Flint's Children Suffer in Class After Years of Drinking the Lead-Poisoned Water - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/politics/flint-michigan-schools.html <comment><USER3> The city of Flint has extremely high poverty and the schools were very bad well before the water issue came to light. I wonder how much of this is due to the lead in water vs just the situation of the city, high poverty, and poor schools, etc. anecdotally I don't think the things mentioned in this article are all that different from other cities in similar situations without the lead in water issue.

Either case hopefully they can turn things around for the kids who have to grow up in this situation.

<comment><USER4> Probably all of the factors you mention are important, but lead certainly didn't help. The main reason to mention lead specifically is the horrible way the situation with water pollution was handled by pretty much everyone, from city officials to Obama himself with his completely disrespectful "take a picture of me pretending to drink the Flint water" media stunt.

<comment><USER5> I agree that's disrespectful if the water he was drinking was not actually Flint water, so I went looking. It appears that what he drank (an admittedly small amount of) was actually filtered Flint water (and he identified it as such).

I fail to see the disrespect or anything else untoward about his actions there.

[https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/obama-drinks-filtered- ci...](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/obama-drinks-filtered-city-water- in-flint-to-show-its-safe)

<comment><USER6> I would guess the "stunt" here is that everyone knows that drinking one glass of Flint water won't really hurt you. It's the long-time exposure from childhood that is the problem.

<comment><USER5> OK, so when the reporter specifically asks him if he'd drink the water in front of him, what's his _least bad_ option? If he makes the speech he does, saying "I don't do stunts" asserting its safety and takes a sip, he's handling the situation as gracefully and productively as he can.

If instead he starts in with a lecture about how it's cumulative exposure, affects children more severely, and _that_ is why he won't take a drink as a publicity stunt, he knows that all that will be reported is "Obama refuses to drink Flint water!"

This wasn't a planned stunt in my estimation (unless you think the reporter was "in on it").

<comment><USER7> First of all -- it was clearly a stunt. The question from the reporter where he "drinks" some water[1] happened after he asked for water in the middle of a speech[2] -- the moment in his speech was so obviously staged that it's not worth elaborating past including the link to the video. With that in mind, it's pretty clear that his answer to the reporter's (probably genuine) question was just doubling-down on the point he'd made with his earlier stunt -- that it's safe to drink.

But ignoring all of that -- why is it a good thing that he said the water was safe? The water wasn't safe to drink, and the video of the President sipping water from Flint means that the entire country collectively agreed that the situation was fixed. But it wasn't fixed -- the water in Flint is still contaminated with lead _today_.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ZynkD3N_k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ZynkD3N_k) [2]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjugN- nUHh8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjugN-nUHh8)

<comment><USER8> It doesn't seem obviously staged to me? The first video you linked he says the water is filtered, emphasizes it multiple times, and says "this doesn't mean we don't need to still replace some pipes". Is there more to the story?

<comment><USER7> As far as I can tell, the second video I linked to (where he asks for water during a speech) happened before the first one (where a reporter asks him about the water he drank). The first one is a reporter following up to check that the water actually was from Flint (and he says it is, but it's filtered) -- and was probably a genuine question from a reporter after his speech (it's probably one of the first questions I'd ask).

The thing I'm referring to as being clearly staged is when he asks in the middle of a speech (where he was talking about things that need to be done in Flint) for some water, takes a tiny sip (he must've been really thirsty!) and continues. If you don't see that as being staged, I really don't know what I could possibly say to convince you otherwise. People from the crowd were shouting "don't drink" and he counters with "I know I'm going to be okay, because I've already had some Flint water."

And you're right that he mentions it's filtered (after being asked that in a follow-up and not when he first did the stunt, but whatever) -- but just because he's not outright lying about the situation doesn't make it the earlier stunt any less staged. There has been very little further outcry about Flint in the past 6 years, because most people you talk to will say "Oh, wasn't that thing in Flint solved years ago? Obama drank the water when he was there!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hear a lot about Flint's children but what about the adults? The lack of reporting on the adult population is really freaking me out. Like, I want to know if people with power, or people providing vital civil services have lead poisoning. I am really concerned that the police and teachers and postal workers and city council and parents etc. might all be mentally impaired. I imagine the Mayor of Flint with lead poisoning and I just hear a voice in back of my head quietly whispering "Caligula. Caligula."

<comment><USER10> I don't think lead has as much of an impact on fully formed brains.

<comment><USER3> But how long has led existed in the pipes? People now grown up could have been impacted when young.

<comment><USER11> I have a book from the 1920's that describes what additives to put into water to prevent it from eroding the lead pipes. Of course back they were only concerned about the pipes and didn't know about (or at least didn't admit) the health problems. Lead used to be very common, up until the 1980s lead was used for nearly all pipes in some way (generally only in solder though so not much - though I don't know how harmful that amount is. Pipes in the ground are generally expected to last for a long time (last I heard Boston still had wood pipes from before the revolution in use), so it is safe to say all towns have lead in their water system somewhere.

Thus all water supplies should be managing to reduce the ability of their water supply to reduce lead. I would also suggest that you should go to your town board and say your number one issue is getting rid of all the lead - <USER2> you are fine with reverting major roads to gravel to pay for it. (and seriously consider what other services are can be eliminated to find more money)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sewage sludge testing doesn't support that lead levels were high enough for long enough to cause significant harm to children in Flint, Michigan. It's understandable that parents would be concerned and tend to overreact, though.

[https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/05/a-brand- new-l...](https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/05/a-brand-new-look-at- lead-contamination-in-flint/)

<comment><USER13> The study that article links to doesn't make any assertion about the harm on children. The author of the mother jones article doesn't seem to cite a source for his claim that it probably didn't significantly harm children. According to the CDC and EPA, there is no known safe level of lead in drinking water, and based on the blood levels that study mentioned children were definitely exposed to lead. Also keep in mind that the way lead leeching works means lead levels in water will fluctuate and can spike to very high levels, so you will see a large variance in how much lead different children were exposed to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This chart of Flint lead levels really puts the whole crisis into perspective: [https://www.motherjones.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/09/blog_...](https://www.motherjones.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/09/blog_flint_lead_levels_1998_2016.gif)

<comment><USER15> These are levels for 5 & 10 10 μg/dL.

I don't remember the exact number, and can't find it in 10 minutes of googling, but before leaded gasoline was banned, the US average was much higher.

My brain wants to say around 40. I probably misremember, but it was in that range.

Which is to say that while the Flint situation is bad, it's much better than how every kid grew up when I was young.

<comment><USER16> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I found it interesting that the article blames the behavior of these children on exposure to lead but contains no information about how much lead they were exposed to or how much lead was found in their blood, especially in the individual cases held up as examples. Of course the people responsible for the Flint Water Crisis deserve to be in prison, but if you claim that one year of lead exposure can lead to multiple suspensions and 70 unexcused absences, I want to know how much lead that is.

<comment><USER18> It's any detectable amount basically.

<comment><USER17> But _was_ there any detectable amount in their blood? It's probable but you can't just handwave those extreme behaviors without bothering to check.

<comment><USER18> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Friendly reminder to test your water for yourself a couple times a year. Do not take anyone else's word for it. You can get decent tests online for $20-30 that will catch the most important types of contamination.

