USA Temperature: can I sucker you? - <AUTHOR> https://tamino.wordpress.com/2018/08/08/usa-temperature-can-i-sucker-you/ <comment><USER2> Honest question: Why such vitriol against "climate deniers?" The term "climate denier" is loading with negative connotation just on it's face, and it's rarely used in isolation in an otherwise respectful way.

There will always be people that disagree with you about something. Some are honest, some are not. Why be an asshole and treat people poorly and disrespectfully? That makes you as bad or worse than them IMHO. Even when they are being assholes (which many are), it is an act of immaturity to lower yourself to that level.

How do you expect to win over hearts and minds when you approach people like that? The worst thing you can do when trying to convince someone of your opinion is offend them by stereotyping, generalizing, and straw-manning their position. How do you feel when people do this to you? Do you find yourself intellectually engaging with them, thinking that they might have some good points?

<comment><USER3> Because their stupidity is going to kill us all. I'm very vitriolic against people that are trying to kill me and my family, I can't help it.

<comment><USER4> Do you not see how your reply to the OP's sincere question amounts to the same lackluster, overgeneralized, and lazy intellectual stance that the people you're criticizing take on climate science?

You couldn't have more aptly proved the OP's point.

<comment><USER5> Honestly, I do not see it that way.

To me it seems as if sizable chunk of people believe in nonsense, and the nonsensical beliefs and actions based on such beliefs are detrimental not only to the people holding such beliefs, but every single living entity on this planet, future generations included.

How is that acceptable? With what right do the people holding these beliefs keep acting the way they do?

It is the reaponsibility of the rest of us to stop this madness as soon as possible. It is the responsibility we as species hold to our ancestors and future generations.

If it is all in vain for you. Fine. But please do consider other living organisms as as important as you, for _you_ are one of _us_. We are in this _together_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > We can completely ignore the fact that over the years the average location > of all the contributing stations has moved slightly northward to colder > territory[.]

Woah, that's not something I'd considered. Are weather stations that contribute to NOAA operated by the volunteer public, kind of like Weather Underground? Either way, that's pretty interesting that there's a distinct northward migration in at least one "demographic."

<comment><USER7> That graph is...questionable. The entire Y axis only covers 55 kilometers. I'm sure the NOAA has more principled ways of accounting for station movement.

<comment><USER8> 55km is not insignificant though. Some _very_ rough estimates - 55km is 0.5% of the distance from the equator to the pole. If the temperature range between those two extremes is 50C then the shift corresponds to a net cooling of 0.25C, which seems like it would have a noticable impact on those graphs.

Obviously there is more to it than that, but I don't think it makes it a non- issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Toxic chemicals in our water and air. Plastic in the ocean. Etc. Etc. These are all things that are killing us and are proven to be bad.

We have to do something irregardless if climate change is mann made or not. The debate is irrelevant (at least until we get everything else cleaned up)

Even climate change deniers want clean water.

<comment><USER10> Clean water is fairly distinct from climate change. Greenhouse gasses are mostly harmless aside from their warming effect, and the stuff that makes air and water unhealthy doesn't warm the planet.

Sometimes these two things go together, such as when replacing coal power plants with renewables. But sometimes they're in opposition. For example, the Volkswagen emissions scandal was that they increased particulate pollution in order to decrease greenhouse gas emissions. In diesel engines, there's a tradeoff between CO2 emissions and other emissions.

<comment><USER11> Erm, VW, decreased particulate emissions during testing in order to pass the testing and have the vehicles be higher powered (and more polluting) under normal use. They did it to sell cars and make profit; they weren't doing it to save the planet.

<comment><USER10> They did it to meet fuel economy numbers. CO2 emitted scales pretty much with fuel burned.

<comment><USER11> I may be misremembering, but AFAIR They artificially reduced diesel consumption figures by having the vehicles run different power curves during testing. Meaning they used more fuel, and made more particulate emissions than they claimed to. So they made it look like the cars would use less fuel than they actually did.

<comment><USER10> Some searching around reveals a lot of discussion about increased fuel consumption in fixed VWs. For example: [https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/jul/12/drivers- loss-o...](https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/jul/12/drivers-loss-of- power-vw-emissions-fix-class-action)

VW disputes this but I don't know if they can be believed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's despicable, isn't it? Like, there are climate change deniers that are overly-skeptical or gullible and buy into the mountains of misinformation. And then there are those like Steve Goddard who sit down every day and work their asses off creating said misinformation (check his twitter). Actively manipulating and cherrypicking data to deceive for personal gain (whether it be paychecks, political favor, whatever).

And they're winning, considering only half of Republicans believe climate change is even happening, let alone that it's manmade. This was probably the stupidest possible problem for the American political machine to make a wedge issue.

<comment><USER13> A fair question: has the climate alarmist side not cherry picked or even used fraudulent data to suit their cause as well? [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/01/leaked-e...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/01/leaked- emails-climate-jones-chinese)

Our skepticism isn't about the climate changing, (remember when it was called global warming?) it's a skepticism about the causes and the degree to which human influence plays a significant role. Any time there is any skepticism at all, we get labeled "deniers" or otherwise ostracized. That's pretty unique in science, usually skepticism is considered a healthy part of the scientific process — unless it's concerning a topic that has substantial political implications.

Given that a large segment of the climate change advocacy also "coincidentally" support far left economic policies as a "remedy," how can it be a surprise that people like me have a deep skepticism of the whole human- caused global warming debate. Another time we had "settled science" with so much politicization was when Eugenics was being advocated.

[http://www.michaelcrichton.com/why-politicized-science-is- da...](http://www.michaelcrichton.com/why-politicized-science-is-dangerous/)

I'll predict the inevitable downvotes, which really only proves the point: debating human causes of climate change is akin to debating the existence of Jesus Christ.

<comment><USER14> _" (remember when it was called global warming?)"_

I keep seeing this phrase lately. What does it mean? [To clarify, I'm asking about why people keep saying "remember when it was called…" as though it proves some point about it. Global warming is still an accurate description of the predicted and confirmed phenomenon.]

<comment><USER15> It's a common argument deniers make to try and spread FUD.

> They used to call it global _warming_ , then they rebranded it to (the more > accurate) climate change because their narrative was coming apart/everything > is fine/elitist climate scientists trying to get money. If they can't even > get their story straight why should we believe them??

> This message was brought to you by the 'Sensible Patriotic Americans Against > Climate Change Nonsense' (funded by Exxon).

<comment><USER8> The irony is that the phrase "climate change" was actually pushed initially by a Republican advisor (Frank Luntz) as it was considered less frightening to the public than "global warming".

The other irony is that this phrase was used a lot of few years back when many were claiming there was no warming going on by cherry picking the 1998 El Nino spike as a starting point for temperature graphs. Then the argument was - there is no warming, so the alarmists have stopped using the term "global warming". Of course with recent warming this particular cherry picked argument has fallen apart, but for some reason the meme persists.

I don't think the people who use the phrase even think about what they are saying. It is just part of the Gish Gallop that gets thrown out where number of words makes up for lack of solid argument (initial post that used this phrase up above being a perfect example of this)

<comment><USER16> _The irony is that the phrase "climate change" was actually pushed initially by a Republican advisor (Frank Luntz) as it was considered less frightening to the public than "global warming"._

Academic publications were using the phrase "climate change" to discuss the warming effects well before Frank Luntz. He may have been important to putting that phrase in front of the general public, but "climate change" isn't a euphemism invented by PR hacks. The foremost summary assessments are assembled by the IPCC -- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose first report came out in 1990.

Here are publications from 1980 and 1970 also using the phrase to discuss warming phenomena.

"On the Distribution of Climate Change Resulting From an Increase in CO2 Content of the Atmosphere", Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, January 1980

[https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0469%28198...](https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0469%281980%29037%3C0099%3AOTDOCC%3E2.0.CO%3B2)

"Carbon Dioxide and its Role in Climate Change", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, October 1970

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC283289/?page=1](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC283289/?page=1)

<comment><USER8> I don't think we are disagreeing. I'm just pointing out that the phrase was deliberately pushed out into the wider public discourse for specific political motivations, and it is ironic that this phrase is now being used by those same political forces to cast aspersions on scientists.

<comment><USER16> It appears that I was trying to correct a misconception you do not actually hold. I've seen apparently well meaning people claim that "global warming" was rebranded "climate change" by Frank Luntz to make it sound less scary, while both terms have been in widespread use among scientists since before the issue became widely known among the public.

<comment><USER17> Yes, but more to the point, they are not synonymous except in very recent history. Theories of climate change were needed to explain evidence of the Ice Age long before anyone thought that warming was a concern, back in the early 19th Century. The evidence that climate could change was also generally distinct from the evidence which established that CO2 could change the climate. Global warming is a subset or result of climate change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We really need to do something now! The summer has been un-fucking-believably hot. Climate change is not something that will happen in the "future" \-- we have to avoid a global ecosystem collapse in the next 10-15 years. :(

<comment><USER19> I know the Pascal's wager argument for action on Climate change (which is that if there is even 1% chance of climate change being real then why not act on it since the downside of acting is nothing <to one political ideology>), but the question is, what if climate change is NOT man-made?

If there is even 1% chance that climate change is a naturally occurring phenomenon then all our efforts to 'stop' greenhouse gas emissions is not going to give the results we want. Maybe building levies and moving cities inland be a better action plan? Maybe faster economic growth is a better solution than subsidized solar and wind.

I am trying to figure our arguments against the above argument.

