/wla_42.html](http://www.sovietarmor.com/catalog/armored/wla_42.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> $700k for an MI-24 seems like a bargain. I like how the link for technical specifications goes to wikipedia...

<comment><USER8> I wonder if it's the version with the star over its most vulnerable spot or not. (Later models put armor-plate over that spot.)

<comment><USER7> They do say that it's for civilian or museum use only, so my money is on the one without the armour plating ;) Having said that, if it does have the armour plating...what's the resale value for titanium nowadays?

<comment><USER9> half inch, 12" by 12" for $360 from Amazon: [http://www.amazonsupply.com/dp/B00CNM793E](http://www.amazonsupply.com/dp/B00CNM793E) (Grade 2)

They also have up to 4 inch thick 12x36 inch plate (only $8,000) and several other dimensions of sheets and rods: [http://www.amazonsupply.com/dp/B00MB366WA](http://www.amazonsupply.com/dp/B00MB366WA) (Grade 5, higher strength alloy)

Free shipping, no customs, brand new.

I can't imagine how difficult customs would be when importing old military equipment from Russia.

<comment><AUTHOR> These actually seem to be coming from Ukraine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Went camping this week. Left my Prius behind, took my girlfriend's 4x4 up the forest service road to the campground ... found 3 Prius there ahead of me.

We need less car than we think we do.

<comment><USER11> >> Car makers call it "contingency anxiety," the urge to buy a mechanically overqualified vehicle because maybe, once in a blue moon—or a hurricane on a high tide—the car buyer might need the extra functionality. The personal-use pickup market is a creature of contingency anxiety. After all, once a year, you need to bring home a Christmas tree.

Source: [http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732443980...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324439804578105270554653446)

Full disclosure: I drive my daughter to Montessori school every morning in Jeep Wrangler Rubicon.

<comment><USER12> I have a GMC Canyon that sits in the garage next to our Prius. I bought it a year before the Prius, but it has about half the mileage on it.

That said, I generally find myself having to move something big once a week during the summer months for landscaping, remodelling, maintenance, play, etc, and those are the times when I find my pickup to be indispensable.

Maybe when relayrides is more ubiquitous, I'll rethink the truck, but right now it's a luxury at about $17k.

<comment><USER13> Lowes and Home Depot have by-the-hour pickup truck rental in many locations.

UHaul is always an option, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There was a collector in the Palo Alto area who had stashed up three large warehouses full of tanks. The warehouses were open as a museum until recently. He had acquired some of the tanks for just $5000 (time of purchase unknown) from liquidation sale of the former soviet military equipment. Transportation to the US had cost him $50-80K for each tank. Fortunately for you (and unfortunately for everyone else) the collection was going to be liquidated or moved. So if you feel like buying a tank you could get one in the Silicon Valley. [http://www.yelp.com/biz/military-vehicle-technology- foundati...](http://www.yelp.com/biz/military-vehicle-technology-foundation- portola-valley)

<comment><USER15> $500 for a tour of 25 people. Are there 25 people on HN who'd want to visit as a group?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The soviet APC's are outstanding EOTWAWKI vehicles- Armored and amphibious.

You can also go with the american v-100 (gage) if you are lucky enough to find one. They come up on ebay occasionally

<comment><USER7> Lots of edits there ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This whole site actually reminds me of the part in Lord of War where they're walking around the Soviet weapons expo, and then later just having items 'disappear'.

<comment><USER17> Or the one where they unscrew rocket mounts from helicopters to make them civilian machines, while the said mounts lie packaged next to them, being shipped 'somewhere else, for completely unrelated reasons'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My old coworker worked with movie studies (Valley of Elah was one) as a consultant providing military like training to the actors. (Enough to make them _look_ like military personell) if the business he was in didn't fall apart they had a hind helicopter on the way.. shipping and certification was more expensive than the chopper... besides that, it was mostly WW2 era jeeps, tanks, etc..

Still that APC looks pretty fun :-D

</comment><comment><USER19> You can get those in Poland too, not sure about the export terms and regulations but it should be similar. This place is fairly close to the city I grew up in.

[http://www.motodemont.com.pl/pl/podstrony/id/4_sprzet_wojsko...](http://www.motodemont.com.pl/pl/podstrony/id/4_sprzet_wojskowy_pojazdy_militarne_czolg_t55_bwp1_mtlb_pts.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> If you do buy any of this kit you might want to read the novel "Red Army" and imagine what it might have been like fighting your way through NATO forces in West Germany in the 1980s:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_%28novel%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_%28novel%29)

</comment><comment><USER21> So for the price of Toyota Rav4 you can get this tank now?? Whoha!

[http://www.sovietarmor.com/catalog/armored/ats_59.html](http://www.sovietarmor.com/catalog/armored/ats_59.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Rav4 has better MPG and cheaper service.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is there a chance the APC could be made road-legal in the United States?

</comment><comment><USER22> Those are 'export prices', local price is 1/10-1/30 of listed ones. I think someone made this site as a joke, or maybe counting on one sale to offset all of his costs.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is selling military vehicles in the Ukraine at the moment wise?

</comment><comment><USER24> I'll take 2 BRDMs please. Bad ass.

</comment><comment><USER25> Eh, I'd rather get an ekranoplan.

</comment><comment><USER26> How does it relate to sanctions?

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't, this is Ukrainian business

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> hmm does not WU have an upper limit of $5000 on wire payments?

<comment><USER7> I'd imagine postage is going to be a problem too...

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Site seems to be down?

<comment><USER7> Still working for me. Your local 'in the interest of national security' agency may be paying you a visit soon...

<comment><USER28> It seems to be back up now. The cross check to make sure I didn't have enough money to actually buy something probably cleared to lift the block...

<comment><USER7> Score 5: Funny</comment></comment></comment></comment>


7 Tips to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment and Drive Users to Checkout - <AUTHOR> http://www.experimentengine.com/blog/reduce-shopping-cart-abandonment/

<comment><USER2> It's crazy that so many companies don't offer a guest checkout, one of the best ones I've seen do this is Spiegel and Bonobos where before you enter the checkout funnel they get your email to remarket but allow you to go through without registering.</comment>


Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful - <AUTHOR> http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/human-centered.html

<comment><USER2> The stuff about the human interface for musical instruments is just hokey. It lends no support to the author's argument. Acoustic instruments have the user interfaces that they have because the physics of sound production made more usable interfaces impractical to build. And, indeed, now that electronics have enabled alternative means of sound production, the design of more intuitive and usable interfaces for musical instruments is an active area of research and development. Likewise, musical notation is an anachronism that has survived more as a matter of tradition than on the merits of the design. If you take a look at the design of most MIDI sequencer software, you'll find that piano roll notation has largely replaced traditional music notation as the default interface because it is so much more intuitive.