<comment><USER20> Aren't you being insufficiently paranoid? No one should trust their municipal water authority but they can totally trust the makers of water testing kits? Obviously, everyone should reinvent all of the relevant chemistry and biology and manufacture their own water treatment infrastructure. [This is sarcasm. Your municipal water authority is probably fine. Everything involves tradeoffs.]

<comment><USER19> Trust, but verify :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This seems like a test case for the association between lead and crime. [http://freakonomics.com/2007/07/09/lead-and- crime/](http://freakonomics.com/2007/07/09/lead-and-crime/)

<comment><USER22> Test case not really needed. The evidence supporting the lead-crime hypothesis is iron-clad at this point.

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/07z65p9a5wdppfl/LifeAfterLead_AEJ_...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/07z65p9a5wdppfl/LifeAfterLead_AEJ_Revision_3_16_17_wRevNotes.pdf?dl=0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Given the available ppb information, I have a hard time telling if Flint had a lead crisis at all. Virginia Tech found that in 10% of homes they hit 25ppb instead of 15ppb standard. And one home had 13,200ppb (which is either testing error, or something special about the house).

Outside of the one house, this isn't enough lead exposure to see effects from.

EDIT: See thread below. Apparently it was not "Virginia Tech" that is the source for these measurements, as reported by the media, but a group calling themselves "The Virginia Tech Research Team". They maintain [http://flintwaterstudy.org/](http://flintwaterstudy.org/) and you can evaluate them for yourself.

<comment><USER24> The 13k figure is accurate. Lead leaking into water from solder erosion doesn't follow a constant, predictable level. The lead breaks off at intermittent rates into the flow. Please refer to other comments and sources for more.

<comment><USER23> Looking at the team doing the test's web page doesn't provide great evidence for neutrality:

[https://imgur.com/ZUoXQ52](https://imgur.com/ZUoXQ52) [http://flintwaterstudy.org/about-page/about- us/](http://flintwaterstudy.org/about-page/about-us/)

In fact, they look like an advocacy organization, not scientific group at all. Something stinks to high heaven here, and it's not Flint's water.

<comment><USER24> I'm not even referring to that source, straw man attacker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Flint leadership deserves a lot of blame.

I read a story (can't find it) about a contractor who intended to do a high quality job taking care of the lead pipes ... but the city of Flint instead gave it to a different contractor, who charged more, did a crappier job (leaving many problems unfixed), used obsolete tech, and took longer.

But, the chosen contractor was politically connected, so ...

<comment><USER26> The city of Flint was taken over by the state a long while ago. So the city would not have made that decision in any case.

The problem with Flint was that they thought having state government take them over and make all the decisions would result in better decisions being made. But that's not how it works. Sometimes, it just results in other people making bad decisions on your behalf.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> There may also be lead from other sources. See:

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180326090313.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180326090313.htm)

</comment><comment><USER28> In 100 years, Flint, Michigan is going to be one of those cases in US history books that shows the ugly side of the American spirit and how little faith we have in local government to do anything right (and how that's often the case).

</comment><comment><USER29> In a few years time, I expect we'll see a significant increase in the crime statistics in Flint.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis)

<comment><USER3> You do realize flint is one of the worst cities in all US for crime. I am not sure it is possible to get worse from where it is now.

<comment><USER5> Why wouldn't it be possible to get worse? The murder rate of 19 per 50K is still fairly low in overall terms and could dramatically increase without triggering any "natural limit".

Combine that with the adverse selection of population, it could get quite a bit more dire. If you had significant resources and flexibility, you've probably already moved your family out of Flint. As things get worse, people with "any" rather than "significant" resources/flexibility will move out. As you remove swaths of population who (for whatever reason) tend to commit less violent crime, your remaining violent crime rate gets worse.

<comment><USER3> It can technically And definitely get worse but if you are using that statistic only you wouldn't understand the totality of how bad it is in Flint. You really have to see it to understand how bad it is. My point is you cannot make it seem like all of sudden flint is going to become high crime rate going forward due to this.

<comment><USER30> That was not at all their point or what they were getting at. Things can always get worse, and this single statistic can be the tipping point to make it worse. I say this as someone who LIVES in the area. Betting you do not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> All water connects, sooner or later. The problem should be fixed if for no other reason on account of this fact.

</comment><comment><USER32> Glad to see Hacker News is again upholding Internet Rule 814: the comment section for any article alleging disparate impact of policy on a group presumed to be people of color will consist largely of posts attempting to contradict the article, rather than posts discussing what should be done if considering that the article's claims are true.

<comment><USER33> The contrarian dynamic applies to every topic. Indeed, your comment is a classic phase-2 contrarian: the one that shows up to object to the objections. Those typically say something like "I can't believe the comments here are so X", and achieve ironic standing by getting upvoted to the top of the thread (which happened in this case). The mechanism is so universal that I don't think specific explanations are needed.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22contrarian%20dynamic%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)

But yes, race-related discussions are fraught, and there's little doubt that race-related, if not racist, beliefs and feelings lie behind some of what people say in them.

<comment><USER32> The problem is less that controversial subjects draw contrarians than it is that anything that even approaches race is controversial; even with subjects in which the facts and science are pretty much concluded - like, say, the devastating effects of lead poisoning caused by water resource mismanagement - if PoC are to be the benefactors of rectification of the issue, said issue becomes questionable.

Given the context (American society and history), the situation is unlike other controversial topics. It's like comparing critical decision-making to kneejerk reactionism; we just can't seem to help ourselves. I feel like that's worth pointing out, above and beyond simple exhaustion with the "Actually" crowd.

<comment><USER33> I think this misses how the contrarian dynamic works. It isn't that controversial topics draw contrarians, it's that _all_ topics do. When people see something they dislike or feel they've spotted a flaw, they rush to point it out. Threads fill up initially with negative responses, not because the community is unusually negative or disproportionately disagrees with article X, but because contrarian responses are the fastest ones to form in the brain. They don't require much processing time or writing time. They're reflexive, not reflective. [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20reflexive%20reflect&sort=byDate&type=comment)

After that first wave of comments, we frequently see a second wave of objections that react in a reflexive way to the first wave. Although they take the opposing position—defending the article and criticizing the comments—it's the same contrarian dynamic, the same mechanism, driving them. Usually the second wave gets upvoted the most, leading to the paradox of the top comment in a thread expressing how bad the thread is, or the most popular comment expressing how wrong the populace is.

There's a place for such comments, and it wouldn't work to exclude them anyhow. But their rapidity means that they add less information. That's not because they're shorter (though it does take longer to add more information). The problem is how predictable they are. They're fast because they're largely precomputed—they're really responses to past things, stored up and ready to fire when a similar-enough signal arises. Comments like that make for repeats of past discussions, which are less interesting. They don't gratify intellectual curiosity. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Comments that add new information, rather than repeating what has been thought or felt or said before, tend to be reflective rather than reflexive. This happens when a topic sparks a new thought or feeling, or touches an unusual experience one has had. These comments add new information and encourage discussions that aren't just repetitions of old ones. But they require processing time: they have to be computed from scratch, not just fetched from cache. It isn't just that they take longer to write, but that it takes longer to form new pathways. It also consumes more energy, which means that reflective comments tend to come out quieter and more delicate than reflexive ones do. And they take more time and energy to read, too, so replies are more likely to be reflective in their own right.

The task of HN can be summed up as: how can we nurture reflective responses and give them priority over reflexive ones, given that the latter are both faster and stronger? How can we get into a reflective-reflective cycle rather than a reflexive-reflexive one?

