Oracle Cranks Up The Cores To 32 With Sparc M7 Chip - <AUTHOR> http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/08/13/oracle-cranks-cores-32-sparc-m7-chip/

<comment><USER2> I like how they're adding hardware specifically to speed up _databases_ , to a CPU based on a RISC core; it looks like there is a trend toward more CISC-like hardware, because designers have figured that operations that would've been done in software can be done faster with dedicated hardware.

My experience with using older SPARC servers for testing various things is that they're rather disappointing, both in terms of value and performance - "more cores" seems to be their guiding principle, and while this makes for impressive benchmark results and aggregate numbers, the speed of a single thread is pretty horrible; it's only in specific multithreaded applications that all the resources on the chip can be fully saturated. Meanwhile x86 servers cost far less and can handle different workloads better because per- clock, each core is several times faster.

<comment><USER3> On the contrary, I wonder if we're likely to see a resurgence in RISC, as it comes into its own with extremely large numbers of cores. I don't think this Oracle chip is necessarily an indicator of that, but there are other signs indicating it could happen.

What you are saying is very true. Or at least it was true, 20 years ago when RISC was supposed to be the next big thing and then it wasn't. But that landscape is finally starting to change.

What's different now is that after dominating the server and desktop market through brute force, Intel hit a saturation point about 10 years ago and since then, clock speeds haven't increased much, nor have instructions per cycle, both of which were increasing so fast year-on-year through the 90s and early 2000s that nobody could keep up. Now even Intel have been forced to start scaling out horizontally by adding more cores: that's now virtually all that differentiates their fastest CPUs from their slowest.

Because of this, developers are increasingly having to think more about writing concurrent code. Languages like Go, F#, Scala and Clojure are seeing a huge upsurge in popularity lately; it's not happenstance. Functional programming has been largely confined to AI and CS research since the 60s, but it's suddenly becoming popular with pragmatists for scalability.

The thing is, once your code is no longer bound by single-threaded performance, it starts making sense to just add more cores if you can, especially if you can do so without a significant transistor cost. With x86, adding cores is expensive because each one is exceptionally complex, but RISC can be simpler, use fewer transistors and operate at lower wattage. Huge numbers of cores can also be exceptionally power efficient if each core can run in a low power mode until needed.

<comment><USER4> The idea that once code is rewritten to take advantage ofother cores then more wimpy cores would be better than a few powerful cores is wrong. Most threaded code today can scale to a small number of cores (2, 4, 6) but can't scale to a ridiculously high number of cores (e.g. 32) due to various bottlenecks that are hard to remove.

Also the simplicity of RISC cores vs X86 does not significantly affect chip cost since these days the vast majority of the space on a chip is taken up by on-chip caches (L1, L2, L3). The space taken up by instruction decoding circuits is really, really negligible next to that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder how much it would cost in licensing to run an Oracle DB on that kind of hardware.

<comment><USER6> Oracle are increasingly moving to hugely punative licensing schemes for running their DB on non-Oracle platforms, up and down the stack; run a single vCPU guest on a VMware farm? Fuck you, license all your hypervisors. Unless you want to buy SPARC, the you can do sub-capacity licensing.

Time will tell whether customers will prefer to get reamed for Oracle hardware to avoid some Oracle software costs, or simply switch to DBs with less tied pricing models.

<comment><USER7> Switch to what? We send a seven figure number every year to Oracle but we currently see no alternative.

SQLServer only runs Windows, their licensing model gets more and more Oracle like every year (for us currently "buying" SQLServer from internal IT isn't much cheaper than Oracle anymore). And you have to maintain you own JDBC driver.

DB2 is just the same thing as Oracle.

PostgreS does not compare.

Then there's the migration itself. Firstly your application will be "tuned for Oracle" over several years. So you'll use every proprietary Oracle feature that gives you additional performance (subpartitions, parallel query execution, optimizer hints, manual column statistics, connect by, listagg, …). Which makes porting fun. You can't assess the performance of your application on the new database until you're done porting. Likely the most performance critical parts will have the most Oracle dependencies. You won't have any experience performance tuning the new database. And you won't have any experience operating the new database (monitoring, trouble shooting, backups, HA, failover, maintenance, …).

Take all this together and we're pretty much locked into Oracle. So I see us go with Oracle hardware rather than switch to some other database. Which has the additional benefit of getting rid of the "engineered" SAN by the internal IT which is slower than a single SSD.

<comment><USER6> > DB2 is just the same thing as Oracle.

DB2 supports sub-capacity licensing on a wide variety of virtualisation platforms, unlike Oracle. This may or may not matter to you. It does to me under a variety of circumstances.

DB2 also has much more granularity in licensing before you have to ramp up to ASE, which, again, may make a big difference to you (many equivalent features are available a significantly lower price points).

> So you'll use every proprietary Oracle feature that gives you additional > performance (subpartitions, parallel query execution, optimizer hints, > manual column statistics, connect by, listagg, …).

More than a few of these are trivial conversions to other DBs. CONNECT BY is hardly magic, neither's parallel query execution or listagg.

Operational concerns are probably the biggest one.

> Take all this together and we're pretty much locked into Oracle.

If you're in a business where running your company on whatever schedule Oracle chooses to offer you, that won't be a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anybody know what the pipeline depth is? At 4GHz, it can't be short, and the cost of mispredicted branches could significantly worsen real-world results.

<comment><USER9> The S3 core has a 16-stage pipeline and it sounds like S4 is roughly the same. All the threads can cover a lot of stalls.

<comment><USER8> Fairly large, then. Hyperthreading is only useful if you can make use of it and if you are batch processing — if you're running a single computation that needs to finish within a certain time, it won't help you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would think that Oracle would be investing more in something like flash storage in their hardware rather than optimizations to processor speed. More threads don't make the disc spin faster and a lot of DB workloads are bound by going to persistent storage.

<comment><USER6> If you've spent any time with Oracle sales staff you'll know their pitch these days is that their on-chip acceleration is the only way to break IO barriers, and that you'll get a shit experience with Oracle DBs unless you deploy on Oracle hardware. It's an old-school full stack play straight from the mainframe era.

SSD, by way of contrast, is relatively commodity stuff that Oracle can't get a lock-in with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> basically vaporware. In the sense that almost nobody will see/touch it. Huge chip - 10B transistors - using new process node - 3D 16nm - will have such low yield that its obviously high price will be even higher. Thus only a handful of systems will be delivered. Thus practical non-existence equivalence.

SPARC CPU division brought down Sun, and i see it still puts a good fight inside Oracle despite Rock cancelation :)

Edit: even if the CPU become realistically (in the High Enterprise sense) available just imagine what [ram-to-cpu] bus should the CPU to sit on for it to be able to feed the beast, especially considering that it will be DB application, not HPC for example

<comment><USER12> >using new process node - 3D 16nm

The Hotchips slides explicitly mentioned 20nm. Based on a bad assumption, the author for this story decided to freely reinterpret '20nm' as 16FF. (There's a connection between the two, but that's mostly for pedants on internet forums)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd love to see the SPARCStation make a comeback with that thing.

<comment><USER14> What would you need it for that couldn't be done better on an iMac?

<comment><USER13> Apparently it does Java better?

Mostly it would be nostalgia. I was assigned to a Sparc at at my first real developer job. It gave me an appreciation for exotic workstations. Plus, I love the Sun style keyboards (I use an HHKB 2 Pro today)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One of the better write ups, since the Hot Chips presentation.

<comment><USER16> It's a shame we've got to wait so long until the publish the videos of the presentations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Decompression can be driven at memory bandwidth rates, so there is now downside to using compression," says Fowler. The on-chip compression leaves the S4 cores leftover capacity to do useful work.

I assume he meant to say that there is "no downside to using compression" ?

<comment><USER18> This is a big thing that GPUs have been doing for decades. I'm honestly surprised this has not been done until now.