Most people who attempt to learn to play an acoustic instrument take lessons for a few months and eventually quit because the user interfaces are so difficult to learn. The idea that software should in any way emulate this sort of design is incomprehensible to me, since the design of software is not nearly so constrained as the design of a physical instrument. On a trumpet, you have to hold down the first and third valve key and extend a slide by a precise amount with your ring finger to play the D above middle C, but the fingering for D an octave higher is completely different. If you're playing in any kind of a group, you also have to be aware that your instrument is really a B flat instrument and transpose the notes accordingly to play along with everyone else. If your software had a bizarre interface like this, nobody would buy it unless absolutely no other alternative existed.</comment>


Ask HN: How to Inspire young people in computer science? - <AUTHOR>

I was optimistic today when I heard that computer science enrollments went up for the first time in along time.<p>What's important for young people to know, about computer science today and what should they be preparing for upon graduation 4 years from now? <comment><USER2> The same things that have been important for several years:

\- A CS degree doesn't mean you will become Dilbert

\- A CS degree doesn't mean your job will be outsourced to a BRIC country.

\- CS is not just programming.

\- A BS in CS can lead to fields like AI/robotics, bioinformatics, finance (well, that might be untimely), etc.

\- It's a myth that CS isn't for girls (mention Lady Lovelace ;) ).

I think (the negations of) those are still the most popular harmful stereotypes about studying CS.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would tell them a couple things:

1) Get involved in communities (like HN, and local CS interest groups) - getting involved while young can lead to many opportunities that "just having a CS degree" wont lead you to.

2) Most university CS programs stick to 1 or 2 languages at the core (java or c/c++) - tell them to try and implement some of their homework in ruby / python / or even things like Scala to learn the similarities and differences between programming languages. This will only be more helpful as you progress into higher level courses.

</comment><comment><USER4> Tell them about the opportunities that arise for starting your own company with minimal resources.

<comment><USER5> Would that be ethical? One does not need a CS degree to start a company. One needs to know how to program, and a CS degree is far from being the only way to learn how to program, right?

It would be interesting if there were initiatives aiming at promoting programming among kids in the 10-12 y.o. age range. Since hi-school is too easy and kids have way too much free time, if they could get the "programming bug" before they're old enough to go to college, everyone would win. They could study math or physics instead of CS, because they already know how to code. And they could even postpone college for a couple of years and try to launch a company while they're young and full of stamina.

Just my 0.02 USD...

<comment><USER4> A CS degree isn't needed for most startups probably but it might help for ones with particularly difficult implementation.</comment></comment></comment>


The Death of the Telephone Call: 1876–2007 - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_next_20/2016/09/what_s_lost_when_telephone_calls_disappear.html <comment><USER3> I think this is another example of popularity and commoditization eventually destroying something.

First, telephones start out as expensive, only available in big cities. I'm not old enough to remember this, but I suspect it would have been an exclusive and prestigious club.

Eventually, telephones get widespread, and cheaper - I'm thinking like mid 90s, before mobile phones became mass market. This was "peak telephone", and it's what I remember from my youth. It was actually pretty good! As the author says, you could casually call your friends without seeming intrusive or clingy, and you could call most business or government agencies and talk to staff, getting quick responses to inquiries from knowledgeable people. Towards the end of this era, you have lots of information lines for time, weather, movies, phone banking services, etc.

Around this time, call centers are introduced - if you call a business or government agency, you don't end up talking to some knowledgeable subject matter expert about some topic, you talk to a call center operator who has a script, and if it's anything non-trivial, tries to transfer you, call back, or generally mess you around.

At this point, the phone network is so cheap, with so many subscribers that the temptation to abuse it to sell things to people is irresistible. Robo- dialling, answering machines, caller ID, and the Do Not Call registry are all introduced to the system, in a nuisance call arms race between callers and callees.

The call centers go to India, and the Philippines. The call center operators get placed behind a interactive voice response system (IVR). Now, it's pretty much impossible to get anything useful done by phone. Landlines are disconnected, people have voice numbers on their mobile devices, but refuse to answer calls from numbers that aren't in their address book.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the fundamental nature of communications networks - the story isn't much different for postal mail, fax, email, usenet, facebook. Success seems to kill the network in the end.

<comment><USER4> > but refuse to answer calls from numbers that aren't in their address book.

I do that. If I don't know the number and that person really wants to talk to me, there is my answer machine where he/she can leave a message. I will never answer a call from a number I do not know, whatever the reason. If it is urgent, the person has to leave a message, so I can call him/her back. Why ? because I get spammed X times a day with numbers from unknown origins. The worst is masked numbers off course.

<comment><USER5> Be wary of assuming that answer machines will be used. I'm 26 and I've never used an answer machine. Maybe accidentally. I'm probably not going to leave you a message because really few people listens to the message. I'm certainly not going to listen to a message someone leaves me. This is what SMS is for, I think.

<comment><USER6> I don't comprehend the thinking behind not listening to voicemails. Why have a voicemail box, then? You're just making anybody who does leave a voicemail think you're ignoring them on purpose. Is it people who didn't purposefully purchase and setup the voicemail feature, but it was automatically enabled?

<comment><USER5> Some operators have it as default - that's how I got one before. I think operators have stopped doing this now, at least where I live, so it's not a problem anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not sure what the author is on about.

In the B2B world at least, phone remains customers' preferred way to get more info prior to a sale and to get support afterwards. The same for B2C - <USER2> least on the support end of things, and provided you can readily talk to a human.

Also, analog phone calls are dead. But voice conversations are here to stay IMHO. There are plenty of "non-phone" alternatives to do those, e.g. Skype or using /call in Slack to sort out in 3-5 min what would take 15+ min to sort out in writing using texts or chats. Voice is just faster.

<comment><USER8> _Voice is just faster._

As someone who grew up more immersed in the digital world than the average, I want to point out that this isn't a universal truth. With practice, concise and clear text can convey more accurate and more useful information than a low-SNR vocal conversation.

<comment><USER9> It's not about transferred information fidelity, it's about short feedback loops, the ability to interrupt, and the knowledge (on both sides) of attention.