I agree with you about race relations being a force multiplier on this (and also [1]). But I'm insisting on the more general issue of contrarian dynamics because it shows why you can't conclude that negative comments, which spring up like mushrooms when a thread is fresh, represent the community. It's a non sequitur, for example, to imply/conclude as you did in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21474980](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21474980) that HN's community must be racist because the comments found fault with the article. That phenomenon is general: the comments always find fault with the article [2]. The fact that the community upvoted your comment to the top (where it was sitting before I moderated it) suggests that much of it is aligned with your view. This interplay between votes and comments is typical.

Most of what we see on HN is so determined by the basic structure of the internet and the initial conditions of this forum that I appreciate McLuhan's "the medium is the message" more every day. It is far more deeply true than I ever realized.

[1] You're right that the context of American society and history makes the topic of race especially charged. But it's even worse than that here. HN's audience is at least half outside the U.S., leading to additional externalities and conflicts that look like something other than what they are, and so are particularly difficult to understand. This overlaps with the American context in inflammatory ways that make the threads both worse and harder to recover from. Basically everybody is fighting from their own, often very different, context and history without even realizing that they're doing it.

[2] That phenomenon is also far stronger than it appears to be, because as moderators we're constantly doing things to counteract it. If we didn't mark shallow dismissals and reflexive negations as off topic, which lowers their rank on the page, they would probably dominate every thread.

<comment><USER32> This has not been my experience. While it's true that some topics do seem to draw contrarian viewpoints immediately, not all do; and while reflexive reactions are most likely to be found immediately on almost all topics, they need not be negative. For non-controversial topics, the reflexive reactions tend to be memes (less common but not unheard of on HN) or affirmative standard talking points - suportive statements generated from common associations. For example, an HN post about a new organizational technique will often fill up with replies explaining how users implement those practices themselves, what tools they use, etc. Because these topics are generally uncontroversial, the defensiveness that is the impetus for contrarian reactionism doesn't arise.

The answer to the issue is fairly simple but relies entirely on the humility of HN's userbase, particularly in regard to topics that seem easy to expound upon "logically" but for which they generally are lacking in knowledge of or experience with.

Therefore, I have little hope.

I'll keep pointing out the fallacy when I see it, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > That lawsuit forced the state to establish the $3 million Neurodevelopmental > Center of Excellence, which began screening students.

That name though. The Neurodevelopmental Center of Excellence is in Flint. It's like hosting an event called the Summit for Cancer-Free Japan, and holding it at Fukushima.</comment>


Full technical details on Asana's worst outage - <AUTHOR> https://blog.asana.com/2016/09/yesterdays-outage/ <comment><USER2> > Initially the on-call engineers didn't understand the severity of the > problem

Every outage I read, something like that happened. At least asana didn't blamed the technology their were using.

<comment><USER3> For me that was the great part of the post mortem, they identified the response process itself as the root cause.

<comment><USER2> yep that was what I thinking aswell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> These sort of deeply apologetic and hyper-transparent post-mortems have become commonplace, but sometimes I wonder how beneficial they are.

Customers appreciate transparency, but perhaps delving into the fine details of the investigation (various hypotheses, overlooked warning signs, yada yada) might actually end up leaving the customer more unsettled than they would have been otherwise.

Today I learned that Asana had a bunch of bad deploys and put the icing on the cake with one that resulted in an outage the next day.

This is coming from someone who runs an ad server - if that ad server goes down it's damn near catastrophic for my customers and their customers. When we do have a (rare) outage, I sweat it out, reassure customers that people are on it, and give a brief, accurate, and high level explanation without getting into the gruesome details.

I'm not saying my approach is best, but I do think trying to avoid scaring people in your explanation is an idea.

<comment><USER5> I work at a shop that does these kinds of post mortems. I find them highly beneficial.

They require us to actually do the work of identifying the issues and writing up what happened and why. I realize that having a customer contract to do this shouldn't be a requirement but human psychology is funny thing. I can turn to my pm and say "I have to do this it's part of the contract" and they immediately back off.

I agree it might not be the best solution but it's definitely better than not doing them.

<comment><USER6> I think the OP didn't mean that these post mortems are not beneficial internally, what he said that disclosing all these details to the public can be confusing and maybe counter productive.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure whats better.

1\. Describing the root cause and what you failed at. 2\. Blame the stuff you are using / other people (clouds you use) 3\. just says nothing and try to forget what happened.

What do you think is best?

<comment><USER7> It's maybe a level of details thing. "A bad deploy went unnoticed, causing a cascading failure. We identified how that happened and have new checks in place to prevent it in the future."

Two lines, with the same information someone not very technically literate would understand from the OP. I agree with being transparent, but I also believe in not unnecessarily scaring and/or confusing customers, either.

(Pretty soon they'll just start outting individual engineers...)

<comment><AUTHOR> We will never out individuals. The person who committed the code was innocent. We got him a fun gift as a sort of joke.

<comment><USER2> Yep the best thing some could do:

\- train the people more \- help them to get over (some ppl could be really mad and infconfident after they did bad)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >And to make things even more confusing, our engineers were all using the dogfooding version of Asana, which runs on different AWS-EC2 instances than the production version

... That kind of defeats the purpose of "dogfooding". Sure, you have to use the same code (hopefully) but it doesn't give you the same experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> You want to replicate as much as possible, but if we ran canary on the same machines we could have testing code bring down production. That's bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Was this incident really recorded minute by minute or is that made up? I've noticed a lot of companies that give this kind of detail like to give a minute by minute report, I just don't understand how they get that accuracy?

<comment><USER10> Oh, man. Most definitely that's real.

If you're working in Slack or chat, you've got a minimum of half a dozen people typing and putting out suggestions and offering to investigate something. That's all time stamped. And even if you're not doing that real- time, you may be using something like a GitHub issue to discuss the problem via comments, which are also time-stamped.

No one at the moment of the incident is probably going "Ah, it's 8:01, better write down that I identified the problem." It's most likely "hay I think I got it one sec" and then that works. Or doesn't. But hopefully it does.

<comment><USER11> Yes, slack and irc time stamps is common. Ideally your shell and auditing gives you that for commands, too!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I find it interesting that they didn't notice the overloading for so long. Also that it took so long to roll back. Given that they reportedly roll out twice a day, it seems like identifying a rollback target would be fairly quick.

<comment><AUTHOR> This was the first time we had this class of outage. Many things were in a very bad state, and many of these symptoms were more familiar to us. So we spent time ruling them out before realising webserver CPU was closer to the root cause than the other symptoms.

We roll back by reverting to a previous release on the load balancers, which is usually pretty instant. The previous releases were bad and themselves rolled back, which is a rare situation for us. So there was a bit of scrambling to look into the chat logs to determine a safe (non-rolled back) release we could roll back to. Then the high CPU caused our roll back to be really, really slow. Then we still had old processes running the bad release running, and killing them on webservers with high CPU took a while to actually work. Then it took a bit of time for load to come down on its own. All of this took place within the 8:08-8:29 window reported in the post. And I'm still simplifying a lot.

<comment><USER13> What I don't get is why you didn't see the relatively low cpu usage on the database server and the super high ones on the webserver immediately in a nagios (or similar) dashboard.

<comment><USER14> And apparently there were no alarms in place for these kind of things

<comment><USER3> Apparently a lot of parts of the system were on alarm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not a bad reaction. With all the reverts is there a QA issue? Or too many releases?