<comment><USER17> Climate change _is_ man-made. We know how much oil we're burning, and we can measure the atmospheric CO2 carbon ratios, and also measure volcanic emissions. The picture is very consistent. There's also no real hope for an alternate mechanism. The actual effect of an increased partial pressure of CO2 is to push the CO2-rich region further out into space. Physics dictates that this _must_ warm the Earth, by ~3.7 W/m^2 per doubling[0].

The history of the theory is perhaps relevant here. CO2-induced climate change was proposed in 1896[1], and shortly thereafter it was stunningly refuted, by multiple independent lines of evidence. Over the next fifty years, the soundness of that evidence was called into question, and eventually the weight of evidence was sufficient to shift the consensus. We have been trying to disprove AGW for more than twelve decades. At this point, we need a very large effect, because the H2O-CO2 feedback loop is pretty ugly, and the effect also needs to be small enough to not notice. There's not really any candidate theories beyond absurdities like, "everything we know about thermodynamics is wrong," or "CO2 molecules have free will and like to play practical jokes on scientists". Failing that, I'm deeply sorry to say that AGW is real.

[0] [https://www.skepticalscience.com/christy-crock-6-climate- sen...](https://www.skepticalscience.com/christy-crock-6-climate- sensitivity.html) [1] [http://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf](http://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf)

<comment><USER19> I guess you don't know "Pascal's Wager" argument for climate change.

Because this is equivalent of hearing "But Bible is real, God himself wrote that in the bible, how dare you suggest that there might be 1% chance of God not being real?" in an actual 'Pascal's wager' argument.

<comment><USER17> Do you know what empiricism is?

<comment><USER19> Do you know what a thought experiment is?

<comment><USER17> Are thought experiments empirical?

<comment><USER19> Nope

<comment><USER17> So then, thought experiments can be valuable aids to scientific understanding, but they can't establish the truth or falsehood of any empirical claim. The two statements, "I have faith that God exists," and "carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas" are not only not equivalent, they are not _comparable_.

But, even setting aside issues of validity, your premise is that there is a not-inconsiderable chance that global warming is not caused by humans, and this premise may be rejected. Error is inherent to measurement, but that does not mean that all statements are equally likely. You don't get to just say, "Assume that the error bars are convenient for my argument"; that's not how empiricism works. AGW is predicated on optics and thermodynamics, and saying that AGW is not true is equivalent to saying that there is a problem with our understanding of those topics. That's the sort of claim where you should really be very specific and have strong evidence, but really, if you're arguing with thermodynamics, you're going to have a bad time.

If you really want to offer a skeptical argument, it _must_ be an empirical argument. In order to make a plausible empirical argument, you need to take into account all observations relating to that phenomenon. This can't be done without learning the science. There are empirical avenues which could lead to the invalidation of AGW (it was considered disproved for decades, after all), but thought experiments are not empirical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The first thing that jumps out at me, actually, is the use of a shorter time period than is likely available. From 1900 or 1920 to now is a pretty short time period.

We have (some) records dating back to the mid-1700s: [https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed- records/groups/0...](https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed- records/groups/027.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> "If you torture the data long enough, it will confess" \- Ronald Coase

</comment><comment><USER22> Meta question: am I being suckered by his presentation of an unsuckered baseline? What about 1850? 1800? 1200?

<comment><USER23> The article says his available data starts at 1895.

However, the point of the article is to reverse engineer a biased chart, and to show it's biased intentions. The article does not try to determine whether climate change is real or not (even though the author's opinion is obvious).

So it doesn't matter if the author's data is limited... it matters that the author of the biased chart has been cherry picked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What part do climate change deniers deny? Is it that the mean global temperature is going up, or the idea that it is going up because of human activities? I thought it was the latter.

<comment><USER25> It was the former and then the was overwhelming evidence. Then it was the latter... And now there's overwhelming evidence. So it's morphing into "it's too late there's nothing we can do!" Or it's not possible to organize etc. Still not helpful.

<comment><USER26> There's also "Yeah but it might be a good thing long-term" which was recently superseded by "But it's good for the economy and the market will fix it if it's really that bad.".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The problem is that the kind of people that would be convinced by proper graphs and analysis like this are not the kind of people that need convincing on this issue. They are not the type of people who value science, logic, or reason. No matter the evidence, they will place beliefs and unsubstantiated opinions ahead of evidence and in places like the US, where people are often taught that beliefs are equally or more important than evidence and facts, you get a culture of anti-intellectualism that supports policies that hurt the entirety of humanity. We should remind people that beliefs are just opinions and as the old adage goes, opinions are like assholes: everyone's got one and they're not particularly interesting or compelling. They certainly should not be the basis of policy.

</comment><comment><USER28> This p-hacking without looking at the p-value, just graphs. Love it.

</comment><comment><USER29> _There's a graph going around the internet from Steve Goddard a.k.a. Tony Heller, claiming to show that temperature in the U.S. has been declining, using only high temperatures, using only summertime temperatures, using only data since 1918, based on a simple average without taking into account new stations coming online or old stations retiring or area-weighting or any of that "expert" stuff_

I like that this piece makes clear how conscious choices of which data to present (and which not to present) can make an argument more convincing without actually lying. I don't like that it makes accusations about a particular person doing so without the courtesy of linking to the person being accused. If your argument is strong, it's usually better to let the reader judge for themselves whether your accusation is accurate. Failing to do so can undermine an otherwise strong argument.

I'm not familiar with Goddard/Heller. Searching for Tony Heller, I find [https://realclimatescience.com](https://realclimatescience.com). It includes a lot of graphs very similar to the ones Tamino dissects. The ones I saw were going day by day, looking at average temperatures for that day over the last 100 years. It's good to know that the start date might have been cherry picked to make the graph look better, and that this is based on raw unadjusted data, but it doesn't seem inherently unfair to use a particular day rather than the average for the entire year.

Is there a better "smoking gun" where he makes the more grandiose claims that Tamino accuses him of doing? Maybe, but without a direct link I wasn't able to find it. And in the absence of better evidence, as long as the graph is clearly labelled "Summer Average Maximum Temperature", I have to say that it seems unlikely that he's actually guilty of "claiming to show that temperature in the U.S. has been declining", and more likely that he is making the more direct claim that summer highs have not been increasing. Which given recent newspaper headlines, I do find to be an interesting counterpoint.

Searching for Steven Goddard, I find this: [https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/who-is-steven- goddard/](https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/who-is-steven-goddard/). I like that he clearly links his pen name to his real identity, and makes clear his scientific and environmental background, and admits that he is not actually a climate scientist. Does "Tamino" have a similar page? Who is he, and what is his background? It felt odd for one pseudonymous author to be calling attention to the fact that someone else was using a pseudonym. At this point, based on a tiny amount of research, I feel a little more comfortable with Heller/Goddard than with Tamino.

<comment><USER30> I imagine the blog post already assumes some familiarity with the people concerned, as this particular circus with arguing about global warming has been going on for a long time by now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This site has malicious ads on it.

</comment><comment><USER32> And they are trying to convince me using charts with a truncated y axis? How about doing it with charts that are not misleading?

<comment><USER8> What would you propose for a zero value on the Y axis? The only number that actually makes sense is zero Kelvin (since 0C and 0F are just arbitrary numbers). At that scale you will not see anything. But that doesn't mean nothing is happening.

The charts are fine.

<comment><USER32> At a 0-100 Celsius scale, or whatever is the equivalent in Fahrenheit, there will be an almost impossible to see increase over the time span of 100 years.

I'm not saying nothing is happening, but those charts are completely deceiving.

<comment><USER33> How would you chart your body temperature? Starting with 0 kelvin? Then you could conclude that all is well because you can't spot a 2 degree increase, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> What worries me more than climate change is the radioactive waste being pumped into the ocean daily for 6 years and no one is talking about it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Look at the temperature chart for the last 10,000 years, the greenland core ice temperature, GISP2 for example, and you'll see a completely different picture.

Everything looks extreme when looked at a very small scale...

<comment><USER36> [http://hot-topic.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/GISP210kla...](http://hot- topic.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/GISP210klarge.png)

Here's the GISP2 data, plus samples from the past two centuries.

Still seems pretty extreme to me.

<comment><USER35> I think this one shows it even better: [http://hot-topic.co.nz/wp- content/uploads/2011/01/GRIPtempBo...](http://hot-topic.co.nz/wp- content/uploads/2011/01/GRIPtempBoxlarge.png)

And yes, there's a fast climb, but it's not the only instance in history, look at 800AD, 200AD, and a lot more in the past, it seems to be the way the temp fluctuates, very sharply.

If we get back to the 10,000 years chart, do the last 150 years seems off the chart? If anything, it shows that we're cooler than the last 10,000 years.

<comment><USER36> A graph that starts at 1840 doesn't show the past 10 000 years at all -- in the long view, that's all just a bunch of noise. What happened to the 'completely different picture' that the 10 000 year view held?

Here's the 10 000 same graph with some colours [https://i.imgur.com/GWhaGCU.png](https://i.imgur.com/GWhaGCU.png) Blue periods were colder than 2009. Yellow periods were warmer. The past 10 000 years were mostly colder than 2009, and we've only gotten warmer since then.

And... precedent isn't the main issue here. Those large bumps have causes. This time, the cause is us. It's up to us [collectively] whether we want this.

Maybe the Roman Period's ~-29.75C represents a better climate for humanity than the 1855 levels. That's right around that '2 degree limit' people talk about. If that's a target, it's about time to transition out of making 'as much CO2 possible as fast as possible'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Great. More 'ammo' for climate change deniers to take out of context and spread around.

Most folks would not bother with trying to understand the points this article is making when presented with the 'no change here' graph. HN readers are not 'most folks' so this type of data manipulation is obvious and wrong to many here.

