Nitrous.io raises $6.65M Series A - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/03/18/with-6-65m-in-its-pocket-nitrous-io-is-set-to-help-more-developers-save-time-and-effort/ We're hiring. htttp://www.nitrous.io/jobs <comment><USER2> I see very little value here. The first angle tries to sell this as a productivity gain, but the fact that new hires will not be able to start committing code for 1-2 days is hardly killing companies. Additionally, the initial setup is a onetime cost which will be amortized over the life of the employee. Locking into a proprietary ecosystem -- that's the gift that keeps on giving.

<comment><USER3> I agree, and I can't help imagine that there isn't some overselling of the "seriousness" of the onboarding problem to (probably) non-engineering VCs.

That said, I can see enormous potential in this as an education platform. Having trouble with you CS homework? Open up Nitrous and get someone far away to help you out.

<comment><USER4> I've been using Nitrous.io to teach an intro to python class for non- programmers (librarians, management, other "Information Professionals"). It's fantastic to be able to get everyone on the same page and same development environment from day 1.

The collaboration feature is still too rough to be useful for a novice level class. Also it gives full access to the collab box with exactly the same permissions as the box owner. If they add some features and some tools for gating access and user privileges it will be useful for my class.

<comment><USER5> Agree 100%. I teach a Programming for Non Programmers class using Sinatra. Typically I'll have all 24 people setup with a "Hello World" app in about 30 minutes.

Even with 2 TAs, I can't even imagine the alternative of trying to get an entire class of programming newbies running ruby locally across Mac and Windows without any problems or leaving anyone behind. It's easy as a developer to underestimate the difficulty of getting things set up. Even in nitrous the most common problem I have to debug during class is people not being in the right directory because they have to use 'cd workspace' before they can 'ruby helloworld.rb'. There's just a giant set of knowledge that we developers rely on to even do the simplest of tasks, and nitrous lets me skip over all that boring stuff and get right to the interesting concepts they can see on their screen like paths, params, request handlers, views and links.

My only complaint is the onboarding UX uses some confusing wording/concepts for beginners like "boxes" and "hostnames" and energy credits. I just handhold everyone through that part so it must be really difficult for someone trying to load it up themselves. When I found some bugs I had the chance to talk with the guys behind nitrous and they were really helpful with trying to figure out what went wrong and how they can simplify the flow, so hopefully we'll see some improvements there with the new round of funding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The pain of setting up your development environment is not something to be avoided. Not only will you gain a better understanding of how everything actually works, you might also uncover some outdated documentation which you can update.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would like to know where their numbers come from?

"The thing that excites us about the education space is that today, a lot of people are teaching children and adults how to code, but at the end of the day, you still have to have that $2,000 machine."

I don't think you "have to have that $2000 machine" even less in 2014 where the cost of hardware are lower than ever. But on the other end, I guess they want those poor student to have to pay for their subscription fee to their service.

Personally I was using Vagrant, but now we use docker which use less resource and it take far less than 3 days to setup (probably less than 30 minutes while you can do something else). I don't disagree with the idea of an IDE in the browser, but for me, it will be something open source that you can host where I want.

</comment><comment><USER8> How is this different from setting up a base development image then cloning it as AWS/DO instances for new developers?

Obviously there is a bit more to that but moving your private code/etc to yet another start-up with no security track record sounds like a funny joke to me.

Please don't tell me the Web IDE is a selling point here.

<comment><USER4> I think the strongest use-case is in education and for novice programmers trying to learn a language and a web-framework. Not for easing on-boarding in any size company other than a startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Programmers making tools for programmers who makes tools for programmers who makes tools for programmers.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been using Nitrous for three months now. Here's why I stick with it:

1) I don't code offline any more. I have too many languages I work with and there's too many points of failure that can be easily fixed with a Google search or StackOverflow. If I'm offline, it's usually a waste of time and most likely, I should be taking a walk.

2) Having a dev environment that is remote means my computer can completely fail and in 5 min, I'm deploying production code again. It means I can move between machines without ANYTHING being different. Leave your work computer at work, work from a friend's computer, yours, it doesn't matter.

3) You actually have control over your box resources. Cloud9 boxes were abysmally slow, even though their editor was better. Koding was way too focused on social and attempting to do too much. Nitrous is simple and fast.

That being said, here is what Nitrous needs to work on:

1) Uptime has been sub-par. They've had problems, especially with US-East, that have led to me not being able to work. This has been minimal, but enough to make me concerned.

2) The editor is very minimal. There is no fuzzy searching for files (like in Sublime), no auto-complete, no code hinting, no error checking other than really basic stuff, like indentation in Python or broken div tags in HTML. Having dabbled with Cloud9's editor, which is fantastic, I def think they need to focus on this.

3) Collaborative editing seems half-baked. Each user has to open the same file and then press a button "Collab Mode". If either forgets to press the button, your editing different files. There's also no sharing of console output, so this means if you are running a script that you are both working on, you both cannot see the same console output. Probably a pretty tricky problem to overcome, so I don't totally blame them.

All and all, still really like the service and hope they keep improving.

<comment><USER4> Right now it seems like Nitrous's team is really focused on improving stability. And with the apparent rapid growth in scale, that's important.

You are certainly right about the need to improve the editor. While the minimalism is part of what has kept me on Nitrous (over Cloud9 or others), it needs massive improvements. It seems to have stagnated for months. CodeMirror has many, many features which would seem to be fairly easy to integrate into the IDE, but haven't been.

I hope the next round of hires is more front-end focused.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Do people really think it's a good idea to have an IDE on the web? What do you do when the network is down, or when you're on the plane, train, etc. And what if the network is slow?

I think I'll keep my local development workstation for some time.

<comment><USER8> I yet to meet a good engineer takes web IDE's seriously.

<comment><USER12> I consulted at Google last year and I really liked the internal web based IDE, and I am sure a lot of people there would agree with me. I was talking to someone at Google last week and mentioned how much I enjoyed the web IDE, even in an early form. He said that it is getting more awesome quickly.

<comment><USER8> You can't compare Googles infrastructure to an average start-up without security team or proper procedures that protect company data.

Not to mention most of the start-ups have shitty uplink with no redundancy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've used Nitrous when it was called something else (I can't remember what it was) and it was a great idea but the editor felt really slow and odd use.

It couldn't even autocomplete HTML closing tags. That's a major point against it for my use cases.

Another alternative is: [https://koding.com/](https://koding.com/) but they are also really slow. I'm going to give Nitrous another try for my Go development, it may have gotten better.

<comment><USER4> Nitrous used to be Action.io. The editor is still lacking features, but responsiveness has improved. Right now the Nitrous team seems more interested in expanding supported tool chains and languages than in improving the IDE experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't like being negative about things like this.. but you're not removing a learning curve with something like this, you are delaying it and spreading it out over time with interest payments - the time spent going back and learning fundamentals - along the way.

Setting up your own development environment is an absolute must. It is the computing world's mise en place.

</comment><comment><USER15> If a new hire can not set up their own machine in 1-2 days of time then the new hire should not have been hired.

I like to customize my text editor to fit my work flow, a text editor on the web gives me no control. I like having control over my environment and it is usually a "set it, forget it" mentality.

<comment><USER16> Welcome to the Starship Enterprise. I have yet to see an enterprise dev stack that a competent developer can get up and running in a day, without "cheating" by being given a VM or preloaded laptop. Lots of reasons:

\- the setup process isn't documented

\- the stack isn't documented

\- the above are documented, but the documents are a year old and obsolete

\- sample data? Go ask Jim on 3. Jim doesn't work here anymore.

\- etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Simplistically, it seems like this is something that a team could do for themselves using tools like Vagrant (with Packer and/or Ansible), individual user licenses for Sublime Text, and a Github account.

Host the newly created development VM locally, or on AWS, Azure, or DigitalOcean and you're good to go.

Sure, that's a couple of tools and subscriptions (that you'll likely already need/have, even if you use Nitrous.io), but I'm not quite sure I quite get what benefit Nitrous.io would provide over a company-maintained and customizable deployment "solution".

For a team that is starting with a blank-slate, maybe it's a short-cut and easier to maintain?

<comment><USER18> For Windows devs, there's [http://boxstarter.org/](http://boxstarter.org/)

<comment><USER19> Is this just a more configurable version of Ninite? I couldn't see any mention of available packages on the site.

<comment><USER18> The packages available would be those provided by Chocolatey: [https://chocolatey.org/packages](https://chocolatey.org/packages)

Chocolatey takes the NuGet tooling used to extend Visual Studio and uses the same approach to manage installing random software. BoxStarter then builds on all these ideas to take care of the initial setup of a machine.

If you just want a bigger ninite, check out [http://allmyapps.com/](http://allmyapps.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have had a nitrous.io (before action.o) account for a long time. They have a very slick developer experience.