Scientific, and many other data processing workloads use compression because memory bandwidth is the slow part. Mostly once you have the data in memory, doing some extra instructions on it is almost free, considering how slow a memory load is in comparison these days. But if all you are doing is compressing the data, then I guess it's a definite win. It'll be interesting to see what sort of speedups this gives when you're also processing the data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Still don't understand why businesses buy this instead of scaling-out. Cost? Complexity?

<comment><USER20> The third and most important reason:

They have someone to blame when shit goes tits up. Response time may still be abysmal, but "dammit we payed a million dollars for this!"

<comment><USER21> and one more thing with large volume transaction processing is scaling out on I/O and ETL jobs.Oracle (and other DB vendors) offer a lot of utilities that scale out perfectly with least of development time. For e.g. it would rather be a difficult deal to work with parsers to parse a Gigabit-data file with code we have to own up , than to use features these DBs directly offer to parallel-load into a ready to use table within minutes.</comment></comment></comment>


Founder Depression Research Survey - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Je9bidatgwAkL57KtWN2Z2jOLJfo4Shpw9ImIb1qjbE/viewform

<comment><USER2> Many people use the words "depressed" and "sad" synonymously. If you're bummed because you didn't get that big client, does that qualify as "feeling depressed"? If you want to study depression in the clinical sense, it might help to give a specific definition to help guide the survey taker.

<comment><USER3> There's a government survey that gets at this right here:

[http://www.integration.samhsa.gov/images/res/PHQ%20-%20Quest...](http://www.integration.samhsa.gov/images/res/PHQ%20-%20Questions.pdf)

(a little google goes a long way)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder what you are expecting to make out by asking these (specific) questions. They seem too little to let you make anything out of it. I would be really interested in your thought process behind these questions.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. I would like to see deeper questions. I suffered through the "struggle" that Ben Horowitz talks about. I would ask questions like:

Do you wonder why you started the startup in the first place? Do you regret it? Do you believe you should be the founder of your own company?

Just some food for thought.</comment></comment>


Data Is a Toxic Asset - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_toxic.html <comment><USER2> I agree, the biggest reason all these security breaches are as bad as they are is because every company and site seems to want to store as much data about its users as they can.

And this point from the article is great:

<i>The Ashley Madison data breach was such a disaster for the company because it saved its customers' real names and credit card numbers. It didn't have to do it this way. It could have processed the credit card information, given the user access, and then deleted all identifying information.</i>

Tip 1 for 'anonymous' or 'secretive' services like this; don't store personal information. There's no reason a site about cheating on your partners needs a real name or any real personal information, at least on the site's part (that can be shared between the actual users when they want to share it). Similarly, there's no reason any anonymous service should store anything bar a username and maybe email address. Or for that matter, get access to any device features like the camera or contact list. That way, if it ever gets hacked, the data is (for people who didn't use their real name and email) completely useless.</comment>


Gmail's New Default Theme is a Step Backwards for Usability - <AUTHOR> http://www.newmediacampaigns.com/page/gmails-new-default-theme-is-a-step-backwards-for-usability

<comment><USER2> _"From the 'Classic' to 'Default' themes, the foreground to background brightness difference and the foreground to background color difference is reduced by 28%!"_

The author fails to realize that Google did this on purpose. This contrast reduction is for READ emails. Unread emails stand out really well (black on white). My guess is that designers did usability tests and found out that people are more interested in new, unread emails, than in read emails. So they made sure that you can easily find new, unread emails and the old, read, emails just get out of your way. And it does make a lot of sense to me... I'll give new theme a try.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see your point, but I am not sure I agree.

My behavior may be atypical, but I tend to read new mail sequentially. Only when I am looking for a particular message do I scan the email listing. It is in this case that I would prefer to have increased contrast.

Furthermore, I find it jarring to have such a dramatic difference in read vs. unread mail when scanning a list that contains both.

Whether my experience and preferences match Gmail users as a whole is unknown.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's just what you're used to, it's not better or worse. Every change of any sites design always has someone who liked the old way better. Then they get used to it, and complain again when it changes.

</comment><comment><USER4> Switching the default theme makes people notice the change.

They're then much more likely to find out about and use custom themes.

</comment><comment><USER5> Luckily people will be getting a Theme switcher, though comparing my now "Classic" themed Personal account, to my Google Apps for domains default theme, there are differences, so Classic isn't exactly the same as the old default theme.

I believe it's the colour behind the "Archive", "Delete" buttons.

Yes I am being anal but I look at that screen for a decent proportion of my day and it doesn't look right, which is annoying.

<comment><USER6> I went back to Classic as my theme (after briefly considering the eye straining Terminal throw-back).

It is close enough to the original that it feels the same to me.

<comment><USER5> I'll get used to it eventually, I'd probably get used to any of the themes eventually. Except the Terminal one, I'll happily miss out on the geek points to avoid it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The "Shiny" theme is pretty, but I think all of the new themes would look better if alternate conversations in the e-mail list were shaded slightly. As it is, my inbox is a big sea of white.

<comment><USER8> I liked Shiny as well, but there are some white on black blocks that were hard on my eyes, so I'm currently using the "New Blue."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hm, I don't care about the color theme one way or another, but when I clicked 'Sign out' a popup appeared and said,

       "There is a request to the server pending. Are you sure?"

I know what this means, but even then I have no idea what that specific request might be. I doubt the average gmail user has any clue whatsoever about this message.

Not really something I'd expect from Google.

<comment><USER10> Isn't this a Firefox thing? I remember seeing it on other places than gmail...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think that while this is a problem the solution should be to just make picking a theme either as part of the sign up process or as a high lighted feature. People who have trouble reading light text would then know they could change the look and feel of the application.

</comment><comment><USER12> I just wish Google would let me go back to my good old iGoogle, and not this garbage one they have now with the side-bar on the left.

For now, I use Google.ca until they redesign that one, and then it will be time to get a new homepage.

Anyone here use page flakes?

<comment><USER13> I feel the same as you but I ended up installing the Stylish Firefox addon and used the recipe to hide the left navigation. (Actually I modified it some so it also hides the search box and other wasted space.)

It's sad but I have too much invested in Google to leave right now and I'm not comfortable giving my Google credentials to a foreign website like PageFlakes.

<comment><USER12> Would you mind providing a URL for the recipe? I'm a Firefox user, so that would solve part of my problem.

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very true!

I've customised the Graffiti view + tag colours to produce something I quite like. But I definitely didnt like the new "default" (the older "classic" was a lot cleaner)

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone see a theme they like that increases usability?

<comment><USER16> Night Shade and Shiny both stay pretty readable while reducing the total amount of light coming off the screen. On a big monitor, I don't like tons of white background, so I'm using Night Shade right now. It also has some faint similarities to the color schemes of Ubuntu's Human theme and the casing of the Acer Aspire One, which appeals to me.

I looked for a theme that would make Ubuntu's new DarkRoom desktop theme usable (black text on dark gray buttons, whee!) but not even Sunset works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> They refer to this is the "default" theme. Does that mean that I can revert to the old theme?

<comment><USER4> The "old" theme is called "classic". Did you read the article?

<comment><USER17> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I definitely agree.</comment>


Linguist explains grammar of doge. Wow. - <AUTHOR> http://the-toast.net/2014/02/06/linguist-explains-grammar-doge-wow/

<comment><USER2> At least he was good enough to point out the poor rulers of the Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia, who are probably rolling in their graves.</comment>


Lincoln assassination eyewitness (1956) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_iq5yzJ-Dk

<comment><USER2> If my memory serves me correctly, that particular event sparked the creation of the Secret Service. The recent scandals involving the Secret Service makes this surprisingly relevant. Thanks!</comment>


Hexaflexagons (video by Vi Hart) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIVIegSt81k&list=UUOGeU-1Fig3rrDjhm9Zs_wg&index=1&feature=plcp <comment><USER2> I know I will sound like a fanboy but every morning before starting to work, I watch one vi hart video.