<comment><USER38> I wouldn't say that - he's basically reverse engineered the graph that a climate change denier is already using for evidence and shown how it's basically cherry-picked BS.

Clearly the denialists are already well-versed with this particular approach.

<comment><USER39> I don't even believe that people that produce such graphs are real deniers. I think there is a lot of money to be made by for people like this and they are in the "climate denier industry". Someone going out of their way to produce a graph like that must know what they are doing and have ulterior motives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is a very nice blog post. Quite instructive. Recently, several times I've run into people tell me that temps in the U.S. are rising and I've wondered why they make such a claim. The blog sources the claim and overall the point I take from the blog post is that it's easy to deceive people since people seek, by and large, confirmation of preconceived ideas rather than the truth.

<comment><USER10> I don't think you actually understood it. Its point is that the temperature really is rising, and you have to resort to tricks to show that it's not.

<comment><USER40> I think my comment has been badly misinterpreted given the down voting. I've reread my post and I'm not sure why it has been so misinterpreted. Clearly I failed to convey my intent. Obviously the blog post is about how one can construct a misleading graph by cherry picking data.

The blog shows how one can cleverly display data to reinforce a prior belief. In this case the prior belief is that temperature is not rising. Recently I've encountered a number of people making the claim that temps have been declining. I've wondered why this claim is being made and now I know the source. As shown in the blog post the source is a purposefully misleading graph. As stated by the author this misleading graph has recently been making the rounds on the internet.

<comment><USER10> I think you must have forgotten a "not" or otherwise made a typo that reversed the meaning of your comment.

"Recently, several times I've run into people tell me that temps in the U.S. are rising and I've wondered why they make such a claim."

As written, your comment sounds like you don't understand why someone would say temperatures are rising, and ascribe it to confirmation bias rather than climate change.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


'Artificial Intelligence' Gains Fans Among Investors.com - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703834604575365310813948080.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsTop <comment><USER2> I'm not really sure what the difference between "Artificial Intelligence" is and what people have been doing.

It's not like the system is discovering new factors or whatever.</comment>


Show HN: My 8th grade documentary on cryptography (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeaZGt8_j1k

<comment><AUTHOR> Feeling nostalgic as I enter my last week of college classes. Perhaps some people will find this funny. I guess some passions never change...

(We had to find an "expert" for our documentary -- not so easy for this subject -- so I gave my dad a script. That's him. He's not an expert.)</comment>


What does "hacking" mean in"growth hacking"? - <AUTHOR>

What does "hacking" mean in"growth hacking"? What is the difference between normal growth and "hacked" growth? Can the method be applied to other activities like "learning hacking", "sports hacking"?<p>How can I hack myself to be better or quicker at something? <comment><USER2> "Growth hacking" simply means proactively making growth happen, instead of passively watching growth take place.

> How can I hack myself to be better or quicker at something?

Growth hacking is more often applied to a project or a company than an individual.</comment>


Fresh air for sale - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/jan/21/fresh-air-for-sale <comment> the-great-assyr Anyone thinking at SPACEBALLS THE MOVIE?</comment>


GPT3, Centaur Chess, and Human Exceptionalism - <AUTHOR> https://parthchopra.substack.com/p/gpt3-centaur-chess-and-human-exceptionalism <comment><USER2> "Just like we sometimes buy pottery b/c it is handmade, will we will one day prefer writing that is also "human made"?"

I wonder what the role of cryptography will be to manage authenticity moving forward. Or if the prompts and seeded data become the "true creative art form"

GPT3 may be showing how "shallow" our human writing is, but I do think the real value of writing is to get someone else to do something (ex. writing a company memo to rally and encourage going after an opportunity). It doesn't seem far to when a human just provides intent and the AI may generate writing to best convince people to follow it. The real scary (or at least paradigm shifting) part will be, as you mentioned, when intent is no longer ours</comment>


Uber's latest service takes you across continents in a speed boat - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/28/uberboat-istanbul/

<comment><USER2> For those interested in this space, another player is Sailo: [http://sailo.com/](http://sailo.com/).</comment>


Memtype: open source USB password keeper - <AUTHOR> https://www.tindie.com/products/area0x33/memtype-open-source-password-keeper/ <comment><USER2> Wouldn't a 4 digit PIN be really fast to hack? And then all of your passwords are belong to us?

<comment><AUTHOR> That was my first thought too and i'm no expert.</comment></comment>


Ask HN[Feature request]: Show all posts by domain - <AUTHOR>

It would be great if the domain shown for each post, such as (techcrunch.com) were a clickable link that would show all posts that point to that domain, the same way reddit does it.<p>(As an aside, as reddit is OSS (code.reddit.com) why not modify to HNs needs?) <comment><USER2> <http://searchyc.com> has this functionality.</comment>


Linux 4.6 to Offer Faster Raspberry Pi 3D Performance - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4.6-RPi-Faster-3D <comment><AUTHOR> Linux 4.6-rc1 was released on Saturday:

[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-46-...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-46-features&num=1) [https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/3/26/132](https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/3/26/132)</comment>


Show HN: Hnplain, output Hacker News in plain text - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/olahol/hnplain

<comment><AUTHOR> I trivial tool I wrote that outputs Hacker News in nice plain text, I use it to send myself and email at lunch time with the top stories on HN.</comment>


Show HN: Yet another Hacker News Reader for Android. - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ncom.yahn Hopefully doesn't suck. <comment><USER2> Switching between article and comments and display of nested comments are great.</comment>


Earth may once have had two moons - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14391929

<comment><USER2> Nature's summary, with a bit more detail: [http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110803/full/news.2011.456.ht...](http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110803/full/news.2011.456.html)

Since I occasionally pound on this point, I'd observe this is a _good_ use of computer models; they take their hypothesis, explore its possibility, and generate real-world predictions that we can test against to determine if it accurate. (Albeit perhaps decades later, but that's not their fault.) And no claims about how it has now been proved or anything.

</comment><comment><USER3>
      > It was a rather gentle collision at around 2.4km per
      > second; lower than the speed of sound

Is that the speed of sound through solid rock, or should that be m/s instead?

<comment><USER4> No, that's about right. Seismic waves propagate between 2-8 km/s depending on rock density. 2.4 m/s is an easy run for most people.

<comment><USER3> I suppose that's the problem with speeds in space... 2.4 km/s would be anything but "a gentle collision" on Earth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting quote: "The researchers involved hope that data from two US space agency (Nasa) lunar missions will substantiate or challenge their theory within the next year."

</comment><comment><USER6> "For decades, scientists have been trying to understand why the near side of the Moon - the one visible from Earth - is flat and cratered while the rarely- seen far side is heavily cratered and has mountain ranges higher than 3,000m."

Is it possible that the Earth has shielded the moon from asteroid collisions? This seems to me to be a far simpler explanation as to why the side facing Earth has fewer collision marks.

<comment><USER7> It's the opposite way round. The side that's not facing the Earth has fewer craters.

<comment><USER8> I'm under the impression that's not true. Looking at <http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/clementine/images/> I see a smoother surface on the earth side. I also found on the Internet some paired images from different cameras, which of course can be chosen to emphasize either side.

<comment><USER9> You are correct. There is a nice browser with a good DEM at

<http://pub.lmmp.nasa.gov/lunarmapper/lm.html?host=pub>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Earth currently has two moons, or even more, depending on how you define "moon": <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_moons_of_Earth>

<comment><USER11> How are you proposing a moon be defined? From the Wikipedia article: "There have been large generic searches for small moons, actual proposals or claimed sightings of specific objects in orbit, and finally, analysis and searches for those proposed objects. All three of these have failed to confirm a permanent natural satellite."

Also from Wikipedia: "A natural satellite or moon is a celestial body that orbits a planet".

There have been no other confirmed moons of Earth besides 'The Moon'.

<comment><USER10> They're not officially categorized as "moons", but the article lists several "quasi-satellites" that orbit the Earth. There is a distinction, but personally, I would consider them similar enough to count as other moons.

<comment><USER3> From the article:

      > Quasi-satellites orbit the Sun...

By definition, that makes them not a moon of Earth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd just like to congratulate everybody on the fact that there are seven comments so far and not one of them says "That's no moon..."

<comment><USER13> Why the congratulations? If people are no longer saying "That's no moon..." then perhaps the deception is complete.

> Researchers suggest the collision may explain the mysterious mountains on > the far side of our Moon.

The best way intelligent life, such as humans, can travel between stars is embedded deep inside a large pre-existing object, rather than a flimsy arficially-made spaceship. That object could be modified so it can navigate around by putting large booster rockets ON ONE SIDE. If humans wanted to observe a planet for terraforming and colonization, they would navigate the object into orbit as an apparent Moon around that planet. If their habitat in that moon was on the opposite side as the booster rockets, then by leaving those rockets, which would look like mysterious mountains, on the permanent far side from the Earth, they could keep the Earth permanently within observation for terraforming, etc.</comment></comment>


Live blogging: Max Levchin of Slide opens the Web 2.0 Expo keynotes - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2008/04/23/live-blogging-max-levchin-of-slide-opens-the-web-20-expo-keynotes/

<comment><USER2> "The future of social apps are split between brand advertising and direct-to- consumer sales [...] people make billions of dollars selling virtual goods, like eyes or hair for characters in online games or social networks."

More advertising for inane smiley faces. Just what the internet needs.</comment>


The Commodore 64 (C64) is 30 years old today - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19055707

<comment><USER2> I've got the logo for the Commodore 64 tattooed on my left shoulder. It began my love of computers at a young age that has been with me for my entire life. I turn 30 in 2 weeks. I feel glad and honored to share a birthday so close to something that has affected my life so much. It's fun to know we grew up together.

I'd like to share a story with Hacker News about something so dear to my heart.