<comment><AUTHOR> When you do daily deployments, you can't QA every one much. You rely on automated tests and Internal users using the new code for a couple hours before the deployment. We were unlucky in this case with the number of bad releases. Each was relatively minor, and ironically one was to fix a bug with the code that caused this outage. We run a 5 whys for most of them.

<comment><USER16> > When you do daily deployments, you can't QA every one much.

In that case, should you be doing daily deployments to production?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Strangely, there are no actual technical details in the report and the blame is on the process. Although most of the times there is some way to prevent bugs from causing problems with better architecture.

<comment><USER11> The detail was right there: debugging something in security caused massive logging which caused CPU bottlenecking.

Performance is the hardest thing to integration test for. Keeping careful track of CPU/memory/network/disk load with automated alerts can help.

(Fancy systems like running a traffic replica can help, too, but at a much higher cost.)

<comment><AUTHOR> We actually have a traffic replica (dark client) setup for the new webserver architecture we are gradually migrating to. It likely would have caught this before deploying to users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reading through this, it sounds like some basic monitoring would've quickly allowed them to pinpoint the cause instead of wasting time with database servers. All it would take is pulling up the charts in Munin or Datadog or whatever and seeing "Oh, there's a big spike correlated with our deploy and the server is redlining now, better roll that back". A bug or issue in the recent deploy would logically be one of the first suspects in such a circumstance. Don't know why they wasted 30-60 minutes on a red herring. The correlation would be even more obvious if they took advantage of Datadog's event stream and marked each deployment.

Additionally, CPU alarms on the web servers should've informed them that the app was inaccessible because the web servers did not have sufficient resources to serve requests. This can be alleviated _prior to_ pinpointing the cause by a) spinning up more web servers and adding them to the load balancer; or b) redirecting portions of the traffic to a static "try again later" page hosted on a CDN or static-only server. This can be done at the DNS level.

Let this be a lesson to all of us. Have basic dashboards and alarming.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have very comprehensive dashboards. Getting the perfect ones that help in all cases, while not being information overload (the problem here) and being discoverable is a hard, iterative process.

<comment><USER18> Yes, monitoring requires a lot of tuning until you find a sweet spot, but it doesn't sound like this is something that would've been buried deep in the annals of monitor. CPU/load data on your web servers should be pretty visible/accessible and one of the first graphs that get pulled up (and your alarms should've pointed out the issue anyway).

I'm not sure what you're using for dashboards but Datadog makes it pretty easy to find this stuff. I'm not a Datadog shill and I actually am not a _huge_ fan of the product, but it's what we use and it's been a big help over our previous Munin installation.

Other process changes that could prevent this are good load testing in a stage environment and getting your company using the real prod code on the real prod infrastructure as its main/default install. A lot of the benefits of "dogfooding" are lost if you're using alpha code on dev-only boxes (as you state that you are in another comment).

As another commenter said, I'm not sure that postmortems like this are valuable unless the problem was particularly complex/interesting. I'm sure that a lot of people at Asana know how to fix this and that it's just a matter of getting management to allow them to do so. I'm sure you owe your customers an explanation of some sort, but I don't know if you need to get into details that say "Yeah, it was just a pretty typical organizational failure, we really should've known better". Everyone has those, but it's best not to publicize them too much.

I'm not going to hold it against Asana because I've worked at a lot of companies and I know how this goes, but when people come here and analyze the cause, as a postmortem invites the readers to do, you seem a little defensive. Perhaps it's best to keep the explanation more brief/vague when it's not a complex failure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is "not that different" from getting a very high load spike do you guys not have some autoscaling setup?

<comment><AUTHOR> We do, but it didn't help given the cause of the high cpu was our logging infrastructure (Amazon Kinesis) being overloaded by the webservers.

<comment><USER20> Does kinesis not support UDP sylog style logging, some of these old technologies had the right idea: if your sending too much data, drop the packets on the floor instead of falling over!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The real support for a frequent deployment system is in the immune system! I've had good luck with a deployment immune system that rolls back if CPU or other load jumps, even if it doesn't immediately cause user failure. (I e, monitor crucial internals, not just user availability)</comment>


Rangesh Wants To work on Cloud Tech..Hire Me Oxygen Cloud - <AUTHOR> http://ec2-46-137-230-86.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com/

<comment><USER2> Well I'm sold! I think you can expect at least 15 job offers by the end of the day.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hope for the best :/

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


My car insurance exposed my location - <AUTHOR> https://scarpino.xyz/posts/how-my-car-insurance-exposed-my-position.html <comment><USER2> comments from the first time this was posted here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14314205](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14314205)

</comment><comment><USER3> Denouement, in which the author is not rewarded:

> _The company fixed the leak 3 weeks later by providing new Web services > endpoints that use authenticated calls. The company mailed its users saying > them to update their App as soon as possible. The old Web services have been > shutdown after 1 month and half since my first contact with the CERT > Nazionale._

> _I could be wrong, but I suspect the privacy flaw has been around for 3 > years because the first Android version of the App uses the same APIs._

> _I got no bounty._

> _The company is a leading provider of telematics solutions._

I wonder how much that flaw would have fetched from a malicious actor?

<comment><USER4> Not much. It's a good finding; as a bounty submission (for a good company), I could see it getting $1-$2k. But I don't think there's a market for these kinds of information leakage bugs. As a rule of thumb: if you can't plug a vulnerability directly into a business process that was already built and operationalized on _some other vulnerability_ , it's probably not worth anything on the black market.

<comment><USER5> It might be good for class action lawyers and bounty hunters to start teaming up. Then the company either settles up to avoid a trial and bad publicity, or else they have an expensive court battle with potential negative PR coming out.

<comment><USER4> Something like that already happened with Justine Bone and Medsec.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow. This is gross negligence. Short version: the guy's insurance company had him put a GPS-enabled device in his car to measure usage. With no auth and only the car's license plate number, you can track the car, find out who owns it, and get a bunch of stats.

This is the kind of thing that should result in a fine of millions of dollars. They never even tried to secure this.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have not seen him mentioning that the web service is apparently invoked over unsecure http. You can still add authentication, but if the service is running over http yu might as well not have any authentication at all.

<comment><USER8> >I have not seen him mentioning that the web service is apparently invoked over unsecure http.

It's mentioned. From the blog post: "besides the ugliest formatting ever and the fact the request uses plain HTTP"

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pretty certain I read this last year.

</comment><comment><USER10> Unless there has been some new innovation in this space, the OBD behavior trackers are just accelerometers. The typical placement down in the driver's footwell makes GPS too unreliable to bother with. The GPS correlation comes from being foolish enough to install their app.

<comment><USER11> There are many insurance companies that use OBD GPS trackers, as well as standalone trackers that plug in to the cigarette lighter, in order to charge based on mileage.

e.g. [https://www.metromile.com/](https://www.metromile.com/)

<comment><USER12> They don't work well. I deal with them at work. The data is terrible.</comment></comment></comment>


Evil Twin Attack: The Definitive Guide - <AUTHOR> https://rootsh3ll.com/evil-twin-attack/ <comment><USER2> Would a vpn to your lan thwart the attack?</comment>


Thunks: Old-fashioned closures? - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2009/06/i-thunk-therefore-i-am.html

<comment><USER2> From: <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thunk>

        Claimed by the inventors to be from the supposed
        past tense, being coined when they realised after
        much thought (whence "thunk") that the type of an
        argument in ALGOL 60 could be predetermined at
        compile time;

Certainly that's what Ingerman said to me.