Starting the day with those fantastic videos is like kickstarting both my analytical mind and my creative mind or may be those videos just make me happy in a very geek sense and the day begins in a better mood.

Also, SPIRALS EVERYWHERE...</comment>


Ask HN: How many of you are writers and what are you writing? - <AUTHOR> Following the comments on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13850693 made me realise that, like me, a lot of you HNers are writers too. I'm an unpublished novelist writing fiction, speculative and otherwise, and I'm curious to know what the rest of you are writing.<p>Fiction or Non-Fiction? Poetry or Prose? Blog entries or Encyclopaedias? Have any of you been published? <comment><USER2> I write little stories about my farm for kids but it seems to resonate with adults. I seem to get more reactions from adults than from children.One even held my hands and started sobbing. I didn't know what to make of it..making grown ups weep was certainly not my intent when I wrote them.

What I really like to write tho' is weird fiction. And I have..it feels too personal to share. I don't think I will ever share it. It seems like it comes from the darkest parts of me. I went through a lovecraft/m.r.james/algernon phase and even though I moved past it..to try other authors and genres..I never forgot how I felt when I first got started on weird fiction. It feels the same way again when I dig deep and write little snippet stories for myself.

</comment><comment><USER3> I do a lot of different writing. A lot of it could be called blogging, but that doesn't really capture it. This is a partial list of my sites:

[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/my- sites.html](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/my-sites.html)

I do freelance writing for pay.

I do resume work:

[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/resumes.html](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/resumes.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> I have a directory of unpublished blog posts on my hard drive.

I also am writing and publishing (and not publicising yet) a series of blog posts about developing software. When I have enough posts written I might cross-publish them onto Medium or whatever the blog publishing platform of the moment is.

I have notes and ideas of lots of (non-fiction) things I want to write about more fully at some point.

And I would like to try my hand at writing some fiction. Sci-fi or fantasy because it would be fun, I imagine.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm the author of Hello Web App ([http://hellowebapp.com](http://hellowebapp.com)) and I'm currently in the middle of writing Hello Web Design ([http://hellowebdesignbook.com](http://hellowebdesignbook.com)), which I just finished a Kickstarter campaign for last month.

Non-fiction books, self-published (I do the design for them as well).

</comment><comment><USER6> I write all the time, but nothing that would publish me a novel nor have I been published anywhere professionally. When I was younger, I would write short stories and stuff like that. Again, nothing worth making into a novel.

When I was in college, I had developed a fascination with wanting to help college students establish their careers, or help people who were having a midlife crisis and were in a career already change careers if they so desired, or just to help make the workplace better.

Having gone to school for Psychology and after graduation, I was unable to get a job and pursue it. Of course, it would have helped to have gone back for a Masters Degree, but I had no money. So I did the next best thing: I was a programmer at heart (teaching myself when I was young), so I used that skillset to get a job.

However, my love and passion for wanting to understand and help people in the workplace never died. So I did the next best thing: I created a website that helped people with jobs, careers, and the workplace. I scoured the Internet searching for a website similar to my idea, but I could only find individual blog post articles related to the topics I was interested in writing about, nothing that really made the entire website about the topics of jobs, careers, and the workplace. Little did I know that there were many people who would actually be interested in learning more about what I was interested in.

After writing dozens of articles and publishing them, I opened the blog up for others to contribute. It has become like a full-time job but I love it. I am sure so many people reading the website are encouraged to write their own articles, and every experience at work helps me write yet another article. The topics are endless and the ideas are endless.

So I basically write about work to help people deal with work. Articles like: How do you ask for a raise? How do you impress your boss? How to deal with back-stabbing co-workers? How to get along with your boss. and so on and so forth. I'm hoping that one day if I ever do decide to go back for a Masters Degree, I can use this information in some way for research purposes, but my aim is to just make the place that we are at for nearly most of our lives, 40-50 hours a week + driving time a better place to be. The website has been up for several years now and we just hit a benchmark of 1,500 posts.

Every week, I check my inbox, and I've got a ton of new articles that people want to contribute! So this is not just my website, but it has turned into its own community of contributors, and those contributors share with their friends and following. Contributors include freelance writers, marketers, startups, individuals (doctors, lawyers, professors, plumbers, electricians, CEOs, board members, bosses, programmers, engineers, etc.), and even professional researchers at some well known universities. I even get people from Canada, Europe, Phillipines, India, Japan, and Australia who send in articles. I would have never talked to these people otherwise. The diversity teaches me about what work is like around the world. I don't do any marketing for it. I just write and others write, and we share it with the world, and those who get it love it.

[http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com](http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com)</comment>


Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41551546 <comment><USER2> This is really a shame. I brought a Windows Phone on the first day WP7 was released and it was surprisingly initiative at the time.

I stayed with WP all the way up to WP10 until last year when I finally switched away.

I was happy to put up with having fewer apps back in 2010 because I liked the OS so much, but more recently it felt like they just stopped innovating and the lack of apps is much more of an issue today in 2017.

I think Microsoft could have done more to make WP10 more attractive to users, but at the end of the day because of decisions made (primarily by Apple) to limit functionality of universal web apps and in turn creating OS specific ecosystems, they were forced to fight against a almost insurmountable network effect either way.

It's a shame because this seems to be the fate of many tech innovations.

</comment><comment><USER3> Windows Mobile is my favorite example of ecosystems being more valuable than individual user experiences.

They came out later and really managed to hit a bright spot in between the customizability of Android and the sleekness of iOS.

But without the deep app ecosystem backing them up, I'm not sure we're going to see any new players emerge in this current form factor of mobile computing.

So far we've seen:

\- Amazon fail \- Microsoft fail \- Facebook fail (killed internally)

All fail at providing anything like a competitive answer to Android and iOS dominance.

What I see are all the big players lining up to take a crack at Augmented Reality when the tech hits a sweet spot sometime in the next 5-10 years. That's the reason for the crazy investments in MagicLeap, etc. it's a bet on being able to muscle into the absolutely massive mobile ecosystem.

<comment><USER4> We've already forgotten Blackberry and Palm it seems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Other comment thread, but essentially the same news: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15432720](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15432720)

<comment><USER6> We merged the comments there—thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh boy, Nokia's gonna be pissed

<comment><USER8> Nokia? What Nokia?

<comment><USER9> That one: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia)</comment></comment></comment>


There is free will: we make choices even if our atoms don't - <AUTHOR> http://m.nautil.us/issue/72/quandary/yes-determinists-there-is-free-will <comment><USER2> So typical - there is no clear definition, lots of ambiguous terms...People just want to have this free will so much that they always intentionally conflate the terms.

It's not happening, free will is the human-life equivalent of square circle.

1\. Determinism or not, free will doesn't exist in either case. 2\. Lack of knowledge is not the same as random. 3\. Me deciding something doesn't happen because decisions are not points in time - your decision is smeared in space time and it lasts for long. Even when you say "fuck it, it's chocolate" that is not a _single_ moment in time where the decision is made. 4\. The whole idea of "me" being a singular, well defined thing is purely an artefact of human language. We are a process, not a thing.

If free will is so real, can you freely choose never to choose again? Of course not. You are forced to choose because the choosing is an unstoppable process which evolves over time. Just like universe. Cannot stop the motion.

<comment><USER3> Your claims are no more convincing than the article.

You're entirely free to hold your beliefs about this, of course (or are you? perhaps they're predetermined), but don't imagine they're somehow more valid than the alternatives.

<comment><USER4> They're convincing to me. I have a hard time seeing a reason to ascribe 'free will' to a physical process that was always going to happen in that particular way. A ball doesn't choose to bounce when it is dropped on the ground.

<comment><USER5> > I have a hard time seeing a reason to ascribe 'free will' to a physical > process

Who says it's a physical process to begin with? That's an assertion, not a proof.