If you are skeptical about browser development, there are three good counter examples: Google's internal system, nitrous.io, and fpcomplete.com (for Haskell). I find all three excellent.

For nitrous.io, one of the big wins is having many options for instant on development environments. It pairs well with github and Heroku.

<comment><USER12> One more comment on nitrous.io: I would use it more often but I have a difficult time reading white text on a black background and there is no styling option to use different themes. I asked about this, but the response was not promising.

fpcomplete.com (for Haskell) does not have this problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This could be a good teaching tool for people new to development. Rather than setting up a bunch of vm's, just use nitrous and code in the browser...and as they become better, they can start using ssh and so on. Could also be interesting as an enterprise offer.

</comment><comment><USER21> There's some interesting tech powering nitrous.io, having seen an early example of it around 7 months ago.

I like the experience, but personally do not use it as it deviates too heavily from my normal development process.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think a web ide would be great if an organization could host it themself. Hell I would even by one if I could put it on my own webserver

<comment><USER12> I agree, but lots of people trust github with their proprietary code. Indeed, when I do use nitrous.io, it is with github repos.</comment></comment>


GitHub's Unicorn Setup - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/blog/517-unicorn <comment><USER2> Its great to see companies sharing what they've learned from experience about system architecture. So many times this sort of stuff is very difficult to plan out and the only real way to get it right is through experimentation. Having first hand descriptions like this is a great resource if you are setting something up the first time.

I like that they posted their unicorn config file too!

<comment><USER3> Also it doubles as documentation for the members of our team who aren't familiar with this part of the system :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _When the Unicorn master starts, it loads our app into memory. As soon as it's ready to serve requests it forks 16 workers. Those workers then select() on the socket, only serving requests they're capable of handling. In this way the kernel handles the load balancing for us._

Wasn't there a heated debate here just the other day about the prefork model?

Guess it's at least back en vogue @github.

<comment><USER5> It's connection pooling, not a fork-per-accept web server. Each worker is select/epoll/kqueue'ing for individual requests.

<comment><USER6> Has any mainstream web server ever been pure demand-forked? Apache has been connection pooled since the '90s; the second edition of Unix Network Programming used it as a case study.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. Hence the "pre" in prefork. A "forking" web server (one fork per request) would be incredibly inefficient, whereas prefork is only... slightly inefficient. :-)

<comment><USER8> How's this for incredibly inefficient <http://github.com/tlrobinson/wwwoosh/blob/master/wwwoosh.sh> ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't understand why people insist on architectures where otherwise- independent processes share a single socket.

You're already running a reverse proxy in front of them! There's no reason each Unicorn couldn't be listening on a different port. Does that third layer of local load-balancing between the HTTP proxy and the event-driven app server actually get you anything?

<comment><USER10> Replacing N ports with one simplifies configuration.

I never understood the complex HAProxy in front of Apache in front of Nginx in front of Mongrel type setups that seem to be popular in the Rails world. Why not just use Unicorn? What value is GitHub getting from having Nginx in front?

<comment><USER3> Unicorn is not for slow clients or static assets. That's what nginx is for. See <http://unicorn.bogomips.org/PHILOSOPHY.html> for info on Unicorn and slow clients.

nginx also has features like ESI, serving from memcached, and rate limiting which Unicorn does not (and doesn't need).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there any benefit in using unicorn over passenger?

<comment><USER12> Unicorn doesn't make your site very slow for the 5 seconds-2 minutes (YMMV) after you deploy.

<comment><USER13> It seems to me like the Passenger guys could easily add an option so that on a "touch tmp/restart.txt" a set of new worker processes is started before the old ones are killed off. I imagine this would make this slowness a thing of the past. For the record, my apps experiencing this momentary queueing and slowness on restart (5 seconds max).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How does passenger handle restarts? Does it also allow a zero downtime restart ?

<comment><USER15> You run "touch #{RAILS_ROOT}/tmp/restart.txt".

That will restart the rails processes. No connections are dropped, and I've not seen any downtime.

<comment><USER16> To clarify, my understanding is that while rails is restarting, Passenger will queue all the requests that come in and begin processing them as soon as rails is ready. But yeah, zero downtime, it's pretty awesome.

<comment><USER12> Sites do tend to lag for at least several seconds after the restart though.

<comment><USER17> Yeah. We load balance across 5 Apache/Passengers and I do rolling deploys (all in Capistrano) by removing a Passenger from load balancing, updating the app, restarting Apache, and adding it back into load balancing with a 10 second delay between each. We tried the Passenger touch restart.txt and that didn't go well _at all_ when we were under load.

<comment><USER14> Can you share your setup please?

<comment><USER17> I wrote a short post about our setup in March and it hasn't really changed since then: [http://codemonkey.ravelry.com/2009/03/10/quick-update- ravelr...](http://codemonkey.ravelry.com/2009/03/10/quick-update-ravelry-runs- on/)

If you have any questions or are looking for details or something, ask away - just stick a comment on the blog post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The Grand Unicorn is proud!</comment>


People Walked Differently in Medieval Times - <AUTHOR> http://mentalfloss.com/article/505105/why-people-walked-differently-medieval-times <comment><USER2> Some interesting arguments suggesting what he is saying is at least partially wrong: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/74penu/walki...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/74penu/walkin_medieval_did_people_walk_on_heels_first/)

<comment><USER3> Gait is Def cultural. My gait changed from living in America for decades. I can tell who is Indian vs American Indian just by the gait.

<comment><USER4> I'm Canadian. You wouldn't think that would be very different from the U.S., but... when I first visited the U.S. as an adult (Boston), I had to change my gait IMMEDIATELY. I was a fast walker, and had been trained as an actor to hit toe first "for better energy" \- that is, to appear more energetic on stage. Trouble is, that makes you quieter, and Americans in the Eastern US back then simply assumed that anyone gaining on them quickly and quietly from behind was probably a mugger. Pedestrian after pedestrian after pedestrian would whirl around to look at me in a startled way, even during the day, nevermind at night. So I learned to thump my heels down noisily for my stay and that eliminated the problem. I could walk fast without frightening anybody, as long as I was conspicuously loud about it.

<comment><USER5> I kick gravel or scrape the ground with my shoe every once in a while at night to make my presence known.

<comment><USER6> Have you noticed others scuffing their shoes in response? I do. I'm almost sure it's some kind of unconscious communication going on.

<comment><USER7> Maybe there is something similar with coughing. There definitely is with yawning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there any evidence for this other than a YouTube video from some guy claiming it's true?

<comment><USER9> I walked barefoot until I was about 10 (New Zealand lol). Toe-walking helped me avoid various hazards on the ground like prickles and stones.

<comment><USER10> I did the same as kid in NZ. No snakes or spiders to worry about, weather is mild, why not?

Now I heel-toe as I'm a dancer, but running is another story

<comment><USER11> We moved back to NZ where I grew up, and our kids went to a 50-person primary school with not a pair of shoes in sight. You learn where the patches of prickles are and avoid those bits of the grass. (Data point: the prickles are in the same places at the beach and community hall as they were 40 years ago when I were a lad)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I switched from "normal" western shoes to minimalist "barefoot" shoes about 4 months ago. My motivation was to mitigate some pain I had in the balls of my feet.

Since then my gate has changed from heel to toe walking. The reason is that heel walking hurts when walking (nearly) brarefoot. However the change is subtle.

The guy in the video is anything but subtle. Based on my recent experience I strongly doubt people walked that way.

Since switching, my feet feel better, my knees feel better and my back feel better.

I've bee wearing xero brand shoes. They are super comfortable but I've been disappointed in their quality. Can anyone recommend "minimalist" shoes they like?

<comment><USER13> I wear sandals as much as possible. When I need something that covers my foot, I've been getting Converse All Star Slim Ox and stripping out the insoles. One aspect of minimalist shoes is that there's not a lot there: they're generally not really built to last. The Slim Ox are pretty cheap (when they're available: they aren't always) and are a good compromise in my experience.

<comment><USER14> Instead of the Converse shoes, which have a somewhat rigid rubber bottom outsole, consider buying some plain canvas-bottomed shoes. You will wear through all of the layers of canvas within a few months, but if you get them from China (e.g. on Taobao) they only cost like $5–$10 per pair.

Alternately, thin leather moccasins can also often be pretty cheap (or can be made yourself).

If you want something a bit more durable, I find that most styles of Vibram's finger shoes last a fair while, but plenty of people seem to dislike their appearance.

<comment><USER13> Sure, there are alternatives. The Cons run about $45 a pair, last about a year, and don't call undue attention to themselves. I find they strike a pretty good balance. Plus, they're Cons :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have spent a few years mostly walking around either in Vibrams or in canvas shoes I bought for $10/pair in China, and frequently walk like this.

