Egyptian 'bent' pyramid dating back 4,600 years opens to public - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/egypt-bent-pyramid-dahshur-cairo-sneferu-pharaoh-a9003906.html <comment><USER2> Related, physicist Kurt Mendelssohn's _The Riddle of the Pyramids_ is a great read. It proposes that the "bent" pyramid has its shape because of the catastrophic collapse of another pyramid being built at the same time, which led to choosing a safer angle for the remaining portion of the bent pyramid.

It took away a lot of the marketing "mystery" of the pyramids for me, instead taking a very practical engineering, scientific, and analytical approach to investigating the pyramid phenomenon.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was there at the end of June- it's pretty spectacular. We arrived on a Friday morning at 7am to beat the heat, and we were the only tourists on site at all.

Extremely surreal to go down in to the middle of an engineering marvel that large, and I couldn't believe that I was alone inside of it.

<comment><USER4> That's awesome! I went to Cairo in 2016 and only got to see the Bent Pyramid at a distance from the Step Pyramid site, since I didn't have much time there. Even from afar it's an amazing sight.

I'm longing to go back there, even more now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is hard to comprehend a large timescale of four thousand six hundred years. I wonder how much of our current software would last that long.

<comment><USER6> There's a well known science fiction novel where a "programmer-archaeologist" on an interstellar fleet digs into a bunch of nested hypervisors and software nobody has touched in thousands of years, to find things still running on the unix time epoch.

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

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

<comment><USER7> The best part of that was, being a space-faring civilization, the narrator muses that its starting point is probably based on the date when humans first left Earth to go to the moon!

<comment><USER8> My second round of amusement and feeling impressed was that, after thousands of years, the guy was off by only 1 year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pyramids are awesome feats of engineering and construction.

Also reminds me of the muon detection tech that can probe through solid material. [https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/ancient/cosmic-ray- muons-...](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/ancient/cosmic-ray-muons-reveal- hidden-void-in-the-great-pyramid/)

</comment><comment><USER10> _Tourists will be allowed inside the ancient structure after archaeologists found "hidden tombs" containing mummies, masks and tools._

Did they miss a NOT? That seems like a strange reason to go from not allowing tourists to allowing them!

<comment><USER11> > Authorities are looking to promote tourism at Dahshur, located about 17 > miles south of central Cairo.

> The site, which lies in the open desert, attracts just a trickle of visitors > and is currently free of the touts and bustle of Giza.

> The promotion of Dahshur is part of a wider push to boost tourism, an > important source of foreign revenue for Egypt that dipped steeply after the > country's 2011 uprising before gradually recovering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ah Sneferu ... the OG who started this whole pyramid for burial chambers trend. If I'm not mistaken, before this fella, royal tombs were buried (concealed) in caves dug into mountain sides - far from Cairo. This guy Sneferu thought "why don't we build a mountain like tomb right here?"

The reason it is "bent" is because they ran out of boulders and so had to reduce the pitch to reduce the number of blocks required to finish the project.

<comment><USER13> Yes. Buried, then concealed, then Sneferu's attempts via "mastabas" (Arabic for "bench"), building mastabas over mastabas for proof of concept of a pyramid. These projects were on the scale of lifetimes. These were incredible engineers.

<comment><USER14> _These projects were on the scale of lifetimes._

Not quite, given that Sneferu had at least three built.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very cool, although that picture in the narrow tunnel does not look very inviting. Especially not if I think about how crowded some landmarks can become. Imagine being stuck with 400 other tourists for 2 hours in tunnels like that.

</comment><comment><USER16> Heh -

I've been reading some of Joseph Campbell's Oriental Mythology and he goes into some of the early burial rituals. It's truly fascinating stuff. Did you know that a lot of the early rulers of the area were buried with their entire retinue (10s or 100+ servants) alive? Including sometimes the ruler himself. Gruesome stuff, but also quite fascinating.

<comment><USER17> I don't know, it's a bit like mass murders, we should expunge their murderous names from all records.

Sod them and their misery inflicting monuments.

<comment><USER18> > I don't know, it's a bit like mass murders, we should expunge their > murderous names from all records. Sod them and their misery inflicting > monuments.

"Those who don't know history, are doomed to repeat it." It's important to understand who (by our standards) bad people were, why they were bad, and what circumstances enabled them to be bad. If you erase them, you can't learn from them.

<comment><USER17> Doesn't mean we have to remember their names though, which is what they wanted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > _" Tourists will be allowed inside the ancient structure after > archaeologists found "hidden tombs" containing mummies, masks and tools."_

That's not true, is it? I'm under the impression the bent pyramid was looted dry thousands of years ago, like the others.

</comment><comment><USER20> Pyramids represent such amazing engineering and such untold suffering. Farming only started 10k years ago and 5k years later we had such an energy and time surplus that we were moving mountains around for our rulers' ego's.

A lot of whippings would have to be handed out for me to move rocks around in the sun.

<comment><USER21> Most Egyptologists do not think the pyramids were built by slave labor.

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

<comment><USER20> I didn't use the world slavery once, but I'll bite. They probably weren't entrepreneurs.

None of that looks like a situation I'd want to have imposed on me. No individuals say "you know what I want to do today? Move rocks for zero economic use."

I quote from your page:

"Forms of forced labor and servitude are seen throughout all of ancient Egypt even though it wasn't specifically declared as the well known term we have today, slavery.

... Conscripted workers were not owned by individuals, like other slaves, but rather required to perform labor as a duty to the state."

Yeah awesome. Sign me up. The term is irrelevant. The pyramids are undoubtedly both great works and massive causes of suffering.

<comment><USER21> I'm certainly not arguing that it was an enjoyable or desirable profession. I was simply responding to your "a lot of whippings" comment. It is a common falsehood on the internet that the pyramids were built with slave labor. They would be better described as peasants with no political power and few other options. This would also describe the overwhelming majority of the population until at least the renaissance.

 _There is a consensus among Egyptologists that the Great Pyramids were not built by slaves. Rather, it was peasants who built the pyramids during flooding, when they could not work in their lands._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Fascinating, is there a site with pictures taken on the inside of the pyramid.</comment>


I Just Want a Dumb TV - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5728167/i-just-want-a-dumb-tv

<comment><USER2> I agree, I have an LG smart tv but never use the streaming apps because they aren't that great. The interface/experience on Roku and Apple TV is so much better.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also, you can replace the smart part if you get a dumb TV.</comment>


Bare Metal Rust Generics - <AUTHOR> https://www.ecorax.net/as-above-so-below-1/ <comment><USER2> Rust is great. While working with Secure Enclave's isn't the same as a microcontroller per se (many SE's work in tandem with powerful chipsets), at MobileCoin we've found a lot of benefits from using Rust.

Rust appears to provide the ability to largely move to a world where the bugs are in logic and not in buffer/array verification or multi-threading. It feels like a real advancement to move up a layer of abstraction from plumbing to design.

Time will tell, certainly it's not impossible to have bugs in rust by any stretch of the imagination, but I have found that bugs in rust code tend to be more interesting than "out of bounds memory exception at line X."

</comment><comment><USER3> The author cites "concern about binary size" bloat as a valid concern his colleagues have about generics. He explains that they normally would write distinct implementations. Am I wrong for thinking that generics shouldn't result in more bloat than the equivalent hand-duplicated code. And conceivably the compiler would be able to recognize that a List<&Foo> and a List<&Bar> are parameterized by equivalently-sized types and thus can share a single copy of the same generated code (although this might break inlining optimizations)?