Since concise and clear statements can be made in both media, the difference is entirely in the limitations of the transport medium, and written text lacks all of the characteristics I earlier mentioned.

<comment><USER8> The ability to interrupt is what I most _dislike_ about voice. IRC/IM/Slacj/HipChat/whatever can provide just as short of a feedback cycle, and people can be inattentive in voice calls as well, which is a greater waste of time due to their synchronous nature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The numbers used here don't really make the case. A text message is a conversation element, a call is a conversation.

I spent 4 hours on the phone Friday, on 5 calls. I also sent a couple dozen texts. According to the article, I'm not a phone user.

<comment><USER11> > _The numbers used here don 't really make the case._

I got that impression too. I think a better metric would be minutes spent talking compared to text messages sent. Even then, I can talk about a lot more in a minute of voice than I can in even five minutes of texting, given the lag between messages.

The article is riding the line between absurdity and parody.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've found that phone is far more effective at resolving disagreements than email/text. For serious disagreements, meeting face to face for a beer works best.

<comment><USER13> _I 've found that phone is far more effective at resolving disagreements than email/text._

People who are better at talking in person tend to feel this way. Others are better at emailing (I am like this, it gives me time to clarify my thoughts, and delete the petty insults), and think the opposite.

The only time I prefer to see face-to-face is when I need to build a relationship of trust with the person, and it's easier for some people (like you) to see that I am not ripping them off.

<comment><USER14> People who are better at emailing often overestimate how good other people are at reading emails.

<comment><USER15> This is a far bigger problem than some here might think. I write emails now on the assumption that the recipient might read the first two sentences, skim the first two paragraphs, and ignore the rest.

<comment><USER16> They should teach this in business school. I never write my boss an email more than three sentences long. I never ask two questions in one email, unless I don't mind one of them being ignored.

<comment><USER17> Surely they do teach just that?

Whenever I write a report I always put the summary first because that is all that anyone who trusts me needs to read. The rest is supporting information and extended arguments in favour of the proposition that I make in the summary together with some notes about why alternatives are no good.

Of course, I never went to business school, I'm an engineer who started as a physicist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A typical short phone call has a few items of back & forth equal to a good number of texts. So for text to surpass phone calls, I think the ratio needs to be much higher than 1:1, maybe something like 8:1. So the "death" date gets pushed further out, but it's still there somewhere.

I agree that mobile voice quality is terrible on most phones, especially when people choose to make their calls on speakerphone for some reason. At work we have landlines and actual desk phones with hard-wired headsets because the call quality is amazing compared to mobile. It lets you have a fully nuanced, tonal, relaxed conversation with everything but the facial expressions and hand gestures.

<comment><USER19> > especially when people choose to make their calls on speakerphone for some > reason

You make it sound so mysterious. Speaking for myself, I do it for long conversations because it's actually painful to keep the phone held to my ear for that long.

<comment><USER20> Phones used to be shaped so it was comfortable to do so. It was quite a useful feature.

<comment><USER21> Yes! I have many times complained about what happened to phone ergonomics. It started with cordless phones. The old corded handsets had a nice design with a deep cup for your ear, and they were pleasant to talk on. The cordless phones were bricks, and as often as not the earpiece actually stuck out a bit. Very uncomfortable, and of course with the size requirements of cell phones it's gotten even worse.

<comment><USER22> On the contrary, it's now cheap and simple to use a mic on a pair of headphones and be completely free of any burden.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm not writing it off yet.

 _More_ of my friends are calling than in 2007 when it was texting, IM and then the mass rush to Facebook. Quite a few are now cutting down Facebook, a couple have left completely.

Maybe it's an age thing, but I find a 30 min call much more effective at "topping up the friendship" than any number of minutes online chat. I had a very early ICQ, and no end of IM since, but since smart phones the fragmentation has got so ridiculous I rarely bother. I think I'd need to install about 10 with 2-5 contacts in each to cover most and miss everyone using iMessage of course (never did understand why Apple didn't release for multiple platforms).

<comment><USER23> They didn't support multiple platforms for the same reason Blackberry's BBM was a Blackberry exclusive; platform lock-in. I have iMessage and I love using it with people I text regularly. It still works for SMS, but it's a degraded experience. There are tons of other options now, but I still use iMessage the most since it's the best-integrated messenger on iOS, and they'll keep it that way with things like private APIs + total control over the App Store.

<comment><USER24> I wish instead of lasers and magic ink Apple would add group chat iMessage (and conference calls to Facetime).

<comment><USER25> Group chat is already there since iOS 5 in the very beginning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'd like it if audio were on the way up. On WhatsApp I send lots of audio messages but the amount I get back in return is small. It's so much easier to hit record than to try and type on a tiny virtual keyboard. Text is great for my laptop, short or long audios, for my phone. No calls, though.

Actually, I find audio messages more like writing, in that one can think about what they want to say and there's no pressure to say something "right this moment", as with a telephone call. Likewise, the person receiving the audio message can listen to it when it suits them.

<comment><USER27> Same here. I moved abroad and everyone here uses whatsapp. Voice recordings are extremely common and popular.

I just wish slack added the same feature, so I can drop a recording into a channel, instead of typing a wall of text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have my Nokia still going strong; but sadly they're killing the last GSM network in Canada next year and I won't have anything to connect it to. I like telephone calls a lot of the time, I use them about as often as text messages.

Next year I might need to buy a phone which is about 12 times as expensive, has worse signal reliability, and which has a battery which will last me literally one 14th the time my current one does, and which will take up about twice the space in my pocket, and it will be a shattering liability every time I take it with me. All the while, it will have so much software on it and so much attack surface that I will need to stay abreast of hundreds upon hundreds of megabytes of updates twice a month (at least) just so that people don't commit fraud with my identity.

Seriously, screw this noise, get me out of here.

<comment><USER29> Or you could just get another dumbphone: [http://www.rogers.com/web/link/wirelessBuyFlow?forwardTo=Pho...](http://www.rogers.com/web/link/wirelessBuyFlow?forwardTo=PhoneThenPlan&productType=normal&productId_Detailed=Z222BLU)

<comment><USER28> People report a lot of battery issues for those. I'd probably want a Nokia.

<comment><USER30> Well then get a new Nokia dumbphone: [https://www.microsoft.com/en/mobile/phones/all#order_by=late...](https://www.microsoft.com/en/mobile/phones/all#order_by=latest).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _Somebody_ is using phones to make calls. Usually it's the guy in the big Chevy SUV behind me weaving from side to side on the carriageway. If phone calls were really dying I wouldn't see so many parents pulling out of school dropoff with a phone clamped to their ear. Who are these people calling? Each other? Or are they all answering calls from robodiallers?