The guy in the video is exaggerating his motions a lot though (could explain part of why he finds it takes so much work for his calves). In particular, my steps end up being small, with my feet staying under my center of mass, my stepping leg is bent, my steps are almost directly in line, and I find that my torso moves very smoothly without bouncing up and down or stopping and starting.

<comment><USER15> I have spent a decade walking like this, and I agree with you.

It seems that he wants to make his movements clear to the audience, but in practice I would expect he is walking with short balanced steps.

I walk like you describe you do, but in the end I also developed calves like those you see on the folks in paintings from the 1400-1500s!

A parenting aside: I want to make sure that my daughter grows up walking the way she already naturally does, but it is hard to find good footwear for it in kids. The materials are all heavy relative to the size of the shoes and so it is hard to find a shoe that is both flexible and resistent to the weather. I'd love to hear any suggestions.

<comment><USER16> Vivo Barefoot has a kids' range: [https://www.vivobarefoot.com/uk/kids](https://www.vivobarefoot.com/uk/kids)

Not too cheap though.

I can't really speak to the quality of the kids shoes, but I own quite a few pairs of their adult shoes and am very happy with them.

<comment><USER17> I'm not so happy with their adult shoes. Some are good, like Gobi. Others are pretty bad, and they change their designs pretty radically so they never improve their weak points.

For example, I spent a few hundred on the first Porto iteration, and it fell apart in less than 2 months. Their German shop refused to honor the guarantee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Yes it is possible to change your gait, even through exercise. I do wall- facing squats. It's the kind of squat that makes it impossible to cheat and use bad form, but it's quite a bit harder. The last time I did 131 total, including 40 in the last set. I'm aiming for 200 or 300.

I noticed differences in how I walk, especially on incline, decline, and walking up/down stairs. These squats teach you better balance and strengthen more muscles. My range of motion is also fuller when biking, instead of the newbie's typical "pedal pushing".

Running barefoot and dancing also affects gait, so why not type of shoes ?

</comment><comment><USER19> That dude has an anterior pelvic tilt so him talking about having good posture makes me think this is BS about how they walked in the past.

But i agree that shoes are terrible for your posture but not if you walk like he describes

And personally i believe that a full foot strike is better than heel/forefoot strike.

<comment><USER20> It all smells like invented folklore like the YouTube ninjers.

<comment><USER21> I did re-enactment for 20 years in the UK, and you wouldn't believe how much of this sort of shite goes round in those circles.

And I wore "leather socks" for the events, not modern shoes, and my gait didn't change at all. Unless I was walking on wet stone, grass or concrete. Leather is really, really, slippery when wet.

<comment><USER14> It takes months if not years of frequent deliberate practice to change your unconscious gait as an adult (or at least it took a year or two for me; maybe some people are prodigy athletes and can master new physical skills faster). Just switching shoes won't do anything by itself or overnight.

This is sort of like saying "I'm used to using a fork, and I couldn't pick up anything when I tried chopsticks a few times. There's no way people actually eat with a pair of these, I'm sure they actually just stab their food with it like a skewer."

If you want to learn, I recommend you try switching to walking entirely barefoot all the time for a month or two, including while walking on hard surfaces (e.g. concrete sidewalk). You'll be forced into a dramatically shorter more balanced stride irrespective of which bit of your foot touches down first, because a long straight-legged stride will be painful for all of your joints. It will be even more dramatic if you try walking very fast or running. Frankly the difference between forefoot striking and heel striking when walking is relatively minor, compared to the difference between a long bouncy straight-legged stride and a short balanced bent-leg stride.

Walking on rough surfaces (e.g. loose gravel, trails strewn with twigs and small rocks, ..) and warm or cold surfaces (within reason; don't burn your skin off) will also be instructive – after a lifetime of walking in protective shoes which prevent you from feeling the ground this will seem very painful on your sensitive nerves/skin, but within a few months you will become desensitized and tougher and be able to handle walking barefoot in a much wider variety of conditions.

It's also fun (feels nice) to walk barefoot in the grass, in the mud, in the rain, climbing up trees or over rocks, on cobblestones, ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I do this when I'm walking around the house (no shoes allowed), partly because my heels eventually hurt when walking on hard surfaces with no padding, but mostly so I avoid treading on a lego brick or a type G (UK) power plug (though this is the first time I've thought about it, so these are assumptions).

I also run on the balls of my feet, but I never thought about why I might do that until I read an article about it a few years back.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think I do a lot of toe first walking around the house. My wife complains it's so quiet I'm like a ghost always suddenly appearing and startling her.

<comment><USER24> My martial arts sensei walks like this. Smooth as a cat. He has done Ninjutsu and traditional Jujutsu training in Japan.

See also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Across_the_Nightingale_Floor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Across_the_Nightingale_Floor)

But it's partly out of taking short steps - to maintain balance. If your feet are too far apart you're vulnerable to tripping and leg sweeps and getting unbalanced by being hit in general.

I find it impossible to do toe first if my step is the usual length.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> There's a German barefoot shoe manufacturer called Leguano. They swear by the toes-first walk. I think it's a bit silly to walk this way.

But I got a pair of Leguanos anyways (for the barefoot shoe experience) and I definitely walk different in these shoes. Before, my stride was quite far. Too far for my body height. Now I take smaller steps, there's less pressure on my heel. Overall, I can say that barefoot shoes are great. First shoe that I actually enjoy wearing.

So I guess going toes-first could make sense, but simply taking smaller steps with less pressure on the heels could have a similar healthy effect.

</comment><comment><USER26> One of my cousins naturally toe-walked similar to the video at least into his teens. Of course his mother wondered out loud "What type of sport is that good for?", and at the time I didn't have an answer ready to fire at a moment's notice.

Myself, I naturally heel-walk and rather heavily as well. You can imagine the wear-pattern on my shoe soles.

<comment><USER27> Shoe wear is an interesting investigate tool. The most easily observed wear, sole wear, is the result of friction due to foot motion relative to the ground, not force.

Midsole compression and heel counter distortion better correspond to force pattern, but they are integrative and themselves affect gait.

Seems like you'd want both for a good model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Women in ancient China had their feet bound [1]. There were rules on how to walk properly as ladies. Court women had stricter walking rules; those in Qing Dynasty (the last in China) wore high-heel shoes, which made walking more difficult and painful so the women must take very small steps. Men back then had sexual fetish for small feet. I am so glad foot binding is illegal and no longer practiced in China.

Warning: "foot binding" on the Internet may contain disturbing images (including on Wikipedia). You may not like what you see, so I recommend just watch [2].

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

[2]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOSmGBL33yk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOSmGBL33yk)

</comment><comment><USER29> Many years ago I remember seeing a little girl about 6 or 7 who was the daughter of a friend. She walked around on her toes. I asked why, they said it was a disorder (learned/self-taught behavior) they were trying to correct.

<comment><USER30> Toe walking is often idiopathic, but it's also a symptom of autism, cerebral palsy and Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

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

<comment><USER31> I have that (toe walking), went to a physical therapist for it and everything. nowadays it just looks weird and my shoes wear in the front instead of the heel. The doctor (rightfully) said that the passive standing on toes (for whatever reason I did that) would pass on its own as I gained weight (it did), but the gait never really changed. It did mean things like squats are more difficult, ankle flexiblity was a bit shit. It's a bit better now though, but it takes active effort to stretch and whatnot.

I don't have cerebral palsy or Duchenne, but not sure about autism :p.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> My personal experience matches what the article suggests. After I started to use barefoot shoes not just for running, but for all daily activities, I noticed few things. I walk slower, like 15%. I do strike more with the toe than with with heel, but this is very surface-dependence. My balance improved. Barefoot shoes in general have less traction, but I have found that walking on icy pavement became easier. The most puzzling aspect was that I get tired less at least subjectively. The last summer I was able to walk non-stop 40 kilometers, when previously I restricted my daily hiking tours to 15-20 km.

<comment><USER14> Which "barefoot shoes" are you talking about? Most of the styles of e.g. Vibram shoes have rubber soles (and in particular you end up being able to shape your foot to the surface) so there is relatively good traction compared to other shoes. Leather moccasins and especially canvas shoes can have relatively poor traction. When walking entirely barefoot, skin has very good traction.

Either way, walking with a forefoot strike (or even walking with a heel strike in unpadded flexible shoes) generally implies keeping your steps small and your feet directly under your center of mass. If you are on ice, the more you keep your center of mass over your feet, the less sliding you'll do.

<comment><USER32> I use Vibram for running and vivobarefoot.com as daily shoes. My experience with both as on slippery surfaces like rocks after rain when hiking and on icy pavement was that traction was definitely worse compared with good ordinary hiking or winter shoes/boots. But as it was much easier to keep balance, the net result was improvement.

