Cancer Progress: Much More Than You Wanted to Know - <AUTHOR> http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/01/cancer-progress-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ <comment><USER2> I've read an argument recently that the lion's share of the increase in longevity throughout the 20th century in America is almost entirely due to better hygiene at the personal and civil infrastructural levels, with a bit coming from antibiotics as well.

Doctors and the rest of modern medical care have provided some increases in the quality of life and certain treatments (i.e. orthopedics) are undeniably better but this doesn't do much to increase lifespans.

I believe this was from _The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War_ by Gordon.

<comment><USER3> I'd think vaccines would have been a noticeable chunk of that as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Besides not smoking, what are scientifically justified steps one can take while young to reduce the risk of cancer?

<comment><USER5> Stay out of the sun would be the next one.

<comment><USER3> Also, don't let your Vitamin D level drop too low.

Of course the best way to get Vitamin D is to be out in the sun... Your gut is pretty bad at absorbing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So bad that the images do not load for me. Android, Chrome</comment>


USCIS policy change threatens non-citizens with deportation if they lose status - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1323136/a-uscis-immigration-policy-change-threatens-non-citizens-with-deportation-if-they-lose-status/ <comment><USER2> TL;DR: rules are being restored to what they were almost 3 years into the Obama administration. Phony hypothetical cases are presented to criticize this. Plus, he overstates its effects to "all non-citizens", falsely implying that Permanent Residents are at risk (they aren't unless they committed fraud to get PR status and the government can prove that).

<comment><USER3> Huh. I didn't get that at all from the piece. I think what you wrote isn't a "TL,DR" summary, but a criticism.

For example, you write "he overstates its effects to "all non-citizens", falsely implying that Permanent Residents are at risk".

Where does that occur in the text? The title is "A quiet change in US policy threatens _immigrants who apply for a change in status_ " and the specific claim of the change is (emphasis mine in both cases):

> On June 28, USCIS announced that _non-citizens who apply for a "benefit"_ > –such as an extension or change of status, a green card, or > citizenship—would be placed in deportation proceedings if that benefit is > denied.

I see nothing which suggests or implies "all non-citizens."

I think you also overstate things with your statement "rules are being restored to what they were almost 3 years into the Obama administration." At the surface level, for example, the linked-to policy memorandum points out the effect of Yith v. Nielsen, so it's not exactly the same.

I have not been able to find Policy Memorandum No. 110, Disposition of Cases Involving Removable Aliens, dated July 11, 2006, which was the previous policy memorandum on the topic. Could you point me to it?

In any case, I don't think the US deportation policies under Obama or Bush were all that just.</comment></comment>


Inside Fermi: Nvidia's HPC Push - <AUTHOR> http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT093009110932 <comment><USER2> To some extent Fermi looks like more of the same, only bigger and faster.

What's really interesting about it is that they've added L1 and L2 cache, they've gone to a global memory model so you can pass pointers around and they've put some effort into making branches less expensive. I didn't yet spot whether it supports recursion, but it's implied that it does. I expect to see a lot more GPU-raytracing projects start popping up in the near future thanks to this...

I'd be very interested to see how this compares to Larrabee, if/when it actually comes out.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a pile more information on nvidia's site for fermi at <http://www.nvidia.com/object/fermi_architecture.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> The big change is certainly the support for indirect jump instructions and the exception handling support. Quite a big leap in GPU programmability. The only piece still missing is fully coherent caches.

</comment><comment><USER5> Single page: [http://www.realworldtech.com/includes/templates/articles.cfm...](http://www.realworldtech.com/includes/templates/articles.cfm?ArticleID=RWT093009110932&mode=print)

Good find.</comment>


A "Fill-In-The-Blank" Investor Update Template - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/a-fill-in-the-blank-investor-update-template-for-busy-founders-d431c227347b <comment><USER2> I actually can't tell if this is useful or a parody.

<comment><USER3> They include a Google doc version so I think they are sincere. But it could also still be an unintentional parody.

What I find fascinating: here is someone's attempt to show that they have planned for absolutely everything needed to make the startup successful. But very little thought given to how to sustain their biggest asset:

> We are stretched really thin though and while it's been awesome seeing > everyone step up, I do worry about fatigue setting in at some point.

No plan to deal with something that's totally foreseeable.</comment></comment>


The Next Revolutionary Apple Product? Don't Hold Your Breath. - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/28/apple_q3_earnings_don_t_hold_your_breath_for_new_product_categories.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the biggest thing missing from this article - or really this mindset - is that Apple's biggest success was disrupting the phone business. True, they innovated with the iPad. But their best moves have come when a market for a product already existed, and they rewrote the rules. I don't know how many markets exist like that right now.</comment>


Email isn't broken, it just needs tools like this to make it more intuitive - <AUTHOR> https://www.squadmail.com/?auth=HN371

<comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer: I am one of the guys that are building SquadMail and would love to get your feedback on it.</comment>


Justify your alpha: Response to "Redefine statistical significance" - <AUTHOR> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319880949_Justify_your_alpha_a_response_to_Redefine_statistical_significance <comment><AUTHOR> This is a response to the recent recommendation to change the threshold for statistical significance to p < .005</comment>


Show HN: Import Balsamiq Mockups into CanvasFlip using this simple interface - <AUTHOR> http://canvasflip.com/balsamiq-and-canvasflip-utility-tool.php <comment><USER2> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11377340](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11377340)

Curious as to what has changed in the last two months.</comment>


The Millionaire Cop Next Door - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0628/opinions-rich-karlgaard-digital-rules-millionaire-cop-next-door.html <comment><USER3> I sympathize with the general direction of the criticism ("defined benefits pensions are much, _much_ more valuable -- and expensive -- than people typically give them credit for"), but $2 million is strictly superior to a $80k annuity, even if one's assumption is 4% annualized post-inflation returns or, more pessimistically, a 4% safe draw-down rate. Cash doesn't expire when you expire, pensions (mostly) do.

The fair cash value of the pension is closer to $1 million. (Please accept this as a handwavy approximation as I'm on a train -- you can probably find any number of calculators on the Internet which would give you a more exact calculation.)

<comment><USER4> Yes, the author is pretty off-the-mark and I would say misleading. Here are some scenarios worked out with www.numbercanvas.com

Early Retirement, Average Lifespan: $1 million

Early Retirement, Long Lifespan: $1.5 million

Average Retirement, Long Lifespan: $1.25 million

Average Retirement, Average Lifespan: $650,000

Early Retirement, Short Lifespan: $480,000

[http://pastebin.com/QU5dnCe8](http://pastebin.com/QU5dnCe8)

<comment><USER5> Expected joint life at early retirement (which is what the article prices) in the US is ~35 years assuming spouse of similar age to the retiree (looking at [http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p590.pdf](http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs- pdf/p590.pdf) from a quick google).

The 4% was not defined as _real return_ , maybe it was supposed to be - <USER2> otherwise you need to account for the inflation linkage of the annuity.

With that basis you get $1.4m with no inflation and almost exactly $2m with an inflation assumption of 2%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it's great that police officers, teachers and gov't employees with seniority make six figures with pension in some of the better unionized municipalities.

Their work provide a valuable and concrete service to the community. I think startup enthusiasts on the other hand are kind of like starting a band, providing entertainment/art for an audience and for the performer to satisfy an itch. Life is a finite thing which makes our chosen paths speak for our individual/subjective values. We shouldn't be green about other people's financial or personal success, but should of focus on ourselves and embrace the rewards and consequences our choices make.

I think that's what makes a Computer Programmer so exciting. You can either choose to work for a startup and be a rock star or you can choose to work to work at a regular company or gov't with good life balance and benefits; and/or save your money and good planning to retire at mid-50's.

I must admit, sometimes it does feel like I didn't have the choice and have been dealt with a bad hand. But I think how lucky I'm to be in US where I can eat really delicious taco's, watch free TV shows/movies and chillax with peeps and other things I enjoy without being rich.

Ofc, there's a lot of social pressure to earn more for your family and for yourself, but I think relationships in general should focus on empowering the other person than imposing with money, expectations or guilt. And being upset with what other peeps make is just my own projections of my own insecurities.

<comment><USER7> I just think we shouldn't be bankrupting the state and cities to pay for these pensions.

<comment><USER8> Going back in time, when the person first started as an employee, the employer made a promise that the person would receive a pension upon retirement. That was part of the employment contract negotiation. People decided on a job based in part on the entire earnings, which includes both salary and pension. Some people are willing to take a lower salary in order to have a higher pension, while others prefer it the other way around.

If the state and cities are going bankrupt then why did they enter the contract in the first place? What was the economic planning they did which let them conclude - apparently falsely - that they would be able to keep their side of the bargain, and how has it broken down?

Personally, I believe it's a combination of continued pressure to lower taxes and continued pressure to outsource government work to more expensive private businesses, especially when tied to the philosophical idea that the government should be small enough to 'drown it in the bathtub.'

In other words, another solution to not going bankrupt is to raise taxes, rather than breaking existing contracts.

<comment><USER9> It's because people live longer. When defined benefits were introduced many people died before retiring, or if they did retire lived a handful of years. Today it is perfectly possible to live longer post retirement than you spent working in these kind of jobs.