</comment><comment><USER31> Interestingly, I worked at a Telco from 2011-2015, granted, a rural one in North America.

In all honesty, without a shadow of a lie, the master strategy of the VP of Technology was to get a fax line into every home and business....... in 2015.

Oh yes, they really can be that clueless.

<comment><USER7> Fax is still a growth market in the US, or at least was as late as last year if a chap in that market I interacted with then is anything to go by. He was working on a fax sending API. The stuff couldn't go by signed email or anything of the sorts because of some administrative and (medical) insurance related paperwork if memory serves.

<comment><USER10> That's a feature of the absurdity of compliance checkboxes.

If the auditor is an idiot, you can get a moderate finding for doing things like applying a security patch that isn't FIPS validated, or similar nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think the author tries too hard to make his point. If I have a chat with someone and send thirty messages he's counting that as thirty conversations vs one phone call.

A much fairer way is to look at how many times you speak with your friends via text vs calling them. I find that I have many small text conversations but when we get together by phone it's usually a long conversation of thirty minutes or more.

I do not think the telephone call is going away. When a majority of smart phones sold only allow texting is when I will believe it. I do think that the landline phone sadly is going to become an endangered species, I will regret losing mine it's my secret weapon.

</comment><comment><USER11> That's the most hyperbole I've ever seen in a single article. I had to stop reading when I got to "The final voice mail that anybody actually heard was recorded sometime around 2009". I get that it was meant as a joke, like much of the exaggeration in the piece, but it's just too much.

</comment><comment><USER33> I didn't send my first text until 2008, but once I did, voice calls were dead to me.

</comment><comment> crooked-v Yet another article whining about kids these days.

</comment><comment><USER34> Good riddance. Telephone calls are awful.

2007 was also, incidentally, the last time I had a telephone that actually functioned decently as a telephone - the venerable Nokia brickphone. Since then, I've had nothing but grief with terrible signal, mics and speakers that cut out intermittently, and antennas that cannot pick up towers that are in line-of-sight with smartphones. They are, however, lovely for doing email and texting, which have the additional benefit of leaving behind a persistent paper trail so that there is an actual record of what is said that can be referred to later.

<comment><USER35> >leaving behind a persistent paper trail so that there is an actual record of what is said that can be referred to later./< Isn't this sometimes a good reason to make phone calls?

<comment><USER34> Fortunately I'm not involved in anything shady that would make records of that kind a liability. Good thing, too; I've got terrible auditory memory, half the time things I hear just go poof into the ether 30 seconds later without lodging anywhere in my brain.

<comment><USER36> The ephemeral nature of a voice call is not only an advantage for questionable activities.

You can defuse a potential conflict by voice call because the medium allows airing of issues in a more candid fashion, and allows more rapid convergence onto common ground compared to text based communication.

I think that bad news is best communicated along channels that allow some kind of non-verbal perception (on a phone call largely by judging the nature and length of the silences). Face to face is best, but synchronous voice communication is a second best.

<comment><USER23> Not sure how common this is outside of the valley, but Google Hangouts and other video conferencing solutions work pretty well too. Maybe not so much Hangouts because the video quality is terrible, but it + chromebox for meetings is so much cheaper than previous solutions which required 8u of rack space for a video processor and server that it's totally worth it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Optimizing Touchscreen Keyboards for Swype Input - <AUTHOR> http://sangaline.com/blog/swype_optimization/

<comment><USER2> I'm the other author of the blogpost and we're both happy to answer any questions anyone has.</comment>


Ask HN: What non-trivial JavaScript app would you like explained in depth? - <AUTHOR> I am preparing a course to teach developers how to create and maintain a non-trivial Javascript application. It will include in depth git history, discussions on architecture (why is it important to build feature X in way Y), annotated source code, and screencasts discussing sticky issues and giving insight into both the problem and solution.
My objective is to help those who know how to write javascript learn how to build production ready applications that accomplish a business goal. My hope is that this knowledge will increase confidence and productivity in the students' careers.
Is the app something you'd like to have a say about? Do you care which tools are used?
 Disclaimer I will build on the shoulders on giants and as such the source code (including git history) will be released under as permissive a license as possible while following the licensing requirements of the chosen technologies; however -- some of the material will be created with the intention of making a profit. <comment><AUTHOR> I think I missed the mark with my description. I am creating a new app. I was looking for input on what it should do. Maybe I should reconsider and instead break down an open source project.

<comment><USER2> I would certainly pay for an in-depth break down of a popular open source JavaScript app/library.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> An excellent piece of js software that I'd love to see explained is Mozilla's pfd.js. It is by far the most stable piece of js software that I have ever used.

Tinkering is playing around with knowledge to make something cool, engineering is the art of making it reliable and durable.

Most of what I see on the web is tinkering, pdf.js feels like it was made by engineers, instead of by tinkerers.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would love a great tutorial on AngularJS even though it is not an app. Sometimes it is not just about source code but more about the flow and logistics of the framework.

</comment><comment><USER5> Etherpad. By the way, it seems like an interesting project.

</comment><comment><USER6> Google Docs/Sheets

</comment><comment><USER7> Spotify</comment>


The biggest barrier to Windows 10 success is still Windows 7 - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-biggest-barrier-to-windows-10-success-is-still-windows-7/?loc=newsletter_large_thumb_related&ftag=TRE5575fdc&bhid=25696397469645606458680072209264 <comment><USER2> Or in other words, Windows 10 is still hated enough that people prefer sticking to Windows 7.</comment>


The worst Billion dollar Internet acquisitions (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2006/11/the_worst_billi.html

<comment><USER2> In the "too soon to tell" category, he suggests that YouTube looks overvalued, and that MySpace could be one of the BEST acquisitions of all time. Oops.

<comment><USER3> 4 years from now we might be looking back at Facebook like we look at AOL now

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This post was written 4 years ago. At that point is was too early to tell. Four years later we know YouTube was a pretty good deal. Myspace looked like a great deal for a few years. Now...not so much. It takes several years to know if things will work out or not.</comment>


African palm oil expansion is bad news for the continent's primates - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/african-palm-oil-expansion-is-bad-news-for-the-continents-primates/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand how an article focused primarily on demand figures for palm oil does not even mention prices rising because of demand for palm oil.