When I was just shy of 3 years old, my father brought home some greyish-brown television-looking thing. He had purchased it from a co-worker of his, along with a bunch of games on floppy disks and cartridges, a joystick, and a KoalaPad. He turned on the computer, some sounds happened, and a blue screen eventually appeared with a flashing prompt and the word "Ready."

He fussed through some manuals and papers to find the boot sequence necessary to start something called Jumpman. I watched, in fascination, as he was able to manipulate these things on the screen. Various beeps and boops emitted from the machine and a little stick figure climbed ladders and dodged various objects. He quickly died in the game.

He started to show me other stuff this thing was capable of. KoalaPainter was absolutely wonderful. I could draw and manipulate shapes on the screen as much as I wanted; as if I was using a piece of paper.

He couldn't get me away from the thing. Eventually, bedtime came around, and I cried as I was torn away from something that I was completely enamored with.

Around 2 or 3 in the morning, my father awoke, hearing weird noises coming from the basement. He groggily stumbled down the stairs and into the room to find his 3 year old son, covered with a blinking glow, sitting at the keyboard. After watching him perform the boot sequence only a couple of times, I had it memorized, had gotten up from my bed, and was sitting there playing games.

Silent Service. Kickman. Heist. These kicked off a long and wonderful obsession with technology, computers and video gaming. They defined who I would be as a child; a self-professed and proud nerd and geek. Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering; the whole nine yards. 286, 386, 486. Oak Technologies. Math co-processors. Sound Blaster. Voodoo. Serial cable LAN parties playing Doom. Betrayal at Krondor. Ultima VI. BBS. MUD. The first time I saw a GIF. Links. The Nintendo Entertainment System.

So many absolutely wonderful memories that I wouldn't trade for anything. The Commodore 64 was absolutely integral in defining who I have been and who I continue to be. Without it: I have no idea where I'd be in this world.

I'm a software developer now. I've been programming since I was in grade school. I picked up a software application development degree just because I thought it may be handy someday. I grabbed a theatre degree, because it was my other passion I discovered at a relatively young age.

Computers have always been in my life, through thick and thin. They always do exactly what you tell them to do. Nothing more, nothing less. Humble machines that push electrons around to provide entertainment, fascination, communication and now, connection.

Thanks Commodore. I owe you one. Happy birthday.

 _EDIT_ \- reproduced on my blog here:

[http://randomdrake.com/2012/08/01/celebrating-30-years-on- th...](http://randomdrake.com/2012/08/01/celebrating-30-years-on-this-world- alongside-the-commodore-64/)

<comment><USER3> I'm about the same age with nearly the same experience, although I don't remember exactly when the Commodore showed up in the house, it was just always there.

Hours and hours of Jumpman, Ghostbusters, Castles of Dr. Creep, Bruce Lee, Space Taxi, Save New York, Kids On Keys, Asteroid, Impossible Mission, 5-A-Side Soccer.

That tattoo's a great idea...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, great memories.

I got my C64 on 1984. A few (boring games) and all of the English manuals. A problem because I did not speak much English, nor did I know how to properly read ( I was 5 ). But my oldest brother would write down the typical Basic program: 10 PRINT "HELLO" 20 GOTO 10

After about two years of playing around with it, learning how to read a bit more, and watching a ton of TV in English, I was able to start writing down my own little short programs. Then I discovered that I could load and save stuff to a floppy disk. Then after some time, I kept learning and reading some of the manuals (what I understood), and wrote programs that were up to 50 LOC long. Which for a kid who is 7-8 years old is pretty good. Then the damn thing broke, and I was without a computer for about six long years. A 133mhz speed demon that my brother bought to connect to the internet. I did not know what email was, much less the internet. But I sat down with Win 95 and started poking around. I haven't stopped ever since.

I constantly find myself searching ebay for old C64s and 6502 chips. Never have bought anything, but one day I will.

</comment><comment><USER5> It might be difficult for non-programmers to realize but the first computer that touches you really defines who you are as a programmer. Without you realizing it at the time, it sets up so many paths in the life of a programmer that the single machine becomes like a cornerstone of whatever you do later. And you always go back to your first computer.

Other people might have partially similar experiences with their first car or guitar. Possibly. I wouldn't know.

While I might have had an innate interest in programming, it was C64 that verified it for real. Without C64 I would have turned out to be a very different programmer or worse, I wouldn't have started programming at all. I owe so much to that machine--and all that in terms of what most people can't understand.

What a funny world.

<comment><USER6> "Without you realizing it at the time, it sets up so many paths in the life of a programmer that the single machine becomes like a cornerstone of whatever you do later. And you always go back to your first computer."

My first computer was a Heathkit, my grandfather brought me. We built it together. I wish I still had it. I miss that machine. Worthless today, except in a collection. And to me.

But my second was a Commodore VIC20. Another machine with a solid place in my heart. Also wish I still had it.

After the VIC its IMB clones, MSDOS, DRDOS, Windows - blah blah blah until the later 90's when I brought my first Mac.

Of course now, it's hard to romanticize a any computer. Since they so common place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Like others I grew up on that machine. Downloading thousands of games from BBSes, learning to program, trying to figure out what a hex editor does.

.. and now I've just spent far too much time looking through old issues of commodore magazine.

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/54503219/Commodore- Microcomputer-I...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/54503219/Commodore- Microcomputer-Issue-37-1985-Sep-Oct)

<comment><USER8> Here's far more magazines to look at: <http://www.bombjack.org/commodore/>

And books.

<comment><USER9> Wow, thank-you for that! I found a scanned in copy of RUN Special Edition 1989 with the purple color and all. Many great memories just came flooding back. I remember my copy had just about fallen apart but I kept it until just a few years ago when my parents house caught fire. That issue was very special to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A good reminder that personal computers existed before Apple made their own (and the C64 was a way more popular machine than the expensive, elitist Apple II). :) (because I have seen the comment in last week that "Apple invented personal computers" I almost choked on that one).

<comment><USER11> What? You are misinformed. Apple II was introduced in 1977 and Apple III was introduced in 1980, way before C64. It's precursor Vic-20 was introduced in 1980.

Apple definitely was one of the companies inventing personal computers.

<comment><USER8> The Commodore Pet was introduced in '77. Both were preceded by any number of personal computers of varying capabilities (depending on how you want to define "personal computer" that includes Commodore / MOS Technologies "KIM-1").

Apple invented _some_ aspects, like lots of others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was growing in rural area of comunist country when I get this computer more then 20 years ago. I was six years old back then and still remember playing with screwdriver alternating tapedeck to let games load.

I was only person around who wants do to anything around programming and only manual was writen in German, language I was not able understand, so I was just retyping examples and try to figure out how it works.

</comment><comment><USER13> For those of you who want to relive the days of the Commodore 64 (or the Commode 64 as us spec-chums used to call it) there's a very good emulator[1], as well as a site that lets you play games online[2].

If you want to see just what the C64 demo scene is capable of, then Booze Design's Edge of disgrace[3] is probably a good start. Finally, if you want to try your hand at C64 demo coding there's an excellent resource here[4].

[1] - <http://www.viceteam.org/>

[2] - <http://c64s.com/>

[3] - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzvMYE3PUn4>

[4] - <http://codebase64.org/doku.php?id=base:demo_programming>

<comment><USER14> Thanks for these links. [4] reminds me especially why I used to prefer amber on black instead of green on black in those old days when being able to choose the colour of your display was a real feature!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was a ZX Spectrum kid, which at the time was a great rivalry. But I have fond memories of the C64 and many other 80s home micros from visiting friends' houses, and I have to admit that C64 music still sounds good today, courtesy of its SID sound chip - not something that can really be said of the Spectrum's feeble monophonic beeper.

Happy birthday, C64!

<comment><USER16> I was a ZX Spectrum kid, too. A couple of years ago we cleaned out the attic, and mice had eaten the Spectrum's rubber keyboard. So much for the plan to display my first computer in the hallway of my yet to be founded billion dollar company...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just finished reading an article about the Dragon32's birth 30 years ago this month. Pity I wasn't old enough to witness this boom.

[http://www.reghardware.com/2012/08/01/the_dragon_32_is_30_ye...](http://www.reghardware.com/2012/08/01/the_dragon_32_is_30_years_old/)

<comment><USER18> I was a Commodore/Speccy person myself, but I bought most popular 8 bit computers in the 90s for very cheap (most Speccys/Sinclairs, Commodores, Amstrad CPCs, Oric, BBC, Dragons, MSX, Spectravideo, ... I have 30+ machines counting just 8 bit ones).

My Dragon 32 has a botched key [;]. I hope I can fix it at some point. I had friends in school in the 80s who got a Dragon 32 by collecting biscuit boxes (local offer).

I remember playing Zaxxon for Dragon in my friend's house and thinking it wasn't too bad (similar to Speccy's, remarkably less visual than C64's).

It came with full schematics, it was made to be hacked. Sometimes I wish that kind of thing was possible now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> sometimes i miss the simple world of

      r,g,b
      0,0,0
      255,255,255
      116,67,53
      124,172,186
      123,72,144
      100,151,79
      64,50,133
      191,205,122
      123,91,47
      79,69,0
      163,114,101
      80,80,80
      120,120,120
      164,215,142
      120,106,189
      159,159,159

the C64 16 colors. life was so much simpler then (and kids had respect for the elders and yada yada yada ....)

<comment><USER20> Then again you could also make it complex with interleaved colors up to more than a hundred :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> People still write demos for C64(and for other platforms too, for that matter) and it's been the most active demo platform ever since it's birth. Now, the question stands... Why isn't writing demos(or any code, for that matter) considered interesting or exciting for huge majority of people? I for one have always loved the low-level hacks and creative problem solving needed when programming these 80's machines.