More interestingly, did you make that assertion of your own free will? :-)

<comment><USER4> > More interestingly, did you make that assertion of your own free will? :-)

Very cute if unoriginal, someone says that anytime I bring up this argument, and the answer is very simple, of course I didnt!

A 'decision' is a physical process, as in 'physics' physical, if something is not physical, then it is magic, and I dont believe (believe being used in the abstract sense of course) in magic.

<comment><USER5> > if something is not physical, then it is magic

Again you are simply asserting it is so. I'll grant you it's a very popular assertion, but you'll forgive me if I don't just take your word for it.

1) I think free will is a concept that has to be approached in a practical matter: as in we get better social outcomes if we assume people have free will.

The concept has utility.

2) Processes with simple rules can still exhibit emergent behaviour.

edited: To add point #2

<comment><USER4> > 1) I think free will is a concept that has to be approached in a practical > matter: as in we get better social outcomes if we assume people have free > will.

The concept has utility.

You must understand, this is the most horrifying part! People are sentenced to prisons, torture, and death for "making bad/evil decisions". I'm not saying we should let murderers be murderers, but what I am saying is we should start looking closely into possible "down to the hardware" remedies instead if prison. If we are operating on this whole free-will notion, then that will never happen.

> 2) Processes with simple rules can still exhibit emergent behaviour.

Define emergent in this case, I dont know of any truly emergent behavior that violates the rules of what caused it, you could say 'organic life' was an emergent behavior, but it still obeys physics.

>you'll forgive me if I don't just take your word for it.

I think if we can't get passed an agreement that magic isnt real, that may be a reasonable time to end the discussion.

<comment><USER5> In every culture, in every era, people have usually been pretty sure they had everything figured out, and that they understood life and the world completely.

I don't believe our present time is any more enlightened in this matter than any other.

(Also it seems to me that you keep using the word 'magic' as a weasel word: as if people disagreeing with you are just children who believe in silly things.)

<comment><USER4> > In every culture, in every era, people have usually been pretty sure they > had everything figured out, and that they understood life and the world > completely.

I don't think anyone here believes they have everything figured out.

> I don't believe our present time is any more enlightened in this matter than > any other.

I think we're slowly getting better over time, as our collective knowledge compounds as time goes.

> Also it seems to me that you keep using the word 'magic' as a weasel word

You made a claim that a 'choice/decision' is not necessarily a physical process, I don't know how else I should interpret that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The strongest argument against free will doesn't have to do with determinism (and I agree with Christian List that looking at lower levels is a category error). Even if you chuck out determinism, you still can't say what free will is a supposed to _be_. It just evaporates while you try to examine it, no matter what sort of framework you put up around it.

<comment><USER7> That's the case for many abstract notions no one seems to agree on. Art, culture, nation, justice... No one really agrees on what they're supposed to be, only on single instances. Doesn't make the more encompassing abstraction any less real or useful.

<comment><USER6> No, I don't think that's it. Art, justice, etc, have constituent parts. People disagree, but there's lots of stuff in those boxes. When I turn my minds eye to free will, there's nothing there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > If you try to make sense of human behavior, not just in ordinary life but > also in the sciences, then the ascription of intentionality is > indispensable. It's infeasible and not illuminating to explain human > behavior at the level of astronomically complex neural firing patterns that > take place in the brain.

"It's difficult to describe macro behavior as a direct function of micro behavior, therefore, intentionality doesn't belong on, nor should be falsified at, the micro level."

All of the lines of argument in this article seem pretty weak. My time of disrespecting modern philosophy has sure come to an abrupt middle.

</comment><comment><USER9> > Indeterminism at the level of psychology is required for free will and > alternative possibilities. That is entirely compatible with determinism at > the fundamental physical level.

Not sure I understand/agree with that. Can you build non-determinism out of deterministic pieces?

<comment><USER10> > Can you build non-determinism out of deterministic pieces?

Yes. Pseudo-random generators are deterministic on lower level, yet they effectively non-deterministic in the sense that you cannot easily predict next value.

Or you can just take a system with large number of interacting particles - even if behavior of each of them is determined, the system as a whole is hard to predict.

Converse is also possible, you can build effectively deterministic system on top of a non-deterministic one. We do that with computers, we have digital computers (deterministic) on top of solid-state physics, which is non- deterministic due to interactions of electrons and the material.

This is not really a paradox, since at the higher level you only consider macrostates, so the fact that the microstates, which you consider at the lower level, are (non-)deterministic doesn't really matter.

<comment><USER11> Determinism and predictability are distinct concepts, it is epistemically dangerous to conflate them.

<comment><USER12> Well put. Compatibilist arguments typically hinge on some bait and switch and this is a popular one. The author does this exact thing in his weather example:

> At the level of individual air molecules, there is no such thing as weather. > Perhaps the system at that very fine-grained level of description would > indeed behave deterministically according to classical physical laws, but as > you move to a more macroscopic description, you abstract away from this > microphysical detail. _That is not driven by ignorance on our part_ , but by > the explanatory need to focus on the most salient regularities.

> When you consider the macroscopic weather states, the system is not > deterministic, but stochastic, or random.

The high level weather pattern is just like the output of the pseudorandom number generator. It _appears_ stochastic to someone who is only given the high level description, but it is still deterministic in the actual world. Given the Laplace's demon description of the system, there is no room for alternative possibilities.

I think the author is only added the part I have bolded to try and deflect this. He is saying "we don't _want_ the Laplace's demon description of the system, we just want the high level precis." Weirder still, he seems to suggest that getting the Laplace's demon is a realistic possibility, which obviously it's not.

But the fact is it doesn't matter whether it's possible for a human to get the Laplace's demon description, or whether you actively pursue it or whatever - if your accept that it's there, as List seems to, then it fully determines the higher level phenomena and this idea about higher level indeterminacy is moot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are you going to read this comment or not? this is a choice. If you read it, will you respond to it? yet another choice.

I can stay the fact that you're reading this far is a free choice you made out of possible alternative forks of reality. Yet, if I attempt to dig deep on why you have decided to read thus far, I've to factor in your genetic makeup and the summation of all the experiences from the moment you were conceived until this very moment, which is impossible to do, I also have no way to infer the current state of your mind, your brain state is unaccessible information to me. So, I just abstract it all by giving YOU agency, a free will. You choose to read this far by your own freewill as far as I can tell.

Therefore, freewill is a concept that exist at certain plan of abstraction (along with the concept of I and YOU) but they all dissolve once you try to peek inside inner-working of the brain's decision making machinery. But since we human don't have a way to peek inside each other brain in real-time with ease, we operate at the higher level concepts of YOU, and I assign the agency and "freewill" to YOU since I've no better explanation of why you have read up until this point.

</comment><comment><USER14> All arguments I have ever seen involving free will, from both sides, are very weak. It is a branch of philosophy that is particularly self-obsessed, and particularly unlikely to make any decent forward progress. The people who write books about free will are self-selected for a tendency to pontificate on a topic that has no foreseeable resolution.

</comment><comment><USER11> > _The jury is out on whether the world is fundamentally deterministic...but > suppose it is. This does not necessitate that the world is also > deterministic at some higher level of description._

Ah, so there can exist counterfactual levels of description which are inconsistent with what may be the fundamental nature of reality. This seems accurate. (C.f. religion)

> _We can attach probabilities to different scenarios, but it's not the case > that the weather state at the present time fully determines the weather > state in a few days' time. Multiple different trajectories are entirely > possible._

In superdeterminism, the state of the universe at the present time _does_ fully determine the weather state in a few days time. Multiple trajectories are _not_ physically possible, though we are able to probabilistically model such trajectories based on the incomplete information that we do have access to.

<comment><USER15> This article seems (to me) to be advocating some sort of scientific cognitive dissonance. Where you can 'believe' different (and contradictory) things about the nature of systems surrounding you.