Sure, I get that it's in Oreos and bread and toothpaste and a number of other products but if the price doubles will it still be in those products? It's used widely because it's solid at room temp, easy to handle, and helps with consistency, but I find it hard to believe that demand will not drop at _all_ if demand is really that high. You can't exactly turn over 20 million hectares in a year.

In my travels, I found this data to be useful: [https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/which-everyday- products-...](https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/which-everyday-products- contain-palm-oil)

<comment><USER3> An accurate observation.

Though I agree with your principle (ie this is not a complete analysis), in the authors defense it is accurately titled "African palm oil expansion is bad news for the continent's primates."

Had it been titled "An analysis of the impacts of African palm oil expansion", your argument would have been poignant.

<comment><USER2> Yes and no. The Ars author cites a study that uses the highest possible number (from another study 9 years old from Corley) plus another high number for biofuels that does not take into account farming techniques or price elasticity, and then indicates that because of this, maybe Africa's habitat will be significantly eroded because it's "highly suitable" to palm oil based on their study of the climate. No cost accounting, political geography, etc discussed.

The original study from Corley seems quite measured in the Abstract ([https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146290110...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901108001196#!)) and also indicates that a number of factors would prevent this from happening due to substitution.

"Alarmist habitat erosion is good for clicks" is not a good reason to perpetuate hypothetical land use when there is plenty of actual non- hypothetical discussion to be had around the industry.

Do I need to go to the mat on this? Probably not, no, but it is symptomatic of a larger issue that I have trouble abiding: Oversimplified article associates two things together in the mind of information consumers who do not fully understand the problem. That association is for life. The correction / nuance never comes. Best to try and get to that nuance up front if at ALL possible, otherwise it's irresponsible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Worth noting that in many countries - including Australia and New Zealand - that it is not compulsory (legally mandated) for food manufacturers to label the oil that they use as Palm Oil. They can just state Vegetable Oil, thus hindering many consumers in these countries from determining which products in their local supermarket use palm oil - just by looking at the label directly on the product.

A poor outcome for consumers in these markets.

<comment><USER5> Is there any literature that actually states labelling items with palm oil vs vegetable oil actually makes a difference in consumer behaviour? In my small window of the world, I feel like the issue with palm oil is not well known.

<comment><USER4> This isn't literature, but from Melbourne Zoo's Don't Palm Us Off campaign, a campaign in favour of mandatory labelling of palm oil in Australia and New Zealand, their argument goes:

"Mandatory labelling of palm oil will help put pressure on food companies to start using sustainably-produced palm oil." [0]

There seems to be disagreement about what sustainable palm oil entails or how sustainable it actually is [1], so would be good to see this claim backed up with research.

[0] [https://www.zoo.org.au/get-involved/act-for-wildlife/dont- pa...](https://www.zoo.org.au/get-involved/act-for-wildlife/dont-palm-us-off) [1] [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/10/nestle-p...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/10/nestle- products-removed-from-melbourne-zoos-over-palm-oil)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In the US, in 2006, the FDA started requiring that food labels list grams of trans fat per serving. They were pretty vague about the legality of the requirement ("this guidance, do not establish legally enforceable responsibilities"), and they allowed for anything less than 0.5 grams per serving to be reported as 0 grams [1]. Every label since then shows grams of trans fat per serving. However, I have never seen any number reported other than 0 grams. Partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, once ubiquitous on packaged food labels, has practically vanished from them. For the most part it was replaced with palm oil (I suspect there was also a lot of serving size manipulation to take advantage of the 0.5 grams rule). It appears that the FDA is going to ban the addition of partially hydrogenated oil to food altogether by 2020 [2]. I imagine this (and perhaps similar legislation in other countries) is leading to increased demand for palm oil. This is not good for the environment nor Africa's primates. But how good is it for the primates on all continents, namely the humans eating palm oil all over the world? I suspect the answer is: way better than trans fats, but not very good.

[1] [https://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocument...](https://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocumentsRegulatoryInformation/LabelingNutrition/ucm053479.htm) [2] [https://www.fda.gov/food/ucm292278.htm](https://www.fda.gov/food/ucm292278.htm)

</comment><comment><USER7> Its used in huge amounts in pastries, like donuts. It also makes for over 20% of Nutela content (55% being sugar), and its present in many other processed produts.

</comment><comment><USER8> This thread has too much argument for the sake of arguing. People are trying to debate whether or not a nature vs. development dichotomy exists _in the abstract_. Of course it doesn't, but why don't we talk about the particulars of _this_ situation instead of turning the comment section into a high school debate class? The article clearly states that it will be very difficult to balance conservation of primate habitats with expansion of palm oil harvesting. Given that information, and the fact that the continent is desparately in need of economic development, I think the environmental losses are justifiable if they lead to better livelihoods for Africans.

<comment><USER9> I was with you until

> I think the environmental losses are justifiable if they lead to better > livelihoods for Africans

I have been to Borneo, I have seen the future and it is bleak. The guy running the Palm Oil Plantation has a car, AC in his house and a big screen tv. The ground is poisoned forever (after less than 20 years of growing palm oil) and ultimately the topsoil of Borneo will wash away into the leaving a lifeless desolate bump sticking out of the ocean.

Nothing abstract about that.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like a horrible future for Borneons. But, it's obvious why many farmers turn to palm oil.

It is a very effective cash crop (hence the big screen TV - possibly a Curved 100" OLED screen for "that guy" running the Palm Oil plantation ;) and the demand is there worldwide.

Farming is often a very tough existence, so palm oil is very alluring for many who would otherwise face relative or absolute poverty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Although palm oil consumption (of RBD palm oil) by industrial food processors has been rising for a while, a significant development was the scrutiny, public awakening, and regulatory phase-out of trans fats that happened in jurisdictions in the last decade or two.

Trans fats occurred in food as a side-effect of partial hydrogenation of unsaturated vegetable oils, where the result had desirable properties for food processing, performing similar to but remaining cheaper than animal-derived solid-at-room-temp fats.

Palm oil performs similarly to partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, and is therefore readily available substitute for manufactured foods affected by the trans fat phase-out.

</comment><comment><USER11> > African countries have the right to develop economically

Who owns the Palm Oil companies razing Africa? Are they largely African held, or is this another extractive colonial project?

