Ubuntu One file syncing code Open Sourced - <AUTHOR> https://insights.ubuntu.com/2015/08/10/ubuntu-one-file-syncing-code-open-sourced <comment><USER3> An active FOSS alternative to this is Syncthing. [https://github.com/syncthing](https://github.com/syncthing)

<comment><USER4> I really like the philosophy of the project and the guys running it, but my recent experience trying to use it as a dropbox replacement has been bad: machines that stayed "syncing..." forever, deleted files that reappeared after a while, renamed folders resulting in duplicated folders with both the old and the new name...

I think it's just that the software is not yet mature and production-ready, and perhaps I was throwing too much data at it at once. Seeing the project progress, I'm confident that when it becomes more stable it will be a very nice piece of software, but it's not there yet.

<comment><USER5> Not sure what is causing your bad experience. Are you using an up-to-date version? I have been deploying it across 4 different computers and it works like a charm.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I was using the last version in all machines (some mint, some arch).

I was trying to sync seven machines in three different physical locations, some with slow internet connectivity; only one machine in each location had its syncthing ports open to the internet through NAT. I'm not sure it's a supported use case: syncing in the same LAN generally worked fine, but changes often didn't propagate correctly to other locations; for instance a folder name change sometimes was not propagated to the remote locations, and after some time the machine in which the rename had happened detected that the rest of the machines in the syncthing group had a folder which didn't exist locally (the folder with the old name), and downloaded it from its peers. The result was that the folder was duplicated everywhere, with both the old and the new name.

The same happened sometimes with deletions: sometimes they didn't propagate over LAN boundaries, and this resulted in the deleted files reappearing after some time.

A machine staying "syncing..." forever also happened sometimes, requiring a manual restart of the service. I couldn't reliably reproduce it though.

I like the project and I'm sure if I reported the issues in github they'd have given support. I wish I had the time for properly reporting and investigating, but I really needed a syncing solution I could trust for a small business and I needed it ASAP, so I settled for owncloud (which for the moment has not given me any surprises). I will try to find some time to reproduce the bugs in my personal machines and report them, but I really didn't have the time when I found them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One year ago I said it will be awesome if they did, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8347760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8347760) It is AWESOME :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Neat. I really liked Ubuntu One. However, if they seek to receive contributions I think GitHub would give them more exposure than launchpad, from what I can tell the history is not preserved (probably with good reasons) so the switch from bazaar would not have been painful.

<comment><USER8> _> if they seek to receive contributions_

They don't. This is a code dump for a dead project. From the FAQ:

        "Will you take patches?"
        In general, no.
        We won't have anybody assigned to reviewing and accepting code.
        We'd encourage interested maintainers to fork the code [...]

<comment><USER7> I've missed that, thanks! Then it totally makes sense since it's their own platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So could this evolve into a better owncloud server? I don't think AGPL is a problem for the majority of owncloud usecases. It looks it's based on Python & Postgres - maybe it has better performance than owncloud?

</comment><comment><USER10> That's good news, but in my experience Ubuntu One file sync never worked very well. Maybe someone can improve it now we have the code.

It's also worth noting that this is a centralized, server-based file sync, unlike the peer-to-peer Syncthing and BTSync. It's more like Dropbox.

</comment><comment><USER11> Any chance of seeing any docs covering this? For example, addressing the overall architecture?

</comment><comment><USER12> As a person who does not always want or need to install another VCS tool (Bazaar) I have created a cloned copy on Github (I'm sure others have done so as well but they haven't posted here yet from what I could find). Enjoy! [https://github.com/stevegood/filesync- server](https://github.com/stevegood/filesync-server)

</comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know why they didn't open source it in the first place? Couldn't find anything in the article.

<comment><USER14> Third point in the FAQ:

        Why did it take so long to release?

        Our engineering team was tasked with supporting
        the release of the phone and then the now
        announced Snappy project. The team cared deeply
        about open sourcing this code and spent time
        wherever they could spare in moving it forward,
        cleaning up the code so it would work enough
        outside of the very specific production
        environment and untangle it of some commercial
        code that was used at some point.

<comment><USER15> exactly, Cannonical is really doing too many things with limited resource at the same time.

<comment><USER16> The obvious follow-up question is, given their limited resources, why were they spending some of it on closed-source code based on other people's commercial code?

<comment><USER17> What're you talking about, there?

<comment><USER16> The answer quoted above said they needed to spend time to "untangle it of some commercial code that was used at some point." That just strikes me as a bizarre problem for Canonical to have even had.

<comment><USER18> Only if your focus is open source. UbuntuOne was conceived of as a service, so to make the project go faster and solve problems commercial products were used. As you'd expect you then have to disentangle that code to release you code as open source - happens all the time in big proprietary code bases that are being open sourced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is exciting. Alternatives currently are things like Dropbox (proprietary and somewhat pricy) and TorrentSync (proprietary). I look forward to firing this thing up on my own server and have a private remote file storage. I do currently run a NAS but without a VPN connection home it's not as useful.

<comment><USER20> There's also Seafile, which I've been using for a quite a while now and really impressed by.

<comment><USER21> I tried to package and run Seafile, but it was kind of complex, and under- documented. Also, the first time I got it to run on my server, it ran my Linux server into the ground (IIRC it kept the CPU so busy that I couldn't do anything through SSH -- had to reboot the server to get back in). I also got the impression the open source community isn't that active -- i.e., it's mostly maintained by the commercial backers (some Chinese company, I think).

On the other hand, Syncthing is a clear demonstration where deploying Go code is dead easy, although I really don't like Go's packaging all that much.

The one thing I still want from Syncthing is a way to have client-side encryption, e.g. have remote storage with zero knowledge of the actual data I'm storing.

<comment><USER20> What specific trouble do you have with it? I have it setup on a server with a semi reasonable deployment/update mechanism managed through fabric and ansible.

I understand the setup was crappy (you have to leverage their script), but I believe Debian is looking at packaging it so maybe in the future that flow will be better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder how long until someone creates an Android client for this (one that is configurable, not hard-coded to point to the defunct Ubuntu One servers).

I'd love to run a ZFS-backed Ubuntu One server for all my family's portable devices.

</comment><comment><USER23> A very good response to Win10s inclusion of closed-source, proprietary, non- removable, everything-is-uploaded, "just trust us", spyware. Ubuntu isn't perfect, but it's far more trustworthy than anything MS has put out in recent decades.

<comment><USER8> Not really. This is dead code, U1 was discontinued. It's more like if MS opensourced Bob.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, in the FAQ of the article it becomes pretty clear how dead this code is:

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

      Do I have to sign a contributor agreement to modify the code?

No. This is no longer an active project, we are providing the code for public to read and use on their own.

      Will you take patches?

In general, no. We won't have anybody assigned to reviewing and accepting code. We'd encourage interested maintainers to fork the code and build out a community around it.

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

So, I mean, er, thanks for open sourcing a dead project. But still under an AGPLv3 license.... meh.

<comment> vezzy-fnord _So, I mean, er, thanks for open sourcing a dead project. But still under an AGPLv3 license.... meh._

A project gets released as free software, and not only do you make a sarcastic thanks, but you moan about how it's using a license that ensures you pass on the same freedom to other users. Talk about entitlement.

<comment><USER16> This is Canonical, a company that would not have existed on the work of the free software community. For them to even consider writing closed-source software is entitlement.

<comment><USER25> 90% if not more of web startups from the last 10 years would not exist without free software. Is it entitlement that Facebook has closed-source software? Dropbox? GitHub?

<comment><USER16> Canonical's primary _product_ is Ubuntu, which is, to first order, a repackaging of Debian. Facebook and Dropbox just _use_ free software. GitHub is sort of in between; certainly they have invested a lot into the stuff besides raw git hosting, which is why they have such a dominant position, but certainly git itself is a core part of their product.

<comment><USER18> Canonical has put a lot of energy into open source for a decade - <USER2> code and putting free software into the hands of millions around the world. It should be entitled (your word, different usage) to write proprietary code if it thinks that's the right approach.

If you constantly burn the companies and people who actually work on open source for not meeting the purity standard then you make it a hard environment. Honestly, there are way more fully proprietary software companies out there, or companies using but not contributing anything to open source to have a go at.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Twitter bans Russia Today and Sputnik from advertising on its service - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/26/twitter-bans-russia-today-and-sputnik-from-advertising-on-its-service/ <comment><USER2> Dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15559025](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15559025)

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, my company's proxy blocks Twitter, so I am happy with this link ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, well done twitter. About time. Now how about those Nazies and Russian bots can you block them???</comment>


YC Hacks Winner: Athelas – Blood imaging and analysis from your smartphone - <AUTHOR> http://ychacks.challengepost.com/submissions/25781-athelas

<comment><USER3> 2nd place: [http://ychacks.challengepost.com/submissions/25794-nunchuck-...](http://ychacks.challengepost.com/submissions/25794-nunchuck- js)

3rd place: [http://ychacks.challengepost.com/submissions/25746-vrniture](http://ychacks.challengepost.com/submissions/25746-vrniture)

My favorites:

[http://ychacks.challengepost.com/submissions/25722-savant](http://ychacks.challengepost.com/submissions/25722-savant) \- basically text searchable system playback. Think Timemachine meets quicktime recorder.

[http://ychacks.challengepost.com/submissions/25720-gezi- web-...](http://ychacks.challengepost.com/submissions/25720-gezi-web-browser) \- Tabless browser. It was an interesting concept using the history as the search/navigation display. He struggled to sell during the pitch.