<comment><USER4> Yes, if you were to duplicate the code, you'd be doing the same thing as monomorphization. But it's possible that they wouldn't actually duplicate it, and do something else that would be smaller, like, casting to a void pointer or something.

The compiler can do some optimizations like this, yes, but there's a lot more work to do in this area.

As an example of something folks still do by hand sometimes, take the starts_with method on Path: [https://doc.rust- lang.org/stable/std/path/struct.Path.html#m...](https://doc.rust- lang.org/stable/std/path/struct.Path.html#method.starts_with)

It looks like this:

        pub fn starts_with<P: AsRef<Path>>(&self, base: P) -> bool {
            self._starts_with(base.as_ref())
        }

        fn _starts_with(&self, base: &Path) -> bool {
            iter_after(self.components(), base.components()).is_some()
        }

Why split this into two functions? Well, you can get smaller code size this way, because you're sort of "hand-de-duplicating" the parts that aren't generic. Once we call .as_ref, everything else is actually identical, but the compiler isn't good enough at this yet to do this itself, so we do it by hand.

I wouldn't say this technique is super super common or well-known, just for the standard library (because it's used _everywhere_ ) and for folks that are sensitive to code size, like embedded or wasm people.

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't "dyn" get you the equivalent in Rust? Runtime generics as opposed to compile time.

<comment><USER4> Nope; dyn is dynamic dispatch, this is statically dispatched.

It is true that dyn means you don't get monomorphization, and can help with binary sizes.

EDIT: thinking about this some more, I wanted to say that it does _feel_ similar, but one big difference that's easy to explain is that dyn will change the way the value is represented in memory, and this will not. Conceptually, both do "cast and then call this single function", but in the dyn case, the cast would be to a trait object, whereas this casts directly to &Path.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love this article, gives some great examples of decent abstractions to adopt in different situations to achieve the goals of the project. Great story telling.

Right at the beginning this is a great quote:

"I was wrong."

We'd all do well to say that more often when it happens, and that's not about Rust, just life generally.

</comment><comment><USER7> I very much enjoyed the way the article is written. The good balance between technical details and humor.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm hoping that someone will one day build a RTOS in Rust that can run on M0 (or smaller) devices, comes with decent tooling (so you won't need projects like Platformio to compensate for the horrific tooling that embedded platforms have), and abstractions that are "just so".

The "just so"-bit is really hard.

Embedded systems need something like Rust.

<comment><USER9> I'd love to see a QNX clone.

<comment><USER10> Redox ([https://www.redox-os.org](https://www.redox-os.org)) is still under heavy development, and isn't intended for widespread use yet, but it is based on a microkernel architecture. I don't know if that's close enough to what you'd like to see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It looks like you can even run Rust on a small BluePill board featuring an STM32F103C8T6 ARM Cortex M3 with a modest 64 Kbytes of Flash memory and only 20 Kbytes of SRAM: [https://github.com/TeXitoi/blue-pill- quickstart](https://github.com/TeXitoi/blue-pill-quickstart)

<comment><USER12> I think the boards I used for [http://yager.io/vumeter/vu.html](http://yager.io/vumeter/vu.html) had even less memory, like 8kbytes of SRAM or something. Rust wasted a few kB on error reporting functions, iirc, but other than that everything fit without too much effort as long as I didn't try to include soft-float emulation or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great article. The writing style reminds me of James Mickens. For instance, this classic [https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf)

<comment><USER14> Hey! You just made my day. James Mickens (that article in particular) was a huge inspiration, especially the part about crying blood. May have been a bit too dramatic...

<comment><USER13> In that style, there is nothing too dramatic. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> ...I imagine. Drawn beyond the lines of reason, push the envelope watch it bend

<comment><USER15> Considering the article title references sacred geometry and so does the Lateralus lyrics, I thought it was apropos, if a bit silly. Guess some of you disagreed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Let's ask ADAers if they moved to rust

<comment><USER17> I'm a huge fan of Rust, but I was under the impression that the domains where Ada is most commonly used are very risk-averse, so I presume Rust is still a bit young for a lot of the Ada use cases.

<comment><USER18> I agree. Ada has been around and picked apart for high-integrity software jobs. I am personally learning SPARK2014, the subset of Ada. It has formal verification as part of the toolset. I would think Rust would need to develop similar formal tools and not just the PL to be used in the same industries as Ada/SPARK2014. I know somebody is going to link to the use of Rust for something in aerospace. I know Julia is touting something to do with air traffic control, but the core of these high-integrity applications need the full gamut of design tools around the PL. I still like Rust, but I am also playing with Zig.

<comment><USER19> > It has formal verification as part of the toolset. I would think Rust would > need to develop similar formal tools and not just the PL to be used in the > same industries as Ada/SPARK2014.

There are people agreeing with you, and they are trying to make it happen: [https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/sealed-rust-the-plan/](https://ferrous- systems.com/blog/sealed-rust-the-plan/)

<comment><USER18> Thank you. I hadn't heard of it before. I would like to see it happen. I do think it will take many man-years to catch up with Ada/SPARK2014 and win industry favor and confidence, but it's good to see.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How I started in web security - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@homakov/how-i-started-in-web-security-400b80824e86 <comment><USER2> Likewise, my story about how I got into and out of security: it really just takes basic programming knowledge, understanding reverse engineering concept, and constantly testing shit.

When I got kicked out of college for my hack (rm [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090007](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090007)) all I did was spam URLs with different IDs and test if they returned 200 or 404.. and bam press coverage + job offers. Sometimes the simplest of stuff can lead to nirvana.

I'm no longer in security since it was getting very addicted (I would start testing every website I'd visit for vulbs)..and I had to change and decided to jump into the startup world.

<comment><USER3> > ... I had to change and decided to jump into the startup world.

You don't have to choose one of them. I was in a similar position about 6 years ago, software + security background and passion for startups which led me to start my own company ([https://www.netsparker.com/](https://www.netsparker.com/)), we're building a tool to automate web app security and advancing the automated scanning in web apps, it's really fun stuff if you are into security.

Security industry is great for startups and new comers, another option is obviously working for a security startup, there are tons of them.

<comment><USER4> I've actually heard about your product, as someone was using it against a customer's app portal (on one of our servers). It didn't find an exploit per- se, but it helped us to discover a performance/DoS issue when it would occasionally start crashing + restart a vhost. So, indirectly, thanks for the great product!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> """Use your own brain. After all any book is just a list of thoughts of another guy, who might be wrong."""

"""The text above is preface to a little security book I write for newbie hackers and web developers."""

I chuckled.

<comment><USER6> Just goes to show his honesty :-) "One is not to trust my teachings implicitly but to test them oneself and evaluate their effects." — Buddha (thus making Buddhism perhaps the only "religion" not plagued by faith and dogma, and kind of disseminating the scientific method)

<comment><USER7> Buddhism is not the only religion not plagued by faith and dogma.

Faith and dogma exist wherever people have outsourced their ability to think. 'Buddhists' do this too, just as some adherents to other faiths do too.

On a side note, the intellectual portions of Vedic literature often emphasise the need for viveka (knowledge, discrimination) and prashnena (questioning) which are requisite qualities of a shisya (student). Arguably, much of Buddhist metaphysics is based on these Upanishadic texts (Vedanta).