</comment><comment><USER12> I imagine a contributing factor to this trend of palm oil being popular is the many folks pursuing "alternative remedies." Palm oil is high in medium chain triglycerides (MCT) and MCT oil is medically recommended for a number of very serious conditions, including Cystic Fibrosis and stomach cancer. Coconut oil, also high in MCT oil, was popular in an alternative remedy community I used to participate in.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why increase production of palm oil when algae oil is healthier for you, more sustainable, and cheaper?

</comment><comment><USER14> Africa's main concern should really be the sustainable welfare of one kind of primate: Homo sapiens. I don't recall ever seeing a "made in $AFRICAN_COUNTRY" label on anything. Theres a lot of economic potential there, but no one can be bothered to even start doing anything worthwhile with it. Once Homo sapiens is sorted out, the rest will come naturally.

<comment><USER15> Humans depend on the rest of the planet on many ways. The frontier of drug discovery come from plants in the rainforest at a time when conventional antibiotics are beginning to fail us. Lots of carbon is locked up in peat bogs in that same rainforest that we light on fire to clear land for palm oil production. We also need to manage soil properly if we are to sustain food production on this planet. Conservation is necessary regardless of whether you're doing it for other animals or for us. Conservation is about not letting short-term incentives thwart long-term sustainability, in other words self- discipline over impulsiveness.

<comment><USER14> Sure, but when people live in squalor and die of malnutrition and disease from time to time primates do not even register on the radar of priorities. Worrying about primate populations under these circumstances is an extremely ivory tower position to take. It's like if your children were dying of starvation and you were agonizing over the carbon footprint of driving to the grocery store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Environmentalism can easily become neo-colonialism in which largely Western countries impose their values and limit what developing countries do to better their people.

The people living in the countries in question should be free to make their choices regarding how they want to develop their country and economy without interference from the West.

<comment><USER17> Note that if we disrobe your statement of its developing-versus-West rhetoric, we end up with:

 _" People in any country should be able to do whatever they want in regard to environment without any interference from the international community."_

<comment><USER18> Pretty much. yeah.

Frankly, us environmental hopefuls are trying to stop a tank rolling towards them. We wont and we will be crushed.

There is just no Hope - Most of the world lives in absolutely mind boggling scenarios. And they all hope to eventually have first world standards of living.

Our models, growth projections and _debt_ depends on the world being able to achieve that growth. Humanity has made a bet that the future will be better for all - more consumption, more growth, more resources.

Except its just that our industries take advantage of unprotected commons. Amazon deforestation, sea pollution, over fishing, air pollution are the obvious big ticket examples.

Heck, many smaller economies go up the ladder because "regulations are far more flexible" \- which is great for business, jobs and income. Want to dredge that river for sand?

Simply: The world economy does not correctly price the cost of damage to the environment in its transactions.

If it did so, costs would spike and a large number of transactions would cease to be viable.

\-----

The illustrative example is plastic. I bet that 99% of the people reading this have plastic touching them right now. 85% of you will have more than 2 pieces of plastic on your person.

Plastic use is only going to increase; worldwide plastic use is VERY far from its eventual peak - most of India and China have yet to reach first world levels of consumption.

Now realize that plastic is hundreds of times _cheaper_ than alternatives. It may also be LESS damaging than many alternatives like paper (chemical and water use).

Plastic is immortal, and is never going to break down, and we arent anywhere near how much plastic we will have to make before humanity leaves this planet.

If we stopped plastic tomorrow, our economy would crater. We would be back to tinning food. That will mean costs and would go up only on packaging costs, forget about cleaning and losses due to spoilage - thats just food. Forget medicines.

\----

We arent going to get out of this by doing the right thing. We are going to get out of this because someone will start a plan to pull carbon out of the air and shove it into the core.

And then people will keep polluting.

\-----

Sorry its been frustrating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> American expansion was "bad news" for the continent's bison. But that was a net positive for the nation in the long run, as it allowed the US to become a more self-sufficient country. Developing countries shouldn't be discouraged from doing the same by aesthetes in the west who have already built their industry and infrastructure.

<comment><USER20> Nearly wiping out the bison was not a prerequisite to the US becoming self sufficient. Nor is destroying their natural areas a prerequisite for developing nations.

Additionally you're presenting a false dichotomy of either we hold back developing nations or we say goodbye to nature. That's ridiculous. We can help them to grow and become modern and raise their quality of life while preserving their precious natural areas.

<comment><USER21> Connecting the coasts via trains would not have been possible with the millions of bison that used to inhabit the west. Either because of the bison directly destroying track, or interaction with the Natives who hunted the bison and were hostile towards Americans.

<comment><USER22> Damn bisons destroying our fine tracks and bringing Indians with them; let's wipe out their species!

<comment><USER21> I don't know what point you think I'm arguing, but I am saying what happened historically. The US would have had a much harder time maintaining their gains from the Mexican-US war less than 20 years earlier(and may have ultimately lost California et al back to Mexico) if they were not able to connect the west coast to the east via rail.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


On mutex performance and WTF::Lock - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/nfroyd/2017/03/29/on-mutex-performance-part-1/ <comment><USER2> For those wondering, WTF stands for Web Template Framework: [https://webkit.org/blog/6161/locking-in- webkit/](https://webkit.org/blog/6161/locking-in-webkit/)

<comment><USER3> My favourite mutex name is the "sex lock" \-- also known as the shared/exclusive or sx lock.

<comment><USER4> Windows NT has a kernel mutex type called a "mutant" that was added for compatibility with OS/2's mutex (back when the NT team was still pretending to be building a new OS/2 kernel). Dave Cutler thought the OS/2 mutex semantics were "brain-damaged" and called NT's version "mutant". If an OS/2 thread exited while holding a mutex, the mutex would remain inaccessible forever.

[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2004/09/24/cl...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2004/09/24/cleaning- up-shared-resources-when-a-process-is-abnormally-terminated/)

<comment><USER5> They would have, if a Microsoft employee hadn't figured out a viable way to use extended mode in Windows 3.x.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> WTF locks now use a policy we call eventual fairness. You can barge but the amount of time anyone loses due to the barging race is bounded. [https://trac.webkit.org/changeset/203350/webkit](https://trac.webkit.org/changeset/203350/webkit)

<comment><USER7> Hard fairness guarantees for locking are very expensive and only situationally needful, so it's hard to justify paying a high cost to have them always on. It seems like the best thing to do is to use the fastest locking primitive you can find, and implement fairness on top of that in the rare case that you need it.

<comment><USER6> Eventual fairness costs nothing.