Taken to its logical conclusion if there was a miracle pill that added 50 years to every lifespan the annuity system would implode.

Yet people, being people, don't like to accept that things have changed. They stick to talk of contracts (where it is only accrued, previous years that are contractually earned) without seeing the upside.

Basically you can have this pension and die at 70 or a less generous one and live until 80.

<comment><USER8> Your argument is that the economic planners of 40 years ago didn't expect this increase in longevity. They knew of course that people were living longer. Do you have any evidence which might suggest that they significantly underestimated the increase?

For example, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Life_Expectancy_at_Birth_b...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Life_Expectancy_at_Birth_by_Region_1950-2050.png) shows a pretty linear growth.

Assuming retirement at about age 60, [http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html](http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html) says white males in the 1950s had 16 years of life expectancy, and it's 22 years now. Not only is the trend increasing at a relatively constant rate, but living "longer post retirement than you spent working in these kind of jobs" appears to be relatively uncommon. Most people spend about 40-45 years working, and about 1/2 that more on pension.

Unless you can point to some really firm numbers, I think you are incorrectly underestimating the expertise of the actuaries of decades ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Forbes is just now reporting on the obvious: $2 million in pension benefits per retiree is becoming increasingly unaffordable for many cities. (Also because municipal workers in some states can switch jobs to a nearby city and get a second pension, that can jump to $4 million per person.)

In the San Francisco bay area we have this nearby example:

[http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405274870362530...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748703625304575115551578762006) "The study also found that lavish pay and benefit packages were a root cause of the city's problems. In Vallejo compensation packages for police captains top $300,000 a year and average $171,000 a year for firefighters. Regular public employees in the city can retire at age 55 with 81% of their final year's pay guaranteed. Police and fire officials can retire at age 50 with a pension that pays them 90% of their final year's salary every year for life and the lives of their spouses."

And another example in California, where residents may be required to pay more in taxes (it's already the highest-taxed state) because of political mismanagement and ballooning pension benefits:

[http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230481500...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304815004579419371878171830) "Yet government pension costs are soaring as the bills that politicians postponed during the hard economic times come due. No less than Warren Buffett warned this week that "local and state financial problems are accelerating, in large part because public entities promised pensions they couldn't afford." .. Calpers also voted last month to dun state taxpayers for an additional $1.2 billion a year. And lo, the state Legislative Analyst's Office says that California State Teachers' Retirement System (Calstrs) says it needs $5.3 billion to $5.7 billion more annually by 2020 to pay down its $71 billion shortfall. That's more than California spends on the University of California and Cal State colleges."

<comment><USER3> There also exists a culture in California of systematically looting the pension system via "spiking", where everyone knows the formula of the pension weights the last year's pay most heavily, and engages in a game of "I'll scratch your back and someone will scratch mine in N years" whereby people are allowed sudden bumps in seniority / job title / overtime hours months before retirement, to no legitimate governmental purpose, with the sole objective of increasing their pension's value. There are a variety of reforms designed to address this, from speedbumps like "OK, we'll use the average of the last 3 years" to making spiking outright illegal. The common argument against illegalizing spiking is, I kid you not, that spiking is so ingrained in the cultural mores and expectations of California public servants that to deny spiking for new retirees would be grievously unfair to them when compared to Of-Course-I-Spiked-Everyone-Does retirees.

<comment><USER11> Spiking as you describe it is _always_ outright illegal (if its done "to no legitimate government purpose", its an outright illegal gift of public funds -- but if the personnel decisions are made under existing laws and procedures which exist to assure that personnel actions, positive or negative, _have_ a legitimate government purpose, which is almost always the case with what is usually described as "spiking", its not what _you_ describe as "spiking".)

What _isn 't_ illegal, and what is what is usually called "spiking", is people changing their preferences in terms of what they will apply for that they are qualified for, or what they will accept in terms of overtime requirements in a position, based on proximity to retirement. With retirement programs that are based on last-years salary, this can produce an outsize reward, which is what reforms are intended to address.

And the closest argument to the one you present I've seen -- and I've spent a lot of time in and around state government and public worker issues -- isn't that its "ingrained in cultural mores and expectations", but that changing the terms for current workers (not future workers) is not acceptable because the terms of the retirement program are part of the deal they accepted when they started working, and in which they have a -- legally enforceable under federal law -- property interest, so that it would be _outright illegal_ to change the terms (which is _exactly_ the reason that the change to the three-year rule only worked for new hires.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> compare to your 401k contribution:

[http://paloaltofreepress.com/palo-alto-city-employees-to- rea...](http://paloaltofreepress.com/palo-alto-city-employees-to-reap-a-boat- load-of-money-on-taxpayers-sponsored-cruiseliner/)

"The city's pension contribution for police managers will be $59,903 on average, according to the proposed budget. Police officers pensions are the next most expensive, costing $42,688 each, followed by firefighters pensions at an annual average cost of $42,289, and fire chiefs pensions at $41,828."

This 40K+/year contribution is what allows to pay those 200K+/year pensions.

<comment><USER13> Next time anybody says developers are too expensive, ask yourself how much they would have to earn to get $50K in matching on their 401(k).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Having been raised in a single parent home with a government employed mother, I know first hand that it is extremely difficult to raise a family on a government salary. Like another commenter said, these plans also are paid for from the government paycheck in part by the workers, reducing their current salary. Often, these government workers are also raising families and putting their kids through school. Without such a pension plan, this would not be possible and many (especially single parent) families of government working households would be stuck to a threshold close to the poverty line. The reality is that just because over the course of 30-some-odd years of hard work they accumulate enough pension to live a middle-class life style, does not make them millionaires, especially when you take into account healthcare deductions, the cost of living, their childrens' education, and any mortgage/car payments. The least we can do is support the people that protect, educate, and serve our communities. It is not necessary to bring light to their supposedly vast troves of wealth (sarcasm) when there are plenty of millionaires and billionaires who acquire their wealth through questionable means.

(Also I don't approve of the fact that comments on the article itself are disabled, sidenote.)

<comment><USER15> _" Often, these government workers are also raising families and putting their kids through school. Without such a pension plan, this would not be possible and many (especially single parent) families of government working households would be stuck to a threshold close to the poverty line."_

Please can you explain to me, honestly. Why would someone that has children or plans to willingly choose to take a pay cut in exchange for a big pension fund? Sounds very selfish, because it implies that these people want to struggle to pay for their children's upbringing and education just so that they could have a "cushy middle-class" retirement when the kids are out of the house. That is the quote and justification one of the posters below used when explaining why it's okay that they get huge pensions instead of using their salary to save up for retirement like the rest of society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's fantastic how articles like these trot out figures like '$80k a year!' as if we're all supposed to be shocked and appalled that someone is making around what it costs to have a decent home and raise a family. I guess we really do need to pay our greedy firemen and teachers less, they have had it too good for too long making a decent wage and deserve to go right on the scrapheap with the rest of the trash in this country that we've already convinced to work for peanuts. Not that they had a choice.

<comment><USER17> Should you get paid near $80k a year for the next 26 years when you are not working?

I also think it should be adjustable depending where you are living. Do you live in the area and so plowing some of that money back in to the local economy? If not there should be a reduction.

England is reducing some benefits for those who live abroad and thus not spending money in the country.

<comment><USER16> > Should you get paid near $80k a year for the next 26 years when you are not > working?

Yes. Why not? Because that offends your sensibilities about work? Because you feel that people should work until they're 65~70 to retire, if they ever manage to? Right now a number of school teachers are working until their late 60s to make a pittance upon retirement, trading down from houses to mobile homes to even make their retirement manageable. Do you feel these people aren't as worthy as others making obscene amounts of money as they essentially raise the nation's children for them?

Your entire supposition either buys into the myth that there isn't enough to go around or worse, that you simply believe because we treat the majority of our labor pool like shit that anyone daring not to is in the wrong.

<comment><USER15> " _> Should you get paid near $80k a year for the next 26 years when you are not working? Yes. Why not?_"

They got paid a salary their entire working career, which they should have been taking out of to save up for retirement. You know, like the rest of society does.

<comment><USER18> you do realize that the workers negotiated a pension with the city in exchange for lower salaries during the years in which they work, right? This pension is their retirement savings.

The city's benefit is that they don't have to pay as high salary as they otherwise would (without a pension); that means the city can take the money they save on salary each year, invest it, and hopefully get a high enough return that they save money compared to paying a full salary without the pension. Essentially, the city wants to borrow money from the workers at A% interest and then go invest it (maybe in itself, maybe in more traditional investments) and hopefully get an ROI of B%, where B > A.

The workers' benefit is that they get a "guaranteed" retirement fund (ie less risk) that they don't have to manage or worry about and depending on the circumstances, a higher total compensation than they would without the pension (ie the city pays them interest for essentially loaning the city money) (ie better returns).

If the city's investments of the saved salary money returns more than what is needed to fund the pensions, the city gets to keep that extra money.

<comment><USER15> So the politicians wanted to have their cake and eat it, no I get that perfectly. On the one hand they promise large future payouts to gullible public servants. And on the other hand they get to pander to the general public about how they've reduced the budget (or not increased it). Ridiculous.

For that matter, why is the city in the business of trying to make a profit out of peoples' pensions? And even then there was no accountability or repercussions for politicians that decided to dip their fingers into the pension investment pools.