Related to this, I'm finding myself using "Lunk," "Cluck," and "Drug" as the past tense versions of "Link", "Click" and "Drag". They're easier to say, and most people seem to understand without effort.

</comment><comment><USER3> In the Lisp 'world' a thunk is often a function/closure with no parameters.

<comment><USER4> The Haskell world, as well.</comment></comment>


Twitter's "Tweet" Trademark Torpedoed - <AUTHOR> http://samj.net/2009/08/twitters-tweet-trademark-torpedoed.html <comment><USER2> "Upstarts' unseemly usurpation ultimately undone" (Twitter's fantasy headline one year from now).

The verdict is still out on this (with "first use" being Twitter's ace in the hole), but the article is an informative update on this situation.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm usually quite critical of trademark law as I generally think giving exclusive rights to a single company over common English words is wrong.

I do, however, think in this instance Twitter actually have a point - "Tweet" has long been associated with its service, the word itself is a variant of the name "Twitter", and all the early references I can find explicitly refer to Twitter itself.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wouldn't count Twitter out just yet.

All three of the other pending marks are based on Twitter's own earlier (unregistered) use of 'Tweet'. So Twitter might be able to argue _those_ should be rejected based on their earlier common-law usage.

Or, they could buy off those three applications.

Or, a combination of both. ("Do you folks want to make us your enemy, and take a chance that your registration will be rejected based on our earlier creation of the 'Tweet' term, or take this bag of money/stock/thanks? Your choice, tiny companies dependent on our ecosystem!")</comment>


BitCoin is a public ledger - <AUTHOR> http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2013/05/bitcoin-is-public-ledger.html#.UbZmiRZ-Uqb

<comment><USER2> I have seen so many times in news stories that bitcoin mining reveals a series of new bit that make up a bitcoin, or that a bitcoin is just a series of bits.

Bitcoin is a ledger, that ledger is public. The columns are labelled with things like 17Zsi2TiKrZoAoaQ7bzt3wPB5NZV1T4KeE, That column _is_ the bitcoin in your wallet. You need to have a password to move something out of your column and into another. That's the private key to your wallet.

Most people understand ledgers. Most of the misunderstandings about bitcoin (especially regarding anonymity) indicate that people don't realise that bitcoin is a ledger.

<comment><USER3> Haha, even here, misinformed (often angry) comments are directed at Bitcoin supporters that align precisely with what you're saying. Some of the accussations are simply flat out incompatible with an open/public ledger, let alone getting into anything Bitcoin specific.

And that's despite stuff like this being posted repeatedly. In fact, this is a repost from like ~~2~~ 10 days ago, isn't it? ( [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5796935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5796935) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like everyone's tuckered out. A full day of WWDC and PRISM and the Bitcoin story only has 4 comments after 2 hours. Get some rest, guys! ;)

<comment><USER5> It might also be because this link has been posted at least two times recently:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5796935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5796935)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5807149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5807149)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Y'all know that there's already a protocol designed exactly for doing this without hacking BitCoin, don't you?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping)

</comment><comment><USER7> This sounds like a modern version of the Poor Man's Copyright[1] where you mail yourself some document for _protection_.

[1] [http://www.snopes.com/legal/postmark.asp](http://www.snopes.com/legal/postmark.asp)

</comment><comment><USER8>
        $ echo foo > bar
        $ gpg --sign bar
        $ gpg --verify bar.gpg

<comment><USER9> It looks like the method described in the article also provides a verified timestamp without the need for a (centralized) timestamp authority. I'd say that's a pretty important difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Doesn't this actually destroy bitcoins (of which there will only ever be a finite amount)

<comment><USER11> Sure, in the sense that they are now permanently unusable by being transferred to keys for which the private key is not known.

By sending a single satoshi (0.000000001 BTC), the monetary effect is insignificant. There will eventually be 2,100,000,000,000,000 of such units.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Bitstampoer on github already does a Verizon of this.

[https://github.com/newell-purdue/bitstamper](https://github.com/newell- purdue/bitstamper)</comment>


Ask HN: Is Google Cloud load balancer down? - <AUTHOR> Seems like requests are failing before getting to any backends.<p>"The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds." <comment><USER2> Yes, support team has responded with this:

Description: We are investigating reports of elevated errors for the Google Cloud HTTP(S) load balancer that occurred on 2017-07-14 between 10:20 and 10:40 US/Pacific

How to diagnose: Applications behind the Google Cloud HTTP(S) load balancer may have experienced errors on 2017-07-14 between 10:20 and 10:40 US/Pacific</comment>


75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas - <AUTHOR> http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809 <comment><USER3> It's not only a consequence of direct habitat destruction, but also the use of pesticides. According to [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2946087/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2946087/), more than a billion pounds of pesticides are used on lawns in the US every year. There is little regulation there.

All of those pesticides are designed to _kill bugs_. Why are we now surprised that bugs are disappearing?

We are sterilizing the planet.

According to this ([http://www.beyondpesticides.org/assets/media/documents/lawn/...](http://www.beyondpesticides.org/assets/media/documents/lawn/factsheets/LAWNFACTS&FIGURES_8_05.pdf)), we use up to 3.5x more pesticides per acre on suburban lawns than on agriculture.

<comment><USER4> I don't get it. Who cares if there's bugs in your grass?

I used to play with bugs in the yard as a kid.

<comment><USER5> My step-father has this weird obsession with keeping a perfectly flat green lawn as a front yard. Any time an ant-hill springs up it's out with the pesticide. Any weeds that pop up are immediately exterminated. It's this sort of stupidity on a global scale that's causing the problem. For a lot of middle-class America, a sterile grass mono-culture is the ideal for a front yard, environmental health be damned.

<comment><USER6> Right, if you're that obsessed with perfection, just pave over the damn thing. I only kill ants if they're building nests that threaten something else, like a tree. Usually though, that's a good indication the tree is already sick. I'm nursing one back to health, hopefully, now that had an ant colony at it's base.

I let moss, and local vegetation that grows fairly small thrive in my yard. In some ways, I prefer the moss to my grass.

I do fog my yard, so guilty, but I live in area densely populated with mosquitos which are a problem and they have plenty of wooded areas nearby to thrive if they want. But yeah, if there was some way to be selective, I'd be all for it, but it's not worth 20 mosquito bites when I go outside for 30 minutes to keep bees around.

Maybe if I could hire a service to do this: [http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/07/health/zika-virus-sterile- mosq...](http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/07/health/zika-virus-sterile- mosquito/index.html)

Granted I imagine that's not something I could do without having to get EPA or fish and wildlife approval.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yes. This is a case of hard data confirming what we already know. As in - <USER2> types of butterflies I used to like, and see yearly as a kid - are gone. I see them now once in 5 years, if lucky. I bring my kids to look because it's a first time for them.

On the other hand, some types of beetles, ants, flies, mosquitoes, even wasps - are just new. They were not here 20-30 years ago. Now, what are the consequences of all that... I kind of feel we'll find out sooner than we'd like.

<comment><USER8> This year, I left a portion of my lawn unmowed. I seeded it with a $10 bag of wildflower seeds. It's given me 4 months of beautiful flowers, loads of polinators, many butterflies, and it's given me less yard to mow. I now think that lawns of neatly trimmed grass are about as dumb as it gets.