<comment><USER7> Right, I'm referring to the idea of immediate fairness. I'm agreeing w/ your approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So the takeaway here is apparently that POSIX mutexes on macOS/iOS are really slow due to an oddball design decision (fairness), and the browser vendors are racing to see who can reimplment them best. Windows and Linux do this just fine AFAICT.

Seems like it would be more effective for the WebKit folks to just work on their Darwin compatriots to fix the C library locks, no?

<comment><USER9> Fairness isn't an oddball design decision, it's an important assumption that many realtime systems rely on.

<comment><USER8> It's oddball in the sense that literally no one else does it. So I don't know what systems you mean, since by definition they don't run on Linux (glibc or bionic) or Windows.

I'm not saying there's no use case for a fair mutex anywhere (though I'll come really close and say that if you want fairness a lock is the wrong abstraction), I'm saying that stuffing a context switch into every contended call to pthread_mutex_unlock() is a terrible design decision.

<comment><USER9> If you don't need fairness, don't use a fair lock. The default assumption should be fairness because it doesn't require you to think (just like the default transaction isolation level should be serializable). As the blog post points out, OS X provides unfair mutexes too.

Windows locks are fair by default too, BTW (IIRC anyway). People just use the unfair version when they need performance.

<comment><USER10> [http://www.pcdoctor- community.com/wp/posts/2007/10/fairness-...](http://www.pcdoctor- community.com/wp/posts/2007/10/fairness-in-win32-lock-objects/)

Windows XP tried to implement some amount of fairness in its locks but did not guarantee it. Windows Vista gave up on fairness entirely.

You should just be using unfair locks. Thread starvation is rare in most OSes at this point.

<comment><USER11> Thread starvation is still very much a thing on a lot of devices. macOS and iOS even have a Quality Of Service implementation in the kernel specifically to ensure that high-priority threads get to run when they'd otherwise be starved, and this can lead to low-priority threads being suspended for many seconds at a time under high workload. In fact, it's now really dangerous to use a regular spinlock on iOS and macOS because you can get into a priority inversion livelock if threads from different QoS levels are contending the same lock. The Obj-C runtime was seeing delays of tens of seconds in some cases when using spinlocks, so it now uses a private "os_lock" which is a spinlock that uses SPI to "donate" the QoS of the waiting thread to the one that holds the spinlock.

<comment><USER12> As of iOS 10 and macOS 10.12, it is no longer private: `os_unfair_lock`.

[https://developer.apple.com/reference/os/os_unfair_lock](https://developer.apple.com/reference/os/os_unfair_lock)

<comment><USER11> Oh good! I'll have to do some research at some point to find out if this is literally the same thing as the os_lock that the Obj-C runtime uses, but either way, I'm glad it's available now.

<comment><USER12> It uses the same private API (or at least, what you described in your previous post).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd be interested in seeing the rational behind the fairshare policy. I suppose theoretically the firstfit policy could result in starvation via one thread constantly preempting another during the lock contention, but I don't imagine that would happen very often in practise.

<comment><USER14> Starvation is a serious problem. Imagine two cores both trying to get a lock. The lock is held by a cache line in one of the cores. If both cores try to get the lock very often, the core further away may very well _never_ get the lock.

The synthetic benchmark results don't show that because they behave nicely: each thread waits politely in between each attempt to get the lock. Real code doesn't always do that.

<comment><USER8> > Imagine two cores both trying to get a lock. The lock is held by a cache > line in one of the cores. If both cores try to get the lock very often, the > core further away may very well never get the lock.

If that were true, then your problem is L2-cache-bound and trying to fit your solution into SMP is the Wrong Thing. In fact, the single-threaded behavior you end up with is going to be faster (by definition!) than the "fair" architecture you seem to want.

No one serious thinks this behavior of the default locking primitive is a good thing. Maybe ( _maybe_ ) it's a good fit for some particular problem somewhere, but I'd want to see a benchmark. It's definitely not a consensus opinion among people who do serious thought about synchronization.

<comment><USER11> > _No one serious thinks this behavior of the default locking primitive is a > good thing._

Clearly some people do or OS X wouldn't do it.

<comment><USER15> Would it be the first badly implemented thing in OS X?

<comment><USER11> Mutexes are heavily used and get a lot of scrutiny, and work was done to speed them up when 10.11 (or was it 10.10? Whichever one added QoS) came out. I'm positive the people who maintain it are aware of the tradeoffs between fair and unfair locks and made the default fair intentionally.

Or more generally, just because Linux and Windows both behave in a certain manner doesn't make that de facto correct. It's all tradeoffs, and different people value different things. Correct-by-default (i.e. fair locks) is valuable, the only question is whether it's worth the performance hit (although you can always opt in to unfair locks to get better performance).

<comment><USER16> > I'm positive the people who maintain it are aware of the tradeoffs between > fair and unfair locks and made the default fair intentionally.

I think you're neglecting a couple of less-technical factors here. Yes, fairness was certainly made the default for reasons at _some point_ (but still, even then, one might argue that an opt-in solution might have been better). On the other hand, there's the likely possibility that those reasons don't really hold true anymore. Think of Scene Graphs vs. Entity Component Systems in high-performance videogame design - in this example the rise of caching made a whole architecture out-dated.

On the other hand, like removing the GIL in Python, such decisions are not to be taken lightly because of the things you _will_ break. It's very likely that there _are_ applications that would still have problems with starving threads, and just switching from opt-out to opt-in will make them break for no apparent reason in the strangest of circumstances. I know, Apple likes to break things more often than MS, but I'd guess that´s not a risk they're willing to take. Imagine you're updating your OS and a dozen apps that worked for a decade and don´t get updates anymore start behaving strangely.

So, it's not unreasonable to settle for a less-than-optimal solution that still keeps things working and only makes things slower in the worst-case scenario. That doesn't mean it's not open to criticism, though.

<comment><USER17> > Yes, fairness was certainly made the default for reasons at some point (but > still, even then, one might argue that an opt-in solution might have been > better).

I think an unfair or opt-in-fair solution was deemed worse than fair-by- default for the simple reason that the most straightforward way to implement mutexes is

      enter kernel mode
      maybe grab a spinlock if on SMP
      add yourself to the waiting list
      sleep until woken up

      do critical section

      enter kernel mode
      spinlock
      wake the first waiting thread

That's a functionality every mutex must have and it happens to give fair semantics for free. Making semantics weaker for the purpose of optimization (and not just for the sake of making application developer's life harder or future flexibility which may happen to never be needed) actually takes additional work on top of that.