And the last thing that I'd like to add in response. I think the reason why most people are shocked at this article, is because they've been conditioned and drilled with the thought that public servants are under-paid. But as you say, the public servants did this on "purpose" as a risk-mitigating process. If that's the case, then they need to stop yapping incessantly in the public sphere about how they're paid less in comparison to their private counterparts.

<comment><USER18> > So the politicians wanted to have their cake and eat it, no I get that > perfectly.

That's how capitalism works (under ideal conditions). Everyone tries to make the best possible deal for themselves, not just politicians.

> For that matter, why is the city in the business of trying to make a profit > out of peoples' pensions?

For a multitude of possible reasons. Because the profit there can be used to reduce the tax rates. Because the profit can be used to pay for something that the city couldn't otherwise afford. Because the benefits plan allows them to more accurately plan future liabilities (compared to paying employees a market rate salary (that's not otherwise lowered by a pension) that floats up and down with inflation and the economy).

> And even then there was no accountability or repercussions for politicians > that decided to dip their fingers into the pension investment pools.

Are you talking about embezzlement or about the city borrowing money from the pension fund? The first is illegal and an enforcement problem that's pretty unrelated to where the money was embezzled from. The second may or may not actually be a problem depending on the terms at which the city borrows the money. Regardless, that's also not related to pensions specifically, since the city can borrow money at stupid terms from anyone, not just the pension fund.

> I think the reason why most people are shocked at this article, is because > they've been conditioned and drilled with the thought that public servants > are under-paid.

That's because the public workers actually were underpaid compared to private industry workers when the deals were originally negotiated (even including the expected value of the pension). Over the years since then, private corporations have lowered the salaries they pay (usually by not keeping up with inflation as opposed to actual pay cuts, though that happens, too) most of their workers, so public sector jobs have become much more competitive.

> If [the public servants did this on "purpose" as a risk-mitigating > process]'s the case, then they need to stop yapping incessantly in the > public sphere about how they're paid less in comparison to their private > counterparts.

I have a few problems with many of the implicit assumptions in this statement; specifically that there is an agreed upon way to value a pension, that there is an agreed upon way to value the value of the risk-mitigation of a pension plan, that there is little variation in the ratio of the total compensation public workers earn to a market rate salary across all government workers, that all government workers are yapping incessantly about being paid less than market rate when using total compensation instead of just salary (combined with the previous assumption: as opposed to just the ones that are currently underpaid), and that only the workers are benefiting (or that they benefit much more than the city) from such a deal.

On a side note, it's disappointing to see people want to drag the public sector workers down to a their (possibly only just perceived) lower level instead of wanting to drag themselves up to the public sector workers' level.

<comment><USER15> _" That's how capitalism works (under ideal conditions). Everyone tries to make the best possible deal for themselves, not just politicians."_ Well, the common tying nature between capitalism and what I we're describing there is human nature. Which, I would say, has strong under-currents of greed. The difference between the thing we're discussing and capitalism/free-market is that in the latter, greed can't manifest it's ugly head with absolute state power. It's tempered by being required to provide to the rest of society a valuable good/service, that they request.

 _" The second may or may not actually be a problem depending on the terms at which the city borrows the money. Regardless, that's also not related to pensions specifically, since the city can borrow money at stupid terms from anyone, not just the pension fund."_ Well, I'm not sure about borrowing as such. But I was referring to politicians/finance committees using up the capital in pension funds, and then having to pay pensioners their pension yearly from new tax-money that comes in. So in essence, they destroy the buffer and end up just siphoning new funds into pensions that start maturing.

 _" Over the years since then, private corporations have lowered the salaries they pay (usually by not keeping up with inflation as opposed to actual pay cuts, though that happens, too) most of their workers, so public sector jobs have become much more competitive."_ That may be the case, I haven't looked at the raw data to refute that. But I'd add that perhaps the corporations lowered the salaries because of a slouching/badly performing market. In which case it's the rest of society that is subsidizing the now-cushy jobs of the public sector. On top of having to deal with their (possibly) under-paid jobs in the private sector.

 _" I have a few problems with many of the implicit assumptions in this statement; specifically that there is an agreed upon way to value a pension, that there is an agreed upon way to value the value of the risk-mitigation of a pension plan, that there is little variation in the ratio of the total compensation public workers earn to a market rate salary across all government workers, that all government workers are yapping incessantly about being paid less than market rate when using total compensation instead of just salary (combined with the previous assumption: as opposed to just the ones that are currently underpaid), and that only the workers are benefiting (or that they benefit much more than the city) from such a deal."_

I agree with you to an extent on this point. We are making a lot of assumptions in this discussion, and we're clumping together disparate values to attempt a comparison. I'm probably not the person to debate with on the finer details because I will interpret most of these things from my anarcho- capitalist viewpoint of the state. So to me, generalizing things to what they actually are is much more meaningful than endlessly comparing apples and oranges within the complicated framework of the state.

 _" On a side note, it's disappointing to see people want to drag the public sector workers down to a their (possibly only just perceived) lower level instead of wanting to drag themselves up to the public sector workers' level."_ There are probably multiple things at play here regarding peoples' opinion of public sector workers. To me, at least, I see them as leeches of the state. They represent a class of individuals that are permanently dependent on leeching the benefits given to them by the state. They will fight tooth and nail for the benefits that they get from the state, to the detriment of society by preventing a possibly different form of governance from emerging. Now, don't get me wrong, these are probably good people that don't deserve to have their livelihood yanked from underneath them. But I am forced to acknowledge the fact that change is very very difficult because we have so many people reliant on (what I would view) very unnecessary benefits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Guys, guys, I hate to break this to you, but I think Forbes picked an example that may not be representative of the typical government pension.

I'm not saying that I disagree with the _North County Times_ of Carlsbad, California, but I think that most government pensions are not that generous. $30K/year is more likely, and those employees may not be entitled to Social Security benefits either.

[http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds-&-columns/op- eds-&-colu...](http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds-&-columns/op- eds-&-columns/pension-theft-class-war-goes-to-the-next-stage)

[http://money.cnn.com/2013/07/23/retirement/detroit- pensions/](http://money.cnn.com/2013/07/23/retirement/detroit-pensions/)

</comment><comment><USER20> The article and discussion here left me wondering what will happen when some of the public pension funds inevitably start to default on their obligations? Based on the amount many states need to invest every year, an amount which they don't have and can't reasonably get via taxes/fees, I think it's only a question of if, not when.</comment>


Service Discovery with Mesos-DNS - <AUTHOR> http://mesosphere.com/2015/01/21/mesos-dns-service-discovery/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the comments everybody. I am one of the people behind Mesos-DNS and will gladly answer any questions about it.

DNS is an obvious way to support many service discovery needs. There were two motivations for implementing Mesos-DNS instead of using another DNS system. First, we needed a DNS system that closely integrates with Mesos. Instead of having every user or framework describe tasks twice (once to Mesos for execution and once to a DNS system), it easier and cleaner to automatically pass task information from Mesos to DNS. Second, we wanted a simple solution. Mesos and its frameworks already implement fault tolerance and life cycle management. We did not want to force Mesos users to deploy another set of consensus mechanisms, persistent storage, or a replicated logs just for DNS.

One more interesting detail. SkyDNS, Consul, and Mesos-DNS use the great go- DNS library by Miek Gieben (github.com/miekg/dns). So, their core DNS capabilities are the same. They differ in what they offer for fault-tolerance, life cycle management, load balancing, etc. Mesos-DNS defers all this functionality to Mesos and its framework (KISS).

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome, Mesos-DNS is simple and stateless. Unlike Consul and SkyDNS, it does not require consensus mechanisms, persistent storage, or a replicated log. This is possible because Mesos-DNS does not implement heartbeats, health monitoring, or lifetime management for applications. This functionality is already available by the Mesos master, slaves, and frameworks.

<comment><USER4> The same is the case for SkyDNS2. It runs just fine against our Etcd backends.

In both cases the combination (SkyDNS + Etcd or Consul) looks far less complicated than Mesos, so I don't really see what you think you gain. If you already have other reasons to want to run Mesos, sure.

<comment><USER5> They are simpler but keep it mind all the other things you get from running on Mesos, like provisioning your services, having your services restarted when they crash, workload migration when machines fail, bin-packing so you don't waste resources, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I haven't yet had a chance to play with or research Mesosphere, but I'm hearing it mentioned more and more. Are its goals similar to that of CoreOS and/or Docker Swarm, in that we're slinging around services/containers rather than managing machines or VMs?

<comment><USER2> A quick summary of what Mesosphere is working (DCOS - the datacenter opearting system) on is at [https://mesosphere.com/](https://mesosphere.com/) .

Apache Mesos, the core of Mesosphere's infrastructure, has been in use by companies like Twitter for years to manage clusters with 10s of thousands of servers. [http://mesos.apache.org/](http://mesos.apache.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is the Github repo [https://github.com/mesosphere/mesos- dns](https://github.com/mesosphere/mesos-dns)

</comment><comment><USER7> Doesn't this sound a lot like DNS-SD over mDNS?