[http://ychacks.challengepost.com/submissions/25770-listening...](http://ychacks.challengepost.com/submissions/25770-listeningpost) \- This was an audio parser that realtime searched what you were saying in a conversation. So if you said "Apple stock versus microsoft stock" it would search and result would be displayed.

<comment><USER4> > > [http://ychacks.challengepost.com/submissions/25770-listening...](http://ychacks.challengepost.com/submissions/25770-listening..). > - This was an audio parser that realtime searched what you were saying in a > conversation. So if you said "Apple stock versus microsoft stock" it would > search and result would be displayed.

I guess it really depends on your way of speaking, voice, tone, because for me this does not work very well. Too bad, the idea is great.

EDIT: so what? I get downvoted because it does not work as well for me as in the demo? Interesting.

<comment><USER5> One of the team members here, there's definitely a lot of work needed to improve the general speech recognition capabilities behind it. We also were mostly excited about the idea that over time as that technology improves this type of service automatically improves as well.

Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not only is this an impressive application of data science in solving a real problem, I'm even more impressed that Tanay is still in high school and already building great hacks leveraging computer vision and machine learning. Truly awesome work that deserves the recognition.

</comment><comment><USER7> I love the idea and the scrappy implementation, but how does anyone know that this works? What was it validated against? Should the title maybe be "Idea for cheap disease analysis via blood sample and iOS"

<comment><USER8> As an analytical chemist also with a degree in biochem who has worked extensively on blood analysis, this will not work at any meaningful rate of reliability. I sometimes get frustrated when the key part of some great breakthrough is hid behind a buzzword as if its a cure-all for the details. I would love to know how "machine learning" is going to just magically make this work at a reliable rate. I guess I am just a pessimistic lab rat.

<comment><USER9> Indeed it won't. Microscopy is hardly the bottleneck in hematology; and neither is cell counting, which is already carried on by automated analyzers for the most part anyway [1,2]. The problem is the need of _differential staining_ : due to fundamental physical limits, no amount of machine learning can ever distinguish key hematocytes like lymphocytes from granulocytes in raw, unstained samples from microphotographs alone. So unless you use spectroscopy --and there's been some work done on that, _eg_ [3,4]--, you need to _spread_ , _fix_ and _stain_ your sample, each of which take a series of choreographed steps, reagents and considerable skill in controlled conditions to get (minimally) right [5] --hence the need for a lab.

So unless they attached a USB microspectrometer to the iPod, or streamlined the existing sample preparation process in a low-cost, fully-portable form; they are just solving the wrong problem.

[1] [http://www.mlo-online.com/articles/201401/automation-in- hema...](http://www.mlo-online.com/articles/201401/automation-in-hematology- heres-the-state-of-the-art-in-2014.php)

[2] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18550479](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18550479)

[3] [http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?uri=FiO-2008-FWD5](http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?uri=FiO-2008-FWD5)

[4] [http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/cgi/content/meeting_abstra...](http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/cgi/content/meeting_abstract/72/8_MeetingAbstracts/1705)

[5] [http://mmserver.cjp.com/gems/blood/lh.6.1.houwen.pdf](http://mmserver.cjp.com/gems/blood/lh.6.1.houwen.pdf)

<comment><USER10> I was wondering about the need for staining. Is there potential that they could stain the blood sample and potentially get a result? I'm speaking relatively hypothetically.

This is at least more in the right direction than what I had seen previously.

I saw much worse a few months ago at a competition I was in. The winning team "created" a device (that looked like a USB key). They claimed that if you had a sore throat you could take a sample with a q-tip, insert into the device, and it would magically determine the presence of an infection. Those were their words. I was horrified and when I approached the organizers afterwards they didn't understand my explanation on why it was not possible. Indeed, after that time as I have spoken about it most people do not understand that it's not currently possible. Sci-fi blurs the realm of possibility for many and it seems reasonable to them. Back to the actual contest, mine was an "idea competition" and not a YC Hackathon.

Tanay's idea is leaps and bounds closer to the realm of possibility than the idea behind the other team I witnessed. For that, his age, and his other work on his startup clipped.me, I congratulate him and look forward to seeing him come up with something truly useful in the future.

<comment><USER11> The Oxford Nanopore Minion is "usb scale": [https://www.nanoporetech.com/technology/the-minion- device-a-...](https://www.nanoporetech.com/technology/the-minion-device-a- miniaturised-sensing-system/the-minion-device-a-miniaturised-sensing-system)

Not quite built in a weekend, but certainly within the realm of possibility.

<comment><USER12> Just for context, Oxford Nanopore have struggled a fair bit with getting this device to work. They have recently released quite promising prototype devices, but the project is many years behind schedule. Albeit that isn't surprising given what a massive shift in technology it is.

<comment><USER11> Oh, sure, but no one thinks they are violating the laws of physics anymore. It's "just" engineering now to get the accuracy and sustained-read lengths high enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Was the lens ready prior to YC Hacks?

I am not trying to take away from what they built, but I am genuinely curious what all was done prior to YC Hacks, since building the lens there seems like a challenge in itself.

<comment><USER14> Here's what I used: [http://www.edmundoptics.com/optics/optical-lenses/ball- conde...](http://www.edmundoptics.com/optics/optical-lenses/ball-condenser- lenses/n-bk7-ball-lenses/2041)

Basically, I took a piece of rubber, poked a hole in it, and fit the lens in. It took a couple of hours to get the positioning right but after that it worked like a charm :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> one question: why is every single person in the YC Hacks photos using a variant of the macbook? i'm someone who is about to pursue a CS degree, and also embarking on an autodidactic journey in software development and i'm entirely used to windows machines and do not personally like the mac interface that much (possibly simply out of habit). why is it so prevalent for developers and programmers to use macs? are windows machines inferior for such purposes?

<comment><USER16> Windows: good window manager, bad stack

Ubuntu/linux: bad window manager, good stack

OSX: good window manager, good stack

Window manager: how much time you spend fussing with UI settings and how reliable it is day-to-day

Stack: how much time you spend installing, maintaining packages necessary for what you want to do (apps, libs, envs, etc.)

<comment><USER15> thanks for the concise response.

i'm curious though: as a layman in technical details but a fan of the tech world, i've always been under the impression that since windows was developed by a engineering-centric organization like MS, it should be far better for such technical uses, as opposed to OSX, developed by a design-centric company like Apple. am i completely wrong in that view?

<comment><USER16> If you're doing popular web-stack programming (python, ruby, node) you'll have a far better experience on a unix-based operating system since much of the tooling is designed with it in mind.

Windows has ports here and there, and there's always Cygwin, but it's going to feel like a compatibility layer the whole time you're using it (especially if you're following guides/stack overflow help).

I've used all three stacks for years and couldn't happier with my latest MBPr (hardware or software wise).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Where did they get malarial blood during the hackathon?

<comment><USER18> Perhaps the data they are using is available online somewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is correct. He said he used training data sets online to test.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nicely done! Manu Prakash's lab at Stanford has explored this bead-lens approach quite a bit with the Foldscope project:

[http://www.foldscope.com/](http://www.foldscope.com/)

[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0098781)

It has come up a few times on HN, e.g.: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7591573](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7591573)

</comment><comment><USER19> There have been a lot of these recently, actually something launched about a week ago. Still its great for a 30 hr hackathon.

[http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/ianxen-rapid-iphone- app-...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/ianxen-rapid-iphone-app-to- eradicate-malaria/#!bu496r)

Indiegogo:[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/end-malaria-on-bangka- isl...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/end-malaria-on-bangka-island- indonesia)

<comment><USER19> In fact the whole turn your iphone into microscope is a growing area of interest for bio-hackers.

This one seems to be similar to what was done at the hackathon. Would definitely try it one of these days.

[http://kottke.org/13/10/turn-your-iphone-into-a- microscope](http://kottke.org/13/10/turn-your-iphone-into-a-microscope)

[http://www.instructables.com/id/10-Smartphone-to-digital- mic...](http://www.instructables.com/id/10-Smartphone-to-digital-microscope- conversion/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This sounds like something that is done in every American hospital - <USER2> "automated diff." In a blood count, the cells are examined and determined to be red cells, white cells, or platelets. Within each category of cell there are sub-types (neutrophils, lymphocytes, monocytes, eosinophils, basophils) and sub-sub-types (bands, metamyelocytes, etc). Basically, you can automatically identify members of various cellular lineages.

Cool that they got this to work through an iPhone camera.

</comment><comment><USER21> Two words. Hats off !!. My initial pessimistic instinct told me that this was not completely built at the hackathon. Glad I read through the comments.

</comment><comment><USER22> Cool! This definitely deserved to win, I think. At the least it's better than the other YC Hacks thing I looked at, which had XSS holes! [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8130482](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8130482)

</comment><comment><USER23> In the article's slideshow there are a bunch of interesting pictures. The very last picture looks to be a box full of Lego blocks? What did that component of the solution do? :)

<comment><USER14> Glad you mentioned it! Originally I was using that as a mount for the microscope, but unfortunately the lights placed in it weren't strong enough. The iPhone camera flash turned out to work best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Try getting FDA approval for this and see what happens.

</comment><comment><USER25> For those that attended, was it tough to concentrate in that large warehouse-y room? Looked loud and busy.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was noisy at times and the chairs were pretty flimsy but that's part of the fun of hackathons. It's a test of a lot of things like time management, concentration, will power, teamwork, communication, etc. Afterawhile you get so focused on what you're doing you don't notice how big it is.

Some teams were in the old YC building as well. I have to say they did a pretty good job organizing. Wifi was perfect, power was everywhere, food was awesome and plentiful, events happened on time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Athelas is pretty awesome, and potentially life-saving. Fantastic job Tanay.

</comment><comment><USER27> Very impressive work, and great name as well.