I'm not sure I buy it.

<comment><USER16> It's not saying the same thing is different, but the fact free will is an emergent concept that only works on the level of a person. There is no reasonable definition of free will at the atomic level, it just doesn't exist. Let's say a picture is beautiful. Well atoms can't be beautiful so hence the picture can't be beautiful. Beauty is a very high level emergent concept that only exist at that level. It's completely compatible with determinism but the fact its ultimately deterministic atoms at play is irrelevant. It's similar for free will, the cocomcept doesn't reply on determinism and that it's completely independent from it. It's about a person's actions not the underlying mechanism of how a person acts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> HN should institute a rule than anyone replying to a free will thread should get 2ⁿ negative points for each post, where n is the depth position in the thread.

Present company included, naturally.

<comment><USER4> I feel honored

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Step 1: Define "Free Will".

<comment><USER18> I am at work right now but I can walk the fuck out anytime I feel like it.

<comment><USER2> Does determinism prevent you? Why _would_ you want or feel like it? And when that happens, how do you control the deliberation process itself?

Can you freely choose your deliberations? Why would you choose them exactly like that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm not convinced. At least not by the summary this article puts forward. Perhaps the world isn't deterministic (although how could we possibly know?). Even if it isn't, that non-determinism is only visible at the smallest of scales. Whether an electron is here or there is hardly likely to be caused by my mental states. So, if we don't have free will, at best we have random will. That is not free will as most people conceive of it.

To the whole section about human behavior being too complex to explain in terms of fundamental physics, my answer is: it can't be explained in terms of fundamental physics _yet_. But, again, given sufficient time, research, and computational power, it seems highly likely that eventually human behavior will be explained in terms of fundamental physics. Or at least, we will be able to simulate a human (or higher animal) brain with sufficient resolution so as to demonstrate that there are no other inputs to cognition than current state + laws of physics. I really don't see how our current inability to explain human behavior physically has any bearing on the question of cognitive determinism.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think the root of the problem is in trying to use logical proof to reason about things that are beyond the limits of logical reasoning and our relatively small human minds. We know from results like the Godel Incompleteness theorem that even mathematics has very real limits on what is provable through human reasoning. The logical paradox of free will and determinism is like the paradoxes used within mathematics to prove its own limits. It is unfortunate but predictable that we cling to the delusion that we can resolve the paradox of free will through logical reasoning. There are some aspects of reality, particularly those dealing with one's own mind or self, that cannot be reasoned about. It is also a well known open secret that those aspects of reality, while beyond the reaches of thinking and logical explanation, can be directly experienced. The practitioners of various forms of meditation experience have a great deal to report about such experiential knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER21> > _You may be a big bunch of atoms governed by the mechanical laws, but you > are not just any bunch of atoms. You are an intricately structured bunch of > atoms, and your behavior depends not just on the laws that govern the > individual atoms but on the way those atoms are assembled. At a higher level > of description, your decisions can be truly open._

They essentially redefine "free will" as "difficult to predict", instead of "truly random" or "magical" or something like that.

With this definition of "free will":

Does a cow have free will?

Does a tree have free will?

Does a rolling dice have free will?

</comment><comment><USER22> I can flip a coin every time I have an opportunity to make certain minor choices. Some of those choices will turn out to have major effects (my whole life changed once because the batteries were low on my Walkman and I tuned into the radio instead of playing a cassette tape like I otherwise would have). Most will not.

The point is, I can do this, and I have. Other times I have chosen not to leave as much to chance. For all practical purposes, to me this indicates sufficient free will for me to comfortable believing I have it.

<comment><USER23> I agree that believing free-will exists can be advantageous when being confronted with choices and alternative timelines. Believing that you have no autonomy can lead to situations where you don't weigh different possibilties at a given moment in time. In general, it's... deflating?

The problem for me is that there are an innumerable amount of solutions to any given choice. You have to narrow these down subconsciously. Tracing back all of the reasons why you didn't consider all these choices that were implicitly ruled out, for me, ends up at birth, and I'm pretty sure I didn't have a choice in being born.

<comment><USER22> > Tracing back all of the reasons why you didn't consider all these choices

It likely varies a lot across individuals.

For me personally, when I do this I see a whole lot of small choices made almost whimsically that led up to very large results. It came down to aesthetics a lot of the time. My values, relationships and knowledge were all inconsistent and in constant flux for many years, and when faced with analysis paralysis, how I forced a decision was often not discernably different from chance.

As I get older, it appears my choices have more weight, but they paradoxically also seem more predetermined. Perhaps it's as simple as that we're more unpredictable in our youth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Since we are discussing if there is free will or not can I get an answer to who first proposed the solution I describe here [0]. I know I am not the first person to have raised this argument, but I can't find who did.

0\. [https://www.tillett.info/2018/12/21/the-last-word-on-free- wi...](https://www.tillett.info/2018/12/21/the-last-word-on-free-will/)

<comment><USER11> Not believing in free will does not inevitably lead to a nihilistic funk.

Funks are often caused by an abrupt shift in worldview without a corresponding set of tools for integrating that worldview into the rest of your life.

<comment><USER25> Calvinists and Sunni Muslims don't believe in free will. Neither one as a class could be said to be in a nihilistic funk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If some process M behaves according to fixed rules yet no other process can exist that can determine, with certainty, M's behavior ahead of M, then M is still "deterministic" in the physics sense of the word, but is it deterministic enough to claim no free will?

I guess some could say that M is not free because the decisive question is, could have M behaved differently? But I am not sure that question is entirely well-defined.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't see how conflating inscrutible with non-deterministic is useful. But this is the argument the author is making. They seem to argue that it is a useful thing to do scientifically. Perhaps philosophers would do well to focus on whether a different person in the same circumstances would be forced to make the same decision. The answer is clearly no. But not because of a lack of determinism.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is just another false dichotomy theists like to use to argue their case. It's like arguing whether humans are inherently good or evil - no, humans create both of those things. Or whether the universe was created or not. Why make up stories for something we can never know?

</comment><comment><USER29> I wrote a koan about free will not too long ago...

[http://mitchgordon.me/zen/2019/04/02/koan-of- will.html](http://mitchgordon.me/zen/2019/04/02/koan-of-will.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> As long as the concept of infinity exist it's impossible to say that existence is deterministic or not. It's rather determinism wrapped in indeterminism and that wrapped in determinism so on and so forth.

</comment><comment><USER31> Does anyone know of a good text that will better help explain the concept of 'free will' and the agruments around it? Kant et al are completely opaque and nearly unreadable.

</comment><comment><USER7> Before you go on disparaging the author and philosophy in general like the proverbial xkcd physicist, take a look at this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism)</comment>


11 Ways to Invoke a Function in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/myshov/status/848626449783369730 <comment><USER2> Interesting. I just happen to have this tab open: [http://exploringjs.com/es6/ch_callables.html](http://exploringjs.com/es6/ch_callables.html).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, guys! I just want to be clear. I have a little mistake in my tweet because I mixed a function invocation and a code execution in one place, so please forgive me. But it's fun anyway ;)

<comment> angry-hacker Just link the picture next time, or even better to pastebin or such.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is why we can't have nice things.</comment>


50 Ways to Get Things Done (old but relevant) - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/fast50_02/all50.html

<comment><USER3> A word of caution.....

A lot of the "get things done" and "get better fast" solutions that are floating around draw from experiences of successful people or organisations, extrapolate from this and present what they have done as the best solution. This, however does not take into consideration what is cause and what is effect.

For instance, if you take 50 companies and let them follow this advice (from the article)

\- Bet the company

\- Think big

\- Prescribe change

\- Reach for the sky

\- Set your sites high

\- Commit to change

what you will see 5 years later is that 40 of the companies have gone bankrupt because they bet the company and reached for the sky. But all that is apparent to the casual observer is the 10 companies that have success, and all that is observed is their often risky strategies that have led them to their success.