<comment> vertex-four I think it's centralised, so you don't need to either have all your machines on one subnet or configure your routers (if you can) to forward DNS-SD packets between all your subnets, probably creating a small broadcast storm at scale.

<comment><USER7> DNS-SD doesn't require mDNS, you can use it with generic DNS servers. There's an example in the RFC, see [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6763#section-13.1](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6763#section-13.1)

But it's usually used with mDNS on a local network.</comment></comment></comment>


HN Meetup: Beijing - <AUTHOR>

Since the last one was a really good time, we're organizing another Beijing HN meetup, at 8:00PM on Saturday, May 7th. If you'd like to come, drop a line to firstname.lastname@example.com, and I'll send over the details about where we're meeting once we know how many people are coming! <comment><AUTHOR> 我们毕竟在北京,我应该加中文介绍:上次HN聚会很好玩了,因此我们一些HN的水车又要聚集起来。时间是这周六(5月7号)晚上8点,地点要等我们统计一些人数再通知大家! 如果你或者你的朋友们感兴趣,请联系:firstname.lastname@example.com :)

<comment><USER2> 可惜错过了。下次早点通知啊。

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hmm, out of curiosity, anyone interested in something similar for Shenzhen. Wonder if any HNers live here. I think I met one guy online so far. :)

<comment><USER4> I grew up in Shenzhen. Definitely down for something if in town (usually around christmas or end of summer).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Whoa, didn't know there was any of HN community in Beijing. Pretty cool. I'm definitely in!

</comment><comment><USER6> 在上海,无法前往,祝活动成功!

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm in!

</comment><comment><USER8> good, welcome!</comment>


A self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, document store - <AUTHOR> http://linux.die.net/man/3/stdio <comment><USER2> Where I find this really excels is the excellent query mechanism here: [http://linux.die.net/man/1/grep](http://linux.die.net/man/1/grep)

</comment><comment><USER3> Because of the excellent Python bindings, this hot new document store took absolutely ZERO implementation time for all of my projects.

Check out the Python bindings docs here: [https://docs.python.org/2/library/stdtypes.html#bltin- file-o...](https://docs.python.org/2/library/stdtypes.html#bltin-file-objects)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not to mention the analytics provided by [http://linux.die.net/man/1/iostat](http://linux.die.net/man/1/iostat)

</comment><comment><USER4> Distributed system plugin: [http://linux.die.net/man/8/nfsd](http://linux.die.net/man/8/nfsd)

</comment><comment><USER5> If you find your datasets using too much disk space, simply enable compression: [http://www.bzip.org/](http://www.bzip.org/)

</comment><comment><USER6> perfect storage system clearly far superior to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10256649](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10256649)

</comment><comment><USER7> #facepalm</comment>


Milled: A search engine for email newsletters - <AUTHOR> https://milled.com/ <comment><USER2> Hey, I built this! Solo founder and profitable. Stack is primarily Amazon SES + Rails, and affiliate monetized. Happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER3> Have you ever thought about packaging up the analytics you can derive from this into a product offering?

The inspiration you mentioned in another comment is the exact impetus that would make for a lucrative offering, particularly on the agency side. Things such as email cadence, offerings, screenshots of the specific emails, etc. Either at an individual brand level, rolled up to a pre-defined category, or allowing individuals to choose their own basket of companies to create benchmarks from. Would be really useful when creating pitches, but also for ongoing digest reports for competitive monitoring.

And that's just based off of re-packaging what you're already showing. There are lots of additional useful opportunities that would only varying levels of effort to unlock.

<comment><USER2> Great ideas -- thanks! A couple of people have suggested similar, though selling to hedge funds.

Right now, I think the greatest growth is still from adding more brands and making them more accessible (improving search and navigation), to yield more traffic. Spinning up a new product and sales channel might be a distraction, but definitely worth thinking about as the site grows.

<comment><USER3> You could also repurpose the idea and leverage it as a traffic driver. Run a few high-level queries to get the baseline stats, then post those up on a benchmarks page.

That way you have a draw for those types of needs, yielding more traffic from that niche. And could (but don't have to) leverage it as a passive sales channel and low-effort product by just throwing a blurb at the bottom of that to contact if they're looking for something more specific. Which would be a low-effort product of just tweaking the queries you created to get the data for that page, plus the one time upfront effort of making a splashy Excel/Powerpoint template to drop the bespoke query results into.

That'd end up with a solid, minimal effort traffic driver. A potential passive sales channel with minimal incremental effort. And since the targeting/messaging is open ended in nature and you don't _want_ to focus heavily on a new sales channel and product offering, you can let it sit there and mellow while seeing which potential market segments (hedge funds, agencies, in-house, etc) shake out organically. Giving you some potential insights into which area to focus on if you _do_ eventually want to go from passive to active.

<comment><USER2> Yup, good idea -- just a link + landing page to see what inbound queries come in. Will explore it! Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Chaz, great work creating this.

My only thought is, I wonder how well these ecommerce emails perform. The majority of them are very image heavy, which affects deliverability and conversions. Some of them have most or all of their text and buttons directly on the images themselves.

Of course, if you're offering a discount, the email may convert better than average, but since the majority of stores only send this type of ecommerce style emails throughout the year, I'm curious how they perform in general.

<comment><USER2> It really depends on the brand and the type of email that you're sending (new product, content, abandoned cart, etc), and each email marketer needs to test for themselves. I've seen more textual emails work well when it's a welcome letter from the CEO or founder, but it's not a rule.

Broadly speaking, ecommerce is still a very visual experience at every step. It's really rare for me to see emails without images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting idea. Maybe you should think of extracting text content from the images for more SEO fodder.

</comment><comment><USER6> Cool project. What is the end goal? A Lifestyle business? Only search by keywords?

</comment><comment><USER7> Neat site. What sort of money are you making with it?

</comment><comment><USER8> Needs more RSS.</comment>


Markets vs. Monopolies in Education: A Global Review of the Evidence - <AUTHOR> http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9634

<comment><AUTHOR> The author began his career as a software engineer. Once that career provided him with independent means, he began a very fruitful career of full-time educational policy research.</comment>


Communicating with Strangers on the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/08/communicating-with-strangers-on-internet.html <comment><USER2> I love this post. Really. I take public transportation from Long Island to NYC 4 times a week and I enjoy my zero-context conversations. It's a hoot-- "People"!

As with most things, once you draw a distinction, the factors go multi- dimensional.

To my example, many people I've met on the train don't wish to speak with anyone and they position themselves physically in the seats, in segregated spaces. But adversity and face to face seating bring people into relation. And with sufficient insight to a shared situation, and a bit of curiousity, people will find each other. They may never learn the other's name, but they will engage.

I might add, semiotically, context is just a shortcut, an economical expression of your message. What programmer doesn't like a one liner?!</comment>


What we learned from getting rejected by YC - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/7ec3d7a83642/

<comment><AUTHOR> got some great feedback from the community here and decided to revise and repost this</comment>


Why old versions of 286 Xenix did not run on 386s - <AUTHOR> http://www.os2museum.com/wp/?p=2626 <comment><USER2> I wonder if you could fix this by writing a binary patch that redirected the copyseg routine to a version that zeroed the last 2 bytes of the destination instead of copying them from the source.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, but copyseg may also be used for other things too and as mentioned in the article and comments this wasn't the only problem with IBM PC XENIX 1.0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What useful stuff could really be done on Xenix - seems like such a low spec system to run a unix ish OS on.

<comment><USER4> The first UNIX machine that I used was a 286. There were several companies that offered UNIX or UNIX-like environments on AT hardware. In my case I began with Microport UNIX, but I did get my share of Xenix later on.

In our case we had several rs232-connected terminals we used to do development on. By today's standards it was primitive, but the tools weren't really that different : we had vi, make, a C compiler, etc. We also used troff for typesetting documentation. Primarily we were developing bespoke curses-based apps for various companies.

In addition to the serial terminals, the console supported virtual terminals. You could switch between four of them with Alt+F1/F2/F3/F4 just like a modern linux machine in text mode. This made the console a coveted spot for doing programming.

We certainly weren't running X11. For one thing, it would have taken too many resources. X11 was barely usable with 4MB of RAM (I think we started with 2.5MB but we did upgrade that a bit eventually) but at that point you wouldn't want to run a compile job too. With 8MB it was actually usable enough to run some xterms.

However, even if that machine had the RAM the SVR2-based OS wouldn't have been modern enough to run X. You didn't have sockets, the select() system call, gettimeofday() (only second-granularity timekeeping was available from the kernel), etc.

You didn't have networking of course, other than uucp. With uucp you could at least hookup with the internet for email and usenet although we never did that. We did have local email though. (Only the mailx CLI though; nothing as fancy as Elm or PINE)

I remember processes could only use up to 20 file descriptors. Of course, without sockets there wasn't much to spend them on.

There was no multithreading, although SYSV shared memory was available. If you really wanted to you could do MT-like programming using explicit shared memory segments, but it usually wasn't worth the bother.

Everything on the machine was statically-linked. Shared libraries would have been pretty difficult to implement on the 286 since it didn't have real virtual memory: each process's memory had to be contiguous in physical RAM. Of course this meant that there was no mmap() system call. malloc() was implemented completely on top of sbrk()

There wasn't any job-control (^Z/fg/bg etc) -- every terminal was running a single process at a time. Tools like screen were just becoming available but we couldn't use it since that OS didn't support pty's.