<comment><USER6> Buddha himself was clearly against faith and dogma, and also considered metaphysics irrelevant to the human condition. If you consider Buddhism to be the original teachings, then it's obvious dogma has no place in it, and a person afflicted by dogma could always be pointed to the original teachings. More religious branches of Buddhism exist, but they are blatant bastardizations of the original teachings. This is very different from the situation in other religions, where the original scriptures are the main sources of dogma galore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Neat article, interesting that suggestions for sane defaults in rails were more-or-less ignored until the problem was demonstrated to easily impact a wide user-base.

<comment><USER9> That was the source of lolz at the time it happened. If anything, the article demonstrates how little you need to know to break things. In a way, it's a miracle anything works around here.

<comment><USER10> "If engineers built buildings and bridges the way programmers write software the first woodpecker that would come along would destroy civilization."

<comment><USER11> That is kind of unfair :)

Typically infrastructure engineers get to (or rather have to) over-engineer things. When you build a bridge you don't build something that is _just_ good enough to hold X cars. You design it to hold X + Y% and/or have Z redundancy

Most software doesn't put peoples lives in danger and thus doesn't get the budget/resources to put in NASA like engineering in software

<comment><USER12> A lot of engineering is about meeting requirements while keeping costs down. As the joke goes... "Anyone can build a bridge that stands; it takes an engineer to build a bridge that just barely stands"

<comment><USER13> I realize it's a joke, but even then it's not a good one. The reality is actually the other way around. Anyone can build a bridge that barely stands, but it takes an engineer to build one that still stands after an earthquake.

<comment><USER12> Uhhhh... see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_bridges](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_bridges)

I'm not sure if the original designers intended for these to have multi- millenia design lives, but I bet that they could have been made much cheaper...

<comment><USER13> If they were made much cheaper, they likely would not be standing today.

<comment><USER12> Precisely! Engineering usually isn't about designing the best X, it's about designing the cheapest X that meets all of its requirements.

Edit: even if the requirement is for X to be the best in the world (which, as a non-quantifiable requirement, makes me uneasy), the goal would still be to do it as cost effectively as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I remember when that whole snafu was on the HN front page! :)

(This isn't the exact link I remember seeing, but [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3666564](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3666564) )

</comment><comment><USER15> I was very intrigued by "Oh, also avoid certifications."

I'm planning to become a solo, freelance, contract worker in IT security.

I have no certs. (I do have a PhD. in a computer related field, though.)

So, how do I convince organizations to hire me in this cert obsessed world?</comment>


Air conditioning is warming the Earth - <AUTHOR> https://kottke.org/19/09/air-conditioning-is-warming-the-earth <comment><USER2> It's not air conditioning that is warming the Earth, it's capitalism! If we accepted that we don't need to have such big profits, we could accept to stop working when it's too hot (or too cold, or too dark, etc). If we didn't have to pay such interests on the debt so fast, we could accept to receive our Amazon packets in 2 months instead of 2 hours, we could send them by sail instead of oil-powered cargos.</comment>


In Praise of Evolvable Systems (1996) - <AUTHOR> http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html <comment><USER2> Cool. Interesting to contrast this attitude with the approach behind (the failure of) Xanadu: <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html></comment>


Show HN: Magic Grid – A simple JavaScript library for dynamic grid layouts - e-oj https://github.com/e-oj/Magic-Grid <comment><AUTHOR> For those wondering why not just use CSS Grid -- it's not build for that[0] (see @rachelandrew's comment). It's not explained on the repo README but the author goes into it on the explanation blog post.

As mentioned, Masonry[1] is the other famous library for doing this. Magic Grid also has a Vue port[2] if you're into that.

[EDIT] - PR just got merged, explanation of this stuff is on the Github README now

[0]: [https://github.com/rachelandrew/cssgrid- ama/issues/19](https://github.com/rachelandrew/cssgrid-ama/issues/19)

[1]: [https://github.com/desandro/masonry](https://github.com/desandro/masonry)

[2]: [https://github.com/imlinus/Vue-Magic- Grid](https://github.com/imlinus/Vue-Magic-Grid)

<comment><USER2> Although I've read through the "css grid isn't meant to do this details", you can get fairly close to this with pure css grid, see here: [https://github.com/wesbos/css- grid/blob/master/20%20-%20CSS%...](https://github.com/wesbos/css- grid/blob/master/20%20-%20CSS%20Grid%20Image%20Gallery/image-gallery- FINISHED.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the JSfiddle for that demo:

[https://jsfiddle.net/cbjzped2/](https://jsfiddle.net/cbjzped2/)

The problem with that is that the grid rows are determined dynamically:

        .item.v2 {
          grid-row: span 2;
        }
        .item.v3 {
          grid-row: span 3;
        }
        .item.v4 {
          grid-row: span 4;
        }
        .item.h2 {
          grid-column: span 2;
        }

I'd much rather drop in a library like MagicGrid or Masonry and deal with it from there, to be honest, instead of trying to hack grid to do it. I think grid _could_ be extended to handle this kind of design but until it is...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I spent some time trying to build a simple grid layout with dynamic width and height items in order for the layout to naturally flow responsively. Most libraries—like this one—require fixed width items or fixed width containers with fluid items.

Fully responsive turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be due to lots of rabbit holes, but the algorithm was fairly straightforward. My first approach was to try CSS Flex and Grid, but they didn't cut the mustard since they're not really designed for this sort of thing. I then found CSS Columns and had that working, but it proved too unstable for production use with issues with the sort order of items, wrapping across columns, and cross- browser support.

I ended up building our own library: [https://github.com/heydovetail/react- masonry-responsive](https://github.com/heydovetail/react-masonry-responsive)

There's a nice brief writeup about using CSS for masonry layout here: [https://regisphilibert.com/blog/2017/12/pure-css-masonry- lay...](https://regisphilibert.com/blog/2017/12/pure-css-masonry-layout-with- flexbox-grid-columns-in-2018/)

<comment><USER4> I've experimented with fully responsive layouts too for my website ([http://www.uptopnews.com](http://www.uptopnews.com)) but at the end I just used css flex gird. I almost build a comment section where the comments are cards in a grid but that rabbit hole was too deep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Correct me if I'm wrong, but using window.addEventListener("resize", () => (), 200) is no good, you probably should consider window.requestAnimationFrame() and debouncing. Otherwise, your library will drain battery juice, despite it's really lightweight. Say, on Android, actions like typing into an input field, changing orientation, scrolling backward and triggering url bar appearing, all of them do trigger costly document reflow.

<comment> e-oj You're right requestAnimationFrame is more efficient than using the resize listener with a delay. I'm actually working on an update to change that. It'll be fixed soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How about a grid of equal-height items, but intersperse something between each row- can this library do that?

For example, consider a bookshelf design where the books are the items and each row has an element underneath it (the element would itself be composed of say 3 images for left and right ends plus the middle)

afaik that's not possible with CSS grid either since grid doesn't have an `nth-row` selector

<comment> e-oj No, the library doesn't support that. you should be able to achieve the effect with plain html and css though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Now that I have a bunch of knowledgeable people in one thread.

Anyone know of a good grid layout library/framework.

With grid i don't mean the css syntax version but the actual visual design grid that gives you something like:

[https://cl.ly/a01ae1db0240](https://cl.ly/a01ae1db0240)

<comment><USER8> Not sure what your question is. You want something like a 12 column grid? Or the visual lines?