I suspect with barefoot shoes even those with a rubber sole with a pattern the depth of the pattern is just too shallow. So effectively the weight is distributed over the whole surface of the foot. With ordinary shoes pattern on the soles and heels make the contact surface much smaller and pressure higher improving traction.

<comment><USER14> I guess I haven't walked much on ice. There the standard bearer is probably something with metal spikes. I found vibrams pretty good for e.g. climbing around tide pools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've been a toe walker my entire life, so this is fascinating. Sometimes, this is indicative of cerebral palsy, but this isn't true for me. I'm not sure why I started to do it, but my parents said that ever since I was a toddler I have always toe walked—perhaps I simply like the feeling of my toe alighting on the ground first. Curious enough, my toddler now toe walks as well.

And I can confirm: my calves are huge, especially relative to my skinny frame. I also find sprint sports easier, like tennis and soccer.

<comment><USER31> Same aaand same. Started toewalking not long after I was able to walk, and I'd unconsciously stand on my toes when just standing idle for some reason. I replied in another comment chain, there was a link to wikipedia [1] that also linked to autism. I'm fairly sure that it's just one of those things that doesn't need to have a medical reason though. Especially not when hipsters do it due to barefoot walking shoes and such :p

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> ive spent more than a few summers in turn-shoes, which were a dominant construction method of footwear in medieval europe. mine are modern recreations made in as correct a way as seems feasible.

you absolutely cease to heel-strike in about a day. your gait shifts. when fighting, you take many quick short steps. hills and slick grass are interesting.

i haven't tried hobnailed boots but my friends who have think they improve traction at the cost of some comfort — you're basically walking on permanent cobbles. they absolutely destroy flooring.

<comment><USER35> > when fighting, you take many quick short steps

Wait what

> hprotagonist

Ohhhhh

<comment><USER34> my namesake does this too, but i do it in maille and i use a spear not a chunk of rebar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Maybe the pattens made for a particular step:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patten_(shoe)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patten_\(shoe\))

but the rich (which more or less represent the whole lot of people found in portraits and paintings) seemingly used them commonly when outside, particularly in cities, while the rest of the people would probably have gone barefoot or had anyway wooden sandals or similar.

<comment><USER37> Most medieval pattens bend near the ball of the foot, and you can heel-walk or toe-walk in them just fine.

I own a pair of modern hiking boots that bend in pretty much the same way as pattens -- they have a huge shank that keeps the arch stiff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm pretty sure that guy got his theories from the the Born to Run/barefoot running crowd. Scientific validity is suspect.

<comment><USER37> Both heel-running and toe-running are a thing. It gets suspect when someone claims one of the two is more natural.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This makes sense to me. If you watch babies learning to walk, they often walk on their toes first, vs heels. He mentions that you are leaning forward, that keeps the momentum up to make it easier.

So if it wasn't for Buster Brown, we would all be able to toe walk easily.

</comment><comment><USER40> Not sure if this is true, but I walked solely barefoot for a few months and definitely noticed changes in my gait. Rather than just dropping my foot onto the ground, I almost gently slid the foot to the ground to minimize impact, and walked more toe forward.

</comment><comment><USER41> I remember when learning to scuba dive we were told to walk a similar same way when doing a shore dive - slide your feet forward and explore with your toes so you don't step on something you shouldn't like coral, sharp rocks or a ray.

</comment><comment><USER42> I recall hearing that some American Indians were noted to have a similar stride. If the thin leather shoes in Medieval Europe were like moccasins some tribes wore that might lend weight to this claims made here.

</comment><comment><USER43> I hate this repackaging of content that just pads with filler pretending to be an article. The mentalfloss article I mean.

</comment><comment><USER44> Just curious. If that's the way they walk, how do they run?

</comment><comment><USER37> This is BS. I walk around in medieval-style shoes for a couple of weeks per year, 20+ years, and I still heel walk in them.

And that's despite the fact that I do two styles of dance that toe-walk (15th and 16th century Italian) during those 2 weeks.

<comment><USER45> The author was talking about a time before that where people didn't wear shoes. He focuses on Germany. The shoes you wore is from a later time and different place.

<comment><USER37> I'm familiar with the era, and Germany in that era, and no, I wasn't wearing shoes from a later time and a different place.

In fact I don't own any "structured shoes" like the article mentions as leading to heel-walking, although I do wear wood patten overshoes when it's muddy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Just because walking a certain way makes sense under some conditions does not mean it's the one true way under all conditions. When walking on uneven terrain or moving surfaces, in bad visibility, when trying to walk quietly, when fighting, generally when there is a greater requirement for stability and control, humans (especially when barefoot or wearing minimal footwear) tend to instinctively adopt a fore-/midfoot first strike.

When walking on solid, even terrain in good visibility and without imminent danger, most people would naturally use a heel-first strike, as it's a lot more economical in terms of muscle/energy usage. In that sense - if you're looking to build your calves, I have little doubt that consciously walking with a forefoot strike all the time might just do the trick, especially considering that calf muscles have a larger percentage of slow-twitch muscle fibres responding to a larger volume of submaximal loads.

You just have to make sure to take smaller steps, bend your knees a bit more than people generally do and fix your anterior pelvic tilt if you have it so as not to look too awkward (that is, if you care about the social aspect of it.)

When running barefoot or in minimal shoes on a hard surface almost everyone trying to use a heel-strike will quickly and painfully realise what a terrible idea it is and would naturally revert to a fore-/midfoot strike in order to take advantage of the body's natural shock-absorption mechanisms. Only modern thick-soled shoes make heel-first running possible, as they absorb a lot of the shock at the heel so no pain is immediately felt there.

They also make it feel somewhat natural, as when the feet are isolated from the natural ground sensation by centimetres of padding, there's somewhat of an instinct towards a stronger impact to regain that sensation. There's a reason for the extremely high number of nerve endings in the feet. Unfortunately the result is a running mechanic to which we are simply not physically adapted and a huge amount of preventable injuries, which are largely unknown in parts of the world where shoes aren't a big thing.

Feet in the western world are so universally deformed by the continuous usage of modern shoes from a very young age, that I would speculate there aren't many present day podiatrists who've ever seen a healthy real-life foot with naturally spread-out toes and a strong, healthy arch.

Big, strong supportive shoes (especially ones with pointy/compressive toe boxes) are really bad for you, unless you're walking in very dangerous terrain with lots of sharp pointy things, in which case they're great for you. Not the pointy toe boxes, those are always bad for you, but they look better, so you know. Pick your poison.

While biomechanically we're certainly screwed up quite a bit, I would say the solution is retraining according to an intuitive understanding of natural basic movement principles and their application to each specific situation, rather than blindly following a single recipe no matter what.

I don't believe for a second that people walked forefoot-first all the time at any point in human history, although without modern perfectly even roads and thick-soled shoes, they probably did it quite a bit more often. Just check out any video of indigenous people online, they walk heel-first all the time.

Source - lots of personal research, observation, experimentation and some application of common sense. I am not a professional in any related area.

<comment><USER14> Some further advantages of forefoot walking: it is much quieter; it is easier to precisely place your feet (e.g. 10 people can all walk in the same footprints and hide their numbers); you can very quickly and easily transition between walk and run or other types of motions (jumping, climbing, backing up, scooting sideways, crouching, diving to the floor, ...); it is more stable / easier to recover from sudden forces if e.g. the ground gives way or someone shoves you; your torso bounces around a lot less, which can make carrying certain kinds of loads or wearing some types of clothing easier, and also really helps if you are trying to aim a video camera while walking.

<comment><USER46> Absolutely. In terms of effective, controlled movement, it's better in pretty much every single way, except that it costs more energy, which is why it's generally not a particularly natural, intuitive thing to do all the time. Like probably every living organism, we're not generally programmed for unnecessary exertion.

EDIT: That being said, a lot can be improved in most people's heel-first gait, among other things - taking smaller steps, pushing the pelvis slightly forward into a neutral tilt, staying a bit closer to the ground (slightly more bent knees), making contact with the ground before shifting the whole weight, not throwing the legs forward and letting the heels slam on the ground. Getting all of that right makes heel-walking a lot more controlled and less bouncy. It also feels great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Japan has its medieval way of walking too: [http://asaikarate.com/what-is- nanba-walking-ナンバ歩きとは何ぞや?/](http://asaikarate.com/what-is-nanba-walking- ナンバ歩きとは何ぞや?/)

</comment><comment><USER48> The bit about developing bigger calf muscles from walking on the toe rings true for me. I always ran on the balls of my feet, with my heel almost never hitting the ground - I played a lot of basketball, and you're always moving forward and back, side to side, rarely in a straight line more than a couple dozen yards at most. It's common to say you got "caught flat-footed" if somebody blows by you when playing defense, and we routinely did a drill we called "foot fires," where you step in place on the balls of your feet as fast as possible, keeping balance.