The shells available weren't nearly as fancy as we have today -- no up-arrow to get the previous command, etc. In fact, when we started we only had /bin/sh: if you made a typo in a command you'd have to retype the whole thing. Very soon afterwards we got a copy of csh so we could do editing like "!!", "^foo^bar", etc.

For scripting we mostly had awk/sed/sh. This was before perl became popular; obviously before things like python and ruby were on the scene.

Oh, and I should also mention: these types of OSes were sold for around $1000 in 1986 dollars. There were some cheaper options, primarily Coherent's unlicensed UNIX clone which started at around $100. However, the biggest player in the space was SCO and they stayed eye-watering expensive until they got swept away by the tide of Linux and BSDs in the 90s.

Anyway, although it was primitive in every way compared a modern Linux or OS/X machine it was certainly a useful environment for its time.

If you're interested in this sort of history, I'd recommend checking out [http://www.tuhs.org/](http://www.tuhs.org/) You can get even earlier PDP-11 versions on UNIX and run them in an editor. It's fascinating to see what parts of changed drastically and what things are exactly the same 35 years later.

<comment><USER5> The 20 file descriptor limit was a pain for an app I worked on that wanted to write data to 26 files based on the first letter of a person's last name. I would have killed to have been able to keep 26 descriptors open at once. Ah, the bad old days...</comment></comment></comment>


Dell XPS 15 review: A bigger version of the best PC laptop - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/dell-xps-15-review-a-bigger-version-of-the-best-pc-laptop/ <comment><USER2> If you are interested in this new Dell XPS 15, this is a much better review [1]:

[http://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-15-9550-i7-512GB- UHD-I...](http://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-15-9550-i7-512GB-UHD- InfinityEdge-Notebook-Review.156462.0.html)

NotebookCheck folks do some of the most thorough testing of notebooks you can find anywhere.

\</comment><comment>-

[1] For example: ArsTechnica review seem to have botched graphics tests somehow.

Having Nvidia GTX 960M GPU is a big part of XPS 15 value proposition (and what makes it stand out from e.g. Macbook Pro).

This doesn't show up in ArsTechnica review, yet it is completely obvious in NotebookCheck one.

<comment><USER3> Anyone know if this will allow GPU-passthrough of the Nvidia GPU? It seems to have most of the requirments

<comment><USER4> GPU passthrough requires a hardware video output for the discrete GPU. You can go looking through the moaning of Oculus Rift users[1] as they prowl laptops that do this, but it's pretty much unheard of in current standard laptops.

[1] Rift needs better video latency than you get with routing the DGPU output through the IGPU. Apparently there are now some specialized 17" gaming laptops that support a "direct mode" that might allow GPU passthrough to HDMI given software support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _sigh_ Another laptop with plenty of room for another column of keys on the right omitting discreet home/end/pgup/pgdn keys for no good reason.

Really tired of bad ideas like this becoming universal traits.

<comment><USER6> This is the reason I bought the 3rd gen lenovo carbon and not the xps. Not to mention the keyboard is superb and very coder friendly.

<comment><USER7> I had the X1 carbon 3rd gen and I have the XPS 13 9350 right now, I don't see a lot of differences in the keyboard. Why do you like the ThinkPad one better?

<comment><USER6> I think the carbon keys have much better travel, and best of all, dedicated Home/End/PG Up/Down keys. Those are priceless to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure I'd call the XPS 13 the best PC laptop. The keyboard is pretty terrible, and the touchpad is so wide that my palms will rest on it and cause the cursor to move around while I'm typing. There's also some bounce on the spacebar which results in sometimes registering double spaces (the latest BIOS alleviates the problem, but not completely).

The DPI of the screen is really high and doesn't scale well under XFCE, but I'm not sure if that's really a fault of the laptop.

<comment><USER9> I currently run Debian Jessie on an XPS 13 - GNOME 3 handles high DPI with minimal configuration. I'm sure KDE could manage as well, but I did not have a magnifying glass available to navigate the miniscule menus. I've run into more issues with apps that don't scale - some games and the Arduino IDE being the biggest offenders I've come across.

I agree with regard to the touchpad size/palm sensitivity - accidental clicks are a big problem.

<comment><USER10> You can disable "click on tap" in Gnome settings. For me it's much better this way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As someone who has been buying MacBooks since 2006, I'm starting to feel envious of the various PC laptops out there - in particular the XPS 13 and the Surface Book. With OS X not proving itself to be a fantastic OS in recent revisions I'm wondering how long it'll be before I give into temptation.

Maybe when someone finally gets a trackpad that's as good as the Macbook. Almost every PC laptop I've tried has paled in comparison.

<comment><USER12> I tried a friend's Surface the other day and got blown away by how smoothly everything ran and how quick Edge was compared to Safari. No hang-ups, no "This application was forced to quit," no opening iTerm and having to kill a process by hand, better memory management, and pretty decent battery life. Of course, the trackpad and keyboard were still not as good as the ones on the MBP; there's some weird Apple magic going on there and while OEMs are catching up I wonder how much longer it'll take to actually match the performance of Apple's input devices.

It's amazing how the tables have turned; I can't imagine myself saying anything like this 5-6 years ago.

<comment><USER13> "the trackpad and keyboard were still not as good as the ones on the MBP"

did you touch a Surface Book?

<comment><USER12> Nope, this was an SP3 with the newer type cover IIRC. Haven't had the chance to see an SB in person yet, but I've heard good things about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Unfortunately, even with this 84Wh battery, the battery life of the XPS 15 > wasn't tremendous. The blame for this lies almost certainly with that large > screen. Dell's own battery life estimates (which are in the same ballpark as > ours, given some differences in testing methodology) suggest that swapping > out the 4K panel for the 1080p one would extend battery life in similar > workloads by 60 percent or more.

Why is Apple the only one that can build a 15" retina laptop with 9-10 hours of battery life?

<comment><USER15> I'm sure it helps to write the OS.

<comment><USER16> It's definitely the OS. Battery life on a Macbook Pro in Windows via Boot Camp tanks.

One could make the argument that substandard drivers for the Apple hardware is to blame here, so perhaps battery benchmarks on a Hackintosh vs the same hardware in Windows would settle the debate, but that's some tinfoil hat shit… Apple has been vocal about battery life as a top priority for the company going all the way back to the PowerPC/Intel switch.

<comment><USER17> I'm not so sure it's the OS. The new Pixel has even better battery life than the latest Macbooks, in a similar form factor, and it's all Linux underneath the hood. IMO it's more of a commitment to tweaking whatever OS you have, not necessarily to writing the whole thing.

<comment><USER16> I think we're saying the same thing just a little differently.

Apple didn't write Darwin from scratch, after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Personally I'm wondering if/when they'll expand the sleek Latitude 7000 series to 15". After being disappointed by where Lenovo took ThinkPad, I've been really happy with my 15" 6540 (c. 2013) and would happily buy a 15" machine from Dell again.

[http://www.dell.com/uk/business/p/latitude-e7470-ultrabook/p...](http://www.dell.com/uk/business/p/latitude-e7470-ultrabook/pd?ref=PD_OC)

</comment><comment><USER19> The problem with these 4K laptops where you need to set your font as 250% is that if you RDP to a HyperV Windows 7 VDI machine at the higher resolution, you see nothing because you cannot change font size or resolution on the remote machine.

So before you RDP, you need to change the local resolution to something compatible with normal font size (100%) and 15". It is such an annoyance to change resolutions back and forth that you end up configuring the lower resolution permanently.

<comment><USER20> You might try looking for this OS X feature: [http://superuser.com/questions/316133/how-to-zoom-in- windows...](http://superuser.com/questions/316133/how-to-zoom-in-windows- using-the-mouse-like-in-os-x)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I got one of these in November and primarily run Ubuntu on it, and I'm really happy with it. The only thing that (really) sucks is that Suspend/Resume is broken, so you get a kernel panic if you shut the lid. Otherwise, it's wicked fast (compiles LLVM in 10 minutes and CoreCLR in about 2 minutes) and the display is really nice.

The only gripe I have with the layout of the keyboard is that sometimes the palm of my hand grazes the touchpad while typing, which on Ubuntu causes a click and moves the mouse cursor - a minor annoyance when typing but easily undoable.

The Ubuntu installation process is a little dicey but some person on the Ubuntu forums posted a detailed list of instructions and they mostly worked for me. Upgrading the kernel did not fix my suspend/resume problem, though. ([http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2301071](http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2301071))

The battery life is not as stellar as a macbook but I don't mind. It can last through a flight across the United States, so that works for me.

</comment><comment><USER22> I would probably get a Thinkpad T460s before this laptop, especially since the new T460s is even thinner than it used to be (closer to the X1 carbon). What do people find so attractive about this laptop? I'm thinking about getting one this upcoming year and neither the XPS' touchpad nor the keyboard seem very good.

<comment><USER23> I love Thinkpads, but the thing that really annoys me is just how much Lenovo charge for upgrades. I end up having to buy with the smallest memory and storage they have, and then separately upgrading them. The Lenovo prices are often up to ten times the market rate for the same items.

<comment><USER13> I view upgradability as a plus, i can buy the lowest end and do it myself.