</comment><comment><USER28> How is this different than lifelens?

<comment><USER5> Is lifelens active anymore? Their blog looks like it's been hacked and hasn't been updated in a while. More info on LifeLens here ([http://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferhicks/2014/07/30/biomimi...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferhicks/2014/07/30/biomimicry- continues-to-evolve-fly-inspires-tiny-microphone/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Interesting that nothing in the original post says iOS. Only HN's title. In fact the page linked to says

"BUILT FOR Android iOS Mobile – HTML Web Desktop – Mac Desktop – Other Hardware / Wearable"

<comment><AUTHOR> I was there when he demo'd and he used an iPhone. He never mentioned anything else so I assumed.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which Linux filesystem "produce" less wear and tear on SSD NAND? - <AUTHOR> Linux filesystems usually do lot of read and write on storage eg. hhd and ssd. On the other hand SSD are getting cheaper but give a less TBW per capacity. So which Linux FS is doing less writes (write amplification) on SSD? EXT3, EXT4, XFS, BTRFS, F2FS ...? Linux OS is for desktop use! <comment><USER2> I have two laptops with SSDs running only Linux, and they both have mostly been powered on for two years or more (XFS and BTRFS). Both are still operating normally and smartctl shows minimal wear.

I would focus on mount options that limit writing (e.g., relatime/noatime) or putting ~/.cache on tmpfs.

In my experience ~/.cache gets the most frequent writing during normal desktop usage. A lot of applications ignore XDG standards and create their own snowflake folder directly in $HOME. You might want to watch for and replace those making a lot of writes with a symlink to where they belong. (This quickly became a frustrating battle that I lost).

<comment><USER3> Funny story: almost three years ago I got a second hand thinkPad T440. It came with a 240GB ssd. A second hand laptop with an used ssd inside.

At the time I didn't have much money so I just kept the drive and decide to possibly face the issue.

I still use it, of course (it's my personal laptop).

Some days ago I switched to root and noticed a dead.letter file in root's home directory.

I examined the file and it was an email dropped into the home directory by smartd, alerting me that my hard drive was near failure.

The funny thing is, that email was from February 2018. More than two years since that email, that drive is still working.

<comment><USER4> Well, well, I guess we are a movement then. _I_ got a secondhand T440p three years ago, with a 240GB SSD. This machine is indestructible - it had already seen heavy use in an engineering company, and I really haven't spared it either. Running various permutations of Arch and Xfce all the way through. Last month, I finally _did_ upgrade the SSD to a brand new Samsung EVO 1TB. The old unit (also a Samsung EVO, as it turned out) is doing just fine, though, but now running in a non-critical convenience setup.

I can't really sing enough praises for this ancient ThinkPad, now also with a new very cheap, ridiculously superb display and stuffed full of RAM. I have a newer, sleeker, faster Lenovo Something sitting around, but somehow the 440 is what I always end up using.

<comment><USER5> What is the resolution of the display?

<comment><USER4> 1920x1080, high as the T440p will go. At around USD 70 on eBay, I am blown backwards by the quality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think you would get more mileage out of tracking where all the writes are, and making whatever changes are needed to reduce them.

Auditd, can, for example, track every write. Track it over a good sample period of typical use, then make whatever changes are needed. Might be database tuning, moving specific files to tmpfs, changing the way you do backups, reducing writes to syslog, changing fs mount options, etc.

Auditd is a little complex, but it's fairly easy to find write-ups on how to monitor writes and generate use reports.

<comment><USER7> You can just use the find command for tracking writes, for example:

      find / -type f -printf '%TY-%Tm-%Td %TT %p\n' | sort

(you probably want to add -mount in there too and use find per each mount point separately)

<comment><USER6> Auditd would show frequency, the process name and uid that did the write, and when, etc. Last modified time isn't always enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Rule of thumb: your preferred FS will be OK. Limiting write is _not_ a goal in and of itself.

See [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Improving_performance#R...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Improving_performance#Reduce_disk_reads/writes)

<comment><USER9> True for SSDs; if you're using COTS _SD cards_ (think RPi), it might be still a concern.

I managed to get plenty of useful life from an old, failing SD card by only loading (R/O) the bootloader, kernel and initramfs, and never touching it beyond initramfs (mount a USB drive as /). Similarly for an ancient PATA (!) SSD in a netbook: grub+kernel+initramfs, and nothing else; saves me from a USB stick out the side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there likely to be any meaningful difference? With most worthwhile SSDs incorporating a sizable DRAM cache and OS file system caching on top, would day-to-day journaling and other overhead be expected to make a dent in SSD longevity?

</comment><comment><USER11> Ext3, ext4, and XFS have a journal that's constantly being overwritten. On Btrfs, the file system is the journal. It does have a bit of a wandering trees problem [1], where F2FS expressly intends to reduce the wandering tree problem.[2] There's also different approaches that don't involve filesystems [3].

But I think you have to assess the crash resistance and repairability of filesystems, not just worry about write amplification. I think there's too much made about SSD wear. The exception are the consumer class of SD Card and USB flash, those are junk to depend on for persistent usage, best suited for occasional use, and all eventually fail. If you're using such flash, e.g. in an embedded device, you probably want to go with industrial quality flash to substantially improve reliability.

Consider putting swap on zram [4] or using zswap [5]. I've used both, typically with a small pool less than 1/2 of RAM. I have no metric for clearly deciding a winner, either is an improvement over conventional swap. Perhaps hypothetically zswap should be better because it's explicitly designed for this use case; where zram is a compressed RAM disk on which you could put anything, including swap. But in practice, I can't tell a difference performance wise.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.08514](https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.08514)

[2] [https://lwn.net/Articles/520829/](https://lwn.net/Articles/520829/)

[3] [https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast13/technical- sessions/...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast13/technical- sessions/presentation/lu_youyou)

[4] [https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/blockdev/zram.txt](https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/blockdev/zram.txt) [https://github.com/systemd/zram-generator](https://github.com/systemd/zram- generator)

[5] [https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt](https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt)

</comment><comment><USER12> Have a look at this paper [0]

While there are big gaps of write amplification for metadata writes, on macro benchmarks all filesystems have similar results.

btrfs has the biggest WAF, but you can enable compression globally and I suspect that difference alone will make it come ahead of others.

[0] Analyzing IO Amplification in Linux File Systems [https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.08514](https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.08514)</comment>


The Chemical History of a Candle (1848) - <AUTHOR> https://www.bartleby.com/30/7.html <comment><USER2> This is one of my favourite books! It's very readable with a bit of effort, and must have been riveting to see in person.

I most enjoy how thoroughly Faraday demonstrates how exactly they were able to know what they knew at the time - which gets into pretty advanced stuff. I doubt many today could so easily explain how we know certain scientific facts to be true, let alone demonstrate the chain of reasoning on their desktop.

At the time this would have been cutting edge science put into a lecture for children; his massive electromagnet would have been like having a cyclotron in a lecture hall today. At the same time, despite being something like 170 years ago, Faraday manages to stick pretty much to facts that we would still agree on today, despite all the scientific revolutions that have happened since then (like disproving the aether, understanding atoms and heat, electromagnetism, and such). Pretty much the only archaic aspects of it are the names of the chemicals he uses.

His explanation about the essence of what makes fire glow is also the best I have ever encountered.

<comment><USER3> _> despite being something like 170 years ago,_

 _> Faraday manages to stick pretty much to facts that we would still agree on today,_

 _> despite all the scientific revolutions that have happened since then_

So much like how good Product Managers / Architects "spec-out" the system.

The implementation(s) may be left open (or change over time), but the architecture remains valid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bill Hammack, engineerguy on YouTube, did a video series based on these lectures that are a very good.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrHnLXMTOWM&list=PL0INsTTU1k...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrHnLXMTOWM&list=PL0INsTTU1k2UCpOfRuMDR- wlvWkLan1_r)

<comment><USER5> I tried to read this book a few years ago and my first thought was, "This book would be much better as a video." Look forward to watching this.

<comment><USER6> That makes sense because originally it wasn't a book but a live performance by Michael Faraday (who was a pioneer of scientific popularization besides being a great original researcher).</comment></comment></comment>


Apple Reports Record Fourth Quarter Results - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/10/27Apple-Reports-Record-Fourth-Quarter-Results.html <comment><USER2> 32% quarterly profit growth, 22% quarterly revenue growth. Good night.

In case you're doing the math at home:

~$24M/hour.

~$500,000/minute.

~$6,500/second.

(And an extra $200B in the bank.) Unbelievable.

<comment><USER3> In this quarter AAPL have made more profit than AMAZ has ever made in its entire lifetime as a company, and probably for the next 5 years too.

AAPL also has about the same revenue growth as FB/GOOGL, while trading at about 1/10th the PE.

Man, Wall Streets really, really hate this company.

<comment><USER2> To be fair, Amazon is a pretty bad company to compare to with regard to profit; Amazon intentionally tries to have 0 profits while increasing revenue.

Apple is literally running into the, "How much more money could you possibly make?" problem.

<comment><USER4> Which is ridiculous on the face of it - why would Wall St. subsidize Amazon's quest for 0 profits while spurning Apple's kingly quarterly earnings?

The reason is that Wall St. is threatened by Apple because they cannot control them.

<comment><USER5> I disagree. The only point people on Wall St pay attention to is how to make more money. Apple depends a lot on iPhone for it's profits to trading at other companies' P/E.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> With that unbelievable 40% margin it seems like they could wipe out all competition by lowering their prices. I wonder if they worry that that would get them into monopoly territory and bring heavier regulation.

<comment><USER7> Apple is a premium* brand. They don't make commodity products.