<comment><USER9> Yes, a big problem for insects in suburban areas is humans tendency to want "manicured" nature. Just walk around anywhere in e.g. silicon valley, where lawns are kept short and there are less than a dozen types of trees and bushes (also often trimmed) and you'll note there are very few insects, which has resulted in even fewer types of birds and practically no small animals. Insects need old, decomposing tree trunks and branches on the ground, and humans tend to remove those because it isn't tidy enough for them. I share a vacation house on a small (maybe 5 square km) island in the archipelago of Stockholm and despite there being houses on almost all of that island, we have 120 different _species_ of birds on it. This is likely a result of a longtime policy that says house owners should strive to keep old, fallen trees when possible and avoid tidying up their land too much, and the parts that are public land are not interfered with much at all.

<comment><USER10> A lot of people don't like having insects in their homes, so it would make sense that they manicure their lawns to reduce the number of insects around their homes.

<comment><USER11> It might, but how far do insects actually travel? If it was really restricted like that then it would surely be better to concrete over the yard and park their cars there.

I've seen various flying insects _more_ than a hundred miles out to sea but I accept that not all insects fly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Results like this are some confirmation of what everyone not entirely swaddled in the virtual worlds of city and business is already entirely aware of: that our living planet is dying. All the people I know who have lived in rural areas for decades (in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and SE. Asia) are in no doubt that their local ecologies are collapsing, and that the collapse is accelerating.

I'm not sure how useful the knowledge is at this late stage. Turning things around would require changes of a pace and scale that we have no idea how to motivate and coordinate. Fork and done, I reckon.

<comment><USER13> " Turning things around would require changes of a pace and scale that we have no idea how to motivate and coordinate."

Things like electricity, the automobile, air travel and the internet went from nonexistent to universal in developed countries in phenomenally short time spans. Renewable energy appears to be following a similar trajectory, leaving all the estimates in the dust and emerging faster than most people realize or can keep track of. Fast enough? Well, we'll find out. But at this point you can't say it's slow.

<comment><USER12> Two problems with that.

Firstly: climate change is only one of the problems caused by a culture based almost entirely on the ecocidal fantasy of stolen-from-the-future 'economic growth'. We are losing topsoil at a dizzying pace. Fresh water is disappearing. The habitats on which natural systems depend are being ripped apart. Novel substances are being created and released into our air, water and land with unknown consequences. Climate change is a single crisis piled upon multiple others. Case in point: Australia's Queensland inner reefs are almost completely gone, and the outer reefs have only a few decades left. Causes: multiple, from nutrient-rich agricultural runoff (largely from pointless vanity sugar cane production), to wholesale destruction of coastal ecosystems including mangroves, which are crucial nurseries for many reef fish. Increasing ocean temperatures deal the final blow to already critically weakened ecosystems. This is our planet in miniature. Climate change isn't _the_ problem. It's yet another symptom of the same fundamental dynamic, delivered as just the latest and largest of a series of blows many ecosystems will not survive.

Secondly: the changes needed are not only (and perhaps not primarily) technological. They require planetary coordination and cooperation to handle on political and social levels, and the defeat of a crazed unthinking ideology of unhindered 'economic growth'. Fundamental changes of attitude and societal organisation need to be agreed upon in the next few decades, and implemented without delay. Yet we can't even agree on obvious tiny measures like removing nuclear weapons, and rogue wealthy nations resist nearly every attempt to do anything meaningful about any of the critical issues. We just don't know how to do what's needed, and there are no solutions on the horizon. And we are still locked into fantasies of national government and sovereignty, despite being (factually & physically) a global civilisation.

Look at the political convulsions happening now as a consequence of current worldwide refugee crises. But that's _minuscule_ compared to what's coming. Imagine what happens when ocean level rises cause two billion refugees to seek somewhere to live. Given our level of global immaturity, what do you think will happen? It will be all wars and walls. And our capability, in the midst of such convulsions, to make (and keep) difficult international agreements? Nil.

I'd absolutely love to be wrong. But all physical and social indicators are pointing in the same direction.

<comment><USER14> So start doing something. What have you got to lose if you're already doomed? Get yourself a copy of _Deep Green resistance_ and join an aboveground affiliate group. It's easy to manufacture excuses not to do something because it looks impossible. So what? Better than saying you sat there and did nothing and watched it all disintegrate.

<comment><USER15> Cutting down our per head footprint is nice and laudable, but it's really just a minor tweak to the "O" in an exponential "Big Oh".

I suspect that crispinb deems something much more paradigmatic necessary than just a bit of reprorization in economic policies and everybody using less plastic bags. Some paradigm shifts are so big that it is very difficult to even think about them loudly without getting universally shunned.

What if, for example, you are convinced that for long term planetary survival (on a level that can support the human species), individualistic basic human rights will have to occasionally take a second place? That's what tyranny is made of, but that's also what desperate measures are made of. You won't win any popularity contests with that...

<comment><USER14> No disagreement on any of that. I don't want to scare people off with inflammatory suggestions (which is why I suggest aboveground activism rather than taking up pipeline sabotage, but I am absolutely for paradigmatic change despite the inevitability of violent opposition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Being an earth dwelling human, this seems pretty bad. Aside from buying ammo or survival rations, what's something proactive that I can do? Is there an organization that is trying to rid the world of pesticides (assuming that's the cause)? If I opt to call my representatives, what am I calling in support of/against?

Over the last year, reading the news had made me more passive and worried. I want to dedicate a slice of time to doing something to solve the problem, but I'm not certain if there's anything pragmatic to be done against big areas of environmental concern like this, global warming, ocean acidity, and etc.

<comment><USER17> > I want to dedicate a slice of time to doing something to solve the problem

Eat less meat (huge environmental impact!), bike more, don't consume as much non-local food, etc.

<comment><USER18> I wanted to tack on here that even our agriculture has a huge environmental impact — nothing worse for biodiversity than how we've replaced animal habitats with fields of a single crop! And then pesticides etc.

I don't know if it ever happen, but we really should support capture fisheries, fish farms, and captured game.

Properly Managed Captured Fisheries (Mostly more prosperous nations have well managed fisheries, outstanding fisheries would be in Alaska & New Zealand) allow us to extract protien we all need without destroying ecosystems. Same goes for captured game but that scales significantly worse.

Fish farms are in a unique position because unlike farming animals on land, it can be done without radically changing the part of the ocean the fish are farmed in.

I think recently there have been some problems with fish farms and antibiotic / illness spreading but I really think these can be overcome and that long term aquaculture would be the most environmentally conscious option. (In a similar position to electric cars today).

<comment><USER19> > _we really should support capture fisheries, fish farms, and captured game_

I guess if you HAVE to eat meat that is a better option, but we don't need it anymore. Its such an inefficient way to get calories and its not as nutritious as plant substitutes.

<comment><USER20> Are you serious? Most of the plant substitutes for meat are based off nutrient-devoid grains, soy, and corn. It's also not at all an inefficient way to get calories; fat packs the most calories per gram, and fat (especially saturated fat) is not easily available in plants unless you're making a concerted effort to eat avocados, olives, and coconuts. I'd rather eat a fatty steak and be satiated for hours, than have the same calories from quinoa (or some other 'healthy' grain) and be ravenous 2 hours later when my insulin levels drop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Presumably this is similar here in the U.S.? In the 80's and 90's the fronts of our cars would get so encrusted with mashed bugs that it would take real scrubbing to get them off. I haven't had to do that in many years.