Since we are talking about a uniprocessor desktop OS developed in the nineties, it's plausible they didn't care about mutex performance as much as today and giving this extra guarantee afforded by their simple implementation seemed reasonable at the time.

<comment><USER18> note that every half decent mutex implementation _will not_ enter the kernel (in neither lock or unlock) unless the mutex is contended.

<comment><USER17> Sure, but OP's benchmark clearly shows that OS X's default mutex is at most 5% decent ;)

<comment><USER11> I'd love to see them perform the same benchmark on macOS 10.12. Pthread mutexes were sped up in "the new OSes" according to a tweet made last year (sorry no link), though I'm not sure if that was referring to 10.11 or 10.12. Either way, the benchmark should perform better now, and I'm curious how much. I'd run it myself except those numbers wouldn't be comparable to OP's Mac Mini benchmark. Of course, OP's Linux benchmark numbers aren't either, because it's a different (and probably much more powerful) machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > I don't know how firstfit policy locks compare to something like WTF::Lock > on my Mac mini

As a layperson, it would have been nice to see at least some simple benchmarks substantiating what is being said, after several paragraphs trying to explain why WTF::Lock is not a good candidate, and given it's in the title of the post.

</comment><comment><USER20> > But fairness is not guaranteed for all OS mutexes; in fact, fairness isn't > even guaranteed in the pthreads standard

Is this true? I do not want to have to pay to read the standard

<comment><USER18> Good thing it is available for free then!

<comment><USER20> Where? I didn't find it</comment></comment></comment>


L0pht Heavy Industries Testifying at the United States Senate (1998) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVJldn_MmMY

<comment><USER2> Ironic that some members turned out to be rats for the feds.

<comment><USER3> [http://www.stuffaboutcode.com/2013/07/raspberry-pi- reading-c...](http://www.stuffaboutcode.com/2013/07/raspberry-pi-reading-car- obd-ii-data.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice find! I remember when this happened</comment>


TCL came out of nowhere to capture the US TV market. Up next: cheap phones - <AUTHOR> https://www.protocol.com/tcl-roku-tv-profit-smartphone <comment><USER2> Perhaps I'm an old fogey, but every time I see "TCL" my first thought is towards the programming language.</comment>


Why Hasn't Google Released a 'Bootstrap' for Material Design? - <AUTHOR> http://www.jasonshen.com/2015/why-hasnt-google-released-a-bootstrap-for-material-design/

<comment><USER2> Polymer Starter Kit [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9630780](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9630780)

A starting point for building web applications with Polymer 1.0 Included out of the box:

Polymer, Paper and Iron elements Material Design layout Routing with Page.js Unit testing with Web Component Tester Offline-first setup through Service Worker elements End-to-end Build Tooling (including Vulcanize)

Much thanks to Rob Dodson, Addy Osmani and at al the Polymer Team.</comment>


In a legacy Rails app, drink every time… - <AUTHOR> https://www.valent.io/article/legacy-rails-drinking-game/ <comment><USER2> I learned what technical dept was using Rails. Rails feels like constantly creating technical dept for future developers, but I guess it is because you are more conscious of it.</comment>


Furor Over Web Poll to Keep or Abort Unborn Child - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1330860/Should-abortion--decide-U-S-couple-set-website-unborn-child.html

<comment><USER2> This is most certainly a marketing effort by the anti-abortionist. That said, it is very effective. You can't help but read the post see the pet name "Wiggles" and not feel a connection. This is a serious topic and I commend them for developing a "simulation" that leaves the reader feeling a situation that they are not involved in. It makes it real that is for sure. I don't know where I stand on the legality of abortion, but I do know where I stand on the morality of it. This exercise helps those not personally involved in the question, visualize the choice in front of someone.</comment>


The Jobs Numbers: Who's Hiring in America–and Who's Not - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/jobs-numbers/ <comment><USER2> Why is this forum flooded with bloomberg articles who has a free limit of two articles?</comment>


Learning binary file formats (2003) - <AUTHOR> https://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=20690 <comment><USER2> This is not from 2003. The date on the posts is 2018.

fasm is a very good assembler to start with, and I've used it a lot for various things over the years. Unfortunately one of the executable formats it's not able to generate (natively) is the 16-bit segmented protected-mode "NE" format (16-bit Windows), which forced me back to MASM for a recent project.

That said, like these posts show, it is possible to make fasm generate it "byte-by-byte" and perhaps macro-ise it for future use, although I had other constraints at the time which meant MASM was the easier choice.

<comment><AUTHOR> My original title - "Learning binary file formats (work in progress) from flat assembler Author". Someone edited it and I can't change title anymore looks like. :-)

<comment><USER3> calling dang...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A lot of people don't realize this, but macroassemblers are generally quite good at generating arbitrary binary data. Case in point: [https://github.com/corkami/pocs/tree/master/mini](https://github.com/corkami/pocs/tree/master/mini)</comment>


Yabbos: Yet another browser based operating system - <AUTHOR> http://yabbos.xyz/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, all! Ask, and ye shall be enlightened!

Seriously though, there is a hell of a lot to this thing and pretty much zero documentation. You can actually view the code that gets locally cached in /sys. It is possible to edit the system's code, but you need to have root permissions to do that.

The easiest way to get biofeedback from the bare desktop is to add the hotkey_apps parameter to the url like this:

[https://yabbos.xyz/desk?hotkey_apps=TextEdit,Arcade,Synth,Fa...](https://yabbos.xyz/desk?hotkey_apps=TextEdit,Arcade,Synth,Face)

Then you just press Ctrl+Alt+[1-9], where the number depends on the position in the list of apps, so Ctrl+Alt+1 opens the TextEdit app, etc. You can save files in TextEdit with Alt+s. The desktop currently uses the /tmp folder. You can always pop open a terminal with Alt+t.

<comment><USER2> Why were you unable to come up with an appropriate name for you browser based operating system?

[https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=yabbos](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=yabbos)

<comment><AUTHOR> I just came up with that name a couple days ago. Didn't check what alternative meanings it might have. I've been hacking on it since 2012. This project has gone by more than one name in the past. I easily get bored of staring at the same old name after awhile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even though the obscene meaning shows up at the top of search results, it is not a common idiom, and the rest of the search pages do not reflect the obscene meaning.

However, this HN page does show up in the fifth page of search results, so maybe we can take the opportunity, right here and right now to change the main meaning to a more useful, less obscene one :) !</comment></comment></comment></comment>