I think there are better articles out there than this one [0], but it was the first search result.

Thinking about their behaviors through that lens is interesting and, to me, clarifies a lot of the strategy behind some of their actions. Fun stuff.

[0]:[http://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/15/apple-is-a-luxury-brand- not-a...](http://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/15/apple-is-a-luxury-brand-not-a-tech- company.html) AUTO PLAY NON-MUTED VIDEO WARNING

<comment><USER8> Apple is in general a premium brand, not a luxury brand. The Apple Watch Edition is their first foray into luxury brand territory,

See: [http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/05/luxury-vs- pr...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/05/luxury-vs-premium.html)

<comment><USER7> I agree. That's a great little writeup - thanks for posting it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Apple shipped 48 million barometers this quarter, up from 39 million in Q4 of last year.

<comment><USER10> That's a good litmus

<comment><USER9> Mhm. You might say that the barometer shipments are a good...barometer of Apple's performance. More seriously, I'm actually interested because I'm on a mission to crowdsource atmospheric pressure data from at least 1 billion barometers, so the more Apple ships the better. Projects like PressureNet[1] and Sunshine[2] are only currently accessing a tiny portion of what's now available for weather forecasting.

[1] Android: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.cumulonimbu...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.cumulonimbus.barometernetwork)

[2] iPhone: [https://thesunshine.co/](https://thesunshine.co/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apple is leveraging its established ground to pursue more profit. This requires operation excellence. However, to win in the future, it needs products like what Jobs delivered. Based on the products Apple offered in the post-Jobs era so far, Apple has not shown any sign to provide a product that really shines as a whole. Even though I am a big fan of Apple, this makes me wonder its future.

edit: typo

<comment><USER12> I think about this a lot, but I can't come up with a single product that has an average selling price of over $600, that pretty much EVERYONE (at least adults) in the world would need, that they would also want to upgrade every two years.

The Watch would be this device as long as its gets more independent of the phone. Maybe a car in the future!

But in the near term, I would imagine their growth would taper off as more and more of the developing world get an iPhone (China still has few more years of growth) & Moore's law means features aren't added as often.

<comment><USER4> > But in the near term, I would imagine their growth would taper off as more > and more of the developing world get an iPhone (China still has few more > years of growth) & Moore's law means features aren't added as often.

Apple has enough in the bank to make a strategic shift or leap into another market when that starts to happens (who knows what they haven't released that they've been prototyping for years).

<comment><USER11> The problem is not about resources. It's about the organization's product- oriented DNA and its familiarity to the field it works on. I hope Apple could show us some more polished products so that as someone who works on iOS could see a clearer and brighter future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While they're busy counting money, they managed to ship an iOS who stutters on their flagship phone : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGCA_v4WUaI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGCA_v4WUaI)

The performance downgrade is even worse on last years 6, 6+ and 5S, they stutter and drop frames while scrolling.

<comment><USER14> I really don't understand why you got downvoted. I am extremely worried by the latest iOS release that managed to make an iphone 6s laggier on ios 9.1 than an iphone 5 on ios 8 for an app i'm currently developping. Provided that ios 9 brings absolutely nothing fundamentaly new, and how buggy ios 9.0 was, that makes me hope really strongly that they had the interns work on that release while the good developpers were working on revamping the whole os for ios10.

We all know that blackberry was still making great sales until the very last moments of its expected collapse, simply because good business managers always find a way to grab some profits in the short term eventhough things look bad in the long term.

<comment><USER15> iOS 9.1 is causing major performance issues on the iPhone 6s? I assume the recommendation is to stick with 9.0.2 at this point then?

<comment><USER13> You have no choice with 6S, since it shipped with iOS9. 9.0.2 stutters too.

<comment><USER15> Yes, when I bought it (at the Apple Store), it came with iOS9. I have updated it to 9.0.2 but have yet to update it to 9.1. I haven't noticed any problems, though (except for one issue with the Facebook app going crazy -- so that the phone was hot to the touch when I picked it up -- but that only happened once).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love the profits that this industry can bring, that much is amazing. Deploying that capital, like on R&D and acquisition is Apple's bigger problem now. The dividend is not bad either!

With the added competition from Microsoft, I'm sure they will be pushing even harder for the next release. I am hoping a recent down-trend will be well reverse via software updates to come, apparently the phones need some more optimization? But also nice to see competition on features, form factor, power, display size... seems like some really good Surface products and I'm not following Apple as closely I guess.

The market has no idea how to value it. Which should mean a huge opportunity for someone who does?

(I wonder if 10 hours late this can get any responses)

</comment><comment><USER17> Something important to consider is whether this beat analyst expectations or not. Your earnings could grow by 20%, but if the stock had priced in 25% growth then you'll still see your stock drop after a report.

Anybody know whether this beat expectations or not? It doesn't explicitly say it in the press release.

Edit: According to Fortune, looks like this was a modest beat: [http://fortune.com/2015/10/27/apple-beats-expectations- stock...](http://fortune.com/2015/10/27/apple-beats-expectations-stock-pops/)

<comment><USER3> Well.. considering AAPL has about the same P/E as IBM/HP, which has about -10% growth, I would personally say the growth is not priced in at all.

But even though it's priced as if the company is dying, analysts are still expecting it to grow 20%+.

The disconnect is almost funny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Eventually people will realize how grossly overpriced their iPhone is and the party will slowly come to an end... There are so many great alternatives at much lower cost.

</comment><comment><USER19> iPhone gets them ~63%. iPad brings less than Mac hardware. Apple Watch is just ~4% after a year. Investors should probably be a bit worried.

<comment><USER20> Apple watch at ~4% in less than a year is amazing. Especially considering that most people are claiming it is an abject failure. Version 2 is typically when an Apple product hits its stride so I expect to see it grow.

The iPad was great when the iPhone was small, but Apple has basically cannibalized iPads with plus size phones. The large iPad Pro will be a wait and see thing.

<comment><USER21> There are so many interesting dynamics going on with tablets that it's really hard to read the tea leaves about where things are going. You seem to have long (in part because unsubsidized) upgrade cycles, larger phones, questions of reconvergence(?) with laptops, indirect competitors like Chromebooks in areas like education, very cheap entrants like the $50 Amazon Fire--the list goes on. I'm neither bearish nor bullish on tablets as a category simply because I find it so hard to really get my head around the space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There are people who make under $10 an hour assembling Apple computers in California. I teach at a community college and some of my students are employed at the factory. It's interesting how Apple gets a complete pass on their wages but companies that make a fraction of Apple's profits like Walmart or McDonald's are constantly criticized for how they pay their employees.

<comment><USER23> What computers are Apple assembling in California? They assemble the Mac Pro in Texas.

<comment><USER22> They're assembling the iMacs there and a few others

<comment><USER4> You mean Flextronics?

[http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/06/13/us-assembly-of- app...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/06/13/us-assembly-of-apples-new- mac-pro-to-be-handled-by-flextronics---report)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The importance of lifestyle branding! A lot of the iPhone sale could be attributed to the Rose Gold 6s.

      leaving the world better than we found it.

Good Grief!

Edit: Did I hit a nerve or what!</comment>


An Ex-Teacher Made a Video Game That Skewers the No Child Left Behind Act - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/an-ex-teacher-made-a-video-game-that-skewers-the-no-child-left-behind-act <comment><USER2> My wife teaches in a high poverty school and it just mystifies us that so much of the public debate about how to deal with the achievement gap focuses on blame.

We want to blame people. Teachers, parents, administrators, we're all looking for a scapegoat and there's no consensus which group is to blame.

But it's not that simple. There aren't any bad guys for us to nail to the cross. The achievement gap is the result of stark socioeconomic inequality.

Kids in poverty are kids not learning. The only way to deal with the achievement gap is for us to be brave enough as a society to deal with that. Failing schools are a symptom of disease of poverty, not the disease itself.

I strongly recommend everyone read this article: [http://www.salon.com/2013/08/25/i_taught_at_the_worst_school...](http://www.salon.com/2013/08/25/i_taught_at_the_worst_school_in_texas/)

My wife didn't write it, but it strongly resembles her day to day experience where she teaches.

<comment><USER3> >The achievement gap is the result of stark socioeconomic inequality.

The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker came out in 2002 and showed why this thinking is flawed. The achievement gap is significantly caused by genetic differences, and the correlation to income is not totally causation. The term used by geneticists "heritability" gives the proportion of differences between people (within a population), on some trait, that is caused by genetic differences. The traits that will determine your success at school, like personality and IQ are significantly heritable.

Here's a recent study from the UK that looked at identical (monozygotic) and fraternal (dizygotic) twins and gave heritability estimates for different school subjects: [http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273](http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273)

Article: [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131211185323.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131211185323.htm)

>The researchers found that for compulsory core subjects (English, Mathematics and Science), genetic differences between students explain on average 58% of the differences between GCSE scores. In contrast, 29% of the differences in core subject grades are due to shared environment -- such as schools, neighbourhoods or families which twins share. The remaining differences in GCSE scores were explained by non-shared environment, unique to each individual.

>Overall, science grades (such as Biology, Chemistry, Physics) were found to be more heritable than Humanities grades (such as Media Studies, Art, Music) -- 58% vs 42%, respectively.

<comment><USER4> You've pointed to a study that found a link between individual's grades and genetic differences in one country. But it's a big leap to go from there, and explain why a particular school would have bad grade averages, especially schools in different countries - unless you're making the argument that schools are composed of people from large groups of genetically similar people, and these people are necessarily very distinct from people at schools that have better grade averages. Intuitively, that seems unlikely to me; the society would have to be extremely stratified, geographically and genetically, with very little intermixing.