<comment><USER23> Yes, being able to upgrade is great. But I do get annoyed at how much they charge. For example getting an additional 16GB of memory for the T450s is $309 at Lenovo (on big sale from the usual $430), while the same from Crucial is $180. A 512GB SATA SSD for that model is $430 (on sale from $580) while a comparable model from Crucial is $180, or a Samsung 850 Pro for $220 on Amazon.

As a consequence I have a collection of unused 500GB laptop hard drives since you have to order with some storage and that is the cheapest Lenovo do. I immediately replace them, but this is wasteful and silly. If their prices were far closer to normal then I'd just get Lenovo to do it, and they'd make more money. Instead they see me getting the lowest specs, instead of what I actually use.

<comment><USER13> i guess i would never even consider buying from the oem unless it is soldered on.

crucial is overcharging too. 16gb ram kits are $75

i also have a large box of 500gb drives

<comment><USER23> It only has one ram slot (the other has 4GB soldered in) so you can't use a kit - you need a single 16GB sodimm. Retail prices are around $150 everywhere.

If Lenovo charged an amount substantially similar (or better) than regular retail, then I'd gladly pay them for the upgrades. But at multiples of the retail price it makes no sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> recent Mac OSX makes me go back to windows laptops, and Linux on them, but I wonder how this one compares to Macbook Pro 15. Touchpad, and battery are important.

<comment><USER25> I have an XPS 13 and run Linux on it. The drivers for the touchpad were very rough with the version of Ubuntu it shipped with, but updating to a Kernel version > 4 fixed all my problems.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, the worst Linux laptop I had in years:

1) the touchpad never worked; 2) the keyboard still has problems; 3) some of the more important programs look just horrible on Linux, as the resolution is just too high; 4) sometimes WiFi just does not work;

...so much for the Sputnik project.

<comment><USER25> Is that with the 'Infinity' screen or whatever they called it? I just got the 1080p one and don't use scaling. I had a Yoga with a hidpi screen and agree that a bunch of programs just don't work at all with scaling in Linux.

<comment><USER26> I should have just bought a Thinkpad :-) It's the Infinity display + preinstalled Linux that caught my attention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nvidia will launch this year (spring) it's new cards based on 16nm. That's a 4 year jump because cards are now 28nm. (AMD has the same plans) A six year jump this year in storage technology is promised by intel, it's Octane disk are 7 times faster then ssd in a practice test. Intel believes it's technology can be 1000 faster than ssd. You can always wait but this time you should.

</comment><comment><USER28> I have one I bought a couple of months ago hooked up to a 44" 4K Visio TV via HDMI. It is my main development machine and I love it. I bought it through the Microsoft store to avoid crapware (via their Signature Edition line) and it was actually cheaper than the same specs on dell.com at the time.

<comment><USER29> I really wish Dell could comprehend just how much ill will and outright damage they cause to their brand with all the useless trashware they put on their systems. McAfee?? Really? That, and that horrible webcam they put in there. It's just screams "I'm a low quality piece of junk" far louder than any positives can make up for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Given the strength of Intel's latest integrated GPUs, it just doesn't make sense any more to add weak dedicated GPUs to laptops. As the author said, "this isn't a gaming laptop". I'd claim that the whole category of gaming laptop no longer has relevance.

<comment><USER31> So my mac laptop draws into 5120x2880 buffer, then scales that down to 4k to display on my external 4k monitor. It's also still driving the internal retina display with a different scaling.

External GPU helps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I would argue that the best PC laptops are the old IBM ThinkPads. The best PC laptop in production, I'm not sure. The Panasonic Toughbooks are pretty nice for their purpose.

<comment><USER14> At a certain point the ThinkPad keyboard fetishization has to take a back seat to the awful screens and miserable touchpads, no?

<comment><USER33> I agree on the touchpads, but I like Thinkpad screens. Give me a nice 1080p matte finish any day over the ultra-glossy high resolution screens that make everything tiny, burn through battery, and look terrible in bright sunlight.

With the extended battery and bay battery (no slice battery) I was seeing over 14 hours of real world wireless usage (inc. fullscreen video) on my 14" Thinkpad. The Thinkpad is a workhorse, not a toy.

<comment><USER14> The 1080p IPS screen on my T450s is a blurry piece of crap with awful backlight bleed in comparison to the screen on my rMBP. I can at least control my room lighting to avoid glare--I can't do anything about the low-resolution hazy text on the 1080p matte screen. For a workhorse machine--I stare at text all day--that clarity is priceless.

<comment><USER34> Is your screen glossy that reflects the lights around? I am asking, because I am also using a T450s, with matt a 1920x1080 screen. It's the best screen I ever had. I can work with any ambient light, does not reflect, it is not as sensitive to viewing angle as the screens that I had before and has very lively colours. I absolutely love this machine.

Maybe we don't have the same screens, i.e. there are different models?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> If, like me, you're considering getting one of these to install linux on (to replace a macbook pro or whatever), you should check out the archwiki article on it: [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_15](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_15)

Even if you're going to run a different distro, I find the arch wiki to be one of the best resources for "should I try installing linux on this?"

</comment><comment><USER36> Another option (much cheaper!) that I'm monitoring is UX501VW:

i7-6700HQ, GTX960M, 512 GB PCIe Gen3 x4 SSD, 4K IPS display 15 inch for $1500

Unfortunately, even though it's been out for over a month, no major websites have reviewed the laptop.

[http://www.amazon.com/UX501VW-DS71T-Touchscreen-Skylake- H-i7...](http://www.amazon.com/UX501VW-DS71T-Touchscreen-Skylake-H-i7-6700HQ- Thunderbolt/dp/B018AX3OHO)

<comment><USER13> "Amazing 512 GB PCIe Gen3 x4 solid state drive"

Couldnt they just say NVME so I know what they are talking about? Industry standard terms exist for a reason. Imagine if someone stopped using USB port and came up with their own description of the standard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The ouches:

1\. Extremely poor graphics performance in benchmarks.

2\. More than 5 hours less battery life than the MacBook Pro. (!)

3\. No Thunderbolt port that can be used while charging the machine.

</comment><comment><USER38> And when does the Developer edition with Ubuntu come out? Anyone know? Been waiting for a Skylake, 4k screen, and 16GB RAM.

</comment><comment><USER39> I wish for a developer edition with Ubuntu.

</comment><comment><USER40> I hope that higher-res screens become standard in the 13-15in line of PC laptops. I have an XPS13 that I love, but there are still many programs (even certain interfaces inside Windows itself!) that do not behave well with hi-DPI displays.

</comment><comment><USER41> Does it run linux?

</comment><comment><USER42> Anyone see that episode of South Park lately where Jimmy is the only human that can identify an ad from real content?

Now, when I read something like this, it's obviously an ad.</comment>


RateMySite: [coffee][talk] (San Francisco only right now) - <AUTHOR> http://coffee.gabandgo.com/

<comment><USER2> I like the idea but it could use a little sprucing up to become actionable:

1) Let me enter conversation topics. Or just ice breaker topics. In my head the table headings would read: Hi, I'm | @ | on | for | interested in |. Interested in would then be the place for me to dump some suggestion for breaking into a conversation. I could say "Ponies and Unicorns" so that someone would just have something comfortable to say to me other than "uh...hi, i saw your on this website". Or i could put "Communism and the fall of the USSR" to ward of small talkers.

2) I know you probably want to avoid having people log in and junk like that but it would be nice to (optionally) let people log in to their favorite social service (facebook, twitter) so you could pull their profile image and display it in the table. It helps with identifying people.

Sounds like a great idea.

<comment><USER3> With respect to 1:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_Talk#Discussion_topics>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I started this as an interesting way to get people communicating with each other - I'm fairly new to San Francisco, and am always interested in meeting new people to chat with, so I decided to make a site where you can post online that "i'm sitting at a coffee shop, and interested in chatting with anyone around" - then other people can go online and see which coffee shops have people at them - kind of a longwinded explanation for a simple site...I'm hoping the concept makes sense with the minimalist approach on the page. Still need to make a mobile version, I know the JS doesn't play nice with the BBerry, not sure about iPhones - anyone out there that can try for an iPhone?

<comment><USER4> Seems to work fine on the iPhone.

You probably have this in mind already, but it would be nice if I could:

\- See my entry immediately added to the table (rather than having to refresh)

\- Remove my entry. (In case I get a phone call and have to leave before the time is up, or have a change of heart.)

Other than that, I really like the minimalistic design. The dashed border doesn't bother me at all[1] as it gives it a nice hacker feel --- unless that's not what you were aiming for --- and goes well with the [coffee][talk] header.

One thing that I'm not too sure of is the red text on gray background (the column headers). But I can't seem to think of another color that would go better.

[1] Not that I'm a web designer or graphic artist.

</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>===

EDIT: Additionally, maybe you should number the instructions at the top of the location page as it gives the impression that you can click on them, like a menu. e.g. On the iPhone I scrolled back up with the word "instructions" out of view, and thought it was a menu.

There also doesn't seem to be a way to get back to the homepage, although that's not too much of a problem since there is only one location.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have a recommendation for a cool new 3D surround-sound interface that will not require any additional coding. It's called: real life. Try putting down the iphone and laptop and just striking up conversations with people around you. You'll be amazed at how well it works.