To drive the point home: In 1982 Tom Peters and Robert Waterman did exactly this, they investigated a number of successful companies and saw what they had done that noone else was doing. And they concluded that this was what you should do if you wanted to be successful, and thereby completely ignored cause and effect. Their studies were published in the business bestseller "in search of excellence".

And what if you look at the companies that they investigated today? Many are bankrupt, and many are in financial trouble. Only a few are doing really well.

One of the companies that "did all the right things" was Atari.

This was actually one of the primary reasons I left business school. I basically thought "these guys have no idea what they are talking about" - <USER2> a lot of them still don't...</comment>


Is Joe Armstrong kidding? - <AUTHOR> https://pragprog.com/titles/jaerlang2/errata

<comment><AUTHOR> If you check the errata #77244, that's his ONE SINGLE example of how you can use pattern matching with maps. I smiled as I read the example. But when I tried it, boom! That piece of code does not run on any released version of Erlang, and I am here trying out Erlang to see if I can use it in my enterprise project! The most disappointed I have been while learning any language.

<comment><USER2> Yes, the line

        count_characters([H|T], #{ H := N }=X) -> …

is not yet fully understood by the VM. More details on this here [1]. Every other line works fine though. Oh and instead of using maps one can use records, dicts, sets, gb_trees, proplists, …

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23106543/illegal- pattern-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23106543/illegal-pattern-in- map-of-erlang)

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree. But that line is the crux! They should have implemented this match to begin with, to functionally make use of maps!</comment></comment></comment>


In a corporate blog yesterday, Oracle attacked 83 computer scientists - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/joshbloch/status/1237507341983068168 <comment><USER2> Oracle slogan is "be exactly as evil as you can get away with".

<comment><USER3> I would argue that's true of virtually all publicly-traded for-profit companies. They just vary widely in how much they "can get away with".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> s/attacked/criticized the statements of/, and the twitter thread lacks any link to the blog post in question. How is this supposed to foster discussion at higher levels of the disagreement hierarchy? Flagged.

<comment><USER5> Your first sentence does not even make sense -- what are you trying to say?

Why are you flagging -- it is not clear at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If anything, the excerpt that the tweet shares from the blog post ("Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain") underplays how aggressive the post is. Alone, the tweet's image looks at first like a footnote disclosing funding sources, but the full context does indeed seem like systematic criticism of the briefs and everyone around them.

* [https://www.oracle.com/corporate/blog/pay-no-attention-to-th...](https://www.oracle.com/corporate/blog/pay-no-attention-to-that-man-behind-the-curtain-030920.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Which developer conferences in Europe are worth attending? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Biggest Python conference is EuroPython ([https://ep2019.europython.eu/](https://ep2019.europython.eu/)) but it was in July so you missed that one...

There is PyCon in almost each country. I am volunteering at PyCon SK ([https://pycon.sk/](https://pycon.sk/)), but it will be in March next year.

You can make it to PyCon PL ([https://pl.pycon.org/2019/en/](https://pl.pycon.org/2019/en/)), PyCon UK ([https://2019.pyconuk.org/](https://2019.pyconuk.org/)) in September in the past I have been on both and can recommend to visit.</comment>


Audible Magic Hard Sells EC to Require Their Tech for Article 13 - <AUTHOR> https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1086761804301094917.html <comment><USER2> This was very expected. There are only few companies that could provide technology semi-compliant with the Article 13. AudibleMagic is at the top of the list. Although they can only identify audio from the content so the platforms would still have to make a deal with someone else.

Anyway, I'm glad that the Article 13 got stopped, at least for now.</comment>


How to implement a programming language in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://lisperator.net/pltut/ <comment><USER2> in the link, the author says, don't use regexp for parser. is there any background on this? trying to understand the limitation of regexp.

<comment><USER3> Simple example: RegExp allows you to find the next closing parenthesis. But it can not "see" how many opening parenthesis there were before that. Therefore it can not tell you if the closing parenthesis it found is the "matching" closing parenthesis</comment></comment>


What the new iPhone connector means for your old accessories - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/07/19-pin-iphone-dock/

<comment><USER2> Besides the constant need to evolve, what is the main advantage of this new connector?

<comment><USER3> It's smaller.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: User management for social users on a Python (ruby)  Web app - <AUTHOR> Hi HNers
I am trying to build a python web app that is a fairly basic way to save articles and recipes (I know its been done a thousand times but this is just practice app building). There are tons of mechanisms to auth and get the info from say FB. How do you manage and store the information at a user level? Is there a library - I can imagine its a pretty common problem.
Alternatively is there a ruby gem that can do this in case there is nothing reusable for Python?
Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> Python Social Auth¹ by Matías Aguirre is a great library that was abstracted from battle-tested Django Social Auth. Authomatic² by Peter Hudec is good as well.

Flask Social³ by Matt Wright is worth a look, too.

You can find example implementations with different DBs in the examples directories of the projects. I've used everything from Redis and MongoDB to SQLite to store user information. It all depends on your goals. My framework of choice is Flask most of the time.

[1] [https://github.com/omab/python-social- auth](https://github.com/omab/python-social-auth)

[2] [https://github.com/peterhudec/authomatic](https://github.com/peterhudec/authomatic)

[3] [https://github.com/mattupstate/flask- social](https://github.com/mattupstate/flask-social)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!</comment></comment>


Amazon Has Swallowed Downtown Seattle - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-06-29/prime-real-estate-amazon-has-swallowed-downtown-seattle <comment><USER3> To be honest, the section of the city Amazon has "swallowed" was grass and weed filled parking lots 5 years ago as well as broken down buildings. While the construction has been a drag for drivers in that area, the city looks and feels so much better, IMO, due to their investments.

Now, has Amazon invested enough in infrastructure to help the swelling population they are partly to blame for increasing (not to mention lack of houses, housing prices, student class sizes, etc.)? No, not really - <USER2> that's the price of being one of the fastest growing cities with the lowest unemployment in the country. But in terms of the city buildings and neighborhood - so much better.

<comment><USER4> This, many times over. Yes, Seattle's South Lake Union now looks a lot like downtown San Jose. It's a completely different world from 10 years ago, though, and so much better.

We missed out on a chance to have a giant urban park ("Seattle Commons": [http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&...](http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&File_Id=8252)), but credit to Paul Allen for executing an unbelievable plan B.

[Bloomberg's article focuses more on Amazon's new HQ in downtown Seattle, but Amazon's impact today is mostly in South Lake Union. Background: [http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/amazon- will...](http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/amazon-will-add- troy-block-towers-to-its-seattle-office-empire/)]

(Source: Born in Seattle and have lived within ~0.5 miles for 10+ years)

<comment><USER5> I dunno, a giant green park within the city like SF's golden gate park or NYC's central park sounds really incredible.

<comment><USER6> You don't like Discovery Park, Washington Park, Volunteer Park, Golden Gardens, Carkeek Park, or Lincoln Park?

<comment><USER7> They're all lovely parks, but none are within walking distance of downtown.

<comment><USER6> We may have different definitions of walking distance from downtown because I think that both Volunteer and Washington Park fall in that range, although I understand that they are farther than a hypothetical South Lake Union park. On the other hand, I would note that neither Golden Gate Park nor Central Park are near their respective downtowns.

<comment><USER7> I don't really disagree, but it's a 50 minute (uphill) walk from Pike Place to Volunteer Park, whereas it's 15 minutes to the edge of SLU. I don't really mind walking an hour, but many people do.

Golden Gate is a little out of the way, Central Park is super accessible by subway.

<comment><USER6> That's fair. Alternatively, it's a 35-minute bus ride.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The irony is that Seattle as a city is already extremely connected with nature. From their office they should be able to see Puget sound, Ranier and the cascades, not to mention lake union. There is a nice park a 15 minute walk away from their offices, and the city it's self has a surprising amount of trees. The hikes around Seattle are amazing and plenty within an hour drive. I work in downtown Seattle and have coworkers that have a ferry on their commute.