I still have to be careful buying pants; I've blown the inseam out of a few pairs of slim-leg jeans below the knee pulling them on too quickly.

<comment><USER37> The muscles you use to stand up on your toes are quite distinctive, if I dance on-your-toes enough I end up with a bulge in my calf similar to women who frequently wear high heels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> somewhere out there, one brave last LifeHacker is combining this with the Power Pose just because</comment>


How bugs per line of code is similar to traffic deaths per car - <AUTHOR> http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/10126017769/

<comment><USER2> As people are so fond of reminding here, "correlation is not causation". These data do _not_ imply that:

"some of the things that one might think have an impact on traffic fatalities that according to Smeed's law do not: better traffic signage, traffic rules, more stringent enforcement of such rules, mass adoption of safety equipment etc."

You can NOT draw that conclusion from these data alone. For this, you need a sample that has the _same_ N/P but differ among the factors above. It is entirely plausible that this graph _comes about_ from the adoptation of such measures, which are only done by societies as the number of vehicles increases.

If you want these data to be explained by homeostasis, you need to show that the risk of dying is _the same_ in all these countries. When judged by D/N, it sure looks like the acceptable risk is not the same, but it's probably not a good measure. Is "fraction of the population dying in vehicle accidents" really constant among these countries? In that case, I'd agree that it looks like homeostasis.

<comment><USER3> _You can NOT draw that conclusion from these data alone._

You're right, but there is a lot of other data, and a whole new design philosophy that follows from it (<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html>), which I suspect the blogger is aware of but which he has chosen not to introduce here.

His subject isn't actually traffic, after all, but his conjecture about computer code.

<comment><USER2> I'm aware of the different strategies of roadway safety. However, if the conclusion from the article is true, then there shouldn't be _any_ design philosophy that works, though...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1\. Read a chapter from The Mythical Man-month each day before going to bed. ^_^

2\. Assumption that when a large project with lots of coders involved grows (and matures) the number of bugs (per line of code) decreases, is very naive one. (see pp 1)

3\. Of course, all those useless layers and piles of poorly-designed abstractions we used to see in a typical Java projects are the results of automated memory management and Moore's law. ^_^

If one neglects what is under the hood one will eventually run into a trouble. Memory and its management are still here, like another processes, flows of data and other dynamics. Not thinking about them does not eliminate them from existence. JVM is a user-level process, one of many.

So, it is not a _risk homeostasis_ it is a mere ignorance. ^_^

</comment><comment><USER5> This is pure speculation, based on an analogy that makes little sense, and, AFAIK, it is factually wrong.

Studies have shown that, all else being equal, there's a linear relation between code size and bug count. I can't find the source right now, though.

<comment><USER6> There is this study <http://www.neverworkintheory.org/?p=58> which basically says after you control for LOC most of the other complexity metrics become noise.

<comment><USER5> That's the one I was looking for, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One interesting thing that the theory does is it reminds us that behavior and risk is a two pronged game - we _accept_ the level of risk we are comfortable with, and we indicate our acceptable level of risk by our behavior.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think it has more to do with culture than number of vehicles, the countries with high deaths are all in West-Europe. I would be able to predict that without even looking at the graphs, in Italy, Spain,.. they drive like a madman in big cities. For most of the other countries, the differences are really minor which imo are random or can be explained by traffic regulations or differences between the countries.

I think it's the same with programming, the size of your program doesn't matter but the culture does. If don't use any system to develop, test,.. and don't really care about good code you will have bugs. On the other hand, with a good system you will have less bugs.

If the argument of the blog post was true, then you would have more bugs if you use more libraries? Or the bigger the libraries you use the more bugs? Doesn't make any sense.

<comment><USER9> There've been a lot of road safety and speeding restrictions introduced in the UK over the last 20 years, and at the same time there's been a drop in the number of deaths back to 1926 levels. I'm willing to bet that the profile of car ownership is very different to then.

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10408417>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This analogy becomes more and more true as programming's virtues shift more toward communication and away from cleverness. When performance becomes a commodity (and it will soon, even for very large systems), the biggest expense isn't getting from point A to point B, it's the accidents that happen along the way. There couldn't be a better analogy demonstrating the need for programmers to write for humans rather than computers.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is not necessarily true though. You might be better off writing code than figuring out how to use somebody else's half written library.

Productivity should strictly be number of hours between problem and solution.

</comment><comment><USER12> Neat analogy. Just as I value concise code, I prefer cities that have fewer cars in them.

</comment><comment><USER13> What would happen if driving drunk became legal? Nothing? That seem extremely counterintuitive.

<comment><USER7> oddly enough, not really.

The argument is that if drunk driving became common (because it was legal) then other drivers and pedestrians would adjust their behavior according to the increased risk.

Based on that, you would expect a spurt of additional deaths early on, as we adjusted to the new risk, and then the numbers would drop again.

That sounds pretty reasonable to me, certainly if I knew that every third driver was drunk, I would behave differently on the roads (ie, would never go near them).

<comment><USER14> Adjust your behavior to a car flying at you at 80MP/H? Right. And you do realize that drunk drivers don't need any other traffic to park themselves into a tree?

It's the same when gunloon rednecks argue that if it wasn't guns, it would be knifes, all the way down to a paperclip.

<comment><USER2> It's reasonable. It would be so dangerous to be around traffic that other people would avoid it. Thus _deaths_ might go back down, but note that there's nothing saying that everything else would be normal. It would for example be a lot more inconvenient for those that now stay away from traffic to get around.

These data should not be used to make the claim that attempting to increase safety is _useless_. Improved vehicle safety features, for example, has been compensated for by faster driving. That means the safety features didn't help lower deaths, but they _did_ help everyone get around faster.

<comment><USER15> So if we want to make roads safer, we should make people think driving is more dangerous than it really is.

It's counterintuitive - changes in perception of reality are more useful than changes in reality.

<comment><USER16> > _we should make people think driving is more dangerous than it really is_

Which is precisely what is being researched and done in various areas, e.g by making the road appear narrower through various visual tricks.

And it works.

Until people learn. I don't mean by that that they necessarily know they're being tricked and consciously "undo" the trick, but they are then trained to handle a tougher constraint, and thus are able to routinely do something they could not before, out of pure training. The whole danger/constraint/learning system is actually very elastic. The net result is that not only they end up driving at the same speed as before in the modified area, they actually drive faster than before in the other non-modified areas.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my idea and free web app (for site monitoring) - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
I submitted a similar post a while ago, but it seems that my msg was lost (yes, I shouldn't have set a URL).
Anyway, what we developed is more than just a normal site monitoring that checks if a site is up or not, but a new concept of Network-based integrity monitoring (NBIM).
The idea is to monitor the integrity of network/Internet assets, similarly to what we are used with file-based integrity. In a nutshell,  it will verify that important parts of your Internet presence have not being altered.
Our beta product, NBIM, offers this functionality to detect changes (malicious or not) on web pages, http headers, whois database, DNS, host, HTTPS pages, and SSL certificates (with more to come). If anything ever changes, you get an email alert (or tweet to be cool) almost in real time showing a diff between the old and new snapshot.
The link: http://sucuri.net/?page=nbi
Comments about the idea, page design, implementation, concept, etc are welcome!
Thanks!
--dd <comment><USER2> I like the idea too, but thought I would offer some comments about the design. Just thinking out loud, so don't take anything personally ;)

I am not sold on the logo, firstly the icon that looks kinda like a lint ball (is it meant to be the 'cloud'?) and the wording for sucuri, my brain insists it starts with SLI whenever I glance at it... I like the idea of a stylized font, but I don't think its quite there yet.

Also the menu, although simple and usable, seems like it could be a bit more prominent/flashier. It just doesn't seem to match the layout... hard to explain this one.

I like the design/layout of the content areas, nice CSS work, but perhaps the login box text could be a little larger or clearer. If you're having trouble fitting it in (hence the small text), try losing "Address" off Email Address, its implied enough these days.

Under the form elements to enter your site address, the text seems very small, for something so important. Beef that up a bit, its part of your sales pitch, don't hide it away :)

Actually... while I sat here procrastinating, I did up a quick mockup of what I am talking about... I thought you should make the products you are promoting for more prominent,

Check it out at : <http://www.esonica.com/sucuri.jpg>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the awesome and detailed reply. I will certainly put all your suggestions in practice.

I am more a security type of person (and unix guy) and that's why I tried to keep the page simple, but I guess I left it too simple :)

Btw, did you get a chance to register and look at the application internally? I would love some feedback from there too.

thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 1) 5th bullet point should read: Notifications available via email and Twitter!