<comment><USER5> > _Intuitively, that seems unlikely to me; the society would have to be > extremely stratified, geographically and genetically, with very little > intermixing._

That sounds right to me. Gated communities, luxury buildings vs slums, FiDi vs. Outer Sunset -- communities are incredibly stratified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a parent and married to a wife who's a teacher in a public elementary school in a large school district, I can say all this talk of improving school, train teachers, etc is missing the mark. More of the responsibility rests with the parents, not with the school or teachers or administrators.

Sure teachers/school matter, but not as much as the parents from my observation.

<comment><USER2> The blame game is unhealthy. As long as our public discourse is about blaming parents, blaming teachers, or blaming anybody, we won't strike at the root of the problem, which is poverty. Kids living in poverty simply won't do well in school in statistically significant numbers. If we solve that, then we'll solve our achievement gap.

<comment> tom-lord How do you fix education? By fixing the poverty.

How do you fix poverty? By fixing the education.

Oh wait, hang on...

<comment><USER2> How do you fix poverty? By having a safety net not full of holes like swiss cheese.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As lousy as No Child Left Behind is, it annoys me how many people have completely forgotten that it was a reaction to terrible schools that couldn't be fixed, not the invention of them. Everyone just conveniently blames everything on those stupid tests now.

<comment><USER8> No - it was a FAKE reaction to school problems.

Fake because it was not designed to work - it was designed to require essentially no new funds.

Solutions to school problems exist, are known and were not chosen.

Raise teacher pay, make teaching a desirable career. Provide good school food, provide homework assistance, provide school buildings with low noise levels, provide working ventilation to lower classroom CO2 levels, make sure buildings are not fungus-infected ... the list goes on and on.

<comment><USER9> > Fake because it was not designed to work - it was designed to require > essentially no new funds.

Isn't this policy a federal intervention? If school funding is an issue, why not increase it at state or local level?

> Known solutions to school problems exist,

You fogot to mention getting rid of teacher unions and starting evaluation of teacher performance. The idea of teacher tenure is simply insane!

<comment><USER10> In reply to biehl.

Finland has been falling on the PISA tests and on other rankings does not do that well.

[http://www.economist.com/news/international/21591195-fall- fo...](http://www.economist.com/news/international/21591195-fall-former- nordic-education-star-latest-pisa-tests-focusing-interest)

The answer is clear from the international results. If you want a high performing school have big classes, high stakes tests and loads of repetition like the high performing Asian schools do.

Or you could ponder why with such great schools why developed Asian countries like Korea and Japan don't run rings around the US in, say, software development and if, in the end, average school rankings don't really matter that much.

<comment><USER11> I love how they use Shanghai to represent the whole of China. A few rich cities don't make for very interesting data points. Education in most of Asia is even more dysfunctional than in the states and definitely europe. Even Japan and Korea have mostly horrible schools focused on high stakes testing, outdated teaching methods, and suppressing as much creative thinking as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I thought the pineapple issue is only in Japan, Korea, China and most of countries in Asia so everyone's comment was quite surprising to me. Schools are built to create more workers to fulfill corporate or society's needs. The technology might make millions of jobs vanish in few decades so more and more schools will start teaching computer science to young kids and some exetreme cases might be, "hey, let's start educating our 3 year old boy/girl to learn coding"... The question would be, what schools provides? Education or Training?

<comment><USER13> The real difference in the US is the presence of a substantial number of schools that are instead on the school-to-prison-or-army pipeline. The "high- potential" students are encouraged to join the armed forces, while the kids who have caused trouble are piped into our for-profit incarceration system. I don't see that so much in Asia.

As for education vs training, that's a great question. A lot of my students want training initially because they are concerned about their economic futures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > ... the United States' No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which further tied > schools' funding to standardized testing results, by making students your > biggest problem. > by making students your biggest problem > students your > biggest problem > school</comment>


A hacker accessed a Ring camera and harassed an 8-year-old - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/12/12/she-installed-ring-camera-her-childrens-room-peace-mind-hacker-accessed-it-harassed-her-year-old-daughter/ <comment><USER2> Buy a surveillance device for your daughter, _get a surveillance device on your daughter_.

The main problem is that prolific advertising has been able to convince most everyone (not in the tech sector) that it's a good idea to fill your home with surveillance devices. This wasn't even some pragmatic compromise like a baby cam, but rather installing a security camera in an 8 year old's bedroom!

It's unfortunate that these kind of results are one of the few speedbumps to the surveillance industry's advertising. Although failing fast with petty crime is much nicer than failing long-term with highly organized crime!

</comment><comment><USER3> On the one hand, if this really is a result of hackers logging in with a re- used password that was found in another companies breach then I don't know what Amazon is really suppose to do. On the other hand, telling the family that and saying "nothing we could have done" seems like a terribly in- sufficient response. I empathize with both parties here, though obviously more so with the family. Maybe Amazon should require 2FA for logging into Ring?

<comment><USER4> Amazon should be proactively monitoring that their users haven't reused breached passwords. Every responsible service should be doing this.</comment></comment>


Bump (YC S09) has been acquired by Google - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bu.mp/post/61411611006/bump-google <comment><USER2> There are reasons NFC isn't taking off.

1) It's a technology, not a feature. Many companies, mostly Android handset makers but also Blackberry and Nokia, have included it in their devices as "yet another selling point". It was included not as a way to make a better device or experience for customers, but as a gimmick for upselling handsets.

2) It's insecure. Holy hell, Batman. Just spend a couple minutes reading through the security section of the NFC Wikipedia entry. It's insanely easy to read transactions remotely, _modify data_ , and jam signals. Even more, there is no hint of security built into the technology. None. No RF signal modification detection, no encryption.

3) Unreliable. While it sounds like a good idea on paper, for the most part it just doesn't work very well in practice. There's too many subpar implementations in too many devices. Just because you have a good one in your handset doesn't help when most of the limited ones available in public are cheap.

There's a damn good reason Apple hasn't included NFC. It's broken. They definitely put out crappy products from time to time (don't forget Ping, iPod socks, Maps, Siri, MobileMe, and about 300 variations of the Mac before Jobs came back). But NFC hasn't proven to be something useful or valuable. They won't include it. Perhaps something like it in the future, but never NFC in its current form.

<comment><USER3> NFC supports encryption, which solves the eavesdropping and unauthorized modification problems. It's done at the card level as an optional feature, since not all applications need encryption.

MIFARE DESFire comes to mind as one of the more popular cards with encryption, though I do recall there's others as well: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIFARE#MIFARE_DESFire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIFARE#MIFARE_DESFire)

And as for it being unreliable: [citation needed]. I've never had problems sending data to another NFC-enabled device. The only time I've ever had it not work was back when phones with non-NXP chipsets first started to appear on the market, and some folks were still selling standalone tags that used NXP's older proprietary format (MIFARE Classic) rather than the standardized format (NFC Forum). That's rarely a problem these days.

<comment><USER4> I don't think geuis is saying the actual communication is unreliable, but the actions are. I.e. the NFC part works, but the whole touch to share (say a video or whatever) part has more troubles. Which is a problem even though it is just a failing of handling things hugher up the stack it makes it look like NFC is problematic.

<comment><USER3> That's a fair point.

The lower level stuff and NDEF format is well standardized. The higher level operations are not nearly as well standardised right now, even more so when you're dealing with large files, which will require a handoff to Bluetooth or WiFi Direct.

In NFC's defense, it's only recently (4.2, Jelly Bean) that Android even supported transferring large files via Bluetooth handoff, so hopefully that stuff will improve with time.

<comment><USER2> Fair point too. I hope it does improve in time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Even though I hadn't thought about this company for a long time, _just yesterday evening_ I was wondering "whatever happened to Bump?" and checked their site.

Since the start they've had interesting technology (though of the kind that looks easier to implement than it really is) but, in my opinion at least, never found a killer app for it. I remember when they had that webpage where you would hit the space bar with your phone and that would be enough to create the connection. That was really cool, but it felt like a "cool trick" rather than something I ended up using.

edit: I didn't want to come off as negative and I'm sorry if it reads this way. Their solutions are very innovative and inventive, and _really_ feel magical. I just wish it had caught on more… Hopefully Google is planning on using the technology in many places. It would make sense of course for it to be part of the core of Android, but the syncing between mobile and desktop could be very useful as well.

</comment><comment><USER6> So did Bump fail or is this considered a successful exit?

I met some Bump folk a year ago. The company had a lot of employees and still wasn't making any money.

They basically burnt all their investors money. Calling this an acquisition is bending the truth.

<comment><USER7> _Calling this an acquisition is bending the truth._

Umm. Google bought them - that's an acquisition no matter if they are making money or not (unless "acquisition" has been redefined somehow)

<comment><USER8> The announcement doesn't actually say that Google bought them. It just says that the Bump team is joining Google.

<comment><USER6> I wish we could have more detail on these kind of transactions.

Someone glancing at the headline would assume this was a successful exist for a YCombinator backed company.

However, perhaps any remaining cash was returned to the original investors, less costs of liquidation, and any assets were "sold" to Google for $1 with some of the development team moving to Google as temporary contractors or probationary hires, rather than immediate permanent hires.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "... stay tuned for future updates"

read, Google will likely be shutting down our services within the next 6 months.

<comment><USER10> I agree, any service ever created should be forced to continue to run perpetually regardless value, user interest, or cost to the company running it.

<comment><USER11> I think you're confusing an "is" statement for an "ought" statement. Google probably _will_ be shutting Bump down. Is that a bad thing? The GP comment didn't say anything about that one way or another; just that it's probably going to happen, whether its defensible or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 4 years of hard work and novel thinking, followed by acquisition.