Why, HN, oh why, "none" of you write(or even watch!) demos!?

<comment><USER22> I used to be an avid consumer of demos. It's just not as much fun to watch when the limits being pushed are completely arbitrary.

Old demos were like watching a guy do world class running on springy blades that you didn't even know existed. Now they are like watching an Olympics where everyone agrees to use only their right foot for all the events.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I grew up with the Oric, Spectrum then the Amiga and 486 PC. This guy reminded me of those horrible load times and why kids today simply wouldn't have the patience to hang around.

Pickup iPad, press game icon, play game.

However, great to see Last Ninja 2!

</comment><comment><USER24> Congrats! I play C64 games on my Pandora often. Great stuff.</comment>


ASK NH: how to build GUI in python. - <AUTHOR>

i want to know how to build GUI in python, i have came across lots of thing but which one will be relatively easy to learn.. <comment><USER2> Maybe this will help: <http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=python+gui>

I have heard that this book is good, but I haven't read it yet. [http://www.amazon.com/Rapid-GUI-Programming-Python- ebook/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Rapid-GUI-Programming-Python- ebook/dp/B000XPNUKO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=books&qid=1295189013&sr=8-2)</comment>


Why is 0x00400000 the default base address for an executable? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2014/10/03/10562176.aspx

<comment><USER2> Hmm, also on x86 in order to be able to access more than 4 GiB of physical memory there was a new paging mode, Physical Address Extension, that makes the pages 4MiB in size, that might have affected that as well but I doubt it. However this mode is required when entering long mode.

<comment><USER3> A small addition though: although the operating system can address more than 4GiB of memory (up to 64 GiB) in PAE-enabled 32-bit x86 CPUs, the user-space applications are still limited to 4GiB of virtual address space and can't address more than that.

But I don't see how it's related to the default base address chosen by linkers being 0x00400000. It's just a field in the PE header and can be easily changed.

<comment><USER4> Address 0x00400000 can't be just changed in PE header. You need also to "rebase" your app with SDK tool.

Tool is now deprecated because ALSR and reason that all apps/libraries should be relocable runtime.

<comment><USER3> > You need also to "rebase" your app

Sure you need to (unless it's some kind of a base independent code like a well-written shellcode). I was just saying that 0x00400000 isn't hard-coded in the x86 architecture or in Windows and it can be set to anything (aligned to 0x10000 boundary).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The fact that Microsoft puts so much care into creating elaborate structures to preserve legacy is why I trust them with securing my identity.

<comment><USER6> I am sure I will get downvoted to all hell, but were you serious? And do other people trust MSFT for similar reasons?

(This, by the way, as a full time IT guy for 6+ years bc of bad Windows software makes me continuously feel the opposite; I did not even open a Hotmail/Live account until I was forced to try and report a bug with MSFT Connect, which requires it.)

<comment><USER7> I remember, once upon a time, you could just phone up Microsoft (UK) for support. This was early 1995 when I was battling with video driver stability problems on an Olivetti M series PC running a beta of Windows 95. The nice helpful person on the other end of the phone asked me to get updated drivers and lo and behold everything magically started to work.

On a serious note MSFT Connect is basically a ghost town. There are so many well documented and easily reproducible issues logged on Connect that languish there for months and months with no-one paying attention. I logged a fairly crippling issue with IIS7, complete with steps to repro, and it was ignored.

The only way to get any kind of support is to pay for a PSS incident. If the root cause does lie firmly in MS's backyard they do at least refund your money. I even got a knowledge base article written up about one of my PSS logged issues :)

(ex-Gold Partner IT guy here)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is for legacy reasons dating back to the time of the 8086 processor. Basically, the 8086 could only access 1MB of memory. In this one megabyte, the BIOS would store a lot of data structures (necessary for accessing disks and setting the video mode). When the first 32-bit processors came out, the original 32-bit operating systems still needed to make use of the BIOS in order to do things like change screen resolutions and enable graphics. To do this, they needed to leave the lowest 1MB of space intact and memory mapped to the corresponding physical addresses. Executables had to be based above this 1 megabyte in order to not overwrite the BIOS. 0x400000 is hexadecimal for 1 megabyte and so executables are often times loaded here.

<comment><USER9> 1 megabyte is 0x100000

Also, as the article mentions, other OSes like WinNT are capable of mapping executables within the first 1mb. Virtual memory and paging can hide the BIOS area away. I think your statement about "original 32bit operating systems" is inaccurate. The limitations given in win95 appears to be mostly due to win3.x legacy backwards compability.

In fact, the main article explains everything accurately. Your summary is more confusing than helping.</comment></comment>


Sounds of the Bodleian - <AUTHOR> https://www.ox.ac.uk/soundsofthebodleian/#radcam <comment><USER2> The Upper Reading room at the Old Bod brings back many memories of long hours spent trying to make sense of Kant.

</comment><comment><USER3> Safari, Firefox Mac - no sounds.

Chrome - oh look - a 'Play' button

<comment><USER4> Working fine on Safari 13.1 on my mac.

<comment><USER5> And perfectly on Firefox 75 on Linux.

<comment><USER6> not working on mac chrome or safari, so british and such a waste of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Sounds of the Bodleian" sounds like a Dr Who episode

</comment><comment><USER8> Are they live? I suppose not.

<comment><USER9> Definitely not - the staff are working from home (my wife would otherwise be working in the building shown). I don't think these sounds were ever live.

<comment><USER10> I wish they were, it'd be handy to know when you can go during quiet periods!

<comment><USER9> I'll pass that on, though we're not likely to be back at work for a while.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Brief History of CSS-In-JS: How We Got Here and Where We're Going - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/gitconnected/a-brief-history-of-css-in-js-how-we-got-here-and-where-were-going-ea6261c19f04 <comment><USER2> I was pretty skeptical of CSS-in-JS at first but then I remembered all the times I had to reject pull requests because they didn't use whatever specification the project was using like BEM. CSS-in-JS prevents having to use those (frankly fairly arbitrary) rules at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> 2018 is going to be the year we really see CSS star to evolve. It's going to be interesting to see where everything lands.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! I'm very excited to see what the CSS landscape will evolve into over the course of 2018. I'm consistently encouraged by the creativity of the open source community.</comment></comment>


First impressions of OS X Lion - <AUTHOR> http://swizec.com/blog/first-steps-with-os-x-lion/swizec/1901

<comment><USER2> Would be a bit more useful without the NSFW screenshots

<comment><USER3> I second this. Just loaded it at work...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to give away a popular(ish) codebase? - <AUTHOR> I developed a project for NodeJS a few years ago that has gotten quite popular since then, and is something that I know a lot of businesses and individuals use. Last I checked it's getting 5k+ downloads/month (that obviously doesn't mean 5k new people per month). It's a binding to a C++ library and I worked out most of the bugs last year.<p>The thing that sucks? V8 has changed considerable, as has NodeJS's api. I'm getting tickets to keep up, but I just don't have any motive to do the work (I've moved on to golang). I've stopped caring about Node, as I actually think it's not that great of a platform anymore. I think it's useful for small, one-off things, but I'm not really interested in developing with it anymore. Any suggestions for getting rid of this thing in a way that's fair to the people who are relying on it for their organization? <comment><USER2> Do you have any major contributors that might be willing to take over? Other than that, publicly declare that you intend to not continue work on it and are looking for someone to take over. You'll probably need some time to transfer it to make sure you give it to an appropriate person.

> fair to the people who are relying on it for their organization?

If there are large-ish organisations that need it, they could take it over or pay you for further development if you are interested in doing that.

</comment><comment><USER3> > in a way that's fair to the people who are relying on it for their > organization?

It's nice of you to think about them, but you don't owe them anything. They didn't pay you for your work. Every developer must understand that if they choose to use a free framework that is being maintained by only 1 developer, they're putting themselves at risk of the framework being discontinued.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, if you want to pass it off I would be interested in at least taking a look at it and seeing if it is something we want to take on. Our focus is node and C++ with a little golang, but probably 90% is C++ and node. Hell for all I know it could be a package we are using. If you want to share privately which package it is my contact is in my profile.</comment>


Why Millions of Tweens Are Using Musical.ly… and Why It Matters - <AUTHOR> https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/millions-of-tweens-using-musically-app/ <comment><AUTHOR> Follow-up post from Gary V in August:

[http://nooga.com/173717/garyvee-why-millions-of-tweens- are-u...](http://nooga.com/173717/garyvee-why-millions-of-tweens-are-using- musically-and-why-it-matters/)

</comment><comment><USER2> SSL cert expired two days ago</comment>


The Speak, Memory Machine - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/say-it-again-3a5bc7c0ec53?ref=hn

<comment><USER2> Much of the old Sony MiniDisc recording equipment is able to save audio from several seconds before you hit the record button. It's really easy to edit the recording afterward and place a track marker at the intended starting point. I don't think this kind of ring buffer is new at all.</comment>


Dutch Spies Watched as Russians Hacked US Democrats - <AUTHOR> http://www.securityweek.com/dutch-spies-watched-russians-hacked-us-democrats-report <comment><AUTHOR> A more elaborate article at [https://www.volkskrant.nl/tech/dutch-agencies- provide-crucia...](https://www.volkskrant.nl/tech/dutch-agencies-provide- crucial-intel-about-russia-s-interference-in-us-elections~a4561913/amp)</comment>


Computer systems predict objects' responses to physical forces - <AUTHOR> https://techxplore.com/news/2017-12-responses-physical.html <comment><USER2> Blocks world!</comment>


Matrices from a geometric perspective - <AUTHOR> http://www.coranac.com/documents/geomatrix/ <comment><USER4> 3Blue1Brown has an _outstanding_ series of short videos, "Essence of linear algebra"[1], which covers vectors, matrix transformations, and the related math. What I particularly like about these videos is that the concepts are introduced first without the numbers and calculations (that stuff is covered later). The concepts are first introduced as abstract animations to emphasize the "shape" of what the vector, matrix, _etc_ really represent.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2x...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2xVFitgF8hE_ab)

<comment><USER5> Amazing series!