2) Re: Sucuri Network-based Integrity Monitoring. This header should not end with a period. Also, do you mean to say the following? Sucuri: Network-based Integrity Monitoring

3) Your explanation below the site field needs polishing. I'd prefer to have it read:

Sucuri notifies bloggers, administrators and web designers when critical information about their systems change.

Don't want to see your site in a _defacement archive_ or in the _news_ because it was hacked? Try NBIM now to be alerted as soon as a suspicious change occurs.

<comment><USER3> Change the text entry button from "Sign Up" to "Try" or "Go". You can still ask people to sign up on the next page, but this change would give people the sense that they're quickly trying your service out without a commitment.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's why I like HN... Always good feedback :)

Thanks for the help, I will implement those very soon..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Idea is good, very original... I registered and am still waiting for the activation email (being more than 10min).

</comment><comment><USER5> You say free, do you mean free software too? Any plans to release the code or just SAS?</comment>


The Continued Battle Against Dangerous Nonsense - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42912720 <comment><USER2> IMO this is just an extreme extension of the bs which has been peddled by multi national for ages (through celebrities no less). Have sugar laden cereals for breakfast, it helps in keeping your child active or this particular stuff has "added" or fortifies with minerals and vitamins. Or celebs endorsed cola brands.

What is happening now is that people, specially celebs, are realizing they that production assembly lines are now commoditized and advertising has become less and less problematic, thanks to twitter, Facebook and other social media outreach. So, they don't need a multi national brand like Nestle, Kellogs etc to peddle their stuff - there is no need for "Tom Brady" approved Cola or something. They can reach directly to their core audience.

<comment><USER3> BS is peddled by industries seeking to grow their business. Medical professionals are also susceptible to industry-sponsored BS-vendors:

[https://www.propublica.org/article/when-evidence-says-no- but...](https://www.propublica.org/article/when-evidence-says-no-but-doctors- say-yes)

Oxycontin was supposedly non-habit forming. Decades ago DES was sold to prevent miscarriages, but actually caused them, and gave those women's daughters vaginal cancer.

No one can actually be fully trusted, so people trust who they think is trust- able. I prefer the middle path... Consult with the professionals, but take their advice with plenty of salt [0].

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I blame Ancel Keyes for starting the whole nonsense diet advice trend.

</comment><comment><USER5> That article is a shining example of why I'm quite happy to pay my TV licence fee. I'm not exactly sure where the funding for BBC.COM comes from and until recently I was excluded from .com due to being British (odd thing, now sorted).

However, ignoring how the article was funded, it is a good example of proper journalism.

Why on God's good earth is quackery still a thing?

<comment><USER6> The article notably excludes Orrin Hatch - if you are wondering how politics could possibly play into this, he made the entire supplements industry possible by using his power to exclude dietary supplements from oversight by the FDA and creating a cycle where the industry kept on funding Hatch in order to get favourable legislation. Utah is the home of quack medicine. [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/06/opinion/the-politics- of-f...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/06/opinion/the-politics-of- fraudulent-dietary-supplements.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I spent six years getting chemistry degrees (and became a programmer instead) and every time people blame chemicals for things I have to laugh.

<comment><USER8> "Chemical free" is always amusing. Pretty much the only material product I buy that's truly chemical free is electricity from the power company.

<comment><USER9> "Organic" is almost as bad in my opinion.

<comment><USER10> With all of these terms, do you understand what people mean when they use them? _Artificial_ and _natural_ likewise can be criticized, but is it helpful? Are you perhaps dereferencing them to a different definition than what they intend? Human language is very fluid and understanding depends at least in part on context. I have my own pet peeves with respect to imprecision in language, but I work against that from getting in the way of the real goal, which is understanding.

<comment><USER9> "Organic" and "Chemical" are words that already have a clear meaning. In the alternative context in which these words are used, they have no meaning. You won't find a consistent or concise definition that describes the alternative context in which these words have come to be used. What those words really mean in that context, is completely arbitrary, varies greatly depending on who you're talking to, and has noting to do with the use of chemicals, or organic chemicals. Worse yet, products that are deemed to be either "Organic" or "Chemical Free" often fail to meaningfully differentiate themselves from the products which are "not organic" or "chemical".

At best, the use of these words is a deceitful marketing ploy used to manipulate people who don't understand chemistry. At worst (as is the case with "organic certification"), it is simply a scam used to con money out of producers and consumers.

<comment> King-Aaron You're fighting a losing battle if you try to enforce traditional meaning to language in a contemporary environment. Context is the key.

The word "organic" takes on a very different meaning if you're describing a brake rotor compound, instead of a bunch of bananas in a supermarket, for instance. However it's by no stretch _devoid of meaning_ in either context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> actual article title 'The scientists calling Tom Brady and Gwyneth Paltrow's bluff'

<comment><USER12> The title depends on which region you are in</comment></comment>


Show HN: Drug Side Effect Database for the Masses - <AUTHOR> http://www.drugcite.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, we've been working on this for the better part of 2 years and feel it's almost ready for both Doctors & Consumers. We have many tools in development that will allow users to take this data further. Your input is always appreciated.</comment>


Startup Airline to offer all-you-can-fly subscriptions for $150/m - <AUTHOR> http://planered.com/

<comment><USER2> Am I the only one that absolutely hates these types of pages?

"We really won't tell you any specifics of what we're doing, but give us your email address and we'll be sure to send you advertisements when we decide to!"

Do these things usually work? If it's a YC startup, or is being done by a friend or something, I'll usually give up my email address, but when it's just "we promise the moon! We'll respect your email, honest!", I usually skip it.

<comment><USER3> Just use firstname.lastname@example.com so you can filter it all out later if it was a waste of time.

<comment><USER4> It's also vary easy to strip out username+<stuff>@gmail.com to firstname.lastname@example.com. Honestly, if I had a list of email address I was about to spam it's one of the first steps I would take.

<comment><USER5> Then only use username+<stuff>@gmail.com and filter anything that goes directly to firstname.lastname@example.com :). I never found spam to be a problem when using GMail, and my e-mail address is publicly accessible in multiple places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cool idea. But

a) How in god's name do they keep costs to $150/month for only 9 passengers. Those passengers will collectively pay $1350 a month for unlimited flights? Are they assuming the majority will end up only flying once or twice? What if they get mostly business guys that fly a couple of times a week. I don't get pricing. One ticket costs more than $150.

b) What stops the TSA from simply stepping in and deeming this a security risk? Limit goes from 9 passengers to 5. Or 4. Etc.

c) Even if the TSA doesn't step in and change the law, how does this guarantee safety? I'm not a fan of TSA and as an Arab flying I'm permanently chosen for the "random check"...but there's a reason airport security exists, no?

d) What about this team makes us think they can build it? They're bootstrapped and trying to buy planes. Using early customer deposits. And their tech team is recruited via a tweet ( <https://twitter.com/#!/PlaneRed/status/93572991077715968>) So seriously, if these guys don't have tech talent or deep pockets, what do they bring to the table?

e) There's no mention on whether the big airports would allow this to go on. "Flying from New York to D.C." : Would that entail driving out somewhere random in Jersey and landing somewhere random far away in Virginia far away from D.C.?

f) "Luxurious" 9-person planes. Luxury here is subjective. Is it a Gulfstream V or a Cessna Caravan?

g) Booking. Besides the fact that they're looking for tech geniuses to build their system via Twitter, any idea on what booking will look like? Will I have to book in advance? How big will the airline "fleet" be? If I'm on an "all- you-can-eat" flight model, I'd expect to be able to log on today and book a flight for Philly tomorrow or the day after. That's what Net Jets does.

I like what they're promising. But there are just a ton of really important tough questions that they seriously need to answer.

</comment><comment><USER7> The $150 is a teaser rate.

From their email:

"A few weeks before we start flying we'll begin selling subscriptions. We will be rewarding our earliest supporters (the first 500), and those who recruit the most friends to PlaneRed with $150/month all-you-can-fly pricing. Obviously, the number of subscriptions we can sell at that price are pretty limited. So please - tell your friends to ensure that you get one!"

</comment><comment><USER8> _skip TSA_ Excuse me? This entire idea, even if realistic, is fraught with political risk: "Oh, you're flying 9 person-planes to avoid our law? One of the major airlines is lobbying against you? Well... time to change the law."

</comment><comment><USER9> More from Forbes: <http://blogs.forbes.com/edzitron/2011/06/29/planered/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Interestingly, they will exclusively fly 9-passenger planes in order to skirt the TSA rule of screening for planes that fly 10 or more.

<comment><USER10> I must be the only one that doesn't mind going through the TSA screening. It usually takes 2 minutes and isn't a big deal. The fact that these guys circumvent the TSA screening rule ___could_ __almost make PlaneRed flights a greater target for malicious activity.