That all being said, I find the project fascinating and it fits in very well with the space needle, the balls should be glimpsable from the (useless) monorail.

</comment><comment><USER9> "one of the best recruiting tools Amazon has is if people come interview on a nice day, and people are sitting outside having lunch from a food truck."

Have they been to Seattle during the months of November to June?

<comment><USER10> I have (I live in Seattle, but don't work for Amazon) and the weather is pretty great roughly nine months out of the year. Late November to February are dreary but spring, summer, and most of fall make up for it. Sorry for leaking the secret, fellow Seattleites.

<comment><USER11> Depends on how you define great weather. It doesn't rain nearly as much as people assume (lived there 6 years), but most days have some light drizzle. For a tennis player, that is emotionally taxing (is it going to rain? should we make plans).

<comment><USER12> I moved to Seattle and it's not the rain that bothers me (it's really not as bad as people say, even during the winter months), it's the cold. .. or rather lack of hot.

It never gets above 26C here. There are plenty of other cities like this (London just had a record heatwave .. of 29C; seriously that's too hot for them. People were passing out in the toobs. Wellington, another coastal city, has people bitching when it gets up to 27C as too hot), but the difference is they do get warm .. for an extended period of time. From May through August (opposite in Wellington cause hemispheres), you know you can put your jacket away. You don't need it. At worst it's gonna be a little refrigerator like if you stay out too late.

In Seattle, it could be mid-June and you might need that jacket...at noon, and then the next day you'll be burning up.

I miss seasons.

<comment><USER13> 29°C is not a record heatwave for London, that's only 5°C higher than the average high for July.

"On average London will see 31 days above 25 °C each year, and 4.2 days above 30.0 °C every year."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London#Climate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London#Climate)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Do you need specially-designed places to be creative?

Off-hand, the places that were really wildly creative during the 20th century were pretty standard offices and workshops, weren't they? Think of Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, and Bletchley Park. They all accomplished wild things. But the buildings were unremarkable.

<comment><USER15> I've read that the Bell Labs offices were designed in order to promote collaboration. It was laid out such that there'd be long hallways between the offices and things like restrooms and stairs, so that there'd be greater chances of colleagues bumping into each other and talking about work.

I don't have a copy of The Idea Factory[1], where I recall reading this handy, but that's my best recollection.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American- Innovatio...](https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American- Innovation/dp/0143122797)

<comment><USER16> And now we put everyone in open-floorplan barns to "promote colllaboration", with nowhere for people to go back and work at when they are done collaborating.

"Hallway conversations" have become "constant conversations"

<comment><USER14> I have two theories of why open-plan offices are popular.

The first is simply that it's cheaper to have an open office. Modern office buildings tend to have large spaces -- nearly whole floors -- that are open, but can be subdivided. But subdivision costs money. Paying carpenters to put up walls isn't cheap, and even cube systems can be surprisingly expensive. Plus managers are accountable for costs. So they choose the cheap option.

The second is that open office plans are good for communication and collaboration, though less good for individual silent work. Managers are essentially all about communication and collaboration, which is why they love these open offices. Unfortunately while programmers need to both communicate and work alone, they need to communicate and collaborate much less than managers do, which is why office plans that are selected by managers make things difficult for the programmers.

<comment><USER17> My cynical side says a third reason is that open offices make it very easy for managers/bosses/anyone who wants to see if you're working or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "His survey of Amazon workers indicated they wanted cheap burgers and beer, which encouraged him to break from his traditional model and open the Brave Horse Tavern with a wide assortment of local brews, pub fare and long tables for family-style seating. "I'm sure glad we did that survey, because we might not have gone with this concept otherwise," Douglas said."

Cheap burgers and beer! A 1/4 lb cheeseburger + fries at Brave Horse is $13.50. Beer prices are not listed on the online menu. Presumably if you have to ask you can't afford it.

<comment><USER19> Compared to other Tom Douglas restaurants that's a bit cheaper than usual. Brave Horse is also worse. You can expect to pay $4-9 for a beer depending on what you're getting. Not exactly cheap, but not expensive either, especially for food around a business area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Amazon's is the most ambitious gambit of them all. When its spheres and > three surrounding towers are completed, the company will have 10 million > square feet of office space in Seattle, more than 15 percent of the city's > inventory, on a campus that occupies more than 10 square blocks.

15% of a city's commercial inventory seems like a lot. Any comparable levels to companies in other cities? Is this typical for one company to own/lease such a large percentage of commercial real-estate or is the statistic misleading?

[edit] removed duplicate quote

<comment><USER21> The real information here is that 10 square blocks is enough to be 15 percent of the city's inventory.

Seattle is tiny. So is SF. I'm amused by how small the core of all of the West coast cities seem to be when people try to convince me that there's dense urban living to be found outside of the East Coast.

<comment><USER16> Density and size are different dimensions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting that this article has a clear bias that Amazon is making Seattle better, starting from

> Inevitably, the company's growing presence is making it a scapegoat for > common urban woes such as traffic jams and rising rents

> New, luxury, one-bedroom apartments packed with amenities that appeal to > young urban tech workers fetch upwards of $4,000 a month, putting them out > of reach of the Starbucks barista.

This makes it sound like only luxury apartments are becoming expensive and baristas are upset because they feel entitled to that privilege. Rent at all levels is raising dramatically, 12% per year on Capitol Hill where I live. [http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2014/09/seattle-rents- risi...](http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2014/09/seattle-rents-rising- faster-than-any-other-major-u-s-city-even-faster-on-capitol-hill/)

A lot of my friends work odd jobs as book editors, community managers, etc. and they are being priced out of the area. This is a real issue that warrants attention, unless you want everyone to move out of your neighborhoods except the well-to-do.

> To some long-time Seattleites, the new South Lake Union feels sterile, like > an open-air mall. Wide sidewalks are devoid of cigarette butts and shattered > beer bottles. Street people banging bongos and strumming acoustic guitars > with mangy dogs in tow, a common sight in Seattle's retail and financial > districts, are conspicuously absent.

So the complainers are lamenting the lack of "beer bottles and cigarette butts," nobody "banging bongos" on the streets? Apparently failing to notice the "wide sidewalks?" What's wrong with them?

South Lake Union feel sterile because it's jammed between Denny, Mercer, I-5, and 99, four major throughways. Nobody has tried to urbanize that area for a reason. More power to Amazon for building it up though, and I hope it gains a neighborhood feel over time. I'm a bit skeptical; it feels to overwhelming, noisy, and overly corporate, cut off from the rest of the city.

> Meanwhile, the Space Needle's owners have complained that all the towers > being thrown up by Amazon and developers hoping to house its workers are > crowding out views of the aging tourist attraction.

I guess it's important that our iconic Space Needle is "aging." Yeah, nobody wants to see old stuff!

<comment><USER23> The article is called "Amazon Has Swallowed Downtown Seattle" do you really think there's a bias _towards_ Amazon here? Your evidence is basically that the passages detailing the downsides of Amazon's expansion include silver linings.

I mean, the article could have been called "Amazon Turns Blighted Blocks Into Shining Urbanity."

<comment><USER22> > I mean, the article could have been called "Amazon Turns Blighted Blocks > Into Shining Urbanity." Fair point

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24>
      In a story on Arthur Sulzberger, Mark Bowden wrote in
      Vanity Fair, "Whether owing to hubris or sheer
      distraction, the erection of a new headquarters often
      seems to spell trouble for corporations."

[http://www.businessinsider.com/poorly-timed- headquarters-200...](http://www.businessinsider.com/poorly-timed- headquarters-2009-11)

      Anecdotal experience tends to lead many people in the
      technology industry to suggest that growth (or newly
      "sexy") companies rapidly head into difficulties at
      about the same time as they move from the seedy garages
      and crumbling buildings they started in to shiny new
      office buildings.