Open question I still have - what is the "geometric interpretation" of the transpose operation? A^T?

Considering the fact that the transpose shows up all the time, I'm very surprised that I've never seen a good explanation of how I should be visualizing it.

<comment><USER6> Graph theory offers one nice illustration of the transpose (for square matrices). Here's a directed graph:

      ⬐</comment></comment></comment><comment>---¬
      n₁ → n₂ → n₃

It can be represented by this adjacency matrix:

      X = [ 0  1  0 ]
          [ 0  0  1 ]
          [ 1  0  0 ]

See how there is a _1_ for each row _i_ and column _j_ where there is an edge from node _i_ to node _j_?

Okay, now look at the transpose, Xᵀ:

      Xᵀ = [ 0  0  1 ]
           [ 1  0  0 ]
           [ 0  1  0 ]

If we interpret this matrix as an adjacency matrix, its graph looks like this:

      ⬐</comment><comment>---¬
      n₃ → n₂ → n₁

Taking the transpose of a directed graph's adjacency matrix just reverses the direction of the edges!

P.S: some more cool things about adjacency matrices:

Imagine that a vector represents a node or set of nodes on a graph. Like this:

      n₁ = [ 1 ],  n₂ = [ 0 ],  n₃ = [ 0 ],
           [ 0 ]        [ 1 ]        [ 0 ]
           [ 0 ]        [ 0 ]        [ 1 ]

Watch what happens when we multiply X with n₁:

      X*n₁ = [ 0  0  1 ]   [ 1 ]   [ 0 ]
             [ 1  0  0 ] * [ 0 ] = [ 1 ] = n₂
             [ 0  1  0 ]   [ 0 ]   [ 0 ]

So the adjacency matrix is not only an index of edges, it's also a little machine that can push nodes around on a graph. You can even do it with two at a time:

      X*(n₁ + n₂) = [ 0  0  1 ]   [ 1 ]   [ 0 ]
                    [ 1  0  0 ] * [ 1 ] = [ 1 ] = n₂ + n₃
                    [ 0  1  0 ]   [ 0 ]   [ 1 ]

If you're interested in diving further into algebraic representations of graphs, check out the Leavitt Path algebra: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.1835](https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.1835)

<comment><USER7> Notably adjacency matrices are orthogonal so A^T = A^-1.

This extends to probabilistic transitions as well.

<comment><USER6> Well, the adjacency matrix I used as an example is orthogonal, but they don't have to be. Any matrix with 1's and 0's can be interpreted as an unweighted adjacency matrix for an undirected graph (if the matrix is symmetric) or directed graph (if it's not symmetric). For example, here's an adjacency matrix that's not an orthogonal matrix:

      [ 1 0 ]
      [ 1 1 ]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For people interested in the relationship between algebra and geometry, there is a quite rigorous, yet not too long discussion of these topics in the "Elements of Geometry for Computer Vision" [1].

It comes the from the engineering end and finds a good balance between going into too much depth and introducing the necessary theory for bridging algebra and geometry. E.g. representing motion as a change in basis in linear space, the perspective camera as a mathematical model, etc.

[1] [http://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/~pajdla/gvg/GVG-2016-Lecture.pdf](http://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/~pajdla/gvg/GVG-2016-Lecture.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Did not expect to see this mentioned. I attended this exact course at the university. This is my goto material for computer vision geometry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't want to doubt the potential usefulness of the linked article to certain audiences, but I wanted to point out the following:

It's important to acknowledge that intuition from rotations etc. are crutches, and not substitutes for deeply understanding linear-algebraic constructions and their formal properties.

Linear algebra is not really about the arithmetic of multiplying arrays of numbers - it's about the nice algebraic things that happen when you're working with things that come with "linear" operations. The linear-algebraic things that permeate all of mathematics aren't "rotations matrices" and such, but rather "universal constructions" like kernels and cokernels, products and tensor products etc. We even have abstractions that precisely formalize these nice properties of the category of modules/vector spaces, such as abelian categories and linear functors. Any introductory reference on these will provide you with an abundance of examples where things with these formal properties naturally arise.

<comment><USER10> A related remark: there is another (rather silly) way to "geometrize linear algebra". It goes something like whenever you see a ring R, think of it as the sheaf of functions (the structure sheaf) on some space. Whenever you see a module over R, think of it as the space of sections in some vector bundle over that space. Then anything you say about modules through this admits a sheaf- theoretic version, which is often easier to picture if you're geometrically inclined.

<comment><USER11> In the case where the base ring R is a field (all of typical linear algebra), then the space associated to it is a point. So a vector bundle over this point is just a vector space, so we didn't really gain any extra geometry here - <USER2> you want a way of picturing linear algebra geometrically, you still need some other idea.

<comment><USER10> Good point!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I finished Ph.D. courses without ever having to pay much attention to the geometric interpretation of matrices. The path I took was solely computational and algebraic. I often wondered if I'd missed anything. The 3Blue1Brown videos say I did.

I will admit I don't have a solid intuition for matrices used for rotations, flips, etc. (outside of basic 2x2 examples). This can be a disadvantage, even if one pursues a purely computational approach to linear algebra. For instance, it took me a little longer to understand numerical techniques like Householder transformations. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Householder_transformation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Householder_transformation)

That said, I want to also say something in defense of the purely algebraic approach. In higher dimensions, there is no geometric analogy and people who rely on geometry alone find themselves unable to think abstractly in higher dimensions. To me, matrices and vectors are the building blocks for multivariate generalizations of familiar relationships. The algebraic approach meant I was comfortable dealing with complicated high dimensional objects that weren't amenable to visualization.

I believe intuitions are good for laying a foundation, but abstractions are necessary for generalization and for building larger theoretical systems. Intuitive constructs can only get you so far. If I'm not mistaken, this was what Bourbaki group strove for; that is, to move mathematics past the intuitionist approaches of the day to a solid theoretical foundation built upon abstractions. There are pros and cons, but arguably without this foundation, mathematics might not have grown in the way it did.

<comment><USER7> > In higher dimensions, there is no geometric analogy and people who rely on > geometry alone find themselves unable to think abstractly in higher > dimensions.

Often features in higher dimensions can start to be seen in lower dimensions. For example the common example of the strangeness of higher dimensional spaces is the case that a hypercube with side length 2 can have a smaller volume that a hypersphere touched by hyperspheres of radius 1 at each corner of the hypercube.

This is not true in 3 or even 4 dimensional space. But if you use geometric intuition to see the trend from 1d to 2d to 3d, it seems entirely reasonable.

(Apologies if I didn't explain the problem well. I wanted to find a video on it, but couldn't find one)

> I believe intuitions are good for laying a foundation, but abstractions are > necessary for generalization and for building larger theoretical systems. > Intuitive constructs can only get you so far.

I have a slightly different view on this. I feel that abstractions are fundamentally necessary for communicating rather than conceptualization. For example, you may realize that the type of theorems you have been making about vectors equally applies to polynomials, but in order to convince others you would need to write done the properties they both have (resulting in an abstraction).

Its kind of a subtle point because communication is key to mathematics. But normally, before I try to write a proof, I figure out the intuition for why it must be true in my head. Because this is a powerful tool, I try to learn a solid intuition for any abstraction I am introduced to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is obvious for anyone who does game development. Matrices are use to convert between 3d game coords -> screen coords. Also almost all movements/rotations/scaling of objects in game is done via matrix multiplications.

I used matrices once to draw 3d spheres efficiently! It's very computationally expensive to calculate the points of many sphere's of varying radii every frame. What i instead did was pre-compute a few small sized spheres located at the origin. I then matrix multiplied the pre-computed vertices to position spheres at the desired location and size in the 3d world. This was so much faster my fps went from ~5 to a smooth 60!

Very useful knowledge!

<comment><USER9> > Also almost all movements/rotations/scaling of objects in game is done via > matrix multiplications.

Not necessarily true. Quaternions are used a lot because they have some desirable properties over matrices. As far as I remember, they are smaller and more suitable for interpolation.

<comment><USER14> I could have sworn that quaternion transforms were still 4x4 matrices, but I think that's just because quaternions themselves are representable as 4x4 real matrices, which are computationally convenient. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion#Matrix_representati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion#Matrix_representations)

<comment><USER15> Quaternions are a 4-parameter representation of a rotation + scaling operator, the analog of using a complex number to represent rotation + scaling in the plane.

You can convert a (4 parameter) quaternion to a (9 parameter) 3x3 matrix in a similar way that you can convert a (2 parameter) complex number to a (4 parameter) 2x2 matrix. In either case you aren't using the full parameter space of the matrices.

In general in programs quaternions are used for storing and manipulating rotation operators (e.g. composing them together, etc.) because it saves work and improves numerical stability, but then final application of the rotation to a gigantic list of vectors is done using a matrix, because matrix-vector multiplication is very efficient (only need 9 multiplications and 6 additions to multiply a 3x3 matrix by a 3-element vector).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For an article like this I find that static visualizations aren't anywhere near as effective as dynamic ones found in a similar explanation here (3Blue1Brown on Linear Algebra Transformations)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjBOesZCoqc&list=PLZHQObOWTQ...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjBOesZCoqc&list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2xVFitgF8hE_ab&index=1)

</comment><comment><USER17> A notebook I made for exploring this relationship. If you have Jupyter notebooks setup, you can change the parameters and see how this works in a more interactive setting: [https://github.com/Andrewnetwork/WorkshopScipy/blob/master/N...](https://github.com/Andrewnetwork/WorkshopScipy/blob/master/Notebooks/Matrix%20as%20a%20Function%20%26%20Plotting%20Vectors.ipynb)

</comment><comment><USER18> Genuinely curious how anyone could know about matrices and _not_ know their relationship to geometry.