<comment><USER11> "I must be the only one that doesn't mind going through the TSA screening."

Probably.

Lineups at the airport can be a lot longer than 2 minutes because of the slow pace of screening. And frisking children and the elderly? I feel so much safer.

I don't see why any terrorist would need to re-target airplanes. They did their job in making flying into the U.S. as one of the most dreadful experiences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Now I got it!

      ... starting at $150/m!

Add one or two zeros and you will be closer to the truth.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> From the welcome email, which also links to their blog <http://planered.tumblr.com/>:

Thanks for signing up!

Our goal is to change the way we fly. No more buying outrageously priced tickets. No more lost luggage. No more middle seats in a cramped cabin. And no more TSA.

By signing up we'll make sure you know what's happening as we build our airline - and you'll be among the first to know when we're ready to launch.

A few weeks before we start flying we'll begin selling subscriptions. We will be rewarding our earliest supporters (the first 500), and those who recruit the most friends to PlaneRed with $150/month all-you-can-fly pricing. Obviously, the number of subscriptions we can sell at that price are pretty limited. So please - tell your friends to ensure that you get one!

<comment><USER13> It was my knowledge that it was difficult to go lower on prices in any way without losing money?

The larger planes could take advantage of economies of scale, the only way to get lower fares would be to drastically reduce the cost of flying a plane in the first place.

No lost luggage, more spacious interiors, and less TSA are always selling points though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A two hour flight would cost at the very minimum $6000. With a maximum of 10 passengers, that works out to $600/ per passenger. I don't understand how they can offer this for $150/mo. Perhaps they bombard passengers with advertisements or do scientific experiments to them.

<comment><USER14> From their blog (<http://planered.tumblr.com/>):

We'd like to get subscriptions down to $150 a month. In fact, we're guaranteeing that rate to some early subscribers, and the top PlaneRed.com referrers.

But, if at that rate we just can't put enough planes in the sky to meet demand - we'll have to charge a little more on the subscription - or add a small $25 cost for each flight. (We know - that ruins the 'all you can fly' but we've had several folks make passionate cases for doing so.) What do you think? Which would be better $250 a month, or $150 a month, and $25 per flight?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If they're bootstrapped as they say they are, and can get revenue right away, more power to them. Air taxis were supposed to be the hot new thing in 2008. I think Ron Garrett (cofounder of what became Virgin Charter) has an account on HN; I hope he'll comment.

</comment><comment><USER16> How many people are going to click past the "Let us harvest your email address and we'll let you know the details" landing page?

</comment><comment><USER17> I want to work here. Does anyone know these people?

(Hi Mike! When's your RTW trip?)

<comment><USER6> They're looking for "tech geniuses":

<https://twitter.com/#!/PlaneRed/status/93572991077715968>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a really tough sell... There is no screening for planes smaller than 10 passengers if there is no "sterile" area at either airport. This means that they'll have to fly into smaller airports, which (often) means you're further from the city, with no rental car, public transportation, etc.

They will likely be flying small propeller planes, which many people don't like... props make sense for these short routes though because they are often faster, based on the fact that there is less time for takeoff and landing (they don't spend as much time "reaching altitude")

I also don't like that they are trying to bootstrap based on folks buying these subscriptions which they have yet to launch, and that they plan to launch in a month. Very pyramid-scheme-like.

I would love for it to work, but I just can't see this business model surviving. It reminds me a bit of independence air and Dayjet, both of which lasted less than a year.

Also, this doesn't inspire confidence: <https://twitter.com/#!/PlaneRed/status/93572991077715968>

<comment><USER19> That tweet frustrates the hell out of me. Am I wrong to read "tech geniuses" as kind of condescending?

<comment><USER20> I would think so. It seems like they are being genuine.</comment></comment></comment>


What unexpected thing do you find most useful on your Apple Watch? - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleWatch/comments/f7jj1j/what_unexpected_thing_do_you_find_most_useful_on/ <comment><USER2> A friend of mine has one and said that Apple Pay Express, Mac auto unlock, receiving calls via cellular and heart rate monitoring were among their useful features on the watch.</comment>


Multiprocess Firefox - <AUTHOR> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Multiprocess_Firefox <comment><USER2> From the experience I've had with Chrome, I would say that process per tab is overhead. Sure, there are some benefits from having a few processes that are managing different parts of the system, but not hundreds of processes just for browsing. The way I use Firefox is that having 50 or more tabs open is normal for me, sometimes there are even hundreds of them. Currently Firefox works great and although there are some unresponsiveness during some workflows, they are not so annoying.

I am really worried about this change because I have used Firefox since its version 1.5 and am very familiar with all its problems and successes through the years.

<comment><USER3> > The way I use Firefox is that having 50 or more tabs open is normal for me

I've never understood this. Isn't that what bookmarks are for?

<comment><USER4> I currently have 2014 tabs in my session (almost all unloaded, using around 2GB of ram that I wouldn't use otherwise). I had 1600 tabs a few days ago. They are links I clicked on in other apps or browsed to over the past few months.

When I get a chance to plow through a few dozen/hundred of these tabs I can read/view them and close them very quickly. Notice all the UI stuff I don't have to do: I never had to perform the the actions of saving a bookmark, opening a list of bookmarks, opening a specific bookmark, or deleting a bookmark.

I clicked a link once upon a time, and I will close the tab some time in the future.

When I switch to and close ten tabs, all I have to do from a UI perspective is type q ten times.

<comment><USER5> In terms of UI stuff, how do you find a tab among a thousand?

When the tab page title shrinks and all I see is favicon, I feel lost.

<comment><USER6> You can of course search open tabs from the address bar. But at least my workflow is to browse through the old tabs and read / close one by one.

Also in Firefox the tabs never shrink to just favicon, the tab heads become a scrollable list. Much better than Chrome imo.

<comment><USER7> I use Tree Style Tab for this, although I hate the actual tree functionality - it just happens to be the only reasonable vertical tab solution I've found. Unfortunately, it seems to get a little bit laggy with more than a couple hundred tabs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In between e10s, Servo, and the new developer theme in the current Nightly, I feel like Firefox is finally starting to become more competitive to other browsers again. I switched to Chrome because it seemed like Firefox was becoming more and more dated in comparison, both in terms of technology and UI. I still have some gripes with Firefox at the moment, but I'm beginning to seriously consider switching back.

This is obviously anecdotal, but both e10s and the Nightly in general have been remarkably stable during the time I've tested them.

<comment><USER9> The chrome dev tools are way better than in Firefox. It was a reluctant change for me, but my productivity in chrome is way higher.

<comment><USER10> I had the same experience though I have to admit that some things in Firefox are better these days, like checking where an event comes from, going really deep into objects, referencing other objects, comparing rather big objects.

The only thing I really miss is a view WebSocket frames. In many other cases I ended up preferring Firefox Dev Tools which I think while a bit harder to get into are more powerful.

But that might really relate to _what precisely_ one is doing. I am not a web designer.

<comment><USER9> The only thing I'm missing in either browser is the ability to ignore jQuery as I'm debugging. Stepping in and out of jQuery (and other libraries like underscore) is a pain.

<comment><USER11> The Firefox debugger should automatically blackbox minified sources. You can also click on the little eye icon in the debugger panel to manually blackbox sources.

You can also use the developer toolbar to run a command like `dbg blackbox --glob *-min.js` etc. to blackbox a bunch of stuff at once.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Tools/Debugger/How_...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Tools/Debugger/How_to/Black_box_a_source)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Please please test battery life impact while implementing the Multi-process stuff.

I had to move away from Chrome just on the battery life issue. I suspect (but cannot conclusively prove) that the multi-process crap that Chrome has just drains your battery much faster. And yes I am perfectly aware of the supposed fix in Chrome for the battery killing bug.

<comment><USER13> There's no inherent reason why multiprocess would have a significant impact on energy, it just adds a relatively small amount of extra context switching and marshalling to what is already a huge pile of the same (your desktop OS). When the system is idle, or a page is rendered, the difference shouldn't be measurable.

<comment><USER14> Hypothetically, 50 processes all running separate unsynchronized wakeup timers and event loops could bring the processor out of sleep 50x more often than a single process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Finally some movement on this! It really feels like an inferior experience in 2015 when your browser freezes from an unresponsive javascript in another tab.

<comment><USER16> Chromium circa 2008?

<comment><USER17> Or IE7 circa 2006. IE7 separated its UI and browser content in different processes. IE8+ group several tabs into one process when passing a threshold. This is much better for battery life compare to Chrome process-per-tab.