<comment><USER7> The visual lines. I seem to remember a few frameworks i saw a while back which allow you to control these grid lines and help you do them according to the golden means.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> the state of art here is [https://github.com/bvaughn/react- virtualized](https://github.com/bvaughn/react-virtualized) ([https://bvaughn.github.io/react- virtualized/#/components/Lis...](https://bvaughn.github.io/react- virtualized/#/components/List)) and its successor, [https://github.com/bvaughn/react-window](https://github.com/bvaughn/react- window) ([https://react-window.now.sh/#/examples/list/fixed- size](https://react-window.now.sh/#/examples/list/fixed-size))

</comment><comment><USER10> Neat. We use Masonry [1] although I'm not the biggest fan of it. How does this library compare?

[1] [https://github.com/desandro/masonry](https://github.com/desandro/masonry)

<comment> e-oj Depends on the use case. If the grid's items have varying widths then masonry is the better option. However, for a grid with equal width items, I'll definitely go with magic grid. It's just so much lighter (2.3kb minified) than masonry (23.5kb minified).

<comment><USER11> I really don't see what's lacking with CSS Grids for equal-with items. Even accommodating different sizes, and allowing reordering for packing, works fine with just CSS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you are looking for a more flexible solution with support for any layout and support for animations, something like iOS' UICollectionView or Android's RecyclerView, have a look at [https://github.com/turbolent/collection- view](https://github.com/turbolent/collection-view).

</comment><comment><USER13> Can this, or any solution allow for a cell to overlap into another row or column?

Something like this [https://www.pcscoreboards.com/footballscoreboardpro/scoreboa...](https://www.pcscoreboards.com/footballscoreboardpro/scoreboardbig.gif)

Notice the red 8 seems to need to overlap between rows.

<comment> e-oj This doesn't and I think most grid solutions keep the items separate

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Curious why a lot of grid algorithms/implementations only support items of the same height or width?

<comment> e-oj Makes it much easier to segment the grid into rows or columns

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> And the reason to use this over built-in CSS grids is...

<comment><USER16> +1 - I recently went looking for a CSS framework (I was still in the "Bootstrap" mindset), and ultimately decided on vanilla CSS grid + flexbox. If anyone is looking for a resource to learn CSS grid, I highly recommend Grid Garden: [http://cssgridgarden.com/](http://cssgridgarden.com/)

<comment><USER17> I just started this tutorial. Thats is a "why", not a "how"... So maybe I can ask here. Why grid-column start include the value and grid column end exclude it... In fact where there is a ressource for understanding css logic on the internet?

<comment><USER18> > Why grid-column start include the value and grid column end exclude it

All CSS grid properties are defined in terms of grid "lines", not cells. If you have a grid of 2x2 cells, there are actually 3 vertical lines and 3 horizontal lines:

        1 2 3
      1 ┌─┬─┐
      2 ├─┼─┤
      3 └─┴─┘

"grid-column-start: x" means "this area starts the x _vertical line_ "

"grid-column-end: y" means "this area ends at the y _vertical line_ "

As you can see, there is no possible ambiguity here on whether you mean "inclusive" or "exclusive" like there would be if you referred to cells (which is why you had this question). That's the reason they chose to go with the "lines" model.

> In fact where there is a ressource for understanding css logic on the > internet?

Usually each CSS spec has a rationale and some introduction to the "why" and the "thinking model" of the spec. For CSS grid you may look at [1].

[1] [https://www.w3.org/TR/css-grid-1/#grid- concepts](https://www.w3.org/TR/css-grid-1/#grid-concepts)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> what about ssr?

</comment><comment><USER20> Why do you need yet another library? Not invented here syndrome? A simple Github search gives me literally thousands of results: [https://github.com/search?utf8=&q=css+grid](https://github.com/search?utf8=&q=css+grid)</comment>


Ethereum Launches - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/07/30/ethereum-launches/

<comment><USER2> This is a pretty huge deal. The plan is to build a fully decentralized compute platform. They have worked out the basics but the protocol is still in active development.

What happened today is they launched the mining network for the cryptocurrency that will underpin it. In a few days they will start allowing financial transactions. In the coming months cryptocontracts for messaging/compute/storage will come.

The title is somewhat inaccurate, as only the blockchain launched today, Ethereum itself is under active development. Anyone interested in leaning more check out the talks from their 0th conference that was last year: [http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJqWcTqh_zKEjpSej3ddtD...](http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJqWcTqh_zKEjpSej3ddtDOKPRGl_7MhS)

This episode of Epicenter Bitcoin with Vitalik Buterin, who is kind of the inventor, is also a good overview of the core contract and some immediate challenges: [http://youtu.be/qPsCGvXyrP4](http://youtu.be/qPsCGvXyrP4)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an important moment in history, yet so few realize it. Congratulations guys!

</comment><comment><USER4> Will be very interesting to follow this project!</comment>


Tesla just transformed the Model S into a nearly driverless car - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/524400/tesla-just-transformed-the-model-s-into-a-nearly-driverless-car/ <comment><USER2> It's kind of a shame, really; I'd be a lot more interested in a Tesla if it _weren 't_ such a ridiculously over-automated pile of software masquerading as a car. Is a simple passive electric car really too much to ask for?

<comment><USER3> Yes. You're complaining that a car has features that you don't want to use. Every car I've ever bought has features that I've never used. Cupholders, for example.

It's a valid complaint if the price of the car is much higher because of a feature you don't find valuable. But that doesn't appear to be the case, this time.

<comment><USER2> I can opt not to use the cupholders. I could get out my toolbox and remove them from the car, if they really offended me. So far as I can tell there is no way to remove the giant touchscreen that controls everything about the car and still have a working vehicle. Nor am I aware of any way to permanently disable whatever radio mechanism it is that offers Tesla remote root access to all of their vehicles, which clearly don't actually belong to the people who believed that they were buying them.

<comment><USER3> Let's see: 17" touchscreen in an $90,000+ car. How much did you pay for it? And what is the value of Tesla calling me up 2 minutes after I had an accident to find out if I was OK, or did they need to call 911 on my behalf?

If you don't want monitoring, don't buy the car. If you don't like the touchscreen, and think it makes the car overly expensive, don't buy the car. If you don't like the car, don't buy the car.

Where is the problem?

<comment><USER2> The problem is that there's no other car to be had - nothing comparable, anyway.

There is no fundamental reason that a car like Tesla's _must_ be encumbered with monitoring and complex automation. The same drivetrain and the same body could be sold as a perfectly reasonable, normal car without all the crap: but they have chosen not to offer such a vehicle, and they have no competition who can make up for that gap in the market.

My choice is: burn gas, or put up with a crappy car full of gadgets I don't want but can't disable.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Humbling - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/2668983 It's so easy to forget what our fore-fathers have given us. <comment><USER2> Not sure what's "humbling" here. The fact that compiled code looks more complicated and verbose than that written in a higher-level language (even C), or something else?

<comment><USER3> This doesn't show the compiled code, it shows the syscalls that are made by libc and the dynamic linking system to set up the process.

Back in the days of a.out and static linking, it was much shorter and easier to understand.</comment></comment>


States with the highest taxes also rank as the unhappiest? - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703278604574624743612652998.html

<comment><USER2> Tons of interpretation applied to mere ounces of data. She glosses over the fact that all of the five happiest states are in the sunny south and four of the five least happy states are in the North and, not surprisingly for the Wall Street Journal, concludes that the problem is taxation. In contrast, the New York Times version of this story has the following quote "Americans who described themselves as satisfied tended to live in places where the quality of life was good by most standards — where the sun shone a lot, the air was reasonably clear, housing didn't leave you busted, traffic wasn't too fierce and so on."

<comment><USER3> If I understood the article right, they controlled for this. I think they used salary differentials to account for the myriad ways that one locale might be better than another.