I don't know the Bump team, but I respect the effort and the outcome.

</comment><comment><USER13> Google acquires Bump. It's not the "bumping" that's valuable. It's figuring out two people are in proximity to each other that allows them to bump - that's Gold.

<comment><USER14> Is that a very difficult problem? I thought they just grab the location from the phone, send it to their service, and their service looks for other bumps in the physical and temporal vicinity. It's a rather clever solution, but not exactly a technology that seems worth acquiring, unless there are some patents or tricky performance optimizations I'm missing.

<comment><USER15> Can't elaborate, but there's quite a bit more to it than that. The rabbit hole is pretty deep.

<comment><USER14> Can anyone speculate? The only thing I'm coming up with is that it might require a geo index for quickly calculating the distances between a huge number of location pairs.

<comment><USER13> [http://www.quora.com/Bump-Acquired-by-Google-2013/How- does-B...](http://www.quora.com/Bump-Acquired-by-Google-2013/How-does-Bump- work)

<comment><USER16> Blocked once again by Quoras no reading more than a few words of the answer without logging in rule:(

<comment><USER17> tack on a share=1 query param at the end of the url. [http://www.quora.com/Google-Acquires-Bump- September-2013/How...](http://www.quora.com/Google-Acquires-Bump- September-2013/How-does-Bump-work?share=1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For awhile, I've thought that the problem with Bump is that it requires that the other person shares the same app (although recently I discovered that you can ask the other person to browse to [http://bu.mp](http://bu.mp)). So I have been working on the side on an HTML5 mobile solution that allows sharing contact information and messages with people nearby by just asking them to go to a URL.

The site needs a big UI and workflow revamp (already worked out on paper) and won't scale right now (it just uses a single instance of Meteor and a MongoDB database and doesn't handle Internet-scale abuse.)

You can see the current iteration at [http://www.near.im/](http://www.near.im/).

<comment><USER19> I was trying it on my iMac and phone, opened the website on both devices, then it somewhat disappointed me (should have looked better) by asking to sign in with Facebook. A login-less demo would sell itself better.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for checking it out.

Yeah, the UI is ugly and overly complicated right now. It is really more of a technical demo and a project for me to experiment with Meteor on at this point (it has zero active users.)

I am presently requiring a login to post to (in theory) prevent flooding it with spam. The person who is receiving the message does not need to log in. I have thought about removing the Facebook login requirement either for now (when there aren't many users) or permanently (need to have a way to prevent spam.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I always thought bump would be a compelling technology if it was baked into an OS liked Android. The main issue was getting past the hurdle of convincing others to download it - no one wanted to download an app just to exchange contact info in a moment of need.

If was already on your phone I could see users adopting it for things like contacts & photo exchange.

</comment><comment><USER21> So, this leaves everyone who was building something on top of Bump in a very odd position. Do we continue building on Bump, or do we work to implement something else on our own.

Please note, I'm not saying they are wrong for being acquired by Google. Just saying that as of right now, building on the Bump platform just got a lot more unsure.

</comment><comment><USER22> Finally. Bump is cool, but this is one of those technologies that will only work if baked right in to the OS.

<comment><USER23> That could have been said for Dropbox too. There's pros and cons to each approach. If Bump was built into a single OS, it'd limit its interoperability.

<comment><USER24> Dropbox provides massive utility for laptops and desktops as well.

<comment><USER25> To me, Dropbox is useful precisely because it works everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The logo's a cute idea. Nice to see an acquisition statement with some heart instead of the boilerplate examples[1].

[1]: [http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com](http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com)

</comment><comment><USER27> Another step towards NFC being skipped as a truly impactful technology?

<comment><USER28> How is it being skipped? As an example, parking meters in San Francisco are almost all NFC-equipped. Google's flagship phones have all been NFC-enabled. The future looks bright for NFC...

<comment><USER29> I have a Nexus 4 and live in SF. The NFC feature on the meters _almost never_ works. Probably 10% of the time. I have to enter the meter ID most of the time.

The biggest problem with NFC, etc... it's still significantly faster to swipe a credit card! Getting my phone out, unlocking it with a code, making sure the screen stays on while I stand in line (for e.g. Starbucks). This future is for the birds.

<comment><USER28> Interesting. I have an iPhone so I'm never able to use the NFC feature. However, I find that opening the app and typing in the meter number is quite fast, since I can walk away while doing it. Also, the ability to extend my parking remotely is pretty awesome.

<comment><USER29> I agree, that is a killer feature. Except the additional charge on top of it. :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Would have loved to see Bump pivot to an in-person transaction verification and facilitation app. Imagine having Bump as the intermediary of in-person transactions for large purchases coordinated over Craiglist sales.

</comment><comment><USER31> Google acquired an extremely talented team.

</comment><comment><USER32> Congrats to the Bump team! Would be interesting to see where the future leads with Bump & Google and how it integrates into Android!

</comment><comment><USER33> Good luck to the Bump team at Google!

</comment><comment><USER34> Ten years from now: /.*/ has been acquired by Google.

</comment><comment><USER35> Congrats Dave and team!

<comment><USER36> Agreed, congrats Dave!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> What is Bump? Was that that business-card sharing app I remember from the past?</comment>


"Coincidence?" –Climate Change May Have Powered Evolution of Human Intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://dailygalaxy.com/2020/02/coincidence-climate-change-may-have-powered-the-evolution-of-human-intelligence-weekend-feature/ <comment><USER2> Most people don't think about the fact that "evolution" really is a euphemism for a cold, indifferent, rational genocide performed by nature. When I read phrases like "evolutionary leaps" I can't help but think that yes, with the luxury of retrospective, even the abhorrent acts of the Mongols can be seen as a productive force; but at the other end of it is always countless victims, lives snuffed out by pure chance.

When climate change every so slightly changed the course of our evolution 250 000 years ago, it did so in a world that selected the most competent hunters, survivors, "animals" in the world as it existed. It's curious, and somewhat depressing, to think about what type of "selection" the more than likely catastrophic climate change we will experience in a few generations will have on homo sapiens.

Society, as I see it, is created upon the foundation of knocking natural selection out of the equation. And good riddance; I don't want a world where humans have to fight like predators for the privilege to survive. But this also means we have rigged the game for alternate selection. Considering what the most "fit" future survivors will be, I can't help but wonder what our arbitrary and egocentric selection process will do to the future human -- if it will even be around.

In a sense, we really are space age apes with stone age minds. Whoever survives into the future will be more up to chance and gamble than competence, since our world is so far from meritocratic. At the very least it will be more like a random selection than a fit selection, and worst case we will doom ourselves through our own humanity. But what is the option? IQ tests and fascist elitism? Sometimes it feels like there's no right answer wherever you turn to look.</comment>


The Point of Pattern Matching in Scala (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://www.artima.com/scalazine/articles/pattern_matching.html

<comment><USER2> > with modern VM technology it's (pattern visitor) way more innefficient than > pattern matching

Can someone explain that bit? Visitor pattern is 2 virtual calls. That should be very efficient. How pattern matching is more efficient?

<comment><USER3> 2 virtual calls are required to simply get Visitor's logic executed. But if you want your Visitor to actually do something usefull with visited object then you have to call a bunch of getters to extract the object data. This adds several more virtual calls. Pattern matching in Scala can be implemented as "messing with the bytecode", bypassing getters completely, which saves you all those virtual calls to them.</comment></comment>


Testing Ancient Ships - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/archeologists-are-planning-to-sink-this-ship-dozens-of-times <comment><USER2> Sad how clickbait Nautilus is becoming (or was it already):

 _" Archeologists Are Planning to Sink This Ship Dozens of Times"_

 _" Once that superstructure model is conclusive, they'll be able to repeatedly simulate the shipwreck until they find the storage pattern for the amphorae that matches how they ended up in reality."_

They aren't sinking it dozens of times, they're just simulating it in software. It would be equivalent to saying "engineers crash the same car a million times", whey they're just doing a software simulation.

<comment><USER3> You're right about that title. We'll be more diligent. Thanks

<comment><USER4> Pardon my presumption in asking, but assuming that clickbait titles actually work as intended, what balance do you seek between pageviews and accuracy? In relation to that choice, what type of audience do you seek?

<comment><USER3> We avoid clickbait titles, compared to what you see on a lot of sites, but try to make the title appealing and accurately informative. Pageviews are important, you want to be read...but we always strive for accuracy and context. It can be a fine line struggle that all media goes through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does nautil.us sponsor hackernews now or does hackernews just really like the content on nautil.us?

<comment><USER6> Looks like op scrapes nautil.us and posts anything, which gives them more karma (~26000) as nautil.us articles generally do well. Creating a feedback loop.

<comment><USER7> Karma doesn't directly influence story submissions, so I don't think there's a feedback loop there (if that's what you mean).

<comment><USER8> The op gets karma from the submissions because they do well enough so the op just keeps submitting them. Feedback loop.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Should startups use Magento? - <AUTHOR> http://warambil.wordpress.com/2011/07/30/should-startups-use-magento/ Magento ecommerce platform has become very popular. However, there are a few issues that should be taken into account <comment><USER2> nope you should not!</comment>


ISP Walks Out of Piracy Talks: "We're Not The Internet Police" - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/isp-walks-out-of-piracy-talks-were-not-the-internet-police-121217/ <comment><USER2> Original blog post by iinet: [http://blog.iinet.net.au/iinet-withdraws-notice- notice-schem...](http://blog.iinet.net.au/iinet-withdraws-notice-notice- scheme/)

</comment><comment><USER3> From the 17th Dec

<comment><USER4> Does that make this less important...? Would you like a timestamp?