<comment><USER19> Why do you assume a geometric interpretation is a given? For graphics, matrices and geometry go hand in hand, but not for other fields. There isn't always a geometric relationship.

Matrices are a notation normally introduced as part of linear algebra, for solving a system of equations. The book I first learned linear algebra from is "Advanced Engineering Mathematics" which doesn't cover anything geometric in the entire first chapter on linear algebra (which usually takes 1 quarter in college to cover). It mentions linear transformations, but only algebraically. What it does talk about is Gauss-Jordan elimination, augmented matrices, homogeneity, inverses, determinants, eigenvalues, unitary and skew-Hermitian matrices.

Most of that stuff isn't geometric, and it seems like it wouldn't be hard for lots of people to have been exposed to the algebra without learning the geometric interpretations.

Everything going on in neural networks today is built on matrices and matrix operations that don't have a naturally geometric point of view.

<comment><USER18> >Why do you assume a geometric interpretation is a given?

Because that's how matrices are introduced first, in high school mathematics?

>There isn't always a geometric relationship.

Not sure about that to be honest. Seems like there is always a yin-yang between algebra and geometry -- two sides of the same coin.

>The book I first learned linear algebra from is "Advanced Engineering Mathematics"

I pulled my copy of the shelf in my office for the first time in 20+ years and took a look:

I see many references to geometry : Example 5. Linear Transformations ... the matrices ... represent a reflection in the line... Exercise 19 (Rotation) Show that the linear transformation ... with matrix... is a counterclockwise rotation ... and so on.

Actually, I realized I'm reading the chapter "Linear Algebra Part II , Matrices..." and you cited "the first chapter on linear algebra, so I read that chapter (Vectors) and I find on page 276 : "Geometric Representation" with a nice figure titled "Geometrical Interpretation of a scalar triple product".

So hmm. Perhaps we're looking at different books? I found that the current (10th) edition is available in Safari Books. Interestingly they have removed some of the geometric references that are present in my 1983 version. However they also included this :

"(d) Computer graphics. To visualize a three-dimensional object with plane faces (e.g., a cube), we may store the position vectors of the vertices with respect to a suitable x1x2x3-coordinate system (and a list of the connecting edges) and then obtain a two-dimensional image on a video screen by projecting the object onto a coordinate plane, for instance, onto the x1x2-plane by setting x3 = 0. To change the appearance of the image, we can impose a linear transformation on the position vectors stored. Show that a diagonal matrix D with main diagonal entries 3, 1, image gives from an x = [xj] the new position vector y = Dx, where y1 = 3x1 (stretch in the x1-direction by a factor 3), y2 = x2 (unchanged), image (contraction in the x3-direction). What effect would a scalar matrix have?

(e) Rotations in space. Explain y = Ax geometrically when A is one o..."

So to be honest I'm not seeing evidence to support your assertion that the geometric interpretation of matrices is absent from that textbook.

<comment><USER19> You said you were genuinely curious how people could learn matrices without the geometry. I (and others here) gave multiple examples of how that could happen, but you're arguing. Are you really curious, or was your question rhetorical? Do you not believe it's possible that anyone could have learned math in a different order than you did?

Despite your objection, it's a fact that matrices for systems of equations and neural networks both do not have a naturally geometric interpretation. Nor do many of the applications used in my math book: electrical networks, traffic flow, models of commodity markets, etc. You are free to ignore that, but if you do, it might not help you understand why some people learned matrices without a geometric context.

You are looking at a different book than I am. I have 7th edition Kreyszig. I didn't say geometry was absent from the book, I said it was absent from the first quarter/semester of linear algebra in my book. There is geometry in the book, but many students that went through college the same time I did could easily have taken the minimum requirement, one quarter of math and stopped there.

I don't know about yours, but my high school math introduced solving systems of linear equations. It did not cover orthonormal bases or rotations or affine transforms or homogeneous coordinates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How disgraceful, conflating matrices with linear and affine transformations.

<comment><USER21> Way too often intuition (or trying to make things clear on an intuitive level) interferes with and/or severely impedes and slows down gaining the actually useful skills. Maybe not in applications to computer grahics, but in genreral there is so much to matrix analysis [1] that trying to translate everything into geometric images would make learning it at a practically useful level anything but impossible.

Rote learning, like the mindless memorizing of the multiplication table, is an extremely important component of education that is to reach any degree of sophistication or usefulness.

Also, being not (too firmly) attached to a particular interpretation of a formal system leaves open the door to potentially discovering new applications.

[1] See, for example, a book by Horn and Johnson.

<comment><USER22> I just love how a few posts over here massively upvote clearly simple comments such as "I had used a matrix in 3D and then used them to rotate points in 3D space" against somebody who may not clearly understand, yet still makes a point that matrices are way more abstract than people expect them to be - <USER3> they downvote because it's harder to understand.

This is such a horrible form of childish anti-intellectualism.</comment></comment></comment>


Move Fast and Break Nothing - <AUTHOR> http://zachholman.com/talk/move-fast-break-nothing/ <comment><USER2> The problem with the new motto is that it is uncontroversial. As Zuck himself once mentioned at Startup School, corporate mottos are valuable only if they are controversial, that is, "be honest" is not a valuable motto, because it is obvious and uncontroversial, whereas "Move Fast and Break Things" is not so: it says something about prioritization that not everyone agrees with, and thereby communicates where the company stands on this issue. Everyone wants to move fast as long as nothing gets broken. I agree that it is possible to leverage technology to move faster while keeping things less broken, but it does not change the fundamental dynamic that at some point, you will have to trade _some_ stability for speed, and the new motto does not take a stance on which one it prefers at all.

<comment><USER3> Move Fast (and Break Things) is the unwritten motto of every mediocre dev shop out there (breaking things being an unintended side effect of moving fast). It's not controversial.

<comment><USER4> Its also the motto of many good companys. At least in my mind, move fast and break things, means that you iterate quickly and move into testing fast, to find the errors there.

This works of course better with exerimental APIs compared to things you have to put on CD and ship.

<comment><USER5> And in the "ships CDs" camp, we have Adobe and Microsoft, long held as bastions of robust, stable, well-tested software.

<comment><USER6> There are other camps too. Like software consulting firms building software for large enterprises like banks, insurance companies etc. The consequences of breaking things are all written down in very exact legal terms. It is not at all fun when a regression bug shows up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thoroughly enjoyed the visual design and layout of this site.

That he took the deck and turned it into vibrant and unique feeling content made it feel more special than a normal blog post.

Not sure where I'm going with this but I liked the balance of medium.com-like- focus + the design and style content of a NYT special feature.

I'm assessing my reaction from a web analysts perspective, just interesting how much more engaged I was w/this from the first second than normal.

<comment><USER8> It felt similar to _why's stuff Like this 'Nobody Knows Shoes' book [https://cloud.github.com/downloads/shoes/shoes/nks.pdf](https://cloud.github.com/downloads/shoes/shoes/nks.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm surprised that few seem to understand that Zuckerberg chose a motto with a deeper meaning than 'breaking products and code'. He meant break the systems, calcified behaviors, and system-think that ends up killing a company over the long term.

Move fast, and don't go in predictable directions based on existing corporate momentum. The only way to disrupt yourself is to 'break things' i.e. architectures, regular income, etc that may be holding you back from a better opportunity.

<comment><USER10> This is some deeply Talmudic reading of a fairly straight-forward description of engineering deploy cycles. But why stop after just putting those words in his mouth, when he could be retroactively understood to mean so much more!

Move fast! Run to all meetings! Take typing lessons so you move faster while coding! Break things! Break your laptop to get a faster one from the company! Move your laptop fast at the hard surface to break it faster and while moving faster!

Some may say, if you keep running around with your laptop, you might actually break it. I call that synergy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tangential, but does anyone know what Github uses to match their css and html classes in the integration suite? I often find that I don't clean up my css as the free as I should because I'm scared of breaking another page by mistake, so something that tells me "you're really not using this anywhere anymore" would be great.

<comment><USER12> I don't know what Github uses, but where I work, we do screenshot testing. We have PhantomCSS[0], which is a helper on top of CasperJs that visits pages, takes screenshots and compares them. There are a lot of other tools, Huxley and Selenium come to my mind, that do the same stuff. Even Facebook[1] tests this way.

[0]: [https://github.com/Huddle/PhantomCSS](https://github.com/Huddle/PhantomCSS) [1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkTCL6Nqm6Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkTCL6Nqm6Y)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This post just touches on so many of my personal "yes dammit yes" buttons I am purring like the kitten in the gif (go have a look)

My new boss just gave a piece of advice that marries up very well with this - clients want Stability, Performance and Features - in that order. Consumers want features _Then_ Stability and performance if they like it.

So yes - hurry up and put the talk online please Zach - Itching to listen.

<comment><USER14> Woah, I _love_ your boss' advice! It is necessary to know your audience before you can prioritize.

Also, I don't think consumers want features in the sense of "more", but in the sense of "key". Maybe it is Key Features, Stability, Performance, More Features, in that order.

<comment><USER15> In my experience clients and consumers really just care about Feature Lists; power users maybe lean more towards Key Features. Performance and Stability are only a concern when they've already become a problem.