So imagine that person X and person Y both live in state Z. They offer to Y $Q more dollars to move to New York. Because Y was willing to take the deal, we can assume that $Q is enough to make up for the cold weather, etc., in New York.

Afterwards if we ask X and Y about their happiness, and X is happier, how can we explain that? The OP offers some theories as to why that might be, and develops some arguments as to why higher taxes are one likely explanation.

<comment><USER4> It's an _editorial_ in a well known anti-tax paper. It's not "correcting" for anything, because it's not doing any science. It's combining some research (without links, so without any way for me to easily tell if it's in-context or not) from disparate sources to make a pretty typical point about "taxes are bad".

It only looks like "science" to you because it starts out talking about someone else's paper (and one that says nothing about tax at all, AFAICT).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This suggests an alternative good explanation: "Using data from the 2005-2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and a 2003 economics paper examining quality-of-life indicators"

This time period is when the Republicans were in peak power in the White House and Congress. I suggest that this political environment makes blue-state dwellers unhappy.

<comment><USER6> The substantive political environment is identical now. The study already indicates that people in areas with winning sports franchises are less happy, so there goes the "in power party makes me happy" explanation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is ridiculous and bogus. So many things wrong with it:

1\. Self reported happiness varies greatly by culture; a society which reports low happiness may merely be less enthused. So the basic data is completely untrustworthy.

2\. Taking the top 5 and bottom 5 states is a ridiculous way to do a correlation. If there was a strong correlation, you could graph it all the way across all 50 states. And even if you found that correlation, it still wouldn't mean much, because...

3\. Any correlation which treats Alaska (population: less than a million) and California (population: 54 million) as the same type of entity is ridiculous. Comparing cities might make slightly more sense, but comparing states is absurd. And even if you used cities, it would be silly because...

4\. Controlling a study like this is nearly impossible. There's no reason to suspect taxation above any of the other thousands of alternative explanations, all of which make at _least_ as much sense as taxation does. Which of course is what really happened here: someone who dislikes taxation is looking for evidence which might confirm that thought.

</comment><comment> Gorm-Casper To make a general statement like that based on a study purely on USA, seems wrong.

I used to live in Denmark where they (according studies I won't bother digging up now) have both the happiest people on the planet AND pay the highest percentage in tax.

<comment><USER3> _To make a general statement like that based on a study purely on USA, seems wrong._

On the contrary. The author seems to be trying only to apply her conclusions to America, so it would be appropriate.

Also, bringing other variables into the regression (societal factors, etc.) would just muddy the waters. If we've got a sample that excludes some variables altogether, it would make sense to use it (with the caveat that we can't know what effect those other dimensions might have).

<comment><USER4> Uh, what? Ignoring evidence is never correct. The burden goes the other way around -- you need to prove the absence of uncorrected correlations if you want to do a good science. You can't just limit your study to a cherry-picked set and announce that "you're only trying to apply your conclusions to the studied subjects".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sounds bogus to me. The article has a strong bias.

My guess is that big city stress is the cause for the "unhappiness" measured. It just so happens that big cities tend lean more democratic, and the countryside is more republican.

<comment><USER6> You basically just restated the article without contradicting it.

The whole point is that striving harder to afford a comfortable standard of living in a higher tax, higher cost environment reduces happiness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yes, and Denmark has one of the highest tax rates in the world, and also happens to harbour the happiest people on earth. Maybe a bit more data would be a good thing.

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=happiest+people+on+...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=happiest+people+on+earth)

<comment><USER10> Could be the reverse is true: instead of taxes leading happiness, happiness might lead taxation.

Or put another way: happy Europeans are probably much easier to tax than happy Americans. :)

<comment><USER9> Could be. Or it could be that a large public sector leads to _both_ high taxation _and_ happiness. My point was just that there doesn't seem to be enough data in the article to assert the conclusions that it does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if it's the "Rich Financial Lives of Poor People" article. Hard to tell behind the paywall, but nothing else seems to make sense.

[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol326/issue5960/sindex.dt...](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol326/issue5960/sindex.dtl)</comment>


Debunking the "Bitcoin's Electricity Consumption" Problem - <AUTHOR> https://blockchaind.net/debunking-bitcoins-electricity-problem/ <comment><USER2> Argument 1: "Well that's how bitcoin work."

Argument 2: "Bitcoin is more than a company, so lets compare it with the costs of securing the whole internet"

Fact is the cost of a transaction is orders of magnitude bigger, and it's just getting worse with time.</comment>


How I Accidentally Built a Tech Startup - <AUTHOR> http://howtostartasubscriptionbusiness.com/2015/03/03/how-i-accidently-built-a-tech-startup/

<comment><USER2> Tech companies usually don't have such long domain names, but that's just me.

<comment><USER3> This person may still believe that Google's algorithm heavily rewards keywords in domain names.

That particular change resulted in tons of domains like this, so Google decreased the boost significantly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Owner of the domain here, the combination of url and it generally being the text that people use when they link still gives some good SEO advantages in my experience.</comment></comment></comment>


64-bit Knowledge Base - <AUTHOR>

How much memory can an application access in Win32 and Win64?
http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0036/
What can I use instead of "int 3" instruction in a 64-bit application? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0035/
Can I use 32-bit pointers in a 64-bit application? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0033/
How can I find out in a 32-bit application what 64-bit processes are launched? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0034/
What can I use instead of rundll32.exe to run 64-bit DLL? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0037/
Why is it so hard to create a 64-bit version of an application? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0038/
How can I find out in Win64 how many processor cores there are in the system? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0039/
How to check if a 64-bit project is being built in Visual Studio using #ifdef
http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0032/
Is it possible to use more than 2 Gbytes of memory in a 32-bit program launched in the 64-bit Windows? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0001/
What advantages do 64-bit processors have over 32-bit ones? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0002/
Why do 64-bit applications work faster than 32-bit ones? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0003/
Is it possible to launch 64-bit applications in a 32-bit operating system? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0004/
How to correctly cast a pointer to int in a 64-bit application? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0005/
Where is the 64-bit compiler in Visual Studio? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0006/
Should I fix all the errors found by the static code analyzer? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0007/
The warnings C4311 and C4312 generated by the analyzer when using the /Wp64 switch http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0008/
How to compile a 64-bit application with using Visual C++ Express 2005/2008/2010? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0009/
Visual Studio Team System, /analyze and D9040 http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0010/
A common error occurring when compiling a 64-bit application: error C2440, OnTimer http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0011/
Strange errors occurring when compiling the 64-bit version of an application, error C2664 http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0012/
A common error occurring when compiling a 64-bit application: error C4235, Assembler http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0013/
How can I know if the DWORD_PTR type is defined using ifdef? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0014/
Why does not Visual C++ support the inline assembler for Intel 64 and IA-64 anymore? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0015/
How can a 32-bit program detect that it is launched in a 64-bit Windows? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0016/
Obsolete descriptions of functions in MSDN taking no account of 64 bits http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0017/
Functions of the ntohl/htonl class and 64-bit values http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0018/
Difference between %p and %x http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0019/
Why is the value of the ProgramFiles environment variable replaced with that of ProgramFiles(x86)? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0020/
Is there a way to make the type size_t 32-bit in a 64-bit program? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0021/
Is size_t a standard type in C++? And in C? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0022/
Working with the type size_t in the functions prinft, scanf and similar functions http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0023/
Are the types size_t and uintptr_t equivalent? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0024/
Is there the 64-bit version of Visual Studio? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0025/
How to compile a C++ application in Visual Studio 2010 so that it could work in Windows 2000?
http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0026/
Warning C4267 in the expression unsigned n = str.find(substr) http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0027/
Why does Windows put 64-bit units into System32? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0028/
WOW6432Node and API-functions RegOpenKeyEx / RegEnumKeyEx http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0029/
Why does WoW64 use register and file system redirection? http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0030/
Confusion of WPARAM with UINT, and LPARAM with LONG http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0031/ <comment><USER2> I guess it's worth copying for clickable links. Kudos for the list!