<comment><USER22> I have heard this before. I'm not a climate change denier. Could it have anything to do with more aerodynamic car designs?

<comment><USER23> I drive a jeep (basically a brick on wheels) and bugs are still awful.

<comment><USER22> The reason I asked this question was because I drive a Nissan Cube.

<comment><USER24> Do you see a lot of bugs?

<comment><USER22> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is pretty alarming and suggests that soaking agricultural land in insecticides might be having some far-reaching side effects.

<comment><USER26> Well, the intention of insecticides is to kill insects. All insects.

It's working, but perhaps a little too well?

<comment><USER27> The intention of insecticides is to kill the insects that prey on specific crops, not to kill every single insect there is. It's working better than they thought, causing it to have unintended consequences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I live in Minneapolis. The city fumigates regularly in the summer by aircraft and ground-based methods both, which is why I can go running around the lakes in mid July and get maybe _one_ mosquito bite. I think most US cities are like this.

It's a policy that should be scrapped in spite of the risk of West Nile and Lyme Disease.

<comment><USER29> They're not fumigating, they're spreading a bacteria that kills (only supposedly) mosquito larva.

[http://www.mmcd.org/mosquito-control/larva- control/](http://www.mmcd.org/mosquito-control/larva-control/)

<comment><USER28> So that's what they're doing? Are you sure that's all?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Not about insects, but birds:

In the Pacific Northwest, on the coast of Olympic National Park, (Ruby Beach, Kalaloch, etc) 30 years ago (when I was a kid) the beaches were teaming with seagulls. On a given day you would see hundreds.

The last two years I've taken my own kids there, we are lucky to see even 1 seagull each day.

Maybe it's something else, heck maybe there was an open garbage pit 30 years ago and it's since been closed, but as discussed, most of these ecological changes (even human caused) are too slow for individual humans to detect.

So thought I'd share my own anecdote :P

</comment><comment><USER31> What are the odds that honey bee colony collapse disorder isn't confined to just honey bees?

</comment><comment><USER32> Too bad it wasn't the mosquitoes. Now when people shoot down ideas to eradicate them because "what about the species that eat them" I can just point out this 75 percent reduction in other flying insects...

<comment><USER33> I seem to recall that there are no actual species found that eat purely mosquitoes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This kind of data should be collected on multiple places in the world. Given such findings we should thoroughly watch our ecosystems.

I have been in Japan during summer this year and (gotten used to the central- European ecosystems where the data for this paper has been collected) was surprised by the amount of insects and especially butterflies, which I had rarely seen for years. Is this just the climate (which also grows some giant insects) or could there be something different at play?

</comment><comment><USER35> Just today we were discussing how there was almost zero insects splatters on the windshield or bonnet after an intercity travel. I remember it would get very dirty, at least almost always needed a wash.

<comment><USER36> > zero insects splatters on the windshield or bonnet after an intercity > travel.

Still happens for me in Romania. In fact, I've just noticed it today after an 8-hour trip in my car through half of the country. Could be caused by the fact that we're not that "advanced" when it comes to use of insecticides.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> My feeling: brace for systemic collapse.

<comment><USER38> Depends on how widely you define system. So far in all previous mass extinctions the system resets to a new normal and repopulates the various gaps with new choices. The cynic in me would imagine the 'system' is working to kill off humanity so that it can re-balance.

<comment><USER39> > _We will arrive at a moment of sufficent self-alienation where we can > contemplate our own destruction [as a species] as in a static spectacle._

\-- Walter Benjamin

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> It's almost as if widespread use of pesticides is having a widespread effect on insects

</comment><comment><USER41> The company I work for has a big portion of it's land devoted to nature meadow, and it is amazing how much more insects you see and hear, and I find it 9000x prettier than grass. We're letting most of our lawn at home get overtaken by a clover-like plant called Germander. People call it "lawn cancer", but I like it better than grass. More life in it, it gets pretty purple flowers in the spring, and it is hardy as hell.

My wife hates spiders in the house, but I love them - they take care of all the other critters I hate more, and they are interesting little buggers, especially the jumping spiders and wolf spiders.

<comment><USER42> Our flat is the same - I enjoy letting the mould grow on the wall, in its pretty, grey shapes. And every Summer, as the world turns in its natural course, there's the seasonal infestation of fruit flies around the bin. Nature's lovely.

Maybe our romantic adoration could be rediscovered if we admitted more things as being 'natural'? People, too, provide a kind of undergrowth, and their greater structures form some very fetching accretions.

<comment><USER41> Hyperbole, the first resort of trolls.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> And in the meantime here we are, spending 200 kWh in energy per Bitcoin transaction.

Planet is doomed :(

<comment><USER44> why would you single out bitcoin? did you do any calculations as to how much material and human resources are spent^Wwasted maintaining fiat systems around the world? there are whole industries around designing, printing, securing and transporting money. banks, financial institutions, government institutions. all of that would be 90% obsolete if we switched to cryptocurrencies.

bitcoin is literally drop in the bucket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> This study appears to be an alarmist rehash of what was previously discussed on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533)

Here's one of the original papers: [https://www.farmlandbirds.net/sites/default/files/Orbrioch%2...](https://www.farmlandbirds.net/sites/default/files/Orbrioch%20Nature%20reserve.pdf)

The 75% decline number appears to be from two data points from a 220-acre plot. From that paper:

 _" What follows is a description of measured Insect-Biomasses from samples collected in the Orbroich Bruch Nature Reserve, near Krefeld, using Malaise Insect Traps. The results show that, in the same two areas, sampled in the years 1989 and 2013, there was a dramatic fall in the number of flying insects. Using the same traps, in the same areas, significant reductions of insect populations, of more than 75%, were found. Our data confirms, that in the areas studied, less than 25% of the original number of flying insects collected in 1989, were still present in 2013."_

 _" The Orboicher Bruch, to the Northwest of Krefeld, is a designated Nature Reserve of around 100 hectares (220 acres). Due to the reserve's relatively remote location and its rugged landscape, intensive farming came to the area only recently."_

So alarmists are extrapolating from two data points (years 1989 and 2013) for a 220-hectare plot of German farmland to the entire world. I think that is a bit of a stretch, even for statistics.

since different bugs breed in different seasons, and numbers depend on the fruitfulness of previous generations, food supply, predation, disease, temperature and so on, this bug weight could vary considerably from year to year (or site to site) for any number of reasons. While one year cicadas thrive, the next year there may be none. Shocking, simply shocking!

BTW they're measuring the _weight_ of dead bugs - not how many bugs or what species of bugs - just the weight of bugs. Actually they're not even measuring that, they're measuring the weight of dead bugs' soaked in 70-80% alcohol.

I could go on and on about controls in statistical experiments but I think you get the idea.

See the original HN posting for discussions pointers to the earlier papers.

<comment><USER37> To people that were driving 20 years ago and are now, it was pretty obvious without any statistics that something was wrong, for several years now. 25 years ago, I couldn't drive 500 km in summer without scraping off a thick crust of dead bugs on my windshield afterwards (it was even common to stop just for that). In the past few years, I've driven thousands of km across Europe in summer with barely a dead bug on my windows.