[http://www.ipglossary.com/glossary/new-headquartersoffice- sy...](http://www.ipglossary.com/glossary/new-headquartersoffice-syndrome- shiny/)

<comment><USER25> For example, Zynga's office building is worth more than the entire company:

[https://medium.com/halting-problem/zyngas-offices-now- worth-...](https://medium.com/halting-problem/zyngas-offices-now-worth-more- than-zynga-the-company-47a704d48249)

<comment><USER26> This is a satirical blog. Please take a second to look at the rest of its content.

<comment><USER25> I first saw it reported in SFGate, they've since retracted the story:

 _Editor 's note: SFGATE has removed this story after reviewing Zynga's company valuation. The initial report was based on the enterprise value of Zynga compared to its cash reserves and property value. The latest company financial data as of May 6th, 2016, however, indicates an overall market valuation of $2.2 billion, with cash reserves of $987 million, putting its enterprise value at $1.21 billion, which is significantly more than the projected value of the company's real estate holdings at 8th and Townsend Streets in San Francisco._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The "Community Banana Stand" in one picture is amusing. As if someone were growing bananas within a thousand miles.

<comment><USER28> Actually it's just a short drive away. [https://www.facebook.com/CWUBiologyGreenhouse/photos/pcb.102...](https://www.facebook.com/CWUBiologyGreenhouse/photos/pcb.1021036491266254/1021036407932929/?type=3)

Sure probably not the same bananas, but maybe one day it will be cheaper to grow in a local greenhouse or greenwall than to ship them from another hemisphere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I spent some time in Seattle last summer. I was really impressed by the LEED certifications that a lot of the buildings in the downtown area have; most of them are certified gold - the spaces seem really nice for working!

</comment><comment><USER30> sorry this is offtopic but: scrolling, scrolling . . . oh great, where did my article go and what am i suddenly reading now?

reminds me of jankyscroll ([https://github.com/benzweig/jankyscroll](https://github.com/benzweig/jankyscroll))

</comment><comment><USER31> Nothing says connecting with nature more than being surrounded by concrete and steel.

<comment><USER32> Ok, well if you are in a city you are most likely already surrounded by concrete and steel. The idea of these structures is to displace some of that concrete with a green area. What's a better solution for you?

<comment><USER31> Well you could design them like all the cities around the world whose primary design focus isn't vehicle traffic and tightly packed skyscrapers. You could design parks and walkways and bike lanes that are for people, and not businesses. You could design buildings with no exterior walls. You could design smaller buildings and space them farther from each other. You could encourage the development of small business outside mega-cities to grow community that doesn't require moving to an urban jungle. Or, you know, anything other than continuing to add concrete and steel and then patching it with artificial greenery to make it seem less oppressive. But i'm probably crazy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> All this and all the free bananas you can eat!

<comment><USER34> 50,000 chimps all banging on keyboards will produce good things.</comment></comment>


The Hedge Fundization of VC - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/the-hedge-fundization-of-vc-27dfd1126d69 <comment><USER2> So how do you exit the investment, if you alg detect that it is time to sell?</comment>


Ask HN: How do you hack out of your last failure? - <AUTHOR>

I discovered HN a few months back probably in the most difficult phase of my life - professional failure, losing dad, in the country of my dreams where sadly nothing was going right for me. And reading HN has been therapeutic to say the least! My interaction with the community is primarily passive - I hardly comment on anything. But just reading the posts and comments - it gives me back makes me think, that its not only me. I've become aware that I do too much stupid shit that are tangential to the main project (just for the fun of it) - I was overdoing it to the point of not completing anything and trying to make everything perfect. I'm trying to change all that - but over the past year, I've stopped communicating with my old real world (brilliant & never-failing) friends - just to avoid embarrassment. I now seek new groups (online) who would never judge me (doesn't this emphasize the terribly important use case for a pseudonym feature? lulz :D) ... Its difficult to keep smiling and all happy when Murphy's law takes control of your life. So how do you hack out of your last failure? <comment><USER2> With failure, I think it's important to remember that the universe has no continuity. In the grand scheme of things, there's no plan, no story - just a sequence of events. If you flip a coin a million times and it comes up tails every time, there's still a 50% chance the next will be heads.

The idea that you need to overcome failure is based on the fallacy that failure makes success less attainable. That's a narrative you're building on top of the disconnected events of reality. As long as you still have the resources to think and to create, what does it matter whether things are "going right?" Failure only lasts until you start your next project.

<comment><AUTHOR> Firstly, thank you for taking the time to read and providing such an wonderful answer. I re-read it a number of times - and it just makes me feel a lot lighter. Funny how we try to extrapolate from non-correlated events and project an absolute image ... it went very deep man! Thanks :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> First, I will note that avoiding your old friends may be a good thing. People tend to hang out with people similar to them. If the way you were then in some way caused your failures, it might be for the best to leave the friends from that era behind. (I'm some pathetic bleeding heart idealist with financial problems who at some point realized all my close friends could be described the same way. I decided I better start making new friends. Blaming the world for not appreciating the importance of my ideals was not going to pay the bills. Those people are no longer part of my inner circle. My finances have been gradually improving.)

A couple of movies I like: "Beyond Rangoon" and "Citizen Jane". I am thinking both are based on true stories. _Beyond Rangoon_ is basically about a woman who had something really tragic happen to her, is mired in depression and then travels someplace where people have much bigger problems and makes her peace with her losses. _Citizen Jane_ is about a woman whose second husband robs her blind and murders her beloved aunt for the woman's money and about her search for justice. There is a very good scene where, after her house is foreclosed on, a friend offers to let her live with them in their nice upscale house so she doesn't have to move to some really crappy apartment. She replies "I got myself into this mess and I will get myself out." I have some pretty big problems I am working on resolving. It's a scene I think about often. I could use assistance from somewhere in terms of figuring out how on earth to do certain things but I really am not looking to be rescued. Getting rescued won't give me the skills I need to have lifelong financial security. "Give a man fish..." and all that.

Best of luck.</comment>


GraphQL Server Tutorial with Apollo Server and Express - <AUTHOR> https://www.robinwieruch.de/graphql-apollo-server-tutorial/ <comment><USER2> I like how this tutorial walks you through setting up a babel config with node. Too often I see tutorials that just assume you're transpiling your node server with all the fancy stage 2 features like decorators.

However, as with most node tutorials, I end up bored when it comes to persistence layers. Like why do we need to set up Postgres for the millionth time? Why do we need to connect the ORM to the database and explain to it how the models are associated? Maybe I'm just spoiled by Rails, but a lot of this stuff is fairly universal and should probably be automated.

<comment><USER3> I tend to agree but I've personally stopped using popular ORMs and instead my own semi-reusable, lighter weight libraries that are closer to the native db drivers. I feel like in this longer form writing, having the complete process laid out offers more consistency and understanding of how things work. I also think it's a no-win situation for an author; use a library/ORM and get an equal amount of negative feedback.

<comment><USER4> > I tend to agree but I've personally stopped using popular ORMs and instead > my own semi-reusable, lighter weight libraries that are closer to the native > db drivers.

One could argue that GraphQL libs like Apollo are ORM by nature. So you're just kind of shuffling things around but you're still using an ORM.

ORM is a complicated problem to solve, that light-weighter libraries don't solve, but at the same time ORM can't replace usage of SQL either, as soon as it's time to optimize queries or use dedicated functionalities not covered by an ORM library.

Fortunately, some databases are now better at returning complex multidimensional datas using object aggregation functions in order to avoid N+1 queries, unfortunately, most do that in a proprietary way and the standard totally lacks on that aspect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice write up, I like the clean and straight forward style of writing.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for mentioning the Lombok earthquake gofund support page also, donated.</comment></comment>