\---

How much memory can an application access in Win32 and Win64? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0036/>

What can I use instead of "int 3" instruction in a 64-bit application? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0035/>

Can I use 32-bit pointers in a 64-bit application? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0033/>

How can I find out in a 32-bit application what 64-bit processes are launched? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0034/>

What can I use instead of rundll32.exe to run 64-bit DLL? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0037/>

Why is it so hard to create a 64-bit version of an application? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0038/>

How can I find out in Win64 how many processor cores there are in the system? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0039/>

How to check if a 64-bit project is being built in Visual Studio using #ifdef <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0032/>

Is it possible to use more than 2 Gbytes of memory in a 32-bit program launched in the 64-bit Windows? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0001/>

What advantages do 64-bit processors have over 32-bit ones? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0002/>

Why do 64-bit applications work faster than 32-bit ones? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0003/>

Is it possible to launch 64-bit applications in a 32-bit operating system? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0004/>

How to correctly cast a pointer to int in a 64-bit application? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0005/>

Where is the 64-bit compiler in Visual Studio? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0006/>

Should I fix all the errors found by the static code analyzer? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0007/>

The warnings C4311 and C4312 generated by the analyzer when using the /Wp64 switch <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0008/>

How to compile a 64-bit application with using Visual C++ Express 2005/2008/2010? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0009/>

Visual Studio Team System, /analyze and D9040 <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0010/>

A common error occurring when compiling a 64-bit application: error C2440, OnTimer <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0011/>

Strange errors occurring when compiling the 64-bit version of an application, error C2664 <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0012/>

A common error occurring when compiling a 64-bit application: error C4235, Assembler <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0013/>

How can I know if the DWORD_PTR type is defined using ifdef? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0014/>

Why does not Visual C++ support the inline assembler for Intel 64 and IA-64 anymore? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0015/>

How can a 32-bit program detect that it is launched in a 64-bit Windows? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0016/>

Obsolete descriptions of functions in MSDN taking no account of 64 bits <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0017/>

Functions of the ntohl/htonl class and 64-bit values <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0018/>

Difference between %p and %x <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0019/>

Why is the value of the ProgramFiles environment variable replaced with that of ProgramFiles(x86)? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0020/>

Is there a way to make the type size_t 32-bit in a 64-bit program? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0021/>

Is size_t a standard type in C++? And in C? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0022/>

Working with the type size_t in the functions prinft, scanf and similar functions <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0023/>

Are the types size_t and uintptr_t equivalent? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0024/>

Is there the 64-bit version of Visual Studio? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0025/>

How to compile a C++ application in Visual Studio 2010 so that it could work in Windows 2000? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0026/>

Warning C4267 in the expression unsigned n = str.find(substr) <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0027/>

Why does Windows put 64-bit units into System32? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0028/>

WOW6432Node and API-functions RegOpenKeyEx / RegEnumKeyEx <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0029/>

Why does WoW64 use register and file system redirection? <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0030/>

Confusion of WPARAM with UINT, and LPARAM with LONG <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0031/>

</comment><comment><USER3> This may be useful, but I think it would be more polite to just link to <http://www.viva64.com/en/k/></comment>


When Chinese Employees Ask for Justice, Facebook Silence Their Voices - <AUTHOR> https://en.pingwest.com/a/3649 <comment><USER2> It's quite the lengthy article but the crux of what they believe led to his suicide is here:

 _Relevant sources unveiled that before Mr. Chen's last PSC, he had already been under pressure from the advertising department, so he expected to shift to other groups to maintain his job in Facebook and the opportunity to work in the United States.

According to informed sources told PingWest that, Mr. Chen's group had undergone organizational restructuring, during which the group's original manager hopped to another group. A new manager was hired to lead Mr. Chen's group, but the manager soon realized that many of his ICs were already transferring groups, resulting in a sharply-increased workload per capita within the group.

Mr. Chen, who was already in high pressure, submitted his transfer request as well, and was pre-approved by another group, meaning that all that's left is to have his own manager sign off on the transfer.

The new manager reportedly gave Mr. Chen verbal approval and told him to stay on the team until the PSC, but eventually gave him the "Meets Most" rating, which factually voided Mr. Chen's transfer request because the other group is very unlikely to accommodate a new IC who just received the worst possible rating, according to Facebook internal sources close to Mr. Chen.

Mr. Chen, who had been on the verge of collapse, was mentally pushed off the edge by a Facebook robot, according to people familiar with the matter as well as other employees on Blind, an anonymous workplace social networking app.

Two weeks before the tragedy, the Facebook advertising system experienced a Severe Site Event (SEV), which is essentially a server crash. A SEV management bot created a task for the SEV to be resolved and assigned the task to Mr. Chen, requiring him to fix the bug and submit the SEV report before the deadline, which is roughly one hour after the time of his death.

Mr. Chen tried to push the deadline to be delayed but another bot monitoring the SEV rejected the change and maintained the deadline to be met in 12 days._

It sounds like the already existing pressure in Ads + reorg + new manager blocking his transfer request + SEV caused him to just give in. Given Zuckerberg's public push on transparency, openness, and wanting to connect the world, I'm honestly quite surprised and disappointed at how secretive they've been on this tragedy.

<comment><USER3> Man, I can't imagine working in such an environment. It feels so detached to normal human interaction.

Couple questions as I don't (and largely have no intention to) work in Silicon Valley:

\- Shouldn't the bar for transfers be roughly the same as the bar for initial employment? As in, give the candidates a similar interview process as if they were coming outside of the company into that team? Why would a transfer be based on the current manager, who is already disincentivized to allow the employee to switch teams?

\- > Mr. Chen tried to push the deadline to be delayed but another bot monitoring the SEV rejected the change

Maybe someone who works at FB can clear this up but how does this work? A bot opens a ticket, dev attempts to change a dropdown field and another bot decides whether to revert or not? Or is there a human involved, and do they have override powers?

<comment><USER4> > Shouldn't the bar for transfers be roughly the same as the bar for initial > employment? As in, give the candidates a similar interview process as if > they were coming outside of the company into that team? Why would a transfer > be based on the current manager, who is already disincentivized to allow the > employee to switch teams?

1\. This allows internal transfers to avoid reinterviewing. I think many would agree that going through the same interview process is not productive, especially with the types of interview questions asked at FB (predominantly Leetcode style). This reflects FB's standard hiring process for engineers, where engineers are hired into a "general" pipeline and not to a specific team, with the implication that once they pass FB's interview, they are qualified to work on basically any team. The performance requirements are there so that engineers cannot just change teams every time they perform poorly.

2\. I think the incentives are intended such that the very worst case for a manager is being forced to fire an employee for poor performance -- it means the manager was unable to help the employee improve their performance. Having them transfer within the company reflects much better on the manager. In practice, this may not be true in all situations.

In the general / common case, this system is great for engineers in terms of internal mobility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article appears to have some fundamental misunderstandings. Their description of the review system is not stack ranking, in which employees are ranked in a hierarchy and the lowest on the totem are fired. Instead, the "meets/exceeds" scale has been pretty standard wherever I've worked.