<comment><USER6> Honestly, when I'm at a coffee shop, I normally don't want strangers walking up and starting conversations with me, because I'm normally working. I think this is a good way to basically take down your "Do not disturb" sign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Even if I realize I have someone in the same coffee shop who's looking to talk to strangers, how do I recognize them short of hollering?

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, you have a valid point - slightly easier than a kid yelling "DAD, WHERE ARE YOU?" in a store... I was thinking about that, and thought about adding an "advanced options" tab that will open up a few additional items, like: what color shirt are you wearing? different time limit (preset @ 30min right now) etc.,

The problem is trying to keep it very minimalist and simple though while throwing all those options in the loop

<comment><USER6> Why not a simple "Tell them how to find you" field, and let the user type in their own quick criteria.

"Ask the person behind the counter for me, they know me", "sitting in the comfy armchair by the door with my laptop and xyz headphones on"

seems like it would stay pretty simple that way.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like that, does make it easier than a specific like shirt color

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> And one more thing - if there are any special requests for other cities to throw into this first version, let me know...for all the help you guys at least deserve to get your city put up on the site! I saw a Milbrae and a Palo Alto - any NYC, Boston, etc.,?

</comment><comment><USER8> I like it! As usual, the issue will be enough traffic to make it worthwhile to post. Otherwise, my interest in posting will trail off over time because of few successful link-ups. "Network effect" relevant here.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for all the feedback, some great ideas here! Sorry to those who I didn't get to send individual replies back to, the Blackberry gets a little tiring after awhile!

</comment><comment><USER9> mp3jeep01,

i like it too.

how about getting the list of cafes at yelp?

Also add tags to get an idea what a person's interests are.

by the way, which cafe do you usually work at? i'm up for coworking in the city. msg me at dannyroa _at_ gmail.</comment>


Automatic Derivation of Code Generators from Machine Descriptions (1980) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/roderic-cattell/thesis-toplas.pdf <comment><USER2> The Go compiler codegen backend IIRC does this via ISA descriptions.</comment>


A list of donations that Bill Gates has made - <AUTHOR> http://www.youhavetocit.com/2012/04/bill-gates-had-donated-over-36854000000.html <comment><USER2> I'm really confused right now. Over half of that money 18.5 billion, was donated to the "male circumcision consortium" so they can circumcise people in Africa. Is that really such an important issue that it became the recipient of one of the largest donations in the history of the world?

I'm certain that I must be missing something.

<comment><USER3> I am also astonished by that number, but circumcision certainly seems to be an important way of fighting HIV.

 _"There is compelling evidence that male circumcision reduces the risk of heterosexually acquired HIV infection in men by approximately 60%."_ [1]

 _"Evidence among heterosexual men in sub-Saharan Africa shows a decreased risk of between 38 percent and 66 percent over two years"_ [2]

But Circumcision Rates in Africa are relatively high anyways, due to the population's religious background.[3]

Quote of New York Times Article: [4]

 _"Among those are 14 studies that provide what the experts characterize as "fair" evidence that circumcision in adulthood protects men from H.I.V. transmission from a female partner, cutting infection rates by 40 to 60 percent. Three of the studies were large randomized controlled trials of the kind considered the gold standard in medicine, but they were carried out in Africa, where H.I.V. — the virus the causes AIDS — is spread primarily among heterosexuals._ "

 _"Other studies have linked male circumcision to lower rates of infection with human papillomavirus and herpes simplex Type 2._ "

 _" The procedure has long been recognized to lower urinary tract infections early in life and reduce the incidence of penile cancer._ "

So i guess it just all adds up in a way.

That being said, the number of over 18 billion Dollars (according to the article) being spent on this issue still astonishes me...

[1] <http://www.who.int/hiv/topics/malecircumcision/en/>

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision#Sexually_transmit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision#Sexually_transmitted_diseases)

[3] [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Global_M...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Global_Map_of_Male_Circumcision_Prevalence_at_Country_Level.png)

[4] [https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/27/science/benefits-of- circu...](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/27/science/benefits-of-circumcision- outweigh-risks-pediatric-group-says.html)

<comment><USER4> Is there a chance this is a case of correlation studies reported as causation by the media?

I find it unconvincing that it might protect against HIV. Personal incredulity and the endorsing of the WHO aside, how does that work?

<comment><USER5> The general theory is that circumcision causes a change in the membrane and "microbiomes" around that part of the penis.

I still struggle, however, to believe that a truly controlled study could ever be conducted and I wonder if the money wouldn't be better spent just providing condoms and sexual education to these at risk groups. We already know that condoms are very, very good a reducing HIV transmission rates, plus they work for both partners (circumcision studies only show reduced transmission _to_ men _from_ women), and also consistent use can reduce the risk of cervical cancers, HPV and unwanted pregnancies. In a way, studies and campaigns that focus on circumcision are unethical if they don't also provide access to this highly effective device.

But going back to the studies, the problem I have understanding them is that there is, as far as I'm aware, no way to perform a placebo circumcision. Any adult who has a circumcision is surely likely alter his behavior or perhaps take greater notice of the sexual education he received alongside the circumcision. Or, perhaps he may have the superhero effect, thinking he can have more unprotected sex? That's the part that makes it hard for me to believe that studies are controlled. And for those studies that look only at populations that perform infant circumcisions, it seems even more likely that differences in cultural, religious or social norms of each population would have just as much influence as the operation.

If anyone has details on how these studies control for confounding factors like that, I'd be interested to hear.

<comment> muuh-gnu > how these studies control for confounding factors like that

The answer is: they simply do not at all.

[1] <http://www.salem-news.com/fms/pdf/2011-12_JLM-Boyle-Hill.pdf>

[2] <http://www.circumstitions.com/HIV-SA.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What about a list of things Bill Gates did to build Microsoft, and the positive results of those achievements? It's a huge list, and it's the one that people should use to assess him morally.

For example, there is huge value in standardization: having one platform that most people use at a given time saves a ton of porting effort. Same with the backward compatibility: I know several people that still get a lot of value from DOS applications. And look at the price of software over the last 30 years, adjusted for inflation. Microsoft helped bring those prices down and make these technologies more available to people.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have to veto that site's side scrolljacking. I can't view the main table properly on my htc desire, scrolling right switches me to a different article!

</comment><comment><USER8> This means some major vaccine has been developed, and some major life threatening illness cured, right? Am I right?

<comment><USER9> That would be a qualified yes. As an example, the Gates Foundation has given a bit over a billion dollars to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Malaria, and Tuberculosis. Those three diseases are among the biggest causes of (relatively) easily preventable deaths. In terms of vaccines, research is being done to develop a vaccine for malaria (which causes about 1% of global deaths), but vaccination may not prove to be the most effective means of eradicating the disease. Things like antimalarial drugs and mosquito netting may be more cost-effective, and so malaria rates have dropped dramatically despite there not being a vaccine. There is a vaccine for Tuberculosis, but it's definitely not cost-effective. AIDS is no longer a death sentence, though no vaccine exists. So in terms of Malaria and AIDS, the foundation has been reasonably successful (tuberculosis is proving to be a rather more difficult problem).

So the Gates Foundation has contributed to improvements in health, though again, the contribution is fairly limited (as one would expect when talking about a fund with only $30 billion, which is a huge amount of money for an individual but pretty much insignificant on a global scale).

<comment><USER10> Correction: no FDA approved HIV vaccine exists, yet. However, HIV vaccines do exist and are in, or will soon be in, clinical trials. That doesn't necessarily mean that they will be proven to be safe and effective, but it's not unreasonable to imagine that one of the vaccines in the pipeline will prove to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No donations to the victims of Microsoft Windows™?

</comment><comment><USER12> What's more important is that he produced that much money. You can't give away what you haven't produced.

<comment><USER13> How does one "produce" or "make" money? I was always under the impression it basically just gets shifted around.. yeah, you first have to attract a lot of mass before you can repel it again, but that ain't making mass.

<comment><USER13> Here's a radical idea: instead of passive-aggressively determing this does "not add to the discussion" you might simply _try_ to answer the question. After all, people (surely on here) say making money this and making money that all day long; and while needed, pointing out how dumb that is will not ever be "on-topic", so I attached the (trick) question to a comment that is sure to remain at the bottom of the discussion. If it rubs you the wrong way it's probably for a reason; good luck with that. I didn't imply Bill Gates never produced any value, any such crap is solely in your head as well.

<comment><USER14> Creating wealth is not a zero-sum game. So your phrase: "I was always under the impression it basically just gets shifted around" is wrong.

Basic economics, man.

The extension of this is that if you've accumulated great wealth (through the market, rather than through dictatorship or government) then you have also generated great wealth for your business customers or clients. But that wealth will be more spread out.

<comment><USER13> _Creating wealth is not a zero-sum game._

That's great; "making money" however is, seeing how there is a fixed amount in circulation.