<comment><USER5> It's a repost.

<comment><USER6> Humour those of us who were busy doing Christmas-related things and missed this one. I found it interesting.

I expect the next move from those beholden to the major studios will be to lobby for tougher legislation - SOPA-style. It is important to maintain awareness and vigilance so that all efforts can be made to stymie such legislation.

<comment><USER7> The Communication minister (Stephen Conroy) is, apart from a horrible "filter the naughty stuff off the internet" plan which has since gone away, pretty switched on about tech.

Although he has been critical of iinet in the past, be's also said that he's not going to push new laws into place unless both sides agree on them.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Henrik Ibsen invented realistic theater, and now he bores. Why? - <AUTHOR> https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/henrik-ibsen-part-2/ <comment><USER2> > "theater of concurrence," a genre whose practitioners take for granted that > their liberal audiences already agree with them about everything

Bit of an ideological record scratch moment there, so I went to look for an "about commentary magazine" (there isn't one?) and an overview of their work: [https://www.commentarymagazine.com/issues/](https://www.commentarymagazine.com/issues/) which is clearly coming from a very ideological place.

Nonetheless the central thesis of the piece is sound; what was shockingly progressive now looks mundane, because society has changed.

> Therein, however, lies the source of our latter-day discontent with Ibsen, > which is that the people who go to see serious plays today are no longer > horrified by anything in A Doll's House or Ghosts. To the contrary, they > sympathize with Nora and her fellow transgressors, and this sympathy cannot > help but diminish the impact of Ibsen's work.

For similar reasons nobody reads Stendhal any more, Tolkein looks cliched and oddly paced if you are exposed to any modern fantasy before reading him, and landmark films like _Citizen Kane_ and _2001_ are entertainment only to very specific audiences.

<comment><USER3> Coincidentally, just a couple of hours ago, I heard an interview of 'Ink' playwright James Graham talking about audiences expecting Rupert Murdoch to be presented as a straightforward villain.

<comment><USER4> One of the many excellent things about Ink was how it forced audiences to revise - rapidly - their notions of Murdoch, even if after the play, we were left to reflect on the corrupting effects of power.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I read A Doll's House and Ghosts in high school. Ghosts ends with the main character's son, who has inherited syphilis from his father, insanely chanting "The sun, the sun, the sun, the sun."

That ending is something that my brother and I reference today as an example of how art can become top-heavy and unconvincing (The sun is the "source," which in this case is the father, who has passed his disease literally and figuratively on to his son).

The ultimate problem I have with Ibsen is that his plays feel pre-configured, even fake. He's never searching for a thesis or questioning. He has an opinion to unload (e.g. the sins of the father shall be visited upon the son) and he's decided to use a play to do it. The result feels sterile, boring, lacking in wit, pointless.

I would unfavorably compare Ibsen to Raymond Carver. Carver also deals with disintegrating families, marital tension, poverty, alcoholism and the rest. But Carver somehow feels vital and real. His writing never resembles overwrought tragedy even though there's plenty of unhappiness. You never get the feeling that Carver has the answers or that he's talking down to you.

<comment><USER6> Have you read or seen the Wild Duck? I think it's much superior to Ibsen's better known plays.

<comment><USER7> As in Norwegian, I have to ask... is Vildanden (the wild duck) not one of his most known/iconic plays outside of Norway? I would say it's easily one of the three defining plays people would know about over here, so it confuses me to see it mentioned like this.

<comment><USER6> My impression is that a Doll's House and Ghosts are much better known in the English speaking world. Enemy of the People too--probably because of the punchy title.

<comment><USER7> Interesting, over here I would say et Dukkehjem (a doll's house), Vildanden (the wild duck), and Peer Gynt are his most known works, probably not-very- closely followed by en folkefiende (Enemy of the people). Fascinating.

<comment><USER6> The message of the Wild Duck is sort of unpopular. If we could somehow stage the play on HN, it'd probably get massively downvoted :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Whenever you see a new play that purports to indict the spiritual emptiness > of the bourgeoisie—and most latter-day British and American dramas do just > that—you are seeing his influence at work. From Shaw to Arthur Miller to > Tony Kushner, he is the great forerunner, the prophet of modern drama. Yet > fewer directors and actors are showing any interest in his own plays

This is the peril of artistic innovation. Sonic Youth inspired most nineties bands, but they now sound like generic nineties grunge, only becoming amazing when you realise the track was written ten years beforehand.

Same with JMW Turner. To me personally his landscapes seem incredibly bland, but now I realise he was one of the people who inspired so many others to look at the beauty of nature to the level it became an Ikea cliché.

<comment><USER9> I'm old enough to remember when SY and Pixies were new, and even as a music fan they sounded like a revolution. But within ten years it seemed normal, and ten years after that it was just boring. That's just how music is. Still great bands though.

<comment><USER10> I agree that Sonic Youth sounds a little dated at this point. But a lot of classic rock (not all, but a lot) still sounds pretty revolutionary to me, The Doors in particular.

<comment><USER11> I think Sonic Youth won't stand the test of time, like a few other bands, because they weren't very good. They were basically 'abstract art in sound' \- and essentially their sound was 'breaking moulds'. It was very different, hyper alt. But it wasn't necessarily, in and of itself, very great.

So, Sonic Youth 'works' in the culture of the late 1980's and early 1990's. But it doesn't work beyond that.

Very timely, but not timeless.

So Van Halen, kind of the opposite of Sonic Youth ... I was never a fan but dragged to see them live a few years ago - it was monumental. A sound created to fill a stadium, just 4 dudes and not a lot of fuss/electronics or gear. A clean big sound from just them playing. A little like Chilli Peppers in terms of 'just four guys without much else'. Ironically I only ever saw them with Pixies opening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _Whenever you see a new play that purports to indict the spiritual emptiness > of the bourgeoisie—and most latter-day British and American dramas do just > that—you are seeing his influence at work._

Right, just like if you hear someone sneeze, you're witnessing the influence of the first human that sneezed.

As if nobody could independently get the brilliant idea to criticize the bourgeoise?

<comment><USER3> Indeed - and more recent incarnations of the genre, if well done, are more likely to supplant the original as influences, simply because they address more contemporary, less settled issues.

<comment><USER12> Also, there was a theme in art of the 1800's of critizing the bourgeoise before Ibsen. Maybe not in plays, but certainly in painting.

E.g.

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

The woman in that painting, 26 years before _A Doll 's House_ could well be "Nora".

<comment><USER13> Hmm, but that is criticising bourgeois behaviour in the name of bourgeois and/or Christian values, no? Whereas Ibsen criticises the values themselves…. Of course, this dichotomy is too simple, and tags like "bourgeois values" are shortcut descriptions of a moral world with as much complexity and contradictions as the present day's….

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> An indictment of American theatre more than Ibsen. In London, Ibsen adaptations have been shocking as ever. Robert Icke's phenomenal Wild Duck was one of the best plays I saw last year. The fact that Ibsen can be hit or miss is down to the production, not the writer.</comment>


Chemisty of Cast-Iron Seasoning: A Science-Based How-To (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://sherylcanter.com/wordpress/2010/01/a-science-based-technique-for-seasoning-cast-iron/ <comment><USER2> among the people who have not had success with this method are Marc Maron and Ed Nisley [http://rovinggastronome.com/mainblog/2014/05/12/kitchen- psa-...](http://rovinggastronome.com/mainblog/2014/05/12/kitchen-psa-cast- iron-care/) [https://softsolder.com/2016/11/07/cast-iron-pan-seasoning- lo...](https://softsolder.com/2016/11/07/cast-iron-pan-seasoning-low-woo- results/)</comment>


Getting Better at Getting Better - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/10/better-time <comment><USER3> I am uninterested in professional sport but read this anyway and was really struck by this line:

> "...historically, practice was ... not about mastering skills. People > figured that either you had those skills or you didn't."

I suspect many people still feel this way. Those who keep trying to hone their skills are the fun ones to be with. Unfortunately they appear still to be in the minority.

<comment><USER4> In art, it looks like people on the outside think of "talent" as something you either have or don't, but people who are artists themselves and involved in an art community (online, in a school, etc.) tend to focus on practice much, _much_ more.

<comment><USER5> Great point.

This is easily observable in the idea that an artist refines his or her's own style. For example, I recently toured the Andy Warhol museum, and the progression of his style/projects were clearly showcased.

Certainly, people recognize him as having an intrinsic talent, but one that he built on to create some of the works for which he is most recognized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This distinction is already visible today in our field. Looking at my batch of CS grads, there's clear divide between people who took on riskier positions or joined startups and people who continued to do what they were already good at. A few years after graduation, and this divide is already fairly stark - <USER2> people in the former being exponentially better than when they left school, and people in the latter not growing significantly.

The best people in CS are no different than the best workers/athletes in any field. The challenge for the next few decades will be to see how we can improve the pedagogy at Universities to help people learn to learn better.

<comment><USER7> > there's clear divide between people who took on riskier positions or joined > startups and people who continued to do what they were already good at.

Not saying you're incorrect, but there might be some survivorship bias to this.

<comment><USER6> You're probably right. I guess I'm looking at a visible divide in skill and knowledge occuring in my friends right now and trying to find some sort of casual factor. While casting people along the 'startup/big-company' variable gives some immediate separation, it's by no means the only factor.

<comment><USER8> When I do the same exercise, it seems to come down to not much more than hard work. The more skilled and knowledgeable people are those that generally work hard and persevere through difficult challenges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a great article but I wish it would have also included advancement in area of steroids. We live in an era where drugs fuel a significant part of professional sports. Top tier athletes also have top tier drug regimens and their "doctors" have found ways to 'hack' the testing. It's an area that the media isn't open about discussing but it is there with the millions of dollars at stake.