Further, it seems that FB HR asked the source of this article to not speak to the press about an internal event that involved a very sensitive issue. Yet, the journalist repeatedly states that Mr. Yin was asked to speak with nobody about the issue. It looks like he ignored the advice, and became a very visible interviewee, even appearing on public news. He told his manager after the interviews - what was he thinking? It's pretty obvious that FB doesn't want it's employees speaking to the press.

This article's inaccuracies in an attempt to spin a tragedy into some sort of Facebook conspiracy reinforces the correctness of the company's "do not speak to the press" attitude.

<comment><USER6> a meets/exceeds scale becomes stack ranking when the proportion of different ranks is capped so that even if everybody on a team did well, some would have to be given the lowest ranking

<comment><USER7> "Meets most" is just the politically correct version of PIP or "you should look for other jobs now"

<comment><USER8> that's "meets some". Meets most means you have 1 or 2 secondary axes you need to fix

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My brother, a GP doctor, said that he writes a _lot_ of scripts for antidepressants every performance review season. Performance management sucks.

The racial tenor of this article seems bizarre and over the top, though?

<comment><USER10> maybe I'm missing something but people don't normally take antidepressants to deal with one off periods of stress, right?

<comment><USER9> If the period lasts months, then sure. People go on meds for temporary events all the time, e.g. Seasonal Affective Disorder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seems like there's a few things at play here

Foremost it sounds like Facebook has a shitty performance management culture. Let's forget intent for a minute. Looking at the details offered, it's just bad. If you get a rating of "meets most", and that's really bad then your system is off the bat not clear.

The implied story I got was about Chinese worker and visa abuse. But it sounds like it's more just bad company culture with high degrees of competitiveness and finger pointing. I don't see anything especially relevant to his race or immigration status. The idea that they're dangling anything over his head (as is a common and important problem for many low skilled tech workers, (which probably doesn't describe this guy)) because it's implied they were going to push him out.

The internal push to silence any internal discussion on it is shameful.

But overall this seems like the result of organizational incompetence rather than malice. And I don't think it should be surprising to anyone that this is the case because you're going to be selecting for a very specific profile for a company like Facebook. Namely, people who put higher value on money and prestige.

</comment><comment><USER7> This incident has gone wild on popular overseas Chinese forums criticizing the double standards and mistreatments. It'll be interesting and eye opening if someone could translate the information shared there.

<comment><USER11> Since you seem to be active in those forums yourself, maybe you could do the translating?

<comment><USER7> It'll be way too risky to expose the threads. Some user ids and conversations can be used to infer the real identity

<comment><USER11> Then why mention them at all?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How can Facebook be claiming to protect the family's privacy when it is in fact preventing employees from speaking to the press about bad working conditions?

<comment><USER13> By doing both? Both the family and the company want to avoid a media blowup about the death, so keeping quiet protects both the family and Facebook's corporate interests (and probably also the mental health of other employees).

The argument people are making is that it doesn't protect society's interests, but as far as I can tell, Facebook isn't claiming it is.

<comment><USER14> Being quiet about the specifics of the individual case does not prevent them from having a transparent discussion of company policies and practices that may have contributed. The argument is that this does not protect _employees '_ interests because it allows these practices to continue unexamined.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is his suicide linked to some kind of maltreatment of Chinese employees at Facebook? The article doesn't make that clear.

<comment><USER16> Not mistreat Chinese employee per say. The individual is operating under big stress, and the manager is deliberately playing politics to prevent him switching teams, threatening to put his job at jeperody.

I don't feel like this is engineered to target Chinese. But if all proven, Facebook's internal culture seems fucked up...Maybe that is why it doesn't want even its employees to talk about it.

<comment><USER9> That's usually SOP at companies which have suicides. Suicidal ideation is contagious. They'll bring in a grief counselor, and encourage you to talk to _them_ , instead.

<comment><USER16> Well, yes and no

Suicide is one thing. But Facebook's refusal to change anything as regarding to the cause of this employee's passing is jarring, for stuff like fire fast, highly stressful Sev meeting and etc, and super high peer pressure.

Even Amazon does change its way of handling internal transfer after employee's attempted suicide.

Not to mention there are Facebook employees defending on other places, claiming this is nothing burger, because Facebook's suicide rate is below national average, which ironically signals the issue is indeed internal and not normal.

<comment><USER17> Comparing against the national average seems like BS anyway. The suicide rate of employees in any given company should be compared to suicide rates of other populations of people with comparable incomes, opportunities, etc. For instance, how does the suicide rate in Facebook compare to Google? Or how does the suicide rate in one Facebook department compare to another?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > to hold a vigil for a Facebook employee who took his own life after > allegedly [being] bullied in the company and suffering extremely excessive > work pressure

> Most Attendees wore black

Huh. Why not white?

<comment><USER19> In America at least, black clothing (typically formal wear, the specifics vary from place to place) is strongly associated with mourning. It's traditional garb at funerals and gatherings to pay respects for the departed. This may be different in other countries, and it's not a universal practice, but it's common enough that most everyone understands the meaning.

<comment><USER14> For context for those who are not already aware, since this is being downvoted... white traditionally has the same associations in Chinese culture. So it was not an entirely unreasonable question. The answer is just that this happened in the US, not China, and wearing white in the US would be unusual.

<comment><USER18> But this is an event for Chinese migrants, not even American Chinese.

<comment><USER20> It happened in the United States. And who says it was exclusively attended by Chinese Nationals?

<comment><USER18> The article.

<comment><USER14> This is a pressure tactic against Facebook. They are also carrying signs and chanting slogans. Of course the signs and slogans are in English; wouldn't do much good in Chinese. So it makes sense they would follow the custom of the country they are in and the company they are trying to pressure.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Feeling Sick  - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
I have been here since the beginning and I was more normal that what I currently am. Obviously I am using my past self as a metric to measure my present self, which is not really a good scale, but please bear with me.
I am unable to get things done, and I can't handle it anymore. I never believed in reading productivity p0rn, but my situation started getting so bad, that I took a 1-2 week break, and focused on reading all the popular recommended reading from GTD by Allen, to Zen Habits, etc. This was a couple of months ago, but I still can't seem to focus. I understand what needs to be done, and its really trivial, but I am unable to bring myself to do anything at all. I feel like throwing up. I really can't focus, and this i driving me crazy.
I am otherwise perfectly normal, healthy/fit, had a girlfriend (asked her for time off after valentine's day), and a great relationships with friends and family. I have been blessed with more that what most people in the world have in their lives, and I am thankful for that, but really I really don't have any motivation or desire to do anything.
I asked myself if i could do anything, what would I want to do, and really I have no idea. [I could say travel and help others in third world / other countries or here, but really i have done that and  it just doesn't click].
If you have any advice that could help me reset, I'd greatly appreciate it. I even tried meditation, but I can't still for more than 5 minutes anymore.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> _I asked myself if i could do anything, what would I want to do, and really I have no idea._

First, before I get to the advice part, a note: Our ability make decisions in the present based on our _current_ emotional reaction to scenarios we imagine happening in the _future_ is an amazing evolutionary advance (compared to, e.g., what even chimpanzees can do), but where it breaks down is that we have only _one_ emotional response circuit, which got _reused_ by evolution for us to evaluate future scenarios, and _it_ doesn't distinguish between the present and the future.