<comment><USER18> Chrome also groups multiple tabs on single process, based on a number of factors: [https://www.chromium.org/developers/design- documents/process...](https://www.chromium.org/developers/design- documents/process-models)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> New multiprocess mode is a big pain for add-on developers. More details [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/Working_with_mul...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/Working_with_multiprocess_Firefox)

</comment><comment><USER20> The problem with e10s (Electrolysis, codename for multiprocess Firefox) is it's actually _less_ concurrent and runs far _worse_ than normal Firefox, at least currently. It's downright unusable.

<comment><USER21> Switching tabs is just awful. If one page is busy loading something, I want to switch to another tab and see what's there, but instead I get to stare at the word "Connecting..." for several seconds. I just feel like I'm waiting for the browser to catch up all the time.

<comment><USER22> FYI, you can help submit a performance profile to Mozilla so they can work to resolve this: [http://mikeconley.ca/blog/2015/05/04/electrolysis-and-the- bi...](http://mikeconley.ca/blog/2015/05/04/electrolysis-and-the-big-tab- spinner-of-doom/)

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the link. It's almost certainly one of my addons that's causing the trouble, but I like my addons!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interesting -- I figured a multiprocess Firefox would only arrive once Servo was finished. Or are these two projects complementary?

<comment><USER24> They're completely separate projects- Servo is run by different people and is intended more as a research project.

They do overlap in that Firefox is starting to include little bits of Rust for things the the URL parser or image decoders.

<comment><USER21> Servo isn't aiming at replacing Gecko in Firefox, but it is aiming to be production-ready code. The plan is to make it embeddable like webkit. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9541138](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9541138)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I really hope Mozilla keeps NoScript alive. .. Please help the maker get it ported to support Multiprocess Firefox.

<comment><USER26> Is NoScript really at risk? That would be a big deal.

<comment><USER27> Yep, add-ons that connect background logic and "on-site" logic are going to have a lot of issues. Some APIs change from sync to async (which is good anyway). Some others are replaced or removed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> For the first time in years, the other day, I left Firefox open overnight. I use a proxy at work for Firefox due to strict filtering on our primary connection. I was monitoring the amtrack debacle in Philadelphia. I came in the next day to an entirely unresponsive Firefox. I had purposely gone to the home page before leaving to avoid bashing the processing with the live stream. Still, after ~12 hours of being on the cnn.com home page - with NO other usage - Firefox had become unusable. Chrome - with its ~20 normal and ~13 incognito tabs were as stable as they were 3 days ago.

I want (and do to an extent) to love Firefox. It was what at one time what expressed to me that there was an alternative to ie. But, I now, in the real world (at least the world I inhabit) can not find it to be better than chrome in any instance. From dev tools to performance. I had no intention of trying to test the differences; I happened to be using ffx for the proxy reason and was saddened to see it had crashed the following day.

Here's to hoping this speaks to progress in this regard.

(Speaking from OS X)

<comment><USER29> Just remember that anecdote != data and all that. My ff gets restarted in two cases - ff or kernel gets security patch. That sometimes means a month of no restarts. (With maybe 30+ tabs in different groups open)

<comment><USER30> Same here. I keep sessions open for months at a time, with heavy tab churning (some days I have 30 open, then I close 10, open 20 more, etc).

<comment><USER31> FF on Windows (work) is rock solid for me, while on Mac (home) it becomes unusable (too slow) after a few days, and also is a memory hog. I do keep 100s of tabs open on both, although most of those are usually not loaded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Guys please don't do this, I hate chrome,not because it is almost perfect internet browser, just because it is almost an entire OS runs on top of my own OS(I just want a browser not os).I am afraid Firefox will end up where chrome going right now.

<comment><USER33> At this point pretty much _all_ (modern) browsers _except_ Firefox have this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> How much will process-per-tab increase memory usage?

<comment><USER35> This is multiprocess, but not process-per-tab. There is still a single rendering process for all tabs, at least for now.

<comment><USER36> But the ultimate plan seems to be to have process-per-tab. The article states: "In future iterations, we expect every browser tab to run in its own process."

<comment><USER37> There's some interesting talk about that in mozilla.dev.platform: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform/NHIjpGvOelE)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The multiprocess feature was one of the main reasons, I switched to Chrome in the first place. I think, it is just a good idea to keep the things separated, so one tab can not stop the whole browser.

Today, the browser more and more becomes that, which was called "operating system" some years ago. Many applications today run just from the browser and instead of switching apps, you switch the tabs....

So, it is just a good idea in my opinion to upgrade the security of the browser to a higher level.

I am not sure about the memory consumption, but since Chrome seems to have solved this topic, also Firefox should be able to, and maybe it's also time for me to switch back?

<comment><USER22> > I am not sure about the memory consumption, but since Chrome seems to have > solved this topic, also Firefox should be able to, and maybe it's also time > for me to switch back?

The reason I never promoted Chrome/ium to my "main" browser, instead using it sporadically whenever I decided I wanted to look at a page that use Flash is basically because Chrome is extremely RAM and CPU hungry in use cases where the number of user tabs are high (not sure what the tipping point is, but I regularly have more than 100 tabs present in my browser -- granted, not necessarily _loaded_ ).

Restoring a session with that many tabs basically disables the computer if using Chrome, necessitating a coffee break while pages load. Electrolysis in Firefox retains the lower RAM and CPU usage of the single process model, and also happens to feel much snappier day to day - I would absolutely recommend that you give the latest nightlies a shot -- or Firefox Aurora, which prompts users to turn it on: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I hope this doesn't lead to the overhead seen in Chrome. The overhead is constant and all the time; the browser is far from crashing all the time. I'm honestly very skeptic about the tradeoff here. And with the move to HTML5 and away from binaries ran by a browser engine, I'm unsure about the necessity due to current security issues in modern browsers too. The security nightmares in browsers always seem to have been related to ActiveX, NPAPI, running black boxes in general.

I actually think this was a far better idea (but ironically unthought of) during the days of ActiveX and a much less sensible idea today in 2015.

</comment><comment><USER40> Six years in the making? Wow...

</comment><comment><USER41> I've been using Chrome since Paul Irish started working on the Dev Tools. I used to have crashes when i had 120 tabs, but with Flashblock and uBlock i've had none.

</comment><comment><USER42> This was what motivated me to switch to Chrome several years ago.

</comment><comment><USER43> Tested it today and the performance improvement seems very significant. Good job Mozilla (wow, I haven't said that in a while...)

</comment><comment><USER44> Now if I can only fix the wobbly address bar that changes size depending on Back/Forward availability.

<comment><USER11> Can you please post a bug (with screenshots, list of add-ons installed, and any custom browser css tweaks) to [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/) and CC :callahad in Bugzilla?

Those sorts of fit-and-finish bugs really bother me, and I'd love to figure out how we can fix that one for you.

<comment><USER44> Thanks for the offer. But I believe that the decision to remove the Forward button when there is no 'Forward' history was a design decision. Unfortunately, it has the unpleasant effect of resizing the address bar as well. So as you click through tabs, or click links, the address bar keeps resiing depending on the state of the history in that tab.

These 'design' decisions are quite silly IMHO. But I will find the original bug report and CC you on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I am testing this , seems okay so far. ps. I also like ,Reader View

<comment><USER21> Reader view is also available in the Beta channel if you don't want to go as far as running nightlies just to get it. [https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/channel/#beta](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/#beta)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Goodbye RAM :) Or better for RAM, since I can now selectively kill and resume processes?

Oh, I see it's not one process per tab. So does anyone know how I can more easily survive on 2GB with many tabs, other than by constantly killing processes?

<comment><USER47> My strategy is to periodically close Firefox and reopen it, to "hibernate" the tabs I'm not currently using.

Between lazy tab restore and Chrome's process per tab memory overhead, Firefox is currently waaay better than Chrome for those of us coping with RAM Deficit Disorder and O(e^x) tab syndrome; I hope when the Fox gets process-per-tab they don't close that gap.

<comment><USER48> There's a plugin for that (tm). I use unload tab quiet successfully. The only problems I had were with pdfjs tabs.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- us/firefox/addon/unloadtab/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- us/firefox/addon/unloadtab/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> So they basically want to be Goolge Chrome? hmmm...

<comment><USER50> Other browsers are multi-process too? hmmm...

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Wouldn't too many processes bloat memory? I hope it will be configurable to have some balance.

</comment><comment><USER52> I hate FLASH when using with firefox. This is great news for all Flash-Hater :)

<comment><USER53> Why is it so? Flash is already in a separate process since '11 or '12 and I don't think electrolysis will bring any benefit in that regard.

<comment><USER52> Yes, but if there is a reason for Firefox to crash, it's due to the Flash Plugin.

<comment><USER53> Please elaborate, because IIRC the whole reason for offloading flash to a separate process was letting it crash without affecting the main process, and it fulfilled its duty every the time I've experienced a Flash crash.</comment></comment></comment></comment>