I know I'm leaning heavy on the sports side of the article but this isn't all a result of refining the skills required for sport. They are also faster, stronger, and recover more quickly because of the drugs athletes take.

<comment><USER10> > This is a great article but I wish it would have also included advancement > in area of steroids.

My thoughts exactly. I was a great fan of professional cycling when I was a kid (I still follow it, mostly for the scenery nowadays), so much so that as an Miguel Indurain fan I still remember the 8-man chase in the 1996 Tour de France that saw his reign end ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xsXthk4YIo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xsXthk4YIo)). Each and every one of those 8 athletes from that legendary chase has been proved as being doped sometimes during their career (and most probably they all were doped during that stage). It has not been proved yet, but it's an open secret that Indurain itself might have been a doper, and even Merckx. This ruined professional cycling for me.

Two years after that 1996 Tour the Festina scandal started and at least cycling did try to make itself clean. The same cannot be said of football, where it's absolutely incredible how players like Messi and Ronaldo can play 60+ matches per year at such a high level, consistently. By "incredible" I mean "more than human".

<comment><USER11> You might be interested in this New Yorker article then: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/09/man-and- superma...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/09/man-and-superman)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I didn't expect this to be an article about education. But it seems to make a lot of sense. I have always felt that bad teachers recognize that there is a problem with their classroom management, however the solutions they come up with aren't great. I also have seen that most bad teachers have common problems. Which would imply that with a pretty standard set of instructions a bad teacher could transform into something better with just a bit of work.

<comment><USER13> Yes halfway through this article could have been about anything, so broad was the application of the concept, but education was an interesting choice. There are surely many other fields that can be similarly improved.

Just focusing not only on doing your job, but how you do it, the little details, and then having constant feedback and trying to improve constantly, it's an incredibly valuable concept.

<comment><USER14> Reminds me of first Bush Treasury Secretary John O'Neill's emphasis on safety when he took over at Alcoa in the 80's. It was part of a broader strategy that he referred to as habitual excellence." I first came across it in Charles Duhigg's book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, where he provides an interesting account of how it helped mend crippling mistrust between labor and management. Here's a newspaper article that quickly summarizes it:

[http://www.post- gazette.com/business/businessnews/2012/05/13...](http://www.post- gazette.com/business/businessnews/2012/05/13/Habitual-excellence-The- workplace-according-to-Paul-O-Neill/stories/201205130249)

We've done something like this at my workplace by moving to scrum (with regular retrospectives) and, more importantly, by adopting stricter coding standards together with regular code reviews (weekly as a group and by using pull requests with continuous integration.)

I would have liked to see us extend this to something even more like O'Neill's approach with a greater focus on eliminating production bugs (especially with respect to our deployment practices where unexpected snags abound). But I haven't been able to get management support for that. (Our more critical business function is to keep existing infrastructure humming rather than develop new products so I feel it would make more sense for us than for, say, a startup, but I guess no one like admitting to themselves that their main reason-for-being is to maintain the status quo.)

Nevertheless, all together, the changes have made a world of difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here's an example of a school applying Demming's/Toyota's/Lean's techniques to great success.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGZHQnuZXj8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGZHQnuZXj8)

</comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me a lot of the notion of Growth Mindset vs Fixed Mindset that Carol Dweck has popularized.

<comment><USER17> I found out about this via one of Aaron Swartz's blog posts: [http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck)

It's a good read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a very good article. The reference to the newly published book _Faster, Higher, Stronger: How Sports Science Is Creating a New Generation of Superathletes--and What We Can Learn from Them_ by Mark McClusky prompted me to request that book from my friendly public library. I like how the article looks at the absolute skill levels among professional competitors in chess and professional performers in orchestral music and shows that the skill level in those and many other domains has been steadily rising in my lifetime. There is still a lot of untapped potential in most individuals alive today that can be developed even at adult ages.

As the article reports, "What we're seeing is, in part, the mainstreaming of excellent habits. In the late nineteen-fifties, Raymond Berry, the great wide receiver for the Baltimore Colts, was famous for his attention to detail and his obsessive approach to the game: he took copious notes, he ate well, he studied film of his opponents, he simulated entire games by himself, and so on. But, as the journalist Mark Bowden observed, Berry was considered an oddball. The golfer Ben Hogan, who was said to have 'invented practice,' stood out at a time when most pro golfers practiced occasionally, if at all. Today, practicing six to eight hours a day is just the price of admission on the P.G.A. Tour. Everyone works hard. Everyone is really good." This kind of cultural change can still go a lot further in a lot of fields on human performance. A culture of continual efforts at self-improvement has hardly even begun in many occupations.

The article's conclusion about improving the performance of elementary and secondary school teachers in the United States is thoughtful, and also refers to good new books, _Building a Better Teacher_ by Elizabeth Green and _The Teacher Wars_ by Dana Goldstein. Studies of educational effectiveness in the United States consistently show that the variance in teacher quality in any one school swamps the variance in school quality between one school and another, so any child in any school district is at risk of getting an ineffective teacher. (Although schools in poor neighborhoods of the United States, on the whole, have the greatest difficulty in hiring and retaining good teachers.) Anything that can help teachers learn to teach better before or after they began working in the classroom will have massive social benefits. An economist who has studied teacher effectiveness for years shows that the best teachers are almost literally worth their weight in gold, while the worst teachers have negative added value for their pupils.[1] Bringing a culture of continual self-improvement in America's schools is a project of crucial national importance.

[1] [http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing- teachers-h...](http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing-teachers-how- much-good-teacher-worth)

<comment><USER19> In your experience, are there some tools or even a general cultural approach that benefit homeschooling parents which could be applied to mainstream teachers?

<comment><USER18> This is a quick reply because I'm about to go out. Feel free to ask follow-up questions. One thing that homeschoolers fearlessly do is reject curriculum materials if they don't work, and use different materials for different children. Many classroom teachers are not at liberty to do either of these things officially, but if they do them on the sly, they will be helping the learners in their care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there any place where I can find a programming coach ?

<comment><USER21> > Is there any place where I can find a programming coach ?

I think this is a very good one: [https://pragprog.com/book/tpp/the-pragmatic- programmer](https://pragprog.com/book/tpp/the-pragmatic-programmer)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does this imply we are headed towards a future where there isn't a 10x difference between the best programmers and the worst? Where someone comes up with repeatable training that can help programmers advance throughout their career?

<comment><USER23> This line comes to mind:

Young Composer: "Herr Mozart, I am thinking of writing a symphony. How should I get started?"

Mozart: "A symphony is a very complex musical form and you are still young. Perhaps you should start with something simpler, like a concerto."

Young Composer: "But Herr Mozart, you were writing symphonies when you were 8 years old."

Mozart: "Yes, but I never asked anyone how."

<comment><USER24> His father was a famous music teacher and started teaching him at age 4 (and he watched his sisters lessons already at age 3).

<comment><USER23> If you could take 10 4 year olds and start training them in music that way, you won't get 10 Mozarts. I doubt you'll get one. (I'll concede they may all be very good for 8 year olds though) Different people learn different ways.

I guess my point is, for a given training program, you're going to have a wide distribution of effectiveness of graduates.

<comment><USER25> Yes,

But if you take 10 mozarts, who don't have a father who is a music teacher, doesn't have a sister whom he can watch getting trained and his own training doesn't start at 4.

I'd doubt if they would do anything in Music. Let alone become some one like mozart.

<comment><USER20> There's a real life case study we can use here.

The Jacksons. Joe Jackson pushed his kids really really hard often to the point of abuse. All of them are good singers now but only one of them became Michael Jackson.

<comment><USER24> But is that because MJ was better than the others, or because his marketing played out better? There might be some factors independent of the skill of the individual that end up making a star.

<comment><USER26> It wasn't all marketing. Not even mostly marketing. When the group was still young but in the industry all of the industry execs pushed for Jermaine Jackson to go solo. He considered the cute one by girls and was considered to have just as much talent as Michael. Or at least close to it. While he had a decent solo career it was nothing like when Michael got older and went solo.

Basically Jermaine was heavily marketed when he went solo and even had a bidding war for his services. But it was MJ who was the star and for lack of a better term had the "it" factor.

<comment><USER20> Jermaine could maybe sing as well as Michael but could he dance like him ?

Michael was in another league altogether. Even Quincy Jones says about Michael , "Sometimes the hand of god just lingers a bit longer over someones head".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I found it interesting that the story omitted the name of the person Kermit Washington punched and got suspended for. It was Rudy Tomjanovich. He went on to have a hall of fame coaching career. It was probably on purpose so that the main purpose of the story wasn't derailed but I find it interesting nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER27> Since his name came up in the article, it is worth reading more about the ideas that W. Edwards Deming[1] lectured on.

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

</comment><comment><USER28> Too meta.

</comment><comment><USER29> And how would this apply to hacking? Or entrepreneurship?

<comment><USER30> Look at your current url!

What does YCombinator do?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Receive curated trip ideas by text based on your country's lockdown - <AUTHOR> https://avoy.io/concierge <comment><USER2> I always think about it twice when I need to put my telephone number. It seems too easy to me to start being bombarded with texts messages and so hard to stop them. It also seems quite easy to start subscribing massively telephone numbers with a simple script (I hate captchas but I understand why they're in the game).

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi pachico,

This sentiment makes sense, we have a few safeguards in place right now, but we wanted to open this feature up to people who might not already be using the app and telephone number felt like the best way.

We will have a think about a better way to implement this.

Thanks for the feedback!</comment></comment>