Thus to ask yourself "what would I want to do", and to have no idea, is completely normal. A standard brain limitation. You're in a funk, where you feel sick. You think of some future scenario, something you could do, and check in with your emotion circuit. It says, "blah" and "feel sick". So do you _feel_ like you _want_ that future scenario? No, you feel sick.

So keep in mind that your emotional future predictor circuit is going to be offline while you're in a funk. Being _experimental_ is a reasonable idea: you can go out and try things like going jogging or meditating or getting a hug or getting more sleep or cutting out the caffeine or taking a vacation or painting your room purple or doing nothing for a day and _observe_ whether you feel a bit better or not, but when you _imagine_ doing things you're not going to _feel_ like you'd want to do them.

Another thing I notice is that in your description you describe your feeling bad as a _result_ of not getting thing done ("I can't focus, and this driving me crazy"; "I asked myself what would I want to do"). I'm imaging that you have, in the past, felt good about getting things done, and so when you are unhappy and not getting things done, your hypothesis is that you're unhappy because you're not getting things done.

I suspect that causality may be going the other way: that is, you're not getting things done because you're unhappy, and when your emotional equilibrium is restored, your natural ability to get things done that you want to do will also be restored.

In the meantime, you need to triage your tasks: what are the things that you _actually_ need to get done (to avoid starvation or homelessness, etc.); and what are the other tasks you "should" or want to get done. If you're having trouble with tasks in the first category, ask for help in getting them done from friends and family. For the rest, set them aside and don't worry about them until your emotional equilibrium is restored.

When you're in a negative emotional state, you need to first get to neutral. Once you're in neutral, working on aspirations and productivity tools are ways to then get to positive. But you can't go from -10 to +10 in one jump. You need to get to zero first.

I went through a period of depression, so I'm quite familiar with the feeling of _not wanting to do anything_ , and being unhappy about it. I found therapy enormously helpful in getting myself up to zero. Eventually I got to zero and stopped going to therapy because I had outgrown it.

So this is my advice, since I've been in this situation and this is what worked for me: get therapy. Recognize that the goal of therapy is to get you reset, to get you up to zero. Once you're at zero, and start feeling like doing things again, that's the time to pursue GTD or whatever that you find useful. Therapists are typically not going to help you much getting past zero, but getting you out of your negative condition and up to zero is something that they're _really good at_.

Please feel free to email me at email@example.com if there's anything you'd like to ask or tell me privately.

<comment><USER3> I wish I could upvote this by more than just one point. This response is amazing. I know I don't add much to the conversation here, but I really wanted you to know that this was valued by me and I'm sure many others. Thank you.

<comment><USER4> I agree. Great response. So much advice a person like this would receive would be "do this" or "do that." If you don't have the urge to do anything perhaps that is a good thing. Your mind/body is trying to tell you something. It may be time to take a break. There's nothing wrong with that. We all sleep at night and sometimes we need more rest at points of our lives. Humans are not linear. We are more suited to a cycle of up and down rather than a straight, linear way of life.

When we're sick, the best way to get better is to rest. I know this isn't a popular opinion for a place like HN or even America in general.

You said you tried meditating but can't stand it for more than 5 minutes. There are other forms of activities that can get you into a meditative-like state. For me, this could be reading or walking for the sake of walking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Work to live, don't live to work.

Stop worrying about your productivity and indulge in life. Ask that girl if she'd like to disappear overseas for a week or two.

</comment><comment><USER6> To start off, if it makes you feel any better, most people's work ethics are like you.

You can't just keep going on a journey to search for motivation, because it didn't work for me. If you've attempted to read the productivity literature and the self help literature, I'm sure everything I say, you know already.

So to keep it clean and simple, pull yourself together man. No one is going to help you, and you're on your journey on your own. The motivation has to come within, and if you really want to become successful, then start acting more successful. Surround yourself with people of good work ethics. Start challenging people to motivate yourself through competition. You have to figure out what works for you.

The best way to measure your determination is to go jog. Set a high expectation number, let's say if you're endurance can only allow you to jog 2 miles currently, set a goal to jog for 4 miles. Refuse to stop until you finish the distance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks man. I usually run 60-90 minutes 2x week, so running calms me down, and that is something that I force myself to do, but the other stuff doesn't happen. I guess that is what i figured after reading all this self help stuff that I ultimately need to figure stuff out myself, but I thought there might be other folks that could point me in the right direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think you will find your answer or at least some breadcrumbs leading to it in stillness.

Every time you're feeling the way you are, as I suspect your post was written in a heightened state of your emotion, drop everything at hand and go to a quiet space. Grab a cup of tea and just sit and look at the smoke coming out of the cup. Clear your mind and purge yourself of all negative thoughts.

I understand the feeling every well as I think many here will say the same. We all want to do a lot of things, and sometimes that myriad of "things" we want to do can get overwhelming. When it gets overwhelming, just drop everything and regain your footing. I do make it a point to do "nothing" sometimes :)

When I say stillness, I really mean it. No computer, cellphones, electronics nothing but your collected self and perhaps a cup of tea. No watch either. You are the master of your self, space and time. Everything is as you say and execute.

</comment><comment><USER8> One piece of advice: talk to a licensed professional therapist or some other trusted and professional source of counseling.

</comment><comment><USER9> Burnout?

You must learn to forgive yourself for not doing enough, not being up to par to your past self, etc etc. Let your GF help you and be with you and take a break. a REAL brake. don't spend a week "resting" trying to cram in 20 books. There's no quick fixes.

Once you really rest. Once you find yourself calm again, let the drive and passion build up by itself once more, soon it will burn again even more . Start w/ small achievements, baby steps, you'll learn not to let yourself burnout again. Soon you'll be back on track.

</comment><comment><USER10> What are the things that you were trying to do but couldn't do? Is it a particular thing or things in general? If it's a particular thing, may be your subconscious is telling you the task is not ready to begin.

I have similar experiences in not able to start on a particular development task and later it turned out that the design was bad. All the effort would be wasted if I have started anyway.

It's better to just relax and do something else enjoyable. When things are ready, you can jump right in.

</comment><comment><USER11> I understand what you're going through, and can relate with much of what you've said. I don't know what to do myself, or what advice to give. I would suggest disconnecting yourself from computers and the intenet for a whle though, and see if that improves your focus on other things.

</comment><comment><USER12> You're burnt out, in the true sense of the term. If you don't take care of yourself now you may end up this way for good. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnout_(psychology)>

</comment><comment><USER13> I understand if you don't want to share, but what was the reason behind you and your girlfriends break-up? Is it possible that it has something to do with the way you feel now?

<comment><AUTHOR> I told her that i needed sometime alone to figure stuff out. I still like her, and she still likes me, she tried to help, but sometimes I just don't want people around me. I thought that was understood, but clarifying again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Take some time to forget about being productive and be creative.

Draw a picture. Bake something delicious. Write a poem.

Then share it with someone.

</comment><comment><USER15> Set short, intermediate and long term goals and knock off the short ones one day at a time until you get back on track.

<comment><USER16> I think the key here is set some short-term goals. Although it's important to have some long-term, you need to get the ball rolling. Set some short- term/easily attainable goals that way you'll have some successes to build off of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What are you trying to get done? Why? What would you do if you didn't have to do this stuff you're trying to get done?

<comment><AUTHOR> I freelance to make bank. I have enough money to get by for a couple of months, or live beyond my means for 2 months and blow it all. That is the question that i keep asking myself, because I went through all the old stuff on HN that suggested traveling, or helping others and volunteering. I don't have an answer, and I am just freaking out because of that.</comment></comment>