<comment><USER14> Really? I don't think consumers have shown at all that they care about (or are even aware of) feature lists. Even facebook is shifting toward a strategy of cobbling together single-feature apps instead of building one big feature- heavy platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As always, I enjoyed reading Zach's thoughts.

Spotted one tiny error:

[http://zachholman.com/images/talks/break- nothing/anpp.jpg](http://zachholman.com/images/talks/break-nothing/anpp.jpg)

annp should be anpp in this image.

<comment><USER17> Actually caught this last night and fixed it literally everywhere but the important place: this image. :) Fixed! Thanks for pointing it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> ... Two code paths (old&new) - I've been doing this to some extent without trying to get any insight, or make it a practice (of my own first), but often the old code just stays before deploying the newer (day or two), or before submission, and then it's killed (or #ifdef-out).

I liked the "empathy" bit though. Recently I've did the UCLA Extension TMP courses, and one of the lecturers - Jorge Cherbosque, PhD talked exactly about this and much more - here is the lecture (highly recommended)

[https://www.uclaextension.edu/tmp/Pages/79th/D1.aspx](https://www.uclaextension.edu/tmp/Pages/79th/D1.aspx)

Is there a video behind the talk?

</comment><comment><USER19> Reading the title, I thought it would be a post about TDD. I don't do TDD, I wish I had the time and resources and I am moving toward adding a more test- driven approach. Adding unit tests to my key libs allows me to move fast without breaking anything (for the key libs, our test suite is stupendously comprehensive).

Of course, during new feature dev this luxury isn't always available. The next best thing is to do a phased rollout where our users become our beta testers. This works really well because users can switch to the non-beta version through the menu bar very easily.

There are other strategies for moving fast without breaking stuff, but these two provide easy, big wins.

</comment><comment><USER20> > What do you consider good feedback? How can you promote understanding and > positive approaches in your criticism of the code? How can you help the > submitter learn and grow from this scenario? Unfortunately these questions > don't get asked enough, which creates a self-perpetuating cycle of cynics > and aggressive discussion.

I'd be really interested to hear how teams codify this. To the extent that it's possible, I think feedback should be rooted in objective measures, e.g. styleguide/lint violations, test failures, etc. All too often, though, there are subjective things that come up: organization of code, interface design, using framework X instead of framework Y. These are the criticisms that most often lead to aggressive back and forths.

<comment><USER21> But those are the most important and interesting discussions to have, so I'm not convinced we should shy away from that sort of feedback.

That said, they're also the sort of discussions which should often happen before code is written. Decisions can be changed much more quickly at that point, and people take it much less personally when you talk about how the design of something can be improved when they haven't spent the time to implement it. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Twilio follows a similar model for large scale changes, but at a distributed service level using a shadow proxy ([https://github.com/twilio/shadow](https://github.com/twilio/shadow)) rather than having parallel code paths.

</comment><comment><USER13> What interests me in companies similar to GitHub is how the organisational politics reflects the code (or coding process)

I assume if I knew more about fluid dynamics one could make some decent correlations between blockages, eddies, and viscosity and middle management sign offs, manual testing and IM channels.

I guess I am looking for justification that a flat collegiate structure produces higher quality long term code.And some idea how to persuade people to adopt such a format - open, free flowing discussion about code and a data driven "prove it not say it with authority" seems to conflict with hierarchies.

Or maybe I am just fed up with organisational politics. :-)

If a githuber is on could they comment on how design decisions and business decisions are taken ?

</comment><comment><USER23> "Move fast with stablity"

That's why small companies have a chance.

The big ones get slow and focus on different things. They have to change their maxims and their customers don't necessarily like that.

</comment><comment><USER24> Really distasteful slogan. I think every engineer who has worked in corp. America is used to management asking for mutually exclusive things due to ignorance.

</comment><comment><USER25> Comparing the results of requests processed against both the new and old system is a pattern. [http://www.alwaysagileconsulting.com/application- pattern-ver...](http://www.alwaysagileconsulting.com/application-pattern- verify-branch-by-abstraction/)

It was also done in mainframes at the processor instruction level.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think of "move fast and break things" in a different context that most people(maybe). It doesn't say move fast and SHIP broken things.

To me it speaks to the fact that you shouldnt be afraid to completely change something if its to improve the product. Eliminate technical debt. Dont code around a workaround that doesnt always work.

</comment><comment><USER27> For me the best line was "You can have the best, most comprehensive test suite in the world, but tests are still different from production.". Getting the business logic working is often the easy part of distributed apps in production environments with real users and unexpected data.

<comment><USER28> While it is true that most tests are different from production, having a solid test suite can go a long way in moving with startup speed but breaking stuff as little as possible. We (as in me and a couple of others from our startup) have written a howto on using Docker and Ansible to build your test suite a few months ago. Strangely enough, it has almost the same title:

[http://blog.mist.io/post/82383668190/move-fast-and-dont- brea...](http://blog.mist.io/post/82383668190/move-fast-and-dont-break-things- testing-with)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Personally, I think this is the most important piece of the article:

" _...I think the best way to get things done in a company isn 't to bash it over your employee's heads every few hours, but to instead build an environment that helps foster those effects._"

</comment><comment><USER30> This pretty much sums it up: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle#.22...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle#.22Pick_any_two.22)

</comment><comment><USER31> I agree that breaking a production user's experience is as verboten as it gets for agile software development. That's why we have massive test suites and CI infrastructure.

However, you do want to avoid "CI handcuffs", where either because CI is too brittle or because you're simply integrating too many independent projects which, in order to push a change requiring coordinating changes elsewhere, requires massively outsized developer effort in order to push things through with zero CI breakage. This is more of a problem in CI systems with binary metrics like PASS/FAIL where every change that doesn't PASS is rejected.

It's too easy to "wedge" a system like this, where project X's change can't go through without project Y being able to handle the change, and you end up introducing multiple code paths in both projects on a solely temporary basis just in order to keep CI green and happy. Rather than having a zero-tolerance CI failure policy, developers should be allowed to break CI temporarily, so long as they fix it in a timely manner (within an hour or two). Per-developer breakage metrics, to the extent they are needed, should not be in terms of breakage counts but instead breakage durations.

That is, outside of production, it's fine to break stuff and quickly fix it, so long as you don't leave it broken. The big problems are where domain-siloed developers break a zero-tolerance policy because it was necessary to relax it "temporarily", and things stay broken because the policy stays relaxed and cannot be reinstated without sirens going off. Then restoring the CI policy is blocked for everyone by the one guy who knows the AIX quirks for debootstrap or whatever.

Instead, breaking changes should be "allowed" where there is a window to fix the error and still move forward. Only when the window closes without a fix should the breaking change be rolled back (automatically). This line of thinking lends itself to formal, automated policy, but this depends first on judgment and cultural approval.

As it happens, the best CI system I'm aware of for truly distributed, multiple project integration is OpenStack's Zuul: [https://github.com/openstack- infra/zuul](https://github.com/openstack-infra/zuul) I'm not sure if it accommodates my prescription above, but if not, they probably have a better idea.

<comment><USER32> I, uh, don't understand. No sane environment commits straight to prod. You stage to an integration environment. The integration environment can break, no problems. But you only migrate staged dev from the integration environment to prod when all the test pass. Is that not how _everyone_ does things???

<comment><USER33> Github does it differently. They have "prod" stuff that everyone sees, and "candidate" things which are ALSO deployed from the same codebase (with different enabling flags), and then can do long-term tests (and smaller pull requests) to verify that the New Way (candidate) behaves identically to the Old Way.

Slide 35 [0] of this presentation actually starts the discussion of this exact thing, though Zach has talked about it before. Later, he shows a chart showing the differences as the code in the parallel branch changed over about five hours. (Wow, that's some fast iteration.)

0: [https://speakerdeck.com/holman/move-fast-and-break- nothing?s...](https://speakerdeck.com/holman/move-fast-and-break- nothing?slide=35)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> You don't need to break things with good regression testing.

</comment><comment><USER35> Nicely done

</comment><comment><USER36> Sorry to be That Guy but this is one of the reasons I'm really getting into Haskell, the more I study it. Clojure's still stronger for exploratory work, but Haskell's the only language where I feel comfortable that I'm breaking nothing when I "move fast" (at least, on code I haven't touched in a while).

Ok, I'm totally That Guy so I'm just going to shut up.

<comment><USER37> I think you must have missed the point somewhere. Test coverage and metrics are important not just to catch "programming" errors but also logical and semantic errors. Haskell only partially helps with those other categories.

<comment><USER36> Absolutely true.

I think that if you know how to use it, Haskell's type system can reduce your bug count substantially. It makes a difference, spending 30% of your time debugging as opposed to 70%. (These numbers are approximate and vary depending on the problem you're working on.) You still need to test, though. That is true. QuickCheck does a lot for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Quite a bit OT, but I've never seen the transform-rotate property used as a styling in text...probably something that can/will be used to death, but it looks great here...gives the piece a very magazine feel (that, plus the handplaced-layout of floating embed images)

<comment><USER39> Unfortunately, it looks awful in Firefox.

<comment><USER15> What version? I'm on 32 on Ubuntu and it looks clean and crisp.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> All this crap is easier said than done.

</comment><comment><USER41> Does the article get any better after the cat video and the mention of Cheetos™? I bailed at that point.

<comment><USER17> It doesn't. The author goes on a long, ambiguous tirade about Skittles™ and how they aren't as aerodynamic as once initially thought.

You did good by refusing to read the rest of the post and informing everyone of that fact on Hacker News. Cheers!

<comment><USER42> Fantastic response</comment></comment></comment>