<comment><USER46> I made a road trip this year from Germany to France to Spain to Gibraltar and back (~8.000 km) and had at most one or two bugs on the windshields every couple of days. I am 28 and thought this is normal, but it's so obvious that it isn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Tech like Permaculture & Regenerative Agriculture utilize ecosystems & food webs to manage pests. Better to design natural processes to create more food than to manage natural processes by destroying them.

There's a saying, "You don't have a bug problem, you have a lack of (insert appropriate bug predator here) problem."

</comment><comment><USER48> [https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/electronic-...](https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/electronic- smog-is-disrupting-nature-on-a-massive-scale-921711.html)

[http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/15368378.2015.104...](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/15368378.2015.1043557)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22367734](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22367734)

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1383571806...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1383571806003202)

</comment><comment><USER49> I've noticed a lot less bug splatter on windshields when I go on a long trip in the Midwest. Inm sure there's research in this but I'm in a restaurant right now waiting for my group.

It has to be disconterning to see these kind of changes.

Edited: there's more with linked articles elsewhere in the thread that I just saw.

</comment><comment><USER50> I dislike most insects. So long as this doesn't impact humanity's ability to thrive on the planet I don't mind. Since we're doing just fine in the face of such significant losses in biomass I don't really worry.

</comment><comment><USER51> I might be missing something here, but we're only talking about measurments in Germany, right? It seems like there's some conclusion-jumping in the comments that this is happening globally (whether or not it actually is).

<comment><USER52> > only talking about measurements in Germany, right?

Yes ...

> total insect biomass using Malaise traps, deployed over 27 years in 63 > nature protection areas in Germany

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I went to Disney World/NASA space center in Orlando a few years back.

One impression I got was: For a place with some many water around, there were no mosquito and extremely quiet- no bird noise and no cricket noise at all.

</comment><comment><USER54> It's pot-boilerish, a good deal of the science (i.e. _why_ the insects disappear) is bonkers, and the author's reputation is somewhat tarnished these days, but oh boy did it make an impression: I read Charles Pellegrino's _Dust_ almost twenty years ago, and this talk of insect die-off still brings the terrifying plot to the front of my mind.

Also, for a 1998 novel, it had a pretty decent future scenario of people somewhere around _now_ using all-powerfull 'pads' for their web and mail and video chats and general computing.

</comment><comment><USER55> We move at the start of the year to a house in the country here in Scotland that is pretty much surrounded by farmland and I've been amazed at the amount of insect life in our garden - particularly the amount of bees and butterflies.

However, because the area round us is rather hilly it is all low intensity cattle and sheep rearing. It's probably at least 15 kms (mostly over sea) to the nearest arable farming - who are presumably the heaviest users of insecticides.

<comment><USER56> Sounds lovely, but what is the net connection like? (asking as someone who needs it for work)

<comment><USER55> 20Mbps - which isn't nearly as fast as what we had in central Edinburgh but fast enough for my work and Netflix/iPlayer etc.

Mind you finding a house we liked with a decent internet connection was _very_ difficult.

[Weirdly we did find a house in rural Perthshire that had 450Mbps - full BT FTTP - but we didn't like the house!]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Which is one of the reasons I don't understand a few "pro-science" folks that go against organic by equating things like anti-vaxxers to people that believe sustainable and organic farming are better for our health and for the planet as a whole.

Sure, people defend all kinds of things with stupid arguments, but just because stupid arguments may be used to argue for something doesn't mean that other arguments are not correct.

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm extremely unqualified, but is it possible that the insects just learned to avoid the specific traps used to do the measurements over time?

<comment><USER59> I was thinking the same, but its unlikely to lead to a 75% decline. The ratio of trapped insects (or insects that even get within a few meters of the traps) to total insects must be incredibly incredibly small.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I went down the Mekong River from China to Thailand in about 2006 and there were thousands of insects that would flock to the boat when it moored overnight. I repeated the trip in early 2016 and there were almost none. Deforestation and the replacement of virgin forest with rubber plantations appeared to be the main factor, but at a guess the use of pesticides was probably also to blame.

</comment><comment><USER61> When I was a kid I used to play with ladybugs that where almost everywhere. Not anymore. Now the only thing that I see are spiders and wasps.

</comment><comment><USER62> We are not having this problem in Colorado, USA. We've got so many butterflies this year, they're showing up on weather radar.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/butterflies-appear-on- weather...](http://www.businessinsider.com/butterflies-appear-on-weather- radar-in-denver-2017-10)

</comment><comment><USER63> We need to do a better job as humans of respecting and embracing the ecosystems around us.

</comment><comment><USER44> this thread is full of doom and gloom.

is there really no non-apocalyptic perspective on this? consider: any other "apex" predator in history never stopped to research and ponder on effects of him demolishing the ecosystem.

the fact that this makes rounds in media and grabs attention and creates social pressure gives at least a glimmer of hope that something will be done about it.

if it's not too late.

</comment><comment><USER64> Edit: I see the study was conducted in Germany, but it has me wondering about the U.S. where I have (anecdotally) noticed a large decline as well.

Are there large enough areas of the country that you could control for areas that don't spray for mosquitos to see if the populations have also declined in those areas?

It wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that the spraying over the last 10 years to control the mosquito population due to the media induced West Nile panic followed by zika panic has contributed to this.

<comment><USER65> My understanding is that mosquito's make up a very small amount of the total insect biomass (happy to be corrected).

I'm wondering if there aren't environmental factors like the rise of plastics or other chemicals in the environment that are slowly degrading insect populations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Well, it's not worth doing anything now. We can engineer them out of diamonds with boutique DNA later. Or something.

</comment><comment><USER67> Not sure, I have been wondering ( Europe) why new bugs appear that I have never noticed before. Butterflies are less also

<comment><USER7> Either due to warming (pine beetle being the poster child of that), or invasive species (Asian tiger mosquito).

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Seems like the site would freeze the entire browser on Firefox 57.0b9 in macOS 10.12.

</comment><comment><USER69> Everyone is chiming in with anecdotes. Maybe they're all correct.

But I definitely remember fireflies being everywhere at my parents house and turning the sky into a shimmering display... and I rarely see more then a few fireflies at all these days.

<comment><USER70> Same. I don't know if it's the pesticides on the farm fields by my parents' house, or what. There used to be swarms of them, maybe 2-3 feet in diameter. Now just a hand full. It's been like that for over 20 years.

Same with gnats, but I don't get nostalgic about those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Monsanto.

</comment><comment><USER72> If this holds up, this would seem to be a hugely important result. I'm waiting for HN's biologists to weigh in.

<comment><USER73> HN biologists are likely to be far less qualified than the authors of this paper.

This is not the only study detailing this observation; several have been floating around for the past few years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> That's alarming, but it needs followup. There have been rather obvious changes in Europe since the end of Iron Curtain. Would be nice to see similar data for other continents.

</comment><comment><USER75> All this pessismism in this thread, acting like everyone on the planet has a terminal illness.

Lol. Go outside. Read about the success of the endangered species program. Stop living in fear

</comment><comment><USER76> I think I might have found a way to reverse this at the local level in an individual yard. The problem is that is illegal and I was basically told that I was a scumbag for doing this. You can read more about my native yard experiment here: [http://opilionesman.blogspot.ca/2017/05/i-wanted-to-share- so...](http://opilionesman.blogspot.ca/2017/05/i-wanted-to-share-some-things- that-i.html)</comment>


Simultaneous cat and external keyboard input causing kernel panic - <AUTHOR> https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/11/3/110

<comment><USER2> I would advise to disable the software watchdog.</comment>