<comment><USER15> Every bank loan is new money in, at minimum, the form of an interest charge (but more often on some or all of the principal too). The principal+interest paid to the bank is more than the principal alone, even in the simplest case. In either case, however, the bank has "made" money (but not wealth or value) and devalued (inflated) the paper currency in circulation. (You, however, are expected to make value with the capacity to transact that has been loaned to you). In the case of almost everyone else however, I agree: people are largely competing for the pre-existing numbers. But banks get to make them up, and that function is independent of the printing of currency. The actual currency is just printed as needed to facilitate trade, satisfying debts, and hopefully the creation of wealth; hopefully the wealth created is enough to counter the wealth removed, because otherwise there's lots of vacuums running around sucking up value. Oddly, most modern countries accumulate interest-bearing public debt (inflation _and_ interest), employing banks as lenders, instead of just printing the money (currency) to spend on worthwhile projects and to remove from circulation when they're done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> irony list:

\- most of his donations are for universities. and when you go any university lab all they have is Macs.

\- 15 Bi to his own foundation. (August 24, 1999, January 29, 2010)

<comment><USER17> I'm sure if you check out the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation [1][2], you'll be satisfied that 15 billion counts as money well spent. It's not a fund for him to spend on himself.

[1] <http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/home.aspx> [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundati...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Since 1997. Prior to that Bill donated zip, zero, nada to charitable causes. I suspect that Melinda is the driving force behind this.

<comment><USER19> I suspect Bill is the type of person to focus intensely on one thing at a time. Prior to 1997 his focus was Microsoft. After that, he rode its success into his next endeavor, which is charity.</comment></comment>


Is This an Image? Or Is It a Gun? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kauffj/liberator.png <comment><USER2> > _This project is meant to remind politicians, bureaucrats, and busy-bodies > everywhere that attempting to restrict distribution of code is both > pragmatically preposterous and a violation of free speech._

It's not code. It's data. And we already have tremendous amounts of precedent for restricting the distribution of data considered verboten. The simplest example would be CP (which, heck, is already images).

<comment><USER3> True, but I think the argument being made is similar to the absurdities that exist in Australia where it is illegal to _sell_ cigarettes to people under 18 and it's illegal to _buy_ cigarettes for people under 18 but it's not illegal for people to smoke cigarettes under 18 - unsurprisingly people under 18 _do_ still manage to get their hands on cigarettes and no one asks questions at that point. Surely the purpose of the laws was to prevent people under 18 from smoking cigarettes - why not make a law for exactly that? I think the 3D printable guns issue is similar - banning the distribution of a substance but not outright banning the substance is absurd.

<comment><USER4> Your whole hypothesis is nonsense.

The intent of those cigarette laws is to stop minors from getting their hands on cigarettes. It's not intended to make criminals of kids.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's Your Fitness Story? - <AUTHOR> I go to the gym 3 times a week - 30-45 minutes and 5 minutes each of warmup and post-workout stretching. I wish I could do more cardio, aerobics or sports but don't think I can find time for that.<p>Wondering what others in the HN community are doing to stay fit. <comment><USER2> I try and run 5-6 days a week, mostly in the 3-4 mile range, but one longer run on the weekends.

I mix it up with the routes, so it's not the same run every day.

I also find that running in the evening is better for my concentration on work than running in the morning - but I'm sure that's going to vary from person to person.</comment>


One day left to help Internet Archive reach its donation goal - <AUTHOR> https://archive.org/donate/?1 <comment><USER2> I really dig the basic idea of the IA and I'm an avid user of the site. But, it kind of scares me that they in one sentence say that they will "make our cultural treasures accessible to everyone. Forever." and in the next one asks for money to make it happen. "Forever" is a bold statement and I can't be the only one that sees a contradiction in this. I guess what they're saying is: if the money runs out the data will disappear.

I've worked closely with archivists and preservationists in the cultural heritage sector and I know that to keep the sacred promise of saving something for an eternity you have to have strategies for what you save in the first place. However, I don't see a clear strategy with the IA. The Internet Archive (not the Wayback Machine part of it) is basically a site where I can upload whatever digital litter I like as long as it's not protected by copyright and they (without questions asked) store it "forever". It's fantastic in a sense. But is it sustainable in the long run?

For the the Wayback Machine I can force a snapshot of a site whenever I like and as often as I please. I stumbled across the snapshot for this page today [ [https://web.archive.org/web/20140415000000*/http://www.econo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140415000000*/http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2014/02/economist-explains-16) ] and I think it illustrates what I'm trying to say. During march 2014 there was up to 4 snapshots a day, while august did not have a single snapshot. I guess people where trigger happy with the "Save Page Now" [ [https://archive.org/web/](https://archive.org/web/) ] feature when the article got publicity. Could it perhaps be a better idea to snapshot at certain times and find smart algos that can detect important changes in the page?

I'd love to hear some replies to my criticism. I say what I say because I love the IA and I hope it's being taken care of in a way that will truly make it be there forever.

<comment><USER3> It would work if they have capital to the point where they can run the site on the interest/dividends paid out on investing that capital. I highly doubt they are in that position but there is a scheme where that will work.

<comment><USER4> That would likely require a very substantial amount of capital. I too doubt they are in such a position.

<comment><USER5> List of sponsors: [http://archive.org/about/credits.php](http://archive.org/about/credits.php)

<comment><USER2> Made me very happy to see Library of Congress there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Done. I also didn't hear about this until now, but surely the 2-to-1 matching is very nice.

We really need to donate to this kinds of projects. We can't let our technological past be forgotten, I think.

</comment><comment><USER7> Didn't hear about this until now. Just donated because I want archive.org to life a long time. The do an important and unique service for the entire web.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm glad they accept donations in bitcoins (not converted). I've been donating some of my early-mined bitcoins to charities. I tend to be more generous with them than I could be with a straight credit card payment. There must be a psychological effect at play there.

[https://archive.org/donate/bitcoin.php](https://archive.org/donate/bitcoin.php)

</comment><comment><USER9> Done. archive.org is a shining jewel on the Internet. In many ways it's the fulfillment of the promise the Internet once held of globally accessible information.

</comment><comment><USER10> A supporter will match 2-1, so your 10 bucks becomes 30 bucks :)

</comment><comment><USER11> I agree this is a great cause, but did I miss why there is only 1 day to go until a goal is reached? They don't explain the consequences of only getting USD1.48 million instead of 1.5.

There is someone who said (I'm sorry I can't find the quote) that they don't donate to charities who don't specify an aim for a campaign or how they will know if they've succeeded. I like the spirit of this and feel that more information is better than just "Come on, guys, we need 1.5mil before 12am!".

</comment><comment><USER12> Does archive.org let you download dumps of all of their data? If they make a weekly torrent containing their whole data-set it would be easily immortalised...

<comment><USER13> They hit 10 petabytes two years ago* - which is 10000 terabytes. Torrents don't really cut it at that scale.

* [http://blog.archive.org/2012/10/26/10000000000000000-bytes-a...](http://blog.archive.org/2012/10/26/10000000000000000-bytes-archived/)

<comment><USER14> > They hit 10 petabytes two years ago* - which is 10000 terabytes. Torrents > don't really cut it at that scale.

I see no reason why torrents couldn't handle this. Data transport through bittorrent still works even with large numbers of bytes.

<comment><USER13> At these scales, bandwidth to disks isn't trivial - at a gigabyte a second, it would still take over 130 days to build the checksums for the torrent. I don't think Bittorrent fundamentally allows multithreaded torrent generation.

I think they bundle their data into WARCs of a few (dozen?) megabytes. Copying those around is much more straightforward, with much lower latency.

<comment><USER15> I think he could have meant that some DHT could have been used, it needn't be specifically torrents. You could then volunteer your machine to redundantly store, say, 5GB of the archive.

If you are willing to spend time copying files around you should donate: your pay-per-hour probably far exceeds the time it would take you to dilly dally with billions of WARCs. Even if you flip burgers for a living. There are far better ways to contribute than by typing 'cp'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Who is this supporter?

<comment><USER16> To elaborate - if I am going to spend my money, I want to know who is benefiting from it.

In this campaign, some not specified contributor will have 2 times more (moral) influence than all smaller contributors combined.

Somebody will get its dose of feel good and I want to know who it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really don't understand how they can be fine with so much illegal content hosted on the site.

Ex: [https://archive.org/details/JohnMayerMusic](https://archive.org/details/JohnMayerMusic)

This is being featured on the homepage! No way this is in the public domain.

<comment><USER18> Did you read the detailed Rights section on the home page?

<comment><USER17> Of course not, do most people?

What are you referring to, that they will take things down only when a complaint is filed? That doesn't really speak to the quality of the archive that it's there in the first place.

<comment><USER18> It's pretty hard to miss. On the link you provided, it's a great big section right below the top one which explains which John Mayer recordings are not allowed on archive.org and which are.

More broadly, archive.org does operate in a legally gray area. But by trying to be a comprehensive archive but providing straightforward mechanisms for rights holders to opt out (including retroactively)--and by being a non-profit that doesn't run advertising--they seem to strike a reasonable balance for most people.

<comment><USER17> I see, FYI this notice is nowhere in the new beta site. I see it in the original.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Average comment score for HN users? - <AUTHOR>

I think I remember previously seeing a site that ranked HN users by their average comment score, but I can't find it now.  Can anyone point me in the right direction? <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders>

</comment><comment><USER3> What does leaders do, if not that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Leaders does for the leaders, but not all users. I'd like to find the info for all users.</comment></comment>